his greatest historical work, the Surrender of Breda. This is probably
the most utterly unaffected historical painting in existence. There is
positively no stage business about it. On the right is the Spanish
staff, on the left the deputation of the vanquished Flemings. In the
centre the great Spinola accepts the keys of the city from the governor;
his attitude and face are full of dignity softened by generous and
affable grace. He lays his hand upon the shoulder of the Flemish
general, and you can see he is paying him some chivalrous compliment on
the gallant fight he has lost. If your eyes wander through the open
space between the two escorts, you see a wonderful widespread landscape
in the Netherlands, which would form a fine picture if the figures all
were gone. Opposite this great work is another which artists consider
greater,--Las Meninas. When Luca Giordano came from Italy he inquired
for this picture, and said on seeing it, "This is the theology of
painting." If our theology were what it should be, and cannot be,
absolute and unquestionable truth, Luca the Quick-worker would have been
right. Velazquez was painting the portrait of a stupid little infanta
when the idea came to him of perpetuating the scene just as it was. We
know how we have wished to be sure of the exact accessories of past
events. The modern rage for theatrical local color is an illustration of
this desire. The great artist, who must have honored his art, determined
to give to future ages an exact picture of one instant of his glorious
life. It is not too much to say he has done this. He stands before his
easel, his pencils in his hand. The little princess is stiffly posing in
the centre. Her little maids are grouped about her. Two hideous dwarfs
on the right are teasing a noble dog who is too drowsy and magnanimous
to growl. In the background at the end of a long gallery a gentleman is
opening a door to the garden. The presence of royalty is indicated by
the reflection of the faces of the king and queen in a small mirror,
where you would expect to see your own. The longer you look upon this
marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely
the placing of color on canvas which causes this perfect illusion. It
does not seem possible that you are looking at a plane surface. There is
a stratum of air before, behind, and beside these figures. You could
walk on that floor and see how the artist is getting on with the
portrait. There is space and light in this picture, as in any room.
Every object is detached, as in the common miracle of the stereoscope.
If art consist in making a fleeting moment immortal, if the True is a
higher ideal than the Beautiful, then it will be hard to find a greater
painting than this. It is utterly without beauty; its tone is a cold
olive green-gray; there is not one redeeming grace or charm about it
except the noble figure of Velazquez himself,--yet in its austere
fidelity to truth it stands incomparable in the world. It gained
Velazquez his greatest triumph. You see on his breast a sprawling red
cross, painted evidently by an unskilful hand. This was the gracious
answer made by Philip IV. when the artist asked him if anything was
wanting to the picture. This decoration, daubed by the royal hand, was
the accolade of the knighthood of Santiago,--an honor beyond the dreams
of an artist of that day. It may be considered the highest compliment
ever paid to a painter, except the one paid by Courbet to himself, when
he refused to be decorated by the Man of December.
Among Velazquez's most admirable studies of life is his picture of the
Borrachos. A group of rustic roysterers are admitting a neophyte into
the drunken _confrerie._ He kneels to receive a crown of ivy from the
hands of the king of the revel. A group of older tipplers are filling
their cups, or eyeing their brimming glasses, with tipsy, mock-serious
glances. There has never been a chapter written which so clearly shows
the drunkard's nature as this vulgar anacreontic. A thousand men have
painted drunken frolics, but never one with such distinct spiritual
insight as this. To me the finest product of Jordaens' genius is his
Bohnen Koenig in the Belvedere, but there you see only the incidents of
the mad revel; every one is shouting or singing or weeping with maudlin
glee or tears. But in this scene of the Borrachos there is nothing
scenic or forced. These topers have come together to drink, for the love
of the wine,--the fun is secondary. This wonderful reserve of Velazquez
is clearly seen in his conception of the king of the rouse. He is a
young man, with a heavy, dull, somewhat serious face, fat rather than
bloated, rather pale than flushed. He is naked to the waist to show the
plump white arms and shoulders and the satiny skin of the voluptuary;
one of those men whose heads and whose stomachs are too loyal ever to
give them _Katzenjammer_ or remorse. The others are of the commoner type
of haunters of wine-shops,--with red eyes and coarse hides and grizzled
matted hair,--but every man of them inexorably true, and a predestined
sot.
We must break away from Velazquez, passing by his marvellous portraits
of kings and dwarfs, saints and poodles,--among whom there is a dwarf of
two centuries ago, who is too like Tom Thumb to serve for his twin
brother,--and a portrait of Aesop, which is a flash of intuition, an
epitome of all the fables. Before leaving the Spaniards we must look at
the most pleasing of all Ribera's works,--the Ladder-Dream of Jacob.
The patriarch lies stretched on the open plain in the deep sleep of the
weary. To the right in a broad shaft of cloudy gold the angels are
ascending and descending. The picture is remarkable for its mingling the
merits of Ribera's first and second manner. It is a Caravaggio in its
strength and breadth of light and shade, and a Correggio in its delicacy
of sentiment and refined beauty of coloring. He was not often so
fortunate in his Parmese efforts. They are usually marked by a timidity
and an attempt at prettiness inconceivable in the haughty and impulsive
master of the Neapolitan school.
Of the three great Spaniards, Ribera is the least sympathetic. He often
displays a tumultuous power and energy to which his calmer rivals are
strangers. But you miss in him that steady devotion to truth which
distinguishes Velazquez, and that spiritual lift which ennobles Murillo.
The difference, I conceive, lies in the moral character of the three.
Ribera was a great artist, and the others were noble men. Ribera passed
a youth of struggle and hunger and toil among the artists of Rome,--a
stranger and penniless in the magnificent city,--picking up crusts in
the street and sketching on quiet curbstones, with no friend, and no
name but that of Spagnoletto,--the little Spaniard. Suddenly rising to
fame, he broke loose from his Roman associations and fled to Naples,
where he soon became the wealthiest and the most arrogant artist of his
time. He held continually at his orders a faction of _bravi_ who drove
from Naples, with threats and insults and violence, every artist of
eminence who dared visit the city. Car-racci and Guido only saved their
lives by flight, and the blameless and gifted Domenichino, it is said,
was foully murdered by his order. It is not to such a heart as this that
is given the ineffable raptures of Murillo or the positive revelations
of Velazquez. These great souls were above cruelty or jealousy.
Velazquez never knew the storms of adversity. Safely anchored in the
royal favor, he passed his uneventful life in the calm of his beloved
work. But his hand and home were always open to the struggling artists
of Spain. He was the benefactor of Alonzo Cano; and when Murillo came up
to Madrid, weary and footsore with his long tramp from Andalusia,
sustained by an innate consciousness of power, all on fire with a
picture of Van Dyck he had seen in Seville, the rich and honored painter
of the court received with generous kindness the shabby young wanderer,
clothed him, and taught him, and watched with noble delight the first
flights of the young eagle whose strong wing was so soon to cleave the
empyrean. And when Murillo went back to Seville he paid his debt by
doing as much for others. These magnanimous hearts were fit company for
the saints they drew.
We have lingered so long with the native artists we shall have little to
say of the rest. There are ten fine Raphaels, but it is needless to
speak of them. They have been endlessly reproduced. Raphael is known and
judged by the world. After some centuries of discussion the scorners and
the critics are dumb. All men have learned the habit of Albani, who, in
a frivolous and unappreciative age, always uncovered his head at the
name of Raphael Sanzio. We look at his precious work with a mingled
feeling of gratitude for what we have, and of rebellious wonder that
lives like his and Shelley's should be extinguished in their glorious
dawn, while kings and country gentlemen live a hundred years. What
boundless possibilities of bright achievement these two divine youths
owed us in the forty years more they should have lived! Raphael's
greatest pictures in Madrid are the Spasimo di Sicilia, and the Holy
Family, called La Perla. The former has a singular history. It was
painted for a convent in Palermo, shipwrecked on the way, and thrown
ashore on the gulf of Genoa. It was again sent to Sicily, brought to
Spain by the Viceroy of Naples, stolen by Napoleon, and in Paris was
subjected to a brilliantly successful operation for transferring the
layer of paint from the worm-eaten wood to canvas. It came back to Spain
with other stolen goods from the Louvre. La Perla was bought by Philip
IV. at the sale of Charles I.'s effects after his decapitation. Philip
was fond of Charles, but could not resist the temptation to profit by
his death. This picture was the richest of the booty. It is, of all the
faces of the Virgin extant, the most perfectly beautiful and one of the
least spiritual.
There is another fine Madonna, commonly called La Virgen del Pez, from a
fish which young Tobit holds in his hand. It is rather tawny in color,
as if it had been painted on a pine board and the wood had asserted
itself from below. It is a charming picture, with all the great Roman's
inevitable perfection of design; but it is incomprehensible that
critics, M. Viardot among them, should call it the first in rank of
Raphael's Virgins in Glory. There are none which can dispute that title
with Our Lady of San Sisto, unearthly and supernatural in beauty and
majesty.
The school of Florence is represented by a charming Mona Lisa of
Leonardo da Vinci, almost identical with that of the Louvre; and six
admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts
and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and
who admiring his genius regret his errors, is a portrait of his wife
Lucrezia Fede, whose name, a French writer has said, is a double
epigram. It was this capricious and wilful beauty who made poor Andrea
break his word and embezzle the money King Francis had given him to
spend for works of art. Yet this dangerous face is his best excuse,--the
face of a man-snarer, subtle and passionate and cruel in its blind
selfishness, and yet so beautiful that any man might yield to it against
the cry of his own warning conscience. Browning must have seen it before
he wrote, in his pathetic poem,--
"Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold,
You beautiful Lucrezia, that are mine!"
Nowhere, away from the Adriatic, is the Venetian school so richly
represented as in Madrid. Charles and Philip were the most munificent
friends and patrons of Titian, and the Royal Museum counts among its
treasures in consequence the enormous number of forty-three pictures by
the wonderful centenarian. Among these are two upon which he set great
value,--a Last Supper, which has unfortunately mouldered to ruin in the
humid refectory of the Escorial, equal in merit and destiny with that of
Leonardo; and the Gloria, or apotheosis of the imperial family, which,
after the death of Charles, was brought from Yuste to the Escorial, and
thence came to swell the treasures of the Museum. It is a grand and
masterly work. The vigorous genius of Titian has grappled with the
essential difficulties of a subject that trembles on the balance of
ridiculous and sublime, and has come out triumphant. The Father and the
Son sit on high. The Operating Spirit hovers above them. The Virgin in
robes of azure stands in the blaze of the Presence. The celestial army
is ranged around. Below, a little lower than the angels, are Charles and
Philip with their wives, on their knees, with white cowls and clasped
hands,--Charles in his premature age, with worn face and grizzled beard;
and Philip in his youth of unwholesome fairness, with red lips and pink
eyelids, such as Titian painted him in the Adonis. The foreground is
filled with prophets and saints of the first dignity, and a kneeling
woman, whose face is not visible, but whose attitude and drapery are
drawn with the sinuous and undulating grace of that hand which could not
fail. Every figure is turned to the enthroned Deity, touched with
ineffable light. The artist has painted heaven, and is not absurd. In
that age of substantial faith such achievements were possible.
There are two Venuses by Titian very like that of Dresden, but the heads
have not the same dignity; and a Danae which is a replica of the Vienna
one. His Salome bearing the Head of John the Baptist is one of the
finest impersonations of the pride of life conceivable. So
unapproachable are the soft lights and tones on the perfect arms and
shoulders of the full-bodied maiden, that Tintoret one day exclaimed in
despair before it, "That fellow paints with ground flesh."
This gallery possesses one of the last works of Titian,--the Battle of
Lepanto, which was fought when the artist was ninety-four years of age.
It is a courtly allegory,--King Philip holds his little son in his arms,
a courier angel brings the news of victory, and to the infant a
palm-branch and the scroll _Majora tibi._ Outside you see the smoke and
flash of a naval battle, and a malignant and tur-baned Turk lies bound
on the floor. It would seem incredible that this enormous canvas should
have been executed at such an age, did we not know that when the pest
cut the mighty master off in his hundredth year he was busily at work
upon a Descent from the Cross, which Palma the Elder finished on his
knees and dedicated to God: Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit Palma
reverenter absolvit Deoque dicavit opus.
The vast representation of Titian rather injures Veronese and Tintoret.
Opposite the Gloria of Yuste hangs the sketch of that stupendous
Paradise of Tintoret, which we see in the Palace of the Doges,--the
biggest picture ever painted by mortal, thirty feet high and
seventy-four long.
The sketch was secured by Velazquez in his tour through Italy. The most
charming picture of Veronese is a Venus and Adonis, which is finer than
that of Titian,--a classic and most exquisite idyl of love and sleep,
cool shadow and golden-sifted sunshine. His most considerable work in
the gallery is a Christ teaching the Doctors, magnificent in
arrangement, severely correct in drawing, and of a most vivid and
dramatic interest.
We pass through a circular vaulted chamber to reach the Flemish rooms.
There is a choice though scanty collection of the German and French
schools. Albert Durer has an Adam and Eve, and a priceless portrait of
himself as perfectly preserved as if it were painted yesterday. He wears
a curious and picturesque costume,--striped black-and-white,--a graceful
tasselled cap of the same. The picture is sufficiently like the statue
at Nuremberg; a long South-German face, blue-eyed and thin,
fair-whiskered, with that expression of quiet confidence you would
expect in the man who said one day, with admirable candor, when people
were praising a picture of his, "It could not be better done." In this
circular room are four great Claudes, two of which, Sunrise and Sunset,
otherwise called the Embarcation of Sta. Paula, and Tobit and the Angel,
are in his best and richest manner. It is inconceivable to us, who
graduate men by a high-school standard, that these refined and most
elegant works could have been produced by a man so imperfectly educated
as Claude Lorrain.
There remain the pictures of the Dutch and the Flemings. It is due to
the causes we have mentioned in the beginning that neither in Antwerp
nor Dresden nor Paris is there such wealth and profusion of the
Netherlands art as in this mountain-guarded corner of Western Europe. I
shall have but a word to say of these three vast rooms, for Rubens and
Van Dyck and Teniers are known to every one. The first has here a
representation so complete that if Europe were sunk by a cataclysm from
the Baltic to the Pyrenees every essential characteristic of the great
Fleming could still be studied in this gallery. With the exception of
his Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral at Antwerp, painted in a
moment of full inspiration that never comes twice in a life, everything
he has done elsewhere may be matched in Madrid. His largest picture here
is an Adoration of the Kings, an overpowering exhibition of wasteful
luxuriance of color and _fougue_ of composition. To the left the Virgin
stands leaning with queenly majesty over the effulgent Child. From this
point the light flashes out over the kneeling magi, the gorgeously
robed attendants, the prodigality of velvet and jewels and gold, to fade
into the lovely clear-obscure of a starry night peopled with dim camels
and cattle. On the extreme right is a most graceful and gallant portrait
of the artist on horseback. We have another fine self-portraiture in the
Garden of Love,--a group of lords and ladies in a delicious pleasance
where the greatest seigneur is Peter Paul Rubens and the finest lady is
Helen Forman. These true artists had to paint for money so many ignoble
faces that they could not be blamed for taking their revenge in painting
sometimes their own noble heads. Van Dyck never drew a profile so
faultless in manly beauty as his own which we see on the same canvas
with that of his friend the Earl of Bristol. Look at the two faces side
by side, and say whether God or the king can make the better nobleman.
Among those mythological subjects in which Rubens delighted, the best
here are his Perseus and Andromeda, where the young hero comes
gloriously in a brand-new suit of Milanese armor, while the lovely
princess, in a costume that never grows old-fashioned, consisting of
sunshine and golden hair, awaits him and deliverance in beautiful
resignation; a Judgment of Paris, the Three Graces,--both prodigies of
his strawberries-and-cream color; and a curious suckling of Hercules,
which is the prototype or adumbration of the ecstatic vision of St.
Bernard. He has also a copy of Titian's Adam and Eve, in an
out-of-the-way place downstairs, which should be hung beside the
original, to show the difference of handling of the two master
colorists.
Especially happy is this Museum in its Van Dycks. Besides those
incomparable portraits of Lady Oxford, of Liberti the Organist of
Antwerp, and others better than the best of any other man, there are a
few large and elaborate compositions such as I have never seen
elsewhere. The principal one is the Capture of Christ by Night in the
Garden of Gethsemane, which has all the strength of Rubens, with a more
refined study of attitudes and a greater delicacy of tone and touch.
Another is the Crowning with Thorns,--although of less dimensions, of
profound significance in expression, and a flowing and marrowy softness
of execution. You cannot survey the work of Van Dyck in this collection,
so full of deep suggestion, showing an intellect so vivid and so
refined, a mastery of processes so thorough and so intelligent, without
the old wonder of what he would have done in that ripe age when Titian
and Murillo and Shakespeare wrought their best and fullest, and the old
regret for the dead,--as Edgar Poe sings, the doubly dead in that they
died so young. We are tempted to lift the veil that hides the unknown,
at least with the furtive hand of conjecture; to imagine a field of
unquenched activity where the early dead, free from the clogs and
trammels of the lower world, may follow out the impulses of their
diviner nature,--where Andrea has no wife, and Raphael and Van Dyck no
disease,--where Keats and Shelley have all eternity for their lofty
rhyme,--where Ellsworth and Koerner and the Lowell boys can turn their
alert and athletic intelligence to something better than war.
A CASTLE IN THE AIR
I have sometimes thought that a symptom of the decay of true kinghood in
modern times is the love of monarchs for solitude. In the early days
when monarchy was a real power to answer a real want, the king had no
need to hide himself. He was the strongest, the most knowing, the most
cunning. He moved among men their acknowledged chief. He guided and
controlled them. He never lost his dignity by daily use. He could steal
a horse like Diomede, he could mend his own breeches like Dagobert, and
never tarnish the lustre of the crown by it. But in later times the
throne has become an anachronism. The wearer of a crown has done nothing
to gain it but give himself the trouble to be born. He has no claim to
the reverence or respect of men. Yet he insists upon it, and receives
some show of it. His life is mainly passed in keeping up this battle for
a lost dignity and worship. He is given up to shams and ceremonies.
To a life like this there is something embarrassing in the movement and
activity of a great city. The king cannot join in it without a loss of
prestige. Being outside of it, he is vexed and humiliated by it. The
empty forms become nauseous in the midst of this honest and wholesome
reality of out-of-doors.
Hence the necessity of these quiet retreats in the forests, in the
water-guarded islands, in the cloud-girdled mountains. Here the world is
not seen or heard. Here the king may live with such approach to nature
as his false and deformed education will allow. He is surrounded by
nothing but the world of servants and courtiers, and it requires little
effort of the imagination to consider himself chief and lord.
It was this spirit which in the decaying ripeness of the Bourbon dynasty
drove the Louis from Paris to Versailles and from Versailles to Marly.
Millions were wasted to build the vast monument of royal fatuity, and
when it was done the Grand Monarque found it necessary to fly from time
to time to the sham solitude and mock retirement he had built an hour
away.
When Philip V. came down from France to his splendid exile on the throne
of Spain, he soon wearied of the interminable ceremonies of the
Cas-tilian court, and finding one day, while hunting, a pleasant farm on
the territory of the Segovian monks, flourishing in a wrinkle of the
Guadarrama Mountains, he bought it, and reared the Palace of La Granja.
It is only kings who can build their castles in the air of palpable
stones and mortar. This lordly pleasure-house stands four thousand feet
above the sea level. On this commanding height, in this savage Alpine
loneliness, in the midst of a scenery once wildly beautiful, but now
shorn and shaven into a smug likeness of a French garden, Philip passed
all the later years of his gloomy and inglorious life.
It has been ever since a most tempting summer-house to all the Bourbons.
When the sun is calcining the plains of Castile, and the streets of
Madrid are white with the hot light of midsummer, this palace in the
clouds is as cool and shadowy as spring twilights. And besides, as all
public business is transacted in Madrid, and La Granja is a day's
journey away, it is too much trouble to send a courier every day for the
royal signature,--or, rather, rubric, for royalty in Spain is above
handwriting, and gives its majestic approval with a flourish of the
pen,--so that everything waits a week or so, and much business goes
finally undone; and this is the highest triumph of Spanish industry and
skill.
We had some formal business with the court of the regent, and were not
sorry to learn that his highness would not return to the capital for
some weeks, and that consequently, following the precedent of a certain
prophet, we must go to the mountain.