454 APPENDIX TO PART II

its smile most exquisite, and its cast and chiselling lovely to a degree. Pictures so painted would be good copies for tapestry workers. In 710, the plague of Philistines, the coarse gesture is used, noted by Richmond, but it is a picture worth two of ours.¹

734 [“The Shepherds in Arcadia”] is very fine in tone; only part of the sky (which is now generally green in hue) is altered to a crude blue. Is it possible that this blue, or anything like it, was the original tint; that the other hues were raw in proportion, and that we owe our majesty of tone to time?

§ 18. CALAIS, 22nd August.-A heavy and dull day from Montreuil. All bleak and desolate here.

722 [“The Ecstasy of St. Paul”] is a valuable N. Poussin, from its freshness of colour. It is a landscape seen through a stone arch. The distance dark and forcible, the stone tones subdued and faint, and yet distance kept; a sword laid across the near stone is a fine incident.

728 [“Mars and Rhea Sylvia”] I have marked as very grand, but forget it. Two works by N. Poussin, in the Gallery, one of large size figures rather above life, and finely treated.

562 [Le Sueur: “St. Scholastica appearing to St. Benedict”] is a lovely floating Madonna, with attendant angels beautifully buoyant and graceful and tender, but not religious nor sublime.

1135 [“The Holy Family”]: a most beautiful Giorgione. The distance, though green, luminous, and well toned, seems to me crudely and freshly painted, coarse in handling, but the head of St. Catherine is glorious pure warm brown in shade; and the whole picture operates very perilously on the black forced dead light and shade of the large Raphael, hung near it.²

1136 [“Concert Champêtre”] is also very valuable; the standing woman a graceful thought, and the red cap a marvellous colour, warming the whole landscape.

In my favourite picture, the Bellini portraits [No. 1156], I have noted at first a cunning expression from the askance look in John himself. It wore off, and, I fancy, was false. Note that the screen which brings out these two heads appears a dead black, veined in imitation of marble, with white, but it is in reality a greenish and subdued black, against which the two caps-pure black-detach themselves vigorously; and also, though less forcibly, the hair of John Bellini. The execution of the flesh is at once the most delicate and forcible in the whole gallery. Raphael looks laborious after it, and Titian careless.

2541 [“The Philosopher in Meditation”]. With spiral stair; a most precious Rembrandt.

2558 [“A Storm on the Dykes of Holland”]. Ruysdael’s sea, action good, well sympathized with by reeds on shore, foam fairly broken; not the remotest degree either of lustre or transparency. But far finer than Vandevelde.

2164 [“Heron Hawking”]. A well painted game piece by Teniers, with agreeable landscape.

¹ [No. 165 in the National Gallery, a picture by Poussin of the same subject.]

² [Owing to the re-arrangements of the Gallery since Ruskin wrote, it is impossible now to say which picture by Raphael he here refers to.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]