Brighter and brighter the cities of Italy had been rising and
broadening on hill and plain, for three hundred years. He saw only
strength and immortality, could not but paint both; conceived the form
of man as deathless, calm with power, and fiery with life.
Turner saw the exact reverse of this. In the present work of men,
meanness, aimlessness, unsightliness: thin-walled, lath-divided,
narrow-garreted houses of clay; booths of a darksome Vanity Fair,
busily base.
But on Whitby Hill, and by Bolton Brook,[130] remained traces of other
handiwork. Men who could build had been there; and who also had
wrought, not merely for their own days. But to what purpose? Strong
faith, and steady hands, and patient souls--can this, then, be all you
have left! this the sum of your doing on the earth!--a nest whence the
night-owl may whimper to the brook, and a ribbed skeleton of consumed
arches, looming above the bleak banks of mist, from its cliff to the
sea?
As the strength of men to Giorgione, to Turner their weakness and
vileness, were alone visible. They themselves, unworthy or ephemeral;
their work, despicable, or decayed. In the Venetian's eyes, all beauty
depended on man's presence and pride; in Turner's, on the solitude he
had left, and the humiliation he had suffered.
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