and dome beyond; so that for two months, I had it to look at by daylight and moonlight. The Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella had still their spice garden,'-I made hay, that June, with the Franciscans, in their orchard at the "top of Fésole," and San Miniato, the loveliest of lovely ruins, was yet encircled by a wilderness of wild rose. It was still possible, in these quiet places, to conceive what Florence had been, in the year of Victories. 2 My main work, for those two months, was in the apse of Santa Maria Novella, on Ghirlandajo; in the Brancacci Chapel, on Masaccio and Lippi; and in St. Mark's convent, on Angelico. And very solemnly I wish that I had gone straight home that summer, and never seen Venice,* Tintoret! Perhaps I might have been the Catholic Archbishop of York, by this time-who knows! building my or * Seen her, that is to say, with man's eyes. My boyhood's first sight of her, when I was fourteen, could not have been brighter, and would not have been forgotten.1 was an overcharging scamp-(though we may just as well remember the fact) -for otherwise I should not have got into this very nice quarter; it is really a great luxury to see the form of the cathedral against the night sky, and to be able to saunter in the great square in the twilight without having a riverside walk home." [See Præterita, ii., ch. vii. § 127. In a letter to his mother, Ruskin gives an account of the spice-garden (June 9):— "... By-the-bye you needn't have sent me a medicine chest. I never saw such a pretty thing in my life as the 'spezieria' of Santa M. Novella. The monks are the apothecaries of Florence, and there is room after room opening off the cloisters in the most exquisite order and taste,-a very toy of bottles and shelves, and a lovely garden in the middle buried in rose leaves, where they grow all they want. It is very curious to see the shelves and drawers and jars of an apothecary's shop exactly under, and touching the bottom of -frescoes by Taddeo Gaddi, and with a vaulted roof above, and monks behind the counter." For another description of the Spezieria, see Ruskin's review of Eastlake's History of Oil-Painting, in On the Old Road, 1899, i. § 98.] 2 [Paradise Lost, i. 289. Ruskin gives an account of his hay-making in a letter to his father (June 22):— "... I had some good exercise too last night, making hay up at Fiesole in the Franciscan convent with the monks. I assure you-when the Franciscans do work-they work to purpose. Then I rested in the garden under the cypresses of the top of Fésole' waiting for the moon rise, to descry new lands, rivers or island in her spotty globe,' and so walked back into Florence with the fire-flies flitting about all the way." Ruskin quotes from memory. Milton has "Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe."] 3 [1254; see Val d'Arno, § 121.] [Ruskin was, however, sixteen when he first saw Venice (1835). For his impressions of that visit, see Vol. I. p. 543.] cathedral there, in emulation of the Cardinal's at Westminster -instead of a tiny Sheffield museum.1 § 11. Fate, and the unlucky task of book-writing, ordered otherwise. For Modern Painters could not be finished with a study of ecclesiastical history; and, as the stress of summer came on in Florence, having gained some initiatory conception of her art, with the nature that taught it, and learned to love even the yellow sand of Arno scarcely less than the white sand of Arve, I went north to my special work again, and spent the early autumn, nearly alone, in Val Anzasca. There was little more than a châlet for inn, at Macugnaga, in those days. § 12. In September, Mr. J. D. Harding, who, after Copley Fielding, had been my master in water-colour, wrote to ask if he could join me in his autumn tour. I went down to meet him at Baveno; and thence we drove quietly in an open carriage by Como and the spurs of the Italian Alps to Venice, walking up all the hills, stopping at all the river sides, sleeping a night or two at Como, Bergamo, Brescia, and Padua,—with a week at Verona. A most happy time, for me; and, I believe, for us both. Harding had vivid, healthy, and unerring artistic faculty, but no depth of science, and scarcely any of sentiment. 1 saw him once impressed by the desolation of the great hall of the Casa Foscari; but in general, if the forms of the subject were picturesque, it was all he cared for, nor would he with any patience analyze even those. So far as his art and aim went, I was able entirely to sympathize with him; and we both liked, in one way or another, exactly the same sorts of things; so that he didn't want to go and draw the marshes at Mantua when I wanted to draw Monte Monterone -but we could always sit down to work within a dozen 1 [The Roman Catholic Cathedral at Westminster (for which Cardinal Manning began to collect funds in 1865), now approaching completion, was not destined to be begun till a much later date (1895). The "tiny Sheffield museum" refers to the cottage at Walkley, near Sheffield, in which the museum of the St. George's Guild was at that time housed. In 1890 the museum was transferred to the more spacious house in Meersbrook Park provided by the Sheffield Corporation.] yards of each other, both pleased. I did not mind his laughing at me for poring into the foreground weeds, which he thought sufficiently expressed by a zigzag, and heartily admired in him the brilliancy of easy skill, which secured, and with emphasis, in an hour or two, the effect of scenes I could never have attempted. His time in travelling was of course professionally too valuable to him to admit of much study in galleries, (which, for the rest, when a painter's manner is once fixed, usually does him more hurt than good). But he generally went with me on my exploring days in Venice, and we saw the Scuola di San Rocco together, and both of us for the first time. My companion, though by no means modest as to his own powers, was (partly for that very reason, his confidence in them being well grounded) quite frank and candid in his admiration of stronger painters; and when we had got through the upper gallery, and into the room of the Crucifixion, we both sate down and looked-not at it-but at each other,—literally the strength so taken out of us that we couldn't stand!1 When we came away, Harding said that he felt like a whipped schoolboy. I, not having been at school so long as he, felt only that a new world was opened to me, that I had seen that day the Art of Man in its full majesty for the first time; and that there was also a strange and precious gift in myself enabling me to recognize it, and therein ennobling, not crushing me. That sense of my own gift and function as an interpreter2 strengthened as I grew older; and supports, and I believe justifies me now in accepting in this last cycle of life, the responsibilities lately once more offered to me in Oxford. 3 § 13. The public estimate of me, so far as it is wise at all, and not grounded merely on my manner of writing, is, I think, chiefly as an illustrator of natural beauty. They 1 [See above, Introduction, p. xxxvii.] ... 2 [So in Love's Meinie, Lecture iii.: "My own special function is, and always has been, that of the Interpreter only, in the Pilgrim's Progress."] 3 [Ruskin was re-appointed to the Slade Professorship in January 1883.] had as much illustration of it before as they needed, one would have thought, and if not enough to their taste in Chaucer or Spenser, in Byron or Scott, at all events in their own contemporary poets. Tennyson's "Brook" is far beyond anything I ever did, or could have done, in beauty of description; and the entire power of natural scenes on the constant feelings of the human heart is taught, (and perfectly,) by Longfellow in "Hiawatha." But I say with pride, which it has become my duty to express openly, that it was left to me, and to me alone, first to discern, and then to teach, so far as in this hurried century any such thing can be taught, the excellency and supremacy of five great painters, despised until I spoke of them,―Turner, Tintoret, Luini, Botticelli, and Carpaccio.3 Despised,-nay, scarcely in any true sense 1 [Cf. Vol. II. p. xxviii. n.] 2 2 [For other passages showing Ruskin's admiration of Longfellow, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xiii. § 10 n., vol. iv. ch. xix. § 20, vol. v. pt. vii. ch. iv. § 5 n.] 3 [Cf. what Ruskin says in Præterita, i. ch. ix. § 180: "Tintoret was virtually unseen, Veronese unfelt, Carpaccio not so much as named, when I began to study them." His claim in the case of Turner and Tintoret needs no comment. With regard to Luini among painters-as to Chartres among cathedrals (see Vol. I. p. 377 n.) -it is noticeable that he did not write all that was in his mind or so much as might have been expected to justify the very high rank he accorded to that painter. In Modern Painters Luini was not mentioned: see note from Frondes Agrestes to Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iv. § 21. Ruskin's principal references to him are in Queen of the Air, § 157, and Catalogue of the Educational Series, No. 49. The modern cult of Botticelli owes much to Ruskin's enthusiasm; but something must be allowed also to the essay of Pater (first published in the Fortnightly Review of August 1870, reprinted in Studies in the Renaissance, 1873). Reference should be made also to Mr. Swinburne's "Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence (first published in the Fortnightly Review for July 1868), in which he speaks of "the faint and almost painful grace which gives a distinct value and curious charm to all the works of Botticelli." At an auction in 1867 D. G. Rossetti picked up a Botticelli for £20. "If he had not something to do," writes his brother, "with the vogue which soon afterwards began to attach to that fascinating master, I am under a misapprehension." Pater's essay first appeared in the Fortnightly Review of August 1870. Ruskin's first mention of Botticelli was in a lecture delivered at Oxford during the Lent Term, 1871. Carpaccio had been proclaimed in a lecture of the preceding year, and it became a standing joke among the profane to ask who was Ruskin's last 66 greatest painter." It was in answer thereto that Mr. Bourdillon wrote: "To us this star or that seems bright, And oft some headlong meteor's flight The least is only the most far, Whose worlds, may be, the mightiest are." Ruskin's principal references to Botticelli are in Ariadne Florentina and Fors Clavigera, Letter 22. For the previous eclipse of Botticelli's reputation, see J. P. Richter's of the word, known. I think, before the year 1874,1 in which I began work on the frescoes of Botticelli and Perugino in the Sistine Chapel, there will scarcely be found so much as a notice of their existence in the diary of any traveller, and there was no consciousness of their existence in the entire mind of modern Rome. They are little enough noticed now; and yet, in London, Turner's most precious drawings are kept in the cellar of the National Gallery :-nevertheless, my work is done; and so far as the English nation studies the Arts at all, will tell, in its due time. § 14. The reader who has had patience with these personal details, thus far, will understand now the temper in which, on my return to England, I wrote the second volume of Modern Painters, and the extreme prominence given to Tintoret, in the closing sections of it. The short Addenda which provoked this garrulous Epilogue will also, I think, Lectures on the National Gallery, p. 46. The first picture by Botticelli bought for the National Gallery (No. 275 in 1865) cost only £159, 11s. 6d. "The Nativity" (No. 1034) cost in 1878 £1500. The praise of Carpaccio is principally in Guide to the Venetian Academy and St. Mark's Rest. His earliest reference to Carpaccio as "faultless" and consummate was in 1870 (Verona and its Rivers, § 22; Lectures on Art, § 73). In Stones of Venice Carpaccio is referred to only for his interesting pieces of Venetian architecture. It was in revisiting Venice in 1869 that Ruskin fell under Carpaccio's sway. His "discovery" of the painter had been anticipated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones; as the following letter shows : VENICE, May 13th, 1869. MY DEAREST NED,-There's nothing here like Carpaccio There's a little bit of humble-pie for you! Well, the fact was, I had never once looked at him, having classed him in glance and thought with Gentile Bellini, and other men of the more or less incipient and hard schools, and Tintoret went better with clouds and hills. I don't give up my Tintoret, bnt his dissolution of expression into drapery and shadow is too licentious for me now. But this Carpaccio is a new world to me; only you have no right to be so fond of him, for he is merely what you would have been if you had been born here, and rightly trained from the beginning -and one shouldn't like oneself so much. I've only seen the Academy ones yet, and am going this morning (cloudless light) to your St. George of the Schiavoni; and I must send this word first to catch post.-Ever your loving, J. R. This letter was first printed in its entirety in a privately printed volume (1894), Letters on Art and Literature by John Ruskin, edited by Thomas J. Wise, p. 41. It had previously been published, in an incomplete form, by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie in an essay on "John Ruskin" in Harper's Magazine for March 1890, and reprinted in her Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning, 1892, p. 135. Carpaccio's pictures had, however, been highly esteemed before Burne-Jones and Ruskin discovered" him; his picture in the National Gallery (No. 750) cost £3400 in 1865.] 1 [This is a mistake for 1872; see above, p. 350 n.] |