Here have I been in Italy half a book, and scarcely a page about the Pictures or the “National Monuments.” Ci vuol pazienza. I fear you will soon cry “hold enough,” as I have cried many a time in these endless galleries congested with bad pictures, yet apparently never to be weeded. For the bad Masters were just as prolific as the good, besides having the advantage of numbers. Civerchio, Crespi, Garofalo, the Caracci, Penni, Guercino, Domenichino—the very names recall acres of vast glaring canvases, and the memory of Pistoja with only one picture to see—and that a Lorenzo di Credi—is as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Berenson, that prince of connoisseurs and creative critics, has done brave service both in dethroning and uplifting. Yet am I convinced there is still a wilderness of invaluable pictures by unvalued artists, who, to-day obscure, shall to-morrow be exalted in glory. Mutations of taste are not yet foreclosed: Michelangelo himself with his Super-statues, may recede and rejoin the mellifluous Raphael, while Siena replaces Florence. The art of Japan may win further victories, or we may follow the great expounder of Renaissance painting to his Chinese Canossa. Or the revolt against anecdote may spread to sacred anecdote, and disestablish the bulk of Christian art. I can imagine a newer Pre-Raphaelitism ruling the vogue, and Stefano da Zevio’s St. Catherine in the Rose-Garden becoming the centre of the world’s desire. I have a weakness myself for this Veronese picture, just because it is so frankly free from so many artistic virtues, so unpretentious of reality, so candidly a pattern, a reverie in roses and birds and angels and gold, a poem, a melting music. I like this new chord of roses and haloes, it is a rare harmony, a lovely marriage of heaven and earth. I can well imagine a visual art arising which will repudiate realities altogether. The cinematograph has come to complete the lesson of the camera, and to throw back the artist on his own soul.

But whatever revolutions in taste await us, my peregrinations have convinced me that there is no single consciousness in the world that holds a knowledge of the treasure of art, even though we limited the art to Italian, nay though we omitted sculpture and architecture and tapestries, and the delicious terra-cottas of Luca della Robbia, and ivories and bronzes and goldsmiths’ work, and the majolicas of Urbino and Pesaro, and cameos and medallions and glass-work, and book-binding and furniture, and the intarsiatura of cassoni and pulpits and choir-stalls and lecterns, and the pavement art of the graffiti, and everything save drawing and painting. For when every church, house, and gallery in the world had been ransacked for every trace of Italian brush or pencil on plaster, canvas or paper, and all this registered in the one poor human brain, there would still remain the unexplored ocean of illumination—the manuscript books and missals, and decrees and charters of guilds and confraternities and Monti di PietÀ, and lists of monks and rules of monasteries, and matricular books of Drapers and Mercers, and even decorative wills and deeds of gift—all that realm of beauty so largely extinguished by printing.

Upon which fathomless ocean embarking, we may well behold without too much of awe or envy the sails of the master-mariners. Sufficient to drift and anchor at the first enchanted isle.

Less enchanted, however, are even the galleries of masterpieces than the quiet bowers one finds for oneself—like that chapel in Arona where, unveiling an altar-picture in despite of a tall candle-stick, I caught my breath at the sudden serene beauty of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Holy Family; or like that reclusive Venetian church, where the luminous unity of Bellini’s Madonna and Saints pierces the religious gloom. Pictures in collections are as unreal as objects in museums, less so perhaps to-day than when each was painted for a definite altar, refectory, wall or ceiling, yet none the less destroying one another’s beauties. ’Tis only in the visual arts that we surrender ourselves to a chaos of impressions; imagine Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, Rossini, Gounod, sounding simultaneously. I could have wept to see how Simone Martini’s Annunciation in the Uffizi had suffered by being transplanted to more gilded society. Gone was that golden and lilied purity which used to illumine the corridor.

And yet to see a picture in its own place is often equally heartbreaking. Some of the greatest pictures have carefully selected the most sombre and inaccessible situations.

Europe has perhaps no more melancholy chamber than that art-shrine in Rome in which the pleasure-pilgrims of the world crick their necks or catch bits of frescoed ceiling in hand-mirrors. ’Tis not merely the bad light—for even in the best morning light the Sistine Chapel is fuscous—nor the sombre effect of the discoloured and chaotic Last Judgment, with its bluish streakiness and dark background—nor the dull painted hangings, nor the overcrowding of the ceiling with its Titanic episodes and figures, nor even the Signorellis and Botticellis round the walls, though all contribute to the stuffy sublimity.

The oppressiveness is partially due to the fact that the architectural ceiling that Michelangelo painted—as artificial as the hangings—has faded rather more than the frescoes themselves, so that the figures seem to droop higgledy-piggledy upon the spectator’s head instead of standing out statuesque in their panels and spandrils. I dismiss the specious theory of a painting friend that they thus only hover the better, as prophets and patriarchs should. I refuse to be crushed even by Michelangelo. I know that a ceiling can soar, not menace, for have I not expanded under the gay lightness of the Pintoricchio ceiling in the Borgia apartments! Even the heavy and gilded ceiling of the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice, sombre enough in all conscience, by preserving architectural plausibility, and resting on painted pillars, escapes seeming to fall upon one’s head. Yet at best a ceiling is a poor place for any save the most simple design. Michelangelo, or rather his papal employer, went against the principle of decoration. A room with such massive masterpieces on its ceiling could not but be top-heavy. Moreover the art feeling can only be received in comfort. If we are to be transported outside our bodies, we must not be distressfully reminded of them by the straining of neck muscles. How foolish and provoking of Correggio to put his finest soaring figures not only into a cathedral cupola, but into a cupola lit only by a few round windows. And his frescoes in the other dome at Parma are equally invisible. One is reduced to enjoying them in the copies. Michelangelo himself undertook the dizzying task of vault-painting with vast reluctance, and complained in a sonnet that he had grown a goitre, and that his belly had been driven close beneath his chin. He achieved a miracle of art—in the wrong place. Perhaps Julius II was not so Philistine in thinking more ultramarine and gold-leaf would have brightened it up.