The peculiarly luminous treatment of the flesh perfected by Bellini in repose, it remained for Tintoretto to realise in motion; this we may venture to illustrate from a work too immense for our discussion in any but a limited aspect--his last great work, _The Paradise_, in the Ducal Palace. The quality we are seeking in it becomes the more remarkable on account of its loss of superficial colour, so that at first it seems cold and faded as if a mist had fallen upon it; then, very slowly, like day breaking out of the veil, colour reveals itself as a fresh property in the forms. We cannot penetrate the depth of it; rank behind rank the luminous faces define themselves like mysterious shapes of the atmosphere, some mere ghosts in the depths which daylight cannot pierce, some radiant already with the light; and across and through them all, through the flame-winged throng of Cherubim, piercing all companies and ranks of being to the extremes of the vast canvas, shoot the rays from the central source of light in the seat of Christ. It is a symphony of colour become almost vocal; we perceive it not only with the eye but in all our senses, this music of the spheres which one man has dared to gather into a single canvas. Who but Tintoretto could have dreamed of achieving this perspective built solely of human forms and faces? Into all the mysteries of life--those echoes of experience which we touch but faintly, those substances with which we feel inexplicable correspondencies--into these Tintoretto has looked: the rays from behind the Son of God have poured into the heart of the universe, and from it has grown his Paradise. Joy is the heart of this great symphony; it works upon us rather as a creative force than as a thing created, sounding continually some new note or rarer harmony of colour. At times it overpowers us, and then amid the maze of divine musicians and Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones and Principalities and Powers, some single harmonious human form, strong in beauty, with wings of light, some tender, lovely face of youth or woman, the solemn gesture of saint or bishop, the rainbow of an angel’s wing, gives our intellect a resting-place. For it is not through obscuring of outlines that this wonder of music in colour is accomplished; the human form, on which all the notes are played, is become indeed a perfect instrument, but not by forfeiting its material strength or substance; the structure is massive, solid--if to our notion of solidity we may unite the gift of perfect ease within an element whose progress only is by flight, where each moment is poised but slightly in its passage to the next, where there is no time because no stable unit to serve as pedestal for time. In this great picture, that faculty of the Venetian painters which we are now illustrating, found perhaps its completest realisation--the power of winging flesh with colour so that it is endowed with the very properties of atmosphere.