Florentines of the fifteenth century, that consists the true
appreciation and habitual enjoyment of Tuscan Renaissance painting.
The outline of an ear and muscle of the neck by Lippi; the throw of
drapery by Ghirlandaio; the wide and smoke-like rings of heavy hair by
Botticelli; the intenser, more ardent spiral curls of Verrocchio or
the young Leonardo; all that is flower-like, flame-like, that has the
swirl of mountain rivers, the ripple of rocky brooks, the solemn and
poignant long curves and sudden crests of hills, all this exists in
the paintings of the Florentines; and it is its intrinsic nobility and
exquisiteness, its reminiscence and suggestion of all that is
loveliest and most solemn in nature, its analogy to all that is
strongest and most delicate in human emotion, which we should seek for
and cherish in their works.

IX.

The hour of low lights, which the painters of the past almost
exclusively reproduced, is naturally that in which we recognise
easiest, not only the identity of mood awakened by the art and by the
country, but the closer resemblance between the things which art was
able to do, and the things which the country had already done. Even
more, immediately after sunset. The hills, becoming uniform masses,
assert their movement, strike deep into the valley, draw themselves
strongly up towards the sky. The valleys also, with their purple
darkness, rising like smoke out of them, assert themselves in their
turn. And the sky, the more diaphanous for all this dark solidity
against it, becomes sky more decisively; takes, moreover, colour which
only fluid things can have; turns into washes of pale gold, of palest
tea-rose pink and beryl green. Against this sky the cypresses are
delicately finished off in fine black lacework, even as in the
background of Botticelli's _Spring_, and Leonardo's or Verrocchio's
_Annuniciation_. One understands that those passionate lovers of line
loved the moment of sunset apart even from colour. The ridges of pines
and cypresses soon remain the only distinguishable thing in the
valleys, pulling themselves (as one feels it) rapidly up, like great
prehistoric shapes of Saurians. Soon the sky only and mountains will
exist. Then begins the time, before the starlit night comes to say its
say, when everything grows drowsy, a little vague, and the blurred
mountains go to sleep in the smoke of dusk. Then only, due west, the
great Carrara peaks stand out against the sanguine sky, lo