THE LOUVRE: I. THE OLD MASTERS
The Winged Victory of Samothrace--Botticelli's
Fresco--Luini--Ingres--The Salon Carre--La Joconde--Leonardo
da Vinci--Pater, Lowell and Vasari--Early Collectors--Paul
Veronese--Copyists--The Salle des Primitifs--The Grande
Galerie--Landor's Pictorial Creed--The Great
Schools--Rembrandt--Van Dyck and Rubens--Amazing
Abundance--The Dutch Masters--The Drawings.
It is on the first landing of the Escalier Daru, at the end of the
Galerie Denon, that one of the most priceless treasures of the
Louvre--one of the most splendid things in the world--is to be found:
it has been before us all the way along the Galerie Denon, that avenue
of noble bronzes, the first thing that caught the eye: I mean the
"Winged Victory of Samothrace". Every one has seen photographs or
models of this majestic and exquisite figure, but it must be studied
here if one is to form a true estimate of the magical mastery of the
sculptor. The Victory is headless and armless and much mutilated; but
that matters little. She stands on the prow of a trireme, and for
every one who sees her with any imagination must for all time be the
symbol of triumphant and splendid onset. The figure no doubt weighs
more than a ton--and is as light as air. The "Meteor" in a strong
breeze with all her sails set and her prow foaming through the waves
does not convey a more exciting idea of commanding and buoyant
progress. But that comparison wholly omits the element of
conquest--for this is essential Victory as well.
The statue dates from the fourth century B.C. It was not discovered
until 1863, in Samothrace. Paris is fortunate indeed to possess not
only the Venus of Milo but this wonder of art--both in the same
building.
Before entering the picture galleries proper, let us look at two other
exceedingly beautiful things also on this staircase--the two frescoes
from the Villa Lemmi, but particularly No. 1297 on the left of the
entrance to Gallery XVI., which represents Giovanna Tornabuoni and the
Cardinal Virtues, and is by Sandro Filipepi, whom we call Botticelli.
For this exquisite work alone would I willingly cross the Channel even
in a gale, such is its charm. A reproduction of it will be found
opposite page 20, but it gives no impression of the soft delicacy of
colouring: its gentle pinks and greens and purples, its kindly reds
and chestnut browns. One should make a point of looking at these
frescoes whenever one is on the staircase, which will be often.
The ordinary entrance to the picture galleries of the Louvre is
through the photographic vestibule on the right of the Winged Victory
as you face it, leading to the Salle Duchatel, notable for such
differing works as frescoes by Luini and two pictures by
Ingres--representing the beginning and end of his long and austere
career. The Luinis are delightful--very gay and, as always with this
tender master, sweet--especially "The Nativity," which is reproduced
opposite page 16. The Ingres' (which were bequeathed by the Comtesse
Duchatel after whom the room is named) are the "OEdipus solving the
riddle of the Sphinx," dated 1808, when the painter was twenty-eight,
and the "Spring," which some consider his masterpiece, painted in
1856. He lived to be eighty-six. English people have so few
opportunities of seeing the work of this master (we have in oils only
a little doubtful portrait of Malibran, very recently acquired, which
hangs in the National Gallery) that he comes as a totally new
craftsman to most of us; and his severity may not always please. But
as a draughtsman he almost takes the breath away, and no one should
miss the pencil heads, particularly a little saucy lady, from his hand
in the His de la Salle collection of drawings in another part of the
Louvre.
In the Salle Duchatel is also a screen of drawings with a very
beautiful head by Botticelli in it--No. 48. From the rooms we then
pass to the Salon Carre (so called because it is square, and not, as I
heard one American explaining to another, after the celebrated
collector Carre who had left these pictures to the nation), and this
is, I suppose, for its size, the most valuable gallery in the world.
It is doubtful if any other combination of collections, each
contributing of its choicest, could compile as remarkable a room, for
the "Monna Lisa," or "La Joconde," Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of the
wife of his friend Francesco del Giocondo, which is its greatest glory
and perhaps the greatest glory of all Paris too, would necessarily be
missing.
[Illustration: THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE
_(Louvre)_]
Paris without this picture would not be the Paris that we know, or the
Paris that has been since 1793 when "La Joconde" first became the
nation's property--ever more to smile her inscrutable smile and exert
her quiet mysterious sway, not only for kings and courtiers but for
all. When all is said, it is Leonardo who gives the Louvre its special
distinction as a picture gallery. Without him it would still be
magnificent: with him it is priceless and sublime. For not only are
there the "Monna Lisa" and (also in the Salon Carre) the sweet and
beautiful "Madonna and Saint Anne," but in the next, the Grande
Galerie, are his "Virgin of the Rocks," a variant of the only Leonardo
in our National Gallery, and the "Bacchus" (so like the "John the
Baptist") and the "John the Baptist" (so like the "Bacchus") and the
portrait of the demure yet mischievous Italian lady who is supposed to
be Lucrezia Crivelli, and who (in spite of the yellowing ravages of
time) once seen is never forgotten.
The Louvre has all these (together with many drawings), but above all
it has the Monna Lisa, of which what shall I say? I feel that I can
say nothing. But here are two descriptions of the picture, or rather
two descriptions of the emotions produced by the picture on two very
different minds. These I may quote as expressing, between them, all. I
will begin with that of Walter Pater: "As we have seen him using
incidents of sacred story, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects
for pictorial realisation, but as a cryptic language for fancies all
his own, so now he found a vent for his thought in taking one of these
languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, as Modesty or
Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression.
"_La Gioconda_ is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the
revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness,
only the _Melancholia_ of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude
symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We
all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in
that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea.
Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.[1] As often
happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limit, there
is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that
inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were
certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that
Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to
connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its
germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of
something sinister on it, which plays over all Leonardo's work.
Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image
defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express
historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady,
embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living
Florentine to this creature of his thought? By what strange affinities
had the dream and the person grown up thus apart, and yet so closely
together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's brain,
dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at
last in _Il Giocondo's_ house. That there is much of mere portraiture
in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the
presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was
protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed
labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of
magic, that the image was projected?
"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are
come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of
strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it
for a moment beside one of those white Greek Goddesses or beautiful
women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty,
into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts
and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that
which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward
form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the
middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the
return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver
in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for
strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of
Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this
has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only
in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and
tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life,
sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern
philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and
summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady
Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the
modern idea."
[1] Yet for Vasari there was further magic of crimson in the
lips and cheeks, lost for us. _Pater's note._
This was what the picture meant for Pater; whether too much, is beside
the mark. Pater thought it and Pater wrote it, and that is enough. To
others, who are not as Pater, it says less, and possibly more. This,
for example, is what "Monna Lisa" suggested to one of the most
distinguished and civilised minds of our time--James Russell Lowell:--
She gave me all that woman can,
Nor her soul's nunnery forego,
A confidence that man to man
Without remorse can never show.
Rare art, that can the sense refine
Till not a pulse rebellious stirs,
And, since she never can be mine,
Makes it seem sweeter to be hers!
Finally, since we cannot (I believe) spend too much time upon this
picture, let me quote Vasari's account of it. "For Francesco del
Giocondo, Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of Monna Lisa, his
wife, but, after loitering over it for four years, he finally left it
unfinished. This work is now in the possession of the King Francis of
France, and is at Fontainebleau. Whoever shall desire to see how far
art can imitate nature may do so to perfection in this head, wherein
every peculiarity that could be depicted by the utmost subtlety of the
pencil has been faithfully reproduced. The eyes have the lustrous
brightness and moisture which is seen in life, and around them are
those pale, red, and slightly livid circles, also proper to nature,
with the lashes, which can only be copied, as these are, with the
greatest difficulty; the eyebrows also are represented with the
closest exactitude, where fuller and where more thinly set, with the
separate hairs delineated as they issue from the skin, every turn
being followed, and all the pores exhibited in a manner that could
not be more natural than it is: the nose, with its beautiful and
delicately roseate nostrils, might be easily believed to be alive; the
mouth, admirable in its outline, has the lips uniting the rose-tints
of their colour with that of the face, in the utmost perfection, and
the carnation of the cheek does not appear to be painted, but truly of
flesh and blood; he who looks earnestly at the pit of the throat
cannot but believe that he sees the beating of the pulses, and it may
be truly said that this work is painted in a manner well calculated to
make the boldest master tremble, and astonishes all who behold it,
however well accustomed to the marvels of art.
"Monna Lisa was exceedingly beautiful, and while Leonardo was painting
her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping some one constantly
near her, to sing or play on instruments, or to jest and otherwise
amuse her, to the end that she might continue cheerful, and so that
her face might not exhibit the melancholy expression often imparted by
painters to the likenesses they take. In this portrait of Leonardo's,
on the contrary, there is so pleasing an expression, and a smile so
sweet, that while looking at it one thinks it rather divine than
human, and it has ever been esteemed a wonderful work, since life
itself could exhibit no other appearance."
[Illustration: LA JOCONDE: MONNA LISA
LEONARDO DA VINCI
_(Louvre)_]
King Francis I. (who met our Henry VIII. on the Field of the Cloth of
Gold) bought the picture of Monna Lisa from the artist for a sum of
money equal now to L20,000. It was on a visit to Francis that
Leonardo died. "Monna Lisa" was the most valuable picture in the
cabinet of Francis I. and was first hung there in 1545. It is very
interesting to think that this work, the peculiar glory of the
Gallery, should also be its nucleus, so to speak. The Venus of Milo
and the Winged Victory, which I have grouped with "Monna Lisa" as its
chief treasures, were not added until the last century.
Among other pictures in the Louvre which date from the inception of a
royal collection in the brain of Francis I. are the "Virgin of the
Rocks" by Leonardo, Raphael's "Sainte Famille" (No. 1498) and "Saint
Michael," Andrea del Sarto's "Charite" and Piombo's "Visitation".
Louis XIII. began his reign with about fifty pictures and increased
them to two hundred, while under Louis XIV., the Louvre's most
conspicuous friend, the royal collection grew from these two hundred
to two thousand--assisted greatly by Colbert the financier, who bought
for the Crown not only much of the collection of the banker Jabach of
Cologne, the Pierpont Morgan of his day, who had acquired the art
treasures of our own Charles I., but also the Mazarin bibelots. Under
Louis XIV. and succeeding monarchs the pictures oscillated between the
Louvre, the Luxembourg and Versailles. The Revolution centralised them
in the Louvre, and on 8th November, 1793, the collection was made over
to the public. During the first Republic one hundred thousand francs a
year were set aside for the purchase of pictures.
But we are in the Salon Carre. Close beside "La Joconde" is that
Raphael which gives me personally more pleasure than any of his
pictures--the portrait, beautiful in greys and blacks, of Count
Baldassare Castiglione, reproduced opposite page 52; here is a
Correggio (No. 1117) bathed in a glory of light; here is a golden
Giorgione; here is an allegory by Titian (No. 1589) not so
miraculously coloured as the Correggio but wonderfully rich and
beautiful; here is a little princess by Velasquez; and near it a
haunting portrait of a young man (No. 1644) which has been attributed
to many hands, but rests now as the work of Francia Bigio. I reproduce
it opposite page 70. And that is but a fraction of the treasures of
the Salon Carre. For there are other Titians, notably the portrait
(No. 1592) of a young man with a glove (reproduced opposite page 64)
marked by a beautiful gravity; other Raphaels, more characteristic,
including "La Belle Jardiniere" (No. 1496), filled with a rich deep
calm; the sweetest Luini that I remember (No. 1354), and the immense
"Marriage at Cana" by Paolo Veronese, which when I saw it recently was
being laboriously engraved on copper by a gentleman in the middle of
the room. It was odd to watch so careful a piece of translation in the
actual making--to see Veronese's vast scene with its rich colouring
and tremendous energy coming down into spider-like scratches on two
square feet of hard metal. I did not know that such patience was any
longer exercised. This picture, by the way, has a double
interest--the general and the particular. As Whistler said of
Switzerland, you may both admire the mountain and recognise the
tourist on the top. It is full of portraits. The bride at the end of
the table is Eleanor of Austria; at her side is Francis I. (who found
his way into as many pictures as most men); next to him, in yellow, is
Mary of England. The Sultan Suliman I. and the Emperor Charles V. are
not absent. The musicians are the artist and his friends--Paul himself
playing the 'cello, Tintoretto the piccolo, Titian the bass viol, and
Bassano the flute. The lady with a toothpick is (alas!) Vittoria
Colonna.
It is, by the way, always student-day at the Louvre--at least I never
remember to have been there, except on Sundays, when copyists were not
at work. Many of the copies are being made to order as altar pieces in
new churches and for other definite purposes. Not all, however! A
newspaper paragraph lying before me states that the authorities of the
Louvre have five hundred unfinished copies on their hands, abandoned
by their authors so thoroughly as never to be inquired for again. I am
not surprised.
From the Salle Carre we enter the Grande Galerie, which begins with
the Florentine School, and ends, a vast distance away, with Rembrandt.
But first it is well to turn into the little Salle des Primitifs
Italiens, a few steps on the right, for here are very rare and
beautiful things: Botticelli's "Madonna with a child and John the
Baptist" (No. 1296); Domenico Ghirlandaio's "Portrait of an old man
and a boy" (No. 1322), which I reproduce opposite page 136, that
triumph of early realism, and his "Visitation" (No. 1321), with its
joyful colouring, culminating in a glorious orange gown; Benedetto
Ghirlandaio's "Christ on the way to Golgotha" (No. 1323, on the
opposite wall), a fine hard red picture; two little Piero di Cosimos
(on each side of the door), very mellow and gay--representing scenes
in the marriage of Thetis and Peleus; Fra Filippo Lippi's "Madonna and
Child with two sainted abbots" (No. 1344), and the "Nativity" next it
(No. 1343); a sweet and lovely "Virgin and Child" (No. 1345) of the
Fra Filippo Lippi school; another, also very beautiful, by Mainardi
(No. 1367); a canvas of portraits, including Giotto and the painter
himself, by Paolo Uccello (No. 1272), the very picture described by
Vasari in the _Lives_; and Giotto's scenes in the life of St. Francis,
in the frame of which, as we shall see, I once, for historical
comparison, slipped the photograph of M. Henri Pol, charmeur des
oiseaux. These I name; but much remains that will appeal even more to
others.
To walk along the Grande Galerie is practically to traverse the
history of art: Italian, Spanish, British, German, Flemish and Dutch
paintings all hang here. Nothing is missing but the French, which,
however, are very near at hand. Some lines of Landor which always come
to my mind in a picture gallery I may quote hereabouts with peculiar
fitness, and also with a desire to transfer the haunting--a very good
one even if one does not agree with the reference to Rembrandt, which
I do not:--
First bring me Raphael, who alone hath seen
In all her purity Heaven's Virgin Queen,
Alone hath felt true beauty; bring me then
Titian, ennobler of the noblest men;
And next the sweet Correggio, nor chastise
His little Cupids for those wicked eyes.
I want not Rubens's pink puffy bloom,
Nor Rembrandt's glimmer in a dirty room
With these, nor Poussin's nymph-frequented woods
His templed heights and long-drawn solitudes.
I am content, yet fain would look abroad
On one warm sunset of Ausonian Claude.
It is no province of this book to take the place of a catalogue; but I
must mention a few pictures. The left wall is throughout, I may say,
except in the case of the British pictures, the better. Here, very
early, is the lovely "Holy Family" of Andrea del Sarto (No. 1515);
here hang the four Leonardos which I have mentioned and certain of his
derivatives; a beautiful Andrea Solario (No. 1530); a Lotto, very
modern in feeling (No. 1350); a very striking "Salome" by Luini
(1355), and the same painter's "Holy Family" (No. 1353); Mantegna; a
fine Palma; Bellini; Antonello da Messina; more Titians, including
"The Madonna with the rabbit" (No. 1578) and "Jupiter and Antiope"
(No. 1587); a new portrait of a man in armour by Tintoretto, lately
lent to the Louvre, one of his gravest and greatest; and so on to the
sweet Umbrians--to Perugino and to Raphael, among whose pictures are
two or three examples of his gay romantic manner, the most pleasing
of which (No. 1509), "Apollo and Marsyas," is only conjecturally
attributed to him.
We pass then to Spain--to Murillo, who is represented here both in his
rapturous saccharine and his realistic moods, "La Naissance de la
Vierge" (No. 1710) and "Le Jeune Mendicant" (No. 1717); to Velasquez,
who, however, is no longer credited with the lively sketch of Spanish
gentlemen (No. 1734); and to Zurbaran, the strong and merciless.
The British pictures are few but choice, including a very fine
Raeburn, and landscapes by Constable and Bonington, two painters whom
the French elevated to the rank of master and influence while we were
still debating their merits. Such a landscape as "Le Cottage" (No.
1806) by Constable, with its rich English simplicity, brings one up
with a kind of start in the midst of so much grandiosity and pomp. It
is out of place here, and yet one is very happy to see it. From
Britain we pass to the Flemish and Germans--to perfect Holbeins,
including an Erasmus and Duerer; to Rubens, who, however, comes later
in his full force, and to the gross and juicy Jordaens.
Then sublimity again; for here is Rembrandt of the Rhine. After
Leonardo, Rembrandt is to me the glory of the Louvre, and especially
the glory of the Grande Galerie, the last section of which is now hung
with twenty-two of his works. Not one of them is perhaps superlative
Rembrandt: there is nothing quite so fine as the portrait of
Elizabeth Bas at the Ryks, or the "School of Anatomy" at the
Mauritshuis, or the "Unjust Steward" at Hertford House; but how
wonderful they are! Look at the miracle of the flying angel in the
picture of Tobias--how real it is and how light! Look closely at the
two little pictures of the philosopher in meditation. I have chosen
the beautiful "Venus et L'Amour" and the "Pelerins d'Emmaus" for
reproduction; but I might equally have taken others. They will be
found opposite pages 146 and 154.
On the other wall are a few pictures by Rembrandt's pupils and
colleagues, such as Ferdinand Bol and Govaert Flinck, who were always
on the track of the master; and more particularly Gerard Dou: note the
old woman in his "Lecture de la Bible," for it is Rembrandt's mother,
and also look carefully at "La Femme Hydropique," one of his most
miraculously finished works--a Rembrandt through the small end of a
telescope.
From these we pass to the sumptuous Salle Van Dyck, which in its turn
leads to the Salle Rubens, and one is again filled with wonder at the
productivity of the twain--pupil and master. Did he never tire, this
Peter Paul Rubens? Did a new canvas never deter or abash him? It seems
not. No sooner was it set up in his studio than at it he must have
gone like a charge of cavalry, magnificent in his courage, in his
skill and in his brio. What a record! Has Rubens' square mileage ever
been worked out, I wonder. He was very like a Frenchman: it is the
vigour and spirit of Dumas at work with the brush. In the Louvre
there are fifty-four attested works, besides many drawings; and it
seems to me that I must have seen as many in Vienna, and as many in
Dresden, and as many in Berlin, and as many in Antwerp, and as many in
Brussels, to say nothing of the glorious landscape in Trafalgar
Square. He is always overpowering; but for me the quieter, gentler
brushes. None the less the portrait of Helene Fourment and their two
children, in the Grande Galerie, although far from approaching that
exquisite picture in the Liechtenstein Gallery in Vienna, when the
boys were a little older, is a beautiful and living thing which one
would not willingly miss.
Van Dyck was, of course, more austere, less boisterous and abundant,
but his record is hardly less amazing, and he seems to have faced
life-size equestrian groups, such as the Charles the First here,
without a tremor. The Charles is superb in his distinction and
disdain; but for me, however, Van Dyck is the painter of single
portraits, of which, no matter where I go, none seems more noble and
satisfying than our own Cornelius Van Voorst in Trafalgar Square. But
the "Dame et sa Fille," which is reproduced on the opposite page, is
very beautiful.
[Illustration: UNE DAME ET SA FILLE
VAN DYCK
_(Louvre)_]
All round the Salle Rubens are arranged the little cabinets in which
the small Dutch pictures hang--the Jan Steens and the Terburgs, the
Hals' and the Metsus, the Ruisdaels and the Karel du Jardins, the
Ostades and the golden Poelenburghs. Of these what can I say? There
they are, in their hundreds, the least of them worth many minutes'
scrutiny. But a few may be picked out: the Jan van Eyck (No. 1986) "La
Vierge au Donateur," reproduced opposite page 166, in which the
Chancellor Rollin reveres the Virgin on the roof of a tower, and small
wild animals happily play around, and we see in the distance one of
those little fairy cities so dear to the Flemish painter's
imagination; David's "Noce de Cana"; Metsu's "Vierge et Enfant" the
Memling and the Rogier van der Weyden, close by; Franz Hals'
"Bohemienne," reproduced opposite page 186; Van der Heyden's lovely
"Plaine de Haarlem" (No. 2382); Paul Potter's "Bois de La Haye" (No.
2529), almost like a Diaz, and his little masterpiece No. 2526; the
Terburgs: the "Music Lesson" (No. 2588) and the charming "Reading
Lesson" (No. 2591) with the little touzled fair-haired boy in it,
reproduced opposite page 206; Ruisdael's "Paysage dit le Coup de
Soleil" (No. 2560); Hobbema's "Moulin a eau" (No. 2404); and, to my
eyes, almost first of all, Vermeer of Delft's "Lacemaker" (No. 2456),
reproduced opposite page 216. These are all I name.
So much for the paintings by the masters of the world. The Louvre also
has drawings from the same hands, which hang in their thousands in a
series of rooms on the first floor, overlooking the Rue de Rivoli.
Here, as I have said, are other Leonardos (look particularly at No.
389), and here, too, are drawings by Raphael and Rembrandt, Correggio
and Rubens (a child's head in particular), Domenico Ghirlandaio and
Chardin, Mantegna and Watteau, Duerer and Ingres. I reproduce only
one, a study attributed to the school of Fabriano, opposite page 228.
Here one may spend a month in daily visits and wish never to break the
habit. We have in England hardly less valuable and interesting
drawings, but they are not to be seen in this way. One must visit the
Print Room of the British Museum and ask for them one by one in
portfolios. The Louvre, I think, manages it better.