X. THE SHRINE OF THE SLAVES 363

Luini does not mean that St. Stephen really stood there; but only that the thought of the saint who first saw Christ in glory may best lead us to the thought of Christ in pain. But when Carpaccio paints St. Stephen preaching, he means to make us believe that St. Stephen really did preach, and as far as he can, to show us exactly how he did it.

199. And, lastly, to return to the point at which we left him. His own notion of the way things happened may be a very curious one, and the more so that it cannot be regulated even by himself, but is the result of the singular power he has of seeing things in vision as if they were real. So that when, as we have seen, he paints Solomon and the Queen of Sheba standing at opposite ends of a wooden bridge over a ditch, we are not to suppose the two persons are less real to him on that account, though absurd to us; but we are to the understand that such a vision of them did indeed appear to the boy who had passed all his dawning life among wooden bridges, over ditches; and had the habit besides of spiritualizing, or reading like a vision, whatever he saw with eyes either of the body or mind.

The delight which he had in this faculty of vision, and the industry with which he cultivated it, can only be justly estimated by close examination of the marvellous picture in the Correr Museum, representing two Venetian ladies with their pets.¹

200. In the last general statement I have made of the rank of painters, I named two pictures of John Bellini, the Madonna in San Zaccaria, and that in the sacristy of the Frari, as, so far as my knowledge went, the two best pictures in the world.² In that estimate of them I of course considered as one chief element, their solemnity of purpose-as another, their unpretending simplicity. Putting aside these higher conditions, and looking only to perfection

¹ [Plate LXVII. The picture is No. 5 in Room XVI., and is known as the portrait of “Due Cortigiane.” Compare Ruskin’s note of 1877 in the Venetian Index to Stones of Venice, Vol. XI. p. 369.]

² [See The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret, § 10 (Vol. XXII. p. 83).]

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