the other gives me personally more pleasure. The
Titian is massive and wonderful: perhaps indeed too massive in the
conception of the Madonna, for the suggestion of flight is lacking; but
it has an earthiness, even a theatricalness, which one cannot forget,
superb though that earthiness may be. The cherubs, however, commercial
copies of which are always being made by diligent artists, are a joy.
The Titians that hang in the gallery of my mind are other than this. A
Madonna and Child and a rollicking baby at Vienna: our own "Bacchus and
Ariadne"; the Louvre "Man with a Glove": these are among them; but the
"Assumption" is not there.

Tintoretto's great picture of the "Miracle of S. Mark" was painted
between 1544 and 1548, before he was thirty. The story tells that a
pious slave, forbidden by his master to visit and venerate the house of
S. Mark, disobeyed the command and went. As a punishment his master
ordered him to be blinded and maimed; but the hands of the executioners
were miraculously stayed and their weapons refused to act. The master,
looking on, was naturally at once converted.

Tintoretto painted his picture of this incident for the Scuola of S.
Mark (now a hospital); but when it was delivered, the novelty of its
dramatic vigour--a palpitating actuality almost of the cinema--was too
much for the authorities. The coolness of their welcome infuriated the
painter, conscious as he was that he had done a great thing, and he
demanded the work back; but fortunately there were a few good judges to
see it first, and their enthusiasm carried the day. Very swiftly the
picture became a wonder of the city. Thus has it always been with the
great innovators in art, except that Tintoretto's triumph was more
speedy: they have almost invariably been condemned first.

An interesting derivative detail of the work is the gateway at the back
over which the sculptured figures recline, for these obviously were
suggested by casts, which we know Tintoretto to have possessed, of
Michael Angelo's tombs in S. Lorenzo's sacristy at Florence. Every
individual in the picture is alive and breathing, but none more
remarkably so than the woman on the left with a child in her arms and
her knee momentarily resting on a slope of the pillar. No doubt some of
the crowd are drawn, after the fashion of the time, from public men in
Venice; but I know not if they can now be identified.

Another legend of S. Mark which, by the way, should have its Ven