Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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Among Correggio's masterpieces, besides his frescoes, there is at Parma
his picture called 'Day,' from the broad flood of daylight in the
picture (and doubtless in contrast to his famous 'Notte' or 'Night,' in
the Dresden Gallery). Here is a Virgin and Child, with St Jerome
presenting to them his translation of the Scriptures, and the Magdalene
bending to kiss in adoration the feet of the infant Saviour.

In the Dresden Gallery in addition to the 'Notte' are five pictures, one
of the marriage of St Catherine as the Church--the bride, espoused with
a ring to the infant Saviour, a favourite subject of Italian painters,
and a specially favourite subject with Correggio; and another, the
Magdalene reading, half shrouded with her flowing hair, so well known
by engravings. I must say a few more words of the 'Notte,'--it is a
nativity illuminated entirely by the unearthly glory shining from the
Child Christ. Virgin and Child are bathed and half lost in the fair
radiance, which falls softly on a shepherd and maiden, leaving the rest
of the figures, the stalled beasts, and the surroundings of the stable,
in dim shadow.

In our National Gallery there are fine specimens of Correggio. There is
an 'Ecce Homo': Christ crowned with thorns, holding out his bound hands,
with a Roman soldier softening into pity, Pilate hardening in
indifference, and the Virgin fainting with sorrow. There are also 'the
Virgin with the Basket,' so named from the little basket in front of the
picture; and 'a Holy Family;' and there is a highly-esteemed picture
from a mythological subject, 'Mercury teaching Cupid to read in the
presence of Venus.'

We must return to the Venice of Titian, and see how his successors, with
much more of the true painter in them than the fast degenerating
scholars of other Italian schools, were mere men, if great men, matched
with Titian.

Tintoretto is only Tintoretto or Tintoret because his father was a dyer,
and 'Il Tintoretto' is in Italian, 'the little dyer.' Tintoretto's real
name was one more in keeping with his pretensions, Jacopo Robusti. He
was born in Venice, in 1512, and early fore-shadowed his future career
by drawing all kinds of objects on the walls of his father's dye-house,
an exercise which did not offend or dismay the elder Robusti, but, on
the contrary, induced him to put the boy into the school of Titian,
where Tintoretto only remained a short time. Titian did not choose to
impart what could be imparted of his art to his scholars, and, in all
probability, Tintoretto was no deferential and submissive scholar. There
is a tradition that Titian expelled this scholar from his academy,
saying of the dyer's son, that 'he would never be anything but a
dauber.'

Tintoret was not to be daunted. He lived to be a bold-tempered, dashing
man, and he must have been defiant, even in his boyhood, as he was
swaggering in his youth, when he set up an academy of his own, and
inscribed above the door, 'The drawing of Michael Angelo and the
colouring of Titian.' He had studied and taught himself from casts and
theories since he left the school of Titian, and then, with worldly
wisdom equal to his daring, he commenced his artistic career by
accepting every commission, good or bad, and taking what pay he could
get for his work; but, unfortunately for him and for the world, he
executed his work, as might have been expected, in the same headlong,
indiscriminate spirit, acquiring the name of 'Il Furioso' from the
rapidity and recklessness of his manner of painting. Often he did not
even give himself the trouble of making any sketch or design of his
pictures beforehand, but composed as he painted.

Self-confident to presumption, he took for his inspirations the merest
impulses, and considerably marred the effect of his unquestionably grand
genius by gross haste and carelessness. He was a successful man in his
day, as so energetic and unscrupulous a man was likely enough to be, and
his fellow-citizens, who saw principally on the surface,[20] were
charmed beyond measure by his tremendous capacity for invention, his
dramatic vigour, his gorgeous, rampant richness and glare; or, by
contrast, his dead dulness of ornament and colouring; and were not too
greatly offended by his occasional untruthfulness in drawing and
colouring, and the inequality of his careless, slovenly, powerful
achievements. Yet even Tintoret's fascinated contemporaries said of him
that he 'used three pencils: one gold, one silver, one lead.'

Naturally Tintoretto painted an immense number of pictures, to only
three of which, however, he appended his name. These were, 'The
Crucifixion,' and 'The Miracle of the Slave,' two of fifty-seven
pictures which he painted for the school of St Roch alone, in Venice;
the other was the 'Marriage at Cana,' in the church of Santa Maria
della Saluto, Venice.

There is an authentic story told of Tintoretto in his age, which is in
touching contrast to what is otherwise known of the man. Dominico, who
was a painter, Tintoret had a daughter, Marietta, very dear to him, who
was also a painter--indeed, so gifted a portrait painter, as to have
been repeatedly invited to foreign courts to practise her art,
invitations which she declined, because she would not be parted from her
father. To Tintoret's great grief, this daughter died as she was thirty
years of age, and her father was in his seventy-eighth year. When her
end was unmistakably near, the old man took brush and canvas and
struggled desperately to preserve a last impression of the beloved
child's face, over which death was casting its shadow.

Tintoretto died four years later, in 1594. His portrait is that of a man
who holds his head high and resolutely; he has, strange to say, a
somewhat commonplace face, with its massive nose, full eye, short curly
beard and hail. The forehead is not very broad, but the head is 'long,'
as Scotch people say, and they count long-headedness not only an
indication of self-esteem, but of practical shrewdness. Tintoret's power
was native, and had received little training; it is a proof of the
strength of that power that he could not quench it. His faults, as a
painter, I have already had to chronicle in the sketch of the man. He
was greatest on large canvases, where his recklessness was lost in his
strength; and in portraits, where his quickness in seizing striking
traits more than equalled that rapidity of conclusion in realizing, and
still more notably in classifying, character, which, to say the least,
is liable to error.

Even before Tintoretto lived sacred subjects and art had entirely
changed places. In the days of Fra Angelico and the Van Eycks, art was
the means by which painters brought before men sacred subjects, to whose
design painters looked with more or less of conviction and feeling. By
the time that Tintoret painted, sacred subjects were the means by which
painters showed their art; means, the design of which was largely lost
sight of, and which might be freely tortured and twisted, falsified,
well-nigh burlesqued, if, by so doing, painters could better display
their originality, skill, and mastery of technicalities. Sacred subjects
had become more and more human in the lower sense, and less and less
divine. A man who had so little reverence as Tintoret showed for his own
higher self, his fellow-men, and his art, would scarcely seem well
qualified to take up sacred subjects. But criticism is entirely and
hopelessly divided on the question, for while some authorities hold that
he made of the awful scene of the Crucifixion a merely historical and
decidedly theatrical procession, other authorities maintain that he
preserved in that 'great composition' 'repose and dignity, solemnity and
reverence.'

Here is M. Charles Blanc, the French art critic's opinion of Tintoret's
largest work, seventy-four feet in length and thirty feet in height: The
Glory of Paradise, in the great hall or throne-room of the Doge's
Palace:--

'If the shadows had not become so black, such a picture would have had
something of sublimity; but that sky, without transparency, the lights
of which, even, are of a burnt and baked colour, has rather the air of a
lit-up Erebus than of a Paradise. Four hundred figures are in motion in
this vast enclosure, some naked, others draped, but draped uniformly in
a staring red or a hard blue, which form as many spots, in some sort
symmetrical. The manner is quick; a little loose, but confident. The
models are neither taken from nature nor from the ideal, they are drawn
from practice, and are in general only turns of the head, without beauty
and without delicacy. The angels are agitated like demons; and the
whole--coarse enough in execution as in thought, is imposing
nevertheless by mass, movement, and number. It is the striking image of
a multitude in the air, a rout in the heavens, or rather in purgatory.'

Here, again, is Mr Ruskin's unequalled estimate of Tintoret's works: 'I
should exhaust the patience of the reader if Ion the various stupendous
developments of the imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco
alone. I would fain join awhile in that solemn pause of the journey into
Egypt, where the silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their
tremulous lines the alternate folds of fair cloud, flushed by faint
crimson light, and lie across the streams of blue between those rosy
islands like the white wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the
sleep of the disciples among those mossy leaves that lie so heavily on
the dead of the night beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and
toss fearfully above the motion of the torches as the troop of the
betrayer emerges out of the hollows of the olives; or wait through the
hour of accusing beside the judgment-seat of Pilate, where all is
unseen, unfelt, except the one figure that stands with its head bowed
down, pale like the pillar of moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the
Godhead, half wrapt in the whiteness of the shroud. Of these and all
other thoughts of indescribable power that are now fading from the walls
of those neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavour at a future time to
preserve some image and shadow more faithfully than by words; but I
shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a
work of less touching, but more tremendous appeal; the Last Judgment in
the church of Santa Maria dell' Orto.'

'By Tintoret only has this unimaginable event been grappled with in its
verity; not typically, nor symbolically, but as they may see it who
shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he
has received with Dante and Michael Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned;
but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in the adoption of this
image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at
the sweeping blow and demon-dragging of the other; but, seized
Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the
victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor
the fiery lake, that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the
earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly
cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf
where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin
of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling like
water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes, and caverns, and shadows of
the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and
adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and
struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their
clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet,
like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam pool; shaking
off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the
clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God; blinded yet more, as they
awake, by the white light of the new heaven, until the great vortex of
the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment-seat; the Firmament
is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and
floats, and falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright
clouds are darkened with them as with thick snow; currents of atom life
in the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, and higher and higher
still, till the eye and thought can follow no farther, borne up,
wingless, by their inward faith, and by the angel powers invisible, now
hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their
condemnation.'

There is only one little work, of small consequence, by Tintoretto in
the National Gallery, but there are nearly a dozen in the Royal
Galleries, as Charles I. was an admirer and buyer of 'Tintorettos.' Two
Tintorettos which belonged to King Charles I, are at Hampton Court; the
one is 'Esther fainting before Ahasuerus,' and the other the 'Nine
Muses.' With another 'Esther' I have been familiar from childhood by an
old engraving. In the congenial to Tintoret, and he has certainly
revelled in the sumptuousness of the mighty Eastern tyrant, in royal
mantle and ermine tippet, seated on his throne, and stretching his
jewelled sceptre to Esther, who is in the rich costume of a Venetian
lady of the period, and sinking into the arms of her watchful maids,
with a fair baby face, and little helpless hands, having dainty frills
round the wrists, which scarcely answer to our notion of the attributes
of the magnanimous, if meek, Jewish heroine.

Paul Cagliari of Verona is far better known as Paul Veronese. He was
born in Verona in 1530, and was the son of a sculptor. He was taught by
his father to draw and model, but abandoned sculpture for the sister art
of painting, which was more akin to his tastes, and which he followed in
the studio of an uncle who was a fair painter.

Quitting Verona, Paul Veronese repaired to Venice, studying the works of
Titian and Tintoret, and settling in their city, finding no want of
patronage even in a field so fully appropriated before he came to take
his place there. His first great work was the painting of the church of
St Sebastian, with scenes from the history of Esther. Whether he chose
the subject or whether it was assigned to him, it belonged even more to
him than to Tintoret, for Veronese was the most magnificent of the
magnificent Venetian painters. From that date he was kept in constant
employment by the wealthy and luxurious Venetians. He visited Rome in
the suite of the Venetian ambassador in 1563, when he was in his
thirty-fourth year, and he was invited to Spain to assist in the
decoration of the Escurial by Philip II., but refused the invitation.

Veronese is said to have been a man of kindly spirit, generous and
devout. In painting for churches and convents, he would consent to
receive the smallest remuneration, sometimes not more than the price of
his colours and canvas. For his fine picture now in the Louvre, the
'Marriage of Cana,' he is believed not to have had more than forty
pounds in our money. He died when he was but fifty-eight years of age,
in 1588. He had married and left sons who were painters, and worked with
their father. He had a brother, Benedotto, who was also a painter, and
who is thought to have painted many of the architectural backgrounds to
Veronese's pictures.

Veronese's portrait, which he has left us, gives the idea of a more
earnest and impressionable man than Tintoret. A man in middle age,
bald-headed, with a furrowed brow, cheeks a little hollowed, head
slightly thrown back, and a somewhat anxious as well as intent
expression of face; what of the dress is seen, being a plain doublet
with turned-over collar, and a cloak arranged in a fold across the
breast, and hanging over the right shoulder like a shepherd's 'maud' or
plaid. Looking at the engraving, and hearing of Paul Veronese's
amiability and piety, one has little difficulty in thinking of the
magnificent painter, as a single-hearted, simple-minded man, neither
vain nor boastful, nor masterful save by the gift of genius.

I have called Paul Veronese a magnificent painter, and magnificence is
the great attribute of his style; but before going farther into his
merits and defects, I should like to quote to you a passage from Mr
Ruskin, the most eloquent and dogmatic of art critics, prefacing the
passage with the statement that the true lesson which it teaches is
particularly needful for women, who, if they love art at all, are apt to
regard it chiefly for its sentiment, and to undervalue such proper
painter's work, such breadth and affluence and glory of handling, as are
to be met with on the canvases of painters like Veronese and Rubens.
'But I perceive a tendency among some of the more thoughtful critics of
the day to forget the business of a painter is _to paint_, and so
altogether to despise those men, Veronese and Rubens for instance, who
were painters, _par excellence_, and in whom the expressional qualities
are subordinate. Now it is well, when we have strong moral or poetical
feeling manifested in painting, to mark this as the best part of the
work; but it is not well to consider as a thing of small account the
painter's language in which that feeling is conveyed; for if that
language be not good and lovely, the man may indeed be a just moralist
or a great poet, but he is not a _painter_, and it was wrong of him to
paint.'

It was said of Paul Veronese, that while he had not 'the brilliance and
depth of Titian' or the 'prodigious facility' of Tintoret, yet, in some
respects, Veronese surpassed both. But he was certainly deficient in a
sense of suitability and probability. He, of all painters, carried to an
outrageous extent the practice, which I have defended in some degree, of
painting sacred and historical subjects as if they had happened in his
own day and city. He violated taste and even reason in painting every
scene, lofty or humble, sacred or profane, alike, with the pomp of
splendour and richness of ornament which were the fashion of the time;
but he had a vivid perception of character, and a certain greatness of
mind which redeemed his plethora of gorgeousness from monotony or
vulgarity.

Veronese is reported to have been far more correct and careful in
drawing than was Tintoret, while Veronese's prodigality of colour was a
mellowed version of Tintoret's glare or deadness. One of Veronese's best
pictures is the 'Marriage of Cana,' painted originally for the refectory
of the convent of San Giorgio, Venice, and now in the Louvre. 'It is not
less than thirty feet long and twenty feet high, and contains about one
hundred and thirty figures, life size. The Marriage Feast of the
Galilean citizen is represented with a pomp worthy of "Ormuz or of Ind."
A sumptuous hall of the richest architecture; lofty columns, long lines
of marble balustrades rising against the sky; a crowd of guests
splendidly attired, some wearing orders of knighthood, are seated at
tables covered with gorgeous vases of gold and silver, attended by
slaves, jesters, pages, and musicians. In the midst of all this dazzling
pomp, this display of festive enjoyment, these moving figures, these
lavish colours in glowing approximation, we begin after a while to
distinguish the principal personages, our Saviour, the Virgin Mary, the
twelve Apostles, mingled with Venetian senators and ladies, clothed in
the rich costume of the sixteenth century; monks, friars, poets,
artists, all portraits of personages existing in his own time; while in
a group of musicians he has introduced himself and Tintoretto playing
the violoncello, while Titian plays the bass. The bride in this picture
is said to be the portrait of Eleanor of Austria, the sister of Charles
V, and second wife of Francis I.'[21]

Though Veronese is not greatly esteemed as a portrait painter, it so
happens that the highly-prized picture of his in our National Gallery,
called 'The Family of Darius before Alexander,' is understood to be
family portraits of the Pisani family in the characters of Alexander,
the Persian queen, etc., etc. Another of Veronese's pictures in the
National Gallery is 'The Consecration of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.'




CHAPTER VII.

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


In the falling away of the schools of Italy, and especially of the
followers of Michael Angelo and Raphael, into mannerism and
exaggeration, fitly expressed in delineation of heathen gods and
goddesses, there arose a cluster of painters in the North of Italy who
had considerable influence on art.

The Carracci included a group of painters, the founders of the later
Bolognese School. Lodovico, the elder of the three, was born at Bologna,
1555. He was educated as a painter, and was so slow in his education,
that he received from his fellow-scholars the nickname of 'Il Bue' (the
ox). But his perseverance surmounted every obstacle. He visited the
different Italian towns, and studied the works of art which contained,
arriving at the conclusion that he might acquire and combine the
excellences of each. This combination, which could only be a splendid
patch-work without unity, was the great aim of his life, and was the
origin of the term _eclectic_ applied to his school. Its whole tendency
was to technical excellence, and in this tendency, however it might
achieve its end, painting showed a marked decline. As an example of the
motives and objects supplied by the school, I must borrow some lines
from a sonnet of the period written by Agostino Carracci:

'Let him, who a good painter would be,
Acquire the drawing of Rome,
Venetian action, and Venetian shadow,
And the dignified colouring of Lombardy,
The terrible manner of Michael Angelo,
Titian's truth and nature,
The sovereign purity of Correggio's style,
And the true symmetry of Raphael;

* * * * *

And a little of Parmegiano'a grace,
But without so much study and toil,
Let him only apply himself to imitate the works
Which our Niccolino has left us here.'

Lodovico opened a school of painting at Bologna, in which he was for a
time largely assisted by his cousins. He died 1619.

Agostino Carracci, cousin of Lodovico, was born at Bologna in 1559. His
father was a tailor, and Agostino himself began life as a jeweller. He
became a painter and an engraver in turn, devoting himself chiefly to
engraving. Towards the beginning of the seventeenth century he was with
his more famous brother, Annibale, at Rome, where he assisted in
painting the Farnese Gallery, designing and executing the two frescoes
of Galatea and Aurora with such success, according to his
contemporaries, that it was popularly said that 'the engraver had
surpassed the painter in the Farnese.' Jealousy arose between the
brothers in consequence, and they separated, not before Annibale had
perpetrated upon Agostino a small, but malicious, practical joke, which
has been handed down to us. Agostino was fond of the society of people
of rank, and Annibale, aware of his brother's weakness, took the
opportunity, when Agostino was surrounded by some of his aristocratic
friends, to present him with a caricature of the two brothers' father
and mother, engaged in their tailoring work.

Agostino died at Parma when he was a little over forty, and was buried
in the cathedral there, in 1602.

Annibale, Agostino's younger brother, was born in 1560. It was intended
by his parents that he should follow their trade and be a tailor, but he
was persuaded by his cousin Lodovico to become a painter. After visiting
Parma, Venice, and Bologna, he worked with his cousin and teacher for
ten years. Annibale was invited to Rome by the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese,
to decorate the great hall of his palace in the Piazza Farnese, with
scenes from the heathen mythology, for which work he received a monthly
salary of ten scudi, about two guineas, with maintenance for himself and
two servants, and a farther gift of five hundred scudi. It was a
parsimonious payment, and the parsimony is said to have preyed on the
mind and affected the health of Annibale, and a visit to Naples, where
he, in common with not a few artists, suffered from the jealous
persecutions of the Neapolitan painters, completed the breaking up of
his constitution. He painted, with the assistance of Albani, the
frescoes in the chapel of San Diego in San Giacomo degli Spagnole, and
pressed upon his assistant more than half of his pay. Annibale's health
had already given way, and after a long illness he died, when forty-nine
years of age, at Rome, 1609, and was buried near Raphael in the
Pantheon.

The merit of the Carracci lay in their power of execution, and in a
certain 'bold naturalism, or rather animalism,' which they added to
their able imitations, for their pictures are not so much their own, as
'After Titian,' 'After Correggio,' etc. In this intent regard to style,
and this perfecting of means to an end, thought and in a manner
neglected. Yet to the Carracci, and their school, is owing a certain
studied air of solemnity and sadness in 'Ecce Homos,' and 'Pietas,'
which, in proportion to its art, has a powerful effect on many
beholders, who prefer conventionality to freedom; or rather, who fail to
distinguish conventionality in its traces. Annibale was the most
original while the least learned of the Carracci; yet, even of Annibale,
it could be said that he lacked enthusiasm in his subjects. His best
productions are his mythological subjects in the Farnese Palace. A
celebrated picture of his, that of the 'Three Marys' (a dead Christ, the
Madonna, and the two other Marys), is at Castle Howard, and has been
exhibited at Manchester, and I think also at Leeds. At Manchester it
attracted the greatest attention and admiration. I believe this was not
only because Annibale Carracci in the 'Three Marys' does attain to a
most piteous mournfulness of sentiment, but because such work as that of
the Carracci finds readiest acceptance from a general public, which
delights in striking, superficial effects. The same reason, in
conjunction with the decline of Italian art, may account for the great
number of the Carracci school and followers.

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