There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renaissance painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters--Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that upright-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency. But when all that is said it should be added that his “Ascension” is no close following of Italian example. The grouping is different and the setting is quite the opposite of the Italian. This is an open-air Ascension, not a studio-lighted gathering of academic figures posed merely to repeat each other’s linear contours. The apostles stand in a great valley plain with mountains at the sides and back. They stand _in_, not _out_, of the landscape. The angels are in a huge floating oval about the risen Christ. What beautiful moving circling figures they are! With what superb recognition of light, air, and space they are given! And how they hold their exact place in relation to the background and to the figures below them! All of La Farge’s knowledge and skill came into play in painting these two groups that contrast with and yet complete each other. They are his highest achievement in figure-painting. It may be merely provincial pride that makes one think they do not suffer by comparison with the groups of the great Italians, yet there are intelligent people who believe that. But after one has studied and wondered over these figures, he begins to look further, and finally comes to question if the enveloping landscape is not the more beautiful part of the picture. No such landscape was ever painted by any old master, not even by Titian in his “Presentation” picture in the Venice Academy. And thereby hangs a tale. La Farge could not at first get the right landscape for it, and in the middle of the work, that is in 1886, he and his friend Henry Adams went on a long trip to Japan. It was in the mountains of Japan (or was it, perhaps, later in the South Sea islands?) that he saw and sketched the superb landscape that now does service in the background of the “Ascension.” It fitted the figures exactly and is their natural and proper environment. Figures and groups from Italy that are not Italian and landscapes from Japan that are not Japanese blend together perfectly because translated, transmuted, by the genius of La Farge into something that is peculiarly his own type of the Ascension. In such fashion, and of such materials, is great art brought into being.