eed they fly, the angel and the human
creatures; the angel wrapt in an orb of light floats on, stooped forward
in his fierce flight, and does not touch the ground; the chastised
creatures rush before him in abandoned terror. All this might have been
invented by another, though in other hands it would assuredly have been
offensive; but one circumstance which completes the story could have
been thought of or dared by none but Tintoret. The Angel casts a SHADOW
before him towards Adam and Eve.

Now that a globe of light should cast a shadow is a license, as far as
mere optical matters are concerned, of the most audacious kind. But how
beautiful is the circumstance in its application here, showing that the
angel, who is light to all else around him, is darkness to those whom he
is commissioned to banish forever.

I have before noticed the license of Rubens in making his horizon an
oblique line. His object is to carry the eye to a given point in the
distance. The road winds to it, the clouds fly at it, the trees nod to
it, a flock of sheep scamper towards it, a carter points his whip at it,
his horses pull for it, the figures push for it, and the horizon slopes
to it. If the horizon had been horizontal, it would have embarrassed
everything and everybody.

In Turner's Pas de Calais there is a buoy poised on the ridge of a near
wave. It casts its reflection vertically down the flank of the wave,
which slopes steeply. I cannot tell whether this is a license or a
mistake; I suspect the latter, for the same thing occurs not
unfrequently in Turner's seas; but I am almost certain that it would
have been done wilfully in this case, even had the mistake been pointed
out, for the vertical line is necessary to the picture, and the eye is
so little accustomed to catch the real bearing of the reflections on the
slopes of waves that it does not feel the fault.

Sec. 17. Various licenses or errors in water painting of Claude, Cuyp,
Vandevelde.

In one of the smaller rooms of the Uffizii at Florence, off the Tribune,
there are two so-called Claudes; one a pretty wooded landscape, I think
a copy, the other a marine with architecture, very sweet and genuine.
The sun is setting at the side of the picture, it casts a long stream of
light upon the water. This stream of light is oblique, and comes from
the horizon, where it is under the sun, to a point near the centre of
the picture. If this had been done as a license, it would be