on the battle dust;' the sacred cloud, with its lance light and triumph singing, that went down to brood over the masts of Salamis, was more than morning mist among the olives: 2 and yet what were the Greek's thoughts of his God of Battle? No spirit power was in the vision:* it was a being of clay strength, and human passion, foul, fierce, and changeful; of penetrable arms, and vulnerable flesh. Gather what we may of great from Pagan chisel or Pagan dream, and set it beside the orderer of Christian warfare, Michael the Archangel: not Milton's "with hostile brow and visage all inflamed;" not even Milton's in kingly treading of the hills of Paradise; not Raffaelle's with the expanded wings and brandished spear; but Perugino's with his triple crest of traceless plume unshaken in heaven, his hand fallen on his crossleted sword, the truth girdle binding his undinted armour; God has put His power upon him, resistless radiance is on his limbs; no lines are there of earthly strength, no trace on the divine features of earthly anger; trustful, and thoughtful, fearless, but full of love, incapable except of the repose of eternal conquest, vessel and instrument of Omnipotence, filled like a cloud with the victor light, the dust of principalities and powers

5

* This sentence of course refers to Mars, not Pallas. The false bias of the general statement is enough corrected in the "Queen of the Air." [1883.]

1 [Olympus is here apparently a slip for Parnassus, unless it is meant only for heaven. See Herodotus, 8, 37: When the Persians had advanced near the temple of Athena at Delphi, at that moment thunder fell on them from heaven, and two crags, broken away from Parnassus, bore down upon them with a loud crash, and killed many of them, and a loud cry and a war-shout issued from the temple. .. Those of the barbarians who returned, as I am informed, declared that besides these they saw other miraculous things, for that two heavy-armed men, of more than human stature, followed them slaying and pursuing them."]

2 [See Herodotus, 8, 65. A few days before the battle a phantom procession was seen going to Eleusis. A cloud of dust was seen, and a voice arose from it--the voice of the mystic Bacchus. Then the dust arose in a cloud, which was raised aloft and was borne towards Salamis to the encampment of the Greeks.]

3 [Paradise Lost, vi. 260, and see xi. 238-250.]

4 In the Louvre.]

5 The description seems to have been written from the figure of Michael in the "Assumption of the Virgin" in the Accademia at Florence (for a photographic reproduction, see p. 82 of G. C. Williamson's Perugino). For another reference to the picture, see above, p. 84 n. The National Gallery Perugino (No. 288)-with a similar figure (except that there is no triple crest)-was not acquired till 1856.]

beneath his feet, the murmur of hell against him heard by his spiritual ear like the winding of a shell on the far off sea shore.

It is vain to attempt to pursue the comparison; the two orders of art have in them nothing common, and § 21. Conthe field of sacred history, the intent and scope clusion. of Christian feeling, are too wide and exalted to admit of the juxtaposition of any other sphere or order of conception; they embrace all other fields like the dome of heaven. With what comparison shall we compare the types of the martyr saints;* the St. Stephen of Fra Bartolomeo,' with his calm forehead crowned by the stony diadem, or the St. Catherine of Raffaelle2 looking up to heaven in the dawn of the eternal day, with her lips parted in the resting from her pain; or with what the Madonnas of Francia and Pinturicchio,3 in whom the hues of the morning and the solemnity of eve, the gladness in accomplished promise, and sorrow of the sword-pierced heart, are gathered into one human Lamp of

* I will put no depreciatory comments under the honest canticle with which a book I was so happy in writing is brought to a close; though I have long ceased to care for the Madonnas of Francia, and much prefer the St. Catherine of Luini 5 to that of Raffaelle, and feel the whole passage to read more like a piece of Mrs. Jameson than of me. Perhaps I am none the better, if the wiser, in these changes of temperament: but they enable me, at all events, fully to ratify the useful censures in the following Addenda, given with the second edition of the old book, and which I conclude my editoral duty by commenting upon, at some length, in the "Epilogue." [1883.]

1 [As in the picture in the Cappella del Santuario of the cathedral at Lucca.] 2 [See above, sec. i. ch. xii. § 10, p. 159.]

[Ruskin may have been thinking especially of the Francia in the National Gallery see above, p. 196 n. He had especially admired the Madonna by Pinturicchio in the Louvre, which he had noted in his 1844 diary as "exquisite and pure."]

4 [See Ethics of the Dust, § 87, where "Dora" asks the "Lecturer" to "read the end of the second volume of Modern Painters," and he replies that he has changed his mind between 27 and 40; "but," he adds, "that second volume is very good for you as far as it goes. It is a great advance and a thoroughly straight and swift one, to be led, as it is the main business of that second volume to lead you, from Dutch cattle-pieces, and ruffian-pieces, to Fra Angelico."]

5 [A favourite saint with Luini; see, for instance, the frescoes of the Monastero Maggiore (San Maurizio), Milan, the "Body of St. Catherine borne across the Sea to its Sepulchre" in the Brera, and the "St. Catherine of the Hermitage" (frontispiece to G. C. Williamson's Luini, 1899). For Ruskin's general estimate of Luini, see below, p. 355.]

[For Mrs. Jameson, see Præterita, ii. ch. vii. § 143.]

ineffable love? or with what the angel choirs of Angelico, with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings like the glitter of many suns upon a sounding sea, listening in the pauses of alternate song, for the prolonging of the trumpet blast, and the answering of psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep, and from all the star shores of heaven?1

1 [It is interesting to compare this passage with the first impression for it, which is given by Ruskin in a letter to his father:

With this

"FLORENCE, June 5.—.. I spent an hour and a half before a Fra Angelico [in the Uffizi], and hadn't enough of it neither. I learnt how ladies dance from Simone Memmi [in the Campo Santo at Pisa]; and I saw angels dancing to-day, and so I know how they do it. I wish you could see one of Angelico's, either dancing or singing. One that I saw to-day had just taken the trumpet from his lips, and with his hand lifted-listens to the blast of it passing away into heaven. And then to see another bending down to clash the cymbals, and yet looking up at the same instant all full of love. And their wings are of ruby colour and pure gold, and covered with stars, and each has a tongue of fire on his forehead, waving as he moves."

66 canticle in praise of Fra Angelico, compare Ruskin's review of Lord Lindsay, On the Old Road, 1899, i. §§ 90-94.]