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Scoriandrus Directory 07
Page 02
Five months had been employed in the march from New Carthage to the plains of Italy, of which the actual passage of the Alps had occupied fifteen days. Hannibal's first care was now to recruit the strength of his troops, exhausted by the hardships and fatigues they had undergone. After a short interval of repose, he turned his arms against the Taurinians (a tribe bordering on, and hostile to, the Insubrians), whom he quickly reduced, and took their principal city (Turin). The news of the approach of P. Scipio next obliged him to turn his attention toward a more formidable enemy. In the first action, which took place in the plains westward of the Ticinus, the cavalry and light-armed troops of the two armies were alone engaged, and the superiority of Hannibal's Numidian horse at once decided the combat in his favor. The Romans were completely routed, and Scipio himself severely wounded; in consequence of which he hastened to retreat beyond the Ticinus and the Po, under the walls of Placentia. Hannibal crossed the Po higher up, and, advancing to Placentia, offered battle to Scipio; but the latter declined the combat, and withdrew to the hills on the left bank of the Trebia.
Reynolds was well-grounded in Venetian color, Bolognese composition, Parmese light-and-shade, and paid them the homage of assimilation; but if Gainsborough (1727-1788) had such school knowledge he positively disregarded it. He disliked all conventionalities and formulas. With a natural taste for form and color, and with a large decorative sense, he went directly to nature, and took from her the materials which he fashioned into art after his own peculiar manner. His celebrated Blue Boy was his protest against the conventional rule of Reynolds that a composition should be warm in color and light. All through his work we meet with departures from academic ways. By dint of native force and grace he made rules unto himself. Some of them were not entirely successful, and in drawing he might have profited by school training; but he was of a peculiar poetic temperament, with a dash of melancholy about him, and preferred to work in his own way. In portraiture his color was rather cold; in landscape much warmer. His brush-work was as odd as himself, but usually effective, and his accessories in figure-painting were little more than decorative after-thoughts. Both in portraiture and landscape he was one of the most original and most English of all the English painters--a man not yet entirely appreciated, though from the first ranked among the foremost in English art.
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