e of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the
devil.

There are many circumstances which combine to give to this noble work a
more than usually imaginative character. The symbolical use of the net,
which is the cross net still used constantly in the canals of Venice,
and common throughout Italy, is of the same character as that of the
carpenter's tools in the Annunciation; but the introduction of the
spectral figure is of bolder reach, and yet more, that vision of the
after temptation which is expressly indicated as a subject of thought
rather than of sight, because it is in a part of the scene, which in
_fact_ must have been occupied by the trunks of the trees whose tops are
seen above; and another circumstance completes the mystic character of
the whole, that the flaky clouds which support the angelic hosts take on
the right, where the light first falls upon them, the shape of the head
of a fish, the well-known type both of the baptismal sacrament, and of
Christ.

Sec. 20. The Crucifixion.

But the most exquisite instance of this imaginative power occurs in an
incident in the background of the Crucifixion. I will not insult this
marvellous picture by an effort at a verbal account of it. I would not
whitewash it with praise, and I refer to it only for the sake of two
thoughts peculiarly illustrative of the intellectual faculty immediately
under discussion. In the common and most catholic treatment of the
subject, the mind is either painfully directed to the bodily agony,
coarsely expressed by outward anatomical signs, or else it is permitted
to rest on that countenance inconceivable by man at any time, but
chiefly so in this its consummated humiliation. In the first case, the
representation is revolting; in the second, inefficient, false, and
sometimes blasphemous. None even of the greatest religious painters have
ever, so far as I know, succeeded here; Giotto and Angelico were cramped
by the traditional treatment, and the latter especially, as before
observed, is but too apt to indulge in those points of vitiated feeling
which attained their worst development among the Byzantines: Perugino
fails in his Christ in almost every instance (of other men than these
after them we need not speak.) But Tintoret here, as in all other cases,
penetrating into the root and deep places of his subject, despising all
outward and bodily appearances of pain, and seeking for some means of
expressing, not the rack of nerve