Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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It may strike some as strange that a picture should be on panels, but
those of the old pictures which were not on plastered walls were
commonly on panels, many of them on the lids and sides of chests and
presses which were used to hold sacred vessels and priestly raiment.

When the wings of the Van Eycks' altar-piece of the 'Adoration of the
Lamb' were opened on festivals, the subjects of the upper central
picture were seen, consisting of the Triune God, a majestic figure, and
at his side in stately calm the Virgin and the Baptist. On the inside of
the wings were angels, at the two extremities Adam and Eve. The lower
central picture shows the Lamb of the Revelation, whose blood flows into
a cup; over it is the dove of the Holy Spirit. Angels, who hold the
instruments of the Passion, worship the Lamb. Four groups of many
persons advance from the sides, these are the holy martyrs, men and
women, priests and laymen. In the foreground is the fountain of life; in
the distance are the towers of the heavenly Jerusalem. On the wings
other groups are coming up to adore the Lamb; on the left those who have
laboured for the Kingdom of the Lord by worldly deeds--the soldiers of
Christ led by St George, St Sebastian, and St Michael, the patron saints
of the old Flemish guilds, followed by emperors and kings--a goodly
company. Beyond the soldiers and princes, on the left, are the righteous
judges, also on horseback. In front of them, on a splendidly caparisoned
gray, rides a mild, benevolent old man in blue velvet trimmed with fur.
This is the likeness of Hubert Van Eyck, painted after his death by his
brother John, and John himself is in the group, clothed in black, with a
shrewd, sharp countenance. On the self-renunciation have served the Lamb
in the spirit, hermits and pilgrims, among them St Christopher, St
Anthony, St Paul the hermit, Mary Magdalene, and St Mary of Egypt. A
compartment underneath, which represented hell, finished the whole--yet
only the whole on one side, for the wings when closed presented another
series of finely thought-out and finished pictures--the Annunciation;
figures of Micah and Zechariah; statues of the two St Johns, with the
likenesses of the donors who gave to the world so great a work of art,
kneeling humbly side by side, the burgomaster somewhat mean-looking in
such company in spite of the proof of his liberality, but his wife noble
enough in feature and expression to have been the originator of this
glory of early Flemish painting. The upper part of the picture is
painted on a gold ground, round the central figure of the Lamb is vivid
green grass with masses of trees and flowers--indeed there is much
lovely landscape no longer indicated by a rock or a bush, but betokening
close observation of nature, whether in a fruitful valley, or a rocky
defile, or mountain ridges with fleecy clouds overhead. The expression
of the immense number of figures is as varied and characteristic as
their grouping.[2]

Hubert Van Eyck died while this work was in progress, and it was
finished by his brother John six years after Hubert's death. When one
thinks of the intense application and devotion which such a work costs,
and recalls the bronze gates of St John that occupied Lorenzo Ghiberti
49 years, and when we read, as we shall read a few chapters farther on,
of large paintings which were begun and ended in so many days--even so
many hours, one can better understand what is the essential difference
between the works of the early and the later painters, a difference
which no skill, no power even can bridge over. John Van Eyck, who had
lived late enough to have departed from the painting of sacred pictures
alone, so that he left portraits and an otter hunt among his works, is
three times represented in our National Gallery, in three greatly
esteemed portraits, one a double portrait, believed to be the likenesses
of the painter and his wife, standing hand in hand with a terrier dog
at their feet.

Gossaert, called de Mabuse from his native town of Mabeuze, sometimes
signing his name Joannes Malbodius, followed in the steps of the Van
Eycks, particularly in his great picture of the 'Adoration of the
Kings,' which is at Castle Howard, the seat of the Earl of Carlisle.
Mabuse was in England and painted the children of Henry VII, in a
picture, which is at Hampton Court. There is a picture in the palace of
Holyrood, Edinburgh, which has been attributed to Mabuse. It represents
on the sides of a triptych or diptych (somewhat like a folding screen)
James III. and his queen with attendants. The fur on the queen's dress
displays already that marvellous technical skill for which Flemish
painting is so celebrated.

Hans Memling belonged to Bruges. There is a tradition of him, which is
to a certain extent disproven, that he was a poor soldier relieved by
the hospital of St John, Bruges, and that in gratitude he executed for
the hospital the well-known reliquary of St Ursula. However it might
have originated, this is the most noted work of a painter, who was
distinguished frequently by his minute missal-like painting (he was also
an illuminator of missals), in which he would introduce fifteen hundred
small figures in a picture two feet eight inches, by six feet five
inches in size, and work out every detail with the utmost niceness and
care. The reliquary, or 'chasse,' is a wooden coffer or shrine about
four feet in length, its style and form those of a rich Gothic church,
its purpose to hold an arm of the saint. The whole exterior is covered
with miniatures by Memling, nearly the whole of them giving incidents in
the legendary history of St Ursula, a 'virgin princess of Brittany,' or
of England, who, setting out with eleven thousand companions, her lover,
and an escort of knights on a pilgrimage to Rome, was, with her whole
company, met and murdered, by a horde of heathen Huns, when they had
reached Cologne, on their return. My readers may be aware that the
supposed bones of the virgins and St Ursula form the ghastly adornment
of the church founded in her honour at Cologne. It is absolutely filled
with bones, built into the walls, stowed under the pavement, ranged in
glass cases about the choir. Hans Memling's is a pleasanter
commemoration of St Ursula.

Quintin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, was born at Louvain about
1460. Though he worked first as a smith he is said by Kugler to have
belonged to a family of painters, which somewhat takes from the romance,
though it adds to the probability of his story. Another painter in
Antwerp having offered the hand and dowry of his daughter--beloved by
Quintin Matsys--as a prize to the painter who should paint the best
picture in a competition for her hand, the doughty smith took up the
art, entered the lists, and carried off the maiden and her portion from
all his more experienced rivals. The vitality of the legend is indicated
by the inscription on a tablet to the memory of Quintin Matsys in the
Cathedral, Antwerp. The Latin inscription reads thus in English:

'Twas love connubial taught the smith to paint,'

Quintin Matsys lived and died a respected burgher of Antwerp, a member
of the great Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke. He was twice married,
and had thirteen children.

Whatever might have been his source of inspiration, Quintin Matsys was
an apt scholar. His 'Descent from the Cross,' now in the Museum,
Antwerp, was _the_ 'Descent from the Cross,' and _the_ picture in the
Cathedral, until superseded by Rubens' masterpiece on the same subject.
Still Quintin Matsys version remains, and is in some respects an
unsurpassed picture. There is a traditional grouping of this Divine
tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the
Lord is supported by two venerable old men--Joseph of Arimathea and
Nicodemus--while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the
Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full
of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos. For this
picture Quintin Matsys--popular painter as he was--got only three
hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, of course,
the value of money was much greater in those days). The Joiners'
Company, for whom he painted the 'Descent from the Cross,' sold the
picture to the City of Antwerp for five times the original amount, and
it is said Queen Elizabeth offered the City nearly twenty times the
first sum for it, in vain.

Quintin Matsys painted frequently half-length figures of the Virgin and
Child, an example of which is in the National Gallery. He excelled in
the 'figure painting' of familiar subjects, then just beginning to be
established, affording a token of the direction which the future
eminence of the Flemish painters would take. One of his famous pictures
of this kind is 'The Misers,' in the Queen's collection at Windsor. Two
figures in the Flemish costume of the time, are seated at a table;
before them are a heap of money and a book, in which one is writing with
his right hand, while he tells down the money with his left. The faces
express craft and cupidity. The details of the ink-horn on the table,
and the bird on its perch behind, have the Flemish graphic exactness.




CHAPTER 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.


I have come to the period when Italian art is divided into many
schools--Paduan, Venetian, Umbrian, Florentine, Roman, Bolognese, etc.,
etc. With the schools and their definitions I do not mean to meddle,
except it may be to mention to which school a great painter belonged.
Another difficulty meets me here. I have been trying so far as I could
to give the representative painters in the order of time. I can no
longer follow this rule strictly, and the grouping of this chapter is
made on the principle of leading my readers up by some of the
predecessors who linked the older to the later Italian painters, and by
some of the contemporaries of these later painters, to that central
four, Lionardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, who
occupy so great a place in the history of art.

In the brothers Bellini and their native Venice, we must first deal with
that excellence of colouring for which the Venetian painters were
signally noted, while they comparatively neglected and underrated
drawing. A somewhat fanciful theory has been started, that as Venice,
Holland, and England have been distinguished for colour in art, and as
all those States are by the sea, so a sea atmosphere has something to do
with a passion for colour. Within more reasonable bounds, in reference
to the Venetians, is the consideration that no colouring is richer,
mellower, more exquisitely tinted than that which belongs to the blue
Italian sky over the blue Adriatic, with those merged shades of violet,
green, and amber, and that magical soft haze which has to do with a
moist climate.

The two brothers Gentile and Gian or John Bellini, the latter the more
famous of the two, were the sons of an old Venetian painter, with regard
to whom the worthy speech is preserved, that he said it was like the
Tuscans for son to beat father, and he hoped, in God's name, that
Giovanni or Gian would outstrip him, and Gentile, the elder, outstrip
both. The brothers worked together and were true and affectionate
brothers, encouraging and appreciating each other.

Gentile was sent by the Doge at the request of the Sultan--either
Mahommed II, or Bajazet II., to Constantinople, where Gentile Bellini
painted the portrait of the Sultan and the Sultana his mother, now in
the British Museum. The painter also painted the head of John the
Baptist in a charger as an offering--only too suitable--from him to the
Grand Turk. The legend goes on to tell that in the course of the
presentation of the gift, an incident occurred which induced Gentile
Bellini to quit the Ottoman Court with all haste. The Sultan had
criticized the appearance of the neck in John the Baptist's severed
head, and when Gentile ventured to defend his work, the Sultan proceeded
to prove the correctness of his criticism, by drawing his scimitar and
cutting off at a stroke the head of a kneeling slave, and pointing to
the spouting blood and the shrinking muscle, gave the horrified painter
a lesson in practical anatomy. On Gentile's return from the East, he was
pensioned by his State, and lived on painting, till he was eighty years
of age, dying in 1501.

Gian Bellini is said to have obtained by a piece of deceit, which is not
in keeping with his manly and honourable character, the secret,
naturally coveted by a Venetian, of mixing colours with resin and oil. A
Venetian painter had brought the secret from Flanders, and communicated
it to a friend, who, in turn, communicated it to a third painter, and
was murdered by that third painter for his pains, so greedy and criminal
was the craving, not only to possess, but to be as far as possible the
sole possessor of, the grand discovery. Gian Bellini was much less
guilty, if he were really guilty. Disguised as a Venetian nobleman, he
proposed to sit for his portrait to that Antonella who first brought the
secret from Flanders, and while Antonella worked with unsuspicious
openness, Gian Bellini watched the process and stole the secret.

Gian Bellini lived to the age of ninety, and had among his admirers the
poet Ariosto and Albrecht Duerer. The latter saw Gian Bellini in his age,
and said of him, when foolish mockers had risen up to scout at the old
man, and his art now become classic, 'He is very old, but he is still
the best of our painters.' Gian Bellini had illustrious pupils,
including in their number Titian and Giorgione.

The portraits of Gentile and Gian, which are preserved in a painting by
Gian, show Gentile fair-complexioned and red-haired, and Gian with dark
hair.

Gian Bellini is considered to have been less gifted with imagination
than some of his great brother artists; but he has proved himself a man
of high moral sense, and while he stopped short at the boundary between
the seen and the unseen, it is certain he must still have painted with
much of 'the divine patience' and devout consecration of all his powers,
and of every part of his work, which are the attributes of the earliest
Italian painters. When he and his brother began to paint, Venetian art
had already taken its distinctive character for open-air effects, rich
scenic details in architecture, furniture and dress (said to be
conspicuous in commercial communities), and a growing tendency to
portraiture. Gian went with the tide, but he guided it to noble results.
His simplicity and good sense, with his purity and dignity of mind, were
always present. He introduced into his pictures 'singing boys, dancing
cherubs, glittering thrones, and dewy flowers,' pressing the outer world
into his service and that of religious art. It is said also that his
Madonnas seem 'amiable beings imbued with a lofty grace;' while his
saints are 'powerful and noble forms.' But he never descended to the
paltry or the vulgar. He knew from the depths of his own soul how to
invest a face with moral grandeur. Especially in his representations of
our Saviour Gian Bellini 'displays a perception of moral power and
grandeur seldom equalled in the history of art.' The example given is
that of the single figure of the Lord in the Dresden Gallery, where the
Son of God, without nimbus, or glory, stands forth as the 'ideal of
elevated humanity.'

The greater portion of Gian Bellini's pictures remain in the churches
and galleries of Venice. But the first great work at which the two
brothers in their youth worked in company--the painting of the Hall of
Council in the palace of the Doge, with a series of historical and
legendary pictures of the Venetian wars with the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa (1177), including the Doge Ziani's receiving from the Pope
the gold ring with which the Doge espoused the Adriatic, in token of
perpetual dominion over the sea--was unfortunately destroyed by fire in
1577. Giovanni Bellini's greatest work, now at St Salvatore, is Christ
at Emmaus, with Venetian senators and a Turkish dragoman introduced as
spectators of the risen Lord.

Of another great work at Vicenza, painted in Gian Bellini's old age,
when neither his skill nor his strength was abated, 'The Baptism of
Christ,' Dean Alford writes thus:

'Let us remain long and look earnestly, for there is indeed much
to be seen. That central figure, standing with hands folded on
His bosom, so gentle, so majestic, so perfect in blameless
humanity, oh what labour of reverent thought; what toil of
ceaseless meditation; what changes of fair purpose, oscillating
into clearest vision of ideal truth, must it have cost the great
painter, before he put forth that which we see now! It is as
impossible to find aught but love and majesty in the Divine
countenance, as it is to discover a blemish on the complexion of
that body, which seems to give forth light from itself, as He
stands in obedience, fulfilling all righteousness.

'And even on the accessories to this figure, we see the same
loving and reverent toil bestowed. The cincture, where alone the
body is hidden from view, is no web of man's weaving; or, if it
were, it is of hers whose heart was full of divine thoughts as
she wove: so bright and clear is the tint, so exquisitely
careful and delicate every fold where light may play or colour
vary. And look under the sacred feet, on the ground blessed by
their pressure; no dash of hurrying brush has been there: less
than a long day's light, eve, did not suffice to give in
individual shape and shade every minutest pebble and mote of
that shore of Jordan. Every one of them was worth painting, for
we are viewing them as in the light of His presence who made
them all and knew them all.

'And now let us pass to the other figures: to that living and
glowing angelic group in the left hand of the picture. Three of
the heavenly host are present, variously affected by that which
they behold. The first, next the spectator, in the corner of the
picture, is standing in silent adoration, tender and gentle in
expression, the hands together, but only the points of the
fingers touching, his very reverence being chastened by angelic
modesty; the second turns on that which he sees a look of
earnest inquiry, but kneels as he looks; and indeed that which
he sees is one of the things which angels desire to look into.
The third, a majestic herald-like figure, stands, as one
speaking, looking to the spectator, with his right hand on his
garment, and his left out as in demonstration, unmistakeably
saying to us who look on, "Behold what love is here!" Then,
hardly noticing what might well be much noticed, the grand dark
figure of the Baptist on the right, let us observe how
beautifully and accurately all the features of the landscape are
given.'

Of the same work another critic records: 'The attendant angels in this
work (signed by the artist) are of special interest, instinct with an
indefinable purity and depth of reverential tenderness elsewhere hardly
rivalled. But the picture, like that in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, with
which it is nearly contemporary, is almost more interesting from the
astonishing truth and beauty of its landscape portions. _These_ form
here a feature more important, perhaps, than in any work of that period;
the stratification and form of the rocks in the foreground, the palms
and other trees relieved against the lucid distance, and the
mountain-ranges of tender blue beyond, are as much beyond praise for
their beauty and their truth, as they have been beyond imitation from
the solidity and transparent strength of their execution! The minute
finish is Nature's, and the colouring more gem-like than gems.'

No praise can exceed that bestowed on Gian Bellini's colouring for its
intensity and transparency. 'Many of his draperies are like crystal of
the clearest and deepest colour,' declares an authority; and another
states' his best works have a clear jewel brightness, an internal
gem-like fire such as warms a summer twilight. The shadows are intense
and yet transparent, like the Adriatic waves when they lie out of the
sun under the palace bridges.'

Portrait-painting, just beginning, was established in Venice, its later
stronghold, by Gian Bellini. His truthful portrait of the Doge Loredano,
one of the earliest of that series of Doges' portraits which once hung
in state in the ducal palace, is now in our National Gallery.

Of Gentile Bellini, whose work was softer, but less vigorous than his
brother's, the best painting extant is that at Milan of St Mark
preaching at Alexandria, in which the painter showed how he had profited
by his residence at Constantinople in the introduction of much rich
Turkish costume, and of an animal unknown to Europe at the time--a
camelopard.

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua. He was the son of a farmer. His
early history, according to tradition, is very similar to that of
Giotto. Just as Cimabue adopted Giotto, Squarcione, a painter who had
travelled in Italy and Greece, and made a great collection of antiques,
from which he taught in a famous school of painters, adopted Andrea
Mantegna at the early age of ten years. It was long believed that
Mantegna, in the end, forfeited the favour of his master by marrying
Nicolosa Bellini, the sister of Gentile and Gian Bellini, whose father
was the great rival of Squarcione; and farther, that Mantegna's style of
painting had been considered Bellini. Modern researches, which have
substituted another surname for that of Bellini as the surname of Andrea
Mantegna's wife, contradict this story.

Andrea Mantegna, a man of much energy and fancy, entered young into the
service of the Gonzaga lords of Mantua, receiving from them a salary of
thirty pounds a year and a piece of land, on which the painter built a
house, and painted it within and without--the latter one of the first
examples of artistic waste, followed later by Tintoret and Veronese,
regardless of the fact that painting could not survive in the open air
of Northern Italy.

Andrea Mantegna had his home at Mantua, except when he was called to
Rome to paint for the Pope, Innocent VIII. An anecdote is told by Mrs
Jameson of this commission. It seems the Pope's payments were irregular;
and one day when he visited his painter at work, and his Holiness asked
the meaning of a certain allegorical female figure in the design, Andrea
answered, with somewhat audacious point, that he was trying to
represent _Patience_. The Pope, understanding the allusion, paid the
painter in his own coin, by remarking in reply, 'If you would place
Patience in fitting company, you would paint Discretion at her side.'
Andrea took the hint, said no more, and when his work was finished not
only received his money, but was munificently rewarded.

Andrea Mantegna had two sons and a daughter. One of his sons painted
with his father, and, after Andrea Mantegna's death, completed some of
his pictures.

Andrea Mantegna's early study of antique sculpture moulded his whole
life's work. He took great delight in modelling, in perspective, of
which he made himself a master, and in chiaroscuro, or light and shade.
Had his powers of invention and grace not kept pace with his skill, he
would have been a stiff and formal worker; as it was, he carried the
austerity of sculpture into painting, and his greatest work, the
'Triumph of Julius Caesar,' would have been better suited for the
chiselled frieze of a temple than it is for the painted frieze of the
hall of a palace. Yet he was a great leader and teacher in art, and the
true proportions of his drawing are grand, if his colouring is harsh. I
am happy to say that Mantegna's 'Triumph of Julius Caesar' is in England
at Hampton Court, having been bought from the Duke of Mantua by Charles
I. These cartoons, nine in number, are sketches in water-colour or
distemper on paper fixed on cloth. They are faded and dilapidated, as
they well may be, considering the slightness of the materials and their
age, about four hundred years. At the same time, they are, after the
cartoons of Raphael (which formed part of the same art collection of
Charles I.), perhaps the most valuable and interesting relic of art in
England.

The series of the 'Triumph' contain the different parts, originally
separated by pillars, of a long and splendid procession. There are
trumpeters and standard bearers, the statues of the gods borne aloft,
battering-rams and heaps of glittering armour, trophies of conquest in
huge vases filled with coin, garlanded oxen, and elephants. The second
last of the series, presents the ranks of captives forming part of the
show, rebellious men, submissive women, and unconscious children--a
moving picture. In the last of the series comes the great conqueror in
his chariot, a youth in the crowd following him, carrying his banner, on
which is inscribed Caesar's notable despatch, 'Veni, vidi, vici;' 'I
came, I saw, I conquered.'

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