Page 17 - Demo

led by Jacob's servant barely emerge to our view. The second great Venetian artist of the period was Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto, a painter of unsurpassed vitality and stupendous dramatic power.
A remarkable portraitist, his large group-portrait at the Kress for reproduction is of the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo and his familv, represents Tintoretto's challenge to Titian's group portrait of the familv ofthe Doge Andrea Vendramin, painted thirty vears earlier, or about 1543. Titian's Vendramin portrait, now in the National Gallerv, London, is very close in height to the picture now in the National Gallery in Washington; but Tintoretto's painting is much greater in the dimension of width. It is, in effect, a great mural composition with the glowing figure of the Madonna who has miraculously appeared in the canter, and the Doge and his spouse kneeling on either side of the raised dais on which she sits. The standing figure of a Venetian Senator at the left has provisionally been identified as the Doge's brother, Giovanni; the two young men at the right, behind the Doge's wife, as Giovanni's sons, and the two winged boys, masquerading as musician-angels, as his grandsons. An interesting technical detail of this painting is the fact (revealed on examination after cleaning) that the heads of Giovanni and his two sons are each painted on separate pieces of canvas and -glued onto the larger canvas. This must mean that these portraits were made in separate sittings. In such a large painting, the studio force may well have helped in the draperies and the background, but Tintoretto's direct and vital touch is felt throughout the whole picture, particularly in the heads and the hands so full of freshness and strength.