in his
characteristic monkish heads, Angelico, and John Bellini, (note
especially the St. Christopher at the side of that mighty picture of St.
Jerome, at Venice,) and so of all: which practice had indeed a perilous
tendency for men of debased mind, who used models such as and where they
ought not, as Lippi and the corrupted Raffaelle; and is found often at
exceeding disadvantage among men who looked not at their models with
intellectual or loving penetration, but took the outside of them, or
perhaps took the evil and left the good, as Titian in that Academy study
at Venice which is called a St. John, and all workers whatsoever that I
know of, after Raffaelle's time, as Guido and the Caracci, and such
others: but it is nevertheless the necessary and sterling basis of all
ideal art, neither has any great man ever been able to do without it,
nor dreamed of doing without it even to the close of his days.

Sec. 15. Evil results of opposite practice in modern times.

And therefore there is not any greater sign of the utter want of
vitality and hopefulness in the schools of the present day than that
unhappy prettiness and sameness under which they mask, or rather for
which they barter, in their lentile thirst, all the birthright and power
of nature, which prettiness, wrought out and spun fine in the study, out
of empty heads, till it hardly betters the blocks on which dresses and
hair are tried in barbers' windows and milliners' books, cannot but be
revolting to any man who has his eyes, even in a measure, open to the
divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that he meets in
the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily, outreaching all efforts
of conception as all power of realization, were it Raffaelle's three
times over, even when the glory of the wedding garment is not there.

Sec. 16. The right use of the model.

So far, then, of the use of the model and the preciousness of it in all
art, from the highest to the lowest. But the use of the model is not
all. It must be used in a certain way, and on this choice of right or
wrong way all our ends are at stake, for the art, which is of no power
without the model, is of pernicious and evil power if the model be
wrongly used. What the right use is, has been at least established, if
not fully explained, in the argument by which we arrived at the general
principle.

The right ideal is to be reached, we have asserted, only by the
banishment of the immediate s