One needs a magnifying-glass to see everything there is to be seen in the landscape through the window on the left. Besides the city with its towers and walls and the mountains behind, there is a river in the foreground where two little people are sitting in a boat. Observe every tiny stone in the pavement, and every open page of the books on the shelves. Here, too, is breadth in the handling. Hold the book far away from you, so that the detail of the picture vanishes and only the broad masses of the composition stand out. You still have what is essential. The picture is one in which Italian feeling and sentiment blend with Flemish technique and love of little things. There has always been something of a mystery about the picture, and you must not be surprised some day if you hear it asserted that Antonello did not paint it at all. Such changes in the attributions of unsigned paintings are not uncommon.
One of the greatest pioneer artists of the fifteenth century was Andrea Mantegna of Padua in the north of Italy. More than any other painter of his day, he devoted himself to the study of ancient sculpture, even to the extent of sometimes painting in monochrome to imitate the actual marble. Paintings by him, which look like sculptured reliefs, are in the National Gallery; and at Hampton Court is a series of cartoons representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar, in which the conception and the handling are throughout inspired by old Roman bas-reliefs. In other pictures of his, the figures look as though cast of bronze, for he was likewise influenced by the sculptors of his own day, particularly by the Florentine Donatello, one of the geniuses of the early Renaissance. Mantegna's studies of form in sculpture made him an excellent draughtsman. Strangely enough, it was this very severe artist who was, perhaps, the first to depict the charm of babyhood. Often he draws his babes wrapped in swaddling clothes, with their little fingers in their mouths, or else in the act of crying, with their eyes screwed up tight, and their mouths wide open. Such a combination of hard sculpturesque modelling with extreme tenderness of feeling has a charm of its own.
We have now just one more picture of a sacred subject to look at, one of the last that still retains much of the old beautiful religious spirit of the Middle Ages. The painter of it, Sandro Botticelli, a Florentine, in whom were blended the piety of the Middle Ages and the intellectual life of the Renaissance, was a very interesting man, whose like we shall not find among the painters of his own or later days. He was born in 1446, in Florence, the city in Italy most alive to the new ideas and the new learning. Its governing family, the Medici, of whom you have doubtless read, surrounded themselves with a brilliant society of accomplished men, and adorned their palaces with the finest works of art that could be produced in their time. The best artists from the surrounding country were attracted to Florence in the hope of working for the family, who were ever ready to employ a man of artistic gifts.
In such an atmosphere an original and alert person like Botticelli could not fail to keep step with the foremost of his day. His fertile fancy was charmed by the revived stories of Greek Mythology, and for a time he gave himself up to the painting of pagan subjects such as the Birth of Venus from the Sea, and the lovely allegory of Spring with Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces. He was one of the early artists to break through the old wall of religious convention, painting frankly mythological subjects, and he did them in an exquisite manner all his own.
The true spirit of beauty dwelt within him, and all that he painted and designed was graceful in form and beautiful in colour. If, for instance, you look closely into the designs of the necks of dresses in his pictures, you will find them delightful to copy and far superior to the ordinary designs for such things made to-day. In his love of beauty and his keen appreciation of the new possibilities of painting he was a true child of the Renaissance, though he had not the joyous nature so characteristic of the time. Moreover, as I have said, he retained the old sweet religious spirit, and clothed it with new forms of beauty in his sacred paintings. There is something pathetic about many of these—the Virgin, while she nurses the Infant Christ, seems to foresee all the sorrow in store for her, and but little of the joy. The girl angels who nestle around her in so many of his pictures, have faces of exquisite beauty, but in most of them, notwithstanding the fact that they are evidently painted from Florentine girls of the time, Botticelli has infused his own personal note of sadness.
At the end of the fifteenth century, when Botticelli was beginning to grow old, great events took place in Florence. Despite the revival of learning, we are told by historians that the Church was becoming corrupt and the people more pleasure-loving and less interested in the religious life. Then it was that Savonarola, a friar in one of the convents of Florence, all on fire with enthusiasm for purity and goodness, began to awaken the hearts of the people with his burning eloquence, and his denunciations of their worldliness and the deadness of the Church. He prophesied a great outpouring of the wrath of God, and in particular that the Church would be purified and renewed after a quick and terrible punishment. The passion, the conviction, the eloquence of Savonarola for a time carried the people of Florence away, and Botticelli with them, so that he became one of the 'mourners' as the preacher's followers were called.
At this time many persons burnt in great 'bonfires of vanities' all the pretty trinkets that they possessed. But when the prophecies did not literally come true, and the people began to be weary of Savonarola's vehemence, we read that a reaction set in, which afforded a chance for his enemies within the Church, whom he had lashed with his tongue from the pulpit of the cathedral. They contrived to have him tried for heresy and burnt in the market-place of Florence, in the midst of the people who so shortly before had hung on every word that fell from his lips.
This tragedy entirely overwhelmed Botticelli, who thenceforward almost abandoned painting, and gave up his last years to the practices of the religious life. It was at this time, says Mr. Horne, and under the influence of these emotions, in the year 1500, when he was sixty years of age, that he painted the picture here reproduced, as an illustration to the prophecies of Savonarola, and a tribute to his memory. Savonarola had been wont to use the descriptions, in the Book of Revelations, of the woes that were to fall upon the earth before the building of the new Jerusalem, to illustrate his prophecy of the scourge that was to come upon Italy, before the Church became purified from the wickedness of the times. At the top of the picture is written in Greek:
I, Sandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500, during the troubles of Italy, in the half year after the first year of the loosing of the Devil for 3½ years, in accordance with the fulfilment of the 11th chapter of the Revelations of St. John. Then shall the Devil be chained, according to the 12th chapter, and we shall see him trodden down as in the picture.
The Devil which was loosed for three and a half years stood for the stage of wickedness through which Botticelli believed that Florence was passing in 1500. In the bottom corners of the picture you can see minute little devils running away discomfited; otherwise all is pure joy and peace, symbolic of the gladness to come upon Italy when the Church had been purified:
When Life is difficult, I dream
Of how the angels dance in Heaven.
Of how the angels dance and sing
In gardens of eternal spring,
Because their sins have been forgiven....
And never more for them shall be
The terrors of mortality.
When life is difficult, I dream
Of how the angels dance in Heaven....[2]
[Footnote 2: By Lady Alfred Douglas.]
That is what Botticelli dreamed. He saw the beautiful angels in green, white, and red dancing with joy, because of the birth of their Saviour, and into their hands he put scrolls, upon which were written:—'Glory to God in the Highest.' The rest of the verse, 'Peace and goodwill towards men' is on the scrolls of the shepherds, brought by the angel to behold the Babe lying in the manger. The three men, embraced with such eagerness and joy by the three angels in the foreground, are Savonarola and his two chief companions, burnt with him, who, after their long suffering upon earth, have found reward and happiness in heaven.
Such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture, as spiritual in idea as any of the paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli's skill matched his thought. His drawing of the angels in their Greek dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group surpassing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger, nor will you soon see a lovelier Virgin's face than hers. Botticelli had great power of showing the expression in a face, and the movement in a figure. Here the movements may seem overstrained, a fault which grew upon him in his old age; the angel, with the two shepherds on the right, has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically at the Babe, and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence. The artists of the early Renaissance had learnt with so much trouble to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired skill sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors by stiffness.
The way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the Nativity of Christ, is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert van Eyck painted the Three Maries at the Sepulchre. We saw how the latter pictured the event as actually taking place outside Jerusalem. To Botticelli the Nativity of Christ was emblematic of a new and happier life for people in Florence, with the Church regenerated and purified, as Christ would have wished it to be. To him the Nativity was a symbol of purity, so he painted the picture as a commentary on the event, not as an illustration of the Biblical text.
The angels rejoice in heaven as the shepherds upon earth, the devils flee away discomfited, and Savonarola and his companions obtain peace after the tribulations of life. Such was the message of Botticelli in the picture here reproduced.
The original of our next picture is very small, only seven inches square, yet I hope it will instantly appeal to you. The name of the artist, Raphael, is perhaps the most familiar of all the names of the Old Masters, mainly, it may be, because he was the painter of the Sistine Madonna, the best known and best loved of Madonnas.
When Raphael drew and painted this picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' about the year 1500, he was himself like a young knight, at the outset of his short and brilliant career. As a boy he was handsome, gifted, charming. His nature is said to have been as lovely as his gifts were great, and he passed his short life in a triumphant progress from city to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists, princes, and popes. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter living in the town of Urbino, in Central Italy, but Raphael when quite young went to Perugia to study with the painter Perugino, a native of that town.
Perugia stands upon a high hill, like the hill in the background of the picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' only higher, for from it you can overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as Assisi—the home of St. Francis—which lies on the slope of the next mountain. That beautiful Umbrian landscape, in which all the towns look like castles perched upon the top of steep hills, with wide undulating ground between, occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino, and often in those of his pupil Raphael. If you have once seen the view from Perugia for yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination of the young painter. Raphael had a most impressionable mind. It was part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it. The artists of his day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular problem in connection with their art. Michelangelo, a giant in intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece. His sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of figure-painting. He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing. As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are for the most part unfinished.
Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one masterpiece after another. For him the great interest in the aspect of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression of the face. What was fantastic and weird fascinated him. At Windsor are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with gigantic claws. He once owned a lizard, and made wings for it with quicksilver inside them, so that they quivered when the lizard crawled. He put a dragon's mask over its head, and the result was ghastly. The tale gives us a side light on this extraordinary personage. When you are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his strong, yet perplexing personality. The faces in his pictures are wonderful faces, with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden of strange thought. By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light, his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting, till Raphael and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo. Heretofore, Italian painters had been contented to bathe their pictures in a flood of diffused light, but he experimented also with effects of strong light and shade on the face. His landscape backgrounds are an almost unearthly cold grey, and include the strangest forms of rock and mountain. His investigations into several of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which affected in an important degree the work of many later artists.
If Raphael had less originality than Michelangelo or Leonardo, if Leonardo was the first artist to obtain complete mastery over the expression of the face and Michelangelo over the drawing of the figure, Raphael was able to profit at once by whatever they accomplished. Yet never was he a mere imitator, for all that he absorbed became tinged with a magical charm in his fertile brain, a charm so personal that his work can hardly be mistaken for that of any other artist.
Our picture of a 'Knight's Dream' was probably painted while Raphael was under the influence of a master named Timoteo Viti, whose works you are not likely to know, or much care about when you see them. It was just after he had painted it that he came into Perugino's hands.
Although the 'Knight's Dream' is so small, and Raphael was but a boy when he painted it, the picture has the true romantic air, characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance. He does not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it. Yet he chose the competition of these two ideals as the subject of this picture. The Knight, clothed in bright armour and gay raiment, bearing no relation at all to the clothes worn in 1500, rests upon his shield beneath the slight shade of a very slender tree. In his dream there appear to him two figures, both of whom claim his knightly allegiance for life: one, a young and lovely girl in a bright coloured dress with flowers in her hair, tempts him to embrace a life of mirth, of
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,
Nods and Becks and wreathed Smiles.
The other resembles the same poet's
Pensive Nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure.
She holds sword and book, symbols of stern action and wise accomplishment. Which the knight will choose we are not told, perhaps because Raphael himself never had to make the choice. He was too gifted and too fond of work to be tempted from it by anything whatever. Always joyous and always successful, he was able to paint any subject, sacred, profane, ancient, or modern, so long as it was a happy one. He was too busy and too gay to feel pain and sorrow, as Botticelli felt them, and to paint sad subjects. To him the visible world was good and beautiful, and the invisible world lovely and happy likewise. His Madonnas are placid or smiling mothers. The fat and darling babies they hold are indeed divine but not awesome. Yet the extraordinary sweetness of expression, nobility of form, and beauty of colouring in the Madonnas make you almost hold your breath when you look at them.
In the 'Knight's Dream' there is a simple beauty in the pose and grouping of the figures. You can hardly fancy three figures better arranged for the purpose of the subject. There is something inevitable about them, which is the highest praise due to a mastery of design in the art of composition. Raphael's surpassing gift was in fitting beautiful figures into any given space, so that it seems as though the space had been made to fit the figures, instead of the figures to fit the space. You could never put his round Madonnas into a square frame. The figures would look as wrong as in a round frame they look right. If you were to cut off a bit of the foreground in any of his pictures and add the extra piece to the sky, you would make the whole look wrong, whereas perhaps you might add on a piece of sky to Hubert van Eyck's 'Three Maries' without spoiling the effect.
The colouring of the picture, too, is jewel-like and lovely, but the uncoloured drawing is itself full of charm. The grace of line, which was to distinguish all the works of his mature years, is already manifest in this effort of his boyhood. It seems to foretell the sweep of the Virgin's drapery in the Sistine Madonna, and the delightful maze of curves flowing together and away again and returning upon themselves which outline the face, the arms, hands, and draperies of St. Catherine in the National Gallery. You will find it well worth a little trouble to look long and closely at one of Raphael's well-known Madonnas till you clearly see how the composition of all the parts of it is formed by the play of long and graceful curves.
You can see from the drawing of the 'Knight's Dream,' which is hung quite near the painting in the National Gallery, how carefully Raphael thought out the detail of the picture before he began to paint. He seems even to have been afraid that he might not be able to draw it again so perfectly; therefore he placed the drawing over the panel and pricked it through. The marks of the pin are quite clear, and it brings one nearer this great artist to follow closely the process of his work. It makes the young boy genius of 1500 almost seem akin to the struggling boy and girl artists of the present time.
From Perugia Raphael went to Florence, where he painted a number of his most beautiful Madonnas. Then, in 1508, he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. to decorate some rooms in the Vatican Palace. The Renaissance popes were possessed of so great wealth, and spent it to such purpose, that its spending influenced the art of their age. Many of the rooms in the Vatican had been decorated by Botticelli and other good artists of the previous half-century, but already the new pope considered their work out of date and ordered it to be replaced by Michelangelo and Raphael. For nine years Raphael worked at the decoration of the palace, always being pressed, hurried, and even worried by two successive popes who employed him. The wall spaces which he had to fill were often awkwardly broken up with windows and doors, but he easily overcame whatever difficulties were encountered. To succeed apparently without struggle was a peculiar gift granted to Raphael above any other artist of his day. The frescoes painted by him in the Vatican illustrated subjects from Greek philosophy and medieval Church history, as well as from the Old and New Testament. As an illustrator of sacred writ he never attempted that verisimilitude in Eastern surroundings to which Hubert van Eyck leaned, neither was he satisfied with the dress of his own day in which other painters were wont to clothe their sacred characters. The historical sense, which has driven some modern artists to much antiquarian research to discover exactly what Peter and Paul must have worn, did not exist before the nineteenth century. Raphael felt, nevertheless, that the clothes of the Renaissance were hardly suitable for Noah and Abraham, so he invented a costume of his own, founded upon Roman dress, but different from oriental or contemporary clothes. The Scripture illustrations of Raphael most familiar to you may probably be his cartoon designs for tapestry in the South Kensington Museum, which were bought by Charles I. In these you can see what is meant about the clothes, but you will not be surprised at them, because the same have been adopted by the majority of Bible illustrators ever since the days of Raphael. His pictures became so popular that it was thought whatever he did must be right. The dress was a mere detail in his work, but it was easy to copy and has been copied persistently from that day to this. It is curious to think that the long white robes, which Christ wears in the illustrations of our present-day Sunday School books and other religious publications, are all due to imitation of Raphael's designs.
The first room he finished for Julius II. was so rich in effect and beautiful in colour that the Pope could scarcely wait for more rooms as fine. Raphael had to call in a large number of assistants to enable him to cover the walls fast enough to please the Pope, and the quality of the work began to deteriorate. The uneven merit of his frescoes foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility and power. But in his panel pictures, when he was not hurried, his work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death.
Raphael was thirty-seven when he died in 1520, and very far from coming to the end of his powers of learning. Each picture that he painted revealed to him new difficulties to conquer, and new experiments to try, in his art. We seem compelled to think that had he lived and laboured for another score of years, the history of painting in Italy might have been different. In Rome and Florence no successor attempted to improve upon his work. His pupils and assistants were more numerous than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of his facility of drawing and painting they were contented. None of them had Raphael's genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any personal note. It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write beautifully and then had had little to say.
Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael. Several of his pupils were artists of ability, and lived to carry on his traditions of painting in the north of Italy. Leonardo himself had been so erratic, produced so little, and so few of his pictures survive, that many know him best in his pupils' work, or through copies and engravings of his great 'Last Supper'—a picture that became an almost total wreck upon the walls of the Refectory in Milan, for which it was painted. His influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great, so that during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not show a likeness to the work of Leonardo. He had created a type of female beauty all his own. The face will impress itself upon your memory the first time you see it, whether in a picture by Leonardo or in one by a pupil. You can see it in the National Gallery in the great 'Madonna of the Rocks,' and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House. It is not a very beautiful face, but it haunts the memory, and the Milanese artists of Leonardo's day never threw off their recollection of it.
With far less power than Leonardo, one of his imitators, Bernardino Luini, painted pictures of such charm and simplicity that almost everyone finds them delightful. If you could see his picture of the angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red, through the air to her last resting-place upon the hill, you would feel the beauty and peace of his gentle nature revealed in his art. But the spell of Leonardo vanished with the death of those who had known him in life. The last of his pupils died in 1550, and with him the Leonardo school of painting came to an end.
There is one more painter belonging to the full Renaissance too famous to remain entirely unmentioned. This is Correggio, a painter affected also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo, but individual in his vision and his work. He passed his life in Parma, in the north of Italy, inheriting a North Italian tradition, and hearing only echoes of the world beyond. His canvases are thronged with fair shapes, pretty women and dancing children, ethereally soft and lovely. But it is in his native town that the angels soar aloft with the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral, and the children frolic on the walls of the convent. These are his masterpieces you would like best.
In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the Renaissance was drawing to an end. The great central epoch may be said to have terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and Raphael in 1520. But we have said nothing yet of Venice, where, in 1520, artists whose visions and whose record of them were to be as wonderful as those of Botticelli and Raphael, were as yet sleeping in their cradles.
A visit to Venice is one of the joys which perhaps few of us have yet experienced. But whether we have been there or not, we all know that the very sound of her name is enchanting for those who are fresh from her magic—her sunrises and sunsets unmatched for colour, and her streets for silence.
The Venetians were a proud and successful people, wealthier by virtue of their great sea-trade than the citizens of Florence or of any other town in Italy; their foremost men lived in great high-roomed palaces, richly furnished, and decorated with pictures of a sumptuous pageantry. But the Venetians were not merely a luxurious people. The poetry of the lagoons, and the glory of the sunset skies, imparted to their lives the wealth of a rare romance. Even in Venice to-day, now that the steamers have spoilt the peace of the canals and the old orange-winged sailing-boats no longer crowd against the quays, the dreamy atmosphere of the city retains its spell.
Few artists ever felt and expressed this atmosphere better than Giorgione, the painter of the first of our Venetian pictures. He was one of the great artists of the Renaissance who died young, ten years before Raphael, but their greatness is scarcely comparable. Like Raphael, Giorgione was precocious, but unlike him he painted in a style of his own that from the very beginning owed little to any one else. He saw beauty in his own way, and was not impelled to see it differently by coming into contact with other artists, however great. Unlike Raphael, he was not a great master of the art of composition. In the little picture before us the grouping of the figures is not what may be called inevitable, like that in the 'Knight's Dream.' It seems as though one day when Giorgione was musing on the beauties of the world, and the blemishes of life, even life in Venice, he thought of some far-off time beyond the dawn of history when all men lived in peace. The ancient Greeks called this perfect time the 'Golden Age' of the world. In many ways their idea of it tallies with the description of the Garden of Eden, and they were always contrasting with it the 'Iron Age' in which they thought they lived, as the Hebrews contrasted the life of Adam and Eve in the garden with their own. As the fancy flashed across Giorgione's mind, perchance he saw some just king of whom his subjects felt no fear seated upon a throne like this. A dreamy youth plays soft music to him, and another hands him flowers and fruit. Books lie strewn upon the steps, and a child stands in a reverent attitude before him. Wild and domestic animals live together in harmony; the ground is carpeted with flowers; all is peaceful. Such a subject suited the temperament of Giorgione, and he painted it in the romantic mood in which it was conceived. Nothing could be further from everyday life than this little scene. It has the unlaboured look that suits such an improvised subject. Of course no one knows for certain that this is a picture of the Golden Age, and you may make up any story you like about it for yourselves. That is one of the charms of the picture. It has been said that the throned one is celebrating his birthday, and that his little heir is reciting him a birthday ode accompanied by music. You may believe this if you like, but how do you then account for the leopard and the peacock living in such harmony together?
Giorgione painted a few sacred pictures and many mythological scenes, besides several very beautiful portraits of dreamy-looking poets and noblemen. But even when he illustrated some well-known tale, he did not care to seize upon the dramatic moment that gives the crisis of the story, as Giotto would have done, and as the painter of our next picture does. Violent action did not attract him. Whatever the subject, if it were possible to group the figures together at a moment when they were beautifully doing nothing, he did so. But he liked still more to paint ideal scenes from his own fancy, where young people sit in easy attitudes upon the grass, conversing for an instant in the intervals of the music they make upon pipes and guitar. He was the first artist, so far as I know, to paint these half real, half imaginary scenes, of which our picture may be one. In all of them landscape bears an important part, and in some the background has become the picture and completely subordinated the figures. In this little 'Golden Age' the landscape is quiet in tone, tinged with melancholy, romantic, to suit the mood of the figures. Its colouring, though rich, is subdued, more like the tints of autumn than the fresh hues of spring. The Venetians excelled in their treatment of colour. They lived in an uncommon world of it. Giorgione saw his picture in his mind's eye as a blaze of rich colour; he did not see the figures sharply outlined against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael's 'Knight's Dream.' That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard II. diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione's eye outline was nothing without colour and light and shade. The body of the King upon the throne in our picture is massed against the background, but there is no definite outline to divide it from the tree behind. In this respect Giorgione was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures of a still later time.
Giorgione was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague in 1510, the same year as Botticelli. His master, Giovanni Bellini, who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great Titian, his fellow-pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century or more.
Titian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art. His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgione, except during the short space of time when he painted under the spell of his brother artist. It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between Titian's early and Giorgione's late work. Titian perhaps had the greater intellect. Giorgione's pictures vary according to his mood, while Titian's express a less changeable personality. In spite of his youth, Giorgione made a profound impression upon all the artists of his time. They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy mood. It was almost as though Giorgione had absorbed the romance of Venice into his pictures, so that for a time no Venetian painter could express Venetian romance except in Giorgione's way.
But in 1518, eight years after Giorgione's death, another great innovating master was born at Venice, Tintoret by name, who in his turn opened new visions of the world to the artists of his day. While painting in the rest of Italy was becoming mannered and sentimental, lacking in power and originality, Tintoret in Venice was creating masterpieces with a very fury of invention and a corresponding swiftness of hand. He was his own chief teacher. Outside his studio he wrote upon a sign to inform or attract pupils—'The design of Michelangelo and the colouring of Titian.' Profound study of the works of these two masters is manifest in his own. Like Michelangelo he worked passionately rather than with the sober competence of Titian. His thronging visions, his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures. His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale. He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance had deviated but little from it. In Tintoret the freedom of the Renaissance reached its height. For him tradition had no fetters. When he painted a picture of Paradise for the Doge's Palace it measured 84 by 34 feet, and contained literally hundreds of figures. His imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a figure. New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush in exhaustless multitude.
It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret's most famous works, still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which they were painted, or in which they have been brought together. But the National Gallery is fortunate in possessing one relatively small canvas of his which shows some of his finest qualities. The subject of St. George slaying the dragon was not a new one. It had been painted by Raphael and by several of the earlier Venetian painters, but Tintoret's treatment of it was all his own. In the earlier pictures, the princess, for whose sake St. George fights the dragon, was a little figure in the background fleeing in terror. St. George occupied the chief place, as he does upon the back of our gold sovereigns, where the princess has been left out altogether. Tintoret makes her flee, but she is running towards the spectator, and so, in her flight, stands out the most conspicuous figure. One of the victims that the dragon has slain lies behind her. In the distance St. George fights with all his might against the powers of evil, whilst 'the splendour of God' blazes in the sky. There is a vividness and power about the picture that proclaims the hand of Tintoret. In contrast to Giorgione he liked to paint figures in motion, yet he was as typical an outcome of Venetian romance as the earlier painter. Nothing could be more like a fairy-tale than this picture. It was no listless dreamer that painted it, but one with a gorgeous imagination and yet a full knowledge of the world, enabling him to give substance to his visions. Tintoret's stormy landscapes are as beautiful in their way as Giorgione's dreamy ones, and each carries out the mood of the rest of the picture. This one is full of power, mystery, and romance. Tintoret had modelled his colouring upon Titian and was by nature a great colourist, but too often he used bad materials that have turned black with the lapse of years. In this picture you see his colour as it was meant to be, rich, and boldly harmonious. The vivid red and blue of the princess's clothes are a daring combination with the brilliant green of the landscape, but Tintoret knew what he was doing, and the result is superb. With his death in 1594 the best of Venetian painting came to an end.
There were as many excellent painters in the fairy city as there had been in Florence; contemporaries of Giovanni Bellini (who, in his early years, worked in close companionship with Mantegna, his brother-in-law), as well as contemporaries of Titian and Tintoret. The painter Veronese, for instance, died a few years before Tintoret. For pomp and pageantry his great canvases are eminent. Standing in some room of the Doge's Palace, decorated entirely by his hand, we are carried back to the time when Venice was Queen of the Seas, unrivalled for magnificence and wealth. He was the Master of Ceremonies, before whom other painters of pomps and vanities pale. Gorgeous colouring is what all these Venetian painters had in common. We see it in the early days when Venetian art was struggling into existence. In her art, as in her skies and waters, we are overwhelmed by a vision of colour unsurpassed.
We have now touched on a few prominent points in the history of painting in Italy from its early rise in Florence with Giotto; through its period of widespread excellence in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, when Raphael, Giorgione, Michelangelo, and Leonardo were all painting masterpieces in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan at the same moment; to its final blaze of sunset grandeur in Venice. It is time to return to the north of Europe. In the next chapter we will try to gain a few glimpses of the progress of painting in Germany, Holland, Flanders, and our own country.
The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world which could not long remain confined to Italy. There were then, as now, roads over the passes of the Alps by which merchants and scholars were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes of thought stirred in the south.
In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the art of the north. Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent; so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events in wonderful detail. They were a strictly practical people whose painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously minute and veracious. But they were not a handsome race, and their models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came handiest and by no means the best looking. Thus the figures in their pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of vigour, truth, and skill.
When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of Raphael, in whom grace was native, they fell in love with his work and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did. But to them grace was not God-given, and in their attempt to achieve it, their pictures became sentimental and postured, and the naïve simplicity and everyday truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished. The influence of the Van Eycks had not been confined to Flanders. Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected. They learnt the new technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eycks in the fifteenth century. Like them, too, they discarded gold backgrounds and tried to paint men and women as they really looked, instead of in the old conventional fashion of the Middle Ages. Schools of painting grew up in several of the more important German towns, till towards the end of the fifteenth century two German artists were born, Albert Dürer at Nuremberg in 1471, and Hans Holbein the younger at Augsburg in 1497, who deserve to rank with the greatest painters of the time in any country.
Dürer is commonly regarded as the most typically German of artists, though his father was Hungarian, and as a matter of fact he stands very much alone. His pictures and engravings are 'long, long thoughts.' Every inch of the surface is weighted with meaning. His cast of mind, indeed, was more that of a philosopher than that of an artist. In a drawing which Dürer made of himself in the looking-glass at the age of thirteen, we see a thoughtful little face gazing out upon the world with questioning eyes. Already the delicacy of the lines is striking, and the hair so beautifully finished that we can anticipate the later artist whose pictures are remarkable for so surprising a wealth of detail. The characteristics of the Flemish School, carefulness of workmanship and indifference to the physical beauty of the model, to which the Italians were so sensitive, continued in his work. For thoroughness his portraits can be compared with those of John van Eyck. In the National Gallery his father lives again for us in a picture of wonderful power and insight.
Dürer was akin to Leonardo in the desire for more and yet more knowledge. Like him he wrote treatises on fortifications, human proportions, geometry, and perspective, and filled his sketchbooks with studies of plants, animals, and natural scenery. His eager mind employed itself with the whys and wherefores of things, not satisfied with the simple pleasure that sight bestows. In his engravings, even more than in his pictures, we ponder the hidden meanings; we are not content to look and rejoice in beauty, though there is much to charm the eye. His problems were the problems of life as well as the problems of art.
The other great artist of Germany, Hans Holbein the younger, was the son of Hans Holbein the elder, a much esteemed painter in Augsburg. This town was on the principal trade route between Northern Italy and the North Sea, so that Venetians and Milanese were constantly passing through and bringing to it much wealth and news of the luxury of their own southern life. As a result the citizens of Augsburg dressed more expensively and decorated their houses more lavishly than did the citizens of any other town in Germany. After a boyhood and youth spent at Augsburg, Holbein removed to Basle. He was a designer of wood-engravings and goldsmiths work and of architectural decoration, besides being a painter. In those days of change in South Germany, artists had to be willing to turn their hands to any kind of work they could get to do. North of the Alps, where the Reformation was upsetting old habits, an artist's life was far from being easy. Reformers made bonfires of sacred pictures and sculptured wooden altar-pieces. Indeed the Reformation was a cruel blow to artists, for it took away Church patronage and made them dependent for employment upon merchants and princes. Except at courts or in great mercantile towns they fared extremely ill. Altar-pieces were rarely wanted, and there were no more legends of saints to be painted upon the walls of churches.
The demand for portraiture, on the other hand, was increasing, whilst the growth of printing created a new field for design in the preparation of woodcuts for the illustration of books. Thus it came to pass that the printer Froben, at Basle, was one of the young Holbein's chief patrons. We find him designing a wonderful series of illustrations of The Dance of Death, as well as drawing another set to illustrate The Praise of Folly, written by Erasmus, who was then living in Basle and frequenting the house of Froben. Erasmus was a typical scholar of the sixteenth century, belonging rather to civilized society as a whole than to any one country. He moved about Europe from one centre of learning to another, alike at home in educated circles in England, Flanders, and Germany. He had lived for some time in England and knew that there were men there with wealth who would employ a good painter to paint their portraits if they could find one. Erasmus himself sat to Holbein, and sent the finished portrait as a present to his friend Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England.
In England, owing to the effects of the Wars of the Roses, good painters no longer existed. A century of neglect had destroyed English painting. Henry VIII., therefore, had to look to foreign lands for his court painter, and where was he to come from? France was the nearest country, but the French King was in the same predicament as Henry. He obtained his painters from Italy, and at one time secured the services of Leonardo da Vinci; but Italy was a long way off and it would suit Henry better to get a painter from Flanders or Germany if it were possible. So Erasmus advised Holbein to go to England, and gave him a letter to Sir Thomas More. On this first visit in 1526, he painted the portraits of More and his whole family, and of many other distinguished men; but it was not till his second visit in 1532 that he became Henry VIII.'s court painter. In this capacity he had to decorate the walls of the King's palaces, design the pageantry of the Royal processions, and paint the portraits of the King's family. Although Holbein could do and did do anything that was demanded of him, what he liked best was to paint portraits. Romantic subjects such as the fight of St. George and the dragon, or an idyll of the Golden Age, little suited the artistic leanings of a German. To a German or a Fleming the world of facts meant more than the world of imagination; the painting of men and women as they looked in everyday life was more congenial to them than the painting of saints and imaginary princesses.
But how unimportant seems all talk of contrasting imagination and reality when we see them fused together in this charming portrait of Edward, the child Prince of Wales. It belongs to the end of the year 1538, when he was just fifteen months old, and the imagination of Holbein equipped him with the orb of sovereignty in the guise of a baby's rattle. It is in the coupling of distant kingship and present babyhood that the painter works his magic and reveals his charm.