ken away;--we do not seriously miss them
either from the Three Fates, the Ilissus, or the Torso of the Vatican.
The face of the Theseus is so far destroyed by time that you can form
little conception of its former aspect. But it is otherwise in Christian
sculpture. Strike the head off even the rudest statue in the porch of
Chartres and you will greatly miss it--the harm would be still worse to
Donatello's St. George:--and if you take the heads from a statue of
Mino, or a painting of Angelico--very little but drapery will be
left;--drapery made redundant in quantity and rigid in fold, that it may
conceal the forms, and give a proud or ascetic reserve to the actions,
of the bodily frame. Bellini and his school, indeed, rejected at once
the false theory, and the easy mannerism, of such religious design; and
painted the body without fear or reserve, as, in its subordination,
honorable and lovely. But the inner heart and fire of it are by them
always first thought of, and no action is given to it merely to show its
beauty. Whereas the great culminating masters, and chiefly of these,
Tintoret, Correggio, and Michael Angelo, delight in the body for its own
sake, and cast it into every conceivable attitude, often in violation of
all natural probability, that they may exhibit the action of its
skeleton, and the contours of its flesh. The movement of a hand with
Cima or Bellini expresses mental emotion only; but the clustering and
twining of the fingers of Correggio's S. Catherine is enjoyed by the
painter just in the same way as he would enjoy the twining of the
branches of a graceful plant, and he compels them into intricacies which
have little or no relation to St. Catherine's mind. In the two drawings
of Correggio (S. 13 and 14) it is the rounding of limbs and softness of
foot resting on cloud which are principally thought of in the form of
the Madonna; and the countenance of St. John is foreshortened into a
section, that full prominence may be given to the muscles of his arms
and breast.

So in Tintoret's drawing of the Graces (S. 22), he has entirely
neglected the individual character of the Goddesses, and been content to
indicate it merely by attributes of dice or flower, so only that he may
sufficiently display varieties of contour in thigh and shoulder.

230. Thus far, then, the Greeks, Correggio, Michael Angelo, Raphael in
his latter design, and Tintoret in his scenic design (as opposed to
portraiture), are at one. But