Painting, as the Venetians understood it, is a lost art, because the
mental conditions which made it possible exist no longer. The race is
getting to that mannish stature in which every childlike quality is a
shame to it; and the Venetian feeling for and cultivation of color are
essentially childlike traits. No shadows of optics, no spectra of the
prism clouded their passionate enjoyment of color as it was or as it
might be, no uplifted finger of cold decorum frightened them into gray
or sable gloom; they garbed themselves in rainbows, and painted with the
sunset. Color was to them a rapture and one of the great pursuits of
their lives; it was music visible, and they cultivated it as such,--not
by rule and measure, by scales and opposites, through theories and
canons, with petrific chill of intellect or entangling subtilty of
analysis. Their lives developed their instincts, and their instincts
their art. They loved color more than everything else; and therefore
color made herself known to them in her rarest and noblest beauty. They
went to Nature as children, and Nature met them as a loving mother
meets her child, with her happiest smile and the richest of her gifts.
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