“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 245

77. With this final warning against our author’s hesitating approbation of what is greatest and best, we must close our specific examination of the mode in which his design has been worked out. We have done enough to set the reader upon his guard against whatever appears slight or inconsiderate in his theory or statements, and with the more severity, because this was alone wanting to render the book one of the most valuable gifts which Art has ever received. Of the translations from the lives of the saints we have hardly spoken; they are gracefully rendered, and all of them highly interesting-but we could wish to see these, and the enumerations of fresco subjects* with which the other volumes are in great part occupied, published separately for the convenience of travellers in Italy. They are something out of place in a work like that before us. For the rest, we might have more interested the reader, and gratified ourselves, by setting before him some of the many passages of tender feeling and earnest eloquence with which the volumes are replete-but we felt it necessary rather to anticipate the hesitation with which they were liable to be received, and set limits to the halo of fancy by which their light is obscured-though enlarged.

78. One or two paragraphs, however, of the closing chapter must be given before we part:-

“What a scene of beauty, what a flower-garden of art-how bright and how varied-must Italy have presented at the commencement of the sixteenth century, at the death of Raphael! The sacrileges we lament took place for the most part after that period; hundreds of frescoes, not merely of Giotto and those other elders of Christian Art, but of Gentile da Fabriano, Pietro

* We have been much surprised by the author’s frequent reference to Lasinio’s engravings¹ of various frescoes, unaccompanied by any warning of their inaccuracy. No work of Lasinio’s can be trusted for anything except the number and relative position of the figures. All masters are by him translated into one monotony of commonplace:-he dilutes eloquence, educates naïveté, prompts ignorance, stultifies intelligence, and paralyses power;

¹ [“Execrable engravings,” Ruskin calls them, Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xviii. § 13; “vile and vulgar,” ibid., vol. iv. ch. i. § 1 n.]

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