en he shall rise into sudden strength, or
an instance occur when his efforts shall be successful. But there are
some pictures which rank not under the head of failures, but of
perpetrations or commissions; some things which a man cannot do or say
without sealing forever his character and capacity. The angel holding
the cross with his finger in his eye, the roaring, red-faced children
about the crown of thorns, the blasphemous (I speak deliberately and
determinedly) head of Christ upon the handkerchief, and the mode in
which the martyrdom of the saint is exhibited (I do not choose to use
the expressions which alone could characterize it), are perfect,
sufficient, incontrovertible proofs that whatever appears good in any of
the doings of such a painter must be deceptive, and that we may be
assured that our taste is corrupted and false whenever we feel disposed
to admire him. I am prepared to support this position, however
uncharitable it may seem; a man may be tempted into a gross sin by
passion, and forgiven; and yet there are some kinds of sins into which
only men of a certain kind can be tempted, and which cannot be forgiven.
It should be added, however, that the artistical qualities of these
pictures are in every way worthy of the conceptions they realize. I do
not recollect any instance of color or execution so coarse and
feelingless.'

[Footnote 226: _Modern Painters_, vol. i. p. 87.]

We have only to think of the S. Agnes by Tintoretto, or of Luini's St.
Catherine, in order to be well aware how far Domenichino, as a painter,
deviated from the right path of art.[227]

[Footnote 227: I allude to the Tintoretto in S. Maria dell'Orto at
Venice, and to the Luini in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan. Yet the
model of Luini's S. Catherine was the infamous Contessa di Cellant, who
murdered her husband and some lovers, and was beheaded for her crimes in
Milan. This fact demonstrates the value of the model in the hands of an
artist capable of using it.]

Yet we are bound to acquit him, as a man, of that moral obliquity which
Mr. Ruskin seems to impute. Indeed, we know Domenichino to have been an
unaffectedly good fellow. He was misled by his dramatic bias, and also
by the prevalent religious temper of his age. Jesuitry had saturated the
Italian mind; and in a former chapter I have dwelt upon the concrete
materialism which formed the basis of the Jesuitical imagination. In
portraying the martyrdom of S. Agnes as he has do