is over.

So at 6 precisely I am up, and my breakfast-in the shape of coffee, eggs, and a volume of Sismondi-is on the table by 7 to the minute.

By 8 I am ready to go out with a chapter of history read. I go to the old Lombard church of which I told you, for the people hardly frequent this (owing to its age and gloom, I suppose), and therefore I can draw there without disturbing any one even during the mass hours. There I draw among the frescoes and mosaics (and with a noble picture of Francia over one altar) until 12 o'clock. Precisely at 12 I am ready to begin my perambulation (with the strong light for the pictures) among the other churches, for the masses are then over, and I can get at everything. I usually go first to San Romano, the church of the Dominican monks, where are the two great Fra Bartolommeos. The monks are most kind in every way, and pleased at my giving so much time to study their pictures. They take all their candlesticks off their altar and bring me steps to get close to the picture with, and leave me with it as long as I like. And such a heavenly picture as one of them is! Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine of Siena, both kneeling, the pure pale clear sky far away behind, and the auburn hair of the Magdalene, hardly undulating but falling straight beside the pale, pure cheek (as in the middle ages), and then across the sky in golden lines like light. Well, from San Romano, I go to the Duomo, where there is a most delicious old Sacristan, with the enthusiasm of Jonathan Oldbuck, and his knowledge to boot, and perfectly enraptured to get anybody to listen to him while he reads or repeats (for he knows them all by heart) the quaint inscriptions graven everywhere in Latin (dark, obsolete-lettered Latin) and interprets the emblems on the carved walls. After two hours' work of this kind, and writing-as I go-all I can learn about the history of the churches, and all my picture criticism, I go home to dine-dinner being ready at two exactly. At three I am again ready to set to work, and then I sit in the open, warm, afternoon air, drawing the rich ornaments on the façade of St. Michele. .. [Here follows the description of that church, given in Vol. III. p. 206.]

After working at this till past five or so, I give up for the day, and walk for exercise round the ramparts. There, as you know, I have the Pisan mountains, the noble peaks of Carrara, and the Apennines towards Parma, all burning in the sunset, or purple and dark against it, and the olive woods towards Massa, and the wide, rich, viny plain towards Florence, the Apennines still loaded with snow, and purple in the green sky, and the clearness of the sky here is something miraculous. No romance can be too high flown for it; it passes fable.

1 The Antiquary was always a favourite with Ruskin: see Fiction Fair and Foul, §§ 24, 35, 38.

...

Finally, when the rose tints leave the clouds, I go and spend a quarter of an hour beside the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto. . . . [Here follows the description of the statue, given below, p. 122 n.] With this I end my day, and return home as the lamps begin to burn in the Madonna shrines, to read Dante, and to write to you.

Love to my mother. Ever, my dearest Father,

Your most affectionate son,
J. RUSKIN.

From Lucca Ruskin passed to Pisa, where the Campo Santo with its frescoes opened to him a new world of simple and sincere religious art, and became to him, he says, "a veritable Palestine." His letters soon show him absorbed in copying and recopying from Giotto and Simon Memmi, and Benozzo Gozzoli and Orcagna. It was a graphic Bible that he found spread out before him :

". . . You cannot guess (he writes to his father, May 15,) how these men must have read their Bible, how deeply the patriarchal spirit seems written in their hearts. I have been drawing from Benozzo's life of Abraham, which is as full and abundant as the scripture itself, nothing missed, though a good deal added. Little Ishmael fighting little Isaac to Sarah's great indignation, being one of such passages,-a comment on the 'saw the son of the Egyptian mocking' of the Bible [Genesis xxi. 9]; but this is succeeded by the most heavenly Hagar in the Wilderness. I shall set to work on her to-morrow. To-day I have been finishing an easy bit (easy because small and well made out)— Abraham parting from the Angels when they go towards Sodom.2 It is a beautiful observance of the scriptural history that while three angels came to Abraham, only two come to Sodom at even [Genesis xviii. 2, xix. 1]. In the fresco the central angel is rising, looking back towards Sodom with his hand raised in the attitude of condemnation, afterwards adopted by M. Angelo in the Judgment. The two angels turn towards Sodom, one with his eyes steadfast on the city, the other looking back to Abraham. The latter turns away, with his hands folded in entire faith and resignation, but with such a quivering distress about the lips and appeal for pity in the eye that I have had the tears in mine over and over again while I was drawing it. The plaster on which is this passage has already risen in a blister from the wall, and will be blown into the Arno in dust before the year is out."

Everything at Pisa delighted him—the Cathedral, the little church of

1 Epilogue, § 7, below, p. 350.

2 See Plate 10, facing p. 316, below.

La Spina, the sunsets on the Carrara mountains; "but," he writes (May 18):

"the Campo Santo is the thing. I never believed the patriarchal his-
tory before, but I do now, for I have seen it. You cannot conceive the
vividness and fulness of conception of these great old men.
In spite
of every violation of the common confounded rules of art, of anach-
ronisms and fancies, the boldest and wildest-Lorenzo de' Medici figur-
ing as an Egyptian sorcerer, and Castruccio degli Interminelli coming
in over and over again long before the flood, and all the patriarchs in the
costume of the thirteenth century—N'importe; it is Abraham himself
still. Abraham and Adam, and Cain, Rachel and Rebekah, all are there,
real, visible, created, substantial, such as they were, as they must have
been; one cannot look at them without being certain that they have
lived; and the angels, great and real and powerful, that you feel the
very wind from their wings upon your face, and yet expect to see them
depart every instant into heaven; it is enough to convert one to look
upon them; one comes away like the women from the sepulchre,
having seen a vision of angels which said that he was Alive. And the
might of it is to do all this with such fearless, bold, simple truth, no
slurring, no cloudiness, nor darkness;1 all is God's good light and fair
truth; Abraham sits close to you, entertaining the angels, you may touch
him and them; and there is a woman behind him, bringing the angels
some real positive pears, and the angels have knives and forks and
glasses, and a table-cloth as white as snow, and there they sit with their
wings folded: you may put your finger on the eyes of their plumes, like
St. Thomas, and believe. And the centre angel has lifted his hand and
is telling Abraham-his very lips moving-that Sarah shall have a son,
and there is no doubt on Abraham's face, only he holds his knife hard
for wonder and gladness. And Sarah is listening, holding back the
curtains of the tent."

His manner of life was as strenuous at Pisa (May 18) as at Lucca :

“Breakfast at 7, to work at 8, work till one; or on Thursdays and Saturdays till 12, when I go to call on the Professor Rossini and see more pictures. Dine at 2; to work again at 3, always in Campo Santo; stop at 5, walk about town, or as yesterday up on the roof of La Spina, to get the details. Then up tower to see sunset on Carrara mountains, home at past 7 or 8; tea and write till 9, or longer, if I am not sleepy; bed at 10.”

When his portfolio was well filled at Pisa, Ruskin moved on to 1 See on this subject the contrast which Ruskin drew between early Christian art and the religious paintings of our own day: Academy Notes, 1875, s. Nos. 584 and 129.

Florence, where his "new discoveries," he says, became yet "more absorbing." The novelty and enthusiasm are well expressed in a letter to his father:

2

FLORENCE, June 4.-. . . I went yesterday to Santa Maria Novella, and was very much taken aback. There is the Madonna of Cimabue, which all Florence followed with trumpets to the church; there is the great chapel painted by Orcagna, with the Last Judgment, at least 500 figures; there is the larger chapel with 14 vast and untouched frescoes, besides the roof, of Domenico Ghirlandajo; there is the tomb of Filippo Strozzi; there is the great crucifixion of Giotto; there, finally, are three perfectly preserved works of Fra Angelico, the centre one of which is as near heaven as human hand or mind will ever or can ever go. Talk of chiaroscuro and colour; give me those burnished angel wings of which every plume is wrought out in beaten gold, in zones of crimson and silver colour alternately, which play and flash like, and with far more rainbow hue about them than, the breasts of the Valparaiso birds, which, however, will give you some idea of the effect and power of light in them. And then the faces, without one shadow of earth or mortality about them, all glorified. . . .

He studied principally the primitives, without, however, neglecting the later painters. His continued and increased admiration of Michael Angelo appears throughout this volume; but already he had begun to trace in the work of the crowning masters what he afterwards described as the writing on the wall. "Raphael and Michael Angelo," he says (June 4), "were great fellows, but from all I can see they have been the ruin of art."

Ruskin's studies at Florence may be traced in nearly every chapter of this volume. His note-books show that he did not spare himself. He was sometimes at work by five o'clock in the morning. The galleries, the churches and convents, the private palaces, were all laboriously explored; and those were the days when many works of art, now gathered together in galleries and museums, were still preserved-or more truthfully, neglected-in their several shrines. He felt the desultoriness of the work, but persevered notwithstanding :

"It requires a good deal of courage, mind you," he writes in a letter to his mother (Florence, June 26), "to work as I am working at present -obliged to take a shallow glance at everything and to master nothing. I am not studying a branch of science in which I feel steady progress,

1 Epilogue, § 10, below, p. 351.

2 See Mornings in Florence, § 34.

3 See Lectures on Architecture and Painting, §§ 125–127.