Realistic Setting by George Eliot--The Quality of Atmosphere, or
Local Color--Recapitulation.

=Evolution of Background in the History of Painting: The First
Stage.=--In the history of figure painting it is interesting to study
the evolution of the element of background. This element is
non-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial art. The figures in
Pompeiian frescoes are limned upon a blank bright wall, most
frequently deep red in color. The father of Italian painting, Cimabue,
following the custom of the Byzantine mosaicists, whose work he had
doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background
devoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of
his greater and more natural pupil, Giotto, the element of background
remains comparatively insignificant. What interests us in Giotto's
work at Padua and Assisi is first of all the story that he has to
tell, and secondly the human quality of the characters that he
exhibits. His sense of setting is extremely slight; and the homely
details that he presents for the purpose of suggesting the time and
place and circumstances of his action are very crudely depicted. His
frescoes are all foreground. It is the figures in the forefront of his
pictures that arrest our eye. His buildings and his landscapes are
conventionalized out of any real reference to his people. These are
examples of the first stage of evolution--the stage in which the
element of background bears no significant relation to the main
business of the picture.

=The Second Stage.=--In the second stage, the background is brought
into an artistic, or decorative, relation with the figures in the
foreground. This phase is exhibited by Italian painting at its period
of maturity. The great Florentines drew their figures against a
background of decorative line, the great Venetians against a
background of decorative color. But even in the work of the greatest
of them the background exists usually to fulfil a purpose merely
decorative, a purpose with immediate reference to art but without
immediate reference to life. There is no real reason, with reference
to life itself, why the "Mona Lisa" of Leonardo should smile
inscrutably upon us before a background of jagged rocks and cloudy
sky; and the curtains in Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" are introduced
merely as a detail of composition, and are not intended as a literal
statement that curtains hung upon a rod exist in heaven.

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