The Venetian School of Painting Part 7

_Vincenzo Catena._

Bergamo. Carrara: Christ at Emmaus.

Berlin. Portrait of Fugger; Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.).

Dresden. Holy Family (L.).

London. Warrior adoring Infant Christ (L.); S. Jerome in his Study (L.); Adoration of Magi (L.).

Mr. Benson: Holy Family.

Lord Brownlow: Nativity.

Mond Collection: Madonna, Saints, and Donors (E.).

Paris. Venetian Amba.s.sadors at Cairo.

Venice. Ducal Palace: Madonna, Saints, and Doge Loredan (E.).

Giovanelli Palace: Madonna and Saints.

S. Maria Mater Domini: S. Cristina.

S. Trovaso: Madonna.

Vienna. Portrait of a Canon.

_Marco Basaiti._

Bergamo. The Saviour, 1517; Two Portraits.

Berlin. Pieta; Altarpiece; S. Sebastian; Madonna (E.).

London. S. Jerome; Madonna.

Milan. Ambrosiana: Risen Christ.

Munich. Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.).

Murano. S. Pietro: a.s.sumption.

Padua. Portrait, 1521; Madonna with SS. Liberale and Peter.

Venice. Academy: Saints; Dead Christ; Christ in the Garden, 1510; Calling of Children of Zebedee, 1510.

Museo Correr: Madonna and Donor; Christ and Angels.

Salute: S. Sebastian.

Vienna. Calling of Children of Zebedee, 1515.

_Andrea Previtali._

Bergamo. Carrara: Pentecost; Marriage of S. Catherine; Altarpiece; Madonna, 1514; Madonna with Saints and Donors.

Lochis: Madonna and Saint.

Count Moroni: Madonna and Saints; Family Group.

S. Alessandro in Croce: Crucifixion, 1524.

S. Spirito: S. John Baptist and Saints, 1515; Madonna and four Female Saints, 1525.

Berlin. Madonna and Saints; Marriage of S. Catherine.

Dresden. Madonna and Saints.

London. Madonna and Donor (E.).

Milan. Brera: Christ in Garden, 1512.

Oxford. Christchurch Library: Madonna.

Venice. Ducal Palace: Christ in Limbo; Crossing of the Red Sea.

Redentore: Nativity; Crucifixion.

Verona. Stoning of Stephen; Immaculate Conception.

_N. Rondinelli._

Berlin. Madonna.

Florence. Uffizi: Madonna and Saints.

Milan. Brera: Madonna with four Saints and three Angels.

Paris. Madonna and Saints.

Ravenna. Two Madonnas with Saints.

S. Domenico: Organ Shutters; Madonna and Saints.

Venice. Museo Correr: Madonna; Madonna with Saints and Donors.

Giovanelli Palace: Two Madonnas.

_Bissolo._

London. Mr. Benson: Madonna and Saints.

Mond Collection: Madonna and Saints.

Venice. Academy: Dead Christ; Madonna and Saints; Presentation in Temple.

S. Giovanni in Bragora: Triptych.

Redentore: Madonna and Saints.

S. Maria Mater Domini: Transfiguration.

Lady Layard: Madonna and Saints.

PART II

CHAPTER XIV

GIORGIONE

When we enter a gallery of Florentine paintings, we find our admiration and criticism expressing themselves naturally in certain terms; we are struck by grace of line, by strenuous study of form, by the evidence of knowledge, by the display of thought and intellectual feeling. The Florentine gestures and att.i.tudes are expressive, nervous, fervent, or, as in Michelangelo and Signorelli, alive with superhuman energy. But when looking at pictures of the Venetian School we unconsciously use quite another sort of language; epithets like "dark" and "rich" come most freely to our lips; a golden glow, a slumberous velvety depth, seem to engulf and absorb all details. We are carried into the land of romance, and are fascinated and soothed, rather than stimulated and aroused. So it is with portraits; before the "Mona Lisa" our intelligence is all awake, but the men and women of Venetian canvases have a grave, indolent serenity, which accords well with the slumber of thought.

Up to the beginning of the sixteenth century the painters of Venice had not differed very materially from those of other schools; they had gradually worked out or learned the technicalities of drawing, perspective and anatomy. They had been painting in oils for twenty-five years, and they betrayed a greater fondness for pageant-pictures than was felt in other States of Italy. Florence appoints Michelangelo and Leonardo to decorate her public palace, but no great store is set by their splendid achievements; their work is not even completed. The students fall upon the cartoons, which are allowed to perish, instead of being treasured by the nation. Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio and the band of State painters are appreciated and well rewarded. These men have reproduced something of the lucent transparency, the natural colour of Venice, but it is as if unconsciously; they are not fully aiming at any special effect. Year after year the Venetian masters a.s.similate more or less languidly the influences which reach them from the mainland. They welcome Guariento and Gentile da Fabriano, they set themselves to learn from Veronese or Florentine, the Paduans contribute their chiselled drawing, their learned perspective, their archeological curiosity. Yet even early in the day the Venetians escape from that hard and learned art which is so alien to their easy, voluptuous temperament. Jacopo Bellini cannot conform to it, and his greatest son is ready to follow feeling and emotion, and in his old age is quick to discover the first flavour of the new wine. If Venetian art had gone on upon the lines we have been tracing up to now, there would have been nothing very distinctive about it, for, however interesting and charming Alvise and Carpaccio, Cima and the Bellini may be, it is not of them we think when we speak of the Venetian School and when we rank it beside that of Florence, while Giovanni Bellini alone, in his later works, is not strong enough to bear the burden.

The change which now comes over painting is not so much a technical one as a change of temper, a new tendency in human thought, and we link it with Giorgione because he was the channel through which the deep impulse first burst into the light. We have tried to trace the growth of the early Venetian School, but it does not develop logically like that of Florence; it is not the result of long endeavour, adding one acquisition and discovery to another. Venetian art was peculiarly the outcome of personalities, and it did not know its own mind till the sixteenth century. Then, like a hidden spring, it bubbles irresistibly to the surface, and the spot where it does so is called by the name of a man.

There are beings in most great creative epochs who, with peculiar facility, seem to embody the purpose of their age and to yield themselves as ready instruments to its design. When time is ripe they appear, and are able, with perfect ease, to carry out and give voice to the desires and tendencies which have been straining for expression.

These desires may owe their origin to national life and temperament; it may have taken generations to bring them to fruition, but they become audible through the agency of an individual genius. A genius is inevitably moulded by his age. Rome, in the seventeenth century, drew to her in Bernini a man who could with real power ill.u.s.trate her determination to be grandiose and ostentatious, and, at the height of the Renaissance, Venice draws into her service a man whose sensuous feeling was instilled, accentuated, and welcomed by every element around him.

More conclusively than ever, at this time, Venice, the world's great sea-power, was in her full glory as the centre of the world's commerce and its art and culture. Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route to India in 1498, but the stupendous effect which this was to exert on the whole current of power did not become apparent all at once. Venice was still the great emporium of the East, linked to it by a thousand ties, Oriental in her love of Eastern richness.

It would be exaggerating to say that the Venetians of the sixteenth century could not draw. As there were Tuscans who understood beautiful harmonies of colour, so there were Venetians who knew a good deal about form; but the other Italians looked upon colour as a charming adjunct, almost, one might say, as an amiable weakness: they never would have allowed that it might legitimately become the end and aim in painting, and in the same way form, though respected and considered, was never the princ.i.p.al object of the Venetians. Up to this time Venice had fed her emotional instincts by pageants and gold and velvets and brocades, but with Giorgione she discovered that there was a deeper emotional vehicle than these superficial glories,--glowing depths of colour enveloped in the mysterious richness of chiaroscuro which obliterated form, and hid and suggested more than it revealed.

Giorgione no longer described "in drawing's learned tongue"; he carried all before him by giving his direct impression in colour. He conceives in colour. The Florentines cared little if their finely drawn draperies were blue or red, but Giorgione images purple clouds, their dark velvet glowing towards a rose and orange horizon. He hardly knows what att.i.tudes his characters take, but their chestnut hair, their deep-hued draperies, their amber flesh, make a moving harmony in which the importance of exact modelling is lost sight of. His scenes are not composed methodically and according to the old rules, but are the direct impress of the painter's joy in life. It was a new and audacious style in painting, and its keynote, and absolutely inevitable consequence, was to subst.i.tute for form and for gay, simple tints laid upon it, the quality of chiaroscuro. We all know how the shades of evening are able to transform the most commonplace scene; the dull road becomes a mysterious avenue, the colourless foliage develops luscious depths, the drab and arid plain glows with mellow light, purple shadows clothe and soften every harsh and ugly object, all detail dies, and our apprehension of it dies also. Our mood changes; instead of observing and criticising, we become soothed, contemplative, dreamy. It is the carrying of this profound feeling into a colour-scheme by means of chiaroscuro, so that it is no longer learned and explanatory, but deeply sensuous and emotional, that is the gift to art which found full voice with Giorgione, and which in one moment was recognised and welcomed to the exclusion of the older manner, because it touched the chord which vibrated through the whole Venetian temperament.

And the immediate result was the picture of _no subject_. Giorgione creates for us idle figures with radiant flesh, or robed in rich costumes, surrounded by lovely country, and we do not ask or care why they are gathered together. We have all had dreams of Elysian fields, "where falls not any rain, nor ever wind blows loudly," where all is rest and freedom, where music blends with the plash of fountains, and fruits ripen, and lovers dream away the days, and no one asks what went before or what follows after. The Golden Age, the haunt of fauns and nymphs: there never has been such a day, or such a land: it is a mood, a vision: it has danced before the eyes of poets, from David to Keats and Tennyson: it has rocked the tired hearts of men in all ages: the vision of a resting-place which makes no demands and where the dwellers are exempt from the cares and weakness of mortality. Needless to say, it is an ideal born of the East; it is the Eastern dream of Paradise, and it speaks to that strain in the temperament which recognises that life cannot be all thought, but also needs feeling and emotion. And for the first time in all the world the painter of Castelfranco sets that vague dream before men's eyes. The world, with its wistful yearnings and questionings, such as Leonardo or Botticelli embodied, said little to his audience. Here was their natural atmosphere, though they had never known it before. These deep, solemn tones, these fused and golden lights are what Giorgione grasps from the material world, and as he steeps his senses in them the subject counts but little in the deep enjoyment they communicate. We, who have seen his manner repeated and developed through thousands of pictures, find it difficult to realise that there had been nothing like it before, that it was a unique departure, that when Bellini and t.i.tian looked at his first creations they must have experienced a shock of revelation. The old definite style must have seemed suddenly hard and meagre, and every time they looked on the glorious world, the deep glow of sunset, the mysterious shades of falling night, they must have felt they were endowed with a sense to which they had hitherto been strangers, but which, it was at once apparent, was their true heritage. They had found themselves, and in them Venice found her real expression, and with Giorgione and those who felt his impetus began the true Venetian School, set apart from all other forms of art by its way of using and diffusing and intensifying colour.