Print collector's quarterly (12.1925)

as the trifling plaything of great artists. Lithography is
a heavy medium. It is done on stones. It is drawn in
penetrating grease and printed with unyielding ink. Is
it fanciful to see in this stone-borne art something akin
to sculpture ? It is an art of the mass. It handles the
huge volume of the day and the night—white and black.
It is the orchestra, not the violin. The nerve-line of
etching is not within its spirit. The great lithographer
of the future, its Rembrandt when he comes, will desire
of the stone all and more than all that can be demanded
of any medium whatsoever ; it will be no mere hand-
maiden of greater powers. May we imagine Tintoret
living to-morrow and working on stones ? He said his
favourite colours were white and black, the flash and
the gloom. He would be the lithographer towards whose
advent these many artists have been groping. And in
him lithography would fulfil its function of a great art.
His paintings round the halls of the Scuola di San
Rocco, smothered in the dazzled gloom between the
windows, all the colour sucked out of them, fiercely
thrusting out their forms, the whites flashing from their
black depths—imagine these printed in glowing ink from
lithographic stones ; the star shining on Nazareth
announcing the mighty birth, the startled Virgin
mother-to-be, the faring into Egypt, the tumult of the
massacred innocents (a bloodless bewilderment of pure
form), the terrible sorrow in Gethsemane, the awful
serene lifting upon the Cross ; and again that sweet
meeting of Mary with Elizabeth that is painted on the
staircase, and the great passion-torn Moses striking
water from the rock upon the roof : how splendid these
things would be as prints from the stone ; the forms,
felt as a sculptor feels his clay, could be so felt on the

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