IV. CONCLUSION 217

the gold into sunshine, and cover the tree with it. Well done: but still this is not enough; the tree is so full foliaged and so old that the wood birds come in crowds to build there; they are singing, two or three under the shadow of every bough. I cannot show you them all; but here is a large one on the outside spray, and you can fancy the others inside.”

§ 26. In this way the calls upon the imagination are multiplied as a great painter finishes; and from these larger incidents he may proceed into the most minute particulars, and lead the companion imagination to the veins in the leaves and the mosses on the trunk, and the shadows of the dead leaves upon the grass, but always multiplying thoughts, or subjects of thought, never working for the sake of realization; the amount of realization actually reached depending on his space, his materials, and the nature of the thoughts he wishes to suggest. In the sculpture of an oak-tree, introduced above an Adoration of the Magi on the tomb of the Doge Giovanni¹ Dolfino (fourteenth century), the sculptor has been content with a few leaves, a single acorn, and a bird; while, on the other hand, Millais’ willow-tree with the robin, in the background of his “Ophelia,” or the foreground of Hunt’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” carries the appeal to the imagination into particulars so multiplied and minute, that the work nearly reaches realization. But it does not matter how near realization the work may approach in its fulness, or how far off it may remain in its slightness, so long as realization is not the end proposed, but the informing one spirit of the thoughts of another. And in this greatness and simplicity of purpose all noble art is alike, however slight its means, or however perfect, from the rudest mosaics of St. Mark’s to the most tender finishing of the “Huguenot” or the “Ophelia.”²

§ 27. Only observe, in this matter, that a greater degree of realization is often allowed for the sake of colour than

¹ [Ruskin had by a slip of the pen written “Marco,” and so the word stood in all previous editions; the tomb is that referred to above, ch. ii. § 62, p. 95.]

² [Millais’s “Ophelia” is No. 1506 in the National Gallery collection (hung in the Tate Gallery); it was exhibited at the Academy in 1852. For other references by Ruskin to the picture, see Academy Notes, 1857, s. No. 283; 1859, s. No. 15;

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