the picture. This mass of light is
as interesting by its composition as by its intensity. The cicerone who
escorts the stranger round the sacristy in the course of five minutes
and allows him some forty seconds for the contemplation of a picture
which the study of six months would not entirely fathom, directs his
attention very carefully to the "bell' effetto di prospettivo," the
whole merit of the picture being, in the eyes of the intelligent public,
that there is a long table in it, one end of which looks further off
than the other; but there is more in the "bell' effetto di prospettivo"
than the observance of the common law of optics. The table is set in a
spacious chamber, of which the windows at the end let in the light from
the horizon, and those in the side wall the intense blue of an Eastern
sky. The spectator looks all along the table, at the farther end of
which are seated Christ and the Madonna, the marriage guests on each
side of it,--on one side men, on the other women; the men are set with
their backs to the light, which passing over their heads and glancing
slightly on the table-cloth, falls in full length along the line of
young Venetian women, who thus fill the whole centre of the picture with
one broad sunbeam, made up of fair faces and golden hair. Close to the
spectator a woman has risen in amazement, and stretches across the table
to show the wine in her cup to those opposite; her dark red dress
intercepts and enhances the mass of gathered light. It is rather
curious, considering the subject of the picture, that one cannot
distinguish either the bride or the bride-groom; but the fourth figure
from the Madonna in the line of women, who wears a white head-dress of
lace and rich chains of pearls in her hair, may well be accepted for the
former, and I think that between her and the woman on the Madonna's left
hand the unity of the line of women is intercepted by a male figure: be
this as it may, this fourth female face is the most beautiful, as far as
I recollect, that occurs in the works of the painter, with the
exception only of the Madonna in the _Flight into Egypt_. It is an ideal
which occurs indeed elsewhere in many of his works, a face at once dark
and delicate, the Italian cast of feature moulded with the softness and
childishness of English beauty some half a century ago; but I have never
seen the ideal so completely worked out by the master. The face may best
be described as one of the purest a