Snow is the only critic that treats everything equally. It came down on the sixth of January, and by 3:19 in the morning there was nothing left of the mattress except a long low ridge under the white, one corner of blue damask showing where the wind had scoured it clean, one black opening where the coils refused to be covered, and two dead grass stalks standing out of the drift with their seed heads still on them. Three quarters of the canvas is night. The only warm thing in the picture is the lamp on the wet asphalt at the right edge, a long way off.
Caravaggio’s Burial of Saint Lucy, which hangs in Naples, is mostly empty wall. He gave two thirds of that canvas to nothing at all and put the whole event down in the bottom third, small, at the foot of a great blank darkness. Everyone has treated that ever since as a late failure of nerve. I have never believed it. He was painting how much of the world is not involved. The sky over Dunning Street was not involved either. Sub nive, quies.
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