NOTES ON THE LOUVRE 473

the foreground. Paul Veronese’s mystery through all his decision; lightness of touch and intense refinement, through all his power.

1416, Cosimo Rosselli.¹ An exquisite branch of white blossom of some kind, something like cherry, its flowers drawn dark in perfect perspective of every curve against the golden sky in foreground. It is a crowing of the Virgin.

2115, Rubens [“The Village Fair”]. Get engraving of some part of Rubens’ drunken festival to put beside Angelico: show quality in both.

I did not think Rubens could have been so ignoble as he is in the Frances and Victories, and above all Minervas, with tucked-up petticoats and bare muscular legs, and half-boots, in the Medici series.²

Veronese [No. 1192]. In the great Cana picture it appears to me difficult to decide whether irony or insult is intended by the cats playing with the handle of the vase of water. Is it to show the irreverence with which the most solemn gifts of God are treated by man; as in like manner the head of clown with bells, and then the hour-glass just under Christ. The patterns on the dresses of the Veronese, unless they are of gold, or damask, or something lustrous, are, when dark, just as dark in light as in shade, if not a little darker.

1598. In Leonardo’s St. Anne (a villainous piece of rubbish now, whatever it may have been) there are some good bits, and those Pre-Raphaelite. The pebbles under the feet of St. Anne are now more laboured than the figures, some of the flints being agatescent, and every vein of the agate drawn in pebbles not an inch wide.³ In Titian’s “Entombment” [No. 1584] the two snail shells on the ground are painted as carefully as any part of the picture.⁴ In Veronese’s “Dinner in Simon’s House” [No. 1193] the interwoven lace of the hem of the table-cloth most laborious; the meshes being carefully varied in size, quite as careful as Hunt’s them in “The Awakening Conscience.”⁵

¹ [The picture described is, however, No. 1416, by Piero di Cosimo.]

² [The series of pictures, representing the history of Mary of Medici, painted by Rubens, 1620-1625, for the old gallery of the Luxembourg; Nos. 2085-2108 in the Louvre. Ruskin notices them in more detail in The Harbours of England, § 30 and n.; see also Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. viii. § 6.]

³ [See Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. ix. § 18, where Ruskin notice this detail in his discussion of Finish in art.]

⁴ [In a later diary (1856) Ruskin notes:-

“Besides the snail shells in Titian’s ‘Entombment’ there are two alchemilla leaves in the left-hand bottom corner, beautifully drawn-quite as laboured as the foot of the Christ. The foreground of the ‘Belle Jardiničre’ is worked out in the hardest way with conspicuous columbine, rose and plaintain-all in brownish green with black shadows.”]

⁵ [For this picture, and for the details here mentioned, see above, p. 335.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]