But neither form nor colour alone could satisfy his eye; the uninterrupted habit of nocturnal study discovered to him what Venice had not yet seen, not even in Giorgione, if we may form an opinion from what remains of him--the powers of that ideal chiaroscuro which gave motion to action, raised the charms of light, and balanced or invigorated effect by dark and lucid masses opposed to each other. The first essays of this complicated system, in single figures, are probably the frescoes of the palace Gussoni;[150] and in numerous composition, the Last Judgement, and its counterpart, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, in the church of Sta. Maria dell' Orfo. It is evident that the spirit of Michael Angelo domineered over the fancy of Tintoretto in the arrangement of the Last Judgement, though not over its design; but grant some indulgence to that, and the storm in which the whole fluctuates, the awful division of light and darkness into enormous masses, the living motion of the agents, notwithstanding their frequent aberrations from their centre of gravity,[151] and the harmony that rules the whirlwind of that tremendous moment, must for ever place it among the most astonishing productions of art. Its sublimity as a whole triumphs even over the hypercriticisms of Vasari, who thus describes it:--"Tintoretto has painted the Last Judgement with an extravagant invention, which, indeed, has something awful and terrible, inasmuch as he has united in groups a multitudinous assemblage of figures of each sex and every age, interspersed with distant views of the blessed and condemned souls. You see likewise the boat of Charon, but in a manner as novel and uncommon as highly interesting. Had this fantastic conception been executed with a correct and regular design, had the painter estimated its individual parts with the attention which he bestowed on the whole, so expressive of the confusion and the tumult of that day, it would be the most admirable of pictures. Hence he who casts his eye only on the whole, remains astonished, whilst to him who examines the parts it appears to have been painted in jest."