240 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

we believe, degrade Ghirlandajo to fellowship with the herd of the sensual, though in the fresco of the vision of Zacharias¹ there are seventeen different reds in large masses, and not a shade of blue. The fact is, there is no colour of the spectrum, as there is no note of music, whose key and prevalence may not be made pure in expression, and elevating in influence, by a great and good painter, or degraded to unhallowed purpose by a base one.

70. We are sorry that our author “cannot unreservedly praise the colouring of Angelico;” but he is again curbed by his unhappy system of balanced perfectibility, and must quarrel with the gentle monk because he finds not in him the flames of Giorgione, nor the tempering of Titian, nor the melody of Cagliari. This curb of perfection we took between our teeth from the first, and we will give up our hearts to Angelico without drawback or reservation. His colour is, in its sphere and to its purpose, as perfect as human work may be: wrought to radiance beyond that of the ruby and opal, its inartificialness prevents it from arresting the attntion it is intended only to direct; wre it composed with more science it would become vulgar from the loss of its unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted with its purity, if deeper, with its joyfulness, if more subdued, with its sincerity. Passages are, indeed, sometimes unsuccessful; but it is to be judged in its rapture, and forgiven in its fall: he who works by law and system may be blamed when he sinks below the line above which he proposes no elevation, but to him whose eyes are on a mark far off, and whose efforts are impulsive, and to the utmost of his strength, we may not unkindly count the slips of his sometimes descent into the valley of humiliation.

71. The concluding notive of Angelico is true and interesting, though rendered obscure by useless recurrence to the favourite theory.

“Such are the surviving works of a painter, who has recently been as unduly extolled as he had for three centuries past been unduly depreciated,

¹ [In the choir of S. Maria Novella.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]