648. VIRGIN AND CHILD.
Lorenzo di Credi (Florentine: 1459-1537). See 593.
A pretty landscape background, with a ruin, and the angel appearing to the shepherds in the distance—the whole charmingly harmonious in its blue-grays. "A pure and simple-minded man, Lorenzo delighted in pure, bright, and simple landscapes, in which one reads something of the gentle Angelico's feeling. Nature with Credi, as with the saint of Fiesole, must show no stain, no trouble, no severity, no sign of the transient. Far be it from him to introduce the jagged ranges that Leonardo reared upon his far, mysterious horizons. No, he must have all that is green and blue, and cheerful" (Gilbert's Landscape in Art, p. 225). With regard to the landscape backgrounds of the Italian painters, Mr. Mackail, in a letter to F. T. Palgrave (Journals and Memories, p. 256), raises the question "whether landscape painting has not lost as well as gained by being elevated from the background into the substance of a picture; whether, that is, the moral or human interest that is essential to all great art can exist in pure landscape painting without putting a greater strain on it than it will bear. Take, for instance, the landscape backgrounds of Lorenzo di Credi's pictures in the National Gallery, or of the great Perugino triptych. Have they not a moral or spiritual quality, as they stand in their place in the picture, that they can only have through this elusive (if one may say so) treatment?"