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The entire heavens seemed to be ablaze from horizon to zenith, not as with the lurid fires of a great conflagration, which might suggest only the idea of universal devastation, but with the tender sheen of varied half-tints, playfully shooting athwart and intermingling with brighter curtains of light of every conceivable hue.
These retouches a secco have destroyed to a great extent the atmospheric quality and the relation of the planes in Michael Angelo’s suave true-fresco method, which, as may be seen in the vault, gives the grey half-tints of the flesh-tones in a way only equalled by Andrea del Sarto in fresco and Rembrandt in oil painting.
Looking up, Clover saw above the tree-tops strange pinnacles and spires and obelisks which seemed air-hung, of purple-red and orange-tawny and pale pinkish gray and terra cotta, in which the sunshine and the cloud-shadows broke in a multiplicity of wonderful half-tints. Above them was the dazzling blue of the Colorado sky. She drew a long, long breath. "So this is a canyon," she said.
Like him, great sovereign of art, I have sketched my figure in light clear tones of supple yet solid color; for shadow is but an accident, remember that, young man. Then I worked backward, as it were; and by means of half-tints, and glazings whose transparency I kept diminishing little by little, I was able to cast strong shadows deepening almost to blackness.
They lack, it is true, the gorgeous coloring of the eastern Indian summer, with its beauty of scarlets, crimsons, ochres, maroons and mauves, the western color scheme being in half-tints of low tone.
Poetic style, when address'd to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best effect thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor.
We have a case of pretended madness in the Edgar of King Lear; and it is certainly true that that is a charcoal sketch, coarsely outlined, compared with the delicate drawing, the lights, shades, and half-tints of the portraiture in Hamlet.
Nevertheless, this former conception of his, when compared to that wonderful complexity of ethereal lines, colors, tints and half-tints which go to make up the modern New York girl, seemed inexpressibly simple, almost what plain arithmetic must appear to a man who has mastered calculus.
The room was fitted up in the purest Greek style, not without an affectation of archaism, in the severe forms and subdued half-tints of the frescoes which ornamented the walls with scenes from the old myths of Athene. Yet the general effect, even under the blazing sun which poured in through the mosquito nets of the courtyard windows, was one of exquisite coolness, and cleanliness, and repose.
Not with half-tints in which colour disappears are Monet and his school concerned, but with the brilliant vibration of colour in the full light, with open spaces where the light is reflected back and forward, and nature is but a prism filled with dazzling and iridescent tints. I remember once writing about one of Monet's innumerable snow effects: "This picture is in his most radiant manner.