"Annunciation" with music which thrills us through
and through?

Religion and poetry did not exist for Tintoretto because the love and
cultivation of the Muses was a duty prescribed by the Greeks and Romans,
and because the love of God and the saints was prescribed by the Church;
but rather, as was the case with the best people of his time, because
both poetry and religion were useful to man. They helped him to forget
what was mean and sordid in life, they braced him to his task, and
consoled him for his disappointments. Religion answered to an
ever-living need of the human heart. The Bible was no longer a mere
document wherewith to justify Christian dogma. It was rather a series of
parables and symbols pointing at all times to the path that led to a
finer and nobler life. Why then continue to picture Christ and the
Apostles, the Patriarchs and Prophets, as persons living under Roman
rule, wearing the Roman toga, and walking about in the landscape of a
Roman bas-relief? Christ and the Apostles, the Patriarchs and Prophets,
were the embodiment of living principles and of living ideals.
Tintoretto felt this so vividly that he could not think of them
otherwise than as people of his own kind, living under conditions easily
intelligible to himself and to his fellow-men. Indeed, the more
intelligible and the more familiar the look and garb and surroundings of
biblical and saintly personages, the more would they drive home the
principles and ideas they incarnated. So Tintoretto did not hesitate to
turn every biblical episode into a picture of what the scene would look
like had it taken place under his own eyes, nor to tinge it with his own
mood.

His conception of the human form was, it is true, colossal, although the
slender elegance that was then coming into fashion, as if in protest
against physical force and organisation, influenced him considerably in
his construction of the female figure; but the effect which he must
always have produced upon his contemporaries, and which most of his
works still produce, is one of astounding reality as well as of wide
sweep and power. Thus, in the "Discovery of the Body of St. Mark," in
the Brera, and in the "Storm Rising while the Corpse is being Carried
through the Streets of Alexandria," in the Royal Palace at Venice, the
figures, although colossal, are so energetic and so easy in movement,
and the effects of perspective and of light and atmosphere are so on a
level with the gigant