NINTH LECTURE.
COLOUR.—OIL PAINTING.
NINTH LECTURE.
Having finished the preceding lecture with observations on Fresco, a method of painting almost as much out of use as public encouragement, and perhaps better fitted for the serene Italian than the moist air of more northern climates, I now proceed to Oil Painting. The general medium of paint is Oil; and in that, according to the division of our illustrious commentator on Du Fresnoy, "all the modes of harmony, or of producing that effect of colours which is required in a picture, may be reduced to three, two of which belong to the Grand style, and the other to the Ornamental. The first may be called the Roman manner, where the colours are of a full and strong body, such as are found in the Transfiguration. The next is that harmony which is produced by what the ancients called the corruption[99] of the colours, by mixing and breaking them till there is a general union in the whole, without any thing that shall bring to your remembrance the painter's palette or the original colours: this may be called the Bolognian style, and it is this hue and effect of colours which Ludovico Carracci seems to have endeavoured to produce, though he did not carry it to that perfection which we have seen since his time in the small works of the Dutch school, particularly Jan Steen, where art is completely concealed, and the painter, like a great orator, never draws the attention from the subject on himself. The last manner belongs properly to the ornamental style, which we call the Venetian, being first practised at Venice, but is perhaps better learned from Rubens: here the brightest colours possible are admitted, with the two extremes of warm and cold, and these reconciled by being dispersed over the picture, till the whole appears like a bunch of flowers."
As I perfectly coincide with this division, and the practical corollaries deduced from it, what I have to say relatively to each of these classes or styles will rather be a kind of commentary on it than a text containing a doctrine of my own.
If the Roman style of Historic colour be the style of Raffaello in the Transfiguration, it died with him; it is certainly not that Roman style which distinguishes that school from Giulio Romano to Carlo Maratti.
Though the Transfiguration be more remarkable for the characteristic division of its parts than for its masses, yet it has more than the breadth, a closer alliance and larger proportion of correspondent colours, and a much purer theory of shade than we meet with in the subsequent pictures of the same school; the picture at Genoa of the Lapidation of St. Stephen, by Giulio Romano, only excepted, which was probably soon after framed on the principles of the Transfiguration.
The crudeness of colour and asperity of tone observable in the Roman School, though founded on simplicity, is perhaps a greater proof of their want of eye and taste than of a pure historic principle. Harmony of colour consists in the due balance of all, equally remote from monotony and from spots. Though each part of Roman pictures be painted with sufficient breadth of manner, their discordance is such that they do not coalesce into one whole, but appear unconnected fragments in apposition. Their theory of shade is so defective, that the parts deprived of light of the same body, or the same piece of drapery, are not effaced, but coloured. If the positive reds and blues of the Roman school invigorate the eye, they likewise command it, and counteract the grandeur of History in a degree not much inferior to the bad effect produced by the imitation of stuffs discriminated according to their texture; their bright asperity, and bleak purity, equally pervert the negative and subordinate character of drapery, and attract a larger share of attention from the beholder than they deserve. A Madonna in the hands of Carlo Maratti, and sometimes even of Raffaello, at least in his earlier productions, is the least visible part of herself. The most celebrated Madonna of Andrea del Sarto, though in Fresco, is certainly more indebted to her drapery than her face, perhaps still more to the sack on which her husband rests, and from which the picture got its name.