t
effect which melodies so powerful and so direct as these produce upon
the ordinary public. Sitting, as is my wont, one Sunday morning,
opposite the Bacchus, four Germans with a cicerone sauntered by. The
subject was explained to them. They waited an appreciable space of time.
Then the youngest opened his lips and spake: "Bacchus war der
Wein-Gott." And they all moved heavily away. _Bos locutus est._ "Bacchus
was the wine-god!" This, apparently, is what a picture tells to one man.
To another it presents divine harmonies, perceptible indeed in nature,
but here by the painter-poet for the first time brought together and
cadenced in a work of art. For another it is perhaps the hieroglyph of
pent-up passions and desired impossibilities. For yet another it may
only mean the unapproachable inimitable triumph of consummate craft.

Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all over Venice--in
the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; in the Temptation of S.
Anthony at S. Trovaso no less than in the Temptations of Eve and Christ;
in the decorative pomp of the Sala del Senato, and in the Paradisal
vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio. Yet, after all, there is one of
his most characteristic moods, to appreciate which fully we return to
the Madonna dell'Orto. I have called him "the painter of
impossibilities." At rare moments he rendered them possible by sheer
imaginative force. If we wish to realise this phase of his creative
power, and to measure our own subordination to his genius in its most
hazardous enterprise, we must spend much time in the choir of this
church. Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious
fancy--aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining
to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking
to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative
sympathy in the spectator--such men will not take the point of view
required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the Worship of
the Golden Calf and in the Destruction of the World by Water. It is for
them to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in
his hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai
in lightnings.

The gondola has had a long rest. Were Francesco but a little more
impatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone. I bid
him turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia.
This is a pro