I teazed my _valet de place_ (Mr. Andrew Wyche, a Tyrolese, a very pleasant, companionable, and patriotic sort of person) the whole of the first morning at every fresh landing or embarkation by asking, ‘But are we going to see the Saint Peter Martyr?’ When we reached the Church of Saint John and Saint Paul, the light did not serve, and we got reprimanded by the priest for turning our backs on the host, in our anxiety to find a proper point of view. We returned to the charge at five in the afternoon, when the light fell upon it through a high-arched Gothic window, and it came out in all its pristine glory, with its rich, embrowned, overshadowing trees, its nobly-drawn heroic figures, its blood-stained garments, its flowers and trailing plants, and that cold convent-spire rising in the distance amidst the sapphire mountains and the golden sky. I found every thing in its place and as I expected. Yet I am unwilling to say that I saw it through my former impressions: this picture suffices to itself, and fills the mind without an effort; for it contains all the mighty world of landscape and history, grandeur and breadth of form with the richest depth of colouring, an expression characteristic, powerful, that cannot be mistaken, conveying the scene at the moment, a masterly freedom and unerring truth of execution, and a subject as original as it is stately and romantic. It is the foremost of Titian’s productions, and exhibits the most extraordinary specimen of his varied powers. Most probably, as a picture, it is the finest in the world; or if I cannot say it is the picture which I would the soonest have painted, it is at least the one which I would the soonest have. It is a rich feast to the eye, ‘where no crude surfeit reigns.’ As an instance of the difference between Titian and Raphael, you here see the figures from below, and they stand out with noble grandeur of effect against the sky; Raphael would have buried them under the horizon, or stuck them against the landscape, without relief or motion. So much less knowledge had he of the picturesque! Again, I do not think Raphael could have given the momentary expression of sudden, ghastly terror, or the hurried, disorderly movements of the flying Monk, or the entire prostration of the other (like a rolling ruin) so well as Titian. The latter could not, I know, raise a sentiment to its height like the former; but Raphael’s expressions and attitudes were (so to speak) the working out of ‘foregone conclusions,’ not the accidental fluctuations of mind or matter—were final and fixed,[47] not salient or variable. I observed, in looking closer, that the hinder or foreshortened leg of the flying monk rests upon the edge of a bank of earth, from which he is descending. This explains the action of the part better, but I doubt whether this idea of inequality and interruption from the broken nature of the ground is an addition to the feeling of precipitate fear and staggering perplexity in the mind of the person represented. This may be an hypercriticism. The colouring of the foremost leg of this figure is sufficient to prove that the utter paleness of the rest of it is from its having faded in the course of time. The colour of the face in this and the other monk is the same as it was twenty years ago; it has sustained no injury in that time. But for the sun-burnt, well-baked, robust tone of the flesh-colour, commend me to the leg and girded thigh of the robber. What a difference between this and Raphael’s brick-dust!—I left this admirable performance with regret; yet I do not see why; for I have it present with me, ‘in my mind’s eye,’ and swear, in the wildest scenes of the Alps, that the St. Peter Martyr is finer. That, and the Man in the Louvre, are my standards of perfection; my taste may be wrong; nay, even ridiculous—yet such it is.