II. ROME 273

course all the great religious paintings, Perugino’s antechamber, Angelico’s chapel, and the whole lower story of the Sistine,¹ were entirely useless to me. No soul ever bade me look at them, and I had no sense yet to find them out for myself. Everybody told me to look at the roof of the Sistine chapel, and I liked it; but everybody also told me to look at Raphael’s Transfiguration, and Domenichino’s St. Jerome; which also I did attentively, as I was bid, and pronounced-without the smallest hesitation-Domenichino’s a bad picture, and Raphael’s an ugly one;² and thenceforward paid no more attention to what anybody said, (unless I happened to agree with it) on the subject of painting.

Sir Joshua’s verdict on the Stanze³ was a different matter, and I studied them long and carefully, admitting at once that there was more in them than I was the least able to see or understand, but decisively ascertaining that they could not give me the least pleasure, and contained a mixture of Paganism and Papacy wholly inconsistent with the religious instruction I had received in Walworth.

Having laid these foundations of future study, I never afterwards had occasion seriously to interfere with them. Domenichino is always spoken of-as long as, in deference to Sir Joshua,⁴ I name him at all-as an entirely bad painter; the Stanze, as never giving, or likely to give, anybody in a healthy state of mind,-that is to say, desirous of knowing what sibyls were really like, or how a Greek conceived the Muses,-the slightest pleasure; and the

¹ [It is not clear what Ruskin means by “Perugino’s antechamber”; the Anticamera delle Stanzi, originally painted by Raphael, contains paintings by G. da Udine (restored by C. Maratta). For Angelico’s frescoes in the Cappella di Niccolo V., see Vol. XV. p. 421 n., Vol. XVI. p. 272, Vol. XXI. p. 105; and for the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, Vol. XXII. p. 442.]

² [For Ruskin’s criticism of Domenichino, see Vol. III. p. 184 and the other places there noted. Of Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” though he often criticises it in the sense here indicated (see, e.g., Vol. V. pp. 82-83 n.), he elsewhere speaks as containing a summary of elementary theology; see Vol. XXIII. pp. 254-256.]

³ [See the Fifth of the Discourses.]

⁴ [See No. 76 of the Idler, where Sir Joshua enumerates “the purity of Domenichino” among the accepted commonplaces of criticism.]

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