ement of truth which has been attempted by the moderns. I
have said in the chapter on symmetry in the second volume, that all
landscape grandeur vanishes before that of Titian and Tintoret; and this
is true of whatever these two giants touched;--but they touched little.
A few level flakes of chestnut foliage; a blue abstraction of hill forms
from Cadore or the Euganeans; a grand mass or two of glowing ground and
mighty herbage, and a few burning fields of quiet cloud were all they
needed; there is evidence of Tintoret's having felt more than this, but
it occurs only in secondary fragments of rock, cloud, or pine, hardly
noticed among the accumulated interest of his human subject. From the
window of Titian's house at Venice, the chain of the Tyrolese Alps is
seen lifted in spectral power above the tufted plain of Treviso; every
dawn that reddens the towers of Murano lights also a line of pyramidal
fires along that colossal ridge; but there is, so far as I know, no
evidence in any of the master's works of his ever having beheld, much
less felt, the majesty of their burning. The dark firmament and saddened
twilight of Tintoret are sufficient for their end; but the sun never
plunges behind San Giorgio in Aliga without such retinue of radiant
cloud, such rest of zoned light on the green lagoon, as never received
image from his hand. More than this, of that which they loved and
rendered much is rendered conventionally; by noble conventionalities
indeed, but such nevertheless as would be inexcusable if the landscape
became the principal subject instead of an accompaniment. I will
instance only the San Pietro Martire, which, if not the most perfect, is
at least the most popular of Titian's landscapes; in which, to obtain
light on the flesh of the near figures the sky is made as dark as deep
sea, the mountains are laid in with violent and impossible blue, except
one of them on the left, which, to connect the distant light with the
foreground, is thrown into light relief, unexplained by its materials,
unlikely in its position, and in its degree impossible under any
circumstances.

Sec. 7. Causes of its want of influence on subsequent schools.

I do not instance these as faults in the picture: there are no works of
very powerful color which are free from conventionality concentrated or
diffused, daring or disguised; but as the conventionality of this whole
picture is mainly thrown into the landscape, it is necessary, while we
a