1159. THE CALLING OF ABRAHAM.
Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See 31.
A very impressive picture in spite of the somewhat grotesque angel who accosts Abraham and points him to the Almighty seated in the clouds above (Genesis xii.). And indeed it is in his skies that Gaspard points us to the Infinite—in the open sky, stretching far away into that yellow horizon. To what does this strange distant space owe its attractive power?
"There is one thing that it has, or suggests, which no other object of sight suggests in equal degree, and that is—Infinity.... For the sky of night, though we may know it boundless, is dark; it is a studded vault, a roof that seems to shut us in and down; but the bright distance has no limit—we feel its infinity, as we rejoice in its purity of light.... Of the value of this mode of treatment (i.e. the rendering of open sky) there is a farther and more convincing proof than its adoption either by the innocence of the Florentine or the ardour of the Venetian, namely, that when retained or imitated from them by the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, when appearing in isolation from all other good, among the weaknesses and paltrinesses of Claude, the mannerisms of Gaspar, and the caricatures and brutalities of Salvator, it yet redeems and upholds all three, conquers all foulness by its purity, vindicates all folly by its dignity, and puts an uncomprehended power of permanent address to the human heart upon the lips of the senseless and the profane"[228] (Modern Painters, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. v. §§ 5, 12).