Theory of Colours — trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (1840)

The mannered treatment of light and shade here alluded to by the author is very seldom to be met with in the works of the colourists; the taste may have first arisen from the use of plaster-casts, and was most prevalent in France and Italy in the early part of the last century. Piazzetta represented it in Venice, Subleyras in Rome. In France "Restout taught his pupils that a globe ought to be represented as a polyhedron. Greuze most implicitly adopted the doctrine, and in practice showed that he considered the round cheeks of a young girl or an infant as bodies cut into facettes."[1]

[1] See Taylor's translation of Merimée on oil-painting, p. 27. Barry, in a letter from Paris, speaks of Restout as the only painter who resembled the earlier French masters: the manner in question is undoubtedly sometimes very observable in Poussin. The English artist elsewhere speaks of the "broad, happy manner of Subleyras."--_Works_, London, 1809.

NOTE F F.--Par. 859.

All this was no doubt suggested by Heinrich Meyer, whose chief occupation in Rome, at one time, was making sepia drawings from sculpture (see Goethe's Italiänische Reise). It is hardly necessary to say that the observation respecting the treatment of the surface in the antique statues is very fanciful.

NOTE G G.--Par. 863.

This observation might have been suggested by the drawings of Claude, which, with the slightest means, exhibit an harmonious balance of warm and cold.

NOTE H H.--Par. 865.

The colouring of Paolo Uccello, according to Vasari's account of him, was occasionally so remarkable that he might perhaps have been fairly included among the instances of defective vision given by the author. His skill in perspective, indicating an eye for gradation, may be also reckoned among the points of resemblance (see Par. 105).

NOTE I I.--Par. 902.

The quotation before given from Boschini shows that the method described by the author, and which is true with regard to some of the Florentine painters, was not practised by the Venetians, for their first painting was very solid. It agrees, however, with the manner of Rubens, many of whose works sufficiently corroborate the account of his process given by Descamps. "In the early state of Rubens's pictures," says that writer,[1] "everything appeared like a thin wash; but although he often made use of the ground in producing his tones, the canvas was entirely covered more or less with colour." In this system of leaving the shadows transparent from the first, with the ground shining through them, it would have been obviously destructive of richness to use white mixed with the darks, the brightness, in fact, already existed underneath. Hence the well-known precept of Rubens to avoid white in the shadows, a precept, like many others, belonging to a particular practice, and involving all the conditions of that practice.[2] Scarmiglione, whose Aristotelian treatise on colour was published in Germany when Rubens was three-and-twenty, observes, "Painters, with consummate art, lock up the bright colours with dark ones, and, on the other hand, employ white, the poison of a picture, very sparingly." (Artificiosissimè pictores claros obscuris obsepiant et contra candido picturarum veneno summè parcentes, &c.)

[1] "La Vie des Peintres Flamands," vol. i.

[2] The method he recommended for keeping the colours pure in the lights, viz. to place the tints next each other unmixed, and then slightly to unite them, may have degenerated to a methodical manner in the hands of his followers. Boschini, who speaks of Rubens himself with due reverence, and is far from confounding him with his imitators, contrasts such a system with that of the Venetians, and adds that Titian used to say, "Chi de imbratar colori teme, imbrata e machia si medemi."--_Carta del Navegar_, p. 341. The poem of Boschini is in many respects polemical. He wrote at a time when the Flemish painters, having adopted and modified the Venetian principles, threatened to supersede the Italian masters in the opinion of the world. Their excellence, too, had all the charm of novelty, for in the seventeenth century Venice produced no remarkable talent, and it was precisely the age for her to boast of past glories. The contemptuous manner in which Boschini speaks of the Flemish varnishes, of the fear of mixing tints, &c., is thus always to be considered with reference to the time and circumstances. So also his boasting that the Venetian masters painted without nature, which may be an exaggeration, is pointed at the _Naturalisti_, Caravaggio and his followers, who copied nature literally.

NOTE K K.--Par. 903.

The practice here alluded to is more frequently observable in slight works by Paul Veronese. His ground was often pure white, and in some of his works it is left as such. Titian's white ground was covered with a light warm colour, probably at first, and appears to have been similar to that to which Armenini gives the preference, namely, "quella che tira al color di carne chiarissima con un non so che di fiammeggiante."[1]