ision which they alone can behold. And
recollecting that fresco of Signorelli's, you feel as if this vast, tall
canvas at S. Maria dell' Orto, where topple and welter the dead and the
quick, were merely so much rhetorical rhodomontade by the side of the
old hymn of the Last Day--

"Mors stupebit et natura
Quum resurget creatura
Judicanti responsura."

V

Again, in the chaos of newly-developing artistic means, and of struggling
individual imaginations, we get once more, at the end of the eighteenth
century, to what we found at the beginning of the fourteenth: the art
that does not show, but merely speaks. We find it in what, of all things,
are the apparently most different to the quiet and placid outline
illustration of the Giottesque: in the terrible portfolio of Goya's
etchings, called the Disasters of War. Like Duerer and Rembrandt, the
great Spaniard is at once extremely realistic and extremely imaginative.
But his realism means fidelity, not to the real aspect of things, of
the _thing in itself_, so to speak, but to the way in which things will
appear to the spectator at a given moment. He isolates what you might
call a case, separating it from the multitude of similar cases, giving
you one execution where several must be going on, one firing off of
cannon, one or two figures in a burning or a massacre; and his technique
conduces thereunto, blurring a lot, rendering only the outline and
gesture, and that outline and gesture frequently so momentary as to be
confused. But he is real beyond words in his reproduction of the way in
which such dreadful things must stamp themselves upon the mind. They are
isolated, concentrated, distorted: the multiplicity of horrors making
the perceiving mind more sensitive, morbid as from opium eating, and
thus making the single impression, which excludes all the rest, more vivid
and tremendous than, without that unconsciously perceived rest, it could
possibly be. Nay, more, these scenes are not merely rather such as they
were recollected than as they really were seen; they are such as they
were recollected in the minds and feelings of peasants and soldiers, of
people who could not free their attention to arrange all these matters
logically, to give them their relative logical value. The slaughtering
soldiers--Spaniards, English, or French--of the Napoleonic period become
in his plates Turks, Saracens, huge vague things in half Oriental
costumes, whiskered, almost turbaned in