Tintoretto and the Wrong Trousers

I found a pair of light cotton trousers and they looked OK in the shop, but when I got them home I realised that the elasticated bottoms weren't a good look, and the blue was a shrieking sort of blue that not even Tiepolo at his bluest would have chosen. I couldn't do much about the blue, but I was determined the elasticated bottoms would go. I didn't want to look like Andy Pandy's  mother. So I grabbed the scissors (this apartment has everything) and hacked off the bottoms, then hemmed them amateurishly. The trousers now flapped around my legs like flour bags, at a moment when the sartorial authorities have declared that all trouser legs must be tight-fitting as tourniquets. Never mind. Nobody would look at me anyway. At least I would be cool in the punishing heat. Thus attired I went out in search of Tintoretto. The punishing heat had gone and a light rain was falling. The trousers, to be honest, were beginning to feel a bit too thin.

But I persevered. I hopped onto a vaporetto and chugged round the northern coast to ORTO. The church Madonna del Orto contains the tallest painting ever attempted. I went in. The church was lofty, pink and grey and cream brick and marble - my favourite colours, I can't imagine why I packed all this blue. I just misspelled 'pink' as 'oink'. I just thought you'd like to know.

I was a bit disappointed with Tintoretto's Last Judgement. The whole of the bottom half - hell, yes - was so dark as to be almost invisible. His colours seemed a bit muddy - but perhaps my taste has been corrupted by all the shrieking blue. Still, Tintoretto was roughly contemporary with Elizabeth 1, and when you compare his stuff with the awful primitive tat that was being churned out by English artists of the period, it makes you realise just how grrrrreat he was. My favourite thing in the church was a small dog in a painting by Titian, Tobias and the Angel. I also saw a very macho old pug on the boat. He looked like a tiny bull.

 I am happy to record that the English tourists here are some of the least disgusting. There's a lot of debate in Venetian forums about trying not to look like a tourist, and the difference between tourism and travelling. I suppose if you drift past St Mark's square on a cruise ship several storeys high, exclaim raucously and take photos, then sail off to somewhere else, it might exhibit a vulgar attitude to travel which is to be deplored. But as we, the gaping hordes, churn up and down the Grand Canal, gazing at all these palaces built by millionaire merchants to exhibit their wealth and taste, I would have thought they'd be chuffed that hordes of people would come from Wanxian and Wisconsin and Wotton-under Edge to gape, stunned, at the majesty of the place, hundreds of years later. In other words, being a tourist in Venice is just what comes naturally.