Page:Thoughts on art and life.djvu/165

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As regards the ships that are there, you will depicft some with torn sails and tattered shreds flut tering through the air with shattered rigging;some of the masts will be split and fallen, and the ship lying down and wrecked in the raging waves; some men will be shrieking and clinging to the remnants of the vessel. You will make the clouds driven by the fury of the winds and hurled against the high summits of the mountains, and eddying and torn like waves beaten against rocks ; the air shall be terrible owing to deep darkness caused by the dust and the mist and the dense clouds.

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In the first place you must represent the smoke of the artillery mingled with the air, and the dust, and tossed up by the stampede of thehorses and the combatants. And you must treat , this confusion in this way: dust being an earthly thing has weight, and although owing to its fine- ness it is easily lifted up and mingled with the air, it nevertheless falls readily to the earth again, and it is its finest part which rises highest, therefore that part will be the least visible and will seem to be almost of the same colour as the air; the higher the smoke, which is mingled with the dusty air, rises towards a certain height, the more it will seem like a dark cloud, and at the summit the smoke will be more visible than the dust.

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