NOTES ON THE LOUVRE 463

pitch of his Shadow, his light is necessarily as white as he can get it, and yet not nearly raised enough, nor warm enough in comparison, making his shadows, though of perfectly true pitch, look ghostly. Veronese, on the contrary, assumes the luminous chalk side, accessible without difficulty, for his total key; only altering it by introducing a feeble direction of general light-nothing like so much as that which there is from a window into the inside of a room-which on the distant buildings casts no shadow at all. (Q. is there not a worse falsity than Turner’s, by-the-bye, in having a dark side without a shadow in the open air?) Vide page 320 [reference to another sketch] which in the near figures, the shadow of a black dwarf, within about three feet of the white tablecloth, is not traceable on the marble of the floor, all the way from his foot to the table but only to about the length of his foot, and on the table-cloth itself is a most ætherial grey, just like one of Turner’s feeblest, only not so sharp, and lighter than the dark side of said table-cloth. His whole purpose, therefore, is to represent character, action, and local colour, with as little of accidental light and shade as possible, except as it is necessary to explain form; while, nevertheless, as a group of lights and shades the picture is magnificent; but all its shadows are local tints-hence his fondness for negroes, who give him a rich brown: one of them places his hand on a white column; it is like a Benvenuto Cellini’s mingling of bronze and alabaster; their hair gives him the most vigorous black-together with local blacks occurring in dresses and patterns, as, for instance, on the under table-cloth, where the black remains intense and full in full light, though the red of a lilac dress in front of it remains red (and lighter than that, local black) in full shade.

Contentment; Singleness of Purpose.

Picturesque; Sympathy required in it.

§ 32. Consider, then, if this be not a further instance of the necessity of Contentment with, and of aiming at, a single object, if any great perfection is to be reached. Veronese desires glory and truth of colour, and he gets it, adding all the majesty of shadow by local colour; the French painters have vaily tried to join force of light and shade with colour; note especially the sharp divisions of draperies in blue and white, as sharp as candlelight shadow, in fresco of Ascending Magdalen over altar of La Madeleine.¹ Now, to get this, they have sacrificed a certain portion of colour, whitening their blues and reds on the lights, and using much light colour; the result is a kind of statuesque block in a sickly candlelight, drawing the eye to all its bits and divisions, and entirely picturesque in treatment without the shadow of picturesqueness in conception. They are, in fact, bad imitations of Greek statues, seen by a feeble sunlight (for the shadows have the sharpness of the highest sunlight without its force or energy), and dressed up in opaque and artificial colour (I never thought of this necessary sympathy between shadow and Form or Fancy in the Picturesque before). Tintoret, on the other hand, as he increases the force of his shadow, increases that of colour also; his main difference from Veronese and Titian being less in the force of cast shadows than in the increased vigour of dark sides. But then, as he increases this vigour, in draperies, etc., with the Frenchman,

¹ [By C. J. Ziegler (1804-1856).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]