The nocturnal studies of Tintoretto from models and artificial groups have been celebrated: these, prepared in wax or clay, he arranged, raised, suspended, to produce masses, foreshortening, and variety of effect: it was thence he acquired that decision of chiaroscuro unknown to more expanded daylight, by which he divided his bodies, and those wings of obscurity and light by which he separated the groups of his composition, though the mellowness of his eye nearly always instructed him to connect the two extremes by something intermediate that partook of both, as the extremes themselves by reflexes with the back-ground or the scenery. The general rapidity of his process, by which he baffled his competitors and often overwhelmed himself, did not indeed always permit him to attend deliberately to this principle, and often hurried him into an abuse of practice, which in the lights turned breadth into mannered or insipid flatness, and in the shadows into total extinction of parts: of all this, he has in the schools of S. Rocco and Marco given the most unquestionable instances; the Resurrection of Christ and the Massacre of the Innocents, comprehend every charm by which chiaroscuro fascinates its votaries: in the Vision, dewy dawn melts into deep but pellucid shade, itself rent or reflected by celestial splendour and angelic hues: whilst in the Infant-massacre at Bethlehem alternate sheets of stormy light and agitated gloom dash horror on the astonished eye. He pursued, however, another method to create, without more assistance from chiaroscuro than individual light and shade, an effect equivalent and perhaps superior to what the utmost stretch of its powers could have produced, in the Crucifixion of the Albergo, or Guest-room of S. Rocco, the largest and most celebrated of his works. The multitudinous rabble dispersed over that picture, (for such, rather than composition, one group excepted, that assemblage of accidental figures deserves to be called,) he connected by a sovereign tone, ingulphing the whole in one mass of ominous twilight, an eclipse, or what precedes a storm, or hurricane, or earthquake; nor suffering the captive eye to rest on any other object than the faint gleam hovering over the head of the Saviour in the centre, and in still fainter tones dying on the sainted group gathered beneath the Cross. Yet this nearly superhuman contrivance, which raises above admiration a work whose incongruous parts else must have sunk it beneath mediocrity, Agostino Carracci, in his print, with chalcographic callus, has totally overlooked; for notwithstanding the iron sky that overhangs the whole, he has spread, if not sunshine, the most declared daylight from end to end, nor left the eye uninformed of one motley article, or one blade of grass.