Renaissance in Italy Volume III Part 15

Veronese elevated pageantry to the height of serious art. His domain is noonday sunlight ablaze on sumptuous dresses and Palladian architecture.

Where Tintoretto is dramatic, he is scenic. t.i.tian, in a wise harmony, without either the aeschylean fury of Tintoretto, or the material gorgeousness of Veronese, realised an ideal of pure beauty. Continuing the traditions of Bellini and Giorgione, with a breadth of treatment, and a vigour of well-balanced faculties peculiar to himself, t.i.tian gave to colour in landscape and the human form a sublime yet sensuous poetry no other painter in the world has reached.

Tintoretto and Veronese are, both of them, excessive. The imagination of Tintoretto is too pa.s.sionate and daring; it scathes and blinds like lightning. The sense of splendour in Veronese is overpoweringly pompous.

t.i.tian's exquisite humanity, his large and sane nature, gives proper value to the imaginative and the scenic elements of the Venetian style, without exaggerating either. In his masterpieces thought, colour, sentiment, and composition--the spiritual and technical elements of art--exist in perfect balance; one harmonious tone is given to all the parts of his production, nor can it be said that any quality a.s.serts itself to the injury of the rest. t.i.tian, the Sophocles of painting, has infused into his pictures the spirit of music, the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders, making power incarnate in a form of grace.

Round these great men are grouped a host of secondary but distinguished painters--Palma with his golden-haired large-bosomed sirens; idyllic Bonifazio; dramatic Pordenone, whose frescoes are all motion and excitement; Paris Bordone, who mingled on his canvas cream and mulberry juice and sunbeams; the Robusti, the Caliari, the Ba.s.sani, and others whom it would be tedious to mention. One breath, one afflatus, inspired them all; and it is due to this coherence in their style and inspiration that the school of Venice, taken as a whole, can show more masterpieces by artists of the second cla.s.s than any other in Italy. Superior or inferior as they may relatively be among themselves, each bears the indubitable stamp of the Venetian Renaissance, and produces work of a quality that raises him to high rank among the painters of the world. In the same way the spirit of the Renaissance, pa.s.sing over the dramatists of our Elizabethan age, enabled intellects of average force to take rank in the company of the n.o.blest. Ford, Ma.s.singer, Heywood, Decker, Webster, Fletcher, Tourneur, Marston, are seated round the throne at the feet of Shakspere, Marlowe, and Jonson.

In order to penetrate the characteristics of Venetian art more thoroughly, it will be needful to enter into detailed criticism of the three chief masters who command the school. To begin with Veronese. His canvases are nearly always large--filled with figures of the size of life, ma.s.sed together in groups or extended in long lines beneath white marble colonnades, which enclose s.p.a.ces of clear sky and silvery clouds. Armour, shot silks and satins, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres, crowns, all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun, form the habitual furniture of his pictures. Rearing horses, dogs, dwarfs, cats, when occasion serves, are used to add reality, vivacity, grotesqueness to his scenes. His men and women are large, well proportioned, vigorous--eminent for pose and gesture rather than for grace or loveliness--distinguished by adult more than adolescent qualities.

Veronese has no choice type of beauty for either s.e.x. We find in him, on the contrary, a somewhat coa.r.s.e display of animal force in men, and of superb voluptuousness in women. He prefers to paint women draped in gorgeous raiment, as if he had not felt the beauty of the nude. Their faces are too frequently unrefined and empty of expression. His n.o.blest creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full of nerve and blood. In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he does not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly;[282] he remains proud, powerful, and frigidly materialistic. He raises neither repulsion nor desire, but displays with the calm strength of art the empire of the mundane spirit. All the equipage of wealth and worldliness, the l.u.s.t of the eye, and the pride of life--such a vision as the fiend offered to Christ on the mountain of temptation; this is Veronese's realm. Again, he has no flashes of poetic imagination like Tintoretto; but his grip on the realities of the world, his faculty for idealising prosaic magnificence, is even greater.

Veronese was precisely the painter suited to a nation of merchants, in whom the a.s.sociations of the counting-house and the exchange mingled with the responsibilities of the Senate and the pa.s.sions of princes. He never portrayed vehement emotions. There are no brusque movements, no extended arms, like those of Tintoretto's Magdalen in the "Pieta" at Milan, in his pictures. His Christs and Maries and martyrs of all sorts are composed, serious, courtly, well-fed personages, who, like people of the world accidentally overtaken by some tragic misfortune, do not stoop to distortions or express more than a grave surprise, a decorous sense of pain.[283] His angelic beings are equally earthly.

The Venetian Rothschilds no doubt preferred the ceremonial to the imaginative treatment of sacred themes; and to do him justice, Veronese did not make what would in his case have been the mistake of choosing the tragedies of the Bible for representation. It is the story of Esther, with its royal audiences, coronations, and processions; the marriage feast at Cana; the banquet in the house of Levi, that he selects by preference.

Even these themes he removes into a region far from Biblical a.s.sociations.

His _mise en scene_ is invariably borrowed from luxurious Italian palaces--large open courts and _loggie_, crowded with guests and lacqueys--tables profusely laden with gold and silver plate. The same love of display led him to delight in allegory--not allegory of the deep and mystic kind, but of the pompous and processional, in which Venice appears enthroned among the deities, or Jupiter fulminates against the vices, or the genii of the arts are personified as handsome women and blooming boys.

In dealing with mythology, again, it is not its poetry that he touches; he uses the tale of Europa, for example, as the motive for rich toilettes and delightful landscape, choosing the moment that has least in it of pathos.

These being the prominent features of his style, it remains to be said that what is really great in Veronese is the sobriety of his imagination and the solidity of his workmans.h.i.+p. Amid so much that is distracting, he never loses command over his subject; nor does he degenerate into fulsome rhetoric.

Tintoretto is not at home in this somewhat vulgar region of ceremonial grandeur. He requires both thought and fancy as the stimulus to his creative effort. He cannot be satisfied with reproducing, even in the n.o.blest combinations, merely what he sees around him of resplendent and magnificent. There must be scope for poetry in the conception and for audacity in the projection of his subject, something that shall rouse the prophetic faculty and evoke the seer in the artist, or Tintoretto does not rise to his own alt.i.tude. Accordingly we find that, in contrast with Veronese, he selects by preference the most tragic and dramatic subjects to be found in sacred history. The Crucifixion, with its agonising deity and prostrate groups of women, sunk below the grief of tears;--the Temptation in the wilderness, with its pa.s.sionate contrast of the grey-robed Man of Sorrows and the ruby-winged, voluptuous fiend;--the Temptation of Adam in Eden, a glowing allegory of the fascination of the spirit by the flesh;--Paradise, a tempest of souls, whirled like Lucretian atoms or gold dust in sunbeams by the celestial forces that perform the movement of the spheres;--the Destruction of the world, where all the fountains and rivers and lakes and seas of earth have formed one cataract, that thunders with cities and nations on its rapids down a bottomless gulf; while all the winds and hurricanes of the air have grown into one blast, that carries men like dead leaves up to judgment;--the Plague of the fiery serpents, with mult.i.tudes encoiled and writhing on a burning waste of sand;--the Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents, with its spilth of blood on slippery pavements of porphyry and serpentine;--the Delivery of the tables of the law to Moses amid clouds on Sinai, a white ascetic, lightning-smitten man emerging in the glory of apparent G.o.dhead;--the anguish of the Magdalen above her martyred G.o.d;--the solemn silence of Christ before the throne of Pilate;--the rus.h.i.+ng of the wings of Seraphim, and the clangour of the trumpet that awakes the dead;--these are the soul-stirring themes that Tintoretto handles with the ease of mastery.[284]

Meditating upon Tintoretto's choice of such subjects, we feel that the profoundest characteristic of his genius is the determination toward motives pre-eminently poetic rather than proper to the figurative arts.

The poet imagines a situation in which the intellectual or emotional life is paramount, and the body is subordinate. The painter selects situations in which physical form is of the first importance, and a feeling or a thought is suggested. But Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetical ideas; and he often fails to realise them fully through the inadequacy of painting as a medium for such matter. Moses, in the drama of the "Golden Calf," for instance, is a poem, not a true picture.[285] The pale ecstatic stretching out emaciated arms, presents no beauty of att.i.tude or outline.

Energy of thought is conspicuous in the figure; and reflection is needed to bring out the purpose of the painter.[286]

It is not, however, only in the region of the vast, tempestuous, and tragic that Tintoretto finds himself at home. He is equal to every task that can be imposed upon the imagination. Provided only that the spiritual fount be stirred, the jet of living water gushes forth, pure, inexhaustible, and limpid. In his "Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne," that most perfect lyric of the sensuous fancy from which sensuality is absent;[287] in his "Temptation of Adam," that symphony of grey and brown and ivory more l.u.s.trous than the hues of sunset; in his "Miracle of S.

Agnes," that lamb-like maiden with her snow-white lamb among the soldiers and the priests of Rome, Tintoretto has proved beyond all question that the fiery genius of t.i.tanic artists can pierce and irradiate the placid and the tender secrets of the soul with more consummate mastery than falls to the lot of those who make tranquillity their special province.[288]

Paolo Veronese never penetrated to this inner shrine of beauty, this Holiest of Holies where the spiritual graces dwell. He could not paint waxen limbs, with silver lights and golden and transparent mysteries of shadow, like those of Bacchus, Eve, and Ariadne. t.i.tian himself was powerless to imagine movement like that of Aphrodite floating in the air, or of Madonna adjuring Christ in the "Paradiso," or of Christ Himself judging by the silent simplicity of his divine att.i.tude the worldly judge at whose tribunal He stands, or of the tempter raising his jewelled arms aloft to dazzle with meretricious brilliancy the impa.s.sive G.o.d above him, or of Eve leaning in irresistible seductiveness against the fatal tree, or of S. Mark down-rus.h.i.+ng through the sky to save the slave that cried to him, or of the Mary who has fallen asleep with folded hands from utter la.s.situde of agony at the foot of the cross.

It is in these att.i.tudes, movements, gestures, that Tintoretto makes the human form an index and symbol of the profoundest, most tragic, most delicious thought and feeling of the inmost soul. In daylight radiancy and equable colouring he is surpa.s.sed perhaps by Veronese. In mastery of every portion of his art, in solidity of execution, and in unwavering hold upon his subject, he falls below the level of t.i.tian. Many of his pictures are unworthy of his genius--hurriedly designed, rapidly dashed upon the canvas, studied by candlelight from artificial models, with abnormal effects of light and dark, hastily daubed with pigments that have not stood the test of time. He was a gigantic _improvitsatore_: that is the worst thing we can say of him. But in the swift intuitions of the imagination, in the purities and sublimities of the prophet-poet's soul, neither Veronese nor yet even t.i.tian can approach him.

The greatest difficulty meets the critic who attempts to speak of t.i.tian.

To seize the salient characteristics of an artist whose glory it is to offer nothing over-prominent, and who keeps the middle path of perfection, is impossible. As complete health may be termed the absence of obtrusive sensation, as virtue has been called the just proportion between two opposite extravagances, so is t.i.tian's art a golden mean of joy unbroken by brusque movements of the pa.s.sions--a well-tempered harmony in which no thrilling note suggests the possibility of discord. In his work the world and men cease to be merely what they are; he makes them what they ought to be: and this he does by separating what is beautiful in sensuous life from its alloy of painful meditation and of burdensome endeavour. The disease of thought is unknown in his kingdom; no divisions exist between the spirit and the flesh; the will is thwarted by no obstacles. When we think of t.i.tian, we are irresistibly led to think of music. His "a.s.sumption of Madonna" (the greatest single oil-painting in the world, if we except Raphael's "Madonna di San Sisto") can best be described as a symphony--a symphony of colour, where every hue is brought into harmonious combination--a symphony of movement, where every line contributes to melodious rhythm--a symphony of light without a cloud--a symphony of joy in which the heavens and earth sing Hallelujah. Tintoretto, in the Scuola di San Rocco, painted an "a.s.sumption of the Virgin" with characteristic energy and impulsiveness. A group of agitated men around an open tomb, a rush of air and clash of seraph wings above, a blaze of glory, a woman borne with sideways-swaying figure from darkness into light;--that is his picture, all _brio_, excitement, speed. Quickly conceived, hastily executed, this painting (so far as clumsy restoration suffers us to judge) bears the impress of its author's impetuous genius. But t.i.tian worked by a different method. On the earth, among the Apostles, there is action enough and pa.s.sion; ardent faces straining upward, impatient men raising impotent arms and vainly divesting themselves of their mantles, as though they too might follow her they love. In heaven is radiance, half eclipsing the archangel who holds the crown, and revealing the father of spirits in an aureole of golden fire. Between earth and heaven, amid choirs of angelic children, rises the mighty mother of the faith of Christ, who was Mary and is now a G.o.ddess, ecstatic yet tranquil, not yet accustomed to the skies, but far above the grossness and the incapacities of earth. Her womanhood is so complete that those for whom the meaning of her Catholic legend is lost, may hail in her humanity personified.

The grand manner can reach no further than in this picture--serene, composed, meditated, enduring, yet full of dramatic force and of profound feeling. Whatever t.i.tian chose to touch, whether it was cla.s.sical mythology or portrait, history or sacred subject, he treated in this large and healthful style. It is easy to tire of Veronese; it is possible to be fatigued by Tintoretto. t.i.tian, like nature, waits not for moods or humours in the spectator. He gives to the mind joy of which it can never weary, pleasures that cannot satiate, a satisfaction not to be repented of, a sweetness that will not pall. The least instructed and the simple feel his influence as strongly as the wise or learned.

In the course of this attempt to describe the specific qualities of Tintoretto, Veronese, and t.i.tian, I have been more at pains to distinguish differences than to point out similarities. What they had in common was the Renaissance spirit as this formed itself in Venice. Nowhere in Italy was art more wholly emanc.i.p.ated from obedience to ecclesiastical traditions, without losing the character of genial and natural piety.

Nowhere was the Christian history treated with a more vivid realism, harmonised more simply with pagan mythology, or more completely purged of mysticism. The Umbrian devotion felt by Raphael in his boyhood, the prophecy of Savonarola, and the Platonism of Ficino absorbed by Michael Angelo at Florence, the scientific preoccupations of Lionardo and the antiquarian interests of Mantegna, were all alike unknown at Venice. Among the Venetian painters there was no conflict between art and religion, or art and curiosity--no reaction against previous pietism, no perplexity of conscience, no confusion of aims. t.i.tian, Tintoretto, and Veronese were children of the people, men of the world, men of pleasure; wealthy, urbane, independent, pious:--they were all these by turns; but they were never mystics, scholars, or philosophers. In their aesthetic ideal religion found a place, nor was sensuality rejected; but the religion was sane and manly, the sensuality was vigorous and virile. Not the intellectual greatness of the Renaissance, but its happiness and freedom, was what they represented.

FOOTNOTES:

[265] From the beginning of _Julian and Maddalo_, which relates a ride taken by Sh.e.l.ley with Lord Byron, on the Lido, and their visit to the madhouse on its neighbouring island. The description, richly coloured and somewhat confused in detail, seems to me peculiarly true to Venetian scenery. With the exception of Tunis, I know of no such theatre for sunset-shows as Venice. Tunis has the same elements of broad lagoons and distant hills, but not the same vaporous atmosphere.

[266] _Lettere di Messer Pietro Aretino_, Parigi, MDCIX, lib. iii. p. 48.

I have made a paraphrase rather than a translation of this rare and curious description.

[267] See Yriarte, _Un Patricien de Venise_, p. 439.

[268] See above, Chapter IV, Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco.

[269] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 183.

[270] I must refer my readers to Crowe and Cavalcaselle for an estimate of the influence exercised at Venice by Gentile de Fabriano, John Alamannus, and the school of Squarcione. Antonello da Messina brought his method of oil-painting into the city in 1470, and Gian Bellini learned something at Padua from Andrea Mantegna. The true point about Venice, however, is that the Venetian character absorbed, a.s.similated, and converted to its own originality whatever touched it.

[271] The conditions of art in Flanders--wealthy, bourgeois, proud, free--were not dissimilar to those of art in Venice. The misty flats of Belgium have some of the atmospheric qualities of Venice. As Van Eyck is to the Vivarini, so is Rubens to Paolo Veronese. This expresses the amount of likeness and of difference.

[272] Jacopo and his sons Gentile and Giovanni.

[273] Notice particularly the Contadina type of S. Catherine in a picture ascribed to Cordegliaghi in the Venetian Academy.

[274] These Scuole were the halls of meeting for companies called by the names of patron saints.

[275] Notice in particular, from the series of pictures ill.u.s.trating the legend of S. Ursula, the very beautiful faces and figures of the saint herself, and her young bridegroom, the Prince of Britain. Attendant squires and pages in these paintings have all the charm of similar subordinate personages in Pinturicchio, with none of his affectation.

[276] The most beautiful of these _angiolini_, with long flakes of flaxen hair falling from their foreheads, are in a Sacra Conversazione of Carpaccio's in the Academy. Gian Bellini's, in many similar pictures, are of the same delicacy.

[277] What follows above about Giorgione is advanced with diffidence, since the name of no other great painter has been so freely used to cover the works of his inferiors.

[278] Lord Lansdowne's Giorgionesque picture of a young man crowned with vine, playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example. The celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its landscape and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is given by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo. See _History of Painting in North Italy_, vol. ii. p. 147.

[279] Under the fire of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's destructive criticism, it would require more real courage than I possess to speak of the "Entombment" in the Monte di Pieta at Treviso as genuine. Coa.r.s.e and unselect as are the types of the boy angels, as well as of the young athletic giant, who plays the part in it of the dead Christ, this is a truly grandiose and striking picture. Nothing proves the average greatness of the Venetian masters more than the possibility of attributing such compositions to obscure and subordinate craftsmen of the school.

[280] Crowe and Cavalcaselle a.s.sign this picture with some confidence and with fair show of reason, to Cariani, on whom again they father the frescoes at Colleoni's Castle of Malpaga. I have ventured to notice it above in connection with Giorgione, since it exhibits some of the most striking Giorgionesque qualities, and shows the ascendency of his imagination over the Venetian School.

[281] Giorgione, b. 1478; d. 1511. t.i.tian, b. 1477, d. 1576. Tintoretto, b. 1512; d. 1594. Veronese, b. 1530; d. 1588.

[282] I cannot, for example, imagine Veronese painting anything like Rubens' two pictures of the "Last Judgment" at Munich.

[283] For his sacred types see the "Marriage at Cana" in the Louvre, the little "Crucifixion" and the "Baptism" of the Pitti, and the "Martyrdom of S. Agata" in the Uffizzi.

[284] These examples are mostly chosen from the Scuola di S. Rocco and the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice; also from "Pietas," in the Brera and the Pitti, the "Paradise" of the Ducal Palace, and a sketch for "Paradise" in the Louvre.

[285] S. Maria dell' Orto.

[286] What is here said about Tintoretto is also true of Michael Angelo.

His sculpture in S. Lorenzo, compared with Greek sculpture, the norm and canon of the perfect in that art, may be called an invasion of the realm of poetry or music.

[287] There are probably not few of my readers who, after seeing this painting in the Ducal Palace, will agree with me that it is, if not the greatest, at any rate the most beautiful, oil picture in existence. In no other picture has a poem of feeling and of fancy, a romance of varied lights and shades, a symphony of delicately blended hues, a play of att.i.tude and movement transitory but in no sense forced or violent, been more successfully expressed by means more simple or with effect more satisfying. Something of the mythopoeic faculty must have survived in Tintoretto, and enabled him to inspire the Greek tale with this intense vitality of beauty.

[288] The first of these pictures is in the Ducal Palace, the other two in the Academy at Venice.

CHAPTER VIII

LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO