mode of treatment may be given, which any one can test by a visit to our National Gallery.

This simplicity of construction is very apparent in the central portion of the altar-piece by Girolamo Romani. It may be said to consist of five planes or compositional parts, distinctly separable as follows: 1. the whole of the figures above and below; 2. wall behind the figures; 3 and 4. landscape (including two planes); 5. sky. It will be observed in this picture the halftints in the drapery of the Madonna are made little of, every part of it being correspondingly toned down to its proper plane, undisturbed by any foreign high lights or shadows. Again, Titian's 'Venus and Adonis is easily reducible to four elementary parts: the massing of the light figures; the dark trees; the dogs, forming the middle or connecting tone between them; and the sky. In the nameless picture of A Warrior adoring Christ' we have in the first plane, the whole group of figures and horse; 2. the middle distance, comprising trees and landscape; 3. blue distance; 4. sky. The Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian does not offer quite so simple an exposition of the rule; yet it is, nevertheless, sufficiently discernible: 1. figures and tree; 2. warm landscape; 3. blue distance; 4. sky. In the fine Christ appearing to Mary' it is obvious enough: 1. figures; 2. landscape, with dark tree rising into the sky; 3. blue sea; 4. warm, rich sky.

Many more examples might be given of these simple reductions, but the above are sufficient for the purpose of illustration. In all Venetian Art of the great period they are conspicuous or traceable, and generally more or less so according to the greater or less power of the work. The value of this mode of looking at picturesque facts or material is a potency of appeal, a punctuation of purpose, so to speak, a solidity and grasp of expression which crushes the centrality of the picture into the mind of the observer with irresistible force and weight without the disturbance of impertinent detail or anything to divide the attention and interfere with its proper mission. The lesson to be learned from this is, that if a single flower has to be painted, it must be painted thoroughly, as for itself alone; that if a field has to be represented for its own sake, it must shine in all its wealth of colour and bloom-though, even here there is wide room for choice and selection*-but that these and all other objects serving as accessories to a large subject or idea must be used only as adjuncts in which all distinctive treatment for their own sakes

Turner's Crossing the Brook' and 'Frosty Morning' in the National Gallery will show how much art, and a broad interpretation of nature, go to form the epic in landscape painting.

or

or for any speciality of execution will be more than thrown away, for it will be positively injurious. True Art never deifies her material at the expense of its significance. She makes her symbols inconsiderable that their meaning may be the plainer and more immediately penetrative, just as the master rhetorician who has anything to say worth the telling abandons the flowers of oratory for a simple statement of his ideas, well assured that if they are of a sterling sort, they will reach their mark more certainly and effectually by that means than any other. Thus Art will frequently make more of a pebble than a ruby, and out of pure reticence set aside her glistening silks for unobtrusive folds of sober serge, content to be nothing so that her end be accomplished, her mission well and faithfully executed.

One reason for the present unimaginative want of largeness. in English painting is undoubtedly the confusion of Art and Nature. The Art which influences men's minds the most permanently and in the largest degree is not even an attempted reproduction of nature as it really appears. The Trans-. figuration' of Raphael has no pretensions to literal truthfulness. of treatment in any part of it. Form and figure and fold express all that he wanted them to express, and nothing would have been gained by a closer following of nature and the life. It is not possible that one of the celebrated cartoons or Vatican frescoes could enter into the registry of fact; some of the figures in these works are even conventional types adopted from previous painters. Many of the most renowned pictures represent several stages of the same dramatic action. So little was actual reproduction or even verisimilitude aimed at by the greatest painters that those who stand highest in the best schools never scrupled to place names and inscriptions with the utmost ingenuousness on their works: and in this they were quite right; for they knew and felt that their Art was altogether something else than a poor apology for nature, and thus they threw it wholly on its own basis and bearing by getting rid of the notion that it was ever their intention or desire to approach the actual in any degree whatsoever. A Hamlet, a Sylvia, or a Desdemona, never existed in real life as Shakespeare has portrayed them. never see people act, or hear them speak, precisely as they act. and speak. Their prototypes, it is true, are found among us, but, we repeat, in no one particular are the characters of Shakespeare, or those of any true artist, mere draughts of those they have seen around them. This holds good from schylus to Michel Angelo, and from Michel Angelo to Walter Scott. Titian's tree is a painter's, not a naturalist's, tree. It is an organism, but an organism of his own mind, not of nature.

We

Even on his faces he has bestowed as much as he found in them. Nature must be the artist's servant, not his master: his language and expressional medium, not the ruler and usurper of his ideas; and if she must be reproduced at all, she must be translated through Art, not mimicked by artifice.

To return to the subject immediately under consideration, there is another means of gaining impressiveness sometimes made use of by the Venetian painters which is worth noticing. It is that of removing their figures or groups wholly from the background: not bestowing the light or shadow partly on the background and partly on the figure, but making the one altogether lighter or darker than the other. This, of course, is by no means a rule: but where it is used, it constitutes a great element of force and power. It is perhaps, however, more generally the case in regard to the distinctive separation of colour than light.

One of the most marvellous instances of power in order and mastery of breadth is the large picture of Paradise' by Tintoretto in the Ducal Palace at Venice. It is said to be the largest picture ever painted upon canvas, and contains an innumerable number of faces and figures. Under any other treatment than that of one of these giants in Art such a picture must have been more or less in confusion: but it is not so here. Each of these sweet and heavenly faces is an individual, and yet the picture is made up of masses-is, indeed, simply constructed, considering the nature of the representation. It is painted in planes. There is a rich, dark, warm plane; there is a light and glowing one; there is a soft, tender, pearly-grey one: all separated from each other, all harmonized with each other, all contributing to make a picture as individual in its parts as it is grand in its entirety; a world brought by the painter's magic power into the compass of a canvas: one broad glance will see it as a picture; days of study will not exhaust its almost ungraspable wealth of material.

This,

It has been said that the Venetian painters seldom disturbed their breadth of appeal by tints or tones other than local, or such as are produced by large conditions of circumstance: but this, it should be remarked, is not invariably the case. Sometimes in the draperies of Paul Veronese and Tintoretto we find varying elements introduced to a certain extent. however, does not invalidate the rule. They did it subject to the dominant idea of this law of breadth, and for that reason these variations did not disturb their pictures nearly so much as would be the case in a modern picture painted from no such centrality of principle. It ought to be observed that in their very finest works these freedoms are never intro

duced.

duced. If we compare the 'Adoration of the Magi' of Paul Veronese in our National Gallery with its (for him) unusual number of scattered lights, with the broader and grander Family of Darius before Alexander,' we see how much majesty and power is gained by their absence. The four masterpieces of Tintoretto in the Guard Room of the Ducal Palace at Venice, 'Bacchus and Ariadne,' the Three Graces,' and their companion pictures, are characterised by the most perfect repose in this respect; as are also the fine Europa of Paul Veronese, and almost all the works on the walls and ceiling of that wonderful art treasury. Whatever liberties they may have permitted themselves, they never for a moment forgot their keynote or outstepped the tonic limits of their picture.

6

It remains to say something of the third part of our subject of the Venetian painters' means or manipulatory mode of expressing their ideas. A studious inspection of their works will render it apparent that many of their finest qualities, particularly as regards tone, were obtained, by a skilful use of their ground. This ground appears to have been laid in with transparent colour without any admixture of white: not flat, but indicating with more or less precision the ultimate tones of the picture. Wherever it is visible, it is rich, warm, and low-toned: never blue, grey, or cold. The painting upon this has been very thin, except in the high lights: sometimes, from a clear knowledge of the use of the ground, a mere whisk of the brush has been all that was necessary. Over this a final glaze has been sometimes given, generally rather sparing and tender than copious. In the Miracle of St. Mark,' by Tintoretto, and the 'Fisherman Presenting the Ring to the Doge,' by Paris Bordone, in the Accademia, it would seem as if the whole tone of the picture had been modified by a flat warm glaze: but, we believe, in the one instance it is known to have been applied subsequently to the painter's lifetime; possibly this may also have been the case with the other. Be this as it may, there is no doubt that the real value of the pictures of this school lies in a great measure beneath, not on the surface. This may be proved, firstly from a very instructive picture by Titian in the Gallery of the Uffizi at Florence, of the Madonna and Child' (which appears to have been a study for his large' Pesaro Family 'in the church of the Frati at Venice). The work is little more than commenced, and it is seen that the ground is laid in with a somewhat broken, but very rich pinky grey. It has then received a first painting in parts, the half-tones being got from the ground, which has been thinly painted or scumbled over; or, in some parts, scarcely touched at all. If he had finished the picture,

judging

judging from precedent, he never would have lost these. In the 'Three Ages,' in the Doria Palace in Rome, he has made large uses of his ground. The piece of blue drapery which covers the loins of the youth seated is only a little bluish semitransparent grey passed lightly over the ground of his canvas.

Many examples of this mode of treatment might be adduced from Tintoretto, who frequently owes the principal power of his picture to it, as far as manipulatory treatment goes. Two may be given. One, the Angel's head in his 'Paradise' in the Ducal Palace, at the bottom in the centre of the picture. If examined carefully and closely, it will be seen to consist of a few light sweeps of pearly pink or grey over the deep, rich, warm ground of the canvas. It leaves nothing to be desired in colour, sentiment, and tenderness. The other example is in those marvels of manipulation in the foreground of the Miracle of St. Mark,' a broken axe, a hammer, a splinter of wood, and a piece of rope. Within the proper limit of observation, they scarcely seem to be painted at all; there is a dab of the brush for a shadow, a touch for the high light, and that is all except the final glaze before alluded to, which appears to go over the whole picture. At the right distance, however, all of them come into perfect roundness and solidity, as if they might be picked up. Yet there is nothing vulgar in the imitation of these objects, owing to the large manner in which they are done. In the painting of them, it should be noted, Tintoretto has not used the first ground, but the already painted foreground of the picture. By this means, on the same system as if the former had been the basis, he has got the form of the object, its shadow, reflected light: everything, in fact, but the high light, which is just touched on with a bit of opaque colour. There is a remarkable instance of the painter's power over the faculty of vision in one of the splinters of the handle of the axe (not the one with the high light), which he has only indicated, commenced as it were, relying on the eye of the spectator to point it, which it actually does; for what the eye seems to perceive at the proper distance vanishes altogether on a nearer approach. Another proof of what is stated above may be found in the Widow of Nain' by Palma Vecchio in the Accademia at Venice. In this picture, which is painted

We do not remember if the same thing is observable in the replica of this picture in the Bridgewater Collection.

It may be remarked that the mode of painting described above was not limited to the Venetian school, but was used by others scarcely less celebrated. There was a picture by Velasquez in the last Winter Exhibition of the Works of Old Masters at Burlington House, begun in the same way. There are also a head by Van Dyck in Rome, and a picture by Leonardo da Vinci at Florence, laid-in in a similar manner.

on