A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools

35. BACCHUS AND ARIADNE

Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See 4.

A picture which is at once a school of poetry and a school of art – "in its combination of all the qualities which go to make a great work of art possibly the finest picture in the world" (Poynter). It is a translation on canvas of the scene described in Catullus, where Bacchus, the wine-god, returning with his revel rout from a sacrifice, finds Ariadne on the seashore, after she had been deserted by Theseus, her lover. Bacchus no sooner sees her than he is enamoured and determines to make her his bride —

Bounding along is blooming Bacchus seen,With all his heart aflame with love for thee,Fair Ariadne! and behind him, see,Where Satyrs and Sileni whirl along,With frenzy fired, a fierce tumultuous throng…There some wave thyrsi wreathed with ivy, hereSome toss the limbs of a dismembered steer…Others with open palms the timbrel smite,Or with their brazen rods make tinklings light. Carmen lxiv.: Sir T. Martin's translation.

Nothing can be finer than the painter's representation of Bacchus and his rout: there is a "divine inebriety" in the god which is the very "incarnation of the spirit of revelry." "With this telling of the story," says Charles Lamb (Essay on Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art), "an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud… But Titian has recalled past time, and made it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, – as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant, her soul undistracted from Theseus, Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian." But though as yet half unconscious, Ariadne is already under her fated star: for above is the constellation of Ariadne's crown – the crown with which Bacchus presented his bride. And observe in connection with the astronomical side of the allegory the figure in Bacchus's train with the serpent round him: this is the serpent-bearer (Milton's "Orphiucus huge") translated to the skies with Bacchus and Ariadne. Notice too another piece of poetry: the marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne took place in the spring, Ariadne herself being the personification of its return, and Bacchus of its gladness; hence the flowers in the foreground which deck his path.

The picture is as full of the painter's art as of the poet's. Note first the exquisite painting of the vine leaves,67 and of the flowers in the foreground, as an instance of the "constant habit of the great masters to render every detail of their foreground with the most laborious botanical fidelity": "The foreground is occupied with the common blue iris, the aquilegia, and the wild rose (more correctly the Capparis spinosa); every stamen of which latter is given, while the blossoms and leaves of the columbine (a difficult flower to draw) have been studied with the most exquisite accuracy." But this detail is sought not for its own sake, but only so far as is necessary to mark the typical qualities of beauty in the object. Thus "while every stamen of the rose is given because this was necessary to mark the flower, and while the curves and large characters of the leaves are rendered with exquisite fidelity, there is no vestige of particular texture, of moss, bloom, moisture, or any other accident, no dewdrops, nor flies, nor trickeries of any kind; nothing beyond the simple forms and hues of the flowers, even those hues themselves being simplified and broadly rendered. The varieties of aquilegia have in reality a grayish and uncertain tone of colour, and never attain the purity of blue with which Titian has gifted his flower. But the master does not aim at the particular colour of individual blossoms; he seizes the type of all, and gives it with the utmost purity and simplicity of which colour is capable." A second point to be noticed is the way in which one kind of truth has often to be sacrificed in order to gain another. Thus here Titian sacrifices truth of aerial effect to richness of tone – tone in the sense, that is, of that quality of colour which makes us feel that the whole picture is in one climate, under one kind of light, and in one kind of atmosphere. "It is difficult to imagine anything more magnificently impossible than the blue of the distant landscape; impossible, not from its vividness, but because it is not faint and aerial enough to account for its purity of colour; it is too dark and blue at the same time; and there is indeed so total a want of atmosphere in it, that, but for the difference of form, it would be impossible to tell the mountains intended to be ten miles off, from the robe of Ariadne close to the spectator. Yet make this blue faint, aerial, and distant; make it in the slightest degree to resemble the tint of nature's colour; and all the tone of the picture, all the intensity and splendour, will vanish on the instant" (Modern Painters, vols. i., xxvii., xxx. (Preface to the Second Edition), pt. i. sec. ii. ch. i. § 5, pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. i. § 15; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. ix. § 18; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 31; Arrows of the Chace, i. 58). We may notice lastly what Sir Joshua Reynolds points out (Discourse viii.), that the harmony of the picture – that wonderful bringing together of two times of which Lamb speaks above, is assisted by the distribution of colours. "To Ariadne is given (say the critics) a red scarf, to relieve the figure from the sea, which is behind her. It is not for that reason alone, but for another of much greater consequence; for the sake of the general harmony and effect of the picture. The figure of Ariadne is separated from the great group, and is dressed in blue, which, added to the colour of the sea, makes that quantity of cold colour which Titian thought necessary for the support and brilliancy of the great group; which group is composed, with very little exception, entirely of mellow colours. But as the picture in this case would be divided into two distinct parts, one half cold and the other warm, it was necessary to carry some of the mellow colours of the great group into the cold part of the picture, and a part of the cold into the great group; accordingly, Titian gave Ariadne a red scarf, and to one of the Bacchantes a little blue drapery."

This famous picture was a commission from the Duke Alfonso I. of Ferrara. There were great delays in its delivery, the Duke and his agents resorting alternately to threats and cajolery in order to extract the promised canvas from the painter. Among other excuses Titian said he had no canvas for it. The Duke supplied the canvas, and sent at the same time a frame. But the picture did not come. Ultimately Titian took it with him to Ferrara in 1522, and finished it there. He seems to have been engaged on it, off and on, for some three years. The picture subsequently passed into the Aldobrandini collection at Rome, from which it was purchased for an English collector in 1806. Twenty years later it was acquired by the National Gallery.

36. A LAND STORM

Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See 31.

The one gleam of light breaking through the clouds falls on the watch tower of a castle, perched on a rock – "a stately image of stability," where all things else are bent beneath the power of the storm. The spirit of the picture is, however, better than its execution. Take, for instance, the clouds. They are mere "massive concretions of ink and indigo, wrung and twisted very hard, apparently in a vain effort to get some moisture out of them" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. iv. § 6). In the tree forms, again, Ruskin sees a concentration of errors. "Gaspard Poussin, by his bad drawing, does not make his stem strong, but his tree weak; he does not make his gust violent, but his boughs of Indian-rubber" (for details of this criticism see ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. §§ 12, 13).

37. See under 7

38. THE ABDUCTION OF THE SABINE WOMEN

Rubens (Flemish: 1577-1640).

Peter Paul Rubens, born on the festival of Saints Peter and Paul (hence his Christian name), is the chief glory of the Flemish School, and one of the great masters of the world. It is impossible to walk round any gallery where there are good specimens of his work and not to be impressed at once with his power. Here, one feels, is a strong man, who knew what he wanted to paint, and was able to paint it. Whatever moral or poetical feelings he had or had not, he was at any rate master of the painter's language,68 and this language is itself "so difficult and so vast, that the mere possession of it argues the man is great, and that his works are worth reading." "I have never spoken," says Ruskin elsewhere, "and I never will speak of Rubens but with the most reverential feeling; and whatever imperfections in his art may have resulted from his unfortunate want of seriousness and incapability of true passion, his calibre of mind was originally such that I believe the world may see another Titian and another Raphael, before it sees another Rubens." Rubens affords, in fact, "the Northern parallel to the power of the Venetians." Like the Venetians, too, he is a great colourist. The pictures by the later Northern painters which here hang around his are dark and gloomy; his are all bright and golden. He is like Paul Veronese, too, in his "gay grasp of the outside aspects of the world."69 His pictures in this Gallery embrace a wide range of subjects – some peaceful, others tumultuous – some religious, others profane, but over them all is the same gay glamour, "Alike, to Rubens, came subjects of tumult or tranquillity, of gaiety or terror; the nether, earthly, and upper world were to him animated with the same feeling, lighted by the same sun; he dyed in the same lake of fire the warp of the wedding-garment or of the winding-sheet; swept into the same delirium the recklessness of the sensualist and rapture of the anchorite; saw in tears only their glittering, and in torture only its flush." A fourth characteristic, which also cannot fail to be perceived in a general survey of Rubens's pictures in the Gallery, remains to be noticed. In all his exuberant joyousness is a strain of coarseness, "a want of feeling for grace and mystery." "There is an absence everywhere of refinement and delicacy, a preference everywhere for abundant and excessive types." He would have agreed, one may think, with the saying of Blake (in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell), "exuberance is beauty," – Madonnas, goddesses, Roman matrons, have all alike a touch of grossness. Rubens, says Fromentin, "is very earthy, more earthy than any among the masters whose equal he is, but the painter comes to the aid of the draughtsman and the thinker, and sets them free." To like effect Heine speaks of "the colossal good humour of that Netherlands Titan, the wings of whose spirit were so strong that they bore him up to the sun, in spite of the hundredweights of Dutch cheese hanging to his legs."

It is instructive to notice how the art of Rubens was characteristic of the circumstances of his life and time. In the first place, though he travelled in many lands, Rubens remained to the end a Fleming, every inch of him.70 "A man long trained to love the monk's visions of Fra Angelico, turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of Rubens which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten that while Angelico prayed and wept in his olive shade, there was different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders; – wild seas to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful breeding of stout horses and fat cattle; close setting of brick walls against cold winds and snow; much hardening of hands and gross stoutening of bodies in all this; gross jovialities of harvest homes and Christmas feasts which were to be the reward of it; rough affections, and sluggish imaginations; fleshy, substantial, iron-shod humanities, but humanities still; humanities which God had his eye upon, and which won, perhaps, here and there, as much favour in his sight as the wasted aspects of the whispering monks of Florence. (Heaven forbid it should not be so, since the most of us cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and reapers still.) And are we to suppose there is no nobility in Rubens's masculine and universal sympathy with all this, and with his large human rendering of it, Gentleman though he was, by birth, and feeling, and education, and place; and, when he chose, lordly in conception also? He had his faults, perhaps great and lamentable faults, though more those of his time and his country than his own; he has neither cloister breeding nor boudoir breeding, and is very unfit to paint either in missals or annuals; but he has an open sky and wide-world breeding in him, that we may not be offended with, fit alike for king's court, knight's camp, or peasant's cottage." It is thus that Rubens was a child of Flanders. But he was also a child of the intellectual time in which he lived. He was born at a time, says Ruskin, when the Reformation had been arrested – his father, curiously enough, had fled from Antwerp as a Reformer, but afterwards returned to Catholicism. "The Evangelicals despised the arts, while the Roman Catholics were effete or insincere, and could not retain influence over men of strong reasoning power. The painters could only associate frankly with men of the world, and themselves became men of the world. Men, I mean, having no belief in spiritual existences, no interests or affections beyond the grave. Not but that they still painted Scriptural subjects. Altarpieces were wanted occasionally, and pious patrons sometimes commissioned a cabinet Madonna. But there is just this difference between men of this modern period and the Florentines or Venetians – that, whereas the latter never exert themselves fully except on a sacred subject, the Flemish and Dutch masters are always languid unless they are profane." Rubens was thus a man of the world. When a boy he was for some time page in the family of a countess at Brussels. But his bent towards art was too strong to be gainsaid. When only twenty-two he was already a master-painter in the Antwerp Guild. Two years later he went to Italy, and for eight years he was in the service of the Duke of Mantua. An excellent Latin scholar, he was also proficient in French, Italian, English, German, and Dutch. These gifts procured him diplomatic employment. In 1603 "the Fleming," as they called him, was sent on a mission to Spain. In 1608 news of his mother's illness reached him, and he hastened home, when he was appointed court-painter to the Archduke Albert, then Governor of the Netherlands. In 1620 he visited Paris, at the invitation of Mary de' Medici (a sister of the Duchess of Mantua), and received the commission for the celebrated series of pictures now in the Louvre, commemorating the marriage of that princess with Henry IV. of France. In 1628 Rubens was sent on a mission to Philip IV. of Spain, and made the acquaintance of Velazquez. The great decorative master and the great realist (his junior by twenty-two years) painted together, travelled together, and talked together for eight or nine months. Rubens, we are told, was never so well pleased as when he was in the company of Velazquez, and Velazquez showed no resentment at the commissions given by the court to the foreign painter. In 1629 Rubens was sent to Charles I. of England (see under 46), by whom, in the following year, he was knighted. He was also given an honorary degree by the University of Cambridge. On this occasion, Rubens was commissioned to paint the pictures which adorn the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall (now the United Service Institution). Wherever he went Rubens continued to paint, and his diplomacy he considered as mere recreation. "The painter Rubens," he is reported to have said of himself, "amuses himself with being ambassador." "So said one with whom, but for his own words, we might have thought that effort had been absorbed in power, and the labour of his art in its felicity." How hard he laboured is known by the enormous number of his works which still survive, by the large fortune he amassed, and by the great request in which his talents were held. "Whatever work of his I may require," wrote a celebrated Antwerp printer, "I have to ask him six months before, so as that he may think of it at leisure, and do the work on Sundays or holidays; no week-days of his could I pretend to get under 100 florins." But of the several thousands of works ascribed to the master, many were painted from his sketches by pupils and assistants. "To put it plainly, Rubens established a picture factory at Antwerp. He was thus enabled to paint portraits, landscapes, hunting scenes, and pictures of genre, as well as to undertake several series of gigantic decorations as important as those of Raphael or Michael Angelo. The master made small, lively sketches of the work to be done, the pupils laid them in, each doing what suited his talent, while Rubens reserved to himself the duty of bringing the picture together; in some cases by using the work beneath as a ground for almost complete repainting, in most cases by mainly correcting here and there, or enhancing the effect with a few brilliant and dexterous touches" (R. A. M. Stevenson's "Portfolio monograph" on Rubens). Brueghel, Snyders, Teniers, and Van Dyck were among his assistants. Some of Rubens's letters contain curious information on his methods. Thus he offers to Sir Dudley Carleton certain pictures in exchange for a collection of antique marbles. Among them was to be "'A Last Judgment,' begun by one of my pupils after an original which I made of much larger size for the Prince of Neubourg, who paid me for it 3500 florins in ready money. As the present piece is not quite finished, I will retouch it altogether by myself, so that it can pass for an original: 1200 florins."

Rubens was unspoilt by success. Like many other great artists, he is conspicuous for "a quite curious gentleness and serene courtesy… His letters are almost ludicrous in their unhurried politeness. He was an honourable and entirely well-intentioned man, earnestly industrious, simple and temperate in habits of life, highbred, learned, and discreet. His affection for his mother was great, his generosity to contemporary artists unfailing." He was twice married. In 1626 his first wife, Isabella Brant, died. Four years later he married Helena Fourment, a beautiful girl of sixteen, the living incarnation of his feminine type. "At the time of his second marriage Rubens was fifty-three years of age. He led a serious, happy, retired life. His leisure time he devoted to his family, to a few friends, to his correspondence, his collections, and his rides." "In the morning," we read, "he rose very early, and while he painted someone read aloud Livy, Plutarch, Cicero, Virgil or other poets. Then he would stroll in his gallery to stimulate his taste by the sight of the works of art he had brought from Italy. On other occasions he would study science, in which he always retained an active interest. Although he lived splendidly, he ate and drank moderately, and the gout from which he suffered in later life was certainly undeserved. He painted in the afternoon till towards evening, when he mounted a horse and rode out of the town." His house at Antwerp still stands; as also does his country-house, near Mechlin, of which there is a view in our Gallery (No. 66) (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 15, sec. ii. ch. ii. § 12; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. i. § 2; vol. iv. pt. v. ch. i. § 17; vol. v. pt. viii. ch. iv. § 21, pt. ix. ch. vi. §§ 1-9; On the Old Road, i. 185, 186; Stones of Venice, vol. i. App. 15; Wauters, The Flemish School, p. 214).

"A miracle of agitation. A flush tide of the richest colour, which positively seems to boil up in swirling eddies of harmonious form. Its whole surface is swept by lines which rush each other on like the rapid successive entrances of an excited stretto, till the violent movement seems to undulate the entire pattern of the picture" (R. A. M. Stevenson: Velazquez, 1899, p. 51). As for the subject, see for the story of the Sabine women under 644. But the subject in this case does not greatly matter. "Rubens in one of his most marvellous pictures, the Rape of the Sabines, which hangs in the National Gallery, did not even take the trouble to dress his Sabines in the costumes of their day. Without any more ado he dressed them in the style of the seventeenth century. One might rather think it a kidnapping of beautiful Antwerp women on a Flemish fair-day. But what difference does it make? He has made white shoulders that shine, sumptuous stuffs, warriors with glittering arms – all which is instinct with life, and blazes with the deepest colouring of the greatest of Flemish masters. The colourists have never considered the subject otherwise than as a means of representing life under such and such actions, or such and such aspects, joyful or sad, or simply plastic" (Benjamin Constant in North American Review, Nov. 1900).

39. THE NURSING OF BACCHUS

Nicolas Poussin (French: 159371-1665).

The life of Nicolas Poussin may be summed up in the cry of Æneas, Italiam petimus– we make for Italy. He was born in Normandy, of a noble family, and first learnt painting under Quintin Varin at Les Andelys. When eighteen he went to Paris and became acquainted with Courtois, the mathematician, whose collection of Italian prints fired him with a desire to go to Rome. This devotion to Rome became from that day the leading point alike in his life and in his art. Among the artist friends of his wandering years was Philippe de Champaigne (see under 798). After several unsuccessful efforts to get to Rome, Poussin made the acquaintance at Lyons of the Italian poet Marino, who invited him to Rome (1624), and introduced him to Cardinal Barberini. The Cardinal, however, was called away, and for a time Poussin's life in Rome was one of severe struggle. He also fell ill, and was nursed by a compatriot, Dughet, whose daughter he afterwards married. The wife brought her husband a comfortable dowry, with which a house was bought, and the painter, now released from the pinch of poverty, was able to give free play to his talents. In 1640 he returned to Paris, where he was introduced by Richelieu (for whom amongst other pictures he painted No. 62 in this Gallery) to Louis XIII. The king appointed him his painter-in-ordinary, with a salary of £120 and rooms in the Tuileries, but two years later, disgusted with the intrigues and jealousies of Paris, and being anxious to rejoin his wife, he returned to Rome, where he remained – full of work – for the rest of his life. His house on the Pincian, adjoining the church of the Trinita, may still be seen, and he is buried in the church of St. Lorenzo. Poussin, says his biographer, Bellori, led a regular life, rising early and taking a walk for one or two hours, sometimes in the city, but more often on Monte Pincio, not far from his house. From these lovely gardens he could enjoy the view of Rome on its hills; there he met his friends and discoursed on curious and learned topics. "In the evening he went out again and walked on the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the hill, in the midst of the strangers who congregate there. He always had friends with him, and often they made a kind of retinue. He spoke often of art, and so clearly, that artists and all cultivated men of talent came to hear his beautiful and profound thoughts about painting." "During my sojourn in Rome," says a traveller of that period, "I often saw Poussin. I admired the extreme love this excellent painter had for perfection in his art. I met him among the ruins of Rome, in the Campagna, and on the banks of the Tiber, and I saw him carry home stones, moss, flowers, and other things, in order to paint them from nature. One day I asked him how he had attained such an elevation among the greatest artists of Italy. He answered modestly, 'I have neglected nothing.'"