he sun, made
of the texture of the sky, lying against it like transparent and still
luminous shadows. All pictures of such effects of climate are false,
even Perugino's and Claude's, because even in these the eye is not
sufficiently attracted and absorbed away from the foreground, from the
earth to the luminous sky. That effect is the most powerful, sweetest,
and most restorative in all nature perhaps; a bath for the soul in
pure light and air. That is the incomparable buoyancy and radiance of
deepest Tuscan summer. But the winter is, perhaps, even more Tuscan
and more austerely beautiful. I am not even speaking of the fact that
the mountains, with their near snows and brooding blue storms and ever
contending currents of wind and battles and migrations of great
clouds, necessarily make much of winter very serious and solemn, as it
sweeps down their ravines and across their ridges. I am thinking of
the serene winter days of mist and sun, with ranges of hills made of a
luminous bluish smoke, and sky only a more luminous and liquid kind,
and the olives but a more solid specimen, of the mysterious silvery
substance of the world. The marvellous part of it all, and quite
impossible to convey, is that such days are not pensive, but
effulgent, that the lines of the landscape are not blurred, but
exquisitely selected and worked.

XII.

A quality like that of Tuscan art is, as I have once before remarked,
in some measure, abstract; a general character, like that of a
composite photograph, selected and compounded by the repetition of the
more general and the exclusion of more individual features. In so far,
therefore, it is something rather tended towards in reality than
thoroughly accomplished; and its accomplishment, to whatever extent,
is naturally due to a tradition, a certain habit among artists and
public, which neutralises the refractory tendencies of individuals
(the personal morbidness evident, for instance, in Botticelli) and
makes the most of what the majority may have in common--that dominant
interest, let us say, in line and mass. Such being the case, this
Tuscan quality comes to an end with the local art of the middle ages,
and can no longer be found, or only imperfect, after the breaking up
and fusion of the various schools, and the arising of eclectic
personalities in the earliest sixteenth century. After the painters
born between 1450 and 1460, there are no more genuine Tuscans.
Leonardo, once independent of