But these, whose names I have engraved, have something to
say--generally much,--either about the future life of man, or about his
gods. They are therefore, literally, seers or prophets. False prophets,
it may be, or foolish ones; of that you must judge; but you must read
before you can judge; and read (or hear) them consistently; for you
don't know them till you have heard them out. But with Sir Joshua, or
Titian, one portrait is as another: it is here a pretty lady, there a
great lord; but speechless, all;--whereas, with these twenty-five men,
each picture or statue is not merely another person of a pleasant
society, but another chapter of a Sibylline book.

50. For this reason, then, I do not want Sir Joshua or Velasquez in my
defined group; and for my present purpose, I can spare from it even four
others:--namely, three who have _too_ special gifts, and must each be
separately studied--Correggio, Carpaccio, Tintoret;--and one who has no
special gift, but a balanced group of many--Cima. This leaves twenty-one
for classification, of whom I will ask you to lay hold thus. You must
continually have felt the difficulty caused by the names of centuries
not tallying with their years;--the year 1201 being the first of the
thirteenth century, and so on. I am always plagued by it myself, much as
I have to think and write with reference to chronology; and I mean for
the future, in our art chronology, to use as far as possible a different
form of notation.

51. In my diagram the vertical lines are the divisions of tens of years;
the thick black lines divide the centuries. The horizontal lines, then,
at a glance, tell you the length and date of each artist's life. In one
or two instances I cannot find the date of birth; in one or two more,
of death; and the line indicates then only the ascertained[J] period
during which the artist worked.

And, thus represented, you see nearly all their lives run through the
year of a new century; so that if the lines representing them were
needles, and the black bars of the years 1300, 1400, 1500 were magnets,
I could take up nearly all the needles by lifting the bars.

52. I will actually do this, then, in three other simple diagrams. I
place a rod for the year 1300 over the lines of life, and I take up all
it touches. I have to drop Niccola Pisano, but I catch five. Now, with
my rod of 1400, I have dropped Orcagna indeed, but I again catch five.
Now, with my rod of 1500, I indeed drop Filip