Bible, it is fine; and as a work of art by a mighty and original genius glorying in difficulties of light and shade, it is tremendous.  Opposite is a quieter representation of the miracle of the manna, which has very charming details of a domestic character in it, the women who wash and sew and carry on other employments being done with splendid ease and naturalness.  The manna lies about like little buttons; Moses discourses in the foreground; in the distance is the Israelite host.  All that the picture lacks is light:  a double portion:  light to fall on it, and its own light to be allowed to shine through the grime of ages.

Tintoretto also has two altar-pieces here, one an “Entombment,” in the Mortuary Chapel—­very rich and grave and painful, in which Christ’s mother is seen swooning in the background; and the other a death of S. Stephen, a subject rare with the Old Masters, but one which, were there occasion to paint it, they must have enjoyed.  Tintoretto has covered the ground with stones.

The choir is famous for its series of forty-six carved panels, representing scenes in the life of S. Benedict; but some vandal having recently injured one or two, the visitor is no longer allowed to approach near enough to examine them with the thoroughness that they demand and deserve.  They are the work of a carver named Albert de Brule, of whose life I have been able to discover nothing.  Since before studying them it is well to know something of the Saint’s career, I tell the story here, from The Golden Legend, but not all the incidents which the artist fixed upon are to be found in that biography.

Benedict as a child was sent to Rome to be educated, but he preferred the desert.  Hither his nurse accompanied him, and his first token of signal holiness was his answered prayer that a pitcher which she had broken might be made whole again.  Leaving his nurse, he associated with a hermit who lived in a pit to which food was lowered by a rope.  Near by dwelt a priest, who one day made a great meal for himself, but before he could eat it he received a supernatural intimation that Benedict was hungry in a pit, and he therefore took his dinner to him and they ate it together.  A blackbird once assailing Benedict’s face was repelled by the sign of the cross.  Being tempted by a woman, Benedict crawled about among briars and nettles to maintain his Spartan spirit.  He now became the abbot of a monastery, but the monks were so worldly that he had to correct them.  In retaliation they poisoned his wine, but the saint making the sign of the cross over it, the glass broke in pieces and the wine was innocuously spilt.  Thereupon Benedict left the monastery and returned to the desert, where he founded two abbeys and drove the devil out of a monk who could not endure long prayers, his method being to beat the monk.  Here also, and in the other abbeys which he founded, he worked many miracles:  making iron swim, restoring life to the dead, and so forth.  Another attempt to poison him, this time with bread, was made, but the deadly stuff was carried away from him by a pet raven.  For the rest of the saint’s many wonderful deeds of piety you must seek The Golden Legend:  an agreeable task.  He died in the year 518.