and Turner--have ever painted a fragment of good landscape.
In missal painting exquisite figure-drawing is frequent, and landscape
backgrounds in late works are elaborate; but I only know thoroughly
good landscape in one book; and I have examined--I speak
deliberately--thousands.

11. For one thing, the passion is necessary for the mere quantity of
design. In good art, whether painting or sculpture, I have again and
again told you every touch is necessary and beautifully intended. Now
it falls within the compass of ordinary application to place rightly
all the folds of drapery or gleams of light on a chain, or ornaments
in a pattern; but when it comes to placing every leaf in a tree, the
painter gets tired. Here, for instance, is a little bit of Sandro
Botticelli background; I have purposefully sketched it in the
slightest way, that you might see how the entire value of it depends
on thoughtful placing. There is no texture aimed at, no completion,
scarcely any variety of light and shade; but by mere care in the
placing the thing is beautiful. Well, every leaf, every cloud, every
touch is placed with the same care in great work; and when this is
done as by John Bellini in the picture of Peter Martyr,[2] or as it
was by Titian in the great Peter Martyr, with every leaf in a wood he
gets tired. I know no other such landscape in the world as that is, or
as that was.

[Footnote 2: National Gallery, No. 812.]

12. Perhaps you think on such conditions you never can paint landscape
at all. Well, great landscape certainly not; but pleasant and useful
landscape, yes; provided only the passion you bring to it be true and
pure. The degree of it you cannot command; the genuineness of it you
can--yes, and the depth of source also. Tintoret's passion may be like
the Reichenbach, and yours only like a little dripping Holywell, but
both equally from deep springs.

13. But though the virtue of all painting (and similarly of sculpture
and every other art) is in passion, I must not have you begin by
working passionately. The discipline of youth, in all its work, is in
cooling and curbing itself, as the discipline of age is in warming and
urging itself; you know the Bacchic chorus of old men in Plato's
_Laws_. To the end of life, indeed, the strength of a man's finest
nature is shown in due continence; but that is because the finest
natures remain young to the death: and for you the first thing you
have to do in art (as in life) is to