nning and ferocity with wicked human
thought and self-command, which Raphael has enshrined in that splendid
harmony of scarlet silk and crimson satin, and purple velvet and dull
white brocade, as the portraits of Leo X. and his cardinals Rossi and
Dei Medici.

The idealistic painter, accustomed to rely upon the intrinsic beauty
which he has hitherto been able to select or create; accustomed also to
think of form as something quite independent of the medium through which
it is seen, scarcely conscious of the existence of light and air in his
habit of concentrating all attention upon a figure placed, as it were,
in a sort of vacuum of indifference;--this idealistic artist is left
without any resources when bid to paint an ugly man or woman. With the
realistic artist, to whom the man or woman is utterly indifferent, to
whom the medium in which they are seen is everything, the case Is just
reversed: let him arrange his light, his atmospheric effect, and he will
work into their pattern no matter what plain or repulsive wretch. To
Velasquez the flaccid yellowish fair flesh, with its grey downy shadows,
the limp pale drab hair, which is grey in the light and scarcely
perceptibly blond in the shade, all this unhealthy, bloodless, feebly
living, effete mass of humanity called Philip IV. of Spain, shivering in
moral anaemia like some dog thorough bred into nothingness, becomes
merely the foundation for a splendid harmony of pale tints. Again, the
poor little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly
kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes
of an _auto da fe_, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the
dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an
abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly
dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal
strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, tinged
yellowish in the hair, bluish in the eyes and downy cheeks, pale red in
the lips and the rose in the hair; something to match which in beauty
you must think of some rarely seen veined and jaspered rainy twilight,
or opal-tinted hazy winter morning. Ugliness, nay, repulsiveness,
vanish, subdued into beauty, even as noxious gases may be subdued into
health-giving substances by some cunning chemist. The difference between
such portraits as these and the portraits by Raphael does not however
consist merely in