After giving the subject of light and shade a good deal of thought, it appears to me that there is only one rule which invariably applies to all pictures, and that is, that there should be a uniform scale of tone throughout the work. The gradient, from light to shade, may be very steep as in Rembrandt, or very gentle as in P. Veronese, but this gradient or transition should not be abrupt in one part of the picture, and gentle in another. The whole work (whatever scale you adopt) should be homogeneous.
Sir. J. Reynolds and others have endeavored to ascertain the proportion of light to shade in the works of the old masters. I believe these experimental blots have been made rather with a view to black and white than legitimate light and shade; but whatever their object, I don’t think that any theory can be built up on them. I am convinced that what the old masters called the chiaro-oscuro of their pictures was a matter of feeling, and sometimes of accident, but never of calculation.
Theorists often talk learnedly about secondary and tertiary lights, but the artist never dreamt of them. They are nothing more than the efforts he has made, and the means to which he has resorted, in order to connect the highest light of his principal group with the gloom of his background.
Rembrandt’s vigorous light and shade and Correggio’s luminous breadth ought to be ascribed to the natural idiosyncrasies of the painters, intensified probably by the conditions under which their works were executed. They were assuredly not the results of calculation or learning.
Modern artists are often credited by their critics with subtleties of which they are perfectly innocent. They introduce into their pictures certain harmonies of tone or color by a kind of pictorial instinct, but certainly not in obedience to theoretical laws.
In designing a composition of many figures, it is natural to begin with the principal group or centre of interest. When you have got this satisfactorily arranged, you proceed with the less important figures, and it is here that beginners (and some who are by no means beginners) often come to grief.
They get a fine action or a noble attitude for some accessory figure, and they are so much in love with it that they must introduce it, whether it is in keeping with the principal group or not. It may (viewed as a single figure) be very good, and yet be injurious to the general harmony of the composition.
Recollect that accessory figures, however good in themselves, if they mar the general effect, ought to be sacrificed.
By so doing you will doubtless raise a cry of lamentation from your friends. They will say, “What could have induced you to have scraped out that figure? Why, it was the best thing in the picture,” and so on. To which you might reply that you did not want it to be the best thing in the picture, and therefore you erased it.
It was this tendency to introduce some favorite figure where it was not wanted, which rather mars Raffaelle’s latest manner, as exemplified in the “Transfiguration,” and in the “Incendio del Borgo”; and what in Raffaelle was only an incipient tendency became a confirmed habit in the work of his imitators.