Fig. 66.
[Larger View]

Note how grandly the young prince on his pony, by Velasquez, tells out against the sky, with its low horizon and strong contrast of light and dark; nor does it lose a bit by being placed where it is, over the smaller pictures.

The Rembrandt, on the opposite side, with its burgomasters in black hats and coats and white collars, is evidently intended and painted for a raised position, and to be looked up to, which is evident from the perspective of the table. The grand Titian in

the centre, an altar-piece in one of the churches in Venice (here reversed), is also painted to suit its elevated position, with low horizon and figures telling boldly against the sky. Those placed low down are modern French pictures, with the horizon high up and almost above their frames, but placed on the ground they fit into the general harmony of the arrangement.

It seems to me it is well, both for those who paint and for those who hang pictures, that this subject should be taken into consideration. For it must be seen by this illustration that a bigger style is adopted by the artists who paint for high places in palaces or churches than by those who produce smaller easel-pictures intended to be seen close. Unfortunately, at our picture exhibitions, we see too often that nearly all the works, whether on large or small canvases, are painted for the line, and that those which happen to get high up look as if they were toppling over, because they have such a high horizontal line; and instead of the figures telling against the sky, as in this picture of the ‘Infant’ by Velasquez, the Reynolds, and the fat man treading on a flag, we have fields or sea or distant landscape almost to the top of the frame, and all, so methinks, because the perspective is not sufficiently considered.

Note.—Whilst on this subject, I may note that the painter in his large decorative work often had difficulties to contend with, which arose from the form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he was painting the Sistine Chapel:—

“I’ho già fatto un gozzo in questo stento.”

Now have I such a goitre ’neath my chin

That I am like to some Lombardic cat,

My beard is in the air, my head i’ my back,