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

Sodoma (see under 1144).

Presentation of SS. Placidas and Maurus to St. Benedict (233): fresco, Monte Oliveto.

St. Benedict Preaching (98): fresco, Monte Oliveto.

Christ (12): fresco, convent of S. Anna, near Siena.

Christ bound to the Column (61): picture, Academy, Siena.

Swoon of St. Catherine (69): fresco, S. Domenico, Siena.

Vision of St. Catherine (64): " " "

Presentation of the Virgin (263): fresco, S. Bernardino, Siena.

Tiepolo (see under 1192).

Anthony and Cleopatra (162, 168): frescoes, Palazzo Labia, Venice.

[The best of Tiepolo's works. "His frescoes in the Palazzo Labia, representing the embarkation of Anthony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and their famous banquet at Canopus, are worthy to be classed with the finest decorative work of Paolo Veronese." – J. A. Symonds: Century Guild Hobby Horse, April 1889.]

Timoteo della Vite (Ferrarese: 1469-1523).

The Magdalen (265): picture, Pinacoteca, Bologna.

[By the first master of Raphael. The picture is mentioned by Vasari (iii. 114): "She is standing upright, her vestment is a short mantle, but the figure is covered principally with the long hair, which falls to her feet; and this is so beautiful and natural that, while observing it, one cannot but fancy that the light silky tresses are stirred by the wind. The countenance, also, has the most divine beauty of expression, and clearly exhibits the love which this Saint bore to her Lord."]

Titian (see under 4).

Miracles of St. Anthony of Padua (14, 133): frescoes, Scuola del Santo, Padua.

Tura, Cosimo (see under 772).

Triumph of Venus (112): fresco, Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara.

Triumph of Minerva (129): " " "

Unknown Painter.

Richard II. before the Madonna (27): picture, Wilton House.

Vasco, Fernandez ("Gran Vasco") (Portuguese: born 1552).

St. Peter enthroned as Pope (48): picture, sacristy of the cathedral, Vizen, Portugal.

Veronese, Paolo (see under 26).

Allegorical Subjects, "Justice," "Temperance," etc. (15, 18, 155, 156): frescoes, Villa Giacomelli, Masèr.

[This villa, built by Palladio for Daniele Barbara in 1580, is reached from Cornuda, a station on the line between Treviso and Belluno. It contains some of Veronese's most beautiful wall-paintings.]

Viterbo, Lorenzo di (painted 1648).

Betrothal of the Virgin (67): fresco, S. Maria della Verita, Viterbo.

Presentation: fresco, S. Maria della Verita, Viterbo.

There is also a copy, presented by Mrs. Bywater, of Domenico Veneziano's "Madonna and Child" (No. 1215).

SCULPTURES AND MARBLES

Many of the sculptures belonging to the National Gallery have been removed to the Hall of Sculpture at the Tate Gallery or to the National Portrait Gallery. Among those that remain in Trafalgar Square are: —

"The Dying Alexander" (in the Vestibule). – A Renaissance copy in Egyptian porphyry of the bust, in the Uffizi at Florence, known as "The Dying Alexander." The bust is now generally recognised as the work of a Pergamene sculptor, and is supposed to represent a youthful giant. The influence of the "Alexander type" is in any case noticeable in this fine work; a type embodying "the traces of human passion, the imperfection of human longing, the divine despair, which attach to the highest mortal natures because they are high and because they are mortal." – Presented by Mr. Henry Yates Thompson.

Bust of Mantegna. – A plaster cast from the bust of Mantegna in the Mantegna Chapel at Mantua: see the description quoted under 274. – Presented by Mr. Henry Vaughan.

1

The Tate Gallery is ten minutes' drive or twenty minutes' walk from Trafalgar Square. It is reached in a straight line by Whitehall, Parliament Street, past the Houses of Parliament, Millbank Street, and Grosvenor Road.

2

Mr. Ruskin himself was converted by the acquisition of the great Perugino (No. 288). In congratulating the Trustees on their acquisition of this "noble picture," he wrote: "It at once, to my mind, raises our National Gallery from a second-rate to a first-rate collection. I have always loved the master, and given much time to the study of his works; but this is the best I have ever seen" (Notes on the Turner Gallery, p. 89 n.).

3

See, for instance, Nos. 10, 61, 193, 195, 479 and 498, 757, 790, 896, 1131, and 1171.

4

The exterior of the building is not generally considered an architectural success, and the ugliness of the dome is almost proverbial. But it should be remembered that the original design included the erection of suitable pieces of sculpture – such as may be seen in old engravings of the Gallery, made from the architect's drawings – on the still vacant pedestals.

5

The several extensions of the Gallery are shown in the plan on a later page.

6

The total number should thus be 28; but in the reconstruction four smaller rooms were thrown into two larger ones. The plan thus shows 25 numbered rooms and one called the "Dome."

7

This sum only includes amounts paid out of Parliamentary grants or other National Gallery funds or special contributions.

8

In 1894, however, an alteration was made in the Minute, and the responsibility for purchases was vested in the Director and the Trustees jointly.

9

Sir William Gregory relates in his Autobiography the following story: "In 1884, when the Trustees were endeavouring to secure some of the pre-eminently fine Rubenses from the Duke of Marlborough, Alfred Rothschild met me in St. James's Street, and said, 'If you think the Blenheim Rubenses are more important than your Dutch pictures to the Gallery, and that you cannot get the money from the Government, I am prepared to give you £250,000 for the Peel pictures; and I will hold good to this offer till the day after to-morrow.'"

10

Of the 1170 pieces thus unaccounted for (the total number belonging to the Trustees being roughly 2870) the greater number are at Millbank. Others are on loan to provincial institutions (see App. II.).

11

With this object in view, several of them have been published with descriptive letterpress by Mr. Sydney Vacher.

12

These contrasts were worked out and illustrated by Mr. Grant Allen in his papers on "The Evolution of Italian Art" in the Pall Mall Magazine for 1895.

13

See Raphael's Madonnas, by Karl Károly, 1894.

14

Ruskin's Modern Painters is of course the great book on this subject. The evolution of "Landscape in Art" has been historically treated by Mr. Josiah Gilbert in a work thus entitled, which contains numerous illustrations from the National Gallery.

15

My references to this book are to the new edition of 1897.

16

It should be noted that the Italian terms quattro-cento and cinque-cento correspond with our fifteenth (1400-1500) and sixteenth (1500-1600) centuries respectively.

17

Italian Masters in German Galleries, p. 124. My references to this work are to Mrs. Richter's translation, 1883; in the case of Morelli's Borghese and Doria-Pamfili Galleries in Rome, they are to Miss Ffoulkes's translation, 1892.

18

Well said: but it remains to be asked, whether the "grace" sought is modest, or wanton: affectionate, or licentious (J. R.).

19

Not by its own natural course or decay; but by the political and moral ruin of the cities by whose virtue it had been taught, and in whose glory it had flourished. The analysis of the decline of religious faith quoted below does not enough regard the social and material mischief which accompanied that decline (J. R.)

20

See Dante, Inferno xxix. 121. There was, moreover, in Siena a "Prodigal Club," and a poet of the day wrote a series of sonnets (translated by D. G. Rossetti) "Unto the blithe and lordly fellowship."

21

History of the Renaissance in Italy, iii. 161.

22

See for Correggio's connection with the Ferrarese-Bolognese School, Morelli's German Galleries, pp. 120-124.

23

With the pictures of Venice, those of many neighbouring towns – Brescia, Bergamo, Treviso, and Verona – are associated. All these local schools have certain peculiarities of their own, and some of them are well represented here. Nowhere, for instance, out of Brescia itself can the Brescian School be so well studied as in the National Gallery. But above these local peculiarities there are common characteristics in the work of all these schools which they share with that of Venice. It is only these common characteristics that can here be noticed. (Some interesting remarks by Dr. Richter, on the independence of the Veronese School, will be found in The Art Journal, February 1895.)

24

It should, however, be remembered that "before the Venetian School of painting had got much beyond a lisp, Venetian artists were already expressing themselves strikingly and beautifully in stone, in architectural and sculptural works" (see Morelli's German Galleries, p. 5).

25

Now ascribed, however, to Catena.

26

The earlier Paduan School, represented in the National Gallery by № 701, was only an offshoot from the Florentine.

27

It was this false striving after "the ideal," as Mr. Symonds points out, that caused Reynolds, with his obsolete doctrine about the nature of "the grand style," to admire the Bolognese masters. For Reynolds's statement of his doctrine see his Discourses, ii. and iii., and his papers in the Idler (Nos. 79 and 82); for Ruskin's destructive criticism of it, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. i. – iii.

28

The realism and the morbid taint in the religious pictures of the Italian decadence were in some measure the direct outcome of ecclesiastical teaching. "Depict well the flaying of St. Bartholomew," said a Jesuit father, "it may win hearts to piety." The comment of Shelley on the Bolognese Schools was this: "Why write books against religion when we may hang up such pictures?"

29

Sir W. M. Conway: Early Flemish Artists and their Predecessors on the Lower Rhine, 1887.

30

The letters often found on pictures, which for a long time excited the curiosity and imagination of critics, are now fully explained as the initials not of the painters but of the patrons (see Wauters: The Flemish School, p. 61).

31

This statement, like all others in so short and general a summary as alone can be here attempted, is of course only broadly true.

32

It is interesting to note that this spirit of anti-religious revolt is what fascinated Heine in Dutch pictures. "In the house I lodged at in Leyden there once lived," he says, "the great Jan Steen, whom I hold to be as great as Raphael. Even as a sacred painter Jan was as great, and that will be clearly seen when the religion of sorrow has passed away… How often, during my stay, did I think myself back for whole hours into the household scenes in which the excellent Jan must have lived and suffered. Many a time I thought I saw him bodily, sitting at his easel, now and then grasping the great jug, 'reflecting and therewith drinking, and then again drinking without reflecting.' It was no gloomy Catholic spectre that I saw, but a modern bright spirit of joy, who after death still visited his old workroom to paint many pictures and to drink" (Heine's Prose Writings, Camelot Series, p. 67).

33

"The Dutch painters were not poets, nor the sons of poets, but their fathers rescued a Republic from the slime and covered it with such fair farms that I declare to this day I like Dutch cheese as well as any, because it sends one in imagination to the many-uddered meadows which Cuyp has embossed in gold and silver. What savoury hares and rabbits they had in the low blunt sand-hills, and how the Teniers boor snared them, and how the big-breech'd Gunn-Mann (I haven't any knowledge of Dutch, but I am sure that must be the Dutch for 'sportsman') banged off his piece at them, and then how the shining Vrow saw them in the Schopp and bargained for them. The Schopp had often a window with a green curtain in it, and a basso-relievo of Cupids and goats beneath, with a crack across the bas-relief, and iron stains on the marble, and a bright brass bulging bottle on the sill, and such pickling cabbage as makes the mouth water" (Letters of James Smetham, p. 172).

34

On the ground floor small copies of many of the famous pictures at Madrid may be seen.

35

This statement, though broadly true, requires, of course, much modification: see the early Spanish picture (of the 15th century) on loan in this room from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

36

Elsewhere Mr. Ruskin speaks of "Twickenham classicism" (with a side allusion, of course, to Pope) "consisting principally in conceptions of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most of our suburban villas" (Pre-Raphaelitism, reprinted in On the Old Road, i. 283).

37

In a later lecture on landscape (delivered at Oxford and reported in Cook's Studies in Ruskin, p. 290) Ruskin cited Evelyn (who was nearly contemporary with Claude) as another case in point: "We passed through a forest (of Fontainebleau)," says Evelyn, "so prodigiously encompass'd with hideous rocks of white hard stone, heaped one on another in mountainous height, that I think the like is nowhere to be found more horrid and solitary." It is interesting to note how long this ignorance of mountains lasted, even amongst painters. James Barry, the R. A., was "amazed at finding the realities of the Alps grander than the imaginations of Salvator," and writes to Edmund Burke from Turin in 1766 to say that he saw the moon from the Mont Cenis five times as big as usual, "from being so much nearer to it"!

38

It is worth noting that a similar incident (which in this picture has greatly shocked some of the critics) is introduced in Orcagna's great fresco of the Triumph of Death. "The three kings of the German legend are represented looking at the three coffins containing three bodies of kings, such as themselves, in the last stage of corruption… Orcagna disdains both poetry and taste; he wants the facts only; he wishes to give the spectator the same lesson that the kings had, and, therefore, instead of concealing the dead bodies, he paints them with the most fearful detail. And then, he does not consider what the three kings might most gracefully do. He considers only what they actually, in all probability, would have done. He makes them looking at the coffins with a startled stare, and one holding his nose" (Lectures on Architecture and Painting, pp. 209, 210).

A comparison of the various opinions expressed on this picture would form a diverting chapter in the history of art criticism. Thus in Kugler's Handbook we are told that it is "in many respects one of the noblest pictures existing"; Sir Henry Cole ("Felix Summerly") called it "doubtless the greatest Italian painting in this country"; Hazlitt said it was "one of the best pictures on so large a scale that he was acquainted with"; Waagen pronounced it to be "the most important specimen of Italian art in England"; Solly called it "the second picture in the world"; and Mrs. Jameson saw in it a combination of "the characteristic power and beauty of the finest school of design and the finest school of colouring in the world." For an equally uncompromising condemnation see Landseer's Catalogue, pp. 92-119. It is interesting to note that in some cases the admiration excited by the picture was due to the dirt with which by long neglect and lapse in time it had come to be discoloured. Thus Hazlitt says that "the figure of Lazarus is very fine and bold. The flesh is well-baked, dingy, and ready to crumble from the touch, when it is liberated from its dread confinement to have life and motion impressed on it again" (Criticisms on Art, 1843, p. 9). Thus it was inferred that Sebastiano stooped to the trivial artifice of imparting an appearance of half putrefaction to the exhumed corpse. The absurdity of this criticism is well exposed by Henry Merritt, the famous picture restorer, in his essay on "Dirt and Pictures Separated" (Art Criticism and Romance, i. 69). The fact is that the whole picture was sadly darkened with time, and that it had become "embedded beneath a thick covering, compounded of half opaque varnish, patches of modern paint, and dirt." It has only been found possible partly to remove this covering. It may not be uninteresting to add that the picture was a favourite with Charles Darwin. "Many of the pictures in the National Gallery," he wrote, "gave me much pleasure; that of Sebastian del Piombo exciting in me a sense of sublimity" (Life, i. 49).

The poet Tennyson was another great admirer of the picture. His son, describing visits with the poet to the National Gallery, says, "he always led the way first of all to the "Raising of Lazarus," by Sebastian del Piombo, and to Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne."" "The Christ I call Christlike," said Tennyson on one occasion to Carlyle, "is Sebastian del Piombo's in the National Gallery" (Memoir, ii. 235). It is possible that the poet may have written the stanzas cited above with his eye on Sebastiano's picture.

39

"When they went to nature, which I believe to have been a very much rarer practice with them than their biographers would have us suppose, they copied her like children, drawing what they knew to be there, but not what they saw there" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. iii. § 7).

40

The "Claude Lorraine glass" – a convex dark, or coloured hand-mirror used to concentrate the features of a landscape in a subdued tone – "gives the objects of nature," says an old writer, "a soft mellow tinge like the colouring of that master."

41

But Ruskin does not quite keep his promise. "If Claude had been a great man he would not have been so steadfastly set on painting effects of sun; he would have looked at all nature, and at all art, and would have painted sun effects somewhat worse, and nature universally much better" (Modern Painters, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 23).

42

The passages quoted from Sir F. Burton are to be found in his edition of the Official Catalogue (unabridged) of the Foreign Schools. That work, which occupied the late Director's leisure for many years, is a worthy monument of his wide learning and fastidious taste. A large-paper edition was issued by the Stationery Office in 1892.

43

See, however, the sunset picture of his predecessor, Bellini (726). Connoisseurs should note that this picture is referred to by Richter as bearing on the vexed question of Palma Vecchio's relation with Titian, and showing that the latter imitated the former rather than vice versâ (Italian Art in the National Gallery, p. 85. See also Morelli's German Galleries, p. 25).

44

Called also "Sinon before Priam" (Æneid, ii. 79).

45

The two pictures were bought by the nation in 1834 for £11,550. The sum was then thought a very large one, and the trustees fortified themselves with the opinion of experts. Amongst these Sir David Wilkie, R.A., wrote, "It is certainly a large sum for two pictures; but giving this difficulty its due weight, I would decidedly concur in giving this sum rather than let them go out of the country, considering the rarity of such specimens even in foreign countries, and their excellence as examples of the high school to which they belong, to which it must be the aim of every other school to approach."

46

The picture is inscribed "Mariage d'Isaac avec Rebecca," but it is a repetition with some variations in detail of the Claude known as Il Molino (The Mill) in the Doria palace at Rome. Ruskin characterises this version of the subject as a "villainous and unpalliated copy." "There is not," he adds, "one touch or line of even decent painting in the whole picture; but as connoisseurs have considered it a Claude, as it has been put in our Gallery for a Claude, and as people admire it every day for a Claude, I may at least presume it has those qualities of Claude in it which are wont to excite the public admiration, though it possesses none of those which sometimes give him claim to it; and I have so reasoned, and shall continue to reason upon it, especially with respect to facts of form, which cannot have been much altered by the copyist" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. i. § 9, sec. iv. ch. ii. § 8).

47

The following is the text of this portion of Turner's will: "I give and bequeath unto the Trustees and Directors for the time being of a certain Society or Institution, called the 'National Gallery' or Society, the following pictures or paintings by myself, namely Dido Building Carthage, and the picture formerly in the De Tabley collection. To hold the said pictures or paintings unto the said Trustees and Directors of this said Society for the time being, in trust for the said Institution or Society for ever, subject, nevertheless, to, for, and upon the following reservations and restrictions only; that is to say, I direct that the said pictures or paintings shall be hung, kept, and placed, that is to say, always between the two pictures painted by Claude, The Seaport and Mill." The "picture formerly in the De Tabley collection" is the "Sun rising in a Mist," 479. Turner bought it back at Lord de Tabley's sale at Christie's in 1827 for £514: 10s., and ever afterwards refused to part with it. The other picture, the Carthage (498), was returned unsold from the Academy, and Turner always kept it in his gallery. His friend Chantrey used to make him offers for it, but each time its price rose higher. "Why, what in the world, Turner, are you going to do with the picture?" he asked. "Be buried in it," Turner replied – a remark he often made to other friends.

48

"So in N. Poussin's 'Phocion' (40) the shadow of the stick on the stone in the right-hand corner, is shaded off and lost, while you see the stick plainly all the way. In nature's sunlight it would have been the direct reverse: you would have seen the shadow black and sharp all the way down; but you would have had to look for the stick, which in all probability would in several places have been confused with the stone behind it" (ibid.).

49

Compare on this point G. Poussin's "Abraham and Isaac" (31).

50

One may compare with Ruskin's description the similar one by Tennyson of a distant view of Monte Rosa —

How faintly-flush'd, how phantom-fair,Was Monte Rosa, hanging thereA thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleysAnd snowy dells in a golden air.

The Daisy.

51

"In some of the convents (in Mexico) there still exist, buried alive like the inmates, various fine old paintings … brought there by the monks" (Dublin National Gallery Catalogue). The Spanish influence gave birth, moreover, to a native Mexican School of painting, said to be of considerable merit.

52

"Murillo, of all true painters the narrowest, feeblest, and most superficial, for those reasons the most popular" (Two Paths, § 57 n.) – "The delight of vulgar painters (as Murillo) in coarse and slurred painting merely for the sake of its coarseness, opposed to the divine finish which the greatest and mightiest of men disdained not" (Modern Painters, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. x. § 3).