258 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

unfrequently been treated as entirely fabulous; and Raspe,¹ in particular, rests their claims to gratitude on the contingent introduction of amber-varnish and poppy-oil:-“Such perhaps,” he says, “might have been the misrepresented discovery of the Van Eycks.” That tradition, however, for which the great painters of Italy, and their sufficiently vain historian,² had so much respect as never to put forward any claim in opposition to it, is not to be clouded by incautious suspicion. Mr. Eastlake has approached it with more reverence, stripped it of its exaggeration, and shown the foundations for it in the fact that the Van Eycks, though they did not create the art, yet were the first to enable it for its function; that having found it in servile office and with dormant power-laid like the dead Adonis on his lettuce-bed³-they gave it vitality and dominion. And fortunate it is for those who look for another such reanimation, that the method of the Van Eycks was not altogether their own discovery. Had it been so, that method might still have remained a subject of conjecture; but after being put in possession of the principles commonly acknowledged before their time, it is comparatively easy to trace the direction of their inquiry and the nature of their improvements.

9. With respect to remote periods of antiquity, we believe that the use of a hydrofuge oil-varnish for the protection of works in tempera, the only fact insisted upon by Mr. Eastlake,⁴

¹ [R. E. Raspe: A Critical Essay on Oil-Painting, 1781, p. 67.]

² [The reference is to Vasari, who in his Life of Antonello of Messina attributes the invention to “Giovanni of Bruges” (Jan Van Eyck), and describes the excitement which it caused among Italian painters. The passage is in part cited below, p. 272. For Ruskin’s general opinion of Vasari, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. ii. § 4; On the Old Road (1899 ed.), ii. p. 311 (“an ass with precious things in his panniers”); Ariadne Florentina, § 194 (“a very foolish person”).]

³ [The allusion is either to the ritual at the Festival of Adonis: see Theocritus, Id. xv., “Here are built for him shadowy bowers of green, all laden with tender anise”; or to the fennel and lettuce-jars, or forcing-beds, called by the Greeks “Adonis Gardens” (see 1 Henry VI., i. 6; Paradise Lost, ix. 440; Faerie Queene, iii. 6): these also had their place in the Adonis ritual (see Frazer’s Golden Bough, 1st ed., i. 284).]

⁴ [ “The movable pictures of the ancients were, for the most part, on wood, and either in tempera or in encaustic. Works executed in either of these methods were, from an early period, often covered with a durable hydrofuge varnish, which, if not indispensible in all cases as a defence against damp, at least served to protect the painting from dust, and allowed of its being washed with safety” (Eastlake, p. 14).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]