cks and water, among the clutching, gigantic men, the huge, full-bosomed
woman, tosses a frightful half-fleshed carcass, grass still growing from
his finger tips, his grinning skull, covered half with hair and half
with weeds, greenish and mouldering: a sinner still green in earth and
already arising.

[Footnote 12: How peccable is the individual imagination, unchastened
by tradition! I find among the illustrations of Mr. Berenson's very
valuable monograph on Lotto, a most curious instance in point. This
psychological, earnest painter has been betrayed, by his morbid
nervousness of temper, into making the starting of a cat into the
second most important incident in his Annunciation.]

A wonderful picture: a marvellous imaginative mind, with marvellous
imaginative means at his command. Yet, let us ask ourselves, what is the
value of the result? A magnificent display of attitudes and forms, a
sort of bravura ghastliness and impressiveness, which are in a sense
_barrocco_, reminding us of the wax plague models of Florence and of
certain poems of Baudelaire's. But of the feeling, the poetry of this
greatest of all scenes, what is there? And, standing before it, I think
instinctively of that chapel far off on the windswept Umbrian rock, with
Signorelli's Resurrection: a flat wall accepted as a flat wall, no
place, nowhere. A half-dozen groups, not closely combined. Colour
reduced to monochrome; light and shade nowhere, as nowhere also all
these devices of perspective. But in that simply treated fresco, with
its arrangement as simple as that of a vast antique bas-relief, there
is an imaginative suggestion far surpassing this of Tintoret's. The
breathless effort of the youths breaking through the earth's crust,
shaking their long hair and gasping; the stagger of those rising to
their feet; the stolidity, hand on hip, of those who have recovered
their body but not their mind, blinded by the light, deafened by the
trumpets of Judgment; the absolute self-abandonment of those who can
raise themselves no higher; the dull, awe-stricken look of those who
have found their companions, clasping each other in vague, weak wonder;
and further, under the two archangels who stoop downwards with the
pennons of their trumpets streaming in the blast, those figures who
beckon to the re-found beloved ones, or who shade their eyes and point
to a glory on the horizon, or who, having striven forward, sink on
their knees, overcome by a v