Quotes from John Ruskin
John Ruskin, M.A.
Honorary Student of Christ Church
Slade Professor of Fine ArtQuotes from "Lectures on Art,"
Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870
"The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues . . . . The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. you can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstance." Lect. 1:27
"For the trades by which the British people have believed it to be the highest of destinies to maintain itself, cannot now long remain undisputed in its hands; its unemployed poor are daily becoming more violently criminal; and a searching distress in the middle classes, arising partly from their vanity in living always up to their incomes, and partly from their folly in imagining that they can subsist in idleness upon usury, will at last compel the sons and daughters of English families to acquaint themselves with the principles of providential economy; and to learn that food can only be got out of the ground, and competence only secured by frugality; and that although it is not possible for all to be occupied in the highest arts, nor for any, guiltlessly, to pass their days in a succession of pleasures, the most perfect mental culture possible to men is founded on their useful energies, and their best arts and brightest happiness are consistent, and consistent only, with their virtue." Lect. 1:27
"We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now finally betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice..." Lect. 1:28
"The highest thing that art can do is to set before you the true image of the presence of a noble human being. It has never done more than this, and it ought not to do less." Lect. 2:31
"All great arts have for their object either the support or exaltation of human life, - usually both...." Lect. 2:31
"The great arts . . . have had, and can have, but three principal directions of purpose: first, that of enforcing the religion of men; secondly that of perfecting their ethical state; thirdly, that of doing them material service." Lect. 2:32
Ruskin advises reading Plato's Republic -
Book II and what you like of Book III on art and morality."...consider how the arts have thus followed the worship of the crowd. You have paintings of saints and angels, innumerable; - of petty couriers, and contemptible or cruel kings, innumerable. Few, how few you have (but these, observe, almost always by great painters) of the best men, or of their actions. But think for yourselves...what history might have been to us now... if it had but been the object both of the people to discern, and of their arts to honour and bear record of, the great deeds of their worthiest men." Lect. 2:58
"And you will find, as you examine further, that all inferior artists are continually trying to escape from necessity of sound work, and either indulging themselves in their delights in subject, or pluming themselves on their noble motives for attempting what they cannot perform; (and observe, by the way, that a great deal of what is mistaken for conscientious motive is nothing but a very pestilent, because very subtle, condition of vanity); where as the great men always understand at once that the first morality of a painter, as everybody else, is to know his business; and so earnest are they in this, that many, whose lives you would think, by the results of their work, had been passed in strong emotion, have in reality subdued themselves, though capable of the very strongest passions, into a calm as absolute as that of a deeply sheltered mountain lake, which reflect every agitation of the clouds in the sky, and every change of the shadows on the hills, but is itself motionless." Lect. 3:74
"...no people has every attained the higher stages of art skill, except at a period of its civilization which was sullied by frequent, violent, and even monstrous crime; and lastly, that the attaining of perfection in art power has been hitherto, in every nation, the accurate signal of the beginning of its ruin. Respecting which phenomena, observe first, that although good never springs out of evil, it is developed to its highest by contention with evil." Lect. 3:77,78
"...animal energy...is gradually subdued and exalted into bright human life; the art instinct purifying itself with the rest of the nature, until social perfectness is nearly reached; and then comes the period when conscience and intellect are so highly developed, that new forms of error begin in the inability to fulfill the demands of the one, or to answer the doubts of the other. Then the wholeness of the people is lost; all kinds of hypocrisies and oppositions of science develop themselves; and their faith is questioned on one side, and compromised with on the other; wealth commonly increases at the same period to a destructive extent; luxury follows; and the ruin of the nation is then certain: while the arts, all this time, are simply, as I said at first, the exponents of each phase of its moral state, and no more control it in its political career than the gleam of the firefly guides its oscillation." Lect. 3:81
"These, then, are the two essential instincts of humanity: the love of Order, and the love of Kindness. By the love of order the moral energy is to deal with the earth, and to dress it, and keep it; and with all rebellious and dissolute forces in lower creatures, or in ourselves. By the love of doing kindness it is to deal rightly with all surrounding life. And then, grafted on these, we are to make every other passion perfect; so that they may every one have full strength and yet be absolutely under control." Lect. 3:88
"I believe it to be quite one of the crowning wickednesses of this age that we have starved and chilled our faculty of indignation, and neither desire nor dare to punish crimes justly. We have taken up the benevolent idea, forsooth, that justice is to be preventive instead of vindictive; and we imagine that we are to punish, not in anger, but in expediency; not that we may give deserved pain to the person in fault, but that we may frighten other people from committing the same fault. The beautiful theory of this non-vindictive justice is, that having convicted a man of a crime worthy of death, we entirely pardon the criminal, restore him to his place in our affection and esteem, and then hang him, not as a malefactor, but as a scarecrow. That is the theory. And the practice is that we send a child to prison for a month for stealing a handful of walnuts, for fear that other children should come to steal more of our walnuts. And we do not punish a swindler for ruining a thousand families, because we think swindling is a wholesome excitement to trade. But all true justice is vindictive to vice as it is rewarding to virtue. Only and herein it is distinguished from personal revenge it is vindictive of the wrong done, not of the wrong done to us. It is the national expression of deliberate anger, as of deliberate gratitude; it is not exemplary, or even corrective, but essentially retributive; it is the absolute art of measured recompense, giving honour where honour is due, and shame where shame is due, and joy where joy is due, and pain where pain is due. It is neither educational, for men are to be educated by wholesome habit, not by rewards and punishments; nor is it preventive, for it is to be executed without regard to any consequences; but only for righteousness' sake, a righteous nation does judgment and justice. But in this, as in all other instances, the rightness of the secondary passion depends on its being grafted on those two primary instincts, the love of order and of kindness, so that indignation itself is against the wounding of love." Lect. 3:90
"And now, if... you remember the course of the arts of great nations, you will perceive that whatever has prospered, and become lovely, had its beginning...in the love of order in material things...and the desire of beauty in material things, which is associated with true affection, charity; and with the innumerable conditions of true gentleness expressed by...(grace). You will find that this love of beauty is an essential part of all healthy human nature, and though it can long co-exist with states of life in many other respects unvirtuous, it is itself wholly good; - the direct adversary of envy, avarice, mean worldly care, and especially cruelty. It entirely perishes when these are willfully indulged; and the men in whom it has been most strong have always been compassionate, and lovers of justice, and the earliest discerners and declarers of things conducive to the happiness of mankind." Lect. 3:91
"I have not yet spoken, nor is it possible for me today to speak adequately, of the moral power of the imagination: but you may for yourselves enough discern its nature merely by comparing the dignity of the relations between the sexes, from their lowest level in moths or molluscs, through the higher creatures in whom they become a domestic influence and law, up to the love of pure men and women; and, finally, to the ideal love which animated chivalry. Throughout this vast ascent it is the gradual increase of the imaginative faculty which exalts and enlarges the authority of the passion, until, at its height, it is the bulwark of patience, the tutor of honour, and the perfectness of praise.
You will find further, that as of love, so of all the other passions, the right government and exaltation begins in that of the Imagination, which is lord over them. For to subdue the passions, which is thought so often to be the sum of duty respecting them, is possible enough to a proud dullness; but to excite them rightly, and make them strong for good, is the work of the unselfish imagination." Lect. 3:93-94
"True, and a thousand times true it is, that, here at least, 'greater is he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.' .... I press to the conclusion which I wish to leave with you, that all you can rightly do, or honourably become, depends on the government of these two instincts of order and kindness, by this great imaginative faculty, which gives you inheritance of the past, grasp of the present, authority over the future....Whom will you be governing by your thoughts, two thousand years hence? Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being immoral, little else except art is moral; that life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality: and for the words 'good' and 'wicked,' used of men, you may almost substitute the words 'Makers' and 'Destroyers.' Lect. 3:95
"...the entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one. It must never exist alone, never for itself; it exists rightly only when it is the means of knowledge, or the grace of agency for life.
Now, I pray you to observe,...every good piece of art, to whichever of these ends it may be directed, involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.
Skill, and beauty, always then; and, beyond these, the formative arts have always one or other of the two objects which I have just defined to you truth, or serviceableness; and without these aims neither the skill nor their beauty will avail; only by these can either legitimately reign....
Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and Likeness; and in the architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use; and you must have the three in each group, balanced and co-ordinate; and all the chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating one of these elements.
For instance, almost the whole system and hope of modern life are founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill, photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get everything by grinding music, literature, and painting. You will find it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding. Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley first; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we have lost our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was trying to make clear to you in my last address, and which long ago I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power. The entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man's work have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in looking at a honeycomb or a bird's-nest; we understand that these differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of sticks. But a picture, which is a much more wonderful thing than a honeycomb or a bird's-nest,have we not known people, and sensible people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?" Lect. 4:98-100
"Too justly the historian accuses the genius of past art, in that, types of too many such elsewhere, the galleries of Berlin 'are made up, like other galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, Romulus's She-Wolf, and the Corregiosity of Corregio, and contain, for instance, no portrait of Friedrich the Great, no likeness at all, or next to none at all, of the noble series of Human Realities, or of any part of them, who have sprung, not from the idle brains of dreaming dilettanti, but from the head of God Almighty, to make this poor authentic earth a little memorable for us, and to do a little work that may be eternal there.'
But I have told you enough, it seems to me, at least today, of this function of art in recording fact; let me now finally, and with all distinctness possible to me, state to you its main business of all; its service in the actual uses of daily life.
You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call this its main business. That is indeed so, however. The giving brightness to picture is much, but the giving brightness to life more.... I have been ten years trying to get this very plain certainty I do not say believed but even thought of, as anything but a monstrous proposition. To get your country clean, and your people lovely; I assure you, that is a necessary work of art to begin with! .... Christian art, as it arose out of chivalry, was only possible so far as chivalry compelled both kings and knights to care for the right personal training of their people; it perished utterly when those kings and knights became devourers of the people." Lect. 4:115-116
"But I tell you beforehand, all that we can do will be utterly useless, unless you teach your peasant to say grace, not only before meat, but before drink; and having provided him with Greek cups and platters, provide him also with something that is not poisoned to put into them." Lect. 4:120
"Agriculture by the hand, then, and absolute refusal or banishment of unnecessary igneous force, are the first conditions of a school of art in any country. And until you do this, be it soon or late, things will continue in that triumphant state to which, for want of finer art, your mechanism has brought them; that, though England is deafened with spinning wheels, her people have not clothes though she is black with digging of fuel, they die of cold and though she has sold her soul for gain, they die of hunger. Stay in that triumph, if you choose; but be assured of this, it is not one which the fine arts will ever share with you." Lect. 4:123
"...all things lovely and righteous are possible for those who believe in their possibility, and who determine that, for their part, they will make every day's work contribute to them. Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close: then let every one of these short lives heave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourselves; so, from day to day, and strength to strength, you shall build up indeed, by Art, by Thought, and by Just Will, an Ecclesia of England, of which it shall not be said, 'See what manner of stones are here,' but, ''See what manner of men.' Lect. 4:125
"on the contrary, in the exercises of artists, oil should be the vehicle of colour employed from the first. The extended practice of water-color painting, as a separate skill, is in every way harmful to the arts: its pleasant slightness and plausible dexterity divert the genius of the painter from its proper aims, and withdraw the attention of the public from excellence of higher claim; nor ought any man, who has the consciousness of ability for good work, to be ignorant of, or indolent in employing, the methods of making its results permanent as long as the laws of Nature allow. It is surely a severe lesson to us in this matter, that the best works of Turner could not be shown to the public for six months without being destroyed, and that his most ambitious ones for the most part perished, even before they could be shown." Lect. 5:128
"That is the most praiseworthy painting which has most conformity with the thing represented." --Leonardo da Vinci quoted by Ruskin
"What we have to do, then, from beginning to end, is I repeat once more, simply to draw spaces of their true shape, and to fill them with colours which shall match their colours; quite a simple thing in the definition of it, not quite so easy in the doing of it." Lect. 5:134
"Entirely first-rate painting work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute over it; you may not particularly admire it, but you will find no fault with it. second-rate painting pleases one person much, and displeases another; but first-rate painting pleases all a little, and intensely pleases those who can recognize its unostentatious skill." Lect. 5:129
"Textures are principally of three kinds:
1.) Lustrous, as of water or glass
2.) Bloomy, or velvety, as a rose-leaf or peach
3.) Linear, produced by filaments of threads, as in feathers, fur, hair, and woven and reticulated tissues.
All the three sources of pleasure to the eye in texture are united in the best ornamental work.
Map of the Development of The Great Schools of Art Line
|------ Early Schools ------|Line and Light
Form
Greek Clay
(pottery decoration)Line and Color
Decoration
Gothic Glass
(windows and book illumination)Mass and Light
(Represented by
Leonardo and his schools)Mass and Color
(Represented by
Giorgione and his schools)|------------- Mass, Light, and Color -------------|
(Represented by Titian and his schools)"You have thus, in your hexagonal scheme, the expression of the universal manner of advance in painting: Line first; then line enclosing flat spaces coloured or shaded; then the lines vanish, and the solid forms are seen within the spaces. That is the universal law of advance: 1. line; 2. flat space; 3. massed or solid space. But, as you see, this advance may be made, and has been made, by two different roads; one advancing always through colour, the other through light and shade. And these two roads are taken by two entirely different kinds of men. The way by colour is taken by men of cheerful, natural, and entirely sane disposition in body and mind, much resembling, even at its strongest, the temper of well-brought-up children:too happy to think deeply, yet with powers of imagination by which they can live other lives than their actual ones; make-believe lives, while yet they remain conscious all the while that they are making believetherefore entirely sane. They are also absolutely contented; they ask for no more light than is immediately around them, and cannot see anything like darkness, but only green and blue, in the earth and sea.
The way by light and shade is, on the contrary, taken by men of the highest powers of thought, and most earnest desire for truth; they long for light, and for knowledge of all that light can show. But seeking for light, they perceive also darkness; seeking for truth and substance, they find vanity. They look for form in the earth, for dawn in the sky; and seeking these, they find formlessness in the earth, and night in the sky....
You have then these two great divisions of human mind: one, content with the colours of things, whether they are dark or light; the other seeking light pure, as such, and dreading darkness as such. One, also, content with the coloured aspects and visionary shapes of things; the other seeking their form and substance. And, as I said, the school of knowledge, seeking light, perceives, and has to accept and deal with obscurity; and seeking form, it has to accept and deal with formlessness, or death.
And you cannot but wonder why, this being the melancholy temper of the great Greek or naturalistic school, I should have called it the school of light. I call it so because it is through its intense love of light that the darkness becomes apparent to it, and through its intense love of truth and form that all mystery becomes attractive to it. And when, having learned these things, it is joined to the school of colour, you have the perfect, though always pensive, art of Titian and his followers." Lect. 6:147-150
"...both schools, rightly followed, require first of all absolute accuracy of delineation. This you need not hope to escape. Whether you fill your spaces with colours, or with shadows, they must equally be of the true outline and in true gradations. I have been thirty years telling modern students of art this in vain. I mean to say it to you only once, for the statement is too important to be weakened by repetition.Without perfect delineation of form and perfect gradation of space, neither noble colour is possible, nor noble light." Lect. 6:159
Read Plato's "Polity" 7th Book on the Sun and Intellectual Sight:
relation of light to philosophy.Check out Ruskin's Mathematical Treatise on Perspective of 1859
"The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires from mere impatience of labour to take the citadel by storm. They must therefore be told again and again that labour is the only price of solid fame, and that, whatever their force of genius may be, there is no easy method of becoming a good painter." --Joshua Reynolds
"Returning to the question of our own practice, I believe that all difficulties in method will vanish, if only you cultivate with care enough the habit of accurate observation, and if you think only of making your light and shade true, whether it be delicate or not. But there are three divisions or degrees of truth to be sought for, in light and shade, by three several modes of study, which I must ask you to distinguish carefully.
I.) When objects are lighted by the direct rays of the sun, or by direct light entering from a window, one side of them is of course in light, the other in shade, and the forms in the mass are exhibited systematically by the force of the rays falling on it; (those having most power of illumination which strike most vertically); and note that there is, therefore, to every solid curvature of surface, a necessarily proportioned gradation of light, the gradation on a parabolic solid being different from the gradation on an elliptical or spherical one. Now, when your purpose is to represent and learn the anatomy, or otherwise characteristic forms, of any object, it is best to place it in this kind of direct light, and to draw it as seen when we look at it in a direction at right angles to that of the ray. This is the ordinary academical way of studying form. Leonardo seldom practices any other in his real work, though he directs many others in his treatise.
The great importance of anatomical knowledge to the painters of the 16th century rendered this method of study very frequent with them; it almost wholly regulated their schools of engraving, and has been the most frequent system of drawing in art-schools since (to the very inexpedient exclusion of others). When you study objects in this way,and it will indeed be well to do so often, though not exclusively, observe always one main principle. Divide the light from the darkness frankly at first: all over the subject let there be no doubt which is which. Separate them one from the other as they are separated in the moon, or on the world itself, in day and night. Then gradate your lights with the utmost subtilty possible to you; but let your shadows alone, until near the termination of the drawing: then put quickly into them what farther energy then need, thus gaining the reflected lights out of their original flat gloom; but generally not looking much for reflected lights. Nearly all young students (and too many advanced masters) exaggerate them. It is good to see a drawing come out of its ground like a vision of light only; the shadows lost, or disregarded in the vague of space. In vulgar chiaroscuro the shades are so full of reflection that they look as if some one had been walking round the object with a candle, and the student, by that help, peering into its crannies.
II.) But, in the reality of nature, very few objects are seen in this accurately lateral manner, or lighted by unconfused direct rays. Some are all in shadow, some all in light, some near, and vigorously defined; others dim and faint in aerial distance. This study of these various effects and forces of light, which we may call aerial chiaroscuro, is a far more subtle one than that of the rays exhibiting organic form (which for distinction's sake we may call 'formal' chiaroscuro), since the degrees of light from the sun itself to the blackness of night, are far beyond any literal imitation. In order to produce a mental impression of the facts, two distinct methods may be followed: the first, to shade downwards from the lights, making everything darker in due proportion, until the scale of our power being ended, the mass of the picture is lost in shade. The second, to assume the points of extreme darkness for a basis, and to light everything above these in due proportion, till the mass of the picture is lost in light.
Thus, in Turner's sepia drawing, 'Isis,' he begins with the extreme light in the sky, and shades down from that till he is forced to represent the near trees and pool as one mass of blackness. In his drawing of the Greta, he begins with the dark brown shadow of the bank on the left, and illuminates up from that, till, in his distance, trees, hills, sky, and clouds, are all lost in broad light, so that you can hardly see the distinction between hills and sky. The second of these methods is in general the best for color, though great painters unite both in their practice, according to the character of their subject. The first method is never pursued in colour but by inferior painters. It is, nevertheless, of great importance to make studies of chiaroscuro in this first manner for some time, as a preparation for colouring; and this for many reasons, which it would take too long to state now...."
III.) Whether in formal or aerial chiaroscuro, it is optional with the student to make the local colour of objects a part of his shadow, or to consider the high lights of every colour as white. For instance, a chiaroscurist of Leonardo's school, drawing a leopard, would take no notice whatever of the spots, but only give the shadows which expressed the anatomy. And it is indeed necessary to be able to do this, and to make drawings of the forms of things as if they were sculptured, and had no colour. But in general, and more especially in the practice which is to guide you to colour, it is better to regard the local colour as part of the general dark and light to be imitated; and, as I told you at first, to consider all nature merely as a mosaic of different colours, to be imitated one by one in simplicity. But good artists vary their methods according to their subject and material....Give Velasquez or Veronese a leopard to paint, the first thing they think of will be its spots; give it to Dürer to engrave, and he will set himself at the fur and whiskers; give it to a Greek to carve, and he will only think of its jaws and limbs; each doing what is absolutely best with the means at his disposal." Lect. 6:167-171
"...the definition of art is 'human labour regulated by human design,' and this design, or evidence of active intellect in choice and arrangement, is the essential part of the work; which, so long as you cannot perceive, you perceive no art whatsoever; which, when once you do perceive, you will perceive also to be replaced by no mechanism (such as photography)." Lect. 6:172
Study the work of Titian, Tintoretto, Velasquez, Correggio, for mix of Light and Color schools.
Also, See work of "John" Bellini, Italian early Renaissance.
"Now, the course of our main colour schools is briefly this:First, we have, returning to our hexagonal scheme, line; then (flat) spaces filled with pure colour; and then masses expressed or rounded with pure colour. And during these two stages the masters of colour delight in the purest tints, and endeavour as far as possible those of opals and flowers. In saying 'the purest tints,' I do not mean the simplest types of red, blue, and yellow, but the most pure tints obtainable by their combinations." Lect. 7:174
"You remember I told you, when the colourists painted masses or projecting spaces, they, aiming always at colour, perceived from the first and held to the last the fact that shadows, though of course darker than the lights with reference to which they are shadows, are not therefore necessarily less vigorous colours, but perhaps more vigorous. Some of the most beautiful blues and purples in nature, for instance, are those of mountains in shadow against amber sky; and the darkness of the hollow in the centre of a wild rose is one glow of orange fire, owing to the quantity of its yellow stamens.
Well, the Venetians always saw this, and all great colourists see it, and are thus separated from the non-colourists or schools of mere chiaroscuro, not by difference in style merely, but by being right while the others are wrong. It is an absolute fact that shadows are as much colours as lights are; and whoever represents them by merely the subdued or darkened tint of the light, represents them falsely. I particularly want you to observe that this is no matter of taste, but fact. If you are especially sober minded, you may indeed choose sober colors where Venetians would have chosen gay ones; that is a matter of taste: you may think it proper for a hero to wear a dress without patterns on it, rather than an embroidered one; that is similarly a matter of taste: but, though you may also think it would be dignified for a hero's limbs to be all black, or brown, on the shaded side of them, yet, if you are using colour at all, you cannot so have him to your mind, except by falsehood; he never, under any circumstances, could be entirely black or brown on one side of him.
In this, then, the Venetians are separate from other schools by rightness, and they are so to their last days. Venetian painting is in this matter always right. But also, in their early days, the colourists are separated from other schools by their contentment with tranquil cheerfulness of light; by their never wanting to be dazzled. None of their lights are flashing or blinding; they are soft, winning, precious; lights of pearl, not of lime: only, you know, on this condition they cannot have sunshine: their day is the day of Paradise; they need no candle, neither light of the sun, in their cities; and everything is seen clear, as through crystal, far or near.
This holds to the end of the fifteenth century. Then they begin to see that this, beautiful as it may be, is still a make-believe light; that we do not live in the inside of a pearl; but in an atmosphere through which a burning sun shines thwartedly, and over which a sorrowful night must far prevail. And then the chiaroscurists succeed in persuading them of the fact that there is mystery in the day as in the night, and show them how constantly to see truly, is to see dimly. And also they teach them the brilliancy of light, and the degree in which it is raised from the darkness; and, instead of their sweet and pearly peace, tempt them to look for the strength of flame and coruscation of lightning, and flash of sunshine on armour and on points of spears.
The noble painters take the lesson nobly, alike for gloom or flame. Titian with deliberate strength, Tintoretto with stormy passion, read it, side by side. Titian the hues of his Assumption, as of his Entombment, into a solemn twilight; Tintoretto involves his earth in coils of volcanic cloud, and withdraws, through circle flaming above circle, the distant light of paradise. Both of them, becoming naturalist and human, add the veracity of Holbein's intense portraiture to the glow and the dignity they had themselves inherited from the Masters of Peace: at the same moment another, as strong as they, and in pure felicity of art-faculty, even greater then they, but trained in a lower school,Velasquez,produced the miracles of colour and shadow-painting, which made Reynolds say of him, 'What we all do with labour, he does with ease;' and one more, Correggio, uniting the sensual element of the Greek schools with their gloom, and their light with their beauty, and all these with the Lombardic colour, became, as since I think it has been admitted without question, the captain of the painter's art as such. Other men have nobler or more numerous gifts, but as a painter, master of the art of laying colour so as to be lovely, Corregio is alone.
I said the noble men learnt their lesson nobly. The base men also, and necessarily, learn it basely. The great men rise from colour to sunlight. The base ones fall from colour to candlelight. Today, 'non ragioniam di lor,' but let us see what this great change which perfects the art of painting mainly consists in, and means. For though we are only at present speaking of technical matters, every one of them, I can scarcely too often repeat, is the outcome and sign of a mental character, and you can only understand the folds of the veil, by those of the form it veils.
The complete painters, we find, have brought dimness and mystery into their method of colouring. That means that the world all round them has resolved to dream, or to believe, no more; but to know, and to see. And instantly all knowledge and sight are given, no more as in the Gothic times, through a window of glass, brightly, but as through a telescope-glass, darkly. your cathedral window shut you from the true sky, and illumined you with a vision; your telescope leads you to the sky, but darkens its light, and reveals nebula beyond nebula, far and farther, and to no conceivable farthest unresolvable. That is what the mystery means.
Next, what does that Greek opposition of black and white mean?
In the sweet crystalline time of colour, the painters, whether on glass or canvas, employed intricate patterns, in order to mingle hues beautifully with each other, and make one perfect melody of them all. But in the great naturalist school, they like their patterns to come in the Greek way, dashed dark on light, gleaming light out of dark. That means also that the world round them has again returned to the Greek conviction, that all nature, especially human nature, is not entirely melodious nor luminous; but a barren and broken thing: that saints have their foibles, sinners their forces; that the most luminous virtue is often only a flash, and the blackest-looking fault is sometimes only a stain: and, without confusing in the least black with white, they can forgive, or even take delight in things that are dappled.
You have then first, mystery. Secondly, opposition of dark and light. Then, lastly, whatever truth of form the dark and light can show.
That is to say, truth altogether, and resignation to it, and quiet resolve to make the best of it. And therefore, portraiture of living men, women, and children,no more of saints, cherubs, or demons...." Lect. 7:173-181
"...I have ventured to call the era of painting represented by John Bellini, the time 'of the Masters.' Truly they deserved the name, who did nothing but what was lovely, and taught only what was right. These mightier, who succeeded them, crowned, but closed, the dynasties of art, and since their day painting has never flourished more.
There were many reasons for this, without fault of theirs. They were exponents, in the first place, of the change in all men's minds from civil and religious to merely domestic passion....
Again, the world round these painters had become sad and proud, instead of happy and humble; its domestic peace was darkened by irreligion, and made restless by pride...." Lect. 7:182, 183
"Again, in the splendid power of realization, which these greatest of artists had reached, there was the latent possibility of amusement by deception, and of excitement by sensualism. And dutch trickeries of base resemblance, and French and English fancies of insidious beauty, soon occupied the eyes of the populace of Europe, too restless and wretched now to care for the sweet earthberries and Madonna's ivy of Cima, and too ignoble to perceive Titian's colour, or Correggio's shade.
Enough sources of evil were here, in the temper and power of the consummate art. In its practical methods there was another, the fatalist of all. These great artists brought with them mystery, despondency, domesticity, sensuality: of all these, good came, as well as evil. One thing more they brought, of which nothing but evil ever comes, or can comeLiberty.
By the discipline of five hundred years they had learned and inherited such power, that whereas all former painters could be right only by effort, they could be right with ease; and whereas all former painters could be right only under restraint, they could be right, free. Tintoretto's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, Reynolds', and Velasquez's, are all as free as the air, and yet right. 'How very fine!' said everybody. Unquestionably, very fine. Next, said everybody, 'What a grand discovery! Here is the finest work ever done, and it is quite free. Let us all be free then, and what fine things shall we not do also!' With what results we too well know.
Nevertheless, remember you are to delight in the freedom won by these mighty men through obedience, though you are not to covet it. Obey, and you also shall be free in time; but in these minor things, as well as in great, it is only right service which is perfect freedom." Lect. 7:184
"This, broadly, is the history of the early and late colour-schools....Now remember, in practice, you cannot follow both these schools; you must distinctly adopt the principles of one or the other. I will put the means of following either within your reach; and according to your dispositions you will choose one or the other: all I have to guard you against is the mistake of thinking you can unite the two. If you want to paint (even in the most distant and feeble way) in the Greek school, the school of Leonardo, Correggio, and Turner, you cannot design coloured windows, nor Anglican paradises. If, on the other hand, you choose to live in the peace of paradise, you cannot share in the gloomy triumphs of the earth.
And, incidentally note, as a practical matter of immediate importance, that painted windows have nothing to do with chiaroscuro. The virtue of glass is to be transparent everywhere. If you care to build a palace of jewels, painted glass is richer than all the treasures of Aladdin's lamp; but if you like pictures better than jewels, you must come into broad daylight to paint them. A picture in coloured glass is one of the most vulgar of barbarisms, and only fit to be ranked with the gauze transparencies and chemical illuminations of the sensational stage." Lect. 7:185-186
"You will have then to choose between these two modes of thought....it is only in this school (of chiaroscuro) that you can follow out the study either of natural history or landscape. The form of a wild animal, or the wrath of mountain torrent, would both be revolting (or in a certain sense invisible) to the calm fantasy of a painter in the schools of crystal. He must lay his lion asleep in St. Jerome's study beside his tame partridge and spare slippers; lead the appeased river by alternate azure promontories, and restrain its courtly little streamlets with margins of marble. But, on the other hand, your studies of mythology and literature may best be connected with these schools of purest and calmest imagination; and their discipline will be useful to you in yet another direction, and that a very important one. It will teach you to take delight in little things, and develop in you the joy which all men should feel in purity and order, not only in pictures but in reality." Lect. 7:187
"...your own predilections must determine your future course of study; only remember whatever school you follow, it must be only to learn method, not to imitate result, and to acquaint yourself with the minds of other men, but not to adopt them as your own.
Be assured that no good can come of your work but as it arises simply out of your own true natures and the necessities of the time around you, though in many respects an evil one. You live in an age of base conceit and baser servility an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all the noble persons who made its intellectual or art life possible to it: an age without honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system, if it were allowed to meddle with it." Lect. 7:189
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