1. _San Rocco before the Pope._ (On the left of the door as we enter.)
A delightful picture in his best manner, but not much labored; and,
like several other pictures in this church, it seems to me to have
been executed at some period of the painter's life when he was either
in ill health, or else had got into a mechanical way of painting, from
having made too little reference to nature for a long time. There is
something stiff and forced in the white draperies on both sides, and a
general character about the whole which I can feel better than I can
describe; but which, if I had been the painter's physician, would have
immediately caused me to order him to shut up his painting-room, and
take a voyage to the Levant, and back again. The figure of the Pope
is, however, extremely beautiful, and is not unworthy, in its jewelled
magnificence, here dark against the sky, of comparison with the figure
of the high priest in the "Presentation," in the Scuola di San Rocco.
2. _Annunciation._ (On the other side of the door, on entering.) A
most disagreeable and dead picture, having all the faults of the age,
and none of the merits of the painter. It must be a matter of future
investigation to me, what could cause the fall of his mind from a
conception so great and so fiery as that of the "Annunciation" in the
Scuola di San Rocco, to this miserable reprint of an idea worn out
centuries before. One of the most inconceivable things in it,
considered as the work of Tintoret, is that where the angel's robe
drifts away behind his limb, one cannot tell by the character of the
outline, or by the tones of the color, whether the cloud comes in
before the robe, or whether the robe cuts upon the cloud. The Virgin
is uglier than that of the Scuola, and not half so real; and the
draperies are crumpled in the most commonplace and ignoble folds. It
is a picture well worth study, as an example of the extent to which
the greatest mind may be betrayed by the abuse of its powers, and the
neglect of its proper food in the study of nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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