It was in the interiors of their mosaic churches, swathed in mellow gold, inlaid with rich colours, and always deeply and darkly shadowed, that the Byzantine architects best embodied this Oriental conception of colour effect, and the whole of Italy was to some extent warmed by their glow. But it was in Venice, where the influence of the East was always paramount, and where the most splendid of all these mosaic churches glowed and glittered in the midst of the city, that the example had strongest and most definite effect. Here it grafted itself and bore fruit, and in the city which for so many centuries had sucked nourishment from Eastern sources there arose in due time a school of painting in which all the great characteristics of Oriental colour are exhibited.
This school it was which took Reynolds captive. But in yielding to colour of this kind he was not yielding to decorative colour. The rich, suffused colour on the canvas of a Tintoret or a Titian is not decorative colour at all. It is emotional colour, colour used to instil a sensation and a feeling, not to define an object. Will the reader compare in his mind the inside of St. Mark’s at Venice with the inside of St. Peter’s at Rome? Both make much use of colour, but in St. Mark’s the colour appears as a pervading deep and rich glow, governed and controlled by light and shade; in St. Peter’s it appears as a complicated pattern of variously cut marbles exposed in clear daylight. This last is the decorative use of colour, and excites no feeling at all. The former is the emotional use of it, and both excites and satisfies deep feeling. The same difference is apparent between colour as dealt with by the Venetian painters and colour as dealt with by the Northern nations before Venice’s influence had been felt.
Bearing these facts in mind, the theory and the practice of Reynolds both gain in significance. He came at the moment when the spread of that Eastern ideal of colouring, which had already been carried here and there through Europe, had become possible in England. He has himself drawn attention to this tendency it possessed to overflow and extend into other nations. “By them,” he says--that is, by Tintoret and Veronese especially--“a style merely ornamental has been disseminated throughout all Europe. Rubens carried it into Flanders, Voet to France, and Lucca Giordano to Spain and Naples.” To which he might have added, “and I myself to England.”