85. I wish you therefore to begin your study of natural history and landscape by discerning the simple outlines and the pleasant colors of things; and to rest in them as long as you can. But, observe, you can only do this on one condition--that of striving also to create, in reality, the beauty which you seek in imagination. It will be wholly impossible for you to retain the tranquillity of temper and felicity of faith necessary for noble purist painting, unless you are actively engaged in promoting the felicity and peace of practical life. None of this bright Gothic art was ever done but either by faith in the attainableness of felicity in heaven, or under conditions of real order and delicate loveliness on the earth.
86. As long as I can possibly keep you among them, there you shall stay--among the almond and apple blossom. But if you go on into the veracities of the school of Clay, you will find there is something at the roots of almond and apple trees, which is--This. You must look at him in the face--fight him--conquer him with what scathe you may: you need not think to keep out of the way of him. There is Turner's Dragon; there is Michael Angelo's; there, a very little one of Carpaccio's. Every soul of them had to understand the creature, and very earnestly.
87. Not that Michael Angelo understands his dragon as the others do. He was not enough a colorist either to catch the points of the creature's aspect, or to feel the same hatred of them; but I confess myself always amazed in looking at Michael Angelo's work here or elsewhere, at his total carelessness of anatomical character except only in the human body. It is very easy to round a dragon's neck, if the only idea you have of it is that it is virtually no more than a coiled sausage; and, besides, anybody can round anything if you have full scale from white high light to black shadow.
88. But look here at Carpaccio, even in my copy. The colorist says, "First of all, as my delicious paroquet was ruby, so this nasty viper shall be black"; and then is the question, "Can I round him off, even though he is black, and make him slimy, and yet springy, and close down--clotted like a pool of black blood on the earth--all the same?" Look at him beside Michael Angelo's, and then tell me the Venetians can't draw! And also, Carpaccio does it with a touch, with one sweep of his brush; three minutes at the most allowed for all the beast; while Michael Angelo has been haggling at this dragon's neck for an hour.