3T2 MORE POT-POURRI 



disagreeably, as beyond my feeling and above my com- 

 prehension. These statues are very ill-disposed for effect ; 

 the confined cell (such it seemed) in which they are 

 placed is so strangely disproportioned to the awful and 

 massive grandeur of their forms. 



' There is a picture by Michael Angelo, considered a 

 chef-d'oeuvre, which hangs in the Tribune to the right of 

 the Venus. Now if all the connoisseurs, with Vasari at 

 their head, were to harangue for an hour together on the 

 merits of this picture, I might submit in silence, for I am 

 no connoisseur; but that it is a disagreeable, a hateful 

 picture is an opinion which fire could not melt out of 

 me. In spite of Messieurs les Connoisseurs and Michael 

 Angelo's fame, I would die in it at the stake. For instance, 

 here is the Blessed Virgin not the " Vergine Santa d'ogni 

 grazia piena," but a Virgin whose brickdust-coloured 

 face, harsh unferninine features, and muscular masculine 

 arms give me the idea of a washerwoman (con rispetto 

 parlando !) an infant Saviour with the proportions of a 

 giant ! And what shall we say of the nudity of the figures 

 in the background ? profaning the subject and shocking 

 at once good taste and good sense. A little further on 

 the eye rests on the divine Madre di Dio of Correggio. 

 What beauty, what sweetness, what maternal love and 

 humble adoration are blended in the look and attitude 

 with which she bends over her Infant ! ' 



Just as a contrast to this bald dislike of Michael 

 Angelo, which I more or less share, I will copy, as an 

 example of modern subtle scholarly criticism, a sentence 

 on the same picture from Pater's ' Renaissance ' a book 

 to be read indeed : 



' When the shipload of sacred earth from the soil of 

 Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the 

 Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it, unlike 

 any flower men had seen before the Anemone, with its 



