hammer in her ears, and the tumult of a city round about her desolation.
The spectator turns away at first, revolted, from the central object of
the picture, forced painfully and coarsely forward, a mass of shattered
brickwork, with the plaster mildewed away from it, and the mortar
mouldering from its seams; and if he look again, either at this or at
the carpenter's tools beneath it, will perhaps see in the one and the
other, nothing more than such a study of scene as Tintoret could but too
easily obtain among the ruins of his own Venice, chosen to give a coarse
explanation of the calling and the condition of the husband of Mary. But
there is more meant than this. When he looks at the composition of the
picture, he will find the whole symmetry of it depending on a narrow
line of light, the edge of a carpenter's square, which connects these
unused tools with an object at the top of the brickwork, a white stone,
four square, the corner-stone of the old edifice, the base of its
supporting column. This, I think, sufficiently explains the typical
character of the whole. The ruined house is the Jewish dispensation,
that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is the Christian; but
the corner-stone of the old building remains, though the builder's tools
lie idle beside it, and the stone which the builders refused is become
the Headstone of the corner.

Sec. 18. The Baptism of Christ. Its treatment by various painters.

In this picture, however, the force of the thought hardly atones for the
painfulness of the scene and the turbulence of its feeling. The power of
the master is more strikingly shown in his treatment of a subject which,
however important, and however deep in its meaning, supplies not to the
ordinary painter material enough ever to form a picture of high
interest; the Baptism of Christ. From the purity of Giotto to the
intolerable, inconceivable brutality of Salvator,[61] every order of
feeling has been displayed in its treatment; but I am aware of no single
case, except this of which I am about to speak, in which it has formed
an impressive picture.

Giotto's, in the Academy of Florence, engraved in the series just
published, (Galleria delle belle Arti,) is one of the most touching I
know, especially in the reverent action of the attendant angels, and
Leonardo's angel in that of Andrea del Verrocchio is very beautiful, but
the event is one whose character and importance are ineffable upon the
features: th