Byzantine frieze in a lower storey, but above all by a camel and driver sculptured in admirable relief on the wall. Returning to the Campo dei Mori, we make our way again to the Fondamenta della Misericordia, where we disembarked. Almost immediately on our left, backing the Palazzo Camello, and perhaps originally forming a part of it, is the house of Tintoretto. It is still unspoiled of its ancient decorations of small sculptured figures and formal designs; and, above all, it is interesting architecturally for its elaborate carved wooden cornice on the two upper storeys to which time has given the appearance of stone. Howells, in his description of Tintoretto’s house, conveys an impression of sordid desolation in the building and its inmates. It may lately have fallen on better days; for there is now nothing forbidding about it, and indeed it is a welcome refuge from the swarms of dirty and discordant children whom the presence of a stranger on this campo seems to have a peculiar power of attracting. Its upper windows look out across the rio on a garden with a majestic cypress tree, and down the long canal to the wide waters of the lagoon. And some of the inmates of the house still have a share in the ancient, though humbler, arts of Venice. There are beadmakers working, as usual in almost total darkness, in an airless room in the basement. After we have seen these rows of patient, crouching workers, bending hour after hour over their gas jets, the beads of the lamp-lit Merceria will call up irresistibly the low benches, the glittering wires, the glazed and darkened windows. For there seems a strange irony in the birth of these shining toys out of the gloom. Many unacknowledged artists have worked upon these beads; much, no doubt, of their workmanship is mechanical; but if we look into them we shall find many little originalities in the gradation of line and colour, many touches of taste and feeling in their graceful and various designs. The house is much as it might have been in Tintoretto’s day, but the walls seem empty and unresponsive and to have less part in him than those palace fronts in which some faded fresco bears witness to the magic of his hand. But there is a building near by that may rightly be called the house of Tintoretto, where we may more faithfully commune with his mind--the Church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, in which, Ridolfi tells us, Tintoretto worked for his keep alone “because his fertile brain was constantly boiling with new thoughts,” and thereby roused the wrath of his fellow artists. It was here that Meissonier, coming in his old age to Venice, set himself down at the feet of the master and copied Tintoretto’s _Last Judgment_ in the choir. But it is not primarily for the artist’s great works in the choir that we return again and again to the Madonna dell’ Orto. It is for a painting no less the work of a giant, but of a giant gifted with tenderness equal to his strength.