APPENDIX 617

thus pleased everybody must be rightly pleasing, spent much time in the Sistine, seeing really on that roof much more than most other people did, and I am able now to say with confidence, pretty nearly all that was to be seen. I felt more and more distinctly through every examining hour that Michael Angelo had all the power of Rubens without his distortion or wantonness;-that he was more spiritual than Sir Joshua, and more natural than the Antique, and with all this had a gift of chiaroscuro and cloudy involution of moving form, which had something in common with my Alps, and Turner. And for some four years after this, that is to say, through the whole writing of the first volume of Modern Painters, remained under the conviction that he was indeed the Lord of modern art.

Adding this new and highest idol to my former group of Rubens, Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Vandyke, Velasquez, and Turner, it will be evident to the artistic reader that every motive and direction of admiration in my mind was wholly adverse to the character of Gothic sculpture, and that it would not have been possible to put myself under worse conditions to the criticism of the Cathedral of Rheims.

Accordingly I find entered in my diary for June 20th, 1841, as the sum of my opinion of the Cathedral of Rheims on my second visit, that

“There is not one good or graceful detail in the whole edifice, with the single exception perhaps of the bracket and figure beneath it between the great central arch” (of the porch) “and the arch on the left. All the rest is the coarsest cheap mason’s work, but certainly well applied for effect, and very far from anything one could call barbarous.”

Similarly of the Cathedral of Laon, I write on the 21st of June:-

“Excessively singular old Norman, chiefly remarkable for its strange mouldings over the doors-branches uniting at intervals with figures sitting in them instead of niches-nave of many columns just like those of Christ Church, going up only one-third of the height, supporting on their capitals groups of three or four jointed columns going up to the roof and very like gas-pipes.”

The “strange mouldings over the doors” must certainly be flamboyant sculpture introduced subsequently in the pediments-tympana, I mean- which it looks as if I did not at that time know from Norman work. In any case, the state of mind shown by these entries is altogether amazing to me, considering what progress I had made in drawing Gothic three years before 1838. And another entry in the same page equally puzzles me- “On the whole I like French towns as much as I detest French country” -seeing that I had been studying Turner’s Rivers of France when first at Oxford, and that at the bottom of the next page I find this entry of Laon itself:-

“A bold promontory commanding between it and another projection of the same hills to the south a plain of as lovely avenued forest as ever I saw in my life, lines of rich green poplar, running into long shadowy masses exquisitely symmetrical, alternating with fields of bright yellow corn.”

[Version 0.04: March 2008]