[Illustration:  THE MIRACLE OF S. MARK FROM THE PAINTING BY TINTORETTO In the Accademia]

The two great pictures of this next room are Titian’s “Assumption” and Tintoretto’s “Miracle of S. Mark,” reproduced opposite page 164, and this one.  I need hardly say that it is the Titian which wins the rapture and the applause; but the other gives me personally more pleasure.  The Titian is massive and wonderful:  perhaps indeed too massive in the conception of the Madonna, for the suggestion of flight is lacking; but it has an earthiness, even a theatricalness, which one cannot forget, superb though that earthiness may be.  The cherubs, however, commercial copies of which are always being made by diligent artists, are a joy.  The Titians that hang in the gallery of my mind are other than this.  A Madonna and Child and a rollicking baby at Vienna:  our own “Bacchus and Ariadne”; the Louvre “Man with a Glove”:  these are among them; but the “Assumption” is not there.

Tintoretto’s great picture of the “Miracle of S. Mark” was painted between 1544 and 1548, before he was thirty.  The story tells that a pious slave, forbidden by his master to visit and venerate the house of S. Mark, disobeyed the command and went.  As a punishment his master ordered him to be blinded and maimed; but the hands of the executioners were miraculously stayed and their weapons refused to act.  The master, looking on, was naturally at once converted.

Tintoretto painted his picture of this incident for the Scuola of S. Mark (now a hospital); but when it was delivered, the novelty of its dramatic vigour—­a palpitating actuality almost of the cinema—­was too much for the authorities.  The coolness of their welcome infuriated the painter, conscious as he was that he had done a great thing, and he demanded the work back; but fortunately there were a few good judges to see it first, and their enthusiasm carried the day.  Very swiftly the picture became a wonder of the city.  Thus has it always been with the great innovators in art, except that Tintoretto’s triumph was more speedy:  they have almost invariably been condemned first.

An interesting derivative detail of the work is the gateway at the back over which the sculptured figures recline, for these obviously were suggested by casts, which we know Tintoretto to have possessed, of Michael Angelo’s tombs in S. Lorenzo’s sacristy at Florence.  Every individual in the picture is alive and breathing, but none more remarkably so than the woman on the left with a child in her arms and her knee momentarily resting on a slope of the pillar.  No doubt some of the crowd are drawn, after the fashion of the time, from public men in Venice; but I know not if they can now be identified.

Another legend of S. Mark which, by the way, should have its Venetian pictorial rendering, tells how a man who was working on the Campanile fell, and as he fell had the presence of mind to cry “S.  Mark!  S. Mark!” whereupon a branch instantly sprang forth from the masonry below and sustained him until help arrived.  Tintoretto, who has other miracles of S. Mark in the Royal Palace here and in the Brera at Milan, would have drawn that falling workman magnificently.