This design differs in nothing from the well-known picture of the
Transfiguration, but the absolute nudity of all the figures.
That Raffaello was accustomed to sketch in naked outlines, may be known
from most collections that possess something of his hand; but perhaps
none but this may be able to produce a design, of a numerous and
complete composition, in which every figure is rendered with anatomical
correctness and finished chiaroscuro.
Another singularity of this important leaf is, the characteristic
disparity of execution in the figures; for though all are drawn with the
pen, and on the first glance seem hatched in one uniform manner, it soon
appears on close inspection, that they cannot have been produced by the
same hand.
The figures of the three Disciples on the Mount, especially the
foreshortened one, are treated with that spirited facility and
confident decision which always mark the pen of Raffaello. Those of the
Saviour and the collateral prophets, though drawn with less precision
and contours here and there, by repeated strokes, corrected, still
exhibit on the whole the same spirit, facility, and confidence of hand.
Of the actors below, the figure of John, with hands crossed on his
breast, and the three next to him have the same Raffaellesque
characteristics, and so the whole of the females kneeling on the
foreground; but of the adjoining apostle, with the book in his hand, the
projected leg and foot are absolutely out of drawing; whilst the
Demoniac and his father, with all the remaining figures, drawn by mere
practice, without a symptom of the master spirit, give palpable proofs
of a different hand.
It appears no improbable conjecture that Raffaello, after settling the
plan and fully arranging the figures of his picture, drew the nudities
of this design as the bases of his draperies: for this reason only, the
principal parts of the forms, and those muscles that would act most
visibly on the draperies, are designed correctly, and finished with
decision; whilst the heads, and what was either to be naked in the
picture or did not act immediately on the drapery, remained in careless
and superficial lines.
That Raffaello suffered parts of his Transfiguration, and in my opinion
some of the most important parts, to receive all but the last finish from
a pupil, if tradition had not told us, there is ocular demonstration in
the picture itself. The proportions of the Demoniac's father are neglected
as a whole, in relation of limb to limb, and the figure is sacrificed to
place. The face of Christ himself, as it was seen in the Louvre, is
unworthy of Raffaello's hand and conception.[98]
The reason why some of the figures are drawn in the true spirit of the
artist, and others in a bald and insignificant manner, may be, that
after slightly sketching the whole, he gave his own finish in the design
to those parts only which he intended to execute with his own hand in
the picture; and less solicitous for the rest, left them to the hand of
some inferior pupil.
The height of this extraordinary design is one foot eight inches four
lines; its breadth one foot two inches five lines; it is without injury.
* * * * *
Taddeo and Federigo Zuccari, the first declared mannerists of this
school, sons of Ottaviano Zuccari, a mediocre painter of S. Angiolo in
Vado, came to Rome successively, formed a school, and filled towns and
states with an immense farrago of good, tolerable, and bad pictures.
From the instructions of Pompeo da Fano and Giacomone da Faenza, but
chiefly from an obstinate study of Raffaello's works, Taddeo, at no
protracted period, gathered enough to diffuse over his own, an air,
though not reality, of style, and to anticipate by contrivance and
facility the rewards which time owes to invention and genius. Courting
the senses of the multitude, he became the hero of the day; they saw
their portraits in his faces, their limbs in his forms, their action in
his attitudes; his draperies, hair, beards, had a cut of fashion. The
simplicity of his disposition is often contrasted by half figures
emerging from his foregrounds; perhaps less from a principle of
imitating his more remote predecessors, than to invigorate the effect of
his chiaroscuro, a method not unknown to Parmegiano.
Rome possesses vast works in fresco of Taddeo; among the best of these
are some Gospel stories at the Consolazione. He seldom painted in oil,
and less commendably in large than small: some of these are cabinet
pictures of exquisite finish,--such a one, (formerly in the collection
of the Duke of Urbino, but more recently at Osimo in the Palace
Leopardi,) is the Nativity of the Saviour, and in Taddeo's very best
style. But the work on which his fame chiefly rests, are the paintings
of the Palazzo Farnese, at Caprarola (engraved in a moderate volume, by
Prenner, 1748). They represent the Feats of the Farnese Family, in peace
and war; to which are joined other stories, both sacred and profane;
but what attracts attention most, is the celebrated "Stanza del Sonno,"
an apartment dedicated to Sleep, replete with a great variety of
allegoric imagery, suggested to him by Annibale Caro, in a long, quaint
letter, printed among his familiar ones, and reproduced among the
"Lettere Pittoriche," t. iii. l. 99.
Dissimilar in the pursuits of life, Taddeo resembled Raffaello in death;
he completed thirty-seven years, and obtained a monument close to
Sanzio, in the "Rotonda."
His brother and pupil Federigo, inferior in design, resembles him in
taste, though more mannered, more capricious in conceit, more crowded in
composition. He completed what death had prevented Taddeo from finishing
in the Sala Regia, that of Farnese, the Trinità de' Monti, and
elsewhere, with the airs of heir-at-law to his brother's talents. Thus
he raised an opinion of capacity for greater enterprise, and was invited
by Francis I. to paint the great Cupola of the metropolitan church at
Florence, which death alone had saved from Vasari's hands. There
Federigo painted more than three hundred figures of fifty feet in
height each, besides that of Lucifer, "so enormous," to use his own
phrase, "that it makes the other figures appear infants;[99]--figures,"
he adds, "larger than the world ever witnessed before in Art." So
little, however, hugeness excepted, is there to admire in this work,
that at the time of Pier da Cortona, a painting of that master would
have been substituted for it, had it not been feared that he would not
live long enough to terminate the whole. After the Cupola, every work of
consequence at Rome appeared his due, and he was recalled by Gregorio to
paint the ceiling of the Paolina, and give a successor to Michael
Angelo. It was at that period, that, on a charge preferred against him
by some courtiers or domestics of Gregorio, he painted and exhibited the
picture of Calumny, and his accusers with asses-ears, which raised a
clamour that obliged him to fly from Rome. During his exile, which
lasted some years, he visited Flanders, Holland, England; had a call
even from Venice to paint a subject in the Ducal Palace, was everywhere
caressed and remunerated, and, the Pope being mitigated, returned to
reassume his interrupted labours in the Capella; the best work perhaps
which, without the assistance of his brother, he has produced at Rome,
though the larger altar-piece of S. Lorenzo in Damaso, and that of the
Angioli at Gesù, with some others dispersed in other churches, may claim
their share of merit. He built a house on Monte Pincio, rapidly and with
the assistance of his scholars furnished with family portraits,
conversations, and other whims in fresco, and left to prove him a
trifler in Art, and the leader of decay.
Invited by Philip II. he went to Madrid, but failed to please; his place
was supplied by Tibaldi, and he sent back with a good pension to Italy.
Towards the end of his life he made another journey, scouring the
principal towns of Italy, and leaving his works wherever he could place
them: of these the Assumption of the Madonna in an oratorio at Rimini on
which he wrote his name, and her Death at Sta. Maria in Acumine of the
same place, with figures more than usually studied, deserve notice. His
Presepio in the Duomo of Foligno, has simplicity and grace; nor less
have the two stories relative to the Madonna, painted for the Duke of
Urbino in a chapel at Loretto. The Miracle of the Snow, in the library
of the Cistercians at Milano, is a multitudinous composition filled with
portraits as usual, variously coloured and well preserved. The Borromean
College at Pavia, has a saloon painted in fresco from incidents in the
life of S. Carlo: the most approved of these is the Saint praying in his
recess: nor might the other two, that of the consistory in which he
received the Cardinal's hat, and the Pest of Milano, want commendation
had they overflowed less in figures. At Torino he painted for the
Jesuits a St. Paul; began to ornament a gallery for the Duke, Charles
Emanuel; published his _Idea de' Pittori Scultori ed Architetti_, and
dedicated it to the Duke. This was followed, at his return to Lombardy,
by two other treatises; "_La dimora di Parma del Sig. Cav. Federico
Zuccaro_; and _Il passaggio per Italia, colla dimora di Parma del Sig.
Cav. Federigo Zuccari_," both printed at Bologna 1608. Next year, on his
return to Rome, he fell sick at Ancona, and there died. His talents,
which extended to sculpture and architecture, were inferior to his
fortune, which preceded that of all his contemporaries, and was in a
great measure the effect of personal qualities; lordly aspect and
demeanour, some literary culture, persuasive manners, and a liberality
that absorbed the wealth which his hand had accumulated.
Emulation seems to have been his chief motive of writing: he longed to
break a lance with Vasari, whom, from whatever cause, as appears from
the postils tacked to the _Vite_, he disliked. They have been sometimes,
especially in the Life of Taddeo, quoted and treated as effusions of
envy and malignity by the annotator of the Roman edition. To prove his
superiority over the Tuscan, he chose a style as obscure and inflated as
that of Giorgio is diffuse and plain; the whole of the treatise printed
at Torino reels in a round of internal and external design, and contains
less precept than peripatetic speculation, which rendered the schools of
that day more loquacious than learned. His language runs over in
intellective[100] and formative conceits, in substantial substances and
formal forms; even the titles of his chapters are larded with equal
fulsomeness of phrase, like that of the XIIth., that "philosophy and to
philosophize, is metaphoric and similitudinarious design." These are the
bait of fools--for none but fools can hope to gather meaning from the
bubbles of sophistry, or stoop to disentangle etymologies which derive
_disegno_ from "Dei signum," the sign of God!
This treatise was probably the offspring of his presidency in the
Academy of St. Luke; for office gives insolence. The Academy dates its
origin from the Pontificate of Gregorio XIII., who granted the brief of
its foundation[101] to Muziano. It had not, however, its full effect
till after the return of Zuccari from Spain, who put it in force and was
unanimously declared "Principe," or President. That was his day of
triumph; he returned from the inauguration in the church of S. Martino
at the foot of the Campidoglio, accompanied by a great concourse of
artists and litterators to his own house, where shortly after he built a
saloon for the accommodation of the Academy, in whose praise he
overflowed in prose and poems, more than once quoted in his larger
treatise; and to seal his extreme affection, bequeathed like Muziano, in
case his own line should fail, the bulk of his fortune to the
establishment.
Giuseppe Cesari, sometimes distinguished by the name of Il Cavaliere
d'Arpino,[102] his native place, was in art what Marino was in
poetry--brilliancy without substance is the characteristic of both, and
either proved the ancient observation, that Arts and Republics receive
the greatest damage from the greatest capacities. The talent of Cesari
bubbled up from his infancy, made him an object of admiration, procured
him through F. Danti, the protection of Gregorio XIII., and in a short
time the reputation of the first master at Rome. Less than the felicity
with which he is said to have executed some pictures from certain
designs of M. Agnolo, in the possession of Giacomo Rocca, his exuberance
alone was sufficient to establish supremacy of name among a race who
measured genius by quantity, and science by confidence of method. If his
numbers were rabble, he arranged them with the skill of a general; if
common-place furnished him with features, arrogance of touch brushed
them into notice; and the horses which he drew with equal truth and
fire, supplied the incorrectness or imbecility of the rider. The
excellence of his colour in fresco, the gaiety which he spread over a
vast surface, hid from the common eye monotony of manner, poverty of
character, and want of finish in the detail of parts.
They were observed, reprobated and opposed by M.A. Caravaggio, A.
Caracci, and the few who saw and thought with them. Quarrels arose, and
challenges were given: that of Caravaggio, Cesari refused to accept,
because he had not yet been knighted, and Annibale rejected that of
Cesari, because, said he, "I know no other weapon than my pencil." They
both experienced the difference of the difficulties that attend
legislation and reform of taste, and were left ineffectually to struggle
with an empiric, who outlived either upwards of thirty years, and then
left a race worse than himself behind him.