GERMAN ART—ALBRECHT DÜRER, 1471-1528.
Albrecht Dürer carries us to a different country and a different race. And he who has been called the father of German painting is thoroughly German, not only in his Saxon honesty, sedateness, and strength, but in the curious mixture of simplicity, subtlety, homeliness, and fantasticalness, which are still found side by side in German genius.
Albrecht Dürer was born at that fittest birth-place for the great German painter, quaint old Nuremberg, in 1471. He was the son of a goldsmith, and one of a family of eighteen children; a home school in which he may have learnt early the noble, manly lessons of self-denial and endurance, which he practised long and well. He was trained to his father's trade until the lad's bent became so unmistakable that he was wisely transferred to the studio of a painter to serve his apprenticeship to art.
When the Nuremberg apprenticeship was completed, Albrecht followed the German custom, very valuable to him, of serving another and a 'wandering apprenticeship,' which carried him betimes through Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy, painting and studying as he went. He painted his own portrait about this time, showing himself a comely, pleasant, and pleased young fellow, in a curious holiday suit of plaited low-bodied shirt, jerkin, and mantle across the shoulder, with a profusion of long fair curls, of which he was said to have been vain, arranged elaborately on each side, the blue eyes looking with frank confidence out of the blonde face. He painted himself a little later with the brave kindly face grown mature, and the wisdom of the spirit shining in the eyes, and weighing on the brows.
On his return from his travels, Albrecht Dürer's father arranged his son's marriage with the daughter of a musician in Nuremberg. The inducement to the marriage seems to have been, on the father's part, the dowry, and on the son's the beauty of the bride. How unhappy the union proved, without any fault of Albrecht's, has been the theme of so many stories, that I am half inclined to think that some of us must be more familiar with Albrecht Dürer's wedded life than with any other part of his history. It seems to me, that there is considerable exaggeration in these stories, for granted that Agnes Dürer was a shrew and a miser, was Albrecht Dürer the man to be entirely, or greatly, at such a woman's mercy? Taking matters at their worst, dishonour and disgrace did not come near the great painter. He was esteemed, as he deserved to be; he had a true friend in his comrade Pirkheimer; he had his art; he had the peace of a good conscience; he had the highest of all consolations in his faith in Heaven. Certainly it is not from Albrecht himself that the tale of his domestic wretchedness has come. He was as manfully patient and silent as one might have expected in a man upright, firm, and self-reliant as he was tender. I do not think it is good for men, and especially for women, to indulge in egotistical sentimentality, and to believe that such a woman as Agnes Dürer could utterly thwart and wreck the life of a man like Albrecht. It is not true to life, in the first place; and it is dishonouring to the man, in the second; for although, doubtless, there are men who are driven to destruction or heart-broken by even the follies of women, these men have not the stout hearts, the loyal spirits, the manly mould of Albrecht Dürer.
But making every allowance for the high colours with which a tale that has grown stale is apt to be daubed, I am forced to admit the inference that a mean, sordid, contentious woman probably did as much as was in her power to harass and fret one of the best men in Germany, or in the world. Luckily for himself, Albrecht was a severe student, had much engrossing work which carried him abroad, and travelled once at least far away from the harassing and galling home discipline. For anything further, I believe that Albrecht loved his greedy, scolding wife, whose fair face he painted frequently in his pictures, and whom he left at last well and carefully provided for, as he bore with her to the end.
In 1506 Albrecht Dürer re-visited Italy alone, making a stay of eight months in Venice, where he formed his friendship with the old Gian Bellini, and where Albrecht had the misfortune to show the proofs and plans of his engravings to the Italian engraver, Raimondi, who engraved Raphael's paintings, and who proved himself base enough to steal and make use of Albrecht Dürer's designs to the German's serious loss and inconvenience.
A little later Albrecht Dürer, accompanied by his wife, visited the Netherlands. The Emperor Maximilian treated the painter with great favour, and a legend survives of their relations:—Dürer was painting so large a subject that he required steps to reach it. The Emperor, who was present, required a nobleman of his suite to steady the steps for the painter, an employment which the nobleman declined as unworthy of his rank, when the Emperor himself stepped forward and supplied the necessary aid, remarking, 'Sir, understand that I can make Albrecht a noble like and above you' (Maximilian had just raised Albrecht Dürer to the rank of noble of the empire), 'but neither I nor any one else can make an artist like him.' We may compare this story with a similar and later story of Holbein and Henry VIII., and with another earlier story, having a slight variation, of Titian and Charles V. The universality of the story shakes one's belief in its individual application, but at least the legend, with different names, remains as an indication of popular homage to genius.
While executing a large amount of work for the great towns and sovereign princes of Germany, some of whom were said to consult the painter on their military operations, relying on his knowledge of mathematics, and his being able to apply it to military engineering and fortification, Albrecht Dürer was constantly improving and advancing in his art, laying down his prejudices, and acquiring fresh ideas, as well as fresh information, according to the slow but sure process of the true German mind, till his last work was incomparably his best.
Germany was then in the terrible throes of the Reformation, and Albrecht Dürer, who has left us the portraits of several of the great Reformers, is believed to have been no uninterested spectator of the struggle, and to have held, like his fellow-painter, Lucas Cranach—though in Albrecht Dürer's case the change was never openly professed—the doctrines of the Reformation.
There is a portrait of Albrecht Dürer, painted by himself, in his later years. (By the way, Albrecht was not averse to painting his own portrait as well as that of his friend Pirkheimer, and of making the fullest claim to his work by introducing into his religious and historical pictures his own figure holding a flag or tablet, inscribed with his name in the quiet self-assertion of a man who was neither ashamed of himself, nor of anything he did.) In that last portrait, Albrecht is a thoughtful, care-worn man, with his fair locks shorn. Some will attribute the change to Agnes Dürer, but I imagine it proceeds simply from the noble scars of work and time; and that when Albrecht Dürer died in his fifty-seventh year, if it were in sourness and bitterness of spirit, as some of his biographers have stated, that sourness and bitterness were quite as much owing to the grievous troubles of his time and country, which so large-minded a man was sure to lay to heart, as to any domestic trouble. Albrecht Dürer was greatly beloved by his own city of Nuremberg, where his memory continues to be cherished. His quaint house still stands, and his tomb bears the motto 'Emigravit,'
Albrecht Dürer's name ranks with the names of the first painters of any time or country, though his work as a painter was, as in the case of William Hogarth, subservient to his work as an engraver. With the knowledge of a later generation to that of the earliest Italian and Flemish painters, Albrecht Dürer had much of their singleness of purpose, assiduity of application, and profound feeling. He had to labour against a tendency to uncouthness in stiff lines and angular figures; to petty elaboration of details; and to that grotesqueness which, while it suited in some respects his allegorical engravings, marred his historical paintings, so that he was known to regret the wasted fantastic crowding and confusion of his earlier work. From the Italians and Flemings he learnt simplicity, and a more correct sense of material beauty. The purity, truth, and depth of the man's spirit, from which ideal beauty proceeds, no man could add to.
Among Albrecht Dürer's greatest paintings are his 'Adoration of the Trinity' at Vienna, his 'Adam and Eve' at Florence, and that last picture of 'The Apostles,' presented by Albrecht Dürer to his native city, 'in remembrance of his career as an artist, and at the same time as conveying to his fellow-citizens an earnest and lasting exhortation suited to that stormy period.' The prominence given to the Bible in the picture, points to it as the last appeal in the great spiritual struggle. With regard to this noble masterly picture, Kugler has written, 'Well might the artist now close his eyes. He had in this picture attained the summit of art; here he stands side by side with the greatest masters known in history.'
But I prefer to say something of Albrecht Dürer's engravings, which are more characteristic of him and far more widely known than his paintings; and to speak first of those two wonderful and beautiful allegories, 'Knight, Death, and the Devil,' and 'Melancolia.' In the first, which is an embodiment of weird German romance as well as of high Christian faith, the solitary Knight, with his furrowed face and battered armour, rides steadfastly on through the dark glen, unmoved by his grisly companions, skeleton Death on the lame horse, and the foul Fiend in person. Contrast this sketch and its thoughtful touching meaning with the hollow ghastliness of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.'
In 'Melancolia' a grand winged woman sits absorbed in sorrowful thought, while surrounded by all the appliances of philosophy, science, art, mechanics, all the discoveries made before and in Albrecht Dürer's day, in the book, the chart, the lever, the crystal, the crucible, the plane, the hammer. The intention of this picture has been disputed, but the best explanation of it is that which regards the woman as pondering on the humanly unsolved and insoluble mystery of the sin and sorrow of life.
In three large series of woodcuts, known as the Greater and the Lesser Passion of the Lord, and the Life of the Virgin, and taken partly from sacred history and partly from tradition, Albrecht Dürer exceeded himself in true beauty, simple majesty, and pathos. Photographs have spread widely these fine woodcuts, and there is, at least, one which I think my readers may have seen, 'The Bearing of the Cross,' in which the blessed Saviour sinks under his burden. In the series of the Life of the Virgin there is a 'Repose in Egypt,' which has a naïve homeliness in its grace and serenity. The woodcut represents a courtyard with a dwelling built in the ruins of an ancient palace. The Virgin sits spinning with a distaff and spindle beside the Holy Child's cradle, by which beautiful angels worship. Joseph is busy at his carpenter's work, and a number of little angels, in merry sport, assist him with his labours. 17
I shall mention only one more work of Albrecht Dürer's, that which is known as the Emperor Maximilian's Prayer Book. This is pen-and-ink sketches for the borders of a book (as the old missals were illuminated), which are now preserved in the Royal Library, Munich. In these little drawings the fancy of the great artist held high revel, by no means confining itself to serious subjects, such as apostles, monks, or even men in armour, but indulging in the most whimsical vagaries, with regard to little German old women, imps, piping squirrels, with cocks and hens hurrying to listen to the melody.
LATER ITALIAN ART—GIORGIONE, 1477-1511—CORREGGIO. ABOUT 1493-1534—TINTORETTO, 1512-1574—VERONESE, 1530-1588.
Giorgio Barbarelli, known as 'Giorgione,—in Italian, 'big,' or, as I have heard it better translated, 'strapping George'—was born at Castelfranco, in Treviso, about 1477, the same year in which Titian was born. Nothing is known of his youth before he came to Venice and studied in the school of Gian Bellini along with Titian.
The two men were friends in those days, but soon quarrelled, and Giorgione's early death completed their separation. Titian was impatient and arrogant; Giorgione seems to have been one of those proud, shy, sensitive men—possibly morbidly sensitive, with whom it is always difficult to deal; but it is recorded of him, as it is not recorded of his great compeer, that Giorgione was frank and friendly as an artist, however moody and fitful he might be as a man.
Giorgione soon became known. According to one account, he painted the façade of the house which he dwelt in, for an advertisement of his abilities as a painter, a device which was entirely successful in procuring him commissions; but unfortunately for posterity, these were frequently to paint other façades, sometimes in company with Titian; grand work, which has inevitably perished, if not by fire, by time and by the sea-damp of Venice, for to Venice Giorgione belonged, and there is no sign that he ever left it.
He had no school, and his love of music and society—the last taste found not seldom, an apparent anomaly, in silent, brooding natures—might tend to withdraw him from his art. He has left a trace of his love for music in his pictures of 'Concerts' and of 'Pastorals,' in which musical performances are made prominent. In Giorgione, with his romantic, idealizing temperament, genre 18 pictures took this form, while he is known to have painted from Ovid and from the Italian tales of his time. He was employed frequently to paint scenes on panels, for the richly ornamented Venetian furniture. Giorgione was not without a bent to realism in his very idealism, and is said to have been the first Italian painter who 'imitated the real texture of stuffs and painted draperies from the actual material.'
Giorgione died at the early age of thirty-three years, in 1511. One account represents him as dying of the plague, others attribute his death to a sadder cause. He is said to have had a friend and fellow-painter who betrayed their friendship, and carried off the girl whom Giorgione loved. Stung to the quick by the double falsehood, the tradition goes on to state that Giorgione fell into despair with life and all it held, and so died.
A portrait of Giorgione is in the Munich Gallery; it is that of a very handsome beardless lad, 'with a peculiar melancholy in the dark glowing eyes.'
Giorgione was, like Titian, grand and free in drawing and composition, and superb in colour. 19 Mrs Jameson has drawn a nice distinction between the two painters as colourists. That the colours of Giorgione 'appear as if lighted from within, and those of Titian from without;' that 'the epithet glowing applies best to Giorgione, that of golden to Titian.'
Giorgione's historic pictures are rare, his sacred pictures rarer still; among the last is a 'Finding of Moses,' now in Milan, thus described by Mrs Jameson: 'In the centre sits the princess under a tree; she looks with surprise and tenderness on the child, which is brought to her by one of her attendants; the squire, or seneschal, of the princess, with knights and ladies, stand around; on one side two lovers are seated on the grass; on the other are musicians and singers, pages with dogs. All the figures are in the Venetian costume; the colouring is splendid, and the grace and harmony of the whole composition is even the more enchanting from the naïveté of the conception. This picture, like many others of the same age and style, reminds us of those poems and tales of the middle ages, in which David and Jonathan figure as preux chevaliers, and Sir Alexander of Macedon and Sir Paris of Troy fight tournaments in honour of ladies' eyes and the "blessed Virgin." They must be tried by their own aim and standard, not by the severity of antiquarian criticism.'
In portraits Giorgione has only been exceeded by Titian. In the National Gallery there is an unimportant 'St Peter the Martyr,' and a finer 'Maestro di Capella giving a music lesson,' which Kugler assigns to Giorgione, though it has been given elsewhere to Titian. The 'refined voluptuousness and impassioned sombreness' of Giorgione's painting have instituted a comparison between him and Lord Byron as a poet.
Correggio's real name was Antonio Allegri, and he has his popular name from his birth-place of Correggio, now called Reggio; although at one time there existed an impression that Correggio meant 'correct,' from the painter's exceedingly clever feats of fore-shortening.
His father is believed to have been a well-to-do tradesman, and the lad is said to have had an uncle a painter, who probably influenced his nephew. But Correggio had a greater master, though but for a very short time, in Andrea Mantegna, who died when Correggio was still a young boy. Mantegna's son kept on his father's school, and from him Correggio might have received more regular instruction. He early attained excellence, and in the teeth of the legends which lingered in Parma for a full century, his genius received prompt notice and patronage. He married young, and from records which have come to light, he received a considerable portion with his wife.
The year after his marriage, when he was no more than six-and-twenty, Correggio was appointed to paint in fresco the cupola of the church of San Giovanni at Parma, and chose for his subject the 'Ascension of Christ;' for this work and that of the 'Coronation of the Virgin,' painted over the high altar, Correggio got five hundred gold crowns, equivalent to £1500. He was invited to Mantua, where he painted from the mythology for the Duke of Mantua. Indeed, so far and wide had the preference for mythological subjects penetrated, that one of Correggio's earliest works was 'Diana returning from the Chase;' painted for the decoration of the parlour of the Abbess of the convent of San Paulo, Parma.
Correggio was a second time called upon to paint a great religious work in Parma—this time in the cathedral, for which he selected 'The Assumption of the Virgin.' A few of the cartoons for these frescoes were discovered thirty or forty years ago, rolled up and lying forgotten in a garret in Parma; they, are now in the British Museum.
In 1533, Correggio, then residing in his native town, was one of the witnesses to the marriage of his sovereign, the Lord of Correggio. In the following year the painter had engaged to paint an altar-piece for an employer, who paid Correggio in advance twenty-five gold crowns, but the latter dying very soon afterwards, in the forty-first year of his age, 1534, his father, who was still alive, was in circumstances to repay the advance on the picture, which had not been painted.
Correggio is said to have been modest and retiring in disposition, and this, together with the fact that, like Giorgione, he did not have a school, has been suggested as the source of the traditions which prevailed so long in Italy. These traditions described the painter as a man born in indigent circumstances, living obscurely in spite of his genius (there is a picture of Correggio's in England, which was said to have been given in payment for his entertainment at an inn), and leading to the end a life of such ill-requited labour, that having been paid for his last picture in copper money, and being under the necessity of carrying it home in order to relieve the destitution of his family, he broke down under the burden, and overcome by heat and weariness, drank a rash draught of water, which caused fever and death.
The story, disproven as it is, is often alluded to still, and remains as a foil to those flattering and courtly anecdotes which I have been repeating of royal and imperial homage paid to Dürer, Titian, and Holbein. I fancy the last-mentioned stories may have grown from small beginnings, and circulated purely in the artist world; but that the former is an utterance of the engrained persuasion of the great world without, that art as a means of livelihood is essentially non-remunerative in the sense of money-getting.
Modest as Correggio may have been, he was not without pride in his art. After looking for the first time on the St Cecilia of Raphael, Correggio is reported to have exclaimed with exultation, 'And I too am a painter.'
He left behind him on his death a son and a daughter, the former living to be a painter of no great name. In the picture of Correggio in the attitude of painting, painted by himself, we see him a handsome spare man with something of a romantic cavalier air, engaged in his chosen art.
Correggio's pictures go to prove that under his seemingly quiet exterior he was a man of the liveliest sensibilities and the keenest perceptions, His pictures, unlike Titian's in their repose, are full of motion and excitement. Correggio is spoken of as a painter who delighted 'in the buoyance of childish glee, the bliss of earthly, the fervour of heavenly love,' whose radiant sphere of art sorrow rarely clouded; but when sorrow did enter, it borrowed from the painter's own quivering heart the very sharpness of anguish. The same authority tells us of Correggio, that he has painted 'the very heart-throbs of humanity.' But it seems as if such a nature, with its self-conscious veil of forced stillness, must have had a tendency to vehemence and excess; and so we hear that Correggio's fore-shortening was sometimes violent, and the energy of his actors spasmodic; thus the cruelly smart contemporary criticism was pronounced on his frescoes of the 'Assumption of the Virgin,' in which legs and arms in wild play are chiefly conspicuous from below, that Correggio had prepared for the Parmese 'a fricassće of frogs.' In addition, the great modern critic, Mr Ruskin, has boldly accused Correggio 'both of weakness and meretriciousness,' and there is this to be said of a nature so highly strung as Correggio's was strung, that it was not a healthily balanced nature.
But if the painter were really inferior in his sense of form and expression to his great predecessors, he was so great in one department, that in it he was held worthy, not only to found the school of Parma, but to be classed with the first four painters of Italy.
That chiarascuro, or treatment of light and shade, in which Lionardo and Andrea Mantegna were no mean proficients, was brought to such perfection by Correggio, that, as Mrs Jameson has sought to illustrate technical expressions, 'you seem to look through. Correggio's shadows, and to see beyond them the genuine texture of the flesh.' In undulating grace of motion, in melting softness of outline, fixed on a canvas, he surpassed all rivals, including Raphael; and this widely attractive quality ('luscious refinement,' Mr Ruskin terms it) in connection with Correggio's ardent, if undisciplined sensibility, has rendered him one of the most valued of painters; his best paintings being highly prized and costly as the easel pictures attributed to Raphael. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell writes that an old Duke of Modena was suspected of having caused Correggio's 'Notte' to be stolen from a church at Reggio, and that the princes of Este were wont to carry 'The Magdalene Reading' with them on their journeys, while the king of Poland kept it under lock and key in a frame of jewelled silver.
Among Correggio's master-pieces, besides his frescoes, there is at Parma his picture called 'Day,' from the broad flood of daylight in the picture (and doubtless in contrast to his famous 'Notte' or 'Night,' in the Dresden Gallery). Here is a Virgin and Child, with St Jerome presenting to them his translation of the Scriptures, and the Magdalene bending to kiss in adoration the feet of the infant Saviour.
In the Dresden Gallery in addition to the 'Notte' are five pictures, one of the marriage of St Catherine as the Church—the bride, espoused with a ring to the infant Saviour, a favourite subject of Italian painters, and a specially favourite subject with Correggio; and another, the Magdalene reading, half shrouded with her flowing hair, so well known by engravings. I must say a few more words of the 'Notte,'—it is a nativity illuminated entirely by the unearthly glory shining from the Child Christ. Virgin and Child are bathed and half lost in the fair radiance, which falls softly on a shepherd and maiden, leaving the rest of the figures, the stalled beasts, and the surroundings of the stable, in dim shadow.
In our National Gallery there are fine specimens of Correggio. There is an 'Ecce Homo': Christ crowned with thorns, holding out his bound hands, with a Roman soldier softening into pity, Pilate hardening in indifference, and the Virgin fainting with sorrow. There are also 'the Virgin with the Basket,' so named from the little basket in front of the picture; and 'a Holy Family;' and there is a highly-esteemed picture from a mythological subject, 'Mercury teaching Cupid to read in the presence of Venus.'
We must return to the Venice of Titian, and see how his successors, with much more of the true painter in them than the fast degenerating scholars of other Italian schools, were mere men, if great men, matched with Titian.
Tintoretto is only Tintoretto or Tintoret because his father was a dyer, and 'Il Tintoretto' is in Italian, 'the little dyer.' Tintoretto's real name was one more in keeping with his pretensions, Jacopo Robusti. He was born in Venice, in 1512, and early fore-shadowed his future career by drawing all kinds of objects on the walls of his father's dye-house, an exercise which did not offend or dismay the elder Robusti, but, on the contrary, induced him to put the boy into the school of Titian, where Tintoretto only remained a short time. Titian did not choose to impart what could be imparted of his art to his scholars, and, in all probability, Tintoretto was no deferential and submissive scholar. There is a tradition that Titian expelled this scholar from his academy, saying of the dyer's son, that 'he would never be anything but a dauber.'
Tintoret was not to be daunted. He lived to be a bold-tempered, dashing man, and he must have been defiant, even in his boyhood, as he was swaggering in his youth, when he set up an academy of his own, and inscribed above the door, 'The drawing of Michael Angelo and the colouring of Titian.' He had studied and taught himself from casts and theories since he left the school of Titian, and then, with worldly wisdom equal to his daring, he commenced his artistic career by accepting every commission, good or bad, and taking what pay he could get for his work; but, unfortunately for him and for the world, he executed his work, as might have been expected, in the same headlong, indiscriminate spirit, acquiring the name of 'Il Furioso' from the rapidity and recklessness of his manner of painting. Often he did not even give himself the trouble of making any sketch or design of his pictures beforehand, but composed as he painted.
Self-confident to presumption, he took for his inspirations the merest impulses, and considerably marred the effect of his unquestionably grand genius by gross haste and carelessness. He was a successful man in his day, as so energetic and unscrupulous a man was likely enough to be, and his fellow-citizens, who saw principally on the surface, 20 were charmed beyond measure by his tremendous capacity for invention, his dramatic vigour, his gorgeous, rampant richness and glare; or, by contrast, his dead dulness of ornament and colouring; and were not too greatly offended by his occasional untruthfulness in drawing and colouring, and the inequality of his careless, slovenly, powerful achievements. Yet even Tintoret's fascinated contemporaries said of him that he 'used three pencils: one gold, one silver, one lead.'
Naturally Tintoretto painted an immense number of pictures, to only three of which, however, he appended his name. These were, 'The Crucifixion,' and 'The Miracle of the Slave,' two of fifty-seven pictures which he painted for the school of St Roch alone, in Venice; the other was the 'Marriage at Cana,' in the church of Santa Maria della Saluto, Venice.
There is an authentic story told of Tintoretto in his age, which is in touching contrast to what is otherwise known of the man. Besides a son, Dominico, who was a painter, Tintoret had a daughter, Marietta, very dear to him, who was also a painter—indeed, so gifted a portrait painter, as to have been repeatedly invited to foreign courts to practise her art, invitations which she declined, because she would not be parted from her father. To Tintoret's great grief, this daughter died as she was thirty years of age, and her father was in his seventy-eighth year. When her end was unmistakably near, the old man took brush and canvas and struggled desperately to preserve a last impression of the beloved child's face, over which death was casting its shadow.
Tintoretto died four years later, in 1594. His portrait is that of a man who holds his head high and resolutely; he has, strange to say, a somewhat commonplace face, with its massive nose, full eye, short curly beard and hail. The forehead is not very broad, but the head is 'long,' as Scotch people say, and they count long-headedness not only an indication of self-esteem, but of practical shrewdness. Tintoret's power was native, and had received little training; it is a proof of the strength of that power that he could not quench it. His faults, as a painter, I have already had to chronicle in the sketch of the man. He was greatest on large canvases, where his recklessness was lost in his strength; and in portraits, where his quickness in seizing striking traits more than equalled that rapidity of conclusion in realizing, and still more notably in classifying, character, which, to say the least, is liable to error.
Even before Tintoretto lived sacred subjects and! art had entirely changed places. In the days of Fra Angelico and the Van Eycks, art was the means by which painters brought before men sacred subjects, to whose design painters looked with more or less of conviction and feeling. By the time that Tintoret painted, sacred subjects were the means by which painters showed their art; means, the design of which was largely lost sight of, and which might be freely tortured and twisted, falsified, well-nigh burlesqued, if, by so doing, painters could better display their originality, skill, and mastery of technicalities. Sacred subjects had become more and more human in the lower sense, and less and less divine. A man who had so little reverence as Tintoret showed for his own higher self, his fellow-men, and his art, would scarcely seem well qualified to take up sacred subjects. But criticism is entirely and hopelessly divided on the question, for while some authorities hold that he made of the awful scene of the Crucifixion a merely historical and decidedly theatrical procession, other authorities maintain that he preserved in that 'great composition' 'repose and dignity, solemnity and reverence.'
Here is M. Charles Blanc, the French art critic's opinion of Tintoret's largest work, seventy-four feet in length and thirty feet in height: The Glory of Paradise, in the great hall or throne-room of the Doge's Palace:—
'If the shadows had not become so black, such a picture would have had something of sublimity; but that sky, without transparency, the lights of which, even, are of a burnt and baked colour, has rather the air of a lit-up Erebus than of a Paradise. Four hundred figures are in motion in this vast enclosure, some naked, others draped, but draped uniformly in a staring red or a hard blue, which form as many spots, in some sort symmetrical. The manner is quick; a little loose, but confident. The models are neither taken from nature nor from the ideal, they are drawn from practice, and are in general only turns of the head, without beauty and without delicacy. The angels are agitated like demons; and the whole—coarse enough in execution as in thought, is imposing nevertheless by mass, movement, and number. It is the striking image of a multitude in the air, a rout in the heavens, or rather in purgatory.'
Here, again, is Mr Ruskin's unequalled estimate of Tintoret's works: 'I should exhaust the patience of the reader if I were to dwell at length on the various stupendous developments of the imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco alone. I would fain join awhile in that solemn pause of the journey into Egypt, where the silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their tremulous lines the alternate folds of fair cloud, flushed by faint crimson light, and lie across the streams of blue between those rosy islands like the white wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the sleep of the disciples among those mossy leaves that lie so heavily on the dead of the night beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and toss fearfully above the motion of the torches as the troop of the betrayer emerges out of the hollows of the olives; or wait through the hour of accusing beside the judgment-seat of Pilate, where all is unseen, unfelt, except the one figure that stands with its head bowed down, pale like the pillar of moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the Godhead, half wrapt in the whiteness of the shroud. Of these and all other thoughts of indescribable power that are now fading from the walls of those neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavour at a future time to preserve some image and shadow more faithfully than by words; but I shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a work of less touching, but more tremendous appeal; the Last Judgment in the church of Santa Maria dell' Orto.'
'By Tintoret only has this unimaginable event been grappled with in its verity; not typically, nor symbolically, but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he has received with Dante and Michael Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned; but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in the adoption of this image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon-dragging of the other; but, seized Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake, that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling like water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes, and caverns, and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God; blinded yet more, as they awake, by the white light of the new heaven, until the great vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment-seat; the Firmament is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats, and falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright clouds are darkened with them as with thick snow; currents of atom life in the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, and higher and higher still, till the eye and thought can follow no farther, borne up, wingless, by their inward faith, and by the angel powers invisible, now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their condemnation.'
There is only one little work, of small consequence, by Tintoretto in the National Gallery, but there are nearly a dozen in the Royal Galleries, as Charles I. was an admirer and buyer of 'Tintorettos.' Two Tintorettos which belonged to King Charles I, are at Hampton Court; the one is 'Esther fainting before Ahasuerus,' and the other the 'Nine Muses.' With another 'Esther' I have been familiar from childhood by an old engraving. I think the subject must have been in some respects congenial to Tintoret, and he has certainly revelled in the sumptuousness of the mighty Eastern tyrant, in royal mantle and ermine tippet, seated on his throne, and stretching his jewelled sceptre to Esther, who is in the rich costume of a Venetian lady of the period, and sinking into the arms of her watchful maids, with a fair baby face, and little helpless hands, having dainty frills round the wrists, which scarcely answer to our notion of the attributes of the magnanimous, if meek, Jewish heroine.
Paul Cágliari of Verona is far better known as Paul Veronese. He was born in Verona in 1530, and was the son of a sculptor. He was taught by his father to draw and model, but abandoned sculpture for the sister art of painting, which was more akin to his tastes, and which he followed in the studio of an uncle who was a fair painter.
Quitting Verona, Paul Veronese repaired to Venice, studying the works of Titian and Tintoret, and settling in their city, finding no want of patronage even in a field so fully appropriated before he came to take his place there. His first great work was the painting of the church of St Sebastian, with scenes from the history of Esther. Whether he chose the subject or whether it was assigned to him, it belonged even more to him than to Tintoret, for Veronese was the most magnificent of the magnificent Venetian painters. From that date he was kept in constant employment by the wealthy and luxurious Venetians. He visited Rome in the suite of the Venetian ambassador in 1563, when he was in his thirty-fourth year, and he was invited to Spain to assist in the decoration of the Escurial by Philip II., but refused the invitation.
Veronese is said to have been a man of kindly spirit, generous and devout. In painting for churches and convents, he would consent to receive the smallest remuneration, sometimes not more than the price of his colours and canvas. For his fine picture now in the Louvre, the 'Marriage of Cana,' he is believed not to have had more than forty pounds in our money. He died when he was but fifty-eight years of age, in 1588. He had married and left sons who were painters, and worked with their father. He had a brother, Benedotto, who was also a painter, and who is thought to have painted many of the architectural backgrounds to Veronese's pictures.
Veronese's portrait, which he has left us, gives the idea of a more earnest and impressionable man than Tintoret. A man in middle age, bald-headed, with a furrowed brow, cheeks a little hollowed, head slightly thrown back, and a somewhat anxious as well as intent expression of face; what of the dress is seen, being a plain doublet with turned-over collar, and a cloak arranged in a fold across the breast, and hanging over the right shoulder like a shepherd's 'maud' or plaid. Looking at the engraving, and hearing of Paul Veronese's amiability and piety, one has little difficulty in thinking of the magnificent painter, as a single-hearted, simple-minded man, neither vain nor boastful, nor masterful save by the gift of genius.
I have called Paul Veronese a magnificent painter, and magnificence is the great attribute of his style; but before going farther into his merits and defects, I should like to quote to you a passage from Mr Ruskin, the most eloquent and dogmatic of art critics, prefacing the passage with the statement that the true lesson which it teaches is particularly needful for women, who, if they love art at all, are apt to regard it chiefly for its sentiment, and to undervalue such proper painter's work, such breadth and affluence and glory of handling, as are to be met with on the canvases of painters like Veronese and Rubens. 'But I perceive a tendency among some of the more thoughtful critics of the day to forget the business of a painter is to paint, and so altogether to despise those men, Veronese and Rubens for instance, who were painters, par excellence, and in whom the expressional qualities are subordinate. Now it is well, when we have strong moral or poetical feeling manifested in painting, to mark this as the best part of the work; but it is not well to consider as a thing of small account the painter's language in which that feeling is conveyed; for if that language be not good and lovely, the man may indeed be a just moralist or a great poet, but he is not a painter, and it was wrong of him to paint.'
It was said of Paul Veronese, that while he had not 'the brilliance and depth of Titian' or the 'prodigious facility' of Tintoret, yet, in some respects, Veronese surpassed both. But he was certainly deficient in a sense of suitability and probability. He, of all painters, carried to an outrageous extent the practice, which I have defended in some degree, of painting sacred and historical subjects as if they had happened in his own day and city. He violated taste and even reason in painting every scene, lofty or humble, sacred or profane, alike, with the pomp of splendour and richness of ornament which were the fashion of the time; but he had a vivid perception of character, and a certain greatness of mind which redeemed his plethora of gorgeousness from monotony or vulgarity.
Veronese is reported to have been far more correct and careful in drawing than was Tintoret, while Veronese's prodigality of colour was a mellowed version of Tintoret's glare or deadness. One of Veronese's best pictures is the 'Marriage of Cana,' painted originally for the refectory of the convent of San Giorgio, Venice, and now in the Louvre. 'It is not less than thirty feet long and twenty feet high, and contains about one hundred and thirty figures, life size. The Marriage Feast of the Galilean citizen is represented with a pomp worthy of "Ormuz or of Ind." A sumptuous hall of the richest architecture; lofty columns, long lines of marble balustrades rising against the sky; a crowd of guests splendidly attired, some wearing orders of knighthood, are seated at tables covered with gorgeous vases of gold and silver, attended by slaves, jesters, pages, and musicians. In the midst of all this dazzling pomp, this display of festive enjoyment, these moving figures, these lavish colours in glowing approximation, we begin after a while to distinguish the principal personages, our Saviour, the Virgin Mary, the twelve Apostles, mingled with Venetian senators and ladies, clothed in the rich costume of the sixteenth century; monks, friars, poets, artists, all portraits of personages existing in his own time; while in a group of musicians he has introduced himself and Tintoretto playing the violoncello, while Titian plays the bass. The bride in this picture is said to be the portrait of Eleanor of Austria, the sister of Charles V, and second wife of Francis I.' 21
Though Veronese is not greatly esteemed as a portrait painter, it so happens that the highly-prized picture of his in our National Gallery, called 'The Family of Darius before Alexander,' is understood to be family portraits of the Pisani family in the characters of Alexander, the Persian queen, &c., &c. Another of Veronese's pictures in the National Gallery is 'The Consecration of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.'
CARRACCI, 1555-1609—GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642—DOMENICHINO, 1581-1641—SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673.
In the falling away of the schools of Italy, and especially of the followers of Michael Angelo and Raphael, into mannerism and exaggeration, fitly expressed in delineation of heathen gods and goddesses, there arose a cluster of painters in the North of Italy who had considerable influence on art.
The Carracci included a group of painters, the founders of the later Bolognese School. Lodovico, the elder of the three, was born at Bologna, 1555. He was educated as a painter, and was so slow in his education, that he received from his fellow-scholars the nickname of 'Il Bue' (the ox). But his perseverance surmounted every obstacle. He visited the different Italian towns, and studied the works of art which they contained, arriving at the conclusion that he might acquire and combine the excellences of each. This combination, which could only be a splendid patch-work without unity, was the great aim of his life, and was the origin of the term eclectic applied to his school. Its whole tendency was to technical excellence, and in this tendency, however it might achieve its end, painting showed a marked decline. As an example of the motives and objects supplied by the school, I must borrow some lines from a sonnet of the period written by Agostino Carracci:
Lodovico opened a school of painting at Bologna, in which he was for a time largely assisted by his cousins. He died 1619.
Agostino Carracci, cousin of Lodovico, was born at Bologna in 1559. His father was a tailor, and Agostino himself began life as a jeweller. He became a painter and an engraver in turn, devoting himself chiefly to engraving. Towards the beginning of the seventeenth century he was with his more famous brother, Annibale, at Rome, where he assisted in painting the Farnese Gallery, designing and executing the two frescoes of Galatea and Aurora with such success, according to his contemporaries, that it was popularly said that 'the engraver had surpassed the painter in the Farnese.' Jealousy arose between the brothers in consequence, and they separated, not before Annibale had perpetrated upon Agostino a small, but malicious, practical joke, which has been handed down to us. Agostino was fond of the society of people of rank, and Annibale, aware of his brother's weakness, took the opportunity, when Agostino was surrounded by some of his aristocratic friends, to present him with a caricature of the two brothers' father and mother, engaged in their tailoring work.
Agostino died at Parma when he was a little over forty, and was buried in the cathedral there, in 1602.
Annibale, Agostino's younger brother, was born in 1560. It was intended by his parents that he should follow their trade and be a tailor, but he was persuaded by his cousin Lodovico to become a painter. After visiting Parma, Venice, and Bologna, he worked with his cousin and teacher for ten years. Annibale was invited to Rome by the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, to decorate the great hall of his palace in the Piazza Farnese, with scenes from the heathen mythology, for which work he received a monthly salary of ten scudi, about two guineas, with maintenance for himself and two servants, and a farther gift of five hundred scudi. It was a parsimonious payment, and the parsimony is said to have preyed on the mind and affected the health of Annibale, and a visit to Naples, where he, in common with not a few artists, suffered from the jealous persecutions of the Neapolitan painters, completed the breaking up of his constitution. He painted, with the assistance of Albani, the frescoes in the chapel of San Diego in San Giacomo degli Spagnole, and pressed upon his assistant more than half of his pay. Annibale's health had already given way, and after a long illness he died, when forty-nine years of age, at Rome, 1609, and was buried near Raphael in the Pantheon.
The merit of the Carracci lay in their power of execution, and in a certain 'bold naturalism, or rather animalism,' which they added to their able imitations, for their pictures are not so much their own, as 'After Titian,' 'After Correggio,' &c. In this intent regard to style, and this perfecting of means to an end, thought and its expression were in a manner neglected. Yet to the Carracci, and their school, is owing a certain studied air of solemnity and sadness in 'Ecce Homos,' and 'Pietás,' which, in proportion to its art, has a powerful effect on many beholders, who prefer conventionality to freedom; or rather, who fail to distinguish conventionality in its traces. Annibale was the most original while the least learned of the Carracci; yet, even of Annibale, it could be said that he lacked enthusiasm in his subjects. His best productions are his mythological subjects in the Farnese Palace. A celebrated picture of his, that of the 'Three Marys' (a dead Christ, the Madonna, and the two other Marys), is at Castle Howard, and has been exhibited at Manchester, and I think also at Leeds. At Manchester it attracted the greatest attention and admiration. I believe this was not only because Annibale Carracci in the 'Three Marys' does attain to a most piteous mournfulness of sentiment, but because such work as that of the Carracci finds readiest acceptance from a general public, which delights in striking, superficial effects. The same reason, in conjunction with the decline of Italian art, may account for the great number of the Carracci school and followers.
Annibale Carracci was one of the first who practised landscape painting and genre pictures, such as 'The Greedy Eater,' as separate branches of art. Two of Annibale's landscapes are in the National Gallery.
Guido Reni, commonly called 'Guido,' was born at Bologna, 1575. His father was a musician, and Guido was intended for the same calling, but finally became a painter and student in the school of the Carracci. He followed Annibale Carracci to Rome, and dwelt there for twenty years. He obtained great repute and favour, but taking offence at some supposed injustice, he left Rome, and settled at last in Bologna, where he established a large school. Though he made great sums of money, which might have enabled him to live in the splendour which he coveted, on account of his addiction to gambling and his grossly extravagant habits, he was constantly in debt, and driven to tax his genius to the utmost, and to sell its fruits for what they would bring, irrespective of what he owed to himself, his art, and to the giver of all good gifts. He died at Bologna, and was buried with much pomp in the church of San Dominico, 1642.
Of Guido we hear that he had three styles: the first, after the vigorous manner of Michael Angelo; the second, in the prevailing ornamental taste of the Rome of his day and the Carracci. This is considered Guido's best style, and is distinguished by its subtle management of light and shade. His third, which is called his 'silvery style,' from its greys, degenerated into insipidity, with little wonder, seeing that at this stage he sold his time at so much per hour to picture-dealers, who stood over him, watch in hand, to see that he fulfilled his bargain, and carried away the saints he manufactured wet from the easel. Such manufactory took him only three hours, sometimes less. His charges had risen from five guineas for a head, and twenty guineas for a whole figure, to twenty times that amount. He painted few portraits, but many 'fancy' heads of saints. Nearly three hundred pictures by Guido are believed to be in existence. Guido's individual distinction was his refined sense of beauty, but it was over-ruled by 'cold calculation,' and developed into a mere abstract conception of 'empty grace' without heart or soul.
His finest work is the large painting of 'Phœbus and Aurora' in a pavilion of the Rospigliosi Palace at Rome. In our National Gallery there are nine specimens of Guido's works, including one of his best 'Ecce Homos,' which belonged to the collection of Samuel Rogers.
Domenico Zampieri, commonly called Domenichino, was another Bolognese painter, and another eminent scholar of the Carracci. He was born in 1581, and, after studying under a Flemish painter, passed into the school of the Carracci. While yet a very young man, Domenichino was invited to Rome, where he soon earned a high reputation, competing successfully with his former fellow-scholar, Guido. Domenichino's 'Flagellation of St Andrew,' and 'Communion of St Jerome,' in payment of which he only received about five guineas; his 'Martyrdom of St Sebastian,' and his 'Four Evangelists,' which are among his masterpieces, were all painted in Rome, and remain in Rome.
Domenichino is said to have excited the extreme hostility of rival painters, and to have suffered especially from the malice of the Neapolitans, when he was invited to work among them. After a cruel struggle Domenichino died in Naples, not without a horrible suspicion of having being poisoned, at the age of sixty, in 1641. One of his enemies—a Roman on this occasion—destroyed what was left of Domenichino's work in Naples.
The painter's fate was a miserable one, and by a coincidence between his fortune and his taste in subjects, he has identified his name with terrible representations of martyrdoms. Kugler writes that martyrdom as a subject for painting, which had been sparingly used by Raphael and his scholars, had come into fashion in Domenichino's time, for 'painters and poets sought for passionate emotion, and these subjects (martyrdoms) supplied them with plentiful food.' Sensationalism is the florid hectic of art's decay, whether in painting or in literature.
Domenichino is accredited with more taste than fancy. He made free use of the compositions of even contemporary artists, while he individualized these compositions. His good and bad qualities are those of his school, already quoted, and perhaps it is in keeping with these qualities that the excellence of Domenichino's works lies in subordinate parts and subordinate characters. There are examples of Domenichino in the National Gallery.
I shall close my long list of the great Italian painters of the past with one who was quite apart from and opposed to the Carracci school, and whose triumphs and failures were essentially his own. Salvator Rosa, born in 1615 near Naples, was the son of an architect. In opposition to his father Salvator Rosa became a painter. Having succeeded in selling his sketches to a celebrated buyer, the bold young Neapolitan started for Rome at the age of twenty years; and Rome, 'the Jerusalem of Painters,' became thenceforth Salvator Rosa's head-quarters, though the character of the man was such as to force him to change his quarters not once or twice only in his life, and thus he stayed some time, in turn, at Naples, Viterbo, Volterra, and Florence. At Volterra the aggressive nature of the painter broke forth in a series of written satires on a medley of subjects—music, poetry (both of which Salvator himself cultivated), painting, war, Babylon, and envy. These incongruous satires excited the violent indignation of the individuals against whom Salvator's wit was aimed, and their efforts at revenge, together with his own turbulent spirit, drove him from place to place.
Salvator Rosa was at Naples 1647, and took part in the riots, so famous in song and story, which made Masaniello, the young fisherman, for a time Captain-General and Master of Naples, when it was, according to law, a Spanish dependency governed by a viceroy. Salvator was in the Compagnia della Morte commanded by Falcone, a battle painter, during the troubles, a wild enough post to please the wild painter, even had he not been in addition a personal adherent of the ruling spirit Masaniello, whom Salvator Rosa painted more than once. After so eventful a life, the painter died peaceably enough in his fifty-ninth year, of dropsy, at Rome, and left a considerable fortune to his only son.
Salvator Rosa was the incarnation of the arrogant, fickle, fierce Neapolitan spirit, and he carried it out sufficiently in an undisciplined, stormy life, without the addition of the popular legend that he had at one time joined a troop of banditti, and indulged in their excesses. The legend seems to have arisen from Salvator Rosa's familiarity with mountain passes, and his love of peopling them appropriately with banditti in action. Salvator Rosa was a dashing battle painter, a mediocre historical painter, and an excellent portrait painter as well as landscape painter. But it is chiefly by the savage grandeur of his mountain or forest landscapes, with their fitting dramatis personæ, that he has won his renown. Mr Ruskin, while he allows Salvator's gift of imagination, denounces him for the reckless carelessness and untruthfulness to nature of his painting. Many of Salvator Rosa's pictures are in the Pitti Palace in Florence, and many are in England.
RUBENS, 1577-1640—REMBRANDT, 1606 OR 1608-1669—TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694—WOUVERMAN, 1620-1668—CUYP, 1605; STILL LIVING, 1638—PAUL POTTER, 1625-1654—CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630.
A long interval elapsed between the Van Eycks and Quintin Matsys, and Rubens; but if Flemish art was slow of growth and was only developed after long pauses, it made up for its slowness and delays by the burst of triumph into which Flemish and Dutch art broke forth in Rubens and his school, in Rembrandt and Cuyp and Ruysdael.
Peter Paul Rubens was born at Siegen in Westphalia, on the day of St Peter and St Paul, 1577. But though Rubens was born out of Antwerp, he was a citizen of Antwerp by descent as well as by so many later associations. His father, John Rubens, a lawyer, an imprudent, thriftless man in character and habits, had been compelled to leave Antwerp in consequence of religious disturbances which broke out there about the time that the northern provinces, more at one and more decided in their union than the southern provinces, established their independence. Rubens spent his early boyhood at Cologne, but on the death of his father when he was ten years of age, his mother, a good and 'discreet' woman, to whom the painter owed much, and confessed his debt, returned with her family to Antwerp. His mother had destined him for his father's profession, but did not oppose her son's preference for art.
After studying under two different artists, and becoming a master in the guild of St Luke, Rubens went to Italy in 1600, when he was a young man of three-and-twenty years of age. He was eight years absent, entering the service of the ducal sovereign of Mantua, being sent by him on a diplomatic mission to Madrid to Philip III, of Spain, visiting on his own account Rome, where he found the Carracci and Guido 22 at the height of their fame, Venice and Genoa, 'leaving portraits where he went.'
With Genoa, its architecture, and its situation, Rubens was specially charmed, but he quitted it in haste, being summoned home to attend the death-bed of his mother, from whom he had parted eight years before; and arriving too late to see her in life. A man of strong feelings in sorrow as in joy, he withdrew into retirement, and resided for his season of mourning in a religious house.
Loving Italy with a painter's enthusiasm, so that to the latest day of his life he generally wrote in Italian, and loved to sign his name 'Pietro Paolo Rubens,' he had intended to return and settle in Mantua, but having been named court painter to the Governess of the Netherlands, Clara Eugenia, and her husband Albert, Rubens had sufficient patriotism and sufficient worldly foresight to induce him to relinquish his idea, and establish himself in his native Antwerp. He was already a man of eminence in his profession, and a man of mark out of it. Go where he would he made friends, and he so recommended himself to his royal patrons by his natural suavity, tact, and sagacity, that he was not only in the utmost favour with them as a right courtly painter, but was employed by them, once and again, on delicate, difficult, private embassies. But it was not only to his patrons that Rubens was endeared, he was emphatically what men call 'a good fellow,' alike to superiors, equals, and inferiors; a frank, honest, bountiful, and generous man. His love of courts and their splendour was the chivalrous homage which a man of his cast of mind paid to the dignity and picturesqueness of high estate.
He married a year after his mother's death, when he was in his thirty-third year. His first wife, Isabella Brant, was a connection of his own (and so was his second wife). He built and painted, in fresco, a fine house in Antwerp, and laid out a pleasant garden, which contained a rotunda, filled with his collection of pictures by the Italian masters, antique gems, &c. &c., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain friends—above all, to paint with might and main in company with his great school, the members of which, like those of Raphael's school where Raphael was concerned, were, for the most part, Rubens' devoted comrades. Counting his work not only as the great object, but the great zest of his life, never did painter receive such sweeping and accumulating commissions, and never, even by Tintoret, were commissions executed with such undaunted, unhesitating expedition.
Withal Rubens frequently left his studio and went abroad, either to act as an unofficial ambassador, or to paint at the special request of some foreign sovereign. Thus he was residing in Paris in 1620, planning for Marie de Medici the series of remarkable pictures which commemorated her marriage with Henry IV. (When I was a little girl, I went occasionally to a country house, the show place of the neighbourhood, where there were copies of this series of Rubens' pictures. I can remember yet looking at them with utter bewilderment, caused by the dubious taste that impelled Rubens to indulge in the oddest mixture of royal personages, high church dignitaries, patron saints, and gods and goddesses.) In 1628 Rubens was in Spain on a mission from his sovereign to her kinsman, Philip IV.; in the following year he was in England, on a service of a similar description to Charles I., from whom, even as Rubens had already received it from King Philip, the painter had the honour of knighthood.
In the mean time Rubens' first wife died, after a union of seventeen years, in 1626; and four years later, in 1630, the painter, when he was a man of fifty years, re-married another connection of his own, Helena Fourment, a girl only in her sixteenth year. Both of his wives were handsome, fair, full-formed Flemish beauties. Elizabeth (in Spanish, Isabella) Brant's beauty was of a finer order than that of her successor, expressing larger capacity of affection and intellect. But on Helena Fourment Rubens doted, while to both women he seems to have been affectionately attached. He has painted them so often, that the face of no painter's wife is so familiar to the art world, and even to the greater world without, as are the faces of these two women, and above all, that of Helena Fourment. He had seven children, who frequently figure in their mothers' portraits. He has left notable portraits of his two sons by his first wife, of his eldest daughter, Clara Eugenia, when eight years of age, and of his daughter Elizabeth, a buxom baby, dressed in velvet and point lace, playing with toys.
After a life of unbroken success and the highest honours, the last distinction conferred on Rubens was, that he was chosen to arrange the gala, and to be the right-hand man who should conduct the Cardinal Infant, the successor of Clara Eugenia, on his first entrance into Antwerp. But the hand of premature disease and death, which not even he could resist, was already on the great painter; his constitution had been undermined by repeated attacks of gout, and he died at the age of sixty years, in 1640. He was the possessor of great wealth at the time of his death, and only a part of his collection, which was then sold, brought so large a sum in those days, as twenty thousand pounds. Rubens' second wife, Helena Fourment, to whom he had been married ten years, survived him, a widow at twenty-six years of age, and married again.
Rubens' portrait is even better known than those of his wives, for, as I have said of Raphael in his popularity, Rubens in his life is the beau-ideal of a painter to the many. The portrait is worthy of the man, with something gallant in the manliness, and with thought tempering what might have been too much of bravado and too much of débonnaireté in the traits. His features are handsome in their Flemish fulness, and match well with hazel eyes, chestnut hair, and a ruddy complexion; his long moustache is turned up, and he wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van Dyck. The great flapping hat, worn alike by men and women, slightly cocked to one side, is the perfection of picturesque head gear. Equally picturesque, and not in the slightest degree effeminate on a man like Rubens, is the falling collar of pointed mechlin, just seen above the cloak draped in large folds.
In his own day Rubens was without a rival as a painter. In a much later day Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced Rubens 'perhaps the greatest master in the mechanical part of the art, the best workman with his tools that ever exercised a pencil.' His consummate excellence lay in his execution and colouring. It is brought as a reproach against his painting, that his noblest characters, even his sacred characters, were but big, brawny, red and white Flemings. His imagination only reached a certain height, and yet, if it were a very earthly Flemish imagination, it could be grandly, as it was always vigorously, earthly and Flemish. At the same time he could be deficient where proportion, and even where all the laws of art, are concerned.
It is right that I should, with regret and shame, say this of Rubens, whose geniality bordered on joviality, and whose age was a grosser age than our own, that he debased his genius by some foul and revolting pictures.
Of the general distinction between Rubens and some of his predecessors I should like to quote Mr Ruskin's passage in his defence: