Note 58 — NUMERICAL CATALOGUE, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE NOTES

Visitors to Venice may like to be reminded that most of Ruskin's criticism upon Tintoret's works there is now easily accessible in (1) The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret, (2) The Stones of Venice, travellers' edition, and (3) the reissue of the second volume of Modern Painters. Mr. Ruskin always accounted his "discovery" of Tintoret as one of the chief works of his life. "I have supplied," he wrote in Stones of Venice (1853), "somewhat copious notices of the pictures of Tintoret, because they are much injured, difficult to read, and entirely neglected by other writers on art." "I say with pride," he wrote in the epilogue to the second volume of Modern Painters (1883), "what it has become my duty to express openly, that it was left to me, and to me alone, first to discern, and then to teach, so far as in this hurried century any such thing can be taught, the excellency and supremacy of five great painters, despised until I spoke of them;—Turner, Tintoret, Luini, Botticelli, and Carpaccio. Despised,—nay, scarcely in any true sense of the word, known." For the Pre-Ruskinian view of Tintoret, the reader may consult Kugler's Handbook of Painting.