well-informed man or the novice. However, whatever he may do, we feel
the _Romanist_ who has just spent some years on classic ground, who has
just arrived and has not yet changed his atmosphere. There is some
unknown quality remaining with him that reveals travel, such as a
foreign odour about his clothes. It is certainly to this fine Italian
scent that the _Descent from the Cross_ owes the extreme favour that it
enjoys. For those indeed who would like Rubens to be somewhat as he is,
but very much also as they imagine him, there is here a seriousness in
youth, a frank and studious flower of maturity which is about to
disappear and which is unique.

I need not describe the composition. You could not mention a more
popular composition as a work of art or as an example of religious
style. There is nobody who has not in his mind the ordering and the
effect of the picture, its great central light cast against a dark
background, its grandiose masses, its distinct and massive divisions. We
know that Rubens got the first idea of it from Italy, and that he made
no attempt to conceal the loan. The scene is powerful and grave. It acts
on one from afar, it stands out strikingly upon a wall: it is serious
and enforces seriousness. When we remember the carnage with which the
work of Rubens is crimsoned, the massacres, the executioners torturing,
martyring, and making their victims howl, we recognize that here we have
a noble _execution_. Everything in it is restrained, concise, and
laconic, as in a page of Holy Writ.

There are neither gesticulations, cries, horrors, nor too many tears.
The Virgin hardly breaks into a single sob, and the intense suffering of
the drama is expressed by scarce a gesture of inconsolable motherhood, a
tearful face, or red eyes. The Christ is one of the most elegant figures
that Rubens ever imagined for the painting of a God. It possesses some