trees, at length mount the sacred hill of crowded pilgrimage. Here ofttimes we find in chapels, painted for the comfort of the faithful, touching scenes from the life of the Madonna and the Saviour-the angel Gabriel bearing the lily in his hand, the sainted mother bending in worship, or the magi kneeling with gifts; and then the agony in the garden, the death upon the cross, the burial, and last of all, the resurrection and ascension. Rude perchance may be these works to the more cultured taste, but to the unlettered multitude, at least, they bring to trembling faith the persuasion of vision. They are part of that grand scheme and mission nowhere to be comprehended save in the land of Italy, whereby pictorial art, when the personal remembrance and living tradition were dying from the outer world, sought in the painted fresco once more to bring Christ upon the earth, and to realise, even to the bodily senses, that the divine Word was made flesh, and dwelt among men. And all these pictured scenes are found in the midst of a nature the most glorious-akin, indeed, to the land of transfiguration, and to the sea that was troubled by the storm; for as the hills are round about Jerusalem, and the Galilean sea is bounded by the mountains, so do hills cluster round many a rock-built city of Italy, and mountains rise even from the bosom of the storm-swept lake. Thus oft in Italy have we looked at the faded fresco on convent walls, and then gone forth to meet the dying sunset; turning our thoughts to Calvary, to the Mount of Olives, to the Galilean sea, to the hills about Jerusalem. We have walked among the olive groves which clothe the Thrasimenan Lake, and climbed the heights of Valambrosa, and perchance come upon a convent as of Bethlehem among the hills, and a scanty hamlet as of Bethany nestling among groves. The land of Italy, indeed, and the land of Judah are akin in beauty, and alike in desolation. The bandit haunts the pictured loveliness, malaria takes her abode in the seats of imperial state, fertility has become barrenness, -and the dews which heaven once sent in mercy are now poured as from vials of wrath. But art still lives

and lingers in the midst of desolation, a struggling life in the midst of death -or worse than death, dishonour. Temples still stand at Paestum, where to rest were the traveller's destruction; malaria keeps guard over the fallen statue. But who shall protect the desecrated church or the painted chapel, when vagrant troops may be seeking for quarter, and liberty triumphs in license?

At the last annual meeting of the Arundel Society-a society well fitted to meet the urgency of the actual and impending crisis-Mr Layard gave signal examples of the cruel neglect and deliberate outrage by which the frescoes of Italy have been, and still. are, threatened, with destruction. In the course of travels and researches in that country, he had found, be said, barbarous names scratched on the great and invaluable mural paintings of Assisi, Spello, and Perugia -the names of Germans who had crossed the Alps years ago for pillage. He greatly feared that the mercenary troops of his Holiness the present Pope would not show themselves better guardians of these precious monuments. But there were also mercenary painters who destroyed such works no less than these mercenary soldiers. An instance of this Vandalism, falsely known under the name Restoration," had fallen under his personal notice. When in Florence he had found a scaffold erected in front of the important fresco by Filippino Lippi, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and three gentlemen standing on the top, with pails and brushes in their hands, of the size of mops. He inquired what they were about to do, and they replied that they were engaged to "rinfrescare" or "refresh" Filippino Lippi! Thus have neglect and violence, time, the elements, and the hand of man, wrought their sure destruction. Many, indeed, are the sad examples of this impending fate which the zealous and well-timed labours of the Arundel Society have brought into notice. The small but ancient town of Spello crowns a precipitous buttress of the Apennines lying northward of Rome. In its collegiate church of Sta Maria Maggiore is a side chapel decorated with frescoes

The floor has long lost its marble mosaic, the blue serene of the starry roof is blackened, and, in some parts, battered till bare. Rain has year by year trickled down the face of frescoes sacred to the Madonna and the Saviour, and a large picture of the Last Judgment is all but illegible. The fate here suffered, the tale here to be told, is indeed sad. There is no picturesque beauty as in the ivy tower, no grandeur as in ruined temple, but only bare desolation and merciless destruction.

Yet this Arena Chapel was not only a shrine for devotion, but a sanctuary sacred to art. It was here that Giotto, the child of promise in the great Italian renaissance, unfolded a genius which filled the world with unaccustomed wonder. Upon these walls, now long given to neglect, he laboured for many a month, throwing the fervour of his religion and the beauty of his art into frescoes which were to him the ready language of thought and emotion. There, as he sedulously painted that great picture of the Last Judg. ment, stood Dante by his side, holding high discourse of purgatory and paradise. The poet, eloquent in suggestive thought, guided, as it were, the painter's hand; rapturous words translated themselves into fervent colours,-angel forms came floating in responsive cadence to the music of the verse, or demons intruded as discords at the harsher deeper guttural. In the "Entombment" * especially, do we find a tragedy and, as it were, an audible wailing, the painter striving, it may be, to transcribe the burning words which Dante spoke; visions of unquenched agony, which had darkened and furrowed the poet's visage, came to the painter at his work, shadowing forth forms of terrible anguish, and then, again, Heaven seems to open in pictures of beauty and of peace. These works, executed at the dawn of the great European awakening at the commencement of the fourteenth century, were then a marvel, and to us they remain a great possession: They are painted poems, speaking

pictures, manifestations of a people's religion and belief. They have been long neglected, but assuredly they well merit the attention of all who desire to study and comprehend the early origin and progress of Christian art.

Year after year the Arundel Society is bringing before the British public works which proclaim this same sad story of destruction. Frescoes, of which the world shall not see the like again, are, as we have said, fast fading from our sight. Rain pouring in at broken windows, the wind beating along the open corridor, incense and the smoke of candles blackening colours once brilliant as the day, or the restorer's brush destroying what the elements had spared. Sometimes again a noble work, lying from the beaten haunts of men, has found its safety only in oblivion. Mr Layard, who brought to light the buried marbles of Nineveh, has, by a like enterprise generously devoted to the service of the Arundel Society, hunted out frescoes which had been well-nigh forgotten. The happy results of an autumn tour in Italy, Mr Layard thus pleasantly describes :

"On one of the wooded hills rising above the lake of Perugia, stands the small town of Panicale. Its half-ruined walls and towers show that it was a

fortified post of some importance during the middle ages. Away from the highroads leading to the principal cities of Central Italy, it is seldom visited by it the miserable shelter of an Italian the traveller, who would scarcely find in "osteria." Yet, like almost every town and hamlet of this favoured land, it contains works of art such as elsewhere would render a city famous. Outside the walls, on an olive-clad eminence overlooking the town, is a convent of nuns. Attached to it is a chapel dediThe wall behind cated to St Sebastian.

its high altar is covered with a fresco representing the martyrdom of the Saint. It is the work, and may be ranked amongst the finest, of a painter who, by his genius and the influence he exercised upon his great contemporaries, forms an epoch in the history of art-Pietro Vannucci, or, as he is more commonly called, from the city in which he principally

VOL. LXXXVIII.-NO. DXL.

21

laboured and founded his school, I Perugino."

This noble work "The Martyrdom of St Sebastian," since published as a chromolithograph by the Arundel Society, is passed unnoticed by Vasari, and has consequently been overlooked even by those who have made the history of Art a special study. "We rode" says Mr Layard, "along the borders of the blue lake, through the oak-woods mirrored on its surface," and there, in the chapel of the Saint, found this master-work of Perugino, the Martyr bound to a porphyry column, divine in resignation, the archers of "singular beauty and grace" performing "their duty with melancholy tenderness" - a work which displays "all the best characteristics of the Umbrian School" and "the peculiar characteristics" of Perugino, perhaps its greatest master. In the following extract we again quote Mr Layard's narrative, printed in elucidation of the published chromotint. It serves, as will be seen, to confirm much that we have already stated.

"After examining," says Mr Layard, most of the principal frescoes in Central Italy, I was surprised at the condition in which I found this painting. Although the highest development of the genius of the early Italian painters is to be found in their frescoes, of all their works

they are those which have unfortunately suffered most. Usually painted in the side-chapels or behind the principal altars

of churches, they have been exposed to many sources of injury. The ill-repaired roof and walls admit the rain and damp. On festivals tawdry hangings are unmercifully nailed over them; the hammer and the ladder each having its share in the process of destruction. Then torches

blaze round the shrine and blacken the

walls during the sacred ceremonies; but

The

neither the fumes of incense nor the smoke of candles have dimmed this masterpiece of the Perugian painter. colour is still as bright and transparent as when first laid on the damp plaster, retaining that brilliancy which distin guishes true fresco-painting. The only injury the picture has sustained has been caused by large nails driven into the wall to suspend a veil with which it has been deemed becoming, as the chapel is attached to a convent, to cover the nude figure of the Saint."

Italy has been, and in some measure

still is, emphatically the land of colour. It is curious and instructive to mark how nations in the supremacy of their wealth and glory have sung as it were their triumphs in the full chorus of colour. The Pharaohs in Egypt decorated the palace of imperial pomp, and the temple for sacred worship, with prismatic hues as the language of ecstasy and triumph. The Moors in Cairo and Grenada sounded in turn their jubilees in tones pitched in the same high key of exultation. Leo and Julius in like manner in Italy built churches rich in resplendent marbles, and made the painted fresco subservient to religious worship and stately magnificence. But when glory departs from a nation, the bright robes in which she clothed her splendour grow faded and sullied. With tarnished honour comes a deadened colour; crimson, the trumpet note of valour, turns pallid with defeat, and instead of joy in gay attire is the sackcloth of mourning. In Upper Egypt the sand of flood over sculpture, column, and the desert has swept its effacing painting. At Cairo the gilded crescent fades against the sky; in Andalusia the Alhambra has long been whitewashed ; and in like manner throughout Italy the jewelled marble has been stript from the denuded monument; frescoes, once the very triumph of colour, are pallid and crumbling; and the land of the south, once clad in almost eastern magnificence, now stricken with poverty, finds her garments tarnished, tattered, and threadbare. Italy, we say, was once emphatically the land of colour-not the colour of rude barbaric grandeur, but the language of subtle refinement, the overflow of exuberant delight, the rapture of a devotion which sought the harmony and the fervour of the skies. Its expression was manifold as the intent and emotion were diver

sified. In Venice, colour gemmed as with ruby and sapphire and emerald became worldly pomp and senatorial dignity. Then, again, in the convent art of Angelico it lost all taint and corruption of earth, it became pure as the elements, holy and without shadow of sin as when light was first divided from darkness; and thus in these works angels float down from

heaven on the sunbeam, and their robes span the sky as in rainbow glory. And this glory faded from Italy when darkness came upon the land, and confusion was thick gathering.

It is then specially fitting that at the time when colour is fast departing from Italy, the Arundel Society should, by the art of the chromolithograph bring the charm and the excellence of its beauty to England. In England we still plod on in the sober, sullen greys of practical everyday existence. Even the great works of Italian colour are known to our own people only in the dispassionate light and shade of black and white engravings. We walk under the shadow of a cloudy sky, or along streets bedimmed with blackening smoke, and have not yet learnt how to throw the sunshine and the warmth of colour across our daily path. We are still labouring along the road of dull utility, and have scarcely yet reared those more airy pinnacles in civilisation which shine in glittering gold and pomp against the clearer sky. We have barely yet discovered that colour is the language of expression and emotion. We do not yet fully recognise that as in music every thought and passion has its speaking note, so in colour the joys and sorrows of our life may be fitly symbolised that colour is in itself indeed a world of joy-that the coloured landscape is as the melody of birds sing ing among trees, and the painted picture an elaborated harmony. At fast, however, the sense of these æsthetic truths dawns upon the English public. If, indeed, Italy be the fading sunset, England is the opening dawn; and the golden day which has long gilded the southern campanile now begins to brighten with unaccustomed splendour upon our more northern shore.

The Arundel Society, then, just at this period of transition, may boast of a chosen and a special mission. It does well to select, as in its published chromotint from an early fresco by Ottaviano Nelli at Gubbio, works of subtle, resplendent, and yet spiritual colour. Italy can still yield to England gems of this pure lustre, which shine indeed as stars in the

firmament rather than lights of the lower world. It is fitting the English eye should be taught, as in this beauteous work copied from a drawing kindly lent by Mrs Higford Burr, that in colour there are harmonies consonant with the fabled music of the spheres. In the pure and beauteous hues of this Madonna with the attendant heavenly host, there is indeed a spirit not of earth. The palette is no longer set with the gross pigment used in mere naturalistic art, but the pencil paints as with sunbeams, and the colours glow as gems spangling among flowers. Thus painting, which has sometimes been termed a mute art, is made through the language of colour to speak as with heavenly transport.

It is now time that we should state more expressly what are the objects of the Arundel Society, and the means by which it seeks to carry its purposes into execution. Its name is adopted from Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, "the father of vertù in England," "the Maecenas of all politer arts as great for his noble patronage of arts and ancient learning as for his high birth and place." The Society was established some ten years since, with the declared purpose of "promoting the knowledge of art." It proposed to publish for its members engravings or other reproductions of rare and important works not lying within the ready reach of the general public. It thus intended to bring to notice monuments of ancient art which from their remote locality or other causes might be difficult of access, and to rescue, ere it should be too late, works endangered by rude violence or more slow decay. Its contemplated sphere may be taken to comprise the arts in every variety of style, as found in all countries and manifested throughout all ages,painting, sculpture, and architecture, schools pagan and classic, Christian and medieval. But out of this wider field it has primarily selected for illustration Italian fresco-painting during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. It was thought the time had arrived when, by scientific inventions and mechanical appliances, greater accuracy than had