eBooks Base 2000

The most beautiful picture in the world, I am convinced, is Raphael's
"Madonna della Seggiola." I was familiar with it in a hundred engravings
and copies, and therefore it shone upon one as with a familiar beauty,
though infinitely more divine than I had ever seen it before. An artist
was copying it, and producing certainly something very like a fac-simile,
yet leaving out, as a matter of course, that mysterious something that
renders the picture a miracle. It is my present opinion that the
pictorial art is capable of something more like magic, more wonderful and
inscrutable in its methods, than poetry or any other mode of developing
the beautiful. But how does this accord with what I have been saying
only a minute ago? How then can the decayed picture of a great master
ever be restored by the touches of an inferior hand? Doubtless it never
can be restored; but let some devoted worshipper do his utmost, and the
whole inherent spirit of the divine picture may pervade his restorations
likewise.


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