II. ROME 269

29. At Florence then, this time, the Newgate-like palaces were rightly hateful to me; the old shop and market-streets rightly pleasant; the inside of the Duomo a horror, the outside a Chinese puzzle. All sacred art,-frescoes, tempera, what not, mere zero, as they were to the Italians themselves; the country round, dead wall and dusty olive;- the whole, a provocation and weariness, except for one master, M. Angelo.

I saw at once in him that there was emotion and human life, more than in the Greeks; and a severity and meaning which were not in Rubens. Everybody about me swearing that Michael Angelo was the finest thing in the world, I was extremely proud of being pleased with him; confirmed greatly in my notion of my own infallibility, and with help of Rogers in the Lorenzo Chapel, and long sittings and standings about the Bacchus in the Uffizi, progressed greatly and vitally in Michael-Angelesque directions.¹ But I at once pronounced the knife grinder in the Tribune² a vulgar nuisance, as I do still; the Venus de’ Medici, an uninteresting little person; Raphael’s St. John, a piece of black bombast; and the Uffizi collection in general, an unbecoming medley, got together by people who knew nothing, and cared less than nothing,* about the arts. On the whole, when I last walked through the Uffizi in 1882 I was precisely of the same opinion, and proud of having arrived at it so quickly. It was not to be expected of me at that time to like either Angelico or Botticelli; and if I had, the upper corridor of the Uffizi was an entirely vile and contemptible place wherein to see the great Madonna of the one, or the Venus Marina of

* That is, cared the wrong way,-liked them for their meanest skills, and worst uses.

¹ [See Modern Painters, vol. ii. (1846), for Ruskin’s admiration of the Medicean tombs in San Lorenzo and of the Bacchus: Vol. IV. pp. 118, 281. Compare with the account in this chapter of his artistic impressions in 1840, the note of 1883 at Vol. IV. p. 117.]

² [The “Arrotino”: see Vol. XXIII. p. 325. For other references to the Venus de’ Medici, see Vol. V. p. 98, and vol. VI. p. 143; and to the St. John, Vol. IV. p. 85.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]