He
must represent gold by colour, not by sticking gold on his fIgures.
[This was done with naivete by the early painters, and is really very
effective in the pictures of Gentile da Fabriano--that Paul Veronese of
the fifteenth century--as the reader will confess if he has seen the
"Adoration of the Magi," in the Florence Academy; but it could not be
tolerated now]. Our applause is greatly determined by our sense of
difficulty overcome, and to stick gold on a picture is an avoidance of
the difficulty of painting it.
Truth of presentation has an inexplicable charm for us, and throws a
halo round even ignoble objects. A policeman idly standing at the
corner of the street, or a sow lazily sleeping against the sun, are not
in nature objects to excite a thrill of delight, but a painter may, by
the cunning of his art, represent them so as to delight every
spectator. The same objects represented by an inferior painter will
move only a languid interest; by a still more inferior painter they may
be represented so as to please none but the most uncultivated eye.
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