but gathering together a mass of evidence from a number of subjects, and I have to think, before everything that I see, of its bearings in a hundred ways. Architecture, sculpture, anatomy, botany, music, all must be thought of and in some degree touched upon, and one is always obliged to stop in the middle of one thing to take note of another—of all modes of study the least agreeable, and least effectual. For instance, I am going now to the Palais Pitti. I have to look at its stones outside and compare them with the smooth work of modern buildings; when I go in, I shall sit down to study a bit of Rubens for an illustration of my book; 2 this Rubens leads me into a train of thought respecting composition diametrically opposite to that which would be induced by a Raffaelle." While Ruskin was thus writing to his mother, his father was writing to him to deplore the falling off in the son's poetry. This tour of 1845 was the last occasion, as we have seen, on which he was at all seriously or determinedly to cultivate his faculty of versification. He had sent home from Florence the lines on "Mont Blanc Revisited," and from Pisa, a month earlier, those "Written among the Basses Alpes."3 His father's verdict was for once severe (June 26):— "I am, to speak truth, disappointed in the last lines sent home, and you see by enclosed Harrison is of same opinion. The Scythian Banquet Song, which you think little of, was the greatest of all your poetical productions. All the Herodotean pieces show real power, and have a spice of the devil in them. I mean nothing irreverent, but the fervour and fury and passion of true poetry. It is cruel in me to ask you to write for me; you should never write poetry but when you cannot help it. Mama objected to your highest poetry being published, but she was rather surprised at "The Old Seaman" on taking it up. The first verse of "Mont Blanc Revisited"-"Oh mount beloved"-s -seems feeble. Your poetry at present has got among your prose, and it may be well to leave it there till the important book be done, which I am certain will overflow with poetry. Never mind my cravings for little poems, nor Murray's for articles. Age quod agis.4 The Book has told, and it is important to pour into the opened ear of the public all you have to say, boldly, surely, and determinedly beyond contradiction, as far as full knowledge of the subject can protect any one from contradiction." 1 For the architecture of the Palazzo Pitti, see below, sec. i. ch. x. § 3 n., p. 137. 2 Ruskin does not seem to have used in Modern Painters any illustrations, pictorial or otherwise, from Rubens's pictures at Florence; but his diary shows that he studied them carefully. 3 See Vol. II. pp. 233, 238. * The motto which J. J. Ruskin had chosen see Vol. I. p. xi. Ruskin's answer is marked by great good sense. He felt within himself that he was now beginning what he afterwards called his first man's work; and, though the poetical impulse was dead, he was conscious of increasing grip and grit. But he is not quite just in what he says about the self-absorption of his mind. The lines "Written among the Basses Alpes" are indeed charged with little compassion, but they are significant of that awakening interest in human conduct and social justice which was soon to colour all his work and thought: ... : PARMA, July 10.- . . . I am not surprised at the lines being so far inferior, but I do not think I have lost power. I have only lost the exciting circumstances. The life I lead is far too comfortable and regular, too luxurious, too hardening. I see nothing of human life, but waiters, doganiers, and beggars. I get into no scrapes, suffer no inconveniences, and am subject to no species of excitement except that arising from art, which I conceive to be too abstract in its nature to become productive of poetry, unless combined with experience of living passion. I don't see how it is possible for a person who gets up at four, goes to bed at ten, eats ices when he is hot, beef when he is hungry, gets rid of all claims of charity by giving money which he hasn't earned, and of those of compassion by treating all distress more as picturesque than as real-I don't see how it is at all possible for such a person to write good poetry. . . . Nevertheless I believe my mind has made great progress in many points since that poetical time. I perhaps could not-but I certainly would not, now write such things. I might write more tamely, but I think I should write better sense, and possibly if I were again under such morbid excitement, I might write as strongly, but with more manly meaning. I believe, however, the time for it has past. From Parma, whither Ruskin had gone from Florence, he wrote again to his father on the same day, summing up in the form of a class list the conclusions of his studies at Lucca, Pisa, and Florence : PARMA, July 10.- . . . I have pretty well now arranged my scale of painters; I may shift them about here and there a little. I am not sure of the places of all, but I regard them pretty nearly in this order and I shall not alter very much. CLASS 1 Pure Religious Art. The School of Love. 1. Fra Angelico. Forms a class by himself; he is not an artist properly so-called, but an inspired saint. 2. Perugino. 3. Pinturicchio. 1 The words occur in the MS. notes for the second lecture of his Oxford course, Readings in Modern Painters." 4. Francia. 5. Raffaelle. 6. Duccio. 8. Simone 7. John Bellini. 11. Lorenzo di Memmi. 9. Taddeo Gaddi. 10. Fra Bartolommeo. CLASS 2 General Perception of Nature human and divine-accompanied by more or less religious feeling. The School of the Great Men. Intellect. The School of 1. Michael Angelo. 2. Giotto. 3. Orcagna. 4. Benozzo. 5. Leonardo. 6. Ghirlandajo. 7. Masaccio. CLASS 3 The School of Painting as Such 1. Titian. 2. Giorgione. 3. John Bellini. 4. Masaccio. 5. Ghirlandajo. 6. P. Veronese. 7. Tintoret. 8. Van Eyck. 9. Rubens. 10. Rembrandt. 11. Velasquez. CLASS 4 School of Errors and Vices 1. Raffaelle (in his last manner). 2. The Caraccis. 3. Guido. 4. C. Dolci. 5. Correggio. 6. Murillo. 7. Caravaggio-with my usual group of landscapists. You see two or three come into two classes. Bellini was equally great in feeling and in colour. The first class is arranged entirely by the amount of holy expression visible in the works of each, not by art. Otherwise F. Bartolommeo must have come much higher, and Duccio much lower. But other revelations were in store; and Ruskin was yet to revise his list.1 From Parma he went, through Milan, to mountain-solitude at Macugnaga. Thence he wandered to the Italian side of the St. Gothard, in order to find and study the sites or scenes of some of Turner's later drawings; to these studies we shall revert in the next volume but one, for it was not till he came to the fourth volume of Modern Painters that Ruskin utilised this portion of the material gathered by him in 1845. After leaving Faido, he met J. D. Harding at Baveno, and with him went by Como, Bergamo, Desenzano and Verona to Venice. first they were both pre-occupied with sketching. But one day, after they had been there a fortnight, they went to see the then little known and uncared-for Tintorets in the Scuola di San Rocco. It was a revelation, and decided the current of Ruskin's life. He had been in some sort prepared for it in the Church of Sta. Maria dell' Orto. The For other lists, see Elements of Drawing Appendix ii., and The Two Paths, Appendix i. At Paradise in the Ducal Palace-which he afterwards called "the thoughtfullest and most precious picture in the world"-had on this occasion left him cold. But the pictures in the church just mentioned stirred him greatly. The following is the account of them written at the time in his note-book; it is interesting to compare these first impressions with the published accounts: 3 2 Chiesa della Madonna dell' Orto.-It was in this church that I first became acquainted with the real genius of Tintoret. I was startled by the picture, which was luckily at the time taken down and in a side chapel, of the Presentation of the young Madonna, and I saw at once that the manner of painting was more great, simple, and full of meaning than that of any other Venetian master; and that the expressions of admiration in the crowd around were more dramatically rendered than I had ever seen except by Giotto. The figure of the young girl-the head crowned with soft light-is made so naturally and so perfectly the centre of all, and its child simplicity and purity so preserved-even to the feebleness of the short, quiet, unconscious step-contrasted with the massy forms and firm, muscular action of the large figure in the foreground-that I know not any representation of the subject whatsoever in which so much reality and sweetness of impression is obtained. But on passing from this to the Last Judgment in the choir, I saw at once that it was to Tintoret, and to him only, that my time at Venice was to be given and that I had found, what I never expected to see of any school, a work which could stand in the same category with Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. It shares in one respect the fault of the Paradiso, i.e.—that there are no figures in it which individually possess great interest-and it differs entirely from the type of the subject adopted by the older painters in that no emotions are represented, nothing but the great sensation of re-awakened life. It differs both from them, and from the work of Michael Angelo, in another respect also-that while Orcagna's, Angelico's, and M. Angelo's are alike not the representation of a definite local scene— but the presenting of a series of groups to the imagination typical of the Judgment of all the earth, Tintoret's is a definite painting of a spot of earth, and so reminds one of Bartolommeo's-and the only appeals made to the larger faculty of the imagination are in the circle of the Apostles seen far off in the heavens (the principal figure is 1 The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret (1872). 2 These and other notes on pictures at Venice are now among the Morgan MSS. of Modern Painters, vol. ii. (see below, p. 361). They seem to have been torn out of the 1845 note-book, which, as now preserved at Brantwood, ends at Florence. 3 For the "Presentation," see Stones of Venice, Venetian Index, s. "Orto"; for the "Last Judgment," see below, sec. ii. ch. iii. § 24, p. 277. indistinguishable owing to the darkness, the height of the picture, and the injuries it has received) and in the traditional incident of the Charon boat-the only one which Tintoret has deigned to avail himself of—and which he has boldly varied-for the Satan instead of driving the wicked down with his spear-has seized one by the limbs and is hurling him into the boat, as in the statue of Hercules and Hylas—the suspended figure stretching its arms behind. But there is also a wonderful meaning in the incident chosen for the middle distance, the great river of God's wrath: bearing down with it heaps of human creatures-tossed and twisted over one another— crowds more, hastening in insane, ungovernable terror from the vague wild distance-to fall into its waters and be borne away. As a piece of painting it would be quite impossible to surpass the rush of this vast river and the bending and crashing of the torn fragments of forest at its edge. Among the foreground figures there is, as I have said before, no painting of emotions; the good and the evil are not yet distinguished -they have not yet had time to separate into groups of terror and hope they are awakening—some ghastly skeleton figures rattling into life-others with their features of corruption shaking the clay from their hair-clogged yet with the earth-appearing here and there like swimmers in a weedy sea-hardly seen among the knotted grass of the rank foreground. One group on the right, in which an angel touches and wakes a youth, is very finely composed; a little more dignity in the features of both would have made it noble. The air is full of the rising bodies—I never saw anything approaching their perfect buoyancy, except by M. Angelo. The colour is throughout quiet and grey, and rightly so, as a matter of feeling, but it necessitates some little inferiority in colour to the rest of his works, neither is the light and shade very broad or grand. The impressions thus received in the Church of Sta. Maria dell' Orto were confirmed and strengthened at the Scuola di San Rocco. The revelation is described in letters to his father: VENICE, Sept. 23.—I have been quite overwhelmed to-day by a man whom I never dreamed of-Tintoret. I always thought him a good and clever and forcible painter; but I had not the smallest notion of his enormous powers. Harding has been as much taken aback as I have but he says he is "crumbled up," while I feel encouraged and excited by the good art. . . . It is marvellous lucky I came here, or I might have disgraced myself for ever by speaking slightly of Tintoret. I look upon Tintoret now, though as a less perfect painter, yet as a far greater man than Titian ipse. |