Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all over Venice—­in the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; in the ‘Temptation of S. Anthony’ at S. Trovaso no less than in the Temptations of Eve and Christ; in the decorative pomp of the Sala del Senato, and in the Paradisal vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio.  Yet, after all, there is one of his most characteristic moods, to appreciate which fully we return to the Madonna dell’ Orto.  I have called him ‘the painter of impossibilities.’  At rare moments he rendered them possible by sheer imaginative force.  If we wish to realise this phase of his creative power, and to measure our own subordination to his genius in its most hazardous enterprise, we must spend much time in the choir of this church.  Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious fancy—­aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative sympathy in the spectator—­such men will not take the point of view required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the ’Worship of the Golden Calf’ and in the ‘Destruction of the World by Water.’  It is for them to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in his hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai in lightnings.

The gondola has had a long rest.  Were Francesco but a little more impatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone.  I bid him turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia.  This is a protected float, where the wood which comes from Cadore and the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring.  Yonder square white house, standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they call the Oasa degli Spiriti.  No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in old days, it was the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night’s rest before their final journey to the graveyard of S. Michele.  So many generations of dead folk had made that house their inn, that it is now no fitting home for living men.  San Michele is the island close before Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay.  The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration.  Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation.  An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception.  This graveyard, with its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust.