As to Italian art, here at Brussels there is nothing but a reminiscence
of it. It is an art which has been falsified by those who have tried to
acclimatise it, and even the specimens of it which have passed into
Flanders lose by their new surroundings. When in a part of the gallery
which is least Flemish, one sees two portraits by Tintoret, not of the
first rank, sadly retouched, but typical--one finds it difficult to
understand them side by side with Memling, Martin de Vos, Van Orley,
Rubens, Van Dyck, and even Antonio More. It is the same with Veronese.
He is out of his element; his colour is lifeless, it smacks of the
tempera painter; his style seems frigid, his magnificence unspontaneous
and almost bombastic. Yet the picture is a superb piece, in his finest
manner; a fragment of an allegorical triumph taken from a ceiling in the
Ducal Palace, and one of his best; but Rubens is close by, and that is
enough to give the Rubens of Venice an accent which is not of this
country. Which of the two is right? And listening merely to the language
so admirably spoken by the two men, who shall decide between the correct
and learned rhetoric of Venetian speech, and the emphatic, warmly
coloured, grandiose incorrectness of the Antwerp idiom? At Venice one
leans to Veronese; in Flanders one has a better ear for Rubens.
Italian art has this in common with all powerful traditions, that it is
at the same time very cosmopolitan because it has penetrated everywhere,
and very lofty because it has been self-sufficient. It is at home, in
all Europe, except in two countries; Belgium, the genius of which it has
appreciably affected without ever dominating it; and Holland, which once
made a show of consulting it but which has ended by passing it by; so
that, while it is on neighbourly terms with Spain, while it is enthroned
in France, where, at least in historical painting, our best painters
have been Romans, it encounters in Flanders two or three men, great men
of a great race, sprung from the soil, who hold sway there and have no
mind to share their empire with any other.
_Fromentin._