The sticky white is bad enough, but it is witness to the general acknowledgment of the prohibition of dark colour, whether on our luckless walls of paint, or on the flattered, fortunate plaster of the south that softly lodges the warming day, and has its colour broken by the weather as an artist chooses to let a tint be effaced or an outline lapse. There is no surer distinction between an old Italian coloured house and a new than this: the new is dark and the old is pale. True, the new is coloured ill as well as darkly, and the old coloured finely (always warmly with variants of rose and yellow) as well as lightly; but the deep tone and the high are difference enough. The new man choses chocolate-colour and dark blue; blue is his preference, and his blue jars with the sky.
The ancient man so used his beautiful distemper that it always looked not merely like a colour, but like a white coloured. The old under-white enlivens the thin and careless colour, somewhat like the soft flame of a lamp by day within a coloured paper. Moreover, the painter did his large and slight work on a simple wall, and not on the detail of cornice or portal. His colour took no account of the architectural forms; it was arbitrary, a decoration that neither followed nor contradicted the builder's design, but stood independent thereof, merely taking the limit of the wall as the boundary of the painting. Here again all the right guidance has forsaken the man of to-day, who takes the mouldings of his house one by one, and gives them separate colours.
Needless to say, the original colour of the stone is better
