Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/447

 Painting in Venice. 417 Miracle of S. Marie, in the Academy of Venice, for instance, is finely conceived and forcibly executed ; but he painted too rapidly to achieve the highest results, and his works are remarkable for their gigantic size rather than for their artistic qualities. His chief works were those he executed for the. Scuola di S. Marco, of which the Miracle is one, and those for the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice. The S. George destroying the Dragon is the only work by Tintoretto in the National Gallery ; but two may be seen in Hampton Court Palace — his Esther before Ahasuerus, and the Nine Muses. In the works of Paolo Veronese, the distinctive principles of the Venetian School are far more successfully fulfilled than in those of Tintoretto. They rival in magnificence those of Titian himself, whilst his delicacy of chiaroscuro, the sincerity with which he brought out the true relations of objects to each other in air and light, his genuine feeling for physical beauty, the softness and freedom of his pencilling, his mastery of true symbolism, and his power of catching the essential characteristics both of men and animals, give him a high position as an independent master. The Marriage at Cana, now in the Louvre, is considered his finest work. It contains 120 figures or heads, including portraits of many of the greatest celebrities of his day, and is full of life and action. Scarcely less famous are his Feast of Levi, in the Academy of Venice ; his Feast in the house of Simon the Pharisee, in the Louvre; and another of the same subject in the Turin Gallery (these four feasts were painted for the refectories of four Venetian convents) ; the Family of Darius, in the National Gallery, which also contains one of his Adora- tions ; his Consecration of S. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, EHA E E