Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
Built in Tudor days, the old red brick of the walls looks eminently picturesque in the midst of a bower of green, the beautiful lawn, with its old sun-dial, adding the true note of harmony to its foregrounds, and now, on this warm early autumn night, the leaves slightly turned to russets and gold, the old garden looked singularly poetic and peaceful in the moonlight.
Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act. To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of painting, with its power of indirect expression, of subordinate but significant detail, its atmosphere, its foregrounds and backgrounds.
After feasting awhile on the view, I proceeded to make camp in a sheltered grove a little way back from the meadow, where pine-boughs could be obtained for beds, and where there was plenty of dry wood for fires, while the artists ran here and there, along the river-bends and up the sides of the cañon, choosing foregrounds for sketches.
It was a literary party, I gathered: but even so there was a haze of politics and society about it vistas of politicians and personages of every kind, all known intimately, all of them quoted, everything heard and whispered in the background of events we had no foregrounds, I can tell you, nothing second-hand, no concealments or reticences.
The changes to which we refer are these, foregrounds suggested by or painted from living forms. In one view of Nemi we saw a superb black, gold, and crimson butterfly resting on a flower. Yet these foregrounds require more strength, more "body," more of that which artists achieve who achieve nothing else. We notice far more individualism in tree forms.
It was not until we were far on our eight hours' journey to Meppel, that we slipped once more into a characteristic region of peace and plenty; marching lines of dark trees, with foregrounds of pink and azure flowers, or golden grain; mossy, thatched roofs, and red tiles crusted with golden lichen.
Before his handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the mild, robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and look round at you with a conscious anxiety which seems to say that, though in the picture, they are not of it, but of your own sentient life of commingled love and weariness; the stately apostles, with comely heads and harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high- seated Virgin like early astronomers at a newly seen star there comes to you the brush of the dark wing of an inward life.
But at the close of the thirteenth century, Giotto, and in the course of the fourteenth, Orcagna, sought, for the first time, to give some resemblance to nature in their backgrounds, and introduced behind their figures pieces of true landscape, formal enough still, but complete in intention, having foregrounds and distances, sky and water, forests and mountains, carefully delineated, not exactly in their true color, but yet in color approximating to the truth.
There is a good deal of ruin within them, which makes the foregrounds uninteresting and squalid. To the west is a public garden planted with fir-trees, and with seats here and there. Aloes grow plentifully on the rocks to the south-west. In the early Middle Ages Arbe was prosperous owing to its trade and its position on the high-road between Venice and the East.
These two painters were the first who relieved the foregrounds of their landscape from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded formalism of the early painters; and gave a close approximation to the forms of nature in all things; retaining, however, thus much of the old system, that the distances were for the most part painted in deep ultramarine blue, the foregrounds in rich green and brown; there were no effects of sunshine and shadow, but a generally quiet glow over the whole scene; and the clouds, though now rolling in irregular masses, and sometimes richly involved among the hills, were never varied in conception, or studied from nature.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking