366 ST. MARK’S REST

In this picture, then, you may discern at once, how Carpaccio learned his business as a painter, and to what consummate point he learned it.*

203. And now, if you have begun to feel the power of these minor pictures, you can return to the Academy and take up the St. Ursula series,¹ on which, however, I find it hopeless to reduce my notes to any available form at present:-the question of the influence of this legend on Venetian life being involved with inquiries belonging properly to what I am trying to do in St. Mark’s Rest. This only you have to observe generally, that being meant to occupy larger spaces, the St. Ursula pictures are very unequal in interest, and many portions seem to me tired work, while others are maintained by Mr. Murray to be only by the hands of scholars. This, however, I can myself assert, that I never yet began to copy or examine any portion of them without continually increasing admiration; while yet there are certain shortcomings and morbid faults throughout, unaccountable, and rendering the greater part of the work powerless for good to the general public. Taken as a connected series, the varying personality of the saint destroys its interest totally. The girl talking to her father in 572 is not the girl who dreams in 578; and the gentle little dreamer is still less like the severe, stiffly dressed, and not in any supreme degree well favoured, bride, in 575; while the middle-aged woman, without any claim to beauty at all, who occupies the principal place in the final

* Another Carpaccio, in the Correr Museum, of St. Mary and Elizabeth,² is entirely lovely, though slighter in work; and the so-called Mantegna, but more probably (according to Mr. Murray) early John Bellini,-the Transfiguration,-full of majesty and earnestness. Note the inscribed “talk” with Moses and Elias,-“Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, oh ye my friends.”

¹ [He had intended a further and separate account of the series (see above, p. 179), but this was never written.]

² [No. 31 in Room II.; dated 1504. Carpaccio’s favourite red parrot figures in the picture. The other picture (No. 6 in Room XVI.) is attributed in the catalogue (Museo Civico e Raccolta Correr, Elenchi degli Oggetti Esposti, 1899) to Bellini. The inscription reads, “Miseremini mei saltem vos amici mei.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]