Thus, in the painting alluded
to in the article on Mr. Page, "The Entombment" of the Louvre, the
landscape is charged with the solemnity of the hour. No blade of grass
or shadow of leaf but seems conscious of the great event, and the sky
reveals, by its heavenly tenderness, that there all is known.
How different in expression, yet how similar in strength, is the
landscape of that seeming miracle, "The Presentation in the Temple"!
It is clear, confident day,--so pure and perfect a day abroad over the
happy earth, that all things lure forth into an atmosphere so unsullied
that to breathe it is life and joy,--over an earth youthful with spring,
fresh with morning; and hither have come the people to see confirmed the
future mother of Christ, now the child Mary. As the maiden ascends the
steps of the Temple, a halo surrounds her,--not her head alone, but all
the form,--and far away a fainter halo rests upon the hills. Her youth,
its purity and half-recognized promise, seem sweetly imaged in the
morning freshness and spring-life of the landscape.
We can remember no landscape by Titian which is not in full sympathy
with the motives which actuate his groups. It is the unison of scene and
act that gives his pictures a unity and completeness never or rarely
found elsewhere.
After Titian came painters--among them, mighty ones--who, like
Tintoretto, wrought from the external. The elements of the landscape
were treated with knowledge and power, but not often with feeling, and
very seldom with a recognition of its central significance.
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