had at small cost; its
masses could not be dashed on in impetuous generalization, fields for
the future recovery of light. They were measured out and wrought to
their depths only by expenditure of toil and time; and, as future
grounds for color, they were necessarily restricted to the _natural_
shadow of every object, white being left for high lights of whatever
hue. In consequence, the character of pervading daylight, almost
inevitably produced in the preparation, was afterwards assumed as a
standard in the painting. Effectism, accidental shadows, all obvious
and vulgar artistical treatment, were excluded, or introduced only as
the lights became more loaded, and were consequently imposed with more
facility on the dark ground. Where shade was required in large mass, it
was obtained by introducing an object of locally dark color. The Italian
masters who followed Van Eyck's system were in the constant habit of
relieving their principal figures by the darkness of some object,
foliage, throne, or drapery, introduced behind the head, the open sky
being left visible on each side. A green drapery is thus used with great
quaintness by John Bellini in the noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a
black screen, with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself and
his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain behind the Madonna,
in Francia's best picture at Bologna. Where the subject was sacred, and
the painter great, this system of pervading light produced pictures of a
peculiar and tranquil majesty; where the mind of the painter was
irregularly or frivolously imaginative, its temptations to accumulative
detail were too great to be resisted--the spectator was by the German
masters overwhelmed with the copious inconsistency of a dream, or
compelled to traverse the picture from corner to corner like a museum of
curiosities.

127. The chalk or pen preparation being completed, and the oil-priming
laid, we have seen that the shadows were laid in with a transparent
_brown_ in considerable body. The question next arises--What influence
is this part of the process likely to have had upon the _coloring_ of
the school? It is to be remembered that the practice was continued to
the latest times, and that when the thin light had been long abandoned,
and a loaded body of color had taken its place, the brown transparent
shadow was still retained, and is retained often to this day, when
asphaltum is used as its base, at the risk of the des