A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
History
A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
National Gallery (Great Britain); Painting -- England -- London -- Catalogs
Potho, for whom he so yearned, and whose favour he wore in his hat."
(W. Fred Dickes in _Athenæum_, June 3 and Aug. 26, 1893).[145]
300. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD.
_Cima da Conegliano_ (Venetian: 1460-1518).
Some miles north of Venice, in the Friuli, rises the town
of Conegliano, which, from its isolated and castled hill,
overlooks the plain of Treviso. Cima, whose real name was
Giovanni Battista, takes his title in art-history from the
"cima," or castled "height," of his native place--a picturesque
feature which he introduced, wherever it was at all possible,
into his pictures. We see these towers of Conegliano in
the present picture; and a window is opened in the large
composition, No. 816, in order to give us a glimpse of a
similar height. In his love of his native landscape is one of
the principal charms of Cima's work. "Morning is his favourite
time--morning among the hills; and then and there the painter
enjoyed more happiness than any twilight gondola could give
him. In our National Gallery are two examples of the Conegliano
scenery, but the brilliant daylight that so distinguishes Cima
is strangely absent" (Gilbert's _Landscape in Art_, p. 329).
One of his best works is the "St. John the Baptist" in the
church of S. Maria dell' Orto, Venice. "He is here painting,"
says Ruskin, "his name-saint; the whole picture full of peace
and intense faith and hope, and deep joy in light of sky and
fruit and flower and weed of earth. The picture was painted
for the church of Our Lady of the Garden, and it is full of
simple flowers, and has the wild strawberry of Cima's native
mountains gleaming through the grass.... He has given us the
oak, the fig, the beautiful 'Erba della Madonna' on the wall,
precisely such a bunch of it as may be seen growing at this
day on the marble steps of that very church; ivy, and other
creepers, and a strawberry plant in the foreground, with a
blossom, and a berry just set, and one half-ripe, and one ripe,
all patiently and innocently painted from the real thing, and
therefore most divine.... His own Alps are in the distance,
and he shall teach us how to paint wild flowers, and how to
think of them" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch.
vii. § 9; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. x. § 5; Oxford _Lectures on
Art_, § 150; _Catalogue of the Educational Series_, p. 27). The
charming landscape and fine colour of Cima are accompanied
by earnestness of religious feeling, and a sense of peace and
quiet, unmixed with any ascetism. "The painter," says Ruskin,
of another of his pictures, "does not desire the excitement
of rapid movement, nor even the passion of beautiful light.
But he hates darkness as he does death. He paints noble human
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