"The Venetian School proposed to itself the representation
of the effect of colour and shade on all things; chiefly on
the human form. Here you have the most perfect representation
possible of colour, and light, and shade, as they affect
the external aspect of the human form, and its immediate
accessories, architecture, furniture, and dress. This external
aspect of noblest nature was the first aim of the Venetians,
and all their greatness depended on their patience in achieving
it" (RUSKIN: _Two Paths_, §§ 20, 22).
Diego answered thus: "I saw in Venice
The true test of the good and beautiful;
First, in my judgment, ever stands that school,
And Titian first of all Italian men is."
VELAZQUEZ, reported by Boschini, in curious Italian
verse thus translated by Dr. Donaldson.
The general characteristics of the Venetian School, as defined by Mr.
Ruskin in the passage above quoted, may be traced both to historical
circumstances and to physical surroundings. Thus the first broad fact
to be noticed about the Venetian School of painting is that it is
later than the Florentine by some hundred years or more. From the point
of view of art, Venice, from her intimate connection as a trading
power with the East, was almost a Byzantine colony. St. Mark's is a
Byzantine church, her earliest palaces are Byzantine palaces. And so,
too, for painting she relied exclusively on a Byzantine supply. It was
not till the latter end of the fourteenth century that the influence
of Giotto's works in the neighbouring town of Padua began to rouse
Venice to do and think for herself in art, instead of letting her
Greek subjects do all for her.[24] But by the time Venetian painters
had acquired any real mastery over their art, Venice was already in a
state of great magnificence; her palaces, with their fronts of white
marble, porphyry, and serpentine, were the admiration of every visitor.
Painters paint what they see around them, and hence at the outset we
find in the Venetian School the rendering of material magnificence
and the brilliant colours that distinguish it throughout. Look, for
instance, at the pictures by a comparatively early Venetian, like
Crivelli (see 602); no other painter of a corresponding age showed such
fondness for fruits and stuffs and canopies and jewels and brilliant
architecture. And then, in the second place, there is the colour of
Venice itself, caused by her position on the lagoons. The Venetians
had no gardens; "but what are the purples and scarlets and blues of
iris, anemone, or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow-grasses
or trained in quiet cloister garden-beds, when compared with that
melodrama of flame and gold and rose and orange and azure, which the
skies and lagoons of Venice yield almost daily to the eye?" (Symonds's
_Renaissance_, iii. 255). But, thirdly, the sea had a further influence
on Venetian painting--it caused at once their love of bodily beauty
and the kind of such beauty that they loved. Compare, for instance, a
typical Venetian "beauty," such as Paris Bordone's (674), with one of
Botticelli's (915): how great is the difference between them! Well,
the sea "tends to induce in us great respect for the whole human body;
for its limbs, as much as for its tongue or its wit.... To put the
helm up at the right moment is the beginning of all cunning, and for
that we need arm and eye;--not tongue. And with this respect for the
body as such, comes also the sailor's preference of massive beauty in
bodily form. The landsmen, among their roses and orange-blossoms, and
chequered shadows of twisted vine, may well please themselves with pale
faces, and finely drawn eyebrows and fantastic braiding of hair. But
from the sweeping glory of the sea we learn to love another kind of
beauty; broad-breasted; level-browed, like the horizon;--thighed and
shouldered like the billows;--footed like their stealing foam;--bathed
in clouds of golden hair like their sunsets." Then further, "this
ocean-work is wholly adverse to any morbid conditions of sentiment.
Reverie, above all things, is forbidden by Scylla and Charybdis. By
the dogs and the depths, no dreaming! The first thing required of us
is presence of mind. Neither love, nor poetry, nor piety, must ever
so take up our thoughts as to make us slow or unready." Herein will
be found the source of a notable distinction between the treatment
of sacred subjects by Venetian painters and all others. The first
Venetian artists began with asceticism, just as the Florentines did;
"always, however, delighting in more massive and deep colour than
other religious painters. They are especially fond of saints who have
been cardinals, because of their red hats, and they sunburn all their
hermits into splendid russet brown" (see 768). Then again, through all
enthusiasm they retain a supreme common sense. Look back, for instance,
from the religious pictures in this room, from Titian's "Holy Family"
(635), or Cima's "Madonna" (634), to those of the Umbrians, which we
have just left. The Umbrian religion is something apart from the world,
the Venetian is of it. The religion of the Venetian painters is as real
as that of Fra Angelico. But it was the faith not of humble men or of
mystics, not of profound thinkers or ecstatic visionaries, so much
as of courtiers and statesmen, of senators and merchants, for whom
religion was not a thing by itself but a part and parcel of ordinary
life. "Throughout the rest of Italy, piety had become abstract, and
opposed theoretically to worldly life; hence the Florentine and Umbrian
painters generally separated their saints from living men. They
delighted in imagining scenes of spiritual perfectness;--Paradises,
and companies of the redeemed at the judgment;--glorified meetings
of martyrs;--madonnas surrounded by circles of angels. If, which was
rare, definite portraitures of living men were introduced, these real
characters formed a kind of chorus or attendant company, taking no part
in the action. At Venice all this was reversed, and so boldly as at
first to shock, with its seeming irreverence, a spectator accustomed to
the formalities and abstractions of the so-called sacred schools. The
madonnas are no more seated apart on their thrones, the saints no more
breathe celestial air. They are on our own plain ground--nay, here in
our houses with us." Cima places the Madonna in his own country-side,
whilst at Venice itself Tintoret paints Paradise as the decoration
for the hall of the Greater Council of the State. The religion of the
Venetian School was not less sincere than that of others, but it was
less formal, less didactic; for Venice was constantly at feud with the
popes, and here we come to the last circumstance which need be noticed
as determining the characteristics of the school. "Among Italian cities
Venice was unique. She alone was tranquil in her empire, unimpeded in
her constitutional development, independent of Church interference,
undisturbed by the cross purposes and intrigues of the despots,
inhabited by merchants who were princes, and by a freeborn people
who had never seen war at their gates. The serenity of undisturbed
security, the luxury of wealth amassed abroad and liberally spent at
home, gave a physiognomy of ease and proud self-confidence to all
her edifices.... The conditions of Florence stimulated mental energy
and turned the face of the soul inwards. Those of Venice inclined
the individual to accept life as he found it" (_Symonds_, iii. 259).
Hence the ideal of Venetian painting was "stateliness and power; high
intercourse with kingly and beautiful humanity, proud thoughts, or
splendid pleasures; throned sensualities; and ennobled appetites."
A speciality of the Venetian School arising from the characteristics
we have described is its portraiture. "If there be any one sign by
which the Venetian countenance, as it is recorded for us, to the very
life, by a school of portraiture which has never been equalled (chiefly
because no portraiture ever had subjects so noble),--I say, if there
be one thing more notable than another in the Venetian features, it is
their deep pensiveness and solemnity. In other districts of Italy, the
dignity of the heads which occur in the most celebrated compositions is
clearly owing to the feeling of the painter. He has visibly realised or
idealised his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults or
failings of the human nature around him, so that the best of his work
is that which has most perfectly taken the colour of his own mind; and
the least impressive, if not the least valuable, that which appears to
have been unaffected and unmodified portraiture. But at Venice, all is
exactly the reverse of this. The tone of mind in the painter appears
often in some degree frivolous or sensual; delighting in costume, in
domestic and grotesque incident, and in studies of the naked form. But
the moment he gives himself definitely to portraiture, all is noble
and grave; the more literally true his work, the more majestic; and
the same artist who will produce little beyond what is commonplace
in painting a Madonna or an Apostle, will rise into unapproachable
sublimity when his subject is a Member of the Forty, or a Master of the
Mint" (_Stones of Venice_, vol. iii. ch. iii. § lxxv.).
In its historical development the Venetian School may be divided, like
other schools, into three main periods. First we have the _Giottesque_
or heroic period, or, as it should in the case of Venice be called,
"the Vivarini epoch, bright, innocent, more or less elementary,
entirely religious art, reaching from 1400-1480." Next comes the
Bellini epoch, sometimes classic and mythic as well as religious,
1480-1520. In this period Venetian art is "entirely characteristic of
her calm and brave statesmanship, her modest and faithful religion."
"Bright costumes, distinct and sunny landscapes, broad backgrounds of
architecture, large skies, polished armour, gilded cornices, young
faces of fisher-boys and country girls, grave faces of old men brown
with sea-wind and sunlight, withered faces of women hearty in a hale
old age, the strong manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity of
patrician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the rosy whiteness
and amber-coloured tresses of the daughters of the Adriatic and the
lagoons--these are the source of inspiration to the Venetians of the
second period.... Among the loveliest motives in the altar-pieces of
this period are the boy-angels playing flutes and mandolines beneath
the Madonna on the steps of her throne. They are more earthly than Fra
Angelico's melodists, and yet they are not precisely of human lineage.
It is not, perhaps, too much to say that they strike the keynote of
Venetian devotion, at once real and devoid of pietistic rapture"
(_Symonds_, iii. 266.) Thirdly comes the epoch of "supremely powerful
art corrupted by taint of death," 1520-1600.
This final transition may perhaps best be seen by tracing the similar
progress in the technical feature which distinguishes the Venetian
painters. They are the school of colour. Their speciality consists
in seeing that "shadow is not an absence of colour, but is, on the
contrary, necessary to the full presence of colour; every colour in
painting must be a shadow to some brighter colour, and a light to some
darker one--all the while being a positive colour itself. And the great
splendour of the Venetian School arises from their having seen and held
from the beginning this great fact--that shadow is as much colour as
light, often much more. In Titian's fullest red the lights are pale
rose-colour, passing into white--the shadows warm deep crimson. In
Veronese's most splendid orange the lights are pale, the shadows crocus
colour.... Observe that this is no matter of taste, but fact. It is
an absolute fact that shadows are as much colours as lights are; and
whoever represents them by merely the subdued or darkened tint of the
light, represents them falsely." But in the two earlier periods above
specified, the Venetians are further "separated from other schools by
their contentment with tranquil cheerfulness of light; by their never
wanting to be dazzled. None of their lights are flashing or blinding;
they are soft, winning, precious; lights of pearl, not of lime: only,
you know, on this condition they cannot have sunshine: their day is
the day of Paradise; they need no candles, neither light of the sun,
in their cities; and everything is seen clear, as through crystal, far
or near. This holds to the end of the fifteenth century. Then they
begin to see that this, beautiful as it may be, is still a make-believe
light; that we do not live in the inside of a pearl; but in an
atmosphere through which a burning sun shines thwartedly, and over
which a sorrowful night must far prevail. And then the chiaroscurists
succeed in persuading them of the fact that there is mystery in the
day as in the night, and show them how constantly to see truly, is to
see dimly. And also they teach them the brilliancy of light, and the
degree in which it is raised from the darkness; and instead of their
sweet and pearly peace, tempt them to look for the strength of flame
and coruscation of lightning." Three pictures may be noted in which
the whole process may be traced. First in Bellini's "St. Jerome"[25]
(694) is the serene light of the Master of Peace. In another Bellini
(726) is a first twilight effect--such as Titian afterwards developed
into more solemn hues; whilst in No. 1130 is an example of the light
far withdrawn and the coils of shade of Tintoret. (For Ruskin's general
remarks on the Venetian School see _Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix.
ch. iii.; _Guide to Venetian Academy_; Oxford _Lectures on Art_, §§
134, 173-177.)
[Illustration]