certain expressions of frangibility, irregular
accumulation, and easy resting of one block upon another, together with
some conditions of lichenous or mossy texture, modern stone-painting is
far beyond the ancient; for these are just the characters which first
strike the eye, and enable the foreground to maintain its picturesque
influence, without inviting careful examination. The mediaeval painter,
on the other hand, not caring for this picturesque general effect, nor
being in anywise familiar with mountain scenery, perceived in stones,
when he was forced to paint them, eminently the characters which they
had in common with figures; that is to say, their curved outlines,
rounded surfaces, and varieties of delicate color, and, accordingly, was
somewhat too apt to lose their angular and fragmentary character in a
series of muscular lines resembling those of an anatomical preparation;
for, although in large rocks the cleavable or frangible nature was the
thing that necessarily struck him most, the pebbles under his feet were
apt to be oval or rounded in the localities of almost all the important
schools of Italy. In Lombardy, the mass of the ground is composed of
nothing but Alpine gravel, consisting of rolled oval pebbles, on the
average about six inches long by four wide--awkward building materials,
yet used in ingenious alternation with the bricks in all the lowland
Italian fortresses. Besides this universal rotundity, the qualities of
stones which rendered them valuable to the lapidary were forced on the
painter's attention by the familiar arts of inlaying and mosaic. Hence,
in looking at a pebble, his mind was divided between its roundness and
its veins; and Leonardo covers the shelves of rock under the feet of St.
Anne with variegated agates; while Mantegna often strews the small
stones about his mountain caves in a polished profusion, as if some
repentant martyr princess had been just scattering her caskets of
pearls into the dust.

Sec. 4. Some years ago, as I was talking of the curvilinear forms in a
piece of rock to one of our academicians, he said to me, in a somewhat
despondent accent, "If you look for curves, you will see curves; if you
look for angles, you will see angles."

The saying appeared to me an infinitely sad one. It was the utterance of
an experienced man; and in many ways true, for one of the most singular
gifts, or, if abused, most singular weaknesses, of the human mind is its
power of persuadin