for Hardy , then , Correggio is the artist of yearning , as , indeed , he himself tells us in a pair of blue eyes in the passage describing the appearance of Elfride Swancourt , where he extends his method and sees his heroine through the eyes of three painters , Raphael , Rubens , and Correggio , in turn : Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the Madonna della Sedia , without its rapture : the warmth and spirit of the type of woman &apos;s feature most common to the beauties - mortal and immortal - of Rubens , without their insistent fleshiness . the characteristic expression of the female faces of Correggio - that of the yearning human thoughts that lie too deep for tears - was hers sometimes , but seldom under ordinary conditions . this is the most elaborate of all Hardy &apos;s experiments in what might be called pictorial definition . it will be observed that in all the examples that I have given he seizes upon some quality that is peculiarly characteristic of the artist in question , so that the reader at once receives an impression of a general facial type before being invited to consider its particular manifestation . with quite subsidiary characters , however , a mere impression is sufficient , and no qualifications are added : thus the woman who opens the lodge gate at Endelstow , in a pair of blue eyes , is simply described as having a double chin and thick neck , like the Queen Anne portrait by Dahl - and although the incident has no importance in the story there is point in the choice of a painter who seems to have had no qualms about stressing the plainness and stodginess of his sitters . even the nationality of the artist alluded to contributes to our impression of the character whom Hardy is presenting . if Cytherea Graye could have been painted by Greuze , or Lucetta Templeman by Titian , Liddy Smallbury , Bathsheba &apos;s servant in far from the madding crowd , suggests rather the healthy , well-scrubbed girls of Dutch art : the beauty her features might have lacked in form was amply made up for by perfection of hue , which at this winter-time was the softened ruddiness on a surface of high rotundity that we meet with in a Terburg or a Gerard Douw ; while Sue Bridehead , with her dark beauty , conjures up in Jude &apos;s mind a recollection of the girls he had seen in engravings from paintings of the Spanish school . an effective use of this device of pictorial allusion to suggest the attitude of a character at a particular moment is to be found in the glimpse of Mr Penny at work at his trade , in under the greenwood tree . Mr Penny is a shoemaker , and his house looks out on to the main road , Mr Penny himself being invariably seen working inside like a framed portrait of a shoemaker by some modern Moroni . although this is not a reference to an actual picture by Moroni ( and no painting of a shoemaker by Moroni exists ) , the effect is still precise , for we know what such a picture by a nineteenth-century Moroni would look like . Moroni , we know , specialized in single portraits in which he emphasized his sitter &apos;s trade or calling , as in the portrait of a tailor in the National Gallery , which was probably the picture by which Hardy knew him best ; and it was clearly Moroni &apos;s practice of putting a frame , as it were , around a single figure , and of isolating him in the context of his daily work , that Hardy found interesting . many of the artists who fascinated Hardy were not particularly fashionable in his own day ; and names of some of them would have been known to a mere handful of his readers . a curious example of his tastes is provided by his two allusions , first in the return of the native , and then in Tess of the D&apos;Urbervilles , to Sallaert and Van Alsloot , artists in whom only recently much interest has been taken , and then mainly by specialists . both worked in Brussels in the early years of the seventeenth century , devoting themselves chiefly to a class of processional scene crowded with tiny figures . among the best known of these are the two pictures by Van Alsloot in the Victoria and Albert Museum representing the annual procession in Brussels known as the Ommeganck , which was held under the patronage of the church of Notre Dame de Sablon , a church founded by the guild of crossbowmen . the object of the procession was to commemorate the translation to this church , from Antwerp , of a miraculous image of the virgin , and it was preceded by the ceremony of the shooting of the popinjay ( a wooden representation of a parrot fixed to the top of a steeple ) . Van Alsloot &apos;s pictures record the Ommeganck of 1615 , when the Infanta Isabella , the consort of the Archduke Albert , had succeeded in shooting the popinjay at the first attempt . the Ommeganck was an extremely colourful affair , dominated as it was by the triumphal cars carrying elaborate enactments of tableaux of such scenes as the nativity and St George &apos;s fight with the dragon . and dotted all over Van Alsloot &apos;s representations of it are the quaint little figures that seem above all else to have caught Hardy &apos;s fancy . Hardy first alludes to them in the return of the native : what was the great world to Mrs Yeobright ? a multitude whose tendencies could be perceived , though not its essences . communities were seen by her as from a distance ; she saw them as we see the throngs which cover the canvases of Sallaert , Van Alsloot , and others of that school - vast masses of beings , jostling , zigzagging , and processioning in definite directions , but whose features are indistinguishable by the very comprehensiveness of the view . in Tess of the D&apos;Urbervilles , published thirteen years later , it is a large herd of cows that brings these processional pictures before Hardy &apos;s eyes : the green lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers . the ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight , which the white-coated animals returned to the eye in rays almost as dazzling . it may be added that this passage has a further interest , for it suggests that Hardy was aware of the colour-theories of men like Rood and Chevreul , which were to have some influence on impressionism . we may compare a similar but much earlier observation upon the nature of colour in far from the madding crowd ( published in 1873 ) : we learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb , but those which they reject , that give them the colours they are known by . if Hardy could scarcely have assumed in the generality of his readers any knowledge of Sallaert or Van Alsloot , he could presumably have counted upon a much wider familiarity with the white horses which almost invariably appear in the landscapes of Wouwermans , always a popular artist in England , and which are alluded to in the scene in the woodlanders where Grace Melbury watches her husband , Fitzpiers , who is being unfaithful to her , riding away on a white horse named Darling to his assignation with Mrs Charmond : he kept along the edge of this high , uninclosed country , and the sky behind him being deep violet he could still see white Darling in relief upon it - a mere speck now - a Wouwermans eccentricity reduced to microscopic dimensions . upon this high ground he gradually disappeared . equally effective is the description , in the same novel , of a freshly pressed tablecloth - reticulated with folds as in Flemish last suppers - or of the clear outlines of figures thrown into relief by the light of a bonfire , in the return of the native : the brilliant lights and sooty shades which struggled upon the skin and clothes of the persons standing round caused their lineaments and general contours to be drawn with Dureresque vigour and dash . and , if poets and novelists have strained themselves to say something original about the moon , only Hardy could have likened it , as he does in Tess , to the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint . as Hardy develops as a writer it is interesting to observe the growing maturation of this device of pictorial allusion , which in his hands becomes a unique skill . in the later novels he is able to employ it in ways that go far beyond a purely descriptive intention . towards the end of Tess , he wishes to suggest the psychological change which has been brought about in Angel Clare by his wife &apos;s confession , and he puts it thus : the picture of life had changed for him . before this time he had known it but speculatively ; now he thought he knew it as a practical man ; though perhaps he did not , even yet . nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art , but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum , and with the leer of a study by Van Beers . although the Poe-like horrifics of Wiertz are still remembered and have won a small place in the history of romanticism , Van Beers , who seems to have deliberately invited comparison with him , has now been completely forgotten . in Hardy &apos;s day , however , he enjoyed something of a succ&amp;egrave;s de scandale with periodic exhibitions in Bond Street . one of these , held in November 1886 , was condemned by a critic writing in the magazine of art as appealing to a class of sensations which have but little to do with those which art &amp;hellip; should aim at evoking . even as a purveyor of horrors the artist was unsuccessful , for he entirely lacked the vastness of conception , the measure of sincerity which gave to the art - if we must so designate it - of a Wiertz , resulting , as it did , from the real hallucinations of a diseased brain , a certain interest and a raison d&apos;&amp;ecirc;tre . towards the end of Tess , Clare returns at length from his wanderings , and we are given a striking picture of the outward change in him which has accompanied the inner : you could see the skeleton behind the man , and almost the ghost behind the skeleton . he matched Crivelli &apos;s dead Christus . his sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue , and the light in his eyes had waned . the angular hollows and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his face twenty years before their time . the painting to which Hardy refers is in the National Gallery . here Hardy &apos;s imagination is stimulated to enlarge upon the allusion and to paint a word-picture of great power . Crivelli was one of his favourite painters , and it is easy to see why the severity of Crivelli &apos;s types - the farthest remove , as they are , from the pretty - particularly appealed to him . as Hardy masters this technique he employs it more and more for dramatic effect . Tess again provides a fine example , in that melancholy scene at the end of the book when Angel Clare and &apos;Liza-Lu walk slowly up to the summit of the west hill above Wintoncester to watch for the prison flag that will tell them that Tess &apos;s execution has been carried out : they moved on hand in hand , and never spoke a word , the drooping of their heads being that of Giotto &apos;s two apostles . the picture to which Hardy here refers is a fragment of a fresco purchased for the National Gallery in 1856 . it comes from a large decoration in the Carmine in Florence which was at that time believed to be by Giotto but which has since been reattributed to Spinello Aretino . the two heads originally formed part of a burial of St John the baptist . even more touching , perhaps , is the long , beautiful description , earlier in the same novel , of the labours of Tess and Marion in the fields , where again the image of two bowed heads is evoked by a simple and telling pictorial allusion : the pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of the two Marys . 