It needed, therefore

§ 15. It needed, therefore, the air of the northern mountains and of the sea to brace the hearts of men to the development of the true landscape schools. I sketched by chance one evening the line of the Apennines from the ramparts of Parma, and I have put the rough note of it,art oil paintings, and the sky that was over it, in Plate 14., and next to this (Plate 15.) a moment of sunset, behind the Euganean hills at Venice. I shall have occasion to refer to both hereafter; but they have some interest here as types of the kind of scenes which were daily set before the eyes of Correggio and Titian, and of the sweet free spaces of sky through which rose and fell, to them, the colored rays of the morning and evening.
§ 16. And they are connected, also, with the forms of landscape adopted by the Lombardic masters, in a very curious way. We noticed that the Flemings, educated entirely in flat land,art oil paintings online, seemed to be always contented with the scenery it supplied; and316we should naturally have expected that Titian and Correggio, living in the midst of the levels of the lagoons, and of the plain of Lombardy, would also have expressed, in their backgrounds, some pleasure in such level scenery, associated, of course, with the sublimity of the far-away Apennine, Euganean, or Alp. But not a whit. The plains of mulberry and maize, of sea and shoal, by which they were surrounded, never occur in their backgrounds but in cases of necessity; and both of them, in all their important landscapes, bury themselves in wild wood; Correggio delighting to relieve with green darkness of oak and ivy the golden hair and snowy flesh of his figures; and Titian, whenever the choice of a scene was in his power, retiring to the narrow glens and forests of Cadore. buy oil paintings online