FIRST TO PAINT A LANDSCAPE

Evening Star, Issue 24004, 1 October 1941, Page 2

FIRST TO PAINT A LANDSCAPE

TITIAN'S MASTERPIECES

Titian was the first in modern tim« to paint a • landscape. There. wea many fine landscapes before his dajß . . But they were only backgroUnjM Titian was the first to -paint a scape for itself alone. The too, is an important part of all his pictures, and it is as as his colours. It smiles with ous, it weeps with the sorrowing,. V thunders with the wrathful. It is not! as with Raphael, nature dominated by man; it is man and nature as in. epar, able parts of a pantheistic whole, laughing, wailing together, and each answer; ihg to the others’ mood. ... ! He was the first to understand th; grandeur and the mystery of thi mountains. To the ancients and to hi contemporaries thev were simply horrif and forbidding.’ He was born amoiij them, and loved them with, a mountaiq eer’s devotion to his home. . But h knew how to use them for artistic puj poses. He knew that the barren desc lation of mountain regions soon weayk the eye, and that the true function C mountains in landscape painting is. a a background, to verdant alluring scene) As such they are supremely effect ivi lending grandeur and sublimity to view, which would otherwise have bee only pretty. Of all painters he uses mountains wit the greatest felicity. In most of hi pictures his native Dolomites, far awai as ho saw them from Venice or the at jacent mainland, stand out blue in th distance, enveloping the landscape -wit a sense of mystery and awe. He: wa the greatest of landscape painters unti Claude Lorraine, and in breadth, es ceeding him. ... _ - . Like Raphael, ,he is a painter to Jiv with. He is not a striver after the ur attainable, a wearier of the. flesh/, lik Michelangelo. . . . He is mundane an human, while Raphael soars above tli earth, but he is equally serene, and lj lends to our mortal life a dignity an a beauty that wo can never conteinplat too often. He may not lift us up, bu ho gives ns a keener and a fuller, sens of the worthiness of terrestrial things —From ‘ Renaissance Masters.’ b George B. Rose.-