analysis of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon,
was an important contribution. But a true appreciation of these
things is possible only in the light of a whole system of such art-
casuistries. Now painting is the art in the criticism of which this
truth most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judgments on
pictures that the 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 [132] 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, as it is, of the possession of the pictorial gift, that
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, all ideas
however abstract or obscure, float up as visible scene or image: it
is the colouring--that weaving of light, as of just perceptible gold
threads, through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's
Lace-girl, that 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 [133] directly and
sensuously as a fragment of Venetian glass; and through this
delight alone become the vehicle 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 few
moments on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such
fallen light, caught as the colours are 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 [134] condition of some other art, by
what German critics term an Anders-streben--a partial alienation
from its own limitations, through 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 châteaux of the country of the Loire, as if it were
intended that among their odd turnings the actors in a theatrical
mode of life might pass each other unseen; there being a poetry
also of memory and of the mere effect of time, by which
architecture 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 [135] 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 kinds 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, namely,
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. Alphonse 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 [136]
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 very 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
[137] 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 pure intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite
subject or situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite
legitimate function in the conveyance 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 appears 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 Shakespeare'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
[138] 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. Herein,
again, 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 [139] realises this
artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its
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. In music, then, rather
than in poetry, is to be found 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 [140] 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 so much as tempted 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,
[141] 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,
but 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, as one might 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 such as 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. While he interfuses his painted work with a
high-strung sort of poetry, caught directly from a singularly rich
and high-strung [142] 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 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
his work. But the slightly older man, with his so limited actual
product (what remains to us of it seeming, when narrowly
explained, 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, [143]
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 with no doubt 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 only that we
possess less of it 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 façade 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 are 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 [144] 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.
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 cap 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 [145] 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 sufficient to
explain his influence, and the true seal of mastery, its authors
assign to Pellegrino da San Daniele the Holy Family in the
Louvre, in consideration of certain points where it comes short of
this standard. Such shortcoming, however, 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
delightful sonnet by a poet* whose own painted work often comes
to mind as one ponders over these precious things--the Fête
Champêtre, is assigned to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo;
and the Tempest, in the Academy at Venice, 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 [146] a pupil
of Palma. And then, 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. He is 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 [147] 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. In that figure, as in some other knightly personages
attributed to him, people have supposed the likeness of the
painter's 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,
Giorgione 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. For the aesthetic
philosopher, [148] therefore, 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, in fact, 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 becomes a
sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its projected reflex or
ideal, all that was intense or desirable in it crystallising about the
memory of this wonderful young man.