398 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

what she could not restore, I could not but look upon the attack which has been made upon the pictures in question as on the violation of a sanctuary. I had seen in Venice the noblest works of Veronese painted over with flake-white with a brush fit for tarring ships; I had seen in Florence Angelico’s highest inspiration rotted and seared into fragments of old wood, burnt into blisters, or blotted into glutinous maps of mildew;¹ I had seen in Paris Raphael restored by David and Vernet; and I returned to England in the one last trust that, though her National Gallery was an European jest, her art a shadow, and her connoisseurship an hypocrisy, though she neither knew how to cherish nor how to choose, and lay exposed to the cheats of every vendor of old canvass, yet that such good pictures as through chance or oversight might find their way beneath that preposterous portico, and into those melancholy and miserable rooms, were at least to be vindicated thenceforward from the mercy of republican, priest, or painter, safe alike from musketry, monkery, and manipulation.

3. But whatever pain I may feel at the dissipation of this dream, I am not disposed altogether to deny the necessity of some illuminatory process with respect to pictures exposed to a London atmosphere and populace. Dust an inch thick, accumulated upon the frames in the course of the day, and darkness closing over the canvass like a curtain, attest too forcibly the influence on floor and air of the “mutable, rank-scented, many.”² It is of little use to be over-anxious for the preservation of pictures which we cannot see; the only question is, whether in the present instance the process may not have been carried perilously far, and

¹ [For the repainting of Veronese’s pictures in S. Sebastiano at Venice, see Vol. XI. p. 432. For the maltreatment of Fra Angelico’s “Vita di Cristo” at Florence, see Vol. IV. p. 100 and n. Several of Raphael’s pictures in the Louvre have at one time or another been subjected to repainting-such as “La Belle Jardiniere,” and the “St. Margaret.” Vernet, the elder (1714-1789), was much employed by Louis XV., and David (1748-1825) by Napoleon. Information with regard to the cleaning and repainting of pictures in the Louvre at a later date was given to the Select Committee of 1853 (Questions 2625-2657).]

² [Shakespeare: Coriolanus, iii. 1. 66.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]