IX

FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND CARPACCIO¹

1. OF these two pictures, the Florentine one represents the highest reach of pure or ideal religious art, next to Angelico; the Venetian one represents the highest reach of religious art, accepting the weakness of human nature, believing in it, abiding by it, and becoming greater therefrom.

The Lippi, therefore, is of the school called “Purist” in Modern Painters;² the Carpaccio of the school called “Naturalist.”

Carpaccio is also much the stronger artist, but trained in a more or less imperfect peasant’s and fisherman’s school of art, and, like all the greatest men, not caring always to show his strength, and not always capable of doing so. Lippi is a far weaker genius, but trained in the most accomplished school of art the world has seen, and putting forth his utmost strength, as a religious duty, at all times and in the least things. Hence the Carpaccio has a natural charm of conception, and a simplicity of execution, which can be more easily represented in copying, by a man who feels them, than the qualities of the Lippi; and Mr. Murray has, therefore, them, than the qualities of the Lippi; and Mr. Murray has, therefore, been able to make such a drawing from the Carpaccio as may, in the absence of the original, give nearly as much pleasure (the rather as he is already himself a very strong master, both of colour and expression); but he has been quite unable to do justice to the exquisite fineness of draughtsmanship in the Lippi, or to give to colours, not reduced to melody, as in

¹ [This Appendix is reprinted from a pamphlet compiled by Henry Swan, the first curator of the St. George’s Museum. (The sections are here numbered for convenience of reference.) It has no title-page; the wrapper is lettered “The | St. George’s Museum, | Upper Walkley, | Sheffield”; and on p. 3 there is the following “drop-title”: “Collected Notes on Some of the | Pictures in the St. George’s Museum, | Sheffield.” Octavo, pp. 16, issued in pale grey wrappers. Most of the notes are collected from Ruskin’s published works, but on pp. 5-10 are the Notes, here reprinted, which do not appear elsewhere. The notes are subjoined to a copy by Mr. Fairfax Murray of the Lippi Madonna, which was the subject of one of Ruskin’s “Lesson Photographs” (see Fors Clavigera, Letters 59 and 69). A reproduction of the picture by Lippi will be found in Vol. XXVIII. The notes refer to that picture, and to Carpaccio’s “Reception of the Ambassadors” (No. 572 in the Academy; Plate XLVII. in this volume; see above, pp. 1., 166), of a portion of which (“The King’s Consent”) there is a water-colour copy by Mr. Fairfax Murray in the St. George’s Museum. These two copies were, says Mr. Swan (p. 5), “the first pictures sent by the Master to the museum. The following are his notes relating to them.”]

² [Rather in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 224); but see also the later Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V. p. 103).]

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