Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/369

 head with heavy lips and nose, a collar tied loose round the large throat; another head, bearded and supine; slight studies of man and horse and child; a Deposition of Christ, and a Burial, with fine realistic landscape hard by the city walls; a man beheading a woman, who in the act grasps hard the doomed head with his unarmed left hand. By Mabuse there is a quaint horror in the way of martyrology; the boiling of some saint in a vessel like a kitchen-pot, while one tormentor scalds his head with water or oil or molten metal out of a little bucket at the end of a pole. Mabuse in his sketches has revelled in the ways and works of hangmen, seen in a grim broad light of German laughter; their quaint gestures and quaint implements have a ludicrous and bloody look; observe another pot with rings round it, ominous and simple in make, and the boy staring with strained eyes. These fine sharp caricatures of torturers might serve a modern eye as studies for Henriet Cousin of "Notre-Damede Paris" or Master Hansen of "Sidonia;" there is a stupid funereal fun in the brute mechanism of their aspect. He has also a really fine drawing of a saint stepping into his own grave, made ready in a chapel before the altar. Martin Schöngauer too has left a good female head with ample hair, and a strong hard design of a knight and devil in deadly grapple. A head after Holbein is unmistakeable; the hair is thick, the chin long, the fine lips fretted and keen. Not far off is the only waif of Spanish art I find here; a head sketched in chalk by Velasquez, with large eyes and red lips, the upper lip thin.

I turn back to Florence for my last note; to one of