reat practical matter I
want you to remember to-day. All effects of light and shade depend not
on the method or execution of shadows, but on their rightness of place,
form, and depth. There is indeed a loveliness of execution _added_ to
the rightness, by the great masters, but you cannot obtain that unless
you become one of them. Shadow cannot be laid thoroughly well, any more
than lines can be drawn steadily, but by a long-practised hand, and the
attempts to imitate the shading of fine draughtsmen, by dotting and
hatching, are just as ridiculous as it would be to endeavour to imitate
their instantaneous lines by a series of re-touchings. You will often
indeed see in Lionardo's work, and in Michael Angelo's, shadow wrought
laboriously to an extreme of fineness; but when you look into it, you
will find that they have always been drawing more and more form within
the space, and never finishing for the sake of added texture, but of
added fact. And all those effects of transparency and reflected light,
aimed at in common chalk drawings, are wholly spurious. For since, as I
told you, all lights are shades compared to higher lights, and lights
only as compared to lower ones, it follows that there can be no
difference in their quality as such; but that light is opaque when it
expresses substance, and transparent when it expresses space; and shade
is also opaque when it expresses substance, and transparent when it
expresses space. But it is not, even then, transparent in the common
sense of that word; nor is its appearance to be obtained by dotting or
cross hatching, but by touches so tender as to look like mist. And now
we find the use of having Lionardo for our guide. He is supreme in all
questions of execution, and in his 28th chapter, you will find that
shadows are to be "dolce e sfumose," to be tender, and look as if they
were exhaled, or breathed on the paper. Then, look at any of Michael
Angelo's finished drawings, or of Correggio's sketches, and you will see
that the true nurse of light is in art, as in nature, the cloud; a misty
and tender darkness, made lovely by gradation.

165. And how absolutely independent it is of material or method of
production, how absolutely dependent on rightness of place and
depth,--there are now before you instances enough to prove. Here is
Duerer's work in flat colour, represented by the photograph in its smoky
brown; Turner's, in washed sepia, and in mezzotint; Lionardo's, in
pencil an