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warrior of Agasias; and distress not agitated nor unworthy, though mortal, as in the dying gladiator; or brutal ferocity and butchered agony, of which the lowest and least palliated examples are those battles of Salvator Rosa which none but a man base-born, and thief-bred, could have conceived 3 without sickening; of which I will only name that example in the Pitti Palace, wherein the chief figure in the foreground is a man with his arm cut off at the shoulder, run through the other hand into the breast with a lance.* And manifold instances of the same feeling are to be found in the repainting of the various representations of the Inferno, so common through Italy; more especially that of Orcagna's in the Campo Santo, wherein the few figures near the top that yet remain untouched are grand in their severe drawing and expressions of enduring despair, while those below, repainted by Solazzino, depend for their expressiveness upon torrents of blood; so in the Inferno of Santa Maria Novella, and of the Arena chapel, not to speak of the horrible images of the Passion, by which vulgar Romanism has always striven to excite the languid sympathies of its untaught flocks. Of

4

5

* Compare Michelet, Du Prêtre, de la Femme, de la Famille, chap. iii. note. He uses language too violent to be quoted; but excuses Salvator by reference to the savage character of the Thirty Years' War. That this excuse has no validity may be proved by comparing the painter's treatment of other subjects. See Sec. II. Chap. III. § 18, note [p. 265, below].

1 [See preceding volume, p. 82.]

The famous piece of sculpture in the Capitoline Museum at Rome-the subject of Byron's familiar lines (Childe Harold, iv. 140). For another reference, see above, p. 119 n.]

3 [For "conceived" ed. 1 reads "dwelt on for an instant." The MS. has "held his breath to paint."]

[Ruskin in his note-book of 1845 wrote of this fresco as follows :—

"The Hell was probably once fine, but the whole of the lower part repainted by Solazzino, as well as the figure of Lucifer (who looks like a large unboiled crab), is execrable beyond forgiveness, and if preserved at all should immediately be reduced to outline and white plaster. The round, fat, unboned, cushiony limbs painted pink and running with blood are as disgusting as they are childish; there is more art in some of the signs at Bartholomew Fair."] 5 [Orcagna's Inferno in S. Maria Novella is behind the altar of the chapel at the head of the staircase leading out of the north transept. The "Inferno of the Arena Chapel" refers to Giotto's fresco of "The Last Judgment," in which Hell occupies the whole right side of the composition.]

which foulness let us reason no farther, the very image and memory of them being pollution; only noticing this, that there has always been a morbid tendency in Romanism towards the contemplation of bodily pain, owing to the attribution of saving power to it; which, like every other moral error, has been of fatal effect in art, leaving not altogether without the stain and blame of it even the highest of the Romanist painters; as Fra Angelico, for instance, who, in his Passion subjects, always insists weakly on the bodily torture, and is unsparing of blood; and Giotto, though his treatment is usually grander, as in that Crucifixion over the door of the Convent of St. Mark's, where the blood is hardly actual, but issues from the feet in a conventional form, and becomes a crimson cord which is twined strangely beneath about a skull;1 only what these holy men did to enhance, even though in their means mistaken, the impression and power of the sufferings of Christ, or of His saints, is always in a measure noble, and to be distinguished with all reverence from the abominations of the irreligious painters following; as of Camillo Procaccini, in one of his martyrdoms in the Gallery of the Brera, at Milan, and other such, whose names may be well spared to the reader.

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1[This crucifix is over the principal entrance (inside) of the church, not the convent of San Marco. It is mentioned by Vasari (i. 111), and is supposed to be the work which established Giotto's fame over Cimabue's, and called forth the lines in the Purgatorio (Credette Cimabue, etc., xi. 91, quoted in Mornings in Florence, § 37). It is thus described by Ruskin in the 1845 note-book :

"This .. [crucifix], of which a copy exists in the transept of Ogni Santi, is, I doubt not, the original of Giotto, and it has served as model for a host of others, small and great, with which the Tuscan churches were filled at the period, the same bend of the body and type of countenance being used in all. The two saints on the arms are in this of Giotto's singularly poor, but the face of the Christ is exceedingly grand-Vandyke-like, the hair flowing with the greatest dignity, the light soft, graduated, and beautifully concentrated on the forehead, the brow horizontal and full of power, the nose straight, the mouth sublime, no hard lines, nor lip drawing about it. The blood gushes from the side in a flat stream, that from the feet runs down till it enters a cavity of the rock, where it turns in a most singular way about a skull. On each side of the skull is a beautiful kneeling figure.” It appears from a further passage in the diary that from this work (as of very many others noted in it) Ruskin made a study.]

[There is, however, no martyrdom by Camillo Procaccini in the Brera. The reference must be taken as generic, applying to pictures by the Eclectic School of the Procaccini-Ercole Procaccini, Camillo (his son), Giulio Cesare (another son), and Giovanni Battista Crespi (a scholar).]

These, then, are the four passions whose expression, in any degree, is degradation to the human form.1 But § 30. Of pasof all passion it is to be observed, that it becomes sion generally. ignoble either when entertained respecting unworthy objects, and therefore shallow or unjustifiable; or when of impious violence, and so destructive of human dignity. Thus Grief is noble or the reverse, according to the dignity and worthiness of the object lamented, and the grandeur of the mind enduring it. The sorrow of mortified vanity or avarice is simply disgusting; even that of bereaved affection may be base if selfish and unrestrained. All grief that convulses the features is ignoble because it is commonly shallow, and certainly temporary, as in children; though in the shock and shiver of a strong man's features, under sudden and violent grief, there may be something of sublime. The grief of Guercino's Hagar, in the Brera Gallery at Milan, is partly despicable, partly disgusting, partly ridiculous; it is not the grief of the injured Egyptian, driven forth into the desert with the destiny of a nation in her heart; but of a servant of all work turned away

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1 1 [Ed. 1 reads:-"These, then, are the four passions whose presence, in any degree, on the human face is degradation. But of all passion it is to be generally observed..." The MS. reads in place of the first six lines of § 30:

"The ignoble character of passion on the human face depends not so much on the character of the passion itself, as on the nobility and dignity of what excites it, and that which I call essentially ignoble is pure passion, i.e. the expression of pain, grief or fear concerning unworthy objects, or in general of pure passion as such without expression of any noble conception or worthy thought. Thus the fear which a man feels of being run over in the street, or of falling out of a window, though it may happen for an instant to be very acute, is essentially ignoble in its effect on the features. The fear which might be expressed in the same face during a violent thunderstorm, or of falling down a precipice is not ignoble, because although the pure passion is as base in itself, it is accompanied in the latter case with noble conceptions of divine power or natural sublimity."

This is one of several cases where familiar illustrations and simple language in the MS. were omitted or altered during revision, in order to preserve the uniform note of elevation at which Ruskin aimed in this volume.]

[This is the picture which excited the admiration of Byron. "Of painting," he wrote from Milan, describing a visit to the Brera Gallery, "I know nothing; but I like a Guercino-a picture of Abraham putting away Hagar and Ishmael-which seems to be natural and godly" (Letters and Journals, ed. of 1899, iii. 377). And so Stendhal: "Il y a une Agar du Guercin faite, pour attendrir les cœurs les plus durs et les plus dévoués à l'argent ou aux cordons" (Rome, Naples, et Florence, ed. 1854, p. 45). Modern opinion follows rather that of Ruskin; see, for instance, J. A. Symonds' Renaissance, ed. 1898, vii, 225.]

exhibited-at least on the face.

for stealing tea and sugar.* Common painters forget that § 31. It is never passion is not absolutely, and in itself, great or to be for itself violent, but only in proportion to the weakness of the mind it has to deal with; and that, in exaggerating its outward signs, they are not exalting the passion, but lowering1 the hero.† They think too much of passions as always the same in their nature: forgetting that the love of Achilles is different from the love of Paris, and of Alcestis from that of Laodamia. The use and value of passion is not as a subject of contemplation in itself, but as it breaks up the fountains of the great deep of the human mind, or displays its mightiness and ribbed majesty, as mountains are seen in their stability best among the coil of clouds; whence, in fine, I think it is to be held, that all passion which attains overwhelming power, so that it is not as resisting, but as conquered, that the creature is contemplated, is unfit for high art, and destructive of the ideal character of the countenance and, in this respect, I cannot but hold Raffaelle to have erred in his endeavour to express passion of such acuteness in the human face; as in the fragment of the Massacre of the Innocents in our own gallery (wherein, repainted though it be, I suppose the purpose of the master is yet to

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* Extremely right; and the entire contents of this paragraph, with the 31st, are of great general value. They are much illustrated and reinforced in my later writings. [1883.]

"The fire, that mounts the liquor till it run o'er,

In seeming to augment it, wastes it."

[For "lowering," ed. 1 reads "evaporating."]

-Henry VIII.

[This is a cartoon, after a design by Raphael, 9 feet 11 inches by 9 feet 3 inches. It was presented by Mr. Prince Hoare to the Foundling Hospital, and was lent by that institution to the National Gallery in 1840. It was formerly No. 184 in the catalogues of the Gallery (see e.g. "Felix Summerly's" (Sir H. Cole's) Handbook, 1852). The number was removed and allotted to another work when the cartoon was reclaimed by the Hospital in 1858 (see Report of the Director of the National Gallery, 1858). The Massacre of the Innocents was a subject more than once designed by Raphael; there is a well-known engraving of one design by Marc Antonio (see No. 567 in Sidney Colvin's Guide to an Exhibition of Drawings and Engravings in the British Museum, 1895. There are studies for the subject in the Albertina collection at Vienna and in the Venice Academy. Raphael had intended it to form one of the series of cartoons for the Vatican tapestries.]

be understood); for if such subjects are to be represented at all, their entire expression may be given without degrading the face, as we shall presently see done with unspeakable power by Tintoret ;* and I think that all subjects of the kind, all human misery, slaughter, famine, plague, peril, and crime, are better in the main avoided, as of unprofitable and hardening influence, unless so far as out of the suffering, hinted rather than expressed, we may raise into nobler relief the eternal enduring of fortitude and affection, of mercy and selfdevotion; or when, as by the threshing-floor of Ornan, and by the cave of Lazarus,1 the angel of the Lord is to be seen in the chastisement, and his love to be manifested to the despair of men.

Thus, then, we have in some sort enumerated those evil signs which are most to be shunned in the seeking § 32. Recapituof Ideal beauty; † though it is not the knowledge lation.

of them, but the dread and hatred of them, which will effectually aid the painter; as, on the other hand, it is not by mere admission of the loveliness of good and holy expression that its subtle characters are to be traced. Raffaelle himself, questioned on this subject, made doubtful answer: he probably could not trace through what early teaching or by what dies of emotion the image had been sealed upon his heart. Our own Bacon, who well saw the impossibility of reaching it by the combination of many separate beauties, yet explains not the nature of that "kind of felicity" to which he attributes

* Sec. II. Chap. III. § 22.

Let it be observed that it is always of beauty, not of human character in its lower and criminal modifications, that we have been speaking. That variety of character, therefore, which we have affirmed to be necessary, is the variety of Giotto and Angelico, not of Hogarth. Works concerned with the exhibition of general character are to be spoken of in the consideration of Ideas of Relation.

1 [Chronicles xxi. 15; John xi. 38.]

2 In a letter to his friend Count Castiglione, Raphael could only explain that he painted from an idea in his mind ("Mi servo d'una certa idea che me viene in mente.") See below, p. 351.]