l after his boyish ramble among the
Calabrian hills; and I do not recollect any instance of a piece of his
bough-drawing which is not palpably and demonstrably a made-up phantasm
of the studio, the proof derivable from this illegitimate tapering being
one of the most convincing. The painter is always visibly embarrassed to
reduce the thick boughs to spray, and _feeling_ (for Salvator naturally
had acute feeling for truth) that the bough was wrong when it tapered
suddenly, he accomplishes its diminution by an impossible protraction;
throwing out shoot after shoot until his branches straggle all across
the picture, and at last disappear unwillingly where there is no room
for them to stretch any farther. The consequence is, that whatever
leaves are put upon such boughs have evidently no adequate support,
their power of leverage is enough to uproot the tree; or if the boughs
are left bare, they have the look of the long tentacula of some
complicated marine monster, or of the waving endless threads of bunchy
sea-weed, instead of the firm, upholding, braced, and bending grace of
natural boughs. I grant that this is in a measure done by Salvator from
a love of ghastliness, and that in certain scenes it is in a sort
allowable; but it is in a far greater degree done from pure ignorance of
tree structure, as is sufficiently proved by the landscape of the Pitti
palace, Peace burning the arms of War; where the spirit of the scene is
intended to be quite other than ghastly, and yet the tree branches show
the usual errors in an extraordinary degree; every one of their
arrangements is impossible, and the trunk of the tree could not for a
moment support the foliage it is loaded with. So also in the pictures of
the Guadagni palace. And even where the skeleton look of branches is
justifiable or desirable, there is no occasion for any violation of
natural laws. I have seen more spectral character in the real limbs of a
blasted oak, than ever in Salvator's best monstrosities; more horror is
to be obtained by right combination of inventive line, than by drawing
tree branches as if they were wing-bones of a pterodactyle. All
departure from natural forms to give fearfulness is mere Germanism; it
is the work of fancy, not of imagination,[72] and instantly degrades
whatever it affects to third-rate level. There is nothing more marked in
truly great men, than their power of being dreadful without being false
or licentious. In Tintoret's Murder of