[85] See Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. vii. ch. iv. § 13.
[86] Ruskin (ibid., vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. iv. § 16) notices this treatment of Apollo under the head of "Imagination Contemplative," as an instance of an imaginative abstraction "in which the form of one thing is fancifully indicated in the matter of another; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of which, in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy-charioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own Gallery, which the reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo in Wilson's Niobe," see No. 110.
[87] This figure is specially good. It was to rival this great landscape that James Ward (see 688), as he avows in his autobiography, painted his "Fighting Bulls," now in the South Kensington Museum. "How full of lithe natural movement," says Mr. J. T. Nettleship, "is the man in the foreground, in heavy boots and feathered hat, stooping and creeping towards the covey of partridges under cover of bramble and bush, compared with the clumsy anatomical bulls in Ward's picture" (George Morland, p. 54).
[88] Ruskin is here speaking of the somewhat similar "St. George" picture in the Church of St. James at Antwerp.
[89] See also No. 98, in which the tree is said by Ruskin to be "a mere jest" compared to this.
[90] No. 78 was formerly Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Holy Family," on which notes will be found in Volume II. of this Handbook. The picture has now been withdrawn from exhibition and little remains of it, for owing to the excessive use of asphaltum the pigments have disappeared.
[91] "Garofano" is the Italian for "gillyflower" (or clove-pink), and Tisio sometimes painted this flower as his sign-manual (like Mr. Whistler's butterfly).
[92] Authorities differ between this title and "Pan teaching Apollo to play on the pipes." Certainly there is the "Pan's pipe," but then if it is Pan he ought to have goat's legs and horns. The fact that the picture is a companion to "Silenus gathering Grapes" makes also in favour of the description given in the text above.
[93] See also Ruskin's remarks on the companion storm piece, No. 36.
[94] It should be noted that this, as well as very many other pictures, has of late years been cleaned. Thus 98 and 68 (in 1880), 36 and 40 (in 1868), have been "cleaned and varnished." 31 was "relined, repaired, and varnished" in 1878; 161 was "cleaned and repaired" in 1868.