ighly imaginative mind touches them, it always realizes as far as may
be. Even Titian is content to use at the top of his St. Pietro Martiri,
the conventional, round, opaque cloud, which cuts his trees open like a
gouge; but Tintoret, in his picture of the Golden Calf, though compelled
to represent the Sinai under conventional form, in order that the
receiving of the tables might be seen at the top of it, yet so soon as
it is possible to give more truth, he is ready with it; he takes a grand
fold of horizontal cloud straight from the flanks of the Alps, and shows
the forests of the mountains through its misty volume, like sea-weed
through deep sea.[74] Nevertheless, when the realization is impossible,
bold symbolism is of the highest value, and in religious art, as we
shall presently see, even necessary, as of the rays of light in the
Titian woodcut of St. Francis before noticed; and sometimes the
attention is directed by some such strange form to the meaning of the
image, which may be missed if it remains in its natural purity, (as, I
suppose, few in looking at the Cephalus and Procris of Turner, note the
sympathy of those faint rays that are just drawing back and dying
between the trunks of the far-off forest, with the ebbing life of the
nymph; unless, indeed, they happen to recollect the same sympathy marked
by Shelley in the Alastor;) but the imagination is not shown in any such
modifications; however, in some cases they may be valuable (in the
Cephalus they would be utterly destructive,) and I note them merely in
consequence of their peculiar use in religious art, presently to be
examined.

Sec. 19. Exaggeration. Its laws and limits. First, in scale of
representation.

The last mode we have here to note in which the imagination regardant
may be expressed in art is exaggeration, of which, as it is the vice of
all bad artists, may be constantly resorted to without any warrant of
imagination, it is necessary to note strictly the admissible limits.

In the first place, a colossal statue is necessarily no more an
exaggeration of what it represents than a miniature is a diminution, it
need not be a representation of a giant, but a representation, on a
large scale, of a man; only it is to be observed, that as any plane
intersecting the cone of rays between us and the object, must receive an
image smaller than the object; a small image is rationally and
completely expressive of a larger one; but not a large of