234 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

the peaks of the Carrara mountains, purple against the twilight, dark and calm, while the fire-flies glance beneath, silent and intermittent, like stars upon the rippling of mute, soft sea.

“It is by no means an easy task to adjust the chronology of Fra Angelico’s works; he has affixed no dates to them, and consequently when external evidence is wanting, we are thrown upon internal, which in his case is unusually fallacious. It is satisfactory therefore to possess a fixed date in 1433, the year in which he painted the great tabernacle for the Company of Flax-merchants, now removed to the gallery of the Uffizii. It represents the Virgin and child, with attendant Saints, on a gold ground-very dignified and noble, although the Madonna has not attained the exquisite spirituality of his later efforts. Round this tabernacle as a nucleus, may be classed a number of paintings, all of similar excellence-admirable that is to say, but not of his very best, and in which, if I mistake not, the type of the Virgin bears throughout a strong family resemblance.”-Vol. iii. pp. 160, 161.

65. If the painter ever increased in power after this period (he was then forty-three), we have been unable to systematize the improvement. We much doubt whether, in his modes of execution, advance were possible. Men whose merit lies in record of natural facts, increase in knowledge; and men whose merit is in dexterity of hand increase in facility; but we much doubt whether the faculty of design, or force of feeling, increase after the age of twenty-five. By Fra Angelico, who drew always in fear and trembling, dexterous execution had been from the first repudiated; he neither needed nor sought technical knowledge of the form, and the inspiration, to which his power was owing was not less glowing in youth than in age. The inferiority traceable (we grant) in this Madonna¹ results not from its early date, but

¹ [There is a long note on this picutre in Ruskin’s Florentine diary of 1845, from which some of the description in § 66 here is taken. Some additional passages may be given:-

“Perhaps the most valuable single work of Angelico in Florence, except the Judgment of the Accademia. The following points require notice. The Christ is standing on the knees of the Virgin, one hand raised in the usual attitude of benediction, the other holding a globe. The face looks straight forward with the ineffable expression of divinity. The grandeur of this conception as opposed to Raphael’s contemptible domesticity needs no comment. ... [A]fault [in the Madonna] is the hard drawing of the iris and pupil of the eye, terminated by a strong black line, without any dark

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