ich distinguishes him from Tintoretto, and which in
his later period, after the death of Titian and Michelangelo, earned for
him the rank of the first living master, was that beautiful vitality,
that poetic feeling, which as far as it was possible he infused into a
declining period of art. At the same time it becomes more and more
evident, as our attention is turned to the deeper and nobler spirit of
the earlier masters in Venice, that the beauty of his figures is more
addressed to the senses than to the soul, and that his naturalistic
tendencies are often allowed to run wild.

The most celebrated, and as it happens the most historically
interesting, of his great pictures is the _Feast at Cana_, in the
Louvre, measuring thirty feet wide and twenty feet high. This was
formerly in the refectory of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The scene is
a brilliant atrium, surrounded by majestic pillars. The tables at which
the guests are seated form three sides of a parallelogram. The guests
are supposed to be almost entirely contemporary portraits, so that the
figures of Christ and His mother, of themselves insignificant enough,
lose even more in the general interest of the subject. Servants occupy
the foreground, while on the raised balustrades and the balconies of
distant houses are innumerable onlookers. The most remarkable feature of
the whole composition is a group of musicians in the centre of the
foreground, which are portraits of the artist himself and Tintoretto,
playing on violon-cellos, and Titian, in a red robe, with the
contra-bass.

_Christ in the House of Simon_, the Magdalen washing His feet, is
another scarcely less gigantic picture in the Louvre; but it is much
simpler in arrangement, and is distinguished by the fineness of the
heads, especially that of the Christ. An interesting piece of technical
criticism on the _Feast at Cana_ occurs in Reynolds's Eighth
Discourse:--

"Another instance occurs to me," he says, "where equal liberty may be
taken in regard to the management of light. Though the general practice
is to make a large mass about the middle of the picture surrounded by
shadow, the reverse may be practised, and the spirit of rule may still
be preserved.... In the great composition of Paul Veronese, the
_Marriage at Cana_, the figures are for the most part in half shadow;
the great light is in the sky; and indeed the general effect of this
picture, which is so striking, is no more than what we often see