CHAPTER VI

THE CAMPO SANTO

104. THE summer’s work of 1844, so far from advancing the design of Modern Painters, had thrown me off it-first into fine botany, then into difficult geology, and lastly, as that entry about the Madonna shows, into a fit of figure study which meant much. It meant, especially, at last some looking into ecclesiastical history,-some notion of the merit of fourteenth-century painting, and the total abandonment of Rubens and Rembrandt for the Venetian school. Which, the reader will please observe, signified not merely the advance in sense of colour, but in perception of truth and modesty in light and shade. And on getting home, I felt that in the cyclone of confused new knowledge, this was the thing first to be got firm.

Scarcely any book writing was done that winter,-and there are no diaries;¹ but, for the first time, I took up Turner’s Liber Studiorum instead of engravings; mastered its principles, practised its method, and by spring-time in 1845 was able to study from nature accurately in full chiaroscuro, with a good frank power over the sepia tinting.

I must have read also, that winter, Rio’s Poésie Chrétienne,² and Lord Lindsay’s introduction to his Christian Art.³ And perceiving thus, in some degree, what a blind bat and puppy I had been, all through Italy, determined that at least I must see Pisa and Florence again before writing another word of Modern Painters.

¹ [Some idea of his thoughts and occupations is given, however, in a letter to Liddell of October 12, 1844: see Vol. III. p. 669.]

² [For notices of this book, see Vol. IV. pp. xxiii., 189 n.]

³ [Here (as again in § 116) Ruskin’s memory is at fault, for Lord Lindsay’s book was not published till 1847: see Vol. XII. pp. 169, 193, and Vol. VII. p. 264.]

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