May 5: Quotes on this day—
After some time we reached the lava zone. Unsoftened by time, jagged clumps
and slabs stared us in the face, and the mules could only pick their way
at random. On the first high ridge we halted and Kniep made a sketch of
what lay ahead of us— masses of lava in the foreground, the twin
summits of Monte Rosso on the left, and directly above us the forests of
Nicolosi, out of which the snow-covered and faintly fuming peak emerges.
We retraced our steps a little in order to approach Monte Rosso, which I
climbed. It is nothing but a heap of red volcanic cinders, ashes and stones.
It would have been easy to walk all round the rim of the crater if a
blustering morning wind had not made every step unsafe; to advance at all,
I tried taking off my overcoat, but then my hat was in danger of being
blown into the crater at any moment and myself after it. I sat down to pull
myself together and survey the landscape, but this did not help much, as the
gale was blowing directly from the east. A magnificent panorama was spread
out far and wide below me. The whole coast from Messina to Syracuse with its
curves and bays lay open to my view or only slightly hidden by coastal hills.
I descended, half dazed, to find Kniep sitting in a sheltered place where
he had made good use of his time. With delicate strokes he had fixed on
paper what the fury of the wind had hardly allowed me to see, let alone
imprint on my memory... To me, the stacks of Jaci were a great temptation,
for I was dying to chip off for myself some of those beautiful zeolites
I had seen in Gioeni's collection. But the Englishman's ghostly warning
triumphed; I gave up the zeolites and felt inordinately proud of my self-control.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, May 5, 1787
One should lay in one's picture so that it has the look of representing
the scene on a gray day, without sun, without clear-cut shadows.
Speaking radically, there are neither lights nor shades. There is a color
mass for each object, having different reflections on all sides. Let us
suppose that, in this scene, in the open air and under gray light, a ray
from the sun suddenly illumines the objects: you will have lights and
shades as they are understood, but they are pure accidents. The deeper
truth of this, singular as it may seem, contains the whole comprehension
of color in painting. How strange it is that this truth has been
understood by only a very small number of great painters, even among
those who are regarded as colorists.
— Eugene Delacroix, Journal, May 5, 1852
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