Reading comprehension exercise 2

So Tiziano continued to draw. But one thing troubled him greatly- all the pictures he made were black, drawn with his piece of black charcoal, yet round about him glowed a perfect glory of colour – the beautiful blue of the sky; the delicate, changing pink of the great jagged peaks above him; the red, blue and yellow wild flowers; the golden brilliance of sunshine; and the rich, soft, mellowed tints in the old houses of the town. Colour! Tiziano loved it more than anything else in the world. Yet how was he to reproduce it and get it into his pictures? He had no money to buy paints, and paints were expensive in those days. His father, who was a mountaineer, would never listen to anything so foolish as buying paints for a boy when the family needed food and clothing and fuel to keep them warm.

Let Tiziano make shoes! There was a trade for a man! All the same, Tiziano continued to dream of painting and to wonder if there was not some way he could make a picture in colours.

The day before the festival of flowers. Tiziano chanced to pass the spot where the garlands had been woven the evening before. Suddenly, he noticed stains on the stones of the walk before the inn. They were stains from flowers that had been dropped and crushed, and those stains were coloured! They were every colour that a painter needed! In a moment the feast and the fun went out of Tiziano’s mind. Catarina saw her brother heading away from the merriment and hastening out of the village. She ran to bring him back and found him in a meadow like a variegated quilt from the brilliance of the wild flowers. “Tiziano” she called, “Why are you running away from the feast? “ The boy did not answer for a moment. Too often he had been teased by his family and the villagers for the crazy dreams in his head. At last he answered bluntly, “I have found that the stains of flowers make colours and I am going to paint a picture.”