VENETIAN PAINTING
Painting bloomed late in Venice--Conditions offered by Venice to
Art--Shelley and Pietro Aretino--Political circumstances of
Venice--Comparison with Florence--The Ducal Palace--Art regarded as an
adjunct to State Pageantry--Myth of Venezia--Heroic Deeds of
Venice--Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Picture of a Ball--Early
Venetian Masters of Murano--Gian Bellini--Carpaccio's little Angels--The
Madonna of S. Zaccaria--Giorgione--Allegory, Idyll, Expression of
Emotion--The Monk at the Clavichord--Titian, Tintoret, and
Veronese--Tintoretto's attempt to dramatise Venetian Art--Veronese's
Mundane Splendour--Titian's Sophoclean Harmony--Their Schools--Further
Characteristics of Veronese--of Tintoretto--His Imaginative
Energy--Predominant Poetry--Titian's Perfection of Balance--Assumption of
Madonna--Spirit common to the Great Venetians.
It was a fact of the greatest importance for the development of the fine
arts in Italy that painting in Venice reached maturity later than in
Florence. Owing to this circumstance one chief aspect of the Renaissance,
its material magnificence and freedom, received consummate treatment at
the hands of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. To idealise the
sensualities of the external universe, to achieve for colour what the
Florentines had done for form, to invest the worldly grandeur of human
life at one of its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of the highest
art, was what these great artists were called on to accomplish. Their task
could not have been so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as in
the sixteenth, if the development of the aesthetic sense had been more
premature among the Venetians.
Venice was precisely fitted for the part her painters had to play. Free,
isolated, wealthy, powerful; famous throughout Europe for the pomp of her
state equipage, and for the immorality of her private manners; ruled by a
prudent aristocracy, who spent vast wealth on public shows and on the
maintenance of a more than imperial civic majesty: Venice, with her
pavement of liquid chrysoprase, with her palaces of porphyry and marble,
her frescoed façades, her quays and squares aglow with the costumes of the
Levant, her lagoons afloat with the galleys of all nations, her churches
floored with mosaics, her silvery domes and ceilings glittering with
sculpture bathed in molten gold: Venice luxurious in the light and colour
of a vaporous atmosphere, where sea-mists rose into the mounded summer
clouds; arched over by the broad expanse of sky, bounded only by the
horizon of waves and plain and distant mountain ranges, and reflected in
all its many hues of sunrise and sunset upon the glassy surface of smooth
waters: Venice asleep like a miracle of opal or of pearl upon the bosom of
an undulating lake:--here and here only on the face of the whole globe was
the unique city wherein the pride of life might combine with the lustre of
the physical universe to create and stimulate in the artist a sense of all
that was most sumptuous in the pageant of the world of sense.
There is colour in flowers. Gardens of tulips are radiant, and mountain
valleys touch the soul with the beauty of their pure and gemlike hues.
Therefore the painters of Flanders and of Umbria, John van Eyck and
Gentile da Fabriano, penetrated some of the secrets of the world of
colour. But what are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, anemone,
or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow grasses or trained in quiet
cloister garden-beds, when compared with that melodrama of flame and gold
and rose and orange and azure, which the skies and lagoons of Venice yield
almost daily to the eyes? The Venetians had no green fields and trees, no
garden borders, no blossoming orchards, to teach them the tender
suggestiveness, the quaint poetry of isolated or contrasted tints. Their
meadows were the fruitless furrows of the Adriatic, hued like a peacock's
neck; they called the pearl-shells of their Lido flowers, _fior di mare_.
Nothing distracted their attention from the glories of morning and of
evening presented to them by their sea and sky. It was in consequence of
this that the Venetians conceived colour heroically, not as a matter of
missal-margins or of subordinate decoration, but as a motive worthy in
itself of sublime treatment. In like manner, hedged in by no limitary
hills, contracted by no city walls, stifled by no narrow streets, but open
to the liberal airs of heaven and ocean, the Venetians understood space
and imagined pictures almost boundless in their immensity. Light, colour,
air, space: those are the elemental conditions of Venetian art; of those
the painters weaved their ideal world for beautiful and proud humanity.
Shelley's description of a Venetian sunset strikes the keynote to Venetian
painting:[265]--
As those who pause on some delightful way,
Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood
Looking upon the evening and the flood,
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky: the hoar
And airy Alps, towards the north appeared,
Through mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared
Between the east and west; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many-folded hills--they were
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido through the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles--
And then, as if the earth and sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade,"
Said my companion, "I will show you soon
A better station." So, o'er the lagune
We glided: and from that funereal bark
I leaned, and saw the city; and could mark
How from their many isles, in evening's gleam,
Its temples and its palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
With this we may compare the following extract from a letter, addressed in
May 1544 to Titian, by one of the most unprincipled of literary bandits
who have ever disgraced humanity, but who nevertheless was solemnised to
the spirit of true poetry by the grandiose aspect of nature as it appeared
to him in Venice. That Pietro Aretino should have so deeply felt the charm
of natural beauty in an age when even the greatest artists and poets
sought inspiration in human life rather than the outer world, is a
significant fact. It seems to illustrate the necessity whereby Venice
became the cradle of the art of nature.[266] "Having, dear Sir, and my
best gossip, supped alone to the injury of my custom, or, to speak more
truly, supped in the company of all the boredoms of a cursed quartan
fever, which will not let me taste the flavour of any food, I rose from
table sated with the same disgust with which I had sat down to it. In this
mood I went and leaned my arms upon the sill outside my window, and
throwing my chest and nearly all my body on the marble, abandoned myself
to the contemplation of the spectacle presented by the innumerable boats,
filled with foreigners as well as people of the city, which gave delight
not merely to the gazers, but also to the Grand Canal itself, that
perpetual delight of all who plough its waters. From this animated scene,
all of a sudden, like one who from mere _ennui_ knows not how to occupy
his mind, I turned my eyes to heaven, which, from the moment when God made
it, was never adorned with such painted loveliness of lights and shadows.
The whole region of the air was what those who envy you, because they are
unable to be you, would fain express. To begin with, the buildings of
Venice, though of solid stone, seemed made of some ethereal substance.
Then the sky was full of variety--here clear and ardent, there dulled and
overclouded. What marvellous clouds there were! Masses of them in the
centre of the scene hung above the house-roofs, while the immediate part
was formed of a grey tint inclining to dark. I gazed astonished at the
varied colours they displayed. The nearer masses burned with flames of
sunset; the more remote blushed with a blaze of crimson less afire. Oh,
how splendidly did Nature's pencil treat and dispose that airy landscape,
keeping the sky apart from the palaces, just as Titian does! On one side
the heavens showed a greenish-blue, on another a bluish-green, invented
verily by the caprice of Nature, who is mistress of the greatest masters.
With her lights and her darks, there she was harmonising, toning, and
bringing out into relief, just as she wished. Seeing which, I who know
that your pencil is the spirit of her inmost soul, cried aloud thrice or
four tines, 'Oh, Titian! where are you now?'"
In order to understand the destiny of Venice in art, it is not enough to
concentrate attention on the peculiarities of her physical environment.
Potent as these were in the creation of her style, the political and
social conditions of the Republic require also to be taken into account.
Among Italian cities Venice was unique. She alone was tranquil in her
empire, unimpeded in her constitutional development, independent of Church
interference, undisturbed by the cross purposes and intrigues of the
Despots, inhabited by merchants who were princes, and by a free-born
people who had never seen war at their gates. The serenity of undisturbed
security, the luxury of wealth amassed abroad and liberally spent at home,
gave a physiognomy of ease and proud self-confidence to all her edifices.
The grim and anxious struggles of the Middle Ages left no mark on Venice.
How different was this town from Florence, every inch of whose domain
could tell of civic warfare, whose passionate aspirations after
independence ended in the despotism of the bourgeois Medici, whose
repeated revolutions had slavery for their climax, whose grey palaces bore
on their fronts the stamp of mediaeval vigilance, whose spirit was
incarnated in Dante the exile, whose enslavement forced from Michael
Angelo those groans of a chained Titan expressed in the marbles of S.
Lorenzo! It is not an insignificant, though a slight, detail, that the
predominant colour of Florence is brown, while the predominant colour of
Venice is that of mother-of-pearl, concealing within its general whiteness
every tint that can be placed upon the palette of a painter. The
conditions of Florence stimulated mental energy and turned the forces of
the soul inwards. Those of Venice inclined the individual to accept life
as he found it. Instead of exciting him to think, they disposed him to
enjoy, or to acquire by industry the means of manifold enjoyment. To
represent in art the intellectual strivings of the Renaissance was the
task of Florence and her sons; to create a monument of Renaissance
magnificence was the task of Venice. Without Venice the modern world could
not have produced that flower of sensuous and unreflective loveliness in
painting, which is worthy to stand beside the highest product of the Greek
genius in sculpture. For Athena from her Parthenon stretches the hand to
Venezia enthroned in the ducal palace. The broad brows and earnest eyes of
the Hellenic goddess are of one divine birth and lineage with the golden
hair and superb carriage of the sea-queen.
It is in the heart of Venice, in the House of the Republic, that the
Venetian painters, considered as the interpreters of worldly splendour,
fulfilled their function with the most complete success. Centuries
contributed to make the Ducal Palace what it is. The massive colonnades
and Gothic loggias of the external basement date from the thirteenth
century; their sculpture belongs to the age when Niccola Pisano's genius
was in the ascendant. The square fabric of the palace, so beautiful in the
irregularity of its pointed windows, so singular in its mosaic diaper of
pink and white, was designed at the same early period. The inner court and
the façade that overhangs the lateral canal, display the handiwork of
Sansovino. The halls of the palace--spacious chambers where the Senate
assembled, where ambassadors approached the Doge, where the Savi
deliberated, where the Council of Ten conducted their inquisition--are
walled and roofed with pictures of inestimable value, encased in framework
of carved oak; overlaid with burnished gold. Supreme art--the art of the
imagination perfected with delicate and skilful care in detail--is made in
these proud halls the minister of mundane pomp. In order that the gold
brocade of the ducal robes, that the scarlet and crimson of the Venetian
senator, might, be duly harmonised by the richness of their surroundings,
it was necessary that canvases measured by the square yard, and rendered
priceless by the authentic handiwork of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese,
should glow upon the walls and ceilings. A more insolent display of public
wealth--a more lavish outpouring of human genius in the service of State
pageantry, cannot be imagined.
Sublime over all allegories and histories depicted in those multitudes of
paintings, sits Venezia herself enthroned and crowned, the personification
of haughtiness and power. Figured as a regal lady, with yellow hair
tightly knotted round a small head poised upon her upright throat and
ample shoulders, Venice takes her chair of sovereignty--as mistress of the
ocean to whom Neptune and the Tritons offer pearls, as empress of the
globe at whose footstool wait Justice with the sword and Peace with the
olive branch, as a queen of heaven exalted to the clouds. They have made
her a goddess, those great painters; they have produced a mythus, and
personified in native loveliness that bride of the sea, their love, their
lady. The beauty of Venetian women and the glory of Venetian empire find
their meeting point in her, and live as the spirit of Athens lived in
Pallas Promachos. On every side, above, around, wherever the eye falls in
those vast rooms, are seen the deeds of Venice--painted histories of her
triumphs over emperors and popes and infidels, or allegories of her
greatness--scenes wherein the Doges perform acts of faith, with S. Mark
for their protector, and with Venezia for their patroness. The saints in
Paradise, massed together by Tintoretto and by Palma, mingle with
mythologies of Greece and Rome, and episodes of pure idyllic painting.
Religion in these pictures was a matter of parade, an adjunct to the
costly public life of the Republic. We need not, therefore, conclude that
it was unreal. Such as it was, the religion of the Venetian masters is
indeed as genuine as that of Fra Angelico or Albert Dürer. But it was the
faith, not of humble men or of mystics, not of profound thinkers or
ecstatic visionaries, so much as of courtiers and statesmen, of senators
and merchants, for whom religion was a function among other functions, not
a thing apart, not a source of separate and supreme vitality. Even as
Christians, the Venetians lived a life separate from the rest of Italy.
Their Church claimed independence of the see of Rome, and the enthusiasm
of S. Francis was but faintly felt in the lagoons. Siena in her hour of
need dedicated herself to Madonna; Florence in the hour of her
regeneration gave herself to Christ; Venice remained under the ensign of
the leonine S. Mark. While the cities of Lombardy and Central Italy ran
wild with revivalism and religious panics, the Venetians maintained their
calm, and never suffered piety to exceed the limits of political prudence.
There is, therefore, no mystical exaltation in the faith depicted by her
artists. That Tintoretto could have painted the saints in glory--a
countless multitude of congregated forms, a sea whereof the waves are
souls--as a background for State ceremony, shows the positive and
realistic attitude of mind from which the most imaginative of Venetian
masters started, when he undertook the most exalted of religious themes.
Paradise is a fact, we may fancy Tintoretto reasoned; and it is easier to
fill a quarter of an acre of canvas with a picture of Paradise than with
any other subject, because the figures can be arranged in concentric tiers
round Christ and Madonna in glory.
There is a little sketch by Guardi representing a masked ball in the
Council Chamber where the "Paradise" of Tintoretto fills a wall. The men
are in periwigs and long waistcoats; the ladies wear hoops, patches, fans,
high heels, and powder. Bowing, promenading, intriguing, exchanging
compliments or repartees, they move from point to point; while from the
billowy surge of saints, Moses with the table of the law and the Magdalen
with her adoring eyes of penitence look down upon them. Tintoretto could
not but have foreseen that the world of living pettiness and passion would
perpetually jostle with his world of painted sublimities and sanctities in
that vast hall. Yet he did not on that account shrink from the task or
fail in its accomplishment. Paradise existed: therefore it could be
painted; and he was called upon to paint it here. If the fine gentlemen
and ladies below felt out of harmony with the celestial host, so much the
worse for them. In this practical spirit the Venetian masters approached
religious art, and such was the sphere appointed for it in the pageantry
of the Republic. When Paolo Veronese was examined by the Holy Office
respecting some supposed irreverence in a sacred picture, his answers
clearly proved that in planning it he had thought less of its spiritual
significance than of its aesthetic effect.[267]
In the Ducal Palace the Venetian art of the Renaissance culminates; and
here we might pause a moment to consider the difference between these
paintings and the mediaeval frescoes of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena.[268]
The Sienese painters consecrated all their abilities to the expression of
thoughts, theories of political self-government in a free State, and
devotional ideas. The citizen who read the lesson of the Sala della Pace
was instructed in his duties to God and to the State. The Venetian
painters, as we have seen, exalted Venice and set forth her acts of power.
Their work is a glorification of the Republic; but no doctrine is
inculcated, and no system of thought is conveyed to the mind through the
eye. Daily pacing the saloons of the palace, Doge and noble were reminded
of the greatness of the State they represented. They were not invited to
reflect upon the duties of the governor and governed. Their imaginations
were dilated and their pride roused by the spectacle of Venice seated
like a goddess in her home. Of all the secular States of Italy the
Republic of S. Mark's alone produced this mythical ideal of the body
politic, self-sustained and independent of the citizens, compelling their
allegiance, and sustaining them through generations with the life of its
organic unity.[269] The artists had no reason to paint thoughts and
theories. It was enough to set forth Venice and to illustrate her acts.
Long before Venetian painting reached a climax in the decorative triumphs
of the Ducal Palace, the masters of the school had formed a style
expressive of the spirit of the Renaissance, considered as the spirit of
free enjoyment and living energy. To trace the history of Venetian
painting is to follow through its several stages the growth of that
mastery over colour and sensuous beauty which was perfected in the works
of Titian and his contemporaries.[270] Under the Vivarini of Murano the
Venetian school in its infancy began with a selection from the natural
world of all that struck them as most brilliant. No other painters of
their age in Italy employed such glowing colours, or showed a more marked
predilection for the imitation of fruits, rich stuffs, architectural
canopies, jewels, and landscape backgrounds. Their piety, unlike the
mysticism of the Sienese and the deep thought of the Florentine masters,
is somewhat superficial and conventional. The merit of their devotional
pictures consists of simplicity, vivacity, and joyousness. Our Lady and
her court of saints seem living and breathing upon earth. There is no
atmosphere of tranced solemnity surrounding them, like that which gives
peculiar meaning to similar works of the Van Eycks and Memling--artists,
by the way, who in many important respects are more nearly allied than any
others to the spirit of the first age of Venetian painting.[271]
What the Vivarini began, the three Bellini,[272] with Crivelli, Carpaccio,
Mansueti, Basaiti, Catena, Cima da Conegliano, Bissolo, Cordegliaghi,
continued. Bright costumes, distinct and sunny landscapes, broad
backgrounds of architecture, large skies, polished armour, gilded
cornices, young faces of fisherboys and country girls,[273] grave faces of
old men brown with sea-wind and sunlight, withered faces of women hearty
in a hale old age, the strong manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity of
patrician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the rosy whiteness and
amber-coloured tresses of the daughters of the Adriatic and lagoons--these
are the source of inspiration to the Venetians of the second period.
Mantegna, a few miles distant, at Padua, was working out his ideal of
severely classical design. Yet he scarcely touched the manner of the
Venetians with his influence, though Gian Bellini was his brother-in-law
and pupil, and though his genius, in grasp of matter and in management of
composition, soared above his neighbours. Lionardo da Vinci at Milan was
perfecting his problems of psychology in painting, offering to the world
solutions of the greatest difficulties in the delineation of the spirit by
expression. Yet not a trace of Lionardo's subtle play of light and shadow
upon thoughtful features can be discerned in the work of the Bellini. For
them the mysteries of the inner and the outer world had no attraction. The
externals of a full and vivid existence fascinated their imagination.
Their poetry and their piety were alike simple and objective. How to
depict the world as it is seen--a miracle of varying lights and melting
hues, a pageant substantial to the touch and concrete to the eyes, a
combination of forms defined by colours more than outlines--was their
task. They did not reach their end by anatomy, analysis, and
reconstruction. They undertook to paint just what they felt and saw.
Very instructive are the wall-pictures of this period, painted not in
fresco but on canvas by Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, for the decoration
of the Scuole of S. Ursula and S. Croce.[274] Not only do these bring
before us the life of Venice in its manifold reality, but they illustrate
the tendency of the Venetian masters to express the actual world, rather
than to formulate an ideal of the fancy or to search the secrets of the
soul. This realism, if the name can be applied to pictures so poetical as
those of Carpaccio, is not, like the Florentine realism, hard and
scientific. A natural feeling for grace and a sense of romance inspire the
artist, and breathe from every figure that he paints. The type of beauty
produced is charming by its negligence and _naïveté_; it is not thought
out with pains or toilsomely elaborated.[275]
Among the loveliest motives used in the altar-pieces of this period might
be mentioned the boy-angels playing flutes and mandolines beneath Madonna
on the steps of her throne. There are usually three of them, seated, or
sometimes standing. They hold their instruments of music as though they
had just ceased from singing, and were ready to recommence at the pleasure
of their mistress. Meanwhile there is a silence in the celestial company,
through which the still voice of the praying heart is heard, a silence
corresponding to the hushed mood of the worshipper.[276] The children are
accustomed to the holy place; therefore their attitudes are both reverent
and natural. They are more earthly than Fra Angelico's melodists, and yet
they are not precisely of human lineage. It is not, perhaps, too much to
say that they strike the keynote of Venetian devotion, at once real and
devoid of pietistic rapture.
Gian Bellini brought the art of this second period to completion. In his
sacred pictures the reverential spirit of early Italian painting is
combined with a feeling for colour and a dexterity in its manipulation
peculiar to Venice. Bellini cannot be called a master of the full
Renaissance. He falls into the same class as Francia and Perugino, who
adhered to _quattrocento_ modes of thought and sentiment, while attaining
at isolated points to the freedom of the Renaissance. In him the
colourists of the next age found an absolute teacher; no one has surpassed
him in the difficult art of giving tone to pure tints in combination.
There is a picture of Bellini's in S. Zaccaria at Venice--Madonna
enthroned with Saints--where the skill of the colourist may be said to
culminate in unsurpassable perfection. The whole painting is bathed in a
soft but luminous haze of gold; yet each figure has its individuality of
treatment, the glowing fire of S. Peter contrasting with the pearly
coolness of the drapery and flesh-tints of the Magdalen. No brush-work is
perceptible. Surface and substance have been elaborated into one
harmonious richness that defies analysis. Between this picture, so strong
in its smoothness, and any masterpiece of Velasquez, so rugged in its
strength, what a wide abyss of inadequate half-achievement, of smooth
feebleness and feeble ruggedness, exists!
Giorgione, did we but possess enough of his authentic works to judge by,
would be found the first painter of the true Renaissance among the
Venetians, the inaugurate of the third and great period.[277] He died at
the age of thirty-six, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown. Time has
destroyed the last vestige of his frescoes. Criticism has reduced the
number of his genuine easel pictures to half a dozen. He exists as a great
name. The part he played in the development of Venetian art was similar to
that of Marlowe in the history of our drama. He first cut painting
altogether adrift from mediaeval moorings, and launched it on the waves of
the Renaissance liberty. While equal as a colourist to Bellini, though in
a different and more sensuous region, Giorgione, by the variety and
inventiveness of his conception, proved himself a painter of the calibre
of Titian. Sacred subjects he seems to have but rarely treated, unless
such purely idyllic pictures as the "Finding of Moses" in the Uffizzi, and
the "Meeting of Jacob and Rachel" at Dresden deserve the name. Allegories
of deep and problematic meaning, the key whereof has to be found in states
of the emotion rather than, in thoughts, delighted him. He may be said to
have invented the Venetian species of romance picture, where an episode in
a novella forms the motive of the painting.[278] Nor was he deficient in
tragic power, as the tremendous study for a Lucrece in the Uffizzi
collection sufficiently proves. In his drawings he models the form without
outline by massive distribution of light and dark. In style they are the
very opposite of Lionardo's clearly defined studies touched with the metal
point upon prepared paper. They suggest colouring, and are indeed the
designs of a great colourist, who saw things under the conditions of their
tints and tone.
Of the undisputed pictures by Giorgione, the grandest is the "Monk at the
Clavichord," in the Pitti Palace at Florence.[279] The young man has his
fingers on the keys; he is modulating in a mood of grave and sustained
emotion; his head is turned away towards an old man standing near him. On
the other side of the instrument is a boy. These two figures are but foils
and adjuncts to the musician in the middle; and the whole interest of his
face lies in its concentrated feeling--the very soul of music, as
expressed in Mr. Robert Browning's "Abt Vogler," passing through his eyes.
This power of painting the portrait of an emotion, of depicting by the
features a deep and powerful but tranquil moment of the inner life, must
have been possessed by Giorgione in an eminent degree. We find it again in
the so-called "Begrüssung" of the Dresden Gallery.[280] The picture is a
large landscape, Jacob and Rachel meet and salute each other with a kiss.
But the shepherd lying beneath the shadow of a chestnut tree beside a well
has a whole Arcadia of intense yearning in the eyes of sympathy he fixes
on the lovers. Something of this faculty, it may be said in passing,
descended to Bonifazio, whose romance pictures are among the most charming
products of Venetian art, and one of whose singing women in the feast of
Dives has the Giorgionesque fulness of inner feeling.
Fate has dealt less unkindly with Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese than with
Giorgione. The works of these artists, in whom the Venetian Renaissance
attained completion, have been preserved in large numbers and in excellent
condition. Chronologically speaking, Titian, the contemporary of
Giorgione, precedes Tintoretto, and Tintoretto is somewhat earlier than
Veronese.[281] But for the purpose of criticism the three painters may be
considered together as the representatives of three marked aspects in the
fully developed Venetian style.
Tintoretto, called by the Italians the thunderbolt of painting, because of
his vehement impulsiveness and rapidity of execution, soars above his
brethren by the faculty of pure imagination. It was he who brought to its
perfection the poetry of _chiaroscuro_, expressing moods of passion and
emotion by brusque lights, luminous half-shadows, and semi-opaque
darkness, no less unmistakably than Beethoven by symphonic modulations. He
too engrafted on the calm and natural Venetian manner something of the
Michael Angelesque sublimity, and sought to vary by dramatic movement the
romantic motives of his school. In his work, more than in that of his
contemporaries, Venetian art ceased to be decorative and idyllic.
Veronese elevated pageantry to the height of serious art. His domain is
noonday sunlight ablaze on sumptuous dresses and Palladian architecture.
Where Tintoretto is dramatic, he is scenic. Titian, in a wise harmony,
without either the Æschylean fury of Tintoretto, or the material
gorgeousness of Veronese, realised an ideal of pure beauty. Continuing the
traditions of Bellini and Giorgione, with a breadth of treatment, and a
vigour of well-balanced faculties peculiar to himself, Titian gave to
colour in landscape and the human form a sublime yet sensuous poetry no
other painter in the world has reached.
Tintoretto and Veronese are, both of them, excessive. The imagination of
Tintoretto is too passionate and daring; it scathes and blinds like
lightning. The sense of splendour in Veronese is overpoweringly pompous.
Titian's exquisite humanity, his large and sane nature, gives proper value
to the imaginative and the scenic elements of the Venetian style, without
exaggerating either. In his masterpieces thought, colour, sentiment, and
composition--the spiritual and technical elements of art--exist in perfect
balance; one harmonious tone is given to all the parts of his production,
nor can it be said that any quality asserts itself to the injury of the
rest. Titian, the Sophocles of painting, has infused into his pictures the
spirit of music, the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders, making
power incarnate in a form of grace.
Round these great men are grouped a host of secondary but distinguished
painters--Palma with his golden-haired large-bosomed sirens; idyllic
Bonifazio; dramatic Pordenone, whose frescoes are all motion and
excitement; Paris Bordone, who mingled on his canvas cream and mulberry
juice and sunbeams; the Robusti, the Caliari, the Bassani, and others
whom it would be tedious to mention. One breath, one afflatus, inspired
them all; and it is due to this coherence in their style and inspiration
that the school of Venice, taken as a whole, can show more masterpieces by
artists of the second class than any other in Italy. Superior or inferior
as they may relatively be among themselves, each bears the indubitable
stamp of the Venetian Renaissance, and produces work of a quality that
raises him to high rank among the painters of the world. In the same way
the spirit of the Renaissance, passing over the dramatists of our
Elizabethan age, enabled intellects of average force to take rank in the
company of the noblest. Ford, Massinger, Heywood, Decker, Webster,
Fletcher, Tourneur, Marston, are seated round the throne at the feet of
Shakspere, Marlowe, and Jonson.
In order to penetrate the characteristics of Venetian art more thoroughly,
it will be needful to enter into detailed criticism of the three chief
masters who command the school. To begin with Veronese. His canvases are
nearly always large--filled with figures of the size of life, massed
together in groups or extended in long lines beneath white marble
colonnades, which enclose spaces of clear sky and silvery clouds. Armour,
shot silks and satins, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres,
crowns, all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun, form the
habitual furniture of his pictures. Rearing horses, dogs, dwarfs, cats,
when occasion serves, are used to add reality, vivacity, grotesqueness to
his scenes. His men and women are large, well proportioned,
vigorous--eminent for pose and gesture rather than for grace or
loveliness--distinguished by adult more than adolescent qualities.
Veronese has no choice type of beauty for either sex. We find in him, on
the contrary, a somewhat coarse display of animal force in men, and of
superb voluptuousness in women. He prefers to paint women draped in
gorgeous raiment, as if he had not felt the beauty of the nude. Their
faces are too frequently unrefined and empty of expression. His noblest
creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full
of nerve and blood. In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he does
not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly;[282] he remains
proud, powerful, and frigidly materialistic. He raises neither repulsion
nor desire, but displays with the calm strength of art the empire of the
mundane spirit. All the equipage of wealth and worldliness, the lust of
the eye, and the pride of life--such a vision as the fiend offered to
Christ on the mountain of temptation; this is Veronese's realm. Again, he
has no flashes of poetic imagination like Tintoretto; but his grip on the
realities of the world, his faculty for idealising prosaic magnificence,
is even greater.
Veronese was precisely the painter suited to a nation of merchants, in
whom the associations of the counting-house and the exchange mingled with
the responsibilities of the Senate and the passions of princes. He never
portrayed vehement emotions. There are no brusque movements, no extended
arms, like those of Tintoretto's Magdalen in the "Pietà" at Milan, in his
pictures. His Christs and Maries and martyrs of all sorts are composed,
serious, courtly, well-fed personages, who, like people of the world
accidentally overtaken by some tragic misfortune, do not stoop to
distortions or express more than a grave surprise, a decorous sense of
pain.[283] His angelic beings are equally earthly.
The Venetian Rothschilds no doubt preferred the ceremonial to the
imaginative treatment of sacred themes; and to do him justice, Veronese
did not make what would in his case have been the mistake of choosing the
tragedies of the Bible for representation. It is the story of Esther, with
its royal audiences, coronations, and processions; the marriage feast at
Cana; the banquet in the house of Levi, that he selects by preference.
Even these themes he removes into a region far from Biblical associations.
His _mise en scène_ is invariably borrowed from luxurious Italian
palaces--large open courts and _loggie_, crowded with guests and
lacqueys--tables profusely laden with gold and silver plate. The same love
of display led him to delight in allegory--not allegory of the deep and
mystic kind, but of the pompous and processional, in which Venice appears
enthroned among the deities, or Jupiter fulminates against the vices, or
the genii of the arts are personified as handsome women and blooming boys.
In dealing with mythology, again, it is not its poetry that he touches; he
uses the tale of Europa, for example, as the motive for rich toilettes and
delightful landscape, choosing the moment that has least in it of pathos.
These being the prominent features of his style, it remains to be said
that what is really great in Veronese is the sobriety of his imagination
and the solidity of his workmanship. Amid so much that is distracting, he
never loses command over his subject; nor does he degenerate into fulsome
rhetoric.
Tintoretto is not at home in this somewhat vulgar region of ceremonial
grandeur. He requires both thought and fancy as the stimulus to his
creative effort. He cannot be satisfied with reproducing, even in the
noblest combinations, merely what he sees around him of resplendent and
magnificent. There must be scope for poetry in the conception and for
audacity in the projection of his subject, something that shall rouse the
prophetic faculty and evoke the seer in the artist, or Tintoretto does not
rise to his own altitude. Accordingly we find that, in contrast with
Veronese, he selects by preference the most tragic and dramatic subjects
to be found in sacred history. The Crucifixion, with its agonising deity
and prostrate groups of women, sunk below the grief of tears;--the
Temptation in the wilderness, with its passionate contrast of the
grey-robed Man of Sorrows and the ruby-winged, voluptuous fiend;--the
Temptation of Adam in Eden, a glowing allegory of the fascination of the
spirit by the flesh;--Paradise, a tempest of souls, whirled like Lucretian
atoms or gold dust in sunbeams by the celestial forces that perform the
movement of the spheres;--the Destruction of the world, where all the
fountains and rivers and lakes and seas of earth have formed one cataract,
that thunders with cities and nations on its rapids down a bottomless
gulf; while all the winds and hurricanes of the air have grown into one
blast, that carries men like dead leaves up to judgment;--the Plague of
the fiery serpents, with multitudes encoiled and writhing on a burning
waste of sand;--the Massacre of the Innocents, with its spilth of blood on
slippery pavements of porphyry and serpentine;--the Delivery of the tables
of the law to Moses amid clouds on Sinai, a white ascetic,
lightning-smitten man emerging in the glory of apparent godhead;--the
anguish of the Magdalen above her martyred God;--the solemn silence of
Christ before the throne of Pilate;--the rushing of the wings of Seraphim,
and the clangour of the trumpet that awakes the dead;--these are the
soul-stirring themes that Tintoretto handles with the ease of
mastery.[284]
Meditating upon Tintoretto's choice of such subjects, we feel that the
profoundest characteristic of his genius is the determination toward
motives pre-eminently poetic rather than proper to the figurative arts.
The poet imagines a situation in which the intellectual or emotional life
is paramount, and the body is subordinate. The painter selects situations
in which physical form is of the first importance, and a feeling or a
thought is suggested. But Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetical
ideas; and he often fails to realise them fully through the inadequacy of
painting as a medium for such matter. Moses, in the drama of the "Golden
Calf," for instance, is a poem, not a true picture.[285] The pale ecstatic
stretching out emaciated arms, presents no beauty of attitude or outline.
Energy of thought is conspicuous in the figure; and reflection is needed
to bring out the purpose of the painter.[286]
It is not, however, only in the region of the vast, tempestuous, and
tragic that Tintoretto finds himself at home. He is equal to every task
that can be imposed upon the imagination. Provided only that the spiritual
fount be stirred, the jet of living water gushes forth, pure,
inexhaustible, and limpid. In his "Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne," that
most perfect lyric of the sensuous fancy from which sensuality is
absent;[287] in his "Temptation of Adam," that symphony of grey and brown
and ivory more lustrous than the hues of sunset; in his "Miracle of S.
Agnes," that lamb-like maiden with her snow-white lamb among the soldiers
and the priests of Rome, Tintoretto has proved beyond all question that
the fiery genius of Titanic artists can pierce and irradiate the placid
and the tender secrets of the soul with more consummate mastery than falls
to the lot of those who make tranquillity their special province.[288]
Paolo Veronese never penetrated to this inner shrine of beauty, this
Holiest of Holies where the spiritual graces dwell. He could not paint
waxen limbs, with silver lights and golden and transparent mysteries of
shadow, like those of Bacchus, Eve, and Ariadne. Titian himself was
powerless to imagine movement like that of Aphrodite floating in the air,
or of Madonna adjuring Christ in the "Paradiso," or of Christ Himself
judging by the silent simplicity of his divine attitude the worldly judge
at whose tribunal He stands, or of the tempter raising his jewelled arms
aloft to dazzle with meretricious brilliancy the impassive God above him,
or of Eve leaning in irresistible seductiveness against the fatal tree, or
of S. Mark down-rushing through the sky to save the slave that cried to
him, or of the Mary who has fallen asleep with folded hands from utter
lassitude of agony at the foot of the cross.
It is in these attitudes, movements, gestures, that Tintoretto makes the
human form an index and symbol of the profoundest, most tragic, most
delicious thought and feeling of the inmost soul. In daylight radiancy and
equable colouring he is surpassed perhaps by Veronese. In mastery of every
portion of his art, in solidity of execution, and in unwavering hold upon
his subject, he falls below the level of Titian. Many of his pictures are
unworthy of his genius--hurriedly designed, rapidly dashed upon the
canvas, studied by candlelight from artificial models, with abnormal
effects of light and dark, hastily daubed with pigments that have not
stood the test of time. He was a gigantic _improvitsatore_: that is the
worst thing we can say of him. But in the swift intuitions of the
imagination, in the purities and sublimities of the prophet-poet's soul,
neither Veronese nor yet even Titian can approach him.
The greatest difficulty meets the critic who attempts to speak of Titian.
To seize the salient characteristics of an artist whose glory it is to
offer nothing over-prominent, and who keeps the middle path of perfection,
is impossible. As complete health may be termed the absence of obtrusive
sensation, as virtue has been called the just proportion between two
opposite extravagances, so is Titian's art a golden mean of joy unbroken
by brusque movements of the passions--a well-tempered harmony in which no
thrilling note suggests the possibility of discord. In his work the world
and men cease to be merely what they are; he makes them what they ought to
be: and this he does by separating what is beautiful in sensuous life from
its alloy of painful meditation and of burdensome endeavour. The disease
of thought is unknown in his kingdom; no divisions exist between the
spirit and the flesh; the will is thwarted by no obstacles. When we think
of Titian, we are irresistibly led to think of music. His "Assumption of
Madonna" (the greatest single oil-painting in the world, if we except
Raphael's "Madonna di San Sisto") can best be described as a symphony--a
symphony of colour, where every hue is brought into harmonious
combination--a symphony of movement, where every line contributes to
melodious rhythm--a symphony of light without a cloud--a symphony of joy
in which the heavens and earth sing Hallelujah. Tintoretto, in the Scuola
di San Rocco, painted an "Assumption of the Virgin" with characteristic
energy and impulsiveness. A group of agitated men around an open tomb, a
rush of air and clash of seraph wings above, a blaze of glory, a woman
borne with sideways-swaying figure from darkness into light;--that is his
picture, all _brio_, excitement, speed. Quickly conceived, hastily
executed, this painting (so far as clumsy restoration suffers us to judge)
bears the impress of its author's impetuous genius. But Titian worked by a
different method. On the earth, among the Apostles, there is action enough
and passion; ardent faces straining upward, impatient men raising impotent
arms and vainly divesting themselves of their mantles, as though they too
might follow her they love. In heaven is radiance, half eclipsing the
archangel who holds the crown, and revealing the father of spirits in an
aureole of golden fire. Between earth and heaven, amid choirs of angelic
children, rises the mighty mother of the faith of Christ, who was Mary and
is now a goddess, ecstatic yet tranquil, not yet accustomed to the skies,
but far above the grossness and the incapacities of earth. Her womanhood
is so complete that those for whom the meaning of her Catholic legend is
lost, may hail in her humanity personified.
The grand manner can reach no further than in this picture--serene,
composed, meditated, enduring, yet full of dramatic force and of profound
feeling. Whatever Titian chose to touch, whether it was classical
mythology or portrait, history or sacred subject, he treated in this large
and healthful style. It is easy to tire of Veronese; it is possible to be
fatigued by Tintoretto. Titian, like nature, waits not for moods or
humours in the spectator. He gives to the mind joy of which it can never
weary, pleasures that cannot satiate, a satisfaction not to be repented
of, a sweetness that will not pall. The least instructed and the simple
feel his influence as strongly as the wise or learned.
In the course of this attempt to describe the specific qualities of
Tintoretto, Veronese, and Titian, I have been more at pains to distinguish
differences than to point out similarities. What they had in common was
the Renaissance spirit as this formed itself in Venice. Nowhere in Italy
was art more wholly emancipated from obedience to ecclesiastical
traditions, without losing the character of genial and natural piety.
Nowhere was the Christian history treated with a more vivid realism,
harmonised more simply with pagan mythology, or more completely purged of
mysticism. The Umbrian devotion felt by Raphael in his boyhood, the
prophecy of Savonarola, and the Platonism of Ficino absorbed by Michael
Angelo at Florence, the scientific preoccupations of Lionardo and the
antiquarian interests of Mantegna, were all alike unknown at Venice. Among
the Venetian painters there was no conflict between art and religion, or
art and curiosity--no reaction against previous pietism, no perplexity of
conscience, no confusion of aims. Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese were
children of the people, men of the world, men of pleasure; wealthy,
urbane, independent, pious:--they were all these by turns; but they were
never mystics, scholars, or philosophers. In their aesthetic ideal religion
found a place, nor was sensuality rejected; but the religion was sane and
manly, the sensuality was vigorous and virile. Not the intellectual
greatness of the Renaissance, but its happiness and freedom, was what they
represented.
FOOTNOTES:
[265] From the beginning of _Julian and Maddalo_, which relates a ride
taken by Shelley with Lord Byron, on the Lido, and their visit to the
madhouse on its neighbouring island. The description, richly coloured and
somewhat confused in detail, seems to me peculiarly true to Venetian
scenery. With the exception of Tunis, I know of no such theatre for
sunset-shows as Venice. Tunis has the same elements of broad lagoons and
distant hills, but not the same vaporous atmosphere.
[266] _Lettere di Messer Pietro Aretino_, Parigi, MDCIX, lib. iii. p. 48.
I have made a paraphrase rather than a translation of this rare and
curious description.
[267] See Yriarte, _Un Patricien de Venise_, p. 439.
[268] See above, Chapter IV, Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco.
[269] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 183.
[270] I must refer my readers to Crowe and Cavalcaselle for an estimate
of the influence exercised at Venice by Gentile de Fabriano, John
Alamannus, and the school of Squarcione. Antonello da Messina brought his
method of oil-painting into the city in 1470, and Gian Bellini learned
something at Padua from Andrea Mantegna. The true point about Venice,
however, is that the Venetian character absorbed, assimilated, and
converted to its own originality whatever touched it.
[271] The conditions of art in Flanders--wealthy, bourgeois, proud,
free--were not dissimilar to those of art in Venice. The misty flats of
Belgium have some of the atmospheric qualities of Venice. As Van Eyck is
to the Vivarini, so is Rubens to Paolo Veronese. This expresses the
amount of likeness and of difference.
[272] Jacopo and his sons Gentile and Giovanni.
[273] Notice particularly the Contadina type of S. Catherine in a picture
ascribed to Cordegliaghi in the Venetian Academy.
[274] These Scuole were the halls of meeting for companies called by the
names of patron saints.
[275] Notice in particular, from the series of pictures illustrating the
legend of S. Ursula, the very beautiful faces and figures of the saint
herself, and her young bridegroom, the Prince of Britain. Attendant
squires and pages in these paintings have all the charm of similar
subordinate personages in Pinturicchio, with none of his affectation.
[276] The most beautiful of these _angiolini_, with long flakes of flaxen
hair falling from their foreheads, are in a Sacra Conversazione of
Carpaccio's in the Academy. Gian Bellini's, in many similar pictures, are
of the same delicacy.
[277] What follows above about Giorgione is advanced with diffidence,
since the name of no other great painter has been so freely used to cover
the works of his inferiors.
[278] Lord Lansdowne's Giorgionesque picture of a young man crowned with
vine, playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example. The
celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its landscape
and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is given by
Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo. See
_History of Painting in North Italy_, vol. ii. p. 147.
[279] Under the fire of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's destructive criticism,
it would require more real courage than I possess to speak of the
"Entombment" in the Monte di Pietà at Treviso as genuine. Coarse and
unselect as are the types of the boy angels, as well as of the young
athletic giant, who plays the part in it of the dead Christ, this is a
truly grandiose and striking picture. Nothing proves the average
greatness of the Venetian masters more than the possibility of
attributing such compositions to obscure and subordinate craftsmen of the
school.
[280] Crowe and Cavalcaselle assign this picture with some confidence and
with fair show of reason, to Cariani, on whom again they father the
frescoes at Colleoni's Castle of Malpaga. I have ventured to notice it
above in connection with Giorgione, since it exhibits some of the most
striking Giorgionesque qualities, and shows the ascendency of his
imagination over the Venetian School.
[281] Giorgione, b. 1478; d. 1511. Titian, b. 1477, d. 1576. Tintoretto,
b. 1512; d. 1594. Veronese, b. 1530; d. 1588.
[282] I cannot, for example, imagine Veronese painting anything like
Rubens' two pictures of the "Last Judgment" at Munich.
[283] For his sacred types see the "Marriage at Cana" in the Louvre, the
little "Crucifixion" and the "Baptism" of the Pitti, and the "Martyrdom
of S. Agata" in the Uffizzi.
[284] These examples are mostly chosen from the Scuola di S. Rocco and
the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice; also from "Pietàs," in the
Brera and the Pitti, the "Paradise" of the Ducal Palace, and a sketch for
"Paradise" in the Louvre.
[285] S. Maria dell' Orto.
[286] What is here said about Tintoretto is also true of Michael Angelo.
His sculpture in S. Lorenzo, compared with Greek sculpture, the norm and
canon of the perfect in that art, may be called an invasion of the realm
of poetry or music.
[287] There are probably not few of my readers who, after seeing this
painting in the Ducal Palace, will agree with me that it is, if not the
greatest, at any rate the most beautiful, oil picture in existence. In no
other picture has a poem of feeling and of fancy, a romance of varied
lights and shades, a symphony of delicately blended hues, a play of
attitude and movement transitory but in no sense forced or violent, been
more successfully expressed by means more simple or with effect more
satisfying. Something of the mythopoeic faculty must have survived in
Tintoretto, and enabled him to inspire the Greek tale with this intense
vitality of beauty.
[288] The first of these pictures is in the Ducal Palace, the other two
in the Academy at Venice.