EPILOGUE 241

§ 7. Primarily observe, it announces itself clearly to you as a work of art, not a mere photograph or colour-stain from nature. I have again and again throughout my books dwelt upon the virtue and even necessity to the intellectual training of men, of effort for the simple rendering of natural or historical fact.¹ Only, I have always said also, that the highest art is not this, but something far different from this, and pronouncing itself as such at a glance; as a statue, not a human body-as a picture, not a natural scene. Preeminently, Venetian art does so; and Giorgione in no wise intends you to suppose that the Madonna ever sat thus on a pedestal with a coat of arms upon it, or that St. George and St. Francis ever stood, or do now stand, in that manner beside her; but that a living Venetian may, in such vision, most deeply and rightly conceive of her, and of them.

Secondly, observe that the ideas which the picture conveys to you, are of noble, beautiful, and constant things. Not of disease, vice,-thrilling action, or fatal accident.

And that is also one of the chief lessons which in the sum of my work I have given;² that, though in many derivative and subordinate ways the action and interest of pictures may be admirable, the greatest pictures represent men and women in peace, clouds and mountains in peace; men and women noble, clouds and mountains beautiful. Never in the moral or the material universe does the great art of man acknowledge guilt, grief, change, or fear.

St. George (as by Ruskin here)-the patron saint of the Costanzo chapel, but more usually S. Liberale-the patron saint of the Cathedral. The saint in armour, however he may be called, refers to the profession of arms which Matteo followed. A study for the figure is in the National Gallery (No. 269). Some have imagined that the model for the knight was Giorgione himself; others, with more probability, suggest that it is a portrait of Matteo Costanzo himself (see Giorgione da Castelfranco e La Sua Madonna nel duomo della Sua Patria, per L. Ab. Camavitto: Castelfranco, 1889). The armour in the study is a faithful reproduction of that in a stone effigy of Matteo which still exists in the cemetery of Castelfranco.]

¹ [See Modern Painters and Stones of Venice, passim; and Ariadne Florentina, § 112: “Understand clearly and finally this simple principle of all art, that the best is that which realises absolutely, if possible.” And for the following limitation to that statement, see (among numerous passages to the like effect) Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. x. (“Of the Use of Pictures”).]

² [See, for instance, Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. pp. 113 seq.); and The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret.]

XI. Q

[Version 0.04: March 2008]