the altar; the altar-piece, The Descent of the Holy Spirit, is in one of the chapels which completely girdle the circular church itself.  The ceiling pictures, depicting three of the most dramatic moments in sacred history, have received the most enthusiastic praise from the master’s successive biographers.  They were indeed at the time of their inception a new thing in Venetian art.  Nothing so daring as these foreshortenings, as these scenes of dramatic violence, of physical force triumphant, had been seen in Venice.  The turbulent spirit was an exaggeration of that revealed by Titian in the St. Peter Martyr; the problem of the foreshortening for the purposes of ceiling decoration was superadded.  It must be remembered, too, that even in Rome, the headquarters of the grand style, nothing precisely of the same kind could be said to exist.  Raphael and his pupils either disdained, or it may be feared to approach, the problem.  Neither in the ceiling decorations of the Farnesina nor in the Stanze is there any attempt on a large scale to faire plafonner the figures, that is, to paint them so that they might appear as they would actually be seen from below.  Michelangelo himself, in the stupendous decoration of the ceiling to the Sixtine Chapel, had elected to treat the subjects of the flat surface which constitutes the centre and climax of the whole, as a series of pictures designed under ordinary conditions.  It can hardly be doubted that Titian, in attempting these tours de force, though not necessarily or even probably in any other way, was inspired by Correggio.  It would not be easy, indeed, to exaggerate the Venetian master’s achievement from this point of view, even though in two at least of the groups—­the Cain and Abel and the David and Goliath—­the modern professor might be justified in criticising with considerable severity his draughtsmanship and many salient points in his design.  The effect produced is tremendous of its kind.  The power suggested is, however, brutal, unreasoning, not nobly dominating force; and this not alone in the Cain and Abel, where such an impression is rightly conveyed, but also in the other pieces.  It is as if Titian, in striving to go beyond anything that had hitherto been done of the same kind, had also gone beyond his own artistic convictions, and thus, while compassing a remarkable pictorial achievement, lost his true balance.  Tintoretto, creating his own atmosphere, as far outside and above mere physical realities as that of Michelangelo himself, might have succeeded in mitigating this impression, which is, on the whole, a painful one.  Take for instance the Martyrdom of St. Christopher of the younger painter—­not a ceiling picture by the way—­in the apse of S. Maria del Orto.  Here, too, is depicted, with sweeping and altogether irresistible power, an act of hideous violence.  And yet it is not this element of the subject which makes upon the spectator the most profound effect, but the impression of saintly submission, of voluntary self-sacrifice, which is the dominant note of the whole.