2

changed. Only one traditional circumstance he has received with Dante' and Michael Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned; but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in the adoption of this image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon dragging of the other, but seized Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction: nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather and the clay heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half- kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam Pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as they awake, by the white light of the new Heaven, until the great vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment-seat: the Firmament is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats, and falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright clouds are darkened with them as with thick snow, currents of atom life in the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, and higher and higher still, till the eye and the thought can follow no farther, borne up, wingless, by their inward faith and by the angel powers invisible, now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their condemnation.3

1 [Inferno, iii. 89.]

22 Peter iii. 12.]

3 This description also was quoted in Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian Index, 8. "Orto").]

how distin

guished from realism.

Now, I wish the reader particularly to observe throughout § 25. The Ima- all these works of Tintoret, the distinction of the ginative Verity, Imaginative Verity from falsehood on the one hand, and from realism on the other. The power of every picture depends on the penetration of the imagination into the TRUE nature of the thing represented, and on the utter scorn of the imagination for all shackles and fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way of its suggestiveness. In the Baptism it cuts away the trunks of trees as if they were so much cloud or vapour, that it may exhibit to the thought the completed sequency of the scene ; * in the Massacre it covers the marble floor with visionary light, that it may strike terror into the spectator without condescending to butchery; it defies the bare fact, but creates in him the fearful feeling; in the Crucifixion it annihilates locality, and brings the palm leaves to Calvary, so only that it may bear the mind to the Mount of Olives; as in the Entombment1 it brings the manger to Jerusalem, that it may take the heart to Bethlehem; and all this it does in the daring consciousness of its higher and spiritual verity, and in the entire knowledge of the fact and substance of all that it touches. The imaginary boat of the demon angel expands the rush of the visible river into the descent of irresistible condemnation; but to make that rush and roar felt by the eye and heard by the ear, the rending of the pine branches above the cataract is taken directly from nature; it is an abstract of Alpine storm. Hence, while we are always placed face to face with whatever is to be told, there is in and beyond its reality a voice supernatural; and that which is doubtful in the vision has strength, sinew, and assuredness, built up in it by fact.

The same thing is done yet more boldly in the large composition of the ceiling, the Plague of Fiery Serpents: a part of the host, and another sky horizon, are seen through an opening in the ground.

1

[At Parma; see above, ch. iii. § 16, p. 262; and Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xviii. § 18 (plate 17).]

2 [Also in the Scuola di San Rocco, on the roof of the Upper Room; see for a full description of the picture; Stones of Venice (Venetian Index, s. "Rocco, Scuola di San," No. 24).]

3

Let us, however, still advance one step farther, and observe the imaginative power deprived of all aid from chiaroscuro, colour, or any other means of gination, how § 26. The Imaconcealing the framework of its thoughts.

66

manifested in sculpture.

It was said by Michael Angelo that "non ha l'ottimo scultore alcun concetto, ch' un marmo solo in se non circoscriva,”1 a sentence which, though in the immediate sense intended by the writer it may remind us a little of the indignation of Boileau's Pluto, "Il s'ensuit de-là que tout ce qui se peut dire de beau est dans les dictionnaires; il n'y 3 a que les paroles qui sont transposées,"" yet is valuable, because it shows us that Michael Angelo held the imagination to be entirely expressible in rock, and therefore altogether independent, in its own nature, of those aids of colour and shade by which it is recommended in Tintoret, though the sphere of its operation is of course by these incalculably extended. But the presence of the imagination may be rendered in marble as deep, thrilling, and awful as in painting, so that the sculptor seek for the soul and govern the body thereby.

Of unimaginative work, Bandinelli and Canova supply us with characteristic instances of every kind: the § 27. BandiHercules and Cacus of the former, and its criti- nelli, Canova, cism by Cellini, will occur at once to every one; the disgusting statue now placed so as to conceal Giotto's important tempera picture in Santa Croce is a better

1 [Sonnet xv. The original reads "artista," not "scultore." (Sonnets of Michael Angelo, etc., 1878, p. 46) thus translates

"The best of artists hath no thought to show
What the rough stone in its superfluous shell
Doth not include: to break the marble spell
Is all the hand that serves the brain can do."]

3 Mino da

Fiesole.

J. A. Symonds

2 [From "Les Héros de Roman: Dialogue a la manière de Lucien," p. 180 in the Oeuvres Complètes de Boileau-Despréaux, 1861.]

3 [For Bandinelli, see above, p. 168 n. ; for Canova, p. 121. This statue by Baccio Bandinelli (1488-1560), made in 1546, stands in the Piazza della Signoria at Florence. Cellini's very entertaining criticism of it given to the Grand Duke, in presence of Bandinelli - who, says Cellini, "writhed and made the most ugly faces is in ch. lxx. of the second book of his Autobiography (Symonds' translation, ed. 1888, ii. 221).]

1

instance; but a still more impressive lesson might be received by comparing the inanity of Canova's garland grace, and ball-room sentiment,2 with the intense truth, tenderness, and power of men like Mino da Fiesole, whose chisel leaves many a hard edge, and despises down and dimple, but it seems to cut light and carve breath, the marble burns beneath it, and becomes transparent with very spirit. Yet Mino stopped at the human nature; he saw the soul, but not § 28. Michael Angelo. the ghostly presences about it; it was reserved for Michael Angelo to pierce deeper yet, and to see the

3

1 [In the Capella dei Baroncelli, in the south transept, is Bandinelli's "Dead Christ” in marble. For another reference to it, see above, p. 194. Ruskin's account of it in his note-book of 1845 is as follows:

"It is difficult to speak of this work (marble, colossal) in terms of sufficient dispraise. It is a bad statue of a dying French duellist or gamester, and the legs of the model have been so bad that, I think in almost every point, their forms may be taken to contrast with the Elgins as pure examples of the wrong. The details and particular references are given at pages 17 and 38 of the note-book [a book of sketches, etc., in illustration of the written diary]. But the peculiarity of its general effect is not there stated. Commonly when a statue is by an inferior hand, one feels a want of vitality, or a rigidity or an imperfection of form resulting from deficient knowledge, or want of completion or badly selected position; but here there is no stoniness, no rigidity, no incompletion; the statue has the disgusting effect of an ugly, naked body; one has the same reluctance to go near it, that one would have if it were a dirty, stripped Italian; the whole purity of the marble is destroyed by the man's vulgar conception, and this is an effect I never recollect having before perceived. Usually bad sculpture is not fleshy enough, but this is too much so."

This sculpture partially conceals Giotto's altar-piece, in five panels, of "The Coronation of the Virgin."]

3

[Cf. preceding volume, p. 230.]

Ruskin had been specially struck by the two tombs by Mino da Fiesole in the church of the Badia. He writes in his note-book of 1845:

"The recumbent figures have all his usual animation, but the gem of the church is the little child on the right hand side of that of Ugo, Count of Tuscany. It is the most beautiful and breathing realisation of infancy that ever sculptor struck; no fat legs, nor hands that look like stuffed gloves; no curly hair nor round cheeks nor bee-stung lips; the child is thin and somewhat hard in outline, there is no fine nor soft chiselling about it; it looks as if it had been exhausted by too much of the strong life within it, worn out with mind; and the execution is not delicate neither, but in many places hard and false or imperfect in what is commonly called drawing, and this is especially the case with the mouth, which hardly looks like a mouth at all when one looks close at it, but is rather like a deep chip or crack in the marble, and yet at the right distance it is a mouth all lighted up with love and child sweetness, altogether divine. Neither can I at all trace the sources of the heavenly expression in the eyes, for all is simply and even rudely cut, but the lines though apparently not refined in drawing are refined in their degree, their lightness and untraceableness being as total a defeat of all attempt to copy or imitate as nature herself."]

indwelling angels. No man's soul is alone; Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand; the light or the fear of the Spiritual things that move beside it may be seen on the body; and that bodily form with Buonarotti, white, solid, distinct, material, though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument or the habitation of some infinite, invisible power. The earth of the Sistine Adam that begins to burn; the woman-embodied burst of Adoration from his sleep; the twelve great torrents of the Spirit of God that pause above us there, urned in their vessels of clay; the waiting in the shadow of futurity of those through whom the Promise and Presence of God went down from the Eve to the Mary, each still and fixed, fixed in his expectation, silent, foreseeing, faithful, seated each on his stony throne, the building stones of the word of God, building on and on, tier by tier, to the Refused one the head of the corner;1 not only these, not only the troops of terror torn up from the earth by the four-quartered winds of the Judgment, but every fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched became instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the words be few: the St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from his sepulchre, bound hand and foot by his grave clothes, it is left for us to loose him; the strange spectral wreath of the Florence Pietà, casting its pyramidal, distorted shadow, full of pain and death, among the faint purple light that cross and perish under the obscure dome of St. Maria del Fiore; the white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther-like, yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among

1 [The description down to this point is of the roof of the Sistine Chapel. (1) The creation of Adam, (2) the creation of Eve, and (3) the twelve Sibyls and Prophets, heralds and pioneers of Christ. "The Last Judgment" is of course on the wall of the same chapel. The "St. Matthew not yet disengaged from his sepulchre" refers to the huge roughed-out form of the disciple, now in the courtyard of the Accademia at Florence-the perfect shape not yet unloosed. "He also began," says Vasari, "a statue in marble of S. Matteo which, though it is but roughly hewn, shows perfection of design, and teaches sculptors how to extract figures from the stone." The unfinished Pietà-the sculptor's last work in marble-stands behind the high altar in the Cathedral of Florence. For the "Bacchus" in the Uffizi, see preceding volume, p. 118. The "Day and Night" and the "Dawn and Twilight" are of course in the Sagrestia Nuova of San Lorenzo; for another reference to them, see next volume, ch. viii. § 6, and, for Ruskin's study of them, see above, Introduction, p. xxi.]