Escape, Hope, Infinity, by whatever conventionalism sought, the desire is the same in all, the instinct constant: it is no mere point of light that is wanted in the etching of Rembrandt above instanced, a gleam of armour or fold of temple curtain would have been utterly valueless; neither is it liberty, for though we cut down hedges and level hills, and give what waste and plain we choose, on the right hand and the left, it is all comfortless and undesired, so long as we cleave not a way of escape forward; and however narrow and thorny and difficult the nearer path, it matters not, so only that the clouds open for us at its close.* Neither will any amount of beauty in nearer form make us content to stay with it, so long as we are shut down to that alone; † nor is any form so cold or so hurtful but that we may look upon it with kindness, so only that it rise against the infinite hope of light beyond. The reader can follow out the analogies of this unassisted.

But although this narrow portal of escape be all that is absolutely necessary, I think that the dignity of $ 9. How the the painting increases with the extent and amount dignity of treatment is proporof the expression. With the earlier and mightier tioned to the painters of Italy, the practice is commonly to expression of leave their distance of pure and open sky, of such Infinity. simplicity that it in nowise shall interfere with, or draw the attention from, the interest of the figures; and of such purity that, especially towards the horizon, it shall be in the highest degree expressive of the infinite space of heaven. I do not mean to say that they did this with any occult or metaphysical motives. They did it, I think, with the unpretending simplicity of all earnest men; they did what they loved and felt; they sought what the heart naturally seeks, and gave what it most gratefully receives; and I look to them as in all points of principle (not, observe, of knowledge or empirical attainment)

* All this is—in the main-true; but much too emphatically put. Disagreeable things may be less disagreeable when one sees a way out of them, but one prefers things pleasant in the meantime, whether there's a way out, or not. [1883.]

+ Well; I don't feel justified in saying that, till I've had the chance. [1883.]

as the most irrefragable authorities, precisely on account of the child-like innocence, which never deemed itself authoritative, but acted upon desire, and not upon dicta, and sought for sympathy, not for admiration.

And so we find the same simple and sweet treatment, the § 10. Examples open sky, the tender, unpretending horizontal white among the Sou- clouds, the far winding and abundant landscape, in thern schools; Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Laurati, Angelico, Benozzo, Ghirlandajo, Francia, Perugino, and the young Raffaelle; the first symptom of conventionality appearing in Perugino, who, though with intense feeling of light and colour he carried the glory of his luminous distance far beyond all his predecessors, began at the same time to use a somewhat morbid relief of his figures against the upper sky. This he has done. in the Assumption of the Florentine Academy, in that of l'Annunziata, and of the Gallery of Bologna;2 in all which pictures the lower portions are incomparably the finest, owing to the light distance behind the heads.* Raffaelle, in his fall,

This is quite true; but not for metaphysical reasons only. Against a light background, the dark points and half tones of a head have double power; and are just so far additional elements in its expression. [1883.]

1 [All these painters had been studied by Ruskin in 1845 at Pisa and Florence. Laurati (so called by Vasari) is more generally known as Pietro Lorenzetti; frescoes by him in the Campo Santo at Pisa were much admired by Ruskin.]

2 [In his picture diary of 1845 Ruskin notices among other things the re-painting of Perugino's Assumption in the Florentine Academy :

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'The Assumption of the Virgin.-The four figures at the bottom of this picture would by themselves with the bright distance be perfectly exquisite, but the upper figures which come light against the dark upper half of the sky are a little inferior in effect, the angels especially fluttery and poor. (Indeed there is a little tendency to this fault in Perugino not infrequently. It occurs again, I see, as far as one can judge of engravings, in his works at Siena, and in the Assumption here in the Annunziata it is very painful. Notwithstanding, this latter is for the grace and unity of action in its many figures most distinguished, and far from deserving the unkind mention of it in Rio.) The distance of this... picture (the Assumption) has once been very heavenly. Vestiges of its lovely trees and delicate hills are just perceptible under the load of French ultra-marine, which the picture-cleaner has laid on apparently with the house-painter's brush. Where any of the real distance is left, he has changed its colour and turned all the greens to the same crude blue."

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(The word left blank is indecipherable). Rio's "unkind mention" of the Assumption in the Annunziata is that, "to the triumph of his enemies, it was not thought worthy to occupy the place that had been reserved for it;" and that it unfortunately confirms the severe judgment passed upon it by his contemporaries" (The Poetry of Christian Art, 1854, p. 177).]

betrayed the faith he had received from his father and his master, and substituted for the radiant sky of the Madonna del Cardellino, the chamber-wall of the Madonna della Seggiola, and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino.1 Yet it is curious to observe how much of the dignity even of his later pictures depends on such portions as the green light of the lake, and sky behind the rocks, in the St. John of the Tribune; and how the repainted distortion of the Madonna dell' Impannata is redeemed into something like elevated character, merely by the light of the linen window from which it takes its name.

That which was done by the Florentines in pure simplicity of heart, the Venetians did through love of the § 11. Among colour and splendour of the sky itself, even to the the Venetians. frequent sacrificing of their subject to the passion of its distance. In Carpaccio, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese,

1 [The Madonna del Cardellino (painted about 1506) is in the Tribune of the Uffizi. Plate No. 11 in vol. iii. of Modern Painters (ch. xviii. § 12) is engraved from Ruskin's drawing of the background. The Madonna della Seggiola (or della Sedia) is in the Pitti; painted between 1510 and 1514. The Madonna del Baldacchino (left unfinished by Raphael before 1508) is also in the Pitti, as also is the Madonna dell' Impannata (painted about 1513). Ruskin's notes on these pictures, in his Florentine diary of 1845, are as follows:

"The Seggiola struck me exactly as it did before-a clever, well-finished, vulgar, piece of maternity, very uncopiable. The Madonna dell' Impannata I thought less of than ever before. I see the execution is chiefly attributed to Raffaelle's scholars, but it does not matter who it is by, the picture is a coarse and vulgar one, full of grimace without feeling. The figures are all brought out in full light, except only the left limb of St. John, which shows its dark side against the light. Owing to this, the picture would have appeared intolerably vulgar and modern, if one were only to take away the green window behind, from which it has its name.

"Madonna del Baldacchino. —I had several times past this, not only without knowing it to be a Raffaelle, but thinking it one of the worst pictures in the Gallery, before I accidentally cast my eye on its name in the catalogue. Without any exception it is the worst Raffaelle I ever saw. The architecture behind is brown, without air, tone, and more like wood than stone, the conical canopy looks as if the Virgin had been a Chinese instead of an Israelite. Vulgar, kicking angels, with ragged straggly hair drifting in the Salvator style, hold up the curtain with the studied grace of infant phenomena at the Olympic. The Madonna of most common type with a frizzed head-dress, attacked most justly by Rio; the bishops and saints silly, affected, and beggarly studies-I should say from the Pincian steps; they are moreover carelessly painted and unfinished, their great black eyes as meaningless as Murillo's, the flesh is throughout brown, and the blues of the drapery are raw and vapid."

Rio's remark is that "the strange and artificial arrangement of the hair... seems to have been adopted for the express purpose of spoiling the effect," a fault which he attributes to other hands than Raphael's (.c. p. 218).]

and Tintoret, the preciousness of the luminous sky, so far as it might be at all consistent with their subject, is nearly constant ; abandoned altogether in portraiture only, seldom even there, and never with advantage. Titian and Veronese, who had less exalted feeling than the others, afford a few instances of exception: the latter overpowering his silvery distances with foreground splendour; the former sometimes sacrificing them to a luscious fulness of colour, as in the Flagellation in the Louvre, by a comparison of which with the unequalled majesty of the Entombment opposite, the applicability of the general principle may at once be tested.1

§ 12. Among the painters of landscape.

But of the value of this mode of treatment there is a farther and more convincing proof than its adoption either by the innocence of the Florentine or the ardour of the Venetian; namely, that when retained or imitated from them by the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, when appearing in isolation from all other good, among the weaknesses and paltrinesses of Claude, the mannerisms of Gaspar, and the caricatures and brutalities of Salvator, it yet redeems and upholds all three, conquers all foulness by its purity, vindicates all folly by its dignity,* and puts an uncomprehended power of permanent address to the human heart upon the lips of the senseless and the profane.†

* Too fast and far again! by much; the impetus of phrase running away with me. See the mischief of fine writing. [1883.]

† In one of the smaller rooms of the Pitti Palace, over the door, is a Temptation of St. Anthony, by Salvator, wherein such power as the artist possessed is fully manifested, and less offensively than is usual in his sacred subjects.2 It is a vigorous and ghastly thought, in that kind of horror which is dependent on scenic effect perhaps unrivalled, and I shall have occasion to refer to it again in speaking of the powers of Imagination. I allude to it here, because the sky of the distance affords a remarkable instance of the power of light at present under discussion. It is formed of flakes of black cloud, with rents and openings of intense and lurid green, and at least half of the impressiveness of the picture depends on these openings. Close them, make the sky one mass of gloom, and the spectre will be awful no longer. It

1 [For Ruskin's notes on these pictures, in his 1844 diary, see Præterita, ii. ch. v. For

$ 102.7

2

[Ed. 1 reads, "fully manifested with little, comparatively, that is offensive." another reference to the picture, see below, sec. ii. ch. v. § 7 n., p. 319.]

Now although I doubt not that the general value of this treatment will be acknowledged by all lovers § 13. Other of art, it is not certain that the point to prove modes in which which I have brought it forward will be as readily the power of Infinity is felt. conceded; namely, the inherent power of all representations of infinity over the human heart. For there are, indeed, countless associations of pure and religious kind, which combine with each other to enhance the impression when presented in this particular form, whose power I neither deny nor am careful to distinguish, seeing that they all tend to the same point, and have reference to heavenly hopes; delights they are in seeing the narrow, black, miserable earth fairly compared with the bright firmament; reaching forward unto the things that are before, and joyfulness in the apparent, though unreachable, nearness and promise of them. But there are other modes in which infinity may be represented, which are confused by no associations of the kind, and which would, as being in mere matter, appear trivial and mean, but for their incalculable influence on the forms of all that we feel to be beautiful. The first of these is the curvature of lines and surfaces, wherein it at first appears futile to § 14. The insist upon any resemblance or suggestion of in- beauty of Curfinity, since there is certainly, in our ordinary contemplation of it, no sensation of the kind. But I have repeated again and again that the ideas of beauty are instinctive, and that it is only upon consideration, and even then in doubtful and disputable way, that they appear in their typical character. Neither do I intend at all to insist upon the particular meaning which they appear to myself to bear, but merely on their actual and demonstrable agreeableness so that in the present case, while I assert positively,

vature.

owes to the light of the distance both its size and its spirituality. The time would fail me, if I were to name the tenth part of the pictures, which occur to me, whose vulgarity is redeemed by this circumstance alone: and yet let not the artist trust to such morbid and conventional use of it as may be seen in the common blue and yellow effectism of the present day. Of the value of moderation and simplicity in the use of this, as of all other sources of pleasurable emotion, I shall presently have occasion to speak farther.