Jouin, _Chefs-d'oeuvre: Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture_ (Paris, 1895-97).
[7] In one corner of the picture is found this inscription with its Latin distich:
Imaginem Georgii Gysenii Ista refert vultus, quâ cernis Imago Georgi Sic oculos vivos, sic habet ille genas. Anno ætatis suæ XXXIII. Anno dom. 1532.
[8] We read on one of these letters: _Dem erszamen Jergen Gisze to Lunden in Engelant, mynem broder to handen._
The chief reason why we all know the _Last Judgment_ of Michael Angelo, and not the _Paradise_ of Tintoret, is the same love of sensation which makes us read the _Inferno_ of Dante, and not his _Paradise_; and the choice, believe me, is our fault, not his; some farther evil influence is due to the fact that Michael Angelo had invested all his figures with picturesque and palpable elements of effect, while Tintoret has only made them lovely in themselves and has been content that they should deserve, not demand, your attention.
You are accustomed to think the figures of Michael Angelo sublime--because they are dark, and colossal, and involved, and mysterious--because, in a word, they look sometimes like shadows, and sometimes like mountains, and sometimes like spectres, but never like human beings. Believe me, yet once more, in what I told you long since--man can invent nothing nobler than humanity. He cannot raise his form into anything better than God made it, by giving it either the flight of birds or strength of beasts, by enveloping it in mist, or heaping it into multitude. Your pilgrim must look like a pilgrim in a straw hat, or you will not make him into one with cockle and nimbus; an angel must look like an angel on the ground, as well as in the air; and the much-denounced pre-Raphaelite faith that a saint cannot look saintly unless he has thin legs, is not more absurd than Michael Angelo's, that a Sibyl cannot look Sibylline unless she has thick ones.
All that shadowing, storming, and coiling of his, when you look into it, is mere stage decoration, and that of a vulgar kind. Light is, in reality, more awful than darkness--modesty more majestic than strength; and there is truer sublimity in the sweet joy of a child, or the sweet virtue of a maiden, than in the strength of Antæus, or thunder-clouds of Ætna.