grapes and palm fruit above. Both are white; but both engraved so as to look thoroughly round.

54. All the other great chiaroscurists whom I named to you—Reynolds, Velasquez, and Titian—approached their shadow also on the safe side—from Venice: they always think of color first. But Turner had to work his way out of the dark Greek school up to Venice; he always thinks of his shadow first; and it held him in some degree fatally to the end. Those pictures which you all laughed at were not what you fancied, mad endeavors for color; they were agonizing Greek efforts to get light. He could have got color easily enough if he had rested in that; which I will show you in next Lecture. Still, he so nearly made himself a Venetian that, as opposed to the Dutch academical chiaroscurists, he is to be considered a Venetian altogether. And now I will show you, in a very simple subject, the exact opposition of the two schools.

55. Here is a study of swans, from a Dutch book of academical instruction in Rubens' time. It is a good and valuable book in many ways, and you are going to have some copies set you from it. But as a type of academical chiaroscuro it will give you most valuable lessons on the other side—of warning.

Here, then, is the academical Dutchman's notion of a swan. He has laboriously engraved every feather, and has rounded the bird into a ball; and has thought to himself that never swan has been so engraved before. But he has never with his Dutch eyes perceived two points in a swan which are vital to it: first, that it is white; and, secondly, that it is graceful. He has above all things missed the proportion, and necessarily therefore the bend of its neck.

56. Now take the colorist's view of the matter. To him the first main facts about the swan are that it is a white thing with black spots. Turner takes one brush in his right hand, with a little white in it; another in his left hand, with a little lampblack. He takes a piece of brown paper, works for about two minutes with his white brush, passes the black to his right hand, and works half a minute with that, and, there you are!

You would like to be able to draw two swans in two minutes and a half yourselves. Perhaps so, and I can show you how; but it will need twenty years' work all day long. First, in the meantime, you must draw them rightly, if it takes two hours instead of two minutes; and, above all, remember that they are black and white.

57. But farther: you see how intensely Turner felt precisely what the Fleming did not feel—the bend of the neck. Now this is not because Turner is a colorist, as opposed to the Fleming; but because he is a pure and highly trained Greek, as opposed to the Fleming's low Greek. Both, so far as they are aiming at form, are now working in the Greek school of Phidias; but Turner is true Greek, for he is thinking only of the truth about the swan; and De Wit is pseudo-Greek, for he is thinking not of the swan at all, but of his own Dutch self. And so he has ended in making, with his essentially piggish nature, this sleeping swan's neck as nearly as possible like a leg of pork.

That is the result of academical work, in the hands of a vulgar person.

58. And now I will ask you to look carefully at three more pictures in the London Exhibition.

The first, "The Nativity," by Sandro Botticelli.[10] It is an early work by him; but a quite perfect example of what the masters of the pure Greek school did in Florence.

One of the Greek main characters, you know, is to be απροσωπος, faceless. If you look first at the faces in this picture you will find them ugly—often without expression, always ill or carelessly drawn. The entire purpose of the picture is a mystic symbolism by motion and chiaroscuro. By motion, first. There is a dome of burning clouds in the upper heaven. Twelve angels half float, half dance, in a circle, round the lower vault of it. All their drapery is drifted so as to make you feel the whirlwind of their motion. They are seen by gleams of silvery or fiery light, relieved against an equally lighted blue of inimitable depth and loveliness.

It is impossible for you ever to see a more noble work of passionate Greek chiaroscuro—rejoicing in light. From this I should like you to go instantly to Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Burgomaster" (No. 77 in the Exhibition of Old Masters).

59. That is ignobly passionate chiaroscuro, rejoicing in darkness rather than light.

You cannot see a finer work by Rembrandt. It has all his power of rendering character, and the portrait is celebrated through the world. But it is entirely second-rate work. The character in the face is only striking to persons who like candle-light effects better than sunshine; any head by Titian has twice the character, and seen by daylight instead of gas. The rest of the picture is as false in light and shade as it is pretentious, made up chiefly of gleaming buttons in places where no light could possibly reach them; and of an embossed belt on the shoulder, which people think finely painted because it is all over lumps of color, not one of which was necessary. That embossed execution of Rembrandt's is just as much ignorant work as the embossed projecting jewels of Carlo Crivelli; a real painter never loads (see the Velasquez, No. 415 in the same exhibition).

60. Finally, from the Rembrandt go to the little Cima (No. 93), "St. Mark." Thus you have the Sandro Botticelli, of the noble Greek school in Florence; the Rembrandt, of the debased Greek school in Holland; and the Cima, of the pure color school of Venice.

The Cima differs from the Rembrandt, by being lovely; from the Botticelli, by being simple and calm. The painter does not desire the excitement of rapid movement, nor even the passion of beautiful light. But he hates darkness as he does death; and falsehood more than either. He has painted a noble human creature simply in clear daylight; not in rapture, nor yet in agony. He is dressed neither in a rainbow, nor bedraggled with blood. You are neither to be alarmed nor entertained by anything that is likely to happen to him. You are not to be improved by the piety of his expression, nor disgusted by its truculence. But there is more true mastery of light and shade, if your eye is subtle enough to see it, in the hollows and angles of the architecture and folds of the dress, than in all the etchings of Rembrandt put together. The unexciting color will not at first delight you; but its charm will never fail; and from all the works of variously strained and obtrusive power with which it is surrounded, you will find that you never return to it but with a sense of relief and of peace, which can only be given you by the tender skill which is wholly without pretense, without pride, and without error.