oduce definite expression of evil,) of
which the highest beauty has been attained only once, and then by no
system taught painter, but by a most holy Dominican monk of Fiesole; and
beneath him all stoop lower and lower in proportion to their inferior
sanctity, though with more or less attainment of that which is noble,
according to their intellectual power and earnestness, as Raffaelle in
his St. Cecilia, (a mere study of a passionate, dark-eyed, large formed
Italian model,) and even Perugino, in that there is about his noblest
faces a shortcoming, indefinable; an absence of the full outpouring of
the sacred spirit that there is in Angelico; traceable, I doubt not, to
some deficiencies and avaricious flaws of his heart, whose consequences
in his conduct were such as to give Vasari hope that his lies might
stick to him (for the contradiction of which in the main, if there be
not contradiction enough in every line that the hand of Perugino drew,
compare Rio, de la Poesie Chretienne, and note also what Rio has
singularly missed observing, that Perugino, in his portrait of himself
in the Florence gallery, has put a scroll into the hand, with the words
"Timete Deum," thus surely indicating that which he considered his duty
and message:) and so all other even of the sacred painters, not to speak
of the lower body of men in whom, on the one hand, there is marked
sensuality and impurity in all that they seek of beauty, as in
Correggio and Guido, or, on the other, a want in measure of the sense of
beauty itself, as in Rubens and Titian, showing itself in the adoption
of coarse types of feature and form; sometimes also (of which I could
find instances in modern times,) in a want of evidence of delight in
what they do; so that, after they have rendered some passage of
exceeding beauty, they will suffer some discordant point to interfere
with it, and it will not hurt them, as if they had no pleasure in that
which was best, but had done it in inspiration that was not profitable
to them, as deaf men might touch an instrument with a feeling in their
heart, which yet returns not outwardly upon them, and so know not when
they play false: and sometimes by total want of choice, for there is a
choice of love in all rightly tempered men, not that ignorant and
insolent choice which rejects half nature as empty of the right, but
that pure choice that fetches the right out of everything; and where
this is wanting, we may see men walking up and d