7

meaning of the smallest accessory circumstances. But I have not yet sufficiently dwelt on the fact from which this power arises, the absolute truth of statement of the central fact as it was, or must have been. Without this truth, this awful first moving principle, all direction of the feelings is useless. That which we cannot excite, it is of no use to know how to govern.

1

I have before alluded, Sec. I. Chap. XIV., to the painfulness of Raffaelle's treatment of the Massacre of the Innocents. Fuseli affirms of it, that, "in dramatic gradation he disclosed all the mother through every image of pity and of terror." 1 If this be so, I think the philosophical spirit has § 21. The Massacre of prevailed over the imaginative. The imagination the Innocents. never errs; it sees all that is, and all the relations and bearings of it; but it would not have confused the mortal frenzy of maternal terror with various development of maternal character. Fear, rage, and agony, at their utmost pitch, sweep away all character: humanity itself would be lost in maternity, the woman would become the mere personification of animal fury or fear. For this reason all the ordinary representations of this subject are, I think, false and cold: the artist has not heard the shrieks, nor mingled with the fugitives; he has sat down in his study to convulse features methodically, and philosophize over insanity. Not so Tintoret. Knowing, or feeling, that the expression of the human face was, in such circumstances, not to be rendered, and that the effort could only end in an ugly falsehood, he denies himself all aid from the features, he feels that if he is to place himself or us in the midst of that maddened multitude, there can be no time allowed for watching expression. Still less does he depend on details of murder and ghastliness of death; there is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but there is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The scene is the

1 [Lecture iii., Life and Writings, ii. 176.]

2 [For Ruskin's first note of this picture (also in the Scuola di San Rocco, Lower Room), see above, Introduction, p. xxxviii. For other references, see above, sec. i. ch. xiv. § 31, and below, § 25. A photographic reproduction of the picture is given at p. 82 of J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto.]

outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a lake of life before them, like the burning seen of the doomed Moabite on the water that came by the way of Edom; a huge flight of stairs, without parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a crowd of women mixed with the murderers; the child in the arms of one has been seized by the limbs, she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight ;—she will be dashed dead in a second; 1-close to us is the great struggle; a heap of the mothers entangled in one mortal writhe with each other and the swords, one of the murderers dashed down and crushed beneath them, the sword of another caught by the blade and dragged at by a woman's naked hand; the youngest and fairest of the women, her child just torn away from a death grasp, and clasped to her breast with the grip of a steel vice, falls backwards, helplessly over the heap, right on the sword points; all knit together and hurled down in one hopeless, frenzied, furious abandonment of body and soul in the effort to save. Far back, at the bottom of the stairs, there is something in the shadow like a heap of clothes. It is a woman, sitting quiet,—quite quiet,still as any stone; she looks down steadfastly on her dead child, laid along on the floor before her, and her hand is pressed softly upon her brow.3

2

This, to my mind, is the only Imaginative, that is, the only true, real, heartfelt representation of the being and actuality of

1 [Ed. 1 (in which the preceding words were not italicised) adds:"two others are farther in flight, they reach the edge of a deep river,—the water is beat into a hollow by the force of their plunge ;-close to us. . ."] 2 [Ed. 1 adds:

"Their shrieks ring in our ears till the marble seems rending around us, but far back . . .”]

3 [Ruskin quoted this description a year later in Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, 8. "Rocco, Scuola di San"), adding that "there may have been some change in the colour of the shadow that crosses the pavement. . . . I formerly supposed that this was meant to give greater horror to the scene, and it is very like Tintoret if it be so; but there is a strangeness and discordance in it which make me suspect the colour may have changed."]

274

the subject, in existence.*

§ 22. Various

works in the Scuola di San Rocco.

I should exhaust the patience of the reader, if I were to dwell at length on the various stupendous developments of the imagination of I Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco alone. would fain join awhile in that solemn pause of the journey into Egypt,' where the silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their tremulous lines the alternate folds of fair cloud, flushed by faint crimson light, and lie across the streams of blue between those rosy islands, like the white wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the sleep of the disciples, among those massy leaves that lie so heavily on the dead of the night beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and toss fearfully above the motion of the torches as the troop of the betrayer emerges out of the hollows of the olives; 2 or wait through the hour of accusing beside the judgment seat of Pilate, where all is unseen, unfelt, except the one figure that stands with its head bowed down, pale, like a pillar of moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the Godhead, § 23. The Last half wrapt in the whiteness of the shroud. Of these, and all the other thoughts of indescribable power that are now fading from the walls of those neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavour at a future time to preserve some image and shadow more

Judgment. How treated by various painters.

* Note the shallow and uncomprehending notice of this picture by Fuseli. His description of the treatment of it by other painters is, however, true, terse, and valuable.4

[In the Lower Room of the Scuola di San Rocco. For another reference to the "Flight into Egypt," see above, ch. ii. § 19, p. 244, and Introduction, p. xxxix.; and for a fuller description of the picture, Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, "Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 3).]

8.

2 ["The Agony in the Garden," in the Upper Room of the Scuola di San Rocco. For a fuller description of the picture, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, 8. Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 13).]

3 ["Christ before Pilate," in the Upper Room of the Scuola di San Rocco. For a fuller description of the picture, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, s. "Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 59). A photographic reproduction of the picture is given at p. 84 of J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto.]

[Fuseli says of the picture: "The stormy brush of Tintoretto swept individual Two immense wings of light and shade divide the woe away in general masses. composition, and hide the want of sentiment in tumult." The other pictures of the Massacre noticed by Fuseli are by Bandinelli, Rubens, Le Brun, Poussin, and Raphael (quoted above, p. 272). See Lecture iii., Life and Writings, ii. 175-176.]

faithfully than by words;1 but I shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a work of less touching, but more tremendous appeal; the Last Judgment in the Church of Santa Maria dell' Orto.2 In this subject, almost all realizing or local statement had been carefully avoided by the most powerful painters, they judging it better to represent its chief circumstances as generic thoughts, and present them to the mind in a typical or abstract form. In the Judgment of Angelico the treatment is purely typical; a long Campo Santo, composed of two lines of graves, stretches away into the distance; on the left side of it rise the condemned; on the right the just. With Giotto and Orcagna, the conception, though less rigid, is equally typical; no effort being made at

3

4

1 [An intention which Ruskin did not succeed in carrying out.]

2 [For Ruskin's first note of this picture, see Introduction, pp. xxxvi.-xxxvii.]

3 There are several examples of this subject by Fra Angelico. One of the best is in the Accademia at Florence (see Karl Károly's Guide to the Paintings of Florence, 1893, p. 133, for notices of it); another, from the Dudley collection, is now at Berlin (for a photographic reproduction, see Fra Angelico, by Langton Douglas, 1900, p. 132).] [For an illustration of Giotto's Last Judgment at Padua, see Giotto and his Works at Padua. Orcagna's (one of a series now ascribed by some to Bernardo Daddi) is in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Ruskin gave an interesting account of the fresco in his 1845 note-book :

4

"One hardly knows where to look for the first origin of the conventional mode of treating this subject, afterwards followed by all painters up to Michel Angelo. If this be the first idea, Orcagna should stand high in the list of truly creative painters. The origin of M. Angelo's whole plan is here. The Christ, in a singular oval glory divided by concentric lines like those on a watch case, and the resultant parallelograms thrown into rainbow zones of green and gold. The glory is just the shape of the Greek A,-Christ sitting on the cross bar. His right hand raised as in M. Angelo's. With his left he points to the wound in his side. At first, and from below, I thought the face a failure, but on close examination it gained upon me, and I have now every reason to suppose it very fine. It does not strike at first owing to a most meritorious effort of Orcagna's at rendering it perfectly tranquil and passionless. The brow is, however, slightly knit, but the eyes have no local direction, they seem to command all things. The Madonna in a similar glory, but lower and less, sits on the right hand. She is decidedly a failure-one of the most insipid figures in the whole work; nor is the action of the hand on the knee well explained. The hand is, however, finely drawn.

"On each side of these figures, but above, are three angels. Those on the right bear the Nails, Sponge, and Spear. Those on the left, the Cross, Scourge, and Shroud. Below them, six on each side, are the Apostles. These are by far the finest figures in the whole work. The St. John is perfectly sublime; the second and fifth, counting from right hand, also deserve careful study, the latter looking down on the condemned with bitter pity, the former partly in pity but more in indignation and disgust. The great mass of the condemned are on the whole done rather for general effect and distant, and there is great want of dramatic conception. There are different degrees

the suggestion of space, and only so much ground represented as is absolutely necessary to support the near figures and allow space for a few graves. Michael Angelo in no respect differs in his treatment, except that his figures are less symmetrically grouped, and a greater conception of space is given by their various perspective. No interest is attached to his background in itself. Fra Bartolomeo, never able to grapple with any species of sublimity except that of simple religious feeling, fails most signally in this mighty theme.* His group of the dead, including not more than ten or twelve figures, occupies the foreground only; behind them a vacant plain extends to the foot of a cindery volcano, about whose mouth several little black devils like spiders are skipping and crawling. The judgment of quick and dead is thus expressed as taking place in about a rood square, and on a single group; the whole of the space and horizon of the sky and land being left vacant, and the presence of the Judge of all the earth made more finite than the sweep of a whirlwind or a thunder-storm.

toret.

§ 24. By TinBy Tintoret only has this unimaginable event been grappled with in its Verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be * Fresco in an outhouse of the Ospedale Sta Maria Nuova at Florence.1

of grief but very little attempt at expressing either different character or different conditions of emotion. One head only is very fine in this respect, that of a Dominican just above the queen in green, who is in the front row. This monk in the midst of the howling, struggling, and shrieking crowd is abandoned to a fixed, quiet, tearful despair, seemingly rather reviewing his past life, than intent on what is around him. The green queen too would have been fine, had the face been of a higher type; she is trying to pull back another female from the grasp of a demon, and seems rather intent on this victim than on herself. But all the kings and queens are a good deal like Sadler's Wells ones, and the mass of the figures exhibit nothing but various degrees of a mean terror, howling grief, or a despair which, except in the case of the monk above mentioned, Orcagna has failed to express except by covering the face with the hands.

With this passage, cf. Ruskin's review of Lord Lindsay, On the Old Road, 1899, i. § 73.] 1 [Painted in 1499 for the cloistered cemetery of S. Maria Novella; now in the Picture Gallery of the Hospital and greatly damaged. It was sawn from the wall and placed in an open court, where it suffered greatly from damp until it was transferred to the picture gallery. The lower part was completed by Mariotto Albertinelli. The upper part of the composition, by Fra Bartolommeo, evidently influenced the design of Raphael's "Disputa.' An outline reproduction of the fresco is given at vol. ii. p. 446 of Kugler's Handbook of Painting, ed. 1887.]