Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
At Conegliano where Cima lived we ran into the town between its guardian statues, gave a glance at the splendid old castle which must have given the gentle painter many an inspiration, and then turned eastward.
It was the lagoons round Venice. I spent also many interesting days about this time at our tree O.P. on Cima del Taglio. The Italians had an O.P. in a neighbouring tree, which they called Osservatorio Battisti. The British Field Artillery occupied a third tree, and the French a fourth. The pine trees on that summit were, literally, full of eyes.
Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather to the Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extent overshadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the point of absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.
Cima, Cariani, Paris Bordone, and last, but not least, the great Titian, lent their gifts to the subject, so that we have abundant evidence of the Venetian love of natural scenery. The subject is found among the woodcuts of Albert Dürer, but I have never seen it in any German painting.
Starting early, we were on the top of Costalunga about 9 o'clock, were given a guide by an Italian Field Battery on the summit and went on, along a mountain road commanding a magnificent view, to Cima Echar. Here was a good O.P. from which I got my first sight of Monte Sisemol and Asiago, of which part of the campanile was at that time still standing.
On the Cima di Costabella a minor Italian attack was repulsed. East of Monte Forno, at the north of the Asiago Plateau, detachments of an Austrian regiment, advancing through snow tunnels, penetrated into the Italian trenches, destroyed the dugouts, and inflicted considerable losses upon the Italians.
There died that day, struck by a shell at the foot of our tree O.P. on Cima del Taglio, one of the finest personalities in the Battery, a signalling Bombardier who had worked for some years on a railway in America and, just before the war, as a railway clerk in the Midlands.
All this was characteristically the truth; he bought the Cima, wrote of his baskets to Harwood, but stayed away past his melons, his grapes and his olives.
You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. You renounce all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent Cima da Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity that shines in the spirit of this master, you renounce it with chagrin and pain.
We cannot help thinking that the mere arrangement of their figures by such painters as Cima da Conegliano and Francesco Francia, the architectural regularity of their disposition, the sculpturesque dignity of their attitudes, and the consequent impression of simplicity and repose which they convey, have much to do with the religious effect they produce on the mind, as contrasted with the more dramatic and picturesque conceptions of later artists.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking