composition of the picture, he will find the whole symmetry of it depending on a narrow line of light, the edge of a carpenter's square, which connects these unused tools with an object at the top of the brickwork, a white stone, four square, the corner-stone of the old edifice, the base of its supporting column. This, I think, sufficiently explains the typical character of the whole. The ruined house is the Jewish dispensation; that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is the Christian; but the corner-stone of the old building remains, though the builders' tools lie idle beside it, and the stone which the builders refused is become the Headstone of the Corner.1

Its treatment

In this picture, however, the force of the thought hardly atones for the painfulness of the scene and the § 18. The Bapturbulence of its feeling. The power of the master tism of Christ. is more strikingly shown in his treatment of the by various subject which, however important, and however painters. deep in its meaning, supplies not to the ordinary painter material enough ever to form a picture of high interest; the Baptism of Christ. From the purity of Giotto to the intolerable, inconceivable brutality of Salvator,* every order

* The picture is in the Guadagni Palace. It is one of the most important landscapes Salvator ever painted. The figures are studied from street beggars. On the other side of the river, exactly opposite the point where the Baptism of Christ takes place, the painter, with a refinement of feeling peculiarly his own, has introduced some ruffians stripping off their shirts to bathe. He is fond of this incident. It occurs again in one of the marines of the Pitti Palace, with the additional interest of a foreshortened figure, swimming on its back, feet foremost, exactly in the stream of light to which the eye is principally directed.2

1 [Psalm cxviii. 22.]

[The pictures by Salvator in the Guadagni Palace were the Showing and the Baptism of Christ. Ruskin's discussion of them in his 1845 note-book is worth giving at some length, as an illustration of his careful and prolonged study in the galleries:

"These are decidedly the best Salvators I have ever seen and perfectly genuine and undoubtable throughout. By these in fairness he ought to be judged, for he has taken pains with them and this he seldom did. The firstthe Showing of Christ-consists chiefly of a huge and wild group of skeleton trees which occupy the centre of the picture, and straggle about the sky, shapeless rocks thrown about the foreground and middle distance, and

of feeling has been displayed in its treatment; but I am aware of no single case, except this of which I am about to speak, in which it has formed an impressive picture.

Giotto's, in the Academy of Florence, engraved in the series just published (Galleria delle belle Arti),1 is one of

1

cumbrous mountains behind. The other is finer; it is a sweet passage of calm river under steep and cavernous rocks, with a well studied distance and a grand dark tree obscuring the sky on the left. The skies are the same in both, the regular sky of Salvator-dark blue above cut off from the horizon by rolling white clouds with level flaky bases in shades, which come light upon the blue above, and dark on the yellow light of the distance below.

"At the first sight of these pictures I was taken aback; their magnificent size, masterly handling and vigorous chiaroscuro (enhanced as it is by the blue of the sky having much darkened) and the skeleton branches of the trees like the limbs of the Tempting Demon of the St. Anthony [by Salvator in the Pitti] altogether are at first so impressive that if I had only looked for five minutes and come away, I might have altered my whole opinion of Salvator; and as few people ever look more than five minutes at any picture, it is no wonder that the energy of the superficial master obtains so many admirers, as it had very nearly carried me away myself.

"But on sitting down for a moment and recovering from the first effect, the truth came upon me gradually and fast. Every time I looked, the colour seemed more false, and the eye detected some erring or disagreeable form. Repetition after repetition, mannerism after mannerism, was unveiled, and I did not leave the pictures before it had become painful to look at them. . . . It is not to be doubted that Salvator used this dead colour to enhance the sublimity of his landscape, and that to ill taught minds it does so, but to all pure feeling it only furnishes another and a manifest proof that all violations of national principles for an imaginative result, recoil on the inventor's head, and are productive of nothing but ugliness and disagreeableness. Had these pictures been warmed with real sunlight, they might have approached the true sublime, whereas now they are nothing but small scenepainting and that not of the best.

"But it is not only their colour which is deficient. Their air-tones are still more so, . . . and [the shadows are] perfectly vacant and impenetrable --not black, nor, in the common sense of the term, heavy; as extreme darks they would be good, but they are extreme darks everywhere, the whole picture being made up of these necessarily in order to give value to the low, grey lights. This vulgarity is one of the chief causes of the rapid impression the pictures make, and it is also one of the chief causes of their final failure. For there is nothing to be discovered or penetrated anywhere; distant and near, all is alike-dense, formless, hopeless brown, with the lights cleverly touched over it, the same, whether in rock, trees, or water. One passage only affords an exception, and its beauty is a test of the wrong in the rest. In the Baptism of Christ, on the opposite side of the river, on the right hand, a glade runs up among scattered trunks of trees behind the rocks, and this part of the picture is refreshing and full of nature: one can walk through it, and breathe in it. . . ."

For the incident of the bathers, see above, ch. ii. § 19, and preceding volume, p. 518 n.] 1 [Galleria dell' I. e Reale Accademia delle Belle Arti di Firenze pubblicata con incisione in rame. ... Firenze, 1845. Giotto's "Baptism of Christ" is the seventh plate in that work.]

2

the most touching I know, especially in the reverent action of the attendant angels; and Leonardo's angel in that of Andrea del Verrocchio is very beautiful, but the event is one whose character and importance are ineffable upon the features: the descending dove hardly affects us, because its constant symbolical occurrence hardens us, and makes us look on it as a mere type or letter, instead of the actual presence of the Spirit and by all the sacred painters the power that might be put into the landscape is lost; for though their use of foliage and distant sky or mountain is usually very admirable, as we shall see in the fifth chapter, yet they cannot deal with near water or rock; and the hexagonal and basaltic

1 [This is one of a series of panels, removed from vestment presses at Santa Croce, representing scenes from the life of Christ. They are now attributed to Taddeo Gaddi.] 2 [This is famous as one of the few certainly authentic pictures, if not the only one, by Verrocchio in existence. It was painted by commission for the monks of Vallombrosa. The kneeling angel to the extreme left is said, by a tradition of Vasari, to have been painted by Verrocchio's pupil, Leonardo. Modern critics accept the tradition, and many attribute a larger share in the picture to him (see, e.g., Eugène Muntz's Leonardo, English ed., i. 40). Ruskin described the picture in the 1845 note-book:

"The head painted by Leonardo in this most interesting picture is not superior to Verrocchio's work in religious or grand qualities: neither of them is indeed particularly distinguished in this way; but still, the dark eyes and unpretending simplicity of Verrocchio's angels are to me quite as agreeable and certainly more solemn than the more finished beauty of Leonardo's work. But the difference is certainly great in the attractive qualities of art. Leonardo's hair is silky and lustrous, and more refined than even Raffaelle's in his finest works, and curled with the greatest grace and complexity. Verrocchio's is black, short, rough and straggly. Leonardo's features are full, round, and most purely chiselled. Verrocchio's are thin and marked like Botticelli's, and from poor models. Leonardo's complexion, fair and pure and stippled and shaded with great sweetness of colour. Verrocchio's brown and lightless; and finally, while the latter paints the iris of the eye with a dark, unvaried brown like Raphael, Leonardo has dwelt with a boyish delight on all the light he could get in it, through it and on it, making it a lustrous and transparent grey, that he might have the opportunity, and though it is a little fishy, it is still very ardent and full of feeling and exceedingly clever. The story told of Verrocchio is easily to be credited on looking at it.'

Elsewhere in the note-book Ruskin adds :

"In the angel which Leonardo painted in Verrocchio's picture in the Accademia, the eyes are filled with moist, tender, transparent lustre and light, while Verrocchio's beside it is painted with both iris and pupil hard and dark. I almost think Verrocchio's the grandest of the two in spite of Leonardo's beautiful drawing."

Leonardo's angel, says Vasari, "was much superior to the other parts of the picture. Perceiving this, Andrea resolved never again to take pencil in hand, since Leonardo, though still so young, had acquitted himself in that art better than he had done' (Bohn's ed. 1871, ii. 255). One of the treasures of the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield is a work attributed to Verrocchio; see notes on that collection in a later volume of this edition.]

protuberances of their river shores are, I think, too painful to be endured even by the most acceptant mind; as eminently in that of Angelico, in the Vita di Cristo,' which, as far as I can judge, is a total failure in action, expression, and all else; and in general, it is in this subject especially that the greatest painters show their weakness. For this reason, I suppose, and feeling the difficulty of it, Tintoret has thrown into it his utmost strength, and it becomes noble in his hands by his most singularly imaginative expression, not only of the immediate fact, but of the whole train of thought of which it is suggestive; and by his considering the Baptism not only as the submission of Christ to the fulfilment of all righteousness, but as the opening of the earthly struggle with the prince of the powers of the air, which instantly beginning in the temptation, ended only on the cross.

The river flows fiercely under the shadow of a great rock.*

* A farther examination of this picture has made me doubt my interpretation of some portions of it. It is nearly destroyed, and placed between two lights, and far from the eye, so as to render its details in many of the shadowed portions almost untraceable. I leave the passage unaltered, however, until I can obtain an opportunity of close access to the picture. The other works described are in fuller light and in better preservation, and the reader may accept with confidence the account given of them, which I have confirmed by re-examination.2

[In the Accademia at Florence; cf. above, p. 100 n.]

2[This note was added in the second edition (1848). J. A. Symonds, in an article in the National Observer of August 1, 1891 ("A Morning at San Rocco"), made fun of Ruskin's description, pointing out that what appeared to Ruskin "a horizontal floor of flaky cloud, on which stand the hosts of heaven," was in fact "a set of fairly welldressed women on the river-bank of Jordan, with trees behind them, the tops of which are clearly reflected in the stream." Symonds pointed out other particulars in which the description given above hardly accords with the picture; but the footnote shows that he had been anticipated (as is generally the case with Ruskin's critics) by Ruskin himself. See also Stones of Venice, s. "Rocco, Scuola di San," Upper Room, No. 11, where Ruskin says: "The river is seen far into the distance, with a piece of copse bordering it the sky beyond is dark, but the water nevertheless receives a brilliant reflection from some unseen rent in the clouds, so brilliant, that when I was first at Venice, not being accustomed to Tintoret's slight execution, or to see pictures so much injured, I took this piece of water for a sky." In this later description of the picture, Ruskin says: Behind the rocks on the right a single head is seen, with a collar on his shoulders; it seems to be intended for a portrait of some person connected with the picture." The Pall Mall Gazette (August 1, 1891), commenting on Symonds' article and Ruskin's own correction of this passage, remarked: "We doubt, however, whether even on further examination Mr. Ruskin would altogether give up his hosts of heaven.' On one occasion at Oxford he showed a sketch from some

From its opposite shore, thickets of close gloomy foliage rise against the rolling chasm of heaven, through which §19. By Tinbreaks the brightness of the descending Spirit. toret. Across these, dividing them asunder, is stretched a horizontal floor of flaky cloud, on which stand the hosts of heaven. Christ kneels upon the water, and does not sink; the figure of St. John is indistinct, but close beside his raised right arm there is a spectre in the black shade; the Fiend, harpyshaped, hardly seen, glares down upon Christ with eyes of fire, waiting his time. Beneath this figure there comes out of the mist a dark hand, the arm unseen, extended to a net in the river, the spars of which are in the shape of a cross. Behind this the roots and under stems of the trees are cut away by the cloud, and beneath it, and through them, is seen a vision of wild, melancholy, boundless light, the sweep of the desert; and the figure of Christ is seen therein alone, with His arms lifted as in supplication or ecstasy, borne of the Spirit into the Wilderness to be tempted of the Devil.

There are many circumstances which combine to give to this noble work a more than usually imaginative character. The symbolical use of the net, which is the cross net still used constantly in the canals of Venice, and common throughout Italy, is of the same character as that of the carpenter's tools in the Annunciation; but the introduction of the spectral figure is of bolder reach, and yet more, that vision of the after-temptation which is expressly indicated as a subject of thought rather than of sight, because it is in a part of the scene which in fact must have been occupied by the trunks of the trees whose tops are seen above; and another circumstance completes the mystic character of the whole, that the flaky clouds which support the angelic hosts take on the right, where the light first falls upon them, the shape of the head

picture by Tintoret which, whether by chance or design we knew not, he held out wrong side up, and began discoursing on it so. Ah, well,' he said, joining in the general laughter, 'what does it matter? for in Tintoret you have heaven all round you.'"]