_Cima da Conegliano_ (Venetian: 1460-1518).
Some miles north of Venice, in the Friuli, rises the town
of Conegliano, which, from its isolated and castled hill,
overlooks the plain of Treviso. Cima, whose real name was
Giovanni Battista, takes his title in art-history from the
"cima," or castled "height," of his native place--a picturesque
feature which he introduced, wherever it was at all possible,
into his pictures. We see these towers of Conegliano in
the present picture; and a window is opened in the large
composition, No. 816, in order to give us a glimpse of a
similar height. In his love of his native landscape is one of
the principal charms of Cima's work. "Morning is his favourite
time--morning among the hills; and then and there the painter
enjoyed more happiness than any twilight gondola could give
him. In our National Gallery are two examples of the Conegliano
scenery, but the brilliant daylight that so distinguishes Cima
is strangely absent" (Gilbert's _Landscape in Art_, p. 329).
One of his best works is the "St. John the Baptist" in the
church of S. Maria dell' Orto, Venice. "He is here painting,"
says Ruskin, "his name-saint; the whole picture full of peace
and intense faith and hope, and deep joy in light of sky and
fruit and flower and weed of earth. The picture was painted
for the church of Our Lady of the Garden, and it is full of
simple flowers, and has the wild strawberry of Cima's native
mountains gleaming through the grass.... He has given us the
oak, the fig, the beautiful 'Erba della Madonna' on the wall,
precisely such a bunch of it as may be seen growing at this
day on the marble steps of that very church; ivy, and other
creepers, and a strawberry plant in the foreground, with a
blossom, and a berry just set, and one half-ripe, and one ripe,
all patiently and innocently painted from the real thing, and
therefore most divine.... His own Alps are in the distance,
and he shall teach us how to paint wild flowers, and how to
think of them" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch.
vii. § 9; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. x. § 5; Oxford _Lectures on
Art_, § 150; _Catalogue of the Educational Series_, p. 27). The
charming landscape and fine colour of Cima are accompanied
by earnestness of religious feeling, and a sense of peace and
quiet, unmixed with any ascetism. "The painter," says Ruskin,
of another of his pictures, "does not desire the excitement
of rapid movement, nor even the passion of beautiful light.
But he hates darkness as he does death. He paints noble human
creatures simply in clear daylight; not in rapture, nor yet in
agony. The unexciting colour will not at first delight you;
but its charm will never fail, and you will find that you
never return to it but with a sense of relief and of peace....
Cima is not supreme in any artistic quality, but good and
praiseworthy in all" (_Lectures on Landscape_, § 60; _Guide to
the Academy at Venice_, p. 14). Cima is usually reckoned among
the disciples of Giovanni Bellini, and is believed at one time
to have superintended the workshop of that master.
In the background, on the right, are the towers of Conegliano; on the
left, the neighbouring castle of Colalto. There is something very
pretty in the way in which the earlier Venetian masters placed their
Holy Families in their own fields and amongst their own mountains
(compare _e.g._ the Madonna in the Meadow, No. 599), thus imagining
the Madonna and her child not as a far-away sanctity in the sky, but
as an actual presence nigh unto them, at their very doors.[146] "There
has probably not been an innocent cottage-home throughout the length
and breadth of Europe during the whole period of vital Christianity,
in which the imagined presence of the Madonna has not given sanctity
to the humblest duties, and comfort to the sorest trials of the lives
of women; and every brightest and loftiest achievement of the arts and
strength of manhood has been the fulfilment of the assured prophecy of
the poor Israelite maiden, 'He that is mighty hath magnified me, and
holy is his name'" (_Fors Clavigera_, 1874, p. 105).