Sec. 37. Fig. 87 is generally characteristic, not only of Claude, but of the other painters of the Renaissance period, because they were all equally fond of representing this overhanging of rocks with buildings on the top, and weeds drooping into the air over the edge, always thinking to get sublimity by exaggerating the projection, and never able to feel or understand the simplicity of real rock lines; not that they were in want of examples around them: on the contrary, though the main idea was traditional, the modifications of it are always traceable to the lower masses of limestone and tufa which skirt the Alps and Apennines, and which have, in reality, long contracted habits of nodding over their bases; being, both by Virgil and Homer, spoken of always as "hanging" or "over-roofed" rocks. But then they have a way of doing it rather different from the Renaissance ideas of them. Here, for instance (Plate +41+), is a real hanging rock, with a castle on the top of it, and ([Greek: katerephes]) laurel, all plain fact, from Arona, on the Lago Maggiore; and, I believe, the reader, though we have not as yet said anything about lines, will at once, on comparing it with Fig. 87, recognize the difference between the true parabolic flow of the rock-lines and the humpbacked deformity of Claude; and, still more, the difference between the delicate overhanging of the natural cliff, cautiously diminished as it gets higher[87], and the ideal danger of the Liber Veritatis. [Illustration: FIG. 87.] Sec. 38. And the fact is, generally, that natural cliffs are very cautious how they overhang, and that the artist who represents them as doing so in any extravagant degree entirely destroys the sublimity which he hoped to increase, for the simple reason that he takes away the whole rock-nature, or at least that part of it which depends upon weight. The instinct of the observer refuses to believe that the rock is ponderous when it overhangs so far, and it has no more real effect upon him than the imagined rocks of a fairy tale. [Illustration: FIG. 88.]