artist from the teacher; and the Carracci are in possession of my
submissive homage. Lodovico, far from implicitly subscribing to a
master's dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of
form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious
gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue, that
sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have so
often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic colour. Too often
content to rear the humbler graces of his subject, he seldom courted
elegance, but always when he did, with enviable success. Even now,
though nearly in a state of evanescence, the three nymphs in the garden
scene of St. Michele in Bosco, seem moulded by the hand, inspired by the
breath of love. Agostino, with a singular modesty which prompted him
rather to propagate the fame of others by his graver, than by steady
exertion to rely on his own power for perpetuity of name, combined with
some learning a cultivated taste, correctness, though not elegance of
form, and a corregiesque colour. Annibale, superior to both in power of
execution and academic prowess, was inferior to either in taste, and
sensibility and judgment; for the most striking proof of this
inferiority I appeal to his master-work, the work on which he rests his
fame, the gallery of the Farnese palace: a work whose uniform vigour of
execution nothing can equal but its imbecility and incongruity of
conception. If impropriety of ornament were to be fixed by definition,
the subjects of the Farnese gallery might be quoted as the most decisive
instances. Criticism has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and
Tintoretto from the province of legitimate history with the
contemptuous appellation of ornamental painters, not for having painted
subjects inapplicable to the public and private palaces, the churches
and convents, which they were employed to decorate, but because they
treated them sometimes without regard to costume, or the simplicity due
to sacred, heroic or allegoric subjects: if this be just, where shall we
class him, who with the Capella Sistina, and the Vatican before his eye,
fills the mansion of religious austerity and episcopal dignity with a
chaotic series of trite fable and bacchanalian revelry, without
allegory, void of allusion, merely to gratify the puerile ostentation of
dauntless execution and academic vigour? if the praise given to a work
be not always transferable to its master; if, as Milton says, 'the work
some praise and some the architect,' let us admire the splendour, the
exuberance, the concentration of powers displayed in the Farnese
gallery, whilst we lament their misapplication by Annibale Carracci.
The heterogeneous principle of the eclectic school soon operated its own
dissolution: the great talents which the Carracci had tutored, soon
found their own bias, and abandoned themselves to their own peculiar
taste. B. Schidone died young in 1615. Barto. Schidone, Guido Reni,[57]
Giovanni Lanfranco, Francesco Albani, Domenico Zampieri, and Francesco
Barbieri, called Guercino, differed as much in their objects of
imitation as their names. Schidone, all of whose mind was in his eye,
embraced, and often to meaner subjects applied the harmony and colour of
Correggio, whilst Lanfranco strove, but strove without success, to
follow him through the expanse of his creation and masses. Grace
attracted Guido, but it was the studied grace of theatres: his female
forms are abstracts of antique beauty, attended by languishing
attitudes, arrayed by voluptuous fashions. His male forms, transcripts
of models, such as are found in a genial climate, are sometimes highly
characteristic of dignified manhood or apostolic fervour, like his Peter
and Paul, formerly in the Zampieri at Bologna: sometimes stately,
courteous, insipid, like his Paris attending Helen, more with the air of
an ambassador, by proxy, than carrying her off with a lover's fervour.
His Aurora deserved to precede a more majestic sun, and hours less
clumsy--his colour varies with his style, sometimes bland and
harmonious, sometimes vigorous and stern, sometimes flat and insipid.
Albani, chiefly attracted by soft mythologic conceits, formed nereids
and oreads on plump Venetian models, and contrasted their pearly hues
with the rosy tints of loves, the juicy brown of fauns and satyrs, and
rich marine or sylvan scenery. Domenichino, more obedient than the rest
to his masters, aimed at the beauty of the antique, the expression of
Raphael, the vigour of Annibale, the colour of Lodovico, and mixing
something of each, fell short of all; whilst Guercino broke like a
torrent over all academic rules, and with an ungovernable itch of
copying whatever lay in his way, sacrificed mind, form and costume, to
effects of colour, fierceness of chiaroscuro, and intrepidity of hand.
Such was the state of art when the spirit of machinery, in submission to
the vanities and upstart pride of papal nepotism, destroyed what yet
was left of meaning; when equilibration, contrast, grouping, engrossed
composition, and poured a deluge of gay common-place over the platfonds,
panels and cupolas of palaces and temples. Those who could not conceive
a figure singly, scattered multitudes; to count, was to be poor. The
rainbow and the seasons were ransacked for their hues, and every eye
became the tributary of the great but abused talents of Pietro da
Cortona, and the fascinating but debauched and empty facility of Luca
Giordano.[58]
The same revolution of mind that had organized the arts of Italy,
spread, without visible communication, to Germany, and towards the
decline of the fifteenth century, the uncouth essays of Martin Schön,
Michael Wolgemuth, and Albrecht Altorfer, were succeeded by the finer
polish and the more dextrous method of Albert Durer. The indiscriminate
use of the words genius and talent has perhaps nowhere caused more
confusion than in the classification of artists. Albert Durer was in my
opinion a man of great ingenuity, without being a genius. He studied,
and, as far as his penetration reached, established certain proportions
of the human frame, but he did not invent a style: every work of his is
a proof that he wanted the power of imitation, of concluding from what
he saw, to what he did not see, that he copied rather than selected the
forms that surrounded him, and sans remorse tacked deformity and
meagerness to fulness, and sometimes to beauty.[59] Such is his design;
in composition copious without taste, anxiously precise in parts, and
unmindful of the whole, he has rather shown us what to avoid than what
to follow. He sometimes had a glimpse of the sublime, but it was only a
glimpse: the expanded agony of Christ on the mount of Olives, and the
mystic conception of his figure of Melancholy, are thoughts of
sublimity, though the expression of the last is weakened by the rubbish
he has thrown about her. His Knight attended by Death and the Fiend, is
more capricious than terrible; and his Adam and Eve are two common
models shut up in a rocky dungeon. If he approached genius in any part
of art, it was in colour. His colour went beyond his age, and as far
excelled in truth and breadth and handling the oil colour of Raphael, as
Raphael excels him in every other quality. I speak of easel-pictures--his
drapery is broad though much too angular, and rather snapped than
folded. Albert is called the father of the German school, though he
neither reared scholars, nor was imitated by the German artists of his
or the succeeding century. That the exportation of his works to Italy
should have effected a temporary change in the principles of some
Tuscans who had studied Michael Angelo, of Andrea del Sarto, and Jacopo
da Pontormo, is a fact which proves that minds at certain periods may be
subject to epidemic influence as well as bodies.
Lucas of Leyden[60] was the Dutch imitator of Albert; but the forms of
Aldegraver, Sebald Beheim, and George Pentz, appear to have been the
result of careful inspection of Marc Antonio's prints from Raphael, of
whom Pentz was probably a scholar; and ere long the style of Michael
Angelo, as adopted by Pelegrino Tibaldi, and spread by the graver of
Giorgio Mantuano, provoked those caravans of German, Dutch, and Flemish
students, who on their return from Italy, at the courts of Prague and
Munich, in Flanders and the Netherlands, introduced that preposterous
manner, the bloated excrescence of diseased brains, which in the form of
man left nothing human, distorted action and gesture with insanity of
affectation, and dressed the gewgaws of children in colossal shapes; the
style of Golzius and Spranger, Heynz and ab Ach: but though content to
feed on the husks of Tuscan design, they imbibed the colour of Venice,
and spread the elements of that excellence which distinguished the
succeeding schools of Flanders and of Holland.
This frantic pilgrimage to Italy ceased at the apparition of the two
meteors of art, Peter Paul Rubens,[61] and Rembrandt Van Rhyn; both of
whom disdaining to acknowledge the usual laws of admission to the temple
of fame, boldly forged their own keys, entered and took possession,
each, of a most conspicuous place by his own power. Rubens, born at
Cologne, in Germany, but brought up at Antwerp, then the depository of
western commerce, a school of religious and classic learning, and the
pompous seat of Austrian and Spanish superstition, met these advantages
with an ardour and success of which ordinary minds can form no idea, if
we compare the period at which he is said to have seriously applied
himself to painting, under the tuition of Otho Van Veen, with the
unbounded power he had acquired over the instruments of art when he set
out for Italy; where we instantly discover him not as the pupil, but as
the successful rival of the masters whose works he had selected for the
objects of his emulation. Endowed with a full comprehension of his own
character, he wasted not a moment on the acquisition of excellence
incompatible with its fervour, but flew to the centre of his ambition,
Venice, and soon compounded from the splendour of Paolo Veronese and the
glow of Tintoretto, that florid system of mannered magnificence which
is the element of his art and the principle of his school. He first
spread that ideal pallet, which reduced to its standard the variety of
nature, and once methodized, whilst his mind tuned the method, shortened
or superseded individual imitation. His scholars, however dissimilar in
themselves, saw with the eye of their master; the eye of Rubens was
become the substitute of nature: still the mind alone that had balanced
these tints, and weighed their powers, could apply them to their
objects, and determine their use in the pompous display of historic and
allegoric magnificence; for _that_ they were selected, for _that_ the
gorgeous nosegay swelled: but when in the progress of depraved practice
they became the mere palliatives of mental impotence, empty
representatives of themselves, the supporters of nothing but clumsy
forms and clumsier conceits, they can only be considered as splendid
improprieties, as the substitutes for wants which no colour can palliate
and no tint supply.
In this censure I am under no apprehension of being suspected to include
either the illustrious name of Vandyck,[62] or that of Abraham
Diepenbeck. Vandyck, more elegant, more refined, to graces, which the
genius of Rubens disdained to court, joined that exquisite taste which,
in following the general principle of his master, moderated, and adapted
its application to his own pursuits. His sphere was portrait, and the
imitation of Titiano insured him the second place in that. The fancy of
Diepenbeck, though not so exuberant, if I be not mistaken, excelled in
sublimity the imagination of Rubens: his Bellerophon, Dioscuri,
Hippolytus, Ixion, Sisyphus, fear no competitor among the productions of
his master.
Rembrandt[63] was, in my opinion, a genius of the first class in
whatever relates not to form. In spite of the most portentous deformity,
and without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his
powers of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his
composition, from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the
meanest and most homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest
sensibility, and the most refined taste dwell on them, equally
enthralled. Shakspeare alone excepted, no one combined with so much
transcendant excellence so many, in all other men unpardonable
faults--and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light
and shade, and of all the tints that float between them: he tinged his
pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in
the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible.
Though made to bend a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of Nature,
yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to
insipidity or baldness, and plucked a flower in every desert. None ever
like Rembrandt knew to improve an accident into a beauty, or give
importance to a trifle. If ever he had a master, he had no followers;
Holland was not made to comprehend his power. The succeeding school of
colourists were content to tip the cottage, the hamlet, the boor, the
ale-pot, the shambles, and the haze of winter, with orient hues, or the
glow of setting summer suns.
In turning our eye to Switzerland we shall find great powers without
great names, those of Hans Holbein[64] and Francis Mola only excepted.
But the scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the Tizianesque
colour of Hans Holbein, make the least part of his excellence for those
who have seen his Designs of the Passion, and that series of emblematic
groups, known under the name of Holbein's Dance of Death. From Belinzona
to Basle, invention appears to have been the characteristic of Helvetic
art: the works of Tobias Stimmer, Christopher Murer, Jost Amman,
Gotthard Ringgli, are mines of invention, and exhibit a style of design,
equally poised between the emaciated dryness of Albert Durer and the
bloated corpulence of Golzius.
The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter over
Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in
France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the
catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in
execution. It is in France where Michael Angelo's right to the title of
a painter was first questioned. The fierceness of his line, as they call
it, the purity of the antique, and the characteristic forms of Raphael,
are only the road to the academic vigour, the librated style of Annibale
Carracci, and from that they appeal to the model; in composition they
consult more the artifice of grouping, contrast and richness, than the
subject or propriety; their expression is dictated by the theatre. From
the uniformity of this process, not to allow that the school of France
offers respectable exceptions, would be unjust; without recurring again
to the name of Nicolas Poussin, the works of Eustache le Sueur,[65]
Charles le Brun, Sebastien Bourdon, and sometimes Pierre Mignard,
contain original beauties and rich materials. Le Sueur's series of
pictures in the Chartreux exhibit the features of contemplative piety,
in a purity of style and a placid breadth of manner that moves the
heart. His dignified Martyrdom of St. Laurence, and the Burning of the
Magic Books at Ephesus, breathe the spirit of Raphael. The powerful
comprehension of a whole, only equalled by the fire which pervades every
part of the Battles of Alexander, by Charles le Brun, would entitle him
to the highest rank in history, had the characters been less mannered,
had he not exchanged the Argyraspids and the Macedonian phalanx for the
compact legionaries of the Trajan pillar; had he distinguished Greeks
from barbarians, rather by national feature and form than by
accoutrement and armour. The Seven Works of Charity by Seb. Bourdon teem
with surprising pathetic and always novel images; and in the Plague of
David, by Pierre Mignard, our sympathy is roused by energies of terror
and combinations of woe, which escaped Poussin and Raphael himself.
The obstinacy of national pride,[66] perhaps more than the neglect of
government or the frown of superstition, confined the labours of the
Spanish school, from its obscure origin at Sevilla to its brightest
period, within the narrow limits of individual imitation. But the degree
of perfection attained by Diego Velasquez, Joseph Ribera, and Murillo,
in pursuing the same object by means as different as successful,
impresses us with deep respect for the variety of their powers.
That the great style ever received the homage of Spanish genius, appears
not; neither Alfonso Berruguette, nor Pellegrino Tibaldi, left
followers: but that the eyes and the taste fed by the substance of
Spagnuoletto and Murillo, should without reluctance have submitted to
the gay volatility of Luca Giordano, and the ostentatious flimsiness of
Sebastian Conca, would be matter of surprise, did we not see the same
principles successfully pursued in the platfonds of Antonio Raphael
Mengs, the painter of philosophy, as he is styled by his biographer
D'Azara. The cartoons of the frescoes painted for the royal palace at
Madrid, representing the apotheosis of Trajan and the temple of Renown,
exhibit less the style of Raphael in the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche at
the Farnesina, than the gorgeous but empty bustle of Pietro da Cortona.
From this view of art on the Continent, let us cast a glance on its
state in this country, from the age of Henry VIII. to our own.--From
that period to this, Britain never ceased pouring its caravans of noble
and wealthy pilgrims over Italy, Greece, and Ionia, to pay their
devotions at the shrines of virtù and taste: not content with adoring
the obscure idols, they have ransacked their temples, and none returned
without some share in the spoil: in plaister or in marble, on canvass or
in gems, the arts of Greece and Italy were transported to England, and
what Petronius said of Rome, that it was easier to meet there with a god
than a man, might be said of London. Without inquiring into the
permanent and accidental causes of the inefficacy of these efforts with
regard to public taste and support of art, it is observable, that,
whilst Francis I. was busied, not to aggregate a mass of painted and
chiselled treasures merely to gratify his own vanity, and brood over
them with sterile avarice, but to scatter the seeds of taste over
France, by calling, employing, enriching Andrea del Sarto, Rustici,
Rosso, Primaticcio, Cellini, Niccolo; in England, Holbein and
Torregiano under Henry, and Federigo Zucchero under Elizabeth, were
condemned to gothic work and portrait painting. Charles indeed called
Rubens and his scholars to provoke the latent English spark, but the
effect was intercepted by his destiny. His son, in possession of the
cartoons of Raphael, and with the magnificence of Whitehall before his
eyes, suffered Verio to contaminate the walls of his palaces, or
degraded Lely to paint the Cymons and Iphigenias of his court; whilst
the manner of Kneller swept completely what yet might be left of taste
under his successors: such was the equally contemptible and deplorable
state of English art, till the genius of Reynolds first rescued from the
mannered depravation of foreigners his own branch, and soon extending
his view to the higher departments of art, joined that select body of
artists who addressed the ever open ear, ever attentive mind of our
Royal Founder, with the first idea of this establishment. His
beneficence soon gave it a place and a name, his august patronage,
sanction, and individual encouragement: the annually increased merits of
thirty exhibitions in this place, with the collateral ones contrived by
the speculations of commerce, have told the surprising effects: a mass
of self-taught and tutored powers burst upon the general eye, and
unequivocally told the world what might be expected from the concurrence
of public encouragement--how far this has been or may be granted or
withheld, it is not here my province to surmise: the plans lately
adopted and now organizing within these walls for the dignified
propagation and support of art, whether fostered by the great, or left
to their own energy, must soon decide what may be produced by the unison
of British genius and talent, and whether the painters' school of that
nation which claims the foremost honours of modern poetry, which has
produced with Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Wilson, shall submit
to content themselves with a subordinate place among the schools we have
enumerated.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] See the account of this in Vasari; vita di P. Brunelleschi, tom.
ii. 114. It is of wood, and still exists in the chapel of the family
Gondi, in the church of S. Maria Novella. I know that near a century
before Donato, Giotto is said to have worked in marble two
basso-relievoes on the campanile of the cathedral of Florence; they
probably excel the style of his pictures as much as the bronze works
executed by Andrea Pisani, from his designs, at the door of the
Battisterio.
[28] Masaccio da S. Giovanni di Valdarno born in 1402, is said to have
died in 1443. He was the pupil of Masolino da Panicale.
[29] Andrea Mantegna died at Mantoua, 1505. A monument erected to his
memory in 1517, by his sons, gave rise to the mistake of dating his
death from that period.
[30] Luca Signorelli died at Cortona 1521, aged 82.
[31] Lionardo da Vinci is said to have died in 1517, aged 75, at Paris.
[32] The flying birds of paste, the lions filled with lilies, the
lizards with dragons' wings, horned and silvered over, savour equally of
the boy and the quack. It is singular enough that there exists not the
smallest hint of Lorenzo de Medici having employed or noticed a man of
such powers and such early celebrity; the legend which makes him go to
Rome with Juliano de Medici at the access of Leo X., to accept
employment in the Vatican, whether sufficiently authentic or not,
furnishes a characteristic trait of the man. The Pope passing through
the room allotted for the pictures, and instead of designs and cartoons,
finding nothing but an apparatus of distillery, of oils and varnishes,
exclaimed, _Oimè, costui non è per far nulla, da che comincia a pensare
alla fine innanzi il principio dell' opera!_ From an admirable sonnet of
Lionardo, preserved by Lomazzo, he appears to have been sensible of the
inconstancy of his own temper, and full of wishes, at least, to correct
it.
Much has been said of the honour he received by expiring in the arms of
Francis I. It was indeed an honour, by which destiny in some degree
atoned to that monarch for his future disaster at Pavia.
[33] Frà Bartolomeo died at Florence 1517, at the age of 48.
[34] Michael Angelo Buonarotti, born at Castel-Caprese in 1474, died at
Rome 1564, aged 90.
[35] Like Silanion--'Apollodorum fecit, fictorem et ipsum, sed inter
cunctos diligentissimum artis et inimicum sui judicem, crebro perfecta
signa frangentem, dum satiare cupiditatem nequit artis, et ideo insanum
cognominatum. Hoc in eo expressit, nec hominem ex ære fecit sed
Iracundiam.' Plin. l. xxxiv. 7.
[36] When M. Angelo pronounced oil-painting to be _Arte da donna e da
huomini agiati e infingardi_, a maxim to which the fierce Venetian
manner has given an air of paradox, he spoke relatively to fresco: it
was a lash on the short-sighted insolence of Sebastian del Piombo, who
wanted to persuade Paul III. to have the Last Judgement painted in oil.
That he had a sense for the beauties of oil-colour, its glow, its juice,
its richness, its pulp, the praises which he lavished on Titiano, whom
he called the only painter, and his patronage of Frà Sebastian himself,
evidently prove. When young, M. Angelo attempted oil-painting with
success; the picture painted for Angelo Doni is an instance, and
probably the only entire work of the kind that remains. The Lazarus, in
the picture destined for the cathedral at Narbonne, rejects the claim of
every other hand. The Leda, the cartoon of which, formerly in the palace
of the Vecchietti at Florence, is now in the possession of W. Lock, Esq.
was painted in distemper (a tempera); all small or large oil-pictures
shown as his, are copies from his designs or cartoons, by Marcello
Venusti, Giacopo da Pontormo, Battista Franco, and Sebastian of Venice.
[37] Raphael Sanzio, of Urbino, died at Rome 1520, at the age of 37.
[38] Giorgio Barbarelli, from his size and beauty called Giorgione, was
born at Castel Franco, in the territory of Venice, 1478, and died at
Venice, 1511.
[39] Titiano Vecelli, or, as the Venetians call him, Tiziàn, born at
Cador in the Friulese, died at Venice, 1576, aged 99.
[40] The birth and life of Antonio Allegri, or, as he called himself,
Læti, surnamed Correggio, is more involved in obscurity than the life of
Apelles. Whether he was born in 1490 or 1494 is not ascertained; the
time of his death in 1534 is more certain. The best account of him has
undoubtedly been given by A. R. Mengs in his _Memorie concernenti la
vita e le opere di Antonio Allegri denominato il Correggio_. Vol. ii. of
his works, published by the Spaniard D. G. Niccola d'Azara.
[41] Pelegrino Tibaldi died at Milano in 1592, aged 70.
[42] Sebastiano, afterwards called Del Piombo from the office of the
papal signet, died at Rome in 1547, aged 62.
[43] Daniel Ricciarelli, of Volterra, died in 1566, aged 57.
[44] Now the first ornament of the exquisite collection of J. J.
Angerstein, Esq.--Since purchased for the National Gallery.--EDITOR.