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into Immortal life. For this is indeed an eternal law of Nature, that her great souls and their labours shall always be native to their land, knitted of the same elements as its dust, and bright with the same brightness as its flowers. Thus traced and understood, the schools of Venice will be found to include the entire strength of thought and emotion belonging to the races thus born beneath the light of the Alps, and fed by the flowing of their streams. The basin of Lombardy with its mountain walls, purple horizon, and kindly gifts of fruitful tree and fertile field, had for its children the race of whom Virgil is the supreme type, to which Christianity indeed gave the free strength which was to glow into that of Titian, and which retained nevertheless, through the strength of its proudest masters, the Virgilian softness and the Dardan passion. Correggio in his luxury, and Luini in his purity; Veronese in his splendour, and Mantegna in his pride; Carpaccio in the dawn, and Tintoret in the darkness-all worship with the shepherd of Ida, and are bound with the cestus of the Queen of the Sea.

5. Now the great peculiarity of this race, considered as one artist group, consists in its incapacity of sculpture. From first to last, whenever it uses a chisel, it essentially tries to paint with it; on the one side, produces at its time of highest skill flat sculptures in which the light and shade of the chiselled line are used simply to draw the subject, not to shape it; and on the other, in its decline producing sculpture of fantastic projections in vain imitation of groups designed for the imaginary depths of the painter’s heaven. To draw upon marble like Mantegna, is the pride of the sculptors of Venice in the fifteenth century; to carve the Assumption of Titian in the solid, is the dream of those of the seventeenth. At no period of her art, early or late, is there any native Lombardic sculpture acceptant of the laws of sculpture. The Comaschi indeed founded the schools of freemasonry,¹ but under architectural conditions only. All true sculpture was either by the invading Lombards or the invited Pisan. On the other hand, the Etrurian race, while they carry forward their arts of painting and sculpture with entire intelligence of the virtues of both, nevertheless in some slight degree chastise their painting by the laws of sculpture, and will rather carve with their pencil than paint with their chisel. They are first worshippers of Mars, then of Athena, never of Aphrodite, and they perish in the pursuit of vain knowledge, not of vain pleasure.

the formation of “the cohort of death,” and of another troop formed of Three Hundred youths of the best families, see Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques Italiennes du Moyen Age (Paris, 1826), ch. xi. vol. ii. p. 207.]

¹ [The “Magistri Comaceni” (Comaschi) are mentioned in Lombardic codes as the builders of the time (see Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. i. pt. ii., p. 25 of the edition of 1725), and other historians record that masons were always to be found in that part of Italy notwithstanding its occupation by barbarians (Tiraboschi, Storia della Lett. Ital., 1823, vol. iii. p. 218).]

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XXIV .2 G

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