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THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES

_For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art_


BY SARAH TYTLER

AUTHOR OF "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS" ETC.


_NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION_

* * * * *

LONDON
ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED
15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
1893

[_The Right of Translation is Reserved_]

LONDON:

PRINTED BY J.S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,
CITY ROAD.




PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.


I wish to say, in a very few words, that this book is intended to be a
simple account of the great Old Masters in painting of every age and
country, with descriptions of their most famous works, for the use of
learners and outsiders in art. The book is not, and could not well be,
exhaustive in its nature. I have avoided definitions of schools,
considering that these should form a later and more elaborate portion of
art education, and preferring to group my 'painters' according to what I
hold to be the primitive arrangements of time, country, and rank in
art.




PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.


The restrictions with regard to space under which the little volume
called "The Old Masters" was originally written, caused me to omit, to
my regret, many names great, though not first, in art. The circulation
which the book has attained induces me to do what I can to remedy the
defect, and render the volume more useful by adding two chapters--the
one on Italian and the other on German, Dutch, and Flemish masters.
These chapters consist almost entirely of condensed notes taken from two
trustworthy sources, to which I have been already much indebted--Sir C,
and Lady Eastlake's version of Kugler's "Handbook of Italian Art," and
Dr. Waagen's "Handbook,"--remodelled from Kugler--of German, Dutch, and
Flemish art, revised by J.A. Crowe. I have purposely given numerous
records of those Dutch painters whose art has been specially popular in
England and who are in some cases better represented in our country than
in their own.




CONTENTS.


CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO,
1280-1345--ORCAGNA, 1315-1376--GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428
_OR_ 1429--FRA ANGELICO, 1387-1455 1

II. EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, _ABOUT_
1470-1532--MEMLING, _ABOUT_ 1478-1499--QUINTIN MATSYS, 1460-1530 OR 31
41

III. IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--- IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530 53

IV. LIONARDO DA VINCI. 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566 83

V. GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DUeRER, 1471-1528 169

VI. LATER ITALIAN ART--GIORGIONE, 1477-1511--CORREGGIO, _ABOUT_
1493-1534--TINTORETTO, 1512-1594--VERONESE, 1530-1588 181

VII. CARRACCI, 1555-1609--GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642--DOMENICHINO,
1581-1641--SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673 212

VIII. LATER FLEMISH ART--RUBENS, 1577-1640--REMBRANDT, 1606 _OR_
1608-1669--TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694--WOUVVERMAN,
1620-1668--CUYP, 1605; _STILL LIVING_, 1638--PAUL POTTER,
1625-1654--CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630 225

IX. SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682 260

X. FRENCH ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE LORRAINE,
1600-1682--CHARLES LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE,
1726-1805 286

XI. FOREIGN ARTISTS IN ENGLAND--HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK,
1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO, 1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723 309

XII. ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURIES--TADDEO GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO,
1412-1469--BENOZZO GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED
TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO,
1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH
UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI, FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN 1460--ANTONELLA DA
MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE, 1416--GAROPALO,
1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO SPAGNA, DATE OF
BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS BORDONE,
1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO, 1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO,
1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO, 1592-1666--ALBANO,
1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1615--VASARI, 1512-1574--SOFONISBA
ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1626--LAVINIA FONTANA, 1552-1614 364

XIII. GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY--VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS,
1366-1442--VAN LEYDEN, 1494-1533--VAN SOMER, 1570-1624--SNYDERS,
1579-1657--G. HONTHORST, 1592-1662--JAN STEEN, 1626-1679--GERARD DOW,
1613-1680--DE HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--VAN OSTADE,
1610-1685--MAAS, 1632-1693--METZU, 1615. STILL ALIVE IN 1667--TERBURG,
1608-1681--NETCHER, 1639-1684--BOL, 1611-1680--VAN DER HELST,
1613-1670--RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682--HOBBEMA, 1638-1709--BERCHEM,
1620-1683--BOTH 1600 (?)-1650(?) DU JARDIN, 1625-1678--ADRIAN VAN DE
VELDE, 1639-1672--VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712--DE WITTE, 1607-1692--VAN
DER NEER, 1619 (?)-1683--WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE, THE YOUNGER,
1633-1707--BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708--VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
1653--HONDECOETER, 1636-1695--JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719--PATER SEGERS,
1590-1661--VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749--VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722--MENGS,
1728-1774 391

* * * * *


THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES.

* * * * *


CHAPTER I.

EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO. 1280-1345--ORCAGNA,
1315-1376 GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428 OR 1429--FRA
ANGELICO, 1387-1455.


A pencil and paper, a box of colours, and a scrap-book, form so often a
child's favourite toys that one might expect that a very large portion
of men and women would prove painters. But, as we grow in years and
knowledge, the discrepancy between nature and our attempts to copy
nature, strike us more and more, until we turn in dissatisfaction and
disgust from the vain effort.

There was only one old woman in an Esquimaux tribe who could be called
forward to draw with a stick on the sand a sufficiently graphic likeness
of the Erebus and the Terror. It is only a few groups of men belonging
to different countries, throughout the centuries, who have been able to
give us paintings to which we turn in wonder and admiration, and say
that these are in their degree fair exponents of nature. The old
painter's half-haughty, half-humble protest was true--it is 'God
Almighty,' who in raising here and there men above their fellows, 'makes
painters.'

But let us be thankful that the old propensity to delight in a
facsimile, or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very
common satisfaction and joy--whether cultivated or uncultivated---
derived from looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving
to understand the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to
consider the lives and times which throw light on works of genius. Music
itself is not more universally and gladly listened and responded to,
than pictures are looked at and remembered.

Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my
subject if I can only treat it sympathetically,--enter at a humble
distance into the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and
place before you some of the paintings by reverent and loving
word-painting such as others have achieved, and such as I may strive to
attain to, that you may be in a sort early familiar with these
paintings, before you see them in engravings and photographs, and on
canvas and in fresco, as I trust you may be privileged to see many of
them, when you may hail them not only for what they are, the glories of
art, but for what they have been to you in thoughts of beauty and high
desires.

Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything, and
of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after the fall
of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting as of
other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity,
was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious
conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to
hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and meaningless
type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs
in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to
bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a
similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings
with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the
sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are
very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations,
and as illustrations of faith; but they present no intrinsic beauty or
worth. They are not only clumsy and childish designs ill executed, but
they are rendered unintelligible to all save the initiated in such
hieroglyphics, by offering an elaborate ground-work of type, antitype,
and symbol, on which the artist probably spent a large part of his
strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents, vines, fishes, dolphins,
phoenixes, cocks, anchors, and javelins played nearly as conspicuous a
part in this art as did the dead believer, or his or her patron saint,
who might have been supposed to form the principal figure in the
picture.

Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but
quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the
stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the
old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But
first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.
Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting in
fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or
with size, egg, or fig-juice--the latter practices termed _tempera_ (in
English in distemper) before oil was used to mix colours. But painters
did not confine themselves then to painting with pencil or brush, else
they might have attained technical excellence sooner. It has been well
said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so the
earlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them
called--referring to its durability--'painting for eternity;' and in
metals. Many of them were the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves;
they worked in iron as well as in gold and silver, and they were
sculptors and architects as well as painters; engineers also, so far as
engineering in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, was known
in those days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so
that drawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of
distance, and the management of light and shade, were feebly developed.
Even the fore-shortening of figures was so difficult to the old Italian
painters that they could not carry it into the extremities, and men and
women seem as though standing on the points of their toes.
Landscape-painting did not exist farther than that a rock or a bush, or
a few blue lines, with fishes out of proportion prominently interposed,
indicated, as on the old stage, that a desert, a forest, or a sea, was
to play its part in the story of the picture. So also portrait-painting
was not thought of, unless it occurred in the likeness of a great man
belonging to the time and place of the painter, who was the donor of
some picture to chapel or monastery, or of the painter himself, alike
introduced into sacred groups and scenes; for pictures were uniformly of
a religious character, until a little later, when they merged into
allegorical representations, just as one remembers that miracle plays
passed into moral plays before ordinary human life was reproduced. Until
this period, what we call dramatic expression in making a striking
situation, or even in bringing the look of joy or sorrow, pleasure or
pain, into a face, had hardly been attained.

Perhaps you will ask, what merit had the old paintings of the middle
ages to compensate for so many great disadvantages and incongruities?
Certainly before the time I have reached, they have, with rare
exceptions, little merit, save that fascination of pathos, half-comic,
half-tragic, which belongs to the struggling dawn of all great
endeavours, and especially of all endeavours in art. But just at this
epoch, art, in one man, took a great stride, began, as I shall try to
show, to exert an influence so true, deep, and high that it extends, in
the noblest forms, to the present day, and much more than compensates to
the thoughtful and poetic for a protracted train of technical blunders
and deficiencies.

Giotto, known also as Magister Joctus, was born in 1276 near Florence. I
dare say many have heard one legend of him, and I mean to tell the
legends of the painters, because even when they are most doubtful they
give the most striking indications of the times and the light in which
painters and their paintings were regarded by the world of artists, and
by the world at large; but so far as I have heard this legend of Giotto
has not been disproven. The only objection which can be urged against
it, is that it is found preserved in various countries, of very
different individuals--a crowning objection also to the legend of
William Tell. Giotto was a shepherd boy keeping his father's sheep and
amusing himself by drawing with chalk on a stone the favourites of the
flock, when his drawings attracted the attention of a traveller passing
from the heights into the valley. This traveller was the well-born and
highly-esteemed painter Cimabue, who was so delighted with the little
lad's rough outlines, that getting the consent of Giotto's father,
Cimabue adopted the boy, carried him off to the city of Florence,
introduced him to his studio, and so far as man could supplement the
work of God, made a painter of the youthful genius. I may add here a
later legend of Giotto. Pope Boniface VIII, requested specimens of skill
from various artists with the view to the appointment of a painter to
decorate St Peter's. Giotto, either in impatient disdain, or to show a
careless triumph of skill, with one flourish of his hand, without the
aid of compass, executed a perfect circle in red chalk, and sent the
circle as his contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The
audacious specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was
chosen as the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident
arose the Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the
friend of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom
the grandeur of some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough
attributed. The poet of the 'Inferno' wrote of his friend:

'......... Cimabue thought
To lord it over painting's field; and now
The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'

Petrarch bequeathed in his will a Madonna by Giotto and mentioned it as
a rare treasure of art. Boccaccio wrote a merry anecdote of his comrade
the painter's wit, in the course of which he referred with notable
plain-speaking to Giotto's 'flat currish' plainness of face.

The impression handed down of Giotto's character is that of an
independent, high-spirited man, full of invention, full of imagination,
and also, by a precious combination, full of shrewdness and common
sense; a man genial, given to repartee, and at the same time not
deficient in the tact which deprives repartee of its sting. While he was
working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the painter
on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I would
leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I, sire, if
I were _you_,' replied the wag.

I need scarcely add that Giotto was a man highly esteemed and very
prosperous in his day; one account reports him as the head and the
father of four sons and four daughters. I have purposely written first
of the fame, the reputed character, and the circumstances of Giotto
before I proceed to his work. This great work was, in brief, to breathe
into painting the living soul which had till then--in mediaeval
times--been largely absent. Giotto went to Nature for his inspiration,
and not content with the immense innovation of superseding by the actual
representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the
rigid traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their
faces--the melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so
simple, filled Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with
astonishment and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
commonest deed even coarsely lifelike, as in the case of a sailor in a
boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression,
as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure
of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere
realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light
an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose
above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real
is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion
robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which
is at its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and love.

Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate
successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance,
crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure
these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their
originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would
seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they
appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence
their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest
qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the
Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more
accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of
another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed
fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and
in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.

The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the
unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of
Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the
same in kind.[1]

I wish you, my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to
learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any
half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke
transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you
have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern
marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight
figures with long hands, wooden feet, and clinging draperies, while your
eyes have been familiar with well-modelled frames and limbs and flowing
lines. But we must look deeper if we would not be slaves to superficial
prettiness, or even superficial correctness; we must try to go into the
spirit of a painting and value it more in proportion as it teaches art's
noblest lesson--the divinity of the divine, the serenity of utmost
strength, the single-heartedness of passion.

I have only space to tell you of three or four of the famous works of
Giotto. First, his allegories in the great church, in honour of St
Francis, at Assisi, in relation to which, writing of its German
architect, an author says: 'He built boldly against the mountain, piling
one church upon another; the upper vast, lofty, and admitting through
its broad windows the bright rays of the sun: the lower as if in the
bowels of the earth--low, solemn, and almost shutting out the light of
day. Around the lofty edifice grew the convent, a vast building, resting
upon a long line of arches clinging to the hill-sides. As the evening
draws nigh, casting its deep shadows across the valley, the traveller
beneath gazes upwards with feelings of wonder and delight at this
graceful arcade supporting the massy convent; the ancient towers and
walls of the silent town gathering around, and the purple rocks rising
high above--all still glowing in the lingering sunbeams--a scene
scarcely to be surpassed in any clime for its sublime beauty.' The
upper church contains frescoes wonderfully fresh, by Cimabue, of
Scriptural subjects, and frescoes of scenes from the life vowed to
poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis,
are the four masterpieces with which we have to do. These are the three
vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and
grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been
attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her
rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The
fourth fresco pictures the saint who died, 'covered by another's cloak
cast over his wasted body eaten with sores,' enthroned and glorified
amidst the host of Heaven.

I have chosen the second example of the art of Giotto because you may
with comparative ease see it for yourselves. It is in the National
Gallery, London, having belonged to the collection of the late Samuel
Rogers. It is a fragment of an old fresco which had been part of a
series illustrating the life of John the Baptist in the church of the
Carmine, Florence, a church which was destroyed by fire in 1771. The
fragment in the National Gallery has two fine heads of apostles bending
sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do
it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents
of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in
regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before
Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed to tell the
Bible's stories.

The third instance I have chosen to quote is Giotto's portrait of Dante
which was so strangely lost for many years. The portrait occurs in a
painting, the first recorded performance of Giotto's, in which he was
said to have introduced the likeness of many of his contemporaries, on
the wall of the Palazzo dell' Podesta or Council Chamber of Florence.
During the banishment of Dante the wall was plastered or white-washed
over, through the influence of his enemies, and though believed to
exist, the picture was hidden down to 1840, when, after various futile
efforts to recover it, the figures were again brought to light.

This portrait of Dante is altogether removed from the later portraits of
the indignant and weary man, of whom the Italian market-women said that
he had been in Hell as well as in exile. Giotto's Dante on the walls of
the Council Chamber is a noble young man of thirty, full of ambitious
hope and early distinction. The face is slightly pointed, with broad
forehead, hazel eyes, straight brows and nose, mouth and chin a little
projecting. The close cloak or vest with sleeves, and cap in folds
hanging down on the shoulder, the hand holding the triple fruit, in
prognostication of the harvest of virtue and renown which was to be so
bitter as well as so glorious, are all in keeping and have a majesty of
their own. The picture is probably known by engravings to many of my
readers.

The last example of Giotto's, is the one which of all his works is most
potent and patent in its beauty, and has struck, and, in so far as we
can tell, will for ages strike, with its greatness multitudes of widely
different degrees of cultivation whose intellectual capacity is as far
apart as their critical faculty. I mean the matchless Campanile or
bell-tower 'towering over the Dome of Brunelleschi' at Florence, formed
of coloured marbles--for which Giotto framed the designs, and even
executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture. With this
lovely sight Dean Alford's description is more in keeping than the
prosaic saying of Charles V., that 'the Campanile ought to be kept under
glass.' Dean Alford's enthusiasm thus expresses itself:

'A mass of varied light written on the cloudless sky of
unfathomed blue; varied but blended, as never in any other
building that we had seen; the warm yellow of the lighter marbles
separated but not disunited by the ever-recurring bands of dark;
or glowing into red where the kisses of the sun had been hottest;
or fading again into white where the shadows mostly haunted, or
where the renovating hand had been waging conflict with decay.'

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