_Gaspard Poussin_ (French: 1613-1675). _See_ 31.
This picture and the scene of it--the ancient town of Aricia, about
fifteen miles from Rome, famous in Roman legend, and Horace's first
stopping-place on his journey to Brindisi--are described by Ruskin in
a celebrated passage of _Modern Painters_:--
"Whether it can be supposed to resemble the ancient Aricia,
now La Riccia, close to Albano, I will not take upon me to
determine, seeing that most of the towns of those old masters
are quite as much like one place as another; but, at any rate,
it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty bushes,
of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number
of leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one
dull opaque brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards
the lights, and discover in one place a bit of rock, which
of course would in nature have been cool and grey beside the
lustrous hues of foliage, and which, therefore, being moreover
completely in shade, is consistently and scientifically painted
of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick red, the only thing
like colour in the picture. The foreground is a piece of road
which, in order to make allowance for its greater nearness, for
its being completely in light, and, it may be presumed, for the
quantity of vegetation usually present on carriage-roads, is
given in a very cool green grey; and the truth of the picture
is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the right, with
a stalk to them, of a sober and similar brown.[94]
"Not long ago, I was slowly descending this very bit of
carriage road.... The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky
slopes of La Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall
foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure
of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain.
I cannot call it colour: it was conflagration. Purple and
crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle,
the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light,
every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life;
each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first
a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the
valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty
waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed
along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray
tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls
of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling
alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every
glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening
in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as
sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless
masses of dark rock--dark though flushed with scarlet lichen,
casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the
fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue
mist and fitful sound; and over all, the multitudinous bars
of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness,
and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals
between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing
to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the
measureless line where the Campagna melted into the sea. Tell
me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner?" (vol. i. pt. ii.
sec. ii. ch. ii. §§ 1-3).
Ruskin further instances the picture as an example of "untruth of
trees." It is an elementary law of tree structure that stems only taper
when sending off foliage and sprays:--
"Therefore we see at once that the stem of Gaspard Poussin's
tall tree, on the right of the 'La Riccia,' is the painting
of a carrot or a parsnip, not of the trunk of a tree" (see
further, _ibid._, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. § 6; and
_cf._ vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18).