Lanzi, in his _History of Italian Painting_, gives the following
exquisite encomium on this prince of landscape painters:
"His landscapes present to the spectator an endless variety; so many
views of land and water, so many interesting objects, that, like an
astonished traveller, the eye is obliged to pause and measure the extent
of the prospect, and his distances of mountain and of sea, are so
illusive, that the spectator feels, as it were, fatigued by gazing. The
edifices and temples which so finely round off his compositions, the
lakes peopled with aquatic birds, the foliage diversified in conformity
to the different kinds of trees, all is nature in him; every object
arrests the attention of an amateur, every thing furnishes instruction
to a professor. There is not an effect of light, or a reflection in
water which he has not imitated; and the various changes of the day are
nowhere better represented than in Claude. In a word, he is truly the
painter who, in depicting the three regions of air, earth, and water,
has combined the whole universe. His atmosphere almost always bears the
impress of the sky at Rome, whose horizon is, from its situation, rosy,
dewy, and warm. He did not possess any peculiar merit in his figures,
which are insipid, and generally too much attenuated; hence he was
accustomed to remark to the purchasers of his pictures, that he sold
them the landscape, and presented them with the figures gratis."
* * * * *
"TINTORETTO," says his biographer, "produced works in which the most
captious of critics could not find a shade of defect."
* * * * *