which it is raised from
the darkness; and instead of their sweet and pearly peace, tempt them to
look for the strength of flame and coruscation of lightning, and flash
of sunshine on armour and on points of spears.

177. The noble painters take the lesson nobly, alike for gloom or flame.
Titian with deliberate strength, Tintoret with stormy passion, read it,
side by side. Titian deepens the hues of his Assumption, as of his
Entombment, into a solemn twilight; Tintoret involves his earth in coils
of volcanic cloud, and withdraws, through circle flaming above circle,
the distant light of Paradise. Both of them, becoming naturalist and
human, add the veracity of Holbein's intense portraiture to the glow and
dignity they had themselves inherited from the Masters of Peace: at the
same moment another, as strong as they, and in pure felicity of
art-faculty, even greater than they, but trained in a lower
school,--Velasquez,--produced the miracles of colour and
shadow-painting, which made Reynolds say of him, "What we all do with
labour, he does with ease;" and one more, Correggio, uniting the sensual
element of the Greek schools with their gloom, and their light with
their beauty, and all these with the Lombardic colour, became, as since
I think it has been admitted without question, the captain of the
painter's art as such. Other men have nobler or more numerous gifts, but
as a painter, master of the art of laying colour so as to be lovely,
Correggio is alone.

178. I said the noble men learned their lesson nobly. The base men also,
and necessarily, learn it basely. The great men rise from colour to
sunlight. The base ones fall from colour to candlelight. To-day, "non
ragioniam di lor," but let us see what this great change which perfects
the art of painting mainly consists in, and means. For though we are
only at present speaking of technical matters, every one of them, I can
scarcely too often repeat, is the outcome and sign of a mental
character, and you can only understand the folds of the veil, by those
of the form it veils.

179. The complete painters, we find, have brought dimness and mystery
into their method of colouring. That means that the world all round them
has resolved to dream, or to believe, no more; but to know, and to see.
And instantly all knowledge and sight are given, no more as in the
Gothic times, through a window of glass, brightly, but as through a
telescope-glass, darkly. Your cathedral wind