beneath the window, at about the height of the elbow, and serves to put
things on anywhere: beneath it, down to the floor, the walls are covered
with green cloth; but above are bare and white. The second window is
nearly opposite the bed, and in front of it is the princess's
reading-table, some two feet and a half square, covered by a red
cloth with a white border and dainty fringe; and beside it her seat, not
at all like a reading chair in Oxford, but a very small three-legged
stool like a music stool, covered with crimson cloth. On the table are a
book, set up at a slope fittest for reading, and an hour-glass. Under
the shelf near the table so as to be easily reached by the outstretched
arm, is a press full of books. The door of this has been left open, and
the books, I am grieved to say, are rather in disorder, having been
pulled about before the princess went to bed, and one left standing on
its side.
Opposite this window, on the white wall, is a small shrine or picture (I
can't see which, for it is in sharp retiring perspective), with a lamp
before it, and a silver vessel hung from the lamp, looking like one for
holding incense.
The bed is a broad four-poster, the posts being beautifully wrought
golden or gilded rods, variously wreathed and branched, carrying a
canopy of warm red. The princess's shield is at the head of it, and the
feet are raised entirely above the floor of the room, on a dais which
projects at the lower end so as to form a seat, on which the child has
laid her crown. Her little blue slippers lie at the side of the
bed,--her white dog beside them, the coverlid is scarlet, the white
sheet folded half way back over it; the young girl lies straight,
bending neither at waist nor knee, the sheet rising and falling over her
in a narrow unbroken wave, like the shape of the coverlid of the last
sleep, when the turf scarcely rises. She is some seventeen or eighteen
years old, her head is turned towards us on the pillow, the cheek
resting on her hand, as if she were thinking, yet utterly calm in sleep,
and almost colourless. Her hair is tied with a narrow riband, and
divided into two wreaths, which encircle her head like a double crown.
The white nightgown hides the arm raised on the pillow, down to the
wrist.
At the door of the room an angel enters; (the little dog, though lying
awake, vigilant, takes no notice.) He is a very small angel, his head
just rises a little above the shelf round the room, and would only reach
as high as the princess's chin, if she were standing up. He has soft
grey wings, lustreless; and his dress, of subdued blue, has violet
sleeves, open above the elbow, and showing white sleeves below. He comes
in without haste, his body, like a mortal one, casting shadow from the
light through the door behind, his face perfectly quiet; a palm-branch
in his right hand--a scroll in his left.
So dreams the princess, with blessed eyes, that need no earthly dawn. It
is very pretty of Carpaccio to make her dream out the angel's dress so
particularly, and notice the slashed sleeves; and to dream so little an
angel--very nearly a doll angel,--bringing her the branch of palm, and
message. But the lovely characteristic of all is the evident delight of
her continual life. Royal power over herself, and happiness in her
flowers, her books, her sleeping and waking, her prayers, her dreams,
her earth, her heaven....
"How do I know the princess is industrious?"
Partly by the trim state of her room,--by the hour-glass on the
table,--by the evident use of all the books she has, (well bound, every
one of them, in stoutest leather or velvet, and with no dog's-ears,) but
more distinctly from another picture of her, not asleep. In that one a
prince of England has sent to ask her in marriage: and her father,
little liking to part with her, sends for her to his room to ask her
what she would do. He sits, moody and sorrowful; she, standing before
him in a plain house-wifely dress, talks quietly, going on with her
needlework all the time.
A work-woman, friends, she, no less than a princess; and princess most
in being so. In like manner, is a picture by a Florentine, whose mind I
would fain have you know somewhat, as well as Carpaccio's--Sandro
Botticelli--the girl who is to be the wife of Moses, when he first sees
her at the desert well, has fruit in her left hand, but a distaff in her
right.[2]
"To do good work, whether you live or die," it is the entrance to all
Princedoms; and if not done, the day will come, and that infallibly,
when you must labour for evil instead of good.
_Fors Clavigera_ (Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, 1872).
FOOTNOTES:
[2] More accurately a rod cloven into three at the top, and so holding
the wool. The fruit is a bunch of apples; she has golden sandals, and a
wreath of myrtle round her hair.
THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS
(_RUBENS_)
EUGÈNE FROMENTIN
Many people say _Antwerp_; but many also say _the country of Rubens_,
and this mode of speech more exactly expresses all the things that
constitute the magic of the place: a great city, a great personal
destiny, a famous school, and ultra-celebrated pictures. All this is
imposing, and our imagination becomes excited rather more than usual
when, in the centre of the _Place Vert_, we see the statue of Rubens
and, farther on, the old basilica where are preserved the triptychs
which, humanly speaking, have consecrated it.
The statue is not a masterpiece; but it is he, in his own home. Under
the form of a man, who was nothing but a painter, with the sole
attributes of a painter, in perfect truth it personifies the sole
Flemish sovereignty which has neither been contested nor menaced, and
which certainly never will be.
[Illustration: THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS.
_Rubens._]
At the end of the square is seen Notre Dame; it presents itself in
profile, being outlined by one of its lateral faces, the darkest one, on
account of the rains beating on that side. It is made to look blacker
and bigger by being surrounded with light and low buildings. With its
carved stonework, its rusty tone, its blue and lustrous roof, its
colossal tower where the golden disk and the golden needles of its
dial glitter in the stone discoloured by the vapours from the Scheldt
and by the winters, it assumes monstrous proportions. When the sky is
troubled, as it is to-day, it adds all its own strange caprices to the
grandeur of the lines. Imagine then the invention of a Gothic Piranesi,
exaggerated by the fancy of the North, wildly illuminated by a stormy
day, and standing out in irregular blotches against the scenic
background of a sky entirely black or entirely white, and full of
tempest. A more original or more striking preliminary stage-setting
could not be contrived. Thus it is vain for you to have come from
Mechlin or Brussels, to have seen the _Magi_ and the _Calvary_, to have
formed an exact and measured idea of Rubens, or even to have taken
familiarities in examining him that have set you at your ease with him,
for you cannot enter Notre Dame as you enter a museum.
It is three o'clock; the clock high up has just struck. Scarcely even a
sacristan makes a sound in the tranquil, clean and clear naves, as
Pieter Neefs has represented them, with an inimitable feeling for their
solitude and grandeur. It is raining and the light is fading. Shadows
and gleams succeed each other upon the two triptychs in their thin
framing of brown wood fastened without any pomp to the cold and smooth
walls of the transepts, and this proud painting only stands out the more
amid the violent lights and obscurities contending around it. German
copyists have placed their easels before the _Descent from the Cross_;
there is nobody before the _Elevation to the Cross_. This simple fact
expresses the world's opinion as to these two works.
They are greatly admired, almost unreservedly so, and the fact is rare
in the case of Rubens, but the admiration is divided. The chief renown
has fallen upon the _Descent from the Cross_. The _Elevation to the
Cross_ has the gift of touching still more the impassioned, or more
deeply convinced, friends of Rubens. No two works, in fact, could
resemble each other less than these that were conceived at an interval
of two years, that were inspired by the same effort of mind, and that,
nevertheless, so plainly bear the marks of two separate tendencies. The
date of the _Descent from the Cross_ is 1612; that of the _Elevation to
the Cross_ is 1610. I insist upon the date, for it is important. Rubens
was returning to Antwerp, and it was on his disembarkation, so to speak,
that he painted them. His education was finished. At that moment he had
even an excess of studies that were somewhat heavy for him and of which
he was going to make free use once for all and then get rid of almost
immediately. Of all the Italian masters he had consulted, each one, be
it understood, gave him advice of a sufficiently exclusive nature. The
hot-headed masters authorized him to dare greatly; the severe masters
recommended him to keep himself under strong restraint.
His nature, character, and native faculties all tended to a division.
The task itself exacted that he should make two parts of his beautiful
gifts. He felt the expediency of this, took advantage of it, treated of
the subjects in accordance with their spirit, and gave two contrary and
two just ideas of himself: on the one hand the most magnificent example
we possess of his wisdom, and on the other one of the most astonishing
visions of his fire and ardour. To the personal inspiration of the
painter add a very marked Italian influence and you will still better be
able to explain to yourself the extraordinary value that posterity
attaches to pages which may be regarded as his diploma works and which
were the first public acts of his life as the head of a school.
I will tell you how this influence manifests itself and by what
characteristics it may be recognized. But first it is enough for me to
remark that it exists, in order that the physiognomy of the talent of
Rubens may not lose any of its features at the moment when we examine
it. This is not that he should be positively cramped in canonical
formulæ in which others would find themselves imprisoned.
On the other hand, with what ease he moves among these formulæ, with
what freedom he makes use of them, with what tact he disguises or
confesses them, according as he takes pleasure in revealing the
well-informed man or the novice. However, whatever he may do, we feel
the _Romanist_ who has just spent some years on classic ground, who has
just arrived and has not yet changed his atmosphere. There is some
unknown quality remaining with him that reveals travel, such as a
foreign odour about his clothes. It is certainly to this fine Italian
scent that the _Descent from the Cross_ owes the extreme favour that it
enjoys. For those indeed who would like Rubens to be somewhat as he is,
but very much also as they imagine him, there is here a seriousness in
youth, a frank and studious flower of maturity which is about to
disappear and which is unique.
I need not describe the composition. You could not mention a more
popular composition as a work of art or as an example of religious
style. There is nobody who has not in his mind the ordering and the
effect of the picture, its great central light cast against a dark
background, its grandiose masses, its distinct and massive divisions. We
know that Rubens got the first idea of it from Italy, and that he made
no attempt to conceal the loan. The scene is powerful and grave. It acts
on one from afar, it stands out strikingly upon a wall: it is serious
and enforces seriousness. When we remember the carnage with which the
work of Rubens is crimsoned, the massacres, the executioners torturing,
martyring, and making their victims howl, we recognize that here we have
a noble _execution_. Everything in it is restrained, concise, and
laconic, as in a page of Holy Writ.
There are neither gesticulations, cries, horrors, nor too many tears.
The Virgin hardly breaks into a single sob, and the intense suffering of
the drama is expressed by scarce a gesture of inconsolable motherhood, a
tearful face, or red eyes. The Christ is one of the most elegant figures
that Rubens ever imagined for the painting of a God. It possesses some
peculiar extended, pliant, and almost tapering grace, that gives it
every natural delicacy and all the distinction of a beautiful academic
study. It is subtly proportioned and in perfect taste: the drawing does
not fall far short of the sentiment.
You have not forgotten the effect of that large and slightly hip-shot
body, with its small, thin, and fine head slightly fallen to one side,
so livid and so perfectly limpid in its pallor, neither shrivelled nor
drawn, and from which all suffering has disappeared, as it descends
with so much beatitude to rest for a moment among the strange beauties
of the death of the just! Recollect how heavily it hangs and how
precious it is to support, in what a lifeless attitude it glides along
the sudarium, with what agonized affection it is received by the
outstretched hands and arms of the women. Is there anything more
touching? One of his feet, livid and pierced, encounters at the foot of
the Cross the bare shoulder of Magdalen. It does not rest upon it, but
grazes it. The contact is scarcely noticeable, we divine it rather than
see it. It would have been profane to insist upon it, it would have been
cruel not to have made us believe in it. All Rubens's furtive
sensitiveness is in this imperceptible contact that says so many things,
respects them all, and makes them affecting.
The sinner is admirable. She is incontestably the best piece of work in
the picture, the most delicate, the most personal, one of the best
figures of women, moreover, that Rubens ever executed in his career that
was so fertile in feminine creations. This delicious figure has its
legend; how should it not have, its very perfection having become
legendary! It is probable that this beautiful maiden with the black
eyes, with the firm glance, with the clear-cut profile, is a portrait,
and the portrait is that of Isabella Brandt, whom he had married two
years before, and who had also sat for him for the Virgin in the wing of
the _Visitation_. However, while observing her ample figure, powdered
hair, and plump proportions, we reflect what must some day be the
splendid and individual charms of that beautiful Helen Fourment whom he
is to marry twenty years later.
From his earliest to his latest years, one tenacious type seems to have
taken up its abode in Rubens's heart; one fixed idea haunted his amorous
and constant imagination. He delights in it, he completes it, he
achieves it; to some extent he pursues it in his two marriages, just as
he never ceases to repeat it throughout his works. There is always
something both of Isabella and of Helen in the women whom Rubens painted
from either one of them. In the first he puts a sort of preconceived
trait of the second; into the second glides a kind of ineffaceable
memory of the first. At the date of which we treat, he possesses the
first and is inspired by her; the other is not yet born, and still he
divines her. The future already mingles with the present; the real with
the ideal. As soon as the image appears it has this double form. Not
only is it exquisite, but not a feature is wanting. Does it not seem as
if in thus fixing it from the first day, Rubens intended that neither he
nor anyone else should forget it?
As for the rest, this is the sole mundane grace with which he has
embellished this austere picture, slightly monkish, and absolutely
evangelical in character, if by that is meant the gravity of sentiment
and style, and if we remember the rigours that such a spirit must impose
upon itself. In that case, you will understand, a great part of his
reserve is as much the result of his Italian education as of the
attention he gave to his subject.
The canvas is sombre, notwithstanding its high lights and the
extraordinary whiteness of the winding-sheet. In spite of its reliefs,
the painting is _flat_. It is a picture of blackish grounds on which are
disposed broad strong lights of no gradations. The colouring is not
very rich: it is full, well-sustained, and clearly calculated to be
effective from a distance. It makes the picture, frames it, expresses
its weakness and its strength, and makes no attempt to beautify it. It
is composed of an almost black green, an absolute black, a rather heavy
red, and a white. These four tones are placed side by side as frankly as
is possible with four notes of such violence. The contact is brusque and
yet they do not suffer. In the great white, the corpse of Christ is
drawn with a delicate and supple line and modelled by its own reliefs
without any effort of _nuances_, thanks to deviations of imperceptible
values. No shining, no single division in the lights, and scarcely a
detail in the dark parts. All that is of a singular breadth and
rigidity. The outlines are narrow, the half-tints limited except in the
Christ, where the under layer of ultramarine has worn through and to-day
forms blemishes. The pigment is smooth, compact, flowing easily and
thoughtfully.
At the distance from which we examine it, the work of the hand
disappears, but it is easy to guess that it is excellent and directed
with full confidence by a mind broken into good habits, that conforms to
them, applies itself, and wishes to do well. Rubens remembers, observes,
restrains himself, possesses all his forces, subordinates them, and only
half makes use of them.
In spite of these drawbacks, this is a singularly original, attractive,
and strong work. Van Dyck will derive his best religious inspirations
from it. Philippe de Champagne will not imitate it, I am afraid, except
in its weak points, and from it will compose his French style. Otto Van
Veen should certainly applaud it. What should Van Oort think of it? As
for Jordaens, he is waiting for his fellow student to become more
distinctly and expressly Rubens before following him in these new ways.
_Les Maîtres d' Autrefois_ (Paris, 1876).
BACCHUS AND ARIADNE
(_TITIAN_)
CHARLES LAMB
Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty
years, or since the humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a story
_imaginatively_? By this we mean, upon whom has subject so acted that it
has seemed to direct _him_--not to be arranged by him? Any upon whom its
leading or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyrannically,
that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a
revelation? Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely so
much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that
individualizing property, which should keep the subject so treated
distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar, and to
common apprehensions almost identical; so as that we might say this and
this part could have found an appropriate place in no other picture in
the world but this? Is there anything in modern art--we will not demand
that it should be equal--but in any way analogous to what Titian has
effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the
_Ariadne_, in the National Gallery? Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr
rout about him, repeopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places,
drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like
flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this
telling of the story an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly
proud. Guido in his harmonious version of it, saw no farther. But from
the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and
laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With
the desert all ringing with the mad symbols of his followers, made lucid
with the presence and new offers of a god,--as if unconscious of
Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning
pageant--her soul undistracted from Theseus--Ariadne is still pacing the
solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local
solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last
glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.
Here are two points miraculously co-uniting; fierce society, with the
feeling of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with the
accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the _present_
Bacchus with the _past_ Ariadne; two stories, with double Time;
separate, and harmonizing. Had the artist made the woman one shade less
indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his
advent, where would have been the story of the mighty desolation of the
heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a flattering offer met
with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus was not lightly
to be pieced up by a God.
_Lamb's Complete Works_, edited by R.H. Shepherd (London, 1875).
[Illustration: BACCHUS AND ARIADNE.
_Titian_.]
BACCHUS AND ARIADNE
(_TITIAN_)
EDWARD T. COOK
But though as yet half unconscious, Ariadne is already under her fated
star: for above is the constellation of Ariadne's crown--the crown with
which Bacchus presented his bride. And observe in connection with the
astronomical side of the allegory the figure in Bacchus's train with the
serpent round him: this is the serpent-bearer (Milton's "Ophiuchus
huge") translated to the skies with Bacchus and Ariadne. Notice too
another piece of poetry: the marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne took place
in the spring, Ariadne herself being the personification of its return,
and Bacchus of its gladness; hence the flowers in the foreground which
deck his path.