'At the top-top-top-of everything'

 Yesterday was a day of incessant heavy rain and blustery wind, but at least we made it to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a visit to which remains one of the greatest experiences even Venice has to offer. It was here that the discovery of the power of Tintoretto's art inspired Ruskin to write The Stones of Venice:
'Tintoret swept me in away into the mare maggiore of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of Venice herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue.'
His encounter with the paintings in the Scuola exploded Ruskin's former neat classification of the great artists. As he reported at the time,  'I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today – before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters and put him in the school of Art at the top-top-top-of everything, with a big black line underneath.'
Unfortunately the Crucifixion, for Ruskin and many others the greatest painting in the world, is currently in restauro, concealed behind a high screen while the conservationists and restorers get to work. The results promise to be spectacular – another good reason to revisit Venice. 
And this morning it is still raining, though mercifully with less force than yesterday.