282 LANDSCAPE 



swept valleys than Titian gave us, or sweeter idyllic bits of 

 country than the minor Venetians Bissolo, Basaiti, Cima, 

 Cordegliaghi introduced as backgrounds to their sacred 

 compositions. Giorgione in his masterpiece at Castelfranco 

 translated the feeling of broad champaign and gently swelling 

 lawns into pure harmonies of gold and brown and green and 

 yellow. Tintoretto proved himself the master of a fitful, 

 passionate, suggestive scenery, turbid with emotion and sur- 

 charged with meaning, tuned by imagination to the spiritual 

 key-note of his varying themes. The gentle twilight reaches 

 of Umbrian valleys in Perugino's and young Raphael's pictures 

 have a melancholy charm peculiar to that region. Francia 

 caught their grace, and painted lands of afterglow and dewy 

 peace, with slender stems denned against the spaces of a 

 dreamy, lucid evening sky. Lionardo da Vinci's drawings 

 show that this versatile magician of the arts could sketch a 

 bit of forest with the subtlety of a French draughtsman. 

 Correggio makes us rest beside his holy travellers in pleasant 

 woodlands by the side of babbling water-brooks. 1 



Everywhere, in fact, this art was waiting, ready to emerge. 

 But it had not occurred to masters of the sixteenth century 

 that landscape might be treated as an object in itself. They 

 remained at the same point as the poets Sannazzaro, 

 Poliziano, Boiardo, Ariosto whose descriptive episodes are 

 exquisite, but are never allowed to divert attention from the 

 action and passion of humanity. These remarks might be 

 applied with equal truth to Shakespeare and the rest of the 

 Elizabethan poets. 



1 The picture by Van Eyck above referred to is in the Louvre. Diirer's 

 are engravings. Gentile da Fabriano's sunrise is in the predella of his 

 Adoration of the Magi, in the Florentine Academy. Titian's Marriage of 

 S. Catherine is a good example of his landscape National Gallery. For 

 Tintoretto's power over scenery, I would point to the Temptation of 

 Adam, in the Scuola cli S. Kocco and in the Accademia at Venice ; to 

 the Murder of Abel, in the Accademia ; the Crucifixion, at S. Cassiano ; 

 the Last Judgment, at the Madonna dell' Orto ; the Temptation of Christ, 

 at S. Rocco. Perugino's and Francia's pictures need not be particularised. 

 With regard to Lionardo, I was thinking of a little chalk drawing in the 

 Queen's library at Windsor. At Parma there are beautiful landscape bits 

 by Correggio. 



