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The Veroneses still glowed from the walls, dimming with their Venetian effulgence all the other pictures but the Botticellis and the Francias, and comforting one with the hope that, if one had always felt their beauty so much, one might, without suspecting it, have always had some little sense of art.
He crossed Lombardy afterwards, and found, unexpectedly, some good Paul Veroneses at Turin. He had been troubled by many questions respecting the 'real motives of Venetian work, which he had planned to work out in the Louvre; but 'seeing that Turin was a good place wherein to keep out of people's way, he settled there instead.
On the walls are historical paintings which are admirable examples of story-telling, and on the ceiling are Veroneses, original or copied, the best of which depicts an old man with his head on his hand, fine both in drawing and colour.
"That's better than growing maudlin over a raft of saints who never did me any good. Your Titians and your Veroneses are splendid; there's color and life there. But these cross-eyed mosaics!" Merrihew threw up his hands in protest. Hillard let go his laughter.
It includes nineteen Titians, thirteen Paul Veroneses, seventeen Tintorettos, three Leonardos, three Raphaels and thirteen pictures by Rubens himself. A single one of the Titians, if sold at auction today, would bring more than the Duke paid for the entire collection.
The Turin Gallery, which is large and well arranged, is the fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a couple of magnificent Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses; the latter a Queen of Sheba and a Feast of the House of Levi the usual splendid combination of brocades, grandees and marble colonnades dividing those skies <i>de turquoise malade</i> to which Theophile Gautier is fond of alluding.
The Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the traveller feels at liberty to keep his best attention in reserve.
All this might indicate an artistic temperament, the ability to do petty things grandly; but Hillard had escaped this. He loved his Raphaels, his Titians, his Veroneses, his Rubenses, without any desire to make indifferent copies of them; he admired his Dante, his Petrarch, his Goldoni, without the wish to imitate them.
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