But in 1518, eight years after Giorgione’s death, another great innovating master was born at Venice, Tintoret by name, who in his turn opened new visions of the world to the artists of his day.  While painting in the rest of Italy was becoming mannered and sentimental, lacking in power and originality, Tintoret in Venice was creating masterpieces with a very fury of invention and a corresponding swiftness of hand.  He was his own chief teacher.  Outside his studio he wrote upon a sign to inform or attract pupils—­’The design of Michelangelo and the colouring of Titian.’  Profound study of the works of these two masters is manifest in his own.  Like Michelangelo he worked passionately rather than with the sober competence of Titian.  His thronging visions, his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a surpassing record.  Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures.  His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale.  He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing.  Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance had deviated but little from it.  In Tintoret the freedom of the Renaissance reached its height.  For him tradition had no fetters.  When he painted a picture of Paradise for the Doge’s Palace it measured 84 by 34 feet, and contained literally hundreds of figures.  His imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a figure.  New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush in exhaustless multitude.

It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret’s most famous works, still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which they were painted, or in which they have been brought together.  But the National Gallery is fortunate in possessing one relatively small canvas of his which shows some of his finest qualities.  The subject of St. George slaying the dragon was not a new one.  It had been painted by Raphael and by several of the earlier Venetian painters, but Tintoret’s treatment of it was all his own.  In the earlier pictures, the princess, for whose sake St. George fights the dragon, was a little figure in the background fleeing in terror.  St. George occupied the chief place, as he does upon the back of our gold sovereigns, where the princess has been left out altogether.  Tintoret makes her flee, but she is running towards the spectator, and so, in her flight, stands out the most conspicuous figure.  One of the victims that the dragon has slain lies behind her.  In the distance St. George fights with all his might against the powers of evil, whilst ‘the splendour of God’ blazes in the sky.  There is a vividness and power about the picture that proclaims the hand of Tintoret.