358 ST. MARK’S REST

sentiment of Christ’s flagellation, after having read unlimited quantities of George Sand and Dumas. It is well that they chance to be here: look thoroughly at them and their dramatic chiaroscuros for a little time, observing that no face is without some expression of crime or pain, and that everything is always put dark against light, or light against dark. Then return to the entrance of the church, where under the gallery, frameless and neglected, hang eight old pictures,-bought, the story goes, at a pawnbroker’s in the Giudecca for forty sous each,*-to me among the most interesting pieces of art in North Italy, for they are the only examples I know of an entirely great man’s work in extreme youth. They are Carpaccio’s, when he cannot have been more than eight or ten years old, and painted then half in precocious pride, and half in play. I would give anything to know their real history. “School Pictures,” C. C. call them!¹ as if they were merely bad imitations, when they are the most unaccountable and unexpected pieces of absurd fancy that ever came into a boy’s head, and scrabbled, rather than painted, by a boy’s hand,-yet, with the eternal master-touch in them already.

SUBJECTS.-1. Rachel at the Well. 2. Jacob and his Sons before Joseph. 3. Tobias and the Angel. 4. The Three Holy Children. 5. Job. 6. Moses, and Adoration of Golden Calf (C. C.). 7. Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. 8. Joshua and falling Jericho.

192. In all these pictures the qualities of Carpaccio are already entirely pronounced; the grace, quaintness, simplicity, and deep intentness on the meaning of incidents. I don’t know if the grim statue in No. 4 is, as C. C. have it, the statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, or that which he erected for the three holy ones to worship,-and already I

* “Originally in St. Maria della Vergine” (C. C.). Why are not the documents on the authority of which these statements are made given clearly?

¹ [History of Painting in North Italy, vol. i. p. 213 n. These little pictures are figured and discussed in Ludwig and Molmenti’s Vittore Carpaccio, La Vita e Le Opere, 1906, pp. 26, 27.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]