has yet to be acknowledged. The Venetian painters cannot be even
superficially regarded, without developing the sense of colour; nor the
Roman, without enlarging our cognizance of expression; nor the English,
without refining our perception of the evanescent effects in scenery.
Raphael has made infantile grace obvious to unmaternal eyes; Turner opened
to many a preoccupied vision the wonders of atmosphere; Constable guided
our perception of the casual phenomena of wind; Landseer, that of the
natural language of the brute creation; Lely, of the coiffure; Michael
Angelo, of physical grandeur; Rolfe, of fish; Gerard Dow, of water; Cuyp,
of meadows; Cooper, of cattle; Stanfield, of the sea; and so on through
every department of pictorial art. Insensibly these quiet but persuasive
teachers have made every phase and object of the material world
interesting, environed them with more or less of romance, by such
revelations of their latent beauty and meaning; so that, thus instructed,
the sunset and the pastoral landscape, the moss-grown arch and the craggy
seaside, the twilight grove and the swaying cornfield, an old mill, a
peasant, light and shade, form and feature, perspective and anatomy, a
smile, a gesture, a cloud, a waterfall, weather-stains, leaves,
deer--every object in nature, and every impress of the elements, speaks
more distinctly to the eye, and more effectively to the imagination.
The vicissitudes which sometimes attend a picture or statue furnish no
inadequate materials for narrative interest. Amateur collectors can unfold
a tale in reference to their best acquisitions which outvies fiction.
Beckford's table-talk abounded in such reminiscences. An American artist,
who had resided long in Italy, and made a study of old pictures, caught
sight at a shop window in New Orleans of an 'Ecce Homo' so pathetic in
expression as to arrest his steps and engross his attention. Upon inquiry,
he learned that it had been purchased of a soldier fresh from Mexico,
after the late war between that country and the United States; he bought
it for a trifle, carried it to Europe, and soon authenticated it as an
original Guercino, painted for the royal chapel in Madrid, and sent
thence by the government to a church in Mexico, whence, after centuries,
it had found its way, through the accidents of war, to a pawnbroker's shop
in Louisiana. A lady in one of our eastern cities, wishing to possess, as
a memorial, some article which had belonged to a deceased neighbour, and
not having the means, at the public sale of her effects, to bid for an
expensive piece of furniture, contented herself with buying for a few
shillings a familiar chimney-screen. One day she discovered a glistening
surface under the flowered paper which covered it, and when this was torn
away, there stood revealed a picture of 'Jacob and Rachel at the Well,' by
Paul Veronese; doubtless thus concealed with a view to its secret removal
during the first French Revolution. The missing Charles First of Velasquez
was lately exhibited in this country, and the account its possessor gives
of the mode of its discovery and the obstacles which attended the
establishment of its legal ownership in England is a remarkable
illustration both of the tact of the connoisseur and the mysteries of
jurisprudence.[10]
Political vicissitudes not only cause pictures to emigrate like their
owners, but to change their costume--if we may so call a frame,--with
equal celerity: that which now encloses Peale's Washington, at Princeton,
once held the portrait of George the Third; and there is an elaborate old
frame which holds the likeness of a New England poet's grandfather whence
was hurriedly taken the portrait of Governor Hutchinson, in anticipation
of a domiciliary visit from the 'Sons of Liberty.'
There is scarcely, indeed, an artist or a patron of art, of any eminence,
who has not his own 'story of a picture.' Like all things of beauty and of
fame, the very desire of possession which a painting excites, and the
interest it awakens, give rise to some costly sacrifice, or incidental
circumstance, which associates the prize with human fortune and sentiment.
A friend of mine, in exploring the more humble class of boarding-houses in
one of our large commercial towns, in search of an unfortunate relation,
found himself, while expecting the landlady, absorbed in a portrait on the
walls of a dingy back parlour. The furniture was of the most common
description. A few smutched and faded annuals, half-covered with dust, lay
on the centre-table, beside an old-fashioned astral lamp, a cracked
porcelain vase of wax-flowers, a yellow satin pincushion embroidered with
tarnished gold-lace, and an album of venerable hue filled with hyperbolic
apostrophes to the charms of some ancient beauty; which, with the
dilapidated window-curtains, the obsolete sideboard, the wooden effigy of
a red-faced man with a spyglass under his arm, and the cracked alabaster
clock-case on the mantel, all bespoke an impoverished establishment, so
devoid of taste that the beautiful and artistic portrait seemed to have
found its way there by a miracle. It represented a young and _spirituelle_
woman, in the costume, so elegant in material and formal in mode, which
Copley has immortalized; in this instance, however, there was a French
look about the coiffure and robe. The eyes were bright with intelligence
chastened by sentiment, the features at once delicate and spirited; and
altogether the picture was one of those visions of blended youth, grace,
sweetness, and intellect, from which the fancy instinctively infers a tale
of love, genius, or sorrow, according to the mood of the spectator.
Subdued by his melancholy errand, and discouraged by a long and vain
search, my friend, whose imagination was quite as excitable as his taste
was correct, soon wove a romance around the picture. It was evidently not
the work of a novice; it was as much out of place in this obscure and
inelegant domicile, as a diamond set in filigree, or a rose among pigweed.
How came it there? who was the original? what her history and her fate?
Her parentage and her nurture must have been refined; she must have
inspired love in the chivalric; perchance this was the last relic of an
illustrious exile, the last memorial of a princely house.
This reverie of conjecture was interrupted by the entrance of the
landlady. My friend had almost forgotten the object of his visit; and when
his anxious inquiries proved vain, he drew the loquacious hostess into
general conversation, in order to elicit the mystery of the beautiful
portrait. She was a robust, gray-haired woman, with whose constitutional
good-nature care had waged a long and partially successful war. That
indescribable air which speaks of better days was visible at a glance; the
remnants of bygone gentility were obvious in her dress; she had the
peculiar manner of one who had enjoyed social consideration; and her
language indicated familiarity with cultivated society; yet the anxious
expression habitual to her countenance, and the bustling air of her
vocation which quickly succeeded conversational repose, hinted but too
plainly straitened circumstances and daily toil. But what struck her
present curious visitor more than these casual traits were the remains of
great beauty in the still lovely contour of the face, the refined lines of
her mouth, and the depth and varied play of the eyes. He was both
sympathetic and ingenious, and ere long gained the confidence of his
auditor. The unfeigned interest and the true perception he manifested in
speaking of the portrait rendered him, in its owner's estimation, worthy
to know the story his own intuition had so nearly divined. The original
was Theodosia, the daughter of Aaron Burr. His affection for her was the
redeeming fact of his career and character. Both were anomalous in our
history. In an era remarkable for patriotic self-sacrifice, he became
infamous for treasonable ambition; among a phalanx of statesmen
illustrious for directness and integrity, he pursued the tortuous path of
perfidious intrigue; in a community where the sanctities of domestic life
were unusually revered, he bore the stigma of unscrupulous libertinism.
With the blood of his gallant adversary and his country's idol on his
hands, the penalties of debt and treason hanging over him, the fertility
of an acute intellect wasted on vain expedients--an outlaw, an adventurer,
a plausible reasoner with one sex and fascinating betrayer of the other,
poor, bereaved, contemned,--one holy, loyal sentiment lingered in his
perverted soul--love for the fair, gifted, gentle being who called him
father. The only disinterested sympathy his letters breathe is for her;
and the feeling and sense of duty they manifest offer a remarkable
contrast to the parallel record of a life of unprincipled schemes, misused
talents, and heartless amours. As if to complete the tragic antithesis of
destiny, the beloved and gifted woman who thus shed an angelic ray upon
that dark career was, soon after her father's return from Europe, lost in
a storm at sea, while on her way to visit him, thus meeting a fate which,
even at this distance of time, is remembered with pity. Her wretched
father bore with him, in all his wanderings and through all his remorseful
exile, her picture--emblem of filial love, of all that is beautiful in the
ministry of woman, and all that is terrible in human fate. At length he
lay dangerously ill in a garret. He had parted with one after another of
his articles of raiment, books, and trinkets, to defray the expenses of a
long illness; Theodosia's picture alone remained; it hung beside him--the
one talisman of irreproachable memory, of spotless love, and of undying
sorrow; he resolved to die with this sweet relic of the loved and lost in
his possession; there his sacrifices ended. Life seemed slowly ebbing;
the unpaid physician lagged in his visits; the importunate landlord
threatened to send this once dreaded partisan, favoured guest, and
successful lover to the almshouse; when, as if the spell of woman's
affection were spiritually magnetic, one of the deserted old man's early
victims--no other than she who spoke--accidentally heard of his extremity,
and, forgetting her wrongs, urged by compassion and her remembrance of the
past, sought her betrayer, provided for his wants, and rescued him from
impending dissolution. In grateful recognition of her Christian kindness,
he gave her all he had to bestow--Theodosia's portrait.
The indiscriminate disparagement of the old masters which has so long been
the paradox of Ruskin's beautiful rhetoric, Haydon's suicidal devotion to
the 'grand style,' Mrs. Jameson's gracious exposition of religious art,
and the extravagant encomiums which the fashionable painter of the hour
elicits from accredited critical journals, indicate the antagonistic
theories and tastes that prevail; and yet these are all authentic and
recognized oracles of artistic knowledge--all more or less true; and yet,
in a comparative view, offering such violent contrasts as to baffle and
discourage a novice in search of the legitimate picturesque.
So thoroughly identified with the possibility and probability of deception
is the very name of a picture-dealer, that to the multitude an 'Old
Master' is a bugbear;--the tricks of this trade form a staple of Paris
correspondents and travelled _raconteurs_. The details of manufacture in
perhaps this most lucrative branch of spurious traffic are patent; and,
although the legitimate products of world-renowned painters are
authenticated and on record, scarcely a month passes without some
extensive fraud. The amateur in literature, sculpture, and music, is
comparatively free from this perpetual danger; the sense of mystery does
not baffle his enthusiasm; and while the pictorial votary or victim is
disputing about an 'Andrea del Sarto,' or a 'Teniers,' or bewildered by
the conflicting theories of rival artists in regard to colour, tone,
composition, foreshortening, chiaro-oscuro, &c., he enjoys, without
misgiving, the _noi ci darem_ of Mozart, revels over the faded leaves of
his first edition of a classic, or discourses fluently about the line of
beauty in his copy of a Greek statue. 'God Almighty's daylight,' wrote
Constable, 'is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old
dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart-grease,
tar, and snuff of candle.' The practical lesson derivable from these
anomalous results of 'Pictures' is that we should rely upon our individual
impressions, enjoy what appeals gratefully to our consciousness, repudiate
hackneyed and conventional terms, judgments, and affectations, and boldly
declare with the poet, before the picture which enchants us,--
'I leave to learned fingers and wise hands
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the indescribable;
I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream
Wherein that image shall for ever dwell;
The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream
That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam.'
There are heads of men and women delineated hundreds of years ago, so knit
into the mystic web of memory and imagination, so familiar through
engravings, cameos, and other reproductive forms of art, and so identified
with tragic experience, ideal aspiration, or heroic deeds, that the first
view of the originals is an epoch in life; we seem to behold them down a
limitless vista of time, and they appeal to our consciousness like the
faces of the long-loved, long-lost, and suddenly restored. It is as if we
had entered a spiritual realm, and were greeted by the vanished idols of
the heart, or the 'beings of the mind and not of clay,' once arbiters of
destiny and oracles of genius. Beatrice Cenci, through soulful eyes,
infinitely deepened by a life of tears dried up by the fever of intense
anguish, looks the incarnation of beauty and woe--beauty we have adored in
dreams, woe we have realized through sympathy. With the first sight of
that alabaster skin, those lips quivering with pain, those golden locks,
the theme of poets, that corpse-like headband; the fragility, the fervour,
the sensibility, and the chaste, ineffable grace; above all, the soulful
world of terror, pity, and meekness in the lustrous and melancholy orbs,
how familiar, yet how new, how pathetic, yet sublime! The hoary wretch who
called her child, seems lurking somewhere in that hushed and sombre
palace; the brother whose fair brow was lacerated by parental violence;
the resigned mother, the infernal banquet, the prison, the tribunal, the
bloody axe, flit with fearful distinctness between our entranced vision
and the picture; for tradition, local association, Shelley's muse, the
secret pen of the annalist, and the pencil of Guido, combine to make
absolutely real an unparalleled story of loveliness and persecution,
maidenhood and martyrdom. It is but recently that the true history of this
picture has been authenticated. According to Guerazzi, who has minutely
explored contemporary archives, the 'study' from which it was painted,
Ubaldo Ubaldini made from memory, to console his sister for the loss of
Beatrice. He was one of the many artists who loved the beautiful victim,
with the passion of youth and the fancy of a painter; one of the
courageous but inadequate band who conspired to rescue her at the
scaffold;[11] and it was long believed that he died of indignant grief
after the catastrophe. Imagine him with the shadow of that mighty sorrow
upon his soul, his hand inspired by tender recollection, secluded with her
image stamped on his broken heart, and patiently reproducing those
delicate features and that anguished expression--his last offering to her
he so quickly followed into the valley of death! His 'study' fell into the
hands of Maffei Barberini, and furnished Guido Reni the materials for
this, his most effective and endeared creation. Its marvellous, almost
magnetic expression, doubtless gave rise to the belief, so long current,
that he sketched Beatrice on her way to execution; but the later
explanation is more accordant with probability and more satisfactory to
the mind, for such a work requires for the conditions of success both the
inspiration of love and the aptitude of skill. Ubaldini furnished one, and
Guido the other.
Many travellers, especially women, have expressed great disappointment
with the 'Fornarina.' They cannot associate a figure so much the reverse
of ethereal, and charms so robust, with the refined taste and delicate
person of Raffaelo. But such objections are founded on an imaginative not
philosophic theory of love. There never was a genuine artist who, in
matters of feeling, was not a child of Nature; and we have but to
recognize the idiosyncrasies of poet and painter to find a key to their
human affinities. What a peculiar interest we feel in the objects of love
whose affection cheered, and whose sympathy inspired those products of pen
and pencil, which have become part of our mental being! I have seen a
crowd of half-bashful and wholly intent English girls watch the carriage
which contained the obese, yet still fair-haired Countess, whose youthful
charms so long made Byron a methodical hermit at Ravenna; and the
respectable matron who, as a child, was deemed by sentimentalists in
Germany and her own exaggerated fancy the object of Goëthe's senile
passion, was long courted on that account, at tea-drinkings, by foreign
visitors enamoured of _Faust_ and _Wilhelm Meister_. Still more natural is
the sentiment which lures us to earnest acquaintance with the countenance,
on which he who gave an angelic semblance to maternity and caught the most
gracious aspect of childhood used to gaze with rapture; the eye that
responded to his glance, the smile that penetrated his heart, and were
fixed on his canvas. The impression which the 'Fornarina' of the Tribune
instantly gives, is that of genuine womanhood: there is generosity, a
repose, a world of latent emotion, an exuberance of sympathetic power, in
the full impassioned eye, the broad symmetrical bosom, the rich olive
tint; it is precisely the woman to harmonize by her simple presence, and
to soothe or exalt by her spontaneous love, the mood of a man of nervous
organization and ardent temper. There is a tranquil self-possession in the
face and figure which the sensitive and excitable artist especially finds
refreshing--a candid nature such as alone can inspire such a man's
confidence, a majestic simplicity peculiar to the best type of Roman
women, more delightful to the over-tasked brain and sensibilities than the
highest culture of an artificial kind; and there is the fresh,
unperverted, richly-developed, harmoniously-united heart and physique,
which, notwithstanding the modern standard of female charms, is the
normal and the essential basis of honest, natural affinity. I could never
turn, in the Florence Gallery, from the pale, delicately-rounded, ideal
brow, the almost pleading eye, and the cherubic lips of Raffaelo, instinct
with the needs as well as the immortal longings of genius, to the mellow,
calm, self-sustained, and healthful 'Fornarina,' without fancying the
support, the rest, the inexhaustible comfort--in Othello's sense of that
expressive word--which the sensitive artist could find in the cheerful
baker's daughter, the irritable seeker in the serene and satisfied woman,
the delicate in the strong, the gentle in the hearty, the ideal in the
real, the poetic in the practical, the spiritual in the human; and I
contemplated her noble contour, her contented smile, her beaming cheek,
and eye undeepened by the experience that withers as it teaches--yet
soulful with latent emotion, with an ever-increasing sense of her native
claims to Raphael's love.
Musical organizations are especially sensitive to the pictorial spell; the
letters of Mendelssohn indicate how it influenced his development. Writing
from Venice of church services he attended, he says:--'Nothing impressed
me with more solemn awe than when, on the very spot for which they were
originally created, the "Presentation of Mary and the Child in the
Temple," "The Assumption of the Virgin," "The Entombment of Christ," and
"The Martyrdom of St. Peter," in all their grandeur, gradually steal forth
out of the darkness in which the long lapse of time has veiled them. Often
I feel a musical inspiration, and since I came here have been busily
engaged in composition.' And from Florence he writes:--'There is a small
picture here which I discovered for myself. It is by Fra Bartolomeo, who
must have been a man of most devout, tender, and earnest spirit. The
figures are finished in the most exquisite and consummate manner. You can
see in the picture itself that the pious master has taken delight in
painting it, and in finishing the most minute details, probably with a
view of giving it away to gratify some friend; we feel as if the painter
belonged to it, and still ought to be sitting before his work, or had this
moment left.' This personal magnetism about pictures is an authentic
evidence of their vital relation to character, and it is felt often in an
incredible way by the imaginative and susceptible. The same gifted and
generous composer, who thus wrote of Titian and Fra Bartolomeo, speaks of
the impression he received from Raphael's portrait by himself:--'Youthful,
pale, delicate, and with such inward aspirations, such longing and
wistfulness in the mouth and eyes, that it is as if you could see into his
very soul; that he cannot succeed in expressing all that he sees and
feels, and is thus impelled to go forward, and that he must die an early
death;--all this is written on his mournful, suffering, yet fervid
countenance.'
Vandyke's portraits of Charles the First impress the spectator with regal
fanaticism, and a tragic destiny, more than some of the written histories
of his reign. The exquisite hands of Leonardo's 'Gioconde' are as eloquent
of feminine grace and sensibility as the most elaborate description.
Correggio's 'Magdalen,' in the remorseful _abandon_ and beautiful sadness
of its expression, reveals her who 'loved much,' repented, and was
forgiven. Giovanni di Medici, in the Uffizzi Gallery, fulfils to the
imagination the ideal of mediæval Italian soldiership. Stuart's
'Washington' embodies the serene conscience, the self-control, the humane
dignity and birthright of command, which consecrate our peerless chief;
and Delaroche's 'Napoleon Crossing the Alps' perpetuates the intense
purpose and insatiable ambition that won so many battles and died of
anxiety on an ocean-rock. Such instances, which might easily be
multiplied, prove how a single department of art, and that the least
estimated, is allied to history, patriotism, and sentiment, and capable of
touching their secret springs and unveiling their limitless perspective at
a glance. Guercino's 'Hagar' is a biblical poem. Hamlet's filial
reproaches borrow their keenest sting from two 'counterfeit presentments,'
and Trumbull's faithful and assiduous pencil has transmitted the
individualities of our Revolutionary drama. And thus the art of
portraiture, even in its general relations, may become, through
illustrious subjects and rare fidelity, the romance which association of
ideas breeds from reality.