t off at the
shoulder, run through the other hand into the breast with a lance.[43]
And manifold instances of the same feeling are to be found in the
repainting of the various representations of the Inferno, so common
through Italy, more especially that of Orcagna's in the Campo Santo,
wherein the few figures near the top that yet remain untouched are grand
in their severe drawing and expressions of enduring despair, while those
below, repainted by Solazzino, depend for their expressiveness upon
torrents of blood; so in the Inferno of Santa Maria Novella, and of the
Arena chapel, not to speak of the horrible images of the Passion, by
which vulgar Romanism has always striven to excite the languid
sympathies of its untaught flocks. Of which foulness let us reason no
farther, the very image and memory of them being pollution, only
noticing this, that there has always been a morbid tendency in Romanism
towards the contemplation of bodily pain, owing to the attribution of
saving power to it, which, like every other moral error, has been of
fatal effect in art, leaving not altogether without the stain and blame
of it, even the highest of the pure Romanist painters; as Fra Angelico,
for instance, who, in his Passion subjects, always insists weakly on the
bodily torture, and is unsparing of blood; and Giotto, though his
treatment is usually grander, as in that Crucifixion over the door of
the Convent of St. Mark's, where the blood is hardly actual, but issues
from the feet in a typical and conventional form, and becomes a crimson
cord which is twined strangely beneath about a skull; only that which
these holy men did to enhance, even though in their means mistaken, the
impression and power of the sufferings of Christ, or of his saints, is
always in a measure noble, and to be distinguished with all reverence
from the abominations of the irreligious painters following, as of
Camillo Procaccini, in one of his martyrdoms in the Gallery of the
Brera, at Milan, and other such, whose names may be well spared to the
reader.

Sec. 31. Of passion generally.

Sec. 32. It is never to be for itself exhibited--at least on the face.

These, then, are the four passions whose presence in any degree on the
human face is degradation. But of all passion it is to be generally
observed, that it becomes ignoble either when entertained respecting
unworthy objects, and therefore shallow or unjustifiable, or when of
impious violence, and so destruc