EASTLAKE’S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING 287

exists of asphaltum having been used in Flemish pictures, and with safety, even though prepared in the modern manner:-

“It is not ground” (says De Mayerne), “but a drying oil is prepared with litharge, and the pulverized asphaltum mixed with this oil is placed in a glass vessel, suspended by a thread (in a water bath). Thus exposed to the fire it melts like butter; when it begins to boil it is instantly removed. It is an excellent colour for shadows, and may be glazed like lake; it lasts well.”-Ib., p. 463.

30. The great advantage of this primary laying in of the darks in brown was the obtaining an unity of shadow throughout the picture, which rendered variety of hue, where it occurred, an instantly accepted evidence of light. It mattered not how vigorous or how deep in tone the masses of local colour might be, the eye could not confound them with true shadow; it everywhere distinguished the transparent browns as indicative of gloom, and became acutely sensible of the presence and preciousness of light wherever local tints rose out of their depths. But however superior this method may be to the arbitrary use of polychrome shadows, utterly unrelated to the lights, which has been admitted in modern works; and however beautiful or brilliant its results might be in the hands of colourists as faithful as Van Eyck, or as inventive as Rubens; the principle on which it is based becomes dangerous whenever, in assuming that the ultimate hue of every shadow is brown, it presupposes a peculiar and conventional light.¹ It is true, that so long as the early practice of finishing the underdrawing with the pen was continued, the grey of that preparation might perhaps diminish the force of the upper colour, which became in that case little more than a glowing varnish-even thus sometimes verging on too monotonous warmth, as the reader may observe in the head of Dandolo,² by John Bellini, in the National Gallery. But when, by later and more impetuous hands, the point tracing was dispensed with, and

¹ [On the subject of colour in shadow, see Elements of Drawing, § 55; Lectures on Art, §§ 134, 175.]

² [A slip of the pen for Loredano: No. 189 in the National Gallery.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]