456 APPENDIX
and action. Tintoret, even in his loveliest faces, makes the eyes too dark, and has degraded his noblest figures by making their gestures violent.
But a noble unity of the arts of sculpture and painting will always be found in right understanding of the ends of both, each being thus taught alike to glorify God in the Body and in the Spirit, which are God’s.
3. The schools of art which existed in Europe, independently, or nearly so, of that of Florence, are always to be studied by first considering the characters of the race developing them, and, next, the degree in which they were taught by Greek or Roman masters. Florence only had both; and the greater number of other schools are conditions of Barbarian activity, taught ocularly only by the remains of Rome, and hearing only the Greek religious traditions. Thus, in Verona, the decorations of the Roman arch yet standing in her streets are carried into her early Gothic architecture, energised in that by the Goths, and return into themselves; while the masters of Lombardy are in their virtues too inimitable, and in their errors too attractive, to be either encouraging guides to the wise, or safe ones to the vain.
But standards of perfect painting their central works remain for ever, and the highest reward of the student’s patience and obedience in the school of Giotto and Botticelli will be his power of true delight in Carpaccio and Tintoret.
4. In the midst of the Lombard invasion-or, more accurately, overwhelmed by it and preserved like the seeds of plants under snow-the native race of true Lombardy survived. Lombardy, not the stolen dominion of northern armies, but the great Sculptured Vase whose curved lips are the Alps and Apennine.
The mountain people of the Larian lake, the masters of the waves and the murmur of Benacus, the farmers of the banks of Mincio, the merchants of Mediolanum, the peaceful scholars of Antenor’s land,1 the rock-born shepherds of Cadore, and the red mariners of the ribbed sea sands of Adria,2-neither Greek nor Ostrogoth nor Lombard poured out the blood of these, but in libation, on their sacred Mother-soil. Native still as the olive and the vine to the marble rock and the blue plain, they bind themselves at last into the “cohort of Death” on the field of Legnano,3 and by the swords of the Four Hundred, redeem their captivity
1 [See above, p. 429 n.]
2 [From this point down to the end of § 4, the MS. shows an alternative passage:-
“these, native still as the olive and vine to their marble rocks and azure plains, lived silently through the ruinous ages, guarded by the proud law of Nature that her royal children shall be nourished in their Father’s land, knitted of the same elements as its dust, and bright with the same brightness as its flowers.
“Thus traced and understood, the true schools of Lombardy will be found to include the range of thought and emotion belonging to the race born beneath the light of the Alps and brought up beside the flowing of their waters-race of which Virgil is the supreme type, and which retained, in the virtue of its latest masters, the Virgilian softness and the Dardan fire.”]
3 [For other references to the battle of Legnano (May 29, 1176), in which the Milanese defeated Frederic Barbarossa, see above, p. 135, and Vol. XX. p. 361. For
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