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

The well-founded pride which is thus stamped on Tintoret's art is conspicuous in his life. From the first he stood alone. His father had sent him as a boy to Titian's studio; but after ten days the master dismissed him. From this time forward the two men remained upon distant terms, – Tintoretto being indeed an ardent admirer of Titian, but never a friend, and Titian and his set turning the cold shoulder upon Tintoret. The slight passed by Titian upon the young Tintoret threw him back upon his own resources, and henceforth he pursued his own ideals, self-taught. He bought casts from the antique and from the works of Michelangelo; he devoted the day to painting, and in the night he made drawings from his casts. His persevering labour won for him in time a high position among the painters of Venice, and before he was forty he had become the acknowledged rival of Titian himself. For some years, however, he worked in poverty, often accepting commissions without pay, and when he became famous he often worked "for nothing." For years he painted in the Scuola di San Rocco – "a shrine reared by Tintoret to his own genius" – at the rate of 100 ducats a year. For his "Paradise" in the Ducal Palace, "the greatest picture in the world," he was asked to name his own price, but he left it to the State, and abated something from what they tendered. While the commission was still pending, Tintoret used to tell the senators that he prayed to God for it, so that paradise itself might perchance be his recompense after death. His exquisite "Three Graces" in the Ducal Palace was painted for fifty ducats. He lived aloof from the world, seldom leaving Venice. His house, on the Fondamenta de' Mori, is still standing, and there are stories told of the way in which his wife, the daughter of a Venetian nobleman, tried to guard against his unworldliness. When he left the house she would wrap up money for him in a handkerchief, and expected an account of it on his return. Tintoretto, it is said, had always to confess that he had spent it upon alms. He loved all the arts, and played the lute and various instruments, some of them of his own invention. He designed theatrical costumes, and was well versed in mechanics. He abounded in witty sayings, but no smile, we are told, ever hovered on his lips. He died at the age of seventy-six, leaving as the record of a long life, devoted with rare single-mindedness to his art, the remark that the art of painting was one which became ever increasingly difficult.

A picture of particular interest in the National Gallery, being a representation by one of the greatest of artists of the patron saint of England. The fight of St. George with the dragon is familiar to every one, being on the reverse of our gold sovereigns, and in the "Jubilee" coinage on that of our silver crowns. "As a piece of mere die-cutting, that St. George is one of the best bits of work we have on our money," but a reference to its absurdities in design will serve admirably to bring out some of the imaginative merits of this picture. On our coins St. George's horse looks abstractedly in the air, instead of where it would have looked, at the beast between its legs. Here Tintoret has admirably brought out the chivalry of the horse. Knight and charger are alike intent upon their foe, and note that St. George wears no spurs: the noble animal nature is attuned to his rider. But, though un-spurred, St. George is every inch a knight. His whole strength is given in the spear-thrust which is to kill the dragon: compare this with St. George on our coins, "with nothing but his helmet on (being the last piece of armour he is likely to want), putting his naked feet, at least his feet showing their toes through the buskins, well forward, that the dragon may with the greatest convenience get a bite at them; and about to deliver a mortal blow at him with a sword which cannot reach him by a couple of yards." To understand the other touches of true imagination in Tintoret's picture, it is necessary to recall the meaning of the legend of St. George and the Dragon (identical with that of Perseus and Andromeda).59 The dragon represents the evil of sinful, fleshly passion, the element in our nature which is of the earth, earthy. Notice with what savage tenacity, therefore, the beast is made to clutch at the earth. From his mouth he is spitting fire – the red fire of consuming passion. St. George is the champion of purity; he rides therefore on a white horse, white being the typical colour of a blameless life. He wears no helmet – for that might obscure his sight, and the difficulty in this warfare is not so much to kill your dragon as to see him. In front of him is the dead body of another man:

He gazes on the silent dead"They perished in their daring deeds."This proverb flashes through his head,"The many fail, the one succeeds."

Behind him is a long castle wall, the towers and battlements perhaps of some great city. In many pictures of this subject (see e. g. 75) there are crowds of spectators on the walls, who will cheer the knight in his struggle and applaud him in his victory. But here the walls are deserted, and but for the princess in the foreground, there are no spectators of the struggle: it is one which has to be fought alone and in secret places. The princess had been given, in the story, as a sacrifice to the dragon, and St. George, who comes to rescue her, is thus the type of noble chivalry. "She turns away for flight; and if her hands are raised to heaven, and her knees fall to earth, it is more that she stumbles in a woman's weakness, than that she abides in faith or sweet surrender. Tintoret sees the scene as in the first place a matter of fact, and paints accordingly, following his judgment of girl nature." But in another sense the princess of the allegory represents the soul of man, which has to be freed from subjection to the dragon of the flesh. And so perhaps Tintoret makes her fly, "from a certain ascetic feeling, a sense growing with the growing license of Venice, that the soul must rather escape from this monster by flight than hope to see it subdued and made serviceable" (St. Mark's Rest, Second Supplement, pp. 14, 21, 33; Fors Clavigera, 1873, xxv. and xxvi.)

17. THE HOLY FAMILY

Andrea del Sarto 60 (Florentine: 1486-1531). See 690.

St. Elizabeth with her son, the infant John the Baptist, visiting the Madonna and infant Christ. It is "a Holy Family," but except for the symbolical cross of the Baptist and the faint circlet of golden light surrounding the Madonna's head, there is no hint of divinity about this pretty domestic scene.

18. CHRIST AND THE PHARISEES.61

Bernardino Luini (Lombard: about 1475-1533).

Bernardino, "dear little Bernard," the son of Giovanni Lutero, called Luini from his birthplace Luino, on the Lago Maggiore, is perhaps, says Ruskin, "the best central type of the highly-trained Italian painter," being "alone in uniting consummate art-power with untainted simplicity of religious imagination." "The two elements, poised in perfect balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, that most of us lose the sense of both." Next to nothing is known of his life beyond journeys to various places in the lake district – Lugano, Legnano, and Saronno, to paint frescoes. "We have no anecdotes of him, only hundreds of noble works. Child of the Alps, and of their divinest lake, he is taught, without doubt or dismay, a lofty religious creed, and a sufficient law of life, and of its mechanical arts. Whether lessoned by Leonardo himself, or merely one of many, disciplined in the system of the Milanese School, he learns unerringly to draw, unerringly and enduringly to paint" … "a mighty colourist, while Leonardo was only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the chiaroscuro drawing like a coloured print." Luini's "tasks are set him without question day by day, by men who are justly satisfied with his work, and who accept it without any harmful praise or senseless blame. Place, scale, and subject are determined for him on the cloister wall or the church dome; as he is required, and for sufficient daily bread, and little more, he paints what he has been taught to design wisely and has passion to realise gloriously: every touch he lays is eternal, every thought he conceives is beautiful and pure" (Queen of the Air, § 157; Catalogue of the Educational Series, p. 43; Oxford Lectures on Art, §§ 73, 92). This picture, formerly ascribed to Leonardo, belongs to Luini's second period, when he was under the influence of that master. To his third and independent manner belong the frescoes at Milan, Saronno, and Lugano, and the three pictures in Como Cathedral (Morelli's Italian Masters in German Galleries, 1883, pp. 435-438). Luini's female figures (says Sir Frederick Burton) "are full of sweetness and gracious dignity; and should we incline to cavil at the monotony of his type, its loveliness disarms us. But a merit even higher than his sense of beauty is the pathos which he infused into subjects that required it. These he imagined from within outwards, following his inspiration without egotism or mannerism. He appears to most advantage in fresco; for few have understood so well as he the management of the limited palette of the fresco painter, and that skilful juxtaposition of tints by which the value of each is exalted. The decorated party-wall and adjacent chapels in S. Maurizio at Milan must once have been as conspicuous for their harmonious colouring as the former still is for the radiant beauty of the Virgin Saints in its lower compartment." Copies of several of Luini's frescoes are included in the Arundel Society's Collection.

Christ is arguing with the Pharisees, but he wears the tender expression of the man who "did not strive nor cry, neither was his voice heard in the streets." The disputant on the extreme right, with the close-shaven face and firm-set features, has his hand on a volume of the Scriptures, and is taking his stand (as it were) on the letter of the law. The one on the extreme left, on the other hand, is almost persuaded. In contrast to him is the older man with the white beard, who seems to be marvelling at the presumption of youth. The remaining head is the type of the fanatic; "by our law he ought to die." This picture, besides its splendid colouring, is a good instance of that law of order or symmetry which is characteristic of all perfect art. The central figure faces us; there are two figures on one side, balanced by two on the other; the face in the left corner looks right, that in the right corner looks left, whilst to break any too obtrusive symmetry the head of Christ itself inclines somewhat to the left also. This famous picture, of which there are several old copies, was formerly in the Aldobrandini apartments in the Borghese Palace at Rome.

19. NARCISSUS AND ECHO

Claude (French: 1600-1682). See 2.

Narcissus, a beautiful youth, was beloved by the nymph Echo, but he spurned her love, and when she pined away she was changed into a stone which still retained the power of voice. But Narcissus, seeing his own image reflected in a fountain, became enamoured of it, and when he could never reach his phantom love he killed himself for grief, and the nymphs who came to burn his body found only the "short-lived flower" that bears his name. Here, half-hidden in the trees, we see the

Naiad hid beneath the bank,By the willowy river-side,Where Narcissus gently sank,Where unmarried Echo died.Ionica.

This was one of Sir George Beaumont's Claudes which Constable so much admired when he was staying at Coleorton. "I am now going," wrote Constable to his wife, "to breakfast before the Narcissus of Claude. How enchanting and lovely it is; far, very far surpassing any other landscape I ever beheld" (Leslie's Life of Constable, 1845, p. 120). Ruskin, on the other hand, finds fault with some of the details, as showing Claude's ignorance of tree structure. "Take the stem of the chief tree in Claude's Narcissus. It is a very faithful portrait of a large boa-constrictor with a handsome tail; the kind of trunk which young ladies at fashionable boarding schools represent with nosegays at the top of them by way of forest scenery." Again, "Observe the bough underneath the first bend of the great stem, … it sends off four branches like the ribs of a leaf. The two lowest of these are both quite as thick as the parent stem, and the stem itself is much thicker after it has sent off the first one than it was before. The top boughs of the central tree, in the 'Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' (12), ramify in the same scientific way" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. §§ 7, 9).

20. IPPOLITO DE' MEDICI AND THE ARTIST

Sebastiano del Piombo (Venetian: 1485-1547). See 1.

In 1531 Sebastiano received from the Pope the office of Frate del Piombo, Monk of the Leaden Signet, which was affixed to the pontifical diplomas. An entertaining account of Sebastiano's appointment is given in Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs (see Symonds's translation, i. 150). The painter is here dressed in the black robe of his office; on the table are two parchment-deeds, with Sebastiano's hand on the seal of one of them, and the picture thus represents, perhaps, the ratification of the appointment by his friend and patron, the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. The artist's portrait of himself agrees very well with what Vasari says of his character. He was a painter more of necessity than of choice, and when once he received his valuable sinecure he forsook his palette for the lute, and people found it very hard to get any work out of him. He much preferred talking about pictures, says Vasari, to executing them. He was "of a very full habit," and young painters who resorted to him "rarely made any great profit, since from his example they could learn little beside the art of good living." But he was a thoroughly good fellow, and a kindly withal. A better or more agreeable companion never lived; and when he died he commanded that his remains should be carried to the tomb without any ceremony of priests and friars, and that the amount which would have been thus expended should be distributed to the poor, for the love of God: and so was it done. But in one branch of art, adds Vasari, Sebastiano was always ready to work, namely, in painting portraits, such as this, from the life. "In this art he did certainly surpass all others in delicacy and excellence – so much so that when Cardinal Ippolito fell in love with the lady Giulia Gonzaga, he sent Sebastiano with four swift horses to her home for the purpose of taking her portrait, and in about a month the artist completed the likeness, when, what with the celestial beauties of that lady, and what with the able hand of so accomplished a master, the picture proved to be a most divine one." No. 24 was formerly thought to be the portrait in question.

21. PORTRAIT OF A FLORENTINE LADY

Cristofano Allori (Florentine: 1577-1621).

An excellent portrait-painter, who painted many of the distinguished persons of his time. Of his other works, the best known is the "Judith with the head of Holophernes," in the Pitti. The Judith "so beautifully and magnificently attired is a portrait of his mistress; while her mother appears in the character of Abra, and the head of Holophernes is that of the painter, who permitted his beard to grow for this purpose." He was very fastidious in his execution. "From this method, and from vicious habits that often seduced him from his labours, his pictures are rare, and he himself is little known" (Lanzi's History of Painting, i. 217). Cristofano was the son of Alessandro Allori, a painter of Michelangelo's school.

Notice the richly embroidered head-dress, resembling in form the Venetian rolled coif or turban which often occurs in pictures of Titian.

22. ANGELS WEEPING OVER THE DEAD CHRIST

Guercino (Eclectic-Bologna: 1591-1666).

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri was called Guercino, the Squintling, from an accident which distorted his right eye in babyhood. He attained to much fame and wealth in his day; but was self-taught, and the son of humble parents, his father being a wood-carrier, and agreeing to pay for his son's education by a load of grain and a vat of grapes delivered yearly. As a young man, he settled in Rome, where he became acquainted with Caravaggio. He returned to his native town, Cento, in 1623, and there founded an academy which was much frequented by young painters. In 1642 he removed to Bologna, where he died in affluent circumstances in 1666. In art history Guercino is interesting as showing the blending of the Eclectic style of the Carracci with the Naturalistic style of Caravaggio. In the work of his latest, or Bolognese, period, "when he appears to have endeavoured to approximate to the style of Guido, he forsook the vigorous handling and treatment of his earlier pictures and fell into an insipid manner" (Burton). Guercino (says Symonds) "lived the life of an anchorite, absorbed in studies, reserved, sober, pious, truthful, sincere in his commerce with the world, unaffectedly virtuous, devoted to his art and God." In the motives of his picture one sees reflected the Catholic revival of his day, – "the Christianity of the age was not naïve, simple, sincere, and popular, but hysterical, dogmatic, hypocritical, and sacerdotal. It was not Christianity indeed, but Catholicism galvanised by terror into reactionary movement" (Renaissance, vii. 232).

A comparison even of this little picture – in its somewhat morbid sentiment – with such an one as Crivelli's (602) – with its deeper because simpler feeling – well illustrates the nature of the change. This is, however, one of Guercino's best works. It was formerly in the Borghese Gallery, and Rumohr, in his account of that collection (1784), notices it as one of the productions of the painter's best time. "The figure of Christ is admirable in drawing and foreshortening, and painted with a broad decisive touch in really astonishing relief; while the weeping angels, if not of an elevated type, are marked by a real naïveté and sincerity of pathos. The wonderful chiaroscuro is here not only rich, and well concentrated, too, beyond the painter's wont, but impressive, and duly accounted for by the supernatural luminosity of the body of Christ" (Portfolio, August 1891).

23. "THE VIRGIN OF THE BASKET."

Correggio (Parmese: 1494-1534). See 10.

A celebrated work of the master, and one of the principal treasures of the National Gallery – "a little gem of extraordinary tenderness," Mengs calls it; and Frizzoni, "an incomparable marvel of light, vivacity, and smiling sweetness." Alike in sentiment and in technique, it is very characteristic. A comparison of it with Raphael's great Madonna or any of those of the earlier masters (e. g. Bellini) will show in a moment wherein the peculiarity of Correggio consists. The mother has none of the rapt look of the woman who "laid these things in her heart," and the child has no prophetic sense of future suffering. There is nothing to mark the picture as representing the Holy Family except the introduction of Joseph, the carpenter, in the background. It is a picture painted solely in the "religion of humanity," and full only of artless grace and melodious tenderness. The child is full of play and fun; the mother (with the household basket which gives the picture its name – "La Vierge au panier") is dressing him, and has just succeeded in putting his right arm through the sleeve of his little coat, and is endeavouring by gentle stratagem to do the same with the left; but something has caught his fancy, and she shares in his delight, smiling with all a young mother's fondness at the waywardness of her curly-haired boy. "As a painting," says Sir Edward Poynter, "it is one of those masterpieces of perfect technicality, of brilliant purity of lighting and colouring, and of completeness of modelling in the flesh tints, combined with the utmost apparent ease of execution, which may well be the despair of painters for all time. As a design it is no less remarkable; for though of studied harmony in the arrangement of the forms it is so natural that all appearance of effort is lost, and we cannot conceive of the scene as being rendered in a more artless manner" (The National Gallery, i. 4).

The date of this picture is uncertain. Some, liking to find in it a piece of the painter's own home-life, have dated it 1521-22, that is just after the birth of Correggio's first child. Others put it earlier in the artist's career, 1518. It is perhaps the picture which Vasari describes as in the possession of the Cavaliere Baiardi of Parma – "a marvellous and beautiful work by Correggio, in which Our Lady puts a little shirt on the Infant Christ." It was afterwards in the royal collection at Madrid, from which it passed by the gift of Charles IV. to Don Emanuele Goday, at whose instance it was subjected to a most rigorous cleaning. During the French invasion of Spain it fell into various hands, and in 1825 was bought for the National Gallery from Mr. C. J. Nieuwenhuys for £3800 – a sum, it has been calculated, that would "cover the little panel with sovereigns just twenty-seven times over."

24. AN ITALIAN LADY AS ST. AGATHA

Sebastiano del Piombo (Venetian: 1485-1547). See 1.

The nimbus around the head indicates the saint; the palm branch and the pincers indicate St. Agatha, who was "bound and beaten with rods, and her tender bosom was cruelly torn with iron pincers; and as her blood flowed forth, she said, 'O thou tyrant! shamest thou not to treat me so – thou who hast been nourished and fed from the breast of a mother?' And this was her only plaint." See also under 20.

25. ST. JOHN IN THE WILDERNESS

Annibale Carracci (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609). See 9.

"And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel" (Luke i. 80). In his left hand is the standard of the Lamb, the symbol of his mission, for which he is preparing himself in the desert solitude, while with his right he catches water in a cup from a stream in the rocks, symbolical of the water by which that mission, the baptism unto repentance, was to be accomplished.

26. THE CONSECRATION OF ST. NICHOLAS

Paolo Veronese (Veronese: 1528-1588).

Paolo Caliari (called Veronese from his birthplace) stands, says Ruskin, in the forefront of the great colourists. "Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret were the only painters who ever sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of light and shade as associated with colour, in the noblest of all physical created things, the human form." With Veronese, "the whole picture is like the rose – glowing with colour in the shadows, and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or masses of whiteness, in the lights." Contrasting the aims of Veronese with those of the great chiaroscurists, Ruskin says: "Veronese chooses to represent the great relations of visible things to each other, to the heaven above, and to the earth beneath them. He holds it more important to show how a figure stands relieved from delicate air, or marble wall; how as a red, or purple, or white figure, it separates itself, in clear discernibility, from things not red, nor purple, nor white; how infinite daylight shines round it; how innumerable veils of faint shadow invest it; how its blackness and darkness are, in the excess of their nature, just as limited and local as its intensity of light; all this, I say, he feels to be more important than showing merely the exact measure of the spark of sunshine that gleams on a dagger-hilt, or glows on a jewel. All this, moreover, he feels to be harmonious, – capable of being joined in one great system of spacious truth. And with inevitable watchfulness, inestimable subtlety, he unites all this in tenderest balance, noting in each hair's-breadth of colour, not merely what its rightness or wrongness is in itself, but what its relation is to every other on his canvas." In the tone of his colouring Paolo retained, as Sir F. Burton points out, much of the tradition of the Veronese school. "The silvery tone which differentiates his best works from the golden lustre of Titian was not gained in Venice, and under the lightsome skies of the lagoons he was not tempted to alter it." In the tone of his mind Veronese was thoroughly Venetian. It is a certain "gay grasp of the outside aspects of the world" that distinguishes him. "By habitual preference, exquisitely graceful and playful; religious, without severity, and winningly noble; delighting in slight, sweet everyday incident, but hiding deep meanings underneath it; rarely painting a gloomy subject, and never a base one" (Modern Painters, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. iii. § 16; vol. iv. pt. v. ch. iii. § 18, ch. xx. § 16; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 27; Cambridge Inaugural Lecture in O.O.R., vol. i. § 314). Thus Venetian in character, it is the Venice of his time – with all its material magnificence and pride of life of a nation of merchant princes – that Veronese everywhere paints. "Veronese," says Symonds, "elevated pageantry to the height of serious art. His domain is noonday sunlight ablaze on sumptuous dresses and Palladian architecture. Armour, shot silks and satins, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres, crowns – all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun – form the habitual furniture of his pictures." It is characteristic of the spirit of his time that the pictures by Veronese of banquets and other scenes of gaiety were mostly painted for monasteries. The frank introduction of the costumes of the painter's own time, clothing the fine race to which he belonged, gives to his pictures of this kind an historical interest. Often he introduces portraits into his groups. In expression his figures are often deficient. "He will make the Magdalene wash the feet of Christ with a countenance as absolutely unmoved as that of any ordinary servant bringing an ewer to her master." Animal force in men, superb voluptuousness in women, were his favourite types. "His noblest creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full of nerve and blood. In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he does not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly; he remains proud and powerful, and frigidly urbane. The same love of display led him to delight in allegory – not allegory of the deep and mystic kind, but of the pompous and processional, in which Venice appears enthroned among the deities, or the genii of the arts are personified as handsome women and blooming boys." He painted with marvellous facility and revelled, as we have seen, in exuberance. In this he resembled Rubens, but he combined, as Rubens did not, moderation with profusion. Amid so much that is distracting, Veronese never loses command over his subject or his brush, "restraining, for truth's sake, his exhaustless energy; reining back, for truth's sake, his fiery strength; veiling, before truth, the vanity of brightness; penetrating, for truth, the discouragement of gloom; ruling his restless invention with a rod of iron; pardoning no error, no thoughtlessness, no forgetfulness; and subduing all his powers, impulses, and imaginations, to the arbitrament of a merciless justice, and the obedience of an incorruptible verity."