The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber flung here and there. So in the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret.