He saw beauty in his own way, and was not impelled to see it differently by coming into contact with other artists, however great. Unlike Raphael, he was not a great master of the art of composition. In the little picture before us the grouping of the figures is not what may be called inevitable, like that in the "Knight"s Dream." It seems as though one day when Giorgione was musing on the beauties of the world, and the blemishes of life, even life in Venice, he thought of some far-off time beyond the dawn of history when all men lived in peace.
The ancient Greeks called this perfect time the "Golden Age" of the world. In many ways their idea of it tallies with the description of the Garden of Eden, and they were always contrasting with it the "Iron Age" in which they thought they lived, as the Hebrews contrasted the life of Adam and Eve in the garden with their own. As the fancy flashed across Giorgione"s mind, perchance he saw some just king of whom his subjects felt no fear seated upon a throne like this. A dreamy youth plays soft music to him, and another hands him flowers and fruit. Books lie strewn upon the steps, and a child stands in a reverent att.i.tude before him. Wild and domestic animals live together in harmony; the ground is carpeted with flowers; all is peaceful. Such a subject suited the temperament of Giorgione, and he painted it in the romantic mood in which it was conceived. Nothing could be further from everyday life than this little scene. It has the unlaboured look that suits such an improvised subject. Of course no one knows for certain that this is a picture of the Golden Age, and you may make up any story you like about it for yourselves. That is one of the charms of the picture.
It has been said that the throned one is celebrating his birthday, and that his little heir is reciting him a birthday ode accompanied by music. You may believe this if you like, but how do you then account for the leopard and the peac.o.c.k living in such harmony together?
[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE GOLDEN AGE"
From the picture by Giorgione, in the National Gallery, London]
Giorgione painted a few sacred pictures and many mythological scenes, besides several very beautiful portraits of dreamy-looking poets and n.o.blemen. But even when he ill.u.s.trated some well-known tale, he did not care to seize upon the dramatic moment that gives the crisis of the story, as Giotto would have done, and as the painter of our next picture does. Violent action did not attract him. Whatever the subject, if it were possible to group the figures together at a moment when they were beautifully doing nothing, he did so. But he liked still more to paint ideal scenes from his own fancy, where young people sit in easy att.i.tudes upon the gra.s.s, conversing for an instant in the intervals of the music they make upon pipes and guitar. He was the first artist, so far as I know, to paint these half real, half imaginary scenes, of which our picture may be one. In all of them landscape bears an important part, and in some the background has become the picture and completely subordinated the figures. In this little "Golden Age"
the landscape is quiet in tone, tinged with melancholy, romantic, to suit the mood of the figures. Its colouring, though rich, is subdued, more like the tints of autumn than the fresh hues of spring. The Venetians excelled in their treatment of colour. They lived in an uncommon world of it. Giorgione saw his picture in his mind"s eye as a blaze of rich colour; he did not see the figures sharply outlined against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael"s "Knight"s Dream." That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard II. diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione"s eye outline was nothing without colour and light and shade. The body of the King upon the throne in our picture is ma.s.sed against the background, but there is no definite outline to divide it from the tree behind. In this respect Giorgione was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures of a still later time.
Giorgione was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague in 1510, the same year as Botticelli. His master, Giovanni Bellini, who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great t.i.tian, his fellow-pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century or more.
t.i.tian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art.
His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgione, except during the short s.p.a.ce of time when he painted under the spell of his brother artist. It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between t.i.tian"s early and Giorgione"s late work. t.i.tian perhaps had the greater intellect. Giorgione"s pictures vary according to his mood, while t.i.tian"s express a less changeable personality. In spite of his youth, Giorgione made a profound impression upon all the artists of his time.
They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy mood. It was almost as though Giorgione had absorbed the romance of Venice into his pictures, so that for a time no Venetian painter could express Venetian romance except in Giorgione"s way.
But in 1518, eight years after Giorgione"s death, another great innovating master was born at Venice, Tintoret by name, who in his turn opened new visions of the world to the artists of his day. While painting in the rest of Italy was becoming mannered and sentimental, lacking in power and originality, Tintoret in Venice was creating masterpieces with a very fury of invention and a corresponding swiftness of hand. He was his own chief teacher. Outside his studio he wrote upon a sign to inform or attract pupils--"The design of Michelangelo and the colouring of t.i.tian." Profound study of the works of these two masters is manifest in his own. Like Michelangelo he worked pa.s.sionately rather than with the sober competence of t.i.tian. His thronging visions, his mult.i.tudinous and often vast canvases are a surpa.s.sing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures.
His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale.
He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance had deviated but little from it. In Tintoret the freedom of the Renaissance reached its height. For him tradition had no fetters. When he painted a picture of Paradise for the Doge"s Palace it measured 84 by 34 feet, and contained literally hundreds of figures. His imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a figure. New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush in exhaustless mult.i.tude.
It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret"s most famous works, still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which they were painted, or in which they have been brought together. But the National Gallery is fortunate in possessing one relatively small canvas of his which shows some of his finest qualities. The subject of St. George slaying the dragon was not a new one. It had been painted by Raphael and by several of the earlier Venetian painters, but Tintoret"s treatment of it was all his own. In the earlier pictures, the princess, for whose sake St. George fights the dragon, was a little figure in the background fleeing in terror. St. George occupied the chief place, as he does upon the back of our gold sovereigns, where the princess has been left out altogether. Tintoret makes her flee, but she is running towards the spectator, and so, in her flight, stands out the most conspicuous figure. One of the victims that the dragon has slain lies behind her. In the distance St. George fights with all his might against the powers of evil, whilst "the splendour of G.o.d"
blazes in the sky. There is a vividness and power about the picture that proclaims the hand of Tintoret. In contrast to Giorgione he liked to paint figures in motion, yet he was as typical an outcome of Venetian romance as the earlier painter. Nothing could be more like a fairy-tale than this picture. It was no listless dreamer that painted it, but one with a gorgeous imagination and yet a full knowledge of the world, enabling him to give substance to his visions. Tintoret"s stormy landscapes are as beautiful in their way as Giorgione"s dreamy ones, and each carries out the mood of the rest of the picture. This one is full of power, mystery, and romance. Tintoret had modelled his colouring upon t.i.tian and was by nature a great colourist, but too often he used bad materials that have turned black with the lapse of years. In this picture you see his colour as it was meant to be, rich, and boldly harmonious. The vivid red and blue of the princess"s clothes are a daring combination with the brilliant green of the landscape, but Tintoret knew what he was doing, and the result is superb. With his death in 1594 the best of Venetian painting came to an end.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. GEORGE DESTROYING THE DRAGON From the picture by Tintoretto, in the National Gallery, London]
There were as many excellent painters in the fairy city as there had been in Florence; contemporaries of Giovanni Bellini (who, in his early years, worked in close companionship with Mantegna, his brother-in-law), as well as contemporaries of t.i.tian and Tintoret.
The painter Veronese, for instance, died a few years before Tintoret.
For pomp and pageantry his great canvases are eminent. Standing in some room of the Doge"s Palace, decorated entirely by his hand, we are carried back to the time when Venice was Queen of the Seas, unrivalled for magnificence and wealth. He was the Master of Ceremonies, before whom other painters of pomps and vanities pale. Gorgeous colouring is what all these Venetian painters had in common. We see it in the early days when Venetian art was struggling into existence.
In her art, as in her skies and waters, we are overwhelmed by a vision of colour unsurpa.s.sed.
We have now touched on a few prominent points in the history of painting in Italy from its early rise in Florence with Giotto; through its period of widespread excellence in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, when Raphael, Giorgione, Michelangelo, and Leonardo were all painting masterpieces in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan at the same moment; to its final blaze of sunset grandeur in Venice. It is time to return to the north of Europe. In the next chapter we will try to gain a few glimpses of the progress of painting in Germany, Holland, Flanders, and our own country.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH
The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world which could not long remain confined to Italy. There were then, as now, roads over the pa.s.ses of the Alps by which merchants and scholars were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes of thought stirred in the south.
In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the art of the north. Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent; so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events in wonderful detail. They were a strictly practical people whose painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously minute and veracious. But they were not a handsome race, and their models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came handiest and by no means the best looking. Thus the figures in their pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of vigour, truth, and skill.
When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of Raphael, in whom grace was native, they fell in love with his work and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did. But to them grace was not G.o.d-given, and in their attempt to achieve it, their pictures became sentimental and postured, and the naive simplicity and everyday truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished.
The influence of the Van Eycks had not been confined to Flanders.
Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected. They learnt the new technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eycks in the fifteenth century. Like them, too, they discarded gold backgrounds and tried to paint men and women as they really looked, instead of in the old conventional fashion of the Middle Ages. Schools of painting grew up in several of the more important German towns, till towards the end of the fifteenth century two German artists were born, Albert Durer at Nuremberg in 1471, and Hans Holbein the younger at Augsburg in 1497, who deserve to rank with the greatest painters of the time in any country.
Durer is commonly regarded as the most typically German of artists, though his father was Hungarian, and as a matter of fact he stands very much alone. His pictures and engravings are "long, long thoughts."
Every inch of the surface is weighted with meaning. His cast of mind, indeed, was more that of a philosopher than that of an artist. In a drawing which Durer made of himself in the looking-gla.s.s at the age of thirteen, we see a thoughtful little face gazing out upon the world with questioning eyes. Already the delicacy of the lines is striking, and the hair so beautifully finished that we can antic.i.p.ate the later artist whose pictures are remarkable for so surprising a wealth of detail. The characteristics of the Flemish School, carefulness of workmanship and indifference to the physical beauty of the model, to which the Italians were so sensitive, continued in his work. For thoroughness his portraits can be compared with those of John van Eyck.
In the National Gallery his father lives again for us in a picture of wonderful power and insight.
Durer was akin to Leonardo in the desire for more and yet more knowledge.
Like him he wrote treatises on fortifications, human proportions, geometry, and perspective, and filled his sketchbooks with studies of plants, animals, and natural scenery. His eager mind employed itself with the whys and wherefores of things, not satisfied with the simple pleasure that sight bestows. In his engravings, even more than in his pictures, we ponder the hidden meanings; we are not content to look and rejoice in beauty, though there is much to charm the eye. His problems were the problems of life as well as the problems of art.
The other great artist of Germany, Hans Holbein the younger, was the son of Hans Holbein the elder, a much esteemed painter in Augsburg.
This town was on the princ.i.p.al trade route between Northern Italy and the North Sea, so that Venetians and Milanese were constantly pa.s.sing through and bringing to it much wealth and news of the luxury of their own southern life. As a result the citizens of Augsburg dressed more expensively and decorated their houses more lavishly than did the citizens of any other town in Germany. After a boyhood and youth spent at Augsburg, Holbein removed to Basle. He was a designer of wood-engravings and goldsmiths work and of architectural decoration, besides being a painter. In those days of change in South Germany, artists had to be willing to turn their hands to any kind of work they could get to do. North of the Alps, where the Reformation was upsetting old habits, an artist"s life was far from being easy. Reformers made bonfires of sacred pictures and sculptured wooden altar-pieces. Indeed the Reformation was a cruel blow to artists, for it took away Church patronage and made them dependent for employment upon merchants and princes. Except at courts or in great mercantile towns they fared extremely ill. Altar-pieces were rarely wanted, and there were no more legends of saints to be painted upon the walls of churches.
The demand for portraiture, on the other hand, was increasing, whilst the growth of printing created a new field for design in the preparation of woodcuts for the ill.u.s.tration of books. Thus it came to pa.s.s that the printer Froben, at Basle, was one of the young Holbein"s chief patrons. We find him designing a wonderful series of ill.u.s.trations of _The Dance of Death_, as well as drawing another set to ill.u.s.trate _The Praise of Folly_, written by Erasmus, who was then living in Basle and frequenting the house of Froben. Erasmus was a typical scholar of the sixteenth century, belonging rather to civilized society as a whole than to any one country. He moved about Europe from one centre of learning to another, alike at home in educated circles in England, Flanders, and Germany. He had lived for some time in England and knew that there were men there with wealth who would employ a good painter to paint their portraits if they could find one. Erasmus himself sat to Holbein, and sent the finished portrait as a present to his friend Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England.
In England, owing to the effects of the Wars of the Roses, good painters no longer existed. A century of neglect had destroyed English painting.
Henry VIII., therefore, had to look to foreign lands for his court painter, and where was he to come from? France was the nearest country, but the French King was in the same predicament as Henry. He obtained his painters from Italy, and at one time secured the services of Leonardo da Vinci; but Italy was a long way off and it would suit Henry better to get a painter from Flanders or Germany if it were possible.
So Erasmus advised Holbein to go to England, and gave him a letter to Sir Thomas More. On this first visit in 1526, he painted the portraits of More and his whole family, and of many other distinguished men; but it was not till his second visit in 1532 that he became Henry VIII."s court painter. In this capacity he had to decorate the walls of the King"s palaces, design the pageantry of the Royal processions, and paint the portraits of the King"s family. Although Holbein could do and did do anything that was demanded of him, what he liked best was to paint portraits. Romantic subjects such as the fight of St.
George and the dragon, or an idyll of the Golden Age, little suited the artistic leanings of a German. To a German or a Fleming the world of facts meant more than the world of imagination; the painting of men and women as they looked in everyday life was more congenial to them than the painting of saints and imaginary princesses.
But how unimportant seems all talk of contrasting imagination and reality when we see them fused together in this charming portrait of Edward, the child Prince of Wales. It belongs to the end of the year 1538, when he was just fifteen months old, and the imagination of Holbein equipped him with the orb of sovereignty in the guise of a baby"s rattle. It is in the coupling of distant kingship and present babyhood that the painter works his magic and reveals his charm.
[Ill.u.s.tration: EDWARD, PRINCE OF WALES, AFTERWARDS EDWARD VI.
From the picture by Holbein, in the Collection of the Earl of Yarborough, London]
If you recall for a moment what you know of Henry VIII., his masterful pride, his magnificence, his determination to do and have exactly what he wanted, you will understand that his demands upon his court painter for a portrait of his only son and heir must have been high. No one could say enough about this wonderful child to please Henry, for all that was said in praise of him redounded to the glory of his father.
The following is a translation of the Latin poem beneath the picture:
Child, of thy Father"s virtues be thou heir, Since none on earth with him may well compare; Hardly to him might Heaven yield a son By whom his father"s fame should be out-done.
So, if thou equal such a mighty sire, No higher can the hopes of man aspire; If thou surpa.s.s him, thou shalt honoured be O"er all that ruled before, or shall rule after thee.[3]
[Footnote 3: Translated by Miss K. K. Radford.]
In justice be it said that the little Edward VI. was of an extraordinary precocity. When he was eight years old he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer in Latin. When he was nine he knew four books of Cato by heart as well as much of the Bible. To show you the way in which royal infants were treated in those days,--we read that at the time this picture was painted, the little prince had a household of his own, consisting of a lady-mistress, a nurse, rockers for his cradle, a chamberlain, vice-chamberlain, steward, comptroller, almoner, and dean. It is hard to believe that the child is only fifteen months old, so erect is the att.i.tude, so intelligent the face. The clothes are sumptuous. A piece of stuff similar in material and design to the sleeve exists to-day in a museum in Brussels.
In the best sense Holbein was the most Italian of the Germans. For in him, as in the gifted Italian, grace was innate. He may have paid a brief visit to Italy, but he never lived there for any length of time, nor did he try to paint like an Italian as some northern artists unhappily tried to do. The German merits, solidity, boldness, detailed finish, and grasp of character, he possessed in a high degree, but he combined with them a beauty of line, delicacy of modelling, and richness of colour almost southern. His pictures appeal more to the eye and less to the mind than do those of Durer. Where Durer sought to instruct, Holbein was content to please. But like a German he spared no pains. He painted the stuff and the necklace, the globe and the feather, with the finish of an artist who was before all things a good workman. Observe how delicately the chubby little fingers are drawn.
Holbein"s detailed treatment of the accessories of a portrait is only less than the care expended in depicting the face. He studied faces, and his portraits, one may almost say, are at once images of and commentaries on the people they depict. Thus his gallery of pictures of Henry and his contemporaries show us at once the reflexion of them as in a mirror, and the vision of them as beheld by a singularly discerning and experienced eye that not only saw but comprehended.
This is the more remarkable because Holbein was not always able to paint and finish his portraits in the presence of the living model, as painters insist on doing nowadays. His sitters were generally busy men who granted him but one sitting, so that his method was to make a drawing of the head in red chalk and to write upon the margin notes of anything he particularly wanted to remember. Afterwards he painted the head from the drawing, but had the actual clothes and jewels sent him to work from.
In the Royal Collection at Windsor there are a number of these portrait drawings of great interest to us, since many of the portraits painted from them have been lost. As a record of remarkable people of that day they are invaluable, for in a few powerful strokes Holbein could set down the likeness of any face. But when he came to paint the portrait he was not satisfied with a mere likeness. He painted too "his habit as he lived." Erasmus is shown reading in his study, the merchant in his office surrounded by the tokens of his business, and Henry VIII.
standing firmly with his legs wide apart as if bestriding a hemisphere.
But I think that you will like this fine portrait of the infant prince best of all, and that is why I have chosen it in preference to a likeness of any of the statesmen, scholars, queens, and courtiers who played a great part in their world, but are not half so charming to look upon as little Prince Edward.
CHAPTER IX
REMBRANDT
After the death of Holbein, artists in the north of Europe pa.s.sed through troublous times till the end of the sixteenth century. France and the Netherlands were devastated by wars. You may remember that the Netherlands had belonged in the fifteenth century to the Dukes of Burgundy? Through the marriage of the only daughter of the last Duke, these territories pa.s.sed into the possession of the King of Spain, who remained a Catholic, whilst the northern portion of the Netherlands became st.u.r.dily Protestant. Their struggle, under the leadership of William the Silent, against the yoke of Spain, is one of the stirring pages of history. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, seven of the northern states of the Netherlands, of which Holland was the chief, had emerged as practically independent. The southern portion of the Netherlands, including the old province of Flanders, remained Catholic and was governed by a Spanish Prince who held his court at Brussels.