button to main menu  Observations on Picturesque Beauty, page 88

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vol.1 p.88
[beau]tiful assemblage of tints; it remains lastly to throw the whole into light and shade.- He who would study light and shade, must repair to the mountains. There he will see their most magnificent effects.
  mountain, light and shade
In every object we observe a double effect of illumination, that of the parts, and that of the whole. In a building the cornices, the pilasters, and other ornaments, are set of, in the language of art, with light and shade. Over this partial effect are spread general masses. It is thus in mountains.
Homer, who had a genius as picturesque as Virgil, (tho he seems to have known little of the art of painting) was struck with two things in his views of mountains - with those cavities and projections, which abound upon their surfaces - and with what he calls their shadowing forms. Of the former, he takes notice, when he speaks of a single mountain; of the latter, when he speaks of mountains in combination *. Now it is plain, that in both these
1.87.*   Under the first idea he speaks of Mount Olympus, which he calls πολυπτυχ[ ], or many vallied. / Il. 8. 411.
Under the second, he speaks of that chain of mountains, which separate Phthia from the southern parts of Greece;

----- πολλα μεταξυ
ουρεα τι σχιοεντα -----
Many shadowing mountains intervene. / Il. 1. 156.
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