This picture is inspired by no deeper feeling than a determination to
adhere to the conventions of the time. These conventions ensure an
effect of more or less devotional character, and this, coupled with our
reverence for the name of Raffaelle, the sentiments arising from
antiquity and foreignness, and the inability of most people to judge of
the work on technical grounds, because they can neither paint nor draw,
prevents us from seeing what a mere business picture it is and how poor
the painting is throughout. A master in any art should be first man,
then poet, then craftsman; this picture must have been painted by one who
was first worldling, then religious-property-manufacturer, then painter
with brains not more than average and no heart.
The Madonna’s head has indeed a certain prettiness of a not very uncommon
kind; the paint has been sweetened with a soft brush and licked smooth
till all texture as of flesh is gone and the head is wooden and tight; I
can see no expression in it; the hand upon the open book is as badly
drawn as the hand of S. Catharine (also by Raffaelle) in our gallery, or
even worse; so is the part of the other hand which can be seen; they are
better drawn than the hands in the _Ecce homo_ of Correggio in our
gallery, for the fingers appear to have the right number of joints, which
none of those in the Correggio have, but this is as much as can be said.
The dress is poorly painted, the gold thread work being of the cheapest,
commonest kind, both as regards pattern and the quantity allowed;
especially note the meagre allowance and poor pattern of the embroidery
on the virgin’s bosom; it is done as by one who knew she ought to have,
and must have, a little gold work, but was determined she should have no
more than he could help. This is so wherever there is gold thread work
in the picture. It is so on S. Nicholas’s cloak where a larger space is
covered, but the pattern is dull and the smallest quantity of gold is
made to go the longest way. The gold cording which binds this is more
particularly badly done. Compare the embroidery and gold thread work in
“The Virgin adoring the Infant Christ,” ascribed to Andrea Verrocchio,
No. 296, Room V; “The Annunciation” by Carlo Crivelli, No. 739, Room
VIII; in “The Angel Raphael accompanies Tobias on his Journey into Media”
attributed to Botticini, No. 781, Room V; in “Portrait of a Lady,” school
of Pollaiuolo, No. 585, Room V; in “A Canon of the Church with his Patron
Saints” by Gheeraert David, No. 1045, Room XI; or indeed the general run
of the gold embroidery of the period as shown in our gallery. {147}
So with the jewels; there are examples of jewels in most of the pictures
named above, none of them, perhaps, very first-rate, but all of them
painted with more care and serious aim than the eighteen-penny trinket
which serves S. Nicholas for a brooch. The jewels in the mitre are
rather better than this, but much depends upon the kind of day on which
the picture is seen; on a clear bright day they, and indeed every part of
the picture, look much worse than on a dull one because the badness can
be more clearly seen. As for the mitre itself, it is made of the same
hard unyielding material as the portico behind the saint, whatever this
may be, presumably wood.
Observe also the crozier which S. Nicholas is holding; observe the cheap
streak of high light exactly the same thickness all the way and only
broken in one place; so with the folds in the draperies; all is
monotonous, unobservant, unimaginative—the work of a feeble man whose
pains will never extend much beyond those necessary to make him pass as
stronger than he is; especially the folds in the white linen over S.
Nicholas’s throat, and about his girdle—weaker drapery can hardly be than
this, unless, perhaps, that from under which S. Nicholas’s hands come.
There is not only no art here to conceal, but there is not even pains to
conceal the want of art. As for the hands themselves, and indeed all the
hands and feet throughout the picture, there is not one which is even
tolerably drawn if judged by the standard which Royal Academicians apply
to Royal Academy students now.
Granted that this is an early work, nevertheless I submit that the
drawing here is not that of one who is going to do better by and by, it
is that of one who is essentially insincere and who will never aim higher
than immediate success. Those who grow to the best work almost always
begin by laying great stress on details which are all they as yet have
strength for; they cannot do much, but the little they can do they do and
never tire of doing; they grow by getting juster notions of proportion
and subordination of parts to the whole rather than by any greater amount
of care and patience bestowed upon details. Here there are no bits of
detail worked out as by one who was interested in them and enjoyed them.
Wherever a thing can be scamped it is scamped. As the whole is, so are
the details, and as the details are, so is the whole; all is tainted with
eye-service and with a vulgarity not the less profound for being veiled
by a due observance of conventionality.
I shall be told that Raffaelle did come to draw and paint much better
than he has done here. I demur to this. He did a little better; he just
took so much pains as to prevent him from going down-hill headlong, and,
with practice, he gained facility, but he was never very good, either as
a draughtsman or as a painter. His reputation, indeed, rests mainly on
his supposed exquisitely pure and tender feeling. His colour is
admittedly inferior, his handling is not highly praised by any one, his
drawing has been much praised, but it is of a penmanship freehand kind
which is particularly apt to take people in. Of course he could draw in
some ways, no one giving all his time to art and living in Raffaelle’s
surroundings could, with even ordinary pains, help becoming a facile
draughtsman, but it is the expression and sentiment of his pictures which
are supposed to be so ineffable and to make him the prince of painters.
I do not think this reputation will be maintained much longer. I can see
no ineffable expression in the Ansidei Madonna’s head, nor yet in that of
the Garvagh Madonna in our gallery, nor in the S. Catharine. He has the
saint-touch, as some painters have the tree-touch and others the
water-touch. I remember the time when I used to think I saw religious
feeling in these last two pictures, but each time I see them I wonder
more and more how I can have been taken in by them. I hear people admire
the head of S. Nicholas in the Ansidei picture. I can see nothing in it
beyond the power of a very ordinary painter, and nothing that a painter
of more than very ordinary power would be satisfied with. When I look at
the head of Bellini’s Doge, Loredano Loredani, I can see defects, as
every one can see defects in every picture, but the more I see it the
more I marvel at it, and the more profoundly I respect the painter. With
Raffaelle I find exactly the reverse; I am carried away at first, as I
was when a young man by Mendelssohn’s _Songs Without Words_, only to be
very angry with myself presently on finding that I could have believed
even for a short time in something that has no real hold upon me. I know
the S. Catharine in our gallery has been said by some not to be by
Raffaelle. No one will doubt its genuineness who compares the drawing,
painting and feeling of S. Catharine’s eyes and nose with those of the S.
John in the Ansidei picture. The doubts have only been raised owing to
the fact that the picture, being hung on a level with the eye, is so
easily seen to be bad that people think Raffaelle cannot have painted it.
Returning to the S. Nicholas; apart from the expression, or as it seems
to me want of expression, the modelling of the head is not only poor but
very poor. The forehead is formless and boneless, the nose is entirely
wanting in that play of line and surface which an old man’s nose affords;
no one ever yet drew or painted a nose absolutely as nature has made it,
but he who compares carefully drawn noses, as that in Rembrandt’s younger
portrait of himself, in his old woman, in the three Van Eycks, in the
Andrea Solario, in the Loredano Loredani by Bellini, all in our gallery,
with the nose of Raffaelle’s S. Nicholas will not be long in finding out
how slovenly Raffaelle’s treatment in reality is. Eyes, eyebrows, mouth,
cheeks and chin are treated with the same weakness, and this not the
weakness of a child who is taking much pains to do something beyond his
strength, and whose intention can be felt through and above the
imperfections of his performance (as in the case of the two Apostles’
heads by Giotto in our gallery), but of one who is not even conscious of
weakness save by way of impatience that his work should cost him time and
trouble at all, and who is satisfied if he can turn it out well enough to
take in patrons who have themselves never either drawn or painted.
Finally, let the spectator turn to the sky and landscape. It is the
cheapest kind of sky with no clouds and going down as low as possible, so
as to save doing more country details than could be helped. As for the
little landscape there is, let the reader compare it with any of the
examples by Bellini, Basaiti, or even Cima da Conegliano, which may be
found in the same or the adjoining rooms.
How, then, did Raffaelle get his reputation? It may be answered, How did
Virgil get his? or Dante? or Bacon? or Plato? or Mendelssohn? or a score
of others who not only get the public ear but keep it sometimes for
centuries? How did Guido, Guercino and Domenichino get their
reputations? A hundred years ago these men were held as hardly inferior
to Raffaelle himself. They had a couple of hundred years or so of
triumph—why so much? And if so much, why not more? If we begin asking
questions, we may ask why anything at all? _Populus vult decipi_ is the
only answer, and nine men out of ten will follow on with _et decipiatur_.
The immediate question, however, is not how Raffaelle came by his
reputation but whether, having got it, he will continue to hold it now
that we have a fair amount of his work at the National Gallery.
I grant that the general effect of the picture if looked at as a mere
piece of decoration is agreeable, but I have seen many a picture which
though not bearing consideration as a serious work yet looked well from a
purely decorative standpoint. I believe, however, that at least half of
those who sit gazing before this Ansidei Raffaelle by the half-hour at a
time do so rather that they may be seen than see; half, again, of the
remaining half come because they are made to do so, the rest see rather
what they bring with them and put into the picture than what the picture
puts into them.
And then there is the charm of mere age. Any Italian picture of the
early part of the sixteenth century, even though by a worse painter than
Raffaelle, can hardly fail to call up in us a solemn, old-world feeling,
as though we had stumbled unexpectedly on some holy, peaceful survivors
of an age long gone by, when the struggle was not so fierce and the world
was a sweeter, happier place than we now find it, when men and women were
comelier, and we should like to have lived among them, to have been
golden-hued as they, to have done as they did; we dream of what might
have been if our lines had been cast in more pleasant places—and so on,
all of it rubbish, but still not wholly unpleasant rubbish so long as it
is not dwelt upon.
Bearing in mind the natural tendency to accept anything which gives us a
peep as it were into a golden age, real or imaginary, bearing in mind
also the way in which this particular picture has been written up by
critics, and the prestige of Raffaelle’s name, the wonder is not that so
many let themselves be taken in and carried away with it but that there
should not be a greater gathering before it than there generally is.