460 APPENDIX TO PART II

of the Meaning caprice of the painter. This figure, however, unless it be a white Devil, sent to tempt Susannah, is nearly as inexplicable as the skeleton one of the Crucifixion.¹

[Veronese: “Susannah and the Elders,” No. 1188.]

§ 27. Veronese’s treatment is utterly different. The water falls from a dolphin-mouthed fountain-Susannah, sitting on a bench which is under the statue of a faun, is addressed by the elders, grand senatorial figures, the expression of passion thoroughly marked on their otherwise not ignoble features, Susannah gathering her dress about her bosom-looks up to them neither in fear nor shame-but in the most fiery indignation, the face as expressive as one so much side-shortened can possibly be; the background of the most exquisitely painted laurel leaves, natural size.

[Leonardo’s “Vierge aux Rochers,” No. 1599.]

§ 28. Outline of upper portion of cave in Leonardo’s “Vierge aux Rochers” ... [references to a sketch]; the light from under the dark edge strikes on their crude and artificial cleavage. What kind of mind could lead Leonardo to adopt such an ideal? ... [Further reference to sketches]. Under this cavernous line, in the distance, a whole range apparently of blue icebergs, seen against horizon light, and I think water below. Above, the dark rocks, after the hole has been pierced in them, are rounded off into a kind of haystack shape; beams also run from one to the other. The blue, however, is not so blue as Titian’s, nor the brown so brown. [Later notes:-] Those blue icebergs appear to be his universal distance. In the St. Anne [No. 1598] they rise out of a kind of sea, or wide river, with a weir upon it-these men who never drew landscape from nature could not get on without weirs-and form a cloudy, unfinished distance far away behind the heads, like an old map, some idea of snow in extreme distance. The foreground is a kind of oolite-like rock ... [reference to sketches], covered with loose, painfully elaborated pebbles; one, or a zoned flint, nearly an agate, carefully veined. Behind the head of Monna Lisa [No. 1601], same thing, equally grotesque, blue and unfinished.²

[Noble and Ignoble Drapery.]

§ 29. Titian’s drapery seems an exception to the general rule I had hoped to establish, that artists might at once be known, whether of great or mean mind, by the sense of gravity and of generalization in its treatment. Yet the thought deserves development. I imagine the seriousness of the mind, as distinguished from its simple power, is to a certain degree shown by its choice of heavily gravitating folds: provided this choice be natural, not affected. Nothing can be more grand-more quiet-more simple-more material than its falls in Veronese. In the French fresco picture of the Magdalen washing Christ’s feet in the Madeleine³ here, the blue drapery of Christ, by way of being grand, hangs like a blanket between two posts, and all the draperies are square at the top, and hang in dead verticals and gigantic masses, off which the spectator cannot take his eye; the blue drapery specified between the knees of the Christ, is the principal object in the semicircle. Consider this peculiar blanketty

¹ [For a description of Tintoret’s “Crucifixion” at Venice, see Vol. IV. pp. 270, 271, where, however, the figure here referred to is not noticed.]

² [For a further discussion of Leonardo’s landscape, see above, pp. 112, 113; also Plate 12 and figure 22.]

³ [In the first chapel on the left side; by L. C. F. Couder (1790-1873).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]