of its spiritual and temporal power coincided with the development
of that phase of art of which Michael Angelo sowed the seed in Rome
itself. The germs of Bernini and Tiepolo must be sought in the Sistine
ceiling and in the Moses of San Pietro in Vincoli, however much the
devotees of Michael Angelo may resent the tracing of such a lineage.
But it is hard at this date to be patient with any form of artistic
absolutism, with any critical criteria not based on that sense of
the comparative which is the nineteenth century’s most important
contribution to the function of criticism. It is hard to be tolerant of
that peculiar form of intolerance which refuses to recognize in art
the general law of growth and transformation, or, while recognizing
it, considers it a subject for futile reproach and lamentation. The
art critic must acknowledge a standard of excellence, and must be
allowed his personal preferences within the range of established
criteria: æsthetically, the world is divided into the Gothically and
the classically minded, just as intellectually it is divided into those
who rise to the general idea and those who pause at the particular
instance. The lover of the particular instance will almost always have
a taste for the Gothic, which is the personal and anecdotic in art
carried to its utmost expression, at the cost of synthetic effect; but
if he be at all accessible to general ideas, he must recognize the
futility of battling against the inevitable tendencies of taste and
invention. Granted that, from his standpoint, the art which evolved
from Michael Angelo is an art of decadence: is that a reason for
raging at it or ignoring it? The autumn is a season of decadence;
but even by those who prefer the spring, it has not hitherto been an
object of invective and reprobation. Only when the art critic begins
to survey the modifications of art as objectively as he would study
the alternations of the seasons, will he begin to understand and
to sympathize with the different modes in which man has sought to
formulate his gropings after beauty. If it be true in the world of
sentiment that _il faut aimer pour comprendre_, the converse is true in
the world of art. To enjoy any form of artistic expression one must not
only understand what it tries to express, but know
_The hills where its life rose,
And the sea where it goes._
Thus philosophically viewed, the baroque Rome--the Rome of Bernini,
Borromini and Maderna, of Guercino, the Caracci and Claude
Lorrain--becomes of great interest even to those who are not in
sympathy with the exuberances of seventeenth-century art. In the
first place, the great number of baroque buildings, churches, palaces
and villas, the grandeur of their scale, and the happy incidents of
their grouping, give a better idea than can elsewhere be obtained of
the collective effects of which the style is capable. Thus viewed,
it will be seen to be essentially a style _de parade_, the setting
of the spectacular and external life which had developed from the
more secluded civilization of the Renaissance as some blossom of
immense size and dazzling colour may develop in the atmosphere of the
forcing-house from a smaller and more delicate flower. The process was
inevitable, and the result exemplifies the way in which new conditions
will generate new forms of talent.
It is in moments of social and artistic transformation that original
genius shows itself, and Bernini was the genius of the baroque
movement. To those who study his work in the light of the conditions
which produced it, he will appear as the natural interpreter of that
sumptuous _bravura_ period when the pomp of a revived ecclesiasticism
and the elaborate etiquette of Spain were blent with a growing taste
for country life, for the solemnities and amplitudes of nature.
The mingling of these antagonistic interests has produced an art
distinctive enough to take rank among the recognized “styles”: an art
in which excessive formality and ostentation are tempered by a free
play of line, as though the winds of heaven swept unhindered through
the heavy draperies of a palace. It need not be denied that delicacy
of detail, sobriety of means and the effect of repose were often
sacrificed to these new requirements; but it is more fruitful to
observe how skilfully Bernini and his best pupils managed to preserve
the balance and rhythm of their bold compositions, and how seldom
profusion led to incoherence. How successfully the Italian sense of
form ruled over this semi-Spanish chaos of material, and drew forth
from it the classic line, may be judged from the way in which the
seventeenth-century churches about the Forum harmonize with the ruins
of ancient Rome. Surely none but the most bigoted archæologist would
wish away from that magic scene the façades of San Lorenzo in Miranda
and of Santa Francesca Romana!
In this connection it might be well for the purist to consider what
would be lost if the seventeenth-century Rome which he affects to
ignore were actually blotted out. The Spanish Steps would of course
disappear, with the palace of the Propaganda; so would the glorious
Barberini palace, and Bernini’s neighbouring fountain of the Triton;
the via delle Quattro Fontane, with its dripping river-gods emerging
from their grottoes, and Borromini’s fantastic church of San Carlo at
the head of the street, a kaleidoscope of whirling line and ornament,
offset by the delicately classical circular cortile of the adjoining
monastery. On the Quirinal hill, the palace of the Consulta would go,
and the central portal of the Quirinal (a work of Bernini’s), as well
as the splendid gateway of the Colonna gardens. The Colonna palace
itself, dull and monotonous without, but within the very model of a
magnificent pleasure-house, would likewise be effaced; so would many
of the most characteristic buildings of the Corso--San Marcello, the
Gesù, the Sciarra and Doria palaces, and the great Roman College. Gone,
too, would be the Fountain of Trevi, and Lunghi’s gay little church
of San Vincenzo ed Anastasio, which faces it so charmingly across the
square; gone the pillared court-yard and great painted galleries of
the Borghese palace, and the Fontana dei Termini with its beautiful
group of adjoining churches; the great fountain of the piazza Navona,
Lunghi’s stately façade of the Chiesa Nuova, and Borromini’s Oratory
of San Filippo Neri; the monumental Fountain of the Acqua Paola on the
Janiculan, the familiar “Angels of the Passion” on the bridge of Sant’
Angelo, and, in the heart of the Leonine City itself, the mighty sweep
of Bernini’s marble colonnades and the flying spray of his Vatican
fountains.
This enumeration includes but a small number of the baroque buildings
of Rome, and the villas encircling the city have not been named,
though nearly all, with their unmatched gardens, are due to the art
of this “debased” period. But let the candid sight-seer--even he
who has no tolerance of the seventeenth century, and to whom each
of the above-named buildings may be, individually, an object of
reprobation--let even this sectary of art ask himself how much of
“mighty splendent Rome” would be left, were it possible to obliterate
the buildings erected during the fever of architectural renovation
which raged from the accession of Sixtus V to the last years of the
seventeenth century. Whether or no he would deplore the loss of any one
of these buildings, he would be constrained to own that collectively
they go far toward composing the physiognomy of the Rome he loves.
So far-spreading was the architectural renascence of the seventeenth
century, and so vast were the opportunities afforded to its chief
exponents, that every quarter of the ancient city is saturated with
the _bravura_ spirit of Bernini and Borromini. Some may think that
Rome itself is the best defence of the baroque: that an art which
could so envelop without eclipsing the mighty monuments amid which
it was called to work, which could give expression to a brilliant
present without jarring on a warlike or ascetic past, which could, in
short, fuse Imperial and early Christian Rome with the city of Spanish
ceremonial and post-Tridentine piety, needs no better justification
than the _Circumspice_ of Wren. But even those who remain unconverted,
who cannot effect the transference of artistic and historic sympathy
necessary to a real understanding of seventeenth-century architecture,
should at least realize that the Rome which excites a passion of
devotion such as no other city can inspire, the Rome for which
travellers pine in absence, and to which they return again and again
with the fresh ardour of discovery, is, externally at least, in great
part the creation of the seventeenth century.
V
In Venice the foreground is Byzantine-Gothic, with an admixture
of early Renaissance. It extends from the church of Torcello to
the canvases of Tintoretto. This foreground has been celebrated in
literature with a vehemence and profusion which have projected it still
farther into the public consciousness, and more completely obscured the
fact that there is another Venice, a background Venice, the Venice of
the eighteenth century.
Eighteenth-century Venice was not always thus relegated to the
background. It had its day, when tourists pronounced Saint Mark’s an
example of “the barbarous Gothick,” and were better acquainted with
the ridotto of San Moisè than with the monuments of the Frari. It
is instructive to note that the Venice of that day had no galleries
and no museums. Travellers did not go there to be edified, but to be
amused; and one may fancy with what relief the young nobleman on the
grand tour, sated with the marbles of Rome and the canvases of Parma
and Bologna, turned aside for a moment to a city where enjoyment was
the only art and life the only object of study. But while travellers
were flocking to Venice to see its carnival and gaming-rooms, its
public festivals and private _casini_, a generation of artists were
at work brushing in the gay background of the scene, and quiet hands
were recording, in a series of memorable little pictures, every phase
of that last brilliant ebullition of the _joie de vivre_ before “the
kissing had to stop.”
Longhena and his pupils were the architects of this bright _mise en
scène_, Tiepolo was its great scene-painter, and Canaletto, Guardi
and Longhi were the historians who captured every phrase and gesture
with such delicacy and precision that under their hands the glittering
Venice of the “Toccata of Galuppi” lies outspread like a butterfly with
the bloom on its wings.
Externally, Venice did not undergo the same renovation as Rome. As she
was at the close of the Renaissance, with the impress of Palladio and
Sansovino on her religious and secular architecture, so she remains
to this day. One original architect, Baldassare Longhena, struck the
note of a brilliant _barocchismo_ in the churches of Santa Maria della
Salute and the Scalzi, and in the Pesaro and Rezzonico palaces on the
Grand Canal; and his pupils, developing his manner with infinitely
less talent, gave to Venice the long squat Dogana with its flying
Fortune fronting the Lagoon, the churches of Santa Maria Zobenigo,
San Moisè and the Gesuiti, the Monte di Pietà, and a score of imposing
palaces. The main effect of the city was, however, little modified by
this brief flowering of the baroque. Venice has always stamped every
new fashion with her own personality, and Longhena’s architecture
seems merely the hot-house efflorescence of the style of Sansovino and
Scamozzi. Being, moreover, less under the sway of the Church than any
other Italian state, she was able to resist the architectural livery
with which the great Jesuit subjugation clad the rest of Italy. The
spirit of the eighteenth century therefore expressed itself rather in
her expanding social life, and in the decorative arts which attend
on such drawing-room revivals. Skilful _stuccatori_ adorned the old
saloons and galleries with fresh gilding and mirrors, slender furniture
replaced the monumental cabinets which Venice had borrowed from Spain,
and little _genre_-pictures by Longhi and landscapes by Canaletto and
Battaglia were hung on the large-patterned damask of the boudoir walls.
Religion followed the same lines, adapting itself to the elegancies
of the drawing-room, and six noble families recognized their social
obligations to heaven by erecting the sumptuous church of Santa Maria
degli Scalzi, with its palatial interior, in which one may well imagine
the heavenly hostess saying to her noble donators: “Couvrez-vous, mes
cousins.”
Though begun by Longhena about 1650, the church of the Scalzi is so
identified with the genius of Tiepolo that it may be regarded as an
epitome of eighteenth-century Venetian art. Herr Cornelius Gurlitt,
the most penetrating critic of the Venetian baroque, has indeed justly
pointed out that Longhena was the forerunner and _Geistesgenossen_ of
the great master of eighteenth-century decorative painting, and that
the architect’s bold and sumptuous structural effects might have been
designed as a setting for those unsurpassed audacities of the brush
which, a hundred years later, were to continue and complete them.
On the soaring vault of the Scalzi, above an interior of almost
Palladian elegance and severity, the great painter of atmosphere, the
first of the _pleinairistes_, was required to depict the transportation
of the Holy House from Palestine to Loreto. That Tiepolo, with his
love of ethereal distances, and of cloud-like hues melting into thin
air, should have accepted the task of representing a stone house
borne through the sky by angels, shows a rare sense of mastery; that
he achieved the feat without disaster justifies the audacity of the
attempt.
Tiepolo was above all a lover of open spaces. He liked to suspend
his fluttering groups in great pellucid reaches of sky, and the vast
ceiling of the Scalzi gave him an exceptional opportunity for the
development of this effect. The result is that the angels, whirling
along the Virgin’s house with a vehemence which makes it seem a
mere feather in the rush of their flight, appear to be sweeping
through measureless heights of air above an unroofed building. The
architectural propriety of such a _trompe l’œil_ is not only open to
criticism but perhaps quite indefensible; yet, given the demand for
this particular illusion, who but Tiepolo could have produced it?
The same ethereal effect, but raised to a higher heaven of
translucency, is to be found in the ceiling of the Gesuati (not to be
confounded with the Gesuiti), on the quay of the Zattere. This charming
structure, built in the early eighteenth century by Massari, one of
the pupils of Longhena, but obviously inspired by the great churches
of Palladio, is dedicated to Saint Mary of the Rosary; and Tiepolo, in
three incomparable frescoes, has represented on its ceiling the legend
of Saint Dominick receiving the chaplet from the Virgin in glory.
The guide-books, always on the alert to warn the traveller against an
undue admiration of Tiepolo, are careful to point out that the Mother
of God, bending from her starry throne above the ecstatic saint, looks
like a noble Venetian lady of the painter’s day. No doubt she does.
It is impossible to form an intelligent estimate of Tiepolo’s genius
without remembering that the Catholicism of his time was a religion
of _bon ton_, which aimed to make its noble devotees as much at home
in church as in the drawing-room. He took his models from real life
and composed his celestial scenes without much thought of their inner
significance; yet by sheer force of technique he contrived to impart
to his great religious pictures a glow of supernatural splendour which
makes it not inapt to apply to them the lines of the “Paradiso”:
_Che la luce divina è penetrante
Per l’universo, secondo ch’è degno,
Sichè nulla le puote essere ostante._
VI
It is quite true, however, that Tiepolo was not primarily a devotional
painter. He was first of all a great decorative artist, a master of
emotion in motion, and it probably mattered little to him whether he
was called on to express the passion of Saint Theresa or of Cleopatra.
This does not imply that he executed his task indifferently. Whatever
it was, he threw into it the whole force of his vehement imagination
and incomparable _maestria_; but what he saw in it, whether it was
religious or worldly, was chiefly, no doubt, the opportunity to obtain
new effects of light and line.
If he had a special bent, it was perhaps toward the depicting of
worldly pageants. In the Labia palace on the Canareggio, a building
in which Cominelli, the ablest Venetian architect of the eighteenth
century, nobly continued the “grand manner” of Sansovino and Scamozzi,
Tiepolo found an unequalled opportunity for the exercise of this
side of his talent. Here, in the lofty saloon of the _piano nobile_,
he painted the loves of Antony and Cleopatra transposed to the
key of modern patrician life. He first covered the walls with an
architectural improvisation of porticoes, loggias and colonnades, which
might have been erected to celebrate the “triumph” of some magnificent
Este or Gonzaga. In this splendid setting he placed two great scenes:
Cleopatra melting the pearl, and Antony and Cleopatra landing from
their barge; while every gallery, balcony and flight of steps is filled
with courtiers, pages and soldiers, with dwarfs and blackamoors holding
hounds in leash, and waiting-maids and lacqueys leaning down to see the
pageant.
From this throng of figures the principal characters detach themselves
with a kind of delicate splendour. Royal Egypt,
_On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed_,
in her brocaded gown of white and gold, with a pearl collar about
her throat, and a little toy spaniel playing at her feet, is an
eighteenth-century Dogaressa; Antony is a young Procurator travestied
as a Roman hero; while the turbaned black boy, the maid-servants,
the courtiers, the pages, are all taken _sur le vif_ from some
brilliant rout in a Pisano or Mocenigo palace. And yet--here comes
the wonder--into these “water-flies” and triflers of his day, the
ladies engrossed in cards and scandal, the abatini preoccupied with
their acrostics, the young nobles intriguing with the _prima amorosa_
of San Moisè or engaged in a sentimental correspondence with a nun of
Santa Chiara--into this throng of shallow pleasure-seekers Tiepolo has
managed to infuse something of the old Roman state. As one may think of
Dante beneath the vault of the Gesuati, one may recall Shakespeare in
the presence of these rouged and powdered Venetians. The scene of the
landing suggests with curious vividness the opening scene of “Antony
and Cleopatra”--
_Look where they come!
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet’s fool--_
and one can almost hear the golden Antony, as he brushes aside the
importunate Roman messengers, whispering to his Queen: “What sport
to-night?”
Still more Shakespearian is the scene of the pearl. Cleopatra,
enthroned in state at the banqueting-table, lifts one hand to drop the
jewel into her goblet, and in her gesture and her smile are summed up
all the cruel grace of the “false soul of Egypt.” It is Tiepolo’s
best praise that such phrases and associations as these are evoked by
his art, and that, judged from the painter’s standpoint, it recalls
the glory of another great tradition. Studied in the light of Venetian
painting, Tiepolo is seen to be the direct descendant of Titian and
Veronese. If the intervening century has taken something from the
warmth of his colour, leaving it too often chalky where that of the
Renaissance was golden, he has recovered the lines, the types and the
radiant majesty of the Venetian _cinque cento_, and Veronese’s Venice
Enthroned, in the Ducal Palace, is the direct forbear of his Virgins
and Cleopatras.
VII
It is perhaps no longer accurate to describe Tiepolo as forming a part
of the Venetian background. Recent criticism has advanced him to the
middle distance, and if there are still comparatively few who know his
work, his name is familiar to the cultivated minority of travellers.
Far behind him, however, still on the vanishing-point of the tourist’s
horizon, are the other figures of the Venetian background: Longhi,
Guardi, Canaletto, and their humbler understudies. Of these, Canaletto
alone emerges into relative prominence. His views of Venice are to
be found in so many European galleries, and his name so facilitates
the association of ideas, that, if few appreciate his work, many are
superficially acquainted with it; whereas Guardi, a painter of greater
though more unequal talent, is still known only to the dilettante.
The work of both is invaluable as a “document” for the study of
eighteenth-century Venice; but while Canaletto in his charming canvases
represented only the superficial and obvious aspect of the city, as it
might appear to any appreciative stranger, Guardi, one of the earliest
impressionists, gives the real life of the streets, the _grouillement_
of the crowd in Saint Mark’s square, the many-coloured splash of a
church procession surging up the steps of the Redentore, the flutter of
awnings over market-stalls on a fair-day, or the wide black trail of a
boat-race across the ruffled green waters of the Canalazzo.
Far beneath these two men in talent, but invaluable as a chronicler of
Venetian life, is Canaletto’s son-in-law, Bellotti, who, in a stiff
topographical manner, has faithfully and minutely recorded every
detail of eighteenth-century life on the canals. Being of interest
only to the student of manners, he is seldom represented in the public
galleries; but many private collections in the north of Italy contain
a series of his pictures, giving all the Venetian festivals, from the
Marriage of the Adriatic to the great feat of the _Vola_, which took
place in the Piazzetta on the last Thursday before Lent.
As unknown to the general public as Bellotti, but more sought after by
connoisseurs than any other Italian artist of the eighteenth century
save Tiepolo, is Pietro Longhi, the _genre_-painter, whose exquisite
little transcripts of Venetian domestic life now fetch their weight in
gold at Christie’s or the Hôtel Drouot. Longhi’s talent is a peculiar
one. To “taste” him, as the French say, one must understand the
fundamental naïveté of that brilliant and corrupt Venetian society,
as it is revealed in the comedies of Goldoni and in the memoirs of
contemporary writers. The Venetians were, in fact, amoral rather
than immoral. There was nothing complex or morbid in their vice; it
was hardly vice at all, in the sense which implies the deliberate
saying of “Evil, be thou my good.” Venetian immorality was a mere
yielding to natural instincts, to the _joie de vivre_ of a gay and
sensuous temperament. There was no intellectual depravity in Venice
because there was hardly any intellect: there was no thought of evil
because there was no thought. The fashionable sinners whom posterity
has pictured as revelling in the complexities of vice sat enchanted
before the simple scenes of Goldoni’s drama, and the equally simple
pictures of their favourite _genre_-painter. Nor must it be thought
that this taste for simplicity and innocence was evidence of a subtler
perversion. The French profligate sought in imagination the contrast of
an ideal world, the milk and rose-water world of Gessner’s Idylls and
the _bergerie de Florian_. But Goldoni and Longhi are not idealists,
or even sentimentalists. They draw with a frank hand the life of their
day, from the fisherman’s hut to the patrician’s palace. Nothing can
be more unmistakable than the realism of Goldoni’s dialect plays, and
a people who could enjoy such simple pictures of the life about them
must, in a sense, have led simple lives themselves.