anni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with
Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had caused
the temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works during
the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Now
the many who never knew the original are compelled to form their
estimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies and
prints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what the
picture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impression
may, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well be
more hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist by
a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has
conceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had the
good fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the
marvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselle
minutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished by
the robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,
in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiance
falling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its single
startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the
composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of
the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on
through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to
consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
pose, a gesture in prio