steps, and looking over the said temple,
one may see that the lower figures of the picture are the most
labored. It is strange that the painter never seemed able to conceive
this subject with any power, and in the present work he is
marvellously hampered by various types and conventionalities. It is
not a painting of the Resurrection, but of Roman Catholic saints,
_thinking_ about the Resurrection. On one side of the tomb is a bishop
in full robes, on the other a female saint, I know not who; beneath
it, an angel playing on an organ, and a cherub blowing it; and other
cherubs flying about the sky, with flowers; the whole conception being
a mass of Renaissance absurdities. It is, moreover, heavily painted,
over-done, and over-finished; and the forms of the cherubs utterly
heavy and vulgar. I cannot help fancying the picture has been restored
in some way or another, but there is still great power in parts of it.
If it be a really untouched Tintoret, it is a highly curious example
of failure from over-labor on a subject into which his mind was not
thrown: the color is hot and harsh, and felt to be so more painfully,
from its opposition to the grand coolness and chastity of the
"Crucifixion." The face of the angel playing the organ is highly
elaborated; so, also, the flying cherubs.

3. _The Descent into Hades._ (On the right-hand side of the high
altar.) Much injured and little to be regretted. I never was more
puzzled by any picture, the painting being throughout careless, and in
some places utterly bad, and yet not like modern work; the principal
figure, however, of Eve, has either been redone, or is scholar's work
altogether, as, I suspect, most of the rest of the picture. It looks
as if Tintoret had sketched it when he was ill, left it to a bad
scholar to work on with, and then finished it in a hurry; but he has
assuredly had something to do with it; it is not likely that anybody
else would have refused all aid from the usual spectral company with
which common painters fill the scene. Bronzino, for instance, covers
his canvas with every form of monster that his sluggish imagination
could coin. Tintoret admits only a somewhat haggard Adam, a graceful
Eve, two or three Venetians in court dress, seen amongst the smoke,
and a Satan represented as a handsome youth, recognizable only by the
claws on his feet. The picture