And color pure

The second point to be observed is that brightness of color is altogether inadmissible without purity and harmony; and that the sacred painters must not be followed in their frankness of unshadowed color unless we can also follow them in its clearness. As far as I am acquainted with the modern schools of Germany, they seem to be entirely ignorant of the value of color as an assistant of feeling, and to think that hardness,art oil painting, dryness, and opacity are its virtues as employed in religious art; whereas I hesitate not to affirm that in such art more than in any other, clearness, luminousness and intensity of hue are essential to right impression; and from the walls of the Arena chapel in their rainbow play of brilliant harmonies, to the solemn purple tones of Perugino's fresco in the Albizzi palace,cheap oil paintings for sale, I know not any great work of sacred art which is not as precious in color as in all other qualities (unless indeed it be a Crucifixion of Fra Angelico in the Florence Academy, which has just been glazed and pumiced and painted and varnished by the picture-cleaners until it glares from one end of  the picture gallery to the other;) only the pure white light and delicate hue of the idealists, whose colors are by preference such as we have seen to be the most beautiful in the chapter on Purity are carefully to be distinguished from the golden light and deep pitched hue of the school of Titian whose virtue is the grandeur of earthly solemnity, not the glory of heavenly rejoicing. still life oil paintings