At the Academy of Fine Arts, I hurried fast to the picture of the _Assumption_, discovered by Cicognara[104]: ten large male figures at the bottom of the picture; observe the man rapt in ecstasy on the left, watching Mary. The Virgin, above this group, rises in the centre of a semicircle of cherubs; there is a multitude of admirable faces in that glory: a woman's head, on the right, at the point of the crescent, of unspeakable beauty; two or three heavenly spirits flung horizontally across the sky, in the bold, picturesque manner of Tintoretto. I am not sure that a standing angel does not experience some feeling of a too terrestrial love. The Virgin is largely proportioned; she is clad in a red drapery; her blue scarf floats in the air; her eyes are raised towards the Eternal Father, who appeared at the zenith. Four positive colours, brown, green, red and blue, cover the picture: the aspect of the whole is sombre, the character unideal, but of an incomparable truth and natural vivacity. Nevertheless, I prefer the _Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple_, by the same painter, which hangs in the same room. Facing the _Assumption_ and very cleverly lighted is Tintoretto's _Miracle of St. Mark_, a vigorous scene which seems dug out of the canvas with the chisel and mallet rather than the brush. I went on to the plaster-casts from the metopes of the Parthenon; these plasters had a three-fold interest for me: in Athens, I had seen the voids left by the ravages committed by Lord Elgin[105] and, in London, the kidnapped marbles of which I found the mouldings in Venice. The roving destiny of those master-pieces was linked with mine, and yet Phidias did not fashion my clay. I was unable to tear myself away from the original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael. Nothing is more interesting than those sketches of genius abandoned alone to its studies and its whims: it admits you to its intimacy; it initiates you into its secrets; it informs you by what steps and by what efforts it has attained perfection: one is enraptured at seeing how it was mistaken, how it perceived its error and corrected it. Those pencil-strokes drawn on the corner of a table on a wretched piece of paper retain a marvellous richness and natural artlessness. When you reflect that Raphael's hand has passed over those immortal scraps, you are angry with the glass which prevents you from kissing those holy relics. [Sidenote: Santi Giovanni e Paolo.]