We cannot too greatly admire the singular clearness and extraordinary precision with which the artist has placed in relief every detail that can make a figure live and render a work essentially eloquent.[7]

People have tried to make out that Georg Gisze was a merchant of Basle.  He would then have been of the race connected most closely with the Master’s life.  This opinion has been discussed by Woltmann, Holbein’s historian.  The superscriptions on the sufficiently numerous letters, which are reproduced in this painting, must be especially noticed; they are written in an ancient dialect which seems rather to be that of central Germany.[8]

    Jouin, Chefs-d’oeuvre:  Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture
    (Paris, 1895-97).

FOOTNOTES: 

[7] In one corner of the picture is found this inscription with its Latin distich: 

Imaginem Georgii Gysenii
Ista refert vultus, qua cernis Imago Georgi
Sic oculos vivos, sic habet ille genas. 
Anno aetatis suae XXXIII. 
Anno dom. 1532.

[8] We read on one of these letters:  Dem erszamen Jergen Gisze to Lunden in Engelant, mynem broder to handen.

PARADISE

(TINTORET)

JOHN RUSKIN

The chief reason why we all know the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, and not the Paradise of Tintoret, is the same love of sensation which makes us read the Inferno of Dante, and not his Paradise; and the choice, believe me, is our fault, not his; some farther evil influence is due to the fact that Michael Angelo had invested all his figures with picturesque and palpable elements of effect, while Tintoret has only made them lovely in themselves and has been content that they should deserve, not demand, your attention.

You are accustomed to think the figures of Michael Angelo sublime—­because they are dark, and colossal, and involved, and mysterious—­because, in a word, they look sometimes like shadows, and sometimes like mountains, and sometimes like spectres, but never like human beings.  Believe me, yet once more, in what I told you long since—­man can invent nothing nobler than humanity.  He cannot raise his form into anything better than God made it, by giving it either the flight of birds or strength of beasts, by enveloping it in mist, or heaping it into multitude.  Your pilgrim must look like a pilgrim in a straw hat, or you will not make him into one with cockle and nimbus; an angel must look like an angel on the ground, as well as in the air; and the much-denounced pre-Raphaelite faith that a saint cannot look saintly unless he has thin legs, is not more absurd than Michael Angelo’s, that a Sibyl cannot look Sibylline unless she has thick ones.

[Illustration:  PARADISE.
        Tintoret.]