ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE

individuality was late in getting there, and by that time the painters
were already well enough educated in their craft to know that they
had little to learn elsewhere. The one Venetian who became an Eclectic
Pis. 64-7 remained in spite of it a great painter. Sebastiano del Piombo fell under
the influence of Michelangelo, but while this influence was pernicious
in most cases, the hand that had learned to paint under Bellini, Cima,
and Giorgione never wholly lost its command of colour and tone.
Light and
shadow
XVI
Tintoretto stayed at home, but he felt in lus own person a craving for
sometliing that Titian could not teach liim. The Venice he was born
in was not the Venice of Titian's early youth, and his own adolescence
fell in the period when Spain was rapidly making herself mistress of
Italy. The haunting sense of powers almost irresistible gave a terrible
fascination to Michelangelo's works, which are swayed by that sense
as by a demonic presence. Tintoretto felt this fascination because he
was in sympathy with the spirit which took form in colossal torsos
and Hmbs. To him these were not, as they were to Michelangelo's
enrolled followers, merely new patterns after which to model the nude.
But beside this sense of overwhelming power and gigantic force,
Tintoretto had to an even greater degree the feeling that whatever
existed was for mankind and with reference to man. In his youth
people were once more turning to religion, and in Venice poetry was
making its way more than it had previously done, not only because
Venice had become the refuge of men of letters, but also because of
the diff'usion of printed books. Tintoretto took to the new feeling for
religion and poetry as to his birthright. Yet whether classic fable or
Biblical episode were the subject of his art, Tintoretto coloured it with
his feeling for the human life at the heart of the story. His sense of
power did not express itself in colossal nudes so much as in the
immense energy, in the glowing health of the figures he painted, and
more still in his effects of light, which he rendered as if he had it in his
hands to brighten or darken the heavens at will and subdue them to
his own moods.
He could not have accomplished this, we may be sure, if he had not
had even greater skill than Titian in the treatment of light and shadow
and of atmosphere. It was this wliich enabled him to give such living
versions of BibUcal stories and saintly legends. For, grandng that an
effect of reaUty were attainable in painting without an adequate treatment
of light and atmosphere, even then the reality would look
THE VENETIAN PAINTERS 25
hideous, as it does in many modern painters who attempt to paint
people of today in their everyday dress and among their usual
surroundings. It is not 'ReaUsm' which makes such pictures hideous,
but the want of that toning down which the atmosphere gives to
things in life, and of that harmonizing to which the light subjects all
colours.
It was a great mastery of light and shadow which enabled Tintoretto
to put into his pictures all the poetry there was in his soul without once
tempting us to think that he might have found better expression in
words. The poetry which quickens most of his works in the Scuola di
San Rocco is almost entirely a matter of light and colour. What is it
but the light that changes the soUtudes in which the Magdalen and St. p1- 68
Mary of Egypt are sitting, into dreamlands seen by poets in their
moments of happiest inspiration? What but light and colour, the gloom
and cliill of evening, with the white-stoled figure standing resignedly
before the judge, that give the 'Christ before Pilate' its sublime magic? p'- 69
What, again, but light, colour, and the star-procession of cherubs that
imbue the realism of the 'vlnnunciation' with music which thrills us p'- 7
through and through?
Religion and poetry did not exist for Tintoretto because the love Tintoretto's
and cultivation of the Muses was a duty prescribed by the Greeks and sense
Romans, and because the love of God and the saints was prescribed by
the Church; but rather, as was the case with the best people of his
time, because both poetry and religion were useful to man. They
helped him to forget what was mean and sordid in life, they braced
him to his task, and consoled liim for liis disappointments. Religion
answered to an ever-living need of the human heart. The Bible was no
longer a mere document wherewith to justify Christian dogma. It was
rather a series of parables and symbols pointing at all times to the path
that led to a finer and nobler life. Why then continue to picture Christ
and the Apostles, the Patriarchs and Prophets, as persons living under
Roman rule, wearing the Roman toga, and walking about in the landscape
of a Roman bas-relief? Christ and the Apostles, the Patriarchs
and Prophets, were the embodiment of living principles and of living
ideals. Tintoretto felt this so vividly that he could not tlaink of them
otherwise than as people of his own kind, living under conditions
easily intelligible to himself and to liis fellow men. Indeed, the more
intelligible and the more familiar the look and garb and surroundings
of Biblical and saintly personages, the more would they drive home
the principles and ideas they incarnated. So Tintoretto did not hesitate
to turn every Biblical episode into a picture of what the scene would Pis.70-1,73-4