Adoration of the Magi, after Tintoretto

No artist made a greater impression on the young Ruskin than Jacopo Robusti (1518-94), known as Tintoretto. The contrast of the Venetian master’s rich, powerful works with the refined Tuscan art Ruskin had previously been studying was dramatic. After his first visit to the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice on 24 September 1845, Ruskin confessed to his father that “I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret”. In the cycle of vast canvases depicting the Life of Christ, “he lashes out like a leviathan, and heaven and earth come together. M Angelo himself cannot hurl figures into space as he does, nor did M Angelo ever paint space itself which would not look like a nutshell beside Tintoret’s”

Writing in Volume III of Modern Painters (1856), Ruskin drew attention to the figures of the Magi, depicted as “two of the noblest and most thoughtful of the Venetian senators in extreme old age,” their “steep foreheads and refined features” contrasted with “the head of a Negro servant, and of an Indian, both, however, noble of their kind.”