APPENDIX. 403 



V. 



Fragments on Holbein and others. 



Of Holbein's St. Elizabeth, remember, she is not a perfect 

 Saint Elizabeth, by any means. She is an honest and sweet 

 German lady, the best he could see ; he could do no better ; 

 and so I come back to my old story, no man can do better 

 than he sees : if he can reach the nature round him, it is well ; 

 he may fall short of it ; he cannot rise above it ; " the best, in 

 this kind, are but shadows." 



******* 



Yet that intense veracity of Holbein is indeed the strength 

 and glory of all the northern schools. They exist only in be- 



throated model appears in Spring, the Aphrodite, Calumny, and other 

 works. 1 Secondly, that she was Simonetta, the original of the Pitti 

 portrait. 



'* Now I think she must have been induced to let Sandro draw from 

 her whole person undraped, more or less; and that he must have done, 

 so as such a man probably would, in strict honour as to deed, word, and 

 definite thought, but under occasional accesses of passion of which he 

 said nothing, and which in all probability and by grace of God refined 

 down to nil, or nearly so, as he got accustomed to look in honour at so 

 beautiful a thing. (He may have left off the iindraped after her death.) 

 First, her figure is absolutely fine Gothic ; I don't think any antique is 

 so slender. Secondly, she has the sad, passionate, and exquisite Lom- 

 bard mouth. Thirdly, her limbs shrink together, and she seems not 

 quite to have k liked it,' or been an accustomed model. Fourthly, there 

 is tradition, giving her name to all those forms. 



" Her lover Giuliano was murdered in 1478, and Savonarola hanged 

 and burnt in 1498. Now, can her distress, and Savonarola's preaching, 

 between them, have taken, in few years, all the carnality out of Sandro, 

 supposing him to have come already, by seventy-eight, to that state in 

 which the sight of her delighted him, without provoking ulterior feel- 

 ings V All decent men accustomed to draw from the nude tell us they 

 get to that. 



" Sandro's Dante is dated as published in 1482. He may have been 

 saddening by that time, and weary of beauty, pure or mixed ; though 

 he went on painting Madonnas, I fancy. (Can Simonetta be traced ",n 



I think Zippomh may be u remembrance of her. 



