Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 85

Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See 31.

The scene is the beautiful avenue of oaks, called the "Galleria di Sopra," which skirts the upper margin of the Lake of Albano. Ruskin refers to this picture in illustration of his thesis that Turner's "truth of vegetation," in his representation of the exceeding intricacy of nature, is not to be paralleled among the old painters, and least of all in Gaspard Poussin with his regular "tree-patterns." The picture before us is "a woody landscape," which in nature would be a mass of intricate foliage —

"a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the sky… This, as it comes down into the body of the tree, gets closer, but never opaque; it is always transparent, with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky; then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of illumined foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here and there a single leaf on the extremities: then, under these, you get deep passages of broken irregular gloom, passing into transparent, green-lighted, misty hollows … all penetrable and transparent, and, in proportion, inextricable and incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and mystery of the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to us, some solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless large leaves, the type and embodying of all that in the rest we feel and imagine, but can never see.

"Now, with thus much of nature in your mind, go to Gaspard Poussin's 'View near Albano.' It is the very subject to unite all these effects, a sloping bank shaded with intertwined forest. And what has Gaspard given us? A mass of smooth, opaque, varnished brown, without one interstice, one change of hue, or any vestige of leafy structure, in its interior, or in those parts of it, I should say, which are intended to represent interior; but out of it, over it rather, at regular intervals, we have circular groups of greenish touches, always the same in size, shape, and distance from each other, containing so exactly the same number of touches each, that you cannot tell one from another. There are eight or nine and thirty of them, laid over each other like fish-scales; the shade being most carefully made darker and darker as it recedes from each until it comes to the edge of the next, against which it cuts in the same sharp circular line, and then begins to decline again, until the canvas is covered with about as much intelligence or feeling of art as a house-painter has in marbling a wainscot, or a weaver in repeating an ornamental pattern. What is there in this, which the most determined prejudice in favour of the old masters can for a moment suppose to resemble trees? It is exactly what the most ignorant beginner, trying to make a complete drawing, would lay down; exactly the conception of trees which we have in the works of our worst drawing-masters, where the shade is laid on with the black lead and stump, and every human power exerted to make it look like a kitchen grate well polished"89 (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. §§ 16-19).

A further "untruth of vegetation" is the perpetration of the bough at the left-hand upper corner. This is —

"a representation of an ornamental group of elephants' tusks, with feathers tied to the end of them. Not the wildest imagination could ever conjure up in it the remotest resemblance to the bough of a tree. It might be the claws of a witch, the talons of an eagle, the horns of a fiend; but it is a full assemblage of every conceivable falsehood which can be told respecting foliage, a piece of work so barbarous in every way, that one glance at it ought to prove the complete charlatanism and trickery of the whole system of the old landscape painters" (ibid., § 7).