What is here said about Tintoretto is also true of Michael Angelo. His sculpture in S. Lorenzo, compared with Greek sculpture, the norm and canon of the perfect in that art, may be called an invasion of the realm of poetry or music.
There are probably not few of my readers who, after seeing this painting in the Ducal Palace, will agree with me that it is, if not the greatest, at any rate the most beautiful, oil picture in existence. In no other picture has a poem of feeling and of fancy, a romance of varied lights and shades, a symphony of delicately blended hues, a play of attitude and movement transitory but in no sense forced or violent, been more successfully expressed by means more simple or with effect more satisfying. Something of the mythopoeic faculty must have survived in Tintoretto, and enabled him to inspire the Greek tale with this intense vitality of beauty.
The first of these pictures is in the Ducal Palace, the other two in the Academy at Venice.