to a certain extent, the imaginative work will not, I think, be rightly esteemed except by a mind of some corresponding power: not but that there is an intense enjoyment in minds of feeble yet right conception in the help and food they get from those of stronger thought; but a certain imaginative susceptibility is at any rate necessary, and above all things earnestness and feeling; so that assuredly a work of high conceptive dignity will be always incomprehensible and valueless except to those who go to it in earnest and give it time; and this is peculiarly the case when the imagination acts not merely on the immediate subject, nor in giving a fanciful and peculiar character to prominent objects, as we have just seen, but busies itself throughout in expressing occult and farsought sympathies in every minor detail; of which action the most sublime instances are found in the works of Tintoret, whose intensity of imagination is such that there is not the commonest subject to which he will not attach a range of suggestiveness almost limitless; nor a stone, leaf, or shadow, nor anything so small, but he will give it meaning and oracular voice. Instance, from the works of Tintoret. In the centre of the gallery at Parma, there is a canvas § 16. The of Tintoret's, whose sublimity of conception and Entombment. grandeur of colour are seen in the highest perfection, by their opposition to the morbid and vulgar sentimentalism of Correggio. It is an Entombment of Christ, with a landscape distance, of whose technical composition and details I shall have much to say hereafter;1 at present I speak only of the thought it is intended to convey. An ordinary or unimaginative painter would have made prominent, among his objects of landscape, such as might naturally be supposed to have been visible from the sepulchre, and shown with the crosses of Calvary, some portion of Jerusalem; but Tintoret has a far higher aim. Dwelling on the peculiar force of the event before him, as the fulfilment of the final prophecy respecting the Passion, "He made His grave with the wicked 1 [See next volume, ch. xviii. § 18, and plate 17.] and with the rich in His death,"1 he desires to direct the mind of the spectator to this receiving of the body of Christ, in its contrast with the houseless birth and the desert life. And, therefore, behind the ghastly tomb grass that shakes its black and withered blades above the rocks of the sepulchre, there is seen, not the actual material distance of the spot itself (though the crosses are shown faintly), but that to which the thoughtful spirit would return in vision, a desert place, where the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, and against the barred twilight of the melancholy sky are seen the mouldering beams and shattered roofing of a ruined cattle-shed, the canopy of the Nativity. 2 Let us take another instance. No subject has been more frequently or exquisitely treated by the religious § 17. The Anpainters than that of the Annunciation; though, nunciation. as usual, the most perfect type of its pure ideal has been given by Angelico, and by him with the most radiant consummation (so far as I know) in a small reliquary in the sacristy of St. Maria Novella. The background there, 1 [Isaiah liii. 9.] 3 2 [For some other remarks on this subject, in connection with Rossetti's "Ecce Ancilla Domini," see The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, § 3.] 3 [This is the work from which Ruskin made the pencil sketch (see below, p. 350) engraved as the frontispiece to the last volume of Modern Painters, and described at pt. ix. ch. viii. § 12 of that volume. See also Præterita, ii. ch. vii. § 127. The following is the account of the picture in the 1845 note-book :— "In the sacristy of Sta. Maria Novella is what I think on the whole his most perfect work, the small Annunciation of which I have a study. I have above noticed the exquisite jewellery of Angelico; it is here carried farther than in any other of his works, the gold deeper, and the ornaments more detailed and delicate. The glories are formed of rays indented in the gold deeper and deeper as they approach the head, so that there is always a vivid light on some portion of them, playing in the most miraculous way round the head as the spectator moves, and always brightest close to the head and graduated away so that the effect is absolutely real, and a positive light of the brightest brilliancy is obtained which throws the purest pale flesh colour out in dark relief-an advantage possessed by no other painter. The glories of the angels in the large Uffizii picture are executed with rays in the same way, but have also an outer circle of stars. The style of ornament adopted by Angelico in the dress is also very instructive. Had he made it perfectly regular and of complicated design, he would have given the dresses the appearance of having been embroidered, and the weight of the embroidery would have pulled his angels to earth in an instant. But he has used only rays or dashes of light in clusters, not joined at the roots (Note this in speaking of functional unity), and curved lines with dots at the end not particularly graceful, but varied and irregular looking like no earthly ornament, however, is altogether decorative; but, in the fresco of the corridor of St. Mark's, the concomitant circumstances are of exceeding loveliness. The Virgin sits in an open loggia, resembling that of the Florentine church of L'Annunziata. Before her is a meadow of rich herbage, covered with daisies. Behind her is seen, through the door at the end of the loggia, a chamber with a single grated window, through which a starlike1 beam of light falls into the silence. All is exquisite in feeling, but not inventive nor imaginative. Severe would be the shock and painful the contrast, if we could pass in an instant from that pure vision to the wild thought of Tintoret.2 For not in meek reception of the adoring messenger, but startled by the rush of his horizontal and rattling wings, the Virgin sits, not in the quiet loggia, not by the green pasture of the restored soul, but houseless, under the shelter of a palace vestibule ruined and abandoned, with the noise of the axe and the hammer in her ears, and the tumult of a city round about her desolation. The spectator turns away at first, revolted, from the central object of the picture forced painfully and coarsely forward, a mass of shattered brickwork, with the plaster mildewed away from it, and the mortar mouldering from its seams; and if he look again, either at this or at the carpenter's tools beneath it, will perhaps see, in the one and the other, nothing more than such a study of scene as Tintoret could but too easily obtain among the ruins of his own Venice, chosen to give a coarse explanation of the calling and the condition of the husband of Mary. But there is more meant than this. When he looks at the but simple and childish and therefore heavenly. The Madonna's dress is blue; the angel's, lilac-purple. No other work of the painter can be set beside this for action and expression. The Virgin's face is absolutely luminous with love." This reliquary has now been transferred to the museum in the convent of San Marco (Cell 34). The fresco next described in the text is on the upper floor, at the head of the stairs in the corridor.] 1 [Misprinted "star-light" in the 1873 edition.] 2 [Tintoret's" Annunciation" here described is in the Lower Room of the Scuola di San Rocco; for a further discussion of it, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii., Venetian Index (s. "Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 1). A photographic reproduction of the pic. ture will be found at p. 80 of J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto, 1903 ("Great Masters" series.)] composition of the picture, he will find the whole symmetry of it depending on a narrow line of light, the edge of a carpenter's square, which connects these unused tools with an object at the top of the brickwork, a white stone, four square, the corner-stone of the old edifice, the base of its supporting column. This, I think, sufficiently explains the typical character of the whole. The ruined house is the Jewish dispensation; that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is the Christian; but the corner-stone of the old building remains, though the builders' tools lie idle beside it, and the stone which the builders refused is become the Headstone of the Corner.1 Its treatment In this picture, however, the force of the thought hardly atones for the painfulness of the scene and the § 18. The Bapturbulence of its feeling. The power of the master tism of Christ. is more strikingly shown in his treatment of the by various subject which, however important, and however painters. deep in its meaning, supplies not to the ordinary painter material enough ever to form a picture of high interest; the Baptism of Christ. From the purity of Giotto to the intolerable, inconceivable brutality of Salvator,* every order * The picture is in the Guadagni Palace. It is one of the most important landscapes Salvator ever painted. The figures are studied from street beggars. On the other side of the river, exactly opposite the point where the Baptism of Christ takes place, the painter, with a refinement of feeling peculiarly his own, has introduced some ruffians stripping off their shirts to bathe. He is fond of this incident. It occurs again in one of the marines of the Pitti Palace, with the additional interest of a foreshortened figure, swimming on its back, feet foremost, exactly in the stream of light to which the eye is principally directed.2 1 [Psalm cxviii. 22.] 2[The pictures by Salvator in the Guadagni Palace were the Showing and the Baptism of Christ. Ruskin's discussion of them in his 1845 note-book is worth giving at some length, as an illustration of his careful and prolonged study in the galleries: "These are decidedly the best Salvators I have ever seen and perfectly genuine and undoubtable throughout. By these in fairness he ought to be judged, for he has taken pains with them and this he seldom did. The first the Showing of Christ-consists chiefly of a huge and wild group of skeleton trees which occupy the centre of the picture, and straggle about the sky, shapeless rocks thrown about the foreground and middle distance, and of feeling has been displayed in its treatment; but I am aware of no single case, except this of which I am about to speak, in which it has formed an impressive picture. Giotto's, in the Academy of Florence, engraved in the series just published (Galleria delle belle Arti), is one of cumbrous mountains behind. The other is finer; it is a sweet passage of calm river under steep and cavernous rocks, with a well studied distance and a grand dark tree obscuring the sky on the left. The skies are the same in both, the regular sky of Salvator-dark blue above cut off from the horizon by rolling white clouds with level flaky bases in shades, which come light upon the blue above, and dark on the yellow light of the distance below. "At the first sight of these pictures I was taken aback; their magnificent size, masterly handling and vigorous chiaroscuro (enhanced as it is by the blue of the sky having much darkened) and the skeleton branches of the trees like the limbs of the Tempting Demon of the St. Anthony [by Salvator in the Pitti] altogether are at first so impressive that if I had only looked for five minutes and come away, I might have altered my whole opinion of Salvator; and as few people ever look more than five minutes at any picture, it is no wonder that the energy of the superficial master obtains so many admirers, as it had very nearly carried me away myself. "But on sitting down for a moment and recovering from the first effect, the truth came upon me gradually and fast. Every time I looked, the colour seemed more false, and the eye detected some erring or disagreeable form. Repetition after repetition, mannerism after mannerism, was unveiled, and I did not leave the pictures before it had become painful to look at them. . . . It is not to be doubted that Salvator used this dead colour to enhance the sublimity of his landscape, and that to ill taught minds it does so, but to all pure feeling it only furnishes another and a manifest proof that all violations of national principles for an imaginative result, recoil on the inventor's head, and are productive of nothing but ugliness and disagreeableness. Had these pictures been warmed with real sunlight, they might have approached the true sublime, whereas now they are nothing but small scenepainting and that not of the best. ... "But it is not only their colour which is deficient. Their air-tones are still more so, and [the shadows are] perfectly vacant and impenetrable -not black, nor, in the common sense of the term, heavy; as extreme darks they would be good, but they are extreme darks everywhere, the whole picture being made up of these necessarily in order to give value to the low, grey lights. This vulgarity is one of the chief causes of the rapid impression the pictures make, and it is also one of the chief causes of their final failure. For there is nothing to be discovered or penetrated anywhere; distant and near, all is alike-dense, formless, hopeless brown, with the lights cleverly touched over it, the same, whether in rock, trees, or water. One passage only affords an exception, and its beauty is a test of the wrong in the rest. In the Baptism of Christ, on the opposite side of the river, on the right hand, a glade runs up among scattered trunks of trees behind the rocks, and this part of the picture is refreshing and full of nature: one can walk through it, and breathe in it. . . .' For the incident of the bathers, see above, ch. ii. § 19, and preceding volume, p. 518 n.] 1 [Galleria dell' I. e Reale Accademia delle Belle Arti di Firenze pubblicata con incisione in rame. .. Firenze, 1845. Giotto's "Baptism of Christ" is the seventh plate in that work.] |