the exquisite painting of the vine leaves, and of these flowers in the
foreground, as an instance of the "constant habit of the great masters
to render every detail of their foreground with the most laborious
botanical fidelity." "The foreground is occupied with the common blue
iris, the _aquilegia_, and the wild rose (more correctly the _Capparis
Spinosa_); _every stamen_ of which latter is given, while the blossoms
and leaves of the columbine (a difficult flower to draw) have been
studied with the most exquisite accuracy." But this detail is sought not
for its own sake, but only so far as is necessary to mark the typical
qualities of beauty in the object. Thus "while every stamen of the rose
is given because this was necessary to mark the flower, and while the
curves and large characters of the leaves are rendered with exquisite
fidelity, there is no vestige of particular texture, of moss, bloom,
moisture, or any other accident, no dewdrops, nor flies, nor trickeries
of any kind: nothing beyond the simple forms and hues of the flowers,
even those hues themselves being simplified and broadly rendered. The
varieties of _aquilegia_ have in reality a greyish and uncertain tone of
colour, and never attain the purity of blue with which Titian has gifted
his flower. But the master does not aim at the particular colour of
individual blossoms; he seizes the type of all, and gives it with the
utmost purity and simplicity of which colour is capable." A second point
to be noticed is the way in which one kind of truth has often to be
sacrificed in order to gain another. Thus here Titian sacrifices truth
of aërial effect to richness of tone--tone in the sense, that is, of
that quality of colour which makes us feel that the whole picture is in
one climate, under one kind of light, and in one kind of atmosphere. "It
is difficult to imagine anything more magnificently impossible than the
blue of the distant landscape; impossible, not from its vividness, but
because it is not faint and aërial enough to account for its purity of
colour; it is too dark and blue at the same time; and there is indeed so
total a want of atmosphere in it, that, but for the difference of form,
it would be impossible to tell the mountains intended to be ten miles
off, from the robe of Ariadne close to the spectator. Yet make this blue
faint, aërial, and distant; make it in the slightest degree to resemble
the tint of nature's colour; and all the tone of the picture, all the
intensity and splendour will vanish on the instant."[3] We may notice
lastly what Sir Joshua Reynolds points out (Discourse VIII.), that the
harmony of the picture--that wonderful bringing together of two times of
which Lamb speaks above, is assisted by the distribution of colours. "To
Ariadne is given (say the critics) a red scarf to relieve the figure
from the sea, which is behind her. It is not for that reason alone, but
for another of much greater consequence; for the sake of the general
harmony and effect of the picture. The figure of Ariadne is separated
from the great group, and is dressed in blue, which, added to the colour
of the sea, makes that quantity of cold colour which Titian thought
necessary for the support and brilliancy of the great group; which group
is composed, with very little exception, entirely of mellow colours. But
as the picture in this case would be divided into two distinct parts,
one half cold, and the other warm; it was necessary to carry some of the
mellow colours of the great group into the cold part of the picture, and
a part of the cold into the great group; accordingly, Titian gave
Ariadne a red scarf, and to one of the Bacchante a little blue drapery."
It is interesting to know that this great picture took Titian three
years, off and on, to finish. It was a commission from the Duke of
Ferrara, who supplied canvas and frame for it, and repeatedly wrote to
press for its delivery; it reached him in 1523.
_A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery_ (London and New York,
1888).
FOOTNOTES:
[3] _Modern Painters_, Vols. I., XXVII., XXX. (Preface to Second
Edition), pt. i. sec. ii. ch. 1 § 5, pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. 1. § 15; Vol.
III. pt. iv. ch. ix. § 18; Vol. V. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 31; _Arrows of the
Chace_, I. 58.
THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN
(_FRA ANGELICO_)
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
_The Coronation of the Virgin_, by Fra Beato Angelico, seems to have
been painted by an angel rather than by a mortal. Time has not tarnished
the ideal freshness of this painting, delicate as a miniature in a
missal, and whose tints are borrowed from the whiteness of the lily, the
rose of the dawn, the blue of the sky, and the gold of the stars. No
muddy tones of earth dull these seraphic beings composed of luminous
vapours. Upon a throne with marble steps, the varied colours of which
are symbolic, Christ is seated, holding a crown of rich workmanship
which he is about to place upon the head of his divine mother, kneeling
before him, with her head modestly inclined and her hands crossed upon
her breast. Around the throne, throng a choir of angel-musicians,
playing the trumpet, the theorbo, the _angelot_, and the _viola d'
amore_. A light flame flutters about their heads and their great wings
palpitate with joy at this glorious coronation which will transform the
humble handmaid of the Lord into the Lady of Paradise. To the left, an
angel kneels in prayer. In the lower part of the painting with faces
uplifted to the sky the hosts of the blessed, distributed in two
groups, adore and contemplate. On one side, are Moses, Saint John the
Baptist, the apostles, the bishops, and the founders of orders,
distinguished by some emblem, and for greater certainty bearing their
names inscribed around their nimbus, or upon the embroideries of their
vestments. Saint Dominick holds a branch of lilies and a book. A sun
forms the agrafe of Saint Thomas Aquinas's mantle; Charlemagne,
"_l'empereur à la barbe fleurie_," is recognizable by his crown of
_fleur-de-lis_. Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra, has by his side the
three balls of gold, symbolic of the three purses which he gave to a
poor gentleman to dower his three daughters whose beauty exposed them to
dangers. On the other side, throng King David, apostles, martyrs, Saint
Peter the Dominican with his wounded head, Saint Laurence holding his
gridiron, Saint Stephen with a palm in his hand, and Saint George armed
from head to foot; then, in the foreground of the picture, is the
charming group of saints of perfectly celestial grace: the kneeling
Magdalen offers her vase of perfumes; Saint Cæcilia advances, crowned
with roses; Saint Clara gleams through her veil, constellated with
crosses and golden stars; Saint Catherine of Alexandria leans upon the
wheel, the instrument of her execution, as calmly and peacefully as if
it were a spinning-wheel; and Saint Agnes holds in her arms a little
white lamb, the symbol of innocent purity.
[Illustration: THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN.
_Fra Angelico._]
Fra Beato Angelico has given to these youthful saints a celestial and
ideal beauty, whose type exists not upon this earth: they are visible
souls, rather than bodies, they are thoughts of human form enveloped in
these chaste draperies of white, rose, and blue, sown with stars and
embroidered, clothed as might be the happy spirits who rejoice in the
eternal light of Paradise. If there be paintings in Heaven, surely they
must resemble those of Fra Angelico.
_Guide de l'Amateur au Musée du Louvre_ (Paris, 1882).
JUDITH
(_SANDRO BOTTICELLI_)
MAURICE HEWLETT
In the days when it was verging on a question whether a man could be at
the same time a good Christian and an artist the chosen subjects of
painting were significant of the approaching crisis--those glaring moral
contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call
dramatic. Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had
withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a
question it were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, were such as
the Greeks, with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in
matters of this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as
decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths. To-day we call them
"effective" subjects; we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think
it braces us to shudder, and we think that Art is a kind of emotional
pill; we measure it quantitatively, and say that we "know what we like."
And doubtless there is something piquant in the quivering produced, for
example, by the sight of white innocence fluttering helpless in a grey
shadow of lust. So long as the Bible remained a god that piquancy was
found in a _Massacre of the Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a
_Faust and Gretchen_, in the Doré Gallery, or in the Royal Academy.
It was a like appreciation of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as
powerful didactic agents (coupled with, or drowning, a something purer
and more devout) which had inspired those most beautiful and distinctive
of all the symbols of Catholicism, the _Adoration of the Kings_, the
Christ-child cycle, and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to
their place above the mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old
Testament, that garner of grim tales, proved a sick wine: _David and
Golias_, _Susanna and the Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac_, _Jethro's
Daughter_. But the story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscan
sanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had first cast her in bronze at
the prayer of Cosimo _pater patriæ_. Her entry was dramatic enough at
least: Dame Fortune may well have sniggered as she spun round the city
on her ball. Cosimo the patriot and his splendid grandson were no sooner
dead and their brood sent flying, than Donatello's _Judith_ was set up
in the Piazza as a fit emblem of rescue from tyranny, with the vigorous
motto, to make assurance double, "EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLICAE CIVES
POSVERE." Savonarola, who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application
of Judith's pious sin. A few years later that same _Judith_ saw him
burn. Thus, as an incarnate cynicism, she will pass; as a work of art
she is admittedly one of her great creator's failures. Her neighbour
_Perseus_ of the Loggia makes this only too plain! For Cellini has
seized the right moment in a deed of horror, and Donatello, with all his
downrightness and grip of the fact, has hit upon the wrong. It is fatal
to freeze a moment of time into an eternity of writing. His _Judith_
will never strike: her arm is palsied where it swings. The Damoclean
sword is a fine incident for poetry; but Holofernes was no Damocles, and
if he had been, it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze.
Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a
moment instead of denote a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it
not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things
are, not to state them, to affirm that they are. A sculptured _Judith_
was done not long afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a burin on a
plate; and the man who so carved her was a painter.
[Illustration: JUDITH.
_Botticelli._]
Meantime, _pari passu_, almost, a painter who was a poet was trying his
hand; a man who knew his Bible and his mythology and was equally at home
with either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say that you cannot be an
artist unless you are at home with mythology, unless mythology is the
swiftest and most direct expression of your being, so that you can be
measured by it as a man is known by his books, or a woman by her
clothes, her way of bowing, her amusements, or her charities. For
mythopoeia is just this, the incarnating the spirit of natural fact;
and the generic name of that power is Art. A kind of creation, a
clothing of essence in matter, an hypostatizing (if you will have it) of
an object of intuition within the folds of an object of sense. Lessing
did not dig so deep as his Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling antithesis,"
after all, touches the root of the matter), for he did not see that
rhythmic extension in time or space, as the case may be, with all that
that implies--colour, value, proportion, all the convincing incidents of
form--is simply the mode of all arts, the thing with which Art's
substance must be interpenetrated, until the two form a whole, lovely,
golden, irresistible, and inevitable as Nature's pieces are. This
substance, as I have said, is the spirit of natural fact. And so
mythology is Art at its simplest and barest (where the bodily medium is
neither word, nor texture of stone, nor dye), the parent art from which
all the others were, so to speak, begotten by man's need. This much of
explanation, I am sorry to say, is necessary, before we turn to our
mytho-poet of Florence, to see what he made out of the story of Judith.
First of all, though, what has the story of Judith to do with mythology?
It is a legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends; and between legend
and myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I believe
there are no myths proper to Israel--I do not see how such magnificent
egoists could contract to the necessary state of awe--and I do not know
that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real
myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural
fact, a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very
different thing. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an
historical event is transient and superficial. Take one instance out of
a score. The rainbow links heaven and earth. Iris, then, to the
myth-making Greek, was Jove's messenger, intermediary between God and
Man. That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards,
making her a daughter of Thaumas, incarnated a fact, psychological, but
none the less constant, none the less natural. But, to say, as the
legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated his ark over a drowning world
and secured for his posterity a standing covenant with God, who then and
once for all set his bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere,
in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow
is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who was an ancestor of
Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it may be the
barest history in a splendid epical setting: the point to remember is
that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative art. The artist, in
the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only of men can convert
dead things into life. And now we will go into the Uffizi.
Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of
amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's
_Judith_ tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her
steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes every step she takes.
You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to
the sage himself, who, from his point of view--that painting may fairly
deal with a chapter of history--is perfectly right. The prevailing
strain of the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fortitudo_,
to invert the old enigma. "O God, O my God, hear me also, a widow. Break
down their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that
runs through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of
a little people in their God-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of
savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to
death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice
upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him,
and tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the
emissary of the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox,
"The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the
amazing, thrilling antithesis insisted on over and over again by the old
Hebrew bard. "Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind
prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck." That is the
_leit-motif_: Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it to
the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty,
blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow, flits homeward through
a spring landscape of grey and green and the smile of a milky sky, being
herself the dominant of the chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her
jagged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and
her yellow curls floating over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the
sandals that ravished his eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and
fluttering like harebells in the wind. Behind her plods the slave girl
folded in an orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of
hers, the head of the grim Lord Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the
legend itself! For look at the girl's eyes. What does their dreamy
solemnity mean if not, "the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a
woman"? One other delicate bit of symbolizing he has allowed himself,
which I may not omit. You are to see by whom this deed was done: by a
woman who has unsexed herself. Judith is absorbed in her awful service;
her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees; she is
unconscious of the hindrance. The gates of Bethulia are in sight; the
Chaldean horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape. She is
swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste.
The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and
steps out the more lustily for it.
So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of
pictures. What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell
him that his art could have little to say to a legend? Or that a legend
might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made),
might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under
any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a moment
suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this
double-entry, methodical way, but are we entitled to say that he was not
influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman,
when he squared himself to illustrate the Bible? We say that the subject
of a picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter,
_that_ is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every
picture he painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the
story of Judith? What is, in that story, the natural, essential (as
opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed
was what the old Scots law incisively calls _slauchter_. It may be
glossed over as assassination or even execution--in fact, in Florence,
where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so
called: it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not shirking the
position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or
essence swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the
same mind:
"The smyler with the knyf under his cloke,"
and so on, in lines not be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion.
Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab,
are the standing elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you come
down to that. Your staring looks, your blood, your "chirking," are
accidentals. They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but
the horror of sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his
thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the
stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when
we flout or mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to
insist upon the carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror,
there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it
in her face, to add mentally the poor stage properties we have grown to
trust. No blood, if you please. Therefore, in Botticelli's _Judith_,
nothing but the essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly
imagine, but it is not there to be sensed. The panel is in a tremor. So
swift and secret is Judith, so furtive the maid, we need no hurrying
horsemen to remind us of her oath,--"Hear me, and I will do a thing
which shall go throughout all generations to the children of our
nation." Sudden death in the air; nature has been outraged. But there is
no drop of blood--the thin scarlet line along the sword-edge is a symbol
if you will--the pale head in the cloth is a mere "thing:" yet we all
know what has been done.
_Earthwork out of Tuscany_ (London, 1895).
THE AVENUE OF MIDDELHARNAIS
(_HOBBEMA_)
PAUL LAFOND
Some small and slender trees, branchless almost to their tops, border
the two sides of a road, which occupies the centre of the picture, and
extend all the way to a village which closes the horizon with several
masts and hulls of ships in profile against a sky where the sun is
veiled; to the right, a nursery-garden of shrubs and rose-trees
separated from the road by a wide ditch full of water; then, in the
middle distance, the buildings of a farm; to the left, a clump of trees
and another ditch, and further back the spire of a church; a huntsman,
with a gun on his shoulder and preceded by his dog, is walking on the
road, and two peasants--a man and a woman--have stopped to chat on the
path that leads across to the farm; a horticulturist is grafting the
shrubs in the nursery-garden; and this corner of a landscape has
sufficed for Hobbema to produce a masterpiece which the National Gallery
of London is justly proud to possess. This youngest of the great
European Museums is not the poorest and owns very considerable works of
every school.
[Illustration: THE AVENUE OF MIDDELHARNAIS.
_Hobbema._]
What is most admired in this picture of the Dutch Master? The firmness
of touch, the brilliancy of the key, the ease and breadth of execution
without the slightest sign of hesitation or alteration, or the
extraordinary perfection with which the perspective is rendered? We do
not know. Despite the complexity of the subject, the one defect of which
may be a slight lack of unity in the composition, the general effect of
the picture is simple and powerful, and the gradation of colour
harmonious and correct. It would be impossible to go any farther than
this artist has done in the interpretation of this tranquil Dutch
landscape. The deep values of the trees, the yellowish greys of the
road, and the sluggish water of the ditches, together with the blue sky
flecked with little grey and white clouds produce an ensemble of
absolute calm. The little figures which give life to this canvas are so
fine and delicate in execution that they leave nothing to be desired.
Here, as very rarely happens, the multiplication of details does not
spoil the effect of the whole.
This is a picture absolutely without a peer, and a page by itself in
Hobbema's work. This is true in every sense, even in the choice of
subject; for most frequently the painter borrows the motives for his
pictures from a different phase of nature. Ordinarily he interprets
forest-clearings; the skirts of a wood with poor huts hidden by great
trees; calm and fresh pools; and streams feeding humble mills. Witness
the one in the Louvre for which he showed so great a predilection and
which he reproduced under so many varied aspects.
But whatever may be the subject he treats, he always remains the happy
interpreter of the calm scenery of his own country of low and drowned
horizons; the painter attracted by the light which with him envelops
everything it approaches--trees, cottages, ground, waters, and
distances bathed in delicious depths.
Nature, gentle and friendly to man, which he saw with a simplicity and a
clearness approached by no other painter, attracted and charmed him
above all else, in contrast to his contemporary and friend, J. Ruysdael,
who, led away by heart-breaking melancholy, would never see any side of
her but the energetic and lugubrious, the sad and troubled.
In his forests, on the banks of his ponds and rivers, in the
neighbourhood of his huts and mills, Hobbema wants to have company; so
he has sown his landscapes with figures, and they are constantly
animated with people and animals. Are these figures always his own? It
would be imprudent to affirm this, although they harmonize in most cases
so marvellously with the rest of the picture, and it would therefore
seem difficult for them to be by another hand. However, if we must defer
to his historian, von Wurzbach, they are very frequently the work of
Nicholaas Berghem, Adriaen Van de Velde, Lingelbach, Philip Wouwerman,
Isack van Ostade, Pijnacker, etc., which would prove, at least, that he
knew how to select his collaborators.
The painter of the _Avenue of Middelharnais_ in the National Gallery, of
the _Mill_ in our Louvre, and of many other masterpieces was yet
unknown, or rather despised, not very long ago, and it is quite recently
that his name has emerged from the unjust neglect in which it was
buried. This great name of Hobbema had fallen into such discredit that
when one of his pictures fell by chance into the hands of an amateur or
merchant the signature would be effaced as quickly as possible and
replaced by that of J. Ruysdael, the sole painter worthy of entering
into competition with him.
Who then is this Meindert Hobbema? Where was he born? Where did he live?
What was his life? Alas, we know very little concerning this impeccable
master, one of the greatest glories of Dutch painting. The principal
historians of the Netherland school are ignorant of him or pass him by
in silence. Houbraken, Descamps, and d'Argenville are dumb regarding
him. Those who, by chance, treat of him, commit so many errors that it
is best to take no account of their words. Three cities, Amsterdam,
Koeverden, and a village, Middelharnais, in the province of Guelder,
which he has made famous by the marvellous picture, the subject of our
notice, dispute the honour of being his birthplace. But, it seems,
although nothing can be affirmed with certainty, that he first saw the
light in Amsterdam in 1638. He was the son of a sergeant in the
Netherland army and spent his early life in Koeverden, where he was
baptized and where his father was in garrison. At a later period he
established himself in Amsterdam, where he became the pupil and soon the
comrade and friend of J. Ruysdael, who served as witness to his marriage
with Eeltie Vinck, celebrated in this same city, Oct. 2, 1668. From that
time he scarcely ever left Amsterdam, where he died, Dec. 14, 1709, five
years after his wife, in the sad Roosegraft, which had seen Rembrandt
expire thirty years before. He was sixty-seven years of age. Have we any
need to add that, like Rembrandt, the painter of painters, he died
poor?
That is all we know of Meindert Hobbema. It is little enough, but quite
sufficient. Have we not the man complete in his work? What more could we
wish?
Jouin, _Chefs-d'oeuvre: Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture_
(Paris, 1895-97).
THE DANCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS
(_ANDREA DEL SARTO_)
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE