We may well feel the inadequacy of words as We attempt to revive this wonderful painting. Bellini faithfully recorded Venice, but we cannot so faithfully record Bellini. We can only hope to call attention to the detail of what is undoubtedly one of the most valuable portraits of the Venice of the first Renaissance by one of the greatest of her citizens. When we have paused long enough on the site of the picture and go down the Rio San Giovanni Laterano, immediately in front of the Capello Palace, the high water again denies us passage; but it gives more than it withholds in compelling us to return to our former junction with the Rio Pestrin and to pass out among the coal barges making the wider circuit of the lagoon. It is a wonderful moment when we come suddenly from the narrow water into the wide expanse of the lagoon; and on this December morning a marvellous vision awaits us. The long brown line of Sant’ Erasmo lies like a dark cloud on the water; Burano, San Francesco and Torcello are isolated in a strange translucency of mist; whilst from the low tones of the water one red sail rises like a column of flame. Above Murano the smoke coils languidly; the cypresses over the cemetery wall stand out in startling blackness. A flock of gulls incessantly flickers and glitters on the surface of lucent aquamarine that stretches away to the shore where the mountains lie like purple shadows crowned with a radiancy of snow. The sunlight of the lagoon in this wintry clearness seems other than that which falls on the waterways of the city; this outer robe of Venice to-day is of so immaterial a texture that we feel the material city slipping from our grasp. We turn back into it, but by a way that can feed the visionary sense, by the Rio dei Mendicanti. It might seem, indeed, that all vision would die in the dreary, plastered uniformity of the building that stretches along the fondamenta on our left. This building was formerly the Scuola di San Marco; but the superb façade erected by the Confraternity on the Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo has little in common with these white-washed walls and dreary sunless corridors. For this most famous School is now the Hospital of the Mendicanti, and it is as a visitor to the wards that we are admitted. Yet amidst these chill cloisters and corridors is kept one of the most luminous and visionary treasures of Venice--Tintoretto’s _Procession of St. Ursula and The Virgins_. It is the more precious as being, with _Bacchus and Ariadne_ and _The Paradise_, almost the only work of Tintoretto that we can make sure of fully seeing. There is abundant light in the cold, grey church to illumine a picture which is in itself a song of light in the daybreak.