456 APPENDIX TO PART II

§ 20.--¹ is a fine Annibale [Caracci] (“The Resurrection”) sunrise; orb just half up, a solemn luminous and imaginative passage full of truth. A soldier is sleeping on the top of the tomb; the others undisturbed around it. The seal is on it unbroken, as at a [reference to sketch]; Christ has risen through the stone, not, as is usually represented, cleaving it.

2116. Tournament by Rubens-its distance a sunset as above [reference to a sketch],², most vigorously conceived and every way fine, but remarkable for the impossible position of the sun’s rays, and for the heavy lightless brick-red used in the orb itself.

729 [“The Education of Bacchus”]. The finest Poussin in the Gallery; recumbent nymph and exquisite distance, a little coarse in handling, but thoroughly grand.

1302. Taddeo Gaddi: execution not delicate, but occasional heads very fine, though to me it seems indiscriminately so. The Herod in one has a very good head; the Madonna is poor.

1569. [“Jesus Appearing”? Perugino]. Note for its exquisite trees.

1604. [School of Leonardo: “The Virgin with the Scales”]. Violent simpering in all the faces. Virgin with elaborate curls, yet looks like a man. The St. Michael has a female expression. Both would have been fine if the Madonna had been a Christ, and the St. Michael a Madonna. The other three figures wretched.

In 1599 [“La Vierge aux Rochers”] the Jesus is very solemn, and the picture has grown upon me exceedingly.

2. NOTES OF 1849

§ 21. PARIS, 8th September.-I entered the Louvre this morning³ under the peculiar advantage of having been utterly separated from humanity, and from all manifestation of human mind, for full 120 days, and I was suddenly therein brought into contact with perhaps the most varied exhibition of the powers of the human mind in Europe-(for there is a local colour and character about the Florentine and Roman galleries utterly wanting in the mélange of Dutch, Spanish, French, and Italian work-all first-rate-presented by the Louvre). I felt as if I had been plunged into a sea of wine of thought, and must drink to drowning. But the first distinct impression which fixed itself on me was that of the entire superiority of Painting to Literature as a test, expression, and record of human intellect, and of the enormously greater quantity of Intellect which might be forced into a picture-and read there-compared with that which might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese.⁴ I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went to the making of that picture than of a thousand poems. I saw at once the whole life of the man-his religion, his conception of humanity, his reach of conscience, of moral feeling, his kingly

¹ [? No. 1223; it is not now in the Louvre.]

² [See Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xviii. § 22, fig. 6, where the sketch was used.]

³ [This visit to the Louvre was made on Ruskin’s way home from a Swiss tour in the summer of 1849; compare Vol. IX., Introduction, p. xxiii.]

⁴ [The “Wedding Feast at Cana,” No. 1192.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]