Mercury and Argos

Here is a passage from Modern Painters, illustrating some of Ruskin's ideas on colour as described in the third part of the Elements of Drawing:

"In the Mercury and Argus, the pale and vaporous blue of the heated sky is broken with grey and pearly white, the gold colour of the light warming it more or less as it approaches or retires from the sun; but, throughout, there is not a grain of pure blue; all is subdued and warmed at the same time by the mingling grey and gold, up to the very zenith, where, breaking through the flaky mist, the transparent and deep azure of the sky is expressed with a single crumbling touch; the keynote of the whole is given, and every part of it passes at once far into glowing and aerial space. (Modern Painters v. I, pp. 292-293)"

J.M.W Turner: Mercury and Argos (c.1836) National Gallery of Canada

Prodigals

But  they  are  prodigals,  and  foolish  prodigals  in  art;  they lavish their whole means to get one truth, and leave themselves  powerless  when  they  should  seize  a thousand.

Glaukopis

And in doing this we have first to note the meaning of the principal epithet applied to Athena, “Glaukopis,” “with eyes full of light,” the first syllable being connected, by its root, with words signifying sight, not with words signifying colour. As far as I can trace the colour perception of the Greeks, I find it all founded primarily on the degree of connection between colour and light; the most important fact to them in the colour of red being its connection with fire and sunshine; so that “purple” is, in its original sense, “fire-colour,” and the scarlet, or orange, of dawn, more than any other, fire-colour. I was long puzzled by Homer’s calling the sea purple; and misled into thinking he meant the colour of cloud shadows on green sea; whereas he really means the gleaming blaze of the waves under wide light. Aristotle’s idea (partly true) is that light, subdued by blackness, becomes red; and blackness heated or lighted, also becomes red. Thus, a colour may be called purple because it is light subdued (and so death is called “purple” or “shadowy” death); or else it may be called purple as being shade kindled with fire, and thus said of the lighted sea; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought of as a red luminary opposed to the whiteness of the moon: “purpureos inter soles, et candida lunæ sidera”; or of golden hair: “pro purpureo pœnam solvens scelerata capillo”; while both ideas are modified by the influence of an earlier form of the word, which has nothing to do with fire at all, but only with mixing or staining; and then, to make the whole group of thoughts inextricably complex, yet rich and subtle in proportion to their intricacy, the various rose and crimson colours of the murex-dye,—the crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit of the palm—and the association of all these with the hue of blood;—partly direct, partly through a confusion between the word signifying “slaughter” and “palm-fruit colour,” mingle themselves in, and renew the whole nature of the old word; so that, in later literature, it means a different colour, or emotion of colour, in almost every place where it occurs: and casts around for ever the reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes.

92. So that the word is really a liquid prism, and stream of opal. And then, last of all, to keep the whole history of it in the fantastic course of a dream, warped here and there into wild grotesque, we moderns, who have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea (and so have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy’s safety-lamp in the hand of Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into British subterranean “damp”), have actually got our purple out of coal instead of the sea! And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a name from battle, “Magenta.”

93. There is precisely a similar confusion between light and colour in the word used for the blue of the eyes of Athena—a noble confusion, however, brought about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the heaven is light, more than that it is blue. I was not thinking of this when I wrote, in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, “The sky is not blue colour merely: it is blue fire, and cannot be painted” (Mod. P., iv. p. 361); but it was this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so “Glaukopis” chiefly means grey-eyed: grey standing for a pale or luminous blue; but it only means “owl-eyed” in thought of the roundness and expansion, not from the colour; this breadth and brightness being, again, in their moral sense, typical of the breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in prudence (“if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light”2). Then the actual power of the bird to see in twilight enters into the type, and perhaps its general fineness of sense. “Before the human form was adopted, her (Athena’s) proper symbol was the owl, a bird which seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness of organic perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects which to all others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds distinctly, and its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been deemed prophetic, from discovering the putridity of death even in the first stages of disease.”

I cannot find anywhere an account of the first known occurrence of the type; but, in the early ones on Attic coins, the wide round eyes are clearly the principal things to be made manifest.

On the sky and infinity

"One, however, of these child instincts, I believe that few forget, the emotion, namely, caused by all open ground, or lines of any spacious kind against the sky, behind which there might be conceived the Sea. It is an emotion more pure than that caused by the sea itself 

Whatever beauty there may result from effects of light on foreground objects,—from the dew of the grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the fair daylight hues of darker things (and joyfulness there is in all of them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beautiful,—the light of the declining or breaking day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in the green sky of the horizon;

It  is  not  then  by  nobler  form,  it  is  not  by positiveness  of  hue,  it  is  not  by  intensity  of  light  (for  the  sun itself at noonday is effectless upon the feelings), that this strange distant  space  possesses  its  attractive  power.  But  there  is  one thing  that  it  has,  or  suggests,  which  no  other  object  of  sight suggests in equal degree, and that is—Infinity. It is of all visible things the least material, the least finite, the farthest withdrawn form  the  earth  prison-house,  the  most  typical  of  the  nature  of God, the most suggestive of the glory of His dwelling-place."

Modern Painters II, p. 79-81

"And of  these hues, that of open sky is one not producible by human art.  The sky is not blue colour merely,—it is blue fire, and cannot be  painted.

§ 4. Next, observe, this blue fire has in it white fire; that is, it has  white  clouds,  as  much  brighter  than  itself  as  it  is  brighter than the white paper. So, then, above this azure light, we have another equally exalted step of white light. Supposing the value of the light of the pure white paper represented by the number 10, then that of the blue sky will be (approximately) about 20, and of the white clouds 30. But  look  at  the  white  clouds  carefully,  and  it  will  be  seen they are not all of the same white; parts of them are quite grey

compared with other parts, and they are as full of passages of light and shade as if they were of solid earth. Nevertheless, their most deeply shaded part is that already so much lighter than the blue sky,  which  has  brought  us  up  to  our  number  30,  and  all these high lights of white are some ten degrees above that, or, to white paper, as 40 to 10. And now if you look from the blue sky and white clouds towards the sun, you will find that this cloud white, which is four times as white as white paper, is quite dark and lightless compared with those silver clouds that burn nearer the  sun  itself,  which  you  cannot  gaze  upon,—an  infinite  of brightness. How will you estimate that? And yet to express all this, we have but our poor white paper after all. We must not talk too proudly of our “truths” of art: I am afraid we shall have to let a good deal of black fallacy into it, at the best."

 (Modern Painters vol. IV, p. 51)

Turner and Venice

But let us take, with Turner, the last and greatest step of all. Thank heaven, we are in sunshine again, and what sunshine! Not the lurid, gloomy, plague-like oppression of Canaletti, but white, flashing fulness of dazzling light, which the waves drink and the clouds breathe, bounding and burning in intensity of joy. That sky, it is a very visible infinity, liquid, measureless, unfathomable, panting and melting through the chasms in the long fields of snow-white, flaked, slow-moving vapour, that guide the eye along their multitudinous waves down to the islanded rest of the Euganean hills. Do we dream, or does the white forked sail drift nearer, and nearer yet, diminishing the blue sea between us with the fulness of its wings? It pauses now; but the quivering of its bright reflection troubles the shadows of the sea, those azure, fathomless depths of crystal mystery, on which the swiftness of the poised gondola floats double, its black beak lifted like the crest of a dark ocean bird, its scarlet draperies flashed back from the kindling surface, and its bent oar breaking the radiant water into a dust of gold. Dreamlike and dim, but glorious, the unnumbered palaces lift their shafts out of the hollow sea, pale ranks of motionless flame, their mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues of more eager fire, their grey domes looming vast and dark, like eclipsed worlds, their sculptured arabesques and purple marble fading farther and fainter, league beyond league, lost in the light of distance. Detail after detail, thought beyond thought, you find and feel them through the radiant mystery, inexhaustible as indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed; secret in fulness, confused in symmetry, as nature herself is to the bewildered and foiled glance, giving out of that indistinctness, and through that confusion, the perpetual newness of the infinite, and the beautiful. Yes, Mr. Turner, we are in Venice now.

I think the above example may, at least, illustrate my meaning, and render clear the  distinction which I wish the reader always to keep in mind, between those truths which are selected as a means of deception, and those which are selected for their own sake.

Prout and Venice

Let us pass to Prout. The imitation is lost at once. The buildings have nothing resembling their real relief against the sky; there are multitudes of false distances; the shadows in many places have a great deal more
Vandyke-brown than darkness in them; and the lights very often more yellow-ochre than sunshine. But yet the effect on our eye is that very brilliancy and cheerfulness which delighted us in Venice itself, and there is none of that oppressive and lurid gloom which was cast upon our feelings by Canaletti. And now we feel there is something in the subject worth drawing, and different from other subjects and architecture. That house is rich, and strange, and full of grotesque carving and character that one next to it is shattered and infirm, and varied with picturesque rents and hues of decay that farther off is beautiful in proportion, and strong in its purity of marble. Now we begin to feel that we are in Venice; this is what we could not get elsewhere; it is worth seeing, and drawing, and talking and thinking of, not an exhibition of common daylight or brick walls. But let us look a little closer; we know those capitals very well; their design was most original and perfect, and so delicate that it seemed to have been cut in ivory; what have we got for them here? Five straight strokes of a reed pen! No, Mr. Prout, it is not quite Venice yet.