ark, is reduced to
his zero, or black, for the dark side of the white object. This first
pillar also represents the system of Leonardo da Vinci. In the room of
the Louvre appropriated to Italian drawings is a study of a piece of
drapery by Leonardo. Its lights are touched with the finest white
chalk, and its shadows wrought, through exquisite gradations, to utter
blackness. The pillar 6 is drawn on the system of Turner; the high point
of light is still distinct: but even the darkest part of the shaft is
kept pale, and the gradations which give the roundness are wrought out
with the utmost possible delicacy. The third shaft is drawn on
Veronese's system. The light, though still focused, is more diffused
than with Turner; and a slight flatness results from the determination
that the fact of the shaft's being _white_ shall be discerned more
clearly even than that it is round; and that its darkest part shall
still be capable of brilliant relief, as a white mass, from other
objects round it.

Sec. 14. This resolution, on Veronese's part, is owing to the profound
respect for the _colors_ of objects which necessarily influenced him, as
the colorist at once the most brilliant and the most tender of all
painters of the elder schools; and it is necessary for us briefly to
note the way in which this greater or less respect for local color
influences the system of the three painters in light and shade.

Take the whitest piece of note-paper you can find, put a blot of ink
upon it, carry it into the sunshine, and hold it fully fronting the
sunshine, so as to make the paper look as dazzling as possible, but not
to let the wet blot of ink _shine_. You will then find the ink look
_intensely_ black,--blacker, in fact, than any where else, owing to its
vigorous contrast with the dazzling paper.

Remove the paper from the sunshine. The ink will not look so black.
Carry the paper gradually into the darkest part of the room, and the
contrast will as gradually appear to diminish; and, of course, in
darkness, the distinction between the black and the white vanishes. Wet
ink is as perfect a representative as is by any means attainable of a
perfectly dark color; that is, of one which absorbs all the light that
falls on it; and the nature of such a color is best understood by
considering it as a piece of portable night. Now, of course, the higher
you raise the daylight about this bit of night, the more vigorous is the
contrast between the two.