subjected to one influence, yet the power of the
influence, and their obedience to it, is best seen by varied operation
of it on their individual differences, as in clouds and waves there is a
glorious unity of rolling, wrought out by the wild and wonderful
differences of their absolute forms, which, if taken away, would leave
in them only multitudinous and petty repetition, instead of the majestic
oneness of shared passion. And so in the waves and clouds of human
multitude when they are filled with one thought, as we find frequently
in the works of the early Italian men of earnest purpose, who despising,
or happily ignorant of, the sophistications of theories, and the
proprieties of composition, indicated by perfect similarity of action
and gesture on the one hand, and by the infinite and truthful variation
of expression on the other, the most sublime strength because the most
absorbing unity, of multitudinous passion that ever human heart
conceived. Hence, in the cloister of St. Mark's, the intense, fixed,
statue-like silence of ineffable adoration upon the spirits in prison at
the feet of Christ, side by side, the hands lifted, and the knees bowed,
and the lips trembling together;[18] and in St. Domenico of Fiesole,[19]
that whirlwind rush of the Angels and the redeemed souls round about him
at his resurrection, so that we hear the blast of the horizontal
trumpets mixed with the dying clangor of their ingathered wings. The
same great feeling occurs throughout the works of the serious men,
though most intensely in Angelico, and it is well to compare with it the
vileness and falseness of all that succeeded, when men had begun to
bring to the cross foot their systems instead of their sorrow. Take as
the most marked and degraded instance, perhaps, to be anywhere found,
Bronzino's treatment of the same subject (Christ visiting the spirits in
prison,) in the picture now in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, which,
vile as it is in color, vacant in invention, void in light and shade, a
heap of cumbrous nothingnesses, and sickening offensivenesses, is of all
its voids most void in this, that the academy models therein huddled
together at the bottom, show not so much unity or community of attention
to the academy model with the flag in its hand above, as a street crowd
would be to a fresh-staged charlatan. Some _point_ to the God who has
burst the gates of death, as if the rest were incapable of
distinguishing him for themselves,