you shall be led to see only beauty
or joy;--never vileness, vice, or pain.

Those are the four essentials of the greatest art. I repeat them, they
are easily learned.

1. Faultless and permanent workmanship.

2. Serenity in state or action.

3. The Face principal, not the body.

4. And the Face free from either vice or pain.

221. It is not possible, of course, always literally to observe the
second condition, that there shall be quiet action or none; but
Bellini's treatment of violence in action you may see exemplified in a
notable way in his St. Peter Martyr. The soldier is indeed striking the
sword down into his breast; but in the face of the Saint is only
resignation, and faintness of death, not pain--that of the executioner
is impassive; and, while a painter of the later schools would have
covered breast and sword with blood, Bellini allows no stain of it; but
pleases himself by the most elaborate and exquisite painting of a soft
crimson feather in the executioner's helmet.

222. Now the changes brought about by Michael Angelo--and permitted, or
persisted in calamitously, by Tintoret--are in the four points these:

1st. Bad workmanship.

The greater part of all that these two men did is hastily and
incompletely done; and all that they did on a large scale in
color is in the best qualities of it perished.

2d. Violence of transitional action.

The figures flying,--falling,--striking,--or biting. Scenes of
Judgment,--battle,--martyrdom,--massacre; anything that is in
the acme of instantaneous interest and violent gesture. They
cannot any more trust their public to care for anything but
that.

3d. Physical instead of mental interest. The body, and its
anatomy, made the entire subject of interest: the face,
shadowed, as in the Duke Lorenzo,[43] unfinished, as in the
Twilight, or entirely foreshortened, backshortened, and
despised, among labyrinths of limbs, and mountains of sides and
shoulders.

4th. Evil chosen rather than good. On the face itself, instead
of joy or virtue, at the best, sadness, probably pride, often
sensuality, and always, by preference, vice or agony as the
subject of thought. In the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, and
the Last Judgment of Tintoret, it is the wrath of the Dies Irae,
not its justice, in which they delight; and their only
passionate thought of the com