174 THE STONES OF VENICE

colours of the draperies being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent his life in masquing and revelry.¹ But his pictures are full of horror, and their colour is for the most part gloomy grey. Truly it would seem as if art had so much of eternity in it, that it must take its dye from the close rather than the course of life:-“In such laughter the heart of man is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.”²

§ 32. These are no singular instances. I know no law more severely without exception than this of the connexion of pure colour with profound and noble thought. The late Flemish pictures, shallow in conception and obscene in subject, are always sober in colour. But the early religious painting of the Flemings is as brilliant in hue as it is holy in thought. The Bellinis, Francias, Peruginos painted in crimson, and blue, and gold. The Caraccis, Guidos, and Rembrandts in brown and grey. The builders of our great cathedrals veiled their casements and wrapped their pillars with one robe of purple splendour. The builders of the luxurious Renaissance left their palaces filled only with cold white light, and in the paleness of their native stones.*

§ 33. Nor does it seem difficult to discern a noble reason for this universal law. In that heavenly circle which binds the statutes of colour upon the front of the sky, when it became the sign of the covenant of peace, the pure hues of divided light were sanctified to the human heart for ever;³ nor this, it would seem, by mere arbitrary appointment, but in consequence of the fore-ordained and marvellous constitution of those hues into a sevenfold, or, more strictly still, a threefold order, typical of the Divine nature itself. Observe also, the name Shem, or Splendour, given

* Appendix 12: “Modern Painting on Glass” [p. 455].

¹ [See Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. (“Dürer and Salvator”).]

² [Proverbs xiv. 13.]

³ [Here, again, compare Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]