Tintoretto is not at home in this somewhat vulgar region of ceremonial grandeur. He requires both thought and fancy as the stimulus to his creative effort. He cannot be satisfied with reproducing, even in the noblest combinations, merely what he sees around him of resplendent and magnificent. There must be scope for poetry in the conception and for audacity in the projection of his subject, something that shall rouse the prophetic faculty and evoke the seer in the artist, or Tintoretto does not rise to his own altitude. Accordingly we find that, in contrast with Veronese, he selects by preference the most tragic and dramatic subjects to be found in sacred history. The Crucifixion, with its agonising deity and prostrate groups of women, sunk below the grief of tears;--the Temptation in the wilderness, with its passionate contrast of the grey-robed Man of Sorrows and the ruby-winged, voluptuous fiend;--the Temptation of Adam in Eden, a glowing allegory of the fascination of the spirit by the flesh;--Paradise, a tempest of souls, whirled like Lucretian atoms or gold dust in sunbeams by the celestial forces that perform the movement of the spheres;--the Destruction of the world, where all the fountains and rivers and lakes and seas of earth have formed one cataract, that thunders with cities and nations on its rapids down a bottomless gulf; while all the winds and hurricanes of the air have grown into one blast, that carries men like dead leaves up to judgment;--the Plague of the fiery serpents, with multitudes encoiled and writhing on a burning waste of sand;--the Massacre of the Innocents, with its spilth of blood on slippery pavements of porphyry and serpentine;--the Delivery of the tables of the law to Moses amid clouds on Sinai, a white ascetic, lightning-smitten man emerging in the glory of apparent godhead;--the anguish of the Magdalen above her martyred God;--the solemn silence of Christ before the throne of Pilate;--the rushing of the wings of Seraphim, and the clangour of the trumpet that awakes the dead;--these are the soul-stirring themes that Tintoretto handles with the ease of mastery.[284]