• Ruskin, Modern Painters , III 19:⁠— “There was probably never a period in which the influence of art over the minds of men seemed to depend less on its merely imitative power, than the close of the thirteenth century. No painting or sculpture at that time reached more than a rude resemblance of reality. Its despised perspective, imperfect chiaroscuro, and unrestrained flights of fantastic imagination, separated the artist’s work from nature by an interval which there was no attempt to disguise, and little to diminish. And yet, at this very period, the greatest poet of that, or perhaps of any other age, and the attached friend of its greatest painter, who must over and over again have held full and free conversation with him respecting the objects of his art, speaks in the following terms of painting, supposed to be carried to its highest perfection:⁠— ‘Qual di pennel fu maestro, e di stile Che ritraesse l’ ombre, e i tratti, ch’ ivi Mirar farieno uno ingegno sottile. Morti li morti, e i vivi parean vivi: Non vide me’ di me, chi vide il vero, Quant’ io calcai, fin che chinato givi.’ Dante has here clearly no other idea of the highest art than that it should bring back, as in a mirror or vision, the aspect of things passed or absent.