Here is a night picture from a war story in which the light is furnished
by two fires whose coals and brands are hidden by earth heaped in front.
The sentiment of tenting on the old camp-ground pervades the scene. The
far end of the line of those keeping bivouac disappears into the
distance, and the depths of the ranks behind them fade into the thick
shadows. The flag, a little above the line, catches the light. One great
tree overhead spreads its leafless half-lit arms through the gloom.
Behind all this is unmitigated black. The composition reminds one of a
Hiroshige study of midnight. These men are certainly a part of the
architecture of out of doors, and mysterious as the vault of Heaven. This
type of a camp-fire is possible in our Jeanne d'Arc.
These pictures, new and old, great and unknown, indicate some of the
standards of judgment and types of vision whereby our conception of the
play is to be evolved.
By what means shall we block it in? Our friend Tintoretto made use of
methods which are here described from one of his biographers, W. Roscoe
Osler: "They have been much enlarged upon in the different biographies as
the means whereby Tintoretto obtained his power. They constituted,
however, his habitual method of determining the effect and general
grouping of his compositions. He moulded with extreme care small models
of his figures in wax and clay. Titian and other painters as well as
Tintoretto employed this method as the means of determining the light and
shade of their design. Afterwards the later stages of their work were
painted from the life. But in Tintoretto's compositions the position and
arrangement of his figures as he began to dwell upon his great
conceptions were such as to render the study from the living model a
matter of great difficulty and at times an impossibility.... He ...
modelled his sculptures ... imparting to his models a far more complete
character than had been customary. These firmly moulded figures,
sometimes draped, sometimes free, he suspended in a box made of wood, or
of cardboard for his smaller work, in whose walls he made an aperture to
admit a lighted candle.... He sits moving the light about amidst his
assemblage of figures. Every aspect of sublimity of light suitable to a
Madonna surrounded with angels, or a heavenly choir, finds its miniature
response among the figures as the light moves.
"This was the method by which, in conjunction with a profound study of
outward nature, sympathy with the beauty of different types of face and
varieties of form, with the many changing hues of the Venetian scene,
with the great laws of color and a knowledge of literature and history,
he was able to shadow forth his great imagery of the intuitional world."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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