Among the scores of narratives in the two halls the eye will rest upon Moses Smiting the Rock, for its majesty; upon the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth which has the intensity of Giotto’s fresco at neighboring Padua, with an abandon all its own; upon the Flight into Egypt, with its idyllic landscape; upon the awful tumult and despair of the Massacre of the Innocents; upon the pathos of the white-robed Christ, awaiting his doom from an indifferent proconsul. These occur among many that are equally memorable. Perhaps the subtle humanism of Tintoretto is best shown in the Temptation of Christ, Figure 297. Instead of the ignoble bat-like Satan of the mediæval painters, we have a magnificent starry-eyed youth, a veritable genius of the pride of life. With outstretched, generous arms he offers unstinted power and pleasure. The Christ regards him with tranquil kindness, as one might a splendid animal fawning too eagerly. For so Christian a man as Tintoretto, it implies extraordinary sympathy to imagine a Satan in his own way gloriously sure of his case. In these compositions the method is most various. But where there are many figures Tintoretto generally avoids the convention of placing the chief personages on the picture plane. You look over heads or between bodies to glimpse the Saints or the Blessed Virgin or Christ. And curiously this procedure does not confuse the eye. On the contrary these apparently casual but really most thoughtful arrangements heighten the sense of reality; one feels like a witness, like one himself on the edges of the throng.