Under whom Tintoret studied, after being thrust off by Titian, we are not told. Probably he had no acknowledged preceptor except himself. Already his aim was at the highest. On the wall of his studio he blazoned the motto, “_The drawing of Michael Angelo and the coloring of Titian_.” To blend the excellence of each in a supreme unity,--that was his ambition. Titian might shut him out from personal instruction, but Titian’s works in the churches and palaces were within reach. Tintoret studied them, copied them, and conjured from them the secret their master wished to hide. Having procured casts of Michael Angelo’s statues in the Medicean Chapel at Florence, he made drawings of them in every position. Far into the night he worked by lamplight, watching the play of light and shade, the outlines and the relief. He drew also from living models, and learned anatomy by dissecting corpses. He invented “little figures of wax and of clay, clothing them with bits of cloth, examining accurately, by the folds of the dresses, the position of the limbs; and these models he distributed among little houses and perspectives composed of planks and cardboard, and he put lights in the windows.” From the rafters he suspended other manikins, and thereby learned the foreshortening proper to figures painted on ceilings and on high places. So indefatigable, so careful, was this man, who is known to posterity as “the thunderbolt of painters”! In his prime, he astonished all by his power of elaborating his ideas at a speed at which few masters can even sketch; but that power was nourished by his infinite painstaking in those years of obscurity. Wherever Tintoret might learn, thither he went. Now we hear of him working with the masons at Cittadella; now taking his seat on the bench of the journeymen painters in St. Mark’s Place; now watching some illustrious master decorating the façade of a palace. No commission was too humble for him: who knows how many signboards he may have furnished in his ’prentice days? His first recorded works were two portraits,--of himself holding a bas-relief in his hand, and of his brother playing a cithern. As the custom then was, he exhibited these in the Merceria, that narrow lane of shops which leads from St. Mark’s to the Rialto. What the latest novel or yesterday’s political speech is to us, that was a new picture to the Venetians. Their innate sense of color and beauty and their familiarity with the best works of art made them ready critics. They knew whether the colors on a canvas were in harmony, as the average Italian of to-day can tell whether a singer keeps the key, and doubtless they were vivacious in their discussions. Tintoret’s portraits attracted attention. They were painted with nocturnal lights and shadows, “in so terrible a manner that they amazed every one,” even to the degree of suggesting to one beholder the following epigram: “Si Tinctorectus noctis sic lucet in umbris, Exorto faciet quid radiante die?”[7]