"By Tintoret only has this unimaginable event (the Last Judgment) been
grappled with in its Verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as
they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one
traditional circumstance he has received, with Dante and Michael
Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned; but the impetuosity of his mind
bursts out even in the adoption of this image; he has not stopped at
the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon
dragging of the other, but, seized Hylas like by the limbs, and
tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his
destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake, that
bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of
the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of
the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has
melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruins of nations, and
the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like
water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of
the earth, the bones gather, and the clay heaps heave, rattling and
adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and
struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their
clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet,
like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam Pool; shaking
off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the
clangor of the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as
they awake, by the white light of the new Heaven, until the great
vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment seat;
the Firmament is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that
drifts, and floats, and falls into the interminable, inevitable light;
the bright clouds are darkened with them as with thick snow, currents
of atom life in the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, and
higher and higher still, till the eye and the thought can follow no
farther, borne up, wingless, by their inward faith and by the angel
powers invisible, now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the
breath of their condemnation."
Note in the opposite picture the way the clouds are wrapped about in
the distant Sinai.
The figure of the little Madonna in the "Presentation" should be
compared with Titian's in his picture of the same subject in the
Academy. I prefer Tintoret's infinitely: and note how much finer is
the feeling with which Tintoret has relieved the glory round her head
against the pure sky, than that which influenced Titian in encumbering
his distance with architecture.
The "Martyrdom of St. Agnes" _was_ a lovely picture. It has been
"restored" since I saw it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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