h painting depends in very
considerable measure on the intensity and warmth of its color. For if it
be opaque, and clay cold, and colorless, and devoid of all the radiance
and value of flesh, the lines of its true beauty, being severe and firm,
will become so hard in the loss of the glow and gradation by which
nature illustrates them, that the painter will be compelled to sacrifice
them for a luscious fulness and roundness, in order to give the
conception of flesh; which, being done, destroys ideality of form as of
color, and gives all over to lasciviousness of surface; showing also
that the painter sought for this, and this only, since otherwise he had
not taken a subject in which he knew himself compelled to surrender all
sources of dignity. Whereas, right splendor of color both bears out a
nobler severity of form, and is in itself purifying and cleansing, like
fire, furnishing also to the painter an excuse for the choice of his
subject, seeing that he may be supposed as not having painted it but in
the admiration of its abstract glory of color and form, and with no
unworthy seeking. But the mere power of perfect and glowing color will
in some sort redeem even a debased tendency of mind itself, as eminently
the case with Titian, who, though of little feeling, and often treating
base subjects, or elevated subjects basely, as in the disgusting
Magdalen of the Pitti palace, and that of the Barberigo at Venice, yet
redeems all by his glory of hue, so that he cannot paint altogether
coarsely; and with Giorgione, who had nobler and more serious intellect,
the sense of nudity is utterly lost, and there is no need nor desire of
concealment any more, but his naked figures move among the trees like
fiery pillars, and lie on the grass like flakes of sunshine.[41] With
the religious painters on the other hand, such nudity as they were
compelled to treat is redeemed as much by severity of form and hardness
of line as by color, so that generally their draped figures are
preferable, as in the Francia of our own gallery. But these, with
Michael Angelo and the Venetians, except Titian, form a great group,
pure in sight and aim, between which and all other schools by which the
nude has been treated, there is a gulf fixed, and all the rest, compared
with them, seem striving how best to illustrate that of Spenser.

"Of all God's works, which doe this worlde adorn,
There is no one more faire, and excellent