THE NATIONAL GALLERY 411

should be in a good light, all on a level with the eye, and all secure from damp, cold, impurity of atmosphere, and every other avoidable cause of deterioration.

7. These are the things to be accomplished; and if we set ourselves to do these in our new National Gallery, we shall have made a greater step in art-teaching than if we had built a new Parthenon. I know that it will be a strange idea to most of us that Titians and Tintorets ought, indeed, all to have places upon “the line,” as well as the annual productions of our Royal Academicians;¹ and I know that the coup d’œil. of the Gallery must be entirely destroyed by such an arrangement. But great pictures ought not to be subjects of “coups d’ œil.” In the last arrangement of the Louvre, under the Republic, all the noble pictures in the gallery were brought into one room, with a Napoleon-like resolution to produce effect by concentration of force; and, indeed, I would not part willingly with the memory of that saloon, whose obscurest shadows were full of Correggio; in whose out-of-the-way angles one forgot, here and there, a Raphael; and in which the best Tintoret on this side of the Alps was hung sixty feet from the ground!² But Cleopatra dissolving the pearl was nothing to this; and I trust that in our own Gallery our poverty, if not our will,³ may consent to a more modest and less lavish manner of displaying such treasures as are intrusted to us, and that the very limitation of our possessions may induce us to make that the object of our care which can hardly be a ground of ostentation. It might, indeed, be a matter of some difficulty to conceive an arrangement of the collections in the Louvre or the Florence Gallery which should

¹ [It will be remembered that the exhibitions of the Royal Academy were at this time held in the National Gallery.]

² [The galleries of the Louvre were reorganized on their being declared national instead of Crown property, after the Revolution of 1848; and the choicest pictures were then collected together in the “grand salon carré,” which, although since rearranged, still contains a similar selection. The “best Tintoret on this side of the Alps” is the “Susannah and the Elders,” now No. 349 in that room: for a description of it, see below, p. 459. Ruskin refers again to the position of the picture in Cestus of Aglaia, § 4.]

³ [Romeo and Juliet, v. 1.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]