disproportioned and that many of them have shortcomings and so to speak
an embarrassment of characterization that nothing can justify. The
captain is too big and the lieutenant too small, not only by the side of
Captain Kock, whose stature crushes him, but also beside accessory
figures whose height or breadth gives this somewhat plain young man the
air of a youth who has grown a moustache too soon. Regarding the two as
portraits, they are scarcely successful ones of doubtful likeness and
thankless physiognomy, which is surprising in a portrait-painter who had
made his mark in 1642, and which affords some excuse for Captain Kock's
having a little later applied to the infallible Van der Helst. Is the
guard loading his musket rendered any better? Moreover, what do you
think of his right-hand neighbour, and of the drummer? One might say
that all these portraits lack hands, so vaguely are they sketched and so
insignificant is their action. It follows that what they hold is also
ill rendered: muskets, halberds, drum-sticks, canes, lances, and
flag-pole; and that the gesture of an arm is impotent when the hand that
ought to act does not do so clearly, quickly, or with energy, precision,
or intelligence. I will not speak of the feet, which, in most cases, are
lost in shadow. Such in reality are the necessities of the system of
envelopment adopted by Rembrandt, and such is the imperious foregone
conclusion of his method, that one general dark cloud invades the base
of the picture and that the forms float in it to the great detriment of
their points of support.
Must we add that the clothes are very similar to the likenesses,
sometimes uncouth and unnatural, sometimes rigid and rebellious to the
lines of the body? One would say that they are not worn properly. The
helmets are stupidly put on, the hats are outlandish and ungracefully
worn. The scarfs are in their place and yet they are awkwardly tied.
Here is none of that unique ease of carriage, that natural elegance,
that _négligé_ dress, caught and rendered to the life in which Frans
Hals knows how to attire every age, every stature, every stage of
corpulence, and, certainly also, every rank. We are not reassured on
this point more than on many others. We ask ourselves whether there is
not here a laborious fantasy, like an attempt to be strange, which is
not at all pleasing or striking.
Some of the heads are very handsome, I have mentioned those that are
not. The best, the only ones in which the hand of the master and the
feeling of a master are to be recognized, are those which, from the
depths of the canvas, shoot their vague eyes and the fine spark of their
mobile glances at you; do not severely examine their construction, nor
their plan, nor their bony structure; accustom yourself to the greyish
pallor of their complexion, question them from afar as they also look at
you from a distance, and if you want to know how they live, look at them
as Rembrandt wants us to look at his human effigies, attentively and
long, at their lips and eyes.
There remains an episodical figure which has hitherto baffled all
conjectures, because it seems by its traits, its carriage, its odd
splendour, and its inappropriateness, to personify the magic, the
romantic feeling, or, if you prefer, the misrepresentation of the
picture; I mean that little witch-like personage, child-like and
crone-like at the same time, with her hair streaming and adorned with
pearls, gliding among the guards for no apparent reason, and who, a not
less inexplicable detail, has a white cock, that at need might be taken
for a purse, hanging from her girdle.
Whatever right she has to join the troop, this little figure seems to
have nothing human about her. She is colourless and almost shapeless.
Her figure is that of a doll and her gait is automatic. She has the air
of a beggar, something like diamonds covers her whole body, and an
accoutrement resembling rays. You would say that she came from some
jewry, or old clothes market, or Bohemia, and that, awaking from a
dream, she had attired herself in the most singular of all worlds. She
has the light, the uncertainty, and the wavering of a pale fire. The
more we examine her, the less we can grasp the subtle lineaments that
serve as envelope for her uncorporeal existence. We end by seeing in her
nothing but a kind of extraordinarily strange phosphorescence which is
not the ordinary light of things, nor yet the ordinary brilliance of a
well-regulated palette, and this adds more sorcery to the peculiarities
of her countenance. Notice that in the place she occupies, one of the
dark corners of the canvas, rather low in the middle distance, between a
man in deep red and the captain dressed in black, this eccentric light
has much greater force than the most sudden contrast with a neighbouring
tint, and without extreme care this explosion of accidental light would
have sufficed to disorganize the whole picture.
What is the meaning of this little imaginary or real being, who,
however, is only a supernumerary while yet holding, so to speak, the
chief rôle? I shall not attempt to tell you. Abler people than I have
allowed themselves to inquire what it was and what it was doing there,
without coming to any satisfactory conclusion.
But if to all these somewhat vain questions Rembrandt replied: "This
child is a caprice no less strange than and quite as plausible as many
others in my engraving or painting. I have placed it as a narrow ray
amid great masses of shadow because its exiguity rendered it more
vibrating and it suited me to awaken with a ray one of the dark corners
of my picture. It also wears the usual costume of my female figures,
great or small, young or old, and in it you will find the type
frequently occurring in my works. I love what glitters, and that is why
I have clothed her in brilliant materials. As for those phosphorescent
gleams that astonish you here, whilst elsewhere they pass unnoticed, it
is only the light in its colourless splendour and supernatural quality
that I habitually give to my figures when I illuminate them at all
strongly."--Do you not think that such a reply ought to satisfy the most
difficult, and that finally, the rights of the stage-setter being
reserved, he need only render account of one point: the manner in which
he has treated the picture?
We know what to think of the effect produced by the _Night Watch_ when
it appeared in 1642. This memorable attempt was neither understood nor
relished. It added noise to Rembrandt's glory, increased it in the eyes
of his faithful admirers, and compromised it in the eyes of those who
had only followed him with some effort and attended him to this decisive
point. It made him a painter more peculiar and a master less sure. It
heated and divided men of taste according to the heat of their blood, or
the stiffness of their reason. In short, it was regarded as an
absolutely new but dangerous adventure which brought him applause and
some blame, and which at heart did not convince anybody. If you know the
judgment expressed on this subject by Rembrandt's contemporaries, his
friends and his pupils, you know that opinion has not sensibly varied
for two centuries, and that we repeat almost the same thing that this
great daring man might have heard during his lifetime....
Save one or two frank colours, two reds and a deep violet, except one or
two flashes of blue, you cannot perceive anything in this colourless and
violent canvas to recall the palette and ordinary method of any of the
known colourists. The heads have the appearance rather than the
colouring proper to life. They are red, purple, or pale, without for all
that having the true paleness Velasquez gives to his faces, or those
sanguine, yellowish, greyish, or purplish shades that Frans Hals renders
with such skill when he desires to specify the temperaments of his
personages. In the clothes and hair and various parts of the
accoutrements, the colour is no more exact nor expressive than is, as I
have said, the form itself. When a red appears, it is not of a delicate
nature and it indistinctly expresses silk, cloth, or satin. The guard
loading his musket is clothed in red from head to foot, from his hat to
his boots. Do you perceive that Rembrandt has occupied himself for a
moment with the varied physiognomy of this red, its nature or substance,
as a true colourist would not have failed to do?...
I defy any one to tell me how the lieutenant is dressed and in what
colour. Is it white tinged with yellow? Is it yellow faded to white? The
truth is that this personage having to express the central light of the
picture, Rembrandt has clothed him with light, very ably with regard to
brilliance and very negligently with regard to colour.
Now, and it is here that Rembrandt begins to show himself, for a
colourist there is no light in the abstract. Light of itself is nothing:
it is the result of colours diversely illumined and diversely radiating
in accordance with the nature of the ray that they transmit or absorb.
One very deep tint may be extraordinarily luminous; another very light
one on the contrary may not be at all luminous. There is not a student
in the schools who does not know that. With the colourists, then, the
light depends exclusively upon the choice of the colours employed to
render it and is so intimately connected with the tone that we may
truthfully say that with them light and colour are one. In the _Night
Watch_ there is nothing of the kind. Tone disappears in light as it does
in shade. The shade is blackish, the light whitish. Everything is
brilliant or dull, radiant or obscure, by an alternative effacement of
the colouring principle. Here we have different values rather than
contrasted tones. And this is so true that a fine engraving, a good
drawing, a Mouilleron lithograph, or a photograph will give an exact
idea of the picture in its important effects, and a copy simply in
gradations from light to dark would destroy none of its arabesque.
What is his execution in the picture before us? Does he treat a stuff
well? No. Does he express it ingeniously, or with liveliness, with its
seams, folds, breaks, and tissue. Assuredly not. When he places a
feather at the brim of a hat, does he give it the lightness and floating
grace that we see in Van Dyck, or Hals, or Velasquez? Does he indicate
by a little gloss on a dead ground, in their form, or feeling of the
body, the human physiognomy of a well adjusted coat, rubbed by a
movement or worn with use? Can he, with a few masterly touches and
taking no more trouble than things are worth, indicate lace-work, or
suggest jewellery, or rich embroidery?
In the _Night Watch_ we have swords, muskets, partisans, polished
casques, damascened cuirasses, high boots, tied shoes, a halberd with
its fluttering blue silk, a drum, and lances. Imagine with what ease,
with what carelessness, and with what a nimble way of making us believe
in things without insisting upon them, Rubens, Veronese, Van Dyck,
Titian himself, and lastly Frans Hals, that matchless workman, would
have summarily indicated and superbly carried off all these accessories.
Do you maintain in good faith that Rembrandt in the _Night Watch_ excels
in treating them thus? I pray you, look at the halberd that the little
lieutenant Ruijtenberg holds at the end of his stiff arm; look at the
foreshortened steel, look especially at the floating silk, and tell me
if an artist of that value has ever allowed himself more pitifully to
express an object that ought to spring forth beneath his brush without
his being aware of it. Look at the slashed sleeves that have been so
highly praised, the ruffles, the gloves; examine the hands! Consider
well how in their affected or unaffected negligence their form is
accentuated and their foreshortening is expressed. The touch is thick,
embarrassed, awkward, and blundering. We might truly say that it goes
astray, and that applied crosswise when it should be applied lengthwise,
made flat when any other than he would have rounded it, it confuses
instead of determining the form....
At length I come to the incontestable interest of the picture, to
Rembrandt's great effort in a new field: I am going to speak of the
application on a large scale of that way of looking at things which is
proper to him and which is called chiaroscuro.
No mistake is possible here. What people attribute to Rembrandt is
really his. Without any doubt chiaroscuro is the native and necessary
form of his impressions and ideas. Others have made use of it; but
nobody has employed it so constantly and ingeniously as he. It is the
supremely mysterious form, the most enveloped, the most elliptic, and
the richest in hidden meanings and surprises that exists in the
pictorial language of the painter. In this sense it is more than any
other the form of intimate feelings or ideas. It is light, vaporous,
veiled, discreet; it lends its charm to hidden things, invites
curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to
the speculations of conscience. In short, it partakes of sentiment,
emotion, uncertainty, indefiniteness, and infinity; of dreams and of the
ideal. And this is why it is, as it ought to be, the poetic and natural
atmosphere in which Rembrandt's genius never ceased to dwell.
In very ordinary language and in its action common to all schools,
chiaroscuro is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible, and painting
an object enveloped with air. Its aim is to render all the picturesque
accidents of shadow, of half-tints, of light, of relief, and of
distance; and to give in consequence more variety, more unity of effect,
more caprice and more relative truth either to forms or to colours. The
contrary is a more ingenuous and more abstract acceptation, by virtue of
which objects are shown as they are, viewed close at hand, the
atmosphere being suppressed, and consequently without any other than
linear perspective, which results from the diminishing of objects and
from their relation to the horizon. When we speak of aërial perspective,
we already presuppose a little chiaroscuro.
Any other than Rembrandt, in the Dutch school, might sometimes make us
forget that he was obeying the fixed laws of chiaroscuro; with him this
forgetfulness is impossible: he has so to speak framed, co-ordinated and
promulgated its code, and if we might believe him a _doctrinaire_ at
this moment of his career, when instinct swayed him much more than
reflection, the _Night Watch_ would have a redoubled interest, for it
would assume the character and the authority of a manifesto.
To envelop and immerse everything in a bath of shadow; to plunge light
itself into it only to withdraw it afterwards to make it appear more
distant and radiant; to make dark waves revolve around illuminated
centres, grading them, sounding them, thickening them; to make the
obscurity nevertheless transparent, the half gloom easy to pierce, and
finally to give a kind of permeability to the strongest colours that
prevents their becoming blackness,--this is the prime condition, and
these also are the difficulties of this very special art. It goes
without saying, that if anyone ever excelled in this, it was Rembrandt.
He did not invent, he perfected everything; and the method that he used
oftener and better than anyone else bears his name.
When explained according to this tendency of the painter to express a
subject only by the brilliance and obscurity of objects, the _Night
Watch_ has, so to speak, no more secrets for us. Everything that might
have made us hesitate is made clear. Its qualities have their _raison
d'être_; and we even come to comprehend its errors. The embarrassment of
the practitioner as he executes, of the designer as he constructs, of
the painter as he colours, of the costumer as he attires, the
inconsistency of the tone, the amphibology of the effect, the
uncertainty of the time of day, the strangeness of the figures, their
flashing apparition in deep shadow,--all this results here by chance
from an effect conceived contrary to probability, and pursued in spite
of all logic, not at all necessary, and with the following purpose: to
illuminate a real scene with unreal light, that is to say, to clothe a
fact with the ideal character of a vision. Do not seek for anything
beyond this audacious project that mocked the painter's aims, clashed
with received ideas, set up a system in opposition to customs, and
boldness of spirit in opposition to manual dexterity; and the temerity
of which certainly did not cease to spur him on until the day when I
believe insurmountable difficulties revealed themselves, for, if
Rembrandt resolved some of them, there are many that he could not
resolve.
_Maîtres d'Autrefois_ (Paris, 1876).
THE RAPE OF HELEN
(_BENOZZO GOZZOLI_)
COSMO MONKHOUSE
Though the patronage of art had shifted partly from the Church to the
great magnates, especially the great commercial princes like the Medici
at Florence, her influence was still paramount, and though secular
subjects were not uncommon, the vast majority of paintings executed for
patrons, whether clerical or lay, were still religious in subject. It is
not therefore, surprising that among the artists of the Fifteenth
Century, many of whom were monks and all Church painters, we find a
distinct cleavage dividing artists whose aim was to break away from all
traditions--realists--classicists--in a word, reformers, from artists
who clung tenaciously to the old ideals, and whose main aim was still
the perfection of devotional expression.
[Illustration: THE RAPE OF HELEN.
_Gozzoli_.]
It was to the former class that Benozzo Gozzoli belonged, pupil though
he was of Fra Angelico. Although his special quality may be partly
discerned in the altar-piece that hangs above his master's _predella_,
in the strongly marked character of the saints, and perhaps more in the
carefully studied goldfinches, there was little scope in such a subject
for the exercise of his imagination or the display of his individuality.
It is different with the little panel opposite, _The Rape of Helen_
(No. 591), in which he has depicted with great liveliness and gusto a
scene from a classical legend. Possibly, to Fra Angelico, who regarded
painting only as a means of edification, its employment on such a
subject may have seemed little less than sacrilege, not unlike the use
of a chancel for the stabling of horses. Such views can scarcely be said
to be extinct now, and this is the more remarkable as no one has the
same feeling with regard to the other arts, such as sculpture or poetry.
To a young man like Benozzo, and many others of his day, not monks, nor
specially devout in disposition, it must, nevertheless, have been a
change which was welcome. To paint the _Virgin enthroned with Saints_
over and over again, must have been a little wearisome to men conscious
of a fancy to which they could give no scope except by putting S.
Jerome's hat in a new place, or introducing a couple of goldfinches. One
likes to think of the pleasure with which Gozzoli received his
commission one morning, perhaps from Cosimo de' Medici himself, for whom
his master was adorning a cell in the Convent of San Marco, recently
rebuilt at the great man's expense. Did he know the legend of Helen of
Troy, or had he to seek the advice of some scholar like Nicolli or
Poggio for the right tradition? He seems, indeed, to have been rather
mixed in his ideas on the subject. Did he consult Brunellesco in the
construction of his Greek Temple, or Donatello or Ghiberti for the
statue inside? Whence came that wonderful landscape with its mountains
and cypress trees and strange-shaped ships? From his imagination, or
from some old missal or choir-book illumination? At all events, pleasure
evidently went to the making of it, for his fancy had full scope. His
costumes he adopted frankly from those of his day, adding some features
in the way of strange headgear, much like those in Fra Angelico's
_Adoration_ (in which he possibly had a hand), to give an Eastern colour
to the group of boyish heroes on the left; not knowing or considering
that the robes in which he was accustomed to drape his angels were much
nearer to, were indeed derived from, the costume of the Greeks. For his
ideal of female beauty he seems to have been satisfied with his own
taste. One can scarcely imagine a face or figure much less classical
than that of the blonde with the _retroussé_ nose (presumably Helen
herself), who is riding so complacently on the neck of the long-legged
Italian in the centre. The figures in the Temple are of a finer type,
and the lady in the sweeping robe, with the long sleeves, who turns her
back to us, has a simple dignity which reminds one less of Gozzoli's
master than of Lippo Lippi or Masaccio, whose frescoes in the Carmine
he, in common with all other artists, had doubtless studied. There is
nothing so classical or so natural in the picture as the beautiful
little bare-legged boy that is running away in the foreground. This
little bright panel--so gay, so naïve, so ignorant, and withal so
charming--is of importance in the history of art as illustrated in the
National Gallery. It is the first in which the artist has given full
play to his imagination, and entered the romantic world of classic
legend, and, with one exception, the first which is purely secular in
subject, and was designed for a "secular" purpose. It probably once
formed part of a marriage-chest. The important share which the
landscape has in the composition, and its serious attempt at
perspective, are also worthy of note. As an example of the master
himself, of the painter of the great panoramic procession of the
notables of his day, which under the title of the _Adoration of the
Kings_, covers the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace at Florence,
of the designs of the history of S. Agostino at San Gemignano, and of
the frescoes in Campo Santo at Pisa, it is of course extremely
inadequate, but it suffices to indicate many paths which the young
artist was to strike out from the old track which sufficed for his
saint-like master.
_In the National Gallery_ (London, 1895).
MONNA LISA[9]
_(LEONARDO DA VINCI)_
WALTER PATER
In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some
variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the
outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator,
holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above
Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression,
are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of
which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and
graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured form in which
the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself
alone, his high indifferentism, his intolerance of the common forms of
things; and in the second edition the image was changed into something
fainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in
his work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great
men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life is one of
sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart
from the main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the works on which
his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the
_Battle of the Standard_; or are mixed obscurely with the work of
meaner hands, as the _Last Supper_. His type of beauty is so exotic that
it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that
of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the
world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the
possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom; as to Michelet and
others to have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and
crowds all his chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet
he is so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most
tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes
across them by chance on some secret errand....
[Illustration: MONNA LISA.
_L. da Vinci_.]