gio.

VI.

_Final notes on light and shade._

260. You will find in the 138th and 147th paragraphs of my Inaugural
lectures, statements which, if you were reading the book by yourselves,
would strike you probably as each of them difficult, and in some degree
inconsistent,--namely, that the school of color has exquisite character
and sentiment; but is childish, cheerful, and fantastic; while the
school of shade is deficient in character and sentiment; but supreme in
intellect and veracity. "The way by light and shade," I say, "is taken
by men of the highest powers of thought and most earnest desire for
truth."

The school of shade, I say, is deficient in character and sentiment.
Compare any of Duerer's Madonnas with any of Angelico's.

Yet you may discern in the Apocalypse engravings that Duerer's mind was
seeking for truths, and dealing with questions, which no more could have
occurred to Angelico's mind than to that of a two-years-old baby.

261. The two schools unite in various degrees; but are always
distinguishably generic, the two headmost masters representing each
being Tintoret and Perugino. The one, deficient in sentiment, and
continually offending us by the want of it, but full of intellectual
power and suggestion.

The other, repeating ideas with so little reflection that he gets blamed
for doing the same thing over again, (Vasari); but exquisite in
sentiment and the conditions of taste which it forms, so as to become
the master of it to Raphael and to all succeeding him; and remaining
such a type of sentiment, too delicate to be felt by the latter
practical mind of Dutch-bred England, that Goldsmith makes the
admiration of him the test of absurd connoisseurship. But yet, with
under-current of intellect, which gets him accused of free-thinking, and
therefore with under-current of entirely exquisite chiaroscuro.

Light and shade, then, imply the understanding of things--Color, the
imagination and the sentiment of them.

262. In Turner's distinctive work, color is scarcely acknowledged unless
under influence of sunshine. The sunshine is his treasure; his lividest
gloom contains it; his grayest twilight regrets it, and remembers. Blue
is always a blue shadow; brown or gold, always light;--nothing is
cheerful but sunshine; wherever the sun is not, there is melancholy or
evil. Apollo is God; and all forms of death and sorrow exist in
opposition to