_Lorenzo di Credi_ (Florentine: 1459-1537). _See 593._
A pretty landscape background, with a ruin, and the angel appearing
to the shepherds in the distance--the whole charmingly harmonious in
its blue-grays. "A pure and simple-minded man, Lorenzo delighted in
pure, bright, and simple landscapes, in which one reads something of
the gentle Angelico's feeling. Nature with Credi, as with the saint
of Fiesole, must show no stain, no trouble, no severity, no sign of
the transient. Far be it from him to introduce the jagged ranges that
Leonardo reared upon his far, mysterious horizons. No, he must have all
that is green and blue, and cheerful" (Gilbert's _Landscape in Art_, p.
225). With regard to the landscape backgrounds of the Italian painters,
Mr. Mackail, in a letter to F. T. Palgrave (_Journals and Memories_,
p. 256), raises the question "whether landscape painting has not lost
as well as gained by being elevated from the background into the
substance of a picture; whether, that is, the moral or human interest
that is essential to all great art can exist in pure landscape painting
without putting a greater strain on it than it will bear. Take, for
instance, the landscape backgrounds of Lorenzo di Credi's pictures in
the National Gallery, or of the great Perugino triptych. Have they
not a moral or spiritual quality, as they stand in their place in the
picture, that they can only have through this elusive (if one may say
so) treatment?"