Great Pictures, As Seen and Described Part 6

JUDITH

(_SANDRO BOTTICELLI_)

MAURICE HEWLETT

In the days when it was verging on a question whether a man could be at the same time a good Christian and an artist the chosen subjects of painting were significant of the approaching crisis--those glaring moral contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic. Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a question it were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths. To-day we call them "effective" subjects; we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and we think that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quant.i.tatively, and say that we "know what we like."

And doubtless there is something piquant in the quivering produced, for example, by the sight of white innocence fluttering helpless in a grey shadow of l.u.s.t. So long as the Bible remained a G.o.d that piquancy was found in a _Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a _Faust and Gretchen_, in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy.

It was a like appreciation of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents (coupled with, or drowning, a something purer and more devout) which had inspired those most beautiful and distinctive of all the symbols of Catholicism, the _Adoration of the Kings_, the Christ-child cycle, and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to their place above the mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old Testament, that garner of grim tales, proved a sick wine: _David and Golias_, _Susanna and the Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac_, _Jethro's Daughter_. But the story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscan sanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had first cast her in bronze at the prayer of Cosimo _pater patriae_. Her entry was dramatic enough at least: Dame Fortune may well have sn.i.g.g.e.red as she spun round the city on her ball. Cosimo the patriot and his splendid grandson were no sooner dead and their brood sent flying, than Donatello's _Judith_ was set up in the Piazza as a fit emblem of rescue from tyranny, with the vigorous motto, to make a.s.surance double, "EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLICAE CIVES POSVERE." Savonarola, who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application of Judith's pious sin. A few years later that same _Judith_ saw him burn. Thus, as an incarnate cynicism, she will pa.s.s; as a work of art she is admittedly one of her great creator's failures. Her neighbour _Perseus_ of the Loggia makes this only too plain! For Cellini has seized the right moment in a deed of horror, and Donatello, with all his downrightness and grip of the fact, has. .h.i.t upon the wrong. It is fatal to freeze a moment of time into an eternity of writing. His _Judith_ will never strike: her arm is palsied where it swings. The Damoclean sword is a fine incident for poetry; but Holofernes was no Damocles, and if he had been, it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze.

Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a moment instead of denote a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things are, not to state them, to affirm that they are. A sculptured _Judith_ was done not long afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a burin on a plate; and the man who so carved her was a painter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JUDITH.

_Botticelli._]

Meantime, _pari pa.s.su_, almost, a painter who was a poet was trying his hand; a man who knew his Bible and his mythology and was equally at home with either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say that you cannot be an artist unless you are at home with mythology, unless mythology is the swiftest and most direct expression of your being, so that you can be measured by it as a man is known by his books, or a woman by her clothes, her way of bowing, her amus.e.m.e.nts, or her charities. For mythopoeia is just this, the incarnating the spirit of natural fact; and the generic name of that power is Art. A kind of creation, a clothing of essence in matter, an hypostatizing (if you will have it) of an object of intuition within the folds of an object of sense. Lessing did not dig so deep as his Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling ant.i.thesis,"

after all, touches the root of the matter), for he did not see that rhythmic extension in time or s.p.a.ce, as the case may be, with all that that implies--colour, value, proportion, all the convincing incidents of form--is simply the mode of all arts, the thing with which Art's substance must be interpenetrated, until the two form a whole, lovely, golden, irresistible, and inevitable as Nature's pieces are. This substance, as I have said, is the spirit of natural fact. And so mythology is Art at its simplest and barest (where the bodily medium is neither word, nor texture of stone, nor dye), the parent art from which all the others were, so to speak, begotten by man's need. This much of explanation, I am sorry to say, is necessary, before we turn to our mytho-poet of Florence, to see what he made out of the story of Judith.

First of all, though, what has the story of Judith to do with mythology?

It is a legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends; and between legend and myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I believe there are no myths proper to Israel--I do not see how such magnificent egoists could contract to the necessary state of awe--and I do not know that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural fact, a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very different thing. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event is transient and superficial. Take one instance out of a score. The rainbow links heaven and earth. Iris, then, to the myth-making Greek, was Jove's messenger, intermediary between G.o.d and Man. That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards, making her a daughter of Thaumas, incarnated a fact, psychological, but none the less constant, none the less natural. But, to say, as the legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated his ark over a drowning world and secured for his posterity a standing covenant with G.o.d, who then and once for all set his bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it may be the barest history in a splendid epical setting: the point to remember is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only of men can convert dead things into life. And now we will go into the Uffizi.

Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's _Judith_ tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her steadfast maid d.o.g.g.i.ng with intent patient eyes every step she takes.

You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to the sage himself, who, from his point of view--that painting may fairly deal with a chapter of history--is perfectly right. The prevailing strain of the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fort.i.tudo_, to invert the old enigma. "O G.o.d, O my G.o.d, hear me also, a widow. Break down their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that runs through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of a little people in their G.o.d-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him, and tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the emissary of the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox, "The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the amazing, thrilling ant.i.thesis insisted on over and over again by the old Hebrew bard. "Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the fauchion pa.s.sed through his neck." That is the _leit-motif_: Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it to the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty, blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow, flits homeward through a spring landscape of grey and green and the smile of a milky sky, being herself the dominant of the chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her jagged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and her yellow curls floating over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the sandals that ravished his eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and fluttering like harebells in the wind. Behind her plods the slave girl folded in an orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of hers, the head of the grim Lord Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the legend itself! For look at the girl's eyes. What does their dreamy solemnity mean if not, "the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman"? One other delicate bit of symbolizing he has allowed himself, which I may not omit. You are to see by whom this deed was done: by a woman who has uns.e.xed herself. Judith is absorbed in her awful service; her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees; she is unconscious of the hindrance. The gates of Bethulia are in sight; the Chaldean hors.e.m.e.n are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape. She is swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste.

The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and steps out the more l.u.s.tily for it.

So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of pictures. What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell him that his art could have little to say to a legend? Or that a legend might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made), might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a moment suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this double-entry, methodical way, but are we ent.i.tled to say that he was not influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman, when he squared himself to ill.u.s.trate the Bible? We say that the subject of a picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter, _that_ is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every picture he painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the story of Judith? What is, in that story, the natural, essential (as opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed was what the old Scots law incisively calls _slauchter_. It may be glossed over as a.s.sa.s.sination or even execution--in fact, in Florence, where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called: it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not s.h.i.+rking the position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the same mind:

"The smyler with the knyf under his cloke,"

and so on, in lines not be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion.

Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab, are the standing elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you come down to that. Your staring looks, your blood, your "chirking," are accidentals. They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but the horror of sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when we flout or mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon the carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror, there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add mentally the poor stage properties we have grown to trust. No blood, if you please. Therefore, in Botticelli's _Judith_, nothing but the essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly imagine, but it is not there to be sensed. The panel is in a tremor. So swift and secret is Judith, so furtive the maid, we need no hurrying hors.e.m.e.n to remind us of her oath,--"Hear me, and I will do a thing which shall go throughout all generations to the children of our nation." Sudden death in the air; nature has been outraged. But there is no drop of blood--the thin scarlet line along the sword-edge is a symbol if you will--the pale head in the cloth is a mere "thing:" yet we all know what has been done.

_Earthwork out of Tuscany_ (London, 1895).

THE AVENUE OF MIDDELHARNAIS

(_HOBBEMA_)

PAUL LAFOND

Some small and slender trees, branchless almost to their tops, border the two sides of a road, which occupies the centre of the picture, and extend all the way to a village which closes the horizon with several masts and hulls of s.h.i.+ps in profile against a sky where the sun is veiled; to the right, a nursery-garden of shrubs and rose-trees separated from the road by a wide ditch full of water; then, in the middle distance, the buildings of a farm; to the left, a clump of trees and another ditch, and further back the spire of a church; a huntsman, with a gun on his shoulder and preceded by his dog, is walking on the road, and two peasants--a man and a woman--have stopped to chat on the path that leads across to the farm; a horticulturist is grafting the shrubs in the nursery-garden; and this corner of a landscape has sufficed for Hobbema to produce a masterpiece which the National Gallery of London is justly proud to possess. This youngest of the great European Museums is not the poorest and owns very considerable works of every school.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AVENUE OF MIDDELHARNAIS.

_Hobbema._]

What is most admired in this picture of the Dutch Master? The firmness of touch, the brilliancy of the key, the ease and breadth of execution without the slightest sign of hesitation or alteration, or the extraordinary perfection with which the perspective is rendered? We do not know. Despite the complexity of the subject, the one defect of which may be a slight lack of unity in the composition, the general effect of the picture is simple and powerful, and the gradation of colour harmonious and correct. It would be impossible to go any farther than this artist has done in the interpretation of this tranquil Dutch landscape. The deep values of the trees, the yellowish greys of the road, and the sluggish water of the ditches, together with the blue sky flecked with little grey and white clouds produce an ensemble of absolute calm. The little figures which give life to this canvas are so fine and delicate in execution that they leave nothing to be desired.

Here, as very rarely happens, the multiplication of details does not spoil the effect of the whole.

This is a picture absolutely without a peer, and a page by itself in Hobbema's work. This is true in every sense, even in the choice of subject; for most frequently the painter borrows the motives for his pictures from a different phase of nature. Ordinarily he interprets forest-clearings; the skirts of a wood with poor huts hidden by great trees; calm and fresh pools; and streams feeding humble mills. Witness the one in the Louvre for which he showed so great a predilection and which he reproduced under so many varied aspects.

But whatever may be the subject he treats, he always remains the happy interpreter of the calm scenery of his own country of low and drowned horizons; the painter attracted by the light which with him envelops everything it approaches--trees, cottages, ground, waters, and distances bathed in delicious depths.

Nature, gentle and friendly to man, which he saw with a simplicity and a clearness approached by no other painter, attracted and charmed him above all else, in contrast to his contemporary and friend, J. Ruysdael, who, led away by heart-breaking melancholy, would never see any side of her but the energetic and lugubrious, the sad and troubled.

In his forests, on the banks of his ponds and rivers, in the neighbourhood of his huts and mills, Hobbema wants to have company; so he has sown his landscapes with figures, and they are constantly animated with people and animals. Are these figures always his own? It would be imprudent to affirm this, although they harmonize in most cases so marvellously with the rest of the picture, and it would therefore seem difficult for them to be by another hand. However, if we must defer to his historian, von Wurzbach, they are very frequently the work of Nicholaas Berghem, Adriaen Van de Velde, Lingelbach, Philip Wouwerman, Isack van Ostade, Pijnacker, etc., which would prove, at least, that he knew how to select his collaborators.

The painter of the _Avenue of Middelharnais_ in the National Gallery, of the _Mill_ in our Louvre, and of many other masterpieces was yet unknown, or rather despised, not very long ago, and it is quite recently that his name has emerged from the unjust neglect in which it was buried. This great name of Hobbema had fallen into such discredit that when one of his pictures fell by chance into the hands of an amateur or merchant the signature would be effaced as quickly as possible and replaced by that of J. Ruysdael, the sole painter worthy of entering into compet.i.tion with him.

Who then is this Meindert Hobbema? Where was he born? Where did he live?

What was his life? Alas, we know very little concerning this impeccable master, one of the greatest glories of Dutch painting. The princ.i.p.al historians of the Netherland school are ignorant of him or pa.s.s him by in silence. Houbraken, Descamps, and d'Argenville are dumb regarding him. Those who, by chance, treat of him, commit so many errors that it is best to take no account of their words. Three cities, Amsterdam, Koeverden, and a village, Middelharnais, in the province of Guelder, which he has made famous by the marvellous picture, the subject of our notice, dispute the honour of being his birthplace. But, it seems, although nothing can be affirmed with certainty, that he first saw the light in Amsterdam in 1638. He was the son of a sergeant in the Netherland army and spent his early life in Koeverden, where he was baptized and where his father was in garrison. At a later period he established himself in Amsterdam, where he became the pupil and soon the comrade and friend of J. Ruysdael, who served as witness to his marriage with Eeltie Vinck, celebrated in this same city, Oct. 2, 1668. From that time he scarcely ever left Amsterdam, where he died, Dec. 14, 1709, five years after his wife, in the sad Roosegraft, which had seen Rembrandt expire thirty years before. He was sixty-seven years of age. Have we any need to add that, like Rembrandt, the painter of painters, he died poor?

That is all we know of Meindert Hobbema. It is little enough, but quite sufficient. Have we not the man complete in his work? What more could we wish?

Jouin, _Chefs-d'oeuvre: Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture_ (Paris, 1895-97).

THE DANCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS

(_ANDREA DEL SARTO_)

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

With the majestic and tragic things of art we began, at the landmarks set by Leonardo and Michael Angelo; and are come now, not quite at random, to the lyric and elegiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto. To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than this of ours. His art is to me as the Tuscan April in its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, but lulled and kindled by such air and light as fills the life of the growing year with fire. At Florence only can one trace and tell how great a painter and how various he was. There only, but surely there, can the influence and pressure of the things of time on his immortal spirit be understood; how much of him was killed or changed, how much of him could not be. There are the first-fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight and of flight had pa.s.sed from weary wing and clouding eye, the old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out of hand and heart. How the change fell upon him, and how it wrought, any one may see who compares his later with his earlier works, with the series, for instance, of outlines representing the story of St. John Baptist in the desolate little cloister of Lo Scalzo. In these mural designs there is such exultation and exuberance of young power, of fresh pa.s.sion and imagination, that only by the innate grace can one recognize the hand of the master whom hitherto we know by the works of his after life, when the gift of grace had survived the gift of invention. This and all other gifts it did survive; all pleasure of life and power of mind, all the conscience of the man, his will, his character, his troubles, his triumphs, his sin and honour, heart-break and shame. All these his charm of touch, his sweetness of execution, his "Elysian beauty, melancholy grace," outlived, and blossomed in their dust. Turn from that cloistral series to those later pictures, painted when he was "faultless" and nothing more; and seeing all the growth and all the gain, all the change and all the loss, one to whom the second was unknown would feel and foreknow his story and his sorrow. In the cloister, what life and fullness of growing and strengthening genius, what joyous sense of its growth and the fair field before it, what dramatic delight in character and action! where St. John preaches in the wilderness and the few first listeners are gathered together at his feet, old people and poor, soul-stricken, silent--women with worn still faces, and a spirit in their tired aged eyes that feeds heartily and hungrily on his words--all the haggard funereal group filled from the fountain of his faith with gradual fire and white-heat of soul; or where Salome dances before Herod, an incarnate figure of music, grave and graceful, light and glad, the song of a bird made flesh, with perfect poise of her sweet slight body from the maiden face to the melodious feet; no tyrannous or treacherous G.o.ddess of deadly beauty, but a simple virgin, with the cold charm of girlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she stands before Herodias and when she receives the severed head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure bright animal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing but instinct and motion. In her mother's mature and conscious beauty there is visible the voluptuous will of a harlot and a queen; but, for herself, she has neither malice nor pity; her beauty is a maiden force of nature, capable of bloodshed without bloodguiltiness; the King hangs upon the music of her movement, the rhythm of leaping life in her fair fleet limbs, as one who listens to a tune, subdued by the rapture of sound, absorbed in purity of pa.s.sion. I know not where the subject has been touched with such fine and keen imagination as here. The time came when another than Salome was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her hands. With the coming of that time upon him came the change upon his heart and hand; "the work of an imperious whorish woman." Those words, set by the prophet as a brand upon the fallen forehead of the chosen bride, come back to mind as one studies in her husband's pictures the full calm lineaments, the large and serene beauty of Lucrezia del Fede; a predominant and placid beauty, placid and implacable, not to be pleaded with or fought against. Voluptuous always and slothful, subtle at times no doubt and sweet beyond measure, full of heavy beauty and warm, slow grace, her features bear no sign of possible love or conscience. Seen side by side with his clear sad face, hers tells more of the story than any written record, even though two poets of our age have taken it up. In the feverish and feeble melodrama of Alfred de Musset there is no touch of tragedy, hardly a shadow of pa.s.sionate and piteous truth; in Mr. Browning's n.o.blest poem--his n.o.blest it seems to me--the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly touched upon--missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skilful--the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was corroded by it and his soul burnt into dead ashes, we are shown in full; but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he might have been without it. This is what I think the works of his youth and age, seen near together as at Florence, make manifest to any loving and studious eye. In those later works, the inevitable and fatal figure of the woman recurs with little diversity or change. She has grown into his art, and made it even as herself; rich, monotonous in beauty, calm, complete, without heart or spirit. But his has not been always "the low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand" it was then. He had started on his way towards another goal than that. Nothing now is left him to live for but his faultless hand and her faultless face--still and full, suggestive of no change in the steady deep-lidded eyes and heavy lovely lips without love or pudency or pity. Here among his sketches we find it again and ever the same, crowned and clothed only with the glory and the joy and the majesty of the flesh. When the luxurious and subtle sense which serves the woman for a soul looks forth and speaks plainest from those eyes and lips, she is sovereign and stately still; there is in her beauty nothing common or unclean. We cannot but see her for what she is; but her majestic face makes no appeal for homage or forgiveness.

_Essays and Studies_ (London, 1875).

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DANCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS.

_Andrea del Sarto._]

ADORATION OF THE MAGI

(_GENTILE DA FABRIANO_)

F.A. GRUYER