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 shadow, like those of Bacchus, Eve, and Ariadne.  Titian himself was powerless to imagine movement like that of Aphrodite floating in the air, or of Madonna adjuring Christ in the “Paradiso,” or of Christ Himself judging by the silent simplicity of his divine attitude the worldly judge at whose tribunal He stands, or of the tempter raising his jewelled arms aloft to dazzle with meretricious brilliancy the impassive God above him, or of Eve leaning in irresistible seductiveness against the fatal tree, or of S. Mark down-rushing through the sky to save the slave that cried to him, or of the Mary who has fallen asleep with folded hands from utter lassitude of agony at the foot of the cross.

It is in these attitudes, movements, gestures, that Tintoretto makes the human form an index and symbol of the profoundest, most tragic, most delicious thought and feeling of the inmost soul.  In daylight radiancy and equable colouring he is surpassed perhaps by Veronese.  In mastery of every portion of his art, in solidity of execution, and in unwavering hold upon his subject, he falls below the level of Titian.  Many of his pictures are unworthy of his genius—­hurriedly designed, rapidly dashed upon the canvas, studied by candlelight from artificial models, with abnormal effects of light and dark, hastily daubed with pigments that have not stood the test of time.  He was a gigantic improvitsatore:  that is the worst thing we can say of him.  But in the swift intuitions of the imagination, in the purities and sublimities of the prophet-poet’s soul, neither Veronese nor yet even Titian can approach him.

The greatest difficulty meets the critic who attempts to speak of Titian.  To seize the salient characteristics of an artist whose glory it is to offer nothing over-prominent, and who keeps the middle path of perfection, is impossible.  As complete health may be termed the absence of obtrusive sensation, as virtue has been called the just proportion between two opposite extravagances, so is Titian’s art a golden mean of joy unbroken by brusque movements of the passions—­a well-tempered harmony in which no thrilling note suggests the possibility of discord.  In his work the world and men cease to be merely what they are; he makes them what they ought to be:  and this he does by separating what is beautiful in sensuous life from its alloy of painful meditation and of burdensome endeavour.  The disease of thought is unknown in his kingdom; no divisions exist between the spirit and the flesh; the will is thwarted by no obstacles.  When we think of Titian, we are irresistibly led to think of music.  His “Assumption of Madonna” (the greatest single oil-painting in the world, if we except Raphael’s “Madonna di San Sisto”) can best be described