Tintoret’s genius was only partially acknowledged during his lifetime, and his fame has suffered strange vicissitudes since his death. At times he has been extolled with meaningless extravagance; oftener condemned, after Vasari’s lukewarm fashion, or passed over without mention. Not until Mr. Ruskin came and opened the eyes of the world had Tintoret been adequately appreciated for those points of excellence wherein he has neither rival nor second. He has suffered for the same reasons that Shakespeare was long unesteemed in France: his works are bold, very rapid, often unequal, not in the least to be measured by the yardstick of conventionalism; he treats many new subjects, and the old subjects he always treats in new fashion, thereby provoking formalists to accuse him of wilful oddity or caprice; his reputation for swiftness of execution was deemed by many presumptive evidence that he was superficial; above all, his imagination was so rich and so powerful that it required a cognate imagination to follow it. Moreover, Tintoret was the last master of the great era of Italian painting. After him came schools which did not rely upon originality, but upon the inspiration of former masters. Pictures were but specimens of technique, and the models chosen for imitation were naturally those in which technique could be most easily reduced to rules. The public, as well as the painters themselves, gradually lost the power of valuing art as a _spiritual expression_. Word by word, sentence by sentence, the great language of painting was forgotten, until at last it became as a dead language. It was inevitable that Tintoret’s works, which had not always been understood by his contemporaries, should baffle the interpreters of art grammars and the pedagogues of technique.