Thus much for the Giottesques. The Tuscans of the early Renaissance developed up to the utmost, assisted by the goldsmiths and sculptors, who taught them modelling and anatomy, that realistic element of Giottesque painting. Its ideal decorative part had become impossible. Painting could no longer be a decoration of architecture, and it had not yet the means of being ornamental in itself; it was an art which did not achieve, but merely studied. Among its exercises in anatomy, modelling, perspective, and so forth, always laborious and frequently abortive, its only spontaneous, satisfactory, mature production was its portrait work, Portraits of burghers in black robes and hoods; of square-jawed youths with red caps stuck on to their fuzzy heads, of bald and wrinkled scholars and magnificoes; of thinly bearded artizans; people who stand round the preaching Baptist or crucified Saviour, look on at miracle or martyrdom, stolid, self-complacent, heedless, against their background of towered, walled, and cypressed city—of buttressed square and street; ugly but real, interesting, powerful among the grotesque agglomerations of bag-of-bones nudities, bunched and taped-up draperies and out-of-joint architecture of the early Renaissance frescoes; at best among its picture-book and Noah's-ark prettinesses of toy-box cypresses, vine trellises, inlaid house fronts, rabbits in the grass, and peacocks on the roofs; for the early Renaissance, with the one exception of Masaccio, is in reality a childish time of art, giving us the horrors of school-hour blunders and abortions varied with the delights of nursery wonderland: maturity, the power of achieving, the perception of something worthy of perception, comes only with the later generation, the one immediately preceding the age of Raphael and Michael Angelo; with Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Filippino, Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries.
But this period is not childish, is not immature in everything. Or, rather, the various arts which exist together at this period are not all in the same stage of development. While painting is in this immature ugliness, and ideal sculpture, in works like Verrocchio's and Donatello's David, only a cleverer, more experienced, but less legitimate kind of painting, painting more successful in the present, but with no possible future; the almost separate art of portrait-sculpture arises again where it was left by Graeco-Roman masters, and, developing to yet greater perfection, gives in marble the equivalent of what painting will be able to produce only much later: realistic art which is decorative; beautiful works made out of ugly materials.
The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its life, its power, depend upon death; it is an art developed in the burying vault and cloister cemetery. During the Middle Ages sculpture had had its reason, its vital possibility, its something to influence, nay, to keep it alive, in architecture; but with the disappearance of Gothic building disappears also the possibility of the sculpture which covers the portals of Chartres and the belfry of Florence. The pseudo-classic colonnades, entablatures, all the thin bastard Ionic and Corinthian of Aberti and Bramante, did not require sculpture, or had their own little supply of unfleshed ox-skulls, greengrocer's garlands, scallopings and wave-linings, which, with a stray siren and one or two bloated emperors' heads, amply sufficed. On the other hand, mediaeval civilization and Christian dogma did not encourage the production of naked of draped ideal statues like those which Antiquity stuck on countless temple fronts, and erected at every corner of square, street, or garden. The people of the Middle Ages were too grievously ill grown, distorted, hideous, to be otherwise than indecent in nudity; they may have had an instinct of the kind, and, ugly as they knew themselves to be, they must yet have found in forms like those of Verrocchio's David insufficient beauty to give much pleasure. Besides, if the Middle Ages had left no moral room for ideal sculpture once freed from the service of architecture; they had still less provided it with a physical place. Such things could not be set up in churches, and only a very moderate number of statues could be wanted as open-air monuments in the narrow space of a still Gothic city; and, in fact, ideal heroic statues of the early Renaissance are fortunately not only ugly, but comparatively few in number. There remained, therefore, for sculpture, unless contented to dwindle down into brass and gold miniature work, no regular employment save that connected with sepulchral monuments. During the real Middle Ages, and in the still Gothic north, the ornamentation of a tomb belonged to architecture: from the superb miniature minsters, pillared and pinnacled and sculptured, cathedrals within the cathedral, to the humbler foliated arched canopy, protecting a simple sarcophagus at the corner of many a street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the low relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined, cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down on his pillow as if ashamed even of that amount of prominence, and in a hurry to be trodden down and obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed to obliteration, came the sculptor of the Renaissance, and bade the wafer-like simulacrum fill up, expand, raise itself, lift itself on its elbow, arise and take possession of the bed of state, the catafalque raised high above the crowd, draped with brocade, carved with rich devices of leaves and beasts of heraldry, roofed over with a daïs, which is almost a triumphal arch, garlanded with fruits and flowers, upon which the illustrious dead were shown to the people; but made eternal, and of eternal magnificence, by the stone-cutter, and guarded, not for an hour by the liveried pages or chaunting monks, but by winged genii for all eternity. Some people, I know, call this a degradation, and say that it was the result of corrupt pride, this refusal to have the dear or illustrious dead scraped out any longer by the shoe-nails of every ruffian, rubbed out by the knees of every kitchen wench; but to me it seems that it was due merely to the fact that sculpture had lost its former employment, and that a great art cannot (thank Heaven!) be pietistically self-humiliating. Be this as it may, the sculpture of the Renaissance had found a new and singularly noble line of work, the one in which it was great, unique, unsurpassed, because untutored. It worked here without models, to suit modern requirements, with modern spirit; it was emphatically-modern sculpture; the only modern sculpture which can be talked of as something original, genuine, valuable, by the side of antique sculpture. Greek Antiquity had evaded death, and neglected the dead; a garland of maenads and fauns among ivy leaves, a battle of amazons or centaurs; in the late semi-Christian, platonic days, some Orphic emblem, or genius; at most, as in the exquisite tombs of the Keramikos of Athens, a figure, a youth on a prancing steed, like the Phidian monument of Dexileus; a maiden, draped and bearing an urn; but neither the youth nor the maiden is the inmate of the tomb: they are types, living types, no portraits. Nay, even where Antiquity shows us Death or Hermes, gently leading away the beloved; the spirit, the ghost, the dead one, is unindividual. "Sarkophagen und Urnen bekränzte der Heide mit Leben," said Goethe; but it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half reduced to a conventional crop-headedness, grim and stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their portrait; or reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor asleep, nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic mummy stare, have little of aesthetic or sympathetic value. The early Renaissance, then, first bethought it of representing the real individual in the real death slumber. And I question whether anything more fitting could be placed on a tomb than the effigy of the dead as we saw them just before the coffin-lid closed down; as we would give our all to see them but one little moment longer; as they continue to exist for our fancy within the grave; for to any but morbid feelings the beloved can never suffer decay. Whereas a portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments striking us as conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michael Angelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late Middle Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof, they might indeed place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest: but in the church below, under the funereal pall, they could place only the body such as it may have lain on the bier.
And that figure on the bier was the great work of Renaissance sculpture. Inanimate and vulgar when in heroic figures they tried to emulate the ancients, the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their own line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and beautiful repose of the dead; the individual character cleared of all its conflicting meannesses by death, simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the survivors—all these are things which belong to the Renaissance. As the Greeks gave the strong, smooth life-current circulating through their heroes; so did these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and harmonious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral monuments. Things difficult to describe, and which must be seen and remembered. There is the monument, now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor whose name, were it known, would surely be among the greatest, of the condottiere, Braccioforte: the body prone in its heavy case of armour, not yet laid out in state, but such as he may have been found in the evening, when the battle was over, under a tree where they had carried him to die while they themselves went back to fight; the head has fallen back, side-ways, weighed down by the helmet, which has not even been unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut, austere features, visible beneath the withdrawn vizor; the eyes have not been closed; and there are few things more exquisite and solemn at once in all sculpture, than the indication of those no longer seeing eyes, of that broken glance, beneath the half-closed lids. There is Rossellino's Cardinal of Portugal at S. Miniato a Monte: the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful sanctity; the strong delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of strength, strength still ungnarled by action: a young priest, who in his virginal dignity is almost a noble woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo della Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity with the antique of all these sculptors, as one may see from the shattered remains of the Fonte Gaia of Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded bed of state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet upon her sleeping dog, her sweet, girlish head, with wavy plaits of hair encircled by a rose-wreathed, turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions; the bed gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample-bosomed body, round which the soft robe is chastely gathered, and across which the long-sleeved arms are demurely folded; the most beautiful lady (whose majestic tread through the palace rooms we can well imagine) that the art of the fifteenth century has recorded. There is, above all, the Carlo Marsuppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of the Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and curling acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are commonplace compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant wavy hair and thin, gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. The slight figure looks as if in life it must have seemed almost transparent; and the hands are very pathetic: noble, firm hands, subtle of vein and wrist, crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but in gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That book is certainly no prayer-book; rather a volume of Plato or Cicero: in his last moments the noble old man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages; they have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late; the drowsiness of death has overtaken him, and with his last sigh he has gently folded his hands over the volume, with the faint, last clinging to the things beloved in this world.
Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renaissance, its only sculpture, if we except the exquisite work in babies and angels just out of the nursery of the Robbias, which is a real achievement. But how achieved? This art is great just by the things which Antiquity did not. And what are those things? Shall we say that it is sentiment? But all fine art has tact, antique art most certainly; and as to pathos, why, any quiet figure of a dead man or woman, however rudely carved, has pathos; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling^ hysterical art which makes angels draw the curtains of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine ladies, in hoop or limp Grecian dress, faint (the smelling bottle, Betty!) over their lord's coffin; there is pathos, to a decently constituted human being, wherever (despite all absurdities) we can imagine that there lies some one whom it was bitter to see departing, to whom it was bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question; and, if you choose to call it sentiment, it is in reality a sentiment for line and curve, for stone and light. The great question is, How did these men of the Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful? For they were not all beautiful in life, and ugly folk do not grow beautiful merely because they are dead. The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful Ilaria herself, were you to sketch their profile and place it by the side of no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly fall short of what we call sculpturesque beauty; and many of the others, old humanists and priests and lawyers, are emphatically ugly: snub or absurdly hooked noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging foreheads, fleshy noses, and flabby cheeks, blear eyes and sunk-in mouths; and a perfect network of wrinkles and creases, which, hard as it is to say, have been scooped out not merely by age, but by low mind, fretting and triumphant animalism. Now, by what means did the sculptor—the sculptor, too unacquainted with sculptural beauty (witness his ugly ideal statues), to be able, like the man who turned the successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though crazy demi-gods—to insidiously idealize these ugly and insignificant features; by what means did he turn these dead men into things beautiful to see? I have said that he took up art where Graeco-Roman Antiquity had left it. Remark that I say Graeco-Roman, and I ought to add much more Roman than Greek. For Greek sculpture, nurtured in the habit of perfect form, art to whom beauty was a cheap necessity, invariably idealized portrait, idealized it into beauty or inanity. But when Greek art had run its course; when beauty of form had well-nigh been exhausted or begun to pall; certain artists, presumably Greeks, but working for Romans, began to produce portrait work of quite a new and wonderful sort: the beautiful portraits of ugly old men, of snub little boys, work which was clearly before its right time, and was swamped by idealized portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant revivalist busts of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down to the bonnet blocks of the lower empire. Of this Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic little Caesar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things which ought to be so ugly and yet are so beautiful, we say, at least, perhaps unformulated, we think, "How Renaissance!" And the secret of the beauty of these few Graeco-Roman busts, which is also that of Renaissance portrait sculpture, is that the beauty is quite different in kind from the beauty of Greek ideal sculpture, and obtained by quite different means.
It is, essentially, that kind of beauty which I began by saying belonged to realistic art, to the art which is not squeamish about the object which it represents, but is squeamish about the manner and medium in which that indifferent object is represented; it is a kind of beauty, therefore, more akin to that of Rembrandt and Velasquez than to that of Michael Angelo or Raphael. It is the beauty, not of large lines and harmonies, beauty residing in the real model's forms, beauty real, wholesale, which would be the same if the man were not marble but flesh, not in a given position but moving; but it is a beauty of combinations of light and surface, a beauty of texture opposed to texture, which would probably be unperceived in the presence of the more regal beauty of line and colour harmonies, and which those who could obtain this latter would employ only as much as they were conducive to such larger beauties. And this beauty of texture opposed to texture and light combined with surface is a very real thing; it is the great reality of Renaissance sculpture: this beauty, resulting from the combination, for instance, in a commonplace face, of the roughness and coarser pore of the close shaven lips and chin with the smoothness of the waxy hanging cheeks; the one catching the light, the other breaking it into a ribbed and forked penumbra. The very perfection of this kind of work is Benedetto da Maiano's bust of Pietro Mellini in the Bargello at Florence. The elderly head is of strongly marked osseous structure, yet fleshed with abundant and flaccid flesh, hanging in folds or creases round the mouth and chin, yet not flobbery and floppy, but solid, though yielding, creased, wrinkled, crevassed rather as a sandy hillside is crevassed by the trickling waters; semi-solid, promising slight resistance, waxy, yielding to the touch. But all the flesh has, as it were, gravitated to the lower part of the face, conglomerated, or rather draped itself, about the mouth, firmer for sunken teeth and shaving; and the skin has remained alone across the head, wrinkled, yet drawn in tight folds across the dome-shaped skull, as if, while the flesh disappeared, the bone also had enlarged. And on the temples the flesh has once been thick, the bone (seemingly) slight; and now the skin is being drawn, recently, and we feel more and more every day, into a radiation of minute creases, as if the bone and flesh were having a last struggle. Now in this head there is little beauty of line (the man has never been good-looking), and there is not much character in the sense of strongly marked mental or moral personality. I do not know, nor care, what manner of man this may have been. The individuality is one, not of the mind^ but of the flesh. What interests, attaches, is not the character or temperament, but the bone and skin, the creases and folds of flesh. And herein also lies the beauty of the work. I do not mean its interest or mere technical skill, I mean distinctly visible and artistic beauty.
Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get beauty, visible beauty, not psychologic interest, out of a plain human being; but the beauty (and this is the distinguishing point of what I must call realistic decorative art) does not exist necessarily in the plain human being: he merely affords the beginning of a pattern which the artist may be able to carry out. A person may have in him the making of a really beautiful bust and yet be ugly; just as the same person may afford a subject for a splendid painting and for an execrable piece of sculpture. The wrinkles and creases in a face like that of Benedetto da Maiano's Mellini would probably be ugly and perhaps disgusting in the real reddish, flaccid, discoloured flesh; while they are admirable in the solid and supple-looking marble, in its warm and delicate bistre and yellow. Material has an extraordinary effect upon form; colour, though not a positive element in sculpture, has immense negative power in accentuating or obliterating the mere line. All form becomes vague and soft in the dairy flaccidness of modern ivory; and clear and powerful in the dark terra cotta, which can ennoble even the fattest and flattest faces with its wonderful faculty for making mere surface markings, mere crowsfeet, interesting. Thus also with bronze: the polished, worked bronze, of fine chocolate burnish and reddish reflections, mars all beauty of line; how different the unchased, merely rough cast, greenish, with infinite delicate greys and browns, making, for instance, the head of an old woman like an exquisite withered, shrivelled, veined autumnal leaf. It is moreover, as I have said, a question of combination of surface and light, this art which makes beautiful busts of ugly men. The ideal statue of the Greeks intended for the open air; fit to be looked at under any light, high or low, brilliant or veiled, had indeed to be prepared to look well under any light; but to look well under any light means not to use any one particular relation of light as an ally; the surface was kept modestly subordinated to the features, the features which must needs look well at all moments and from all points of view. But the Renaissance sculptor knew where his work would be placed; he could calculate the effect of the light falling invariably through this or that window; he could make a fellow-workman of that light, present for it to draw or to obliterate what features he liked, bid it sweep away such or such surfaces with a broad stream, cut them with a deep shadow, caress their smooth chiselling or their rough grainings, mark as with a nail the few large strokes of the point which gave the firmness to the strained muscle or stretched skin. Out of this model of his, this plain old burgess, he and his docile friend the light, could make quite a new thing; a new pattern of bosses and cavities, of smooth sweeps and tracked lines, of creases and folds of flesh, of pliable linen and rough brocade of dress: something new, something which, without a single feature being straightened or shortened, yet changed completely the value of the whole assemblage of features; something undreamed of by nature in moulding that ugly old merchant or humanist. With this art which produced works like Desiderio da Settignano's Carlo Marsuppini and Benedetto da Maiano's Pietro Mellini, is intimately connected the art of the great medallists of the Renaissance—Pasti, Guacialotti, Niccolò Fiorentino, and, greatest of all, Pisanello. Its excellence depends precisely upon its independence of the ideal work of Antiquity; nay, even upon the fact that, while the ancients, striking their coins in chased metal dies, obtained an astonishing minuteness and clearness of every separate little stroke and dint, and were therefore forced into an almost more than sculptural perfection of mere line, of mere profile and throat and elaborately composed hair, a sort of sublime abstraction of the possible beauty of a human face, as in the coins of Syracuse and also of Alexander; the men of the fifteenth century employed the process of casting the bronze in a concave mould obtained by the melting away of a medallion in wax; in wax, which taking the living impress of the artist's finger, and recalling in its firm and yet soft texture the real substance of the human face, insensibly led the medallist to seek, not sharp and abstract lines, but simple, strongly moulded bosses; not ideal beauty, but the real appearance of life. It is, moreover, a significant fact that while the men who, half a century or so later, made fine, characterless die-stamped medals in imitation of the antique, Caradossi and Benvenuto for instance, were gold-smiths and sculptors, workers with the chisel, artists seeking essentially for abstract elegance of line; the two greatest medallists of the early Renaissance, Vittore Pisano and Matteo di Pasti, were both of them painters; and painters of the Northern Italian school, to whom colour and texture were all important, and linear form a matter of indifference. And indeed, if we look at the best work of what I may call the wax mould medallists of the fifteenth century, even at the magnificent marble medallions of the laurel-wreathed head of Sigismund Malatesta on the pillars of his church at Rimini, modelled by Pasti, we shall see that these men were preoccupied almost exclusively with the almost pictorial effect of the flesh in its various degrees of boss and of reaction of the light; and that the character, the beauty even, which they attained, is essentially due to a skilful manipulation of texture, and surface, and light—one might almost say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads of the Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund, the delicate dapper Novello, the powerful yet beautiful Isotta; but there are other Renaissance medals which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly with my feelings towards such work as Benedetto's Pietro Mellini. Foremost among these is the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly grotesque, but astonishingly powerful, naïf and characteristic Lorenzo dei Medici by Niccolò real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet imaginative head may be profitably contrasted with the classicizing efforts after the demi-god or successor of Alexander in Pollaiolo's famous medal of the Pazzi conspiracy. Next to this I would place a medal by Guacialotti of Bishop Niccolò Palmieri, with the motto, "Nudus egressus sic redibo"—singularly appropriate to the shameless fleshliness of the personage, with his naked fat chest and shoulders, his fat, pig-like cheeks and greasy-looking bald head; a hideous beast, yet magnificent in his bestiality like some huge fattened porker. These medals give us, as does the bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite ugliness of the original. But there are two other medals, this time by Pisanello, and, as it seems to me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture amalgamates, so as to form a homogeneous and most seemingly simple whole, with the homely charm of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. One of these (the reverse of which fantastically represents the four elements, the wooded earth, the starry sky, the rippled sea, the sun, all in one sphere) is the portrait of Don Inigo d'Avalos; the other that of Cecilia Gonzaga. This slender beardless boy in the Spanish shovel hat and wisp of scarf twisted round the throat; and this tall, long-necked girl, with sloping shoulders and still half-developed bosom; are, so to speak, brother and sister in art, in Pisanello's wonderful genius. The relief of the two medals is extremely low, so that in certain lights the effigies vanish almost completely, sink into the pale green surface of the bronze; the portraits are a mere film, a sort of haze which has arisen on the bronze and gathered into human likeness; but in this film, this scarce perceptible relief, we are made to perceive the slender osseous structure, the smooth, sleek, childish blond flesh and hair, the delicate, undecided pallor of extreme youth and purity, even as we might in some elaborate portrait by Velasquez, but with a springlike healthiness which Velasquez, painting his lymphatic Hapsburgs, rarely has.
Such is this Renaissance art of medals, this side branch of the great realistic portraiture in stone of the Benedettos, Desiderios, and Rossellinos; a perfect thing in itself; and one which, if we muse over it in connection with the more important works of fifteenth century sculpture, will perhaps lead us to think that, as the sculpture of Antiquity, in its superb idealism, its devotion to the perfect line and curve of beauty, achieved the highest that mere colourless art can achieve—thanks to the very purity, sternness, and narrowness of its sculpturesque feeling—so also, perhaps, modern sculpture, should it ever re-arise, must be a continuation of the tendencies of the Renaissance, must be the humbler sister of painting, must seek for the realistic portrait and begin, perhaps, with the realistic medal.
II.
This kind of realism, where only the model is ugly, while the portrait is beautiful; which seeks decorative value by other means than the intrinsic excellence of form in the object represented, this kind of realism is quite different in sort from the realisms of immature art, which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy, is content with producing an ugly picture of an ugly thing. Now this latter kind of realism endured in painting some time after decorative realism such as I have described had reached perfection in sculpture. Nor was it till later, and when the crude scholastic realism had completely come to an end, that there became even partially possible in painting decorative realism analogous to what we have noticed in sculpture; while it was not till after the close of the Italian Renaissance period that the painters arose in Spain and the Netherlands who were able to treat their subjects with the uncompromising decorative realism of Desiderio or Rosellino or Benedetto da Maiano. For the purely imitative realism of the painters of the early Renaissance was succeeded in Italy by idealism, which matured in the great art of intrinsically beautiful linear form of Michael Angelo and Raphael, and the great art of intrinsically beautiful colour form of Giorgione and Titian. These two schools were bound to be, each in its degree, idealistic. Complete power of mere representation in tint and colour having been obtained through the realistic drudgery of the early Renaissance, selection in the objects thus to be represented had naturally arisen; and the study of the antique had further hastened and directed this movement of art no longer to study but to achieve, to be decorative once more, decorative no longer in subservience to architecture, but as the separate and self-sufficing art of painting. Selection, therefore, which is the only practical kind of idealism, had begun as soon as painting was possessed of the power of representing objects in their relations of line and colour, with that amount of light and shadow requisite to the just appreciation of the relations of form and the just relations of colour. Now art which stops short at this point of representation must inevitably be, if decorative at all, idealistically decorative; it must be squeamish respecting the objects represented, respecting their real structure, colour, position, and grouping. For, of the visible impressions received from an object, some are far more intrinsic than others. Suppose we see a woman, beautiful in the structure of her body, and beautiful in the colour of her person and her draperies, standing under a light which is such as we should call beautiful and interesting: of these three qualities one will be intrinsic in the woman, the second very considerably so, the third not at all. For, let us call that woman away and replace her immediately by another woman chosen at random. We shall immediately perceive that we have lost one pleasurable impression, that of beautiful bodily structure: the woman has taken away her well-shapen body. Next we shall perceive a notable diminution in the second pleasurable impression: the woman has taken with her, not indeed her well-tinted garments, which we may have bestowed on her successor, but her beautifully coloured skin and hair, so that of the pleasing colour-impression will remain only as much as was due to, and may have been retained with, the original woman's clothes. But if we look for our third pleasurable impression, our beautiful light, we shall find that unchanged, whether it fall upon a magnificently arrayed goddess or upon a sordid slut And, conversely, the beautiful woman, when withdrawn from that light and placed in any other, will be equally lovely in form, even if we cast her in plaster, and lose the colour of her skin and hair; or if we leave her not only the beautiful tints of her flesh and hair, but her own splendidly coloured garments, we shall still have, in whatsoever light, a magnificent piece of colour. But if we recall the poor ugly creature who has succeeded her from out of that fine effect of light, we shall have nothing but a hideous form invested in hideous colour.