suffer in that strong and beautiful young face, but it is not the power of the Man of Sorrows. This is not Jesus who agonised in the garden, or who wrote upon the ground; it is not the man from whom Pilate turned away his face. [Illustration: BRONZE WELL-HEAD BY ALBERGHETTI, COURTYARD OF PALAZZO DUCALE.] There is one only--the last and greatest of the Venetians of the Renaissance--who could sound all notes of tragedy and pathos as well as notes of joy. Tintoretto, the supreme Venetian, the greatest exponent of the essential spirit of Venice, is the son of a wider kingdom than hers and of a greater age than the Renaissance. Unsurpassed as designer and colourist, he is endowed throughout with the peculiar gifts of Venice; but during those years of passionate study, in which he was winning here and there the secrets of his art, hungry for knowledge, careless of gain, and bargaining only for material in which to realise his conceptions--during those years in which he lived alone in continual meditation on some fresh labour, he was probing the deep and passionate things of humanity as no Venetian artist had ever probed them before. The streets and churches of the city seem to echo still to the steps of this genius at once so robust, so tender, so profound and so joyous. Ridolfi laments the lavishness of his production, arguing that restraint of his overflowing fantasy would have strengthened his conceptions. But Tintoretto had to work in his own way; the instinct that flowered in the Scuola di San Rocco, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ and the _Paradiso_, might be trusted to choose the manner of its relaxation as well as of its labour. No painter, perhaps, has so wonderfully combined the dramatist and lyrist; for Tintoretto with all his vast imaginative strength had power also over the tenderest springs of melody. There is hardly a picture of his in which some exquisite face of youth or woman will not strike a note of tenderness, and we need only call to mind the _Visitation_ in the Scuola di San Rocco, to know what Tintoretto’s tenderness could be. He had that power, the gift only of the greatest, so intensely to imagine his central theme that the most perfectly executed and conspicuous detail does not divert us into lesser issues. It is exactly here that his distinguishing greatness reveals itself He is completely sincere. His vision is too comprehensive to overlook what really filled the foreground; his skill of hand too great to allow its inclusion to be other than an element in the realisation of his central theme; his concentration too intense to make him fear lest an accessory should become a primary interest. We may pause for a moment in consideration of his greatest tragic triumph, the _Crucifixion_, in the Scuola di San Rocco. The theme is immense, and, like the _Death of Abel_, it is treated in a great elemental spirit. Amid all the throes of nature and the sufferings of the Son of Man, the world goes on its way.