Prolonged study of the human form had given to him,
as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures.
His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale.
He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice
with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times
before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of
tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion
and the Last Judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance
had deviated but little from it. In Tintoret the freedom of the
Renaissance reached its height. For him tradition had no fetters. When
he painted a picture of Paradise for the Doge's Palace it measured
84 by 34 feet, and contained literally hundreds of figures. His
imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a
figure. New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush
in exhaustless multitude.
It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret's most famous works,
still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which
they were painted, or in which they have been brought together.
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