Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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I have written, in connection with Lionardo's 'Jaconde' and Raphael's
'Fornarina,' of Titian's 'Bella Donna.' He has various 'Bellas,' but, as
far as I know, this is _the_ 'Bella Donna,'--'a splendid, serious
beauty, in a red and blue silk dress,' in the Sciarra Gallery, Rome.

I have read that critics were at one time puzzled by the singular
yellow, almost straw colour, appearing profusely in the hair of the
women of the Venetian painters of this time, and that it was only by
consulting contemporary records that it was learnt that the Venetian
women indulged in the weak and false vanity of dyeing their black hair a
pale yellow--a process, in the course of which the women drew the hair
through the crown of a broad-brimmed hat, and spreading it over the
brim, submitted patiently to bleaching the hair in a southern sun.

Among Titian's portraits of men, those of the 'Emperor Charles V.' and
the 'Duke of Alva' are among the most famous.

Titian painted, and painted wonderfully, to the very last. He was
eighty-one when he painted the 'Martyrdom of St Lawrence,' one of his
largest and grandest compositions, and in the last year of his life he
painted--leaving it not quite completed,--a 'Pieta;' showing that his
hand owned the weight of years,[16] but the conception of the subject is
still animated and striking, the colours still glowing; while,
Titian-like, the light still flows around the mighty group in every
gradation of tone.




CHAPTER V.

GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DUeRER, 1471-1528.


Albrecht Duerer carries us to a different country and a different race.
And he who has been called the father of German painting is thoroughly
German, not only in his Saxon honesty, sedateness, and strength, but in
the curious mixture of simplicity, subtlety, homeliness, and
fantasticalness, which are still found side by side in German genius.

Albrecht Duerer was born at that fittest birth-place for the great German
painter, quaint old Nuremberg, in 1471. He was the son of a goldsmith,
and one of a family of eighteen children; a home school in which he may
have learnt early the noble, manly lessons of self-denial and endurance,
which he practised long and well. He was trained to his father's trade
until the lad's bent became so unmistakable that he was wisely
transferred to the studio of a painter to serve his apprenticeship to
art.

When the Nuremberg apprenticeship was completed, Albrecht followed the
German custom, very valuable to him, of serving another and a 'wandering
apprenticeship,' which carried him betimes through Germany, the
Netherlands, and Italy, painting and studying as he went. He painted his
own portrait about this time, showing himself a comely, pleasant, and
pleased young fellow, in a curious holiday suit of plaited low-bodied
shirt, jerkin, and mantle across the shoulder, with a profusion of long
fair curls, of which he was said to have been vain, arranged elaborately
on each side, the blue eyes looking with frank confidence out of the
blonde face. He painted himself a little later with the brave kindly
face grown mature, and the wisdom of the spirit shining in the eyes, and
weighing on the brows.

On his return from his travels, Albrecht Duerer's father arranged his
son's marriage with the daughter of a musician in Nuremberg. The
inducement to the marriage seems to have been, on the father's part, the
dowry, and on the son's the beauty of the bride. How unhappy the union
proved, without any fault of Albrecht's, has been the theme of so many
stories, that I am half inclined to think that some of us must be more
familiar with Albrecht Duerer's wedded life than with any other part of
his history. It seems to me, that there is considerable exaggeration in
these stories, for granted that Agnes Duerer was a shrew and a miser, was
Albrecht Duerer the man to be entirely, or greatly, at such a woman's
mercy? Taking matters at their worst, dishonour and disgrace did not
come near the great painter. He was esteemed, as he deserved to be; he
had a true friend in his comrade Pirkheimer; he had his art; he had the
peace of a good conscience; he had the highest of all consolations in
his faith in Heaven. Certainly it is not from Albrecht himself that the
tale of his domestic wretchedness has come. He was as manfully patient
and silent as one might have expected in a man upright, firm, and
self-reliant as he was tender. I do not think it is good for men, and
especially for women, to indulge in egotistical sentimentality, and to
believe that such a woman as Agnes Duerer could utterly thwart and wreck
the life of a man like Albrecht. It is not true to life, in the first
place; and it is dishonouring to the man, in the second; for although,
doubtless, there are men who are driven to destruction or heart-broken
by even the follies of women, these men have not the stout hearts, the
loyal spirits, the manly mould of Albrecht Duerer.

But making every allowance for the high colours with which a tale that
has grown stale is apt to be daubed, I am forced to admit the inference
that a mean, sordid, contentious woman probably did as much as was in
her power to harass and fret one of the best men in Germany, or in the
world. Luckily for himself, Albrecht was a severe student, had much
engrossing work which carried him abroad, and travelled once at least
far away from the harassing and galling home discipline. For anything
further, I believe that Albrecht loved his greedy, scolding wife, whose
fair face he painted frequently in his pictures, and whom he left at
last well and carefully provided for, as he bore with her to the end.

In 1506 Albrecht Duerer re-visited Italy alone, making a stay of eight
months in Venice, where he formed his friendship with the old Gian
Bellini, and where Albrecht had the misfortune to show the proofs and
plans of his engravings to the Italian engraver, Raimondi, who engraved
Raphael's paintings, and who proved himself base enough to steal and
make use of Albrecht Duerer's designs to the German's serious loss and
inconvenience.

A little later Albrecht Duerer, accompanied by his wife, visited the
Netherlands. The Emperor Maximilian treated the painter with great
favour, and a legend survives of their relations:--Duerer was painting so
large a subject that he required steps to reach it. The Emperor, who was
present, required a nobleman of his suite to steady the steps for the
painter, an employment which the nobleman declined as unworthy of his
rank, when the Emperor himself stepped forward and supplied the
necessary aid, remarking, 'Sir, understand that I can make Albrecht a
noble like and above you' (Maximilian had just raised Albrecht Duerer to
the rank of noble of the empire), 'but neither I nor any one else can
make an artist like him.' We may compare this story with a similar and
later story of Holbein and Henry VIII., and with another earlier story,
having a slight variation, of Titian and Charles V. The universality of
the story shakes one's belief in its individual application, but at
least the legend, with different names, remains as an indication of
popular homage to genius.

While executing a large amount of work for the great towns and sovereign
princes of Germany, some of whom were said to consult the painter on
their military operations, relying on his knowledge of mathematics, and
his being able to apply it to military engineering and fortification,
Albrecht Duerer was constantly improving and advancing in his art, laying
down his prejudices, and acquiring fresh ideas, as well as fresh
information, according to the slow but sure process of the true German
mind, till his last work was incomparably his best.

Germany was then in the terrible throes of the Reformation, and Albrecht
Duerer, who has left us the portraits of several of the great Reformers,
is believed to have been no uninterested spectator of the struggle, and
to have held, like his fellow-painter, Lucas Cranach--though in Albrecht
Duerer's case the change was never openly professed--the doctrines of the
Reformation.

There is a portrait of Albrecht Duerer, painted by himself, in his later
years. (By the way, Albrecht was not averse to painting his own portrait
as well as that of his friend Pirkheimer, and of making the fullest
claim to his work by introducing into his religious and historical
pictures his own figure holding a flag or tablet, inscribed with his
name in the quiet self-assertion of a man who was neither ashamed of
himself, nor of anything he did.) In that last portrait, Albrecht is a
thoughtful, care-worn man, with his fair locks shorn. Some will
attribute the change to Agnes Duerer, but I imagine it proceeds simply
from the noble scars of work and time; and that when Albrecht Duerer died
in his fifty-seventh year, if it were in sourness and bitterness of
spirit, as some of his biographers have stated, that sourness and
bitterness were quite as much owing to the grievous troubles of his time
and country, which so large-minded a man was sure to lay to heart, as to
any domestic trouble. Albrecht Duerer was greatly beloved by his own city
of Nuremberg, where his memory continues to be cherished. His quaint
house still stands, and his tomb bears the motto 'Emigravit,'

'For the great painter never dies.'

Albrecht Duerer's name ranks with the names of the first painters of any
time or country, though his work as a painter was, as in the case of
William Hogarth, subservient to his work as an engraver. With the
knowledge of a later generation to that of the earliest Italian and
Flemish painters, Albrecht Duerer had much of their singleness of
purpose, assiduity of application, and profound feeling. He had to
labour against a tendency to uncouthness in stiff lines and angular
figures; to petty elaboration of details; and to that grotesqueness
which, while it suited in some respects his allegorical engravings,
marred his historical paintings, so that he was known to regret the
wasted fantastic crowding and confusion of his earlier work. From the
Italians and Flemings he learnt simplicity, and a more correct sense of
material beauty. The purity, truth, and depth of the man's spirit, from
which ideal beauty proceeds, no man could add to.

Among Albrecht Duerer's greatest paintings are his 'Adoration of the
Trinity' at Vienna, his 'Adam and Eve' at Florence, and that last
picture of 'The Apostles,' presented by Albrecht Duerer to his native
city, 'in remembrance of his career as an artist, and at the same time
as conveying to his fellow-citizens an earnest and lasting exhortation
suited to that stormy period.' The prominence given to the Bible in the
picture, points to it as the last appeal in the great spiritual
struggle. With regard to this noble masterly picture, Kugler has
written, 'Well might the artist now close his eyes. He had in this
picture attained the summit of art; here he stands side by side with the
greatest masters known in history.'

But I prefer to say something of Albrecht Duerer's engravings, which are
more characteristic of him and far more widely known than his paintings;
and to speak first of those two wonderful and beautiful allegories,
'Knight, Death, and the Devil,' and 'Melancolia.' In the first, which is
an embodiment of weird German romance as well as of high Christian
faith, the solitary Knight, with his furrowed face and battered armour,
rides steadfastly on through the dark glen, unmoved by his grisly
companions, skeleton Death on the lame horse, and the foul Fiend in
person. Contrast this sketch and its thoughtful touching meaning with
the hollow ghastliness of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.'

In 'Melancolia' a grand winged woman sits absorbed in sorrowful thought,
while surrounded by all the appliances of philosophy, science, art,
mechanics, all the discoveries made before and in Albrecht Duerer's day,
in the book, the chart, the lever, the crystal, the crucible, the plane,
the hammer. The intention of this picture has been disputed, but the
best explanation of it is that which regards the woman as pondering on
the humanly unsolved and insoluble mystery of the sin and sorrow of
life.

In three large series of woodcuts, known as the Greater and the Lesser
Passion of the Lord, and the Life of the Virgin, and taken partly from
sacred history and partly from tradition, Albrecht Duerer exceeded
himself in true beauty, simple majesty, and pathos. Photographs have
spread widely these fine woodcuts, and there is, at least, one which I
think my readers may have seen, 'The Bearing of the Cross,' in which the
blessed Saviour sinks under his burden. In the series of the Life of the
Virgin there is a 'Repose in Egypt,' which has a naive homeliness in its
grace and serenity. The woodcut represents a courtyard with a dwelling
built in the ruins of an ancient palace. The Virgin sits spinning with
a distaff and spindle beside the Holy Child's cradle, by which beautiful
angels worship. Joseph is busy at his carpenter's work, and a number of
little angels, in merry sport, assist him with his labours.[17]

I shall mention only one more work of Albrecht Duerer's, that which is
known as the Emperor Maximilian's Prayer Book. This is pen-and-ink
sketches for the borders of a book (as the old missals were
illuminated), which are now preserved in the Royal Library, Munich. In
these little drawings the fancy of the great artist held high revel, by
no means confining itself to serious subjects, such as apostles, monks,
or even men in armour, but indulging in the most whimsical vagaries,
with regard to little German old women, imps, piping squirrels, with
cocks and hens hurrying to listen to the melody.




CHAPTER VI.

LATER ITALIAN ART--GIORGIONE, 1477-1511--CORREGGIO. ABOUT
1493-1534--TINTORETTO, 1512-1574--VERONESE, 1530-1588.


Giorgio Barbarelli, known as 'Giorgione,--in Italian, 'big,' or, as I
have heard it better translated, 'strapping George'--was born at
Castelfranco, in Treviso, about 1477, the same year in which Titian was
born. Nothing is known of his youth before he came to Venice and studied
in the school of Gian Bellini along with Titian.

The two men were friends in those days, but soon quarrelled, and
Giorgione's early death completed their separation. Titian was impatient
and arrogant; Giorgione seems to have been one of those proud, shy,
sensitive men--possibly morbidly sensitive, with whom it is always
difficult to deal; but it is recorded of him, as it is not recorded of
his great compeer, that Giorgione was frank and friendly as an artist,
however moody and fitful he might be as a man.

Giorgione soon became known. According to one account, he painted the
facade of the house which he dwelt in, for an advertisement of his
abilities as a painter, a device which was entirely successful in
procuring him commissions; but unfortunately for posterity, these were
frequently to paint other facades, sometimes in company with Titian;
grand work, which has inevitably perished, if not by fire, by time and
by the sea-damp of Venice, for to Venice Giorgione belonged, and there
is no sign that he ever left it.

He had no school, and his love of music and society--the last taste
found not seldom, an apparent anomaly, in silent, brooding
natures--might tend to withdraw him from his art. He has left a trace of
his love for music in his pictures of 'Concerts' and of 'Pastorals,' in
which musical performances are made prominent. In Giorgione, with his
romantic, idealizing temperament, genre[18] pictures took this form,
while he is known to have painted from Ovid and from the Italian tales
of his time. He was employed frequently to paint scenes on panels, for
the richly ornamented Venetian furniture. Giorgione was not without a
bent to realism in his very idealism, and is said to have been the first
Italian painter who 'imitated the real texture of stuffs and painted
draperies from the actual material.'

Giorgione died at the early age of thirty-three years, in 1511. One
account represents him as dying of the plague, others attribute his
death to a sadder cause. He is said to have had a friend and
fellow-painter who betrayed their friendship, and carried off the girl
whom Giorgione loved. Stung to the quick by the double falsehood, the
tradition goes on to state that Giorgione fell into despair with life
and all it held, and so died.

A portrait of Giorgione is in the Munich Gallery; it is that of a very
handsome beardless lad, 'with a peculiar melancholy in the dark glowing
eyes.'

Giorgione was, like Titian, grand and free in drawing and composition,
and superb in colour.[19] Mrs Jameson has drawn a nice distinction
between the two painters as colourists. That the colours of Giorgione
'appear as if lighted from within, and those of Titian from without;'
that 'the epithet glowing applies best to Giorgione, that of golden to
Titian.'

Giorgione's historic pictures are rare, his sacred pictures rarer still;
among the last is a 'Finding of Moses,' now in Milan, thus described by
Mrs Jameson: 'In the centre sits the princess under a tree; she looks
with surprise and tenderness on the child, which is brought to her by
one of her attendants; the squire, or seneschal, of the princess, with
knights and ladies, stand around; on one side two lovers are seated on
the grass; on the other are musicians and singers, pages with dogs. All
the figures are in the Venetian costume; the colouring is splendid, and
the grace and harmony of the whole composition is even the more
enchanting from the naivete of the conception. This picture, like many
others of the same age and style, reminds us of those poems and tales
of the middle ages, in which David and Jonathan figure as _preux
chevaliers_, and Sir Alexander of Macedon and Sir Paris of Troy fight
tournaments in honour of ladies' eyes and the "blessed Virgin." They
must be tried by their own aim and standard, not by the severity of
antiquarian criticism.'

In portraits Giorgione has only been exceeded by Titian. In the National
Gallery there is an unimportant 'St Peter the Martyr,' and a finer
'Maestro di Capella giving a music lesson,' which Kugler assigns to
Giorgione, though it has been given elsewhere to Titian. The 'refined
voluptuousness and impassioned sombreness' of Giorgione's painting have
instituted a comparison between him and Lord Byron as a poet.

Correggio's real name was Antonio Allegri, and he has his popular name
from his birth-place of Correggio, now called Reggio; although at one
time there existed an impression that Correggio meant 'correct,' from
the painter's exceedingly clever feats of fore-shortening.

His father is believed to have been a well-to-do tradesman, and the lad
is said to have had an uncle a painter, who probably influenced his
nephew. But Correggio had a greater master, though but for a very short
time, in Andrea Mantegna, who died when Correggio was still a young boy.
Mantegna's son kept on his father's school, and from him Correggio might
have received more regular instruction. He early attained excellence,
and in the teeth of the legends which lingered in Parma for a full
century, his genius received prompt notice and patronage. He married
young, and from records which have come to light, he received a
considerable portion with his wife.

The year after his marriage, when he was no more than six-and-twenty,
Correggio was appointed to paint in fresco the cupola of the church of
San Giovanni at Parma, and chose for his subject the 'Ascension of
Christ;' for this work and that of the 'Coronation of the Virgin,'
painted over the high altar, Correggio got five hundred gold crowns,
equivalent to L1500. He was invited to Mantua, where he painted from the
mythology for the Duke of Mantua. Indeed, so far and wide had the
preference for mythological subjects penetrated, that one of Correggio's
earliest works was 'Diana returning from the Chase;' painted for the
decoration of the parlour of the Abbess of the convent of San Paulo,
Parma.

Correggio was a second time called upon to paint a great religious work
in Parma--this time in the cathedral, for which he selected 'The
Assumption of the Virgin.' A few of the cartoons for these frescoes were
discovered thirty or forty years ago, rolled up and lying forgotten in a
garret in Parma; they, are now in the British Museum.

In 1533, Correggio, then residing in his native town, was one of the
witnesses to the marriage of his sovereign, the Lord of Correggio. In
the following year the painter had engaged to paint an altar-piece for
an employer, who paid Correggio in advance twenty-five gold crowns, but
the latter dying very soon afterwards, in the forty-first year of his
age, 1534, his father, who was still alive, was in circumstances to
repay the advance on the picture, which had not been painted.

Correggio is said to have been modest and retiring in disposition, and
this, together with the fact that, like Giorgione, he did not have a
school, has been suggested as the source of the traditions which
prevailed so long in Italy. These traditions described the painter as a
man born in indigent circumstances, living obscurely in spite of his
genius (there is a picture of Correggio's in England, which was said to
have been given in payment for his entertainment at an inn), and leading
to the end a life of such ill-requited labour, that having been paid for
his last picture in copper money, and being under the necessity of
carrying it home in order to relieve the destitution of his family, he
broke down under the burden, and overcome by heat and weariness, drank a
rash draught of water, which caused fever and death.

The story, disproven as it is, is often alluded to still, and remains as
a foil to those flattering and courtly anecdotes which I have been
repeating of royal and imperial homage paid to Duerer, Titian, and
Holbein. I fancy the last-mentioned stories may have grown from small
beginnings, and circulated purely in the artist world; but that the
former is an utterance of the engrained persuasion of the great world
without, that art as a means of livelihood is essentially
non-remunerative in the sense of money-getting.

Modest as Correggio may have been, he was not without pride in his art.
After looking for the first time on the St Cecilia of Raphael, Correggio
is reported to have exclaimed with exultation, 'And I too am a painter.'

He left behind him on his death a son and a daughter, the former living
to be a painter of no great name. In the picture of Correggio in the
attitude of painting, painted by himself, we see him a handsome spare
man with something of a romantic cavalier air, engaged in his chosen
art.

Correggio's pictures go to prove that under his seemingly quiet exterior
he was a man of the liveliest sensibilities and the keenest perceptions,
His pictures, unlike Titian's in their repose, are full of motion and
excitement. Correggio is spoken of as a painter who delighted 'in the
buoyance of childish glee, the bliss of earthly, the fervour of heavenly
love,' whose radiant sphere of art sorrow rarely clouded; but when
sorrow did enter, it borrowed from the painter's own quivering heart the
very sharpness of anguish. The same authority tells us of Correggio,
that he has painted 'the very heart-throbs of humanity.' But it seems as
if such a nature, with its self-conscious veil of forced stillness, must
have had a tendency to vehemence and excess; and so we hear that
Correggio's fore-shortening was sometimes violent, and the energy of his
actors spasmodic; thus the cruelly smart contemporary criticism was
pronounced on his frescoes of the 'Assumption of the Virgin,' in which
legs and arms in wild play are chiefly conspicuous from below, that
Correggio had prepared for the Parmese 'a fricassee of frogs.' In
addition, the great modern critic, Mr Ruskin, has boldly accused
Correggio 'both of weakness and meretriciousness,' and there is this to
be said of a nature so highly strung as Correggio's was strung, that it
was not a healthily balanced nature.

But if the painter were really inferior in his sense of form and
expression to his great predecessors, he was so great in one department,
that in it he was held worthy, not only to found the school of Parma,
but to be classed with the first four painters of Italy.

That chiarascuro, or treatment of light and shade, in which Lionardo and
Andrea Mantegna were no mean proficients, was brought to such perfection
by Correggio, that, as Mrs Jameson has sought to illustrate technical
expressions, 'you seem to look through. Correggio's shadows, and to see
beyond them the genuine texture of the flesh.' In undulating grace of
motion, in melting softness of outline, fixed on a canvas, he surpassed
all rivals, including Raphael; and this widely attractive quality
('luscious refinement,' Mr Ruskin terms it) in connection with
Correggio's ardent, if undisciplined sensibility, has rendered him one
of the most valued of painters; his best paintings being highly prized
and costly as the easel pictures attributed to Raphael. Sir W. Stirling
Maxwell writes that an old Duke of Modena was suspected of having caused
Correggio's 'Notte' to be stolen from a church at Reggio, and that the
princes of Este were wont to carry 'The Magdalene Reading' with them on
their journeys, while the king of Poland kept it under lock and key in a
frame of jewelled silver.

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