_Monticelli._


CII

Sir John Millais is certainly right in his estimate of strong and even
bright colour, but it seems to me that he is mistaken in believing that
the colour of the Venetians was ever crude, or that time will ever turn
white into colour. The colour of the best-preserved pictures by Titian
shows a marked distinction between light flesh tones and white drapery.
This is most distinctly seen in the small "Noli Me Tangere" in our
National Gallery, in the so-called "Venus" of the Tribune and in the
"Flora" of the Uffizi, both in Florence, and in Bronzino's "All is
Vanity," also in the National Gallery. In the last-named picture, for
example, the colour is as crude and the surface as bare of mystery as if
it had been painted yesterday. As a matter of fact, white unquestionably
tones down, but never becomes colour; indeed, under favourable
conditions, and having due regard to what is underneath, it changes very
little. In the "Noli Me Tangere" to which I have referred, the white
sleeve of the Magdalen is still a beautiful white, quite different from
the white of the fairest of Titian's flesh--proving that Titian never
painted his flesh white.

The so-called "Venus" in the Tribune at Florence is a more important
example still, as it is an elaborately painted picture owing nothing to
the brightness that slight painting often has and retains, the colours
being untormented by repeated re-touching. This picture is a proof that
when the method is good and the pigments pure, the colours change very
little. More than three hundred years have passed, and the white sheet