The following essay owes its origin to the author's belief that Venetian
painting is the most complete expression in art of the Italian
Renaissance. The Renaissance is even more important typically than
historically. Historically it may be looked upon as an age of glory or
of shame according to the different views entertained of European events
during the past five centuries. But typically it stands for youth, and
youth alone--for intellectual curiosity and energy grasping at the whole
of life as material which it hopes to mould to any shape.
Every generation has an innate sympathy with some epoch of the past
wherein it seems to find itself foreshadowed. Science has of late
revealed and given much, but its revelation and gifts are as nothing to
the promise it holds out of constant acquisition and perpetual growth,
of everlasting youth. We ourselves, because of our faith in science and
the power of work, are instinctively in sympathy with the Renaissance.
Our problems do not seem so easy to solve, our tasks are more difficult
because our vision is wider, but the spirit which animates us was
anticipated by the spirit of the Renaissance, and more than anticipated.
That spirit seems like the small rough model after which ours is being
fashioned.
Italian painting interests many of us more than the painting of any
other school not because of its essential superiority, but because it
expressed the Renaissance; and Venetian painting is interesting above
all because it was at Venice alone that this expression attained
perfection. Elsewhere, particularly in Florence, it died away before it
found complete utterance.
In order to keep the main idea clearly before the mind of the reader, to
show him how the Renaissance reveals itself in Venetian painting, the
introduction of anything not strictly relevant to the subject has been
avoided. The salient points once perceived and connected with the more
important painters, the reader will find no difficulty in seeing the
proper place of any given work by a great master, or the relative
importance of those second-and third-rate painters of whom no special
mention has been made because they are comprised within what has been
said about the greater artists.
But happily art is too great and too vital a subject to be crowded into
any single formula; and a formula that would, without distorting our
entire view of Italian art in the fifteenth century, do full justice to
such a painter as Carlo Crivelli, does not exist. He takes rank with the
most genuine artists of all times and countries, and does not weary even
when "great masters" grow tedious. He expresses with the freedom and
spirit of Japanese design a piety as wild and tender as Jacopo da
Todi's, a sweetness of emotion as sincere and dainty as of a Virgin and
Child carved in ivory by a French craftsman of the fourteenth century.
The mystic beauty of Simone Martini, the agonized compassion of the
young Bellini, are embodied by Crivelli in forms which have the strength
of line and the metallic lustre of old Satsuma or lacquer, and which are
no less tempting to the touch. Crivelli must be treated by himself and
as the product of stationary, if not reactionary, conditions. Having
lived most of his life far away from the main currents of culture, in a
province where St. Bernardino had been spending his last energies in the
endeavour to call the world back to the ideals of an infantile
civilisation, Crivelli does not belong to a movement of constant
progress, and therefore is not within the scope of this work.
To make the essay useful as a handbook to Venetian painting, lists have
been appended of the works, in and out of Italy, by the principal
Venetian masters. These lists do not pretend to absolute completeness.
Only such private collections have been mentioned as are well known and
accessible to students, although in the case of very rare painters all
of their known works are given, and even such as are of doubtful
authenticity are alluded to. The author has seen and carefully
considered all the pictures he mentions, except one or two at St.
Petersburg, which are, however, well known from the photographs of MM.
Braun & Cie. The attributions are based on the results of the most
recent research. Even such painstaking critics of some years ago as
Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle laboured under terrible disadvantages,
because most of their work was done at a time when travelling was much
slower than it has now become, and when photography was not sufficiently
perfected to be of great service. Rapid transit and isochromatic
photography are beginning to enable the student to make of
connoisseurship something like an exact science. To a certain extent,
therefore, Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have been superseded, and to a
great degree supplemented by the various writings of Morelli, Richter,
Frizzoni, and others. The author takes pleasure in acknowledging his
indebtedness to the first systematic writers on Italian painting no less
than to the perfectors of the new critical method, now adopted by nearly
all serious students of Italian art. To the founder of the new
criticism, the late Giovanni Morelli, and to his able successor, Dr.
Gustavo Frizzoni, the author feels bound to ascribe many of his
attributions, although a number are based on independent research, and
for these he alone is responsible. Special thanks are due to a dear
friend, Enrico Costa, for placing his notes of a recent visit to Madrid
at the author's disposal. They have been used, with a confidence
warranted by Signor Costa's unrivalled connoisseurship, to supplement
the author's own notes, taken some years ago.
Having noted the dependence of scientific art study upon isochromatic
photography, the author is happy to take this opportunity of expressing
his gratitude to such able photographers as Löwy of Vienna, Tamme of
Dresden, Marcozzi of Milan, Alinari Bros. of Florence, and Dominic
Anderson of Rome, all of whom have devoted themselves with special zeal
to the paintings of the Venetian masters. The author is peculiarly
indebted to Signor Anderson for having materially assisted his studies
by photographing many pictures which at present have a scientific rather
than a popular interest.
The frontispiece is a reproduction of Giorgione's "Shepherd" at Hampton
Court, a picture which perhaps better than any other expresses the
Renaissance at the most fascinating point of its course. The author is
indebted to Mr. Sidney Colvin for permission to make use of a photograph
taken at his order.