etto had to an even greater degree the feeling that whatever
existed was for mankind and with reference to man. In his youth people
were once more turning to religion, and in Venice poetry was making its
way more than it had previously done, not only because Venice had become
the refuge of men of letters, but also because of the diffusion of
printed books. Tintoretto took to the new feeling for religion and
poetry as to his birthright. Yet whether classic fable or biblical
episode were the subject of his art, Tintoretto coloured it with his
feeling for the human life at the heart of the story. His sense of power
did not express itself in colossal nudes so much as in the immense
energy, in the glowing health of the figures he painted, and more still
in his effects of light, which he rendered as if he had it in his hands
to brighten or darken the heavens at will and subdue them to his own
moods.

He could not have accomplished this, we may be sure, if he had not had
even greater skill than Titian in the treatment of light and shadow and
of atmosphere. It was this which enabled him to give such living
versions of biblical stories and saintly legends. For, granting that an
effect of reality were attainable in painting without an adequate
treatment of light and atmosphere, even then, the reality would look
hideous, as it does in many modern painters who attempt to paint people
of to-day in their every-day dress and among their usual surroundings.
It is not "Realism" which makes such pictures hideous, but the want of
that toning down which the atmosphere gives to things in life, and of
that harmonising to which the light subjects all colours.

It was a great mastery of light and shadow which enabled Tintoretto to
put into his pictures all the poetry there was in his soul without once
tempting us to think that he might have found better expression in
words. The poetry which quickens most of his works in the Scuola di San
Rocco is almost entirely a matter of light and colour. What is it but
the light that changes the solitudes in which the Magdalen and St. Mary
of Egypt are sitting, into dreamlands seen by poets in their moments of
happiest inspiration? What but light and colour, the gloom and chill of
evening, with the white-stoled figure standing resignedly before the
judge, that give the "Christ before Pilate" its sublime magic? What,
again, but light, colour, and the star-procession of cherubs that imbue
the realism of the