[13] In some of the paintings at San Giorgio the blues are now milky splotches.
I cannot dismiss this subject without alluding to another cause for the slight attention given to Tintoret: his pictures are almost invariably condemned to oblivion by the position in which they have been hung. You must look for them in dark corners near the ceiling, or in cross-lights which render an examination impossible. Of those which still exist in the churches for which they were painted, some have been injured by the drippings from candles; others have been partly hidden by tabernacles, reliquaries, and other objects of church ceremonial. Travelers in Venice a generation ago record that rain leaked through the roof of the School of San Rocco, and soaked some of the canvases; others, hung near windows, have had to suffer from the strong sunlight for centuries. In the Ducal Palace, one series of ceiling paintings have succumbed to the daubing of restorers, and are now hardly recognizable as being Tintoret’s; while the matchless “Paradise,” when I recently saw it,[14] was falling rapidly to decay. The seams where the vast canvas was originally joined had rotted in many places; the canvas itself was warped and rumpled, forming little shelves and unevennesses on which the dust had collected so as to hide the colors; and from the ceiling dangled a ragged fringe of cobwebs, in some places two or three feet long.
A few generations hence, when these incomparable works have been irretrievably damaged, posterity will wonder--with a wonder intensified by indignation--that we allowed them to perish. Early Christians, who mutilated pagan works of art because they believed them to be pernicious, may be excused; but what excuse has our age to offer? We pretend to cherish all manifestations of culture, and we have ample means to preserve them; yet whilst our museums are daily adding to their collections of half-barbarous antiquities, dug up in Arizona, in Mexico, in Yucatan, in Peru, in Asia Minor, in Mesopotamia, there are surely hastening to destruction scores of the works of the mightiest genius who ever honored painting. During the past twenty years, New York millionaires have paid more for the immoralities and inanities of modern French painters than would be necessary to erect a separate gallery in Venice for the proper preservation of Tintoret’s masterpieces. If there were but a single manuscript of _Hamlet_ in the world, and no printing-presses, what should we say to those who allowed it to perish through neglect? Yet there are many of Tintoret’s pictures, each of them as precious in its way as a page of _Hamlet_, which we raise no voice to save. In our selfishness, we forget that the treasures which we have inherited from the past are not ours to dissipate and destroy; we hold them in trust for the future, and woe unto us if, unmindful of our responsibility, we prove careless stewards.[15]