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Excerpt from North Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 1: Spring 1957 But there is one more proof for this dating of our painting. Three times has Tintoretto made use of the forge motive. One of the four paintings which he executed for the Salotto Dorato of the Ducal Palace, in 1578, shows. The Forge of Vulcan again. As in our painting, four figures surround the anvil, but no story is told. All emphasis is on the melodious rhythm of the action of forging. There is no interest in the descrip tion of the Cyclopes, who appear here as normal human beings. Placed in an even distribution around the anvil, the rise and fall of their hammers conveys the feeling of an incessant circulating motion, a dynamic manifestation of movement in space and time. This version of the motive is certainly a long way from the graceful, decorative arrangement of our painting. The motive appears for the third time in one of Tintoretto's most mature paintings, the Gathering of the Manna in San Giorgio Maggiore, from about 1594. In the upper left corner of this wonderfully exuberant symphony to the praise of this life on earth are three men gathered around an anvil. The almost jubilant intensity of their movements seems to rotate around the anvil in a frenzy' of action. Thus, the three versions of our motive really sum up the whole course of Tintoretto's transfor mation from a graceful representative of the dying High Renaissance to the forceful innovator of the baroque. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majori