Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 5.djvu/62

50 In the same city of Venice, and almost at the same time, there lived and does yet live, a painter called Jacopo Tintoretto, who is a great lover of all the arts, and more particularly delights in playing on various musical instruments; he is besides a very agreeable person, which is proved in all his modes of proceeding; but as to the matter of painting, he may be said to possess the most singular, capricious, and determined hand, with the boldest, most extravagant, and obstinate brain, that has ever yet belonged to the domain of that art. Of this there is sufficient proof in his works, and in the fantastic composition of his stories, which are altogether different from and contrary'to the usages of other painters; nay, he has been more than ever extravagant in some of his more recent inventions, and in those strange caprices of his fancy, which he has executed almost as it were by hap-hazard and without design; insomuch that one might suppose, he well nigh desired to show that the art is but a jest. He will sometimes present as finished, sketches which are such mere outlines, that the spectator sees before him pencil marks made by chance, the results of a bold carelessness rather than the fruits of design and of a well-considered judgment.

This artist has painted every kind of picture, whether in fresco or oil, with portraits taken from the life also, and he executes works of all prices, in such sort that in this manner of his he has undertaken, and does undertake, the greater part of the pictures painted in Venice. It is to be observed, too, that in his youth Tintoretto had proved himself to possess great ability by the execution of many excellent pictures, insomuch that if he had properly used the advantages which he derived from nature, and had judiciously cultivated them by study, as those have done who have pursued the beautiful manner of his predecessors, and not depended on mere facility of hand as he has permitted himself to do, he would have been one of the best masters that Venice has ever possessed. Nor, proceeding as we have