color has had
much share in rendering abortive the efforts of the modern German
religious painters, inducing their abandonment of its consecrating,
kindling, purifying power.

59. Lord Lindsay says, in a passage which we shall presently quote, that
the most sensual as well as the most religious painters have always
loved the brightest colors. Not so; no painters ever were more sensual
than the modern French, who are alike insensible to, and incapable of
color--depending altogether on morbid gradation, waxy smoothness of
surface, and lusciousness of line, the real elements of sensuality
wherever it eminently exists. So far from good color being sensual, it
saves, glorifies, and guards from all evil: it is with Titian, as with
all great masters of flesh-painting, the redeeming and protecting
element; and with the religious painters, it is a baptism with fire, an
under-song of holy Litanies. Is it in sensuality that the fair flush
opens upon the cheek of Francia's chanting angel,[8] until we think it
comes, and fades, and returns, as his voice and his harping are louder
or lower--or that the silver light rises upon wave after wave of his
lifted hair; or that the burning of the blood is seen on the unclouded
brows of the three angels of the Campo Santo, and of folded fire within
their wings; or that the hollow blue of the highest heaven mantles the
Madonna with its depth, and falls around her like raiment, as she sits
beneath the throne of the Sistine Judgment? Is it in sensuality that the
visible world about us is girded with an eternal iris?--is there
pollution in the rose and the gentian more than in the rocks that are
trusted to their robing?--is the sea-blue a stain upon its water, or
the scarlet spring of day upon the mountains less holy than their snow?
As well call the sun itself, or the firmament, sensual, as the color
which flows from the one, and fills the other.

60. We deprecate this rash assumption, however, with more regard to the
forthcoming portion of the history, in which we fear it may seriously
diminish the value of the author's account of the school of Venice, than
to the part at present executed. This is written in a spirit rather
sympathetic than critical, and rightly illustrates the feeling of early
art, even where it mistakes, or leaves unanalyzed, the technical modes
of its expression. It will be better, perhaps, that we confine our
attention to the accounts of the three men who may be considered