To which they removed in October, 1842.
CHAPTER II
CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)
At Paris, on the way heme in 1844, he had spent some days in studying Titian and Bellini and Perugino. They were not new to him; but now that he was an art-critic, it behoved him to improve his acquaintance with the old masters. "To admire the works of Pietro Perugino" was one thing; but to understand them was another, a thing which was hardly attempted by "the Landscape Artists of England" to whom the author of "Modern Painters" had so far dedicated his services. He had been extolling modernism, and depreciating "the Ancients" because they could not draw rocks and clouds and trees; and he was fresh from his scientific sketching in the happy hunting-ground of the modern world. A few days in the Louvre made him the devotee of ancient art, and taught him to lay aside his geology for history.
In one way the development was easy. The patient attempt to copy mountain-form had made him sensitive to harmony of line; and in the great composers of Florence and Venice he found a quality of abstract design which tallied with his experience of what was beautiful in Nature. Aiguilles and glaciers, drawn as he drew them, and the figure-subjects of severe Italian draughtsmen, are beautiful by the same laws of composition, however different the associations they suggest.