in this subdued state you must distrust the methods by which he pretends
to relate the aesthetic truths you perceive to certain civil and religious
conditions: you scarcely understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains
(on one page) to paint well any person baser than a saint or senator, and
with whom "exactly in proportion to the dignity of the character is the
beauty of the painting,"--comes (on the next page) to paint a very "weak,
mean, and painful" figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose lives
of the great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other
humorous postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad
colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and
understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere of
their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence,
acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not
impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no
one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of any
picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of it:
stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not
adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however
artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader of a
painter's coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian's "Assumption" is
like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any one who has seen
it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning critic describe
intelligibly the difference between the styles of Titian, of Tintoretto,
and of Paolo Veronese,--that difference which no one with the slightest
feeling for art can fail to discern after looking thrice at their works?
It results from all this that I must believe special criticisms on art to
have their small use only in the presence of the works they discuss. This
is my sincere belief, and I could not, in any honesty, lumber my pages
with descriptions or speculations which would be idle to most readers,
even if I were a far wiser judge of art than I affect to be. As it is,