“For instance: our reprobation of bright color is, I think, for the most part, mere affectation, and must soon be done away with. Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves through art in brown and gray, as in Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Salvator; but we are not wholly vulgar, dull, or impious, nor, as moderns, are we necessarily obliged to continue so in any wise. Our greatest men, whether sad or gay, still delight, like the great men of all ages, in brilliant hues. The coloring of Scott and Byron is full and pure; that of Keats and Tennyson rich even to excess. Our practical failures in coloring are merely the necessary consequences of our prolonged want of practice during the period of Renaissance affectation and ignorance; and the only durable difference between old and modern coloring is the acceptance of certain hues by the modern, which please him by expressing that melancholy peculiar to his more reflective or sentimental character and the greater variety of them necessary to express his greater science.”[28] Again, on the subject of color, he says: “We find the greatest artists mainly divided into two groups,--those who paint principally with respect to local color, headed by Paul Veronese, Titian, and Turner, and those who paint principally with reference to light and shade irrespective of color, headed by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Raphael. The noblest members of each of these classes introduce the element proper to the other class, in a subordinate way. Paul Veronese introduces a subordinate light and shade, and Leonardo introduces a subordinate local color. The main difference is, that with Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Raphael vast masses of the picture are lost in comparatively colorless (dark, gray, or brown) shadow,--these painters _beginning_ with the _lights_ and going _down_ to blackness; but with Veronese, Titian, and Turner the whole picture is like the rose,--glowing with color in the shadows and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or masses of whiteness, in the lights,--they having _begun_ with the _shadows_ and gone up _to_ whiteness.” Ruskin said so much about art, and said it so dogmatically, that no one utterance gives an adequate conception of what he thought about any one man. Furthermore, while his language is crystal itself, his thoughts are often contradictory and confusing in the extreme.