Painting

Before Verrocchio, his precursors, first Alessio Baldovinetti and then Pollaiuolo, had attempted to treat landscape as naturalistically as painting would permit. Their ideal was to note it down with absolute correctness from a given point of view; their subject almost invariably the Valdarno; their achievement, a bird’s-eye view of this Tuscan paradise. Nor can it be denied that this gives pleasure, but the pleasure is only such as is conveyed by tactile values.

Bronzino, Pontormo’s close follower, had none of his master’s talent as a decorator, but happily much of his power as a portrait-painter. Would he had never attempted anything else!

(RAPHAEL)

MRS. JAMESON

(RAPHAEL)

F.A. GRUYER

Raphael seemed to have attained perfection in the Virgin with the Fish; however, four or five years later, he was to rise infinitely higher and display something superior to art and inaccessible to science.

It was in 1518 that the Benedictines of the monastery of St. Sixtus ordered this picture. They had required that the Virgin and the Infant Jesus should be in the company of St. Sixtus and St. Barbara. This is how Raphael entered into their views.

(BENOZZO GOZZOLI)

COSMO MONKHOUSE

(PAUL POTTER)

EUGÈNE FROMENTIN

(CARPACCIO)

JOHN RUSKIN

(LEONARDO DA VINCI) 

WALTER PATER

(FRAGONARD)

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT