EASTLAKE’S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING 301

protects and crowds traverse the sacristy and the saloon; but the frescoes of Titian fade in the solitudes of Padua, and the gesso falls crumbled from the flapping canvas, as the sea-winds shake the Scuola di San Rocco.¹

38. But if, on the one hand, mere abstract excellence of colour be thus coldly regarded, it is equally certain that no work ever attains enduring celebrity which is eminently deficient in this great respect. Colour cannot be indifferent; it is either beautiful and auxiliary to the purposes of the picture, or false, froward, and opposite to them. Even in the painting of Nature herself, this law is palpable; chiefly glorious when colour is a predominant element in her working, she is in the next degree most impressive when it is withdrawn altogether: and forms and scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which were indifferent in the colours of noon. Much more is this the case in the feebleness of imitation; all colour is bad which is less than beautiful; all is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it repels where it cannot enthral, and destroys what it cannot assist. It is besides the painter’s peculiar craft;² he who cannot colour is no painter. It is not painting to grind earths with oil and lay them smoothly on a surface. He only is a painter who can melodize and harmonize hue-if he fail in this, he is no member of the brotherhood. Let him etch, or draw, or carve: better the unerring graver than the unfaithful pencil-better the true sling and stone than the brightness of the unproved armour. And let not even those who deal in the deeper magic, and feel in themselves the loftier power, presume upon that power-nor believe in the reality of any success unless that which has been deserved by deliberate, resolute, successive operation. We would neither deny nor disguise the influences of sensibility or of imagination, upon this, as upon every other admirable quality of

¹ [Titian’s frescoes at Padua are in the Scuola del Santo and the Scuola del Carmine; the former now fatally repainted; copies of them have been published by the Arundel Society. For the neglect of the Scuola di San Rocco, see Vol. IV. p. 40.]

² [Compare Ariadne Florentina, § 21.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]