interesting, of his great pictures is the _Feast at Cana_, in the
Louvre, measuring thirty feet wide and twenty feet high. This was
formerly in the refectory of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The scene is
a brilliant atrium, surrounded by majestic pillars. The tables at which
the guests are seated form three sides of a parallelogram. The guests
are supposed to be almost entirely contemporary portraits, so that the
figures of Christ and His mother, of themselves insignificant enough,
lose even more in the general interest of the subject. Servants occupy
the foreground, while on the raised balustrades and the balconies of
distant houses are innumerable onlookers. The most remarkable feature of
the whole composition is a group of musicians in the centre of the
foreground, which are portraits of the artist himself and Tintoretto,
playing on violon-cellos, and Titian, in a red robe, with the
contra-bass.
_Christ in the House of Simon_, the Magdalen washing His feet, is
another scarcely less gigantic picture in the Louvre; but it is much
simpler in arrangement, and is distinguished by the fineness of the
heads, especially that of the Christ. An interesting piece of technical
criticism on the _Feast at Cana_ occurs in Reynolds's Eighth
Discourse:--
"Another instance occurs to me," he says, "where equal liberty may be
taken in regard to the management of light. Though the general practice
is to make a large mass about the middle of the picture surrounded by
shadow, the reverse may be practised, and the spirit of rule may still
be preserved.... In the great composition of Paul Veronese, the
_Marriage at Cana_, the figures are for the most part in half shadow;
the great light is in the sky; and indeed the general effect of this
picture, which is so striking, is no more than what we often see in
landscapes, in small pictures of fairs and country feasts; but those
principles of light and shadow, being transferred to a large scale, to a
space containing near a hundred figures as large as life, and conducted
to all appearance with as much facility and with an attention as
steadily fixed upon the _whole together_ as if it were a small picture
immediately under the eye, the work justly excites our admiration; the
difficulty being increased as the extent is enlarged."
* * * * *
With the death of the great Venetians, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul
Veronese, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the history of
Italian painting of the first rank comes to an end. In Florence, the
imitation of Michelangelo was the chief object striven after, and, as
might be expected, the attempt was not eminently successful. The greater
number of the Italian painters of the early seventeenth century who
attained any fame are known by the name of Eclectics, from their having
endeavoured, instead of imitating any one of their great predecessors,
to select and unite the best qualities of each, without, however,
excluding the direct study of nature. The fallacy of this aim, when
carried to an extreme, is, of course, that the greatness of the earlier
masters consisted really in their individual and peculiar qualities, and
to endeavour to unite characteristics essentially different involves a
contradiction.
The most important of the Eclectic schools was that of the Carracci, at
Bologna, which was founded by LODOVICO CARRACCI (_c_. 1555-1619), a
scholar of Prospero Fontana and Passignano at Florence. In his youth he
was nicknamed "the ox," partly from his slowness, but possibly also for
his study of long-forgotten methods, by which he arrived at the decision
that reform was necessary to counteract the independence of the
mannerists. He therefore obtained the assistance of his two nephews,
AGOSTINO and ANNIBALE CARRACCI, sons of a tailor, and in concert with
them opened an academy at Bologna in 1589. This he furnished with casts,
drawings, and engravings, and provided living models and gave
instruction in perspective, anatomy, etc. In spite of opposition this
academy became more and more popular, and before long all the other
schools of art in Bologna were closed.
The principles of their teaching was succinctly expressed in a sonnet
written by Agostino, in substance as follows:--"Let him who wishes to be
a good painter acquire the design of Rome, Venetian action and
chiaroscuro, the dignified colouring of Lombardy (that is to say, of
Leonardo da Vinci), the terrible manner of Michelangelo, Titian's truth
and nature, the sovereign purity of Correggio, and the perfect symmetry
of Raphael. The decorum and well-grounded study of Tibaldi, the
invention of the learned Primaticcio, and a _little_ of the grace of
Parmigiano."
This "patchwork ideal," as Kugler calls it, was, however, but a
transition step in the history of the Carracci and their art. In the
prime of their activity they threw off a great deal of their
eclecticism, and attained an independence of their own. The merit of
Lodovico is chiefly that of a reformer and a teacher, and the pictures
by Agostino are few and of no great account. But in Annibale we find
much more than imitation of the characteristics of great masters. In his
earlier works there are rather obvious traces of Correggio and Paul
Veronese, but under the influence of the works of Raphael and
Michelangelo and of the antique, as he understood it, he developed a
style of his own. Though in recent years he is a little out of fashion
with the public, there is no question about his having a place among the
greater artists. To show how opinion can change, I venture to quote a
passage from a letter written to me on the subject of Carracci's _The
Three Maries_, lately presented to the National Gallery by the Countess
of Carlisle:--"I saw the gallery at Castle Howard in 1850. _The Three
Maries_ was then still regarded as one of _the_ great pictures of the
world; and they told the story of how Lord Carlisle and Lord Ellesmere
and Lord----, who shared the Paris purchases [after the Peace of 1815]
between them, had to cast lots for this, because it was thought to be
worth more than all the rest of the spoil."
The most important, or at any rate one of the most popular, of the
pupils of Carracci was DOMENICO ZAMPIERI, commonly called DOMENICHINO
(1581-1641). If we are less enthusiastic about him at the present, it
may still be remembered that Constable particularly admired him, but it
is significant that the four examples in the National Gallery are
numbered 48, 75, 77 and 85--there is no more recent acquisition. He had
great facility, and his compositions--not always original--are treated
with great charm if with no real depth. His most famous picture, the
_Communion of S. Jerome_, now in the Vatican, is closely imitated from
Agostino Carracci's.
GUIDO RENI (1575-1642), even more popular in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries than Domenichino, was as skilful in some respects,
but hardly as admirable. The _Ecce Homo_, bequeathed by Samuel Rogers to
the National Gallery, is an excellent example of his ability to charm
the sentimentalist, and if ever there should be a popular revival of
taste in the direction of the now neglected school of the Carracci, he
will possibly resume all the honour formerly paid to him. The same can
hardly be predicted for the far inferior Carlo Maratti, Guercino, and
Carlo Dolce.
Space forbids me more than the bare mention in these pages of the
brilliant revival of painting in Venice during the earlier part of the
eighteenth century by ANTONIO CANALE (1697-1768), GIOVANNI BATTISTA
TIEPOLO (1692-1769), PIETRO LONGHI (1702-1785), and FRANCESCO GUARDI
(1712-1793). Charming as their excellent accomplishments were, they must
give place to more important claims awaiting our attention in other
countries.
_SPANISH SCHOOL_
One of the sensations of the Exhibition of Spanish Old Masters at the
Grafton Gallery in the autumn of 1913 was an altar panel, dated 1250,
which was acquired by Mr Roger Fry in Paris, and catalogued as of the
"Early Catalan School." In view of the fact that this picture is
"certainly to be regarded as one of the very oldest of primitive
pictures painted on wood in any country ... a decade earlier than the
picture by Margaritone in the National Gallery," it seems somewhat
dogmatic to assert that while retaining a strongly Byzantine character
"the style is distinctly that of Catalonia." What was the style of
Catalonia?
So far as the history of the art is concerned, the chapter on Spain is,
with one exception, a very short and a singularly uninteresting one,
whether Mr Fry's panel was painted in Catalonia or whether it was not;
and in spite of every effort to find in this uncongenial country that
expansion of painting that might reasonably have been expected to flow
from Italy and moisten its barren soil for the production of so
wonderful a genius as Velasquez, there is positively nothing earlier
than Velasquez, and not very much after him, that has more than what we
may call a documentary interest. While in Italy or the Netherlands the
names of scores of painters earlier than the seventeenth century are
endeared to us by the recollection of the works they have left us, the
enumeration of those of the few Spaniards of whom we have any knowledge
awakens no such thrill, and if we have ever heard of them, their works
mean little more to us than their names. Only when we come within touch
of Velasquez does our interest awaken--as in the case of Ribera and
Zurbaran--and that is less because of them than because of Velasquez. El
Greco was not a Spaniard by birth, but a Cretan; and if he were ranged
with the Italians, to whom he more properly belongs, he would scarcely
be more famous than some Bolognese masters whose names are now--or
perhaps we ought to say, at the present moment--almost forgotten. The
announcement that one of his portraits has been sold to an American for
L30,000 is of commercial rather than of artistic interest.
If one had to sum up the career and the art of Velasquez in a sentence,
it might be done by calling him a Court painter who never flattered.
After recording his life from the time when he left his master Pacheco
to enter the service of Philip IV. to the day that he died in it, we
shall find that only a bare percentage of his work was not commissioned
by the king; and in all his pictures which were not simply portraits
there is little if anything to be found which is not as literal and
truthful a presentment of the model in front of him as the life-like
representations of Philip and those about his Court, of which the
supreme quality is that of living resemblance, or to put it in more
general terms, vivid realism. Gifted as he must have been with an
extraordinary vision and a still rarer, if not unique, ability to put
down on canvas what he saw, he confined himself entirely within the
limits of actuality, and thereby attained to heights which his great
contemporaries Rubens and Rembrandt in their noblest flights of
imagination never reached.
Velasquez was baptised on the 6th of June 1599, in the church of S.
Peter at Seville. He was the son of well-to-do parents; his father, a
native of Seville, was named Juan Rodriguez de Silva, his mother
Geronima Velasquez. At thirteen years old he had displayed so strong an
inclination towards painting that he was put to study under Francisco de
Herrera, then the most considerable painter in Spain (his son, also
Francisco, was the painter of the _Christ Disputing with the Doctors_,
in the National Gallery), but owing to Herrera's violent temper
Velasquez was shortly transferred to the studio of Francisco Pacheco,
whose daughter he eventually married.
Pacheco who was, besides being an accomplished artist, a man of literary
tastes, and much sought after in Seville by the more intellectual class
of society, was exceedingly proud of his pupil, and said of him that he
was induced to bestow the hand of his daughter upon him "by the
rectitude of his conduct, the purity of his morals, and his great
talents, and from the high expectation he entertained of his natural
abilities and transcendent genius," adding that the honour of having
been his instructor was far greater than that of being his
father-in-law, and that he felt it no demerit to be surpassed by so
brilliant a pupil.
In 1649 Pacheco published a book on painting, in which we are told that
the first attempts of Velasquez were studies in still life, or simple
compositions of actual figures, called _bodegones_ in Spanish, of which
we have a fair example at the National Gallery in the _Christ at the
House of Martha_. Sir Frederick Cook, at Richmond, has another, an _Old
Woman Frying Eggs_, and the Duke of Wellington two more, of which _The
Water Carrier of Seville_ is probably the summit of the young painter's
achievement before he left Seville, in 1623, and entered the service of
Philip IV. as Court painter.
His first portrait of the king was the magnificent whole length in the
Prado Gallery, now numbered 1182, standing in front of a table with a
letter in his right hand. No. 1183 is the head of the same portrait,
possibly done as a study for it. Philip was so pleased with this that he
ordered all existing portraits of himself to be removed from the palace,
and appointed Velasquez exclusively as his painter.
Another of his earliest successes at Court was the whole length portrait
of the king's brother, Don Carlos, holding a glove in his right hand;
and the picture now in the Museum at Rouen of _A Geographer_ is probably
of this date.
In 1628, when Velasquez was still quite young, and had fallen under no
influence save that of Pacheco and the school of Seville, he was charged
by the king to entertain Rubens, who came to the Spanish Court on a
diplomatic mission, and show him all the treasures in the palace. If any
one could influence Velasquez, we might suppose it would have been
Rubens, who was not only a great painter, but a man of the most
captivating manners and disposition, ever ready to help younger artists.
But not only did he have no perceptible effect on the style of
Velasquez, but in the picture of _The Topers_, which must have been
painted while Rubens was at Madrid, or very shortly after he left, we
can almost see a determination not to be influenced by him; for the
subject was a favourite one of Rubens's, and yet there is nothing in
this most realistic presentment of
[Illustration: PLATE XVIII.--VELAZQUEZ
THE INFANTE PHILIP PROSPER
_Imperial Gallery, Vienna_]
actual figures under the title of Bacchus and his votaries which has
anything at all in common with the florid and imaginative compositions
of the Flemish painter. Velasquez had begun as a realist, and a realist
he was to continue till the end of his days.
Shortly after painting this picture he left his native country for the
first time, and visited Venice and Rome. At Venice he made copies of
Tintoretto's _Last Supper_ and _Crucifixion_; but little if any of
Tintoretto's influence is to be seen in the two pictures he painted in
Rome--_The Forge of Vulcan_ and _Joseph's Coat_, both of which are still
as realistic as ever in treatment, though showing great advances in
technical skill. Soon after his return to Spain in 1631, he probably
painted the magnificent whole length _Philip IV._ in the National
Gallery, which compares so well, on examination with the more popular
and showy _Admiral Pulido Pareja_ purchased some years ago from Longford
Castle. Senor Beruete, who has studied the work of Velasquez more
closely and more intelligently than any one else, considers that whereas
there is not a single touch upon the former that is not from the brush
of Velasquez, the latter cannot be properly attributed to him at
all--any more than can another popular favourite, the _Alexandro del
Borro_ in the Berlin Gallery, now given to Bernard Strozzi.
To this period may be also assigned the _Christ at the Column_ in the
National Gallery, a picture which though not at first sight attractive,
is nevertheless as fine in technique, and in sentiment, as any other
picture in the Spanish room, and deserves far more attention than is
usually given to it. Its simple realism and its pathetic sweetness are
qualities which are wanting in many a more showy or sensational
composition, and the more it is studied the nearer we find we are
getting to the real excellences that distinguish Velasquez from any
painter who has ever lived. The _Crucifixion_ at the Prado is perhaps
more wonderful, but the familiar subject helps the imagination of the
spectator to admire it, whereas the unfamiliar setting of our picture is
apt at first sight to repel.
The most important composition undertaken by Velasquez in this middle
period of his career--that is to say between his two visits to Italy in
1629 and 1649--is the famous _Surrender of Breda_, or, as it is
sometimes called, _The Lances_. Soon after his arrival in Madrid he had
once painted an historical subject, _The Expulsion of the Moors_, in
competition with his rivals who had asserted that he could paint nothing
but heads. In this competition the prize was awarded to him, but as the
picture has perished we are unable to judge of its merits for ourselves.
But apart from this, and such unimportant groups of figures as we have
mentioned, he had been occupied wholly in painting single portraits, and
it is a marvellous proof of his genius that he should produce such a
masterpiece of composition as _The Lances_ with so little practice in
this branch of his art. Here, at least, we might have expected to trace
the influence of Rubens, but there is actually no sign of it; and if he
sought any inspiration at all from other painters, it was from what he
recalled of Tintoretto's work which he had seen and studied in Venice.
In the king's eldest boy, _Baltazar Carlos_, who was born in 1629,
Velasquez found a model for two or three of his most charming pictures.
One is at Castle Howard; a second the equestrian portrait, on a
galloping pony, at the Prado; and a third the full length hunting
portrait, also at the Prado, in which we see the little prince standing
under a tree, gun in hand, with an enormous dog lying beside him.
Another is at Vienna, representing him as of about eleven years old,
full length, with his hand resting on the back of a chair. All of these
owe some of their charm to the youth and attractive personality of the
subject; but if we want to see the power of Velasquez without any
outside element to help us to appreciate it, there is the portrait of
the sculptor _Martinez Montanes_ at the Prado. "The head is wonderful in
its colour and its modelling," writes Senor Beruete; "and what a lesson
in technique! The eyes, lightly touched with colour, are set deep in
their sockets, and surmounted by a strongly marked forehead. The high
lights are of a rich _impasto_, manipulated with extraordinary skill;
the greyer tones of the flesh, so true and so delicate, are painted in a
way that brings out with marvellous truth, both the soft parts of the
cheeks and the harder structure of the face, under which one can follow
the bones of the nose and forehead.... Everything in the picture is
spontaneous, and one can see that it is a pledge of friendship given by
one artist to another; there is nothing here of that artificial
arrangement that spoils commissioned portraits even when they are the
work of a painter as independent as Velasquez was. One feels here the
assurance of an artist who knows that his work will be understood by his
friend in the spirit in which it was executed." M. Lefort, the French
critic, is even more enthusiastic. "Ah! these redoubtable neighbours,"
he exclaims, seeing it surrounded by the works of other painters at the
Prado. "This canvas makes them look like mere imitations--dead
conventional likenesses. Van Dyck is dull, Rubens oily, Tintoret yellow;
it is Velasquez alone who can give us the illusion of life in all its
fulness!"
In 1649 Velasquez paid his second visit to Rome, where he painted the
famous portrait of His Holiness, _Pope Innocent X._ which is now in the
Doria palace. This is exceptional in treatment, inasmuch as it is the
only portrait by Velasquez in which the subject is seated--excepting of
course equestrian portraits--and instead of the usual quiet tones of
grey and brown which he was so fond of employing, the picture of the
Pope is a radiant harmony of rose red and white. In its realism it is
even more surprising than most of the other portraits, considering how
ugly the face had to be made to resemble nature, although the sitter was
of a still higher rank than Velasquez's royal master.
Returning to Madrid in 1651, Velasquez never again left Spain, and the
remaining twenty years of his life may be considered the third period of
his artistic development, inasmuch as no special influence was exerted
upon him outside the ordinary and somewhat tedious course of his
employment at the Court. To this period are assigned twenty-six
pictures--Senor Beruete only admits the authenticity of eighty-three in
all, it may be mentioned--twelve of which are royal portraits, seven
those of buffoons and dwarfs, three mythological and two sacred
subjects, and the two famous pieces of real life, _Las Meninas_ and _Las
Hilanderas_.
Of the royal portraits those of the _Infanta Margarita_ are among the
most fascinating, no less from their technical excellence than on
account of the youthful charm of the little Princess. The one at Vienna
represents her as about three years old, dressed in red, standing by a
little table. Of this, Senor Beruete says that it is "one of the most
beautiful inspirations of Velasquez, and perhaps one that reveals better
than any other his power as a colourist; it is a flower, perfumed with
every infantine grace." Another standing portrait, though only a half
length, when she was not many years older, is that in the Salon Carre at
the Louvre, which is more familiar to us being nearer home and more
often reproduced. M. de Wyczewa praises it thus:--"The perfect
_chefs-d'oeuvre_ collected in this glorious salon pale in the presence
of this child portrait; not one of them can bear comparison with this
simple yet powerful painting, which seems to aim only at external
resemblance and without other effort to attain a mysterious beauty of
form and colour." At Frankfort again is a charming picture of the little
Princess, whole length, at the age of six or seven--a replica of which
is at Vienna. She is dressed in greyish white with trimmings of black,
and her hoop skirt is so enormous that her arms have to be stretched out
straight to allow her hands to reach the edge of her coat.