It is strange to hear people, as one does now and then, talking of the "Paradiso" as "a splendid failure." It may be granted that the subject is an impossible one for human art to realise, yet when all allowance has been made for a lamentable amount of drying and blackening, it is difficult to agree that Ruskin was all wrong in his admiration of that thronging multitude, ordered and disciplined by the tides of light and shadow, which roll in and out of the masses, resolving them into groups and single figures of almost matchless beauty and melting away into a sea of radiant æther, which tells us of the boundless space which surrounds the serried ranks of the Blessed. Tintoretto was seventy-eight when it was allotted to him, and it was the last great effort of his mind and hand. Studies for it are preserved both at the Louvre and at Madrid, and it is evident that the painter has framed it upon the thought of Dante's mystic rose. The circles and many of the figures can be traced in the poem, and the idea of the Eternal Light streaming through the leaves of the rose dominates the composition. It is appropriate that it should have been his last great work, as it was also the greatest attempt at composition ever made by a master of the Venetian School. There is no room here to study Tintoretto as a painter of battlepieces, though from the time he painted the "Battle of Lepanto," for the Council of Ten, he often returned to such subjects. His two series for the Gonzaga included several, and the Ducal Palace still possesses examples. The impetuosity of his style stood him in good stead, and he never fails to bring in graceful and striking figures. His portraits are hardly equal to Titian's intellectual grasp or fine-grained colour, but they are extraordinarily characteristic. He prefers to paint men rather than women, and he painted hundreds--all the great persons of his time who lived in and visited Venice. The Venetian portrait by this time was expected to be more than a likeness and more than a problem. It was to please the taste as a picture, to interest and to satisfy criticism. Tintoretto, like Lotto, gets behind the scenes, and we see some mood, some aspect of the sitter that he hardly expected to show. His penetration is not equal to Lotto's, but he deals with his sitters with an observation which pierces below the surface.