so is
Bonifazio's. Titian's _supremacy_ above all the other Venetians, except
Tintoret and Veronese, consists in the firm truth of his portraiture,
and more or less masterly understanding of the nature of stones, trees,
men, or whatever else he took in hand to paint; so that, without some
correlative understanding in the spectator, Titian's work, in its
highest qualities, must be utterly dead and unappealing to him.

[Illustration: FIG. 109.]

[Illustration: FIG. 110.]

[Illustration: FIG. 111.]

[Illustration: FIG. 112.]

Sec. 10. I give one more example from the lower part of the same print
(Fig. 109), in which a stone, with an eddy round it, is nearly as well
drawn as it can be in the simple method of the early wood-engraving.
Perhaps the reader will feel its truth better by contrast with a
fragment or two of modern Idealism. Here, for instance (Fig. 110), is a
group of stones, highly entertaining in their variety of form, out of
the subject of "Christian vanquishing Apollyon," in the outlines to the
Pilgrim's Progress, published by the Art-Union, the idealism being here
wrought to a pitch of extraordinary brilliancy by the exciting nature
of the subject. Next (Fig. 111) is another poetical conception, one of
Flaxman's, representing the eddies and stones of the Pool of Envy
(Flaxman's Dante), which may be conveniently compared with the
Titianesque stones and streams. And, finally, Fig. 112 represents, also
on Flaxman's authority, those stones of an "Alpine" character, of which
Dante says that he

"Climbed with heart of proof the adverse steep."

It seems at first curious that every one of the forms that Flaxman has
chanced upon should be an impossible one--a form which a stone never
could assume: but this is the Nemesis of false idealism, and the
inevitable one.

Sec. 11. The chief incapacity in the modern work is not, however, so much
in its outline, though that is wrong enough, as in the total absence of
any effort to mark the surface roundings. It is not the _outline_ of a
stone, however true, that will make it solid or heavy; it is the
interior markings, and thoroughly understood perspectives of its sides.
In the opposite plate the upper two subjects are by Turner, foregrounds
out of the Liber Studiorum (Source of Arveron, and Ben Arthur); the
lower by Claude, Liber Veritatis, No. 5. I think the reader cannot but
feel that the blocks in the upper two subjects are massy and ponderous;
in the lower, w