Tintoretto by S.L. Bensusan

It would seem that the pictures for the brotherhood of St. Roque secured for Tintoretto the crowning honour of his life, the commission to bring his brush to the service of the Doges' Palace. It is hardly too much to say that just as the Doges' Palace is the most remarkable monument of the Venetian Republic left in Venice to-day, so Tintoretto's pictures are the most remarkable decorations in the palace itself. There must be fifty or more of them, if we include the Hall of Grand Council, the Hall of Scrutiny, the College, the Entrance and the Passage to the Council of Ten, the Ante-room to the Chapel, the Senate and the Salon of the Four Doors; but the task of painting fifty pictures, stupendous though it may seem, is not realised until we remember the size and quality of some of these works. The "Paradise," for example, in the Council Hall, is more than twenty-five yards long, and is such a work as many a painter would have given the greater part of his life to; but Tintoretto had little more than six years to live when he undertook the work, and there is no doubt that while the brain behind the picture was always his, the hand was sometimes that of his son or one of his pupils.

It may be supposed that most painters, who have reached Tintoretto's age when they received their commission for the Ducal Palace, would have hesitated to begin work on such a colossal scale. They would have felt that the span of their life could hardly stretch much farther, and knowing that much was to be done in the way of portraits and small pictures, would have been content with these. It was characteristic of Tintoretto that he should at once undertake pictures on the largest scale known to painters. Not only did he undertake the work, but he accomplished it.