ale
anatomies. The painters of Southern Tuscany loved as a background the
arid and mountainous country of their birth. Taddeo di Bartolo placed
the Death of the Virgin among the curious undulations of pale clay and
sandy marl that stretch to the southernmost gates of Siena; Signorelli
was amused and fascinated by the odd cliffs and overhanging crags,
unnatural and grotesque like some Druidic monument, of the valleys of
the Paglia and the Chiana; and Pier della Francesca has left, in the
allegorical triumphs of Frederick of Urbino and his duchess, studies
most exquisite and correct, of what meets the traveller's eyes on the
watersheds of the central Apennine, sharp-toothed lines of mountain
peaks pale against the sky, dim distant whiteness of sea, and valleys
and roads and torrents twisting intricately as on a map. The country
about Volterra, revealing itself with rosy lividness at dawn, with
delicate periwinkle blue at sunset, through an open city gate or a gap
between the tall black houses, helped to make Neroni a lover of muscle
and sinew, of the strength and suppleness of movement, of the osseous
structure divined within the limbs; and made him shrink all his life
long, not merely from drapery or costume that blunted the lines of the
body, but from any warmth and depth of colour; till the figures stood
out like ghosts, or people in faded tapestries, from the pale lilacs and
greys and washed out cinnamons of his backgrounds. For the bold peaks
and swelling mountains of the valleys of the Arno and the Tiber, and the
depths of colour among vegetation and rivers, seemed crude and emphatic
to a man who carried in his memory those bosses of hill, pearly where
the waters have washed the sides, pale golden buff where a little sere
grass covers the rounded top; those great cracks and chasms, with the
white road snaking along the narrow table-land and the wide valleys; and
the ripple of far-off mountain chains, strong and restrained in curves,
exquisite in tints, like the dry white and purpled hemlock, and the
dusty lilac scabius, which seem to flower alone in that arid and
melancholy and beautiful country.

"Colour," wrote Domenico Neroni, among a mass of notes on his art,
measurements, and calculations, "is the enemy of noble art. It is the
enemy of all precise and perfect form, since where colour exists form
can be seen only as juxtaposition of colour. For this reason it has
pleased the Creator to lend colour only to the in