It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and
Painting--all the various products of art--as but translations into
different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative
thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in
painting--of sound, in music--of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this
way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art
that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a
clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous material
of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty,
untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions
distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For,
as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the
"imaginative reason" through the senses, there are differences of kind
in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the
gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar
and incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching
the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One
of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations;
to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its
responsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that true
pictorial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought nor sentiment,
on the one hand, nor a mere result of communicable technical skill in
colour or design, on the other; to define in a poem that true poetical
quality, which is neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes
of an inventive handling of rhythmical language--the element of song in
the singing; to note in music the musical charm--that essential music,
which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable
from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.
To such a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful, Lessing's
analysis of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon, was a
very important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is
possible only in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries.
And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth most needs
enforcing, for it is in popular judgments on pictures that that false
generalisation of all art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. To
suppose that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or touch,
working through and addressing itself to the intelligence, on the one
side, or a merely poetical, or what may be called literary interest,
addressed also to the pure intelligence, on the other;--this is the way
of most spectators, and of many critics, who have never caught sight,
all the time, of that true pictorial quality which lies between (unique
pledge of the possession of the pictorial gift) the inventive or
creative handling of pure line and colour, which, as almost always in
Dutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese, is
quite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it
accompanies. It is the drawing--the design projected from that peculiar
pictorial temperament or constitution, in which, while it may possibly
be ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things whatever, all
poetry, every idea however abstract or obscure, floats up as a visible
scene, or image: it is the colouring--that weaving as of just
perceptible gold threads of light through the dress, the flesh, the
atmosphere, in Titian's Lace-girl--the staining of the whole fabric of
the thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing,
then--the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures, by
Titian's forest branches; this colouring--the magic conditions of light
and hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent
from the Cross--these essential pictorial qualities must first of all
delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment
of Venetian glass; and through this delight only be the medium of
whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them, in the intention of the
composer. In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite
message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a
moment, on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such
fallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but
refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature
itself. And this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may trace
the coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards; from
Japanese fan-painting, for instance, where we get, first, only abstract
colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers;
then, sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards, until in
Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so actually a touch of
true childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silk
gown, which ascends the temple stairs, in his picture of the
Presentation of the Virgin, at Venice.
But although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions,
and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate
differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it
is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material,
each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art,
by what German critics term an Anders-streben--a partial alienation from
its own limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply
the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.
Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be always approaching to
figure, to pictorial definition. Architecture, again, though it has its
own laws--laws esoteric enough, as the true architect knows only too
well--yet sometimes aims at fulfilling the conditions of a picture, as
in the Arena chapel; or of sculpture, as in the flawless unity of
Giotto's tower at Florence; and often finds a true poetry, as in those
strangely twisted staircases of the chateaux of the country of the
Loire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the actors
in a wild life might pass each other unseen: there being a poetry also
of memory and of the mere effect of time, by which it often profits
greatly. Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the hard limitation of
pure form towards colour, or its equivalent; poetry also, in many ways,
finding guidance from the other arts, the analogy between a Greek
tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief, of
French poetry generally with the art of engraving, being more than mere
figures of speech; and all the arts in common aspiring towards the
principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art,
the object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of all that is
artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in
all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the
form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is
the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a
poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that
the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the
actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form,
the spirit, of the handling; that this form, this mode of handling,
should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the
matter:--this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in
different degrees.
This abstract language becomes clear enough, if we think of actual
examples. In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenly
on the hill-verge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M.
Legros: only, in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnity
of expression, seen upon it or half-seen, within the limits of an
exceptional moment, or caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he
maintains as the very essence of the thing, throughout his work.
Sometimes a momentary tint of stormy light may invest a homely or too
familiar scene with a character which might well have been drawn from
the deep places of the imagination. Then we might say that this
particular effect of light, this sudden inweaving of gold thread through
the texture of the haystack, and the poplars, and the grass, gives the
scene artistic qualities; that it is like a picture. And such tricks of
circumstance are commonest in landscape which has little salient
character of its own; because, in such scenery, all the material details
are so easily absorbed by that informing expression of passing light,
and elevated, throughout their whole extent, to a new and delightful
effect by it. And hence the superiority, for most conditions of the
picturesque, of a river-side in France to a Swiss valley, because, on
the French river-side, mere topography, the simple material, counts for
so little, and, all being so pure, untouched, and tranquil in itself,
mere light and shade have such easy work in modulating it to one
dominant tone. The Venetian landscape, on the other hand, has in its
material conditions much which is hard, or harshly definite; but the
masters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little burdened by
them. Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elements
only, of cool colour and tranquillising line; and they use its actual
details, the brown windy turrets, the straw-coloured fields, the forest
arabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the
presence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or
essence only of a certain sort of landscape--a country of the pure
reason or half-imaginative memory.
Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to the
mere intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite subject or
situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function
in the expression of moral or political aspiration, as often in the
poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy enough for the
understanding to distinguish between the matter and the form, however
much the matter, the subject, the element which is addressed to the mere
intelligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic spirit.
But the ideal types of poetry are those in which this distinction is
reduced to its minimum; so that lyrical poetry, precisely because in it
we are least able to detach the matter from the form, without a
deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at least
artistically, the highest and most complete form of poetry. And the very
perfection of such poetry often seems to depend, in part, on a certain
suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us
through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some
of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake, and often in
Shakspere's songs, as pre-eminently in that song of Mariana's page in
Measure for Measure, in which the kindling force and poetry of the whole
play seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music.
And this principle holds good of all things that partake in any degree
of artistic qualities, of the furniture of our houses, and of dress, for
instance, of life itself, of gesture and speech, and the details of
daily intercourse; these also, for the wise, being susceptible of a
suavity and charm, caught from the way in which they are done, which
gives them a worth in themselves; wherein, indeed, lies what is valuable
and justly attractive, in what is called the fashion of a time, which
elevates the trivialities of speech, and manner, and dress, into "ends
in themselves," and gives them a mysterious grace and attractiveness in
the doing of them.
Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere
intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its
responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of
poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the
composition are so welded together, that the material or subject no
longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear
only; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one
single effect to the "imaginative reason," that complex faculty for
which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue
or symbol.
It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic
ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal,
consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form
from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and
completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition
of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend
and aspire. Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the
true type or measure of perfected art. Therefore, although each art has
its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its
unique mode of reaching the "imaginative reason," yet the arts may be
represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of
music, to a condition which music alone completely realises; and one of
the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, dealing with the products of
art, new or old, is to estimate the degree in which each of those
products approaches, in this sense, to musical law.
By no school of painters have, the necessary limitations of the art of
painting been so unerringly though instinctively apprehended, and the
essence of what is pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the
school of Venice; and the train of thought suggested in what has been
now said is, perhaps, a not unfitting introduction to a few pages about
Giorgione, who, though much has been taken by recent criticism from what
was reputed to be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter,
sums up, in what we know of himself and his art, the spirit of the
Venetian school.
The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff,
half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the
introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo
of Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And
throughout the course of its later development, always subordinate to
architectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped from
the influence of its beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed,
by naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it had no
Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of thought
and sentiment, which taxed so severely the resources of the generations
of Florentine artists, those earlier Venetian painters, down to
Carpaccio and the Bellini, seem never for a moment to have been tempted
even to lose sight of the scope of their art in its strictness, or to
forget that painting must be, before all things decorative, a thing for
the eye; a space of colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent than
the marking of its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun and
shade upon it--this, to begin and end with--whatever higher matter of
thought, or poetry, or religious reverie might play its part therein,
between. At last, with final mastery of all the technical secrets of his
art, and with somewhat more than "a spark of the divine fire" to his
share, comes Giorgione. He is the inventor of genre, of those easily
movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of
allegorical or historic teaching--little groups of real men and women,
amid congruous furniture or landscape--morsels of actual life,
conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come
to seem like glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly
blent colour, obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere
architectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall; he frames them
by the hands of some skilful carver, so that people may move them
readily and take with them where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or
a musical instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of self-education,
stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one's
cabinet, to enrich the air as with some choice aroma, and, like persons,
live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of all art like this, art which
has played so large a part in men's culture since that time, Giorgione
is the initiator. Yet in him too that old Venetian clearness or justice,
in the apprehension of the essential limitations of the pictorial art,
is still undisturbed; and, while he interfuses his painted work with a
high-strung sort of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich and
high-strung sort of life, yet in his selection of subject, or phase of
subject, in the subordination of mere subject to pictorial design, to
the main purpose of a picture, he is typical of that aspiration of all
the arts towards music, which I have endeavoured to explain,--towards
the perfect identification of matter and form.
Born so near to Titian, though a little before him, that these two
companion pupils of the aged Giovanni Bellini may almost be called
contemporaries, Giorgione stands to Titian in something like the
relationship of Sordello to Dante, in Mr. Browning's poem. Titian, when
he leaves Bellini, becomes, in turn, the pupil of Giorgione; he lives in
constant labour more than sixty years after Giorgione is in his grave;
and with such fruit, that hardly one of the greater towns of Europe is
without some fragment of it. But the slightly older man, with his so
limited actual product (what remains to us of it seeming, when narrowly
examined, to reduce itself to almost one picture, like Sordello's one
fragment of lovely verse), yet expresses, in elementary motive and
principle, that spirit--itself the final acquisition of all the long
endeavours of Venetian art--which Titian spreads over his whole life's
activity.
And, as we might expect, something fabulous and illusive has always
mingled itself in the brilliancy of Giorgione's fame. The exact
relationship to him of many works--drawings, portraits, painted
idylls--often fascinating enough, which in various collections went by
his name, was from the first uncertain. Still, six or eight famous
pictures at Dresden, Florence and the Louvre, were undoubtedly
attributed to him, and in these, if anywhere, something of the splendour
of the old Venetian humanity seemed to have been preserved. But of those
six or eight famous pictures it is now known that only one is certainly
from Giorgione's hand. The accomplished science of the subject has come
at last, and, as in other instances, has not made the past more real for
us, but assured us that we possess of it less than we seemed to possess.
Much of the work on which Giorgione's immediate fame depended, work done
for instantaneous effect, in all probability passed away almost within
his own age, like the frescoes on the facade of the fondaco dei Tedeschi
at Venice, some crimson traces of which, however, still give a strange
additional touch of splendour to the scene of the Rialto. And then there
is a barrier or borderland, a period about the middle of the sixteenth
century, in passing through which the tradition miscarries, and the true
outlines of Giorgione's work and person become obscured. It became
fashionable for wealthy lovers of art, with no critical standard of
authenticity, to collect so-called works of Giorgione, and a multitude
of imitations came into circulation. And now, in the "new Vasari,"* the
great traditional reputation, woven with so profuse demand on men's
admiration, has been scrutinised thread by thread; and what remains of
the most vivid and stimulating of Venetian masters, a live flame, as it
seemed, in those old shadowy times, has been reduced almost to a name by
his most recent critics.
*Crowe and Cavalcaselle: History of Painting in North Italy.
Yet enough remains to explain why the legend grew up, above the name,
why the name attached itself, in many instances, to the bravest work of
other men. The Concert in the Pitti Palace, in which a monk, with cowl
and tonsure, touches the keys of a harpsichord, while a clerk, placed
behind him, grasps the handle of the viol, and a third, with hat and
plume, seems to wait upon the true interval for beginning to sing, is
undoubtedly Giorgione's. The outline of the lifted finger, the trace of
the plume, the very threads of the fine linen, which fasten themselves
on the memory, in the moment before they are lost altogether in that
calm unearthly glow, the skill which has caught the waves of wandering
sound, and fixed them for ever on the lips and hands--these are indeed
the master's own; and the criticism which, while dismissing so much
hitherto believed to be Giorgione's, has established the claims of this
one picture, has left it among the most precious things in the world of
art.
It is noticeable that the "distinction" of this Concert, its sustained
evenness of perfection, alike in design, in execution, and in choice of
personal type, becomes for the "new Vasari" the standard of Giorgione's
genuine work. Finding here enough to explain his influence, and the true
seal of mastery, its authors assign to Pellegrino da San Daniele the
Holy Family in the Louvre, for certain points in which it comes short of
that standard, but which will hardly diminish the spectator's enjoyment
of a singular charm of liquid air, with which the whole picture seems
instinct, filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its sacred
personages, with some wind-searched brightness and energy; of which fine
air the blue peak, clearly defined in the distance, is, as it were, the
visible pledge. Similarly, another favourite picture in the Louvre, the
subject of a Sonnet by a poet whose own painted work often comes to mind
as one ponders over these precious things--the Fete Champetre, is
assigned to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo; and the Tempest, in the
Academy at Venice (a slighter loss, perhaps, though not without its
pleasant effect of clearing weather, towards the left, its one untouched
morsel), to Paris Bordone, or perhaps to "some advanced craftsman of the
sixteenth century." From the gallery at Dresden, the Knight embracing a
Lady, where the knight's broken gauntlets seem to mark some well-known
pause in a story we would willingly hear the rest of; is conceded to "a
Brescian hand," and Jacob meeting Rachel to a pupil of Palma; and,
whatever their charm, we are called on to give up the Ordeal and the
Finding of Moses with its jewel-like pools of water, perhaps to Bellini.
Nor has the criticism, which thus so freely diminishes the number of his
authentic works, added anything important to the well-known outline of
the life and personality of the man: only, it has fixed one or two
dates, one or two circumstances, a little more exactly. Giorgione was
born before the year 1477, and spent his childhood at Castelfranco,
where the last crags of the Venetian Alps break down romantically, with
something of parklike grace, to the plain. A natural child of the family
of the Barbarelli by a peasant-girl of Vedelago, he finds his way early
into the circle of notable persons--people of courtesy; and becomes
initiated into those differences of personal type, manner, and even of
dress, which are best understood there--that "distinction" of the
Concert of the Pitti Palace. Not far from his home lives Catherine of
Cornara, formerly Queen of Cyprus; and, up in the towers which still
remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the famous condottiere--a picturesque remnant of
medieval manners, amid a civilisation rapidly changing. Giorgione paints
their portraits; and when Tuzio's son, Matteo, dies in early youth,
adorns in his memory a chapel in the church of Castelfranco, painting on
this occasion, perhaps, the altar-piece, foremost among his authentic
works, still to be seen there, with the figure of the warrior-saint,
Liberale, of which the original little study in oil, with the delicately
gleaming, silver-grey armour, is one of the greater treasures of the
National Gallery, and in which, as in some other knightly personages
attributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of his own
presumably gracious presence. Thither, at last, he is himself brought
home from Venice, early dead, but celebrated. It happened, about his
thirty-fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he entertained
his friends with music, he met a certain lady of whom he became greatly
enamoured, and "they rejoiced greatly," says Vasari, "the one and the
other, in their loves." And two quite different legends concerning it
agree in this, that it was through this lady he came by his death:
Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of her by one of his pupils, he died
of grief at the double treason;--Vasari, that she being secretly
stricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, he
took the sickness from her mortally, along with her kisses, and so
briefly departed.
But, although the number of Giorgione's extant works has been thus
limited by recent criticism, all is not done when the real and the
traditional elements in what concerns him have been discriminated; for,
in what is connected with a great name, much that is not real is often
very stimulating; and, for the aesthetic philosopher, over and above the
real Giorgione and his authentic extant works, there remains the
Giorgionesque also--an influence, a spirit or type in art, active in men
so different as those to whom many of his supposed works are really
assignable--a veritable school, which grew together out of all those
fascinating works rightly or wrongly attributed to him; out of many
copies from, or variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen,
whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons, prized as his; out
of the immediate impression he made upon his contemporaries, and with
which he continued in men's minds; out of many traditions of subject and
treatment, which really descend from him to our own time, and by
retracing which we fill out the original image; Giorgione thus becoming
a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal,
all that was intense or desirable in it thus crystallising about the
memory of this wonderful young man.
And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this
School of Giorgione, as we may call it, which, for most of us,
notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari," will
still identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, Dresden
and Paris; and in which a certain artistic ideal is defined for us--the
conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may
understand as the Giorgionesque, wherever we find it, whether in
Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time--and of which the
Concert, that undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti Palace, is the
typical instance, and a pledge authenticating the connexion of the
school with the master.
I have spoken of a certain interpretation of the matter or subject of a
work of art with the form of it, a condition realised absolutely only in
music, as the condition to which every form of art is perpetually
aspiring. In the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal
condition, this perfect interpretation of the subject with colour and
design, depends, of course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of
that subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of the secrets
of Giorgione's school. It is the school of genre, and employs itself
mainly with "painted idylls," but, in the production of this pictorial
poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as
lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete
expression by drawing and colour. For although its productions are
painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself
without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for the
resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces
instantaneous motion--the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent back
so stately--the fainting lady--the embrace, rapid as the kiss caught,
with death itself, from dying lips--the momentary conjunction of mirrors
and polished armour and still water, by which all the sides of a solid
image are presented at once, solving that casuistical question whether
painting can present an object as completely as sculpture. The sudden
act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression--this he
arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco
Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the ideality of the
highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of
profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a
smile, perhaps--some brief and wholly concrete moment--into which,
however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long
history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and
future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants
the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that
feverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens of
Venice--exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be
spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like some
consummate extract or quintessence of life.
It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like
this is really aspiring and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect
moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its
accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects. On that background
of the silence of Venice, which the visitor there finds so impressive,
the world of Italian music was then forming. In choice of subject, as in
all besides, the Concert of the Pitti Palace is typical of all that
Giorgione, himself an admirable musician, touched with his influence;
and in sketch or finished picture, in various collections, we may follow
it through many intricate variations--men fainting at music, music heard
at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the
pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks;
the tuning of instruments--people with intent faces, as if listening,
like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage, to detect the
smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air,
or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and
finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet
sound--a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes
through some unfamiliar room, in a chance company.
In such favourite incidents, then, of Giorgione's school, music or
music-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a
sort of listening--listening to music, to the reading of Bandello's
novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments
are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at the unexpected
blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not
merely because play is in many instances that to which people really
apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress
of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers
in things without us are permitted free passage, and have their way with
us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to the play
which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play
at real life, like children "dressing up," disguised in the strange old
Italian dresses, parti-coloured, or fantastic with embroidery and furs,
of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above all the
spotless white linen at wrist and throat, he painted so dexterously.
And when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far
off; and in the school of Giorgione, the presence of water--the well, or
marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours
it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fete Champetre,
listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls, blent with the music
of the pipes--is as characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of
music itself. And the landscape feels, and is glad of it also--a
landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain
newly passed through the air, and collected into the grassy channels;
the air, too, in the school of Giorgione, seeming as vivid as the people
who breathe it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out
of it, and no taint, no floating particle of anything but its own proper
elements allowed to subsist within it.
Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scenery," with some
elusive refinement felt about the rustic buildings, the choice grass,
the grouped trees, the undulations deftly economised for graceful
effect. Only, in Italy all natural things are, as it were, woven through
and through with gold thread, even the cypress revealing it among the
folds of its blackness. And it is with gold dust, or gold thread, that
these Venetian painters seem to work, spinning its fine filaments,
through the solemn human flesh, away into the white plastered walls of
the thatched huts. The harsher details of the mountains recede to a
harmonious distance, the one peak of rich blue above the horizon
remaining but as the visible warrant of that due coolness which is all
we need ask here of the Alps, with their dark rains and streams. Yet
what real, airy space, as the eye passes from level to level, through
the long-drawn valley in which Jacob embraces Rachel among the flocks!
Nowhere is there a truer instance of that balance, that modulated unison
of landscape and persons--of the human image and its
accessories--already noticed as characteristic of the Venetian school,
so that, in it, neither personage nor scenery is ever a mere pretext for
the other.
Something like this seems to me to be the vraie verite about Giorgione,
if I may adopt a serviceable expression, by which the French recognise
those more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of any
really considerable person or subject, anything that has at all
intricately occupied men's attention, lie beyond, and must supplement,
the narrower range of the strictly ascertained facts about it. In this,
Giorgione is but an illustration of a valuable general caution we may
abide by in all criticism. As regards Giorgione himself, we have indeed
to take note of all those negations and exceptions, by which, at first
sight, a "new Vasari" seems merely to have confused our apprehension of
a delightful object, to have explained away out of our inheritance from
past time what seemed of high value there. Yet it is not with a full
understanding even of those exceptions that one can leave off just at
this point. Properly qualified, such exceptions are but a salt of
genuineness in our knowledge; and beyond all those strictly ascertained
facts, we must take note of that indirect influence by which one like
Giorgione, for instance, enlarges his permanent efficacy and really
makes himself felt in our culture. In a just impression of that, is the
essential truth, the vraie verite concerning him.
1877.