Tom Nichols and Tessa Hadley - James, Ruskin, and Tintoretto - The Henry James Review 23:3 The Henry James Review 23.3 (2002) 294-303 James, Ruskin, and Tintoretto Tom Nichols University of Aberdeen, and Tessa Hadley, Bath Spa University College [Figures] Henry James's preference for the work of Jacopo Tintoretto (1519-94) over that of Titian (c. 1490-1576) may seem at first sight surprising. Among the masters of the Venetian Renaissance tradition, Titian had long held sway in the canon of educated taste across Europe. In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari had carefully distinguished between the two painters, describing Titian's manner of painting as "judicious, beautiful and astonishing" in contrast to Tintoretto's "fantastic and extravagant" works, and classical-academic art critics of the succeeding centuries tended to follow Vasari's distinction (Artists 458, Painters 509). For Sir Joshua Reynolds, writing late in the eighteenth century, Titian possessed "a sort of senatorial dignity" which exempted him from the crude display of the "mechanism of painting" he saw as characteristic of Tintoretto (66-67). It is no accident, of course, that Reynolds appealed to social categories in making this aesthetic distinction. The identification of Titian with the royal houses and aristocracies of Europe who had so often patronized him as a painter was a long-standing one, while Tintoretto's very different status was proclaimed in his professional nickname.