, conducted by a wooden trough from the rock into an
evaporating-house where it is received in a pan, under which he has
painted scarlet flames of fire with singular skill; and the rock out of
which the brine flows is in its general cleavages the best I ever saw
drawn by mediaeval art. But it is carefully wrought to the resemblance of
a grotesque human head.

[Illustration: FIG. 86.]

Sec. 36. This bolder quaintness of the missals is very slightly modified in
religious paintings of the period. Fig. 86, by Cima da Conegliano, a
Venetian, No. 173 in the Louvre, compared with Fig. 3 of Plate +10+
(Flemish), will show the kind of received tradition about rocks current
throughout Europe. Claude takes up this tradition, and, merely making
the rocks a little clumsier, and more weedy, produces such conditions as
Fig. 87 (Liber Veritatis, No. 91, with Fig. 84 above); while the
orthodox door or archway at the bottom is developed into the Homeric
cave, shaded with laurels, and some ships are put underneath it, or seen
through it, at impossible anchorages.

[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. H. Le Keux
41. The Rocks of Arona.]

Sec. 37. Fig. 87 is generally characteristic, not only of Claude, but of
the other painters of the Renaissance period, because they were all
equally fond of representing this overhanging of rocks with buildings on
the top, and weeds drooping into the air over the edge, always thinking
to get sublimity by exaggerating the projection, and never able to feel
or understand the simplicity of real rock lines; not that they were in
want of examples around them: on the contrary, though the main idea was
traditional, the modifications of it are always traceable to the lower
masses of limestone and tufa which skirt the Alps and Apennines, and
which have, in reality, long contracted habits of nodding over their
bases; being, both by Virgil and Homer, spoken of always as "hanging" or
"over-roofed" rocks. But then they have a way of doing it rather
different from the Renaissance ideas of them. Here, for instance (Plate
+41+), is a real hanging rock, with a castle on the top of it, and
([Greek: katerephes]) laurel, all plain fact, from Arona, on the Lago
Maggiore; and, I believe, the reader, though we have not as yet said
anything about lines, will at once, on comparing it with Fig. 87,
recognize the difference between the true parabolic flow of the
rock-lines and the humpbacked deformity of Claude; and,