“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 211

(Correggio), colour intellectual (Tintoret), colour spiritual (Angelico)-form sensual (French sculpture), form intellectual (Phidias), form spiritual (Michael Angelo). Above all, our author should have been careful how he attached the epithet “sensual” to the element of colour-not only on account of the glaring inconsistency with his own previous assertion of the spirituality of painting-(since it is certainly not merely by being flat instead of solid, representative instead of actual, that painting is-if it be-more spiritual than sculpture); but also, because this idea of sensuality in colour has had much share in rendering abortive the efforts of the modern German religious painters, inducing their abandonment of its consecrating, kindling, purifying power.¹

43. Lord Lindsay says, in a passage which we shall presently quote, that the most sensual as well as the most religious painters have always loved the brightest colours. Not so; no painters ever were more sensual than the modern French, who are alike insensible to, and incapable of colour-depending altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements of sensuality wherever it eminently exists. So far from good colour being sensual, it saves, glorifies, and guards from all evil: it is with Titian, as with all great masters of flesh-painting, the redeeming and protecting element; and with the religious painters, it is a baptism with fire, an under-song of holy Litanies. Is it in sensuality that the fair flush opens upon the cheek of Francia’s chanting angel,* until we think it comes, and fades, and returns, as his voice and his harping are louder or lower-or that the silver light rises upon wave after wave of his lifted hair; or that the burning of the blood is seen on the unclouded brows of the three angels of the Campo Santo, and of folded fire within their wings;² or that the hollow blue of the highest

* At the feet of his Madonna, in the Gallery of Bologna.

¹ [On this subject see Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 197); and Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 456).]

² [The reference is to the fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli at Pisa, “Abraham parting from the Angels”: see Plate opposite p. 316, in Vol. IV.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]