464 APPENDIX TO PART II

he not only introduces sympathetic picturesqueness of form, but a vast mass of relative shade, out of which his fierce lights in pure colour rise in due relation. The Frenchman leaves light in mass, like Paul Veronese, and therefore draws the eye only to his break-up petits shadows: again, Tintoret never sacrifices the truth of a colour, but reaches his light and shade through his colour as far as he can with truth and no further, and in his cast shadows he rather uses one here and there for a ghastly or expressive effect than admits them as a necessity. This comparison, however, I must work out with much thought.¹

Architecture of Veronese; Thinness of colour.

§ 33. Meantime, note further of Veronese, as we saw that the black outlines were much left, so the painting seems extremely thin; being on the floor, I saw the picture divinely, out of its frame. At the bottom, the canvass where the frame had gone over it, appeared covered with a very thin film of gesso, and over this a rich, somewhat dark brown was scratched very rudely in small touches, not like the hand of a master, unless done so on purpose. Nevertheless, all the greys of the architecture, and blues of sky, appeared to me to be painted over this brown, and to have its dark gleaming through them continually, and giving depth. The greys themselves were the most pearly and lovely possible, and, to my amazement, of pure colour blended as finely as Turner’s own-how, on such a scale, heaven knows; but there were pure blues, and gold and rose colour, and the under brown-all most ætherial and amalgamating, and melting into the opalescent grey which made me write in my small notebook, when I first sat down before this architecture, that it had properties which in nature were “almost peculiar to snow.” The touching of the high lights is not so confused as Turner’s, more like scene-painting-fitter for background-as less studied, quite as white but more commonplace in stroke. The strong darks, throughout the pictures, are dreadfully chilled, only a patch here and there showing their original intensity. The vermilions are just as raw and bad as in Cuyp.²

Picturesqueness.

§ 34. The Modified and Sublime Picturesqueness, in exact harmony with the grand colour, is very delicious; consider especially the quaint form of the sandal ... [reference to a sketch-book]. It is white; and it seems to me a curious circumstance that the female figure to which it belongs, the one which I have always so much admired at the side of the picture, being a kind of chorus figure lifting her foot so as (apparently), propping it on the base of the column, to rest the child upon it which she seems about to take from her shoulder, brings the lines of the cavetto of the sandal into exact correspondence with the base of the column, as in the upper sketch: the base is shown more carefully at ... [reference to another sketch], with the opponent line given by the foot of the little girl peeping round the pillar, who forms the chorus on the other (right) side. Thus there is a kind of statuesque quietness given to the figure; it is, at least in the foot ... [reference to sketch]: (the same base is used in the Titian portrait above described), half turned into stone, and endowed with a grand metamorphic repose, contrasting with the full life of all the rest.

¹ [Here, it will be seen, Ruskin is making some of the studies which he worked out in Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. iii. (“Of Turnerian Light”).]

² [See Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 271).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]