“With your hopes for the elevation of English art by means of fresco I cannot sympathize....  It is not the material nor the space that can give us thoughts, passions, or power.  I see on our Academy walls nothing but what is ignoble in small pictures, and would be disgusting in large ones....  It is not the love of fresco that we want; it is the love of God and His creatures; it is humility, and charity, and self-denial, and fasting, and prayer; it is a total change of character.  We want more faith and less reasoning, less strength and more trust.  You want neither walls, nor plaster, nor colours—­ca ne fait rien a l’affaire; it is Giotto, and Ghirlandajo, and Angelico that you want, and that you will and must want until this disgusting nineteenth century has—­I can’t say breathed, but steamed its last.”

So early he had taken up and wrapped round him the mantle of Cassandra.

But he was suddenly to find the sincerity of Ghirlandajo and the religious significance of Angelico united with the matured power of art.  Without knowing what they were to meet, Harding and he found themselves one day in the Scuola di S. Rocco, and face to face with Tintoret.

It was the fashion earlier, and it has been the fashion since, to undervalue Tintoret.  He is not pious enough for the purists, nor decorative enough for the Pre-Raphaelites.  The ruin or the restoration of almost all his pictures makes it impossible for the ordinary amateur to judge them; they need reconstruction in the mind’s eye, and that is a dangerous process.  Ruskin himself, as he grew older, found more interest in the playful industry of Carpaccio than in the laborious games, the stupendous Titan feats of Tintoret.  But at this moment, solemnized before the problems of life, he found these problems hinted in the mystic symbolism of the School of S. Rocco; with eyes now opened to pre-Reformation Christianity, he found its completed outcome in Tintoret’s interpretation of the life of Christ and the types of the Old Testament; fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St. Gothard, he found the lurid skies and looming giants of the Visitation, or the Baptism, or the Crucifixion, re-echoing the subjects of Turner as “deep answering to deep”; and, with Harding of the Broad Brush, he recognised the mastery of landscape execution in the Flight into Egypt, and the St. Mary in the Desert.

He devoted the rest of his time chiefly to cataloguing and copying Tintoret.  The catalogue appeared in “Stones of Venice,” which was suggested by this visit, and begun by some sketches of architectural detail, and the acquisition of daguerreotypes—­a new invention which delighted him immensely, as it had delighted Turner, with trustworthy records of detail which sometimes eluded even his industry and accuracy.