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Transcriber's note:
1) Variations in the spelling of names and recording of some
questionable dates have been left as printed in the original
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2) Chapter IX--Sala del Gran Consiio possibly should be Sala
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THE VENETIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING
[Illustration: _Giorgione._
MADONNA WITH S. LIBERALE AND S. FRANCIS.
_Castelfranco._
(_Photo, Anderson._)]
THE VENETIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING
by
EVELYN MARCH PHILLIPPS
With Illustrations
Books for Libraries Press
Freeport, New York
First Published 1912
Reprinted 1972
International Standard Book Number: 0-8369-6745-3
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-37907
Printed in the United States of America
By
New World Book Manufacturing Co., Inc.
Hallandale, Florida 33009
PREFACE
Many visits to Venice have brought home the fact that there exists,
in English at least, no work which deals as a whole with the Venetian
School and its masters. Biographical catalogues there are in plenty, but
these, though useful for reference, say little to readers who are not
already acquainted with the painters whose career and works are briefly
recorded. "Lives" of individual masters abound, but however excellent
and essential these may be to an advanced study of the school, the
volumes containing them make too large a library to be easily carried
about, and a great deal of reading and assimilation is required to set
each painter in his place in the long story. Crowe and Cavalcaselle's
_History of Painting in North Italy_ still remains our sheet anchor; but
it is lengthy, over full of detail of minor painters, and lacks the
interesting criticism which of late years has collected round each
master. There seems room for a portable volume, making an attempt to
consider the Venetian painters, in relation to one another, and to help
the visitor not only to trace the evolution of the school from its dawn,
through its full splendour and to its declining rays, but to realise
what the Venetian School was, and what was the philosophy of life which
it represented.
Such a book does not pretend to vie with, much less to supersede, the
masterly treatises on the subject which have from time to time appeared,
or to take the place of exhaustive histories, such as that of Professor
Leonello Venturi on the Italian primitives. It should but serve to pave
the way to deeper and more detailed reading. It does not aspire to give
a complete and comprehensive list of the painters; some of the minor
ones may not even be mentioned. The mere inclusion of names, dates, and
facts would add unduly to the size of the book, and, when without real
bearing on the course of Venetian art, would have little significance.
What the book does aim at is to enable those who care for art, but may
not have mastered its history, to rear a framework on which to found
their own observations and appreciations; to supply that coherent
knowledge which is beneficial even to a passing acquaintance with
beautiful things, and to place the unscientific observer in a position
to take greater advantage of opportunities, and to achieve a wide and
interesting outlook on that cycle of artistic apprehension which the
Venetian School comprises, and which marks it as the outcome and the
symbol of a great historic age.
The works cited have been principally those with which the ordinary
traveller is likely to come into contact in the chief European
galleries, and, above all, in Venice itself. The lists do not propose to
be exhaustive, but merely indicate the principal works of the artists.
Those in private galleries, unless easy of access or of first-rate
importance, are usually eliminated. It has not been thought necessary to
use profuse illustrations, as the book is intended primarily for use
when visiting the original works.
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER I PAGE
VENICE AND HER ART 3
CHAPTER II
PRIMITIVE ART IN VENICE 11
CHAPTER III
INFLUENCES OF UMBRIA AND VERONA 21
CHAPTER IV
THE SCHOOL OF MURANO 29
CHAPTER V
THE PADUAN INFLUENCE 33
CHAPTER VI
JACOPO BELLINI 39
CHAPTER VII
CARLO CRIVELLI 44
CHAPTER VIII
GENTILE BELLINI AND
ANTONELLO DA MESSINA 48
CHAPTER IX
ALVISE VIVARINI 58
CHAPTER X
CARPACCIO 68
CHAPTER XI
GIOVANNI BELLINI 81
CHAPTER XII
GIOVANNI BELLINI (_continued_) 92
CHAPTER XIII
CIMA DA CONEGLIANO AND OTHER
FOLLOWERS OF BELLINI 103
PART II
CHAPTER XIV
GIORGIONE 121
CHAPTER XV
GIORGIONE (_continued_) 132
CHAPTER XVI
THE GIORGIONESQUE 140
CHAPTER XVII
TITIAN 144
CHAPTER XVIII
TITIAN (_continued_) 157
CHAPTER XIX
TITIAN (_continued_) 173
CHAPTER XX
PALMA VECCHIO AND LORENZO LOTTO 184
CHAPTER XXI
SEBASTIAN DEL PIOMBO 198
CHAPTER XXII
BONIFAZIO AND PARIS BORDONE 203
CHAPTER XXIII
PAINTERS OF THE VENETIAN PROVINCES 212
CHAPTER XXIV
PAOLO VERONESE 228
CHAPTER XXV
TINTORETTO 243
CHAPTER XXVI
TINTORETTO (_continued_) 254
CHAPTER XXVII
BASSANO 269
PART III
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE INTERIM 281
CHAPTER XXIX
TIEPOLO 297
CHAPTER XXX
PIETRO LONGHI 309
CHAPTER XXXI
CANALE 314
CHAPTER XXXII
FRANCESCO GUARDI 321
BIBLIOGRAPHY 329
INDEX 333
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY AT
1. Madonna with S. Liberale Giorgione Castelfranco
and S. Francis _Frontispiece_
2. Adoration of the Antonio da Murano Berlin
Magi 31
3. Agony in Garden Jacopo Bellini British Museum 41
4. Procession of the Gentile Bellini Venice
Holy Cross 52
5. Altarpiece of 1480 Alvise Vivarini Venice 60
6. Arrival of the Carpaccio Venice
Ambassadors 75
7. Pietà Giovanni Bellini Brera 87
8. An Allegory Giovanni Bellini Uffizi 94
9. Fête Champêtre Giorgione Louvre 136
10. Portrait of Ariosto Titian National Gallery 156
11. Diana and Actaeon Titian Earl Brownlow 161
12. Holy Family Palma Vecchio Colonna Gallery,
Rome 185
13. Portrait of Laura di Lorenzo Lotto Brera
Pola 194
14. Marriage in Cana Paolo Veronese Louvre 234
15. S. Mary of Egypt Tintoretto Scuola di
San Rocco 258
16. Bacchus and Ariadne Tintoretto Ducal Palace 261
17. Baptism of S. Lucilla Jacopo da Ponte Bassano 274
18. Antony and Cleopatra Tiepolo Palazzo Labia,
Venice 304
19. Visit to the Pietro Longhi National Gallery
Fortune-Teller 310
20. S. Maria della Salute Francesco Guardi National Gallery 324
LIST OF PAINTERS
Paolo da Venezia, _fl._ 1333-1358.
Niccolo di Pietro, _fl._ 1394-1404.
Niccolo Semitocolo, _fl._ 1364.
Stefano di Venezia, _fl._ 1353.
Lorenzo Veneziano, _fl._ 1357-1379.
Chatarinus, _fl._ 1372.
Jacobello del Fiore, _fl._ 1415-1439.
Gentile da Fabriano, 1360-1428.
Vittore Pisano (Pisanello), _circa_ 1385-1455.
Michele Giambono, _fl._ 1470.
Giovanni Alemanus, _fl._ 1440-1447.
Antonio da Murano, _circa_ 1430-1470.
Bartolommeo Vivarini, _fl._ 1420-1499.
Alvise Vivarini, _fl._ 1461-1503.
Antonello da Messina, _circa_ 1444-1493.
Jacopo Bellini, _fl._ 1430-1466.
Jacopo dei Barbari, _circa_ 1450-1516.
Andrea Mantegna, 1431-1506.
Carlo Crivelli, 1430-1493.
Bartolommeo Montagna, 1450-1523.
Francesco Buonsignori, 1453-1519.
Gentile Bellini, _circa_ 1427-1507.
Giovanni Bellini, 1426-1516.
Lazzaro Bastiani, _fl._ 1470-1508.
Vittore Carpaccio, _fl._ 1478-1522.
Girolamo da Santa Croce.
Mansueti, _fl._ 1474-1510.
Giovanni Battista da Conegliano (Cima), 1460-1517.
Vincenzo Catena, _fl._ 1495-1531.
Bissolo, 1464-1528.
Marco Basaiti, _circa_ 1470-1527.
Andrea Previtali, _fl._ 1502-1525.
Bartolommeo Veneto, _fl._ 1505-1555.
N. Rondinelli, _fl._ 1480-1500.
Girolamo Savoldo, 1480-1548.
Giorgio Barbarelli (Giorgione), 1478-1511.
Giovanni Busi (Cariani), _circa_ 1480-1544.
Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), 1477-1576.
Palma Vecchio, 1480-1528.
Lorenzo Lotto, 1480-1556.
Martino da Udine (Pellegrino di San Daniele).
Morto da Feltre, _circa_ 1474-1522.
Romanino, 1485-1566.
Sebastian Luciani (del Piombo), 1485-1547.
Giovanni Antonino Licinio (Pordenone), 1483-1540.
Bernardino Licinio, _fl._ 1520-1544.
Alessandro Bonvicino (Moretto), _circa_ 1498-1554.
Bonifazio de Pitatis (Veronese), _fl._ 1510-1540.
Paris Bordone, 1510-1570.
Jacopo da Ponte (Bassano), 1510-1592.
Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto), 1518-1592.
Paolo Caliari (Veronese), 1528-1588.
Domenico Robusti, 1562-1637.
Palma Giovine, 1544-1628.
Alessandro Varotari (Il Padovanino), 1590-1650.
Gianbattista Fumiani, 1643-1710.
Sebastiano Ricci, 1662-1734.
Gregorio Lazzarini, 1657-1735.
Rosalba Carriera, 1675-1757.
G. B. Piazetta, 1682-1754.
Gianbattista Tiepolo, 1696-1770.
Antonio Canale (Canaletto), 1697-1768.
Belotto, 1720-1780.
Francesco Guardi, 1712-1793.
PART I
CHAPTER I
VENICE AND HER ART
Venetian painting in its prime differs altogether in character from
that of every other part of Italy. The Venetian is the most marked and
recognisable of all the schools; its singularity is such that a novice
in art can easily, in a miscellaneous collection, sort out the works
belonging to it, and added to this unique character is the position it
occupies in the domain of art. Venice alone of Italian States can boast
an epoch of art comparable in originality and splendour to that of her
great Florentine rival; an epoch which is to be classed among the great
art manifestations of the world, which has exerted, and continues to
exert, incalculable power over painting, and which is the inspiration as
well as the despair of those who try to master its secret.
The other schools of Italy, with all their superficial varieties of
treatment and feeling, depended for their very life upon the extent to
which they were able to imbibe the Florentine influence. Siena rejected
that strength and perished; Venice bided her time and suddenly struck
out on independent lines, achieving a magnificent victory.
Art in Florence made a strictly logical progress. As civilisation awoke
in the old Latin race, it went back in every domain of learning to the
rich subsoil which still underlay the ruin and the alien structures left
by the long barbaric dominion, for the Italian in his darkest hour had
never been a barbarian; and as the mind was once more roused to
conscious life, Florence entered readily upon that great intellectual
movement which she was destined to lead. Her cast of thought was, from
the first, realistic and scientific. Its whole endeavour was to know the
truth, to weigh evidences, to elaborate experiments, to see things as
they really were; and when she reached the point at which art was ready
to speak, we find that the governing motive of her language was this
same predilection for reality, and it was with this meaning that her
typical artists found a voice. No artist ever sought for truth, both
physical and spiritual, more resolutely than Giotto, and none ever spoke
more distinctly the mind of his age and country; and as one generation
follows another, art in Tuscany becomes more and more closely allied to
the intellectual movement. The scientific predilection for _form_, for
the representation of things as they really are, characterises not
Florentine painting alone, but the whole of Florentine art. It is an art
of contributions and discoveries, marked, it is needless to say, at
every step by dominating personalities, positively as well as relatively
great, but with each member consciously absorbed in "going one better"
than his predecessors, in solving problems and in mastering methods.
Florentine art is the outcome of Florentine life and thought. It is part
of the definite clear-cut view of thought and reason, of that exactitude
of apprehension towards which the whole Florentine mind was bent, and
the lesser tributaries, as they flowed towards her, formed themselves on
her pattern and worked upon the same lines, so that they have a certain
general resemblance, and their excellence is in proportion to the
thoroughness with which they have learned their lesson.
The difference which separates Venetian from the rest of Italian
painting is a fundamental one. Venice attains to an equally
distinguished place, but the way in which she does it and the character
of her contribution are both so absolutely distinct that her art seems
to be the outcome of another race, with alien temperament and standards.
Venice had, indeed, a history and a life of her own. Her entire
isolation, from her foundation, gave her an independent government and
customs peculiar to herself, but at the same time her people, even in
their earliest and most precarious struggles, were no barbarians who
had slowly to acquire the arts of civilised life. Among the refugees
were persons of high birth and great traditions, and they brought with
them to the first crazy settlement on the lagoons some political
training and some idea of how to reconstruct their shattered social
fabric. The Venetian Republic rose rapidly to a position of influence
in Europe. Small and circumscribed as its area was, every feature and
sentiment was concentrated and intensified. But one element above all
permeates it and sets it apart from other European States. The Oriental
element in Venice must never be lost sight of if we wish to understand
her philosophy of art.
There are some grounds, seriously accepted by the most recent
historians, for believing that the first Venetian colonists were the
descendants of emigrants who in prehistoric times had established
themselves in Asia and who had returned from thence to Northern Italy.
"These colonists," says Hazlitt, "were called Tyrrhenians, and from
their settlements round the mouth of the Po the Venetian stock was
ultimately derived." If the tradition has any truth, we think with a
deeper interest of that instinct for commerce which seems to have been
in the very blood of the early Venetians. Did it, indeed, come down to
them from the merchants of Tyre and Carthage? From that wonderful
trading race which stretched out its arms all over Europe and
penetrated even to our own island? From the first, Venice cut herself
adrift, as far as possible, from Western ties, but she turned to Eastern
people and to intercourse with the East with a natural affinity which
savours of racial instinct. All her greatness was derived from her
Asiatic trade, and her bazaars, heaped with Eastern riches, must have
assumed a deeply Oriental aspect. Her customs long retained many details
peculiar to the East. The people observed a custom for choosing and
dowering brides, which was of Asia. The national treatment of women was
akin to that of an Oriental State; Venetian women lived in a retirement
which recalled the life of the harem, only appearing on great occasions
to display their brocades and jewels. Girls were closely veiled when
they passed through the streets. The attachment of men to women had no
intellectual bias, scarcely any sentiment, but "went straight to the
mark: the enjoyment of physical beauty." The position of women in Venice
was a great contrast to that attained by the Florentine lady of the
Renaissance, who was highly educated, deeply versed in men and in
affairs, the fine flower of culture, and the queen of a brilliant
society. The love for colour and gorgeous pageantry was of Semitic
intensity and seemed insatiable, and the gratification of the senses
was a deliberate State policy. But passionate as was the spirit of
patriotism, enthusiastic the love and loyalty of the people, the civic
spirit was absent. The masses were contented to live under a despotic
rule and to be little despots in their own houses. In the twelfth
century the people saw power pass into the hands of the aristocracy, and
as long as the despotism was a benevolent one, the event aroused no
opposition. Like Orientals, the Venetians had wild outbursts, and like
them they quieted down and nothing came of them. As Mr. Hazlitt remarks,
"their occasional resistance to tyranny, though marked by deeds of
horrid and dark cruelty, left no deep or enduring traces behind it. It
established no principle. It taught no lesson." Venice was a Republic
only in name. The whole aspect of her government is Eastern. Its system
of espionage, its secret tribunals, its swift and silent blows,--these
are all Oriental traits, and the East entering into her whole life
from without found a natural home awaiting it. We should be mistaken,
however, in thinking that the Venetians in their great days were
enervated and lapped in the sensuality which we are apt to associate
with Eastern ideals. Sensuality did in the end drain the life out of
her. "It is the disease which attacks sensuousness, but it is not the
same thing." The Venetians were by nature men with a deep capacity for
feeling, and it is this deep feeling which has so large a share in
Venetian art.
The painters of Venice were of the people and had no wide intellectual
outlook at its most splendid moment, such as was possessed by those men
who in Florence were drawn into the company of the Medici and their
court of scholars, and who all their lives were in the midst of a
society of large aims and a free public spirit, in which men took their
share of the responsibilities and honours of a citizen's life. The
merchant-patrons of Venice are quite uninterested in the solving of
problems. They pay a price, and they want a good show of colour and
gilding for their money. Presently they buy from outside, and a
half-hearted imitation of foreigners is the best ambition of Venetian
artists. Art, it has been said, does not declare itself with true
spontaneity till it feels behind it the weight and unanimity of the
whole body of the people. That true outburst was long in coming, but its
seeds were fructifying deep in a congenial soil. They were fostered by
the warmth and colour of Oriental intercourse, and at last the racial
instinct speaks with no uncertain accent in the great domain of art, and
speaks in a new and unexpected way; as splendid as, yet utterly unlike,
the grand intellectual declaration of Florence.
Let us bear in mind, then, that Venice in all her history, in all
her character, is Eastern rather than Western. Hers is the kingdom
of feeling rather than that of thought, of emotion as opposed to
intellect. Her whole story tells of a profoundly emotional and sensuous
apprehension of the nature of things; and till the time comes when her
artists are inspired to express that, their creations may be interesting
enough, but they fail to reveal the true workings of her mind. When they
do, they find a new medium and use it in a new way. Venetian colour,
when it comes into its kingdom, speaks for a whole people, sensuous and
of deep feeling, able for the first time to utter itself in art.
We have to divide the history of the Venetian School into three parts.
The first extends from the primitives to the end of Giovanni Bellini's
life. He forms a link between the first and second periods. The second
begins with Giorgione and ends with Tintoretto and Bassano, and is the
Venetian School proper. Thirdly, we have the eighteenth-century revival,
in which Tiepolo is the most conspicuous figure, and which is in an
equal degree the expression of the life of its time.
CHAPTER II
PRIMITIVE ART IN VENICE
The school of Byzantium, so widespread in its influence, was
particularly strong in Venice, where mosaics adorned the cathedral
of Torcello from the ninth century and St. Mark's became a splendid
storehouse of Byzantine art. The earliest mosaic on the façade of St.
Mark's was executed about the year 1250, those in the Baptistery date
during the reign of Andrea Dandolo, who was Doge from 1342 to 1354. Yet
though the life of Giotto lies between these two dates, and his frescoes
at Padua were within a few hours' journey, there is no sign that the
great revolution in painting, which was making itself felt in every
principal centre of Italy, had touched the richest and most peaceful of
all her States.
Yet local art in Venice was no outcome of Byzantinism. It rose as that
of the mosaicists fell, but its rise differs from that of Florence and
Siena in being for long almost imperceptible. Artists were looked upon
merely as artisans in all the cities of Italy, but in Venice before any
other city they had been placed among the craftsmen. The statute of the
Guild of Siena was not formulated till 1355; that of Venice is the
earliest of which we have any record, and bears the date of 1272. There
is scarcely a word to indicate that pictures in the modern sense of the
term existed. Painters were employed on the adornment of arms and of
household furniture. Leather helmets and shields were painted, and such
banners as we see in Paolo Uccello's battlepieces. Painted chests and
_cassoni_ were already in demand, dishes and plates for the table and
the surface of the table itself were treated in a similar way. Special
regulations dealt with all these, and it is only at the end of the list
that anconæ are mentioned. The ancona was a gilded framework, having a
compartment containing a picture of the Madonna and Child, and others
with single figures of the saints, and these were the only pictures
proper produced at this date. The demand for anconæ was, however, large,
and they were very early placed, not only in the churches, but in the
houses of patricians and burghers. Constant disputes arose between the
painters and the gilders. Pictures were habitually painted upon a gold
ground, but the painters were forbidden to gild the backgrounds
themselves. "Gilding is the business of the gilder, painting that of the
painter," says a contemporary record. "Now the gilder contends that if
a frame has to be gilt and then touched with colour, he is entitled to
perform both operations, but the painter disputes this right, and
maintains that the gilder should return it to him when the addition
of painting is desired." It was, however, finally decided by law that
each should exercise both professions, when one or the other played a
subordinate part in the finished work. Though the art of mosaic was
falling into decay as painting began to emerge, yet the commercial
manufactory of Byzantine Madonnas, which had been established as early
as 600, went on, on the Rialto, without any variation of the traditional
forms.
Florence very early discarded the temptation to cling to material
splendour, but as we pass into the Hall of the Primitives in the
Venetian Academy, we see at once that Venetian art, in its earlier
stages, has more to do with the gilder than the painter. The Holy
Personages are merely accessories to the gorgeous framework, the
embossed ornaments, the real jewels, which were in favour with the rich
and magnificent patrons. There is no sign of any feeling for painting
as painting, no craving after the study of form as the outcome of
intellectual activity, no zest of discovery, such as made the painter's
life in Florence an excitement in which the public shared. What little
Venice imbibes of these things is from outside influence, after due
lapse of time. A prosperous, luxurious city of merchants and statesmen,
she was too much bound up in the transactions and sensations of actual
life to develop any abstract and thoughtful ideals.
Perhaps the first painting we can discover which shows any sign of
independent effort is the series which Paolo da Venezia painted on the
back of the Pala d' Oro, over the high altar of St. Mark, when it was
restored in the fourteenth century. This reveals an artist with some
pictorial aptitude and one alive to the subjects that surround him. It
tells the story of St. Mark's corpse transported to Venice. The first
panel contains a group of cardinals of varying types and expressions; in
another the disciple listening to St. Mark's teaching, and crouching
with his elbows on his knees, has a true, natural touch. The dramatic
feeling here and there is considerable. The scene of the guards watching
the imprisoned Saint through the window and seeing the shadow of two
heads, as the Saviour visits him, imparts a distinct emotion; and there
is force as well as feeling for decorative composition in the panel in
which the Saint's body lies at the feet of the sailors, while his vision
appears shining upon the sails.
Except for the exaggerated insistence on the gilded elaborations of the
early ancona, there is not much to differentiate the early art of Venice
from that of other centres; but we notice that it persevered longer in
the material and mechanical art of the craftsman. Tuscan taste made
little impression, and many years elapsed before work akin to that of
Giotto attracted attention and was admired and imitated. A man like
Antonio Veneziano met with the fate of the innovator in Venice. He had
too much of the simplicity of the Tuscan and was compelled to carry his
work to Pisa, where his naïf and humorous narratives still delight us in
the Campo Santo. It was in 1384 that he was employed to finish the
frescoes of the life of S. Ranieri, which had been left uncompleted
at Andrea da Firenze's death, and the fondness for architecture and
surroundings in the Florentine taste, which secured him a welcome, may,
as Vasari says, be derived from Agnolo Gaddi, who had already visited
Padua and Venice.
In the last years of the fourteenth century tributary streams begin to
feed the feeble main current. In 1365 Guariento, a Paduan, was employed
by the State to paint a huge fresco of Paradise in the Hall of the Gran
Consiglio of the Ducal Palace. This, which lay hid for centuries under
the painting by Tintoretto, was uncovered in 1909 and found to be in
fairly good preservation. It can now be seen in a side room. It tells us
that Guariento had to some extent been influenced by Giotto. The thrones
have long Gothic pendatives, the faces have more the Giottesque than the
Byzantine cast and show that the old traditions were crumbling.
When painting in Venice first begins to live a life of its own,
Jacobello del Fiore stands out as the most conspicuous of the indigenous
Venetians. His father had been president of the Painters' Guild. Jacopo
himself was president from 1415 to 1436. He was a rich and popular
member of the State and a man of high character. His works, to judge
by the specimens left, hardly attained the dignity of art, though in
the banner of "Justice," in the Academy, the space is filled in a
monumental fashion and the figure of St. Gabriel with the lily has
something grand and graceful. We trace the same treatment of flying
banners and draperies and rippling hair in the fantastic but picturesque
S. Grisogono in the left transept of San Trovaso. Jacobello's will,
executed in 1439 in favour of his wife Lucia and his son, Ercole, with
provision for a possible posthumous son, shows him to have been a man of
considerable possessions. He owned a slave and had other servants, a
house, money, and books. Among his fellow-workers who are represented in
Venice are Niccolo Semitocolo, Niccolo di Pietro, and Lorenzo Veneziano.
The important altarpiece by the last, in the Academy, has evidently been
reconstructed; two Eternal Fathers hover over the Annunciation, and the
Saints have been restored to the framework in such wise that the backs
of many of them are turned on the momentous central event. In the
"Marriage of St. Catherine," in the same gallery, Lorenzo gets more
natural. The Child, in a light green dress with gold buttons, has a
lively expression, and looks round at His Mother as if playing a game.
The chapel of San Tarasio in San Zaccaria contains an ancona of which
the central panel was only inserted in 1839, and is identical with
Lorenzo's other work. One of the finest and most elaborate of all the
anconæ is in San Giovanni in Bragora, and is also the work of Lorenzo.
In this, as well as in that of San Tarasio, the Mother offers the Child
the apple, signifying the fruit of the Tree of Jesse and symbolical of
the Incarnation. This incident, which is found thus early in art, was
evidently felt to raise the group of the Mother and Child from a
representation of a merely earthly relationship to a spiritual scene
of the deepest meaning and the highest dignity.
Niccolo di Pietro has several early works of the last decade of the
fourteenth century, from which we gather that he began as a Byzantine,
but that he imitated Guariento and was tentatively drawn to the
Giottesque movement, but not, we may remember, before Giotto had been
dead for some sixty years. Niccolo di Pietro has been confounded with
Niccolo Semitocolo, but it is now realised that they were two distinct
masters. The most important work of Michele Giambono which has come
down to us is the signed ancona with five saints, now in the Venetian
Academy. It is unusual to find a saint in the central panel instead of
the Madonna. The saint is on a larger scale than his companions, and has
hitherto passed as the Redeemer, but Professor Venturi has identified
him as St. James the Great. He has the gold scallop-shell and pilgrim's
staff. It is clear from his size and position that the ancona has been
painted for an altar specially dedicated to this Apostle.
The saints on the right are S. Michael and S. Louis of Toulouse. Between
S. John the Evangelist and S. James is a monastic figure which has
evidently changed places with S. John at some moment of restoration. If
the two figures are transposed, their attitudes become intelligible. S.
John is inculcating a message inscribed in his open book, while the monk
is displaying his humble answer on his own page. The use in it of the
term _servus_ suggests that he is a Servite, though the want of the
nimbus precludes the idea that he is one of the founders. It is probable
that he is S. Filipo Benizzi, who, though considered as a saint from the
time of his death, was not canonised for several centuries.
The Mond Collection includes a glowing picture by Giambono; a seated
figure clad in rich vestments and holding an orb, probably representing
a "Throne," one of the angelic orders of the celestial Hierarchy.[1]
[1] These interesting particulars are given by Mr. G. M'N.
Rushforth in the _Burlington Magazine_ for October 1911.
Works are still in existence which may be ascribed to one or other of
these masters, or of which no attribution can be made, but we know
nothing positive of any other artists of the time which preceded the
influence of Gentile da Fabriano. Nothing leads us to suppose that the
Venetian School in its origin had any pretension to be a school of
colour, or that it could claim anything like real excellence at a time
when the Republic first became alive to the movement which was going on
in other parts of Italy, and decided to call in foreign talent.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
_Paolo da Venezia._
Venice. St. Mark's: The Pala d' Oro.
Vicenza. Death of the Virgin.
_Lorenzo da Venezia._
Venice. Academy: Altarpiece.
Correr Museum: Saviour giving Keys to St. Peter.
S. Giovanni in Bragora: Ancona.
Berlin. Two Saints.
_Nicoletto Semitocolo._
Venice. Academy: Altarpiece.
Padua. Biblioteca Archivescovo: Altarpiece.
_Stefano da Venezia._
Venice. Academy: Coronation of Virgin, with false signature of
Semitocolo.
_Jacobello del Fiore._
Venice. Academy: Justice.
S. Trovaso: S. Grisogono.
_Niccolo di Pietro._
Venice. S. Maria dei Miracoli: Altarpiece.
_Michele Giambono._
Venice. Academy: St. James the Great and other Saints.
London. Mond Collection: A "Throne."
CHAPTER III
INFLUENCES OF UMBRIA AND VERONA
Gentile da Fabriano, the Umbrian master, when he reached Venice in the
early years of the fifteenth century, was already a man of note. He had
received his art education in Florence, and he brought with him fresh
and delicate devices for the enrichment of painting with gold, which,
derived as it was from the Sienese assimilation of Byzantine methods,
was very superior in fancy and refinement to anything that Venice had
to show. He was a man of a gentle, mystic temperament, but he was
accustomed to courts, and a finished master whose technique and artistic
value was far beyond anything that the local painters were capable of.
He spent some years in Venice, adorning the great hall with episodes
from the legend of Barbarossa; one of these, which is specially cited,
was of the battle between the Emperor and the Venetians. Gentile was
working till about 1414, and the walls, finished by Pisanello, were
covered by 1416. After this Gentile remained some time in Bergamo and
Brescia, and settled in Florence about 1422. The year after reaching
Florence, he painted the famous "Adoration of the Magi," now in the
Florentine Academy. Even after leaving Venice his fame survived;
pictures went from his workshop in the Popolo S. Trinità, and he sent
back two portraits after he had returned to his native Fabriano.
We have no positive record of Gentile and Vittore Pisano, commonly
called Pisanello, having met in Venice, but there is every evidence in
their work that they did so, and that one overlapped the other in the
paintings for the Ducal Palace.
The School of Verona already had an honourable record, and its Guild
dates from 1303. The following are its rules, the document of which is
still preserved, while that of Venice has been lost:
RULES OF THE VERONESE GUILD (_abridged_)
1. No one to become a member who had not practised art for
twelve years.
2. Twelve artists to be elected members.
3. The reception of a new member depends on his being a senior.
4. The members are obliged in the winter season to take upon
themselves the instruction of all the pupils in turn.
5. A member is liable to be expelled for theft.
6. Each member is bound to extend to another fraternal
assistance in necessity.
7. To maintain general agreement in any controversies.
8. To extend hospitality to strange artists.
9. To offer to one another reciprocal comfort.
10. To follow the funerals of members with torches.
11. The President is to exercise reference authority.
12. The member who has the longest membership to be President.
There were also by-laws, which provided that no master should accept
a pupil for less than three years, and this acceptance had to be
definitely registered by the public notary, a son, brother, grandson, or
nephew being the only exceptions. No master might receive an apprentice
who should have left another master before his time was out, unless with
that master's free consent. There were penalties for enticing away a
pupil, and others to be enforced against pupils who broke the agreement.
Severe restrictions existed with regard to the sale of pictures, no one
but a member of the Guild being allowed to sell them. No one might bring
a work from any foreign place for purposes of sale. It might not
even be brought to the town without the special permission of the
_Gastaldiones_, or trustees of the Guild, and those trustees were
permitted to search for and destroy forged pictures. Every painter,
therefore, had to subordinate his interests and inclinations to the
local school. It helps us to understand why the individual character of
the different masters is so perceptible, and one of the primary causes
of this must have been the careful training of the pupils in the
master's workshop.
The fresco left by Altichiero, Pisanello's first master, in the Church
of S. Anastasia in Verona, shows how worthily a Veronese painter was at
this early time following in the footsteps of Giotto. Three knights of
the Cavalli family are presented by their patron saints to the Madonna.
The composition has a large simplicity, a breadth of feeling which is
carried into each gesture. The knights with their raised helmets, in the
pattern of horses' heads, are full of reality, the Madonna is sweet and
dignified, and the saints are grand and stately. The picture has a
delightful suavity and ease, and the colouring has evidently been
lovely. The setting is in good proportion and more satisfactory than
that of the Giottesques. From the series of frescoes in S. Antonio,
Verona, we gather that while Venice was still limited to stiff anconæ,
the Veronese masters were managing crowds of figures and rendering
distances successfully. Altichiero puts in homely touches from everyday
life with a freedom which shows he has not yet mastered the principles
of selection or the dignified fitness which guided the great masters;
as, for instance, in the case of the old woman, among the spectators of
the Crucifixion, who shows her grief by blowing her nose. He lets
himself be drawn off by all manner of trivial detail and of gay costume;
but again in such frescoes as S. Lucia, or the "Beheading of St.
George," in the Paduan chapel of the Santo, he proves how well he
understands the force of solid, simply-draped figures, direct in gesture
and expression, while the decorative use he makes of lances against the
background was long afterwards perhaps imitated, but hardly surpassed,
by Tintoretto.
Pisanello, who followed quickly upon Altichiero and his assistant,
Avanzi, exhibits the same chivalresque and courtly inclinations which
commended Gentile da Fabriano to the splendour-loving Venetians. Verona,
under the peaceful but gallant government of the Scaligeri, had long
been the home of all knightly lore, and the artists had been employed to
decorate chapels for the families of the great nobles. Among these,
Pisanello had attained a high place. Though very few of his paintings
remain, they all show these influences, and his subtly modelled medals
establish him as a master of the most finished type. A much destroyed
fresco in S. Anastasia, Verona, portrays the history of St. George and
the Dragon. In the St. George we probably see the portrait of the great
personage in whose honour the fresco was painted. He is mounting his
horse, which, seen from behind, reminds us of the fore-shortened
chargers of Paolo Uccello. The rescued princess, also a portrait, wears
a magnificent dress and an elaborate headgear in the fashion of the day.
Other horses, fiery and spirited, are grouped around, and in the band
of cavaliers, beyond St. George, every head is individualised; one is
beautiful, another brutal, and so on through the seven. A greyhound
and spaniel in the foreground are superbly painted, the background is
excellent, and a realistic touch is given by the corpses which dangle
unheeded from the trees outside the castle-gate. A ruined, but
fortunately not restored, "Annunciation" in S. Fermo, has a simple,
slender figure of the Virgin sitting by her white bed, and the angel,
with great sweeping, rushing wings and bowed, child-like head with fair
hair, is a most sweet and keen figure, thrilling and convincing, in
contrast to all the dead, over-worked frescoes round the church. All
these paintings are too small to be the least effective at the height
at which they are placed, and can only be seen with a good glass.
Pisanello's art is not well adapted to wide, frescoed walls, and he
seems to have enjoyed painting miniature panels, such as the two we
possess. In these he is full of originality, and shows his love for the
knightly life, the life of courts, in the armed _cap-à-pied_ figure of
St. George, whose point-device armour is crowned by a wide Tuscan hat
and feather. The artist's knowledge and love of animals and wild nature
comes out in them, and his interest in beauty and chivalry as opposed to
the outworn conventionalities of ecclesiastic demands.
We shall be able to trace the influence of both the Umbrian and the
Veronese painter on men like Antonio di Murano and Jacopo Bellini, and
it is important to note the likeness of the two to one another. In
Gentile's "Adoration" we have on the one hand the Holy Family and the
gay pageant of the kings, of which we could find the prototype in many
an Umbrian panel. On the other we see those contrasting elements which
were struggling in Pisanello; the delight in flowers and animals, in
gaily apparelled figures, in dogs and horses. The two have no lasting
effect, but though they created no actual school, they gave a stimulus
to Venetian art, and started it on a new tack, enabling it to open its
channels to fresh ideas. During the time they were in Venice, Jacobello
del Fiore shows some signs of adapting the new fashion to his early
style, and the horse of S. Grisogono is very like that of Gentile in the
"Adoration," or like Pisano's horses. Michele Giambono is actually found
in collaboration, in the chapel of the Madonna da Mascoli in St. Mark's,
with such a virile painter as the Florentine, Andrea del Castagno, who
is evidently responsible for God the Father and two of the Apostles; but
Castagno must have been thoroughly antipathetic to the Venetians, and
though he may have taught them the way to draw, he has not left any
traces of a following.
Facio, writing in 1455, speaks of Gentile's work in the Ducal Palace as
already decaying, while Pisanello's was painted out by Alvise Vivarini
and Bellini.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
_Gentile da Fabriano._
Florence. Academy: Adoration of the Magi.
Milan. Brera: Altarpiece.
_Altichiero._
Padua. Capella S. Felice, S. Antonio: Frescoes.
Capella S. Giorgio, S. Anastasia: The Cavalli Family.
_Pisanello._
Padua. S. Anastasia: St. George and the Dragon.
Verona. S. Fermo: Annunciation.
London. S. George and S. Jerome; S. Eustace and the Stag.
CHAPTER IV
THE SCHOOL OF MURANO
The important little town of Murano, a satellite of Venice, lies upon an
island, some ten minutes' row from the mother State, distinct from which
it preserved separate interests and regulations. Its glass manufacture
was safeguarded by the most stringent decrees, which forbade members of
the Guild to leave the islet under pain of death. Its mosaics, stone
work, and architecture speak of an early artistic existence, and we
recognise the justice of the claim of Muranese painters to be the first
to strike out into a more emancipated type than that of the primitives.
The painter Giovanni of Murano, called Giovanni Alemanus or d' Alemagna,
names between which Venetian jealousy for a time drew an imaginary
distinction, had certainly received his early education in Germany, and
betrays it by his heavier ornamentation and more Gothic style; but he
was a fellow-worker with Antonio of Murano, the founder of the great
Vivarini family, and the Academy contains several large altarpieces in
which they collaborated. "Christ and the Virgin in Glory" was painted
for a church in Venice in 1440, and has an inscription with both names
on a banderol across the foreground. The Eternal Father, with His hands
on the shoulders of the Mother and Son, makes a group of which we find
the origin in Gentile da Fabriano's altarpiece in the Brera, and it is
probable that one if not both masters had been studying with the Umbrian
and absorbing the principles he had brought to Venice. It is easy to
trace the influence of Giovanni d' Alemagna, though not always easy to
pick out which part of a picture belongs to him and which to Antonio
working under his influence. In S. Pantaleone is a "Coronation of the
Virgin," with Gothic ornaments such as are not found in purely Italian
art at this period, but the example in which both masters can be most
closely followed is the great picture in the Academy, the "Madonna
enthroned," where she sits under a baldaquin surrounded by saints. Here
the Gothic surroundings become very florid, and have a gingerbread-cake
effect, which Italian taste would hardly have tolerated. Many features
are characteristic of the German; the huge crown worn by the Mother, the
floriated ornament of the quadrangle, the almost baroque appearance of
the throne. Through it all, heavily repainted as it is, shines the dawn
of the tender expression which came into Venetian art with Gentile.
[Illustration: _Antonio da Murano._
ADORATION OF THE MAGI.
_Berlin._
(_Photo, Hanfstängl._)]
Giovanni d' Alemagna and Antonio da Murano were no doubt widely
employed, and when the former died Antonio founded and carried on a
real school in Venice. In 1446 he was living in the parish of S. Maria
Formosa with his wife, who was the daughter of a fruit merchant, and the
wills of both are still preserved in the parish archives. Gentile da
Fabriano had set the example for gorgeous processions with gay dresses
and strange animals; winding paths in the background and foreshortened
limbs prove that attention had been drawn to Paolo Uccello's studies in
perspective, while many figures and horses recall Pisanello. A striking
proof of the sojourn of Gentile and Pisanello in Venice is found in an
"Adoration of Magi," now ascribed to Antonio da Murano, in which the
central group, the oldest king kissing the Child's foot, is very like
that in Gentile's "Adoration," but the foreshortened horses and the
attendants argue the painter's knowledge of Pisanello's work. A
comparison of the architecture in the background with that in the
"St. George" in S. Anastasia shows the same derivation, and the dainty
cavalier, who holds a flag and is in attendance on the youngest king, is
reminiscent of St. George and St. Eustace in Pisanello's paintings in
the National Gallery, so that in this one picture the influences of the
two artists are combined.
Antonio took his younger brother, Bartolommeo, into partnership, and the
title of da Murano was presently dropped for the more modern designation
of Vivarini. Both brothers are fine and delicate in work, but from the
outset of their collaboration the younger man is more advanced and more
full of the spirit of the innovator. In his altarpiece in the first hall
of the Academy the Nativity has already a new realism; Joseph leans his
head upon his hand, crushing up his cheek. The saints are particularly
vivid in expression, especially the old hermit holding the bell, whose
face is brimming with ardent feeling.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
_Giovanni d' Alemanus and Antonio da Murano._
Venice. Christ and the Virgin in Glory; Virgin enthroned, with Saints.
_Antonio da Murano._
Berlin. Adoration of Magi.
CHAPTER V
THE PADUAN INFLUENCE
And now into this dawning school, employed chiefly in the service of the
Church, with its tentative and languid essays to understand Florentine
composition, resulting in what is scarcely more than a mindless
imitation, and with its rather more intelligent perception of the
Humanist qualities of Pisanello's work, there enters a new factor; or
rather a new agency makes a slightly more successful attempt than
Gentile and Castagno had done to help the Venetians to realise the
supreme importance of the human figure, its power in relation to other
objects to determine space, its modelling and the significance of its
attitude in conveying movement. Giotto had been able to present all
these qualities in the human form, but he had done so by the light of
genius, and had never formulated any sufficient rules for his followers'
guidance. In Ghiberti's school, at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, the fascination of the antique in art was making itself felt,
but Donatello had escaped from the artificial trammels it threatened to
exercise, and had carried the Florentine school with him in his profound
researches into the human form itself. Donatello had been working in
Padua for ten years before Pisanello's death, and in an indirect way the
Venetians were experiencing some after-results of the systematising and
formulating of the new pictorial elements. Though the intellectual
life had met with little encouragement among the positive, practical
inhabitants of Venice, in Padua, which had been subject to her since
1405, speculative thought and ideal studies were in full swing. There
was no re-birth in Venice, whose tradition was unbroken and where "men
were too genuinely pagan to care about the echo of a paganism in the
remote past." St. Mark was the deity of Venice, and "the other twelve
Apostles" were only obscurely connected with her religious life, which
was strong and orthodox, but untroubled by metaphysical enthusiasms
and inconvenient heresies. Padua, on the other hand, was absorbed in
questions of learning and religion. A university had been established
here for two centuries. The abstract study of the antique was carried on
with fervour, and the memory of Livy threw a lustre over the city which
had never quite died out. It seemed perfectly right and respectable to
the Venetians that the _savants_, lying safely removed from the busy
stream of commercial life, should cultivate inquiries into theology
and the classics, which would only have been a hindrance to their own
practical business; but such, as it was well known, were of absorbing
interest in the circles which gathered round the Medici in Florence. The
school of art, which was now arising in Padua, was fed from such sources
as these. The love of the antique was becoming a fashion and a guiding
principle, and influenced the art of painting more formally than it
could succeed in doing among the independent and original Florentines.
Francesco Squarcione, though, as Vasari says, he may not have been the
best of painters, has left work (now at Berlin) which is accepted as
genuine and which shows that he was more than the mere organiser he is
sometimes called. He had travelled in Greece, and was apparently a
dealer, supplying the demand for classic fragments, which was becoming
widespread. When he founded his school in Padua he evidently was its
leading spirit and a powerful artistic influence. His pupils, even the
greatest, were long in breaking away from his convention, and few of
them threw it off entirely, even in after life. That convention was
carried with undeviating thoroughness into every detail. Draperies are
arranged in statuesque folds, designed to display every turn of the form
beneath; the figures are moulded with all the precision and limitations
of statuary. The very landscape becomes sculpturesque, and rocks of a
volcanic character are constructed with the regularity of masonry. The
colour and technique are equally uncompromising, and the surface becomes
a beautiful enamel, unyielding, definite in its lines, lacquer-like in
its firmness of finish, while the Gothic forms, which had hitherto been
so prevalent, were replaced by more or less pedantic adaptations from
Roman bas-reliefs. This system of design was practised most determinedly
in Padua itself, but it soon spread to Venice. Squarcione himself was
employed there after 1440, and though Antonio da Murano clung to the old
archaic style he saw the Paduan manner invading his kingdom, and his own
brother became strongly Squarcionesque.
The two brothers of Murano come most closely together in an altarpiece
in the gallery of Bologna, where the framework is more simple than
Alemanus's German taste would have permitted, and the Madonna and Child
have some natural ease, and the delicacy of feeling of primitive art.
Bartolommeo, when he breaks away and sets out to paint by himself, is
crude and strong, but full of vital force. In his altarpiece of 1464,
in the Academy, he gives his saints reality by taking them off their
pedestals and making them stand upon the ground, and though they are
still isolated from one another in the partitions of an ancona, their
sparkling eyes, individual features, and curly beards give them a look
of life. The draperies, thin and clinging, with little rucked folds,
which display the forms, and the drawing of the bony structure,
exaggerated in the arms and legs, are Squarcionesque. The rocks and
stones, too, show the Paduan convention. In several of his other
altarpieces, Bartolommeo introduces rich ornaments and swags of fruit,
such as Donatello had first brought to Padua, or which Paduan artists
delighted to copy from classic columns. Antonio's manner to the end is
the local Venetian manner, infused as it was with the soft and charming
influence of Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello, but Bartolommeo adopts
the new and more ambitious style. Though not a very good painter, and
inclined to be puffy and shapeless in his flesh forms, he was the head
of a crowd of artists, and works of his school, signed _Opus factum_,
went all over Italy, and are found as far south as Bari. Works of his
pupils are numerous; the "St. Mark enthroned" in the Frari is as good if
not better than the master's own work, and the triptych in the Correr
Museum is a free imitation.
Round this early school gathered such painters as Antonio da Negroponte
and Quirizio da Murano, who were both working in 1450. Negroponte has
left an enthroned Madonna in S. Francesco della Vigna, which is one of
the most beautiful examples of colour and of the fanciful charm of the
Renaissance that the early art of Venice has to show. The Mother and
Child are placed in a marble shrine, adorned with antique reliefs, rich
wreaths of fruit swag above her head, a little Gothic loggia is full of
flowers and fruit, and birds are perched on cornucopias. On either
side, four badly drawn little angels, with ugly faces and awkwardly
foreshortened forms, foreshadow the beautiful, music-making angels which
became such a feature of North Italian art. The Divine Mother, adoring
the Child lying across her knees, has an exquisite, pensive face,
conceived with all the delicacy and simplicity of early art. It seems
quite possible, as Professor Leonello Venturi suggests, that we have
here the early master of Crivelli, in whom we find the love of fruit
garlands, of chains of beads and rich brocades carried to its farthest
limits, who takes keen pleasure in introducing the ugly but lively
little angels, and who gives the same pensive and almost mincing
expression to his Madonnas.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
_Antonio da Murano and Bartolommeo Vivarini._
Bologna. Altarpiece.
_Bartolommeo Vivarini._
Venice. Academy: Altarpiece, 1464; Two Saints.
Frari: Madonna and four Saints.
S. Giovanni in Bragora: Madonna and two Saints.
S. Maria Formosa: Triptych.
London. Madonna and Saints.
Vienna. S. Ambrose and Saints.
_Antonio da Negroponte._
Venice. S. Francesco della Vigna: Altarpiece.
CHAPTER VI
JACOPO BELLINI
While Venice was assimilating the spirit of the school of Squarcione,
which in the next few years was to be rendered famous by Mantegna,
another influence was asserting itself, which was sufficient to
counteract the hard formalism of Paduan methods.
When Gentile da Fabriano left Venice, he carried with him, and presently
established with him in Florence, a young man, Jacopo Bellini, who had
already been working with him and Pisanello, and who was an ardent
disciple of the new naturalistic and humanist movement. Both Gentile and
his apprentice were subjected to annoyance from the time they arrived in
Florence, where the strict regulations which governed the Guilds made it
very difficult for any newcomer to practise his art. The records of a
police case report that on the 11th of June 1423 some young men, among
them, one, Bernabo di San Silvestri, the son of a notary, were observed
throwing stones into the painter's room. His assistant, Jacopo Bellini,
came out and drove the assailants away with blows, but Bernabo, accusing
Jacopo of assault, the latter was committed to prison in default of
payment. After six months' imprisonment, a compromise of the fine and a
penitential declaration set him at liberty. The accounts declare that
Gentile took no steps to be of service to his follower; but Jacopo soon
after married a girl from Pesaro, and his first son was christened after
his old master, which does not look as though they were on unfriendly
terms. Jacopo travelled in the Romagna, and was much esteemed by the
Estes of Ferrara, but he was back in Venice in 1430. He has left us only
three signed works, and one or two more have lately been attributed to
him, but they give very little idea of what an important master he was.
[Illustration: _Jacopo Bellini._
AGONY IN GARDEN--DRAWING.
_British Museum._
(_Photo, Anderson._)]
His Madonna in the Academy has a round, simple type of face, and in the
Louvre Madonna, which is attributed but not signed, it is easy to
recognise the same arched eyebrows and half-shut, curved eyelids. In
this picture, where the Madonna blesses the kneeling Leonello d' Este,
we see how Pisanello acted on Jacopo and, through him, on Venetian art.
The connection between the two masters has been established in a very
interesting way by Professor Antonio Venturi's discovery of a sonnet,
written in 1441, which recounts how they painted rival portraits of
Leonello, and how Bellini made so lively a likeness that he was
adjudged the first place. The landscape in the Louvre picture is
advanced in treatment, and with its gilded mountain-tops, its stag and
its town upon the hill-side, is full of reminiscences of Pisanello,
especially of the "St. George" in S. Anastasia. We come upon such
traces, too, in Jacopo's drawings, and it is by his two sketch-books
that we can best judge of his greatness. One of these is in the British
Museum; the other, in the Louvre, was discovered not many years ago in
the granary of a castle in Guyenne. These drawings reveal Jacopo as one
of the greatest masters of his day. He is larger, simpler, and more
natural than Pisanello, and he apparently cares less for the human
figure than for elaborate backgrounds and surroundings. Many of his
designs we shall refer to again when we come to speak of his two sons.
His "Supper of Herod" reminds us of Masolino's fresco at Castiglione
d' Olona. He sketches designs for numbers of religious scenes, treated
in an original and interesting manner. A "Crucifixion" has bands of
soldiers ranged on either side, an "Adoration of the Magi" has a string
of camels coming down the hill, the executioners in a "Scourging" wear
Eastern head-dresses. In a sketch for a "Baptism of Christ" tall angels
hold the garments in the early traditional way; on one side two play
the lute and the violin, while the two on the other side have a trumpet
and an organ. He has sketches for the Ascension, Resurrection,
Circumcision, and Entombment, repeated over and over again with
variations, and one of S. Bernardino preaching in Venice (where he was
in 1427). Jacopo delights even more in fanciful and mythological than in
sacred subjects. A tournament with spectators, a Faun riding a lion, a
"Triumph of Bacchus" with panthers, are among such essays. The fauns
pipe, the wine-god bears a vase of fruit. His love of animals is equal
to that of Pisanello, and S. Hubert and the stag with the crucifix
between its horns is directly reminiscent of the Veronese. His horses,
of which there are immense numbers, sometimes look as if copied from
ancient bas-reliefs. His treatment of single nude figures is often
poor and weak enough, and his rocks have the flat-topped, geological
formation of the Paduan School, but no one who so drank in every
description of lively scene about him could have been in any danger of
becoming a mere archeological type, and it was from this pitfall that he
rescued Mantegna. To judge by his drawings, Jacopo did not overlook any
source of art open to him; he delights in the rich research of the
Paduans as much as in the varieties of wild nature and all the incidents
of contemporary life first annexed by Pisanello. He is often very like
Gentile da Fabriano, he makes raids into Uccello's domains of
perspective, he is frankly mundane and draws a revel of satyrs and
centaurs with a real interpretation of the lyrical and pagan spirit of
the Greeks, and he has an idealism of the soul, which found its full
expression in his son, Giovanni. We cannot call Jacopo Bellini the
founder of the Venetian School, for its makings existed already, but it
was his influence on his sons which, above all, was accountable for the
development of early excellence. His long, flowing lines have a sweep
and a fanciful grace which form an absolute antidote to the definite,
geometrical Paduan convention. In Jacopo we see the thorough
assimilation of those foreign elements which were in sympathy with
the Venetian atmosphere, and while up to now Venice had only imbibed
influences, she was soon to create for herself an artistic _milieu_ and
to become the leader of the movement of painting in the north of Italy.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
_Jacopo Bellini._
Brescia. Annunciation and Predelle.
Verona. Christ on Cross.
Venice. Academy: Madonna.
Museo Correr: Crucifixion.
London. British Museum: Sketch-book.
Paris. Madonna and Leonello d' Este: Sketch-book.
CHAPTER VII
CARLO CRIVELLI
We must turn aside from the main stream when we come to speak of Carlo
Crivelli, who, important master as he was, occupies a place by himself.
A pupil of the Vivarini and perhaps, as we have noted, of Antonio
Negroponte, Crivelli was profoundly influenced by the Paduans, from whom
he learned that metallic, finished quality of paint which he carried to
perfection. Crivelli shows intellect, individuality, even genius, in the
way in which he grapples with his medium and produces his own reading,
and the circumstances of his life were such as to throw him in upon
himself and to preserve his originality. His little early "Madonna and
Child" at Verona is linked with that of Negroponte by the elaborate
festoons, strings of beads, and large-patterned brocades used in the
surroundings, and has those ugly, foreshortened little _putti_, holding
the instruments of the Passion, of the type elaborated by Squarcione and
Marco Zoppo, and which, in their improved state, we are accustomed to
think of as Mantegnesque.
When Crivelli was thirty-eight years old, he was condemned to six
months' imprisonment and to a fine of two hundred lire for an outrage
on a neighbour's wife. Perhaps it was to escape from an unenviable
reputation that he left Venice soon after and set up painting in the
Marches, where he lived from 1468 to 1473. He then went on to Camerino
in Umbria, where his great triptych, now in the Brera, was painted,
and a few years later he was in Ascoli, with a commission for an
Annunciation in the Cathedral. This is the picture now in the National
Gallery, in which the Bishop holds a model of the Duomo. After 1490 he
worked in little towns in the Marches, and is not mentioned after 1493.
He does not seem ever to have come back to Venice.
Shut up in the Marches, where there was little strong local talent, and
where he could not keep up with the progress that was taking place in
Venice, he was obliged himself to supply the artistic movement. He kept
the Squarcionesque traditions to the end, but moulded them by his own
love of rich and exuberant decoration. Moreover, he was of a very
intense religious bias, and this finds a deeply touching and mystical
expression, more especially in his Pietàs. The love of gilded patterns
and fanciful detail was deep-seated in all the Umbrian country. His
altarpieces were intended as sumptuous additions to rich churches, and
were consequently arranged, with many divisions, in the old Muranese
manner. His great ancona, in the National Gallery, is a marvel of
elaborate ornament and enamel-like painting. The Madonna is delicate,
almost affected in her refinement. Her long fingers hold the Child's
garment with the extreme of dainty precision, the croziers and rings of
the saints and bishops are embossed with gold and real jewels. The
flowers in the panel of "The Immaculate Conception," which hangs beside
it, are twisted into heads of mythological beasts and grotesques or
cherubs; but Crivelli has plenty of strength, and his male saints have
vigorous, bony limbs and fierce fanatical eyes. It is, however, in his
colour that he charms us most, and though he does not touch the real
fount, he is of all the earlier school the most remarkable for subtle
tender tones and lovely harmonies of olive-greens and faded rose and
cream embossed with gold.
Crivelli continued executing one great ancona after another, limiting
his progress to perfecting his technique, and his influence was most
deeply felt by such Umbrian painters as Lorenzo di San Severino and
Niccola Alunno. The honours paid him testify to the reputation he
acquired. He was created a knight and presented with a golden laurel
wreath. But though he never, that we can hear of, revisited his native
State, he always adds _Venetus_ to the signature on his paintings, a
fact which tells us that far from Venice and in provincial districts,
her prestige was felt and gave his work an enhanced commercial value.
He had no after-influence upon the Venetian School, and in this respect
is interesting as an example of the tenacity exercised by the
Squarcionesque methods, when, unchecked by any counter-attraction, they
came to act upon a very different temperament; for in his love of grace
and beauty and of rich effects, and especially in his intensity of
mystic feeling, Crivelli is a true Venetian and has no natural affinity
with the classic spirit of the Paduans.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Venice. SS. Jerome and Augustine.
Ascoli. Duomo: Altarpiece and Pietà.
Berlin. Madonna and six Saints.
London. Pietà; The Blessed Ferretti; Madonna and Saints; Annunciation;
Ancona in thirteen compartments; The Immaculate Conception.
Mr. Benson: Madonna.
Sir Francis Cook: Madonna enthroned.
Mond Collection: SS. Peter and Paul.
Lord Northbrook: Madonna; Resurrection; Saints; Crucifixion;
Madonna; Madonna and Saints.
Milan. Brera: SS. James, Bernardino, and Pellegrino; SS. Anthony Abbot,
Jerome, and Andrew.
Poldi-Pezzoli: S. Francis in Adoration.
Rome. Vatican: Pietà.
CHAPTER VIII
GENTILE BELLINI AND ANTONELLO DA MESSINA
What, then, is the position which art has achieved in Venice a decade
after the middle of the fourteenth century, and how does she compare
with the Florentine School? The Florentines, Fra Angelico, Andrea del
Castagno, and Pesellino were lately dead. Antonio Pollaiuolo was in his
prime, Fra Lippo was fifty-four, Paolo Uccello was sixty-three. But
though the progress in the north had been slower, art both in Padua and
Venice was now in vigorous progress. Bartolommeo Vivarini was still
painting and gathering round him a numerous band of followers; Mantegna
was thirty, had just completed the frescoes in the Eremitani Chapel and
the famous altarpiece in S. Zeno; and Gentile and Giovanni Bellini were
two and four years his seniors.
Francesco Negro, writing in the early years of the sixteenth century,
speaks of Gentile as the elder son of Jacopo Bellini. Giovanni is
thought to have been an illegitimate son, as Jacopo's widow only
mentions Gentile and another son, Niccolo, in her will. There is every
reason to believe that, as was natural, the two brothers were the pupils
and assistants of their father. A "Madonna" in the Mond Collection, the
earliest known of Gentile's works, shows him imitating his father's
style; but when his sister, Niccolosia, married Mantegna in 1453, it is
not surprising to find him following Mantegna's methods for a time, and
a fresco of St. Mark in the Scuola di San Marco, an important commission
which he received in 1466, is taken direct from Mantegna's fresco at
Padua.
As the Bellini matured, they abandoned the Squarcionesque tradition and
evolved a style of their own; Gentile as much as his even more famous
brother. Gentile is the first chronicler of the men and manners of his
time. In 1460 he settled in Venice, and was appointed to paint the organ
doors in St. Mark's. These large saints, especially the St. Mark, still
recall the Paduan period. They have festoons of grapes and apples hung
from the architectural ornaments, and the cast of drapery, showing the
form beneath, reminds us of Mantegna's figures. But Gentile soon becomes
an illustrator and portrait painter. Much of his work was done in the
Scuola of St. Mark, where his father had painted, and this was destroyed
by fire in 1485. Early, too, is the fine austere portrait of Lorenzo
Giustiniani, in the Academy. In 1479 an emissary from the Sultan
Mehemet arrived in Venice and requested the Signoria to recommend a good
painter and a man clever at portraits. Gentile was chosen, and departed
in September for Constantinople. He painted many subjects for the
private apartments of the Sultan, as well as the famous portrait now in
the possession of Lady Layard. It would be difficult for a historic
portrait to show more insight into character. The face is cold, weary,
and sensual, with all the over-refined look of an old race and a long
civilisation, and has a melancholy note in its distant and satiated
gaze. The Sultan showed Gentile every mark of favour, loaded him with
presents, and bestowed on him the title of Bey. He returned home in
1493, bringing with him many sketches of Eastern personages and the
picture, now in the Louvre, representing the reception of a Venetian
Embassy by the Grand Vizier. Some five years before Gentile's commission
to Constantinople Antonello da Messina had arrived in Venice, and the
spread and popularisation of oil-painting had hastened the casting off
of outworn ecclesiastical methods and brought the painters nearer to the
truth of life. Antonello did not actually introduce oils to the notice
of Venetian painters, for Bartolommeo Vivarini was already using them in
1473, but he was well known by reputation before he arrived, and having
probably come into contact with Flemish painters in Naples, he had had
better opportunities of seizing upon the new technique, and was able to
establish it both in Milan and in Venice. A large number of Venetians
were at this time resident in Messina: the families of Lombardo,
Gradenigo, Contarini, Bembo, Morosini, and Foscarini were among those
who had members settled there. Many of these were patrons of art, and
probably paved the way to Antonello's reception in Venice. At first all
the traits of Antonello's early work are Flemish: the full mantles,
white linen caps and tuckers, the straight sharp folds and long wings of
the angels have much of Van Eyck, but when he gets to Venice in 1475,
its colour and life fascinate him, and a great change comes over his
work. His portraits show that he grasped a new intensity of life,
and let us into the character of the men he saw around him. His
"Condottiere," in the Louvre, declares the artist's recognition of
that truculent and formidable being, full of aristocratic disdain, the
product of a daring, unscrupulous life. The "Portrait of a Humanist,"
in the Castello in Milan, is classic in its deepest sense; and in the
Trivulzio College at Milan an older man looks at us out of sly,
expressive eyes, with characteristic eyebrows and kindly, half-cynical
mouth. It was not wonderful that these portraits, combined with the new
medium, worked upon Gentile's imagination and determined his bent.
The first examples of great canvases, illustrating and celebrating
their own pageants, must have mightily pleased the Venetians. Scenes
in the style of the reception of the Venetian ambassadors were called
for on all hands, and when the excellence of Gentile's portraits was
recognised, he became the model for all Venice. When his own and his
father's and brother's paintings perished by fire in 1485, he offered
to replace them "quicker than was humanly possible" and at a very low
price. Giovanni, who had been engaged on the external decorations, was
ill at the time, but the Signoria was so pleased with the offer that it
was decided to let no one touch the work till the two brothers were
able to finish it. Gentile still painted religious altarpieces with the
Virgin and Child enthroned with saints, but most of his time was devoted
to the production of his great canvases. Some of these have disappeared,
but the "Procession" and "Miracle of the Cross," commissioned by the
school of S. Giovanni Evangelista, are now in the Academy, and the
third canvas, executed for the same school, "St. Mark preaching at
Alexandria," which was unfinished at the time of his death, and was
completed by his brother, is in the Brera.
[Illustration: _Gentile Bellini._
PROCESSION OF THE HOLY CROSS.
_Venice._
(_Photo, Anderson._)]
These great compositions of crowds bring back for us the Venice of
Gentile's day as no verbal description can do. There is no especial
richness of colour; the light is that of broad day in the Piazza and
among the luminous waterways of the city. We can see the scene any
day now in the wide square, making allowance for the difference of
costume. The groups are set about in the ample space, with the wonderful
cathedral as a background. St. Mark's has been painted hundreds of
times, but no one has ever given such a good idea of it as Gentile--of
its stateliness and beauty, of its wealth of detail; and he does so
without detracting from the general effect, for St. Mark's, though the
keynote of the whole composition, is kept subservient, and is part of
the stage on which the scene is enacted. The procession passes along,
carrying the relics, attended by the waxlights and the banners. Behind
the reliquary kneels the merchant, Jacopo Salò, petitioning for the
recovery of his wounded son. Then come the musicians; the spectators
crowd round, they strain forward to see the chief part of the cortège,
as a crowd naturally does. Some watch with reverence, others smile or
have a negligent air. The faces of the candle-bearers are very like
those we may see to-day in a great Church procession: some absorbed in
their task, or uplifted by inner thoughts; others looking curiously
and sceptically at the crowd. Gentile tries in his crowds to bring
together all the types of life in Venice, all the officials and the
ecclesiastical world, the young and old. With a few strokes he creates
the individual and also the type;--the careless rover; the responsible
magistrate; the shrewd, practical man of business; the young men, full
of their own plans, but pausing to look on at one of the great religious
sights of their city. In the "Finding of the Cross" he produces the
effect of the whole city _en fête_. It was a sight which often met his
eyes. The Doge made no fewer than thirty-six processions annually to
various churches of the city, and on fourteen of these occasions he was
accompanied by the whole of the nobles dressed in their State robes.
Every event of importance was seized on by the Venetian ladies as an
opportunity for arraying themselves in the richest attire, cloth of gold
and velvet, plumes and jewels. Gentile has massed the ladies of Queen
Catherine Cornaro's Court around their Queen upon the left side of the
canal. The light from above streams upon the keeper of the School, who
holds the sacred relic on high. All round are the old, irregular
Venetian houses, and in the crowd he paints the variety of men he saw
around him every day in Venice. Yet even in this animated scene he
retains his old quattrocento calm. The groups are decorously assisting:
only here and there he is drawn off to some small detail of reality,
such as an oarsman dexterously turning his boat, or the maid letting the
negro servant pass out to take a header into the canal. The spectators
look on coolly at one more of the oft-seen, miraculous events. The
committee, kneeling at the side, is a row of unforgettable portraits,
grave, benign, sour, and austere, with bald head or flowing hair. In
this composition he triumphs over all difficulties of perspective; our
eye follows the canals, and the boats pass away under the bridge in
atmospheric light. All the joy of Venice is in that play of light on
broad brick surfaces, light which is cast up from the water and dances
and shimmers on the marble façades.
Gentile made his will in 1502, as well as others in 1505 and 1506. He
left word that he was to be buried in SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and begged
his brother Giovanni to finish the work in the Scuola, in return for
which he is to receive their father's sketch-book. The unfinished piece
is the "St. Mark preaching at Alexandria," and it shows Gentile still
developing his capacity as a painter. It is pale in colour but brilliant
in sunlight. The mass of white given by the head-dresses of the Turkish
women is cleverly subdued so as not to detract from the effect of the
sunlight. The thronged effect of the great square is studied with more
than his usual care, and the faces have all the old individuality. The
foremost figures in the crowd have a colour and richness which we may
attribute to Giovanni's hand.
Gentile was always fully employed, and the detailed paintings of
functions became very popular; but he was a far less modern painter
than his brother, and, in fact, they represent two distinct artistic
generations, though Gentile's work was so much the most elaborate and,
as the quattrocento would have thought, the most ambitious.
Gentile is essentially the historic painter, yet his is a grave, sincere
art, and he has an unerring instinct for the right incidents to include.
He cuts out all unseemly trivialities, his actors are stern, powerful
men, the treatment is historic and contemporary, but not gossipy. We
realise the look of the Venice of his day, in all its tide of human
nature, but we also feel that he never forgot that he was chronicling
the doings of a city of strong men, and that he must paint them, even in
their hours of relaxation and emotion, so as to convey the real dignity
and power which underlay all the events of the Republic.
We gather from his will and that of his wife that they had no children,
which perhaps makes the more natural the affectionate terms upon which
he remained all through his life with his brother. Their artistic
sympathies must have differed widely. Gentile's love for historical
research, for costume and for pageants, found no echo in the deeper
idealism of Giovanni--indeed, his offer of the famous sketch-book, as an
inducement to the latter to finish his last great work, seems to hint
that it was an exercise out of his brother's line; but he knew that
Giovanni was a great painter, and did not trust it, as we might have
expected, to his assistants, Giovanni Mansueti and Girolamo da
Santacroce.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
_Gentile Bellini._
London. S. Peter Martyr; Portrait.
Milan. Brera: Preaching of St. Mark.
Venice. Doge Lorenzo Giustiniani; Miracle of True Cross; Procession of
True Cross; Healing by True Cross.
Lady Layard. Portrait of Sultan.
_Antonello da Messina._
Antwerp. Crucifixion, 1475.
Berlin. Three Portraits.
London. The Saviour, 1465; Portrait; Crucifixion, 1477.
Messina. Madonna and Saints, 1473.
Paris. Condottiere.
Milan. Portrait of a Humanist.
Venice. Academy: Ecce Homo.
Vicenza. Christ at the Column.
CHAPTER IX
ALVISE VIVARINI
Contemporary with Giovanni Bellini were artists still firmly attached to
the past, who were far from suspecting that he was to outstrip them.
One of Antonio de Murano's sons, Luigi or Alvise Vivarini, grew up to
follow his father's profession, and was enrolled in the school of his
uncle, Bartolommeo. The latter being an enthusiastic follower of
Squarcione, Alvise was at first trained in Paduan principles. Jacopo
Bellini's efforts had done something to counteract the hard, statuesque
Paduan manner, and had rendered Mantegna's art more human and less
stony, but Jacopo could not prevent Squarcionesque painters from
importing into Venice the style which he disliked so much. Bartolommeo
threw in his lot with the Paduans, and his school, especially when
reinforced by Alvise, maintained its reputation as long as it only
had to compete with local talent. The Vivarinis had now been firmly
established in Venice for two generations, and were the best-known and
most popular of her painters. Albert Dürer, on his first visit, admired
them more than the Bellini. When, however, Gentile and his brother set
up in Venice, a hot rivalry arose between them and the old Muranese
School. The Bellini had come with their father from Padua, with all its
new and scientific fashions. They had all the prestige of relationship
with Mantegna, and they shared the patronage of his powerful employers.
The striking historical compositions of Gentile were at once in demand
by the great confraternities. Bartolommeo had never been very successful
in his dealing with oil-painting, though he had dabbled in it for some
years before Antonello da Messina came his way, but the perception with
which the Bellini at once grasped the new technique gave them the
victory. We have only to compare the formless contours of much of
Bartolommeo Vivarini's work, the bladder-like flesh-painting of the
Holy Child, with the clear luminous colour and firm delicate touch of
Gentile, to see that the one man is leagues ahead of the other.
Alvise Vivarini had more natural affinity with his father than with his
uncle. He never becomes so exaggerated in his forms as Bartolommeo. The
expression of his faces is much deeper and more inward, and he has
something of the devotional sweetness of early art. His first known
work is an ancona of 1475 at Montefiorentino, in a lonely Franciscan
monastery on the spurs of the Apennines. In the centre of the five
panels the Madonna sits with her hands pressed palm to palm, in
adoration of the Child asleep across her knees. The painter here follows
the tradition of his father and uncle, especially in the Bologna
altarpiece, in which they collaborated in 1450. Four saints stand on
either side, framed in Gothic panels; it is all in the old way, and
it is only by degrees that we see there is more sweetness in the
expression, better modelling in the figures, and a slenderer, more
graceful outline than the earlier anconæ can show. Only five years after
this ancona at Montefiorentino, with its stiff rows of isolated saints,
we have the altarpiece in the Academy "of 1480," which was painted for a
church in Treviso, and here a great change is immediately apparent. The
antiquated division into panels has disappeared, nothing is left of the
artificial, Squarcionesque decorations, the attitudes are simple, and
the scene is a united one. The Madonna's outstretched hand, the
suggestion of "Ecce Agnus Dei," makes an appeal which draws the
attention of all the saints to one point, and it is made plain that the
one idea pervades the entire assembly. The curtain, which symbolises the
sanctuary, still hangs behind the throne, but the gold background is
abandoned. Alvise has not indeed, as yet, imagined any landscape or
constructed an interior, but he lightens the effect by two arched
windows which let in the sky. The forms are characteristic of his
idea of drawing the human figure; they have the long thighs with the
knees low down, which we are accustomed to find, and he constructs a
very fine and sharply contrasted scheme of light and shade. There is no
trace of the statuesque Paduan draperies. The Virgin's brocaded mantle
is simply draped, and the robes of the saints hang in long straight
folds. No doubt Alvise, though nominally the rival of the Bellini, has
more affinity with them, particularly with Giovanni, than with the
Paduan artists, and as time goes on it is evident that he paints with
many glances at what they were doing. In the altarpiece in Berlin he
constructs an elaborate cupola above the Virgin, such as Bellini was
already using. His saints are full of movement. In the end he begins to
attitudinise and to display those artificial graces which were presently
accentuated by Lotto.
[Illustration: _Alvise Vivarini._
ALTARPIECE OF 1480.
_Venice._
(_Photo, Anderson._)]
In 1488 the two Bellini had for some time been employed in the Sala del
Gran Consiglio by the Council of Ten. Alvise, with his busy school, had
hoped, but hitherto in vain, to be invited to enter into competition
with them. At length he wrote the following letter:--
TO THE MOST SERENE THE PRINCE AND THE MOST EXCELLENT
SIGNORIA--I am Alvise of Murano, a faithful servant of your
Serenity and of this most illustrious State. I have long been
anxious to exercise my skill before your Sublimity and prove
that continued study and labour on my part have not been
useless. Therefore offer, as a humble subject, in honour and
praise of that celebrated city, to devote myself, without
return of payment or reward, to the duty of producing a canvas
in the Sala del Gran Consiio, according to the method at
present in use by the two brothers Bellinii, and I ask no more
for the said canvas than that I should be allowed the expenses
of the cloth and colours as well as the wages of the
journeymen, in the manner that has been granted to the said
Bellinii. When I have done I shall leave to your Serenity of
his goodness to give me in his wisdom the price which shall be
adjudged to be just, honest, and appropriate, in return for the
labour, which I shall be enabled, I trust, to continue to the
universal satisfaction of your Serenity and of all the
excellent Government, to the grace of which I most heartily
commend myself.
The "method at present in use" was presumably the oil-painting
established by Antonello, which was now being made use of to replace
the decorations in fresco and tempera which Guariento, Pisanello, and
Gentile da Fabriano had executed, and which were constantly decaying and
suffering from the sea air and the dampness of the climate. The Council
accepted Alvise's offer with little delay, and he was told to paint a
picture for a space hitherto occupied by one of Pisanello's, and was
given a salary of sixty ducats a year, something less than that drawn by
Giovanni Bellini. Unfortunately his work, scenes from the history of
Barbarossa, perished in the great fire of 1577.
Venice is rich in works which show us what sort of painter was at the
head of the Muranese School at the time when it rivalled that of the
Bellini. Alvise has two reading saints on either side of the altarpiece
of 1480, and of these the Baptist is one of his best figures, "admirably
expressive of tension and of brooding thought." It is large and free in
stroke, and particularly advanced in the treatment of the foliage. Close
by hangs a character-study of St. Clare; type of a strenuous, fanatical
old woman, one which belongs not only to the period, but will be
recognised by every student of human nature. Formidable and even cruel
is her unflinching gaze; she is such a figure as might have stood for
Scott's Prioress, and looks as little likely to show mercy to an erring
member of her order. In contrast, there is the exquisite little "Madonna
and Child" with the two baby angels, still shown as a Bellini in the
sacristy of the Church of the Redentore. It is the most absolutely
simple and direct picture of the kind painted in Venice. The baby life
is more perfect than anything that Gian. Bellini produced, and if much
less intellectual than his Madonnas, there is all the tender charm of
the primitives, combined with a freedom of drapery and a softness of
form which could not be surpassed. The two little angels are more
mundane in spirit than those of the school of Bellini; they have nothing
of the mystical quality, though we are reminded of Bellini, and the
painting is an exercise in his manner. In the sacristy of San Giobbe is
an early Annunciation, which is now definitely assigned to Alvise. It
has the old tender sentiment, and the carnations of its draperies are of
a lovely tint. The priests of S. Giovanni in Bragora were great patrons
of the school of the Vivarini, for here, besides several works by
Bartolommeo and his assistants, is a little Madonna in a side chapel,
which may be compared with the Redentore picture. The Mother sits inside
a room, with the Child lying across her knees in the same pose. The two
arched openings in the background of the 1480 altarpiece have become
windows, through which we look out on a charming landscape of lake and
mountain. In the same church a "Resurrection" is not to be overlooked.
It was executed in 1498, and some of the grace and beauty of the
sixteenth century has crept into it. Against the pink flush of dawn
stands the swaying figure of the risen Christ, and below appear the
heads of the two guards, looking up, surprised and joyful. It is perhaps
the very earliest example of that soft and sensuous feeling, that
rhapsody of sensation which was presently to sweep like a flood over the
art of Venice. "What a time must the dawn of the sixteenth century have
been when a man of seventy, and not the most vigorous and advanced of
his age, had the freshness and youthful courage to greet it; nay,
actually to depict its magic and glamour as Alvise does in the
'Resurrection'! Giorgione is here anticipated in the roundness and
softness of the figures, and in the effect of light. Titian's Assunta is
foreshadowed in the fervour of the guards' expressions." Alvise, if he
never thoroughly mastered the structure of the nude, and if his forms
keep throughout some touch of the archaic, some awkwardness in the
thickness of the figures, with their round heads, long thighs, and
uncertain proportions, is yet extraordinarily refined and tender in
sentiment, his line has a natural flow and beauty, and the heads of his
Madonnas and saints cannot be surpassed in loveliness.
His death came when the noble altarpiece to St. Ambrogio in the Frari
was still unfinished, and it was completed by his assistant, Marco
Basaiti. The execution is heavy and probably of Basaiti, but the
venerable doctor is a grand figure, and the two young soldier saints on
his right and left hand are striking examples of the beauty we claim
for him. The architectural plan is very elaborate, but altogether
successful. The group is set beneath an arched vault supported by
columns and cornices. Overhead, behind a balustrade, is placed a
coronation of the Virgin. The many figures are grouped so as not to
interfere with each other, and the sword of St. George, the crozier of
St. Gregory, and the crook of St. Ambrose break up the composition and
give length and line. The faces of the saints are extremely beautiful,
and the two angels making music below compare well with those of the
Bellinesque School.
The portraits Alvise has left add to his reputation, and remind us of
those of Antonello da Messina, particularly in the vital expression
of the eyes, though they are without Antonello's intense force. The
"Bernardo di Salla" and the "Man feeding a Hawk," though some critics
still ascribe them to Savoldo, have features which make their
attribution to Alvise almost certainly correct. Indeed, the resemblance
of Bernardo to the Madonna in the 1480 altarpiece cannot escape the most
unscientific observer. There is the same inflated nostril, the
peculiarly curved mouth, and vivacious eyes.
Among the followers of Alvise, Marco Basaiti, Bartolommeo Montagna, and
Lorenzo Lotto are the most distinguished. Others less direct are
Giovanni Buonconsiglio and Francesco Bonsignori, while Cima da
Conegliano was for a short time his greatest pupil. We shall return to
these later.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Berlin. Madonna enthroned, with six Saints.
London. Portrait of Youth.
Milan. Bonomi-Cereda Collection: Portrait of a Man.
Naples. Madonna with SS. Francis and Bernardino.
Paris. Portrait of Bernardo di Salla.
Venice. Academy: Seven panels of single Saints; Madonna and six Saints,
1480.
Frari: S. Ambrose enthroned.
S. Giovanni in Bragora: Madonna adoring Child; Resurrection
and Predelle.
Redentore: Sacristy: Madonna and Child, with Angels.
Vienna. Madonna.
Windsor. Man feeding a Hawk.
CHAPTER X
CARPACCIO
Vittore Carpaccio was Gentile Bellini's most faithful pupil. He and his
master stand apart in having, before the arrival of the Venetian School
proper, captured an aspect and a charm inspired by the natural beauty
of the City of the Sea. Gentile, as we have seen, paints her historic
appearance, and Carpaccio gives us something of the delight we feel
to-day in her translucent waters and her ample, sea-washed spaces
flooded with limpid light. While others were absorbed in assimilating
extraneous influences, he goes on his own way, painting, indeed, the
scenes that were asked for, but painting them in his own manner and with
his own enjoyment.
Pageant-pictures had been the demand of the Venetian State from very
early days. The first use of painting had been that made by the Church
to glorify religion, and very soon the State had followed, using it to
enhance the love which Venetians bore to their city, and to bring home
to them the consciousness of its greatness and glory. Pageants and
processions were an integral part of Venetian life. The people looked
on at them, often as they occurred, with more pride and sense of
proprietorship than a Londoner does at a coronation procession or at the
King going in state to open Parliament. The Venetian loved splendour and
beauty and the story of the city's great achievements, and nothing
provided so welcome a subject for the decoration of the great public
halls as portrayals of the events which had made Venice famous. Artists
had been employed to produce these as early as the end of the fourteenth
century, and those of the Bellini and Alvise Vivarini (which perished in
the great fire) were a rendering on modern lines of the same subjects,
satisfying the more advanced feeling for truth and beauty.
Besides the Church and the public Government, we have already seen the
"Schools," as they were called, becoming important employers. These
schools were the great organised confraternities in the cause of charity
and mutual help, which sprang up in Venice in the fifteenth century.
That of St. Mark was naturally the foremost, but others were banded each
under their patron saint. Each attracted numbers of rich patrons, for it
was the fashion to belong to the confraternities. Riches and endowments
rolled in, and halls for meeting and for transacting business were
built, and were adorned with pictures setting forth the legends of
their patron saints. We have already seen Gentile Bellini employed in
the schools of San Marco and San Giovanni, and now the schools of St.
Ursula and St. George gave commissions to Carpaccio, or perhaps it would
be more correct to say that Gentile, having become pre-eminent in this
art, provided employment for his pupil and assistant, and that by
degrees Carpaccio became a _maestro_ on his own account.
A host of second-rate painters were plying side by side, disciples
first of one master, then drawn off to become followers of a second;
assimilating the influence first of one workshop and then of another.
Carpaccio has been lately identified as a pupil of Lazzaro Bastiani, who
had a school in Venice, and the recent attribution to this painter of
the "Doge before the Madonna," in the National Gallery, gives some
countenance to the contention that he was held to be of great excellence
in his time.
Though some historians advance the suggestion that Carpaccio was a
native of Capo d'Istria, there is little proof that he was not, like his
father Pietro, born a Venetian. He seems to have worked in Venice all
his life, his first work being dated 1490 and his last 1520. In 1527 his
wife, Laura, declared herself a widow.
The narrative art needed by the confraternities was supplied in
perfection by Carpaccio, and one of his earliest independent
commissions was the important one of decorating the School of St.
Ursula. Devotion to St. Ursula was a monopoly of the school. No one else
had a right to collect offerings in her name or to put up an image to
her. The legend afforded an opportunity for painting varied and dramatic
scenes, of which Carpaccio takes full advantage, and the cycle is one of
the freshest and most characteristic things that has come down to us
from the quattrocento. Problems are not conspicuous. The mediocre
masters who have educated the painter have made little impression on
him. He is entirely occupied in delight in his subject and in telling
his story. The story of St. Ursula, told briefly, is that she was the
daughter of the King of Brittany. The King of England sends his
ambassadors to beg her hand for his son, Hereo. Ursula discusses the
proposal with her father, and makes the conditions that Hereo, who is a
heathen, shall be baptized, and that the betrothed couple must before
marriage visit the Pope and the sacred shrines. After taking leave of
their parents, the Prince and Princess depart on their expedition, but
Ursula has had a vision in her sleep in which an angel has announced her
martyrdom. She is accompanied on her journey by 11,000 virgins, and they
are received by Pope Cyriacus in Rome. The Pope then makes the return
journey with them as far as Cologne, where, however, they are assaulted
and massacred by the Huns, after which Ursula is accorded a splendid
funeral, and is canonised. The thirteen scenes in which the story is
told are arranged on nine canvases, and the painter has not executed
them in the chronological order, some of the latest events being the
least complete in artistic skill. Professor Leonello Venturi assigns the
following dates to the list:
1. The ambassadors of the King of England meet those of the
King of Brittany to ask for the hand of Ursula. Probably
painted from 1496-98.
2. (On same canvas) Ursula discusses the proposal with her
father. 1496-98.
3. The King of Brittany dismisses the ambassadors. 1496-98.
4. The ambassadors return to the King of England. 1496-98.
5. An angel appears to Ursula in her sleep. 1492.
6, 7, 8. The betrothed couple take leave of their respective
parents, and the Prince meets Ursula. 1495.
9. The betrothed couple and the 11,000 virgins meet the Pope.
1492.
10. They arrive at Cologne. 1490.
11, 12. The massacre by the Huns. The Funeral. 1495.
13. The saint appears in glory, with the palm of martyrdom,
venerated by the 11,000 virgins and received in heaven by the
Eternal Father. 1491.
No. 10 is a small canvas, such as might naturally have been chosen for a
first experiment. The heads are large with coarse features, and the
proportions of the figures are poor. The face of the saint in glory (No.
13), plump and without much expression, is of the type of Bastiani's
saints. It may be assumed that such a great scheme of decoration would
not have been entrusted to any one who was not already well known as an
independent master, but perhaps Carpaccio, who would have been about
thirty when the work was begun, was still principally engrossed with the
conventional, ecclesiastical subject. The heads of the virgins pressing
round the saint appear to be portraits, and were very possibly those of
the wives and daughters of members of the confraternity.
The improvement that takes place is so rapid that we can guess how
congenial the painter found the task and how quickly he adapted his
already trained talent. In No. 5 he takes delight in the opportunity for
painting a little domestic scene,--the bedroom of a young Venetian girl,
perhaps a sister of his own. The comfortable bed, the dainty furniture,
are carefully drawn. The clear morning light streams into the room. The
saint lies peacefully asleep, her hand under her head, her long
eyelashes resting upon her cheek: the whole is an idyll, full of insight
into girlish life. The tiny slippers made, no doubt, one of the details
that caught his eye. The crown lying on the ledge of the bed is an
arbitrary introduction, as naïf as the angel. In the funeral scene the
luminous light is diffused over all, the young saint lies upon her bier
and is followed by priest and deacon, the crowd is composed with truth
to nature, the draperies and garments are brought into harmony with the
sky and background, and in all those that follow we find this quality
of light. The landscape behind the massacre has gained in natural
character, the city is at some distance, houses and churches are half
buried in woods; the setting is much more natural than are the quaint
and elegant pages who occupy it, and who are drawing their crossbows and
attacking the martyrs with leisurely nonchalance. The panel in which the
betrothed couple meet shows a great advance, and this and the succeeding
ones of the ambassadors, which were painted between 1495 and 1498, must
have crowned Carpaccio's reputation. He paints Venice in its most
fascinating aspect; the enamelled beauty of its marbles, its sky and
sea, its palaces and ships, the rich and picturesque dresses men wore
in the streets, the barge glowing with rich velvets. He evinces a
fairy-tale spirit which we may compare with the work of Pintoricchio.
His Prince, kneeling in a white and gold dress, with long fair curls, is
a real fairy prince; Ursula, in her red dress and puffed sleeves, her
rippling, flaxen hair and strings of pearls, is a princess of story.
Carpaccio's art is simple and garrulous in feeling, his conception is
as unpassionate as the fancies of a child, but he has a true love for
these gay crowds; Venice going upon her gallant way--her solid, worthy
citizens, men of substance, shrewd and valuable, taking their pleasure
seriously with a sense of responsibility. They throng the streets and
cross over the bridges, every figure is full of freedom and vitality.
The arrival and dismissal of the ambassadors are the best of all the
scenes. In the middle of the great stage King Maurus of Brittany sits
upon a Venetian terrace. In the colonnade to the left is gathered a
group of Venetian personages, members of the Loredano family, which was
a special patron of St. Ursula's Guild, and gave this panel. The types
are all vividly realised and differentiated: the courtier looking
critically at the arrivals; the frankly curious bourgeoisie; the man
of fashion passing with his nose in the air, disdaining to stare too
closely; the fop with his dogs and their dwarf keeper. Far beyond
stretch the lagoons; the sea and air of Venice clear and fresh. What is
noticeable even now in an Italian crowd, the absence of women, was then
most true to life, for except on special occasions they were not seen in
the streets, but were kept in almost Oriental seclusion. The dismissal
of the ambassadors affords the opportunity for drawing an interior with
the street visible through a doorway. A group at the side, of a man
dictating a letter and the scribe taking down his words, writing
laboriously, with his shoulders hunched and his head on one side, is
excellent in its quiet reality. The same life-like vivacity is displayed
in Ursula's consultation with her father. The old nurse crouched upon
the steps is introduced to break the line and to throw back the main
group. Carpaccio has already used such a figure in the funeral scene,
and Titian himself adopts his suggestion.
[Illustration: _Carpaccio._
ARRIVAL OF THE AMBASSADORS.
_Venice._
(_Photo, Anderson._)]
Carpaccio is not a very great painter, but a charming one. His treatment
of light and water, of distant hills and trees, shows a sense of peace
and poetry, and though he is influenced by Gentile's splendid realistic
heads, the type which appeals to him is gentler and more idealised. His
fancy is caught by Oriental details, to which Gentile would naturally
have directed his attention, and of which there was no lack in Venice at
this time. All his episodes are very clearly illustrated, and his
popular brush was kept busily employed. He took a share with other
assistants in the series which Gentile was painting in S. Giovanni
Evangelista. In 1502 the Dalmatians inhabiting Venice resolved to
decorate their school, which had been founded fifty years earlier, for
the relief of destitute Dalmatian seamen in Venice. The subjects were
to be selected from the lives of the Saviour and the patron saints of
Dalmatia and Albania, St. Jerome, St. George of the Sclavonians, and St.
Tryphonius. The nine panels and an altarpiece which Carpaccio delivered
between 1502 and 1508 still adorn the small but dignified Hall of the
school. His "Jerome in his Study" has nothing ascetic, but shows a
prosperous Venetian ecclesiastic seated in his well-furnished library
among his books and writings. He is less successful in his scenes from
the life of Christ; the Gethsemane is an obvious imitation of Mantegna;
but when he leaves his own style he is weak and poor, and imaginary
scenes are quite beyond him. In the death and interment of St. Jerome he
gives a delightful impression of the peace of the old convent garden,
and in the scene where the lion introduced by the saint scatters the
terrified monks he lets a sense of humour have free play. The monks in
their long garments, escaping in all directions, are really comical, and
in conjunction with the ingratiating smile of the lion, the scene passes
into the region of broad farce. We divine the same sense of the comic in
the scene in St. Ursula's history, where the 11,000 virgins are hurrying
in single file along a winding road which disappears out of the picture.
In the principal scene in the life of St. George, Carpaccio again
achieves a masterpiece. The force and vivacity of the saint in armour
charging the dragon, lingers long in the memory. The long, decorative
lines of lance and war-horse and dragon throw back the whole landscape.
The details show an almost childish delight in the realisation of
ghoulish horrors. He rather injures his "Triumph of St. George" by his
anxiety to bring in the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem; the flying flags
distract the eye, and the whole scene is one of confusion, broken up
into different parts, while the dragon is reduced to very unterrifying
insignificance. His series for the school of the Albanians dealt with
the life of the Virgin, who was their special patron. Its remains are
at Bergamo, Milan, and in the Academy. The single figures in the
"Presentation," the priest and maiden, are excellent. A child at the
side of the steps, leading a unicorn, emblem of chastity, shows once
more what a hold this use of a figure had taken of him. In the
"Visitation" the figures are too much scattered, and the fantastic
buildings attract more attention than the women. He still produced
altarpieces, and the Presentation of the Infant Christ in the Temple,
which he was called upon to paint for San Giobbe, where one of Bellini's
most famous altarpieces stood, challenged him to put forth all his
strength. He never produced anything more simple and noble or more
worthy of the cinque-cento than this altarpiece (now in the Academy). It
surpasses Bellini's arrangement in the way in which the personages are
raised upon a step, while the dome overhead and the angel musicians
below give them height and dignity. The contrast between the infant and
the youthful woman and the old men is purposely marked. Such a contrast
between youth and age is a very favourite one. Bellini, in the same
church, draws it between SS. Sebastian and Job, and Alvise Vivarini, in
his last painting, balances a very youthful Sebastian with St. Jerome.
This is the most grandiose, the least of a _genre_ picture of all
Carpaccio's creations, although he does make Simeon into a pontiff with
attendant cardinals bearing his train. One of his last works is the S.
Vitale over the high altar of the church of that name, where we forgive
the wooden appearance of the horse which the saint rides for the sake of
the simple dignity of the rider and the airy effect given by the balcony
overhead. Nor must we forget that study of the "Two Courtesans" in the
Museo Civico, full of the sarcasm of a deep realism. It conveys to us
the matter-of-fact monotony of the long, hot days, and the women and the
animals with which they are beguiling their idle hours are painted with
the greatest intelligence. It carries us back to another phase of life
in Carpaccio's Venice, seen through his observant, humorous eyes, and if
there is nothing in his colour distinctive of the impending Venetian
richness, it is still arresting in its brilliant limpidity; it seems
drawn straight from the transparent canals and radiant lagoons.
We apprehend the difference at once in Bastiani and in Mansueti, who
essay the same sort of compositions. They studied grouping carefully,
and it must have seemed easy enough to paint their careful architecture
and to place citizens in costume with appropriate action in a "Miracle
of the Cross," or the "Preaching of St. Mark"; but these pictures are
dry and crowded, they give no illusion of truth, there is none of the
careless realism of Carpaccio's crowds,--of incidents taking place which
are not essential to the story, and, as in life, are only half seen, but
which have their share in producing a full and varied illusion. The
scenes want the air and depth in which Carpaccio's pictures are
enveloped. We are not stimulated and charmed, taken into the outer air
and refreshed by these heavy personages, standing in rows, painted in
hot, dry colour, and carrying no conviction in their glance and action.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Berlin. Madonna and Saints; Consecration of Stephen.
Ferrara. Death of Virgin.
Milan. Presentation of Virgin; Marriage of Virgin; St. Stephen
disputing.
Paris. St. Stephen preaching.
Stuttgart. Martyrdom of St. Stephen.
Venice. Academy: The History of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins;
Presentation in the Temple.
Museo Correr: Visitation; Two Courtesans.
S. Giorgio degli Schiavone: History of SS. George and
Tryphonius; Agony in the Garden; Christ in the House of
the Pharisee; History of St. Jerome.
S. Vitale: Altarpiece to S. Vitale.
Lady Layard. Death of the Virgin; St. Ursula taking leave
of her Father.
Vienna. Christ adored by Angels.
CHAPTER XI
GIOVANNI BELLINI
The difference between Gian. Bellini and his accomplished brother, that
which makes us so conscious that the first was the greater of the two
and which sets him in a later artistic generation than Gentile, is a
difference of mind. Such pageant-pictures as we hear that Giovanni
was engaged upon have all been destroyed. We may suspect that their
composition was not particularly congenial to him, and that the strictly
religious pictures and the small allegorical studies, by which we must
judge him, were more after his heart. It is his poetic and ideal feeling
which adds so strongly to his claim to be a great artist; it was this
which drew all men to him and enabled him so powerfully to influence the
art of his day in Venice.
Jacopo's wife, Anna, in a will of 1429, leaves everything to her two
sons, Gentile and Niccolo. Giovanni was evidently not her son, but
Vasari speaks of him as the elder of the two, so that it is very
possible that he was an illegitimate child, brought up, after the
fashion that so often obtained, in the full privileges of his father's
house. Documents show that Jacopo Bellini was living in Venice in 1437,
first near the Piazza, and afterwards in the parish of San Lio. He was a
member of S. Giovanni Evangelista, and probably one of the leading
artists of the city. His two sons helped him in his great decorative
works, and also went with him to Padua, where he painted the Gattamalata
Chapel. Their relative position is suggested by a document of 1457,
which records that the father received twenty-one ducats for "three
figures, done on cloth, put in the Great Hall of the Patriarch," only
two of which were to go to the son. In 1459 Gian. Bellini's signature
first appears on a document, and at about this time we may suppose that
he and his brother began to execute small commissions on their own
account. On these visits to Padua the intimacy must have sprung up,
which led to Mantegna's marriage in 1453 with Jacopo's daughter. At
Padua, too, Bellini, in company with Mantegna, drank in the inspiration
left there by Donatello, the greatest master that either of them
encountered. It was the humanistic and naturalistic side of Donatello
which touched Giovanni Bellini, more than all his classic lore. It
chimed in, too, with his father's graceful and fanciful quality, and
there is no doubt that the Venetian painters soon exercised a marked
influence on Mantegna. They "fought for him with Squarcione," and even
in the Eremitani frescoes he begins to lose his purely statuesque type
and to become frankly Renaissance. In the later scenes of the series a
pergola with grapes, a Venetian campanile and doorway replace his
classic towers and arches of triumph. In the "Martyrdom of St. James"
the couple walking by and paying no attention whatever to the tragic
event, are very like the people whom Gentile introduces in his
backgrounds.
There are few documents more interesting in the history of art
than the two pictures of the "Agony in the Garden," executed by the
brothers-in-law, about 1455, from a design by Jacopo in the British
Museum sketch-book. Jacopo draws the mound-like hill, Christ kneeling
before the vision of the Chalice, the figures wrapt in slumber, and the
distant town. In few pictures up to this time is the landscape conceived
in such sympathy with the figures. As we look at this sketch and examine
the two finished compositions, which it is so fortunate to find in
juxtaposition in the National Gallery, we surmise that the two artists
agreed to carry out the same idea and each to give his version of
Jacopo's suggestion, and very curious it is to see the rendering each
has produced.
Mantegna has made use of the most formal and Squarcionesque contours in
his surroundings. The rocks are of an unnatural, geological structure.
The towers of Jerusalem are defined in elaborate perspective, and a band
of classic figures fills the middle distance. The sleeping forms of the
disciples are laid about like so many draped statues taken from their
pedestals. The choir of child angels is solid and leaves nothing to the
imagination, and if it were not for the beautifully conceived Christ,
the whole composition would leave us quite unmoved. On the other hand,
we can never look at Bellini's version without a fresh thrill. He, like
Mantegna, has followed Jacopo's scheme of winding roads and the city
"set on a hill," and has drawn the advancing band of soldiers; but,
independent of all details, he gives us the vision of a poet. The still
dawn is breaking over the broadly painted landscape, the rosy shafts of
light are colouring the sky and casting their magic over every common
object, and, lonely and absorbed, the Sacred Figure kneels, wrapt into
the Heavenly Vision, which is hardly more definite than a stronger
beam of light upon the radiance. One of the disciples, at least, is a
successful and natural study of a tired-out man, whose head has fallen
back and whose every limb has relaxed in sleep. Bellini is less assured,
less accomplished than Mantegna, but he is able to touch us with the
pathos of both natural and spiritual feeling.
Even earlier than this picture, critics place the "Crucifixion" and
"Transfiguration" of the Museo Correr and our own "Salvator Mundi." In
1443, when Giovanni was a young man of four or five and twenty, San
Bernardino had held a great revival at Padua, and the whole of Venice
had thronged to hear him. It is very possible, as Mr. Roger Fry suggests
in his _Life of Bellini_, that Giovanni's emotional temperament had been
worked upon by the preacher's eloquence, and the very poignant feelings
of love and pity which his early art expresses were the deliberate
consequence of his sympathy with the deep religious mysteries expounded.
In the two pictures in the Correr, Bellini is still going with the
Paduan current. In both we have the winding roads so characteristic of
his father, but the rocks in the "Transfiguration" have the jointed,
arbitrary character of Mantegna's and the draperies are plastered to the
forms beneath; yet the figures here have a beauty and a dignity which no
reproduction seems able to convey. The feeling is already more imposing
than the execution. Christ and the two prophets tower up against the
belt of clouds, the central figure conveying a sense of pathetic
isolation; while below, St. John's attitude betrays a state of tension,
the feet being drawn up and contorted. This picture prepares us for the
overwhelming emotion we find in the "Redeemer" and the group of Pietàs.
The treatment of the Christ was a development of the early _motif_ of
angels flying forward on either side of the Cross, but here the sacred
blood pouring into the chalice is also sacramental and connected with
the intensified religious fervour which had led to the foundation of
the Franciscan and Dominican orders, illustrations of which are met
with in the miniatures and wood-engravings of fifteenth-century books
of devotion. The accessories, the antique reliefs, the low wall, the
distant buildings, have an allegorical meaning underlying each one, and
common to trecento and, in a less degree, to quattrocento art. Paradise
regained is signified by the paved court with the open door, in
contradistinction to the Hortus Clausus, or enclosed court; the type of
the old covenant. In one of the bas-reliefs Mucius Scaevola thrusts his
hand into the fire, the ancient type of heroic readiness to suffer. The
other represents a pagan sacrifice, foreshadowing the sacrifice upon the
Cross. Figures in the background are leaving a ruined temple and making
their way towards the new Christian city, fortified and crowned with a
church tower, and in the midst of all this symbolism, Christ and the
attendant angel are placed, vibrating with nervous feeling.
During the next few years, Bellini devoted himself to two subjects of
the highest devotional order. These are the Madonna and Child, the great
exercise in every age for painters, and the Pietà, which he has made
peculiarly his own.
[Illustration: _Giovanni Bellini._
PIETÀ.
_Brera, Milan._
(_Photo, Brogi._)]
Close by, at Padua, Giotto had left a rendering of the last subject, so
full of passionate sorrow that it is hardly possible that it should not,
if only half consciously, have stimulated the artistic sensibilities
of the most sensitive of painters; but Bellini's pathos shrinks from
all exaggeration. He conceives grief with the tenderest insight. His
interest in the subject was so intense that he never left the execution
to others, and though not a single one bears his signature, yet each is
entirely by his own hand. Besides the Pietà at Milan, which is perhaps
the best known, there is one in the Correr Museum, another in the Doge's
Palace, and yet others at Rimini and at Berlin. The version he adopts,
which places the Body of Christ within the sarcophagus, was a favourite
in North Italy. Donatello uses it in a bas-relief (now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum), but whether he brought or found the suggestion in
Padua nothing exists to show. Jacopo has left sketches in which the
whole group is within the tomb, and this rendering is followed by
Carpaccio, Crivelli, Marco Zoppo, and others. It is never found in
trecento art, and is probably traceable to the Paduan impulse to make
use of classic remains.
Giovanni Bellini's Pietàs fall into two groups. In one, the Christ is
placed between the Virgin and St. John, who are embodiments of the agony
of bereavement. In the other, the dead Redeemer is supported by angels,
who express the amazement and grief of immortal beings who see their
Lord suffering an indignity from which they are immune.
Mary and St. John _inside_ the sarcophagus shows that they are conceived
mystically; Mary as the Church, and St. John as the personification of
Christian Philosophy--a significance frequently attached to these
figures. Such a picture was designed to hang over the altar, at which
the mystical sacrifice of the Mass was perpetually offered.
In his treatment of the Brera example Bellini has shaken off the Paduan
tradition, and is forming his own style and giving free play to his own
feeling. The winding roads and evening sky, barred with clouds, are the
accessories he used in the "Agony in the Garden," but the figures are
treated much more boldly; the drapery falls in broad masses, and
scarcely a trace is left of sculpturesque treatment. Careful as is the
study of the nude, everything is subordinated to the emotion expressed
by the three figures: the helpless, indifferent calm of the dead, the
tender solicitude of the Mother, the wandering, dazed look of the
despairing friend. Here there is nothing of beautiful or pathetic
symbol; the group is intense with the common sorrow of all the world.
Mary presses the corpse to her as if to impart her own life, and gazes
with anguished yearning on the beloved face. Bellini seems to have
passed to a more complex age in his analysis of suffering, yet here is
none of the extravagance which the primitive masters share with the
Caracci: his restraint is as admirable as his intensity.
In the Rimini version the tender concern and questioning surprise of the
attendant angels contrast with the inert weight of the beautiful dead
body they support. Their childish limbs and butterfly wings make a
sinuous pattern against the lacquered black of the ground-work, and Mr.
Roger Fry makes the interesting suggestion that the effect, reminiscent
of Greek vase-painting, and the likeness of the Head of Christ to an old
bronze, may, in a composition painted for Sigismondo Malatesta, be no
mere accident, but a concession to the patron's enthusiasm for classic
art.
In 1470 Bellini received his first commission in the Scuola di San
Marco. Gentile had been employed there since 1466 on the history of the
Israelites in the desert. Bellini agreed to paint "The Deluge and the
Ark of Noah" with all its attendant circumstances, but of these,
except from Vasari's descriptions, we can form no idea. These great
pageant-pictures had become identified with the Bellini and their
following, while the production of altarpieces was peculiarly the
province of the Vivarini. Here Bellini effected a change, for sacred
subjects best suited the restrained and simple perfection of his style,
and afforded the most sympathetic opening for his idealistic spirit. For
the next twenty years or more, however, he was unavoidably absorbed in
public work, for we hear of his being given the direction of that which
Gentile left unfinished in the Ducal Palace when he went to the East in
1479. In 1492, Giovanni being ill, Gentile superintended the work for
him, and in that year he was appointed to paint in the Hall of the Grand
Council, at an annual salary of sixty ducats. Other commissions were
turned out of the _bottega_ he had set up with his brother in 1471, and
between that year and 1480 he went to Pesaro to paint the important
altarpiece that still holds its place there. It is in some ways the
greatest and most powerful thing that Bellini ever accomplished. The
central figures and the attendant saints have a large gravity and
carefully studied individuality. St. Jerome, absorbed in his theological
books, an ascetic recluse, is admirably contrasted with the sympathetic,
cultured St. Paul. The landscape, set in a marble frame, is a gem of
beauty, and proves what an appeal nature was making to the painter. The
predella, illustrating the principal scenes in the lives of the saints
around the altar, is full of Oriental costumes. The horses are small
Eastern horses, very unlike the ponderous Italian war-horse, and the
whole is evidently inspired by the sketches which Gentile brought back
on his return from Constantinople in 1481.
Looking from one to another of the cycle of Madonna pictures which
Bellini produced, and of which so many hang side by side in the Academy,
we are able to note how his conception varied. In one of the earliest
the Child lies across its Mother's knee, in the attitude borrowed from
his father and the Vivarini, from whom, too, he takes the uplifted
hands, placed palm to palm. The earlier pictures are of the gentle and
adoring type, but his later Madonnas are stately Venetian ladies. He
gives us a queenly woman, with full throat and stately poise, in the
Madonna degli Alberi, in which the two little trees are symbols of the
Old and New Testament; or, again, he paints a lovely intellectual face
with chiselled and refined features, and sad dark eyes, and contrasts it
dramatically with the bluff St. George in armour; and there is another
Madonna between St. Francis and St. Catherine, a picture which has a
curious effect of artificial light.
CHAPTER XII
GIOVANNI BELLINI (_continued_)
In 1497 the Maggior Consiglio of the Venetian Republic appointed Bellini
superintendent of the Great Hall, and conferred on him the honourable
title of State Painter. In this capacity he was the overseer of all
public works of painting, and was expected to devote a part of his
time to the decoration of the Hall. Sansovino enumerates nine of
his historical paintings, which had been painted before the State
appointment, all having reference to the visit of Pope Alexander; but
though he must have been much engrossed, he seems to have suspended the
work from time to time, for between 1485 and 1488 he painted the large
altarpiece in the Frari, that at San Pietro in Murano, and the one in
the Academy, which was painted for San Giobbe. Of these three, the last
shows the greatest advance and is fullest of experiment. The Madonna is
a grand ecclesiastical figure. It has been said with truth that it is
a picture which must have afforded great support and dignity to the
Church. The Infant has an expression of omniscience, and the Mother
gazes out of the picture, extending invitation and encouragement to the
advancing worshippers. The religious feeling is less profound; the
artist has been more absorbed in the contrast between the beautiful,
youthful body of St. Sebastian and that of St. Giobbe, older but not
emaciated, and with the exquisite surface that his now complete mastery
of oil-painting enabled him to produce. This technique has evidently
been a great delight, and is here carried to perfection; the skin of
St. Sebastian gleams with a gloss like the coat of a horse in high
condition. Everything that architecture, sculpture, and rich material
can supply is borrowed to enhance the grandeur of the group; but the
line of sight is still close to the bottom of the picture, and if it
were not for the exquisite grace with which the angels are placed, the
Madonna would have a broad, clumsy effect. The Madonna of the Frari is
the most splendid in colour of all his works. As he paints the rich
light of a golden interior and the fused and splendid colours, he seems
to pass out of his own time and gives a foretaste of the glory that is
to follow. The Murano altarpiece is quite a different conception;
instead of the seclusion of the sanctuary, it is a smiling, _plein air_
scene: the Mother benign, the Child soft and playful, the old Doge
Barbarigo and the patron saints kneeling among bright birds, and a
garden and mediæval townlet filling up the background, for which, by the
way, he uses the same sketch as in the Pesaro picture. It says much for
his versatility that he could within a short time produce three such
different versions.
Among Bellini's most fascinating achievements in the last years of the
fifteenth century are his allegorical paintings, known to us by the
"Pélerinage de l'Âme" in the Uffizi and the little series in the
Academy. The meaning of the first has been unravelled by Dr. Ludwig from
a mediæval poem by Guillaume de Guilleville, a Cistercian monk who wrote
about 1335, and it is interesting to see the hold it has taken on
Bellini's mystic spirit. The paved space, set within the marble rail,
signifies, as in the "Salvator Mundi," the Paradise where souls await
the Resurrection. The new-born souls cluster round the Tree of Life and
shake its boughs. The poem says:
There is no pilgrim who is not sometimes sad
Who has not those who wound his heart,
And to whom it is not often necessary
To play and be solaced
And be soothed like a child
With something comforting.
Know that those playing
There in order to allay their sorrow
Have found beneath that tree
An apple that great comfort gives
To those that play with it.[2]
[2] This translation is by Miss Cameron Taylor.
[Illustration: _Giovanni Bellini._
AN ALLEGORY.
_Florence._
(_Photo, Anderson._)]
This may be an allusion to sacramental comfort. St. Peter and St. Paul
guard the door, beside which the Madonna and a saint sit in holy
conversation. A very beautiful figure on the left, wrapped in a black
shawl, requires explanation, and it has been suggested that it is the
donor, a woman who may have lost husband and children, and who, still in
life, is introduced, watching the happiness of the souls in Paradise.
SS. Giobbe and Sebastian, who might have stepped out of the San Giobbe
altarpiece, are obviously the patron saints of the family, and St.
Catherine, at the Virgin's side, may be the donor's own saint. This
picture, with its delicious landscape bathed in atmospheric light,
is a forerunner of those Giorgionesque compositions of "pure and
unquestioning delight in the sensuous charm of rare and beautiful
things" in which the artistic nature is even more engrossed than with
the intellectual conception, and within its small space Bellini seems to
have enshrined all his artistic creed. The allegories in the Academy are
also full of meaning. They are decorative works, and were probably
painted for some small cabinet. They seem too small for a cassone. They
are ruined by over-painting, but still full of grace and fancy. The
figure in the classic chariot, bearing fruit, in the encounter between
Luxury and Industry, is drawn from Jacopo's triumphant Bacchus. Fortune
floats in her barque, holding the globe, and the souls who gather round
her are some full of triumphant success, others clinging to her for
comfort, while several are sinking, overwhelmed in the dark waters.
"Prudence," the only example of a female nude in Bellini's works, holds
a looking-glass. Hypocrisy or Calumny is torn writhing from his refuge.
The Summa Virtus is an ugly representation of all the virtues; a
waddling deformity with eyes bound holds the scales of justice; the
pitcher in its hand means prudence, and the gold upon its feet
symbolises charity. The landscape, both of this and of the "Fortune,"
resembles that which he was painting in his larger works at the end of
the century. Soon after 1501 Bellini entered into relations with Isabela
d'Este, Marchioness of Gonzaga. That distinguished collector and
connoisseur writes through her agent to get the promise of a picture,
"a story or fable of antiquity," to be placed in position with the
allegories which Mantegna had contributed to her "Paradiso." Bellini
agreed to supply this, and received twenty-five ducats on account. He
seems, however, to have felt that he would be at a disadvantage in
competing with Mantegna on his own ground, and asks to be allowed to
choose his subject. Isabela was unwillingly obliged to content herself
with a sacred picture, and a "Nativity" was selected. She is at once
full of suggestions, desiring to add a St. John Baptist, whom Bellini
demurs at introducing except as a child, but in April 1504 the
commission is still unaccomplished, and Isabela angrily demands the
return of her money. This brings a letter of humble apology from
Bellini, and presently the picture is forwarded. Lorenzo of Pavia writes
that it is quite beautiful, and that "though Giovanni has behaved as
badly as possible, yet the bad must be taken with the good." The joy of
its acquisition appeased Isabela, who at once began to lay plans to get
a further work out of Bellini, and in 1505 Bembo wrote to her that he
would take a fresh commission always providing he might fix the subject.
From the catalogue of her Mantovan pictures we gather that the picture
"sul asse" (on panel) represented the "B.V., il Putto, S. Giovanni
Battista, S. Giovanni Evangelista, S. Girolamo, and Santa Caterina."
The great altarpieces which remain strike us less by their research,
their preoccupation with new problems of paint or grouping, than by
their intense delight in beauty. Bellini was now nearly eighty years
old, and in 1504 the young Giorgione had proclaimed a revolution in art
with his Castelfranco Madonna. In composition and detail the Madonna
of San Zaccaria is in some degree a protest against the Arcadian,
innovating fashion of approaching a religious scene, of which the Church
had long since decided on the treatment, yet Bellini cannot escape the
indirect suggestion of the new manner. The same leaven was at work in
him which was transforming the men of a younger generation. In this
altarpiece, in the Baptism at Vicenza, in others, perhaps, which have
perished, and above all in the hermit saint in S. Giovanni Crisostomo he
is linked in feeling and in treatment with the later Venetian School.
The new device, which he adopts quite naturally, of raising the line of
sight, sets the figures in increased depth. For the first time he gives
height and majesty to the young Mother by carrying the draperies down
over the steps. He realises to the full the contrast between the young,
fragile heads of his girl-saints and the dark, venerable countenances of
the old men. The head of S. Lucy, detaching itself like a flower upon
its stem, reminds us of the type which we saw in his Watcher in the
sacred allegory of the Uffizi. The arched, dome-like niche opens on a
distance bathed in golden light. Bellini keeps the traditions of the
old hieratic art, but he has grasped a new perfection of feeling and
atmosphere. Who the saints are matters little; it is the collective
enjoyment of a company of congenial people that pleases us so much. The
"Baptism" in S. Corona, at Vicenza, painted sixteen years later than
Cima's in S. Giovanni in Bragora, is in frank imitation of the younger
man. Christ and the Baptist, traditional figures, are drawn without much
zest, in a weak, conventional way, but the artist's true interest comes
out in the beauty of face and gesture of the group of women holding the
garments, and above all in the sombre gloom of the distance, which
replaces Cima's charming landscape, and which keys the whole picture to
the significance of a portent. In the enthronement of the old hermit, S.
Chrysostom himself, painted in 1513, Bellini keeps his love for the
golden dome, but he lets us look through its arch, at rolling mountain
solitudes, with mists rising between their folds. The geranium robe of
the saint, an exquisite, vivid bit of colouring, is caught by the golden
sunset rays, the fine ascetic head stands out against the evening sky,
and in the faces of the two saints who stand on either side of the aged
visionary Bellini has gone back to all his old intensity of religious
feeling, a feeling which he seemed for a time to have exchanged for a
more pagan tone.
In 1507, at Gentile's death, Giovanni undertook, at his brother's
dying request, to finish the "Preaching of St. Mark," receiving as a
recompense that coveted sketch-book of his father's, from which he had
adopted so many suggestions, and which, though he was the eldest, had
been inherited by the legitimate son.
In the preceding year Albert Dürer had visited Venice for the second
time, and Bellini had received him with great cordiality. Dürer writes,
"Bellini is very old, but is still the best painter in Venice"; and
adds, "The things I admired on my last visit, I now do not value at
all." Implying that he was able now to see how superior Bellini was to
the hitherto more highly esteemed Vivarini.
At the very end of Bellini's life, in 1514, the Duke of Ferrara paid
him eighty-five ducats for a painting of "Bacchanals," now at Alnwick
Castle; which may be looked upon as an open confession by one who had
always considered himself as a painter of distinctively religious works,
that such a gay scene of feasting afforded opportunities which he could
not resist, for beauty of attitude and colour; but the gods, sitting at
their banquet in a sunny glade, are almost fully draped, and there is
little of the _abandon_ which was affected by later painters. The
picture was left unfinished, and was later given to Titian to complete.
In his capacity as State Painter to the Republic, it was Bellini's duty
to execute the official portraits of the Doges. During his long life he
saw eleven reigns, and during four he held the State appointment.
Besides the official, he painted private portraits of the Doges, and
that of Doge Loredano, in the National Gallery, is one of the most
perfect presentments of the quattrocento. This portrait, painted by one
old man of another, shows no weakening in touch or characterisation. It
is as brilliant and vigorous as it is direct and simple. The face is
quiet and unexaggerated; there is no unnatural fire and feeling, but an
air of accustomed dignity and thought, while the technique has all the
perfection of the painter's prime.
In 1516 Giovanni was buried in the Church of SS. Giovanni and Paolo, by
the side of his brother Gentile. To the last he was popular and famous,
overwhelmed with attentions from the most distinguished personages of
the city. Though he had begun life when art showed such a different
aspect, he was by nature so imbued with that temperament, which at the
time of his death was beginning to assert itself in the younger school,
that he was able to assimilate a really astonishing share of the new
manner. He is guided by feeling more than by intellect. All the time he
is working out problems, he is dominated by the emotion of his subject,
but his emotion, his pathos, are invariably tempered and restrained by
the calm moderation of the quattrocento. The golden mean still has
command of Bellini, and never allows his feelings, however poignant,
to degenerate into sentimentality or violence.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Bergamo. Lochis: Madonna (E.).
Morelli: Two Madonnas.
Berlin. Pietà (L.); Dead Christ.
Florence. Uffizi: Allegory; The Souls in Paradise (L.).
London. Portrait of Doge (L.); Madonna (L.); Agony in Garden (E.);
Salvator Mundi (E.).
Milan. Brera: Pietà (E.); Madonna; Madonna, 1510.
Mond Collection. Dead Christ; Madonna (E.).
Murano. S. Pietro: Madonna with Saints and Doge Barbarigo, 1488.
Naples. Sala Grande: Transfiguration.
Pesaro. S. Francesco: Altarpiece.
Rimini. Dead Christ (E.).
Venice. Academy: Three Madonnas; Five small allegorical paintings (L.);
Madonna with SS. Catherine and Magdalene; Madonna with
SS. Paul and George; Madonna with five Saints.
Museo Correr: Crucifixion (E.); Transfiguration (E.); Dead
Christ; Dead Christ with Angels.
Palazzo Ducale, Sala di Tre: Pietà (E.).
Frari: Triptych; Madonna and Saints, 1488.
S. Giovanni Crisostomo: S. Chrysostom with SS. Jerome and
Augustine, 1513.
S. Maria dell' Orto: Madonna (E.).
S. Zaccaria: Madonna and Saints, 1505.
Vicenza. S. Corona: Baptism, 1510.
CHAPTER XIII
CIMA DA CONEGLIANO AND OTHER FOLLOWERS OF BELLINI
The rising tide of feeling, the growing sense of the joy of life and the
apprehension of pure beauty, which was strengthening in the people and
leading up to the great period of Venetian art, flooded round Bellini
and recognised its expression in him. He was more popular and had a
larger following among the artists of his day than either Gentile or
Carpaccio with their frankly mundane talent. Whatever Giovanni's State
works may have been, his religious paintings are the ones which are
copied and adapted and studied by the younger band of artists, and this
because of their beauty and notwithstanding their conventional subjects.
Gentile's pageant-pictures have still something cold and colourless,
with a touch of the archaic, while Giovanni's religious altarpieces
evince a new freedom of handling, a modern conception of beautiful
women, a use of that colour which was soon to reign triumphant. As
far as it went indeed, its triumph was already assured; as Giovanni
advanced towards old age, it was no longer of any use for the young
masters of the day to paint in any way save the one he had made popular,
and one artist after another who had begun in the school of Alvise
Vivarini ended as the disciple of Giovanni Bellini.
It was the habit of Bellini to trust much to his assistants, and as
everything that went out of his workshop was signed by his name, even if
it only represented the use of one of his designs, or a few words of
advice, and was "passed" by the master, it is no wonder that European
collections were flooded with works, among which only lately the names
of Catena, Previtali, Pennacchi, Marco Belli, Bissolo, Basaiti,
Rondinelli, and others begin to be disentangled.
Only one of his followers stands out as a strong and original master,
not quite of the first class, but developing his own individuality while
he draws in much of what both Alvise and Bellini had to give. Cima da
Conegliano, whose real name was Giovanni Battista, always signs himself
_Coneglianensis_: the title of Cima, "the Rock," by which he is now so
widely known, having first been mentioned in the seventeenth century by
Boschini, and perhaps given him by that writer himself. He was a son of
the mountains, who, though he came early to Venice, and lived there most
of his life, never loses something of their wild freshness, and to the
end delights in bringing them into his backgrounds. He lived with his
mother at Conegliano, the beautiful town of the Trevisan marches, until
1484, when he was twenty-five, and then came down to Vicenza, where he
fell under the tuition of Bartolommeo Montagna, a Vicentine painter, who
had been studying both with Alvise and Bellini. Cima's "Madonna with
Saints," painted for the Church of St. Bartolommeo, Vicenza, in 1489,
shows him still using the old method of tempera, in a careful, cold,
painstaking style, yet already showing his own taste. The composition
has something of Alvise, yet that something has been learned through
the agency of Montagna, for the figures have the latter's severity
and austere character and the colour is clearer and more crude than
Alvise's. It is no light resemblance, and he must have been long with
Montagna. In the type of the Christ in Montagna's Pietà at Monte Berico,
in the fondness for airy porticoes, in the architecture and main
features of his "Madonna enthroned" in the Museo Civico at Vicenza, we
see characteristics which Cima followed, though he interpreted them in
his own way. He turns the heavy arches and domes that Alvise loved, into
airy pergolas, decked with vines. He gives increasing importance to high
skies and to atmospheric distances. When he got to Venice in 1492, he
began to paint in oils, and undertook the panel of S. John Baptist with
attendant saints, still in the Church of S. Madonna dell' Orto. The
work of this is rather angular and tentative, but true and fresh, and
he comes to his best soon after, in the "Baptism" in S. Giovanni in
Bragora, which Bellini, sixteen years later, paid him the compliment
of copying. It was quite unusual to choose such a subject for the High
Altar, and could only be justified by devotion to the Baptist, who was
Cima's own name-saint as well as that of the Church. Cima is here at his
very highest; the composition is not derived from any one else, but is
all the conception of an ingenuous soul, full of intuition and insight.
The Christ is particularly fine and simple, unexaggerated in pose and
type; the arm of the Baptist is too long, but the very fault serves to
give him a refined, tentative look, which makes a sympathetic appeal.
The attendant angels look on with an air of sweet interest. The distant
mountains, the undulating country, the little town of Conegliano,
identified by the castle on its great rock, or _Cima_, are Arcadian in
their sunny beauty. The clouds, as a critic has pointed out, are full of
sun, not of rain. The landscape has not the sombre mystery of Titian's,
but is bright with the joyous delight of a lover of outdoor life. As
Cima masters the new medium he becomes larger and simpler, and his forms
lose much of their early angularity. A confraternity of his native town
ordered the grand altarpiece which is still in the Cathedral there, and
in this he shows his connection with Venice; the architecture is partly
taken from St. Mark's, the lovely Madonna head recalls Bellini, and a
group of Bellinesque angels play instruments at the foot of the throne.
Cima is, however, never merged in Bellini. He keeps his own clearly
defined, angular type; his peculiar, twisted curls are not the curls of
Bellini's saints, his treatment of surface is refined, enamel-like,
perfectly finished, but it has nothing of the rich, broken treatment
which Bellini's natural feeling for colour was beginning to dictate.
Cima's pale golden figures have an almost metallic sharpness and
precision, and though they are full of charm and refinement, they may
be thought lacking in spontaneity and passion. To 1501 belongs the
"Incredulity of St. Thomas," now in the Academy, but painted for the
Guild of Masons. It is a picture full of expression and dignity, broad
in treatment if a little cold in its self-restraint. Cima seems to have
not quite enough intellect, and not quite enough strong feeling.
However, the little altarpiece of the Nativity, in the Church of the
Carmine in Venice, has a richer, fuller touch, and this foreshadows the
work he did when he went to Parma, where his transparent shadows grow
broader and stronger, and his figures gain in ease and freedom. He
never loses the delicate radiance of his lights, and his types and his
architecture alike convey something of a peculiarly refined, brilliant
elegance.
Like all these men of great energy and prolific genius, Cima produced an
astonishing number of panels and altarpieces, and no doubt had pupils on
his own account, for a goodly list could be made of pictures in his
style, but not by his own hand, which have been carried by collectors
into widely-scattered places. His exquisite surface and finish and his
marked originality make him a difficult master to imitate with any
success. His latest work is dated 1508, but Ridolfi says he lived till
1517, and it seems probable that he returned to his beloved Conegliano
and there passed his last years.
If Cima possessed originality, Vincenzo of Treviso, called Catena,
gained an immense reputation by his industry and his power of imitating
and adopting the manner of Bellini's School. In those days men did not
trouble themselves much as to whether they were original or not. They
worked away on traditional compositions, frankly introducing figures
from their master's cartoons, modifying a type here, making some little
experiment or arrangement there, and, as a French critic puts it,
leaving their own personality to "hatch out" in due time, if it existed,
and when it was sufficiently ripened by real mastery of their art. It is
here that Catena fails; beginning as a journeyman in the Sala del Gran
Consiglio, at a salary of three ducats a month, he for long failed to
acquire the absolute mastery of drawing which was possessed by the
better disciples of the schools. But he is painstaking, determined to
get on, and eager to satisfy the continually increasing demand for work.
His draperies are confused and unmeaning, his faces round, with small
features, inexpressive button mouths, and weak chins, and his flesh
tints have little of the glow which is later the prerogative of every
second-rate painter. Yet Catena succeeds, like many another careful
mediocre man, in securing patronage, and as the sixteenth century opened
he gained the distinction from Doge Loredano of a commission to paint
the altarpiece for the Pregadi Chapel of the Sala di Tre, in the Ducal
Palace. He adapts his group from that of Bellini in the Cathedral of
Murano, bringing in a profile portrait of the kneeling Doge, of which he
afterwards made numerous copies, one of which was for long assigned to
Gentile and one to Giovanni Bellini.
That Catena is not without charm, we discern in such a composition as
his "Martyrdom of St. Cristina," in S. Maria Mater Domini, in which the
saint, a solid, Bellinesque figure, kneels upon the water, in which she
met her death, and is surrounded by little angels, holding up the
millstone tied round her neck, and laden with other instruments of her
martyrdom. Catena borrows right and left, and tries to follow every new
indication of contemporary taste. For instance, he remarks the growing
admiration for colour, and hopes by painting gay, flat tints, in bright
contrast, to produce the desired effect.
It is evident that he made many friends among the rich connoisseurs of
the time, and that his importance was out of proportion to his real
merit. Marcantonio Michele, writing an account of Raphael's last days to
a friend in Venice, and touching on Michelangelo's illness, begs him to
see that Catena takes care of himself, "as the times are unfavourable to
great painters." Catena had acquired and inherited considerable wealth;
he came of a family of merchants, and resided in his own house in San
Bartolommeo del Rialto. He lived in unmarried relations with Dona Maria
Fustana, the daughter of a furrier, to whom he bequeaths in his will 300
ducats and all his personal effects. As a careful portrait-painter, with
a talent for catching a likeness, he was in constant demand, and in some
of his heads--that of a canon dressed in blue and red, at Vienna, and
especially in one of a member of the Fugger family, now at Dresden--he
attains real distinction. And in his last phase he does at length prove
the power that lies behind long industry and perseverance. Suddenly the
Giorgionesque influence strikes him, and turning to imbibe this new
element, he produces that masterpiece which throws a glamour over all
his mediocre performances; his "Warrior adoring the Infant Christ," in
the National Gallery, is a picture full of charm, rich and romantic in
tone and spirit. The Virgin and the Child upon her knee are of his
dull round-eyed type, the form and colours of her draperies are still
unsatisfactory, but the knight in armour with his Eastern turban, the
romantic young page, holding his horse, are pure Giorgionesque figures.
Beautiful in themselves, set in a beautiful landscape glowing with light
and air, the whole picture exemplifies what surprising excellence could
be suddenly attained by even very inferior artists, who were constantly
associating with greater men, at a moment when the whole air was, as it
were, vibrating with genius.
Catena was very much addicted to making his will, and at least five
testaments or codicils exist, one of them devising a sum of money for
the benefit of the School of Painters in Venice, and another leaving to
his executor, Prior Ignatius, the picture of a "St. Jerome in his Cell,"
which may be the one in our national collection, which remained in
Venice till 1862. It is painted in his gay tones, imitating Basaiti and
Lotto, and brings in the partridge of which he made a sort of sign
manual.
Cardinal Bembo writes in 1525 to Pietro Lippomano, to announce that, at
his request, he is continuing his patronage of Catena:
Though I had done all that lay in my power for Vincenzo Catena
before I received your Lordship's warm recommendation in his
favour, I did not hesitate, on receipt of your letter, to add
something to the first piece I had from him, and I did so
because of my love and reverence for you, and I trust that he
will return appropriate thanks to you for having remembered
that you could command me.
Marco Basaiti was alternately a journeyman in different workshops and a
master on his own account. For long the assistant and follower of Alvise
Vivarini, we may judge that he was also his most trusted confidant, for
to him was left the task of completing the splendid altarpiece to S.
Ambrogio, in the Frari. His heavy hand is apparent in the execution, and
the two saints, Sebastian and Jerome, in the foreground, have probably
been added by him, for they have the air of interlopers, and do not come
up to the rest of the company in form and conception. The Sebastian,
with his hands behind his back and his loin cloth smartly tied, is quite
sufficiently reminiscent of Bellini's figure of 1473 to make us believe
that Basaiti was at once transferring his allegiance to that reigning
master. In his earlier phase he has the round heads and the dry precise
manner of the Muranese. In his large picture in the Academy, the
"Calling of the Sons of Zebedee," he produces a large, important set
piece, cold and lifeless, without one figure which arrests us, or
lingers in the memory. "The Christ on the Mount" is more interesting as
having been painted for San Giobbe, where Bellini's great altarpiece
was already hanging, and coming into competition with Bellini's early
rendering of the same scene. Painted some thirty years later, it is
interesting to see what it has gained in "modernness." The landscape and
trees are well drawn and in good colour, and the saints, standing on
either side of a high portico, have dignity. In the "Dead Christ," in
the Academy, he is following Bellini very closely in the flesh-tints and
the _putti_. The _putti_, looking thoughtfully at the dead, is a _motif_
beloved of Bellini, but Basaiti cannot give them Bellini's pathos and
significance; they are merely childish and seem to be amused.
In 1515 Basaiti has entered upon a new phase. He has felt Giorgione's
influence, and is beginning to try what he can do, while still keeping
close to Bellini, to develop a fuller touch, more animated figures, and
a brilliant effect of landscape. He runs a film of vaporous colour over
his hard outlines and makes his figures bright and misty, and though
underneath they are still empty and monotonous, it is not surprising
that many of his works for a time passed as those of Bellini. Though he
is a clever imitator, "his figures are designed with less mastery, his
drawing is a little less correct, his drapery less adapted to the under
form. Light and shade are not so cleverly balanced, colours have the
brightness, but not the true contrast required. In landscape he proceeds
from a bleak aridity to extreme gaiety; he does not dwell on detail, but
his masses have neither the sober tint nor the mysterious richness
conspicuous in his teacher ... he is a clever instrument." Both
Previtali and Rondinelli were workers with Basaiti in Bellini's studio.
Previtali occasionally signed himself Andrea Cordeliaghi or Cordella,
and has left many unsigned pictures. He copies Catena and Lotto, Palma
and Montagna; but for a time his work went forth from Bellini's workshop
signed with Bellini's name. In 1515, in a great altarpiece in San
Spirito at Bergamo, he first takes the title of Previtali, compiling it
in the cartello with the monogram already used as Cordeliaghi. There are
traces of many other minor artists at this period, all essaying the same
manner, copying one or other of the masters, taking hints from each
other. The Venetian love of splendour was turning to the collection
of works of art, and the work of second-class artists was evidently
much in demand and obtained its meed of admiration. Bissolo was a
fellow-labourer with Catena in the Hall of the Ducal Palace in 1492; he
is soft and nerveless, but he copies Bellini, and has imbibed something
of his tenderness of spirit.
It will be seen from this list how difficult it is to unravel the tale
of the false Bellinis. The master's own works speak for themselves
with no uncertain voice, but away from these it is very difficult to
pronounce as to whether he had given a design, or a few touches, or
advice, and still more difficult to decide whether these were bestowed
on Basaiti in his later manner, or on Previtali or Bissolo, or if the
teaching was handed on by them in a still more diluted form to the
lesser men who clustered round, much of whose work has survived and has
been masquerading for centuries under more distinguished names. It is
sometimes affirmed that the loss of originality in the endeavour to
paint like greater men has been a symptom of decay in every school in
the past. It is interesting to notice, therefore, that in every great
age of painting there has always been an undercurrent of imitation,
which has helped to form a stream of tradition, and which, as far as
we can see, has done no harm to the stronger spirits of the time.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
_Cima._
Berlin. Madonna with four Saints; Two Madonnas.
Conegliano. Duomo: Madonna and Saints, 1493.
Dresden. The Saviour; Presentation of Virgin.
London. Two Madonnas; Incredulity of S. Thomas; S. Jerome.
Milan. Brera: Six pictures of Saints; Madonna.
Parma. Madonna with Saints; Another; Endymion; Apollo and Marsyas.
Paris. Madonna with Saints.
Venice. Academy: Madonna with SS. John and Paul; Pietà; Madonna
with six Saints; Incredulity of S. Thomas; Tobias and the
Angel.
Carmine: Adoration of the Shepherds.
S. Giovanni in Bragora: Baptism, 1494; SS. Helen and
Constantine; Three Predelle; Finding of True Cross.
SS. Giovanni and Paolo: Coronation of the Virgin.
S. Maria dell' Orto: S. John Baptist and SS. Paul, Jerome,
Mark, and Peter.
Lady Layard. Madonna with SS. Francis and Paul; Madonna with
SS. Nicholas of Bari and John Baptist.
Vicenza. Madonna with SS. Jerome and John, 1489.
_Vincenzo Catena._
Bergamo. Carrara: Christ at Emmaus.
Berlin. Portrait of Fugger; Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.).
Dresden. Holy Family (L.).
London. Warrior adoring Infant Christ (L.); S. Jerome in his Study (L.);
Adoration of Magi (L.).
Mr. Benson: Holy Family.
Lord Brownlow: Nativity.
Mond Collection: Madonna, Saints, and Donors (E.).
Paris. Venetian Ambassadors at Cairo.
Venice. Ducal Palace: Madonna, Saints, and Doge Loredan (E.).
Giovanelli Palace: Madonna and Saints.
S. Maria Mater Domini: S. Cristina.
S. Trovaso: Madonna.
Vienna. Portrait of a Canon.
_Marco Basaiti._
Bergamo. The Saviour, 1517; Two Portraits.
Berlin. Pietà; Altarpiece; S. Sebastian; Madonna (E.).
London. S. Jerome; Madonna.
Milan. Ambrosiana: Risen Christ.
Munich. Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.).
Murano. S. Pietro: Assumption.
Padua. Portrait, 1521; Madonna with SS. Liberale and Peter.
Venice. Academy: Saints; Dead Christ; Christ in the Garden, 1510;
Calling of Children of Zebedee, 1510.
Museo Correr: Madonna and Donor; Christ and Angels.
Salute: S. Sebastian.
Vienna. Calling of Children of Zebedee, 1515.
_Andrea Previtali._
Bergamo. Carrara: Pentecost; Marriage of S. Catherine; Altarpiece;
Madonna, 1514; Madonna with Saints and Donors.
Lochis: Madonna and Saint.
Count Moroni: Madonna and Saints; Family Group.
S. Alessandro in Croce: Crucifixion, 1524.
S. Spirito: S. John Baptist and Saints, 1515; Madonna and
four Female Saints, 1525.
Berlin. Madonna and Saints; Marriage of S. Catherine.
Dresden. Madonna and Saints.
London. Madonna and Donor (E.).
Milan. Brera: Christ in Garden, 1512.
Oxford. Christchurch Library: Madonna.
Venice. Ducal Palace: Christ in Limbo; Crossing of the Red Sea.
Redentore: Nativity; Crucifixion.
Verona. Stoning of Stephen; Immaculate Conception.
_N. Rondinelli._
Berlin. Madonna.
Florence. Uffizi: Madonna and Saints.
Milan. Brera: Madonna with four Saints and three Angels.
Paris. Madonna and Saints.
Ravenna. Two Madonnas with Saints.
S. Domenico: Organ Shutters; Madonna and Saints.
Venice. Museo Correr: Madonna; Madonna with Saints and Donors.
Giovanelli Palace: Two Madonnas.
_Bissolo._
London. Mr. Benson: Madonna and Saints.
Mond Collection: Madonna and Saints.
Venice. Academy: Dead Christ; Madonna and Saints; Presentation in Temple.
S. Giovanni in Bragora: Triptych.
Redentore: Madonna and Saints.
S. Maria Mater Domini: Transfiguration.
Lady Layard: Madonna and Saints.
PART II