[Page heading: VERROCCHIO AND LANDSCAPE]
In all that concerns movement, Verrocchio was a learner from Pollaiuolo,
rather than an initiator, and he probably never attained his master's
proficiency. We have unfortunately but few terms for comparison, as the
only paintings which can be with certainty ascribed to Verrocchio are
not pictures of action. A drawing however like that of his angel, in the
British Museum, which attempts as much movement as the Hercules by
Pollaiuolo, in the same collection, is of obviously inferior quality.
Yet in sculpture, along with works which are valuable as harbingers of
Leonardo rather than for any intrinsic perfection, he created two such
masterpieces of movement as the "Child with the Dolphin" in the
courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Colleoni monument at
Venice--the latter sinning, if at all, by an over-exuberance of
movement, by a step and swing too suggestive of drums and trumpets. But
in landscape Verrocchio was a decided innovator. To understand what new
elements he introduced, we must at this point carry out our
determination to enquire into the source of our pleasure in landscape
painting; or rather--to avoid a subject of vast extent for which this is
not the place--of landscape painting as practised by the Florentines.
[Page heading: LANDSCAPE PAINTING]
Before Verrocchio, his precursors, first Alessio Baldovinetti and then
Pollaiuolo, had attempted to treat landscape as naturalistically as
painting would permit. Their ideal was to note it down with absolute
correctness from a given point of view; their subject almost invariably
the Valdarno; their achievement, a bird's-eye view of this Tuscan
paradise. Nor can it be denied that this gives pleasure, but the
pleasure is only such as is conveyed by tactile values. Instead of
having the difficulty we should have in nature to distinguish clearly
points near the horizon's edge, we here see them perfectly and without
an effort, and in consequence feel great confirmation of capacity for
life. Now if landscape were, as most people vaguely believe, a pleasure
coming through the eyes alone, then the Pollaiuolesque treatment could
be equalled by none that has followed, and surpassed only by Rogier van
der Weyden, or by the quaint German "Master of the Lyversberg Passion,"
who makes us see objects miles away with as great a precision and with
as much intensity of local colour as if we were standing off from them a
few feet. Were landscape really this, then nothing more inartistic than
gradation of tint, atmosphere, and _plein air_, all of which help to
make distant objects less clear, and therefore tend in no way to
heighten our sense of capacity. But as a matter of fact the pleasure we
take in actual landscape is only to a limited extent an affair of the
eye, and to a great extent one of unusually intense well-being. The
painter's problem, therefore, is not merely to render the tactile values
of the visible objects, but to convey, more rapidly and unfailingly than
nature would do, _the consciousness_ of an unusually intense degree of
well-being. This task--the communication by means purely visual of
feelings occasioned chiefly by sensations non-visual--is of such
difficulty that, until recently, successes in the rendering of what is
peculiar to landscape as an art, and to landscape alone, were accidental
and sporadic. Only now, in our own days, may painting be said to be
grappling with this problem seriously; and perhaps we are already at the
dawn of an art which will have to what has hitherto been called
landscape, the relation of our music to the music of the Greeks or of
the Middle Ages.
[Page heading: VERROCCHIO'S LANDSCAPES]
Verrocchio was, among Florentines at least, the first to feel that a
faithful reproduction of the contours is not landscape, that the
painting of nature is an art distinct from the painting of the figure.
He scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that light and
atmosphere play an entirely different part in each, and that in
landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values. A
vision of _plein air_, vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before
him, and, feeling his powerlessness to cope with it in full effects of
light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately
chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand
out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this
subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare
and dust of the day--the effect so matchlessly given in Gray's
"Elegy"--seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in presence of
his "Annunciation" (in the Uffizi), we feel that he succeeded as only
one other Tuscan succeeded after him, that other being his own pupil
Leonardo.