468 APPENDIX TO PART II

and what purity of colour it admits as opposed to our blundering practice on the one hand, though it may also necessitate heavy colour as opposed to pure Van Eyckism on the other. This, however, is evidently one of the little understood uses of oil colour, as enabling superimposition.

§ 39. But to return: repentirs are not infrequent in Veronese-often covered with heavy colour. Titian’s child in the Holy Family¹-with the magnificent red-capped figure, luminous as a star at a little distance, is apparently heavy and opaque, seen near, or at least nothing very difficult to reach. Bits, however, there are occasionally, which make one hopeless, like the hand of the Madonna laid on the white rabbit in the small Holy Family:² a perfect lamp of light. I never saw a piece of more exquisite colour sentiment than this: in its quaintness and purity, and simplicity and light.

[Vandyck’s “Portrait of a Man,” No. 1976.]

§ 40. Vandyck has a portrait of singular power-a man bareheaded, with arm on side, akimbo, and slashed sleeve-and light distant sky; painted most impetuously and magnificently, but the colour as opaque and heavy as can be-in hands as much so as a bit of deal-and owing all its power to its visible hastiness and masterly dragging and striking; each hand, I suppose, might take the painter from a minute to a minute and a half to finish. The colour of the whole is fine, but it is by choice, opposition, and execution, not quality. I return to Mulready’s maxim:³ the fine colour seems to me to come naturally from the manly hand and eye, and to depend much on everything being done simply, unaffectedly, and at once.

Religious and Aristocratic Sentiment.

§ 41. Vandyck’s “Holy Family,” the chief one here, like that at Dulwich,⁴ is a total failure; the child looks like George the Fourth. Now nothing can be more exquisite than his little Dutch-faced girl asking her father, a black senator, to come out with her.⁵ On the other side of the gallery, nothing more lordly or gentle than a head, one of two, of a prince in armour⁶ near this Holy Family. How is it that he could conceive a gentleman and a child, but not a Madonna? Note that all his dignity becomes vulgarity when he approaches the Sacred infant.⁷

Canaletto.

§ 42. Observe in Canaletto’s La Salute,⁸ one has to look for the Doge’s Palace. Not a ray of light, not a spark of wave, leads to or illustrates it. How cold is this, how utterly lifeless-a man deserves chastisement for making truth so contemptible.⁹

¹ [No. 1577.]

² [“La Vierge au Lapin,” by Titian, No. 1578.]

³ [See Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 19.]

⁴ [ “La Vierge aux Donateurs,” No. 1962. The picture in the Dulwich Gallery is No. 90, “The Madonna and Infant Saviour” (a replica of the picture in the Bridgewater Gallery).]

⁵ [No. 1973: “Portrait of a Man and a Child.”]

⁶ [No. 1971: “Equestrian Portrait of Francis of Moncade.” No. 1972 is a bust portrait of the same. But here, again, the arrangement of the pictures has been altered.]

⁷ [With these notes on Vandyck compare Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. § 14; ch. vi. §§ 5, 10.]

⁸ [“View of the Church of La Madonna della Salute,” No. 1203.]

⁹ [So in the 1844 notes:

“A rascally Canaletti, all the shaded parts of the boats cast a faint insipid reflection: the bright beaks and high lights none whatever, nor any of the vertical lines.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]