(In Lord Spencer's Collection, Althorp)
One of the most striking portraits of the artist. Painted at a fairly
late date in his career, it shows the painter prosperous and rich and
by no means ill pleased with his lot in the world. Full of life and
gaiety, his joyous face gives us a good idea of the gratification he
found in life almost to the end. Indeed, a deal of the fascination of
his art arises from his approaching his subjects in this happy frame of
mind.
[Illustration: Plate IV.]
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Rubens, hearing of the prolonged sojourn of his pupil at Saveltheim,
arrived one day upon the scene, and finally induced Van Dyck to tear
himself from his mistress and continue his journey to Italy.
The great object of his visit was to study the Venetian masters, and
accordingly he repaired forthwith to the City of the Lagoons. We can
picture him standing for the first time before those wonderful
portraits of Titian and Tintoretto, Palma-Vecchio and Moroni, about
which he had heard so much in his student days in Antwerp. That he was
not disappointed is evidenced by the fact that almost immediately a
change is observable in his method. He cast aside as speedily as
possible the silveriness and coolness which had characterised his
palette when working in Antwerp, and endeavoured to assimilate in as
great a degree as possible the golden luminosity and subtle handling of
the mighty Venetians. It is probable that Titian held the first place
in his estimation, for it is rather upon his method that all his
subsequent developments in technique are based. But perhaps full
justice has not been done to the influence Moroni had in moulding his
youthful genius. One has only to compare, for example, the full-length
portrait of an Italian nobleman, No. 1316 in the National Gallery, with
that marvellous representation of Philip le Roy in the Wallace
Collection, reproduced in this volume, to see the connection between
the two painters. There is the same air of distinction in each
portrait, and in silveriness of colouring and elegance of pose there is
much in common. These are not isolated examples in the life-work of
the two masters, but are rather representative of a whole series of
portraits in which their genius runs on nearly parallel lines.
We cannot wonder that Van Dyck was not much impressed by such of the
Umbrian painters as he came in contact with. There was still left in
these men the remains of that mysticism which was born of the intimate
contact with religion in relation to life that had originally brought
it into being. The religious art of the Netherlands--I am speaking now
of that which arose after the middle of the sixteenth century--was
built upon a purely human and materialistic basis. If a scriptural
scene was represented it was brought before us as a subject from
everyday life; a martyrdom with all its brutality, a crucifixion with
all its physical horror, and a madonna and child simply as a peasant
girl with a child, set in homely surroundings. Our artist, endowed
with the same temperament as the men who had created such works, and
who moreover was perhaps the best exponent of this school of painting,
with the possible exception of Rubens himself, could not be expected to
be touched with the subtleties of Botticelli or Filippino Lippi.
Further, it is not unlikely that he found he could learn little from
the technique of Raphael or Andrea del Sarto. But with the Venetians
it was quite otherwise. From the early days of Giovanni Bellini they
seem to have treated religious subjects in just as materialistic a
manner, if less grossly and repugnantly, than the Flemings themselves.
One has but to contemplate the life-work of Titian to see how little
religious feeling, in the Florentine or mystical sense of the term,
there was in his art. Even the two most impressive religious pictures
he ever painted, the "Entombment," in the Louvre, and the "Christ
crowned with Thorns," at Munich, would certainly not have pleased the
patrons of Ghirlandajo or Pollaiuolo. But Titian and his
contemporaries constitute the zenith attained by Italian materialistic
art, at any rate in point of technique.
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