]
[Footnote 4:
"Landscape with setting Sun,"--Lord Farnborough's picture.--ED.]
* * * * *
The Italian masters differ from the Dutch in this--that in their pictures
ages are perfectly ideal. The infant that Raffael's Madonna holds in her
arms cannot be guessed of any particular age; it is Humanity in infancy.
The babe in the manger in a Dutch painting is a fac-simile of some real
new-born bantling; it is just like the little rabbits we fathers have all
seen with some dismay at first burst.
* * * * *
Carlo Dolce's representations of our Saviour are pretty, to be sure; but
they are too smooth to please me. His Christs are always in sugar-candy.
* * * * *
That is a very odd and funny picture of the Connoisseurs
at Rome[1] by Reynolds.
[Footnote 1:
"Portraits of distinguished Connoisseurs painted at Rome,"--belonging to
Lord Burlington.--ED.]
* * * * *
The more I see of modern pictures, the more I am convinced that the ancient
art of painting is gone, and something substituted for it,--very pleasing,
but different, and different in kind and not in degree only. Portraits by
the old masters,--take for example the pock-fritten lady by Cuyp[1]--are
pictures of men and women: they fill, not merely occupy, a space; they
represent individuals, but individuals as types of a species.
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