I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other day I went
to the Prado it was with the wish of finding him perfectly right,
triumphantly right. I had been from the first a strong partisan of
Titian, and in many a heated argument with Ruskin, unaware of our
controversy, I had it out with that most prejudiced partisan of
Tintoretto. I always got the better of him, as one does in such
dramatizations, where one frames one's opponent's feeble replies for
him; but now in the Prado, sadly and strangely enough, I began to wonder
if Ruskin might not have tacitly had the better of me all the time. If
Hay was right in holding that the best Titians in the world were in the
Prado, then I was wrong in having argued for Titian against Tintoretto
with Ruskin. I could only wish that I had the "Assumption" there, or
some of those senators whose portraits I remembered in the Academy at
Venice. The truth is that to my eye he seemed to weaken before the
Spanish masters, though I say this, who must confess that I failed to
see the room of his great portraits. The Italians who hold their own
with the Spaniards are Tintoretto and Veronese; even Murillo was more
than a match for Titian in such pictures of his as I saw (I must own
that I did not see the best, or nearly all), though properly speaking
Murillo is to be known at his greatest only in Seville.
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