160 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

for it is one of the most singular points in the character of this usually decorative and inexpressive painter, that his Infant Christs are always beautiful).

For the rest, I am not going to praise Carpaccio’s work. Give time to it; and if you don’t delight in it, the essential faculty of enjoying good art is wanting in you, and I can’t give it you by ten minutes’ talk; but if you begin really to feel the picture, observe that its supreme merit is in the exactly just balance of all virtue;-detail perfect, yet inconspicuous; composition intricate and severe, but concealed under apparent simplicity; and painter’s faculty of the supremest, used nevertheless with entire subjection of it to intellectual purpose. Titian, compared to Carpaccio, paints as a circus-rider rides,-there is nothing to be thought of in him but his riding. But Carpaccio paints as a good knight rides; his riding is the least of him; and to himself-unconscious in its ease.¹

When you have seen all you can of the picture as a whole, go near, and make out the little pictures on the edge of St. Simeon’s robe; four quite lovely ones; the lowest admitting, to make the whole perfect, delightful grotesque of fairy angels within a heavenly castle wall, thrusting down a troop of supine devils to the deep. The other three, more beautiful in their mystery of shade; but I have not made them out yet. There is one solemn piece of charge to a spirit folding its arms in obedience; and I think the others must be myths of creation, but can’t tell yet, and must now go on quickly to note merely the pictures you should look at, reserving talk of them for a second number of this Guide.

325, 291, 319, containing all you need study in Bonifazio.² In 291, he is natural, and does his best; in 325, he

¹ [Compare above, p. 21.]

² [These three pictures are now in Room X. No. 325 is “The Madonna in Glory”; 291, “Dives and Lazarus”; 319, “The Massacre of the Innocents.” For a notice of Bonifazio de’ Pitati, born at Verona 1487, died in Venice 1553, see p. 84 of the Catalogue of the Royal Gallery of Fine Arts, Venice, by Professor Pietro Paoletti fu Osvaldo.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]