452 APPENDIX

the Carpaccio, by the skill of their arrangement, the charm which in the feeble (in comparison) arrangement of the Lippi they receive in the original, from mere exquisiteness of painting.

2. Note first on the Carpaccio-the princess’s hands are unfinished in form (being terrifically difficult). The delicacy of their colour in flat shadow, against white in shadow, is one of the special achievements of the art of Venice, as opposed to the black vulgarities of Roman chiaroscuro.

Her hair, twisted into a cable, with pearls, is a specially Venetian manner of head-dress, retained by true Venetian women to this day, without knowing the origin of it, which I do not doubt was the successful defence of Aquileia (the true mother city of Venice),¹ in the third century, against the Emperor Maximin. Rope was wanting for the war machines, and there was not hemp enough; the women cut off their long hair, and made ropes of that. They dedicated (when the city was saved) an altar to Bald Venus;² and I have no doubt that not only this head-dress, but the cable-mouldings, which I used to think merely an imitation of the shipping tackle, was influenced in its close-wrung form, as opposed to the graceful opened Lombardic spiral, by this tradition.

The black square behind the head is the mythic symbol that while she puts the marriage ring on her finger, the wedding is to death. Such another black space is put behind the head of the angel in her dream.

But the Venetian colourists always use black in larger spaces than the Florentines, being more sad and more earthly in their temper. In order to show you this difference in these two pictures completely, it would have been needful that the shade of Lippi’s landscape, exquisitely finished in the original, should have been rightly rendered in the copy; but it is here that the copy chiefly fails, for this landscape distance would have taken as much time and trouble to paint as the figures. Mr. Murray has been obliged to paint it hastily, and has not been successful in the haste.

The soft grey-green colour of it, and the more or less green tone through the whole, still more definite in the original, as opposed to the rich red and gold of the Venetian, lead to many interesting points of inquiry, of which here are a few touched upon in my Laws of Fésole.³

3. The colour schools of Italy are in the main three, all dependent essentially, first on locality, and secondly on the national habits of life. These three schools are the Siencese, Florentine, and Venetian.

The first is developed in a red sandstone and clay country, with exquisite and almost miraculous springs of pure water.

The second in a white marble and green serpentine country, with clearflowing mountain streams, but a muddy main river.

The third in a red marble and white dolomite country, with a great plain extending below it to the sea, traversed by muddy rivers.⁴

¹ [Compare above, p. 428.]

² [Compare, again, p. 428. See Gibbon, ch. vii., or F. C. Hodgson’s Early History of Venice, p. 12.]

³ [That is, in the intended second volume of that book, which was to deal with colour: see above, pp. xlii.-xliii. n., and Vol. XV. p. xxvii.]

⁴ [On this subject of the relation between geographical conditions and resultant art, see Modern Painters, vol. v. (Vol. VII. pp. 175-177, 279-280), Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Vol. XI. pp. 38-40), and Aratra Pentelici, § 159 (Vol. XX. pp. 313-314).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]