CHAPTER VII

VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN

On the splendor of Venice—Italo-Byzantine painters of the 14th

Century—Paduan, Veronese, and Umbrian Painters at Venice—Jacopo

Bellini—Squarcione’s school at Padua, Carlo Crivelli—Andrea

Mantegna, mentor for Northern Italy—Antonello da Messina’s

Realism—The flowering of the old Narrative School in Gentile

Bellino—Giovanni Bellini—The backward Vivarini—Carpaccio and the

end of the old Narrative Style—Literary background of Giorgione’s

Art—Giorgione of Castelfranco.

When, about the middle of the fifth century, a pitiful throng of

refugees sought safety from Attila and his Huns in the fens at the head

of the Adriatic, they took with them what was left of the constructive

genius of the Roman Empire. They raised amid the lagoons a healthful and

convenient city, which in the course of centuries became the most

beautiful in Europe. They developed a strong and wise oligarchy, under

forms sufficiently democratic to satisfy the people. They attained an

extraordinary capacity for diplomacy and overseas trade—a brilliant

commercialized civilization. Secure in their isolation and wealth, the

Venetians mediated the long strife between the popes and the Teutonic

emperors, making favorable terms with both. Venice enjoyed a wholly

exceptional political stability. No other commune of Europe could have

fittingly assumed the title, Serenissima. Her galleys and sailing craft

plied to Candia, Rhodes, Smyrna, Alexandretta, Constantinople. Down the

Adriatic to Malta, her trading stations shone white under the yellow

cliffs. Her incoming ships brought back the splendid rugs and silks and

embroideries from the Levant, the beautiful potteries of Asia Minor,

Persia and distant China, the veined marbles and porphyries of Egypt and

of Istria to build into her churches and palaces. She was astute and

powerful enough to divert a crusade into a plundering expedition against

her rival, Constantinople. And thus she got the four antique bronze

horses still chafing above the portico of St. Mark’s and many a relic of

the later Byzantine splendor. Her doors ever opened to the Orient. Her

quays swarmed with turbaned traders. The Greeks had their churches and

confraternities at Venice, and so had the Slavonians. For articles of

luxury the northern caravans came to Venice over the Brenner to load

from the German warehouses on the Grand Canal.

So stable, rich and proud a city was singularly slow in producing its

own art. Venice was never primarily a manufacturing community, and from

the first she expected to import most articles of luxury and display.

Thus when the manydomed Basilica rose over the body of her patron, St.

Mark, Venice called masters from Constantinople to enrich the surfaces

with mosaics, and when, towards the end of the fourteenth century, she

wished to picture the new Palace of the Doges, she called not her own

artists to the task, but those of Padua, Verona and distant Fabriano.

Her originality and greatness in painting do not clearly assert

themselves until about 1475 in the work of the brothers Bellini, and by

1577, the year of Titian’s death, the period of her artistic supremacy

has passed. The whole development is comprised within a century; its

acceleration is even more remarkable than the tardiness of its

appearance. In three generations Venetian painting made the progress

that had required six in Tuscany, and the whole preparatory period,

which in Florence stretched over a century and three-quarters, is

included in the single life of such a master as Giovanni Bellini.

This means that Venetian painting followed simpler and more unperturbed

ideals than that of Florence. The composure, complacency, and

self-centered quality of the Venetians was a source of strength to their

artists and as well a limitation. The city stuck closely to its chief

business of gaining greatly in order to live magnificently. And unlike

Florence, Venice interprets magnificence in the most material terms, in

terms of velvet and veined marbles, fair skins and lustrous hair, in

feasting and measured revelry, grave and gentle manners, colorful

pageantry in honor of God, his saints and the Serenissima Republica. You

will not find poets, scholars, scientists a-plenty at Venice. Her

painters have no tendency to be also architects, sculptors,

mathematicians, theorists in æsthetics; they stick placidly to the main

business of painting. And perhaps just because the Venetian painter

refused to be diverted from the problems proper to his craft, his

progress was so rapid and assured, and the Venetian school, simply as

painting, the most beautiful school of painting the world has ever seen.

It was written in the lagoon itself that Venetian painting should be a

school of color. Long before the marble and porphyry palaces and the

shining bridges of Renaissance Venice spanned the canals, the brown

water gave its satiny reflections of rude hut, coppered galley, tawny

sail, and, in days of complete calm, of the serrated ivory of the Julian

Alps or the velvety azure of the Euganean Hills. As the city grew

palatially, the marble and gold of the palace fronts, and spires and

domes, with the buff and red of soaring bell towers, further enriched

the shimmering of the lagoon. Its waters were ruffled not merely by

winds blending and effacing the weaving of borrowed colors, but also by

the passing of gilded processional barges with rhythmical oars

celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin or the marriage of Venice to

the Adriatic.

Ashore the splendor was hardly less. Along the balustrades of

innumerable little bridges, the rose or yellow marble got an ineffable

finish from the touch of countless hands. Dusky archways gave upon

courts encrusted with variegated marbles, porphyry and mosaics. In the

gloomy streets, gay pictorial frescoes enlivened the fronts of the less

pretentious houses. In the great Piazza of St. Mark and other open

spaces, often passed in solemn procession the religious confraternities

called Schools, the members garbed with a splendor rare even in the

Renaissance. There were clubs of young fops, not yet broken to the

paternal commerce, who gave themselves to the invention and display of

the finest tailoring and haberdashery. And the unorganized kindred

activities of the women of all ages were as effective from the point of

view of social display. Such was the spectacle that Venice offered the

painter for record and even more for inspiration. And the greatness of

the Venetian painters lay in their capacity to lend to this chiefly

material splendor their own kind of ideality.

[Illustration:

FIG. 208. Presentation; Flight to Egypt; Miracle at Cana; Temptation.

From an Italo-Byzantine Altar-front of about 1350.—_Trieste._

]

When Venetian painting about the year 1350 made its first timid

assertions of originality, the leading influence was that of the late

Byzantine artists of the Slavonian coast and the Ionian Islands. We see

their narrative painting assuming a very slightly Italian guise in the

composite altar-front preserved in the museum of Trieste. Figure 208.

Its date cannot be very late in the fourteenth century, and the

stereotyped religious compositions represent models vividly before the

Venetian painter up to the Renaissance. Such Venetian masters as Paolo,

active from 1332 to 1358, and Lorenzo, whose work falls a generation

later, make slight and external improvements on the Byzantine

manner.[70] They reject its more rigid formulas—the gold web over

drapery, the multiplied small folds, the painfully schematized muscles.

They add on their own account radiant blond coloring, splendid brocades,

more gorgeous fashions of gilding, and a new type of architectural

arrangement. The elaborate altar-backs with perforated pilasters, and

flamboyant arches and cresting; with full-length figures below and

half-length of like scale above, become the standard form of Venetic

_ancona_ about 1350 and remains so for nearly a century and a half. We

may see the form, with the upper central panel modernized, in Lorenzo’s

Annunciation of 1357, in the Venetian Academy. The effect depends

largely on the frame-maker. Such altar-pieces are made more thoughtfully

by Caterino and Donato and indeed persist in all Northern Italy until

after 1450. Figure 211. We may study a similar type of _ancona_ with

narratives instead of single figures in the very accomplished and

colorful work doubtfully ascribed to Nicolo Semitecolo, towards the

beginning of the new century. Though the narratives follow pretty

closely the old Byzantine requirements, the whole surface shows the

flower-bed variety and harmony of color which is proper to Venice. Such

work, as a blend of Byzantine and Gothic features, repeats what Siena

had effected with far greater originality and _finesse_ about seventy

years earlier under Duccio and Simone Martini. Modena and Bologna and

Padua through the latter half of the fourteenth century share this

development, but again on a basis of rather marked inferiority to Siena.

The Venetian authorities were fully conscious of the backwardness of

their own artists. When the Ducal Palace was finished in 1365, they

called to fresco its great hall not any of the various local followers

of Paolo and Lorenzo, but Guariento from neighboring Padua. He executed

the great Coronation of the Virgin which was later damaged by fire and

covered by Tintoretto’s Paradise. The temporary removal of Tintoretto’s

canvas showed for a time the crumbling remains of Guariento’s fresco. It

is in an elaborate Gothic-Byzantine style and abounds in incidental

architectural ornament. Below the ceremony of the Coronation there is a

screen of pierced marble niches occupied by graceful angels. It is a

motive that will often recur in the new century. On the whole Guariento

brings little new to Venice, but he does demonstrate the decorative

possibilities of the local style. His influence was restricted because

the Venetians soon ceased to work in fresco.

The impetus necessary to lift Venetian painting out of its routine

condition was supplied in the fifteenth century by Gentile da Fabriano

and Pisanello. Gentile, who worked in the Ducal Palace about 1410,

commanded both the exquisiteness of the Sienese style and its narrative

breadth. Unhappily his Venetian frescoes which are lauded in

contemporary accounts have perished. His sweetness and ideality are

attested by various Madonnas. We may infer his raciness and vivacity as

a narrative painter from the predella of his master work, the Adoration

of the Kings (1423). The little panel of the Presentation in the Temple

is admirable for its architectural inscenation and for the actuality of

its incidental figures. We have a man whose eye takes in the look of

things. This is even more the case with Pisanello (1397–1455), who

worked a little later in the same hall. He has severe notions of

draughtsmanship, as befitted the greatest of all medallists. He brought

from Verona, where his artistic ideas were formed, the ideal of

elaborate and credible setting, especially as regards the relations of

figures to architecture. In his ruined fresco of St. George of Verona,

Figure 209, we may catch his quality. But the Veronese style is really

better represented by such immediate predecessors as Avanzo and

Altichiero. Jointly about 1385 they frescoed the great Oratorio of St.

George at Padua. Especially remarkable are the legends of the titular

saint, Figure 210. Through repainting one may still discern the dignity

and discretion of the arrangement, and in particular the just and

tasteful elaboration of contemporary architectural features. Florentine

and Sienese frescoes of the time are hardly as accomplished. The festal

value of the architecture persists as a leading ideal of the school of

Verona down to her greatest master, Paolo Veronese, and the ideal was

taken up with conviction at Venice—became indeed the distinctive feature

of her narrative school.

[Illustration:

FIG. 210. Altichiero of Verona. St. George baptizes the Family of the

Princess. Fresco.—_Oratory of St. George, Padua._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 209. Pisanello. St. George meets the Princess. Fresco.—_Sant’

Anastasia. Verona._

]

Jacopo Bellini,[71] the first great painter whom Venice herself

developed, was the pupil of Gentile da Fabriano and also profoundly

influenced by the Veronese. Thus he combines in himself the two main

strains of early Venetian painting—its desire for sweetness and its

desire for vivacity and elaborate truthfulness in narrative. Alongside

of Jacopo Bellini worked the faithful imitators of Paolo, Lorenzo, and

Guariento. Such artists as Jacobello del Fiore and Michele Giambono,

while often inherently attractive, are of small importance. Their

contemporary, Antonio Vivarini, though in most ways less sensitively the

artist, prepared the way for the conservative school of Murano.

Antonio’s quality is somewhat obscured by his habit of working with a

German partner, Giovanni. Yet the part of Antonio, as represented by his

altar-piece in the Vatican, dated 1464, Figure 211, seems to have been

merely to build cautiously on the work of Guariento and Lorenzo. His

nephew, Alvise, and his younger brother, Bartolommeo, become influential

figures towards the end of the century.

The hope of the future rested with that far more searching spirit,

Jacopo Bellini. He gave to art not merely his own indefatigable

curiosity but two sons of genius, Gentile and Giovanni. All the leading

tendencies of the Early Renaissance in Venice originate with this

remarkable family. We first meet Jacopo Bellini in 1424 as an assistant

of Gentile da Fabriano and he worked on till 1470. The great decorative

canvases which he made for the Ducal Palace, and for the Schools of St.

Mark and St. John the Evangelist have perished, while the few pictures

remaining from his brush are mostly of late date and inadequately

express his ambitions. His Madonnas at the Uffizi, Venice, Paris, and

Milan retain the exquisite sweetness of his master’s vein. Their modest

grace may be felt in the little Madonna, Figure 212, at Venice. Of

admirable gentleness and spirit is the ornate Annunciation painted in

1444, in Sant’ Alessandro at Brescia. Its predella panels, although

probably of student execution, show how definitely his narrative

compositions derive from Altichiero and the Veronese.

[Illustration:

FIG. 211. Antonio Vivarini. St. Antony (polychromed wood statue) and

Saints. 1464.—_Vatican Gallery, Rome._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 212. Jacopo Bellini. Madonna.—_Venice._

]

But we get the full stature of the man, not from the minor paintings

which chance has spared, but from the two extraordinary sketch books

respectively in the Louvre and the National Gallery. Here we trace his

day by day exercises. Perspective is his constant concern. He piles up

elaborate architecture with an extravagance which even his Veronese

exemplars never ventured. The subject matter gets lost in the setting.

The Annunciation becomes a mere episode in an architectural

extravaganza. So does the Feast of Herod, Figure 213. The buildings

generally are of ornate Early Renaissance type. He loves to adorn them

with swags and statues and low reliefs. Sometimes he sketches actual

Roman sculptures and coins, medallions, and inscriptions. He makes

strange, stern backgrounds for his outdoor scenes, with twisted

stratified mountains and stately distant cities. He loves wild beasts;

draws capital horses for St. George or for Perseus. He is a bit of a

humanist, doing bacchanals, with mischievous satyrs. There are a few

fine portraits and designs for Madonnas. Thus these sketches with the

silver point and quill pen anticipate every mode of the next

generation—the narrative style, the altar-piece, the pastoral mythology.

One feels in the sketch books a nature rather alert and curious than

thorough—a certain lack of concentration and real seriousness. But the

sketches evince an inexhaustible fancy, and if they are ever published

cheaply, they should rival in popularity the most loved picture-books of

fairyland. Jacopo was not only a versatile but a travelled artist.

Active for a time at the brilliant court of Lionello d’Este at Ferrara,

he had also visited Florence and probably Rome. But his most important

move as regards the history of art, was to Padua, about 1453. There the

whole course of Venetian painting was shaped by the apparently casual

fact that an austere young painter named Andrea Mantegna fell in love

with Jacopo’s daughter, Niccolosia, and married her. Through that

alliance, the most formidable of brothers-in-law became the artistic

mentor of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

[Illustration:

FIG. 213. Jacopo Bellini. The Feast of Herod (in upper right

loggia).—_From the Paris Sketch Book._

]

For a moment, indeed, Padua and Mantegna quite efface Venice in

interest. For ten years before this lucky marriage, Padua had been the

scene of intense artistic activity. Donatello, the most powerful realist

sculptor of Florence, was at work on the bronze reliefs for the altar of

Sant’ Antonio, and on the Gattamelata statue. He gave young Mantegna a

strong impulse in the direction of constructive realism. Such Florentine

realists as Paolo Uccello and Fra Filippo Lippi were also transient

visitors at this time. And Padua, ever an academic city, saw the first

systematic art school started by a shrewd and able master, Francesco

Squarcione. Squarcione collected Roman marbles and bronzes, concerned

himself with the new mysteries of perspective, foreshortening and

precise anatomy. He made his students acquire a line with the resiliency

of bronze. He made them copy minutely veined marbles and sculptured

reliefs. He insisted that every picture should have garlands of laurel

mixed with vegetables and fruits. The whole surface had to be brought to

the lustrous surface of an enamel. Severe teaching usually attracts good

pupils. So it was in Squarcione’s case; he had scores of pupils from all

of the Venetic region and even from Dalmatia beyond the Adriatic. He was

too sensible to paint much himself; it didn’t pay so successful a

teacher. So the few pictures ascribed to him are either of small

importance or of dubious authenticity. But his stamp is on all his

pupils. What his teaching meant may be grasped in early Mantegna and

even better in a painter who never emancipated himself—Carlo Crivelli,

of Venice, “Eques Aureatus.”

[Illustration:

FIG. 214. Carlo Crivelli. Madonna. Angels bearing Symbols of the

Passion.—_Verona._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 215. Carlo Crivelli. Pietà.—_Boston._

]

Crivelli’s[72] fame was great but provincial. Originally most of his

altar-pieces adorned churches of the Adriatic Marches. Dozens have

passed thence to the museums of Europe and America. One and all they

seem less painted things than the most splendid of mineral productions.

It is incredible that mere brush and paint can achieve so tense a line

and such jewel-like surfaces. Entirely typical is an early Madonna, at

Verona, Figure 214. The great ancona of 1476 in the National Gallery

shows him faithful to the arrangements of the early Venetians. The

Annunciation, in the same gallery, painted ten years later, reveals him

affected by the narrative tradition of Jacopo Bellini. In America fine

Pietàs at Boston, Figure 215, New York, and in the Johnson Collection,

Philadelphia, exemplify his rectitude and energy. While Mrs. Gardner’s

St. George and the Dragon, as the most fastidious of fairy tales,

consoles us for the absence of this subject among the few pictures of

Jacopo Bellini. From his beginnings about 1460 to his death in 1493,

Carlo Crivelli remained true to his early teaching. Whoever understands

his works has little need to consult further the entirely similar

achievement of such great Ferrarese painters as Marco Zoppo (1440

ca.–1498) and Cosimo Tura (1430 ca.–1495). The influence of Squarcione

passed to the conservative painters at Venice, and influenced the entire

Murano school. We have a resplendent masterpiece of this sort in the

single known work of Antonio da Negroponte, Figure 216, in San Francesco

della Vigna, at Venice. It combines with its evident Squarcionesque

features, the magnificence of the old Gothic-Byzantine style, and much

of the sweetness of Jacopo Bellini. Its date is about 1450, and the

picture is an excellent point of departure for our understanding of the

radical reform that came into Venice and all Lombardy with the activity

of Andrea Mantegna.

[Illustration:

FIG. 216. Fra Antonio da Negroponte. Madonna.—_S. Francesco della

Vigna._

]

Born in 1431 at Vicenza, we find Mantegna[73] enrolled at the tender age

of thirteen in the painters’ guild at Padua. He is described as an

adoptive son of Squarcione. Mantegna was scarcely twenty-four when he

engaged with other fellow pupils to decorate a chapel in the Church of

the Eremitani, the subject being the legends of St. James and St.

Christopher. In the six panels assigned to Mantegna, his quality and

superiority are already manifest. His style is severely archæological

and Roman. He endeavors honestly to reconstruct the times of the

apostles. But his method is more severe than that of the Romans

themselves. The line moves with the slow authority of an engraved

contour. The relief is dry and harsh. There is little sense of

difference between living forms and sculptured figures. The landscape is

built in spiral strata as if worked out of metal. Here transpires

clearly the influence of Jacopo Bellini, which is as evident also in the

ornate architectural settings. The colors are at once dull and garish,

the textures scrupulously studied after Squarcione’s precepts. A most

strenuous art this, and with all its pedantry full of power and dignity.

[Illustration:

FIG. 217. Mantegna. St. James led to Execution. Fresco.—_Eremitani,

Padua._

]

Certain innovations in perspective should be noted. In the fresco, St.

James led to Execution, Figure 217, Mantegna avoids the usual

conventional perspective, which tilts the picture towards the spectator;

and treats the group as if it were on an actual stage set at the height

of the fresco. Thus no ground is seen; the projecting floor cuts off the

feet of the figures; and all vanishing points are precisely set at the

level of the spectator’s eye below. The aim is to create illusion.

[Illustration:

FIG. 218. Andrea Mantegna. Madonna with Saints.—_San Zeno, Verona._

]

Before the completion of the Eremitani frescoes, Mantegna had married

Niccolosia Bellini, had profited largely by her father’s advice, and had

influenced strongly her two brothers, Gentile and Giovanni. They seem to

have been the first eager pupils of the man who was soon to be the

artistic schoolmaster for all Northern Italy. Two years after his

marriage, in 1455, Mantegna liberated himself from legal bondage to

Squarcione, and soon after began the masterpiece of his developed

Renaissance style, the altar-back for San Zeno Maggiore at Verona,

Figure 218. It was finished in 1459, the artist being twenty-eight years

old. It is a little over-rich, finished throughout like a miniature, and

very stately. In arrangement it obeys the artist’s new law of illusion.

The base of the picture is precisely at the level of the eye, so no

floor is seen. The carved classical frame is regarded as the front of an

actual pavillion which is continued in paint. Without the frame, the

architectural perspective of the picture would not explain itself, and

if the picture were set higher or lower all the perspective relations

would be wrong. At Siena, a century and more earlier, the Lorenzetti had

devised this motive of an open box of which the frame is the plastic

front. Mantegna made this sort of illusionism standard for Venice and

all Northern Italy. Its value is open to question, but I believe that

the monumental altar-pieces of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini gain

something in gravity and stability from this careful adjustment of the

perspective to the actual position of the spectator. At any rate it was

the rigid logic and probity of Mantegna that gave to Venetian art

precisely the tonic stimulus it needed.

By thirty he was famous, and yielding to repeated persuasion, he left

Padua for Mantua and the court of the most generous art patrons of the

moment, the Gonzagas. His most notable work for them was the decoration

of the Camera degli Sposi, 1474, in their great palace, and the canvases

of the triumphs of Cæsar, 1481 to 1494, which, sadly damaged and

repainted, are now seen at Hampton Court. The two series represent

strikingly the dual and never completely harmonized strains in

Mantegna’s genius—realism and archaism. He was never more the realist

than in the room decorated in honor of the marriage of Lodovico Gonzaga

and Barbara of Brandenburg, the Camera degli Sposi. The motives are

wholly novel—no religious subjects, nothing mythological, just the

Gonzaga family and their courtiers, sitting in conversation, meeting

ceremoniously, or preparing for the hunt. Nowhere before had such a

consistent use of the principle of illusionism been made, not even in

Roman mural painting of the Antonine age. Mantegna has completely

painted away the real walls of the room, and has replaced the real

architecture by a simulated classical pavillion, with arcades looking

out to the country side and a round opening above. All the figures are

out of doors. To see the scheme properly you must stand precisely in the

centre of the room and turn on your heel. The arrangement in short is

periscopic. As you look up you will see a balcony with cupids, Figure

219, standing on the outside ledge and maids of honor and peacocks

looking down over the balustrade. You see everything feet foremost as if

it were actually there. Then you look out through the arcades where the

view of outside doings is sometimes interrupted by a curtain. Generally

it is drawn aside that you may see these great folk at ease outside

their pleasure house, Figure 220. The portraits are of utmost dignity

and authority. In dealing with real people Mantegna’s style is less

pinched than in his classical decorations. If I have insisted on the

point of illusionism, it is only because the audacious logic of

Correggio and a host of baroque followers for a century and more really

grows out of this scheme at Mantua. You will see the open well with

figures outside the parapet in Correggio’s dome at Parma, and the

figures outside the painted roof in the Convent of St. Paolo. Indeed,

you have only to let the clouds come down through such open roofs and

seat decorative figures on the clouds to arrive at the fully developed

baroque style. And it is odd enough that its most romantic extravagances

are clearly deducible from this rather sober and pedantic illusionism of

Andrea Mantegna.

[Illustration:

FIG. 219. Mantegna. Detail of Ceiling.—_Camera degli Sposi, Mantua._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 220. Mantegna. Portraits of the Gonzaga Family. Fresco.—_Camera

degli Sposi, Mantua._

]

Of the painted cloths representing the Triumphs of Cæsar, Figure 221,

(1484–1492), nine remain in debased condition at Hampton Court, England.

Here the classicism of Mantegna finds its most legitimate expression.

The designs are better seen in the engravings of his school and in the

later woodcut copies by Andreini.

[Illustration:

FIG. 221. Mantegna. Triumph of Cæsar.—_Hampton Court, England._

]

Despite such great commissions, Mantegna lived in something near

poverty. He could never resist a beautiful antique, and he was proud and

difficult in his relations to exacting patrons. His style after his

Roman visit of 1488 to 1490 loses something of its tension and develops

breadth. Perhaps the most impressive picture of this time is the Madonna

of Victory, Figure 222, in the Louvre, which was painted in 1495 to

celebrate Gianfrancesco Gonzaga’s drawn battle with the French at

Fornovo. Its severity is mollified by the graciousness of the evergreen

bower in which the group is set and by the contrasting seriousness of

St. Elizabeth and the kneeling donor. These figures forecast a mystical

and tender quality in certain of the later Madonnas.

In his last years Mantegna undertook an attractive but difficult task in

decorating the study of the famous bluestocking, Isabella d’Este, wife

of Gianfrancesco. With the pertinacity of a suffragette born out of due

time, this great lady framed the most elaborate written programmes, upon

the literal accomplishment of which she insisted. Her correspondence

with such unfortunate protegés as Perugino and Lorenzo Costa is among

the delightful eccentricities of Renaissance annals. The resultant

decorations reflect the sophisticated and somewhat brittle grace of

Isabella’s own personality. None are better than those of Mantegna which

were done about the year 1500. His Parnassus, Figure 223, with its

romantically picturesque gods and godesses, and its admirable round of

dancing muses, is the best that Northern Italy can show in comparison

with Botticelli’s mythologies, unless it be the companion piece, Minerva

expelling the Vices, Figure 224, which is wonderful alike in energy,

inventiveness and grotesque humor, anticipating in its mood similar

refinements in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and Milton’s “Comus.” Mantegna

in these works becomes the true precursor of that poetic pastoralism

which in Giorgione soon dominates the Venetian scene.

[Illustration:

FIG. 222. Mantegna. Madonna of Victory.—_Louvre._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 223. Mantegna. Parnassus.—_Louvre._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 224. Mantegna. Minerva Expelling the Vices.—_Louvre._

]

Mantegna lived on, none too well treated by the younger Gonzagas, until

1506. To relieve his poverty he offered for sale his most treasured

marble, an Agrippina. He left in his studio his most rigid and painful

piece,—the Foreshortened Christ he called it. All his probity is in the

picture. For Giovanni Bellini and others it served as the highest model

of the tragic style, and it refutes the shallow views of such as find

Mantegna merely academic and cold. He left many engravings and

marvellous drawings in which perhaps better than in the paintings we may

feel the exquisiteness of his austerely fastidious taste. Such a drawing

as the Judith in the Uffizi, Figure 225, is an epitome of all that

Mantegna had to bequeath to the Renaissance.

Well his contemporaries knew the value of his example. It rebuked the

slackness of their own practice. Alongside the exquisitely modelled foot

of his St. Sebastian in the Louvre, stands the severed marble foot from

a Greek statue. As he ever measured his work against the antique, so the

painters of Milan, Vicenza, Ferrara, Verona and Venice had to measure

their work against his. And that simple act of honest comparison in a

single generation furthered the art of Northern Italy to a degree that

in Tuscany it had taken a century to attain.

[Illustration:

FIG. 225. Andrea Mantegna. Judith. Wash Drawing.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 226.—Antonello da Messina. The Condottiere.—_Louvre._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 227. Antonello da Messina. St. Jerome in his Study.—_London._

]

At the moment when Mantegna’s influence was at its height, it was

happily modified in a realistic direction by the advent of Antonello da

Messina.[74] Despite recent discoveries, the career of this great

Sicilian realist remains obscure. Vasari imagined him a traveler in

Flanders and a direct pupil of Jan van Eyck, whose invention of oil

painting he was believed to have adopted. The legend is thoroughly

discredited by newly discovered documents. Antonello came up in Sicily

under the influence of visiting Spanish masters. From them he caught at

second hand the point of view of Northern realism, from them he learned

the advantages of the more fluid and lustrous oil vehicle. But he must

also have seen and carefully studied fine paintings of the Flemish

school. There were such in Sicily and at Naples. Antonello emerges about

1470 as the most energetic and truthful draughtsman of his time, and a

portraitist of powerful character equipped with a new and better

technique. In 1475 he was in Venice and Lombardy. Such portraits as the

captain of mercenaries, Il Condottiere, Figure 226, at the Louvre,

immediately set the standard for the entire region. We no longer find

flat profiles, but heads perfectly drawn in three-quarters aspect,

modelled minutely, but with no loss of character and effect. No such eye

as Antonello’s, unless it were that of Piero della Francesca, had as yet

applied itself to the problems of painting. Whether in the nude, in his

St. Sebastians and Crucifixions, or in his rare interiors, such as the

St. Jerome in his Study, Figure 227, in the National Gallery, he

announced new perfections in lighting, modelling and perspective. He

painted for the Church of San Cassiano at Venice a stately and massive

Madonna which led the local painters in the direction of mass and

monumentality. Recent criticism has recognised the mutilated central

panel in the Vienna gallery. Antonello’s work imposes itself primarily

by its mere intensity of existence. It has no charm, and no especial

emotion. Precisely this impersonality makes it an admirable and safe

model. Before his coming the Venetians had experimented with oil

mediums, but they gladly adopted his lustrous enamels, and strong

shadows. He returned soon to his native Sicily, where he died in 1479,

but his brief sojourn in the North had left its stamp. Montagna of

Vicenza, Cima of Conegliano, Buonsignori of Verona, Alvise Vivarini of

Venice are among his conscious emulators, and all the figure painting of

Venice assumes new gravity and authority. And we may mark his influence

even in the leading masters of the new school, Gentile and Giovanni

Bellini.

The tardy emergence of these two brothers of genius is one of the

puzzles of the Venetian school. Neither makes any impression till he is

in his forties, and their work has no directive influence till after

1480. The simplest explanation is that of Mr. Berenson. He suggests that

the brothers loyally contented themselves with the position of partners

in their father’s _bottega_ until his death in 1470. From that moment

their progress is swift. Giovanni enlarges the style of the altar-piece

in a Renaissance and monumental sense, and later moves gradually in a

pastoral direction. Gentile brings to its perfection the complicated

narrative style of his father. Both paint admirable portraits. Since

Gentile is less an innovator than a perfector of an established mode, we

may well begin with him.

[Illustration:

FIG. 228. Gentile Bellini. Sultan Mahomet II.—_London._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 229. Gentile Bellini. A Turkish Youth. Miniature.—_Mrs. John L.

Gardner, Boston._

]

Such early works as the organ shutters of St. Mark’s and the

processional banner with the portrait of the Blessed Lorenzo

Giustiniani, 1465, show that he based himself on Mantegna. His career,

however, is associated with narrative mural paintings for the schools,

in which work he developes a real originality. Whatever he painted in

1466 for the Great School of St. Mark was soon destroyed in a fire. It

was presumably the fame of these canvases that got him in 1469 the

titles of knight and count palatine. In 1479, being fifty years old, he

was called to Constantinople to serve that cruel voluptuary, Sultan

Mahomet II. Gentile’s portrait of him, now in the National Gallery,

Figure 228, is an appalling piece of exact characterization. One feels

the malignity of a character softened by vices, but retaining all mental

lucidity and capacities for both cruelty and calculated self-indulgence.

A more amiable souvenir of this trip is the exquisite miniature portrait

of a young Moslem prince, Figure 229, which is at Fenway Court. Gentile

brought back to Venice the new title of Pasha. We do not find him about

his proper work until 1492, when he agrees to do “not for money but by

superhuman inspiration” the new canvases necessitated by the fire in the

Great School of St. Mark.

The greatest of these is the view of the Piazza of St. Mark’s with the

procession made by the School itself on Corpus Christi day, Figure 230.

In the centre is their venerated relic of the True Cross. About it

attention is fixed and almost military, relaxing gradually at the sides.

There are hundreds of figures and scores of portraits in the picture,

yet there is no smallness of presentation. Such eighteenth century town

painters as Canale and his followers could hardly improve upon the

truthfulness of the scene as regards light and air even. Its value as

record is immense. And, barring a certain stiffness, its value as art is

hardly less.

[Illustration:

FIG. 230. Gentile Bellini. Corpus Christi Procession in Piazza of S.

Marco.—_Venice._

]

Another panel from this series shows Gentile’s really great capacity as

an out-of-doors painter. It represents the miraculous recovery of the

reliquary of the cross which had fallen into the canal. How perfectly

the play of light over the encrusted and plastered palaces is felt, its

shimmer upon the smooth water and through the moving crowds! In the

essentials of _plein-airisme_ we moderns have not so much surpassed this

work. And if Gentile seems after all not quite a great artist, it is due

to that impassivity which is proper to a luminist. With equal realism,

Gentile’s imitator, Carpaccio, added sentiment, hence he is beloved and

Gentile ignored. Yet early Venetian narrative painting is complete with

Gentile, and from every consideration of naturalism it is immensely

superior to anything produced at Florence in this period. It gains all

the smaller points of representation with the most amazing ease, perhaps

because it waives the greater issue of monumentality. It is well put

together, but shows little selection, is even at its best rather

casually full of persons and things. This produces, as compared with

Florence, an odd reversal of conditions. The altar-piece, which in

Florence is rather intimate, is in Venice far the most monumental type

of painting. We study the development of monumental design better in

Giovanni Bellini’s altar-backs than in his brother’s narratives. To

Gentile, at once a searching spirit in details and a conservative on the

whole, it must have been a great satisfaction to have perfected the

narrative mode that his father had so brilliantly inaugurated.

[Illustration:

FIG. 231. Giovanni Bellini. Pietà.—_Milan._

]

After 1500, being in the seventies and ailing, old Gentile acquired the

ominous habit of frequently making and unmaking wills. His last one,

which became effective in 1507, left to his vigorous brother, Giovanni,

the precious paternal sketch books and the heavy duty of finishing for

St. Mark’s School the vast Canvas of St. Mark Preaching at Alexandria,

which is now at Milan. Giovanni was nearly eighty himself, but he put

the great work through handsomely.

[Illustration:

FIG. 232. Giovanni Bellini. Christ at Gethsemane.—_London._

]

Giovanni Bellini[75] was a natural son, but as was the humane Italian

custom, taken into his father’s family. He was born about 1430, and his

early efforts were completely dominated by Mantegna. Indeed he hardly

finds himself artistically until he is fifty, and then he develops a

most gracious capacity for growth which ceases only with his death at

eighty-five. Of the score of pictures which are Mantegnesque in quality

the earliest and most remarkable is the Pietà at Milan, Figure 231. In

the tragic power it outdoes Mantegna himself, and with all its hardness,

it is more painter-like. The distribution of light and dark is broader,

the expression more homely and genuine. Only a little later, perhaps

towards 1470, is the Christ on the Mount of Olives, at London, Figure

232. With a very similar picture by Mantegna in the same gallery, it is

based on a sketch of Jacopo Bellini’s. Although Giovanni frankly

imitates the rigid folds of drapery and landscape from Mantegna, it is

with a distinct difference. The mood is gentler, details are less

obtrusive, there is an exquisite sense of evening sky, and of hills in

gloom, and of the coming of twilight over a river plain. It is the first

greatly felt landscape in Venetian painting, and though Giovanni was far

to surpass it in fineness and accuracy, even he never excelled it in

depth and truthfulness of feeling. The serenity of the eventide is the

fitting foil to Our Lord’s single moment of human weakness and despair.

[Illustration:

FIG. 233. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna.—_Estate Theodore Davis._

]

Giovanni’s early Madonnas are singularly various. We have one very

stately and tender in the estate of Theodore M. Davis, Figure 233. The

Madonna in the John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia, is wistful and

emaciated. One belonging to Mr. Philip Lehman, New York, is of sensuous,

peasant type, while the painting, unlike the soberness of the two

earlier ones, shows the utmost resplendence of Mantegnesque enamels. Its

date may be about 1470. So we see Giovanni wholly flexible and

experimental at forty, and developing chiefly under Mantegna’s

influence.

Giovanni’s emancipation from Mantegna takes place very gradually. It is

virtually complete in the Transfiguration, Figure 234, at Naples which

may be dated towards 1480. Bellini asserts himself fully in the gracious

monumentality of the chief group, while his Arcadian mood is forecast in

the ample landscape softly invested with a colorful light and shade.

There is a more specific emotion and a more romantic richness of setting

in St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Figure 207, Frick Collection,

which may be a year or two later. These are both Wordsworthian pictures,

imbued with a mystical tenderness for natural appearances. Such are the

sources from which Giorgione will soon draw his pagan pastoralism.

[Illustration:

FIG. 234. Giovanni Bellini. The Transfiguration.—_Naples._

]

Towards 1480 Giovanni Bellini’s work assumes monumental breadth, and

withal a new sweetness. His Madonnas settle into what was to be the

Venetian type—superb, mature forms at once queenly and maternal. Earlier

there had been no Madonna type in his work but a singular variety of

forms and faces. In generalizing the stately charm of Venetian

motherhood, Giovanni moves towards the grand style, and does so nearly

twenty years sooner than the Florentines. His characteristic works are

now great altar-pieces, with monumental distribution of the figures

within fine architectural spaces. Generally the frame is a part of the

pictorial organism, the plastic front of a pavillion. It is about the

only survival of Mantegna’s practice in these solemn and gracious

pictures. Unluckily the first of the series perished in 1867 in the

disastrous fire which robbed us also of Titian’s Death of St. Peter

Martyr. But surviving copies of this altar-back for the Church of S.

Giovanni e Paolo confirm the tradition that it was painted well before

1480. In its arrangement and details, especially in the tendency to

crowd the many figures forward, it reveals to me the influence of

Antonello da Messina’s great altar-piece for San Cassiano. It had

apparently a somewhat rigid formality like that of the slightly earlier

piece at Pesaro. Bellini is not yet quite at ease in his new and broader

style, but he has at least glimpsed the ideal of monumentality and

acquired a new technique, that of oil painting, in which to express it.

[Illustration:

FIG. 235. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—_Frari, Venice._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 235_a._> Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of St. Job.—_Venice._

]

We find him full-grown in the noble Madonna of St. Job, Figure 235a,

made for the church of that name about 1484 and now in the Venice

Academy. In this picture the new Venetian ideals of ardor and gravity

unite harmoniously with the old ideal of material splendor. What

playings of light and half-lights there are over mosaics, polished

marbles and carvings! How admirably the strict symmetry of the group is

relieved by varying the postures of the six saints and by contrasting

the sober garb of the monkish saints with the superb nudity of Saints

Job and Sebastian and the shimmering silks of the playing angels below.

And the great picture, with all its monumentality, retains much of that

old lyrical fire, which is gradually yielding to more sedate and

reflective aims.

We shall find the two great Madonnas of 1488, for the Frari, Figure 235,

and for St. Peter’s at Murano, conceived more impassively. For the city

church, Bellini insisted on hieratic effect and incidental splendors,

reverting to the form of the triptych and arranging it after Mantegna’s

fashion with the frame and picture in one perspective. It is perhaps the

grandest as it is the most formal of his altar-backs, consciously regal

in the attitude of the Virgin, with saints as magisterial as so many

Venetian senators. For the suburban church at Murano he set the Madonna

low amid her paladins and opened up delicious landscape vistas at the

sides. The thing, with all its dignity, is lyrical, and almost intimate.

It anticipates the mood of the later open-air Sacred Conversations.

[Illustration:

FIG. 236.—Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with St. Paul and St.

George.—_Venice._

]

In the nineties and the early years of the new century, masterpiece

follows masterpiece, and we must proceed by selection. Giovanni invents

a charming form of altar-piece for private chapels. These Madonnas and

saints at half-length have already the mood of the later conversation

pieces, and need only the less symmetrical scheme which Bellini’s pupil,

Titian, will soon give them. For harmony one might prefer the Madonna

with two female saints, or for robust contrast and vitality the Madonna

with two burly military champions, Figure 236. Both are in the Venetian

Academy.

[Illustration:

FIG. 237. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of the Trees.—_Venice._

]

The single, half-length Madonnas, Figure 237, of this period are counted

by scores, and are in many public and private collections in Europe and

America. They are singularly uniform in inspiration, and yet the mood is

so rich and noble that an apparent monotony is never cloying. Bellini’s

gift in these pictures is to combine a kind of serene obviousness with

great delicacy. There are hints of wistfulness and sadness through the

series, but such sentiments are never much insisted on. The real

mysticism of these pictures is nothing but the notation of the most

natural and mysterious thing in the world—the bond between mother and

babe, the pride of it, the exclusiveness of it, the joyous burden of it.

Art could hardly be less theological or more genuinely religious than in

these Madonnas. I think no human being could miss either their

naturalness or their sacredness.

As Giovanni Bellini approached the scriptural term of years, and the

century drew to its close, he cultivates by way of recreation certain

old leads which become new and powerful influences on his successors.

The element of tact in the man is miraculous. He does nothing till the

time has come when the doing will be most useful. Thus such pastoral

recreations as the Religious Allegory in the Uffizi, Figure 238, and the

little symbolical panels in the Venice Academy lead directly to the

fantastic Arcadianism of Giorgione. The Religious Allegory is vaguely an

illustration for the old French poem “Man’s Pilgrimage.” We have a

Paradise, with the new souls in infant form. The apostles Peter and Paul

stand guard outside the celestial barrier, while the Madonna presides

within. Beyond a dark stream is the hazardous world, a place of caverns

and crags, and hermits and centaurs; of mystery and uncertainty. Perhaps

Giovanni Bellini cared rather more for the darkling shadows over water

and river bank, for the broken light under a veiled sky than for the

formal allegory. Certainly the element of strangeness and glamour is

evident enough in the five little panels depicting virtues and vices.

Again the faery quality, our earth grown strange to us, is the basis of

the charm. We have noted similar fantastic inventions at Florence,

notably in the work of Piero di Cosimo. Bellini evokes a more normal

poetry which is based on a more intimate study of nature. Such

landscapes as his, even when unpeopled, suggest nymphs and shepherds.

[Illustration:

FIG. 238. Giovanni Bellini. Religious Allegory, Souls in

Paradise.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 240. Giovanni Bellini. Doge Loredano.—_London._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 239. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—_S. Zaccaria._

]

At seventy, at the opening of the new century, Giovanni Bellini’s mind

was still flexible, so much so that we hardly know whether he leads or

follows such pupils of genius as Titian and Giorgione. His color

acquires a deeper glow, his warm shadows are heavier and more carefully

graduated; he drops his few remaining Mantegnesque habits. In the

Madonna for San Zaccaria, Figure 239, dated 1505, we have no longer the

illusionistic perspective of the altar-pieces of the ’80s. The group is

set well back, the suffusion of the niche with air is more dense, the

saintly figures have exchanged the old resolute, hieratic attitudes for

a gentle dreaminess; the mood is that of Giorgione’s contemporary

altar-piece at Castelfranco. In the portrait of Doge Loredano, Figure

240, of the same year resolution and wistfulness blend fascinatingly.

The delineation has the force and certainty of Antonello da Messina with

a refinement Antonello never even glimpsed.

In these later years Giovanni Bellini multiplied, largely through

student aid, conversation pieces with gracious gatherings of saints in

the open air. The mood is that of courtly revery. Titian and Palma will

later repeat the theme indefinitely. One of the best is at S. Francesco

della Vigna, and bears the date 1507. It is an idyl borrowing religious

forms. In the altar-piece painted in 1513, Figure 241, for the church of

S. Giovanni Crisostomo, Giambellino anticipates the new and

compositional forms of the rising generation. The rich architecture

opens upon a contemplative old man reading on a crag, with majestic

mountain lines behind him athwart a serene sky. Everything above is off

centre and diagonal, stability being preserved by the great vertical

figures of the saints in the foreground, and by the formality of the

parapet behind them. We have almost a picture within a picture, the

maximum of formality and informality, of nature and artifice—all those

elaborate and calculated beauties which we associate with Titian’s

maturity. There is withal a mystical earnestness of which Titian himself

lacked the secret.

[Illustration:

FIG. 241. Giovanni Bellini. St. John Crisostom.—_S. Giov. Crisostomo._

]

In his remaining two years Bellini designed the lovely and modest nude

Lady at her Toilet, at Vienna, and the Feast of the Gods, Figure 242,

now in Mr. Joseph Widener’s collection at Philadelphia. His career ends

in a rather skeptical acceptance of the sensuous graces of the new

humanism, for the gods are merely Venetian picnickers on an excursion.

The penetrating poetry of the picture is of a homely sort without

pretensions to grandeur. The landscape is partly by Titian.

Giovanni died in 1515, being more than eighty-five years old. As late as

1506, Albrecht Dürer found him the greatest artist at Venice. He had

begun with the faint dawn of the Renaissance and ended in its midday

glow. He had raised Venetian painting to monumental estate, had mastered

the secrets of landscape and its illumination, had initiated a

delightful pastoralism, had conveyed religious emotion in forms humanly

sweet and grave, had made the best of every world. Scores of his pupils

extended his manner to Brescia, Bergamo, Vicenza, and Treviso. His

genius knew neither haste nor hesitation, he was almost never below his

best. The Renaissance produced a few painters of greater scope and

powers, but none more consistently great as an artist or more venerable

as a personality.

[Illustration:

FIG. 242. Giovanni Bellini. Feast of the Gods.—_Widener Coll., Elkins

Park, Pa._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 243. Bartolommeo Vivarini. Madonna with Saints.—_Naples._

]

To appreciate his value a glance at less progressive contemporaries will

suffice. We find Bartolommeo Vivarini normally continuing the routine of

the Murano School. In the polyptych at Bologna, done with his elder

brother Antonio in 1450, we have with slight Squarcionesque improvements

the old attenuated Venetian forms. In the highly decorated Madonna at

Naples, dated 1465, we have an intelligent use of both the

Squarcionesque realisms, and the refinements of Jacopo Bellini. Figure

243. Later pieces such as the triptych of 1487 at the Frari reveal a

heavy-handed imitation of Mantegna, and any little originality of the

master soon gets lost in the voluminous output of the shop. Bartolommeo

died in the last year of his century, whose fair average he had well

represented. His nephew Alvise Vivarini deserves notice as the

transmitter of the realism of Antonello da Messina to such artists as

Montagna, Cima, and Lorenzo Lotto. As a portraitist he has real power.

His great altar-pieces have their bleak and unattractive nobility.

Venice greatly honored him in confiding several of the new panels for

the Ducal Palace to his care. But since these works of the eighties were

soon burned, our view of Alvise remains imperfect. I suspect modern

criticism has somewhat exaggerated his importance. He was active from

about 1460 to 1503, and his altar-pieces afford the best foils for

Giovanni Bellini, as revealing a lesser capacity for growth.

[Illustration:

FIG. 244. Carpaccio. Prince Hero Taking Leave of his Father (L) and

Greeting Ursula (R).—_Venice._

]

We have now to trace the old narrative style to its climax and end in

Vittore Carpaccio.[76] He inherited all the panoramic and luministic

accomplishments of Gentile Bellini, but applied them with far greater

imagination. He deals with legend, giving it contemporary color, and in

his sensitive hands it becomes the most veridical and charming of fairy

lands. Carpaccio’s training is obscure to us. It may be that the very

mediocre narrative painter, Lazzaro Bastiani, first taught him. In any

case he drew more from Gentile Bellini’s resolute handling of light,

textures and costume. We first meet Carpaccio as an artist in the

decoration of the Great School of St. Ursula from 1492 to 1495. He was

probably all of fifty years old. The childlike legend, with its numerous

embassies, meetings and partings, settings out and arrivings, gave him

spectacular opportunities of which he made the most winning use. In the

nine canvases now in the Academy we find an epitome of the courtesy,

circumstance and adventure that accompanied travel in those days, and

the mere spectacle is underlaid with a pensive ideality; for these are

no ordinary journeys, but the quest of martyrdom by a princely youth and

maiden. Nothing is insisted on, however, but the gayety of the events,

and the picturesqueness of their settings. As in all good story-telling,

the persuasiveness depends on veracious minor episodes. There are the

most attentive scribes and secretaries, as if to carry off the unlikely

matter they are inditing. The heavy ease of men-at-arms and

self-conscious elegance of young Venetian fops make them credible

witnesses to else incredible legend. To adorn his tales Carpaccio

borrowed from the woodcut illustrations to Breydenbach’s “Itinerary to

Jerusalem.” It is remarkable how he invests these mere skeletons of

cities with color, sunlight, the glamour of the orient. About all he

draws a veil of air saturated with sunlight, concentrated into rising

clouds whose shadows darken the lustrous blue of the tranquil lagoon.

There never was a more ravishing raconteur in the art of making

incidentals count for essentials. Such a picture as Prince Hero taking

leave of his father and greeting St. Ursula, Figure 244, is the

fulfilment of all that old Jacopo Bellini and his Veronese precursors

had dreamed of. It is typical of a series which has its more intimate

phases only by way of exception. The virginal beauty of the legend gets

a real expression only in the Vision of St. Ursula. Figure 245. The

character of the earnest, slumbering face and the sweet slight body

carries through the exquisitely indicated space, and we hardly need to

be told that the wistful boyish angel is offering a martyr’s palm.

Possibly it takes a mundane person like Carpaccio to realize the beauty

of the more fantastic religious ardors. A completely devout person takes

them as in the day’s work.

[Illustration:

FIG. 245. Carpaccio. Dream of St. Ursula.—_Venice_.

]

Before the end of the century, Carpaccio painted for the School of S.

Giovanni Evangelista the Miracle of the healing of a Demoniac. The

picture is now in the Academy. It is a marvellous panorama of

contemporary Venice, with the bustle of eager crowds, the slipping of

gondolas over the canal, and light flickering over and caressing the

manifold colors of the gay scene. It has the fidelity of Gentile Bellini

without his dryness.

[Illustration:

FIG. 246. Carpaccio. St. George and the Dragon.—_School of St. George

of the Slavonians._

]

The most delightful if not the most important monument of Renaissance

Venice is unquestionably the School of St. George of the Slavonians. It

is the only school that retains its primitive paintings still set in the

original carved and golded wainscoting. There one sees in the ground

floor the legends of St. Jerome, an odd mixture of gravity, richness,

and humor. Nothing more sumptuous than the Saint in his exquisitely

appointed study, or more archly comic than the scene of consternation

when the Saint brings home his lion from the desert. The series was

painted about 1502. Upstairs we have the chivalric legend of St. George

of Cappadocia, painted some eight years later. Nothing could be more

romantically entrancing than the boyish champion charging intrepidly

over the sun-dried shreds and tatters of his predecessors into the very

jaws of the most confidently virulent of dragons, Figure 246, unless it

be the scene where he leads his tame dragon into the astounded court, or

that in which he proudly baptizes his future bride and her parents while

a Turkish band plays a fanfare. About the blowing of these horns of

elfland there is no faintness whatever. We are in the realm of most

palpable adventure and romance, and the emphasis depends on splendid

color and on drawing of a magical alertness.

Carpaccio’s merit as the liveliest and most persuasive of _raconteurs_

seems so definite that it is almost a shock to meet him in other

capacities. Also a disappointment to find in the New Testament subjects

from the School of the Albanians, 1504, that in such stereotyped

subjects he can be almost mediocre. Certainly in the great altar-piece

of the Presentation in the Temple, Figure 247, at the Academy, he shows

that he fully understands the new monumentality of Giovanni Bellini. The

date is 1510. The picture is of the most reverent composure, and as

tender as it is grand. In the portrait of Two Courtesans on a Balcony,

in the Correr, Carpaccio shows a force of character wholly modern. With

a kind of irony he has taken the moral emptiness of his sitters out of

doors, flooded it with sunlight and air, given it harshness and

ugliness, lavishing upon the rich costumes and fair skins the most

delicate pains. John Ruskin will tell you that these are honest women.

Such faith is more worthy of reverence than of imitation. The greatness

of Carpaccio lies in the impartiality with which he renders a certain

kind of life on its own terms. The romancer is capable of appalling

truthfulness.

[Illustration:

FIG. 247. Carpaccio. The Presentation.—_Venice._

]

That he was also a mystic of the most intense sort is hard to believe.

Yet if the marvellous Meditation on the Passion, Figure 248, in the

Metropolitan Museum, be really by him, such is the case. In a desert the

Dead Christ sits in a crumbling throne, while two grim sages, St. Job

and St. Onophrius, sit in rapt contemplation. Their mood has evoked the

bodily vision of their Lord. Art has produced few such symbols for the

hallucinative intensity of the life contemplative. These weather-beaten

forms seem an emanation from the sands and blistering sunlight. They

have few relations to our world. Their souls move in vast uninhabited

spaces. That Carpaccio can have produced this masterpiece as late as

1520, and cast it deliberately in a style learned forty years earlier

seems to me a fantastic hypothesis, even if it has enlisted grave

authority. The abundant similarities of the landscape with that of the

St. Francis of the Frick Collection make me feel that the invention of

this picture is Giovanni Bellini’s, at his moment of highest emotional

power, about 1480. Since the actual painting is evidently in large part

Carpaccio’s, I am driven to the by no means satisfactory hypothesis that

Carpaccio may have executed this masterpiece, and the group to which it

belongs, while serving as studio assistant to Giovanni Bellini. Such a

view at least expresses my conviction that the picture transcends

Carpaccio’s powers.

[Illustration:

FIG. 248.—Ascribed to Carpaccio, perhaps Giovanni Bellini’s Design.

Desert Hermits Meditating the Passion.—_New York._

]

As for his later years, his work goes off, he loses most of his Venetian

patronage, and paints for the obscure Istrian and Dalmatian seaports,

the critics mock him, he dies some time after 1523, leaving no deep

impression. Vasari dispatches him with a few condescending lines, and

nobody cares for him till young Burne-Jones came to Venice some sixty

years ago. He plainly stands out of the main line of progress. He was

too romantically traditional in his themes, and too minutely

naturalistic in his vision to fit into the monumental development of the

Renaissance. In a sense he merely brings the old narrative tradition to

a splendid close. But in so doing he preserves the look of an exquisite

moment—of Venice still in her mediæval gayety and splendor, not yet

reduced to her ultimate magnificent decorum. In him we glimpse the eager

comeliness of patrician youth, self-sufficient in love of living. And

this we see between the glistening waters of the lagoon and the lambent

blue heavens, with pearly domes and bell towers rising as lightly as the

drifting summer clouds above. All this may or may not be apart from what

the wise esteem artistic greatness. In any case it is charm of the most

persuasive and durable kind.

Whether Giorgione of Castelfranco is to be regarded as the last of the

Venetian primitives or as the first of the men of the Renaissance is no

simple problem. It is further complicated by the fact that we do not

surely know what pictures he painted. According to the austerity or

geniality of the critics, the lists vary from eight, Lionello Venturi’s,

to over seventy, Herbert Cook’s. Naturally I also have my own list,

which, with old copies, runs to twenty-four, but I am unwilling to claim

demonstrative weight for what are merely strong subjective convictions.

Walter Pater daintily evaded the issue by writing the most subtle of

essays not on the person, but on the School of Giorgione. I shall in

part imitate him in defining first the Giorgionesque mood before

considering the canon of his works.

[Illustration:

FIG. 249. Giorgione. Portrait of a Youth.—_Berlin._

]

On the side of minor technique Giorgione marks a great advance. He early

abandons the old frank coloring of Giovanni Bellini for a mysterious

method which abolishes line, builds in mass, invests the picture with

deep shadows that are marvellously warm and colorful. What

contemporaries loved to call the Venetian fire originates with him about

1505. Vasari may well be right in saying that he learned the method

directly from Leonardo da Vinci, who was a fugitive in Venice in the

year 1500. Only Leonardo never taught him that shadow is color. That was

Giorgione’s own beautiful discovery, one immensely important for all

decorative painting ever since.

In his early phase, if I am right in thinking that Sir Martin Conway’s

two stories of Paris, Figure 250, and the Ordeal of the Infant Moses and

Judgment of Solomon in the Uffizi, are his, Giorgione was merely a

graceful continuer of the slighter narrative mood of Giovanni Bellini

and Carpaccio,—that is, distinctly a primitive artist. In his fully

developed Arcadian vein he is neither a primitive nor fully of the

Renaissance, but midway between, and his work constitutes not so much a

pioneer effort as a delectable episode quite complete in itself.

Unhappily we are almost without biographical details. Giorgione was born

in 1478, in Castelfranco, a long day’s ride towards the Friulian Alps.

The country abounds in streams, meadows, and immemorial trees—is a

subalpine Arcadia. He came pretty young to Venice and worked with

Giovanni Bellini. Legend tells us that he was big and handsome, amorous,

and a musician. We know that he died of the plague of 1510, in his

thirty-third year. The rest is conjecture from pictures some of which

are his, and all of which are inspired by him.

[Illustration:

FIG. 250. Giorgione. The Infant Paris found by Shepherds.—Sir Martin

Conway. _Maidstone, England._

]

These breathe a single mood, that of Arcadian revery. It is a world of

desire indulged for its own sweetness, of day dreaming apart from will,

action, and results. More blithely it had pre-existed in the Idyls of

Theocritus; more pensively, in the Eclogues of Virgil. This world

revives a far-away pastoral golden age, of lovers and their lasses, of

nymphs and fauns, of vague ardors at once tempered and reinforced by a

sympathetic nature. We are dealing with one of the oldest resources of

poetry, and we can only understand this most beautiful visualization of

the old theme by associating it with the tradition of literary

pastoralism.

Of course the Eclogues of Virgil were read generation by generation, if

not very understandingly, through the Middle Ages. Still the more

sensitive felt the appeal of mountain shadows lengthening over the

evening meadows and the pathos of love-lorn shepherds sighing musically

for hard-hearted shepherdesses. By the middle of the fourteenth century,

the pastoral mode becomes once more contemporary, incidentally in the

interludes of Bocaccio’s _Decameron_, explicitly in his idyl of

alternate prose and verse, the _Ameto_. These are pale lights before the

dawn. Pastoralism becomes widely current in the _Arcadia_ of Jacopo

Sannazaro, the bulk of which was ready by 1489. It is the parent of

those slow-moving, sentimental, and ever lengthy romances in verse and

prose of which Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ is the most familiar to the

modern reader. Dante had once longed for a magic boat in which congenial

souls should drift forever and do nothing but discourse of love.

Transfer these discourses to a leafy nook beside a running stream, with

the herds in view below the branches, and nymphs and satyrs overhearing

the debate—and you have Sannazaro’s _Arcadia_. We have the eternal

poetry and perhaps eternal fallacy of a bygone golden age where duty and

effort are absent, where love and poesy reign.

In his most famous song, _Alma beata_, Sannazaro, celebrating a dead

beauty, makes heaven itself merely an Arcadia—

“Other mountains, other plains,

Other groves and streamlets

In heaven I see, and withal new blossoms.

Other fauns and sylvans, through sweet summer places,

Pursue their nymphs in happier loves than ours.”

You find the mood clear cut in the Venetian nobleman and prelate, Pietro

Bembo, both in his _Asolani_ and in the separate poems. These were being

handed about in Giorgione’s time, from 1500 on. Thus Bembo sings of the

shepherd’s life:

“Tryphon, who in place of ministrants and lackeys,

Loggias and marbles, woven gold and purple,

Lovest about thee willows leafy, cloister

Of joyous hillocks, plants and rivulets—

Well may the world admire thee.”

Naturally the denizens of such paradises live and dress in a state of

nature. The nymphs are lightly clothed and readily discard their slight

draperies for the joys of the bath, which they considerately take within

the range of their shepherd swains. Bembo warmly praises those

“courteous garments” which do not too much hide the fair throat and

bosom, and roundly curses more churlish concealing fashions.

Sannazaro describes with a confusing mixture of metaphors what may be

called a fortunate bath fall.

“Leading one day my herds beside a stream,

I saw a light amid those waters fair,

Which bound me fast straightway with two blond tresses,

And stamped a face all milk and roses

Forever on my heart.”

Earlier painters than Giorgione[77] had essayed these pastoral themes.

Botticelli, Signorelli; in a sardonic way, Piero di Cosimo; Giovanni

Bellini and even Andrea Mantegna had variously attempted this sort of

painted poesy. But the flavor of the Giorgionesque poesy is fuller and

richer. His beauty is that of languor, revery, dream. Whatever the

ostensible theme may be, his painting is Arcadian. His people have not

merely no relation to our world, but slight and ambiguous relations to

each other within the picture. They are isolated in their own musings,

rarely look at each other, never suggest an action, but only a mood.

Even the portraits suggest rather temperament than character or will.

The proud youth, at Berlin, Figure 249, withdraws himself from purpose

and deed. It is an early Giorgione. The Shepherd with a Flute, at

Hampton Court, is bemused with his own fancy. It is of the later years.

The fastidious patrician, at New York, reveals an almost worried and

sickly detachment. If indeed a Giorgione, which I cannot doubt, it is of

his latest manner.

[Illustration:

FIG. 251. Giorgione. Fire Ordeal of Infant Moses.—_Uffizi._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 252. Giorgione. “Soldier and Gipsy.”—_Giovanelli Palace._

]

Take the little Carpaccian idyls at Florence which cannot be much later

than 1500. How far we are from real narrative! In the Ordeal of Moses,

Figure 251, a child is thrusting his tender fingers among live coals.

Ladies and gentlemen stand languidly about and bask in the pleasantness

of their own thoughts. There is a similar nonchalance in the Judgment of

Solomon where a newborn babe is threatened with the sword. The horror is

treated as a negligible incident of an _al fresco_ party.

[Illustration:

FIG. 253. Giorgione. The Three Philosophers.—_Vienna._

]

Again what is the meaning of the mysterious idyl in Prince Giovanelli’s

gallery? Figure 252. In view of the picturesque walls and moat of

Castelfranco, a half nude mother, oblivious of a coming thunder shower,

nurses her child. Equally oblivious of her and the weather, a

fashionably dressed youth turns away. Ruins reflect the ominous

lightning flashes. Old records call this (one of the few certain

Giorgiones) The Soldier and the Gipsy—evidently a bad guess. A learned

Viennese professor chooses to think that this is Prince Adrastus finding

the forsaken Princess Hypsiphile. Nobody can prevent such conjectures or

disprove them. It is safer to imagine that coming rain and thunder at

Venice recalls some old memory of similar weather and state of mind at

Castelfranco, evokes some old desire of which this richly fanciful

masterpiece is the enigmatic symbol. Some story of loving and parting

surely underlies the poesy, it would be foolish to be more specific than

Giorgione himself has chosen to be. The Three Philosophers, at Vienna,

Figure 253, again has been explained as Aeneas surveying the future site

of Rome. What we actually have is a glowing nook at eventide in which

three grave men of different ages go separately about some task

requiring thought and mathematical calculation. And even this duty is

yielding to the spell and mystery of the evening hour. These pictures

are probably a little earlier than the altar-piece of 1504 at

Castelfranco.

[Illustration:

FIG. 254. Giorgione. Madonna with St. George and St.

Francis.—_Castelfranco._

]

[Illustration:

FIG. 255. Giorgione. Landscape by Titian. Sleeping Venus.—_Dresden._

]

That lovely work, Figure 254, has much of the intimacy of Bellini’s

altar-piece at S. Zaccaria, in formal arrangement it is rather

monumental. The mood, however, is one of revery. St. Francis of Assisi

makes his gesture only for himself, and St. George, exponent of the

active life, broods moodily beneath his slackly held pennon. The

Arcadian landscape quietly reinforces the idyllic feeling. Externally

the thing is splendid in color, and as saturated with atmosphere as it

is with mood.

From now on the question of chronology becomes at once difficult, and,

since we are dealing only with five years or so, relatively unimportant.

The sleeping Venus at Dresden, Figure 255, may have been designed about

1505. A Cupid slumbering at the Goddess’s feet has been painted out, and

the landscape was finished by Titian. The noble sleeping body, to use a

word of Lucretius which Montaigne commends, seems “poured out” on the

receptive earth—so grandly and easily it lies. The gestures are

unconscious caresses. The Goddess dreams of old joys. What faun or

sylvan even would not respect that dream? Not with passion, then, though

himself knowing all its sting, does Giorgione deal, but with ardors

sublimated in memory. The marvellous lines of this Venus, as sweeping as

the curves of hills or river currents, were imitated again and again,

but neither Titian, Palma Vecchio, nor the rest ever recaptured the

evasive poetry of their model.

[Illustration:

FIG. 256. Giorgione. Judith.—_Petrograd._

]

In 1508, working with Titian, Giorgione finished certain frescoes for

the outside of the German Warehouse. The remaining red blurs, and

Zanetti’s fragmentary copies, tell us that the postures begin to have

the breadth and conscious counterpoise of the advancing Renaissance, but

that the mood is still that of languor. Very like one of these figures

is the fascinating Judith, at Petrograd, Figure 256. After the horrors

of the night, she stands dreamily. Her lovely left leg escapes from the

courteous draperies, and the foot touches lightly the brow of the

peaceful, severed head of Holophernes. The touch of the foot is almost

careless, as if merely to assure herself that the portent is really

true. Her head bends gently, her nerveless beautiful fingers barely feel

her girdle or support her great sword. Behind her, morning forests and

fields stretch towards a tranquil sea and sky. The gestures are those of

one between sleeping and waking, irresolutely feeling for some basis in

reality. We are in a realm where the most awful deeds and experiences

count only as raw material for delicate imaginings.

[Illustration:

FIG. 257. Giorgione. Pastoral Symphony.—_Louvre._

]

In the later works problems multiply, and a critic is pretty well

reduced to personal intuitions. No doubt, however, should attach to the

pathetic and nearly effaced Christ of St. Roch. The Christ is nobler

than the earlier example at Fenway Court, the feeling more expansive.

Still nobody, not even the executioner, seems to will the atrocity of

the deed. The thing is not an act but a vision, pervaded by a dreamy

tenderness.

The completely repainted Pastoral Concert, Figure 257, at the Louvre is

never the less fraught with Giorgione’s peculiar poetry. A courtly lover

has struck a chord on the lute, and gazes intently, perhaps sadly, at a

shepherd sitting close to him. A rustic, nude nymph whose back only is

seen takes the pipe from her lips to listen. A proud beauty turns toward

a fountain, light draperies slip away from her superb form, and with a

graceful gesture of idleness she pours back into the fountain a tinkling

jet from a crystal pitcher, while she bends to note the ripple and catch

the pleasant, idle sound. This strange scene takes place on the edge of

a vale that winds down to a glittering sea, affording a path to a

shepherd and his flocks. The meaning? Modern criticism is loath to look

beyond contrasts of nude and clothed forms, swing of tree-tops and of

sky, subtle interplay of light and shade. My own reading is merely based

on the contrast between the rustic and urban lovers, and an intuition

that the courtier in peering so wistfully at the shepherd is merely

seeing himself in a former guise. In lassitude, perhaps in satiety,

beside a courtly mistress who is absent from him in spirit, there rises

the vision of earlier simpler love and of a devoted shepherdess who once

piped for him in the shade. The vision rises as his listless hand sweeps

the lute strings in a chord unmarked by the far lovelier mistress at the

fountain. The golden age of love, like Arcady itself, is ever in the

past. Such may be the reading of this poesy. Indeed all Giorgione’s

pictures are less facts than apparitions born of roving thought in

idleness,—such stuff as dreams are made of.

The famous Concert, Figure 258, of the Pitti since Morelli’s time has

been generally classed as an early Titian, I think erroneously. The

precise and powerful execution of the Monk’s head is certainly his, but

I question if the motive itself lay within the scope of his lucid and

uncomplicated imagination. An Augustinian monk holds the initial harmony

on the clavichord and turns towards the ’cellist while the singer waits

impassively. And this simple theme becomes a universal symbol for

thwarted desire. The player asks a kind of sympathy which this world

rarely affords, which certainly these companions cannot give. As in the

Pastoral Symphony, the music awakens impossible longings, is the

accompaniment of inadequacy. Titian was too robust ever to have imagined

such a thing, and I feel we need only modify the old tradition to the

extent of giving Titian a hand in an unfinished Giorgione to account for

this poignant and most characteristic masterpiece.

[Illustration:

FIG. 258. Giorgione _cum_ Titian. The Concert.—_Pitti._

]

There remains old and good tradition for crediting Giorgione with the

design of the altar-piece in San Giovanni Crisostomo. The execution is

unquestionably by Sebastiano del Piombo. If this view be correct,

Giorgione attained the external features of the coming Renaissance

style, missing its athleticism. Certainly the abstraction of the saint

and the unmotivated appearance of the three virtues, and their unrelated

gracefulness, is entirely in Giorgione’s manner, while the whole

invention is alien to Sebastiano’s heavy and forthright talent.

For the view I have tried to give of this poet picture-maker I may claim

at least the merit of consistency. There is only one theme—languor of

love and of remembered happiness; and there is only one setting—the

Arcadia of the pastoral poets. Giorgione is the first painter who

realized Leonardo’s definition of painting as “mute poetry,” yet not

quite mute for there is generally a suggestion of music. And the music

is less heard than contemplated, as is the case in one of his latest

pictures, the Shepherd Boy, Figure 259, who hesitates to set the flute

to his lips lest the melody fall short of that which the imagination has

already heard.

[Illustration:

FIG. 259. Giorgione. Shepherd with a Flute.—_Hampton Court._

]

For ten years after Giorgione’s death his mood dominated Titian with

most of the rising artists. It seemed likely to replace the sturdy and

objective art of Venice with a quite alien subjectivism. Meanwhile the

normal effort of old Giovanni, Bellini and of young Titian continued.

The Renaissance offered to the outer eye new dignities and splendors.

The inner eye went bankrupt in the numerous imitators of Giorgione, in

trivial symbolism and merely playful mythology. After her brief pause in

Arcadia, Venice once more took account of her own proud charms. The

nymphs paled before the comparison, Arcadia vanished. But it never was

wholly forgotten, and, ever since, those who have craved actually to see

the golden age of poesy have had to consult Giorgione of Castelfranco.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER VII

PRAISE OF MANTEGNA IN THE RENAISSANCE

The immense authority of Mantegna kept his name on all honor lists of

painters long after his death.

Lorenzo of Pavia, writing in 1504 to Isabella d’Este, says of a Madonna

by Giovanni Bellini:

“The Painter has made a great effort to do himself honour, chiefly out

of respect to M. Andrea Mantegna, and although it is true that in point

of invention it cannot compare with the work of Messer Andrea, that most

excellent master, I pray Your Excellency to take the picture, both for

your own honour and also because of the merit of the work.”

Julia Cartwright, _Isabella d’Este_, New York, 1903, Vol. I, p. 351.

A little later Lorenzo writes:

“And, as I have said before, in point of invention no one can rival

Andrea Mantegna, who is indeed a most excellent painter, the foremost of

our age. But Zuan Bellini excels in colouring.” l. c. 352.

On Oct. 16, 1506, Lorenzo writes, on learning of Mantegna’s death:

“I am much grieved to hear of the death of our Messer Andrea Mantegna.

For indeed we have lost a most excellent man and a second Apelles, but I

believe that the Lord God will employ him to make some beautiful work.

As for me, I can never hope to see again a finer draughtsman and more

original artist.”

Isabella replied:

“Lorenzo,—We were sure that you would grieve over the death of M. Andrea

Mantegna, for, as you say, a great light has gone out.”

l. c. I. 369.

TITIAN’S VIEW OF MANTEGNA

As late as 1519, Titian admired the Mantegnas at Mantua. Girolamo da

Sestola, Isabella’s music master, writes to her:

“M. Dosso and M. Tiziano, another good master who is making a fine

picture here [The Bacchanal, at Madrid] for the Lord Duke, went to

Mantua. He saw all Mantegna’s works, and praised them greatly to our

signor, and he also praised your studies. But above all, he admired your

_Tondo_ [the frescoed ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi, Fig. 219]

exceedingly, and calls it the finest thing he has ever seen. Our Signor

has one here, but Titian says yours is incomparably the finest.”

l. c. II. 171, 2.

ARIOSTO’S HONOR LIST OF PAINTERS

Ariosto as late as 1515 still includes Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini

among the best artists. The list is instructive as to the fallibility of

contemporary judgments. The two Dossi and Sebastiano del Piombo today

have lost their place in the roll.

“And those who were and still are in our days—

Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Giambellino,

The Dossis, he who chiselled and colored equally

Michel, more than mortal, Angel divine,

Sebastian, Raphael, Titian who honors

No more Cadore, than they Venice and Urbino.”

_Orlando Furioso_, Canto XXXIII, 2.

LOMAZZO’S LIST OF GREAT PAINTERS AND THEIR KINDRED POETS

“Each painter has naturally had a genus more conformable to one poet

rather than another, and has followed that poet in his work, as it is

easy to see in the modern painters. For one sees that Leonardo has

expressed the movement and decorum of Homer, Polidoro the grandeur and

sweep of Virgil, Michelangelo the profound obscurity of Dante, Raphael

the pure majesty of Petrarch, Andrea Mantegna the keen judgment of

Sannazaro, Titian the variety of Ariosto, and Gaudenzio Ferrari the

devotion which one finds expressed in the books of the saints.”

Paolo Lomazzo, _Trattato dell’ Arte delle Pittura_, Milan, 1584, p.

283.

See also Castiglione’s list in Illustrations to Chapter VI, p. 313.

GIORGIONE—LEONARDO ON RURAL AND PASTORAL DELIGHTS

“What moves thee, O man, to quit thy city habitations and leave thy

friends and kin, and go in places wild by reason of mountains and

valleys, if not the natural beauty of the world, the which, if thou

well considerest, thou enjoyest only through the sense of sight? And

if the poet wishes to call himself also a painter in such matters, why

do you not take such sites as described by the poet and stay at home

without feeling the excessive heat of the sun? And would not this be

more useful and less wearisome since it is done in coolness and

without moving about and risk of illness?

“But the mind cannot enjoy the benefit of the eyes, windows of its

habitation, and cannot receive the varieties of delightful spots,

cannot see the shady valleys furrowed by the play of winding streams,

cannot see the various flowers which with their colors make a harmony

for the eye—and so with all the things which can be represented to

that eye.”

“But if the painter in the cold and harsh winter time sets before thee

those same places painted, and others, in which thou mayest have

experienced thy pleasures beside some fountain, thou canst see again

thyself as a lover, with thy loved one in blossoming meadows, under

the sweet shadow of verdurous trees—wilt thou not receive quite an

other pleasure than from hearing such an effect described by the

poet?”

Leonardo, _Trattato_, Wien, 1882, p. 44.

This is so fully in the mood of Giorgione’s idyllism that one likes to

think that he may have talked over such themes with Leonardo when they

met in Venice in 1500.

[Illustration:

FIG. 260. Titian. Bacchus and Ariadne.—_London._

]