158 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

stupid and uninteresting picture ever painted by him:-if you can find anything to enjoy in it, you are very welcome: I have nothing more to say of it, except that the colour of the landscape is as false as a piece of common blue tapestry, and that the “celebrated” old woman with her basket of eggs is as dismally ugly and vulgar a filling of spare corner as was ever daubed on a side-scene in a hurry at Drury Lane.

On the other side of the room,¹ is another wide waste of canvas; miserable example of the work subsequent to Paul Veronese; doubly and trebly mischievous in caricaturing and defiling all that in the master himself is noble: to look long at such a thing is enough to make the truest lovers of Venetian art ashamed of Venice, and of themselves. It ought to be taken down and burned.

Turn your back to it, in the centre of the room; and make up your mind for a long stand; for opposite you, so standing, is a Veronese indeed, of the most instructive and noble kind (260); and beneath it, the best picture in the Academy of Venice, Carpaccio’s “Presentation” (44).²

Of the Veronese, I will say nothing but that the main instructiveness of it is in the exhibition of his acquired and inevitable faults (the infection of his æra), with his own quietest and best virtues. It is an artist’s picture, and even only to be rightly felt by very good artists; the aerial perspectives in it being extremely subtle, and rare, to equal degree, in the painter’s work. To the general spectator, I will only observe that he has free leave to consider the figure of the Virgin execrable; but that I hope, if he has a good opera-glass,³ he will find something to please him in the little rose-bush in the glass vase on the balustrade.

¹ [Ed. 1 adds the then number “543,” but Ruskin’s injunction has now in part been acted upon. The picture has been removed from the walls of the Academy; it is a “Supper in the House of the Pharisee,” by Carlo and Benedetto Caliari, the son and brother of Paolo.]

² [The position of the pictures is altered; the Veronese (“The Annunciation”) is in Room IX., and the Carpaccio is in Room II.]

³ [The picture is now hung on the line.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]