The ghostly figure of the Arab on his camel, and the caravan winding down from the city to depart into the desert, the two splendid knights who gaze without pity or understanding on this spectacle of the death of slaves, the man who leans from his donkey behind the Cross of Christ, all are as prominent to their little circle as they would be in life; and they have just that prominence for us--the immediate participators in the tragedy--that they would have in life. As always in Tintoretto, the horizon is vast. Wide ranges of blue, undulating country extend to the mountains, above which breaks his peculiar, tender, yellow light of dawn; he has made them recede into unimagined distance by setting across the mountains and the light the raised arm of a mounted figure. There is a great calm in this horizon, while in the middle distance above the Arab the wind has set the leaves quivering on a tree whose thin and twisted branches sway wildly against the blackness of the storm. The most impressive light for this picture is obtained when the setting sun illuminates the marvellous group of mourners at the foot of the Cross, so that they stand out in startling brightness against the heightened depths of the vast background, while Christ hangs above them dark within the darkness. [Illustration: EVENING IN THE PIAZZETTA.] The Scuola di San Rocco is the supreme monument to Tintoretto’s poetic, as to his plastic genius. If we are justified in feeling that his understanding of the life of Christ may be a true touchstone of a man’s philosophy, it will become a matter of first interest to us to know how so profound a thinker as Tintoretto approached the subject. There is no lack here indeed of tragic depth. _The Temptation of Christ_ is sufficient alone to vindicate Tintoretto as gifted with understanding above his fellows. Another might have compassed the tumultuous, beautiful earth-spirit, with muscular, proud, uplifted arms, and face burning with desire; but who else could have added that touch of impotence to his restless, aspiring gesture, or have dreamed the tenderness in the lovely, sorrowful face of Christ that looks down on this radiant creature of desire, entirely without judgment or stern denial, but as if too remote from the appeal to make reply? The exceeding pathos of this picture would have been missed if Lucifer, the brightest of the spirits that fell, were a whit less radiant; if Christ’s face had one shade less of compassion in its wondering aloofness. And for our last example we may choose a picture in which the strength of Tintoretto is realised in quietness so complete that a hush seems to lie about it. No painting of his is greater in conception than that of _Christ before Pilate_. The moment he has chosen is that in which Pilate performs his vain ablution before the multitude who lightly accept the guilt he attempts to transfer, in the awful cry, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Tintoretto