school makes the painting of all other schools seem flat, something laid
upon the surface of the canvas.

_Fromentin._

CCXIV

In Van Eyck there is more structure, more muscle, more blood in the
veins; hence the impressive virility of his faces and the strong style
of his pictures. Altogether he is a portrait-painter of Holbein's
kin--exact, shrewd, and with a gift of penetration that is almost cruel.
He sees things with more perfect rightness than Memling, and also in a
bigger and some summary way. The sensations which the aspect of things
evokes in him are more powerful; his feeling for their colour is more
intense; his palette has a fullness, a richness, a distinctness, which
Memling's has not. His colour schemes are of more even power, better
held together, composed of values more cunningly found. His whites are
fatter, his purple richer, and the indigo blue--that fine blue as of old
Japanese enamel, which is peculiar to him--has more depth of dye, more
solidity of texture. The splendour and the costliness of the precious
things, of which the superb fashions of his time were so lavish,
appealed to him more strongly.

_Fromentin._

CCXV

Van Eyck saw with his eyes, Memling begins to see with his soul. The one
had a good and a right vein of thought; the other does not seem to
think so much, but he has a heart which beats in a quite different way.
The one copied and imitated, the other copies too and imitates, but
transfigures. The former reproduced--without any preoccupation with the
ideal types of humanity--above all, the masculine types, which passed
before his eyes in every rank of the society of his time; the latter
contemplates nature in a reverie, translates her with imagination,
dwells upon everything which is most delicate and lovely in human forms,
and creates, above all, in his type of woman a being exquisite and
elect, unknown before and lost with him.

_Fromentin_

CCXVI

BRUGES, 1849

This is a most stunning place, immeasurably the best we have come to.
There is a quantity of first-rate architecture, and very little or no
Rubens.

But by far the best of all are the miraculous works of Memling and Van
Eyck. The former is here in a strength that quite stunned us--and
perhaps proves himself to have been a greater man even than the latter.
In fact, he was certainly so intellectually, and quite equal in
mechanical power. His greatest production is a large triptych in the
Hospital of St.