Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/28

14 it, well-knit together in mind; so I have experienced all he describes, a reflection which pleases me. But he writes at length about a great picture by Titian in the Vatican, thinking it impossible to see any meaning in it, and leads one to suppose that the figures are only arranged elegantly side by side. I flatter myself, however, that I have found a deep significance in this picture, and maintain that he is right who sees most in a Titian, for the man was simply divine. He, indeed, found no opportunity to display the whole breadth of his inspiration, as Raphael did here in the Vatican; yet one can never forget his three pictures at Venice, and this of the Vatican, which I first saw this morning, stands in line with them. If a child could enter the world with perceptions fully developed, things would everywhere break on him with the same joyful, vivid effect as the pictures here do on oneself. The school of Athens, the Disputa, and the St. Peter one feels to be the exact realisation of what the artist’s mind conceived.

How delightful is the entrance past the luminous open arches when one sees the unbroken view into the place of St. Peter’s, and over Rome to the blue Alban mountains, while above one are the figures from the Old Testament, and a thousand bright, little angels amid arabesques of fruits and garlanded flowers. It is thus one enters the gallery for the first time!

But, dear Hensel, all hail to you, for your copy of the Transfiguration is wonderful. It was not to-day that I first felt the delightful shudder which seizes one