Then, again, we have the base disdain of color, of which I have
spoken at length elsewhere. Thus we have the lofty disdain of color,
as in Durer's and Raphael's drawing: finally, the severest and
passionate following of it, in Giorgione and Titian.
5. Color is, more than all elements of art, the reward of veracity of
purpose. This point respecting it I have not noticed before, and it
is highly curious. We have just seen that in giving an account of
anything for its own sake, the most important points are those of
form. Nevertheless, the form of the object is its own attribute;
special, not shared with other things. An error in giving an account
of it does not necessarily involve wider error.
But its color is partly its own, partly shared with other things
round it. The hue and power of all broad sunlight is involved in the
color it has cast upon this single thing; to falsify that color, is
to misrepresent and break the harmony of the day: also, by what color
it bears, this single object is altering hues all round it;
reflecting its own into them, displaying them by opposition,
softening them by repetition; one falsehood in color in one place,
implies a thousand in the neighborhood. Hence, there are peculiar
penalties attached to falsehood in color, and peculiar rewards
granted to veracity in it. Form may be attained in perfectness by
painters who, in their course of study, are continually altering or
idealizing it; but only the sternest fidelity will reach coloring.
Idealize or alter in that, and you are lost. Whether you alter by
abasing, or exaggerating,--by glare or by decline, one fate is for
you--ruin. Violate truth wilfully in the slightest particular, or, at
least, get into the habit of violating it, and all kinds of failure
and error will surround and haunt you to your fall.
Therefore, also, as long as you are working with form only, you may
amuse yourself with fancies; but color is sacred--in that you must
keep to facts. Hence the apparent anomaly that the only schools of
color are the schools of Realism. The men who care for form only, may
drift about in dreams of Spiritualism; but a colorist must keep to
substance. The greater his power in color enchantment, the more stern
and constant will be his common sense. Fuseli may wander wildly among
gray spectra, but Reynolds and Gainsborough must stay in broad
daylight, with pure humanity. Velasquez, the greatest colorist, is
the most accurate portrait painter of Spain; Holbein, the most
accurate portrait painter, is the only colorist of Germany; and even
Tintoret had to sacrifice some of the highest qualities of his color
before he could give way to the flights of wayward though mighty
imagination, in which his mind rises or declines from the royal calm
of Titian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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