een any other
instance of Salvator's painting water with any care, it is usually as
conventional as the rest of his work, yet conventionalism is perhaps
more tolerable in water-painting than elsewhere; and if his trees and
rocks had been good, the rivers might have been generally accepted
without objection.

Sec. 22. Nicholas Poussin.

The merits of Poussin as a sea or water painter may, I think, be
sufficiently determined by the Deluge in the Louvre, where the breaking
up of the fountains of the deep is typified by the capsizing of a wherry
over a weir.

In the outer porch of St. Mark's at Venice, among the mosaics on the
roof, there is a representation of the deluge. The ground is dark blue;
the rain is represented in bright white undulating parallel stripes;
between these stripes is seen the massy outline of the ark, a bit
between each stripe, very dark and hardly distinguishable from the sky;
but it has a square window with a bright golden border, which glitters
out conspicuously, and leads the eye to the rest--the sea below is
almost concealed with dead bodies.

On the font of the church of San Frediano at Lucca, there is a
representation of--possibly--the Israelites and Egyptians in the Red
Sea. The sea is typified by undulating bands of stone, each band
composed of three plies (almost the same type is to be seen in the
glass-painting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as especially at
Chartres). These bands would perhaps be hardly felt as very aqueous, but
for the fish which are interwoven with them in a complicated manner,
their heads appearing at one side of every band, and their tails at the
other.

Both of these representatives of deluge, archaic and rude as they are, I
consider better, more suggestive, more inventive, and more natural,
than Poussin's. Indeed, this is not saying anything very depreciatory,
as regards the St. Mark's one, for the glittering of the golden window
through the rain is wonderfully well conceived, and almost deceptive,
looking as if it had just caught a gleam of sunlight on its panes, and
there is something very sublime in the gleam of this light above the
floating corpses. But the other instance is sufficiently grotesque and
imperfect, and yet, I speak with perfect seriousness, it is, I think,
very far preferable to Poussin's.

On the other hand, there is a just medium between the meanness and
apathy of such a conception as his, and the extravagance, still more
cont