You are accustomed to think the figures of Michael Angelo
sublime--because they are dark, and colossal, and involved, and
mysterious--because, in a word, they look sometimes like shadows, and
sometimes like mountains, and sometimes like spectres, but never like
human beings. Believe me, yet once more, in what I told you long
since--man can invent nothing nobler than humanity. He cannot raise his
form into anything better than God made it, by giving it either the
flight of birds or strength of beasts, by enveloping it in mist, or
heaping it into multitude. Your pilgrim must look like a pilgrim in a
straw hat, or you will not make him into one with cockle and nimbus;
an angel must look like an angel on the ground, as well as in the
air; and the much-denounced pre-Raphaelite faith that a saint cannot
look saintly unless he has thin legs, is not more absurd than Michael
Angelo's, that a Sibyl cannot look Sibylline unless she has thick ones.

[Illustration: PARADISE.
_Tintoret._]

All that shadowing, storming, and coiling of his, when you look into it,
is mere stage decoration, and that of a vulgar kind. Light is, in
reality, more awful than darkness--modesty more majestic than strength;
and there is truer sublimity in the sweet joy of a child, or the sweet
virtue of a maiden, than in the strength of Antaeus, or thunder-clouds of
AEtna.

Now, though in nearly all his greater pictures, Tintoret is entirely
carried away by his sympathy with Michael Angelo, and conquers him in
his own field;--outflies him in motion, outnumbers him in multitude,
outwits him in fancy, and outflames him in rage,--he can be just as
gentle as he is strong: and that _Paradise_, though it is the largest
picture in the world, without any question, is also the thoughtfullest,
and most precious.

The Thoughtfullest!--it would be saying but little, as far as Michael
Angelo is concerned.

For consider it of yourselves. You have heard, from your youth up (and
all educated persons have heard for three centuries), of this _Last
Judgment_ of his, as the most sublime picture in existence.

The subject of it is one which should certainly be interesting to you in
one of two ways.

If you never expect to be judged for any of your own doings, and the
tradition of the coming of Christ is to you as an idle tale--still,
think what a wonderful tale it would be, were it well told. You are at
liberty, disbelieving it, to range the fields--Elysian and