rading effect of the realized decorations and imitated
dress may be seen in him simply, and without any addition of painfulness
from other deficiencies of feeling. The larger of the two pictures in
the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, but for this defect, would have been a
very noble ideal work.

Sec. 15. And color pure.

The second point to be observed is that brightness of color is
altogether inadmissible without purity and harmony; and that the sacred
painters must not be followed in their frankness of unshadowed color
unless we can also follow them in its clearness. As far as I am
acquainted with the modern schools of Germany, they seem to be entirely
ignorant of the value of color as an assistant of feeling, and to think
that hardness, dryness, and opacity are its virtues as employed in
religious art; whereas I hesitate not to affirm that in such art more
than in any other, clearness, luminousness and intensity of hue are
essential to right impression; and from the walls of the Arena chapel in
their rainbow play of brilliant harmonies, to the solemn purple tones of
Perugino's fresco in the Albizzi palace, I know not any great work of
sacred art which is not as precious in color as in all other qualities
(unless indeed it be a Crucifixion of Fra Angelico in the Florence
Academy, which has just been glazed and pumiced and painted and
varnished by the picture-cleaners until it glares from one end of the
picture gallery to the other;) only the pure white light and delicate
hue of the idealists, whose colors are by preference such as we have
seen to be the most beautiful in the chapter on Purity are carefully to
be distinguished from the golden light and deep pitched hue of the
school of Titian whose virtue is the grandeur of earthly solemnity, not
the glory of heavenly rejoicing.

Sec. 16. Ideal form of the body itself, of what variety susceptible.

But leaving these accessory circumstances and touching the treatment of
the bodily form, it is evident in the first place that whatever typical
beauty the human body is capable of possessing must be bestowed upon it
when it is understood as spiritual. And therefore those general
proportions and types which are deducible from comparison of the nobler
individuals of the race, must be adopted and adhered to; admitting among
them not, as in the human ideal, such varieties as result from past
suffering, or contest with sin, but such only as are consistent with
sinless nature