17. Towards the better understanding of which Catholic faith, another step may be made, if you will, by sending to Mr. Ward for the Etruscan Leucothea,* with Dionysus on her knees,' which also stands just half-way in imagination, though only a quarter of the way in time, between the Egyptian Madonna (Isis with Horus), of fifteen hundred years before Christ, and the Florentine Madonna by Lippi, fifteen hundred years after Christ. Lippi, being true-bred Etruscan, simply raises the old sculpture into pure and sacred life, retaining all its forms, even to the spiral of the throne ornament, and the transgression of the figures on the bordering frame, acknowledging, in this subjection to the thoughts and laws of his ancestors, a nobler Catholic Faith than Athanasius wrote: faith, namely, in that one Lord by whose breath, from the beginning of creation, the children of men are born; and into whose hands, dying, they give up their spirit.

18. This photograph of Etruscan art is therefore to be the second of our possessions, and means of study; affording us at once elements of art-practice in many directions, according to our strength; and as we began with drawing

I take the title of this relief from Mr. Parker's catalogue, not being certain of the subject myself, and rather conceiving it to be Latona with Apollo.

1 [Plate V. here. "Bas-relief of Leucothea and Bacchus, a female figure in a chair with a child. In the Villa Albani, Rome (980)." So described under No. 2828 in Mr. Parker's Catalogue (Historical Photographs, by J. H. Parker). The work, however, is not Etruscan; rather does it recall the style of the archaic Attic reliefs (for Ruskin's remarks on the resemblance between Attic and Etruscan art, see Preface to Xenophon's Economist, § 19). "The former view, which saw in this relief a representation of the education of the young Dionysus by Leucothea, scarcely requires refutation at the present stage of archæological science. All authorities now recognize it as a tomb-relief, in which the deceased is represented as a happy mother, seated in a chair and caressing her little daughter. A relative or servant hands her a ribbon, either for her own decoration or for that of the child. The two other smaller female figures are either older daughters or servantmaids; their outstretched hands seem to express their delight in the gaiety of the little one. The wool-basket below the chair indicates that the deceased was a thrifty and diligent housekeeper" (see the English translation of W. Helbig's Guide to the Public Collections of Classical Antiquities in Rome, 1896, vol. ii. pp. 33-34).]

2 [The woodcut here inserted (Fig. 11) is from a bronze in the Third Egyptian Room of the British Museum; it is of the twelfth century B.C.]

the beads of cap, and spiral of chair, in the Lippi,1 rather than the Madonna, so here it will be well to be sure we can draw the throne, before we try the Leucothea. Outline it first by the eye, then trace the original, to correct your drawing; and by the time next Fors comes out, I hope your power of drawing a fine curve, like that of the back of this throne, will be materially increased; by that time also I shall have got spirals to compare with these Etruscan ones, drawn from shells only an hour or two old, sent me by my good friend Mr. Sillar (who taught me the wrongness of the infinite spiral of money interest), by which I am at present utterly puzzled, finding our conclusions in last Fors on this point of zoology quite wrong; and that the little snails have no less twisted houses than the large. But neither for drawing nor architecture

3

2

Fig. 11

is there to-day more time, but only to correct and clarify my accounts, which I have counted a little too far on my

1 [See Letter 59, § 8 (p. 447).].

2 [See Letter 65, § 16 (p. 601).]

3 [See above, pp. 554-555; and below, p. 601.]