tumult of flying, running? doesn’t make much sense, but can’t figure out a plausible alternative, ascending figures in the ‘Judgment,’ what an interval there is!  How strangely the white lamb-like maiden, kneeling beside her lamb in the picture of S. Agnes, contrasts with the dusky gorgeousness of the Hebrew women despoiling themselves of jewels for the golden calf!  Comparing these several manifestations of creative power, we feel ourselves in the grasp of a painter who was essentially a poet, one for whom his art was the medium for expressing before all things thought and passion.  Each picture is executed in the manner suited to its tone of feeling, the key of its conception.

Elsewhere than in the Madonna dell’ Orto there are more distinguished single examples of Tintoretto’s realising faculty.  The ‘Last Supper’ in San Giorgio, for instance, and the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ in the Scuola di San Rocco illustrate his unique power of presenting sacred history in a novel, romantic framework of familiar things.  The commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed to portray in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendour; in the other, an idyll of infinite sweetness.  Divinity shines through the rafters of that upper chamber, where round a low large table the Apostles are assembled in a group translated from the social customs of the painter’s days.  Divinity is shed upon the straw-spread manger, where Christ lies sleeping in the loft, with shepherds crowding through the room beneath.

A studied contrast between the simplicity and repose of the central figure and the tumult of passions in the multitude around, may be observed in the ‘Miracle of S. Agnes.’  It is this which gives dramatic vigour to the composition.  But the same effect is carried to its highest fulfilment, with even a loftier beauty, in the episode of Christ before the judgment-seat of Pilate, at San Rocco.  Of all Tintoretto’s religious pictures, that is the most profoundly felt, the most majestic.  No other artist succeeded as he has here succeeded in presenting to us God incarnate.  For this Christ is not merely the just man, innocent, silent before his accusers.  The stationary, white-draped figure, raised high above the agitated crowd, with tranquil forehead slightly bent, facing his perplexed and fussy judge, is more than man.  We cannot say perhaps precisely why he is divine.  But Tintoretto 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 borderland 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.’