VENETIAN PAINTING OF THE RENAISSANCE
Titian before 1545—Some contemporaries, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma
Vecchio—The advent of Modern Sensitiveness in Lorenzo
Lotto—Moretto of Brescia—Correggio—Titian’s last Manner, its
subjectivism and impressionism—The Portraitist Moroni—Tintoretto
and the new dramatic emotionalism—Paolo Veronese, his spectacular
mastery and impressionism, his characteristic works—Eighteenth
Century Venetians: Tiepolo, Canaletto and Guardi—Longhi.
The glory of Venetian painting is to an unusual degree that of a single
individual, Titian[78] of Cadore. He lived nearly a hundred years, from
1477 to 1576, and we can trace his painting for more than seventy years
of serene and unbroken progress. He had great contemporaries—Sebastiano
del Piombo, Palma Vecchio, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Lorenzo Lotto,
Moroni, Moretto of Brescia—but so various and comprehensive is his
achievement that their work seems merely so many extensions of the paths
first explored by him. In his noble and measured sensuousness, he seems
nearer the Greeks than any other Italian painter.
If he is something less than admirable as a character, it is because of
an unpleasantly calculating side. He schemed ruthlessly for preferment
and lucrative sinecures, had the repute of envying young artists of
talent, flattered to the limit his Hapsburg patrons, bargained and
begged concerning prices, let himself be puffed egregiously by his
blackguard friend, Pietro Aretino, first and most formidable of yellow
journalists. Yet this element of craft in the man was eminently
Venetian. They schemed for splendor and pleasure, and measured even
their indulgences. Thus we should not expect lyrical raptures or
extremes of any sort in Titian. His art is one of judgment and
moderation. Indeed that calculating spirit which makes him unamiable as
a man was a source of strength to him as an artist. One of his pupils,
Palma Giovine, has described his manner of working. First he laid in his
pictures heavily in neutral tones. Then he turned them to the wall for
months to dry. Then he would pass from one to the other, scrutinizing
each “as if it were his worst enemy.” He would add color, amend drawing
and composition, thus systematically carrying many pictures forward at a
time, and subjecting each to repeated criticism and correction. He never
painted a figure at one go, saying that “he who improvises his song
never achieves learned verses or well turned.” Precisely the greatness
of Titian lay in his capacity to put ardor into these prolonged critical
processes. Thus if certain raptures are denied him, he is never below
himself, but always as noble in sentiment as he is resplendent in color.
Tiziano Vecellio was born at Cadore, in the Dolomites, in 1477.[79] Its
shadowy oaks and blue alps live in his backgrounds. At eleven he was put
with a mosaic worker, Zuccati, at Venice. He may have worked for a time
with Gentile Bellini, but attained his real development in the studio of
Giovanni Bellini, under the stimulus of his fellow pupil, Giorgione.
This intimate and poetical phase of Titian’s genius lasts from before
1505 to 1516 and the Assumption.
His second period is that of fullest color and vitality. It runs from
1517 to say 1536, Titian’s fortieth to fifty-ninth year, and the
characteristic works are the monumental altar-pieces at Venice and the
Mythologies painted for the Este family at Ferrara.
The third period extends from about 1537 to 1548. It is marked by deeper
resonances of color that is tending towards tone, and by a more
objective and static ideal. Energy is no longer squandered, and intimate
poetry is not sought. Typical works are those mythologies and portraits
done for the Duke of Urbino, and the early Hapsburg portraits.
[Illustration:
FIG. 261. Titian. Portrait so-called “Ariosto.”—_London._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 262. Titian. Portrait of a Youth.—_Temple Newsham, England._
]
The fourth period begins with 1548 or a little earlier, Titian’s
seventieth year, and lasts nearly thirty years till his death. A looser
and more synthetic construction, the substitution of broken shades and
tone for frank color, a more tragic and ardent mood, a more energetic
grandeur of composition, with lesser formality, are the marks of this
amazing last phase, in which Titian becomes a precursor of Rembrandt and
Velasquez. Since he now works chiefly for the Hapsburgs, the great
examples are at Madrid and Vienna.
[Illustration:
FIG. 263. Titian. The Tribute Money.—_Dresden._
]
The earliest Titians show the sultry shadows of Giorgione, and are
distinguishable from his work only by a more linear quality, and by a
greater explicitness of mood. Titian’s poetry is direct and rarely
ambiguous. What ardors of flesh and spirit are suggested in his early
portraits of men! The portrait of a bearded man in London, Figure 261,
is conceived entirely in Giorgione’s fashion, as a short bust showing
the hands, and the mysterious envelopment in warm shadow is Giorgione’s
as is the sensitiveness of touch and characterization. But with all his
gentle beauty, the man is formidable. His aloofness is no revery, but
some preparation of will for action. Again Giorgione would hardly have
labored to suggest the material splendor of the silvery satin sleeve.
Even more perfect is the half-length of a young patrician at Temple
Newsham, Figure 262, England. It is full of a reserved poetry, yet the
effect is as well almost shrewd and diplomatic. This youth has the
Venetian capacity for both passion and affairs. Both these portraits
should be a little earlier than 1510. Such masterpieces of smouldering
ardor as the Knight of Malta, erroneously ascribed to Giorgione and the
Man with a Glove, at Paris, must be a little later. In concentration
these are as fine as Giorgione’s portraits, but quite a different spirit
transpires from the investing shadows. These men of Titian are no
day-dreamers, but resolute and purposeful. They live little in memory
and much in prospect. Their imagination implies action and possession.
Even the drawing is more resolute. Study the eye sockets, temples, and
cheek bones of these early Titians. Nowhere in Giorgione do you get such
a sense of inner bony structure, of thicker and thinner cushions of
flesh, of tenser or slacker skin. The method finds its most admirable
expression in the two marvellous heads of the Tribute Money (1514–5), at
Dresden, Figure 263. Yet how little mystery or pathos is invoked. With a
gesture and an expression of exquisite consideration and breeding, the
Saviour baffles the most eager and fanatical of inquisitors. Nothing
could be more unlike the abstracted and almost morose Christs of
Giorgione. As usual, Titian stands on the ground of the finest
worldliness, as the Greeks had done. With the supernal, whether in
heaven or Arcadia, he has little concern.
[Illustration:
FIG. 264. Titian. The Three Ages.—_Bridgewater House, London._
]
In the early poesies Titian at once manifests his adoration of Giorgione
and his own independence. In the Three Ages, Figure 264, at Bridgewater
House we may grasp at its highest beauty his robust Arcadianism. In a
meadow landscape an ardent nymph woos her bronzed swain. Complacently he
accepts her unreserved advances. Nothing could be more explicit than the
relation between the lovers, and with equal plainness an old man and
sleeping child serve to teach us that youth and its sweetest ardors are
but a brief pause between childhood and old age. Let us then seize the
moments when nature and love are kind to us. Such is the forthright
poetry of Titian. It is the poetry of every boy and every girl—simple,
classic, unchangeable. Think of the overtones and personal
interpretations with which Giorgione would have overlaid such a theme.
Such twilight mysteries are alien to Titian’s fervent and lucid spirit.
He loves the morning hour with work and love ahead, as Giorgione loves
the veiling glamour and brooding memories of eventide.
[Illustration:
FIG. 265. Titian. “Sacred and Profane Love.”—_Borghese, Rome._
]
The Three Ages was probably painted about 1512, the far more famous
poesy, misnamed Sacred and Profane Love, Figure 265, is two or three
years later. The sumptuous variety and richness of Titian are here at
their height. Luminous marbles, pearly nude forms, lustrous stuffs, dark
shimmer of foliage and sun-swept slopes of grass seem created merely to
set off their respective beauties of hue and texture. Purples, azure,
rose, saturated greens form a sonorous chord of colors which is so
satisfying that one scarcely asks why a Cupid stirs the waters of a
magic fountain, and why a splendidly clothed figure sits tranquilly at
the side while a superb nude figure turns impulsively and holds aloft a
burning lamp.
Explanations of the fable abound. It is Venus persuading Helen to harken
to Paris, or Medea to aid Jason. So the Germans. I am sure only that if
we knew the meaning it would be quite as simple as these explanations.
My friend, the late William P. Andrews, suggested that we have a lovely
symbolism for the inquietude of maidenhood and the composure of
matronhood—love in prospect and retrospect. The universality of the
interpretation is in its favor. Titian’s mind worked socially and
concretely. Plainly the nude figure is reminiscent of Giorgione’s
listless beauty by the fountain in the Pastoral Concert, Figure 257.
Titian’s maiden lacks something of the momentary grace and spontaneity
of her model, but has in compensation a fuller grandeur.
[Illustration:
FIG. 266. Titian. Flora.—_Pitti._
]
Perhaps the ideal portrait of Flora (1515–16), in the Pitti, Figure 266,
should be reckoned with the poesies rather than with portraits. In
material beauty few Titians excel it. The curded whites of the drapery
vie with the flushed ivory of face and bosom. The sweetness of the
impression is almost awe-inspiring. What a world it is that thrusts
forth carelessly such beauty as this! Think of Giorgione’s quite similar
Shepherd with the Pipe, Figure 259, and imagine again the twilight
mystery with which he would have invested this apparition. Titian on the
contrary thinks and feels like every man, but with an intensity and
clearness quite his own. The lyrical and subjective note is incidental
and superficial in him even when he most seems to resemble his lost
comrade.
Titian’s progress in composition is best noted in the religious pieces.
From the first he seeks to break up the old inert symmetries. He invents
active balances, brings the main thrusts to the sides of the pictures
rather than to the centre. Thus even his Conversation Pieces gain
implications of action and energy. In the altar-piece of St. Peter with
Donors, at Antwerp, perhaps as early as 1502, and still somewhat in
Bellini’s style, we find the enthroned figure moved to the side and the
accessory figures arranged in a processional approach. The somewhat
later altar-piece of St. Mark at the Salute, painted probably in 1504,
Figure 267, again evades the old central symmetries. The Saint is
enthroned off centre and his position gains great energy and novelty
from its elevation and consequent foreshortening. The four plague saints
keep the old symmetry, their types are partly from Bellini (the St.
Sebastian), partly from nature. The structure in glowing shadow is that
of Giorgione. We trace the same evasion of old symmetries and the same
Giorgionesque fire in the Baptism of Christ, in the Capitoline at Rome,
and Christ and Mary Magdalen, at London. Such pictures with their
slightly conscious emphasis prepare the way for the more assured and
sonorous harmonies of the great altar-backs of the ’20s.
[Illustration:
FIG. 267. Titian. St. Mark with Plague Saints.—_Salute._
]
The Madonnas and Conversation pieces again show us most vividly how his
taste is working. The Gipsy Madonna, Figure 268, at Vienna, painted
about 1505, is highly Giorgionesque, but Giorgione never painted such
sculptural forms, nor ever conceived so resolute a Christchild. Even the
throwing of the outlet to one side reveals Titian. At Madrid and Vienna
are superb half-length Madonnas arranged symmetrically after Bellini’s
fashion, but with greater freedom of pose. Titian soon saw that the old
compositional forms could not express the new energy. He makes repeated
experiments, shifts the Madonna to one side, as in the unfinished
Madonna with St. Anthony at Florence. He adds figures and rearranges
them until the Conversation piece becomes an audience, with the saints
and donors approaching the Madonna, as in an Adoration of the Magi. We
find the completed form in the admirable Conversation piece, of about
1510 with its two versions in the Louvre and at Vienna, Figure 269; and
considerably later, a further development in those numerous full-length
Holy Families in landscapes of which the Madonna of the Hare (1530),
Figure 270, and The Marriage of St. Catherine, at London, are consummate
types. And with all the conscious experimentalism of this work, the
sense of character and of beauty is unperturbed. As compared with the
contemporary Holy Families of Raphael, the accent is more individual and
local. These superb Madonnas and gracious female saints with attendant
martyrs and church doctors, are merely the lads and lasses of
Carpaccio’s legends, grown up to manhood and womanhood, increased in
dignity and sweetness.
[Illustration:
FIG. 268. Titian. Gipsy Madonna.—_Vienna._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 269. Titian. Madonna with Saints.—_Vienna._
]
Until the death of Giovanni Bellini, in 1515, Titian seems a little
hampered by his example as by that of Giorgione. Then, as if relieved of
a restraint, Titian pursues his own aims. His design, in such great
altar-backs as the Assumption and the Madonna of the Pesaro family,
doubles its breadth and energy. His mythologies, in the bacchanals for
the Alabaster Chamber of Alphonso d’Este, at Ferrara, are no longer
pensive lyrics, but dithyrambs; primordial lyrics, for animation and
power. The religious pictures, such as the noble Entombment in the
Louvre, are no longer insistently pathetic. Subjective poetry is
everywhere giving way to masculine assertion of the splendor of love,
motherhood, comradeship. And these great objective commonplaces, which
were the very staple in their day of Greek Epic and Sculpture, receive
in Titian their finest modern embodiment. His new energy requires a
changed color. All the hues are brighter and more resonant. Their
harmonies no longer require the bond of deep shadow, but are positive
and established at the middle of the color scale, where color is most
itself. If the music of Giorgione was that of vibrating lute strings,
that of Titian has the clarity and clangor of exquisitely harmonized
woodwind and brass.
[Illustration:
FIG. 270. Titian. Holy Family with Rabbit.—_London._
]
Before sounding this new music, Titian prudently secured the sinecure, a
Commissionership of the Salt Taxes, which old Giovanni Bellini had
enjoyed. While scheming for it, he was designing also the most famous of
his great altar-pieces, the Assumption, Figure 271. It was finished in
1518, set on the high altar of the Friar’s Church, whither it has lately
returned. Titian adopts a form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo and
Raphael had employed. The upper celestial tier is symmetrically
arranged, almost in a domical way, the lower tier abounds in swinging
turns and gestures, one carefully balancing the others. The forms are
large and athletic, such as the Renaissance preferred, for greater
gravity. Their weight is compensated by the ease with which they hold
themselves and by the numerous floating and falling cherubs, playfully
at home in their clouds, like so many celestial rose leaves for the
crispness and lightness with which Titian’s brush has touched them in.
[Illustration:
FIG. 271. Titian. The Assumption.—_S. M. dei Frari._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 272. Titian. Pesaro Madonna.—_Frari._
]
An over-spiritual observer might ask, Why are the Apostles so jubilant
at losing their beloved Mistress? Only a little earlier, Giovanni
Bellini, who painted the theme for San Pietro Martire at Murano,
invested his witnesses with pathos, silence, wonder and awe. In
comparison Titian is obvious, and barely reverent. He thinks of nothing
but that this is Mary’s moment of highest glory, so of course her
friends cheer boisterously as they wave her off heavenwards. Titian’s
mind does not work in half tones of sensibility, yet he is honestly
religious in his own way. The Lord’s people are good enough for him, and
he likes them not in the hush of devotion but in the expansive moments
of action. The attitude is operatic. Choruses have no business with
overtones, all voices shall be _robusto_. What infallible taste he shows
along these simple lines! There is no smallness, no mere floridness of
utterance, no hint of over-emphasis. Such art is the despair of the
modern artist. He cannot feel so simply. The great enduring commonplaces
are denied to his more complicated genius.
Perhaps Titian is even more himself in the Madonna of the Pesaro Family,
Figure 272, which was in hand from 1519 to 1526. For animation he sets
the throne of Mary to the right, and carries splendid columns back in
depth. He gives to every gesture of saint or donor a balancing relation
to the gracious curve of the body of the Queen of Heaven. He renews the
Giorgionesque mystery in the portraits of children, adds picturesque
accessories of armor, velvet, and silken banner. The picture is as rich
as it is logical and monumental, as varied in character as it is unified
in mood. It is only by chance that it stands almost over Titian’s tomb,
and yet it would have been hard to find a picture that better represents
both his more intimate and his more objective perfections. Even such
masterpieces as the Madonna with six Saints in the Vatican (1523), and
the lost Slaying of Saint Peter Martyr (before 1530), which enjoyed
three centuries of praise, seem a little set and over-reasonable in
comparison.
Alphonso d’Este’s Alabaster Chamber at Ferrara represented the high
point of mythological poesy for the Full Renaissance, as Castello with
its Signorelli and Botticellis marked a similar culmination for the
Early Renaissance. It is lamentable that we see these essential
expressions of two great moments torn from their context and relegated
to the promiscuity of museums. Yet the scattered poesies from the
Alabaster Chamber remain a delight, at London, Madrid, and Philadelphia,
and give us the truest impression of the pagan greatness of Titian in
his maturity. For this series old Giovanni Bellini, in 1514, painted a
sylvan Feast of the Gods, Figure 242. Titian, succeeding to the work,
freely repainted the landscape, to harmonize it with his own poesies.
Two years later Titian set up The Worship of Venus, now in the Prado.
Before the white image of the goddess the shadowy lawn swarms with
winged loves. They frolic, dally, pluck apples shaken down by their
mates from the trees above. The strong little bodies glow delicately
like the inside of a great shell. A rhythm of joyous life runs through
the picture. In due course Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard will fill earth
and air with tumbling Cupids like these, but will hardly recapture the
spontaneous ecstasy of this scene. It is baffling to learn that its
origins are academic—from the imaginary gallery of the Alexandrian
philosopher, Philostratus. Again a two year interval, for Titian ever
declined to be hurried, and, in 1520, the Bacchanal, or Bacchus among
the Andrians, was ready. About the lolling figures of two clothed
nymphs, the sleek brown bodies of nude sylvans bend in grand gestures as
they pour the wine. At the left Bacchus in professional aloofness goes
about the serious business of emptying a flagon. At the right is flung
the relaxed body of a nymph overcome by sleep and wine. Her splendid
nudity shines forth in competition with a soaring afternoon cloud, while
behind her a lightly draped shepherd dances with his lass. The orgy is
swept by the clean breeze and dappled with sunlight—purifying elements.
We have not intoxication in the gross sense, but the Greek notion of an
elemental Bacchic inspiration.
The decoration was triumphantly completed in 1523 with the Bacchus and
Ariadne, Figure 260, now in the National Gallery. The noisy train of the
god of wine sweeps into the picture oblivious of the heroine. As the
leopards swing the car along the strand, the God flings himself
rapturously towards the form of startled Ariadne, who with a grand,
hesitating gesture turns her head and body away while her legs and feet
still bear her towards her wooer. The thing sparkles with wine-red and
azure, tingles electrically with passion, gives forth a clamor which is
also a harmony. Its exuberance is well contained in noble compositional
forms. The passionate yet disciplined soul of Titian approaching fifty
is fully expressed in this marvellous work.
[Illustration:
FIG. 273. Titian. The Entombment.—_Louvre._
]
Passing to the religious pictures once more, the Entombment, Figure 273,
now in the Louvre, which was painted for the Gonzagas about 1525, is
again a masterpiece of unaffected feeling and of finest disposition of
masses. The central group looms against the sky with the grandeur of a
great dome. Whoever has seen strong men caring for the dead or stricken
will realize the reserve and nobility of acts which are expressions of
sympathies too deep for words. I saw things like that at the Messina
earthquake. Equally fine and restrained is the protective attitude of
the Magdalen towards a Mary stark and mute with grief. Magnificent is
the contrast of the grand nude forms of the dead Christ, with the rich
stuffs in which the attendants are clothed. I imagine when Titian
conceived this simple elegy with such power and pathos he may have had
scornful reference to Raphael’s distorted and sensational version of the
same theme, Figure 186. And perhaps the æsthetic lesson of the picture
is that choice feeling is far more difficult of attainment than fine
painting.
In 1533, Titian, by command, met the Emperor Charles V at Augsburg, was
promptly made a knight and later a count palatine. From now on he was
much employed by the Emperor and his son Philip. With that relationship
a change begins to come over his art. He becomes less exuberant, more
official and objective. Titian at sixty has said almost every possible
thing on his own account, and is content for a space to be observer and
recorder of the stately world about him. We have descriptions of him at
this time, maintaining a princely hospitality in his palace, and
declining to share the dissipations which he willingly provided for such
loose-living friends as Francesco Sansovino and Pietro Aretino.
He strangely depoetizes himself. The change comes somewhere about 1536,
and a notable evidence of it is in the portrait of a lady in peacock
blue velvet, in the Pitti. Posterity has agreed to call her simply La
Bella, and so impersonal a style well befits her impassive beauty.
Materially Titian has never painted more exquisitely, but it has become
a painting of surfaces. The appeal is vague, general, social, there are
no personal intimations, merely a magnificent statement of entirely
obvious perfections.
Again Titian is content to be the mere painter in the so-called Venus of
Urbino, Figure 274. It was painted about 1538, and is in the Uffizi.
Evidently the sleeping Venus of Giorgione is in Titian’s mind, but what
a loss in awaking her! Titian sees the gracious forms for what they are
of nacreous light and rosy shadow, he sees the room for what it is in
distribution of curtained interior and alcove space irradiated by
morning light. He studies curiously the delicate nuances of bluer sheet
and creamier skin, he models out the slender body with faintest
investment of almost imperceptible shadow. In short, he is just a
painter, but what a painter he is!
[Illustration:
FIG. 274. Titian. Venus of Urbino.—_Pitti._
]
About the same time he did the official portraits of Eleonora and
Federigo Gonzaga. He treats them as grandees. They are imposing, almost
pompous, every inch the prince and princess. He sees with a courtier’s
eye, and gives to official portraiture that impersonal cast which it has
since only too faithfully retained. He revives the great traditions of
Venetian narrative painting. The great wall painting, in the Ducal
Palace, of the Imperial Victory at Cadore has perished. Old copies and
engravings tell us of its energy, picturesqueness and panoramic breadth.
Fortunately the great mural canvas, finished in 1538 and representing
Mary entering the Temple, is still in its place; for the old School of
the Carità has become the Academy. In this picture Titian realizes all
that the Veronese and Venetian painters from Altichiero down had sought
for. Like his predecessors, he is chiefly spectacular, subordinating
character, but he attains a monumental breadth which they never remotely
glimpsed. The scheme is worked out in magnificent oblongs varied by
triangular forms which repeat the motive of the steps. The chief
narrative motives, the childish determination of the Virgin, the
gracious expectancy of the high priest, the admiration of the women
below, hold their own amazingly in the vast space. The surface sings
with color. The painting was affixed to the wall in 1538, fully ten
years before Paolo Veronese had made this sort of pageantry his special
domain.
Almost as dispassionate is the great canvas, depicting Christ before the
People (1543), at Vienna. It becomes less an expression of the
submission of Christ than an exaltation of the Imperial power that has
him in charge and of the mob spirit that cries for his blood. The
architectural surroundings are magnificent. There are wonderful details,
as in the howling boy at the left and the white form of a girl caught in
the throng. Her sudden apparition as an element of relief and mystery
anticipates by nearly a century a similar device in Rembrandt’s Night
Watch.
Very characteristic in its patrician decorum is The Disciples at Emmaus,
in the Louvre, Figure 275, which was painted about 1545. Here there is
no intensity in the moment of surprise and revelation. Benignly the
Christ breaks bread; reverently and without excitement the disciples
give him his due worship. All the homeliness and surprise that are in
St. Luke’s narrative, and that Rembrandt later emphasized, have been
leveled out in the interest of discretion and nobility. The disciples
show no more enthusiasm than a Venetian dignitary and prelate should.
[Illustration:
FIG. 275. The Supper at Emmaus.—_Louvre._
]
Two portraits which were both painted within the year 1545 show Titian
at the parting of the ways. The Aretino, in the Pitti Palace, the even
finer sketch being in the Frick Collection, New York, Figure 276,
reveals the truculent and sensual man of letters in all his formidable
massiveness. The satin and velvets in which he is clad are painted
lightly but with fullest regard for their textures and material beauty.
Titian liked Aretino and had profited by his bitter and venal pen. So
without emphasizing Aretino’s effrontery and brutality Titian brings out
his resolute intelligence.
In the portraits of Paul III, Figure 277, especially in that scene where
the decrepit Pope muses craftily between two smooth flatterers and
traitors, his own kinsmen, the sinister air seems filled with contesting
wills. A veil of atmosphere interposes itself before the figures. The
touch is light, contrasts are evaded, materials count for very little,
there is no copying of rich surfaces. Even the color is reduced to tones
of gray merely warmed with reds or cooled with blues.
[Illustration:
FIG. 276. Titian. Pietro Aretino.—_Frick Coll., N. Y._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 277. Titian. Paul III and his Nephews.—_Naples._
]
In its tremulous psychology, in its reticence, in its substitute of
richly broken monochrome for a gamut of real color, this picture is a
kind of negation of everything Titian had attained. His remaining thirty
years were given to ideals which are no longer bounded by the Venetian
lagoon, but are as broad perhaps and indeterminate as the modern
imagination itself. Before exploring this mystery of Titian’s renovation
of his art at seventy, and since his Venetian style has closed, we may
do well to consider some of his contemporaries at Venice and in
Lombardy.
Sebastiano del Piombo[80] was born at Venice in 1487, and like most of
his generation emulated the smouldering harmonies of Giorgione. He
paints such admirable portraits as the so-called Fornarina, at Florence,
which long passed for a Raphael. He soon passes from the lyrism of
Giorgione to a dramatic mode quite his own. He was called to Rome, made
keeper of the Papal Seal, became an executant of Michelangelo’s designs,
and thus indulged a losing rivalry with Raphael. He commands a heavy
dignity in his male portraits, and in his various pictures of the Dead
Christ and Mary, attains a robust and telling pathos. Down to his death,
in 1547, he maintained a tradition of Giorgionesque color in the alien
air of Rome, and represented something of the gravity of the Venetian
Renaissance in a city rapidly giving itself to sensationalism.
[Illustration:
FIG. 278. Palma Vecchio. Adoration of the Shepherds.—_Louvre._
]
Palma Vecchio[81] is a more considerable figure. Born at Serinalta amid
the Bergamesque hills, in 1480, we find him at Venice, by 1505 among the
pupils of Giovanni Bellini. Like the rest, he is touched by Giogione’s
poetry, but on the whole he merely intensifies and refines upon simpler
methods. He follows Titian in the conversation piece, and does many
Arcadian Holy Families which are beautifully lighted, radiantly colored
and felt with a warmth and simplicity that just misses sentimentality.
Among the best is the Adoration of the Shepherds, Figure 278, in the
Louvre.
With Titian, he loves women of generous build and he sets off their
impressive charms by careful posing, employing all the new devices of
counterpoise. One may see him at his grandest in the altar-piece of St.
Barbara, Figure 279, painted after 1561. The saint is worthy to be the
patroness of artillerymen. She holds her martyr’s palm like a field
marshal’s baton, she is imperiously confident and yet gentle—a lovely
Amazon of the Christian pantheon.
[Illustration:
FIG. 279. Palma Vecchio.—_S.M. Formosa._
]
In the Arcadian nude Palma has delicacy and refinement of workmanship,
but the mood is obvious. For him beauty is literally skin deep, and he
gives himself to the impossible competition of paint with nature’s
nacreous shades and ineffable carnations. But he so nearly succeeds that
just as a painter of lovely surfaces no Venetian painter quite equalled
him, not even Titian, and with this single talent Palma almost made
himself a great portraitist. Indeed if painting surfaces were all of
portraiture, he would be the greatest portraitist of the Renaissance.
But his big, blond models lose condition in his hands. Charming as is
such a group as the Three Graces at Dresden, or the dozen or more single
portraits of men and women, they lack the last quality of distinction.
He tries to gain it by adopting rather overtly the pathos and
wistfulness of Giorgione, but it doesn’t suit his exquisitely groomed
cavaliers nor yet their even more exquisitely groomed and most ample
light o’loves. Indeed, despite a handful of superb portraits, Palma has
ever the air rather of a consummate beauty doctor than that of a great
artist. However that be, his influence was widespread throughout
Northern Italy, and especially around his native Bergamo. He died in
1528, leaving a Veronese pupil, Bonifazio, to complete his unfinished
canvases and to carry on to the middle of the century his brilliant and
gentle style. Within his narrow range Palma is admirable, never uneasy,
never below himself. In his unperturbed Arcadianism and even in his
harmless sentimentalism, in his delicacy and robustness, he seems more
Venetian than the Venetians themselves.
Composure is the very soul of the grand style whether in fifth century
Athens or in sixteenth century Florence, Rome, or Venice. It accepts the
human spectacle as worthy and thrilling, admires without misgivings the
best things that come before its eye. That is why radicals hate the
grand style—and rightly, for it is always aristocratic, caring rather
little for the average man and much for that privileged remnant which
lives in highest bodily efficiency and mental ease. The grand style is
on the side of what Matthew Arnold called the barbaric virtues of
wealth, health, and generous living. The moment the artist begins to
question the social order, to be curious about the foibles and fates of
individuals as such, the grand style is in peril. This delicate and
inquisitive sensibility makes its appearance in Italy not long after the
death of Raphael. You will find it in Pontormo, at Florence, in Lorenzo
Lotto, in the Venetic region, in Moretto of Brescia, above all in
Correggio, more assertively in Tintoretto, and latent in Titian’s last
phase. It is a tremor on the sea of history that heralds a new dawn.
[Illustration:
FIG. 280. Lorenzo Lotto. Adoration of the Shepherds.—_Brescia._
]
Lorenzo Lotto,[82] born at Treviso in 1480, first and most
characteristically embodies the new intimacy. He worked widely through
Lombardy and the Marches, enjoying a transitory vogue at Venice. Trained
in the austere methods of Alvise Vivarini, he soon gave himself to his
own native melancholy. One may see his qualities and defects in the
great Enthroned Madonna, in San Bartolommeo at Bergamo. Mr. Berenson has
well remarked that the saints are no longer demi-gods and objects of
worship, but “pious souls in whose faces and gestures we discern the
zeal, the fervor, the yearning, the reverie, or even the sentimental
ecstacy peculiar to the several temperaments most frequently occurring
among the children of Holy Mother Church.” Note too how the stately
architecture derived from Giovanni Bellini and the crowded figure group
mutually dwarf one another. Intimacy and monumentality do not live well
together. This picture was finished in 1516, the year that Titian began
the Assumption. Does not the contrast show Lotto an alien in his time
and a harbinger of ours? In later pictures of less monumental
pretensions,—as in a Nativity, Figure 280, at Brescia, which may
profitably be contrasted with Palma’s more assured version,—he attains a
penetrating beauty of a morbid kind, and his sensitiveness makes him a
most appealing portraitist. He has left an extraordinary gallery of shy,
inadequate, sometimes morose and invalid men, and women, Figure 281.
They have not the confidence of the Renaissance, but hesitations like
our own. Which shows perhaps that the Renaissance mood was ever urban
and the affair of a minority of statesmen, merchants and humanists. In
the little cities where there was no enlightened court the human spirit
retained and betrayed its immemorial frailties and misgivings. Lotto
died in 1556, having widely diffused his sensitive art through the Marca
and Lombardy.
[Illustration:
FIG. 281. Lorenzo Lotto. The Marriage Yoke.—_Madrid._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 282. Moretto of Brescia. Madonna with St. Nicholas.—_Brescia._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 283. Correggio. Detail of Ceiling.—_Convent of S. Paolo, Parma._
]
It is significantly the provincial painters and not the born Venetians
who indulge these quite feminine refinements of sensibility. Such a one
is Moretto of Brescia, born in 1498 and active until 1555. Although
closely in touch with Palma and Titian, he avoids their positive color
and dreams his pictures in delicate harmonies of silver and blue. There
is a morning coolness about them which anticipates certain perfections
of early Velasquez and even of the figure painting of Corot. He is a
distinguished spirit but an anomaly in the age of Aretino. Milton would
have understood him. In portraiture, as in the richly clad nobleman of
the National Gallery, he forces the note of picturesqueness to
restlessness. In such religious pictures as the Madonna in Glory,
(1540), in San Giorgio Maggiore, at Verona, or in the Madonna with St.
Nicholas, at Brescia, (1539), Figure 282, he shows an ecstatic lyrical
feeling, and finds the free and florid compositional forms to express
it. It has an informality which Titian would never have permitted
himself at this moment.
[Illustration:
FIG. 284. Correggio. St. Augustine. Fresco. Toschi’s Copy.—_Cathedral,
Parma._
]
Of course the greatest of those who in the name of sentiment undermined
the grand style was Antonio Correggio,[83] a provincial painter, a
disappointed and unsuccessful man, who lived out his less than fifty
short years (1489?–1534) in or near Parma. His ideas he took from
Mantegna, master of all Northern Italy, whose illusionism he carried a
point further. He made in 1518 for the ceiling of the reception room of
the Convent of San Paolo, Figure 283, a trellis through the verdurous
ovals of which one sees pairs of nude boy geniuses at play. He paints
away the domes of the Church of San Giovanni (1524) and of the Cathedral
(1530), shows us Christ or His Mother soaring into the clouds with hosts
of accompanying angels. He brings the clouds down through the painted
wall and sets them before the pendentives. Church Doctors, Figure 284,
or Evangelists ride their cloud-thrones easily in the company of the
fairest nude angels of either sex. The painting fairly annuls the
architecture. These decorative frescoes are so vital and so richly
various that they demand admiration and disarm criticism. To walk among
the demi-gods and goddesses that loll on the parapet painted about the
Cathedral dome, Figure 285, is to have known the company of Homer’s
immortals. The impression is over-powering and unforgettable. Cautious
people have always resented such profusion and such unrestrained
assertion of life and joy. At the time they called the dome, with its
confusion of wriggling rosy legs of ascending angels, the “frog pond.”
They cavilled at Correggio’s price and appealed to Titian, who knowing a
miracle of fine workmanship, told them that if they turned the dome over
and filled it with ducats, it would not be too much.
[Illustration:
FIG. 285. Correggio. Detail of fresco decoration of Dome of the
Cathedral. After Toschi’s Copy.—_Parma._
]
It was Correggio’s distinction to fill an immense decoration with
lyrical ecstacy. Michelangelo in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel had
done as much in elegiac vein. Both set a destructive example to smaller
men who followed. For two centuries after Correggio’s death in 1534 the
clouds blew into churches, and rosy angelic apparitions cooled their
nude charms in these clouds and dangled their delicate legs therefrom,
and painters worked their will upon mere architecture, and the baroque
style took possession of all Catholic Europe. At its best it is
captivating even to an unwilling Protestant imagination, but it never
regained the height of its beginnings in Correggio.
[Illustration:
FIG. 286. Correggio. “The Day.”—_Parma._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 287. Correggio. Marriage of St. Catherine.—_Louvre._
]
In his religious pieces and mythologies, Correggio is respectful to the
grand style. He had in one way or another taken account of his Titian,
Raphael, and Michelangelo, and he builds his groups in their active
symmetries. But such an allegiance to the decorous style is merely
superficial, his affinities are with the following centuries and the
devotees of sensibility. Even in a grandly composed picture like the
Holy Family called The Day, Figure 286, the women are disquieting in
their personal loveliness. There is no relation to the Parthenon
marbles, as there always seems to be in Titian, no suggestion of a
larger air. These Maries know love, and raptures and tears. In the
somewhat earlier Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure 287, at Paris, the
mood is simply one of great tenderness. In later pictures like the
Madonna with St. George and the Holy Night, at Dresden, the excitement
of all the figures becomes almost unpleasant. So, in the mythologies,
Leda, or Danae, or Antiope, Figure 288, is not goddesslike but
perturbingly feminine and desirable. A most delicate erotic appeal is in
all this work. It is like Alexandrian sculpture. It is still noble, but
less so than Titian or Raphael, less abstract and stylistic. The
exquisite ambiguity of the mood is not quite compatible with the
compositional formulas. One feels it is but a step and a legitimate one
from Correggio to the rare, sentimental nudes of Gainsborough and Sir
Joshua and Romney.
[Illustration:
FIG. 288. Correggio. Jupiter and Antiope.—_Louvre._
]
In every phase Correggio’s work is distinguishable by the most beautiful
handling of color and light and dark. Like Moretto and Lotto he prefers
a blonder scale than the Venetian, and makes his surfaces so many
miracles of ivory, silvery grays and straw yellows, invested with shadow
tenuously modulated, yet of strongest modelling power. He cares nothing
about textures or individually rich passages; it is the whole picture
that counts. The brush sweeps lightly and swiftly, there is no loading
of color, everywhere an exquisite economy and a subtlety that conceals
itself. At all points, technically as well as psychologically, Correggio
deals in overtones. And by that token he is not of the Renaissance, but
is greater or smaller than it, as you may choose to decide. He is more
our contemporary than he is Titian’s.
Meanwhile Titian himself is passing into a subjective phase. In 1545 he
was at Rome. Michelangelo, who offered him unusual courtesies, doubtless
showed him the Sistine ceiling and the recently finished Last Judgment.
Titian, as he writes himself, studied with humble amazement the
“marvellous old stones” that the Roman soil was yielding up to the newly
founded museums.
[Illustration:
FIG. 289. Charles V. at Mühlberg.—_Madrid._
]
Even before the Roman trip, his style begins to show an old man’s
restless vehemence. The titanic ceiling decorations for the Salute, of
1543 and 1544, Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, David and Goliath,
display at once an almost sensational energy and a lesser regard for the
superficial attractions of color. The rugged designs are hacked out in
bold splotches of light and dark. The method begins to be luministic.
The partial foreshortening of the figures to adjust them to being seen
from below is the decorative compromise which prevails at Venice from
Tintoretto to Tiepolo. The new point of view is easiest studied in
Christ crowned with Thorns, in the Louvre. Titian passes swiftly through
this overtly dramatic stage. The same year, 1548, that saw the Crowning
with Thorns, saw also the equestrian portrait of Charles V, Conqueror,
Figure 289, after the battle of Mühlberg. What is odd about the picture
is the elimination of all military conventions—no battle reek, no
stricken foes, no busy staff. Instead just the pale, inflexible,
thoughtful face of a slight old man, physically frail but firmly seated
on a cantering horse. There is no frank color except the purple scarf
and the gold of armor and horse trappings. Everything is expressed in
marvellous grays and browns which contain hints of all the colors. There
is no linear drawing; edge melts into edge without abrupt contrasts. A
twilight mystery, a veiled quality, adds immensely to the expression of
melancholy and might. The mere spectacle of life has become relatively
uninteresting to Titian. He rather meditates on those creative throes of
the mind which underlie action. His conqueror is a thinker.
[Illustration:
FIG. 290. Titian. The Rape of Europa.—_Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston._
]
In Titian’s own portrait, of 1550, at Berlin, the new method is more
strongly announced. The form grows out of a silvery gloom by reason of
hesitating flickers of light which yet have extraordinary modelling
power. In character the work is remarkable. One senses smouldering under
the weathered surfaces of this man of seventy-three the most formidable
capacities for wrath and for passion.
The nudes and mythologies of these final years, the various Danae’s and
the Nymph and Faun at Vienna, the Calisto and Actæon at Bridgewater
House, the Venus and Adonis at Madrid, all show a very different temper
from the early poesies. There is no suggestion of meditative dalliance,
no shy Arcadianism. These are mortals stung and lashed by desire. Love
is not sweet on their lips but bitter and fateful. Even Europa, Figure
290, at Fenway Court, the finest of these later poesies, seems to fill
the sunlight sky and sea with a spasm of erotic expectancy. Passion
becomes cosmic. Strange capacities for tenderness also appear. Compare
the Deposition in the Prado, Figure 291, of 1559, with the masterpiece
of forty years earlier, Figure 273, at the Louvre. The noble domelike
arrangement persists, but within the compositional dome what a change!
The body of the Christ is no longer grandly disposed. It crumples as it
is turned into the tomb. The thing has the unexpectedness of fact. The
canvas is soberly incandescent with half-lit faces which gleam through
the deep grays and browns. Each light is a focus of compassion. Titian
himself, impersonating St. Joseph of Arimathea, supports the Christ.
[Illustration:
FIG. 291. Titian. The Entombment.—_Madrid._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 292. Titian. Education of Cupid.—_Borghese, Rome._
]
In one of the latest poesies, the Education of Cupid, Figure 292, at the
Borghese, Rome, the new method may be studied. The forms are built up of
little and apparently indeterminate touches of russets and grays that
glow from within. The form builds itself out vibratingly. It is no
longer as palpable to the hand as that of the early Titians, but it is
more palpable to the eye and to the mind. Tone has driven out color;
atmospheric envelopment has replaced minute description; the artist
merely creates gradations of light which afford the illusion of bulk. It
is what we call today, rather loosely, impressionism, or, more
accurately, luminism. In the character of these goddesses we have no
longer wistfulness, that ineffable adolescent quality of Titian’s early
poesies, but women fully conscious of their power to give or take away.
His later pictures, The Crowning with Thorns at Munich (1570) and the
Pietà (1576) in the Venice Academy, are nobly tragic in mood. Titian
faces the last great event not as a humanist, but as a humble believer
sorrowing in the suffering of his Lord. Carried off by the plague in
1576, Titian had lived nearly a century, for over seventy years had been
a famous painter. In that long course there is no sign of failure of
power. His dominant mood changes according to his age from the ardent
pastoralism of his early maturity, through the dramatic energy of his
middle age, and the impersonal splendor of his first old age. And when
he had passed the scriptural term, he developed new depths of feeling,
and created to contain them a pulsating realm of light and dark in
twilight. He had begun with the cool preciseness of Giovanni Bellini and
closed with a passionate mystery of expression which foretells
Rembrandt. So far as Venice was concerned, he not merely led its
Renaissance, but was its Renaissance, both in rise and decay. And it is
noteworthy that while Raphael and Michelangelo end in ostentation of
power and decline of feeling, Titian ends in deeper capacities whether
for passion or sympathy, works away from the daylight realities of
humanism towards new depths in natural appearance and new depths in his
own soul.
Around such a man a throng of able painters naturally grew up. The
poorest imitated him, the better took hints from his marvellous practice
and went their own way. Among these was Giambattista Moroni of Bergamo,
born in 1520 and trained under Moretto of Brescia. Mediocre as a
religious painter, he was a portraitist of acutest vision for character.
A provincial, he cared little for the idealizations of the time. In such
a portrait as the Tailor, at London, or the amazing old Abbess in the
Metropolitan Museum, or the Husband and Wife, at Cleveland, or The
Widower, at Dublin, Figure 293, he gives us the very look of people,
even to their uneasiness as they submit to the ordeal of being
portrayed, and withal their intelligence, diligence, and patience.
Titian, when overdriven with portrait commissions, habitually referred
his clients to Moroni, as an abler artist in the specialty. And indeed
Moroni, while lacking Titian’s style, looked harder at his sitters than
Titian ever did. He died in 1572, four years before his generous friend.
[Illustration:
FIG. 293. G-B. Moroni. The Widower.—_Dublin._
]
The Bassanos, the father Jacopo and his sons Leandro and Francesco, were
too popular to be omitted. Their style is pretty eclectic with something
of late Titian and Tintoretto in it. They treat the old religious
themes, are good portraitists, and carry out on their own initiative a
bucolic sort of painting, with abundant horses, cattle and dogs. So
homely a tradition has its place in breaking down the decorum of the
grand style. The excellent average of the family in their craft may be
judged from Leandro’s Pietà, at Cleveland.
Sometimes over the velvety calm of Venice and the lagoon will roll up a
thunder storm. The radiant color becomes more sombrely rich under the
tossing clouds. Their steely edges break into the lightning flash; domes
and towers for a moment stagger under the lashing of the rain squall.
The storm passes, the leaden clouds show saffron backs against the blue,
the evening is here with double serenity and purity. Such is Jacopo
Tintoretto amid the reflective tranquility, and confident splendors of
Venetian painting—a wind of the spirit, a shattering, yet consoling,
apparition. Tenderness, tragedy, romance, are his realm. Where his
contemporaries dealt in superb averages, he deals in transcendent
exceptions. Thus he has ever been a baffling figure to the critics. For
the febrile Ruskin, he is among the greatest of painters; for the coolly
analytical Kenyon Cox, he is little better than a reckless
sensationalist. Every one, friend or foe of his art, must admit its
Shakespearean richness and variety. He lacks Titian’s Olympian poise,
but is more universal.
[Illustration:
FIG. 294. Tintoretto. Tithonus and Aurora. Tempera color
sketch.—_British Museum._
]
Jacopo Robusti,[84] the dyer’s son, was born in Venice in 1518. At
seventeen he was put with Titian. Once passing through the studio Titian
saw on the floor a number of Tintoretto’s sketches. Not trusting himself
to speak, he sent word that the newcomer should never again enter his
studio. An act which contemporary gossip ascribed to jealousy, is rather
to be referred to disgust at Tintoretto’s unbridled vehemence. Whoever
has studied Tintoretto’s tempera sketches, Figure 294, in the British
Museum may realize how Titian felt. The sketches are superb, but Titian
in 1535 was in no way to realize their value. Twenty years later he may
have appreciated them.
[Illustration:
FIG. 295. Tintoretto. Presentation of Virgin in the Temple.—_S. M.
dell’ Orto._
]
Driven out by the best master in Venice, Tintoretto was reduced to the
process of self-education, in which he was aided by that brilliant
decorative colorist and ever luckless artist, Andrea Schiavone.
Tintoretto’s earliest work of note is the decoration of his own parish
church of the Orto, which he undertook about the year 1546 for the
costs. The gigantic canvases of the Deluge and Worship of the Golden
Calf in the Choir made his fame, but we see his peculiar quality better
in the Presentation in the Temple, Figure 295. It was finished only a
few years after Titian’s masterpiece in the Scuola della Carità, hence
the contrast between the two works on the same theme is enlightening.
Titian’s picture is fundamentally a spectacle and a ceremony. Everything
goes as arranged and expected. Tintoretto’s picture is a sudden and
thrilling event full of unexpected graces. The little Virgin is well
within the picture, but keeps her prominence through her position
against the sky and even more by reason of the focusing of intense
interest on her by all the persons in the composition. It is a charming
invention that three mothers and their infant daughters on the steps
should share in the glory of her consecration. At the left a prophetic
figure suddenly grasps the import of the moment and sways with wide
stretched arms towards the hope. From him to the head of the steps rises
a pathetic line of cripples and beggars mercifully veiled in half light.
These are witnesses to the human misery that the Virgin through her Son
is to assuage. The unifying principle, apart from the fine linear
design, is the light which floods out of the picture over the
beautifully carved steps. Everything is conceived in depth, while
Titian’s Presentation is relatively on one plane. Golden browns and
yellows of great luminosity are prevailing colors, the crimsons and
blues serving merely as relief and accent. With all its richness of
illustrative content, the thing is a noble decoration.
A little later, perhaps in 1548, Tintoretto did the first of three
canvases for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. It represents the moment
when a Christian slave is about to be brained. The liberating figure of
St. Mark, Figure 296, swoops down, the maul snaps in the executioner’s
hand. With a singular delicacy the entire interest of the bystanders is
concentrated on the helpless white body of the martyr. The suspense is
breathless. Only the old magistrate high at the right has seen the
miraculous breaking of the executioner’s sledge. His gesture carries the
eye to the figure of the downward swooping saint, thus the most
sensational feature is last seen and comes as a climax. Such dramatic
modulations are of the very essence of Tintoretto’s genius. Again,
though the sweeping curves of the linear design are splendidly balanced,
the light is the ultimate harmonizer. It ripples out in an increasing
wave towards the spectator, kindling as it goes the colors of rich
stuffs and the bronzed or pearly roundings of brows, shoulders, throats
and limbs. The carrying of a uniform rhythm of motion through earth and
sky is again Tintoretto’s invention. He uses it here as elsewhere not as
a sprightly device—which was later the baroque attitude—but as a
necessary factor in emotional expression.
[Illustration:
FIG. 296. Tintoretto. Miracle of the Slave.—_Venice._
]
In 1561 Tintoretto finished the great Marriage at Cana for the Salute.
The picture is tremendously developed in depth, and the Christ is set in
the distance. The foreground figures alone are concerned with the
miracle. Very effective is the contrast of the quiet feasters with those
who are stirred by the marvel. The lighting is consummately fine. There
are passages of extreme loveliness, such as the swaying row of women’s
faces on the right of the table, but the whole thing is far from clear;
illustrative and decorative features are imperfectly harmonized. In this
great scale Tintoretto’s richness and insatiate inventiveness tend to
work against him.
Before considering his colossal labor in the School of St. Roch, we
should note his avowed ideal. It might be read on the walls of his
studio: “The Drawing of Michelangelo and the Coloring of Titian.” In the
studio were casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures brought up at great
expense from Florence and Rome. And to Michelangelo we owe the slender
and alert proportions of Tintoretto’s figures, quite different as they
are from the gravity, almost ponderosity of Titian, Palma, and Paolo
Veronese. The color is based on late Titian, but is more sonorous,
simple, and uncomplicated by minor tones. The brush stroke is unlike
anything earlier—sketchy, impetuous, definitive, working by first
intention. Accordingly the surfaces are much broken, and, to a near
view, lack preciousness. We have neither the fluent enamel of Giorgione
and early Titian, nor yet the muffled richness of Titian’s later manner.
But in the best Tintorettos the touch is infallibly crisp, right and
expressive. To exaggerate these generously avowed influences of the
master who repudiated him and the master he never saw would be easy. As
a matter of fact, Tintoretto is always more the illustrator than either
of his models. If he adopts the grand poses of Michelangelo, he does so
not for abstract beauty, but ever seeks a motive for them. If he chooses
Michelangelo’s slender, athletic proportions, he invests them with
tenderness and enthusiasm. Unlike Titian, he avoids both classical
draperies and rich contemporary costumes, choosing compromise forms of
dress which, without ceasing to be classical, should seem familiar, and
fit for a real world. If he adopts Titian’s coruscating light, he gives
it a special poetry. It does not glow evenly through the picture, but
flashes intermittently, as an accent or accompaniment to emotion.
In 1560 the famous charitable confraternity of St. Roch determined to
decorate their beautiful School. They called Federico Zuccaro, and
Francesco Salviati, who had Roman honors, Tintoretto, and his friends,
Schiavone and Paolo Veronese. The subject in competition was to be a
cartoon of St. Roch in glory for the ceiling of the refectory. When the
day came, Tintoretto unveiled not a cartoon but the finished oval. That
was his drawing, he said; he hoped they would not be offended, but he
knew no other way. The misunderstandings due to this summary procedure
were soon cleared up. Tintoretto became titular painter to the School,
later a member, and worked at the two great halls and ante-rooms for
twenty-eight years.
St. Roch was the Physician Saint who cared for the plague stricken. Thus
the upper hall was pictured with examples of miraculous mercy and
deliverance chosen from the Old Testament. The lower hall was devoted to
the more familiar stories of the life of Christ and of His Mother. Sadly
darkened and neglected, often in impossible light, these pictures baffle
all but the enthusiast. One needs all the vicarious enthusiasm that may
be drawn from a Ruskin to do San Rocco with any thoroughness. Whoever
persists will be rewarded, for while Tintoretto is by no means at his
greatest as a painter in this work, it reveals his inexhaustible
inventiveness, his warmth and tenderness, and power, as no other series
does, whereas it has in the little moonlit landscapes with St. Mary
Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt faery refinements elsewhere lacking in
the master.
Everybody knows at least the great Calvary, with its sense of cosmic
disaster. Marvellous is the storm which sweeps towards the cross from
behind, superb alike the cluster of faithful friends at the foot of the
cross and the proud riders at the flanks. Hate, love and indifference
mingle in the scene. It gets its profound tragedy on terms of fact, is
free from all mystical sentimentality. What was it like on that awful
evening? is the only question the artist asks himself, and his answer, a
sheer gift of the imagination, transcends all the lyrical sweetness and
measured solemnity of the ritual crucifixions. Humanism and religion
unite for once in this masterpiece.
[Illustration:
FIG. 297. Tintoretto. Christ Tempted by Satan.—_Scuola di S. Rocco._
]
Among the scores of narratives in the two halls the eye will rest upon
Moses Smiting the Rock, for its majesty; upon the meeting of Mary and
Elizabeth which has the intensity of Giotto’s fresco at neighboring
Padua, with an abandon all its own; upon the Flight into Egypt, with its
idyllic landscape; upon the awful tumult and despair of the Massacre of
the Innocents; upon the pathos of the white-robed Christ, awaiting his
doom from an indifferent proconsul. These occur among many that are
equally memorable. Perhaps the subtle humanism of Tintoretto is best
shown in the Temptation of Christ, Figure 297. Instead of the ignoble
bat-like Satan of the mediæval painters, we have a magnificent
starry-eyed youth, a veritable genius of the pride of life. With
outstretched, generous arms he offers unstinted power and pleasure. The
Christ regards him with tranquil kindness, as one might a splendid
animal fawning too eagerly. For so Christian a man as Tintoretto, it
implies extraordinary sympathy to imagine a Satan in his own way
gloriously sure of his case. In these compositions the method is most
various. But where there are many figures Tintoretto generally avoids
the convention of placing the chief personages on the picture plane. You
look over heads or between bodies to glimpse the Saints or the Blessed
Virgin or Christ. And curiously this procedure does not confuse the eye.
On the contrary these apparently casual but really most thoughtful
arrangements heighten the sense of reality; one feels like a witness,
like one himself on the edges of the throng.
Along with the decoration of San Rocco, Tintoretto undertook frequent
commissions for the Ducal Palace. But the fire of 1577 consumed his
picture of the naval victory at Lepanto, with much else. In the
mythologies of the Anticollegio painted in 1578 we have the loveliest
poesies of the Venetian school. These are the Marriage of Bacchus and
Ariadne, Mercury and the Graces, Minerva expelling Mars and the Forge of
Vulcan. From the point of view both of decoration and sentiment these
are perhaps the finest nudes in painting. They glow with outdoor health,
the firm wholesome bodies sway from sheer joy in motion, or hover
lightly in the limpid air. The noble forms are fixed for us in
transparent shadows, and broad dapplings of light. There is little of
the sheer dreaminess of Giorgione, who yet counts for something in the
work, nor yet of the explicit sensuousness of Titian. These noble
creatures go about our business,—marrying, seeking grace in life,
composing strife, providing munitions should strife arise. Miss
Phillipps is probably right in divining here an allegory of the
greatness of Venice, bride of the Adriatic, protected by her diplomacy,
admired for her arts, yet ever ready in her arsenals. What is better
worth noting is the combination of breadth and delicacy in the finest of
these poesies, The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Figure 298. The
interlocking of the superb forms in a flowing rhythm or pattern, the
technical miracle of Venus’s easy turn in the air as she offers the ring
and the starry crown, the exquisite alternations of light and half light
others might conceivably have invented. What is proper to Tintoretto and
to him alone is the hesitating hand of Ariadne and her almost resigned
and reluctant acceptance of a new love, being mindful of love once
betrayed. Also the delicacy of Bacchus’s ardent gesture, as knowing
himself to be not only wooer but consoler, is purest Tintoretto. The
picture with its companion pieces is the effulgent afterglow of the
Arcadianism that began with Giorgione. It breathes a charm that has
never since been fully recoverable.
[Illustration:
FIG. 298. Tintoretto. Bacchus and Ariadne.—_Ducal Palace._
]
While these poesies were in progress, about 1575, Tintoretto painted for
the Church of San Cassiano the most original of his Crucifixions, Figure
299. One looks over the narrow top of Golgotha to a peaceful expanse of
marbled evening sky. The heads and serried pikes of the Roman
legionaries suggest a throng behind the hill. The sharpest note of color
is a banner, and the purple robe just stripped from the Christ. Between
John and Mary and the executioners on the ladder and against the sky the
strangest episode passes. It is the moment when a Pharisee hands up to
the executioner the mocking placard “Jesus of Nazareth King of the
Jews.” With a sudden impulse John points out the act to Mary, to console
her. Christ’s enemies affirm the truth of him. Even in the hour of
defeat and death he is eternally his people’s king. The level light
which ripples softly over the nude forms of Christ and the thieves takes
away all harshness. At San Rocco Tintoretto presented an epic and cosmic
terror. Here he suggests all the intimate and lyrical hopes that have
grown out of the sacrifice on Calvary.
[Illustration:
FIG. 299. Tintoretto. Calvary.—_S. Cassiano._
]
Like all the Venetians Tintoretto was an admirable portraitist. His
sober and powerful vein is well shown in the Madonna with Three
Magistrates, Figure 300.
[Illustration:
FIG. 300. Tintoretto. Madonna with Three Magistrates.—_Venice._
]
Among the later altar-pieces none is finer than the Miracle of St. Agnes
in the Orto. It has all of Tintoretto’s sweetness, power and suddenness,
and is nearly in its original condition of color. In 1587, being nearly
seventy years old, he got the commission for his greatest and perhaps
his last picture, the Paradise, in the Hall of the Great Council in the
Ducal Palace. Darkened and dried, it is still to the perceptive observer
a billowing sea of rapturous faces of the blest, obeying in its widening
circles of cloud-borne angels an oceanic rhythm. During the three years
that Tintoretto was painting it, his young daughter and comrade,
Marietta, dressed like a Shakespearean page for greater convenience,
worked and chattered beside him on the scaffolding. She hardly lived to
see the great canvas set on its wall. Tintoretto lived on till 1594, and
then his aged and withered body was carried across the canal from his
palace to his vault in the Orto. Such friends as Schiavone and Paolo
Veronese had gone before him, the old merrymakings and impromptu
concerts in his home had ceased. It was a very tired old man who bid his
sons continue the honorable trade of painting. He had shared nobly the
greatest range of human emotions, and his last artistic vision was of an
ecstatic peace in Paradise.
After Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese[85] seems an anti-climax. His
imagination is very limited. His greatest pictures treat the sole theme
of stately feasts. His soul is that of a very high class society editor.
But no well-advised person looks to Paolo Veronese for soul. One rather
seeks in him judgment and fine painting. Both are at their maximum.
Paolo Caliari was born at Verona in 1528, trained by a half primitive
master, Antonio Badile, and influenced by the energetic compositions of
Brusasorci. Paolo inherited the long Veronese tradition for spectacular
narrative painting with splendid architectural accessories, and he
carries the local tradition to its close and height. He came to Venice
at twenty-seven, a finished and famous artist, bringing with him a novel
sort of color. He avoids the contrasts and keen resonances of the true
Venetians, painting rather in luminous half tones based on gray and
blue. His forms are rich and solid without heavy shadow, and his
canvases have the generally blond and uniform color quality of the
modern out-of-door school.
His preference is for feasts and pageants. We have the spectacle of a
rich and gentle society, dignified in its pleasures and resplendent in
its costume. Gold brocade sets off the pearly skins of the portly and
gracious ladies in his pictures, and their cavaliers are as
magnificently clad in satins, velvets and furs. The feasts are generally
half out of doors in great colonnades, with the light glinting
impartially upon fair throats and faces and upon channeled columns and
sculptured balustrades. Behind, pale cornices and spires swim against a
blue sky.
It was the habit of the wealthy chapters of monks who maintained the
great Venetian churches to paint in their refectories some Scriptural
feast, as a warrant perhaps for their own daily convivialities. Earlier,
the most solemn of all meals, The Last Supper, would have been chosen.
Not so with Veronese and his contemporaries. They chose instead the
Marriage at Cana or the Feast in the House of Simon or of Levi, Figure
301,—splendid events of small or only incidental religious significance,
and treated merely as contemporary banquets.
[Illustration:
FIG. 301. Paolo Veronese. Feast in Levi’s House.—_Venice._
]
Of the four great feasts painted by Paolo Veronese the Marriage at Cana,
in the Louvre, painted in 1563, is earliest, and most imposing. It
builds up indefinitely from the marble pavement, with tier upon tier of
people, clinging to columns and peering from balconies. One may count no
less than two hundred and fifty heads. It has all the stir of a public
banquet and everywhere the greatest richness of table accessories and
costumes. The theme called for little religious emotion. The miracle
itself is a convivial one. Yet Veronese has made this different from
other feasts by a most complicated system of guiding lines which always
lead the eye to the gentle face of the Christ in the centre. He fairly
dominates all this animation and splendor. In the trio of musicians in
the foreground Veronese has given us a precious hint of the part music
played in the life of all Venetian artists. Paolo himself plays the
viola, Tintoretto the ’cello, and Titian the bass. What is remarkable
about the great canvas is its unity. Bathed in equable cool light, the
eye takes it in at a glance; there is no confusing or distracting
emphasis; the whole thing is nobly tranquillizing.
In 1569 Veronese was in Rome. We may possibly see some slight influence
of Michelangelo in the frescoes of the Villa Barbaro, at Maser. These
contain the only nudes of Veronese that have a real athleticism, and the
whole decoration has a more positive and sprightly spirit than is usual
in Veronese’s placid style. Working in a country house for liberal and
congenial patrons, Daniele Barbaro was himself an architect of merit,
Veronese sheds something of that professional dignity which is sometimes
excessive in his official work.
[Illustration:
FIG. 302. Paolo Veronese. Marriage of St. Catherine.—_Santa Caterina._
]
Among his numerous altar-pieces, the Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure
302, in the Venetian Church of that name is perhaps the most gracious.
The women are adorable—hothouse flowers, incredible for poise, hue and
delicate surface bloom. They are not very personal, their charm is a
social one. But they are very gentle, reasonably unconscious of their
own beauty, and quite unforgettably lovely. It took a wonderful eye to
see them at once so simple and so regal.
In the last twelve years of his life, Veronese was constantly employed
in the Ducal Palace and the adjoining public buildings. He employed
assistants freely, and the work affords difficult critical problems. The
work is uneven. In mythology he belies the hopes based on the frescoes
at Maser, where it seemed as if he too might attain the Olympian mood.
It is sadly lacking in the hoydenish group that enacts Europa and the
Bull, Figure 303, in the Ducal Palace. Why are these heavy Venetian
lasses risking their skins and skirts and shins near the seaside and a
bull? The flat prose of the feeling, or rather the absence of any real
feeling, makes one forget the splendor of the painting. Such also is the
effect of the superbly painted Venus and Mars, at New York, and of most
of the mythologies. We have to do with sheer prose and not very sincere
prose at that.
[Illustration:
FIG. 303. Paolo Veronese. Rape of Europa.—_Ducal Palace._
]
When, however, the theme can be drawn from everyday Venice, Veronese is
overpoweringly fine. Again and again in looking at the ceilings of the
Ducal Palace one catches his breath before such visions of magnificence
as Venice as Justice, Figure 304, Venice as Queen of the World. For all
its contemporary quality, it attains a strange other-worldliness. It is
as if some one had looked at superb Venice through a magnifying glass
that ennobled the forms and greatly enhanced the colors. You feel how
Veronese loved it all and how little he cared for anything beyond the
splendor, dignity and prosperity of his adoptive city. He gives us the
look of Venice at her climax of Renaissance glory, as Carpaccio had
given the dying radiance of her mediæval estate. From the point of view
of judgment, style and fine craftsmanship, it is impossible to
overpraise Veronese. He should be regarded rather as a great painter in
the narrower sense than a supreme artist. When he died in 1588, only
fifty years old, he left a very enduring inheritance.
[Illustration:
FIG. 304. Paolo Veronese. Venice attended by Force and Justice.
Ceiling Panel.—_Ducal Palace._
]
It was on the whole his moderate and judicious sumptuousness that
inspired the painters of the next century. It was well that they sought
his imitable merits and not the passion of Titian and Tintoretto. It was
largely thanks to Veronese that Venetian art suffered no such sharp
decline as befell that of Florence and Rome. The decorative tradition of
Veronese sufficed to nourish a Piazetta and a Tiepolo a century and a
half after his death.
[Illustration:
FIG. 305. G-B. Tiepolo. Time revealing Truth.—_Villa Biron, Vicenza._
]
For Giovanni Battista Tiepolo[86] (1695–1770) in sheer force and
fertility yields to none of his Renaissance predecessors. There never
was a more valiant draughtsman or a more splendid colorist. Such
decorations as those of the Scuola del Carmine, and the Labia Palace
fall little behind Veronese’s pageantry in grandeur while representing
an audacity of stroke and coloration which Veronese lacked. So the
tragic scenes of Christ’s Passion at San Luigi have the intensity of
Tintoretto if lacking something of his nobility. In the ceiling
decorations of Tiepolo, Figure 305, we see the freest fancies of the
Baroque, its customary tumult of shimmering clouds and hovering pearly
figures, repeated with a lightness and audacity and withal measure which
the Baroque itself never attained save in its great initiator Correggio.
Such powers as Tiepolo’s soon won him international patronage. He
painted in Austria and died at Madrid. With him perishes the grandeur of
the Venetian school. Only a tinge of masquerade and exhibitionism puts
him lower than his constant exemplar, Paolo Veronese.
[Illustration:
FIG. 306. Antonio Canale. Island of San Michele.—_Royal Collections,
Windsor._
]
Indeed the simplicity which is the most enduring charm of any art is
more felt in the minor Venetians of Tiepolo’s time, as in Antonio
Canale, called Canaletto, Figure 306, who painted the irradiated
panorama of the Venetian lagoon and canals with the ardent precision of
a reborn Gentile Bellini. Francesco Guardi[87] (1712–1765), Canaletto’s
pupil, with a freer brush and fancy paints the spectacle of Venice,
Figure 307, its balls and promenades and water pageants, with the
sensitiveness of a Carpaccio. But Carpaccio’s youthful world is no
longer there to paint. Romance has given way to casual amorous intrigue,
sentiment to show. But out of the welter of sophisticated gayety still
rise clean against the heavens the pale domes and bell towers of an
older and finer Venice. Guardi is perhaps at his best in the numerous
tiny oil sketches which deal with the remote and solitary groves and
ruins of the lagoon. Here we have felicities of broken color and
niceties of observation, accurate notations of evanescent effects of
light, which can still give lessons to the most modern landscapists.
[Illustration:
FIG. 307. Francesco Guardi. Scuola di San Marco. Pen and Wash
Drawing.—_Lamperti Coll., Milan._
]
In Pietro Longhi (1702–1762) Venice developed a sympathetic chronicler
of her social pleasures, Figure 308. The world of his delicate and witty
little canvases is that of the card party, the formal call, the vanity
and ceremony of philandering, the shop, the musicale, the masked ball.
Only Holland has given so true and sympathetic a record of her smaller
affairs, and at the moment, only Hogarth in England and Chardin in
France were doing the thing with equal ability.
[Illustration:
FIG. 308. Pietro Longhi. Maskers at the Zoo.—_London._
]
Nothing better shows the slightly anachronistic quality of Tiepolo’s
grandeur than a fine Longhi. The Venetian imagination had moved indoors,
so to speak, had foregone in favor of individual gratifications the old
vision of the collective splendor. Venice no longer dines grandly in the
open with Veronese, she coquettishly sips coffee with Longhi. If she had
declined in nobility, she had at least kept her sincerity and taste. Her
affair had ever been rather with appearances than with ideals or
interpretations. But since the Greeks no other nation had considered
appearances with such noble candor. She kept to the end the good
pictorial habit of letting appearances explain themselves. Thus if a
Titian will stand beside a Pheidian marble, so will a Tiepolo beside an
Alexandrian masterpiece, while a trim belle of Pietro Longhi need feel
no confusion before a Tanagra figurine. Time passes gently over a city
whose artistic aims are as limited as her taste is sure. Venice had ever
been gracious in her grandeur, and gracious she remained even after she
had ceased to be grand.
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VIII
TITIAN’S ASSUMPTION THE BEGINNING OF THE VENETIAN GRAND STYLE
Titian’s contemporaries were fully aware that the Assumption (1518)
marked the beginning of the Grand Style at Venice and that the change
was revolutionary. The critic Lodovico Dolce writes in his _Dialogo
della Pittura_, Florence, 1735, p. 286 f. putting the words into the
mouth of Aretino:
“After not much time [after the Fondaco frescoes, 1508] he was given
to paint a great panel for the high altar of the Friars Minor; where
Titian, still young, painted in oils the Virgin, who rises to heaven
among many angels who accompany her, and above her he figured a God
Father flanked by two angels. It seems really as if she rises with a
face full of humility, and her robes fly lightly. At the bottom are
the disciples who with various attitudes manifest joy and amazement,
and are mostly larger than life, and assuredly in that picture is
contained the grandeur and terribleness of Michelangelo, the
pleasingness and grace of Raphael, with the coloring proper to nature,
and, moreover, this was the first public work which he made in oils;
and he made it in very little time, and young.”
“Thereupon the stupid painters and the vulgar herd who up to then had
seen nothing but the cold and dead things of Giovanni Bellini, of
Gentile, and of [Alvise] Vivarini (since Giorgione, working in oils,
had not yet had any public work; and for the most part made no other
works than half figures and portraits) which were without movement and
without relief, spake great ill of that picture. Afterwards, as envy
cooled, and opening their eyes a little to the truth, the people began
to be amazed at the new manner discovered in Venice by Titian: and all
the painters from then on strove to imitate it; but being off their
own path, became confused. And surely it must seem a miracle that
Titian, without having at that time seen the antiquities of Rome,
which were the light of all the good painters, solely with that little
spark, which he had discovered in the works of Giorgione, saw and
perceived the idea of perfect painting.”
The general critical justness of this statement must condone its
abundant overstatements and errors of fact.
AURELIO LUINI ON TITIAN’S IMPRESSIONISM
“Aurelio Luini has excellently understood this art [of landscape] to
whom it once happened that visiting Titian, and asking him his opinion
about the background of trees, besides many reasons which he heard from
him about making the foliage sparkle against the background, he saw one
of his [Titian’s] wonderful landscapes which he had at home, which,
having seen quietly, Aurelio thought a daubed up thing, but afterwards,
having withdrawn to a distance, it seemed to him that the sun shone
resplendently in it, making the paths retreat on this side and that; so
that Aurelio had to say that he had never seen a rarer thing in the
world in the way of landscapes.”
Lomazzo, _Trattato_, Milan, 1584, p. 474, 5.
ON BELLE NATURE AND THE ANTIQUE
The Renaissance idea that Nature must be ennobled and corrected by the
Antique is plainly formulated by Dolce, again under the name of Aretino,
_Dialogo_, p. 190.
“One should then choose the most perfect form, imitating nature in
part.... And partly one should imitate the beautiful marble and bronze
figures of the ancient masters. Whereof who so shall taste and possess
fully the marvellous perfection, will be able with certainty to
correct many defects of nature, and make his pictures noteworthy and
grateful to all. Inasmuch as the ancient things contain the entire
perfection of art, and can be the exemplars of all beauty.”
This is one of the earliest full statements of the notion of _belle
nature_, and of the antique as normative. The dogma persists with
unabated rigor down to Sir Joshua Reynolds (see Illustration to Chapter
VI, p. 316) and Jacques Louis David.
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ON THE GREEK AFFINITIES OF VENETIAN PAINTING
“The revival of the Greek Language and Greek Literature raised the long
ebb into a wave that swept over civilized Europe. On its glittering
crest the Venetian painters especially were lifted into the society of
gods, goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs. They might see sky, sea and earth
peopled with radiant beings; perhaps with a sort of semi-belief such as
we accord to the Lorelei and fairies, creations that somehow easily
worked in with creeds and experience. Anyhow, they might see Pan come
dallying down the sparkling brook-side, now shouting to the laughing
brown nymphs rustling through the reeds, and pretending to be afraid,
now scattering a shower of notes from his pipes that would fall upon the
ears as the brightness of the iris over a fountain falls upon the
eye.”...
“It may seem strange if I place the Venetian school and Titian, with his
liberal line—which, however, is by no means wanting in reticence—in
closer relationship with Greek art of the great period than the more
classical schools of Tuscany and Rome. Supposing one were to endeavor to
paint a restoration of the pediments of the Parthenon, it would be
possible to interpolate with figures by Titian, never with any by
Poussin, or, I think, even by Raphael or Michael Angelo.”...
“In spite of extravagant and even absurd defects (for the great artist’s
eyes no longer served him faithfully), when Titian, towards the end of
his life painted the ‘Europa’ ... the muse who inspired Pheidias laid
her hand on the old man’s shoulder, and she inspired the wealth of
volume, ease of line, and glowing sense of nature’s exuberance.”
_George Frederick Watts, his Life and Writings_, London and New York,
Vol. III., pp. 251, 253, 254.
[Illustration:
FIG. 309. Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin.—_Louvre._
]