.
This is the secret of those wonderful inventions of his, which do not
take our breath away like Michelangelo's or Rembrandt's, but seem at the
moment the one and only right rendering of the subject: the Liberation
of St. Peter, Heliodorus, Ezechiel, and the whole series of magnificent
Old Testament stories on the ceiling of the Loggie. In Raphael we see
the perfect fulfilment of the Giottesque programme: he can do all that
the first theme inventors required for the carrying out of their ideas;
and therefore he can have new, entirely new, themes. Raphael furnishes,
for the first time since Giotto, an almost complete set of pictorial
interpretations of Scripture.

We are now, as we proceed in the sixteenth century, in the region where
new artistic powers admit of new imaginative conceptions on the part
of the individual. We gain immensely by the liberation from the old
tradition, but we lose immensely also. We get the benefit of the fancy
and feelings of this individual, but we are at the mercy, also, of his
stupidity and vulgarity. Of this the great examples are Tintoretto, and
after him Velasquez and Rembrandt. Of Tintoret I would speak later,
for he is eminently the artist in whom the gain and the loss are most
typified, and perhaps most equally distributed, and because, therefore,
he contrasts best with the masters anterior to Raphael.

The new powers in Velasquez and Rembrandt were connected with the
problem of light, or rather, one might say, in the second case, of
darkness. This new faculty of seizing the beauties, momentary and not
inherent in the object, due to the various effects of atmosphere and
lighting up, added probably a good third to the pleasure-bestowing
faculty of art; it was the beginning of a kind of democratic movement
against the stern domination of such things as were privileged in shape
and colour. A thousand things, ugly or unimaginative in themselves, a
plain face, a sallow complexion, an awkward gesture, a dull arrangement
of lines, could be made delightful and suggestive. A wet yard, a pail
and mop, and a servant washing fish under a pump could become, in the
hands of Peter de Hoogh, and thanks to the magic of light and shade, as
beautiful and interesting in their way as a swirl of angels and lilies
by Botticelli. But this redemption of the vulgar was at the expense,
as I have elsewhere pointed out, of a certain growing callousness to
vulgarity. What holds good as to the actual artistic, v