FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND CARPACCIO 453

4. The result on their art is, first, that red is despised by the Sienese as a sand-and-clay colour, good in pots, not pictures; but that green is rejoiced in by them as the supreme blessing of the earth in spring. They cannot have enough of it, and seriously injure their painting by excess of it.

The second result, for the Florentine, is the founding of his architecture on the opposition of white to green marble, with red inlaid as a glowing luxury. These, with the blue of the sky between his olive leaves, found his Etruscan school of colour, which was suddenly kindled by Giotto into glow, as of St. Francis’s chariot of fire,¹ and carried by Angelico into the colours of Paradise. but it is always liable to be subdued, when not in its full enthusiasm, towards tones of white and green, partially degraded by the earthly school of Siena.

The third result, for the Venetian, is his founding his architecture on the opposition of red and white marble,² taking up red as a precious, yet constant, colour of domestic power and life, with an exquisitely deep blue, founded on the colour of his distant mountains and plains, and of the Eastern sea; but on the whole rejecting green, as the colour of shallow, vulgar, or angry sea, and, in his own home, the colour of the street pavement, not worth painting. The only thing that Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini never paint with any enjoyment is the water of their own canals.

5. As the schools developed themselves the Sienese gradually expired, having no proper painter’s natural food. The Florentine and Venetian taught each other what they each needed; Venice learned from Florence some love of the spring, and Florence from Venice the glory of purple and scarlet. But to the end each remained in their several power-one the painter of the crimson of flesh and blood, the other of the power and spirit of eternal spring. Their perfect power, after each had taught the other, is seen only in Titian and Angelico; but their peculiar national character is better recognized by two exquisite pictures of more simple men-Carpaccio’s “Dream of St. Ursula,”³ a harmony of crimson and white, with subdued gold and green; and Botticelli’s “Spring,” a harmony of green and white, with subdued gold and crimson.

6. By comparing the drawing and photograph you will see the uses and weaknesses of each. The drawing often misses the perfectness of Lippi’s line; the spiral of the chair, for instance, does not taper rightly; the Madonna’s dress does not sit so easily; the angel’s sleeve does not fold so truly at the shoulder. On the other hand, all that is red or orange-tinted in the painting becomes black or brown in the photograph; and the group which, with the infant they sustain, is throughout suffused with light in the painting, is darkened in its masses like a Bolognese picture, and blotted by the inky wing, which looks like a bit of ebony screwed on.

I cannot make out, either from the photograph or Mr. Murray’s drawing, what the chains of white and green spots are in the distance. I suppose trees or shrubs in rows. Artistically, they are simply a pictorial

¹ [See Vol. XXIII. p. 351.]

² [Compare above, pp. 162, 163.]

³ [For other references to this picture, see above, p. li.; and for Botticelli’s “Spring,” Vol. XXII. p. 430.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]