caste-spirit in the Renascence, a
classification of mankind founded on aesthetic refinement and
intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his
works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men.
Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her
splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting,
as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble--doges, saints,
priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is
never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and
glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in
earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on
the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has
ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal
cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The
"want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the
Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as
there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the
commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in
San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of
the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing
figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His
side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and
seraphim mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo
of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the
twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters
bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy,
unconscious--a serving-maid, and nothing more.

The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal
mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine
artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little
faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and
knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with
heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as
ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived
and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in
saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San
Rocco a great bow