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The Old Masters and Their Pictures, For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art

by Sarah Tytler · English · Gutenberg #19863 · 474,986 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Old Masters and Their Pictures, For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art

Author: Sarah Tytler


        
Release date: November 19, 2006 [eBook #19863]

Language: English

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THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES

_For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art_


BY SARAH TYTLER

AUTHOR OF "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS" ETC.


_NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION_

       *       *       *       *       *

LONDON
ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED
15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
1893

[_The Right of Translation is Reserved_]

LONDON:

PRINTED BY J.S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,
CITY ROAD.




PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.


I wish to say, in a very few words, that this book is intended to be a
simple account of the great Old Masters in painting of every age and
country, with descriptions of their most famous works, for the use of
learners and outsiders in art. The book is not, and could not well be,
exhaustive in its nature. I have avoided definitions of schools,
considering that these should form a later and more elaborate portion of
art education, and preferring to group my 'painters' according to what I
hold to be the primitive arrangements of time, country, and rank in
art.




PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.


The restrictions with regard to space under which the little volume
called "The Old Masters" was originally written, caused me to omit, to
my regret, many names great, though not first, in art. The circulation
which the book has attained induces me to do what I can to remedy the
defect, and render the volume more useful by adding two chapters--the
one on Italian and the other on German, Dutch, and Flemish masters.
These chapters consist almost entirely of condensed notes taken from two
trustworthy sources, to which I have been already much indebted--Sir C,
and Lady Eastlake's version of Kugler's "Handbook of Italian Art," and
Dr. Waagen's "Handbook,"--remodelled from Kugler--of German, Dutch, and
Flemish art, revised by J.A. Crowe. I have purposely given numerous
records of those Dutch painters whose art has been specially popular in
England and who are in some cases better represented in our country than
in their own.




CONTENTS.


CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO,
1280-1345--ORCAGNA, 1315-1376--GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428
_OR_ 1429--FRA ANGELICO, 1387-1455 1

II. EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, _ABOUT_
1470-1532--MEMLING, _ABOUT_ 1478-1499--QUINTIN MATSYS, 1460-1530 OR 31
41

III. IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--- IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530 53

IV. LIONARDO DA VINCI. 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566 83

V. GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DÜRER, 1471-1528 169

VI. LATER ITALIAN ART--GIORGIONE, 1477-1511--CORREGGIO, _ABOUT_
1493-1534--TINTORETTO, 1512-1594--VERONESE, 1530-1588 181

VII. CARRACCI, 1555-1609--GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642--DOMENICHINO,
1581-1641--SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673 212

VIII. LATER FLEMISH ART--RUBENS, 1577-1640--REMBRANDT, 1606 _OR_
1608-1669--TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694--WOUVVERMAN,
1620-1668--CUYP, 1605; _STILL LIVING_, 1638--PAUL POTTER,
1625-1654--CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630 225

IX. SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682 260

X. FRENCH ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE LORRAINE,
1600-1682--CHARLES LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE,
1726-1805 286

XI. FOREIGN ARTISTS IN ENGLAND--HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK,
1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO, 1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723 309

XII. ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURIES--TADDEO GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO,
1412-1469--BENOZZO GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED
TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO,
1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH
UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI, FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN 1460--ANTONELLA DA
MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE, 1416--GAROPALO,
1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO SPAGNA, DATE OF
BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS BORDONE,
1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO, 1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO,
1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO, 1592-1666--ALBANO,
1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1615--VASARI, 1512-1574--SOFONISBA
ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1626--LAVINIA FONTANA, 1552-1614 364

XIII. GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY--VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS,
1366-1442--VAN LEYDEN, 1494-1533--VAN SOMER, 1570-1624--SNYDERS,
1579-1657--G. HONTHORST, 1592-1662--JAN STEEN, 1626-1679--GERARD DOW,
1613-1680--DE HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--VAN OSTADE,
1610-1685--MAAS, 1632-1693--METZU, 1615. STILL ALIVE IN 1667--TERBURG,
1608-1681--NETCHER, 1639-1684--BOL, 1611-1680--VAN DER HELST,
1613-1670--RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682--HOBBEMA, 1638-1709--BERCHEM,
1620-1683--BOTH 1600 (?)-1650(?) DU JARDIN, 1625-1678--ADRIAN VAN DE
VELDE, 1639-1672--VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712--DE WITTE, 1607-1692--VAN
DER NEER, 1619 (?)-1683--WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE, THE YOUNGER,
1633-1707--BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708--VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
1653--HONDECOETER, 1636-1695--JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719--PATER SEGERS,
1590-1661--VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749--VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722--MENGS,
1728-1774 391

       *       *       *       *       *


THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES.

       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER I.

EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO. 1280-1345--ORCAGNA,
1315-1376 GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428 OR 1429--FRA
ANGELICO, 1387-1455.


A pencil and paper, a box of colours, and a scrap-book, form so often a
child's favourite toys that one might expect that a very large portion
of men and women would prove painters. But, as we grow in years and
knowledge, the discrepancy between nature and our attempts to copy
nature, strike us more and more, until we turn in dissatisfaction and
disgust from the vain effort.

There was only one old woman in an Esquimaux tribe who could be called
forward to draw with a stick on the sand a sufficiently graphic likeness
of the Erebus and the Terror. It is only a few groups of men belonging
to different countries, throughout the centuries, who have been able to
give us paintings to which we turn in wonder and admiration, and say
that these are in their degree fair exponents of nature. The old
painter's half-haughty, half-humble protest was true--it is 'God
Almighty,' who in raising here and there men above their fellows, 'makes
painters.'

But let us be thankful that the old propensity to delight in a
facsimile, or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very
common satisfaction and joy--whether cultivated or uncultivated---
derived from looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving
to understand the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to
consider the lives and times which throw light on works of genius. Music
itself is not more universally and gladly listened and responded to,
than pictures are looked at and remembered.

Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my
subject if I can only treat it sympathetically,--enter at a humble
distance into the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and
place before you some of the paintings by reverent and loving
word-painting such as others have achieved, and such as I may strive to
attain to, that you may be in a sort early familiar with these
paintings, before you see them in engravings and photographs, and on
canvas and in fresco, as I trust you may be privileged to see many of
them, when you may hail them not only for what they are, the glories of
art, but for what they have been to you in thoughts of beauty and high
desires.

Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything, and
of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after the fall
of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting as of
other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity,
was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious
conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to
hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and meaningless
type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs
in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to
bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a
similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings
with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the
sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are
very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations,
and as illustrations of faith; but they present no intrinsic beauty or
worth. They are not only clumsy and childish designs ill executed, but
they are rendered unintelligible to all save the initiated in such
hieroglyphics, by offering an elaborate ground-work of type, antitype,
and symbol, on which the artist probably spent a large part of his
strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents, vines, fishes, dolphins,
phoenixes, cocks, anchors, and javelins played nearly as conspicuous a
part in this art as did the dead believer, or his or her patron saint,
who might have been supposed to form the principal figure in the
picture.

Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but
quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the
stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the
old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But
first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.
Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting in
fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or
with size, egg, or fig-juice--the latter practices termed _tempera_ (in
English in distemper) before oil was used to mix colours. But painters
did not confine themselves then to painting with pencil or brush, else
they might have attained technical excellence sooner. It has been well
said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so the
earlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them
called--referring to its durability--'painting for eternity;' and in
metals. Many of them were the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves;
they worked in iron as well as in gold and silver, and they were
sculptors and architects as well as painters; engineers also, so far as
engineering in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, was known
in those days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so
that drawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of
distance, and the management of light and shade, were feebly developed.
Even the fore-shortening of figures was so difficult to the old Italian
painters that they could not carry it into the extremities, and men and
women seem as though standing on the points of their toes.
Landscape-painting did not exist farther than that a rock or a bush, or
a few blue lines, with fishes out of proportion prominently interposed,
indicated, as on the old stage, that a desert, a forest, or a sea, was
to play its part in the story of the picture. So also portrait-painting
was not thought of, unless it occurred in the likeness of a great man
belonging to the time and place of the painter, who was the donor of
some picture to chapel or monastery, or of the painter himself, alike
introduced into sacred groups and scenes; for pictures were uniformly of
a religious character, until a little later, when they merged into
allegorical representations, just as one remembers that miracle plays
passed into moral plays before ordinary human life was reproduced. Until
this period, what we call dramatic expression in making a striking
situation, or even in bringing the look of joy or sorrow, pleasure or
pain, into a face, had hardly been attained.

Perhaps you will ask, what merit had the old paintings of the middle
ages to compensate for so many great disadvantages and incongruities?
Certainly before the time I have reached, they have, with rare
exceptions, little merit, save that fascination of pathos, half-comic,
half-tragic, which belongs to the struggling dawn of all great
endeavours, and especially of all endeavours in art. But just at this
epoch, art, in one man, took a great stride, began, as I shall try to
show, to exert an influence so true, deep, and high that it extends, in
the noblest forms, to the present day, and much more than compensates to
the thoughtful and poetic for a protracted train of technical blunders
and deficiencies.

Giotto, known also as Magister Joctus, was born in 1276 near Florence. I
dare say many have heard one legend of him, and I mean to tell the
legends of the painters, because even when they are most doubtful they
give the most striking indications of the times and the light in which
painters and their paintings were regarded by the world of artists, and
by the world at large; but so far as I have heard this legend of Giotto
has not been disproven. The only objection which can be urged against
it, is that it is found preserved in various countries, of very
different individuals--a crowning objection also to the legend of
William Tell. Giotto was a shepherd boy keeping his father's sheep and
amusing himself by drawing with chalk on a stone the favourites of the
flock, when his drawings attracted the attention of a traveller passing
from the heights into the valley. This traveller was the well-born and
highly-esteemed painter Cimabue, who was so delighted with the little
lad's rough outlines, that getting the consent of Giotto's father,
Cimabue adopted the boy, carried him off to the city of Florence,
introduced him to his studio, and so far as man could supplement the
work of God, made a painter of the youthful genius. I may add here a
later legend of Giotto. Pope Boniface VIII, requested specimens of skill
from various artists with the view to the appointment of a painter to
decorate St Peter's. Giotto, either in impatient disdain, or to show a
careless triumph of skill, with one flourish of his hand, without the
aid of compass, executed a perfect circle in red chalk, and sent the
circle as his contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The
audacious specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was
chosen as the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident
arose the Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the
friend of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom
the grandeur of some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough
attributed. The poet of the 'Inferno' wrote of his friend:

                   '......... Cimabue thought
    To lord it over painting's field; and now
    The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'

Petrarch bequeathed in his will a Madonna by Giotto and mentioned it as
a rare treasure of art. Boccaccio wrote a merry anecdote of his comrade
the painter's wit, in the course of which he referred with notable
plain-speaking to Giotto's 'flat currish' plainness of face.

The impression handed down of Giotto's character is that of an
independent, high-spirited man, full of invention, full of imagination,
and also, by a precious combination, full of shrewdness and common
sense; a man genial, given to repartee, and at the same time not
deficient in the tact which deprives repartee of its sting. While he was
working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the painter
on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I would
leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I, sire, if
I were _you_,' replied the wag.

I need scarcely add that Giotto was a man highly esteemed and very
prosperous in his day; one account reports him as the head and the
father of four sons and four daughters. I have purposely written first
of the fame, the reputed character, and the circumstances of Giotto
before I proceed to his work. This great work was, in brief, to breathe
into painting the living soul which had till then--in mediæval
times--been largely absent. Giotto went to Nature for his inspiration,
and not content with the immense innovation of superseding by the actual
representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the
rigid traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their
faces--the melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so
simple, filled Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with
astonishment and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
commonest deed even coarsely lifelike, as in the case of a sailor in a
boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression,
as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure
of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere
realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light
an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose
above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real
is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion
robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which
is at its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and love.

Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate
successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance,
crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure
these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their
originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would
seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they
appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence
their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest
qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the
Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more
accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of
another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed
fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and
in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.

The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the
unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of
Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the
same in kind.[1]

I wish you, my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to
learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any
half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke
transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you
have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern
marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight
figures with long hands, wooden feet, and clinging draperies, while your
eyes have been familiar with well-modelled frames and limbs and flowing
lines. But we must look deeper if we would not be slaves to superficial
prettiness, or even superficial correctness; we must try to go into the
spirit of a painting and value it more in proportion as it teaches art's
noblest lesson--the divinity of the divine, the serenity of utmost
strength, the single-heartedness of passion.

I have only space to tell you of three or four of the famous works of
Giotto. First, his allegories in the great church, in honour of St
Francis, at Assisi, in relation to which, writing of its German
architect, an author says: 'He built boldly against the mountain, piling
one church upon another; the upper vast, lofty, and admitting through
its broad windows the bright rays of the sun: the lower as if in the
bowels of the earth--low, solemn, and almost shutting out the light of
day. Around the lofty edifice grew the convent, a vast building, resting
upon a long line of arches clinging to the hill-sides. As the evening
draws nigh, casting its deep shadows across the valley, the traveller
beneath gazes upwards with feelings of wonder and delight at this
graceful arcade supporting the massy convent; the ancient towers and
walls of the silent town gathering around, and the purple rocks rising
high above--all still glowing in the lingering sunbeams--a scene
scarcely to be surpassed in any clime for its sublime beauty.' The
upper church contains frescoes wonderfully fresh, by Cimabue, of
Scriptural subjects, and frescoes of scenes from the life vowed to
poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis,
are the four masterpieces with which we have to do. These are the three
vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and
grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been
attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her
rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The
fourth fresco pictures the saint who died, 'covered by another's cloak
cast over his wasted body eaten with sores,' enthroned and glorified
amidst the host of Heaven.

I have chosen the second example of the art of Giotto because you may
with comparative ease see it for yourselves. It is in the National
Gallery, London, having belonged to the collection of the late Samuel
Rogers. It is a fragment of an old fresco which had been part of a
series illustrating the life of John the Baptist in the church of the
Carmine, Florence, a church which was destroyed by fire in 1771. The
fragment in the National Gallery has two fine heads of apostles bending
sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do
it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents
of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in
regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before
Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed to tell the
Bible's stories.

The third instance I have chosen to quote is Giotto's portrait of Dante
which was so strangely lost for many years. The portrait occurs in a
painting, the first recorded performance of Giotto's, in which he was
said to have introduced the likeness of many of his contemporaries, on
the wall of the Palazzo dell' Podestà or Council Chamber of Florence.
During the banishment of Dante the wall was plastered or white-washed
over, through the influence of his enemies, and though believed to
exist, the picture was hidden down to 1840, when, after various futile
efforts to recover it, the figures were again brought to light.

This portrait of Dante is altogether removed from the later portraits of
the indignant and weary man, of whom the Italian market-women said that
he had been in Hell as well as in exile. Giotto's Dante on the walls of
the Council Chamber is a noble young man of thirty, full of ambitious
hope and early distinction. The face is slightly pointed, with broad
forehead, hazel eyes, straight brows and nose, mouth and chin a little
projecting. The close cloak or vest with sleeves, and cap in folds
hanging down on the shoulder, the hand holding the triple fruit, in
prognostication of the harvest of virtue and renown which was to be so
bitter as well as so glorious, are all in keeping and have a majesty of
their own. The picture is probably known by engravings to many of my
readers.

The last example of Giotto's, is the one which of all his works is most
potent and patent in its beauty, and has struck, and, in so far as we
can tell, will for ages strike, with its greatness multitudes of widely
different degrees of cultivation whose intellectual capacity is as far
apart as their critical faculty. I mean the matchless Campanile or
bell-tower 'towering over the Dome of Brunelleschi' at Florence, formed
of coloured marbles--for which Giotto framed the designs, and even
executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture. With this
lovely sight Dean Alford's description is more in keeping than the
prosaic saying of Charles V., that 'the Campanile ought to be kept under
glass.' Dean Alford's enthusiasm thus expresses itself:

     'A mass of varied light written on the cloudless sky of
     unfathomed blue; varied but blended, as never in any other
     building that we had seen; the warm yellow of the lighter marbles
     separated but not disunited by the ever-recurring bands of dark;
     or glowing into red where the kisses of the sun had been hottest;
     or fading again into white where the shadows mostly haunted, or
     where the renovating hand had been waging conflict with decay.'

It is known that Giotto, together with his friend Dante, died before
this--Giotto's last great work--was finally constructed by Giotto's
pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, and that therefore neither of the friends could
have really looked on 'Giotto's Tower,' though Italian Ciceroni point
out, and strangers love to contemplate, the very stone on which 'Grim
Dante' sat and gazed with admiration in the calm light of evening on the
enduring memorial of the painter.

Giotto died in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a
good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he
painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling
in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the
Cross.' The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been
the practice which painted the Virgin Mother now as a brown Italian, now
as a red and white Fleming, and again as a flaxen-haired German or as a
swarthy Spaniard, and draped her and all the minor figures in the
grandest drama the world ever saw--as well as the characters in older
Scripture histories, in the Florentine, Venetian, and Antwerp fashions
of the day. The defence of the practice is, that the Bible is for
universal time, that its Virgin Mother, its apostles and saints, were
types of other mothers and of other heroes running down the stream of
history; that even the one central and holy figure, if He may be
represented at all, as the Divine brother of all humanity, may be clad
not inaptly in the garments of all. It appears to me that there is
reason in this answer, and that viewed in its light the criticism which
constantly demands historic fidelity is both carping and narrow. I do
not mean, however, to underrate historic accuracy in itself, or to
depreciate that longing for completeness in every particular, which
drives our modern painters to the East to study patiently for months the
aspects of nature under its Oriental climate, with its peculiar people
and animals, its ancient costumes and architecture.

Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest
of the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the
church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been
buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his
effigy in marble.

In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little. I have already
mentioned how closely painting was in the beginning allied with working
in metals as well as with sculpture and architecture. It is thus
necessary to write of a magnificent work in metal, the study and
admiration of generations of painters, begun in the life of Giotto, and
completed in two divisions, extending over a period of nearly a hundred
years. We shall proceed to deal with the first division, and recur to
the second a little later.

The old Italian cities. They were then the great merchant cities of the
world, more or less republican in their constitution. They stood to the
citizens, who rarely left their walls, at once as peculiar possessions
and as native countries rather than as cities alone, while they excited
all the patriotism, pride, and love that were elsewhere expended on a
whole country--which after all was held as belonging largely to its king
and nobles. The old Italian merchant guilds, and wealthy merchants as
individuals, vied with each other in signalizing their good citizenship
by presenting--as gifts identified with their names--to their cities,
those palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight
of the world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily
of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni
or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some
competition the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great
group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named,
as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea
executed a series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the
Baptist, which were cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre
door-way. I shall leave the rest of the gates, still more exquisitely
wrought, till their proper time, only observing that the Pisani group of
carvers and founders are supposed to have attained their extraordinary
superiority in skill and grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in
consequence of one of them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to
the study of some ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.

Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come back
to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument--in itself
very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians' love
to their cities. Andrea Orcagna, otherwise known as Andrea di Cione, one
of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about 1315. His
greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.

This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation,
alas, will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial,
though no longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an
arcade, something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running
round, and having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for
the dead were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth
brought from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered
with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross
in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and
contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments--among them the
Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of
the Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of
the walls was continued at intervals, during two hundred years. The
havoc wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the
pictures faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated
fragments, 'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's
illustrations of the book of Job have thus perished. Still Orcagna's
work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in
his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to
borrow from it in design and arrangement. Dean Alford has thus described
Orcagna's mournful, thoughtful 'Triumph of Death:'

'The picture is one of crowded action, and contains very many
personages. The action may be supposed to begin in the lower corner on
the right hand. There we see what appears to be a wedding-party seated
in festivity under a grove of orange-trees laden with fruit. Over two of
them a pair entertaining them with merry strains. But close to them on
the left comes swooping down on bats' wings, and armed with the
inevitable scythe, the genius of Death. Her wild hair streams in the
wind, her bosom is invulnerable, being closed in a trellised armour of
steel. Beneath her, on the ground, are a heap of corpses, shown by their
attire to be the great and wealthy of the world. Three winged figures,
two fiends and one angel, are drawing souls, in the form of children,
out of the mouths of three of these corpses. Above, the air is full of
flying spirits, angels and demons: the former beautiful and saintly, the
latter hideous and bestial. Some are dragging, or bearing upwards, human
souls: others are on their way to fetch them from the heaps of dead:
others, again, are flying about apparently without aim. Further yet to
the left, a company of wretched ones, lame and in rags, are invoking
Death with outstretched arms to come to their relief; but she sweeps by
and heeds them not.

'Dividing one half of the picture from the other, is a high range of
rocks, terminating in a fiery mountain, into which the demons are
casting the unhappy souls which they have carried off. Beyond that seems
to be a repetition of the same lesson respecting Death in another form.
A party of knights and dames are issuing on horseback from a mountain
pass. In the left hand of the picture there lie in their path three
corpses in coffins, with coronets on their heads. One is newly dead; on
the second, decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a
grinning skeleton. The impression produced on the gay party by the sight
is very various. Some look on carelessly; one holds his nose in disgust;
one, a lady jewelled and crowned, leans her head on her hand in solemn
thought. Above, on a rising ground, an aged monk (it is said, Saint
Macarius) is holding a scroll, and pointing out to passengers the moral
of the sight which meets them. The path winds up a hill crowned with a
church, and by its side at various points are hermits sitting in calm
security, or following peaceful occupations. One of them is milking a
doe; another is reading; a third is calmly contemplating from a distance
the valley of Death. About them are various animals and birds. The idea
evidently intended to be conveyed is that deliverance from the fear of
death is to be found not in gaiety and dissipation, but in contemplation
and communion with God.

'Such is the wonderful fresco, and the execution is as wonderful as the
conception. Belonging as the painter did to a rude and early period of
art, he yet had the power of endowing his figures with both majesty and
tenderness of expression.'

The Last Judgment is no less solemn and sad, with hope tempering its
sadness. Mrs Jameson's note of it is: 'Above, in the centre, Christ and
the Virgin are throned in separate glories. He turns to the left,
towards the condemned, while he uncovers the wound in his side, and
raises his right arm with a menacing gesture, his countenance full of
majestic wrath. The Virgin, on the right of her Son, is the picture of
heavenly mercy, and, as if terrified at the words of eternal
condemnation, she turns away. On either side are ranged the Prophets of
the Old Testament, the Apostles and other saints, severe, solemn,
dignified figures. Angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, hover
over Christ and the Virgin; under them is a group of archangels. The
archangel Michael stands in the midst holding a scroll in each hand;
immediately before him another archangel, supposed to represent Raphael,
the guardian angel of humanity, cowers down, shuddering, while two
others sound the awful trumpets of doom. Lower down is the earth where
men are seen rising from their graves; armed angels direct them to the
right and left. Here is seen King Solomon, who, whilst he rises, seems
doubtful to which side he should turn; here a hypocritical monk, whom an
angel draws back by the hair from the host of the youth in a gay and
rich costume, whom another angel leads away to Paradise. There is
wonderful and even terrible power of expression in some of the heads;
and it is said that among them are many portraits of contemporaries, but
unfortunately no circumstantial traditions as to particular figures have
reached us.'

One of Orcagna's altar-pieces, that of 'the coronation of the Virgin,'
containing upwards of a hundred figures, and with the colouring still
rich, is in our National Gallery. As an architect, Orcagna designed the
famous Loggia de' Lanzi of the grand ducal palace at Florence.

Now I must take you back to the bronze gates of the Baptistery in their
triumphant completion nearly a hundred years after the first gate was
executed by Andrea Pisano. I should have liked, but for our limits, to
tell in full the legend of the election of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the
step-son of a goldsmith, and skilled in chasing and enamelling, to
design the second gate; when yet a lad of twenty-three, how he and two
other young men, one of them still younger than Ghiberti, were declared
the most promising competitors in the trial for the work; how the last
two voluntarily withdrew from the contest, magnanimously proclaiming
Lorenzo Ghiberti their superior; how all the three lived to be famous,
the one as a founder in metal, the others as an architect and a
sculptor, and remained sworn brothers in art till death.

Lorenzo Ghiberti has left us an expression of the feeling with which he
set about his task, an expression so suggestive that, even had we no
other indication, it is enough to stamp the true and tender nature of
the man. He prepared for his achievement 'with infinite diligence and
love'--the words deserve to be pondered over. He took at least
twenty-two years to his work, receiving for it eleven hundred florins.
He chose his subjects from the life and death of the Lord, working them
out in twenty panels, ten on each side of the folding doors, and below
these were eight panels containing full-length figures of the four
evangelists and four doctors of the Latin Church, with a complete border
of fruit and foliage, having heads of prophets and sibyls interspersed.
So entire was the satisfaction the superb gate gave, that Lorenzo was
not merely loaded with praise, he received a commission to design and
cast a third and central gate which should surpass the others, that were
thenceforth to be the side entrances.

For his second gate Lorenzo Ghiberti repaired to the Old Testament for
subjects, beginning with the creation and ending with the meeting of
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and represented them in ten compartments
enclosed in a rich border of fruit and foliage, with twenty-four
full-length figures of the Hebrew heroes and prophets, clearly and
delicately designed and finished, occupying corresponding niches. This
crowning gate engaged the founder upwards of eighteen years--forty-nine
years are given as the term of the work of both the gates.

The single defect which is found in those marvellous gates--left to us
as a testimony of what the life-long devotion of genius could
produce--is that they abound floridly both in ornament and action, in
place of being severely simple and restrained according to the classical
standard.

Michael Angelo called these gates 'worthy to be the gates of Paradise,'
and they are still one of the glories of Florence. Casts of the gates
are to be found in the School for Art at Kensington, and at the Crystal
Palace.

A young village boy learned to draw and model from Ghiberti's gates. He
in his turn was to create in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the
Carmine at Florence a school of painters scarcely less renowned and
powerful in its effects than that produced by the works in the Campo
Santa. You will find the Italian painters not unfrequently known by
nicknames, quite as often by their father's trades as by their father's
surnames, and still oftener by the town which was their place of birth
or nurture. This Tom village birth-place, was commonly called Masaccio,
short for Tomasaccio, 'hulking Tom,' as I have heard it translated, on
account of his indifferent, slovenly habits. I think there is a
tradition that he entered a studio in Florence as a colour boy, and
electrified the painter and his scholars, by _brownie_ like freaks of
painting at their unfinished work, in their absence, better than any of
his masters, and by the dexterity with which he perpetrated the frolic
of putting the facsimile of a fly on one of the faces on the easels. His
end was a tragic conclusion to such light comedy. At the age of
twenty-six, he quitted Florence for Rome so suddenly that he left his
finest frescoes unfinished. It was said that he was summoned thither by
the Pope. At Rome, where little or nothing of Masaccio's life is known,
he died shortly afterwards, not without a suspicion of his having been
poisoned.

A curious anecdote exists of the identification of the time when he
forsook Florence to meet his death in Rome. Just as we have read, that
the period of the death of Massinger the dramatist has been settled by
an entry in an old parish register, 'died, Philip Massinger a stranger,'
so there has been found some quaint equivalent to a modern tax-paper
which had been delivered at the dwelling of Masaccio when the word
'gone' was written down.

There is a further tradition--not very probable under the
circumstances--that Masaccio is buried, without name or stone, under the
Brancacci Chapel. Be that as it may, he very early rose to eminence,
surpassing all his predecessors in drawing and colouring, and he
combined with those acquirements such animation and variety of
expression in his characters, that it was said of him 'he painted souls
as well as bodies,' while his invention was not less bold and fresh.

It is difficult to indicate Masaccio's pictures because some of them
have been repainted and destroyed. As to those in the Brancacci Chapel
from the life of St Peter, (with the exception of two,) considerable
confusion has arisen as to which are Masaccio's, and which belong to
his scholar Filippino Lippi. The fresco which Masaccio left unfinished,
that of the Apostles Peter and Paul raising a dead youth (from
traditional history), was finished by Lippi. In the fresco of Peter
baptizing the converts, generally attributed to Masaccio, there is a lad
who has thrown off his garments, and stands shivering with cold, whose
figure, according to authority, formed an epoch in art. Lionardo da
Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, all studied
their art in this chapel. Raphael borrowed the grand figure of St Paul
preaching at Athens in one of the cartoons, from one of Masaccio's or
Filippo Lippi's frescoes. Masaccio's excellence as an artist, reached at
an immature age, is very remarkable.

I have come to the last and probably the best appreciated among modems
of the early Italian painters. Fra Angelico da Fiesole, the gentle
devout monk whom Italians called '_Il Beato_,' the Blessed, and who
probably did receive the distinction of beatification, a distinction
only second in the Roman Catholic Church to that of canonization. He was
born at the lovely little mountain-town of Fiesole near Florence, 1387,
and his worldly name, which he bore only till his twenty-first year, was
Guido Petri de Mugello. In his youth, with his gift already recognized,
so that he might well have won ease and honour in the world, he entered
the Dominican Convent of St Mark, Florence, for what he deemed the good
and peace of his soul. He seldom afterwards left it, and that only as
directed by his convent superior, or summoned by the Pope. He was a man
devoid of personal ambition, pure, humble, and meek. When offered the
Archbishopric of Florence as a tribute to his sanctity, he declined it
on account of his unworthiness for the office. He would not work for
money, and only painted at the command of his prior. He began his
painting with fasting and work, he steadfastly refused to make any
alteration in the originals. It is said that he was found dead at his
easel with a completed picture before him. It is not wonderful, that
from such a man should come one side of the perfection of that idealism
which Giotto had begun. Fra Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and
Virgin are more divinely calm, pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting
saintliness, a more immortal youth and joy, and a more utter
self-abnegation and sympathetic tenderness than are to be found in the
saints and the angels, the Saviour and the Virgin of other painters.
Neither is it surprising that Fra Angelico's defects, besides that of
the bad drawing which shows more in his large than in his small
pictures, are those of a want of human knowledge, power, and freedom.
His wicked--even his more earthly-souled characters, are weak and faulty
in action. What should the reverent and guileless dreamer know, unless
indeed by inspiration of the rude conflicts, the fire and fury of human
passions intensified in the malice and anguish of devils? But Fra
Angelico's singular successes far transcend his failures. In addition to
the sublime serenity and positive radiance of expression which he could
impart to his heads, his notions of grouping and draping were full of
grace, sometimes of splendour and magnificence. In harmony with his
happy temperament and fortunes, he was fond of gay yet delicate colours
'like spring flowers,' and used a profusion of gold ornaments which do
not seem out of keeping in his pictures. The most of Fra Angelico's
pictures are in Florence--the best in his own old convent of St Mark,
where he lovingly adorned not only chapter-hall and court, but the cells
of his brother friars. A crucifix with adoring saints worshipping their
crucified Saviour is regarded as his masterpiece in St Mark's. A famous
coronation of the Virgin, which Fra Angelico painted for a church in his
native town, and which is now in the Louvre, Paris, is thus described by
Mrs Jameson: 'It represents a throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to
which there is an ascent of nine steps; on the highest kneels the
Virgin, veiled, her hands crossed on her bosom. She is clothed in a red
tunic, a blue robe over it, and a royal mantle with a rich border
flowing down behind. The features are most delicately lovely, and the
expression of the face full of humility and adoration. Christ, seated on
the throne, bends forward, and is in the act of placing the crown on her
head; on each side are twelve angels, who are playing a heavenly concert
with guitars, tambourines, trumpets, viols, and other musical
instruments; lower than these, on each side, are forty holy personages
of the Old and New Testament; and at the foot of the throne kneel
several saints, male and female, among them St Catherine with her wheel,
St Agnes with her lamb, and St Cecilia crowned with flowers. Beneath the
principal picture there is a row of seven small ones, forming a border,
and representing various incidents in the life of St Dominic.'




CHAPTER II.

EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, MATSYS, 1460-1530
OR 31.


In the Low Countries painting had very much the same history that it had
in Italy, but the dates are later, and there may be a longer interval
given to each stage of development. Religious painting, profuse in
symbolism, with masses of details elaborately worked in, meets us in the
first place. This style of painting reached its culmination, in which it
included (as it did not include in its representation in the Italian
pictures) many and varied excellencies, among them the establishment of
painting in oil in the pictures of the Flemish family of painters--the
Van Eycks.

Before going into the little that is known of the family history of the
Van Eycks, I should like to call attention to the numerous painter
families in the middle ages. What a union, and repose, and happy
sympathy of art-life it indicates, which we appear to restlessness and
separate interests of modern life. The Van Eycks consisted of no less
than four members of a family, three brothers, Hubert, John, and
Lambert, and one sister, Margaret, devoted, like her brothers, to her
art. There is a suggestion that they belonged to a small village of
Limburg called Eyck, and repaired to Bruges in order to pursue their
art. Hubert was thirty years older than John, and it is said that he was
a serious-minded man as well as an ardent painter, and belonged to the
religious fraternity of our Lady of Ghent. He died in 1426. John, though
of so much consideration in his profession as to be believed to be 'the
Flemish Painter' sent by Duke Philip the Good of Flanders and Burgundy
with a mission to Portugal to solicit the hand of a princess in
marriage, is reported to have died very poor in 1449, and has the
suspicion attached to him of having been a lover of pleasure and a
spendthrift. Of Lambert, the third brother, almost nothing is known;
indeed, the fact of his existence has only lately come to light.
Margaret lived and died unmarried, and belonged, like her brother
Hubert, to the religious society of our Lady of Ghent. She died about
1432.

The invention of painting in oil, for which the Van Eycks are commonly
known, was not literally that of mixing colours with oil, which was
occasionally done before their day. It was the combining oil with resin,
so as to produce at once a good varnish, and avoid the necessity of
drying pictures in the sun, a bright thought, which may stand in the
same rank with the construction, by James Watt, of that valve which
rendered practicable the application of steam to machinery. The thought,
occasioned by the cracking of a picture in tempera exposed to the sun,
is due to Hubert Van Eyck.

The great picture of the Van Eycks, which was worked at for a number of
years by both Hubert and John, and, as some reckon, touched by the whole
family, is the 'Adoration of the Lamb,' at St Bavon's, Ghent. I should
like to give a faint idea of this extraordinary picture, which was
painted for a burgomaster of Ghent and his wife in order to adorn their
mortuary chapel in the cathedral. It was an altar piece on separate
panels, now broken up and dispersed, only a portion of it being retained
in Ghent.

It may strike some as strange that a picture should be on panels, but
those of the old pictures which were not on plastered walls were
commonly on panels, many of them on the lids and sides of chests and
presses which were used to hold sacred vessels and priestly raiment.

When the wings of the Van Eycks' altar-piece of the 'Adoration of the
Lamb' were opened on festivals, the subjects of the upper central
picture were seen, consisting of the Triune God, a majestic figure, and
at his side in stately calm the Virgin and the Baptist. On the inside of
the wings were angels, at the two extremities Adam and Eve. The lower
central picture shows the Lamb of the Revelation, whose blood flows into
a cup; over it is the dove of the Holy Spirit. Angels, who hold the
instruments of the Passion, worship the Lamb. Four groups of many
persons advance from the sides, these are the holy martyrs, men and
women, priests and laymen. In the foreground is the fountain of life; in
the distance are the towers of the heavenly Jerusalem. On the wings
other groups are coming up to adore the Lamb; on the left those who have
laboured for the Kingdom of the Lord by worldly deeds--the soldiers of
Christ led by St George, St Sebastian, and St Michael, the patron saints
of the old Flemish guilds, followed by emperors and kings--a goodly
company. Beyond the soldiers and princes, on the left, are the righteous
judges, also on horseback. In front of them, on a splendidly caparisoned
gray, rides a mild, benevolent old man in blue velvet trimmed with fur.
This is the likeness of Hubert Van Eyck, painted after his death by his
brother John, and John himself is in the group, clothed in black, with a
shrewd, sharp countenance. On the self-renunciation have served the Lamb
in the spirit, hermits and pilgrims, among them St Christopher, St
Anthony, St Paul the hermit, Mary Magdalene, and St Mary of Egypt. A
compartment underneath, which represented hell, finished the whole--yet
only the whole on one side, for the wings when closed presented another
series of finely thought-out and finished pictures--the Annunciation;
figures of Micah and Zechariah; statues of the two St Johns, with the
likenesses of the donors who gave to the world so great a work of art,
kneeling humbly side by side, the burgomaster somewhat mean-looking in
such company in spite of the proof of his liberality, but his wife noble
enough in feature and expression to have been the originator of this
glory of early Flemish painting. The upper part of the picture is
painted on a gold ground, round the central figure of the Lamb is vivid
green grass with masses of trees and flowers--indeed there is much
lovely landscape no longer indicated by a rock or a bush, but betokening
close observation of nature, whether in a fruitful valley, or a rocky
defile, or mountain ridges with fleecy clouds overhead. The expression
of the immense number of figures is as varied and characteristic as
their grouping.[2]

Hubert Van Eyck died while this work was in progress, and it was
finished by his brother John six years after Hubert's death. When one
thinks of the intense application and devotion which such a work costs,
and recalls the bronze gates of St John that occupied Lorenzo Ghiberti
49 years, and when we read, as we shall read a few chapters farther on,
of large paintings which were begun and ended in so many days--even so
many hours, one can better understand what is the essential difference
between the works of the early and the later painters, a difference
which no skill, no power even can bridge over. John Van Eyck, who had
lived late enough to have departed from the painting of sacred pictures
alone, so that he left portraits and an otter hunt among his works, is
three times represented in our National Gallery, in three greatly
esteemed portraits, one a double portrait, believed to be the likenesses
of the painter and his wife, standing hand in hand with a terrier dog
at their feet.

Gossaert, called de Mabuse from his native town of Mabeuze, sometimes
signing his name Joannes Malbodius, followed in the steps of the Van
Eycks, particularly in his great picture of the 'Adoration of the
Kings,' which is at Castle Howard, the seat of the Earl of Carlisle.
Mabuse was in England and painted the children of Henry VII, in a
picture, which is at Hampton Court. There is a picture in the palace of
Holyrood, Edinburgh, which has been attributed to Mabuse. It represents
on the sides of a triptych or diptych (somewhat like a folding screen)
James III. and his queen with attendants. The fur on the queen's dress
displays already that marvellous technical skill for which Flemish
painting is so celebrated.

Hans Memling belonged to Bruges. There is a tradition of him, which is
to a certain extent disproven, that he was a poor soldier relieved by
the hospital of St John, Bruges, and that in gratitude he executed for
the hospital the well-known reliquary of St Ursula. However it might
have originated, this is the most noted work of a painter, who was
distinguished frequently by his minute missal-like painting (he was also
an illuminator of missals), in which he would introduce fifteen hundred
small figures in a picture two feet eight inches, by six feet five
inches in size, and work out every detail with the utmost niceness and
care. The reliquary, or 'chasse,' is a wooden coffer or shrine about
four feet in length, its style and form those of a rich Gothic church,
its purpose to hold an arm of the saint. The whole exterior is covered
with miniatures by Memling, nearly the whole of them giving incidents in
the legendary history of St Ursula, a 'virgin princess of Brittany,' or
of England, who, setting out with eleven thousand companions, her lover,
and an escort of knights on a pilgrimage to Rome, was, with her whole
company, met and murdered, by a horde of heathen Huns, when they had
reached Cologne, on their return. My readers may be aware that the
supposed bones of the virgins and St Ursula form the ghastly adornment
of the church founded in her honour at Cologne. It is absolutely filled
with bones, built into the walls, stowed under the pavement, ranged in
glass cases about the choir. Hans Memling's is a pleasanter
commemoration of St Ursula.

Quintin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, was born at Louvain about
1460. Though he worked first as a smith he is said by Kugler to have
belonged to a family of painters, which somewhat takes from the romance,
though it adds to the probability of his story. Another painter in
Antwerp having offered the hand and dowry of his daughter--beloved by
Quintin Matsys--as a prize to the painter who should paint the best
picture in a competition for her hand, the doughty smith took up the
art, entered the lists, and carried off the maiden and her portion from
all his more experienced rivals. The vitality of the legend is indicated
by the inscription on a tablet to the memory of Quintin Matsys in the
Cathedral, Antwerp. The Latin inscription reads thus in English:

    'Twas love connubial taught the smith to paint,'

Quintin Matsys lived and died a respected burgher of Antwerp, a member
of the great Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke. He was twice married,
and had thirteen children.

Whatever might have been his source of inspiration, Quintin Matsys was
an apt scholar. His 'Descent from the Cross,' now in the Museum,
Antwerp, was _the_ 'Descent from the Cross,' and _the_ picture in the
Cathedral, until superseded by Rubens' masterpiece on the same subject.
Still Quintin Matsys version remains, and is in some respects an
unsurpassed picture. There is a traditional grouping of this Divine
tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the
Lord is supported by two venerable old men--Joseph of Arimathea and
Nicodemus--while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the
Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full
of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos. For this
picture Quintin Matsys--popular painter as he was--got only three
hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, of course,
the value of money was much greater in those days). The Joiners'
Company, for whom he painted the 'Descent from the Cross,' sold the
picture to the City of Antwerp for five times the original amount, and
it is said Queen Elizabeth offered the City nearly twenty times the
first sum for it, in vain.

Quintin Matsys painted frequently half-length figures of the Virgin and
Child, an example of which is in the National Gallery. He excelled in
the 'figure painting' of familiar subjects, then just beginning to be
established, affording a token of the direction which the future
eminence of the Flemish painters would take. One of his famous pictures
of this kind is 'The Misers,' in the Queen's collection at Windsor. Two
figures in the Flemish costume of the time, are seated at a table;
before them are a heap of money and a book, in which one is writing with
his right hand, while he tells down the money with his left. The faces
express craft and cupidity. The details of the ink-horn on the table,
and the bird on its perch behind, have the Flemish graphic exactness.




CHAPTER III.

IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530.


I have come to the period when Italian art is divided into many
schools--Paduan, Venetian, Umbrian, Florentine, Roman, Bolognese, etc.,
etc. With the schools and their definitions I do not mean to meddle,
except it may be to mention to which school a great painter belonged.
Another difficulty meets me here. I have been trying so far as I could
to give the representative painters in the order of time. I can no
longer follow this rule strictly, and the grouping of this chapter is
made on the principle of leading my readers up by some of the
predecessors who linked the older to the later Italian painters, and by
some of the contemporaries of these later painters, to that central
four, Lionardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, who
occupy so great a place in the history of art.

In the brothers Bellini and their native Venice, we must first deal with
that excellence of colouring for which the Venetian painters were
signally noted, while they comparatively neglected and underrated
drawing. A somewhat fanciful theory has been started, that as Venice,
Holland, and England have been distinguished for colour in art, and as
all those States are by the sea, so a sea atmosphere has something to do
with a passion for colour. Within more reasonable bounds, in reference
to the Venetians, is the consideration that no colouring is richer,
mellower, more exquisitely tinted than that which belongs to the blue
Italian sky over the blue Adriatic, with those merged shades of violet,
green, and amber, and that magical soft haze which has to do with a
moist climate.

The two brothers Gentile and Gian or John Bellini, the latter the more
famous of the two, were the sons of an old Venetian painter, with regard
to whom the worthy speech is preserved, that he said it was like the
Tuscans for son to beat father, and he hoped, in God's name, that
Giovanni or Gian would outstrip him, and Gentile, the elder, outstrip
both. The brothers worked together and were true and affectionate
brothers, encouraging and appreciating each other.

Gentile was sent by the Doge at the request of the Sultan--either
Mahommed II, or Bajazet II., to Constantinople, where Gentile Bellini
painted the portrait of the Sultan and the Sultana his mother, now in
the British Museum. The painter also painted the head of John the
Baptist in a charger as an offering--only too suitable--from him to the
Grand Turk. The legend goes on to tell that in the course of the
presentation of the gift, an incident occurred which induced Gentile
Bellini to quit the Ottoman Court with all haste. The Sultan had
criticized the appearance of the neck in John the Baptist's severed
head, and when Gentile ventured to defend his work, the Sultan proceeded
to prove the correctness of his criticism, by drawing his scimitar and
cutting off at a stroke the head of a kneeling slave, and pointing to
the spouting blood and the shrinking muscle, gave the horrified painter
a lesson in practical anatomy. On Gentile's return from the East, he was
pensioned by his State, and lived on painting, till he was eighty years
of age, dying in 1501.

Gian Bellini is said to have obtained by a piece of deceit, which is not
in keeping with his manly and honourable character, the secret,
naturally coveted by a Venetian, of mixing colours with resin and oil. A
Venetian painter had brought the secret from Flanders, and communicated
it to a friend, who, in turn, communicated it to a third painter, and
was murdered by that third painter for his pains, so greedy and criminal
was the craving, not only to possess, but to be as far as possible the
sole possessor of, the grand discovery. Gian Bellini was much less
guilty, if he were really guilty. Disguised as a Venetian nobleman, he
proposed to sit for his portrait to that Antonella who first brought the
secret from Flanders, and while Antonella worked with unsuspicious
openness, Gian Bellini watched the process and stole the secret.

Gian Bellini lived to the age of ninety, and had among his admirers the
poet Ariosto and Albrecht Dürer. The latter saw Gian Bellini in his age,
and said of him, when foolish mockers had risen up to scout at the old
man, and his art now become classic, 'He is very old, but he is still
the best of our painters.' Gian Bellini had illustrious pupils,
including in their number Titian and Giorgione.

The portraits of Gentile and Gian, which are preserved in a painting by
Gian, show Gentile fair-complexioned and red-haired, and Gian with dark
hair.

Gian Bellini is considered to have been less gifted with imagination
than some of his great brother artists; but he has proved himself a man
of high moral sense, and while he stopped short at the boundary between
the seen and the unseen, it is certain he must still have painted with
much of 'the divine patience' and devout consecration of all his powers,
and of every part of his work, which are the attributes of the earliest
Italian painters. When he and his brother began to paint, Venetian art
had already taken its distinctive character for open-air effects, rich
scenic details in architecture, furniture and dress (said to be
conspicuous in commercial communities), and a growing tendency to
portraiture. Gian went with the tide, but he guided it to noble results.
His simplicity and good sense, with his purity and dignity of mind, were
always present. He introduced into his pictures 'singing boys, dancing
cherubs, glittering thrones, and dewy flowers,' pressing the outer world
into his service and that of religious art. It is said also that his
Madonnas seem 'amiable beings imbued with a lofty grace;' while his
saints are 'powerful and noble forms.' But he never descended to the
paltry or the vulgar. He knew from the depths of his own soul how to
invest a face with moral grandeur. Especially in his representations of
our Saviour Gian Bellini 'displays a perception of moral power and
grandeur seldom equalled in the history of art.' The example given is
that of the single figure of the Lord in the Dresden Gallery, where the
Son of God, without nimbus, or glory, stands forth as the 'ideal of
elevated humanity.'

The greater portion of Gian Bellini's pictures remain in the churches
and galleries of Venice. But the first great work at which the two
brothers in their youth worked in company--the painting of the Hall of
Council in the palace of the Doge, with a series of historical and
legendary pictures of the Venetian wars with the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa (1177), including the Doge Ziani's receiving from the Pope
the gold ring with which the Doge espoused the Adriatic, in token of
perpetual dominion over the sea--was unfortunately destroyed by fire in
1577. Giovanni Bellini's greatest work, now at St Salvatore, is Christ
at Emmaus, with Venetian senators and a Turkish dragoman introduced as
spectators of the risen Lord.

Of another great work at Vicenza, painted in Gian Bellini's old age,
when neither his skill nor his strength was abated, 'The Baptism of
Christ,' Dean Alford writes thus:

     'Let us remain long and look earnestly, for there is indeed much
     to be seen. That central figure, standing with hands folded on
     His bosom, so gentle, so majestic, so perfect in blameless
     humanity, oh what labour of reverent thought; what toil of
     ceaseless meditation; what changes of fair purpose, oscillating
     into clearest vision of ideal truth, must it have cost the great
     painter, before he put forth that which we see now! It is as
     impossible to find aught but love and majesty in the Divine
     countenance, as it is to discover a blemish on the complexion of
     that body, which seems to give forth light from itself, as He
     stands in obedience, fulfilling all righteousness.

    'And even on the accessories to this figure, we see the same
    loving and reverent toil bestowed. The cincture, where alone the
    body is hidden from view, is no web of man's weaving; or, if it
    were, it is of hers whose heart was full of divine thoughts as
    she wove: so bright and clear is the tint, so exquisitely
    careful and delicate every fold where light may play or colour
    vary. And look under the sacred feet, on the ground blessed by
    their pressure; no dash of hurrying brush has been there: less
    than a long day's light, eve, did not suffice to give in
    individual shape and shade every minutest pebble and mote of
    that shore of Jordan. Every one of them was worth painting, for
    we are viewing them as in the light of His presence who made
    them all and knew them all.

    'And now let us pass to the other figures: to that living and
    glowing angelic group in the left hand of the picture. Three of
    the heavenly host are present, variously affected by that which
    they behold. The first, next the spectator, in the corner of the
    picture, is standing in silent adoration, tender and gentle in
    expression, the hands together, but only the points of the
    fingers touching, his very reverence being chastened by angelic
    modesty; the second turns on that which he sees a look of
    earnest inquiry, but kneels as he looks; and indeed that which
    he sees is one of the things which angels desire to look into.
    The third, a majestic herald-like figure, stands, as one
    speaking, looking to the spectator, with his right hand on his
    garment, and his left out as in demonstration, unmistakeably
    saying to us who look on, "Behold what love is here!" Then,
    hardly noticing what might well be much noticed, the grand dark
    figure of the Baptist on the right, let us observe how
    beautifully and accurately all the features of the landscape are
    given.'

Of the same work another critic records: 'The attendant angels in this
work (signed by the artist) are of special interest, instinct with an
indefinable purity and depth of reverential tenderness elsewhere hardly
rivalled. But the picture, like that in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, with
which it is nearly contemporary, is almost more interesting from the
astonishing truth and beauty of its landscape portions. _These_ form
here a feature more important, perhaps, than in any work of that period;
the stratification and form of the rocks in the foreground, the palms
and other trees relieved against the lucid distance, and the
mountain-ranges of tender blue beyond, are as much beyond praise for
their beauty and their truth, as they have been beyond imitation from
the solidity and transparent strength of their execution! The minute
finish is Nature's, and the colouring more gem-like than gems.'

No praise can exceed that bestowed on Gian Bellini's colouring for its
intensity and transparency. 'Many of his draperies are like crystal of
the clearest and deepest colour,' declares an authority; and another
states' his best works have a clear jewel brightness, an internal
gem-like fire such as warms a summer twilight. The shadows are intense
and yet transparent, like the Adriatic waves when they lie out of the
sun under the palace bridges.'

Portrait-painting, just beginning, was established in Venice, its later
stronghold, by Gian Bellini. His truthful portrait of the Doge Loredano,
one of the earliest of that series of Doges' portraits which once hung
in state in the ducal palace, is now in our National Gallery.

Of Gentile Bellini, whose work was softer, but less vigorous than his
brother's, the best painting extant is that at Milan of St Mark
preaching at Alexandria, in which the painter showed how he had profited
by his residence at Constantinople in the introduction of much rich
Turkish costume, and of an animal unknown to Europe at the time--a
camelopard.

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua. He was the son of a farmer. His
early history, according to tradition, is very similar to that of
Giotto. Just as Cimabue adopted Giotto, Squarcione, a painter who had
travelled in Italy and Greece, and made a great collection of antiques,
from which he taught in a famous school of painters, adopted Andrea
Mantegna at the early age of ten years. It was long believed that
Mantegna, in the end, forfeited the favour of his master by marrying
Nicolosa Bellini, the sister of Gentile and Gian Bellini, whose father
was the great rival of Squarcione; and farther, that Mantegna's style of
painting had been considered Bellini. Modern researches, which have
substituted another surname for that of Bellini as the surname of Andrea
Mantegna's wife, contradict this story.

Andrea Mantegna, a man of much energy and fancy, entered young into the
service of the Gonzaga lords of Mantua, receiving from them a salary of
thirty pounds a year and a piece of land, on which the painter built a
house, and painted it within and without--the latter one of the first
examples of artistic waste, followed later by Tintoret and Veronese,
regardless of the fact that painting could not survive in the open air
of Northern Italy.

Andrea Mantegna had his home at Mantua, except when he was called to
Rome to paint for the Pope, Innocent VIII. An anecdote is told by Mrs
Jameson of this commission. It seems the Pope's payments were irregular;
and one day when he visited his painter at work, and his Holiness asked
the meaning of a certain allegorical female figure in the design, Andrea
answered, with somewhat audacious point, that he was trying to
represent _Patience_. The Pope, understanding the allusion, paid the
painter in his own coin, by remarking in reply, 'If you would place
Patience in fitting company, you would paint Discretion at her side.'
Andrea took the hint, said no more, and when his work was finished not
only received his money, but was munificently rewarded.

Andrea Mantegna had two sons and a daughter. One of his sons painted
with his father, and, after Andrea Mantegna's death, completed some of
his pictures.

Andrea Mantegna's early study of antique sculpture moulded his whole
life's work. He took great delight in modelling, in perspective, of
which he made himself a master, and in chiaroscuro, or light and shade.
Had his powers of invention and grace not kept pace with his skill, he
would have been a stiff and formal worker; as it was, he carried the
austerity of sculpture into painting, and his greatest work, the
'Triumph of Julius Cæsar,' would have been better suited for the
chiselled frieze of a temple than it is for the painted frieze of the
hall of a palace. Yet he was a great leader and teacher in art, and the
true proportions of his drawing are grand, if his colouring is harsh. I
am happy to say that Mantegna's 'Triumph of Julius Cæsar' is in England
at Hampton Court, having been bought from the Duke of Mantua by Charles
I. These cartoons, nine in number, are sketches in water-colour or
distemper on paper fixed on cloth. They are faded and dilapidated, as
they well may be, considering the slightness of the materials and their
age, about four hundred years. At the same time, they are, after the
cartoons of Raphael (which formed part of the same art collection of
Charles I.), perhaps the most valuable and interesting relic of art in
England.

The series of the 'Triumph' contain the different parts, originally
separated by pillars, of a long and splendid procession. There are
trumpeters and standard bearers, the statues of the gods borne aloft,
battering-rams and heaps of glittering armour, trophies of conquest in
huge vases filled with coin, garlanded oxen, and elephants. The second
last of the series, presents the ranks of captives forming part of the
show, rebellious men, submissive women, and unconscious children--a
moving picture. In the last of the series comes the great conqueror in
his chariot, a youth in the crowd following him, carrying his banner, on
which is inscribed Cæsar's notable despatch, 'Veni, vidi, vici;' 'I
came, I saw, I conquered.'

Another of Mantegna's best pictures is in distemper--in which, and on
fresco, Mantegna chiefly painted,--and is in the Louvre, Paris. It is
the Madonna of Victory, so called from its being painted to commemorate
the deliverance of Italy from the French army under Charles VIII., a
name which has acquired a sardonic meaning from the ultimate destination
of the picture. This picture--which represents the Virgin and Child on a
throne, in an arbour of fruit and flowers, between the archangels,
Michael and St Maurice, in complete armour, with the patron saints of
Mantua and the infant St John in the front, and the Marquis Ludovico of
Mantua and his wife, Isabella D'Este, kneeling to return thanks--was
painted by Mantegna at the age of seventy years; and, as if the art of
the man had mellowed with time, it is the softest and tenderest of his
pictures in execution. A beautiful Madonna of Mantegna's, still later in
time, is in the National Gallery.

When Mantegna was sixty years old he took up the art of engraving, and
prosecuted it with zeal and success, being one of the earliest painters
who engraved his own pictures, and this accomplishment spread them
abroad a hundredfold.

Domenico Ghirlandajo was properly Domenico Bicordi, but inherited from
his father, a goldsmith in Florence,[3] the by-name of Ghirlandajo or
Garland-maker--a distinctive appellation said to have been acquired by
the elder man from his skill in making silver garlands for the heads of
Florentine women and children. Domenico Ghirlandajo worked at his
father's craft till he was twenty-four years of age, when, having in the
mean time evinced great cleverness in taking the likenesses of the
frequenters of Ghirlandajo the elder's shop, the future painter
abandoned the goldsmith's trade for art pure and simple. He soon
vindicated the wisdom of the step which he had taken by giving proofs of
something of the strength of Masaccio, united with a reflection of the
feeling of Fra Angelico.

Ghirlandajo was summoned soon to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel,
afterwards to be so glorious; but his greatest works were done in the
prime of his manhood, in his native city, Florence, where he was chosen
as the teacher of Michael Angelo, who was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo for
three years.

While still in the flower of his age and crowned with golden opinions,
being, it is said with effusion, 'the delight of his city,' Ghirlandajo
died after a short illness, in Ghirlandajo's time Florence had reached
her meridian, and her citizens outvied each other in the magnificence of
their gifts to their fair mother city. Ghirlandajo was fitted to be
their painter; himself a generous-spirited artist, in the exuberance of
life and power, he wished that his fellow-citizens would give him all
the walls of the city to cover with frescoes. He was content with the
specified sum for his painting, desiring more the approbation of his
employers than additional crowns. His genius lying largely in the
direction of portrait painting, he introduced frequently the portraits
of contemporaries, causing them to figure as spectators of his sacred
scenes. One of these contemporaries thus presented, was Amerigo
Vespucci, who was to give his name to a continent. Another was a
Florentine beauty, a woman of rank, Ginevra de Benci.

Ghirlandajo was lavish in his employment of rich Florentine costumes and
architecture. He even made the legends of the saints and the histories
of the Bible appear as if they had happened under the shadow of
Brunelleschi's duomo and Giotto's campanile, and within sound of the
flow of the Arno. In the peculiar colouring used in fresco painting
Ghirlandajo excelled.

He painted a chapel for a Florentine citizen, Francesco Sasetti, in the
church of the Trinità, Florence, with scenes from the life of St
Francis. Of these, the death of St Francis, surrounded by the sorrowing
monks of his order, with the figures of Francesco Sasetti and his wife,
Madonna Nera, on one side of the picture, is considered the best. As a
curious illustration of the modernizing practice of Ghirlandajo, he has
painted an old priest at the foot of the bier, chanting the litanies for
the dying, with spectacles on his nose, the earliest known
representation of these useful instruments.

Ghirlandajo painted during four years the choir of the church of Santa
Maria Novella, Florence, for one of the great Florentine benefactors,
Giovanni Tornabuone, and there are to be seen some of Ghirlandajo's
finest frescoes from the history of John the Baptist and the Virgin.

A Madonna and Child with angels in the National Gallery is attributed to
Ghirlandajo.

Francesco Francia, or Il Francia, was born at Bologna, and was the son
of a carpenter, whose surname was Raibaloni, but Francesco assumed the
name of his master, a goldsmith, and worked himself at a goldsmith's
trade till he was forty years of age. Indeed he may be said never to
have relinquished his connection with the trade, and certainly he was no
more ashamed of it than of his calling as a painter, for he signed
himself indiscriminately 'goldsmith' and 'painter,' and sometimes
whimsically put 'goldsmith' to his paintings and 'painter' to his
jewellery. He was a famous designer of dies for coins and medals, and it
is quite probable, as a countryman of his own has sought to prove, that
he was the celebrated type-cutter, known as 'Francesco da Bologna.' But
it is with Francesco '_pictor_' that we have to do.

Though he only began to prosecute the painter's art in middle age, he
rose with remarkable rapidity to eminence, was the great painter of
Lombardy in his day, rivalling Squarcione, Mantegna's teacher in his
school, which numbered two hundred scholars, and becoming the founder of
the early Bolognese school of painters.

Francia is said to have been very handsome in person, with a kindly
disposition and an agreeable manner. He was on terms of cordial
friendship with Raphael, then in his youth, and thirty years Il
Francia's junior. Il Francia addressed an enthusiastic sonnet to
Raphael, and there is extant a letter of Raphael's to Il Francia,
excusing himself for not sending his friend Raphael's portrait, and
making an exchange of sketches, that of his 'Nativity' for the drawing
of Il Francia's 'Judith;' while it was to Il Francia's care that Raphael
committed his picture of St Cecilia, when it was first sent to Bologna.
These relations between the men and their characters throw discredit on
the tradition that Il Francia died from jealous grief caused by the
sight of Raphael's 'St Cecilia.' As Il Francia was seventy years of age
at the time of his death, one may well attribute it to physical causes.
Il Francia had at least one son, and another kinsman, painters, whose
paintings were so good as to be occasionally confounded with those of Il
Francia.

Il Francia is thought to have united, in his works, a certain calm
sedateness and frank sincerity to the dreamy imaginativeness of some of
his contemporaries. His finest works are considered to be the frescoes
from the life of St Cecilia in the church of St Cecilia at Bologna.

Of a Madonna and Child, by Francia, at Bologna, I shall write down
another of Dean Alford's descriptions,--many of which I have given for
this, among other reasons, that these descriptions are not technical or
professional, but the expression of the ardent admiration and grateful
comprehension of a sympathetic spectator. 'He,' speaking of the Divine
Child, 'is lying in simple nakedness on a rich red carpet, and is
supported by a white pillar, over which the carpet passes. Of these
accessories every thread is most delicately and carefully painted; no
slovenly washes of meretricious colour where He is to be served, before
whom all things are open; no perfunctory sparing of toil in serving Him
who has given us all that is best. On his right hand kneels the Virgin
Mother in adoration, her very face a magnificat--praise, lowliness,
confidence; next to her, Joseph, telling by his looks the wonderful
story, deeply but simply. Two beautiful angels kneel, one on either
side--hereafter, perhaps, to kneel in like manner in the tomb. Their
faces seemed to me notable for that which I have no doubt the painter
intended to express,--the pure abstraction of reverent adoration,
unmingled with human sympathies. The face and figure of the Divine
Infant are full of majesty, as he holds his hands in blessing towards
the spectator, who symbolizes the world which He has come to save. Close
to him on the ground, on his right branch in trustful repose; on his
left springs a plant of the meadow-trefoil. Thus lightly and reverently
has the master touched the mystery of the Blessed Trinity: the goldfinch
symbolizing by its colours, the trefoil by the form of its leaf.'

In our own National Gallery is a picture by Il Francia of the enthroned
Virgin and Child and her mother, St Anne, who is presenting a peach to
the infant Christ; at the foot of the throne is the little St John; to
the right and left are St Paul with the sword, St Sebastian bound to a
pillar and pierced with arrows, and St Lawrence with the emblematical
grid-iron, etc. etc. Opposite this picture hangs, what once formed part
of it, a solemn, sorrowful Pietà, as the Italians call a picture
representing the dead Redeemer mourned over by the Virgin and by the
other holy women. These pictures were bought by our Government from the
Duke of Lucca for three thousand five hundred pounds.

Fra Bartolommeo. We come to a second gentle monk, not unlike Fra
Angelico in his nature, but far less happy than Fra Angelico, in having
been born in stormy times. Fra Bartolommeo, called also Baccio della
Porta, or Bartholomew of the gate, from the situation of his lodgings
when a young man, but scarcely known in Italy by any other name than
that of Il Frate, or the Friar, was born near Florence, and trained from
his boyhood to be a painter. In his youth, however, a terrible public
event convulsed Florence, and revolutionized Baccio della Porta's life.
He had been employed to paint in that notable Dominican convent of St
Mark, where Savonarola, its devoted friar, was denouncing the sins of
the times, including the profligate luxury of the nobles and the
degradation of the representatives of the Church. Carried away by the
fervour and sincerity of the speaker, Baccio joined the enthusiasts who
cast into a burning pile the instruments of pride, vanity, and godless
intellect denounced by the preacher. Baccio's sacrifice to the flaming
heap of splendid furniture and dress, and worldly books, was all his
designs from profane subjects and studies of the undraped figure. A
little later Savonarola was excommunicated by the Pope and perished as
a martyr; and Baccio, timid from his natural temper, distracted by
doubt, and altogether horror-stricken, took a monk's vows, and entered
the same convent of St Mark, where for four years he never touched a
pencil.

At the request of his superior Fra Bartolommeo painted again, and when
Raphael visited Florence, and came with all his conquering sweetness and
graciousness to greet the monk in his cell, something of Il Frate's old
love for his art, and delight in its exercise, returned. He even visited
Rome, but there his health failed him, and the great works of Lionardo,
Michael Angelo, and Raphael, when he compared his own with theirs,
seemed to crush and overwhelm him. But he painted better for his visit
to Rome, even as he had painted better for his intimacy with Raphael.
Nay, it is said Raphael himself painted better on account of his
brotherly regard for, and confidence in, Fra Bartolommeo.

Fra Bartolommeo died aged forty-eight years. Among his best pupils was a
nun of St Catherine's, known as Suor Plautilla.

To Il Frate, as a painter, is attributed great softness and harmony, and
even majesty, though, like Fra Angelico, he was often deficient in
strength. He was great in the management of draperies, for the better
study of which he is said to have invented the lay figure. He indulged
in the introduction into his pictures of rich architecture. He was fond
of painting boy-angels--in which he excelled--playing frequently on
musical instruments, or holding a canopy over the Virgin. Very few of
his works are out of Italy; the most are in Florence, especially in the
Pitti Palace. His two greatest works are the Madonna della Misericordia,
or the Madonna of Mercy, at Lucca, where the Virgin stands with
outstretched arms pleading for the suppliants, whom she shelters under
the canopy, and who look to her as she looks to her Son,--and the grand
single figure of St Mark, with his Gospel in his hand, in the Pitti
Palace, Florence. Sir David Wilkie said of the Madonna of Mercy, 'that
it contained the merits of Raphael, of Titian, of Rembrandt, and of
Rubens.'

Andrea Vanucchi, commonly called Andrea del Sarto, from the occupation
of his father, who was a tailor (in Italian, _sarto_), was born at
Florence in 1488. He was first a goldsmith, but soon turned painter,
winning early the commendatory title of 'Andrea senza errori,' or
'Andrea the Faultless.' His life is a miserable and tragic history. In
the early flush of his genius and industry, with its just crown of fame
and success, he conceived a passion for a beautiful but worthless woman,
whom, in spite of the opposition of his friends, he married. She
rendered his home degraded and wretched, and his friends and scholars
fell off from him. In disgust he quitted Florence, and entered the
service of Francis I, of France; but his wife, for whom his regard was a
desperate infatuation, imperiously summoned him back to Florence, to
which he returned, bringing with him a large sum of money, entrusted to
him by the king for the purchase of works of art. Instigated by his
wife, Andrea del Sarto used this money for his, or rather her, purposes,
and dared not return to France. Even in his native Florence he was
loaded with reproach and shame. He died of the plague at the age of
fifty-five years, according to tradition, plundered and abandoned in his
extremity by the base woman for whom he had sacrificed principle and
honour. We may read the grievous story of Andrea del Sarto, written by
one of the greatest of England's modern poets.

As may be imagined, Andrea del Sarto's excellence lay in the charm of
his execution. His works were deficient in earnestness and high feeling,
and some will have it, that, evilly haunted as he was, he perpetually
painted in his Madonnas the beautiful but base-souled face of the woman
who ruined him. Andrea del Sarto's best works are in Florence,
particularly in the cloisters of the convent of the Annunziata. In the
court of the same convent is his famous Riposo (or rest of the Holy
Family on their way to Egypt), which is known as the 'Madonna of the
Sack,' from the circumstance of Joseph in the picture leaning against a
sack. This picture has held a high place in art for hundreds of years.




CHAPTER IV.

LIONARDO DA VINCI, 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566.


We have arrived at the triumph of art, not, indeed, in unconsciousness
and devotion, but in fulness and completeness, as shown in the works of
four of the greatest painters and men whom the world ever saw. Of the
first, Lionardo da Vinci, born at Vinci in the neighbourhood of
Florence, 1452, it may be said that the many-sidedness which
characterized Italians--above all Italians of his day--reached its
height in him. Not only was he a painter, a sculptor, an architect, and
engineer, but also one of the boldest speculators of the generation
which gave birth to Columbus, and was not less original and ingenious
than he was universally accomplished--an Admirable Crichton among
painters. There is a theory that this many-sidedness is a proof of the
greatest men, indicating a man who might have been great in any way,
who, had his destiny not found and left him a painter, would have been
equally great as a philosopher, a man of science, a poet, or a
statesman. It may be so; but the life of Lionardo tends also to
illustrate the disadvantage of too wide a grasp and diffusion of genius.
Beginning much and finishing little, not because he was idle or fickle,
but because his schemes were so colossal and his aims so high, he spent
his time in preparation for the attainment of perfect excellence, which
eluded him. Lionardo was the pioneer, the teacher of others, rather than
the complete fulfiller of his own dreams; and the life of the proud,
passionate man was, to him self mortification. This result might, in a
sense, have been avoided; but Lionardo, great as he was, proved also one
of those unfortunate men whose noblest efforts are met and marred by
calamities which could have hardly been foreseen or prevented.

Lionardo da Vinci was the son of a notary, and early showed a taste for
painting as well as for arithmetic and mathematics. He was apprenticed
to a painter, but he also sedulously studied physics. He is said,
indeed, to have made marvellous guesses at truth, in chemistry, botany,
astronomy, and particularly, as helping him in his art, anatomy. He was,
according to other accounts, a man of noble person, like Ghirlandajo.
And one can scarcely doubt this who looks at Lionardo's portrait painted
by himself, or at any engraving from it, and remarks the grand presence
of the man in his cap and furred cloak; his piercing wistful eyes;
stately outline of nose; and sensitive mouth, unshaded by his
magnificent flowing beard.

He was endowed with surprising bodily strength, and was skilled in the
knightly exercises of riding, fencing, and dancing. He was a lover of
social pleasure, and inclined to indulge in expensive habits. While a
lad he amused himself by inventing machines for swimming, diving, and
flying, as well as a compass, a hygrometer, etc. etc. In a combination
from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, etc. etc., with which
his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a
nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it
filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer
selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money. As something
beyond amusement, Lionardo planned a canal to unite Florence with Pisa
(while he executed other canals in the course of his life), and
suggested the daring but not impossible idea of raising _en masse_, by
means of levers, the old church of San Giovanni, Florence, till it
should stand several feet above its original level, and so get rid of
the half-sunken appearance which destroyed the effect of the fine old
building. He visited the most frequented places, carrying always with
him his sketch-book, in which to note down his observations; he followed
criminals to execution in order to witness the pangs of despair; he
invited peasants to his house and told them laughable stories, that he
might pick up from their faces the essence of comic expression.[4] A
mania for truth--alike in great and little things--possessed him.

Lionardo entered young into the service of the Gonzaga family of Milan,
being, according to one statement, chosen for the office which he was to
fill, as the first singer in _improvisatore_ of his time (among his
other inventions he devised a peculiar kind of lyre). He showed no want
of confidence in asserting his claims to be elected, for after declaring
the various works he would undertake, he added with regard to
painting--'I can do what can be done, as well as any man, be he who he
may.' He received from the Duke a salary of five hundred crowns a year.
He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works,
he painted his 'Cenacolo,' or 'Last Supper,' one of the grandest
pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice,
in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican
convent, Milan. The situation was damp, and the material used proved so
unsuitable for work on plaster, that, even before it was exposed to the
reverses which in the course of a French occupation of Milan converted
the refectory into a stable, the colours had altogether faded, and the
very substance of the picture was crumbling into ruin.

The equestrian statue of the old Duke of Milan by Lionardo excited so
much delight in its first freshness, that it was carried in triumph
through the city, and during the progress it was accidentally broken.
Lionardo began another, but funds failed for its completion, and
afterwards the French used the original clay model as a target for their
bowmen.

Lionardo returned to Florence, and found his great rival, Michael
Angelo, already in the field. Both of the men, conscious of mighty
gifts, were intolerant of rivalry. To Lionardo especially, as being much
the elder man, the originator and promoter of many of the new views in
art which his opponent had adopted, the competition was very
distasteful, and to Michael Angelo he used the bitter sarcasm which has
been handed down to us, 'I was famous before you were born.'

Nevertheless Lionardo consented to compete with Michael Angelo for the
painting in fresco of one side of the council-hall, by the order of the
gonfaloniere for the year. Lionardo chose for his subject a victory of
the Florentines over the Milanese, while Michael Angelo took a scene
from the Pisan campaigns. Not only was the work never done (some say
partly because Lionardo _would_ delay in order to make experiments in
oils) on account of political troubles, but the very cartoons of the two
masters, which all the artists of the day flocked to see, have been
broken up, dispersed, and lost; and of one only, that of Michael Angelo,
a small copy remains, while but a fragment from Lionardo's was preserved
in a copy made by Rubens.

Lionardo went to Rome in the pontificate of Leo X., but there his
quarrel with Michael Angelo broke out more violently than ever. The Pope
too, who loved better a gentler, more accommodating spirit, seemed to
slight Lionardo, and the great painter not only quitted Rome in disgust,
but withdrew his services altogether from ungrateful Italy.

At Pavia Lionardo was presented to Francis I, of France, who, zealous
in patronizing art, engaged the painter to follow Francis's fortunes at
a salary of seven hundred crowns a year. Lionardo spent the remainder of
his life in France. His health had long been declining before he died,
aged sixty-seven years, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had risen high in the
favour of Francis. From this circumstance, and the generous, chivalrous
nature of the king, there doubtless arose the tradition that Francis
visited Lionardo on his death-bed; and that, while in the act of gently
assisting him to raise himself, the painter died in the king's arms.
Court chronicles do their best to demolish this story, by proving
Francis to have been at St Germain on the day when Lionardo died at
Cloux.

Lionardo was never married, and he left what worldly goods he possessed
to a favourite scholar. Besides his greater works, he filled many MS.
volumes, some with singularly accurate studies and sketches, maps, plans
for machines, scores for music (three volumes of these are in the Royal
Library at Windsor), and some with writing, which is written--probably
to serve as a sort of cipher--from right to left, instead of from left
to right. One of his writings is a valuable 'Treatise' on painting;
other writings are on scientific and philosophic subjects, and in these
Lionardo is believed to have anticipated some of the discoveries which
were reached by lines of close reasoning centuries later.

Lionardo's genius as a painter was expressed by his uniting, in the very
highest degree, truth and imagination. He was the shrewdest observer of
ordinary life, and he could also realize the higher mysteries and
profounder feelings of human nature. He drew exceedingly well. Of
transparent lights and shadows, or chiaroscuro, he was the greatest
master; but he was not a good colourist. His works are very rare, and
many which are attributed to him are the pictures of his scholars, for
he founded one of the great schools of Milan or Lombardy. There is a
tradition that he was, as Holbein was once believed to be, ambidextrous,
or capable of using his left hand as well as his right, and that he
painted with two brushes--one in each hand. Thus more than fully armed,
Lionardo da Vinci looms out on us like a Titan through the mists of
centuries, and he preaches to us the simple homily, that not even a
Titan can command worldly success; that such men must look to ends as
the reward of their travail, and before undertaking it they must count
the cost, and be prepared to renounce the luxurious tastes which clung
to Lionardo, and which were not for him or for such men as he was.

Lionardo's great painting was his 'Last Supper,' of which, happily, good
copies exist, as well as the wreck of the picture itself. The original
is now, after it is too late, carefully guarded and protected in its old
place in the Dominican convent of the Madonna della Grazia, Milan. The
assembled company sit at a long table, Christ being seated in the
middle, the disciples forming two separate groups on each side of the
Saviour. The gradations of age are preserved, from the tender youth of
John to the grey hairs of Simon; and all the varied emotions of mind,
from the deepest sorrow and anxiety to the eager desire of revenge, are
here portrayed. The well-known words of Christ, 'One of you shall betray
me,' have caused the liveliest emotion. The two groups to the left of
Christ are full of impassioned excitement, the figures in the first
turning to the Saviour, those in the second speaking to each
other,--horror, astonishment, suspicion, doubt, alternating in the
various expressions. On the other hand, stillness, low whispers,
indirect observations, are the prevailing expressions in the groups on
the right. In the middle of the first group sits the betrayer; a
cunning, sharp profile, he looks up hastily to Christ, as if speaking
the words, 'Master, is it I?' while, true to the Scriptural account, his
left hand and Christ's right hand approach, as if unconsciously, the
dish that stands before them.[5]

A sketch of the head of Christ for the original picture, which has been
preserved on a torn and soiled piece of paper at Brera, expresses the
most elevated seriousness, together with Divine gentleness pain on
account of the faithless disciple, a full presentiment of his own death,
and resignation to the will of the Father. It gives a faint idea of what
the master may have accomplished in the finished picture.

During his stay at Florence Lionardo painted a portrait of that Ginevra
Benci already mentioned as painted by Ghirlandajo; and a still more
famous portrait by Lionardo was that of Mona Lisa, the wife of his
friend Giocondo. This picture is also known as 'La Jaconde.' I wish to
call attention to it because it is the first of four surpassingly
beautiful portraits of women which four great painters gave in
succession to the world. The others, to be spoken of afterwards, are
Raphael's 'Fornarina,' Titian's 'Bella Donna,' and Rubens' 'Straw Hat.'
About the original of 'La Jaconde' there never has been a mystery such
as there has been about the others. At this portrait the unsatisfied
painter worked at intervals for four years, and when he left it he
pronounced it still unfinished. 'La Jaconde' is now in the Louvre in
nearly ruined condition, yet a judge says of it that even now 'there is
something in this wonderful head of the ripest southern beauty, with its
airy background of a rocky landscape, which exercises a peculiar
fascination over the mind.'

There is a painting of the Madonna and Child Christ said to be by
Lionardo, and probably, at least, by one of his school, and which
belongs, I think, to the Duke of Buccleuch, and was exhibited lately
among the works of the old masters. The group has at once something
touching and exalted in its treatment. The Divine Child in the Mother's
arms is strangely attracted by the sight of a cross, and turns towards
it with ineffable longing, while the Virgin Mother, with a pang of
foreboding, clasping the child in her arms, seeks to draw him back.

The fragment of the cartoon in which Lionardo competed with Michael
Angelo, may be held to survive in the fine painting by Rubens called
'the Battle of the Standard.' Of a famous Madonna and St Anne, by
Lionardo, the original cartoon in black chalk is preserved under glass
in our Royal Academy.[6]

Michael Angelo Buonarroti, born at Castel Caprese near Tuscany, 1475, is
the next of these universal geniuses, a term which we are accustomed to
hold in contempt, because we have only seen it exemplified in parody.
After Lionardo, indeed, Michael Angelo, though he was also painter,
sculptor, architect, engineer, poet, musician, might almost be regarded
as restricted in his pursuits, yet still so manifold was he, that men
have loved to make a play upon his name and call him 'Michael the
angel,' and to speak of him as of a king among men.

Michael Angelo was of noble descent, and though his ancient house had
fallen into comparative poverty, his father was mayor or podesta of
Chiusi, and governor of the castle of Chiusi and Caprese. Michael Angelo
was destined for the profession of the law, but so early vindicated his
taste for art, that at the age of thirteen years he was apprenticed to
Ghirlandajo. Lorenzo the Magnificent was then ruling Florence, and he
had made a collection of antique models in his palace and gardens, and
constituted it an academy for young artists. In this academy Michael
Angelo developed a strong bias for sculpture, and won the direct
patronage of the Medici.

To this period of his life belong two characteristic anecdotes. In a
struggle with a fellow-student, Michael Angelo received a blow from a
mallet in his face, which, breaking bone and cartilage, lent to his nose
the rugged bend,

    'The bar of Michael Angelo.'

An ill-advised member of the Medician house, while entertaining a party
of guests during a snowstorm, sent out the indignant artist to make a
snow man within sight of the palace windows. These anecdotes bear
indirectly on the ruling qualities of Michael Angelo--qualities so
integral that they are wrought into his marble and painted on his
canvas--proud independence and energy.

Before going farther I wish to guard against a common misapprehension of
Michael Angelo--that he was a haughty, arrogant man, absolutely narrow
in his half-idolatrous, half-human worship of art. Michael Angelo was
severe in place of being sweet; he was impatient of contradiction; he
was careless and scornful of ceremony; and in his very wrath at flattery
and hypocrisy, he was liable to sin against his own honesty and
sincerity. But he was a man with a lofty sense of duty and a profound
reverence for God. He was, unlike Lionardo, consistently simple, frugal,
and temperate, throughout his long life. If he held up a high standard
to others, and enforced it on them with hardness, he held up a higher
standard to himself, and enforced it on himself more hardly still. He
was a thoroughly unworldly man, and actions which had their root in
unworldliness have been ascribed unjustly to a kind of Lucifer pride.
Greed, and the meanness of greed, were unknown to him. He worked for the
last ten years of his life (under no less than five different Popes) at
his designs for St Peter's, steadfastly refusing pay for the work,
saying that he did it for the honour of God and his own honour. He made
many enemies and suffered from their enmity, but I cannot learn that,
except in one instance, he was guilty of dealing an unworthy blow at
his opponents. He was generous to his scholars, and without jealousy of
them, suffering them to use his designs for their own purposes. He said,
'I have no friends, I need none, I wish for none;' but that was in
feeling himself 'alone before Heaven;' and of the friends whom he did
possess, he loved them all the more devotedly and faithfully, because
they were few in number.

One need only be told of his love for his old servant Urbino, whom he
presented with two thousand crowns to render him independent of service;
and when the servant was seized with his last illness Michael Angelo
nursed him tenderly, sleeping in his clothes on a couch that he might be
ready to attend his patient. When his cares were ended, Michael Angelo
wrote to a correspondent--'My Urbino is dead--to my infinite grief and
sorrow. Living, he served me truly; and in his death he taught me how to
die. Of Michael Angelo's more equal friendship with Vittoria Colonna I
hope my readers will read at leisure for themselves. No nobler, truer
friendship ever existed. It began when the high-born and beautiful,
gifted, and devout Marchesa de Pescara--most loyal of wives and widows,
was forty-eight, and Michael Angelo sixty-four years of age. After a few
years of privileged intercourse and correspondence, which were the
happiest years in Michael Angelo's life, it ended for this world when he
stood mourning by her lifeless clay. 'I was born a rough model, and it
was for thee to reform and re-make me,' the great painter had written
humbly of himself to his liege lady.[7]

Italy, in Michael Angelo's time, as Germany in Albert Dürer's, was all
quickened and astir with the new wave of religious thought which brought
about the Reformation. Ochino and Peter Martyr, treading in the
footsteps of Savonarola, had preached to eager listeners, but 'in Italy
men did not adopt Lutheranism, though they approached it;' and in all
the crowd of great Italian artists of the day, Michael Angelo shows
deepest traces of the conflict--of its trouble, its seriousness, its
nobleness. He only, among his brethren, acted out his belief that the
things of the world sank into insignificance before those thoughts of
God and immortality which were alone fully worthy of the soul. And it
was, as to a religious work for which he was fitted, that he at last
gave himself up to the raising of St Peter's. We shall have next in
order the life of a man who had all the winning qualities which Michael
Angelo wanted, but we shall hardly, through the whole range of history,
find a nobler man than Michael Angelo.

After his first visit to Rome, 1496, Michael Angelo executed his
colossal statue of David. In 1503 he entered into the competition with
Lionardo for the painting of one end of the Council-hall, in Florence,
which has been already mentioned. For this object he drew as his
cartoon, 'Pisan soldiers surprised while bathing by a sudden trumpet
call to arms.' The grand cartoon, of which only a small copy exists, was
said to have been torn to pieces as an act of revenge by a
fellow-sculptor, whom Michael Angelo had offended.

Michael Angelo was invited to Rome by Julius II. in 1504 to aid in
erecting the unapproachable monument which the Pope projected raising
for himself. Then commenced a series of contentions and struggles
between the imperious and petulant Pope and the haughty, uncompromising
painter, in which the latter certainly had the best of it. At one time
in the course of the quarrel, Michael Angelo departed from Rome without
permission or apology, and stoutly refused to return, though followed
hotly by no less than five different couriers, armed with threats and
promises, and urged to make the reparation by his own gonfaloniere. At
last a meeting and a reconciliation between Michael Angelo and the Pope
were effected at Bologna. Michael Angelo designed for Pope Julius II,
not only the statue of Pope Julius at Bologna, which was finally
converted into a cannon, and turned against the very man whose effigy it
had originally presented, but also for that tomb which was never
completed, the famous figure of Moses seated, grasping his beard with
one hand.

While employed at the tomb, Michael Angelo, then in his fortieth year,
was desired by the Pope to undertake the decoration of the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel. Here, again, the hand of an enemy is said to have
been at work. Michael Angelo, with the first place as a sculptor, was
inexperienced in fresco painting; while Raphael, who was taking the
place of Lionardo as Michael Angelo's most formidable rival (yet whom it
is said Michael Angelo pointed out as the fittest painter of the
ceiling), and who was then engaged in painting the Vatican chambers, had
already achieved the utmost renown. It was anticipated by secret
hostility, so records tradition, that Michael Angelo would fail signally
in the unaccustomed work, and that his merit as an artist would pale
altogether before that of Raphael's. I need hardly write how entirely
malice was balked in the verdict to which posterity has set its seal.

Michael Angelo brought artists from Florence to help him in his great
undertaking, for over the chapel, whose walls had already been painted
by older artists--among them Ghirlandajo, was an enormous vault of 150
feet in length by 50 in breadth, which Michael Angelo was required to
cover with designs representing the Fall and Redemption of Man. But the
painter was unable to bear what seemed to him the bungling attempts of
his assistants; so dismissing them all and destroying their work, he
shut himself up, and working in solitude and secrecy, set himself to
evolve from his own inner consciousness the gigantic scenes of a
tremendous drama. In 22 months (or, as Kugler holds, in three years,
including the time spent on the designs) he finished gloriously the
work, the magnitude of which one must see to comprehend. On All Saints'
Day, 1512, the ceiling was uncovered, and Michael Angelo was hailed,
little though he cared for such clamorous hailing, as a painter indeed.
For this piece of work Michael Angelo received 3000 crowns.

Pope Julius died, and was succeeded by Leo X. of the Medician house,
but, in spite of early associations as well as of mother country,
Michael Angelo was no more acceptable to the Pope--a brilliantly
polished, easy-tempered man of the world, who filled the chair of St
Peter's, than Lionardo had been. Leo X, greatly preferred Raphael, to
whom all manner of pleasantness as well as of courteous deference was
natural, to the two others. At the same time, Leo employed Michael
Angelo, though it was more as an architect than as a painter, and rather
at Florence than at Rome. At Florence Michael Angelo executed for Pope
Clement VII., another Medici, the mortuary chapel of San Lorenzo, with
its six great statues, those of the cousins Lorenzo de Medici and
Giuliano de Medici, the first called by the Florentines 'Il Pensièro,'
or 'Pensive Thought,' with the four colossal recumbent figures named
respectively the Night, the Morning, the Dawn, and the Twilight.

In 1537 Michael Angelo was employed by his fellow citizens to fortify
his native city against the return of his old patrons the Medici, and
the city held out for nine months.

Pope Paul III., an old man when elected to the popedom, but bent on
signalizing his pontificate with as splendid works of art as those
which had rendered the reigns of his predecessors illustrious, summoned
another man, grown elderly, Michael Angelo, upwards of sixty years,
reluctant to accept the commission, to finish the decoration of the
Sistine Chapel; and Michael Angelo painted on the wall, at the upper
end, his painting, 'The Last Judgment.' The picture is forty-seven feet
high by forty-three wide, and it occupied the painter eight years. It
was during its progress that Michael Angelo entered on his friendship
with Vittoria Colonna.

For the chapel called the Paolina or Pauline Chapel Michael Angelo also
painted less-known frescoes, but from that time he devoted his life to
St Peter's. He had said that he would take the old Pantheon and 'suspend
it in air,' and he did what he said, though he did not live to see the
great cathedral completed. His sovereign, the Grand Duke of Florence,
endeavoured in vain with magnificent offers to lure the painter back to
his native city. Michael Angelo protested that to leave Rome then would
be 'a sin and a shame, and the ruin of the greatest religious monument
in Christian Europe.' Michael Angelo, like Lionardo, did not marry; he
died at Rome in 1563, in his eighty-ninth year.

His nephew and principal heir,[8] by the orders of the Grand Duke of
Florence, and it is believed according to Michael Angelo's own wish,
removed the painter's body to Florence, where it was buried with all
honours in the church of Santa Croce there.

The traits which recall Michael Angelo personally to us, are the
prominent arch of the nose, the shaggy brows, the tangled beard, the
gaunt grandeur of a figure like that of one of his prophets.

While Michael Angelo lived, one Pope rose on his approach, and seated
the painter on his right hand, and another Pope declined to sit down in
his painter's presence; but the reason given for the last condescension,
is that the Pope feared that the painter would follow his example. And
if the Grand Duke Cosmo uncovered before Michael Angelo, and stood hat
in hand while speaking to him, we may have the explanation in another
assertion, that 'sovereigns asked Michael Angelo to put on his cap,
because the painter would do it unasked.'

The solitary instance in which Michael Angelo is represented as taking
an unfair advantage of an antagonist, is in connection with the
painter's rivalry in his art with Raphael. Michael Angelo undervalued
the genius of Raphael, and was disgusted by what the older man
considered the immoderate admiration bestowed on the younger. A
favourite pupil of Michael Angelo's was Sebastian Del Piombo, who being
a Venetian by birth was an excellent colourist. For one of his
pictures--the very 'Raising of Lazarus' now in the National Gallery,
which the Pope had ordered at the same time that he had ordered
Raphael's 'Transfiguration'--it is rumoured that Michael Angelo gave the
designs and even drew the figures, leaving Sebastian the credit, and
trusting that without Michael Angelo's name appearing in the work, by
the help of his drawing in addition to Sebastian's superb colouring,
Raphael would be eclipsed, and that by a painter comparatively obscure.

The unwarrantable inference that the whole work was that of one painter,
constituted a stratagem altogether unworthy of Michael Angelo, and if it
had any existence, its getting wind disappointed and foiled its authors.
When the story was repeated to Raphael, his sole protest is said to have
been to the effect that he was glad that Michael Angelo esteemed him so
highly as to enter the lists with him.

We can judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without
having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of
some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's
translations of selections from Michael Angelo's poems.

Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a
painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and
in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is
not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable
dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael
Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them
to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding
a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic
architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like
these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.

In Michael Angelo's works of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his
monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo,
Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic
history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded
the sculptor's meaning in these monuments.

Mrs Jameson quotes an account of Michael Angelo at work. An eye-witness
has left us a very graphic description of the energy with which, even in
old age, Michael Angelo handled his chisel:--"I can say that I have
seen Michael Angelo at the age of sixty, and, with a body announcing
weakness, make more chips of marble fly about in a quarter of an hour
than would three of the strongest young sculptors in an hour,--a thing
almost incredible to him who has not beheld it. He went to work with
such impetuosity and fury of manner, that I feared almost every moment
to see the block split into pieces. It would seem as if, inflamed by the
idea of greatness which inspired him, this great man attacked with a
Vigenére."

In painting Michael Angelo regarded colouring as of secondary
importance. He is not known to have executed one painting in oil, and he
treated oil and easel-painting generally as work only fit for women or
idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no
means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness
and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation
had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of
Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and
his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the
greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the greater part colossal,
as they were to be looked at, in the distance, from below.

    'The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the most perfect
    works done by Michael Angelo in his long and active life. Here
    his great spirit appears in noblest dignity, in its highest
    purity; here the attention is not disturbed by that arbitrary
    display to which his great power not unfrequently seduced him in
    other works. The ceiling forms a flattened arch in its section;
    the central portion, which is a plain surface, contains a series
    of large and small pictures, representing the most important
    events recorded in the book of Genesis--the Creation and Fall of
    Man, with its immediate consequences. In the large triangular
    compartments at the springing of the vault are sitting figures
    of the Prophets and Sibyls, as the foretellers of the coming
    Saviour. In the soffits of the recesses between these
    compartments, and in the arches underneath, immediately above
    the windows, are the ancestors of the Virgin, the series leading
    the mind directly to the Saviour. The external of these numerous
    representations is formed by an architectural frame-work of
    peculiar composition, which encloses the single subjects, tends
    to make the principal masses conspicuous, and gives to the whole
    an appearance of that solidity and support so necessary, but so
    seldom attended to in soffit decorations, which may be
    considered as if suspended. A great number of figures are also
    connected with the frame-work; those in unimportant situations
    are executed in the colour of stone or bronze; in the more
    important, in natural colours. These serve to support the
    architectural forms, to fill up and to connect the whole. They
    may be best described as the living and embodied _genii_ of
    architecture. It required the unlimited power of an architect,
    sculptor, and painter, to conceive a structural whole of so much
    grandeur, to design the decorative figures with the significant
    repose required by the sculpturesque character, and yet to
    preserve their subordination to the principal subjects, and to
    keep the latter in the proportions and relations best adapted to
    the space to be filled.'--_Kugler_.

The pictures from the Old Testament, beginning from the altar, are:--

     1. The Separation of Light and Darkness.
     2. The Creation of the Sun and Moon.
     3. The Creation of Trees and Plants.
     4. The Creation of Adam.
     5. The Creation of Eve.
     6. The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise.
     7. The Sacrifice of Noah.
     8. The Deluge.
     9. The Intoxication of Noah.

     'The scenes from Genesis are the most sublime representations of
     these subjects;--the Creating Spirit is unveiled before us. The
     peculiar type which the painter has here given of the form of the
     Almighty
     Father has been frequently imitated by his followers, and even by
     Raphael, but has been surpassed by none. Michael Angelo has
     represented him in majestic flight, sweeping through the air,
     surrounded by _genii_, partly supporting, partly borne along with
     him, covered by his floating drapery; they are the distinct
     syllables, the separate virtues of his creating word. In the
     first (large) compartment we see him with extended hands,
     assigning to the sun and moon their respective paths. In the
     second, he awakens the first man to life. Adam lies stretched on
     the verge of the earth in the act of raising himself; the Creator
     touches him with the point of his finger, and appears thus to
     endow him with feeling and life. This picture displays a
     wonderful depth of thought in the composition, and the utmost
     elevation and majesty in the general treatment and execution. The
     third subject is not less important, representing the Fall of
     Man, and his Expulsion from Paradise. The tree of knowledge
     stands in the midst; the serpent (the upper part of the body
     being that of a woman) is twined around the
     stem; she bends down towards the guilty pair, who are in the act
     of plucking the forbidden fruit. The figures are nobly graceful,
     particularly that of Eve. Close to the serpent hovers the angel
     with the sword, ready to drive the fallen beings out of Paradise.
     In this double action, this union of two separate moments, there
     is something peculiarly poetic and significant: it is guilt and
     punishment in one picture. The sudden and lightning-like
     appearance of the avenging angel behind the demon of darkness has
     a most impressive effect.'--_Kugler_.


The lower portion of the ceiling is divided into triangles, occupied by
the Prophets and Sibyls in solemn contemplation, accompanied by angels
and genii. Beginning from the left of the entrance their order is--

      1. Joel.
      2. Sibylla Erythræa.
      3. Ezekiel.
      4. Sibylla Persica.
      5. Jonah.
      6. Sibylla Libyca.
      7. Daniel.
      8. Sibylla Cumæa.
      9. Isaiah.
     10. Sibylla Delphica.

    'The prophets and sibyls in the triangular compartments of the
    curved portion of the ceiling are the largest figures in the
    whole work; these, too, are among the most wonderful forms that
    modern art has called into life. They are all represented
    seated, employed with books or rolled manuscripts; genii stand
    near or behind them. These mighty beings sit before us pensive,
    meditative, inquiring, or looking upwards with inspired
    countenances. Their forms and movements, indicated by the grand
    lines and masses of the drapery, are majestic and dignified. We
    see in them beings, who, while they feel and bear the sorrows of
    a corrupt and sinful world, have power to look for consolation
    into the secrets of the future. Yet the greatest variety
    prevails in the attitudes and expression: each figure is full of
    individuality. Zacharias is an aged man, busied in calm and
    circumspect investigation; Jeremiah is bowed down, absorbed in
    thought, the thought of deep and bitter grief; Ezekiel turns
    with hasty movements to the genius next to him, who points
    upwards with joyful expectation, etc. The sibyls are equally
    characteristic: the Persian, a lofty, majestic woman, very aged;
    the Erythræan, full of power, like the warrior goddess of
    wisdom; the Delphic, like Cassandra, youthfully soft and
    graceful, but with strength to bear the awful seriousness of
    revelation.'--_Kugler_.

     'The belief of the Roman Catholic Church in the testimony of the
     sibyl is shown by the well-known hymn, said to have been composed
     by Pope Innocent III, at the close of the thirteenth century,
     beginning with the verse--

                "Dies iræ, dies illa,
                Solvet sæclum in favilla
                Teste David cum Sibylla."

     It may be inferred that this hymn, admitted into the liturgy of
     the Roman Church, gave sanction to the adoption of the sibyls
     into Christian art. They are seen from this time accompanying the
     prophets and apostles, in the cyclical decorations of the
     church.... But the highest honour that art has rendered to the
     sibyls has been by the hand of Michael Angelo,
     on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here in the conception of a
     mysterious order of women, placed above and without all
     considerations of the graceful or the individual, the great
     master was peculiarly in his element. They exactly fitted his
     standard, of art, not always sympathetic, nor comprehensible to
     the average human mind, of which the grand in form and the
     abstract in expression were the first and last conditions. In
     this respect, the sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are more
     Michael Angelesque than their companions the prophets. For these,
     while types of the highest monumental treatment, are yet men,
     while the sibyls belong to a distinct class of beings, who convey
     the impression of the very obscurity in which their history is
     wrapt--creatures who have lived far from the abodes of men, who
     are alike devoid of the expression of feminine sweetness, human
     sympathy, or sacramental beauty; who are neither Christians nor
     Jewesses, Witches nor Graces, yet living, grand, beautiful, and
     true, according to laws revealed to the great Florentine genius
     only.

     Thus their figures may be said to be unique, as the offspring of
     a peculiar sympathy between the master's mind and his subject. To
     this sympathy may be ascribed the prominence and size given them,
     both prophets and sibyls, as compared to their usual relation to
     the subjects they environ. They sit here on twelve throne-like
     niches, more like presiding deities, each wrapt in
     self-contemplation, than as tributary witnesses to the truth and
     omnipotence of Him they are intended to announce. Thus they form
     a gigantic frame-work round the subjects of the Creation, of
     which the birth of Eve, as the type of the Nativity, is the
     intentional centre. For some reason, the twelve figures are not
     prophets and sibyls alternately--there being only five sibyls to
     seven prophets,--so that the prophets come together at one angle.
     Books and scrolls are given indiscriminately to them.

'The Sibylla Persica, supposed to be the oldest of the sisterhood, holds
the book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of sight, which fact,
contradicted as it is by a frame of obviously Herculean strength, gives
a mysterious intentness to the action.

'The Sibylla Libyca, of equally powerful proportions, but less closely
draped, is grandly wringing herself to lift a massive volume from a
height above her head on to her knees.

'The Sibylla Cumana, also aged, and with her head covered, is reading
with her volume at a distance from her eyes.

'The Sibylla Delphica, with waving hair escaping from her turban, is a
beautiful young being, the most human of all, gazing into vacancy or
futurity. She holds a scroll.

'The Sibylla Erythræa, grand, bare-headed creature, sits reading
intently with crossed legs, about to turn over her book.

'The prophets are equally grand in structure, and though, as we have
said, not more than men, yet they are the only men that could well bear
the juxtaposition with their stupendous female colleagues. Ezekiel,
between Erythræa and Persica, has a scroll in his hand that hangs by his
side, just cast down, as he turns eagerly to listen to some voice.

'Jeremiah, a magnificent figure, with elbow on knee and head on hand,
wrapt in meditation appropriate to one called to utter lamentation and
woe. He has neither book nor scroll.

'Jonah is also without either. His position is strained and ungraceful,
looking upwards, and apparently remonstrating with the Almighty upon the
destruction of the gourd, a few leaves of which are seen above him. His
hands are placed together with a strange and trivial action, supposed to
denote the counting on his fingers the number of days he was in the
fish's belly. A formless marine monster is seen at his side.

'Daniel has a book on his lap, with one hand on it. He is young, and a
piece of lion's skin seems to allude to his history.'[9]

In the recesses between the prophets and sibyls are a series of lovely
family groups, representing the genealogy of the Virgin, and expressive
of calm expectation of the future. The four corners of the ceiling
contain groups illustrative of the power of the Lord displayed in the
especial deliverances of his chosen people. Near the altar are:

Right, The Deliverance of the Israelites by the Brazen Serpent.

Left, The Execution of Haman.

Near the entrance are:

Right, Judith and Holofernes.

Left, David and Goliath.[10]

Michael Angelo was thirty-nine years of age when he painted the ceiling
of the Sistine. When he began to paint the 'Day of Judgment' he was
above sixty years of age, and his great rival, Raphael, had already been
dead thirteen years.

The picture of the 'Day of Judgment,' with much that renders it
marvellous and awful, has a certain coarseness of conception and
execution. The moment chosen is that in which the Lord says, 'Depart
from me, ye cursed,' and the idea and even attributes of the principal
figure are taken from Orcagna's old painting in the Campo Santo. But
with all Michael Angelo's advantages, he has by no means improved on the
original idea. He has robbed the figure of the Lord of its transcendant
majesty; he has not been able to impart to the ranks of the blessed the
look of blessedness which 'Il Beato' himself might have conveyed. The
chief excellence of the picture is in the ranks of the condemned, who
writhe and rebel against their agonies. No wonder that the picture is
sombre and dreadful.

Of the allegorical figures of 'Night' and 'Morning' in the chapel of San
Lorenzo, there are casts at the Crystal Palace.

A comparison and a contrast have been instituted between Michael Angelo
and Milton, and Raphael and Shakespeare. There may be something in them,
but, as in the case of broken metaphors, they will not bear being pushed
to a logical conclusion or picked to pieces. The very transparent
comparison which matches Michael Angelo with his own countryman, Dante,
is after all more felicitous and truer. Michael Angelo with Lionardo are
the great chiefs of the Florentine School.

Raphael Sanzio, or Santi of Urbino, the head of the Roman School, was
one of those very exceptional men who seem born to happiness, to inspire
love and only love, to pass through the world making friends and
disarming enemies, who are fully armed to confer pleasure while almost
incapable of either inflicting or receiving pain. To this day his
exceptional fortune stands Raphael's memory in good stead, since for one
man or woman who yearns after the austere righteousness and priceless
tenderness of Michael Angelo, there are ten who yield with all their
hearts to the gay, sweet gentleness and generosity of Raphael. No doubt
it was also in his favour as a painter, that though a man of highly
cultivated tastes, 'in close intimacy and correspondence with most of
the celebrated men of his time, and interested in all that was going
forward,' he did not, especially in his youth, spend his strength on a
variety of studies, but devoted himself to painting. While he thus
vindicated his share of the breadth of genius of his country and time,
by giving to the world the loveliest Madonnas and Child-Christs, the
most dramatic of battle-pieces, the finest of portraits, his noble and
graceful fertility of invention and matchless skill of execution were
confined to and concentrated on painting. He did not diverge long or far
into the sister arts of architecture and sculpture, though his classic
researches in the excavations of Rome were keen and zealous; a heap of
ruins having given to the world in 1504 the group of the
that a writer of his day could record that 'Raphael had sought and found
in Rome another Rome.'

Raphael was born in the town of Urbino, and was the son of a painter of
the Umbrian School, who very early destined the boy to his future
career, and promoted his destination by all the efforts in Giovanni
Santi's power, including the intention of sending away and apprenticing
the little lad to the best master of his time, Perugino, so called from
the town where he resided, Perugia. Raphael's mother died when he was
only eight years of age, and his father died when he was no more than
eleven years, before the plans for his education were put into action.
But no stroke of outward calamity, or loss--however severe, could annul
Raphael's birthright of universal favour. His step-mother, the uncles
who were his guardians, his clever, perverse, unscrupulous master, all
joined in a common love of Raphael and determination to promote his
interests.

Raphael at the age of twelve years went to Perugia to work under
Perugino, and remained with his master till he was nearly twenty years
of age. In that interval he painted industriously, making constant
progress, always in the somewhat hard, but finished, style of Perugino,
while already showing a predilection for what was to prove Raphael's
favourite subject, the Madonna and Child. At this period he painted his
famous _Lo Sposalizio_ or the 'Espousals,' the marriage of the Virgin
Mary with Joseph, now at Milan. In 1504 he visited Florence, remaining
only for a short time, but making the acquaintance of Fra Bartolommeo
and Ghirlandajo, seeing the cartoons of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, and
from that time displaying a marked improvement in drawing. Indeed
nothing is more conspicuous in Raphael's genius in contra-distinction to
Michael Angelo's, than the receptive character of Raphael's mind, his
power of catching up an impression from without, and the candour and
humility with which he availed himself unhesitatingly of the assistance
lent him by others.

Returning soon to Florence, Raphael remained there till 1508, when he
was twenty-five years, drawing closer the valuable friendships he had
already formed, and advancing with rapid strides in his art, until his
renown was spread all over Italy, and with reason, since already, while
still young, he had painted his 'Madonna of the Goldfinch,' in the
Florentine Gallery, and his 'La Belle Jardinière,' or Madonna in a
garden among flowers, now in the Louvre.

In his twenty-fifth year Raphael was summoned to Rome to paint for Pope
Julius II. My readers will remember that Michael Angelo in the abrupt
severity of his prime of manhood, was soon to paint the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel for the same despotic and art-loving Pope, who had
brought Raphael hardly more than a stripling to paint the '_Camere_' or
'_Stanze_' chambers of the Vatican.

The first of the halls which Raphael painted (though not the first in
order) is called the Camera della Segnatura (in English, signature), and
represents Theology, Poetry, Philosophy, with the Sciences, Arts, and
Jurisprudence. The second is the 'Stanza d'Eliodoro,' or the room of
Heliodorus, and contains the grandest painting of all, in the expulsion
of Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem (taken from Maccabees), the
Miracle of Bolsena, Attila, king of the Huns, terrified by the
apparition of St Peter and St Paul, and St Peter delivered from prison.
The third stanza painted by Raphael is the 'Stanza dell' Incendio' (the
conflagration), so called from the extinguishing of the fire in the
Borgo by a supposed miracle, being the most conspicuous scene in
representations of events taken from the lives of Popes Leo III, and
IV.; and the fourth chamber, which was left unfinished by Raphael, and
completed by his scholars, is the 'Sala di Constantino,' and contains
incidents from the life of the Emperor Constantine, including the
splendid battle-piece between Constantine and Maxentius. At these
chambers, or at the designs for them, during the popedoms of Julius II.,
who died in the course of the painting of the Camere, and Leo X., for a
period of twelve years, till Raphael's death in 1520, after which the
'Sala di Constantino' was completed by his scholars.

Raphael has also left in the Vatican a series of small pictures from the
Old Testament, known as Raphael's Bible. This series decorates the
thirteen cupolas of the 'Loggie,' or open galleries, running round three
sides of an open court. Another work undertaken by Raphael should have
still more interest for us. Leo X., resolving to substitute woven for
painted tapestry round the lower walls of the interior of the Sistine
Chapel, commanded Raphael to furnish drawings to the Flemish weavers,
and thence arose eleven cartoons, seven of which have been preserved,
have become the property of England, and are the glory of the Kensington
Museum. The subjects of the cartoons in the seven which have been saved,
are 'The Death of Ananias,' 'Elymas the Sorcerer struck with Blindness,'
'The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,' 'The
Miraculous Draught of Fishes,' 'Paul and Barnabas at Lystra,' 'St Paul
Preaching at Athens,' and 'The Charge to St Peter.' The four cartoons
which are lost, were 'The Stoning of St Stephen,' 'The Conversion of St
Paul,' 'Paul in Prison,' and 'The Coronation of the Virgin.'

In those cartoons figures above life-size were drawn with chalk upon
strong paper, and coloured in distemper, and Raphael received for his
work four hundred and thirty gold ducats (about _£650_), while the
Flemish weavers received for their work in wools, silk, and gold, fifty
thousand gold ducats. The designs were cut up in strips for the
weavers' use, and while some strips were destroyed, the rest lay in a
warehouse at Arras, till Rubens became aware of their existence, and
advised Charles I, to buy the set, to be employed in the tapestry
manufactory established by James I. at Mortlake. Brought to this country
in the slips which the weavers had copied, the fate of the cartoons was
still precarious. Cromwell bought them in Charles I.'s art collection,
and Louis XIV, sought, but failed, to re-buy them. They fell into
farther neglect, and were well-nigh forgotten, when Sir Godfrey Kneller
recalled them to notice, and induced William III, to have the slips
pasted together, and stretched upon linen, and put in a room set apart
for them at Hampton Court, whence they were transferred, within the last
ten years, for the greater advantage of artists and the public, to
Kensington Museum.

The woven tapestries for which the cartoons were designed had quite as
chequered a career. In the two sacks of Rome by French soldiers, the
tapestries were seized, carried off, and two of them burnt for the
bullion in the thread. At last they were restored to the Vatican, where
they hang in their faded magnificence, a monument of Leo X, and of
Raphael. An additional set of ten tapestry cartoons were supplied to the
Vatican by Raphael's scholars.

Raphael painted for the Chigi family in their palace, which is now the
Villa Farnesina, scenes from the history of Cupid and Psyche, and the
Triumph of Galatea, subjects which show how the passion for classical
mythology that distinguishes the next generation, was beginning to work.
To these last years belong his 'Madonna di San Sisto,' so named from its
having been painted for the convent of St Sixtus at Piacenza, and his
last picture, the 'Transfiguration,' with which he was still engaged
when death met him unexpectedly.

Raphael, as the Italians say, lived more like a '_principe_' (prince)
than a '_pittore_' (painter). He had a house in Rome, and a villa in the
neighbourhood, and on his death left a considerable fortune to his
heirs. There has not been wanting a rumour that his life of a principe
was a dissipated and prodigal life; but this ugly rumour, even if it had
more evidence to support it, is abundantly disproven by the nature of
Raphael's work, and by the enormous amount of that work, granting him
the utmost assistance from his crowd of scholars. He had innumerable
commissions, and retained an immense school from all parts of Italy, the
members of which adored their master. Raphael had the additional
advantage of having many of his pictures well engraved by a contemporary
engraver named Raimondi.

Like Giotto, Raphael was the friend of the most distinguished Italians
of his day, including Count Castiglione, and the poet Ariosto. He was
notably the warm friend of his fellow-painters both at home and abroad,
with the exception of Michael Angelo. A drawing of his own, which
Raphael sent, in his kindly interchange of such sketches, to Albert
Dürer, is, I think, preserved at Nüremberg. The sovereign princes of
Italy, above all Leo X., were not contented with being munificent
patrons to Raphael, they treated him with the most marked consideration.
The Cardinal Bibbiena proposed the painter's marriage with his niece,
ensuring her a dowry of three thousand gold crowns, but Maria di
Bibbiena died young, ere the marriage could be accomplished; and
Raphael, who was said to be little disposed to the match, did not long
survive her. He caught cold, as some report, from his engrossing
personal superintendence of the Roman excavations; and, as others
declare, from his courtly assiduity in keeping an appointment with the
Pope, was attacked by fever, and died on his birth-day, April 6th, 1520,
having completed his thirty-seventh year.

All Rome and Italy mourned for him. When his body lay in state, to be
looked at and wept over by multitudes, his great unfinished picture of
the 'Transfiguration' was hung above the bed. He was buried in a spot
chosen by himself in his lifetime, and, as it happened, not far from the
resting-place of his promised bride. Doubts having been raised as to
Raphael's grave, search was made, and his body was exhumed in 1833, and
re-buried with great pomp. Raphael's life and that of Rubens form the
ideal painter's life--bountiful, splendid, unclouded, and terminating
ere it sees eclipse or decay--to all in whom the artistic temperament is
united to a genial, sensuous, pleasure-loving nature.

Raphael was not above the middle height, and slightly made. He was
sallow in colour, with brown eyes, and a full yet delicate mouth; but
his beautiful face, like that of our English Shakespeare, is familiar to
most of us. With regard to Raphael's face, the amount of womanliness in
it is a striking characteristic. One hears sometimes that no man's
character is complete without its share of womanliness: surely Raphael
had a double share, for womanliness is the most distinctive quality in
his face, along with that vague shade of pensiveness which we find not
infrequently, but strangely enough, in those faces which have been
associated with the happiest spirits and the brightest fortunes.

Raphael and his scholars painted and drew about nine hundred pictures
and sketches, including a hundred and twenty Madonnas, eight of which
are in private collections in England. Of Raphael's greatness, Kugler
writes that 'it is not so much in kind as in degree. No master left
behind _so many_ really excellent works as he, whose days were so early
numbered; in none has there been observed so little that is unpleasant.'
All authorities agree in ascribing much of Raphael's power to his purely
unselfish nature and aim. His excellence seems to lie in the nearly
perfect expression of material beauty and harmony, together with
grandeur of design and noble working out of thought. We shall see that
this devotion to material beauty has been made something of a reproach
to Raphael, as it certainly degenerated into a snare in the hands of his
followers, while unquestionably the universal appreciation of Raphael's
work, distinguished from the partial appreciation bestowed on the great
works of others, proceeds from this evident material beauty which is
open to all.

Then, again, Raphael, far more than Andrea del Sarto, deserved to be
called 'faultless;' and this general absence of defects and equality of
excellence is a great element of Raphael's wide popularity; for, as one
can observe for one's self, in regarding a work of art, there is always
a large proportion of the spectators who will seize on an error, dwell
on it, and be incapable of shaking off its influence, and rising into
the higher rank of critics, who discover and ponder over beauties. I
would have it considered also, that this equality of excellence does not
necessarily proceed always from a higher aim, but may arise rather from
an unconsciously lower aim.

The single reproach brought against Raphael as a painter is
that--according to some witnesses only, for most deny the
implication--Raphael so delighted in material beauty that he became
enslaved by it, till it diminished his spiritual insight. It is an
incontestable truth that in Raphael, as in all the great Italian
painters of his century, there was a falling away from the simple
earnestness, the exceeding reverence, the endless patience, the
self-abstraction, and self-devotion of the earliest Italian and Flemish
painters. Therefore there has been within the last fifty or sixty years
that movement in modern art, which is called Pre-raphaelitism, and which
is, in fact, a revolt against subjection to Raphael, and his supposed
undue exaltation of material beauty, and subjection of truth to
beauty--so called. But we must not fall into the grave mistake of
imagining that there was any want of vigour and variety in Raphael's
grace and tenderness, or that he could not in his greatest works rise
into a grandeur in keeping with his subject. Tire as we may of hearing
Raphael called the king of painters, as the Greeks tired of hearing
Aristides called 'the just,' this fact remains: no painter has left
behind him such a mass of surpassingly good work; in no other work is
there the same charm of greatest beauty and harmony.

It is hard for me to give you an idea in so short a space of Raphael's
work. I must content myself with quoting descriptions of two of his
Stanze, those of the Heliodorus and the Segnatura. 'Heliodorus driven
out of the Temple (2 Maccabees iii.). In the background Onias the
priest is represented praying for Divine interposition;--in the
foreground Heliodorus, pursued by two avenging angels, is endeavouring
to bear away the treasures of the temple. Amid the group on the left is
seen Julius II., in his chair of state, attended by his secretaries. One
of the bearers in front is Marc-Antonio Raimondi, the engraver of
Raphael's designs. The man with the inscription, "Jo Petro de Folicariis
Cremonen," was secretary of briefs to Pope Julius. Here you may fancy
you hear the thundering approach of the heavenly warrior, and the
neighing of his steed; while in the different groups who are plundering
the treasures of the temple, and in those who gaze intently on the
sudden consternation of Heliodorus, without being able to divine its
cause, we see the expression of terror, amazement, joy, humility, and
every passion to which human nature is exposed.'[11]

'The Stanza della Segnatura is so called from a judicial assembly once
held here. The frescoes in this chamber are illustrative of the Virtues
of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence, who are represented
on the ceiling by Raphael, in the midst of arabesques by _Sodoma_. The
square pictures by Raphael refer:--the Fall of Man to Theology; the
Study of the Globe to Philosophy; the Flaying of Marsyas to Poetry; and
the Judgment of Solomon to Jurisprudence.

'_Entrance Wall_.--"The School of Athens." Raphael consulted Ariosto as
to the arrangement of its 52 figures. In the centre, on the steps of a
portico, are seen Plato and Aristotle, Plato pointing to heaven and
Aristotle to earth. On the left is Socrates conversing with his pupils,
amongst whom is a young warrior, probably Alcibiades. Lying upon the
steps in front is Diogenes. To his left, Pythagoras is writing on his
knee, and near him, with ink and pen, is Empedocles. The white mantle is
Francesco Maria della Rovere, nephew of Julius II. On the right is
Archimedes drawing a geometrical problem upon the floor. The young man
near him with uplifted hands is Federigo II., Duke of Mantua. Behind
these are Zoroaster, Ptolemy, one with a terrestrial, the other with a
celestial globe, addressing two figures, which represent Raphael and his
master Perugino. The drawing in brown upon the socle beneath this
fresco, is by _Pierino del Vaga_, and represents the death of
Archimedes.

'_Right Wall_.--"Parnassus." Apollo surrounded by the Muses; on his
right, Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Below on the right, Sappho, supposed to
be addressing Corinna, Petrarch, Propertius, and Anacreon; on the left
Pindar and Horace, Sannazzaro, Boccaccio, and others. Beneath this, in
grisaille, are,--Alexander placing the poems of Homer in the tomb of
Achilles, and Augustus preventing the burning of Virgil's Æneid.

'_Left Wall_.--Above the window are Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance.
On the left, Justinian delivers the Pandects to Tribonian. On the right,
Gregory IX. (with the features of Julius II.) delivers the Decretals to
a jurist;--Cardinal de' Medici, afterwards Leo X., Cardinal Farnese,
afterwards Paul III., and Cardinal del Monte, are represented near the
Pope. In the socle beneath is Solon addressing the people of Athens.

'_Wall of Egress_.--"The Disputa." So called from an impression that it
represents a Dispute upon the Sacrament. In the upper part of the
composition the heavenly host are present; Christ between the Virgin and
St John the Baptist; on the left, St Peter, Adam, St John, David, St
Stephen, and another; and on the right, St Paul, Abraham, St James,
Moses, St Lawrence, and St George. Below is an altar surrounded by the
Latin fathers, Gregory, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. Near St
Augustine stand St Thomas Aquinas, St Anacletus, with the palm of a
martyr, and Cardinal Buenaventura reading. Those in front are Innocent
III., and in the background, Dante, near whom a monk in a black hood is
pointed out as Savonarola. The Dominican on the extreme left is supposed
to be Fra Angelico. The other figures are uncertain.' ...

'Raphael commenced his work in the Vatican by painting the ceiling and
the four walls in the room called _della Segnatura_, on the surface of
which he had to represent four great compositions, which embraced the
principal divisions of the encyclopedia of that period; namely,
Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence.

'It will be conceived, that to an artist imbued with the traditions of
the Umbrian School, the first of these subjects was an unparalleled
piece of good fortune: and Raphael, long familiar with the allegorical
treatment of religious compositions, turned it here to the most
admirable account; and, not content with the suggestions of his own
genius, he availed himself of all the instruction he could derive from
the intelligence of others. From these combined inspirations resulted,
to the eternal glory of the Catholic faith and of Christian art, a
composition without a rival in the history of painting, and, we may also
add, without a name; for to call it lyric or epic is not enough, unless,
indeed, we mean, by using these expressions, to compare it with the
allegorical epic of Dante, alone worthy to be ranked with this
marvellous production of the pencil of Raphael.

'Let no one consider this praise as idle and groundless, for it is
Raphael himself who forces the comparison upon us, by placing the figure
of Dante among the favourite sons of the Muses; and, what is still more
striking, by draping the allegorical figure of Theology in the very
colours in which Dante has represented Beatrice; namely, the white veil,
the red tunic, and the green mantle, while on her head he has placed the
olive crown.

'Of the four allegorical figures which occupy the compartments of the
ceiling, and which were all painted immediately after Raphael's arrival
in Rome, Theology and Poetry are incontestably the most remarkable. The
latter would be easily distinguished by the calm inspiration of her
glance, even were she without her wings, her starry crown, and her azure
robe, all having allusion to the elevated region towards which it is her
privilege to soar. The figure of Theology is quite as admirably suited
to the subject she personifies; she points to the upper part of the
grand composition, which takes its name from her, and in which the
artist has provided inexhaustible food for the sagacity and enthusiasm
of the spectator.

'This work consists of two grand divisions,--Heaven and Earth--which are
united to one another by that mystical bond, the Sacrament of the
Eucharist. The personages whom the Church has most honoured for learning
and holiness, are ranged in picturesque and animated groups on either
side of the altar, on which the consecrated wafer is exposed. St
Augustine dictates his thoughts to one of his disciples; St Gregory, in
his pontifical robes, seems absorbed in contemplation of celestial
glory; St Ambrose, in a slightly different attitude, appears to be
chanting the Te Deum; while St Jerome, seated, rests his hands on a
large book, which he holds on his knees. Pietro Lombardo, Duns Scotus,
St Thomas Aquinas, Pope Anacletus, St Buenaventura, and Innocent III.,
are no less happily characterized; while, behind all these illustrious
men, whom the Church and succeeding generations have agreed to honour,
Raphael has ventured to introduce Dante with his laurel crown, and, with
still greater boldness, the monk Savonarola, publicly burnt ten years
before as a heretic.

'In the glory, which forms the upper part of the picture, the Three
Persons of the Trinity are represented, surrounded by patriarchs,
apostles, and saints: it may, in fact, be considered in some sort as a
_resumé_ of all the favourite compositions produced during the last
hundred years by the Umbrian School. A great number of the types, and
particularly those of Christ and the Virgin, are to be found in the
earlier works of Raphael himself. The Umbrian artists, from having so
long exclusively employed themselves on mystical subjects, had certainly
attained to a marvellous perfection in the representation of celestial
beatitude, and of those ineffable things of which it has been said that
the heart of man cannot conceive them, far less, therefore, the pencil
of man portray; and Raphael, surpassing them in all, and even in this
instance, while surpassing himself, appears to have fixed the limits,
beyond which Christian art, properly so called, has never since been
able to advance.'[12]

Of Raphael's Madonnas, I should like to speak of three. The Madonna di
San Sisto: 'It represents the Virgin standing in a majestic attitude;
the infant Saviour _enthroned_ in her arms; and around her head a glory
of innumerable cherubs melting into light. Kneeling before her we see on
one side St Sixtus, on the other St Barbara, and beneath her feet two
heavenly cherubs gaze up in adoration. In execution, as in design, this
is probably the most perfect picture in the world. It is painted
throughout by Raphael's own hand; and as no sketch or study of any part
of it was ever known to exist, and as the execution must have been, from
the thinness and delicacy of the colours, wonderfully rapid, it is
supposed that he painted it at once on the canvas--a _creation_ rather
than a picture. In the beginning of the last century the Elector of
Saxony, Augustus III., purchased this picture from the monks of the
convent for the sum of sixty thousand florins (about £6000), and it now
forms the chief boast and ornament of the Dresden Gallery'[13]

The Madonna del Cardellino (our Lady of the Goldfinch): 'The Virgin is
sitting on a rock, in a flowery meadow. Behind are the usual light and
feathery trees, growing on the bank of a stream, which passes off to the
left in a rocky bend, and is crossed by a bridge of a single arch. To
the right, the opposite bank slopes upward in a gentle glade, across
which is a village, backed by two distant mountain-peaks.

'In front of the sitting matronly figure of the Virgin are the holy
children, our Lord and the Baptist, one on either side of her right
knee. She has been reading, and the approach of St John has caused her
to look off her book (which is open in her left hand) at the new comer,
which she does with a look of holy love and gentleness, at the same
time caressingly drawing him to her with her right hand, which touches
his little body under the right arm. In both hands, which rest across
the Virgin's knee, he holds a captive goldfinch, which he has brought,
with childish glee, as an offering to the Holy Child. The infant Jesus,
standing between his mother's knees, with one foot placed on her foot,
and her hand, with the open book, close above his shoulder, regards the
Baptist with an upward look of gentle solemnity, at the same time that
he holds his bent hand over the head of the bird.

'So much for mere description. The inner feeling of the picture, the
motive which has prompted it, has surely hardly ever been surpassed. The
Blessed Virgin, in casting her arm round the infant St John, looks down
on him with a holy complacency for the testimony which he is to bear to
her Son. Notice the human boyish glee with which the Baptist presents
the captured goldfinch, and, on the other hand, the divine look, even of
majesty and creative love, with which the infant Jesus, laying his hand
on the head of the bird, half reproves St John, as it were saying, "Love
them and hurt them not." Notice, too, the unfrightened calm of the bird
itself, passive under the hand of its loving Creator. All these are
features of the very highest power of human art.

'Again, in accompaniments, all is as it should be. The Virgin, modestly
and beautifully draped; St John, girt about the loins, not only in
accord with his well-known prophetic costume, but also as partaking of
sinful humanity, and therefore needing such cincture: the Child
Redeemer, with a slight cincture, just to suggest motherly care, but not
over the part usually concealed, as indeed it never ought to be, seeing
that in Him was no sin, and that it is this spotless purity which is
ever the leading idea in representations of Him as an infant. Notice,
too, his foot, beautifully resting on that of his mother; the unity
between them being thus wonderfully though slightly kept up. Her eye has
just been dwelling on the book of the Prophecies open in her hand; and
thus the spectator's thought is ruled in accordance with the high
mission of the Holy One of God, and thrown forward into the grand and
blessed future. It is a holy and wonderful picture; I had not seen any
in Italy which had struck or refreshed me more.'[14]

And allow me to write two or three words with regard to the 'Madonna
della Sedia,' or our Lady of the Chair, an engraving of which used to
charm me when a child. The Virgin, very young and simple-looking in her
loveliness, is seated on a low chair, clasping the Divine Child, who is
leaning in weariness on her breast. In the original picture, St John
with his cross is standing--a boy at the Virgin's knee, but he is absent
from the old engraving. The meek adoring tenderness in the face of the
mother, the holy ingenuousness in that of the child, are expressions to
be long studied.

Of Raphael's cartoons, which, so many of us can see for ourselves, I
cannot trust myself to do more than to repeat what strikes me as a
singularly apt phrase of Hazlitt's, given by Mrs Jameson, that the
cartoons are instances in which 'the corruptible has put on
incorruption.' That from the very slightness of the materials employed,
and the very injuries which the cartoons have sustained, we have the
greatest triumph of art, where 'the sense of power supersedes the
appearance of effort,' and where the result is the more majestic for
being in ruins. 'All other pictures look like oil and varnish, we are
stopped and attracted by the colouring, the penciling, the finishing,
the instrumentality of art; but the on the canvas.... There is nothing
between us and the subject; we look through a frame and see Scripture
histories, and amidst the wreck of colour and the mouldering of material
beauty, nothing is left but a universe of thought, or the broad imminent
shadows of calm contemplation and majestic pains.'

And that Raphael did not neglect the minutest details in these sketches,
will be seen by the accompanying note: 'The foreground of Raphael's two
cartoons, "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes," and "The Charge to
Peter," are covered with plants of the common sea cole-wort, of which
the sinuated leaves and clustered blossoms would have exhausted the
patience of any other artist; but have appeared worthy of prolonged and
thoughtful labour to the great mind of Raphael.'--_Ruskin_.

Whole clusters of anecdotes gather round the cartoons, which, as they
have to do with the work and not the worker, I leave untouched, with
regret. But I must forewarn my readers by mentioning some of the refuted
criticisms which have been applied to the cartoons. Reading the
criticisms and their answers ought to render us modest and wary in
'picking holes' in great pictures, as forward and flippant critics, old
and young, are tempted to pick them. With regard to the 'Miraculous
Draught of Fishes,' a great outcry was once set up that Raphael had made
the boat too little to hold the figures he has placed in it. But Raphael
made the boat little advisedly; if he had not done so, the picture would
have been 'all boat,' a contingency scarcely to be desired; on the
other hand, if Raphael had diminished the figures to suit the size of
the boat, these figures would not have suited those of the other
cartoons, and the cartoon would have lost greatly in dignity and effect.

In the cartoon of the 'Death of Ananias,' carping objectors were ready
to suggest that Raphael had committed an error in time by introducing
Sapphira in the background counting her ill-gotten gains, at the moment
when her no less guilty husband has fallen down in the agonies of death.
It was hours afterwards that Sapphira entered into the presence of the
apostles. But we must know that time and space do not exist for
painters, who have to tell their story at one stroke, as it were.

In the treating of the 'Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,'
some authorities have found fault with Raphael for breaking the
composition into parts by the introduction of pillars, and, farther,
that the shafts are not straight. Yet by this treatment Raphael has
concentrated the principal action in a sort of frame, and thus has been
enabled to give more freedom of action to the remaining figures in the
other divisions of the picture. 'It is evident, moreover, that had the
shafts been perfectly straight, according to the severest law of good
taste in architecture, the effect would have been extremely disagreeable
to the eye; by their winding form they harmonize with the manifold forms
of the moving figures around, and they illustrate, by their elaborate
elegance, the Scripture phrase, "the gate which is called
Beautiful."'--_Mrs Jameson_.

Of Raphael's portraits I must mention that wonderful portrait of Leo X.,
often reckoned the best portrait in the world for truth of likeness and
excellence of painting, and those of the so-called 'Fornarina,' or
'baker'. Two Fornarinas are at Rome and one at Florence. There is a
story that the original of the first two pictures was a girl of the
people to whom Raphael was attached; and there is this to be said for
the tradition, that there is an acknowledged coarseness in the very
beauty of the half-draped Fornarina of the Barberini Palace. The
'Fornarina' of Florence is the portrait of a noble woman, holding the
fur-trimming of her mantle with her right hand, and it is said that the
picture can hardly represent the same individual as that twice
represented in Rome. According to one guess the last 'Fornarina' is
Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa de Pescara, painted by Seba Piombo,
instead of by Raphael; and according to another, the Roman 'Fornarina'
is no Fornarina beloved by Raphael, but Beatrice Pio, a celebrated
improvisatrice of the time.

An 'innovation of modern times is to spell Raphael's name in England as
the modern Italians spelt it, _Raffaelle_, a word of four syllables, and
yet to pronounce this Italian word as if it were English, as _Raphael_.
Vasari wrote Raffaello; he himself wrote Raphael on his pictures, and
has signed the only autograph letter we have of his, Raphaello.'[15]

Titian, or Tiziano Vecelli, the greatest painter of the Venetian
School, reckoned worthy to be named with Lionardo, Michael Angelo and
Raphael, was born of good family at Capo del Cadore in the Venetian
State, in 1477. There is a tradition that while other painters made
their first essays in art with chalk or charcoal, the boy Titian, who
lived to be a glorious colourist, made his earliest trials in painting
with the juice of flowers. Titian studied in Venice under the Bellini,
and had Giorgione, who was born in the same year, for his
fellow-scholar, at first his friend, later his rival. When a young man
Titian spent some time in Ferrara; there he painted his 'Bacchus and
Ariadne,' and a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1512, when Titian was
thirty-five years of age, he was commissioned by the Venetians to
continue the works in the great council-hall, which the advanced age of
Gian Bellini kept him from finishing. Along with this commission Titian
was appointed in 1516 to the office of la Sanseria, which gave him the
duty and privilege of painting the portraits of the Doges as long as he
held the office; coupled with the office was a salary of one hundred
and twenty crowns a year. Titian lived to paint five Doges; two others,
his age, equal to that of Gian Bellini, prevented him from painting.

In 1516, Titian painted his greatest sacred picture, the 'Assumption of
the Virgin.' In the same year he painted the poet Ariosto, who mentions
the painter with high honour in his verse.

In 1530, Titian, a man of fifty-three years, was at Bologna, where there
was a meeting between Charles V, and Pope Clement VII., when he was
presented to both princes.

Charles V, and Philip II, became afterwards great patrons and admirers
of Titian, and it is of Charles V. and Titian that a legend, to which I
have already referred, is told. The Emperor, visiting the painter while
he was at work, stooped down and picked up a pencil, which Titian had
let fall, to the confusion and distress of the painter, when Charles
paid the princely compliment, 'Titian is worthy of being served by
Cæsar.' Titian painted many portraits of Charles V., and of the members
of his house. As Maximilian had created Albrecht Dürer a noble of the
Empire, Charles V, created Titian a Count Palatine, and a Knight of the
Order of St Iago, with a pension, which was continued by Philip II., of
four hundred crowns a year. It is doubtful whether Titian ever visited
the Spain of his patrons, but Madrid possesses forty-three of his
pictures, among them some of his finest works.

Titian went to Rome in his later years, but declined to abandon for Rome
the painter's native Venice, which had lavished her favours on her son.
He lived in great splendour, paying annual summer visits to his
birth-place of Cadore, and occasionally dwelling again for a time at
Ferrara, Urbino, Bologna. In two instances he joined the Emperor at
Augsburgh. When Henry III, of France landed at Venice, he was
entertained _en grand seigneur_ by Titian, then a very old man; and when
the king asked the price of some pictures which pleased him, Titian at
once presented them as a gift to his royal guest.

Titian married, as has been recently ascertained, and had three
children,--two sons, the elder a worthless and scandalous priest; the
second a good son and accomplished painter; and a daughter, the
beautiful Lavinia, so often painted by her father, and whose name will
live with his. Titian survived his wife thirty-six years; and his
daughter, who had married, and was the mother of several children, six
years. His second son and fellow-painter died of the same plague which
struck down Titian, in 1566, at the ripe age of eighty-nine years.

Titian is said to have been a man of irritable and passionate temper.
The hatred between him and the painter, Pordenone, was so bitter, that
the latter thought his life in danger, and painted with his shield and
poniard lying ready to his hand. Titian grasped with imperious tenacity
his supremacy as a painter, sedulously kept the secrets of his skill,
and was most unmagnanimously jealous of the attainments of his scholars.
No defect of temper, however, kept Titian from having two inseparable
convivial companions--one of them the architect, Sansovino, and the
other the profligate wit, Aretino, who was pleased to style himself the
'friend of Titian and the scourge of princes.' Though Titian is said, in
the panic of the great plague, to have died not only neglected, but
plundered before his eyes, still Venice prized him so highly, that she
made in his favour the single exception of a public funeral, during the
appalling devastation wrought by the pestilence.

From an engraving of a portrait of Titian by himself, which is before
me, I can give the best idea of his person. He looks like one of the
merchant princes, whom he painted so often and so well, in richly furred
gown, massive chain, and small cap, far off his broad forehead: a
stately figure, with a face--in its aquiline nose and keen eyes, full of
sagacity and fire, which no years could tame.

Towards the close of Titian's life, there was none who even approached
the old Venetian painter in the art which he practised freely to the
last. Painting in Italy was everywhere losing its pre-eminence. It had
become, even when it was not so nominally, thoroughly secularized;--and
with reason, for the painters by their art-creed and by their lives were
fitter to represent gods and goddesses, in whom no man believed, than to
give earnest expression to a living faith. Even Titian, great as he was,
proved a better painter of heathen mythology than of sacred subjects.

But within certain limits and in certain directions, Titian stands
unequalled. He has a high place for composition and for drawing, and his
colouring was, beyond comparison, grand and true. He was great as a
landscape painter, and he was the best portrait painter whom the world
ever saw. In his painting is seen, not, indeed, the life of the spirit,
but the life of the senses 'in its fullest power,' and in Titian there
was such large mastery of this life, that in his freedom there was no
violence, but the calmness of supreme strength, the serenity of perfect
satisfaction. His painting was a reflection of the old Greek idea of the
life of humanity as a joyous existence, so long as the sun of youth,
maturity, health, and good fortune shone, without even that strain of
foreboding pain, and desperate closing with fate, which troubled the
bliss of ancient poet or sculptor. A large proportion of Titian's
principal pictures are at Venice and Madrid.

Among Titian's finest sacred pictures, are his 'Assumption of the
Virgin,' now in the Academy, Venice, where 'the Madonna, a powerful
figure, is borne rapidly upwards, as if divinely impelled; ..,
fascinating groups of infant angels surround her, beneath stand the
apostles, looking up with solemn gestures;' and his 'Entombment of
Christ,' a picture which is also in Venice. Titian's Madonnas were not
so numerous as his Venuses, many of which are judged excellent examples
of the master. His 'Bacchus and Ariadne,' in the National Gallery, is
described by Mrs Jameson, 'as presenting, on a small scale, an epitome
of all the beauties which characterize Titian, in the rich, picturesque,
animated composition, in the ardour of Bacchus, who flings himself from
his car to pursue Ariadne; the dancing bacchanals, the frantic grace of
the bacchante, and the little joyous satyr in front, trailing the head of
the sacrifice.'

Titian's landscapes are the noble backgrounds to many of his pictures.
These landscapes were not only free, but full. 'The great masters of
Italy, almost without exception, and Titian, perhaps, more than any
other (for he had the highest knowledge of landscape), are in the
constant habit of rendering every detail of their foregrounds with the
most laborious botanical fidelity; witness the Bacchus and Ariadne, in
which the foreground is occupied by the common blue iris, the aquilegia,
and the wild rose; _every stamen_ of which latter is given, while the
blossoms and leaves of the columbine (a difficult flower to draw) have
been studied with the most exquisite accuracy.'--_Ruskin_.

In portraits, Titian conveyed to the sitters and transferred to his
canvas, not only a life-likeness, but a positively noble dignity in that
likeness. What in Van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds was the bestowing of
high breeding and dainty refinement, became under Titian's brush
dignity, pure and simple, very quiet, and wonderfully real. There is
this peculiarity in connection with the number of portraits which Titian
executed, that many of them have descended to us without further titles
than those of 'A Venetian Senator,' 'A Lady,' etc., etc., yet of the
individual life of the originals no one can doubt. With regard to
Titian's portraits of women, I have already referred to those of his
beautiful daughter, Lavinia. In one portrait, in the Berlin Museum, she
is holding a plate of fruit; in another, in England, the plate of fruit
is changed into a casket of jewels; in a third, at Madrid, Lavinia is
Herodias, and bears a charger with the head of John the Baptist. A
'Violante'--as some say, the daughter of Titian's scholar, Palma, though
dates disprove this--sat frequently to Titian, and is said to have been
loved by him.

I have written, in connection with Lionardo's 'Jaconde' and Raphael's
'Fornarina,' of Titian's 'Bella Donna.' He has various 'Bellas,' but, as
far as I know, this is _the_ 'Bella Donna,'--'a splendid, serious
beauty, in a red and blue silk dress,' in the Sciarra Gallery, Rome.

I have read that critics were at one time puzzled by the singular
yellow, almost straw colour, appearing profusely in the hair of the
women of the Venetian painters of this time, and that it was only by
consulting contemporary records that it was learnt that the Venetian
women indulged in the weak and false vanity of dyeing their black hair a
pale yellow--a process, in the course of which the women drew the hair
through the crown of a broad-brimmed hat, and spreading it over the
brim, submitted patiently to bleaching the hair in a southern sun.

Among Titian's portraits of men, those of the 'Emperor Charles V.' and
the 'Duke of Alva' are among the most famous.

Titian painted, and painted wonderfully, to the very last. He was
eighty-one when he painted the 'Martyrdom of St Lawrence,' one of his
largest and grandest compositions, and in the last year of his life he
painted--leaving it not quite completed,--a 'Pietà;' showing that his
hand owned the weight of years,[16] but the conception of the subject is
still animated and striking, the colours still glowing; while,
Titian-like, the light still flows around the mighty group in every
gradation of tone.




CHAPTER V.

GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DÜRER, 1471-1528.


Albrecht Dürer carries us to a different country and a different race.
And he who has been called the father of German painting is thoroughly
German, not only in his Saxon honesty, sedateness, and strength, but in
the curious mixture of simplicity, subtlety, homeliness, and
fantasticalness, which are still found side by side in German genius.

Albrecht Dürer was born at that fittest birth-place for the great German
painter, quaint old Nuremberg, in 1471. He was the son of a goldsmith,
and one of a family of eighteen children; a home school in which he may
have learnt early the noble, manly lessons of self-denial and endurance,
which he practised long and well. He was trained to his father's trade
until the lad's bent became so unmistakable that he was wisely
transferred to the studio of a painter to serve his apprenticeship to
art.

When the Nuremberg apprenticeship was completed, Albrecht followed the
German custom, very valuable to him, of serving another and a 'wandering
apprenticeship,' which carried him betimes through Germany, the
Netherlands, and Italy, painting and studying as he went. He painted his
own portrait about this time, showing himself a comely, pleasant, and
pleased young fellow, in a curious holiday suit of plaited low-bodied
shirt, jerkin, and mantle across the shoulder, with a profusion of long
fair curls, of which he was said to have been vain, arranged elaborately
on each side, the blue eyes looking with frank confidence out of the
blonde face. He painted himself a little later with the brave kindly
face grown mature, and the wisdom of the spirit shining in the eyes, and
weighing on the brows.

On his return from his travels, Albrecht Dürer's father arranged his
son's marriage with the daughter of a musician in Nuremberg. The
inducement to the marriage seems to have been, on the father's part, the
dowry, and on the son's the beauty of the bride. How unhappy the union
proved, without any fault of Albrecht's, has been the theme of so many
stories, that I am half inclined to think that some of us must be more
familiar with Albrecht Dürer's wedded life than with any other part of
his history. It seems to me, that there is considerable exaggeration in
these stories, for granted that Agnes Dürer was a shrew and a miser, was
Albrecht Dürer the man to be entirely, or greatly, at such a woman's
mercy? Taking matters at their worst, dishonour and disgrace did not
come near the great painter. He was esteemed, as he deserved to be; he
had a true friend in his comrade Pirkheimer; he had his art; he had the
peace of a good conscience; he had the highest of all consolations in
his faith in Heaven. Certainly it is not from Albrecht himself that the
tale of his domestic wretchedness has come. He was as manfully patient
and silent as one might have expected in a man upright, firm, and
self-reliant as he was tender. I do not think it is good for men, and
especially for women, to indulge in egotistical sentimentality, and to
believe that such a woman as Agnes Dürer could utterly thwart and wreck
the life of a man like Albrecht. It is not true to life, in the first
place; and it is dishonouring to the man, in the second; for although,
doubtless, there are men who are driven to destruction or heart-broken
by even the follies of women, these men have not the stout hearts, the
loyal spirits, the manly mould of Albrecht Dürer.

But making every allowance for the high colours with which a tale that
has grown stale is apt to be daubed, I am forced to admit the inference
that a mean, sordid, contentious woman probably did as much as was in
her power to harass and fret one of the best men in Germany, or in the
world. Luckily for himself, Albrecht was a severe student, had much
engrossing work which carried him abroad, and travelled once at least
far away from the harassing and galling home discipline. For anything
further, I believe that Albrecht loved his greedy, scolding wife, whose
fair face he painted frequently in his pictures, and whom he left at
last well and carefully provided for, as he bore with her to the end.

In 1506 Albrecht Dürer re-visited Italy alone, making a stay of eight
months in Venice, where he formed his friendship with the old Gian
Bellini, and where Albrecht had the misfortune to show the proofs and
plans of his engravings to the Italian engraver, Raimondi, who engraved
Raphael's paintings, and who proved himself base enough to steal and
make use of Albrecht Dürer's designs to the German's serious loss and
inconvenience.

A little later Albrecht Dürer, accompanied by his wife, visited the
Netherlands. The Emperor Maximilian treated the painter with great
favour, and a legend survives of their relations:--Dürer was painting so
large a subject that he required steps to reach it. The Emperor, who was
present, required a nobleman of his suite to steady the steps for the
painter, an employment which the nobleman declined as unworthy of his
rank, when the Emperor himself stepped forward and supplied the
necessary aid, remarking, 'Sir, understand that I can make Albrecht a
noble like and above you' (Maximilian had just raised Albrecht Dürer to
the rank of noble of the empire), 'but neither I nor any one else can
make an artist like him.' We may compare this story with a similar and
later story of Holbein and Henry VIII., and with another earlier story,
having a slight variation, of Titian and Charles V. The universality of
the story shakes one's belief in its individual application, but at
least the legend, with different names, remains as an indication of
popular homage to genius.

While executing a large amount of work for the great towns and sovereign
princes of Germany, some of whom were said to consult the painter on
their military operations, relying on his knowledge of mathematics, and
his being able to apply it to military engineering and fortification,
Albrecht Dürer was constantly improving and advancing in his art, laying
down his prejudices, and acquiring fresh ideas, as well as fresh
information, according to the slow but sure process of the true German
mind, till his last work was incomparably his best.

Germany was then in the terrible throes of the Reformation, and Albrecht
Dürer, who has left us the portraits of several of the great Reformers,
is believed to have been no uninterested spectator of the struggle, and
to have held, like his fellow-painter, Lucas Cranach--though in Albrecht
Dürer's case the change was never openly professed--the doctrines of the
Reformation.

There is a portrait of Albrecht Dürer, painted by himself, in his later
years. (By the way, Albrecht was not averse to painting his own portrait
as well as that of his friend Pirkheimer, and of making the fullest
claim to his work by introducing into his religious and historical
pictures his own figure holding a flag or tablet, inscribed with his
name in the quiet self-assertion of a man who was neither ashamed of
himself, nor of anything he did.) In that last portrait, Albrecht is a
thoughtful, care-worn man, with his fair locks shorn. Some will
attribute the change to Agnes Dürer, but I imagine it proceeds simply
from the noble scars of work and time; and that when Albrecht Dürer died
in his fifty-seventh year, if it were in sourness and bitterness of
spirit, as some of his biographers have stated, that sourness and
bitterness were quite as much owing to the grievous troubles of his time
and country, which so large-minded a man was sure to lay to heart, as to
any domestic trouble. Albrecht Dürer was greatly beloved by his own city
of Nuremberg, where his memory continues to be cherished. His quaint
house still stands, and his tomb bears the motto 'Emigravit,'

    'For the great painter never dies.'

Albrecht Dürer's name ranks with the names of the first painters of any
time or country, though his work as a painter was, as in the case of
William Hogarth, subservient to his work as an engraver. With the
knowledge of a later generation to that of the earliest Italian and
Flemish painters, Albrecht Dürer had much of their singleness of
purpose, assiduity of application, and profound feeling. He had to
labour against a tendency to uncouthness in stiff lines and angular
figures; to petty elaboration of details; and to that grotesqueness
which, while it suited in some respects his allegorical engravings,
marred his historical paintings, so that he was known to regret the
wasted fantastic crowding and confusion of his earlier work. From the
Italians and Flemings he learnt simplicity, and a more correct sense of
material beauty. The purity, truth, and depth of the man's spirit, from
which ideal beauty proceeds, no man could add to.

Among Albrecht Dürer's greatest paintings are his 'Adoration of the
Trinity' at Vienna, his 'Adam and Eve' at Florence, and that last
picture of 'The Apostles,' presented by Albrecht Dürer to his native
city, 'in remembrance of his career as an artist, and at the same time
as conveying to his fellow-citizens an earnest and lasting exhortation
suited to that stormy period.' The prominence given to the Bible in the
picture, points to it as the last appeal in the great spiritual
struggle. With regard to this noble masterly picture, Kugler has
written, 'Well might the artist now close his eyes. He had in this
picture attained the summit of art; here he stands side by side with the
greatest masters known in history.'

But I prefer to say something of Albrecht Dürer's engravings, which are
more characteristic of him and far more widely known than his paintings;
and to speak first of those two wonderful and beautiful allegories,
'Knight, Death, and the Devil,' and 'Melancolia.' In the first, which is
an embodiment of weird German romance as well as of high Christian
faith, the solitary Knight, with his furrowed face and battered armour,
rides steadfastly on through the dark glen, unmoved by his grisly
companions, skeleton Death on the lame horse, and the foul Fiend in
person. Contrast this sketch and its thoughtful touching meaning with
the hollow ghastliness of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.'

In 'Melancolia' a grand winged woman sits absorbed in sorrowful thought,
while surrounded by all the appliances of philosophy, science, art,
mechanics, all the discoveries made before and in Albrecht Dürer's day,
in the book, the chart, the lever, the crystal, the crucible, the plane,
the hammer. The intention of this picture has been disputed, but the
best explanation of it is that which regards the woman as pondering on
the humanly unsolved and insoluble mystery of the sin and sorrow of
life.

In three large series of woodcuts, known as the Greater and the Lesser
Passion of the Lord, and the Life of the Virgin, and taken partly from
sacred history and partly from tradition, Albrecht Dürer exceeded
himself in true beauty, simple majesty, and pathos. Photographs have
spread widely these fine woodcuts, and there is, at least, one which I
think my readers may have seen, 'The Bearing of the Cross,' in which the
blessed Saviour sinks under his burden. In the series of the Life of the
Virgin there is a 'Repose in Egypt,' which has a naïve homeliness in its
grace and serenity. The woodcut represents a courtyard with a dwelling
built in the ruins of an ancient palace. The Virgin sits spinning with
a distaff and spindle beside the Holy Child's cradle, by which beautiful
angels worship. Joseph is busy at his carpenter's work, and a number of
little angels, in merry sport, assist him with his labours.[17]

I shall mention only one more work of Albrecht Dürer's, that which is
known as the Emperor Maximilian's Prayer Book. This is pen-and-ink
sketches for the borders of a book (as the old missals were
illuminated), which are now preserved in the Royal Library, Munich. In
these little drawings the fancy of the great artist held high revel, by
no means confining itself to serious subjects, such as apostles, monks,
or even men in armour, but indulging in the most whimsical vagaries,
with regard to little German old women, imps, piping squirrels, with
cocks and hens hurrying to listen to the melody.




CHAPTER VI.

LATER ITALIAN ART--GIORGIONE, 1477-1511--CORREGGIO. ABOUT
1493-1534--TINTORETTO, 1512-1574--VERONESE, 1530-1588.


Giorgio Barbarelli, known as 'Giorgione,--in Italian, 'big,' or, as I
have heard it better translated, 'strapping George'--was born at
Castelfranco, in Treviso, about 1477, the same year in which Titian was
born. Nothing is known of his youth before he came to Venice and studied
in the school of Gian Bellini along with Titian.

The two men were friends in those days, but soon quarrelled, and
Giorgione's early death completed their separation. Titian was impatient
and arrogant; Giorgione seems to have been one of those proud, shy,
sensitive men--possibly morbidly sensitive, with whom it is always
difficult to deal; but it is recorded of him, as it is not recorded of
his great compeer, that Giorgione was frank and friendly as an artist,
however moody and fitful he might be as a man.

Giorgione soon became known. According to one account, he painted the
façade of the house which he dwelt in, for an advertisement of his
abilities as a painter, a device which was entirely successful in
procuring him commissions; but unfortunately for posterity, these were
frequently to paint other façades, sometimes in company with Titian;
grand work, which has inevitably perished, if not by fire, by time and
by the sea-damp of Venice, for to Venice Giorgione belonged, and there
is no sign that he ever left it.

He had no school, and his love of music and society--the last taste
found not seldom, an apparent anomaly, in silent, brooding
natures--might tend to withdraw him from his art. He has left a trace of
his love for music in his pictures of 'Concerts' and of 'Pastorals,' in
which musical performances are made prominent. In Giorgione, with his
romantic, idealizing temperament, genre[18] pictures took this form,
while he is known to have painted from Ovid and from the Italian tales
of his time. He was employed frequently to paint scenes on panels, for
the richly ornamented Venetian furniture. Giorgione was not without a
bent to realism in his very idealism, and is said to have been the first
Italian painter who 'imitated the real texture of stuffs and painted
draperies from the actual material.'

Giorgione died at the early age of thirty-three years, in 1511. One
account represents him as dying of the plague, others attribute his
death to a sadder cause. He is said to have had a friend and
fellow-painter who betrayed their friendship, and carried off the girl
whom Giorgione loved. Stung to the quick by the double falsehood, the
tradition goes on to state that Giorgione fell into despair with life
and all it held, and so died.

A portrait of Giorgione is in the Munich Gallery; it is that of a very
handsome beardless lad, 'with a peculiar melancholy in the dark glowing
eyes.'

Giorgione was, like Titian, grand and free in drawing and composition,
and superb in colour.[19] Mrs Jameson has drawn a nice distinction
between the two painters as colourists. That the colours of Giorgione
'appear as if lighted from within, and those of Titian from without;'
that 'the epithet glowing applies best to Giorgione, that of golden to
Titian.'

Giorgione's historic pictures are rare, his sacred pictures rarer still;
among the last is a 'Finding of Moses,' now in Milan, thus described by
Mrs Jameson: 'In the centre sits the princess under a tree; she looks
with surprise and tenderness on the child, which is brought to her by
one of her attendants; the squire, or seneschal, of the princess, with
knights and ladies, stand around; on one side two lovers are seated on
the grass; on the other are musicians and singers, pages with dogs. All
the figures are in the Venetian costume; the colouring is splendid, and
the grace and harmony of the whole composition is even the more
enchanting from the naïveté of the conception. This picture, like many
others of the same age and style, reminds us of those poems and tales
of the middle ages, in which David and Jonathan figure as _preux
chevaliers_, and Sir Alexander of Macedon and Sir Paris of Troy fight
tournaments in honour of ladies' eyes and the "blessed Virgin." They
must be tried by their own aim and standard, not by the severity of
antiquarian criticism.'

In portraits Giorgione has only been exceeded by Titian. In the National
Gallery there is an unimportant 'St Peter the Martyr,' and a finer
'Maestro di Capella giving a music lesson,' which Kugler assigns to
Giorgione, though it has been given elsewhere to Titian. The 'refined
voluptuousness and impassioned sombreness' of Giorgione's painting have
instituted a comparison between him and Lord Byron as a poet.

Correggio's real name was Antonio Allegri, and he has his popular name
from his birth-place of Correggio, now called Reggio; although at one
time there existed an impression that Correggio meant 'correct,' from
the painter's exceedingly clever feats of fore-shortening.

His father is believed to have been a well-to-do tradesman, and the lad
is said to have had an uncle a painter, who probably influenced his
nephew. But Correggio had a greater master, though but for a very short
time, in Andrea Mantegna, who died when Correggio was still a young boy.
Mantegna's son kept on his father's school, and from him Correggio might
have received more regular instruction. He early attained excellence,
and in the teeth of the legends which lingered in Parma for a full
century, his genius received prompt notice and patronage. He married
young, and from records which have come to light, he received a
considerable portion with his wife.

The year after his marriage, when he was no more than six-and-twenty,
Correggio was appointed to paint in fresco the cupola of the church of
San Giovanni at Parma, and chose for his subject the 'Ascension of
Christ;' for this work and that of the 'Coronation of the Virgin,'
painted over the high altar, Correggio got five hundred gold crowns,
equivalent to £1500. He was invited to Mantua, where he painted from the
mythology for the Duke of Mantua. Indeed, so far and wide had the
preference for mythological subjects penetrated, that one of Correggio's
earliest works was 'Diana returning from the Chase;' painted for the
decoration of the parlour of the Abbess of the convent of San Paulo,
Parma.

Correggio was a second time called upon to paint a great religious work
in Parma--this time in the cathedral, for which he selected 'The
Assumption of the Virgin.' A few of the cartoons for these frescoes were
discovered thirty or forty years ago, rolled up and lying forgotten in a
garret in Parma; they, are now in the British Museum.

In 1533, Correggio, then residing in his native town, was one of the
witnesses to the marriage of his sovereign, the Lord of Correggio. In
the following year the painter had engaged to paint an altar-piece for
an employer, who paid Correggio in advance twenty-five gold crowns, but
the latter dying very soon afterwards, in the forty-first year of his
age, 1534, his father, who was still alive, was in circumstances to
repay the advance on the picture, which had not been painted.

Correggio is said to hav

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