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Updated: September 21, 2025
A portrait of Giorgione is in the Munich Gallery; it is that of a very handsome beardless lad, 'with a peculiar melancholy in the dark glowing eyes. Giorgione was, like Titian, grand and free in drawing and composition, and superb in colour. Mrs Jameson has drawn a nice distinction between the two painters as colourists.
Again, the arts of etching and mezzotint engraving depend principally for their effect on the velvety, or bloomy texture of their darkness, and the best of all painting is the fresco work of great colourists, in which the colours are what is usually called dead; but they are anything but dead, they glow with the luminous bloom of life.
Well, the Venetians always saw this, and all great colourists see it, and are thus separated from the non-colourists or schools of mere chiaroscuro, not by difference in style merely, but by being right while the others are wrong.
But after him there remained nothing for successors except mechanical imitation, soulless rehandling of themes he had exhausted by reducing them to his imperious imagination in a crucible of fiery intensity. No critic with a just sense of phraseology would call Michelangelo a colourist in the same way as Titian and Rubens were colourists.
The only thing I could do in order to make myself heard was to cough. As for getting in a word, they never even gave me a chance. Gelis discoursed enthusiastically, not only about the Venetian colourists, but also upon all other matters relating to nature or to mankind.
You may see these elements at work everywhere, but to see them in their intensity you should choose the finest day in the month and have yourself rowed far away across the lagoon to Torcello. Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to know Venice or to sympathise with that longing for pure radiance which animated her great colourists.
Liddy, the maltster's great-granddaughter, was about Bathsheba's equal in age, and her face was a prominent advertisement of the features' might have lacked in form was amply made up for by perfection of hue, which at this winter-time was the softened ruddiness on a surface of high rotundity and, like the presentations of those great colourists, it was a face which kept well back from the boundary between comeliness and the ideal.
Titian's chalk-studies, Fra Bartolommeo's, so singularly akin to Andrea del Sarto's, Giorgione's pen-and-ink sketch for a Lucretia, are seen at once by their richness and blurred outlines to be the work of colourists. Signorelli's transcripts from the nude, remarkably similar to those of Michelangelo, reveal a sculptor rather than a painter.
The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and colourists; the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay figures on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo the Madonna was a mere peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable portrait figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand opportunity for foreshortenings.
Our graceful Titian is the prince of colourists, but it must be admitted that his drawing seldom rises above mediocrity." "You must excuse me," he retorted with a smile, "if I doubt whether your position can be maintained. I infer from the tendency of your remarks that you consider drawing of primary importance.
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