And then, tell me, whether you yourselves, or any one you have known,
did ever at any time receive from this picture any, the smallest vital
thought, warning, quickening, or help? It may have appalled, or
impressed you for a time, as a thunder-cloud might: but has it ever
taught you anything--chastised in you anything--confirmed a
purpose--fortified a resistance--purified a passion? I know that for
you, it has done none of these things; and I know also that, for others,
it has done very different things. In every vain and proud designer who
has since lived, that dark carnality of Michael Angelo's has fostered
insolent science, and fleshly imagination. Daubers and blockheads think
themselves painters, and are received by the public as such, if they
know how to foreshorten bones and decipher entrails; and men with
capacity of art either shrink away (the best of them always do) into
petty felicities and innocencies of genre painting--landscapes, cattle,
family breakfasts, village schoolings, and the like; or else, if they
have the full sensuous art-faculty that would have made true painters of
them, being taught from their youth up, to look for and learn the body
instead of the spirit, have learned it and taught it to such purpose,
that at this hour, when I speak to you, the rooms of the Royal Academy
of England, receiving also what of best can be sent there by the masters
of France, contain _not one_ picture honourable to the arts of their
age; and contain many which are shameful in their record of its manners.

Of that, hereafter. I will close to-day by giving you some brief account
of the scheme of Tintoret's _Paradise_, in justification that it is the
thoughtfullest as well as mightiest picture in the world.

In the highest centre is Christ, leaning on the globe of the earth,
which is of dark crystal. Christ is crowned with a glory as of the sun,