Tintoretto'S Famous Pictures

"The Last Judgment," "The Worship of the Golden Calf," "The Presentation of the Virgin," and "The Martyrdom of St. Agnes," are considered Tintoretto's masterpieces.

Of the first two, Ruskin says that no pictures will better reward a resolute study; of "The Last Judgment" he gives a powerful description in his "Modern Painters:" "Bat-like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth-darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam Pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangor of the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as they awake, by the white light of the new Heaven, until the great vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment-seat."

The palaces of Venice are full of Tintoretto's brilliant works, and there is something of his in almost every collection in Europe. Tintoretto's great picture of "Paradise," which covers the end of the library in the ducal palace in Venice, is the largest oil-painting in the world.

This famous Italian artist, Tintoretto, was born in Venice in 1512. His real name was Giacomo Robusti; but, his father being by trade a dyer (Italian, tintore), he was commonly called Tintoretto.

Titian, who was his first master, is said to have sent him home in less than two weeks because he painted so well that master became jealous of pupil.

Tintoretto was the only one of Titian's many pupils and imitators who approached an equality with his master, and who, in fact, became in his turn the founder of a new school. He was distinguished by his freedom of drawing, grandeur of design, and beauty of color.

Tintoretto died in Venice in 1594 when eighty-two years old.