Meditating upon Tintoretto's choice of such subjects, we feel that the profoundest characteristic of his genius is the determination toward motives pre-eminently poetic rather than proper to the figurative arts. The poet imagines a situation in which the intellectual or emotional life is paramount, and the body is subordinate. The painter selects situations in which physical form is of the first importance, and a feeling or a thought is suggested. But Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetical ideas; and he often fails to realise them fully through the inadequacy of painting as a medium for such matter. Moses, in the drama of the "Golden Calf," for instance, is a poem, not a true picture.[285] The pale ecstatic stretching out emaciated arms, presents no beauty of attitude or outline. Energy of thought is conspicuous in the figure; and reflection is needed to bring out the purpose of the painter.[286] It is not, however, only in the region of the vast, tempestuous, and tragic that Tintoretto finds himself at home. He is equal to every task that can be imposed upon the imagination. Provided only that the spiritual fount be stirred, the jet of living water gushes forth, pure, inexhaustible, and limpid. In his "Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne," that most perfect lyric of the sensuous fancy from which sensuality is absent;[287] in his "Temptation of Adam," that symphony of grey and brown and ivory more lustrous than the hues of sunset; in his "Miracle of S. Agnes," that lamb-like maiden with her snow-white lamb among the soldiers and the priests of Rome, Tintoretto has proved beyond all question that the fiery genius of Titanic artists can pierce and irradiate the placid and the tender secrets of the soul with more consummate mastery than falls to the lot of those who make tranquillity their special province.[288] Paolo Veronese never penetrated to this inner shrine of beauty, this Holiest of Holies where the spiritual graces dwell. He could not paint waxen limbs, with silver lights and golden and transparent mysteries of shadow, like those of Bacchus, Eve, and Ariadne. Titian himself was powerless to imagine movement like that of Aphrodite floating in the air, or of Madonna adjuring Christ in the "Paradiso," or of Christ Himself judging by the silent simplicity of his divine attitude the worldly judge at whose tribunal He stands, or of the tempter raising his jewelled arms aloft to dazzle with meretricious brilliancy the impassive God above him, or of Eve leaning in irresistible seductiveness against the fatal tree, or of S. Mark down-rushing through the sky to save the slave that cried to him, or of the Mary who has fallen asleep with folded hands from utter lassitude of agony at the foot of the cross.