458 APPENDIX TO PART II

they are forced in writing to abstain from some words and thoughts, but there is no grossness which pictorial precedent cannot excuse, and in which therefore a gross painter does not indulge himself. There are some ideas of vulgarity or of crime which no words, however laboured, would succeed in suggesting to a gentle heart or a pure mind. But the brutal painter has the eyes at his mercy; and as Kingliness and Holiness, and Manliness and Thoughtfulness were never by words so hymned or so embodied or so enshrined as they have been by Titian, and Angelico, and Veronese, so never were Blasphemy and cruelty and horror and degradation and decrepitude of Intellect-and all that has sunk and will sink Humanity to Hell-so written in words as they are stamped upon the canvasses of Salvator and Jordaens and Caravaggio and modern France.

[Titian: “Portrait of a Man,” No. 1593.]

§ 24. I was singularly struck with one exemplification of all this that I felt in two pictures of Titian, side by side, which showed the entire grasp the man had of the whole range of the joys and the efforts of the grace and the gloom of human life. The one, a portrait of a man in a dark dress, the darkest possible warm green, passing into coal black, the background dark-the light falling, with Rembrandt simplicity and singleness, on the head and hands (note that Rembrandtism in its truth and in its right application to solemn subject is practised by the greatest men): one arm leaned against the plinth of a grey cold column of stone with an Attic base [a rough sketch of this base], the hand falling over the edge of it in perfect rest-the other, right hand, laid on the sword hilt, the back of the hand upmost; the black hilt, ebony black with one or two intense white flashes on it, like those of Turner on the chains in the “Slaver,”¹ rising between the forefinger and the second; the front of the thumb seen below, all at rest-the face dark, the hair short, and as black as night; the eye lightless, calm, but sternly set and fixed, the beard dark brown, and full from the lip-almost the only flowing line admitted in the picture (for the sleeve that rounds to the pendent hand is foreshortened-in a series of short waves as below [rough sketch of piece of sleeve], the white of the column being rudely loaded over its flat intense black in a series of apparently inconsiderate sweeps); the mouth curled and scornful, yet not exaggerated, all quiet and self subdued, yet lurid and wrathful in its single wreathed line of burning red-seen through the shade of the hand like a gleam of angry sunset through a thunder cloud.

[Titian’s “Allegory in honour of Alfonso d’ Avalos,” No. 1589.]

§ 25. Beside this picture hangs that of Titian with his mistress:² she, all softness and gentleness, her light hair half bound, half bedewed, with pearl, her shoulders heaving under the brown kerchief which is falling from them-and her full breast rising out of the light white loose dress-yet grandly always-not sensually. Pure womanhood-tender and voluptuous, but sublime, not sensual-her round and glowing arm, clasped at the shoulder by an armlet of ruby and gold, bent over the bright, ideal, substanceless

¹ [For this picture, once in Ruskin’s collection, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 571, and Plate 12).]

² [This picture is now known as “An Allegory in honour of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis of Guast” (1502-1546), the generalissimo of Charles V.’s armies. A letter is extant from the Marquis to the painter’s friend, Aretino, in which he states his wish to have his portrait painted by Titian, along with that of his wife, and that

[Version 0.04: March 2008]