284 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

practice which invokes accident, evades law, discredits application, despises system, and sets forth with chief exultation, contingent beauty, and extempore invention.

28. But it is not only the fixed nature of the successive steps which influenced the character of these early painters. A peculiar direction was given to their efforts by the close attention to drawing which, as Mr. Eastlake has especially noticed, was involved in the preparation of the design on the white ground. That design was secured with a care and finish which in many instances might seem altogether supererogatory.* The preparation by John Bellini¹ in the Florentine gallery is completed with exhaustles diligence into even the portions farthest removed from the light, where the thick brown of the shadows must necessarily have afterwards concealed the greater part of the work. It was the discipline undergone in producing this preparation which fixed the character of the school. The most important part of the picture was executed not with the brush, but with the point, and the refinements attainable by this instrument dictated the treatment of their subject. Hence the transition to etching and engraving, and the intense love of minute detail, accompanied by an imaginative communication of dignity and power to the smallest forms, in Albert Dürer and others. But this attention to minutiæ was not the only result; the disposition of light and shade was also affected by the method. Shade was not to be had at small cost; its masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to their depths only by expenditure of

* The preparations of Hemling, at Bruges, we imagine to have been in water-colour, and perhaps the picture was carried to some degree of completion in this material. Van Mander observes that Van Eyck’s dead colourings “were cleaner and sharper than the finished works of other painters.”²

¹ [Eastlake refers at p. 381 to this preparation for a picture by Giovanni Bellini (in the collection of the Uffizi), “drawn and shaded on a white ground preparatory to its completion in oil colours.”]

² [Quoted by Eastlake, p. 395.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]