Veronese was precisely the painter suited to a nation of merchants, in whom the associations of the counting-house and the exchange mingled with the responsibilities of the Senate and the passions of princes.  He never portrayed vehement emotions.  There are no brusque movements, no extended arms, like those of Tintoretto’s Magdalen in the “Pieta” at Milan, in his pictures.  His Christs and Maries and martyrs of all sorts are composed, serious, courtly, well-fed personages, who, like people of the world accidentally overtaken by some tragic misfortune, do not stoop to distortions or express more than a grave surprise, a decorous sense of pain.[283] His angelic beings are equally earthly.

The Venetian Rothschilds no doubt preferred the ceremonial to the imaginative treatment of sacred themes; and to do him justice, Veronese did not make what would in his case have been the mistake of choosing the tragedies of the Bible for representation.  It is the story of Esther, with its royal audiences, coronations, and processions; the marriage feast at Cana; the banquet in the house of Levi, that he selects by preference.  Even these themes he removes into a region far from Biblical associations.  His mise en scene is invariably borrowed from luxurious Italian palaces—­large open courts and loggie, crowded with guests and lacqueys—­tables profusely laden with gold and silver plate.  The same love of display led him to delight in allegory—­not allegory of the deep and mystic kind, but of the pompous and processional, in which Venice appears enthroned among the deities, or Jupiter fulminates against the vices, or the genii of the arts are personified as handsome women and blooming boys.  In dealing with mythology, again, it is not its poetry that he touches; he uses the tale of Europa, for example, as the motive for rich toilettes and delightful landscape, choosing the moment that has least in it of pathos.  These being the prominent features of his style, it remains to be said that what is really great in Veronese is the sobriety of his imagination and the solidity of his workmanship.  Amid so much that is distracting, he never loses command over his subject; nor does he degenerate into fulsome rhetoric.

Tintoretto is not at home in this somewhat vulgar region of ceremonial grandeur.  He requires both thought and fancy as the stimulus to his creative effort.  He cannot be satisfied with reproducing, even in the noblest combinations, merely what he sees around him of resplendent and magnificent.  There must be scope for poetry in the conception and for audacity in the projection of his subject, something that shall rouse the prophetic faculty and evoke the seer in the artist, or Tintoretto does not rise to his own altitude.  Accordingly we find that, in contrast with Veronese, he selects by preference the most tragic and dramatic subjects to be found in sacred history.  The Crucifixion, with its agonising deity and prostrate groups of women, sunk below the grief