(MADRID)
]
And now the next child is Carpaccio’s. That great master’s work was dear
to Ruskin in his later Venetian visits; in his earlier he had not seen
it with that first true sight which is virtually first sight, and makes
a shepherd and a Romeo of the lagging lover. When he was well aware of
Carpaccio Ruskin studied his lovely work in the Schiavoni chapel, and
the Saint Ursula series, described in the latest and the freshest of his
writings. But there is one figure—one of three—that sits in the midst of
Carpaccio’s designs, and in the midst of the art of Italy, a child
playing a lute, one of the chief creatures of the work of line and
colour. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple is going forward above;
the three boy-angels are at their music, and this one, the most simply
assiduous, props his instrument upon his lifted knee, and sedulously
watches over his left-hand fingering. The incomparable composition of
this figure owes nothing to any arbitrary ideal of form or action,
nothing to the bodily grimace in which taste had resolved that the necks
of saints, women, and children, in contradistinction to donors, must,
for the purposes of art, be twisted. Venice thought a child to be a
touching creature, thought natural action in a child to be not lower but
higher than make-believe; and when to these new and imperial perceptions
and convictions, she added the new perception of colour and tone, she
proved herself indeed a great and solitary power in painting. The art of
Venice, in the event, turned to the light, and set the darkened head of
a man against the sun and against the cloud. I think there never was a
greater new act in the history of art than this facing of the sun, this
contemplation of the shadow side of things. Tone, with all its mystery,
as well as light with all its mystery, comes about by that change of the
gazer’s station. Did Claude “first set the sun in heaven”? Tintoretto
was born nearly a century earlier than he, and Tintoretto did more than
paint the sun, he implied it by the soft darkness of withdrawal or
eclipse, by the half-light and the half-darkness, by the tenderness of
reflected lights lodged within delicate shadows, or merely in colour by
the Venetian presence of a latent gold. Carpaccio, and masters of an
earlier date than his, had made the discovery of the profounder warmth
of colour, or had perceived the value of that rich secret of the colours
of the East. Carpaccio was—some of the Schiavoni paintings prove it—a
colourist even in the great Venetian sense; but tone, in the great
Venetian sense, was to be the work of Titian. In design, however,
Carpaccio’s minstrel angel has a beauty and spirit that Titian could not
rival, something of the freshness of the flower compared with Titian’s
fruit, both rich and both fragrant, but differently. The Elizabethan
lyric has somewhat the same relation of beauties to the lyric of the
late seventeenth-century—Milton’s, Crashaw’s, Lovelace’s, or Vaughan’s:
peach-blossom to peach, and Carpaccio’s angel to Tintoretto’s.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_