NOTES ON THE LOUVRE 459

ball which seems to mark at once the lustre and the mystery and the hollowness of life and of the world-the Cupid with his arrow sheaf, and azure wings-above,-another bright haired and most lovely nymph, clasping her hands as if in worship of the higher loveliness-her hair wreathed with a sharp laurel-like leaf and white starry flowers-but both small and lustrous-and full of grace and purity-her eyes wet, and the light flashing upon them, while those of the Queen of Titian are set on soft and brooding darkness-the brows of both the fair creatures nearly alike-that subdued horizontal arch which has so much at once of grace and power: the dress of one crimson and green, of the other, the Magdalen-like Grace, grey and gold-between them, their Lord, the head in shadow, the white light flashing from his dark cuirass. Note, by-the-bye, this armour is actually more conspicuous than the head of the wearer; reason, first, that the sentiment is chiefly of colour, to which that of the armour is precious; secondly, that the steel gives the greatest possible contrast to the feminine tenderness.

[Tintoret: “Susannah bathing,” No. 1464.]

§ 26. Two pictures of Susannah. Tintoret and Veronese, the first in Standish gallery;¹ Susannah in attitude and of robing Venus of Guido in our gallery;² face quite calm and somewhat animal-she does not see that she is watched; a magnificent grey grove, in which the bending and twining symmetry of successive trunks, wreathed with lovely, sharp-edged, exquisitely drawn ivy, is more like architecture than ever architecture was like vegetation (how utterly different in its sculpture-like severtity of sentiment from flowing trunks of the same kind with Rubens). leads back in steep perspective to an opening to the sky [sketch of the trunks,], whence the two elders, with Tintoret’s usual caprice, look in over a kind of altar cloth; the foreground is occupied by a water full of reeds and flags, and frogs, and two white nondescript fish tails; but close to the spectator, down among the reeds and water, is a dark grey animal like a rabbit, with long ears, and a malignant human face. There is no doubt, no obscurity about it, it is as plain as the Susannah herself-adding another to my catalogue

of his child as a Cupid. It is supposed that in this picture Titian executed the commission in a semi-allegorical form, symbolising the return of the general from a campaign to enjoy the fruits of peace and victory. The date usually assigned to the picture is 1533, but see The Later Work of Titian, by Claude Phillips, p. 18.]

¹ [The gallery which at that time contained the pictures and other objects of art bequeathed to King Louis-Philippe by Frank Hall Standish (1799-1840), an English author and connoisseur. The “Susannah” (not itself one of the Standish pictures) now hangs in the “Grande Gallerie.” Ruskin had noted this picture also in his diary of 1844:-

“Tintoret’s ‘Susannah’ is very noble, and especially remarkable for the grand landscape, large tree trunks enriched with ivy, most delicately drawn and finished, forming an entire, unbroken, square mass of shade over two-thirds of the picture, in spite of the complete details.”

It is the picture referred to by Ruskin above (p. 411) as “the best Tintoret this side of the Alps.” When the editor of Arrows of the Chace (1880) wrote to ask him to which picture these words referred, Ruskin replied (May 19), “Susannah and the Elders. I am still of the same mind. It is one of the sorrows of my life never to have seen that picture close. ... The Susannah,” he adds, “is one of the great mystic pictures with a landscape of lovely arbour and trellis, and such frogs in the water.”]

² [This must be a slip of the pen for the Susannah of Guido; in that picture in the National Gallery (No. 196) the attitude-that of screening the breast with the arm-resembles Tintoret’s.]

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