NOTE HH.—[Par. 865.]
The colouring of Paolo Uccello, according to Vasari's account of him, was occasionally so remarkable that he might perhaps have been fairly included among the instances of defective vision given by the author. His skill in perspective, indicating an eye for gradation, may be also reckoned among the points of resemblance (see Par. 105).
NOTE II.—[Par. 902.]
The quotation before given from Boschini shows that the method described by the author, and which is true with regard to some of the Florentine painters, was not practised by the Venetians, for their first painting was very solid. It agrees, however, with the manner of Rubens, many of whose works sufficiently corroborate the account of his process given by Descamps. "In the early state of Rubens's pictures," says that writer,[1] "everything appeared like a thin wash; but although he often made use of the ground in producing his tones, the canvas was entirely covered more or less with colour." In this system of leaving the shadows transparent from the first, with the ground shining through them, it would have been obviously destructive of richness to use white mixed with the darks, the brightness, in fact, already existed underneath. Hence the well-known precept of Rubens to avoid white in the shadows, a precept, like many others, belonging to a particular practice, and involving all the conditions of that practice.[2] Scarmiglione, whose Aristotelian treatise on colour was published in Germany when Rubens was three-and-twenty, observes, "Painters, with consummate art, lock up the bright colours with dark ones, and, on the other hand, employ white, the poison of a picture, very sparingly." (Artificiosissimè pictores claros obscuris obsepiant et contra candido picturarum veneno summè parcentes, &c.)
[1] "La Vie des Peintres Flamands," vol. i.
[2] The method he recommended for keeping the colours pure in the lights, viz. to place the tints next each other unmixed, and then slightly to unite them, may have degenerated to a methodical manner in the hands of his followers. Boschini, who speaks of Rubens himself with due reverence, and is far from confounding him with his imitators, contrasts such a system with that of the Venetians, and adds that Titian used to say, "Chi de imbratar colori teme, imbrata e machia si medemi."—Carta del Navegar, p. 341. The poem of Boschini is in many respects polemical. He wrote at a time when the Flemish painters, having adopted and modified the Venetian principles, threatened to supersede the Italian masters in the opinion of the world. Their excellence, too, had all the charm of novelty, for in the seventeenth century Venice produced no remarkable talent, and it was precisely the age for her to boast of past glories. The contemptuous manner in which Boschini speaks of the Flemish varnishes, of the fear of mixing tints, &c., is thus always to be considered with reference to the time and circumstances. So also his boasting that the Venetian masters painted without nature, which may be an exaggeration, is pointed at the Naturalisti, Caravaggio and his followers, who copied nature literally.
The practice here alluded to is more frequently observable in slight works by Paul Veronese. His ground was often pure white, and in some of his works it is left as such. Titian's white ground was covered with a light warm colour, probably at first, and appears to have been similar to that to which Armenini gives the preference, namely, "quella che tira al color di carne chiarissima con un non so che di fiammeggiante."[1]