[252] It was finished, according to Fra Paciolo, in 1498.
[253] Signorelli, with his usual originality, chose the moment when Christ broke bread and gave it to His disciples. In that rare picture at Cortona, we see not the betrayed chief but the founder of a new religion.
[254] The Cenacolo alone will not enable the student to understand Lionardo. He must give his attention to the master"s sketch books, those studies in chalk, in tempera, on thin canvas and paper, prepared for the stylus or the pen, which Vasari calls the final triumphs of designing, and of which, in spite of the loss of many of his books, the surviving specimens are very numerous. Some are easily accessible in Gerli, Chamberlaine, and the autotype reproductions. It is possible that a sympathetic student may get closer to the all-embracing and all-daring genius of the magician through these drawings than if he had before him an elaborate work in fresco or in oils. They express the many-sided, mobile, curious, and subtle genius of the man in its entirety.
[255] "Raffaello, che era la gentilezza stessa ... restavano vinti dalla cortesia e dall" arte sua, ma piu dal genio della sua buona natura; la quale era si piena di gentilezza e si colma di carita, che egli si vedeva che fino agli animali l"onoravano, non che gli uomini."--Vasari, vol.
viii. pp. 6, 60.
[256] See above, Chapter VI, Fra Bartolommeo.
[257] The "Holy Family" at Munich, and the "Madonna del Baldacchino" in the Pitti, might be mentioned as experiments on Raphael"s part to perfect the Frate"s scheme of composition.
[258] See Vasari, vol. viii. p. 60, for a description of the concord that reigned in this vast workshop. The genius and the gentle nature of Raphael penetrated the whole group of artists, and seemed to give them a single soul.
[259] The fresco of "Alexander" in the Palazzo Borghese is by an imitator.
[260] The "Madonna di San Sisto" was painted for a banner to be borne in processions. It is a subtle observation of Rio that the banner, an invention of the Umbrian school, corresponds in painting to the hymn in poetry.
[261] See Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p. 316, for Raphael"s letter on this subject to Leo X.
[262] "La Spasimo di Sicilia" is the single Pa.s.sion picture of Raphael"s maturity. The predella of "Christ carrying the Cross" at Leigh Court, and the "Christ showing His Wounds" in the Tosi Gallery at Brescia, are both early works painted under Umbrian influence. The Borghese "Entombment,"
painted for Atalanta Baglioni, a pen-and-ink drawing of the "Pieta" in the Louvre collection, Marc Antonio"s engraving of the "Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents," and an early picture of the "Agony in the Garden," are all the other painful subjects I can now remember.
[263] For a fuller working out of this a.n.a.lysis I must refer to my _Sketches in Italy_, article "Parma." Much that follows is a quotation from that essay.
[264] Much of the controversy about Michael Angelo, which is continually being waged between his admirers and his detractors, might be set at rest if it were acknowledged that there are two distinct ways of judging works of art. We may regard them simply as appealing to our sense of beauty, and affording harmonious intellectual pleasure. Or we may regard them as expressing the thought and spirit of their age, and as utterances made by men whose hearts burned within them. Critics trained in the study of good Greek sculpture, or inclined by temperament to admire the earlier products of Italian painting, are apt to pursue the former path exclusively. They demand serenity and simplicity. Perturbation and violence they denounce as blemishes. It does not occur to them that, though the phenomenon is certainly rare, it does occasionally happen that a man arises whose art is for him the language of his soul, and who lives in sympathetic relation to the sternest interests of his age. If such an artist be born when tranquil thought and serene emotions are impossible for one who feels the meaning of his times with depth, he must either paint and carve lies, or he must abandon the serenity that was both natural and easy to the Greek and the earlier Italian. Michael Angelo was one of these select artistic natures. He used his chisel and his pencil to express, not merely beautiful artistic motives, but what he felt and thought about the world in which he had to live: and this world was full of the ruin of republics, the corruption and humiliation of society, the subjection of Italy to strangers. In Michael Angelo the student of both art and history finds an inestimably precious and rare point of contact between the inner spirit of an age, and its external expression in sculpture and painting.
CHAPTER VII
VENETIAN PAINTING
Painting bloomed late in Venice--Conditions offered by Venice to Art--Sh.e.l.ley and Pietro Aretino--Political circ.u.mstances of Venice--Comparison with Florence--The Ducal Palace--Art regarded as an adjunct to State Pageantry--Myth of Venezia--Heroic Deeds of Venice--Tintoretto"s Paradise and Guardi"s Picture of a Ball--Early Venetian Masters of Murano--Gian Bellini--Carpaccio"s little Angels--The Madonna of S. Zaccaria--Giorgione--Allegory, Idyll, Expression of Emotion--The Monk at the Clavichord--t.i.tian, Tintoret, and Veronese--Tintoretto"s attempt to dramatise Venetian Art--Veronese"s Mundane Splendour--t.i.tian"s Sophoclean Harmony--Their Schools--Further Characteristics of Veronese--of Tintoretto--His Imaginative Energy--Predominant Poetry--t.i.tian"s Perfection of Balance--a.s.sumption of Madonna--Spirit common to the Great Venetians.
It was a fact of the greatest importance for the development of the fine arts in Italy that painting in Venice reached maturity later than in Florence. Owing to this circ.u.mstance one chief aspect of the Renaissance, its material magnificence and freedom, received consummate treatment at the hands of t.i.tian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. To idealise the sensualities of the external universe, to achieve for colour what the Florentines had done for form, to invest the worldly grandeur of human life at one of its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of the highest art, was what these great artists were called on to accomplish. Their task could not have been so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as in the sixteenth, if the development of the aesthetic sense had been more premature among the Venetians.
Venice was precisely fitted for the part her painters had to play. Free, isolated, wealthy, powerful; famous throughout Europe for the pomp of her state equipage, and for the immorality of her private manners; ruled by a prudent aristocracy, who spent vast wealth on public shows and on the maintenance of a more than imperial civic majesty: Venice, with her pavement of liquid chrysoprase, with her palaces of porphyry and marble, her frescoed facades, her quays and squares aglow with the costumes of the Levant, her lagoons afloat with the galleys of all nations, her churches floored with mosaics, her silvery domes and ceilings glittering with sculpture bathed in molten gold: Venice luxurious in the light and colour of a vaporous atmosphere, where sea-mists rose into the mounded summer clouds; arched over by the broad expanse of sky, bounded only by the horizon of waves and plain and distant mountain ranges, and reflected in all its many hues of sunrise and sunset upon the gla.s.sy surface of smooth waters: Venice asleep like a miracle of opal or of pearl upon the bosom of an undulating lake:--here and here only on the face of the whole globe was the unique city wherein the pride of life might combine with the l.u.s.tre of the physical universe to create and stimulate in the artist a sense of all that was most sumptuous in the pageant of the world of sense.
There is colour in flowers. Gardens of tulips are radiant, and mountain valleys touch the soul with the beauty of their pure and gemlike hues.
Therefore the painters of Flanders and of Umbria, John van Eyck and Gentile da Fabriano, penetrated some of the secrets of the world of colour. But what are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, anemone, or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow gra.s.ses or trained in quiet cloister garden-beds, when compared with that melodrama of flame and gold and rose and orange and azure, which the skies and lagoons of Venice yield almost daily to the eyes? The Venetians had no green fields and trees, no garden borders, no blossoming orchards, to teach them the tender suggestiveness, the quaint poetry of isolated or contrasted tints. Their meadows were the fruitless furrows of the Adriatic, hued like a peac.o.c.k"s neck; they called the pearl-sh.e.l.ls of their Lido flowers, _fior di mare_.
Nothing distracted their attention from the glories of morning and of evening presented to them by their sea and sky. It was in consequence of this that the Venetians conceived colour heroically, not as a matter of missal-margins or of subordinate decoration, but as a motive worthy in itself of sublime treatment. In like manner, hedged in by no limitary hills, contracted by no city walls, stifled by no narrow streets, but open to the liberal airs of heaven and ocean, the Venetians understood s.p.a.ce and imagined pictures almost boundless in their immensity. Light, colour, air, s.p.a.ce: those are the elemental conditions of Venetian art; of those the painters weaved their ideal world for beautiful and proud humanity.
Sh.e.l.ley"s description of a Venetian sunset strikes the keynote to Venetian painting:[265]--
As those who pause on some delightful way, Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood Looking upon the evening and the flood, Which lay between the city and the sh.o.r.e, Paved with the image of the sky: the h.o.a.r And airy Alps, towards the north appeared, Through mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared Between the east and west; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry, Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep west into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many-folded hills--they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido through the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peaked isles-- And then, as if the earth and sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade,"
Said my companion, "I will show you soon A better station." So, o"er the lagune We glided: and from that funereal bark I leaned, and saw the city; and could mark How from their many isles, in evening"s gleam, Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
With this we may compare the following extract from a letter, addressed in May 1544 to t.i.tian, by one of the most unprincipled of literary bandits who have ever disgraced humanity, but who nevertheless was solemnised to the spirit of true poetry by the grandiose aspect of nature as it appeared to him in Venice. That Pietro Aretino should have so deeply felt the charm of natural beauty in an age when even the greatest artists and poets sought inspiration in human life rather than the outer world, is a significant fact. It seems to ill.u.s.trate the necessity whereby Venice became the cradle of the art of nature.[266] "Having, dear Sir, and my best gossip, supped alone to the injury of my custom, or, to speak more truly, supped in the company of all the boredoms of a cursed quartan fever, which will not let me taste the flavour of any food, I rose from table sated with the same disgust with which I had sat down to it. In this mood I went and leaned my arms upon the sill outside my window, and throwing my chest and nearly all my body on the marble, abandoned myself to the contemplation of the spectacle presented by the innumerable boats, filled with foreigners as well as people of the city, which gave delight not merely to the gazers, but also to the Grand Ca.n.a.l itself, that perpetual delight of all who plough its waters. From this animated scene, all of a sudden, like one who from mere _ennui_ knows not how to occupy his mind, I turned my eyes to heaven, which, from the moment when G.o.d made it, was never adorned with such painted loveliness of lights and shadows.
The whole region of the air was what those who envy you, because they are unable to be you, would fain express. To begin with, the buildings of Venice, though of solid stone, seemed made of some ethereal substance.
Then the sky was full of variety--here clear and ardent, there dulled and overclouded. What marvellous clouds there were! Ma.s.ses of them in the centre of the scene hung above the house-roofs, while the immediate part was formed of a grey tint inclining to dark. I gazed astonished at the varied colours they displayed. The nearer ma.s.ses burned with flames of sunset; the more remote blushed with a blaze of crimson less afire. Oh, how splendidly did Nature"s pencil treat and dispose that airy landscape, keeping the sky apart from the palaces, just as t.i.tian does! On one side the heavens showed a greenish-blue, on another a bluish-green, invented verily by the caprice of Nature, who is mistress of the greatest masters.
With her lights and her darks, there she was harmonising, toning, and bringing out into relief, just as she wished. Seeing which, I who know that your pencil is the spirit of her inmost soul, cried aloud thrice or four tines, "Oh, t.i.tian! where are you now?""
In order to understand the destiny of Venice in art, it is not enough to concentrate attention on the peculiarities of her physical environment.
Potent as these were in the creation of her style, the political and social conditions of the Republic require also to be taken into account.
Among Italian cities Venice was unique. She alone was tranquil in her empire, unimpeded in her const.i.tutional development, independent of Church interference, undisturbed by the cross purposes and intrigues of the Despots, inhabited by merchants who were princes, and by a free-born people who had never seen war at their gates. The serenity of undisturbed security, the luxury of wealth ama.s.sed abroad and liberally spent at home, gave a physiognomy of ease and proud self-confidence to all her edifices.
The grim and anxious struggles of the Middle Ages left no mark on Venice.
How different was this town from Florence, every inch of whose domain could tell of civic warfare, whose pa.s.sionate aspirations after independence ended in the despotism of the bourgeois Medici, whose repeated revolutions had slavery for their climax, whose grey palaces bore on their fronts the stamp of mediaeval vigilance, whose spirit was incarnated in Dante the exile, whose enslavement forced from Michael Angelo those groans of a chained t.i.tan expressed in the marbles of S.
Lorenzo! It is not an insignificant, though a slight, detail, that the predominant colour of Florence is brown, while the predominant colour of Venice is that of mother-of-pearl, concealing within its general whiteness every tint that can be placed upon the palette of a painter. The conditions of Florence stimulated mental energy and turned the forces of the soul inwards. Those of Venice inclined the individual to accept life as he found it. Instead of exciting him to think, they disposed him to enjoy, or to acquire by industry the means of manifold enjoyment. To represent in art the intellectual strivings of the Renaissance was the task of Florence and her sons; to create a monument of Renaissance magnificence was the task of Venice. Without Venice the modern world could not have produced that flower of sensuous and unreflective loveliness in painting, which is worthy to stand beside the highest product of the Greek genius in sculpture. For Athena from her Parthenon stretches the hand to Venezia enthroned in the ducal palace. The broad brows and earnest eyes of the h.e.l.lenic G.o.ddess are of one divine birth and lineage with the golden hair and superb carriage of the sea-queen.
It is in the heart of Venice, in the House of the Republic, that the Venetian painters, considered as the interpreters of worldly splendour, fulfilled their function with the most complete success. Centuries contributed to make the Ducal Palace what it is. The ma.s.sive colonnades and Gothic loggias of the external bas.e.m.e.nt date from the thirteenth century; their sculpture belongs to the age when Niccola Pisano"s genius was in the ascendant. The square fabric of the palace, so beautiful in the irregularity of its pointed windows, so singular in its mosaic diaper of pink and white, was designed at the same early period. The inner court and the facade that overhangs the lateral ca.n.a.l, display the handiwork of Sansovino. The halls of the palace--s.p.a.cious chambers where the Senate a.s.sembled, where amba.s.sadors approached the Doge, where the Savi deliberated, where the Council of Ten conducted their inquisition--are walled and roofed with pictures of inestimable value, encased in framework of carved oak; overlaid with burnished gold. Supreme art--the art of the imagination perfected with delicate and skilful care in detail--is made in these proud halls the minister of mundane pomp. In order that the gold brocade of the ducal robes, that the scarlet and crimson of the Venetian senator, might, be duly harmonised by the richness of their surroundings, it was necessary that canvases measured by the square yard, and rendered priceless by the authentic handiwork of t.i.tian, Tintoret, and Veronese, should glow upon the walls and ceilings. A more insolent display of public wealth--a more lavish outpouring of human genius in the service of State pageantry, cannot be imagined.
Sublime over all allegories and histories depicted in those mult.i.tudes of paintings, sits Venezia herself enthroned and crowned, the personification of haughtiness and power. Figured as a regal lady, with yellow hair tightly knotted round a small head poised upon her upright throat and ample shoulders, Venice takes her chair of sovereignty--as mistress of the ocean to whom Neptune and the Tritons offer pearls, as empress of the globe at whose footstool wait Justice with the sword and Peace with the olive branch, as a queen of heaven exalted to the clouds. They have made her a G.o.ddess, those great painters; they have produced a mythus, and personified in native loveliness that bride of the sea, their love, their lady. The beauty of Venetian women and the glory of Venetian empire find their meeting point in her, and live as the spirit of Athens lived in Pallas Promachos. On every side, above, around, wherever the eye falls in those vast rooms, are seen the deeds of Venice--painted histories of her triumphs over emperors and popes and infidels, or allegories of her greatness--scenes wherein the Doges perform acts of faith, with S. Mark for their protector, and with Venezia for their patroness. The saints in Paradise, ma.s.sed together by Tintoretto and by Palma, mingle with mythologies of Greece and Rome, and episodes of pure idyllic painting.
Religion in these pictures was a matter of parade, an adjunct to the costly public life of the Republic. We need not, therefore, conclude that it was unreal. Such as it was, the religion of the Venetian masters is indeed as genuine as that of Fra Angelico or Albert Durer. But it was the faith, not of humble men or of mystics, not of profound thinkers or ecstatic visionaries, so much as of courtiers and statesmen, of senators and merchants, for whom religion was a function among other functions, not a thing apart, not a source of separate and supreme vitality. Even as Christians, the Venetians lived a life separate from the rest of Italy.
Their Church claimed independence of the see of Rome, and the enthusiasm of S. Francis was but faintly felt in the lagoons. Siena in her hour of need dedicated herself to Madonna; Florence in the hour of her regeneration gave herself to Christ; Venice remained under the ensign of the leonine S. Mark. While the cities of Lombardy and Central Italy ran wild with revivalism and religious panics, the Venetians maintained their calm, and never suffered piety to exceed the limits of political prudence.
There is, therefore, no mystical exaltation in the faith depicted by her artists. That Tintoretto could have painted the saints in glory--a countless mult.i.tude of congregated forms, a sea whereof the waves are souls--as a background for State ceremony, shows the positive and realistic att.i.tude of mind from which the most imaginative of Venetian masters started, when he undertook the most exalted of religious themes.
Paradise is a fact, we may fancy Tintoretto reasoned; and it is easier to fill a quarter of an acre of canvas with a picture of Paradise than with any other subject, because the figures can be arranged in concentric tiers round Christ and Madonna in glory.
There is a little sketch by Guardi representing a masked ball in the Council Chamber where the "Paradise" of Tintoretto fills a wall. The men are in periwigs and long waistcoats; the ladies wear hoops, patches, fans, high heels, and powder. Bowing, promenading, intriguing, exchanging compliments or repartees, they move from point to point; while from the billowy surge of saints, Moses with the table of the law and the Magdalen with her adoring eyes of penitence look down upon them. Tintoretto could not but have foreseen that the world of living pettiness and pa.s.sion would perpetually jostle with his world of painted sublimities and sanct.i.ties in that vast hall. Yet he did not on that account shrink from the task or fail in its accomplishment. Paradise existed: therefore it could be painted; and he was called upon to paint it here. If the fine gentlemen and ladies below felt out of harmony with the celestial host, so much the worse for them. In this practical spirit the Venetian masters approached religious art, and such was the sphere appointed for it in the pageantry of the Republic. When Paolo Veronese was examined by the Holy Office respecting some supposed irreverence in a sacred picture, his answers clearly proved that in planning it he had thought less of its spiritual significance than of its aesthetic effect.[267]
In the Ducal Palace the Venetian art of the Renaissance culminates; and here we might pause a moment to consider the difference between these paintings and the mediaeval frescoes of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena.[268]
The Sienese painters consecrated all their abilities to the expression of thoughts, theories of political self-government in a free State, and devotional ideas. The citizen who read the lesson of the Sala della Pace was instructed in his duties to G.o.d and to the State. The Venetian painters, as we have seen, exalted Venice and set forth her acts of power.
Their work is a glorification of the Republic; but no doctrine is inculcated, and no system of thought is conveyed to the mind through the eye. Daily pacing the saloons of the palace, Doge and n.o.ble were reminded of the greatness of the State they represented. They were not invited to reflect upon the duties of the governor and governed. Their imaginations were dilated and their pride roused by the spectacle of Venice seated like a G.o.ddess in her home. Of all the secular States of Italy the Republic of S. Mark"s alone produced this mythical ideal of the body politic, self-sustained and independent of the citizens, compelling their allegiance, and sustaining them through generations with the life of its organic unity.[269] The artists had no reason to paint thoughts and theories. It was enough to set forth Venice and to ill.u.s.trate her acts.
Long before Venetian painting reached a climax in the decorative triumphs of the Ducal Palace, the masters of the school had formed a style expressive of the spirit of the Renaissance, considered as the spirit of free enjoyment and living energy. To trace the history of Venetian painting is to follow through its several stages the growth of that mastery over colour and sensuous beauty which was perfected in the works of t.i.tian and his contemporaries.[270] Under the Vivarini of Murano the Venetian school in its infancy began with a selection from the natural world of all that struck them as most brilliant. No other painters of their age in Italy employed such glowing colours, or showed a more marked predilection for the imitation of fruits, rich stuffs, architectural canopies, jewels, and landscape backgrounds. Their piety, unlike the mysticism of the Sienese and the deep thought of the Florentine masters, is somewhat superficial and conventional. The merit of their devotional pictures consists of simplicity, vivacity, and joyousness. Our Lady and her court of saints seem living and breathing upon earth. There is no atmosphere of tranced solemnity surrounding them, like that which gives peculiar meaning to similar works of the Van Eycks and Memling--artists, by the way, who in many important respects are more nearly allied than any others to the spirit of the first age of Venetian painting.[271]
What the Vivarini began, the three Bellini,[272] with Crivelli, Carpaccio, Mansueti, Basaiti, Catena, Cima da Conegliano, Bissolo, Cordegliaghi, continued. Bright costumes, distinct and sunny landscapes, broad backgrounds of architecture, large skies, polished armour, gilded cornices, young faces of fisherboys and country girls,[273] grave faces of old men brown with sea-wind and sunlight, withered faces of women hearty in a hale old age, the strong manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity of patrician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the rosy whiteness and amber-coloured tresses of the daughters of the Adriatic and lagoons--these are the source of inspiration to the Venetians of the second period.
Mantegna, a few miles distant, at Padua, was working out his ideal of severely cla.s.sical design. Yet he scarcely touched the manner of the Venetians with his influence, though Gian Bellini was his brother-in-law and pupil, and though his genius, in grasp of matter and in management of composition, soared above his neighbours. Lionardo da Vinci at Milan was perfecting his problems of psychology in painting, offering to the world solutions of the greatest difficulties in the delineation of the spirit by expression. Yet not a trace of Lionardo"s subtle play of light and shadow upon thoughtful features can be discerned in the work of the Bellini. For them the mysteries of the inner and the outer world had no attraction. The externals of a full and vivid existence fascinated their imagination.
Their poetry and their piety were alike simple and objective. How to depict the world as it is seen--a miracle of varying lights and melting hues, a pageant substantial to the touch and concrete to the eyes, a combination of forms defined by colours more than outlines--was their task. They did not reach their end by anatomy, a.n.a.lysis, and reconstruction. They undertook to paint just what they felt and saw.
Very instructive are the wall-pictures of this period, painted not in fres...o...b..t on canvas by Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, for the decoration of the Scuole of S. Ursula and S. Croce.[274] Not only do these bring before us the life of Venice in its manifold reality, but they ill.u.s.trate the tendency of the Venetian masters to express the actual world, rather than to formulate an ideal of the fancy or to search the secrets of the soul. This realism, if the name can be applied to pictures so poetical as those of Carpaccio, is not, like the Florentine realism, hard and scientific. A natural feeling for grace and a sense of romance inspire the artist, and breathe from every figure that he paints. The type of beauty produced is charming by its negligence and _navete_; it is not thought out with pains or toilsomely elaborated.[275]
Among the loveliest motives used in the altar-pieces of this period might be mentioned the boy-angels playing flutes and mandolines beneath Madonna on the steps of her throne. There are usually three of them, seated, or sometimes standing. They hold their instruments of music as though they had just ceased from singing, and were ready to recommence at the pleasure of their mistress. Meanwhile there is a silence in the celestial company, through which the still voice of the praying heart is heard, a silence corresponding to the hushed mood of the worshipper.[276] The children are accustomed to the holy place; therefore their att.i.tudes are both reverent and natural. They are more earthly than Fra Angelico"s melodists, and yet they are not precisely of human lineage. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that they strike the keynote of Venetian devotion, at once real and devoid of pietistic rapture.
Gian Bellini brought the art of this second period to completion. In his sacred pictures the reverential spirit of early Italian painting is combined with a feeling for colour and a dexterity in its manipulation peculiar to Venice. Bellini cannot be called a master of the full Renaissance. He falls into the same cla.s.s as Francia and Perugino, who adhered to _quattrocento_ modes of thought and sentiment, while attaining at isolated points to the freedom of the Renaissance. In him the colourists of the next age found an absolute teacher; no one has surpa.s.sed him in the difficult art of giving tone to pure tints in combination.
There is a picture of Bellini"s in S. Zaccaria at Venice--Madonna enthroned with Saints--where the skill of the colourist may be said to culminate in unsurpa.s.sable perfection. The whole painting is bathed in a soft but luminous haze of gold; yet each figure has its individuality of treatment, the glowing fire of S. Peter contrasting with the pearly coolness of the drapery and flesh-tints of the Magdalen. No brush-work is perceptible. Surface and substance have been elaborated into one harmonious richness that defies a.n.a.lysis. Between this picture, so strong in its smoothness, and any masterpiece of Velasquez, so rugged in its strength, what a wide abyss of inadequate half-achievement, of smooth feebleness and feeble ruggedness, exists!
Giorgione, did we but possess enough of his authentic works to judge by, would be found the first painter of the true Renaissance among the Venetians, the inaugurate of the third and great period.[277] He died at the age of thirty-six, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown. Time has destroyed the last vestige of his frescoes. Criticism has reduced the number of his genuine easel pictures to half a dozen. He exists as a great name. The part he played in the development of Venetian art was similar to that of Marlowe in the history of our drama. He first cut painting altogether adrift from mediaeval moorings, and launched it on the waves of the Renaissance liberty. While equal as a colourist to Bellini, though in a different and more sensuous region, Giorgione, by the variety and inventiveness of his conception, proved himself a painter of the calibre of t.i.tian. Sacred subjects he seems to have but rarely treated, unless such purely idyllic pictures as the "Finding of Moses" in the Uffizzi, and the "Meeting of Jacob and Rachel" at Dresden deserve the name. Allegories of deep and problematic meaning, the key whereof has to be found in states of the emotion rather than, in thoughts, delighted him. He may be said to have invented the Venetian species of romance picture, where an episode in a novella forms the motive of the painting.[278] Nor was he deficient in tragic power, as the tremendous study for a Lucrece in the Uffizzi collection sufficiently proves. In his drawings he models the form without outline by ma.s.sive distribution of light and dark. In style they are the very opposite of Lionardo"s clearly defined studies touched with the metal point upon prepared paper. They suggest colouring, and are indeed the designs of a great colourist, who saw things under the conditions of their tints and tone.
Of the undisputed pictures by Giorgione, the grandest is the "Monk at the Clavichord," in the Pitti Palace at Florence.[279] The young man has his fingers on the keys; he is modulating in a mood of grave and sustained emotion; his head is turned away towards an old man standing near him. On the other side of the instrument is a boy. These two figures are but foils and adjuncts to the musician in the middle; and the whole interest of his face lies in its concentrated feeling--the very soul of music, as expressed in Mr. Robert Browning"s "Abt Vogler," pa.s.sing through his eyes.
This power of painting the portrait of an emotion, of depicting by the features a deep and powerful but tranquil moment of the inner life, must have been possessed by Giorgione in an eminent degree. We find it again in the so-called "Begrussung" of the Dresden Gallery.[280] The picture is a large landscape, Jacob and Rachel meet and salute each other with a kiss.
But the shepherd lying beneath the shadow of a chestnut tree beside a well has a whole Arcadia of intense yearning in the eyes of sympathy he fixes on the lovers. Something of this faculty, it may be said in pa.s.sing, descended to Bonifazio, whose romance pictures are among the most charming products of Venetian art, and one of whose singing women in the feast of Dives has the Giorgionesque fulness of inner feeling.
Fate has dealt less unkindly with t.i.tian, Tintoret, and Veronese than with Giorgione. The works of these artists, in whom the Venetian Renaissance attained completion, have been preserved in large numbers and in excellent condition. Chronologically speaking, t.i.tian, the contemporary of Giorgione, precedes Tintoretto, and Tintoretto is somewhat earlier than Veronese.[281] But for the purpose of criticism the three painters may be considered together as the representatives of three marked aspects in the fully developed Venetian style.
Tintoretto, called by the Italians the thunderbolt of painting, because of his vehement impulsiveness and rapidity of execution, soars above his brethren by the faculty of pure imagination. It was he who brought to its perfection the poetry of _chiaroscuro_, expressing moods of pa.s.sion and emotion by brusque lights, luminous half-shadows, and semi-opaque darkness, no less unmistakably than Beethoven by symphonic modulations. He too engrafted on the calm and natural Venetian manner something of the Michael Angelesque sublimity, and sought to vary by dramatic movement the romantic motives of his school. In his work, more than in that of his contemporaries, Venetian art ceased to be decorative and idyllic.