faith, and the purest Romanist practice.

Sec. 16. Of course the inquiry into this branch of the hill influence is
partly complicated with that into its operation on domestic habits and
personal character, of which hereafter: but there is one curious witness
borne to the general truth of the foregone conclusions, by an apparently
slight, yet very significant circumstance in art. We have seen, in the
preceding volume, how difficult it was sometimes to distinguish between
honest painters, who truly chose to paint sacred subjects because they
loved them, and the affected painters, who took sacred subjects for
their own pride's sake, or for merely artistical delight. Amongst other
means of arriving at a conclusion in this matter, there is one helpful
test which may be applied to their various works, almost as easily and
certainly as a foot-rule could be used to measure their size; and which
remains an available test down to the date of the rise of the Claudesque
landscape schools. Nearly all the genuine religious painters use _steep
mountain distances_. All the merely artistical ones, or those of
intermediate temper, in proportion as they lose the religious element,
use flat or simply architectural distances. Of course the law is liable
to many exceptions, chiefly dependent on the place of birth and early
associations of painters; but its force is, I think, strongly shown in
this;--that, though the Flemish painters never showed any disposition to
paint, _for its own sake_, other scenery than of their own land (compare
Vol. III. Chap. XIII. Sec. 20), the sincerely religious ones continually
used Alpine distances, bright with snow. In like manner Giotto,
Perugino, Angelico, the young Raphael, and John Bellini, always, if,
with any fitness to their subject, they can introduce them, use craggy
or blue mountain distances, and this with definite expression of love
towards them; Leonardo, conventionally, as feeling they were necessary
for his sacred subjects, while yet his science and idealism had
destroyed his mountain sincerity; Michael Angelo, wholly an artist, and
Raphael in later years, show no love of mountains whatever, while the
relative depths of feeling in Tintoret, Titian, and Veronese, are
precisely measurable by their affection to mountains. Tintoret, though
born in Venice, yet, because capable of the greatest reaches of feeling,
is the first of the old painters who ever drew mountain detail
rightly:[109] Titian, tho