erated and false means the
pictures most celebrated for this quality are endowed with their
richness and solemnity of color. In the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian,
it is difficult to imagine anything more magnificently impossible than
the blue of the distant landscape;--impossible, not from its vividness,
but because it is not faint and aerial enough to account for its purity
of color; it is too dark and blue at the same time; and there is indeed
so total a want of atmosphere in it, that, but for the difference of
form, it would be impossible to tell the mountains (intended to be ten
miles off) from the robe of Ariadne close to the spectator. Yet make
this blue faint, aerial, and distant--make it in the slightest degree to
resemble the truth of nature's color--and all the tone of the picture,
all its intensity and splendor, will vanish on the instant. So again, in
the exquisite and inimitable little bit of color, the Europa in the
Dulwich Gallery; the blue of the dark promontory on the left is
thoroughly absurd and impossible, and the warm tones of the clouds
equally so, unless it were sunset; but the blue especially, because it
is nearer than several points of land which are equally in shadow, and
yet are rendered in warm gray. But the whole value and tone of the
picture would be destroyed if this blue were altered.

Sec. 16. Turner will not use such means.

Sec. 17. But gains in essential truth by the sacrifice.

Sec. 18. The second quality of light.

Now, as much of this kind of richness of tone is always given by Turner
as is compatible with truth of aerial effect; but he will not sacrifice
the higher truths of his landscape to mere pitch of color as Titian
does. He infinitely prefers having the power of giving extension of
space, and fulness of form, to that of giving deep melodies of tone; he
feels too much the incapacity of art, with its feeble means of light, to
give the abundance of nature's gradations; and therefore it is, that
taking pure white for his highest expression of light, that even pure
yellow may give him one more step in the scale of shade, he becomes
necessarily inferior in richness of effect to the old masters of tone,
(who always used a golden highest light,) but gains by the sacrifice a
thousand more essential truths. For, though we all know how much more
like light, in the abstract, a finely-toned warm hue will be to the
feelings than white, yet it is utterly impossible to mark the same
n