In the works of Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, and many other painters following, interesting examples may be found of the opposite treatment; and as in Lippi the heads are usually very sweet, and the composition severe, the degrading effect of the realized decorations and imitated dress may be seen in him simply, and without any addition of painfulness from other deficiencies of feeling. The larger of the two pictures in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, but for this defect, would have been a very noble ideal work.

lour pure.

The second point to be observed is that brightness of colour is § 15. And Coaltogether inadmissible without purity and harmony; and that the sacred painters must not be followed in their frankness of unshadowed colour, unless we can also follow them in its clearness. As far as I am acquainted with the modern schools of Germany, they seem to be entirely ignorant of the value of colour as an assistant of feeling, and to think that hardness, dryness, and opacity are its virtues as employed in religious art; whereas I hesitate not to affirm that in such art, more than in any other, clearness, luminousness, and intensity of hue are essential to right impression; and from the walls of the Arena chapel in their rainbow play of brilliant harmonies, to the solemn purple tones of Perugino's fresco in the Albizzi Palace, I know not any great work of sacred art which is not as precious in colour as in all other qualities (unless indeed it be a Crucifixion of Fra Angelico in the Florence Academy, which has just been glazed, and pumiced, and painted, and varnished by the picture cleaners until it glares from one end of the gallery to the other); only the pure white light and delicate hue of the idealists, whose colours are by preference such as we have seen to be the most beautiful in the chapter on Purity, are carefully to be distinguished from the golden light and deep-pitched hue of the school of Titian, whose virtue is the grandeur of earthly solemnity, not the glory of heavenly rejoicing.

form of the

body itself; o

what variety

susceptible.

But leaving these accessary circumstances, and touching the § 16. Ideal treatment of the bodily form, it is evident, in the first place, that whatever typical beauty the human body is capable of possessing must be bestowed upon it when it is to be understood as spiritual. And therefore those general proportions and types which are deducible from comparison of the nobler individuals of the race, must be

§ 17. Anatomical development, how far admissible.

adopted and adhered to; admitting among them not, as in the human ideal, such varieties as result from past suffering, or contest with sin, but such only as are consistent with sinless nature, or are the signs of instantly or continually operative affections; for though it is conceivable that spirit should suffer, it is inconceivable that spiritual frame should retain, like the stamped inelastic human clay, the brand of sorrow past, unless fallen :

"His face

Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek."

Yet so far forth the Angelic idea is diminished, nor could this be suffered in pictorial representation.

Again, such muscular development as is necessary to the perfect beauty of the body is to be rendered. But that which is necessary to strength, or which appears to have been the result of laborious exercise, is inadmissible. No herculean form is spiritual, for it is degrading the spiritual creature to suppose it operative through impulse of bone and sinew; its power is immaterial and constant, neither dependent on, nor developed by, exertion. Generally it is well to conceal anatomical development as far as may be; even Michael Angelo's anatomy interferes with his divinity; in the hands of lower men the angel becomes a preparation. How far it is possible to subdue or generalize the naked form I venture not to affirm; but I believe that it is best to conceal it, as far as may be, not with light and undulating draperies, that fall in with and exhibit its principal lines, but with severe and linear draperies, such as were constantly employed before the time of Raffaelle. I recollect no single instance of a naked angel that does not look boylike or childlike, and unspiritualized; even Fra Bartolomeo's might with advantage be spared from the pictures at Lucca: and, afterwards, the sky is merely encumbered with sprawling infants; those of Domenichino in the Madonna del Rosario, and Martyrdom of St. Agnes, are peculiarly offensive, studies of bare-legged children howling and kicking in volumes of smoke. Confusion seems to exist in the minds of subsequent painters between angels and Cupids.

metry, how

Farther, the qualities of symmetry and repose are of peculiar § 18. Symvalue in spiritual form. We find the former most earnestly sought valuable. by all the great painters in the arrangement of the hair, wherein no loosely flowing nor varied form is admitted, but all restrained in undisturbed and equal ringlets; often, as in the infant Christ of Fra Angelico, supported on the forehead in forms of sculpturesque severity. The angel of Masaccio, in the Deliverance of Peter, grand both in countenance and motion, loses much of his spirituality because the painter has put a little too much of his own character into the hair, and left it disordered.

fluence of Greek

Of repose, and its exalting power, I have already said enough § 19. The infor our present purpose, though I have not insisted on the peculiar art, how manifestation of it in the Christian ideal as opposed to the Pagan. dangerous. But this, as well as all other questions relating to the particular development of the Greek mind, is foreign to the immediate inquiry, which therefore I shall here conclude, in the hope of resuming it in detail after examining the laws of beauty in the inanimate creation, always, however, holding this for certain, that of whatever kind or degree the short coming may be, it is not possible but that short coming should be visible in every Pagan conception, when set beside Christian; and believing, for my own part, that there is not only deficiency, but such difference in kind as must make all Greek conception full of danger to the student in proportion to his admiration of it; as I think has been fatally seen in its effects on the Italian schools, when its pernicious element first mingled with their solemn purity, and recently in its influence on the French historical painters; neither can I, from my present knowledge, fix upon an ancient statue which expresses by the countenance any one elevated character of soul, or any single enthusiastic self-abandoning affection, much less any such majesty of feeling as might mark the features for supernatural. The Greek could not conceive a spirit; he could do § 20. Its scope, nothing without limbs; his God is a finite God, talking, pursuing, and going journeys'; if at any time he was touched with a true

1 I know not anything in the range of art more unspiritual than the Apollo Belvedere: the raising of the fingers of the right hand in surprise at the truth of the arrow is altogether human, and would be vulgar in a prince, much more in a deity. The sandals destroy the divinity of the foot, and the lip is curled with mortal passion.

how limited.

§ 21. Conclusion.

feeling of the unseen powers around him, it was in the field of poised battle; for there is something in the near coming of the shadow of death, something in the devoted fulfilment of mortal duty, that reveals the real God, though darkly. That pause on the field of Platea was not one of vain superstition; the two white figures that blazed along the Delphic plain, when the earthquake and the fire led the charge from Olympus, were more than sunbeams 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: 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 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 the field of sacred history, the intent and scope 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 Raffaelle

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, 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 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?