EASTLAKE’S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING 285

toil and time; and, as future grounds for colour, they were necessarily restricted to the natural shadow of every object, white being left for high lights of whatever hue. In consequence, the character of pervading daylight, almost inevitably produced in the preparation, was afterwards assumed as a standard in the painting. Effectism, accidental shadows, all obvious and vulgar artistical treatment, were excluded, or introduced only as the lights became more loaded, and were consequently imposed with more facility on the dark ground. Where shade was required in large mass, it was obtained by introducing an object of locally dark colour. The Italian masters who followed Van Eyck’s system were in the constant habit of relieving their principal figures by the darkness of some object, foliage, throne, or drapery, introduced behind the head, the open sky being left visible on each side. A green drapery is thus used with great quaintness by John Bellini in the noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a black screen, with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself and his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain behind the Madonna, in Francia’s best picture at Bologna.¹ Where the subject was sacred, and the painter great, this system of pervading light produced pictures of a peculiar

¹ [For another reference to the Bellini in the Brera Gallery at Milan, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 180). The picture referred to in the Louvre is No. 1156, “Portraits of Two Men,” now attributed to Gentile Bellini (see below, pp. 453, 454). Francia’s “best picture at Bologna” is the “Madonna and Child, with SS. Roch, Bernardino, Anthony, and Sebastian,” in the Church of S. Martino. Ruskin describes it in his 1846 diary:-

“The Virgin sits upon an arch, through which is seen a sweet landscape; she looks calmly down to the saints assembled below, turning partly to her right towards the San Rocco, holding the Christ with her left arm. The contour of the figure is, I think, the grandest of all the seated Madonnas I know; perfectly calm, unaffected, and sublime; the right hand holds the Bible open; falling lightly over it, the middle and third finger, just a hair’s-breadth more extended than by the mere fall of the hand, hardly point to a red-letter text, too high to be read. For grace and simplicity of gesture and quantity of expression put into turns of hands and arms, the figures below are quite unrivalled; the San Rocco pointing to his limb; St. Francis behind, a glorious grey head and most holy countenance; not monkish, and especially another saint leaning with both hands on his staff. It is impossible without seeing the picture, to conceive how much mind may be thrown into this simple action. St. Sebastian on the right; the body most elaborately and exquisitely painted-I think the most finished piece of flesh painting, for finish without forcing of all the muscular markings, and purity of simple colour that I have ever seen. I think this

[Version 0.04: March 2008]