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| 29 September 2019 |
The qualities of the colors in this image (to the extent that they can even be suggested by a photo, which can serve, after all and at best, only as an analogy of the actual scene--as even the finest recording of music offers but a kind of "parallel" and reductive version of actual living music), the chalky or almost pastel look of them as they appear in the autumnal late-afternoon marine light of the lagoon, is one of the things I miss most about Venice. As the old Venetian painters well knew, it's an atmosphere in which color takes precedence, seems more substantial than form, and the interplay of tones is everything. Let the Tuscans worry about drawing, about delineating forms in space and mathematical perspective--in the lagoon it's all a wash.
