s amid clouds on Sinai, a white ascetic,
lightning-smitten man emerging in the glory of apparent godhead;--the
anguish of the Magdalen above her martyred God;--the solemn silence of
Christ before the throne of Pilate;--the rushing of the wings of Seraphim,
and the clangour of the trumpet that awakes the dead;--these are the
soul-stirring themes that Tintoretto handles with the ease of
mastery.[284]

Meditating upon Tintoretto's choice of such subjects, we feel that the
profoundest characteristic of his genius is the determination toward
motives pre-eminently poetic rather than proper to the figurative arts.
The poet imagines a situation in which the intellectual or emotional life
is paramount, and the body is subordinate. The painter selects situations
in which physical form is of the first importance, and a feeling or a
thought is suggested. But Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetical
ideas; and he often fails to realise them fully through the inadequacy of
painting as a medium for such matter. Moses, in the drama of the "Golden
Calf," for instance, is a poem, not a true picture.[285] The pale ecstatic
stretching out emaciated arms, presents no beauty of attitude or outline.
Energy of thought is conspicuous in the figure; and reflection is needed
to bring out the purpose of the painter.[286]

It is not, however, only in the region of the vast, tempestuous, and
tragic that Tintoretto finds himself at home. He is equal to every task
that can be imposed upon the imagination. Provided only that the spiritual
fount be stirred, the jet of living water gushes forth, pure,
inexhaustible, and limpid. In his "Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne," that
most perfect lyric of the sensuous fancy from which sensuality is
absent;[287] in his "Temptation of Adam," that symphony of grey and brown
and ivory more lustrous than the hues of sunset; in his "Miracle of S.
Agnes," that lamb-like maiden with her snow-white lamb among the soldiers
and the priests of Rome, Tintoretto has proved beyond all question that
the fiery genius of Titanic artists can pierce and irradiate the placid
and the tender secrets of the soul with more consummate mastery than falls
to the lot of those who make tranquillity their special province.[288]

Paolo Veronese never penetrated to this inner shrine of beauty, this
Holiest of Holies where the spiritual graces dwell. He could not paint
waxen limbs, with silver lights and golden and transparent mysteries of