r own gallery, the spirit of the composition is solemn and
unbroken; it would have been a grand picture if the forms of the mass of
foliage on the right, and of the clouds in the centre, had not been
hopelessly unimaginative. The stormy wind of the picture of Dido and
Eneas blows loudly through its leaves, but the total want of invention
in the cloud forms bears it down beyond redemption. The foreground tree
of the La Riccia (compare Part II. Sec. VI. Chap. I., Sec. 6.) is another
characteristic instance of absolute nullity of imagination.

[Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. From a painting by Ruskin,
after Tintoret.]

Sec. 19. Its presence.--Salvator, Nicolo Poussin, Titian, Tintoret.

In Salvator, the imagination is vigorous, the composition dextrous and
clever, as in the St. Jerome of the Brera Gallery, the Diogenes of the
Pitti, and the pictures of the Guadagni palace. All are rendered
valueless by coarseness of feeling and habitual non-reference to nature.

All the landscape of Nicolo Poussin is imaginative, but the development
of the power in Tintoret and Titian is so unapproachably intense that
the mind unwillingly rests elsewhere. The four landscapes which occur to
me as the most magnificently characteristic are, first, the Flight into
Egypt, of the Scuola di San Rocco (Tintoret;) secondly, the Titian of
the Camuccini collection at Rome, with the figures by John Bellini;
thirdly, Titian's St. Jerome, in the Brera Gallery at Milan; and
fourthly, the St. Pietro Martire, which I name last, in spite of its
importance, because there is something unmeaning and unworthy of Titian
about the undulation of the trunks, and the upper part of it is
destroyed by the intrusion of some dramatic clouds of that species which
I have enough described in our former examination of the central cloud
region, Sec. 13.

I do not mean to set these four works above the rest of the landscape of
these masters; I name them only because the landscape is in them
prominent and characteristic. It would be well to compare with them the
other backgrounds of Tintoret in the Scuola, especially that of the
Temptation and the Agony in the Garden, and the landscape of the two
large pictures in the church of La Madonna dell' Orto.

Sec. 20. And Turner.

But for immediate and close illustration, it is perhaps best to refer to
a work more accessible, the Cephalus and Procris of Turner, in Liber
Studiorum.

I know of no landscape more pu