ny question of their mechanical
skill or manner, it must yet, I believe, be felt by the reader that, as
works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy
gates, a kind of Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in
all European schools of Art: perhaps a little too shrill and petulant in
the tone of it, but yet curiously resolute and steady in its triple
Fraternity, as of William of Burglen with his Melchthal and Stauffacher,
in the Grutli meadow, not wholly to be scorned by even the knightliest
powers of the Past.

We have indeed, since these pictures were first exhibited, become
accustomed to many forms both of pleasing and revolting innovation: but
consider, in those early times, how the pious persons who had always
been accustomed to see their Madonnas dressed in scrupulously folded and
exquisitely falling robes of blue, with edges embroidered in gold,--to
find them also, sitting under arcades of exquisitest architecture by
Bernini,--and reverently to observe them receive the angel's message
with their hands folded on their breasts in the most graceful positions,
and the missals they had been previously studying laid open on their
knees, (see my own outline from Angelico of the "Ancilla Domini," the
first plate of the fifth volume of _Modern Painters_);--consider, I
repeat, the shock to the feelings of all these delicately minded
persons, on being asked to conceive a Virgin waking from her sleep on a
pallet bed, in a plain room, startled by sudden words and ghostly
presence which she does not comprehend, and casting in her mind what
manner of Salutation this should be.

232. Again, consider, with respect to the second picture, how the
learned possessors of works of established reputation by the ancient
masters, classically catalogued as "landscapes with figures"; and who
held it for eternal, artistic law that such pictures should either
consist of a rock, with a Spanish chestnut growing out of the side of
it, and three banditti in helmets and big feathers on the top, or else
of a Corinthian temple, built beside an arm of the sea, with the Queen
of Sheba beneath, preparing for embarkation to visit Solomon,--the whole
properly toned down with amber varnish;--imagine the first
consternation, and final wrath, of these _cognoscenti_, at being asked
to contemplate, deliberately, and to the last rent of her ragged gown,
and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at
once to