sympathies of its untaught flocks. Of which foulness let us reason no
farther, the very image and memory of them being pollution, only
noticing this, that there has always been a morbid tendency in Romanism
towards the contemplation of bodily pain, owing to the attribution of
saving power to it, which, like every other moral error, has been of
fatal effect in art, leaving not altogether without the stain and blame
of it, even the highest of the pure Romanist painters; as Fra Angelico,
for instance, who, in his Passion subjects, always insists weakly on the
bodily torture, and is unsparing of blood; and Giotto, though his
treatment is usually grander, as in that Crucifixion over the door of
the Convent of St. Mark's, where the blood is hardly actual, but issues
from the feet in a typical and conventional form, and becomes a crimson
cord which is twined strangely beneath about a skull; only that which
these holy men did to enhance, even though in their means mistaken, the
impression and power of the sufferings of Christ, or of his saints, is
always in a measure noble, and to be distinguished with all reverence
from the abominations of the irreligious painters following, as of
Camillo Procaccini, in one of his martyrdoms in the Gallery of the
Brera, at Milan, and other such, whose names may be well spared to the
reader.
Sec. 31. Of passion generally.
Sec. 32. It is never to be for itself exhibited--at least on the face.
These, then, are the four passions whose presence in any degree on the
human face is degradation. But of all passion it is to be generally
observed, that it becomes ignoble either when entertained respecting
unworthy objects, and therefore shallow or unjustifiable, or when of
impious violence, and so destructive of human dignity. Thus grief is
noble or the reverse, according to the dignity and worthiness of the
object lamented, and the grandeur of the mind enduring it. The sorrow of
mortified vanity or avarice is simply disgusting, even that of bereaved
affection may be base if selfish and unrestrained. All grief that
convulses the features is ignoble, because it is commonly shallow and
certainly temporary, as in children, though in the shock and shiver of a
strong man's features under sudden and violent grief there may be
something of sublime. The grief of Guercino's Hagar, in the Brera
gallery at Milan, is partly despicable, partly disgusting, partly
ridiculous; it is not the grief of the injured Egyptian, driven forth
into the desert with the destiny of a nation in her heart, but of a
servant of all work, turned away for stealing tea and sugar. Common
painters forget that passion is not absolutely and in itself great or
violent, but only in proportion to the weakness of the mind it has to
deal with; and that in exaggerating its outward signs, they are not
exalting the passion, but evaporating the hero.[44] They think too much
of passions as always the same in their nature, forgetting that the love
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