472 APPENDIX TO PART II

Mantegna, 1376 [“Wisdom victorious over the Vices”]. Very important from its good rendering of distant low hills; flat and true, not all knots and humps, but low and soft.

Perugino (?), 1567 [“The Fight between Love and Chastity”]. Very like him, but a profane subject; showing inroads of classicalism: Nymphs assailed by Cupids.

Cima da Conegliano, 1259 [ “Virgin and Child”]. Has hanging rock at side, with house on it, as opposite.¹ It is curious how many pictures depend on rocks with holes through them. Count, to-morrow.

Flemish (?), 2202 [Painter unknown: “The Angelic Salutation”]. Snowy mountains, in clear distance; very pretty; the best of Alps in all Flemish [school]-gem-like and finished, never sublime.

Rubens, 2100, Dolphin swimming after ship,² and red fish on top of water close by: compare with Turner.

Observe that at present in the Louvre one whole side of a room is given to Eustache Le Sueur; and Karl Dujardin, and Albert van Everdingen, and Balthazar Denner are on the line, and their only Tintoret, 60 feet high.³

Poussin, 730 [“Bacchanal”]. Poussin’s best bold landscape; nearly blue hills, one mass of blue against yellow, and brown rocks in front; the sky, first white clouds on greenish blue ground, which, as it goes away to the horizon, takes the character of leaden clouds on a golden distance-the painter seeming not clearly to have made up his mind what he meant it for.

Mountains.-Multitudes of mountains painted blue on one side, and white on the other: Watteaus on this principle.

The grand impression on me in walking through the Louvre often after Switzerland is the utter coarseness of painting-especially as regards mountains. The universal principle of blue mass behind, and green or brown banks or bushes in front. No real sense of height or distance-no care, no detail, no affection. To think of the soft purple dawns melting along the heights of the Valais, and then of such things as these!

§ 50. Sept. 28.-I thought, in the Louvre, yesterday, that it would be well to have separate chapters, showing in art how all things successively depend on-Truth, Refinement, Confusion. That is, I found that truth was an absolute measure of the goodness of art, that the greatest men were always those who gave most truth. Secondly, that refinement was also an absolute measure, all the greatest men being, according to their scale, exquisitely tender and refined and subtle. Thirdly, confusion is also an absolute measure, all the greatest men being confused. Correggio’s “Antiope” [No. 1118] is much bolder and more vague in execution than I thought-a wonderful example of effect of finish got through sketchy touches in

¹ [The sketch on the opposite page of the diary is cut out. Beneath it Ruskin had written, “Put my cottages at Zermatt with this.” The sketch was used as Fig. 86 in Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xvi. § 36.]

² [The subject is “The Majority of Louis XIII.”; the King is shown standing on the ship of State.]

³ [Now rearranged.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]