retto has made us feel that he is.
In other words, his treatment of the high theme chosen by him has been
adequate.

We must seek the Scuola di San Rocco for examples of Tintoretto's
liveliest imagination. Without ceasing to be Italian in his attention to
harmony and grace, he far exceeded the masters of his nation in the
power of suggesting what is weird, mysterious, upon the border-land of
the grotesque. And of this quality there are three remarkable instances
in the Scuola. No one but Tintoretto could have evoked the fiend in his
Temptation of Christ. It is an indescribable hermaphroditic genius, the
genius of carnal fascination, with outspread downy rose-plumed wings,
and flaming bracelets on the full but sinewy arms, who kneels and lifts
aloft great stones, smiling entreatingly to the sad, grey Christ seated
beneath a rugged pent-house of the desert. No one again but Tintoretto
could have dashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering
flakes upon the golden flesh of Eve, half-hidden among laurels, as she
stretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam. No one but
Tintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah,
summoned by the beck of God from the whale's belly. The monstrous fish
rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapour from his trump-shaped
nostril. The prophet's beard descends upon his naked breast in hoary
ringlets to the girdle. He has forgotten the past peril of the deep,
although the whale's jaws yawn around him. Between him and the
outstretched finger of Jehovah calling him again to life, there runs a
spark of unseen spiritual electricity.

To comprehend Tintoretto's touch upon the pastoral idyll we must turn
our steps to San Giorgio again, and pace those meadows by the running
river in company with his Manna-Gatherers. Or we may seek the Accademia,
and notice how he here has varied the Temptation of Adam by Eve,
choosing a less tragic motive of seduction than the one so powerfully
rendered at San Rocco. Or in the Ducal Palace we may take our station,
hour by hour, before the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne. It is well to
leave the very highest achievements of art untouched by criticism
undescribed. And in this picture we have the most perfect of all modern
attempts to realise an antique myth--more perfect than Raphael's
Galatea, or Titian's Meeting of Bacchus with Ariadne, or Botticelli's
Birth of Venus from the Sea. It may suffice to marvel at the sligh