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§ 7. Conditions

peculiar circumstances only), with any high power of intellect. It is, however, necessary carefully to observe the following modifications of this broad principle.

The absolute necesssity, for such I indeed consider it, is of no more. of its necessity than such a luminous point as may give to the feelings a species of escape from all the finite objects about them. There is a spectral etching of Rembrandt, a presentation of Christ in the temple, where the figure of a robed priest stands glaring by its gems out of the gloom, holding a crosier. Behind it there is a subdued window light seen in the opening between two columns, without which the impressiveness of the whole subject would, I think, be incalculably diminished. I cannot tell whether I am at present allowing too much weight to my own fancies and predilections, but without so much escape into the outer air and open heaven as this, I can take permanent pleasure in no picture.

§ 8. And connected analogies.

And I think I am supported in this feeling by the unanimous practice, if not the confessed opinion, of all artists. The Painter of Portrait is unhappy without his conventional white stroke under the sleeve, or beside the arm-chair; the painter of interiors feels like a caged bird, unless he can throw a window open, or set the door ajar; the landscapist dares not lose himself in forest without a gleam of light under its farthest branches, nor ventures out in rain, unless he may somewhere pierce to a better promise in the distance, or cling to some closing gap of variable blue above; Escape, Hope, Infinity, by whatever Conventionalism sought; the desire is the same in all, the Instinct constant: it is no mere point of light that is wanted in the etching of Rembrandt above instanced; a gleam of armour or fold of temple curtain would have been utterly valueless: neither is it liberty, for though we cut down hedges and level hills, and give what waste and plain we choose, on the right hand and the left, it is all comfortless and undesired, so long as we cleave not a way of escape forward; and however narrow and thorny and difficult the ncarer path, it matters not, so only that the clouds open for us at its close. Neither will any amount of beauty in nearer form, make us content to stay with it, so long as we are shut down to that alone; nor is any form so cold or so hurtful but that we may look upon it with kindness, so only that it rise against the infinite hope of light beyond. The reader can follow out the analogies of this unassisted.

ment is propor

to the expression of

But although this narrow portal of escape be all that is absolutely $ 9. How the necessary, I think that the dignity of the painting increases with dignity of treat the extent and amount of the expression. With the earlier and tioned mightier painters of Italy, the practice is commonly to leave their infinity. distance pure and open sky, of such simplicity that it in nowise shall interfere with, or draw the attention from the interest of the figures; and of such purity that, especially towards the horizon, it shall be in the highest degree expressive of the infinite space of heaven. I do not mean to say that they did this with any occult or metaphysical motives. They did it, I think, with the unpretending simplicity of all earnest men; they did what they loved and felt; they sought what the heart naturally secks, and gave what it most gratefully receives; and I look to them as in all points of principle (not, observe, of knowledge or empirical attainment) as the most irrefragable authorities, precisely on account of the child-like innocence, which never deemed itself authoritative, but acted upon desire, and not upon dicta, and sought for sympathy, not for admiration.

Southern

And so we find the same simple and sweet treatment, the open sky, § 10. Examples the tender, horizontal white clouds, the far winding and abundant among the landscape, in Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Laurati, Angelico, Benozzo, schools. Ghirlandajo, Francia, Perugino, and the young Raphael; the first symptom of conventionality appearing in Perugino, who, though, with intense feeling of light and colour, he carried the glory of his luminous distance far beyond all his predecessors, began at the same time to use a somewhat morbid relief of his figures against the upper sky. This he has done in the Assumption of the Florentine Academy, in that of l'Annunziata; and of the Gallery of Bologna, in all which pictures the lower portions are incomparably the finest, owing to the light distance behind the heads. Raphael, in his fall, betrayed the faith he had received from his father and his master, and substituted for the radiant sky of the Madonna del Cardellino, the chamber-wall of the Madonna della Sediola, and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino. Yet it is curious to observe how much of the dignity even of his later pictures depends on such portions as the green light of the lake, and sky behind the rocks, in the St. John of the tribune; and how the repainted distortion of the Madonna dell' Impannata, is redeemed into something

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§ 11. Among the Venetians.

§ 12. Among the painters of Landscape.

like elevated character, merely by the light of the linen window from which it takes its name.

That which was done by the Florentines in pure simplicity of heart, the Venetians did through love of the colour and splendour of the sky itself, even to the frequent sacrificing of their subject to the passion of its distance. In Carpaccio, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret, the preciousness of the luminous sky, so far as it might be at all consistent with their subject, is nearly constant; abandoned altogether in portraiture only, seldom even there, and never with advantage. Titian and Veronese, who had less exalted feeling than the others, afford a few instances of exception; the latter overpowering his silvery distances with foreground splendour; the other sometimes sacrificing them to a luscious fulness of colour; as in the Flagellation in the Louvre, by a comparison of which with the unequalled majesty of the Entombment opposite, the applicability of the general principle may at once be tested.

But of the value of this mode of treatment there is a farther and more convincing proof than its adoption either by the innocence of the Florentine or the ardour of the Venetian; namely, that when retained or imitated from them by the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, when appearing in isolation from all other good, among the weaknesses and paltrinesses of Claude, the mannerisms of Gaspar, and the caricatures and brutalities of Salvator, it yet redeems and upholds all three, conquers all foulness by its purity, vindicates all folly by its dignity, and puts an uncomprehended power of permanent address to the human heart, upon the lips of the senseless and the profane.1

In one of the smaller rooms of the Pitti palace, over the door, is a Temptation of St. Anthony, by Salvator, wherein such power as the artist possessed is fully manifested, and less offensively than is usual in his sacred subjects. It is a vigorous and ghastly thought, in that kind of horror which is dependent on scenic effect, perhaps unrivalled, and I shall have occasion to refer to it again in speaking of the powers of Imagination. I allude to it here, because the sky of the distance affords a remarkable instance of the power of light at present under discussion. It is formed of flakes of black cloud, with rents and openings of intense and lurid green, and at least half of the impressiveness of the picture depends on these openings. Close them, make the sky one mass of gloom, and the spectre will be awful no longer. It owes to the light of the distance both its size and its spirituality. The time would fail me, if I were to name the tenth part of the pictures which occur to me, whose vulgarity is redeemed by this circumstance alone: and yet let not the artist trust to such morbid and conventional use of it as may be seen in the common blue and yellow effectism of the present day. Of the value of moderation

modes in which

Now although I doubt not that the general value of this treatment § 13. Other will be acknowledged by all lovers of art, it is not certain that the the power of point to prove which I have brought it forward, will be as readily infinity is felt. conceded; namely, the inherent power of all representations of infinity

over the human heart; for there are, indeed, countless associations of

pure

14. The Beauty of Cur

and religious kind, which combine with each other to enhance the impression, when presented in this particular form, whose power I neither deny nor am careful to distinguish, seeing that they all tend to the same point, and have reference to heavenly hopes; delights they are in seeing the narrow, black, miserable earth fairly compared with the bright firmament; reachings forward unto the things that are before, and joyfulness in the apparent, though unreachable, nearness and promise of them. But there are other modes in which infinity may be represented, which are confused by no associations of the kind, and which would, as being in mere matter, appear trivial and mean, but for their incalculable influence on the forms of all that we feel to be beautiful. The first of these is the curvature of lines and surfaces, § wherein it at first appears futile to insist upon any resemblance or vature. suggestion of infinity, since there is certainly, in our ordinary contemplation of it, no sensation of the kind. But I have repeated again and again that the ideas of beauty are instinctive, and that it is only upon consideration, and even then in doubtful and disputable way, that they appear in their typical character; neither do I intend at all to insist upon the particular meaning which they appear to myself to bear, but merely on their actual and demonstrable agreeableness; so that in the present case, while I assert positively, and have no fear of being able to prove, that a curve of any kind is more beautiful than a right line, I leave it to the reader to accept or not, as he pleases, that reason of its agreeableness, which is the only one that I can at all trace; namely, that every curve divides itself infinitely by its changes of direction.

stantinexternal

That all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively of § 15. How concurves will, I believe, be at once allowed; but that which there will be Nature. need more especially to prove, is the subtlety and constancy of curvature in all natural forms whatsoever. I believe that, except in crystals, in certain mountain forms admitted for the sake of sublimity or con

and simplicity in the use of this, as of all other sources of pleasurable emotion, I shall presently have occasion to speak farther.

§ 16. The Beauty of Gradation.

§ 17. How found in Nature.

trast, (as in the slope of debris), in rays of light, in the levels of calm water and alluvial land, and in some few organic developments, there are no lines nor surfaces of nature without curvature; though as we before saw in clouds, more especially in their under lines towards the horizon, and in vast and extended plains, right lines are often suggested which are not actual. Without these we could not be sensible of the value of the contrasting curves; and while, therefore, for the most part the eye is fed in natural forms with a grace of curvature which no hand nor instrument can follow, other means are provided to give beauty to those surfaces which are admitted for contrast, as in water by its reflection of the gradations which it possesses not itself. In freshly-broken ground, which Nature has not yet had time to model, in quarries and pits which are none of her cutting, in those convulsions and evidences of convulsion, of whose influence on ideal landscape I shall presently have occasion to speak, and generally in all ruin and disease, and interference of one order of being with another (as in the cattle line of park trees), the curves vanish, and violently opposed or broken and unmeaning lines take their place.

What curvature is to lines, gradation is to shades and colours. It is their infinity, and divides them into an infinite number of degrees. Absolutely without gradation no natural surface can possibly be, except under circumstances of so rare conjunction as to amount to a lusus naturæ; for we have seen that few surfaces are without curvature, and every curved surface must be gradated by the nature of light; and for the gradation of the few plane surfaces that exist, means are provided in local colour, ærial perspective, reflected lights, &c., from which it is but barely conceivable that they should ever escape. For instances of the complete absence of gradation we must look to man's work, or to his disease and decrepitude. Compare the gradated colours of the rainbow with the stripes of a target, and the gradual deepening of the youthful blood in the cheek with an abrupt patch of rouge, or with the sharply drawn veins of old age.

Gradation is so inseparable a quality of all natural shade that the eye refuses in painting to understand a shadow which appears without it; while, on the other hand, nearly all the gradations of nature are so subtle, and between degrees of tint so slightly separated, that no human hand can in any wise equal, or do anything more than suggest the idea

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