expression for Venice: endowed, by reason of her water, with a twofold
gift of light, she was also perhaps more splendid than any other city
in the details of her daily life. Colour was its substance. Everything
was pictorial and rich and festive. Even on a dark day the rooms of the
Accademia seem full of sunshine from the treasure they hold of ancient
Venice. If Bellini’s _Procession of the Cross_ on the Piazza of San
Marco were missing from its place, we should feel that a light had
been put out. The Venetians had always been decorators. The pictures
of the first masters--Vivarini, d’Alemagna, Jacobello del Fiore and
many others--seem literally spun out of the furnaces of Murano. They
are no primitives in their mastery of colour. Consider for a moment
the _Madonna and Saints_ of Vivarini and d’Alemagna in the Sala della
Presentazione. The natural life of the fields has been made to serve
a design of amazing richness. The Virgin’s golden throne is carved
With acorns and roses, and luxuriant oak foliage forms its decorative
fringe; the fruits of the garden in which she sits are lavished round
her; the grass is gemmed with countless tiny flowers, trefoil and
strawberry, milkwort and potentilla, and the infant Christ has burst
open a golden pomegranate, displaying its burden of rich crimson
seeds. There is scarcely a harmony of colour unattempted, scarcely a
jewel unset, from the rainbow of the angels’ wings, and the rim of
fluctuating colours on the Virgin’s green robe folded back over peacock
blue, to the mosaics in the burning gold of the angels’ haloes, in the
Virgin’s crown, and in the mitres of the Fathers. There too is the
very vermilion of Veronese, that wonderful salvia scarlet to which the
_Feast in Levi’s House_ owes so much of its decorative significance.
We shall be better equipped for understanding the early colour-masters
if we realise that their dowry came to them not only from the lagoon.
The marvellous rainbow of Venice the “Ambiguous One” was not their only
light nor the deep azure and emerald and gold, which she hung about
her, the only jewels they knew. The garment of Venetian art is inwoven
with threads of mountain glory, of rich harvests of grape and golden
grain: we must go up into the mainland of Venice to understand the art
of the first masters no less than that of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto
and Veronese, whose conceptions were penetrated with the very sunshine
of earth, a warmer-bodied, fuller sunshine than Venice of the waters
could know, full of secret throbbings of the hidden springing life for
light and ripening. Autumn is the loom on which was woven the robe
of Venetian art, autumn with its indomitable splendours of gold and
silver, green and cremoisin and the supreme scarlet of the salvia.
These colours are steeped in an impermeable dye: they seem saturated
with the light, burning out the more gloriously, the more intensely, as
their allotted span grows less. The passion of the spring is of another
kind; it needs the present magic of the sun to draw out its exquisite,
incipient radiance; it cannot lavish glory except when his countenance
is bent upon it. But in the radiance of autumn foliage there is a
daring that darkness is impotent to quell: it is like a shout of
triumph in the face of death, a procession of all the glory of earth
into the kingdom of the dead, not reluctant, not made fearful by the
rumours that have floated to it in the grey-mantled dawn, in the fierce
trumpeting of rain and wind; boldly, gloriously it marches, scattering
joyfully the gems it cannot hold, that nothing shall be saved. We sing
no dirge, but a triumph song, as the golden trophies fall--a gold more
refulgent than Bellini’s façade of San Marco, though this was gold of
the purest even Venice, the golden city, could win from her furnaces.
We may still see these mainland autumns where the colour-masters
gathered their treasures; on the borders of the mountains we may sit
in such a garden of the Madonna as Vivarini and his fellows record. In
the late autumn the sun is slow to win his way; but when he comes there
is no splendour to rival the fire of the salvia-beds, round cups of
concentrated light springing up into spires and tongues of flame among
the arrow-shaped green leaves. No words can describe the brilliance of
this leaping flame, devouring the sunshine like fuel, and scattering it
abroad in myriad gems of penetrating brightness. In the long luminous
grass of the lawn will be scattered here and there a rose-bush of the
Madonna’s crimson, and tall gold-edged lilies may be seen through the
close-hung flaps of the medusa leaves. This splendid tapestry is spread
upon a poplar background of flickering gold and green, the steadier
gold of low mulberries, and grey-bodied autumn apple-trees on which the
leaves glow blood-red, while behind all rise the grassy slopes of the
mountain outposts crossed by the shadow of some jutting rock.
Often among the humbler Venetian painters, less versed in the deeper
significance of human life and religious symbol, we find a singular
mastery of perspective and many signs of familiarity with the interplay
of light and shade among the mountains. We are reminded again and again
of their apprenticeship to nature as we see one of the countless ruined
towers on the outposts of the Alps rising against the golden sunset
light within its threadbare rampart of dusky branches. The face of
the mountains was a vital and intimate fact to them, not an accepted
piety. We are, for instance, often tempted to consider the persons of
Cima’s sacred themes less as the essential interest than as a finely
designed harmony of colour in the foreground of a landscape. In his
native city of Conegliano he stored his mind with mountain wonders,
and in his wide and delicate horizons there are many touches inspired
by a living memory of the scene. We have known the joy of that limpid
atmosphere after days of mist and rain, those floating sunlit clouds
upon the transparent blue, that jewel-like gleam of a deep pool,
the delicacy of autumn trees passing into gold, the foretaste of an
untrodden stronghold in the winding paths that lose themselves and
come again to view as they coil up the castled heights. The landscape
is conventionalised of course, but its spirit is there--its rare
shades of colour, its marvellous varieties of depth; and ever behind,
there is the vision of the mountains cutting into the sky in a sharp,
clear, azure coldness, or with a luminous haze round their base in
the mellowness of an autumn day. As backgrounds we see them only, for
Venice had other needs than of mountains; but many of these painters
knew them as near realities; they had stept home in the glory of
an autumn sunset amid the revel of the vintage, their whole being
intoxicated with the wine and the splendour of life; they had drunk
that fresh-trodden, unfermented juice, the _vino mosto_, sufficient to
stir those whose senses are alert and in whom the passion of the world
runs high. It needed indeed a Titian to transform the vintage of Cadore
into the bacchic rout of his _Ariadne_, but it is there, in the wooded
mountain slopes, in the pageantry of evening, when the fancy soars to
Ariadne’s crown faintly dawning in the warm blue, and sweeps round some
mist-clad inland lake to float among the turreted heights.
[Illustration: PALAZZO REZZONICO.]
Or if we take our stand on the keep of the ruined Roman citadel
of Asolo, when the evening light streaming down into the shadowy
undulations of the valley, which tosses in ceaseless waves round the
mountain’s base, illuminates a land of rich and golden peace, we feel
again the painters of Venice at our side; the vague, rich spirit of
the winding valleys, allied with the solemn grandeur of the mountains,
above whose dark barrier we have glimpses of remote and shining peaks,
the tiny citadels half gathered into the folding mist, the alternate
radiance and keen obscurity of the lower peaks now visited and now
forsaken by the inconstant sunset light, the sudden illumination
of a solitary peasant or a single tree in sharp relief against the
twilight--all these have passed into the canvas of Giorgione: in him,
above all, we seem to drink that wondrous potion compact of evening
vapour and golden light which the sunset pours into the dim goblet
of the mountain valleys. And we may record here, how, in the last
period of the Venetian Renaissance, the great decorator Veronese
found a field of activity under the shadow of Asolo. When Marcantonio
Barbaro, Procurator of San Marco, and his brother the Patriarch of
Aquileja, bade Palladio build their villa at the little village of
Maser, they called on their friend Paolo to decorate it within. And
this perfect villa is one of the happiest monuments to the two artists;
the excellent skill of both is brought into congenial play, and to the
courtly old patrician Barbaro we owe a debt which perhaps we partly
cancel in the coin of our pleasure. The simple yet sumptuous villa lies
so dexterously disposed below its cypress hill, that it seems almost
to consist of the loggia alone as we climb up the garden slope from
the road, through the judicious mingling of smooth lawn and scythe-cut
grass full of scabious and delicate Alpine flowers. Delicious scents
float down from the late roses along the terrace and the brilliant
flower-beds in the grass; the medusa tree stands luminous against the
evergreen shrubs and cypress, and against the yellow wall a huge cactus
raises its mysterious purple sword-blade. The villa is spacious and
full of air and light; the suite of rooms above the loggia, containing
the great part of Paolo’s work, open one out of the other, and each has
a glass door that leads directly to the lawn and grotto in the cleft
of the hill behind, while the central hall lies open on each side to
wide stretches of mountain country. There were no stern censors here to
ask Paolo if his homely details were quite in keeping with the gravity
of his theme; the artist was working for a friend in a house that was
full of light and sunshine and the clear mountain air, and he has put
his soul with most lucid fantasy into the allegories of autumn and
springtime, of Cybele and Juno, Vulcan and Apollo, of dogs and boys
and girls at play among the mimic balconies, of sprays of fig and vine
leaf; into the figures of Michelangelesque strength reclining above the
doors, and the tiny processions of men and beasts in chiaroscuro on
the friezes; into the clear, radiant faces of women and sinewy forms
of men; the eloquent dogs and lions; and not least into the lithe and
gallant figure of himself, advancing from the mimic door at one end of
the long vista to meet the lady who trips out from the opposite end,
_l’amica dell’ artista_--or, as the guide-book discreetly says--his
wife. The portrait of himself is done with much imagination and even
pathos. He was a dreamer, too, this Veronese. These figures of the
painter and his dog give us pause; they make us feel that he would
have been good to walk the mountains with; that if he could step out
now from the room where he keeps continual watch, on to the exquisite
grass plot, with its happy tuft of white anemone and pale Michaelmas
daisy, we might win from him some mountain confidence which he has not
entrusted to canvas or fresco. It is a pleasure to picture Veronese at
his work upon Marcantonio’s villa. Every midday he must have had good
progress to show; for these blithe works that have kept their colour so
fresh and strong are executed with a few brave master strokes: they
are no less potent in their swift presentment than in their conception.
We can see him dismounting from his scaffold at the summons of Barbaro,
returned from his morning round among his stables or his orchards; we
can see him still keen and stirred by the creative impulse, full of
that excited pleasure which accompanies expression, standing a little
aside while Barbaro bears his admiration to and fro--now confessing
that time and office have rusted his mythology and asking the meaning
of some emblem; now on the lookout for a freak of his friend, some
beast or bird put in perhaps to give him joy; now in raptures over the
old shoes and broom, which he swears he has just thrashed the maid for
leaving on the cornice, while Paolo stands by brimming with mirth at
the deception; now called upon to guess the significance of the fair
lady bridled by her lord, which the guide-book ungallantly interprets
as the victory of virtue over vice, but which to Marcantonio no doubt
seemed capable of less abstract explanation. With all their nobility
of design and execution, there is something about these frescoes so
intimate and sympathetic as to impart to us the actual joy and health
of spirit which conceived them. Given the skill and the robust and
prodigal genius of Veronese, how should they not be joyous in these
halls full of light and air and sunshine, the song of birds and of
trickling water, the sounds of meadow and mountain. We may take leave
of the mountains in the midst of one of those brave companies which
must often have gathered in this earthly Paradise of Marcantonio
Barbaro round the long table spread in the loggia--such a loggia as
Paolo himself so often painted--looking out, through the arches to the
vista of creepered wall and over the green meadows studded with golden
fruit-trees, to the undulating country and tracts of woodland, now
bathed in liquid sunshine, now gathered into a soft-enfolding haze--a
wide ocean from which the campaniles rise like masts of ships, and over
which the distant villas are scattered like shining fishing-boats.
“These workmen,” says d’Annunzio of the Venetian artists of the
Renaissance, “create in a medium that is itself a joyous mystery--in
colour, the ornament of the world, in colour, which seems to be the
striving of the spirit to become light. And the entirely new, musical
understanding they have of colour acts in such a way that their
creation transcends the narrow limits of the symbols it represents
and assumes the lofty, revealing faculty of an infinite harmony.”
Colour--which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light.
These words recur to us again and again face to face with the Venetian
masters. By the primitives the colours are laid on as accessory to
the scene, as it were fine enamel; in the Renaissance painters, they
are not only woven into the fabric of the picture, it grows and moves
through them. We may choose, in illustration, Giovanni Bellini’s
small picture of the _Madonna with St. Catherine and the Magdalen_
in the Accademia, because, though it is in one sense less completely
representative of the distinguishing features of the Venetian school
than, for instance, his masterpiece of the _Frari_, it realises perhaps
more fully than any that “new and musical understanding of colour”
which was the peculiar gift of the Venetians. It is literally informed
with radiance; flesh itself has become spirit, no longer a covering,
but an atmosphere--a directly perfect expression. There is no denial
or emaciation of the flesh; the forms are strong, the habitations of a
potent earth-spirit. The faces are pondering, penetrating, profound,
and withal extremely individual; they might seem impassive, were it
not that every feature is kindled by the pervading colour till we seem
to feel it as a sensuous presence. It is a quality of colour that so
subtly determines the poise of their hands, that makes their touch so
sensitively penetrating that feeling seems to flow from it without
pressure. The solemn harmony of red and green and blue, and of the
diffused radiance of the flesh tints, is not only lit from without by
the sunlight, it seems literally to burn from within, depth behind
depth, with light.
The peculiarly luminous treatment of the flesh perfected by Bellini in
repose, it remained for Tintoretto to realise in motion; this we may
venture to illustrate from a work too immense for our discussion in any
but a limited aspect--his last great work, _The Paradise_, in the Ducal
Palace. The quality we are seeking in it becomes the more remarkable on
account of its loss of superficial colour, so that at first it seems
cold and faded as if a mist had fallen upon it; then, very slowly,
like day breaking out of the veil, colour reveals itself as a fresh
property in the forms. We cannot penetrate the depth of it; rank behind
rank the luminous faces define themselves like mysterious shapes of
the atmosphere, some mere ghosts in the depths which daylight cannot
pierce, some radiant already with the light; and across and through
them all, through the flame-winged throng of Cherubim, piercing all
companies and ranks of being to the extremes of the vast canvas, shoot
the rays from the central source of light in the seat of Christ. It is
a symphony of colour become almost vocal; we perceive it not only with
the eye but in all our senses, this music of the spheres which one man
has dared to gather into a single canvas. Who but Tintoretto could have
dreamed of achieving this perspective built solely of human forms and
faces? Into all the mysteries of life--those echoes of experience which
we touch but faintly, those substances with which we feel inexplicable
correspondencies--into these Tintoretto has looked: the rays from
behind the Son of God have poured into the heart of the universe,
and from it has grown his Paradise. Joy is the heart of this great
symphony; it works upon us rather as a creative force than as a thing
created, sounding continually some new note or rarer harmony of colour.
At times it overpowers us, and then amid the maze of divine musicians
and Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones and Principalities and Powers,
some single harmonious human form, strong in beauty, with wings of
light, some tender, lovely face of youth or woman, the solemn gesture
of saint or bishop, the rainbow of an angel’s wing, gives our intellect
a resting-place. For it is not through obscuring of outlines that this
wonder of music in colour is accomplished; the human form, on which all
the notes are played, is become indeed a perfect instrument, but not
by forfeiting its material strength or substance; the structure is
massive, solid--if to our notion of solidity we may unite the gift of
perfect ease within an element whose progress only is by flight, where
each moment is poised but slightly in its passage to the next, where
there is no time because no stable unit to serve as pedestal for time.
In this great picture, that faculty of the Venetian painters which we
are now illustrating, found perhaps its completest realisation--the
power of winging flesh with colour so that it is endowed with the very
properties of atmosphere.
[Illustration: _By permission of Arnold Mitchell, Esq._
TOWARDS THE RIALTO, SAN ANGELO.]
This luminous quality of the Venetian painters is realised by them
in many more general ways than in the treatment of the human form.
We may consider it in Carpaccio in relation to the significance of
landscape in his compositions. It is his power of treating a scene
atmospherically that supplies one chief charm of his work. It is
never on a day of splendour that either he or Gentile Bellini depicts
Venice; but constantly on a cold, colourless day of late autumn the
waters of Carpaccio seem to live again for us as we have seen them
through the perspective of his arches or in the background of a city
picture. We may see the Grand Canal wind into the dark city under
the pale familiar gold of his Rialto sunset, and scattered sails on
the cold, clear lagoon in weird contrast of orange with the steely
waters or with the pale rose or white of buildings. There is a peculiar
fascination in this clear neutrality of light in sky and water and
buildings; it is no less a property of Venice than her more refulgent
harmonies. Whatever hour of day it comes, it has the strange revelation
of the dawn about it, a curious remoteness in which the works of men
arrest attention as if fraught with a new purport. The emotional
significance of landscape was understood by Carpaccio in a wonderful
degree. How much depends, for instance, in the scene where Ursula’s
father dismisses the English ambassadors, on the vista of canal across
which lights fall from dividing waterways! It is the narrowest strip;
but the sunlight on the houses, the exquisite arch of pale blue sky
fading into white above the distant buildings, give a new value to the
interior; the outside world, on which the sun is shining, seems to
look into the room with the streaming light. A still more beautiful
illustration of Carpaccio’s understanding of light is to be found in
the room where St. Ursula lies asleep. It seems, in fact, scarcely an
indoor room; through its open doors and windows it is in close touch
with the air and sky; and the effect of contact with wind and sky is
heightened by the real plumage of the angel’s grey wings, while the
back-sweep of his robe suggests a sudden alighting after flight with
the current of air still about him. We know of no picture to surpass
this of Carpaccio in conveying the atmosphere of a room into which the
first light is breaking--the exhilaration of an illumined wall, the
waking of colour on window-ledge, chair and bedcover, the blending of
luminous and shadowy. It is the light of the first dawn, the infancy
of day, with a suggestion of unillumined sky, just creeping out of
shadow in the expanse of open, untrellised window behind the plants,
a soft, wonderful stealing green, that has not yet come into its
kingdom. Even buildings are made by Carpaccio to serve an atmospheric
effect. We might illustrate from almost every picture in San Giorgio
degli Schiavoni, but confining ourselves to the St. Ursula series, we
shall find a notable illustration in the buildings seen through the
water-gate in the _Return of the Embassy_, and in the great Renaissance
loggia which fills so conspicuous a place in the foreground, and to
which airiness and light have been imparted by its great arches, by
the water washing round its base, and by the spring of the bridge that
connects it with the campo where the King sits under his canopy. Most
striking of all, perhaps, is the subtle architectural treatment by
which, in the great threefold scene of the Prince’s departure, his
meeting with Ursula and their blessing by the King, Carpaccio has
bestowed an atmosphere of remoteness, almost of fairy strangeness on
the English harbour with its castles and walls and motley buildings
soaring far up the rocky hillside into the sky, an atmosphere entirely
distinct from the upper-world light and joyousness of the contrasting
court of Ursula’s father.