202 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

and those terms incorrect. We are amazed to find a writer usually thoughtful, if not accurate, thus indolently adopting the worn-out falsities of our weakest writers on Taste. Does he-can he for an instant suppose that the ruffian Caravaggio,¹ distinguished only by his preference of candlelight and black shadows for the illustration and reinforcement of villany, painted nature-mere nature-exclusive nature, more painfully or heartily than John Bellini or Raphael? Does he not see that whatever men imitate must be nature of some kind, material nature or spiritual, lovely or foul, brutal or human, but nature still? Does he himself see in mere, external, copiable nature, no more than Caravaggio saw, or in the Antique no more than has been comprehended by David?² The fact is, that all artists are primarily divided into the two great groups of Imitators and Suggestors-their falling into one or other being dependent partly on disposition, and partly on the matter they have to subdue-(thus Perugino imitates line by line with pencilled gold, the hair which Nino Pisano can only suggest by a gilded marble mass, both having the will of representation alike).³ And each of these classes is again divided into the faithful and unfaithful imitators and suggestors; and that is a broad question of blind eye and hard heart, or seeing eye and serious heart, always coexistent; and then the faithful imitators and suggestors-artists proper, are appointed, each with his peculiar gift and affection, over the several orders and classes of things natural, to be by them illumined and set forth.

34. And that is God’s doing and distributing; and none is rashly to be thought inferior to another, as if by his own fault; nor any of them stimulated to emulation, and changing places with others, although their allotted tasks be of different dignities, and their granted instruments of different

¹ [Compare Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. § 54.]

² [For Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) see Vol. I. p. 278.]

³ [For Perugino’s finish, “even to the gilding of single hairs,” see Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 138), and the “Notes on the Louvre,” § 1, below, p. 449; and for Nino Pisano’s gilding of the hair in his statues, ibid., p. 300 and n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]