208 THE STONES OF VENICE

silver grey, and tender like the down on a bird’s breast, with which, far away, it veils the undulation of the mountains;-these it had been well for them to have seen and drawn, whatever they had left unstudied in the gallery.

§ 13. And if the reader would know the reason why this has not been done (it is one instance only out of the myriads which might be given of sightlessness in modern art), and will ask the artists themselves, he will be informed of another of the marvellous contradictions and inconsistencies in the base Renaissance art; for it will be answered him, that it is not right, nor according to law, to draw trees so that one should be known from another, but that trees ought to be generalized into a universal idea of a tree: that is to say, that the very school which carries its science in the representation of man down to the dissection of the most minute muscle, refuses so much science to the drawing of a tree as shall distinguish one species from another; and also, while it attends to logic, and rhetoric, and perspective, and atmosphere, and every other circumstance which is trivial, verbal, external, or accidental, in what it either says or sees, it will not attend to what is essential and substantial,-being intensely solicitous, for instance, if it draws two trees, one behind the other, that the farthest off shall be as much smaller as mathematics show that it should be, but totally unsolicitous to show, what to the spectator is a far more important matter, whether it is an apple or an orange-tree.¹

§ 14. This, however, is not to our immediate purpose. Let it be granted that an idea of an olive-tree is indeed to be given us in a special manner; how, and by what language, this idea is to be conveyed, are questions on which we shall find the world of artists again divided; and it was this division which I wished especially to illustrate by reference to the mosaics of St. Mark’s.

¹ [The MS. here continues:-

“And thus while to the modern figure-painter we ought to be saying continually, ‘Knowledge is bad for you; it makes you see skeletons where you should see men,’ to the modern landscape-painter we have often to say, ‘Knowledge is good for you-or at least as much as the knowing an oak from an apple.’ “]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]