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of a fish, the well-known type both of the baptismal sacrament and of Christ.

But the most exquisite instance of this imaginative power § 20. The occurs in an incident in the background of the Crucifixion. Crucifixion.1 I will not insult this marvellous picture by an effort at a verbal account of it. I would not whitewash it with praise, and I refer to it only for the sake of two thoughts peculiarly illustrative of the intellectual faculty immediately under discussion. In the common and most Catholic treatment of the subject, the mind is either painfully directed to the bodily agony, coarsely expressed by outward anatomical signs, or else it is permitted to rest on that countenance inconceivable by man at any time, but chiefly so in this its consummated humiliation. In the first case, the representation is revolting; in the second, inefficient, false, and sometimes blasphemous. None even of the greatest religious painters have ever, so far as I know, succeeded here: Giotto and Angelico were cramped by the traditional treatment, and the latter especially, as before observed, is but too apt to indulge in those points of vitiated feeling which attained their worst development among the Byzantines; Perugino fails in his Christ in almost every instance: of other men than these, after them, we need not speak. But Tintoret here, as in all other cases, penetrating into the root and deep places of his subject, despising all outward and bodily appearances of pain, and seeking for some means of expressing, not the rack of nerve or sinew, but the fainting of the deserted Son of God before His Eloi cry, and yet feeling himself utterly unequal to the expression of this by the countenance, has, on the one hand, filled his picture with such various and impetuous muscular exertion, that the body of the Crucified

1 [Also in the Scuola di San Rocco, Upper Room. For other references to the picture, see above, sec. i. ch. viii. § 4, and below, § 25, ch. iv. § 13, and Epilogue, 12; also Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. i. § 8, ch. iii. § 17; and Stones of Venice, Venetian Index, 8. "Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 62. A photographic reproduction of the picture will be found between pp. 80 and 81 of J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto. The notice of the picture in that book is worth looking at as an instance of the acceptance of Ruskin's estimate of the master. See also above, Introduction, p. xlv. n.]

is, by comparison, in perfect repose, and, on the other, has cast the countenance altogether into shade. But the Agony is told by this, and by this only; that, though there yet remains a chasm of light on the mountain horizon where the earthquake darkness closes upon the day, the broad and sunlike glory about the head of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the colour of ashes.*

But the great painter felt he had something more to do yet. Not only that Agony of the Crucified, but the tumult of the people, that rage which invoked His blood upon them and their children. Not only the brutality of the soldier, the apathy of the Centurion, or any other merely instrumental cause of the Divine suffering, but the fury of His own people, the noise against Him of those for whom He died, were to be set before the eye of the understanding, if the power of the picture was to be complete. This rage, be it remembered, was one of disappointed pride; and the disappointment dated essentially from the time when, but five days before, the King of Zion came, and was received with hosannahs, riding upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. To this time, then, it was necessary to direct the thoughts, for therein are found both the cause and the character, the excitement of, and the witness against, this madness of the people. In the shadow behind the cross, a man, riding on an ass colt, looks back to the multitude, while he points with a rod to the Christ crucified. The ass is feeding on the remnants of withered palm-leaves.1

With this master-stroke, I believe, I may terminate all illustration of the peculiar power of the imagination over the feelings of the spectator, by the elevation into dignity and

* This circumstance, like most that lie not at the surface, has escaped Fuseli, though his remarks on the general tone of the picture are very good, as well as his opposition of it to the treatment of Rubens. (Lecture ix.) 2

1 [For Ruskin's first note of this "master-stroke," see above, Introduction, p. xxxviii.]

2 [Life and Writings of Fuseli, ii. 366. The picture by Rubens which Fuseli contrasts for its inappropriate "gay technic exaltation" with the solemn tone of Tintoret is in the Church of St. Walburgha at Antwerp.]

meaning of the smallest accessory circumstances. But I have not yet sufficiently dwelt on the fact from which this power arises, the absolute truth of statement of the central fact as it was, or must have been. Without this truth, this awful first moving principle, all direction of the feelings is useless. That which we cannot excite, it is of no use to know how to govern.

I have before alluded, Sec. I. Chap. XIV., to the painfulness of Raffaelle's treatment of the Massacre of the Innocents. Fuseli affirms of it, that, "in dramatic gradation he disclosed all the mother through every image of pity and of terror.

§ 21. The Massacre of the Innocents.

If this be so, I think the philosophical spirit has prevailed over the imaginative. The imagination never errs; it sees all that is, and all the relations and bearings of it; but it would not have confused the mortal frenzy of maternal terror with various development of maternal character. Fear, rage, and agony, at their utmost pitch, sweep away all character: humanity itself would be lost in maternity, the woman would become the mere personification of animal fury or fear. For this reason all the ordinary representations of this subject are, I think, false and cold: the artist has not heard the shrieks, nor mingled with the fugitives; he has sat down in his study to convulse features methodically, and philosophize over insanity. Not so Tintoret. Knowing, or feeling, that the expression of the human face was, in such circumstances, not to be rendered, and that the effort could only end in an ugly falsehood, he denies himself all aid from the features, he feels that if he is to place himself or us in the midst of that maddened multitude, there can be no time allowed for watching expression. Still less does he depend on details of murder and ghastliness of death; there is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but there is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The scene is the

1 [Lecture iii., Life and Writings, ii. 176.]

2 [For Ruskin's first note of this picture (also in the Scuola di San Rocco, Lower Room), see above, Introduction, p. xxxviii. For other references, see above, sec. i. ch. xiv. § 31, and below, § 25. A photographic reproduction of the picture is given at p. 82 of J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto.]

outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a lake of life before them, like the burning seen of the doomed Moabite on the water that came by the way of Edom; a huge flight of stairs, without parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a crowd of women mixed with the murderers; the child in the arms of one has been seized by the limbs, she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight;-she will be dashed dead in a second; '-close to us is the great struggle; a heap of the mothers entangled in one mortal writhe with each other and the swords, one of the murderers dashed down and crushed beneath them, the sword of another caught by the blade and dragged at by a woman's naked hand; the youngest and fairest of the women, her child just torn away from a death grasp, and clasped to her breast with the grip of a steel vice, falls backwards, helplessly over the heap, right on the sword points; all knit together and hurled down in one hopeless, frenzied, furious abandonment of body and soul in the effort to save.2 Far back, at the bottom of the stairs, there is something in the shadow like a heap of clothes. It is a woman, sitting quiet,—quite quiet,— still as any stone; she looks down steadfastly on her dead child, laid along on the floor before her, and her hand is pressed softly upon her brow.3

This, to my mind, is the only Imaginative, that is, the only true, real, heartfelt representation of the being and actuality of

1

1 [Ed. 1 (in which the preceding words were not italicised) adds :

2

"two others are farther in flight, they reach the edge of a deep river,-the water is beat into a hollow by the force of their plunge ;-close to us . . ."] [Ed. 1 adds:

"Their shrieks ring in our ears till the marble seems rending around us, but far back . . ."]

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[Ruskin quoted this description a year later in Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, 8. Rocco, Scuola di San"), adding that "there may have been some change in the colour of the shadow that crosses the pavement. . . . I formerly supposed that this was meant to give greater horror to the scene, and it is very like Tintoret if it be so; but there is a strangeness and discordance in it which make me suspect the colour may have changed."]

§ 22. Various
works in the

Scuola di San
Rocco.

the subject, in existence.* I should exhaust the patience of the reader, if I were to dwell at length on the various stupendous developments of the imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco alone. I would fain join awhile in that solemn pause of the journey into Egypt,' where the silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their tremulous lines the alternate folds of fair cloud, flushed by faint crimson light, and lie across the streams of blue between those rosy islands, like the white wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the sleep of the disciples, among those massy leaves that lie so heavily on the dead of the night beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and toss fearfully above the motion of the torches as the troop of the betrayer emerges out of the hollows of the olives; or wait through the hour of accusing beside the judgment seat of Pilate, where all is unseen, unfelt, except the one figure that stands with its head bowed down, pale, like a pillar of moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the Godhead, § 23. The Last half wrapt in the whiteness of the shroud. Of Judgment. these, and all the other thoughts of indescribable How treated by various power that are now fading from the walls of those painters. neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavour at a future time to preserve some image and shadow more

2

* Note the shallow and uncomprehending notice of this picture by Fuseli. His description of the treatment of it by other painters is, however, true, terse, and valuable.*

1 [In the Lower Room of the Scuola di San Rocco. For another reference to the "Flight into Egypt," see above, ch. ii. § 19, p. 244, and Introduction, p. xxxix.; and for a fuller description of the picture, Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, 8. "Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 3).]

2

["The Agony in the Garden," in the Upper Room of the Scuola di San Rocco. For a fuller description of the picture, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, 8. Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 13).]

66

3 ["Christ before Pilate," in the Upper Room of the Scuola di San Rocco. For a fuller description of the picture, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, s. "Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 59). A photographic reproduction of the picture is given at p. 84 of J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto.]

4

[Fuseli says of the picture: "The stormy brush of Tintoretto swept individual woe away in general masses. Two immense wings of light and shade divide the composition, and hide the want of sentiment in tumult." The other pictures of the Massacre noticed by Fuseli are by Bandinelli, Rubens, Le Brun, Poussin, and Raphael (quoted above, p. 272). See Lecture iii., Life and Writings, ii. 175–176.]

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