[15] So long as the originals exist, copies of great paintings are as unsatisfactory as a Beethoven symphony or a Wagner opera on the piano; but when the originals have perished, copies may serve a worthy purpose in perpetuating at least the concept and general treatment of the painter. It is greatly to be desired that some capable student should do for Tintoret what Toschi has done for Correggio at Parma. A series of faithfully executed sketches would enable posterity to judge of Tintoret’s range of imagination and inexhaustible powers of treatment, although his coloring and drawing could not be reproduced. Many of his paintings have never been engraved, and not one has been well engraved.
What, then, are some of the qualities of Tintoret’s genius? First of all, he had vast scope: Christian and classic lore, the legend and story of Venice, contemporary scenes, and portraiture,--all these lay within his province. But scope alone, unguided by rarer powers, does not suffice for the equipment of the supreme master. Rubens had scope, even Doré had it, and neither ranks among the foremost. In Tintoret it was accompanied by a most intense imagination, which penetrated to the elemental reality and understood the intertangled relations of life. Imagination operated through him with a vigor more like Nature’s own than that of any other man except Shakespeare; a vigor which seems at once inexhaustible and effortless, which never wastes and never scants. In creating a beggar or a seraph he expended just as much energy as was necessary for each; you do not feel that one was harder for him than the other. Tintoret’s creations have this further resemblance to Shakespeare’s: _they live!_ You do not exclaim, “This is a great picture!” but, “This is a great scene!” He is like a traveler who brings back views from a strange country: albeit you have never been there, yet the views are so real, the figures are painted so freely and lifelike, and not in conscious or conventional attitudes, that you cannot doubt their faithfulness, and are absorbed by the wonders and beauties they present.
Tintoret never conspires to startle you by sensational devices. Even in those works where he is most daring he is really painting what his imagination saw naturally, and is no more bent on inventing oddities and marvels than was John in the _Apocalypse_. Before beginning a Biblical or an historical subject, he seems to have asked himself, “How did this look to a bystander?” and he relies upon the actuality of the scene to produce the desired impression. He has been charged, sometimes, with making Christ and his disciples too vulgar. Other painters have so accustomed you to look for a kingly personage in Christ, and for princely garments on his followers, that when you first see a “Last Supper”: by Tintoret you miss the habitual elegance; for he shows you simple and earnest but not ignoble fishermen and artisans of Judea. If you contemplate them wisely, your astonishment will deepen as you reflect that it was through and by such lowly and zealous men as these, and not by philosophers and prelates and princes, that the gospel of brotherly love was disseminated among mankind. It is legitimate for an artist to invest an historic character with emblems which bespeak the significance posterity has attached to him; but it is wholesome to see him as he probably appeared to his contemporaries, before subsequent generations have discovered a retroactive importance in his career. Tintoret employed now one method and now the other, and whosoever has been moved by the “Christ before Pilate” and “The Crucifixion” of the School of San Rocco needs not to be told that pathos and sublimity belong only to the former method.