Placed as the Assunta now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one of Tintoretto’s best-preserved masterpieces, the Miracolo del Schiavo, it undergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modern connoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutely triumphant.  Titian’s turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual, more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has that unique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in its agitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and right to exercise a sane judgment.  When he is thoroughly penetrated with his subject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher above the earth than the elder master.  Yet in fulness and variety of life, in unexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not in poetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titian stands infinitely above his younger competitor.  If, unhappily, it were necessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and the life-work of the other—­making the world the poorer by the loss of Titian or Tintoretto—­can it be doubted for a moment what the choice would be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to face with the mighty genius of the latter?

But to return for a moment to the Assunta.  The enlargement of dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth.  It carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable, without depriving it of the great pulsation of life.  If in sublime beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank with the finest of those in Raphael’s Cartoons, yet they preserve in a higher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality of vitality.  The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture is the first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second.  This is not always the case with the Cartoons, and the reverse process, everywhere adhered to in the Transfiguration, is what gives to that overrated last work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character.  Titian himself in the St. Sebastian of Brescia, and above all in the much-vaunted masterpiece, The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican, sins in the same direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against his better self.

Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, and only half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possession of a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40] What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably suffer opposition at the outset.  In this case the public, admitted on the high festival of St. Bernardino’s Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel, showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable than the friars had been.  Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de’ Frari, and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology to the ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as against the Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian’s wonderful achievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.