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+Project Gutenberg's The Old Masters and Their Pictures, by Sarah Tytler
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Old Masters and Their Pictures
+       For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art
+
+Author: Sarah Tytler
+
+Release Date: November 19, 2006 [EBook #19863]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Yearsley, Ted Garvin and the Online
+Distributed Proofreaders Europe at http://dp.rastko.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES
+
+_For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art_
+
+
+BY SARAH TYTLER
+
+AUTHOR OF "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS" ETC.
+
+
+_NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LONDON
+ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED
+15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
+1893
+
+[_The Right of Translation is Reserved_]
+
+LONDON:
+
+PRINTED BY J.S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,
+CITY ROAD.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+I wish to say, in a very few words, that this book is intended to be a
+simple account of the great Old Masters in painting of every age and
+country, with descriptions of their most famous works, for the use of
+learners and outsiders in art. The book is not, and could not well be,
+exhaustive in its nature. I have avoided definitions of schools,
+considering that these should form a later and more elaborate portion of
+art education, and preferring to group my 'painters' according to what I
+hold to be the primitive arrangements of time, country, and rank in
+art.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
+
+
+The restrictions with regard to space under which the little volume
+called "The Old Masters" was originally written, caused me to omit, to
+my regret, many names great, though not first, in art. The circulation
+which the book has attained induces me to do what I can to remedy the
+defect, and render the volume more useful by adding two chapters--the
+one on Italian and the other on German, Dutch, and Flemish masters.
+These chapters consist almost entirely of condensed notes taken from two
+trustworthy sources, to which I have been already much indebted--Sir C,
+and Lady Eastlake's version of Kugler's "Handbook of Italian Art," and
+Dr. Waagen's "Handbook,"--remodelled from Kugler--of German, Dutch, and
+Flemish art, revised by J.A. Crowe. I have purposely given numerous
+records of those Dutch painters whose art has been specially popular in
+England and who are in some cases better represented in our country than
+in their own.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO,
+1280-1345--ORCAGNA, 1315-1376--GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428
+_OR_ 1429--FRA ANGELICO, 1387-1455 1
+
+II. EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, _ABOUT_
+1470-1532--MEMLING, _ABOUT_ 1478-1499--QUINTIN MATSYS, 1460-1530 OR 31
+41
+
+III. IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
+1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--- IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
+BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530 53
+
+IV. LIONARDO DA VINCI. 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
+1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566 83
+
+V. GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DÜRER, 1471-1528 169
+
+VI. LATER ITALIAN ART--GIORGIONE, 1477-1511--CORREGGIO, _ABOUT_
+1493-1534--TINTORETTO, 1512-1594--VERONESE, 1530-1588 181
+
+VII. CARRACCI, 1555-1609--GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642--DOMENICHINO,
+1581-1641--SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673 212
+
+VIII. LATER FLEMISH ART--RUBENS, 1577-1640--REMBRANDT, 1606 _OR_
+1608-1669--TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694--WOUVVERMAN,
+1620-1668--CUYP, 1605; _STILL LIVING_, 1638--PAUL POTTER,
+1625-1654--CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630 225
+
+IX. SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682 260
+
+X. FRENCH ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE LORRAINE,
+1600-1682--CHARLES LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE,
+1726-1805 286
+
+XI. FOREIGN ARTISTS IN ENGLAND--HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK,
+1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO, 1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723 309
+
+XII. ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH
+CENTURIES--TADDEO GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO,
+1412-1469--BENOZZO GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED
+TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO,
+1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH
+UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI, FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN 1460--ANTONELLA DA
+MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE, 1416--GAROPALO,
+1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
+1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO SPAGNA, DATE OF
+BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS BORDONE,
+1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO, 1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO,
+1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO, 1592-1666--ALBANO,
+1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1615--VASARI, 1512-1574--SOFONISBA
+ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1626--LAVINIA FONTANA, 1552-1614 364
+
+XIII. GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE
+EIGHTEENTH CENTURY--VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS,
+1366-1442--VAN LEYDEN, 1494-1533--VAN SOMER, 1570-1624--SNYDERS,
+1579-1657--G. HONTHORST, 1592-1662--JAN STEEN, 1626-1679--GERARD DOW,
+1613-1680--DE HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--VAN OSTADE,
+1610-1685--MAAS, 1632-1693--METZU, 1615. STILL ALIVE IN 1667--TERBURG,
+1608-1681--NETCHER, 1639-1684--BOL, 1611-1680--VAN DER HELST,
+1613-1670--RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682--HOBBEMA, 1638-1709--BERCHEM,
+1620-1683--BOTH 1600 (?)-1650(?) DU JARDIN, 1625-1678--ADRIAN VAN DE
+VELDE, 1639-1672--VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712--DE WITTE, 1607-1692--VAN
+DER NEER, 1619 (?)-1683--WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE, THE YOUNGER,
+1633-1707--BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708--VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
+1653--HONDECOETER, 1636-1695--JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719--PATER SEGERS,
+1590-1661--VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749--VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722--MENGS,
+1728-1774 391
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO. 1280-1345--ORCAGNA,
+1315-1376 GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428 OR 1429--FRA
+ANGELICO, 1387-1455.
+
+
+A pencil and paper, a box of colours, and a scrap-book, form so often a
+child's favourite toys that one might expect that a very large portion
+of men and women would prove painters. But, as we grow in years and
+knowledge, the discrepancy between nature and our attempts to copy
+nature, strike us more and more, until we turn in dissatisfaction and
+disgust from the vain effort.
+
+There was only one old woman in an Esquimaux tribe who could be called
+forward to draw with a stick on the sand a sufficiently graphic likeness
+of the Erebus and the Terror. It is only a few groups of men belonging
+to different countries, throughout the centuries, who have been able to
+give us paintings to which we turn in wonder and admiration, and say
+that these are in their degree fair exponents of nature. The old
+painter's half-haughty, half-humble protest was true--it is 'God
+Almighty,' who in raising here and there men above their fellows, 'makes
+painters.'
+
+But let us be thankful that the old propensity to delight in a
+facsimile, or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very
+common satisfaction and joy--whether cultivated or uncultivated---
+derived from looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving
+to understand the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to
+consider the lives and times which throw light on works of genius. Music
+itself is not more universally and gladly listened and responded to,
+than pictures are looked at and remembered.
+
+Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my
+subject if I can only treat it sympathetically,--enter at a humble
+distance into the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and
+place before you some of the paintings by reverent and loving
+word-painting such as others have achieved, and such as I may strive to
+attain to, that you may be in a sort early familiar with these
+paintings, before you see them in engravings and photographs, and on
+canvas and in fresco, as I trust you may be privileged to see many of
+them, when you may hail them not only for what they are, the glories of
+art, but for what they have been to you in thoughts of beauty and high
+desires.
+
+Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
+dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything, and
+of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after the fall
+of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting as of
+other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity,
+was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious
+conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to
+hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and meaningless
+type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs
+in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to
+bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a
+similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings
+with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the
+sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are
+very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations,
+and as illustrations of faith; but they present no intrinsic beauty or
+worth. They are not only clumsy and childish designs ill executed, but
+they are rendered unintelligible to all save the initiated in such
+hieroglyphics, by offering an elaborate ground-work of type, antitype,
+and symbol, on which the artist probably spent a large part of his
+strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents, vines, fishes, dolphins,
+phoenixes, cocks, anchors, and javelins played nearly as conspicuous a
+part in this art as did the dead believer, or his or her patron saint,
+who might have been supposed to form the principal figure in the
+picture.
+
+Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but
+quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the
+stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the
+old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But
+first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.
+Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting in
+fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or
+with size, egg, or fig-juice--the latter practices termed _tempera_ (in
+English in distemper) before oil was used to mix colours. But painters
+did not confine themselves then to painting with pencil or brush, else
+they might have attained technical excellence sooner. It has been well
+said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so the
+earlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them
+called--referring to its durability--'painting for eternity;' and in
+metals. Many of them were the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves;
+they worked in iron as well as in gold and silver, and they were
+sculptors and architects as well as painters; engineers also, so far as
+engineering in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, was known
+in those days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so
+that drawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of
+distance, and the management of light and shade, were feebly developed.
+Even the fore-shortening of figures was so difficult to the old Italian
+painters that they could not carry it into the extremities, and men and
+women seem as though standing on the points of their toes.
+Landscape-painting did not exist farther than that a rock or a bush, or
+a few blue lines, with fishes out of proportion prominently interposed,
+indicated, as on the old stage, that a desert, a forest, or a sea, was
+to play its part in the story of the picture. So also portrait-painting
+was not thought of, unless it occurred in the likeness of a great man
+belonging to the time and place of the painter, who was the donor of
+some picture to chapel or monastery, or of the painter himself, alike
+introduced into sacred groups and scenes; for pictures were uniformly of
+a religious character, until a little later, when they merged into
+allegorical representations, just as one remembers that miracle plays
+passed into moral plays before ordinary human life was reproduced. Until
+this period, what we call dramatic expression in making a striking
+situation, or even in bringing the look of joy or sorrow, pleasure or
+pain, into a face, had hardly been attained.
+
+Perhaps you will ask, what merit had the old paintings of the middle
+ages to compensate for so many great disadvantages and incongruities?
+Certainly before the time I have reached, they have, with rare
+exceptions, little merit, save that fascination of pathos, half-comic,
+half-tragic, which belongs to the struggling dawn of all great
+endeavours, and especially of all endeavours in art. But just at this
+epoch, art, in one man, took a great stride, began, as I shall try to
+show, to exert an influence so true, deep, and high that it extends, in
+the noblest forms, to the present day, and much more than compensates to
+the thoughtful and poetic for a protracted train of technical blunders
+and deficiencies.
+
+Giotto, known also as Magister Joctus, was born in 1276 near Florence. I
+dare say many have heard one legend of him, and I mean to tell the
+legends of the painters, because even when they are most doubtful they
+give the most striking indications of the times and the light in which
+painters and their paintings were regarded by the world of artists, and
+by the world at large; but so far as I have heard this legend of Giotto
+has not been disproven. The only objection which can be urged against
+it, is that it is found preserved in various countries, of very
+different individuals--a crowning objection also to the legend of
+William Tell. Giotto was a shepherd boy keeping his father's sheep and
+amusing himself by drawing with chalk on a stone the favourites of the
+flock, when his drawings attracted the attention of a traveller passing
+from the heights into the valley. This traveller was the well-born and
+highly-esteemed painter Cimabue, who was so delighted with the little
+lad's rough outlines, that getting the consent of Giotto's father,
+Cimabue adopted the boy, carried him off to the city of Florence,
+introduced him to his studio, and so far as man could supplement the
+work of God, made a painter of the youthful genius. I may add here a
+later legend of Giotto. Pope Boniface VIII, requested specimens of skill
+from various artists with the view to the appointment of a painter to
+decorate St Peter's. Giotto, either in impatient disdain, or to show a
+careless triumph of skill, with one flourish of his hand, without the
+aid of compass, executed a perfect circle in red chalk, and sent the
+circle as his contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The
+audacious specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was
+chosen as the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident
+arose the Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the
+friend of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom
+the grandeur of some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough
+attributed. The poet of the 'Inferno' wrote of his friend:
+
+                   '......... Cimabue thought
+    To lord it over painting's field; and now
+    The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'
+
+Petrarch bequeathed in his will a Madonna by Giotto and mentioned it as
+a rare treasure of art. Boccaccio wrote a merry anecdote of his comrade
+the painter's wit, in the course of which he referred with notable
+plain-speaking to Giotto's 'flat currish' plainness of face.
+
+The impression handed down of Giotto's character is that of an
+independent, high-spirited man, full of invention, full of imagination,
+and also, by a precious combination, full of shrewdness and common
+sense; a man genial, given to repartee, and at the same time not
+deficient in the tact which deprives repartee of its sting. While he was
+working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the painter
+on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I would
+leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I, sire, if
+I were _you_,' replied the wag.
+
+I need scarcely add that Giotto was a man highly esteemed and very
+prosperous in his day; one account reports him as the head and the
+father of four sons and four daughters. I have purposely written first
+of the fame, the reputed character, and the circumstances of Giotto
+before I proceed to his work. This great work was, in brief, to breathe
+into painting the living soul which had till then--in mediæval
+times--been largely absent. Giotto went to Nature for his inspiration,
+and not content with the immense innovation of superseding by the actual
+representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the
+rigid traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their
+faces--the melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so
+simple, filled Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with
+astonishment and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
+commonest deed even coarsely lifelike, as in the case of a sailor in a
+boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
+sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression,
+as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure
+of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere
+realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light
+an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose
+above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real
+is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion
+robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which
+is at its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and love.
+
+Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
+earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
+idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
+be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate
+successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance,
+crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure
+these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their
+originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would
+seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they
+appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence
+their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest
+qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the
+Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more
+accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of
+another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed
+fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and
+in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.
+
+The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
+that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
+the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the
+unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of
+Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the
+same in kind.[1]
+
+I wish you, my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to
+learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any
+half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke
+transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you
+have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern
+marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight
+figures with long hands, wooden feet, and clinging draperies, while your
+eyes have been familiar with well-modelled frames and limbs and flowing
+lines. But we must look deeper if we would not be slaves to superficial
+prettiness, or even superficial correctness; we must try to go into the
+spirit of a painting and value it more in proportion as it teaches art's
+noblest lesson--the divinity of the divine, the serenity of utmost
+strength, the single-heartedness of passion.
+
+I have only space to tell you of three or four of the famous works of
+Giotto. First, his allegories in the great church, in honour of St
+Francis, at Assisi, in relation to which, writing of its German
+architect, an author says: 'He built boldly against the mountain, piling
+one church upon another; the upper vast, lofty, and admitting through
+its broad windows the bright rays of the sun: the lower as if in the
+bowels of the earth--low, solemn, and almost shutting out the light of
+day. Around the lofty edifice grew the convent, a vast building, resting
+upon a long line of arches clinging to the hill-sides. As the evening
+draws nigh, casting its deep shadows across the valley, the traveller
+beneath gazes upwards with feelings of wonder and delight at this
+graceful arcade supporting the massy convent; the ancient towers and
+walls of the silent town gathering around, and the purple rocks rising
+high above--all still glowing in the lingering sunbeams--a scene
+scarcely to be surpassed in any clime for its sublime beauty.' The
+upper church contains frescoes wonderfully fresh, by Cimabue, of
+Scriptural subjects, and frescoes of scenes from the life vowed to
+poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis,
+are the four masterpieces with which we have to do. These are the three
+vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and
+grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been
+attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her
+rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The
+fourth fresco pictures the saint who died, 'covered by another's cloak
+cast over his wasted body eaten with sores,' enthroned and glorified
+amidst the host of Heaven.
+
+I have chosen the second example of the art of Giotto because you may
+with comparative ease see it for yourselves. It is in the National
+Gallery, London, having belonged to the collection of the late Samuel
+Rogers. It is a fragment of an old fresco which had been part of a
+series illustrating the life of John the Baptist in the church of the
+Carmine, Florence, a church which was destroyed by fire in 1771. The
+fragment in the National Gallery has two fine heads of apostles bending
+sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do
+it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents
+of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in
+regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before
+Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed to tell the
+Bible's stories.
+
+The third instance I have chosen to quote is Giotto's portrait of Dante
+which was so strangely lost for many years. The portrait occurs in a
+painting, the first recorded performance of Giotto's, in which he was
+said to have introduced the likeness of many of his contemporaries, on
+the wall of the Palazzo dell' Podestà or Council Chamber of Florence.
+During the banishment of Dante the wall was plastered or white-washed
+over, through the influence of his enemies, and though believed to
+exist, the picture was hidden down to 1840, when, after various futile
+efforts to recover it, the figures were again brought to light.
+
+This portrait of Dante is altogether removed from the later portraits of
+the indignant and weary man, of whom the Italian market-women said that
+he had been in Hell as well as in exile. Giotto's Dante on the walls of
+the Council Chamber is a noble young man of thirty, full of ambitious
+hope and early distinction. The face is slightly pointed, with broad
+forehead, hazel eyes, straight brows and nose, mouth and chin a little
+projecting. The close cloak or vest with sleeves, and cap in folds
+hanging down on the shoulder, the hand holding the triple fruit, in
+prognostication of the harvest of virtue and renown which was to be so
+bitter as well as so glorious, are all in keeping and have a majesty of
+their own. The picture is probably known by engravings to many of my
+readers.
+
+The last example of Giotto's, is the one which of all his works is most
+potent and patent in its beauty, and has struck, and, in so far as we
+can tell, will for ages strike, with its greatness multitudes of widely
+different degrees of cultivation whose intellectual capacity is as far
+apart as their critical faculty. I mean the matchless Campanile or
+bell-tower 'towering over the Dome of Brunelleschi' at Florence, formed
+of coloured marbles--for which Giotto framed the designs, and even
+executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture. With this
+lovely sight Dean Alford's description is more in keeping than the
+prosaic saying of Charles V., that 'the Campanile ought to be kept under
+glass.' Dean Alford's enthusiasm thus expresses itself:
+
+     'A mass of varied light written on the cloudless sky of
+     unfathomed blue; varied but blended, as never in any other
+     building that we had seen; the warm yellow of the lighter marbles
+     separated but not disunited by the ever-recurring bands of dark;
+     or glowing into red where the kisses of the sun had been hottest;
+     or fading again into white where the shadows mostly haunted, or
+     where the renovating hand had been waging conflict with decay.'
+
+It is known that Giotto, together with his friend Dante, died before
+this--Giotto's last great work--was finally constructed by Giotto's
+pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, and that therefore neither of the friends could
+have really looked on 'Giotto's Tower,' though Italian Ciceroni point
+out, and strangers love to contemplate, the very stone on which 'Grim
+Dante' sat and gazed with admiration in the calm light of evening on the
+enduring memorial of the painter.
+
+Giotto died in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a
+good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he
+painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling
+in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the
+Cross.' The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been
+the practice which painted the Virgin Mother now as a brown Italian, now
+as a red and white Fleming, and again as a flaxen-haired German or as a
+swarthy Spaniard, and draped her and all the minor figures in the
+grandest drama the world ever saw--as well as the characters in older
+Scripture histories, in the Florentine, Venetian, and Antwerp fashions
+of the day. The defence of the practice is, that the Bible is for
+universal time, that its Virgin Mother, its apostles and saints, were
+types of other mothers and of other heroes running down the stream of
+history; that even the one central and holy figure, if He may be
+represented at all, as the Divine brother of all humanity, may be clad
+not inaptly in the garments of all. It appears to me that there is
+reason in this answer, and that viewed in its light the criticism which
+constantly demands historic fidelity is both carping and narrow. I do
+not mean, however, to underrate historic accuracy in itself, or to
+depreciate that longing for completeness in every particular, which
+drives our modern painters to the East to study patiently for months the
+aspects of nature under its Oriental climate, with its peculiar people
+and animals, its ancient costumes and architecture.
+
+Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest
+of the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the
+church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been
+buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his
+effigy in marble.
+
+In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little. I have already
+mentioned how closely painting was in the beginning allied with working
+in metals as well as with sculpture and architecture. It is thus
+necessary to write of a magnificent work in metal, the study and
+admiration of generations of painters, begun in the life of Giotto, and
+completed in two divisions, extending over a period of nearly a hundred
+years. We shall proceed to deal with the first division, and recur to
+the second a little later.
+
+The old Italian cities. They were then the great merchant cities of the
+world, more or less republican in their constitution. They stood to the
+citizens, who rarely left their walls, at once as peculiar possessions
+and as native countries rather than as cities alone, while they excited
+all the patriotism, pride, and love that were elsewhere expended on a
+whole country--which after all was held as belonging largely to its king
+and nobles. The old Italian merchant guilds, and wealthy merchants as
+individuals, vied with each other in signalizing their good citizenship
+by presenting--as gifts identified with their names--to their cities,
+those palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight
+of the world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily
+of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni
+or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some
+competition the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great
+group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named,
+as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea
+executed a series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the
+Baptist, which were cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre
+door-way. I shall leave the rest of the gates, still more exquisitely
+wrought, till their proper time, only observing that the Pisani group of
+carvers and founders are supposed to have attained their extraordinary
+superiority in skill and grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in
+consequence of one of them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to
+the study of some ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.
+
+Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come back
+to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument--in itself
+very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians' love
+to their cities. Andrea Orcagna, otherwise known as Andrea di Cione, one
+of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about 1315. His
+greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.
+
+This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation,
+alas, will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial,
+though no longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an
+arcade, something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running
+round, and having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for
+the dead were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth
+brought from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered
+with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross
+in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and
+contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments--among them the
+Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of
+the Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
+opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
+artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of
+the walls was continued at intervals, during two hundred years. The
+havoc wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the
+pictures faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated
+fragments, 'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's
+illustrations of the book of Job have thus perished. Still Orcagna's
+work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in
+his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to
+borrow from it in design and arrangement. Dean Alford has thus described
+Orcagna's mournful, thoughtful 'Triumph of Death:'
+
+'The picture is one of crowded action, and contains very many
+personages. The action may be supposed to begin in the lower corner on
+the right hand. There we see what appears to be a wedding-party seated
+in festivity under a grove of orange-trees laden with fruit. Over two of
+them a pair entertaining them with merry strains. But close to them on
+the left comes swooping down on bats' wings, and armed with the
+inevitable scythe, the genius of Death. Her wild hair streams in the
+wind, her bosom is invulnerable, being closed in a trellised armour of
+steel. Beneath her, on the ground, are a heap of corpses, shown by their
+attire to be the great and wealthy of the world. Three winged figures,
+two fiends and one angel, are drawing souls, in the form of children,
+out of the mouths of three of these corpses. Above, the air is full of
+flying spirits, angels and demons: the former beautiful and saintly, the
+latter hideous and bestial. Some are dragging, or bearing upwards, human
+souls: others are on their way to fetch them from the heaps of dead:
+others, again, are flying about apparently without aim. Further yet to
+the left, a company of wretched ones, lame and in rags, are invoking
+Death with outstretched arms to come to their relief; but she sweeps by
+and heeds them not.
+
+'Dividing one half of the picture from the other, is a high range of
+rocks, terminating in a fiery mountain, into which the demons are
+casting the unhappy souls which they have carried off. Beyond that seems
+to be a repetition of the same lesson respecting Death in another form.
+A party of knights and dames are issuing on horseback from a mountain
+pass. In the left hand of the picture there lie in their path three
+corpses in coffins, with coronets on their heads. One is newly dead; on
+the second, decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a
+grinning skeleton. The impression produced on the gay party by the sight
+is very various. Some look on carelessly; one holds his nose in disgust;
+one, a lady jewelled and crowned, leans her head on her hand in solemn
+thought. Above, on a rising ground, an aged monk (it is said, Saint
+Macarius) is holding a scroll, and pointing out to passengers the moral
+of the sight which meets them. The path winds up a hill crowned with a
+church, and by its side at various points are hermits sitting in calm
+security, or following peaceful occupations. One of them is milking a
+doe; another is reading; a third is calmly contemplating from a distance
+the valley of Death. About them are various animals and birds. The idea
+evidently intended to be conveyed is that deliverance from the fear of
+death is to be found not in gaiety and dissipation, but in contemplation
+and communion with God.
+
+'Such is the wonderful fresco, and the execution is as wonderful as the
+conception. Belonging as the painter did to a rude and early period of
+art, he yet had the power of endowing his figures with both majesty and
+tenderness of expression.'
+
+The Last Judgment is no less solemn and sad, with hope tempering its
+sadness. Mrs Jameson's note of it is: 'Above, in the centre, Christ and
+the Virgin are throned in separate glories. He turns to the left,
+towards the condemned, while he uncovers the wound in his side, and
+raises his right arm with a menacing gesture, his countenance full of
+majestic wrath. The Virgin, on the right of her Son, is the picture of
+heavenly mercy, and, as if terrified at the words of eternal
+condemnation, she turns away. On either side are ranged the Prophets of
+the Old Testament, the Apostles and other saints, severe, solemn,
+dignified figures. Angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, hover
+over Christ and the Virgin; under them is a group of archangels. The
+archangel Michael stands in the midst holding a scroll in each hand;
+immediately before him another archangel, supposed to represent Raphael,
+the guardian angel of humanity, cowers down, shuddering, while two
+others sound the awful trumpets of doom. Lower down is the earth where
+men are seen rising from their graves; armed angels direct them to the
+right and left. Here is seen King Solomon, who, whilst he rises, seems
+doubtful to which side he should turn; here a hypocritical monk, whom an
+angel draws back by the hair from the host of the youth in a gay and
+rich costume, whom another angel leads away to Paradise. There is
+wonderful and even terrible power of expression in some of the heads;
+and it is said that among them are many portraits of contemporaries, but
+unfortunately no circumstantial traditions as to particular figures have
+reached us.'
+
+One of Orcagna's altar-pieces, that of 'the coronation of the Virgin,'
+containing upwards of a hundred figures, and with the colouring still
+rich, is in our National Gallery. As an architect, Orcagna designed the
+famous Loggia de' Lanzi of the grand ducal palace at Florence.
+
+Now I must take you back to the bronze gates of the Baptistery in their
+triumphant completion nearly a hundred years after the first gate was
+executed by Andrea Pisano. I should have liked, but for our limits, to
+tell in full the legend of the election of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the
+step-son of a goldsmith, and skilled in chasing and enamelling, to
+design the second gate; when yet a lad of twenty-three, how he and two
+other young men, one of them still younger than Ghiberti, were declared
+the most promising competitors in the trial for the work; how the last
+two voluntarily withdrew from the contest, magnanimously proclaiming
+Lorenzo Ghiberti their superior; how all the three lived to be famous,
+the one as a founder in metal, the others as an architect and a
+sculptor, and remained sworn brothers in art till death.
+
+Lorenzo Ghiberti has left us an expression of the feeling with which he
+set about his task, an expression so suggestive that, even had we no
+other indication, it is enough to stamp the true and tender nature of
+the man. He prepared for his achievement 'with infinite diligence and
+love'--the words deserve to be pondered over. He took at least
+twenty-two years to his work, receiving for it eleven hundred florins.
+He chose his subjects from the life and death of the Lord, working them
+out in twenty panels, ten on each side of the folding doors, and below
+these were eight panels containing full-length figures of the four
+evangelists and four doctors of the Latin Church, with a complete border
+of fruit and foliage, having heads of prophets and sibyls interspersed.
+So entire was the satisfaction the superb gate gave, that Lorenzo was
+not merely loaded with praise, he received a commission to design and
+cast a third and central gate which should surpass the others, that were
+thenceforth to be the side entrances.
+
+For his second gate Lorenzo Ghiberti repaired to the Old Testament for
+subjects, beginning with the creation and ending with the meeting of
+Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and represented them in ten compartments
+enclosed in a rich border of fruit and foliage, with twenty-four
+full-length figures of the Hebrew heroes and prophets, clearly and
+delicately designed and finished, occupying corresponding niches. This
+crowning gate engaged the founder upwards of eighteen years--forty-nine
+years are given as the term of the work of both the gates.
+
+The single defect which is found in those marvellous gates--left to us
+as a testimony of what the life-long devotion of genius could
+produce--is that they abound floridly both in ornament and action, in
+place of being severely simple and restrained according to the classical
+standard.
+
+Michael Angelo called these gates 'worthy to be the gates of Paradise,'
+and they are still one of the glories of Florence. Casts of the gates
+are to be found in the School for Art at Kensington, and at the Crystal
+Palace.
+
+A young village boy learned to draw and model from Ghiberti's gates. He
+in his turn was to create in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the
+Carmine at Florence a school of painters scarcely less renowned and
+powerful in its effects than that produced by the works in the Campo
+Santa. You will find the Italian painters not unfrequently known by
+nicknames, quite as often by their father's trades as by their father's
+surnames, and still oftener by the town which was their place of birth
+or nurture. This Tom village birth-place, was commonly called Masaccio,
+short for Tomasaccio, 'hulking Tom,' as I have heard it translated, on
+account of his indifferent, slovenly habits. I think there is a
+tradition that he entered a studio in Florence as a colour boy, and
+electrified the painter and his scholars, by _brownie_ like freaks of
+painting at their unfinished work, in their absence, better than any of
+his masters, and by the dexterity with which he perpetrated the frolic
+of putting the facsimile of a fly on one of the faces on the easels. His
+end was a tragic conclusion to such light comedy. At the age of
+twenty-six, he quitted Florence for Rome so suddenly that he left his
+finest frescoes unfinished. It was said that he was summoned thither by
+the Pope. At Rome, where little or nothing of Masaccio's life is known,
+he died shortly afterwards, not without a suspicion of his having been
+poisoned.
+
+A curious anecdote exists of the identification of the time when he
+forsook Florence to meet his death in Rome. Just as we have read, that
+the period of the death of Massinger the dramatist has been settled by
+an entry in an old parish register, 'died, Philip Massinger a stranger,'
+so there has been found some quaint equivalent to a modern tax-paper
+which had been delivered at the dwelling of Masaccio when the word
+'gone' was written down.
+
+There is a further tradition--not very probable under the
+circumstances--that Masaccio is buried, without name or stone, under the
+Brancacci Chapel. Be that as it may, he very early rose to eminence,
+surpassing all his predecessors in drawing and colouring, and he
+combined with those acquirements such animation and variety of
+expression in his characters, that it was said of him 'he painted souls
+as well as bodies,' while his invention was not less bold and fresh.
+
+It is difficult to indicate Masaccio's pictures because some of them
+have been repainted and destroyed. As to those in the Brancacci Chapel
+from the life of St Peter, (with the exception of two,) considerable
+confusion has arisen as to which are Masaccio's, and which belong to
+his scholar Filippino Lippi. The fresco which Masaccio left unfinished,
+that of the Apostles Peter and Paul raising a dead youth (from
+traditional history), was finished by Lippi. In the fresco of Peter
+baptizing the converts, generally attributed to Masaccio, there is a lad
+who has thrown off his garments, and stands shivering with cold, whose
+figure, according to authority, formed an epoch in art. Lionardo da
+Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, all studied
+their art in this chapel. Raphael borrowed the grand figure of St Paul
+preaching at Athens in one of the cartoons, from one of Masaccio's or
+Filippo Lippi's frescoes. Masaccio's excellence as an artist, reached at
+an immature age, is very remarkable.
+
+I have come to the last and probably the best appreciated among modems
+of the early Italian painters. Fra Angelico da Fiesole, the gentle
+devout monk whom Italians called '_Il Beato_,' the Blessed, and who
+probably did receive the distinction of beatification, a distinction
+only second in the Roman Catholic Church to that of canonization. He was
+born at the lovely little mountain-town of Fiesole near Florence, 1387,
+and his worldly name, which he bore only till his twenty-first year, was
+Guido Petri de Mugello. In his youth, with his gift already recognized,
+so that he might well have won ease and honour in the world, he entered
+the Dominican Convent of St Mark, Florence, for what he deemed the good
+and peace of his soul. He seldom afterwards left it, and that only as
+directed by his convent superior, or summoned by the Pope. He was a man
+devoid of personal ambition, pure, humble, and meek. When offered the
+Archbishopric of Florence as a tribute to his sanctity, he declined it
+on account of his unworthiness for the office. He would not work for
+money, and only painted at the command of his prior. He began his
+painting with fasting and work, he steadfastly refused to make any
+alteration in the originals. It is said that he was found dead at his
+easel with a completed picture before him. It is not wonderful, that
+from such a man should come one side of the perfection of that idealism
+which Giotto had begun. Fra Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and
+Virgin are more divinely calm, pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting
+saintliness, a more immortal youth and joy, and a more utter
+self-abnegation and sympathetic tenderness than are to be found in the
+saints and the angels, the Saviour and the Virgin of other painters.
+Neither is it surprising that Fra Angelico's defects, besides that of
+the bad drawing which shows more in his large than in his small
+pictures, are those of a want of human knowledge, power, and freedom.
+His wicked--even his more earthly-souled characters, are weak and faulty
+in action. What should the reverent and guileless dreamer know, unless
+indeed by inspiration of the rude conflicts, the fire and fury of human
+passions intensified in the malice and anguish of devils? But Fra
+Angelico's singular successes far transcend his failures. In addition to
+the sublime serenity and positive radiance of expression which he could
+impart to his heads, his notions of grouping and draping were full of
+grace, sometimes of splendour and magnificence. In harmony with his
+happy temperament and fortunes, he was fond of gay yet delicate colours
+'like spring flowers,' and used a profusion of gold ornaments which do
+not seem out of keeping in his pictures. The most of Fra Angelico's
+pictures are in Florence--the best in his own old convent of St Mark,
+where he lovingly adorned not only chapter-hall and court, but the cells
+of his brother friars. A crucifix with adoring saints worshipping their
+crucified Saviour is regarded as his masterpiece in St Mark's. A famous
+coronation of the Virgin, which Fra Angelico painted for a church in his
+native town, and which is now in the Louvre, Paris, is thus described by
+Mrs Jameson: 'It represents a throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to
+which there is an ascent of nine steps; on the highest kneels the
+Virgin, veiled, her hands crossed on her bosom. She is clothed in a red
+tunic, a blue robe over it, and a royal mantle with a rich border
+flowing down behind. The features are most delicately lovely, and the
+expression of the face full of humility and adoration. Christ, seated on
+the throne, bends forward, and is in the act of placing the crown on her
+head; on each side are twelve angels, who are playing a heavenly concert
+with guitars, tambourines, trumpets, viols, and other musical
+instruments; lower than these, on each side, are forty holy personages
+of the Old and New Testament; and at the foot of the throne kneel
+several saints, male and female, among them St Catherine with her wheel,
+St Agnes with her lamb, and St Cecilia crowned with flowers. Beneath the
+principal picture there is a row of seven small ones, forming a border,
+and representing various incidents in the life of St Dominic.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, MATSYS, 1460-1530
+OR 31.
+
+
+In the Low Countries painting had very much the same history that it had
+in Italy, but the dates are later, and there may be a longer interval
+given to each stage of development. Religious painting, profuse in
+symbolism, with masses of details elaborately worked in, meets us in the
+first place. This style of painting reached its culmination, in which it
+included (as it did not include in its representation in the Italian
+pictures) many and varied excellencies, among them the establishment of
+painting in oil in the pictures of the Flemish family of painters--the
+Van Eycks.
+
+Before going into the little that is known of the family history of the
+Van Eycks, I should like to call attention to the numerous painter
+families in the middle ages. What a union, and repose, and happy
+sympathy of art-life it indicates, which we appear to restlessness and
+separate interests of modern life. The Van Eycks consisted of no less
+than four members of a family, three brothers, Hubert, John, and
+Lambert, and one sister, Margaret, devoted, like her brothers, to her
+art. There is a suggestion that they belonged to a small village of
+Limburg called Eyck, and repaired to Bruges in order to pursue their
+art. Hubert was thirty years older than John, and it is said that he was
+a serious-minded man as well as an ardent painter, and belonged to the
+religious fraternity of our Lady of Ghent. He died in 1426. John, though
+of so much consideration in his profession as to be believed to be 'the
+Flemish Painter' sent by Duke Philip the Good of Flanders and Burgundy
+with a mission to Portugal to solicit the hand of a princess in
+marriage, is reported to have died very poor in 1449, and has the
+suspicion attached to him of having been a lover of pleasure and a
+spendthrift. Of Lambert, the third brother, almost nothing is known;
+indeed, the fact of his existence has only lately come to light.
+Margaret lived and died unmarried, and belonged, like her brother
+Hubert, to the religious society of our Lady of Ghent. She died about
+1432.
+
+The invention of painting in oil, for which the Van Eycks are commonly
+known, was not literally that of mixing colours with oil, which was
+occasionally done before their day. It was the combining oil with resin,
+so as to produce at once a good varnish, and avoid the necessity of
+drying pictures in the sun, a bright thought, which may stand in the
+same rank with the construction, by James Watt, of that valve which
+rendered practicable the application of steam to machinery. The thought,
+occasioned by the cracking of a picture in tempera exposed to the sun,
+is due to Hubert Van Eyck.
+
+The great picture of the Van Eycks, which was worked at for a number of
+years by both Hubert and John, and, as some reckon, touched by the whole
+family, is the 'Adoration of the Lamb,' at St Bavon's, Ghent. I should
+like to give a faint idea of this extraordinary picture, which was
+painted for a burgomaster of Ghent and his wife in order to adorn their
+mortuary chapel in the cathedral. It was an altar piece on separate
+panels, now broken up and dispersed, only a portion of it being retained
+in Ghent.
+
+It may strike some as strange that a picture should be on panels, but
+those of the old pictures which were not on plastered walls were
+commonly on panels, many of them on the lids and sides of chests and
+presses which were used to hold sacred vessels and priestly raiment.
+
+When the wings of the Van Eycks' altar-piece of the 'Adoration of the
+Lamb' were opened on festivals, the subjects of the upper central
+picture were seen, consisting of the Triune God, a majestic figure, and
+at his side in stately calm the Virgin and the Baptist. On the inside of
+the wings were angels, at the two extremities Adam and Eve. The lower
+central picture shows the Lamb of the Revelation, whose blood flows into
+a cup; over it is the dove of the Holy Spirit. Angels, who hold the
+instruments of the Passion, worship the Lamb. Four groups of many
+persons advance from the sides, these are the holy martyrs, men and
+women, priests and laymen. In the foreground is the fountain of life; in
+the distance are the towers of the heavenly Jerusalem. On the wings
+other groups are coming up to adore the Lamb; on the left those who have
+laboured for the Kingdom of the Lord by worldly deeds--the soldiers of
+Christ led by St George, St Sebastian, and St Michael, the patron saints
+of the old Flemish guilds, followed by emperors and kings--a goodly
+company. Beyond the soldiers and princes, on the left, are the righteous
+judges, also on horseback. In front of them, on a splendidly caparisoned
+gray, rides a mild, benevolent old man in blue velvet trimmed with fur.
+This is the likeness of Hubert Van Eyck, painted after his death by his
+brother John, and John himself is in the group, clothed in black, with a
+shrewd, sharp countenance. On the self-renunciation have served the Lamb
+in the spirit, hermits and pilgrims, among them St Christopher, St
+Anthony, St Paul the hermit, Mary Magdalene, and St Mary of Egypt. A
+compartment underneath, which represented hell, finished the whole--yet
+only the whole on one side, for the wings when closed presented another
+series of finely thought-out and finished pictures--the Annunciation;
+figures of Micah and Zechariah; statues of the two St Johns, with the
+likenesses of the donors who gave to the world so great a work of art,
+kneeling humbly side by side, the burgomaster somewhat mean-looking in
+such company in spite of the proof of his liberality, but his wife noble
+enough in feature and expression to have been the originator of this
+glory of early Flemish painting. The upper part of the picture is
+painted on a gold ground, round the central figure of the Lamb is vivid
+green grass with masses of trees and flowers--indeed there is much
+lovely landscape no longer indicated by a rock or a bush, but betokening
+close observation of nature, whether in a fruitful valley, or a rocky
+defile, or mountain ridges with fleecy clouds overhead. The expression
+of the immense number of figures is as varied and characteristic as
+their grouping.[2]
+
+Hubert Van Eyck died while this work was in progress, and it was
+finished by his brother John six years after Hubert's death. When one
+thinks of the intense application and devotion which such a work costs,
+and recalls the bronze gates of St John that occupied Lorenzo Ghiberti
+49 years, and when we read, as we shall read a few chapters farther on,
+of large paintings which were begun and ended in so many days--even so
+many hours, one can better understand what is the essential difference
+between the works of the early and the later painters, a difference
+which no skill, no power even can bridge over. John Van Eyck, who had
+lived late enough to have departed from the painting of sacred pictures
+alone, so that he left portraits and an otter hunt among his works, is
+three times represented in our National Gallery, in three greatly
+esteemed portraits, one a double portrait, believed to be the likenesses
+of the painter and his wife, standing hand in hand with a terrier dog
+at their feet.
+
+Gossaert, called de Mabuse from his native town of Mabeuze, sometimes
+signing his name Joannes Malbodius, followed in the steps of the Van
+Eycks, particularly in his great picture of the 'Adoration of the
+Kings,' which is at Castle Howard, the seat of the Earl of Carlisle.
+Mabuse was in England and painted the children of Henry VII, in a
+picture, which is at Hampton Court. There is a picture in the palace of
+Holyrood, Edinburgh, which has been attributed to Mabuse. It represents
+on the sides of a triptych or diptych (somewhat like a folding screen)
+James III. and his queen with attendants. The fur on the queen's dress
+displays already that marvellous technical skill for which Flemish
+painting is so celebrated.
+
+Hans Memling belonged to Bruges. There is a tradition of him, which is
+to a certain extent disproven, that he was a poor soldier relieved by
+the hospital of St John, Bruges, and that in gratitude he executed for
+the hospital the well-known reliquary of St Ursula. However it might
+have originated, this is the most noted work of a painter, who was
+distinguished frequently by his minute missal-like painting (he was also
+an illuminator of missals), in which he would introduce fifteen hundred
+small figures in a picture two feet eight inches, by six feet five
+inches in size, and work out every detail with the utmost niceness and
+care. The reliquary, or 'chasse,' is a wooden coffer or shrine about
+four feet in length, its style and form those of a rich Gothic church,
+its purpose to hold an arm of the saint. The whole exterior is covered
+with miniatures by Memling, nearly the whole of them giving incidents in
+the legendary history of St Ursula, a 'virgin princess of Brittany,' or
+of England, who, setting out with eleven thousand companions, her lover,
+and an escort of knights on a pilgrimage to Rome, was, with her whole
+company, met and murdered, by a horde of heathen Huns, when they had
+reached Cologne, on their return. My readers may be aware that the
+supposed bones of the virgins and St Ursula form the ghastly adornment
+of the church founded in her honour at Cologne. It is absolutely filled
+with bones, built into the walls, stowed under the pavement, ranged in
+glass cases about the choir. Hans Memling's is a pleasanter
+commemoration of St Ursula.
+
+Quintin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, was born at Louvain about
+1460. Though he worked first as a smith he is said by Kugler to have
+belonged to a family of painters, which somewhat takes from the romance,
+though it adds to the probability of his story. Another painter in
+Antwerp having offered the hand and dowry of his daughter--beloved by
+Quintin Matsys--as a prize to the painter who should paint the best
+picture in a competition for her hand, the doughty smith took up the
+art, entered the lists, and carried off the maiden and her portion from
+all his more experienced rivals. The vitality of the legend is indicated
+by the inscription on a tablet to the memory of Quintin Matsys in the
+Cathedral, Antwerp. The Latin inscription reads thus in English:
+
+    'Twas love connubial taught the smith to paint,'
+
+Quintin Matsys lived and died a respected burgher of Antwerp, a member
+of the great Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke. He was twice married,
+and had thirteen children.
+
+Whatever might have been his source of inspiration, Quintin Matsys was
+an apt scholar. His 'Descent from the Cross,' now in the Museum,
+Antwerp, was _the_ 'Descent from the Cross,' and _the_ picture in the
+Cathedral, until superseded by Rubens' masterpiece on the same subject.
+Still Quintin Matsys version remains, and is in some respects an
+unsurpassed picture. There is a traditional grouping of this Divine
+tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the
+Lord is supported by two venerable old men--Joseph of Arimathea and
+Nicodemus--while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the
+Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full
+of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos. For this
+picture Quintin Matsys--popular painter as he was--got only three
+hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, of course,
+the value of money was much greater in those days). The Joiners'
+Company, for whom he painted the 'Descent from the Cross,' sold the
+picture to the City of Antwerp for five times the original amount, and
+it is said Queen Elizabeth offered the City nearly twenty times the
+first sum for it, in vain.
+
+Quintin Matsys painted frequently half-length figures of the Virgin and
+Child, an example of which is in the National Gallery. He excelled in
+the 'figure painting' of familiar subjects, then just beginning to be
+established, affording a token of the direction which the future
+eminence of the Flemish painters would take. One of his famous pictures
+of this kind is 'The Misers,' in the Queen's collection at Windsor. Two
+figures in the Flemish costume of the time, are seated at a table;
+before them are a heap of money and a book, in which one is writing with
+his right hand, while he tells down the money with his left. The faces
+express craft and cupidity. The details of the ink-horn on the table,
+and the bird on its perch behind, have the Flemish graphic exactness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
+1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
+BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530.
+
+
+I have come to the period when Italian art is divided into many
+schools--Paduan, Venetian, Umbrian, Florentine, Roman, Bolognese, etc.,
+etc. With the schools and their definitions I do not mean to meddle,
+except it may be to mention to which school a great painter belonged.
+Another difficulty meets me here. I have been trying so far as I could
+to give the representative painters in the order of time. I can no
+longer follow this rule strictly, and the grouping of this chapter is
+made on the principle of leading my readers up by some of the
+predecessors who linked the older to the later Italian painters, and by
+some of the contemporaries of these later painters, to that central
+four, Lionardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, who
+occupy so great a place in the history of art.
+
+In the brothers Bellini and their native Venice, we must first deal with
+that excellence of colouring for which the Venetian painters were
+signally noted, while they comparatively neglected and underrated
+drawing. A somewhat fanciful theory has been started, that as Venice,
+Holland, and England have been distinguished for colour in art, and as
+all those States are by the sea, so a sea atmosphere has something to do
+with a passion for colour. Within more reasonable bounds, in reference
+to the Venetians, is the consideration that no colouring is richer,
+mellower, more exquisitely tinted than that which belongs to the blue
+Italian sky over the blue Adriatic, with those merged shades of violet,
+green, and amber, and that magical soft haze which has to do with a
+moist climate.
+
+The two brothers Gentile and Gian or John Bellini, the latter the more
+famous of the two, were the sons of an old Venetian painter, with regard
+to whom the worthy speech is preserved, that he said it was like the
+Tuscans for son to beat father, and he hoped, in God's name, that
+Giovanni or Gian would outstrip him, and Gentile, the elder, outstrip
+both. The brothers worked together and were true and affectionate
+brothers, encouraging and appreciating each other.
+
+Gentile was sent by the Doge at the request of the Sultan--either
+Mahommed II, or Bajazet II., to Constantinople, where Gentile Bellini
+painted the portrait of the Sultan and the Sultana his mother, now in
+the British Museum. The painter also painted the head of John the
+Baptist in a charger as an offering--only too suitable--from him to the
+Grand Turk. The legend goes on to tell that in the course of the
+presentation of the gift, an incident occurred which induced Gentile
+Bellini to quit the Ottoman Court with all haste. The Sultan had
+criticized the appearance of the neck in John the Baptist's severed
+head, and when Gentile ventured to defend his work, the Sultan proceeded
+to prove the correctness of his criticism, by drawing his scimitar and
+cutting off at a stroke the head of a kneeling slave, and pointing to
+the spouting blood and the shrinking muscle, gave the horrified painter
+a lesson in practical anatomy. On Gentile's return from the East, he was
+pensioned by his State, and lived on painting, till he was eighty years
+of age, dying in 1501.
+
+Gian Bellini is said to have obtained by a piece of deceit, which is not
+in keeping with his manly and honourable character, the secret,
+naturally coveted by a Venetian, of mixing colours with resin and oil. A
+Venetian painter had brought the secret from Flanders, and communicated
+it to a friend, who, in turn, communicated it to a third painter, and
+was murdered by that third painter for his pains, so greedy and criminal
+was the craving, not only to possess, but to be as far as possible the
+sole possessor of, the grand discovery. Gian Bellini was much less
+guilty, if he were really guilty. Disguised as a Venetian nobleman, he
+proposed to sit for his portrait to that Antonella who first brought the
+secret from Flanders, and while Antonella worked with unsuspicious
+openness, Gian Bellini watched the process and stole the secret.
+
+Gian Bellini lived to the age of ninety, and had among his admirers the
+poet Ariosto and Albrecht Dürer. The latter saw Gian Bellini in his age,
+and said of him, when foolish mockers had risen up to scout at the old
+man, and his art now become classic, 'He is very old, but he is still
+the best of our painters.' Gian Bellini had illustrious pupils,
+including in their number Titian and Giorgione.
+
+The portraits of Gentile and Gian, which are preserved in a painting by
+Gian, show Gentile fair-complexioned and red-haired, and Gian with dark
+hair.
+
+Gian Bellini is considered to have been less gifted with imagination
+than some of his great brother artists; but he has proved himself a man
+of high moral sense, and while he stopped short at the boundary between
+the seen and the unseen, it is certain he must still have painted with
+much of 'the divine patience' and devout consecration of all his powers,
+and of every part of his work, which are the attributes of the earliest
+Italian painters. When he and his brother began to paint, Venetian art
+had already taken its distinctive character for open-air effects, rich
+scenic details in architecture, furniture and dress (said to be
+conspicuous in commercial communities), and a growing tendency to
+portraiture. Gian went with the tide, but he guided it to noble results.
+His simplicity and good sense, with his purity and dignity of mind, were
+always present. He introduced into his pictures 'singing boys, dancing
+cherubs, glittering thrones, and dewy flowers,' pressing the outer world
+into his service and that of religious art. It is said also that his
+Madonnas seem 'amiable beings imbued with a lofty grace;' while his
+saints are 'powerful and noble forms.' But he never descended to the
+paltry or the vulgar. He knew from the depths of his own soul how to
+invest a face with moral grandeur. Especially in his representations of
+our Saviour Gian Bellini 'displays a perception of moral power and
+grandeur seldom equalled in the history of art.' The example given is
+that of the single figure of the Lord in the Dresden Gallery, where the
+Son of God, without nimbus, or glory, stands forth as the 'ideal of
+elevated humanity.'
+
+The greater portion of Gian Bellini's pictures remain in the churches
+and galleries of Venice. But the first great work at which the two
+brothers in their youth worked in company--the painting of the Hall of
+Council in the palace of the Doge, with a series of historical and
+legendary pictures of the Venetian wars with the Emperor Frederick
+Barbarossa (1177), including the Doge Ziani's receiving from the Pope
+the gold ring with which the Doge espoused the Adriatic, in token of
+perpetual dominion over the sea--was unfortunately destroyed by fire in
+1577. Giovanni Bellini's greatest work, now at St Salvatore, is Christ
+at Emmaus, with Venetian senators and a Turkish dragoman introduced as
+spectators of the risen Lord.
+
+Of another great work at Vicenza, painted in Gian Bellini's old age,
+when neither his skill nor his strength was abated, 'The Baptism of
+Christ,' Dean Alford writes thus:
+
+     'Let us remain long and look earnestly, for there is indeed much
+     to be seen. That central figure, standing with hands folded on
+     His bosom, so gentle, so majestic, so perfect in blameless
+     humanity, oh what labour of reverent thought; what toil of
+     ceaseless meditation; what changes of fair purpose, oscillating
+     into clearest vision of ideal truth, must it have cost the great
+     painter, before he put forth that which we see now! It is as
+     impossible to find aught but love and majesty in the Divine
+     countenance, as it is to discover a blemish on the complexion of
+     that body, which seems to give forth light from itself, as He
+     stands in obedience, fulfilling all righteousness.
+
+    'And even on the accessories to this figure, we see the same
+    loving and reverent toil bestowed. The cincture, where alone the
+    body is hidden from view, is no web of man's weaving; or, if it
+    were, it is of hers whose heart was full of divine thoughts as
+    she wove: so bright and clear is the tint, so exquisitely
+    careful and delicate every fold where light may play or colour
+    vary. And look under the sacred feet, on the ground blessed by
+    their pressure; no dash of hurrying brush has been there: less
+    than a long day's light, eve, did not suffice to give in
+    individual shape and shade every minutest pebble and mote of
+    that shore of Jordan. Every one of them was worth painting, for
+    we are viewing them as in the light of His presence who made
+    them all and knew them all.
+
+    'And now let us pass to the other figures: to that living and
+    glowing angelic group in the left hand of the picture. Three of
+    the heavenly host are present, variously affected by that which
+    they behold. The first, next the spectator, in the corner of the
+    picture, is standing in silent adoration, tender and gentle in
+    expression, the hands together, but only the points of the
+    fingers touching, his very reverence being chastened by angelic
+    modesty; the second turns on that which he sees a look of
+    earnest inquiry, but kneels as he looks; and indeed that which
+    he sees is one of the things which angels desire to look into.
+    The third, a majestic herald-like figure, stands, as one
+    speaking, looking to the spectator, with his right hand on his
+    garment, and his left out as in demonstration, unmistakeably
+    saying to us who look on, "Behold what love is here!" Then,
+    hardly noticing what might well be much noticed, the grand dark
+    figure of the Baptist on the right, let us observe how
+    beautifully and accurately all the features of the landscape are
+    given.'
+
+Of the same work another critic records: 'The attendant angels in this
+work (signed by the artist) are of special interest, instinct with an
+indefinable purity and depth of reverential tenderness elsewhere hardly
+rivalled. But the picture, like that in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, with
+which it is nearly contemporary, is almost more interesting from the
+astonishing truth and beauty of its landscape portions. _These_ form
+here a feature more important, perhaps, than in any work of that period;
+the stratification and form of the rocks in the foreground, the palms
+and other trees relieved against the lucid distance, and the
+mountain-ranges of tender blue beyond, are as much beyond praise for
+their beauty and their truth, as they have been beyond imitation from
+the solidity and transparent strength of their execution! The minute
+finish is Nature's, and the colouring more gem-like than gems.'
+
+No praise can exceed that bestowed on Gian Bellini's colouring for its
+intensity and transparency. 'Many of his draperies are like crystal of
+the clearest and deepest colour,' declares an authority; and another
+states' his best works have a clear jewel brightness, an internal
+gem-like fire such as warms a summer twilight. The shadows are intense
+and yet transparent, like the Adriatic waves when they lie out of the
+sun under the palace bridges.'
+
+Portrait-painting, just beginning, was established in Venice, its later
+stronghold, by Gian Bellini. His truthful portrait of the Doge Loredano,
+one of the earliest of that series of Doges' portraits which once hung
+in state in the ducal palace, is now in our National Gallery.
+
+Of Gentile Bellini, whose work was softer, but less vigorous than his
+brother's, the best painting extant is that at Milan of St Mark
+preaching at Alexandria, in which the painter showed how he had profited
+by his residence at Constantinople in the introduction of much rich
+Turkish costume, and of an animal unknown to Europe at the time--a
+camelopard.
+
+Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua. He was the son of a farmer. His
+early history, according to tradition, is very similar to that of
+Giotto. Just as Cimabue adopted Giotto, Squarcione, a painter who had
+travelled in Italy and Greece, and made a great collection of antiques,
+from which he taught in a famous school of painters, adopted Andrea
+Mantegna at the early age of ten years. It was long believed that
+Mantegna, in the end, forfeited the favour of his master by marrying
+Nicolosa Bellini, the sister of Gentile and Gian Bellini, whose father
+was the great rival of Squarcione; and farther, that Mantegna's style of
+painting had been considered Bellini. Modern researches, which have
+substituted another surname for that of Bellini as the surname of Andrea
+Mantegna's wife, contradict this story.
+
+Andrea Mantegna, a man of much energy and fancy, entered young into the
+service of the Gonzaga lords of Mantua, receiving from them a salary of
+thirty pounds a year and a piece of land, on which the painter built a
+house, and painted it within and without--the latter one of the first
+examples of artistic waste, followed later by Tintoret and Veronese,
+regardless of the fact that painting could not survive in the open air
+of Northern Italy.
+
+Andrea Mantegna had his home at Mantua, except when he was called to
+Rome to paint for the Pope, Innocent VIII. An anecdote is told by Mrs
+Jameson of this commission. It seems the Pope's payments were irregular;
+and one day when he visited his painter at work, and his Holiness asked
+the meaning of a certain allegorical female figure in the design, Andrea
+answered, with somewhat audacious point, that he was trying to
+represent _Patience_. The Pope, understanding the allusion, paid the
+painter in his own coin, by remarking in reply, 'If you would place
+Patience in fitting company, you would paint Discretion at her side.'
+Andrea took the hint, said no more, and when his work was finished not
+only received his money, but was munificently rewarded.
+
+Andrea Mantegna had two sons and a daughter. One of his sons painted
+with his father, and, after Andrea Mantegna's death, completed some of
+his pictures.
+
+Andrea Mantegna's early study of antique sculpture moulded his whole
+life's work. He took great delight in modelling, in perspective, of
+which he made himself a master, and in chiaroscuro, or light and shade.
+Had his powers of invention and grace not kept pace with his skill, he
+would have been a stiff and formal worker; as it was, he carried the
+austerity of sculpture into painting, and his greatest work, the
+'Triumph of Julius Cæsar,' would have been better suited for the
+chiselled frieze of a temple than it is for the painted frieze of the
+hall of a palace. Yet he was a great leader and teacher in art, and the
+true proportions of his drawing are grand, if his colouring is harsh. I
+am happy to say that Mantegna's 'Triumph of Julius Cæsar' is in England
+at Hampton Court, having been bought from the Duke of Mantua by Charles
+I. These cartoons, nine in number, are sketches in water-colour or
+distemper on paper fixed on cloth. They are faded and dilapidated, as
+they well may be, considering the slightness of the materials and their
+age, about four hundred years. At the same time, they are, after the
+cartoons of Raphael (which formed part of the same art collection of
+Charles I.), perhaps the most valuable and interesting relic of art in
+England.
+
+The series of the 'Triumph' contain the different parts, originally
+separated by pillars, of a long and splendid procession. There are
+trumpeters and standard bearers, the statues of the gods borne aloft,
+battering-rams and heaps of glittering armour, trophies of conquest in
+huge vases filled with coin, garlanded oxen, and elephants. The second
+last of the series, presents the ranks of captives forming part of the
+show, rebellious men, submissive women, and unconscious children--a
+moving picture. In the last of the series comes the great conqueror in
+his chariot, a youth in the crowd following him, carrying his banner, on
+which is inscribed Cæsar's notable despatch, 'Veni, vidi, vici;' 'I
+came, I saw, I conquered.'
+
+Another of Mantegna's best pictures is in distemper--in which, and on
+fresco, Mantegna chiefly painted,--and is in the Louvre, Paris. It is
+the Madonna of Victory, so called from its being painted to commemorate
+the deliverance of Italy from the French army under Charles VIII., a
+name which has acquired a sardonic meaning from the ultimate destination
+of the picture. This picture--which represents the Virgin and Child on a
+throne, in an arbour of fruit and flowers, between the archangels,
+Michael and St Maurice, in complete armour, with the patron saints of
+Mantua and the infant St John in the front, and the Marquis Ludovico of
+Mantua and his wife, Isabella D'Este, kneeling to return thanks--was
+painted by Mantegna at the age of seventy years; and, as if the art of
+the man had mellowed with time, it is the softest and tenderest of his
+pictures in execution. A beautiful Madonna of Mantegna's, still later in
+time, is in the National Gallery.
+
+When Mantegna was sixty years old he took up the art of engraving, and
+prosecuted it with zeal and success, being one of the earliest painters
+who engraved his own pictures, and this accomplishment spread them
+abroad a hundredfold.
+
+Domenico Ghirlandajo was properly Domenico Bicordi, but inherited from
+his father, a goldsmith in Florence,[3] the by-name of Ghirlandajo or
+Garland-maker--a distinctive appellation said to have been acquired by
+the elder man from his skill in making silver garlands for the heads of
+Florentine women and children. Domenico Ghirlandajo worked at his
+father's craft till he was twenty-four years of age, when, having in the
+mean time evinced great cleverness in taking the likenesses of the
+frequenters of Ghirlandajo the elder's shop, the future painter
+abandoned the goldsmith's trade for art pure and simple. He soon
+vindicated the wisdom of the step which he had taken by giving proofs of
+something of the strength of Masaccio, united with a reflection of the
+feeling of Fra Angelico.
+
+Ghirlandajo was summoned soon to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel,
+afterwards to be so glorious; but his greatest works were done in the
+prime of his manhood, in his native city, Florence, where he was chosen
+as the teacher of Michael Angelo, who was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo for
+three years.
+
+While still in the flower of his age and crowned with golden opinions,
+being, it is said with effusion, 'the delight of his city,' Ghirlandajo
+died after a short illness, in Ghirlandajo's time Florence had reached
+her meridian, and her citizens outvied each other in the magnificence of
+their gifts to their fair mother city. Ghirlandajo was fitted to be
+their painter; himself a generous-spirited artist, in the exuberance of
+life and power, he wished that his fellow-citizens would give him all
+the walls of the city to cover with frescoes. He was content with the
+specified sum for his painting, desiring more the approbation of his
+employers than additional crowns. His genius lying largely in the
+direction of portrait painting, he introduced frequently the portraits
+of contemporaries, causing them to figure as spectators of his sacred
+scenes. One of these contemporaries thus presented, was Amerigo
+Vespucci, who was to give his name to a continent. Another was a
+Florentine beauty, a woman of rank, Ginevra de Benci.
+
+Ghirlandajo was lavish in his employment of rich Florentine costumes and
+architecture. He even made the legends of the saints and the histories
+of the Bible appear as if they had happened under the shadow of
+Brunelleschi's duomo and Giotto's campanile, and within sound of the
+flow of the Arno. In the peculiar colouring used in fresco painting
+Ghirlandajo excelled.
+
+He painted a chapel for a Florentine citizen, Francesco Sasetti, in the
+church of the Trinità, Florence, with scenes from the life of St
+Francis. Of these, the death of St Francis, surrounded by the sorrowing
+monks of his order, with the figures of Francesco Sasetti and his wife,
+Madonna Nera, on one side of the picture, is considered the best. As a
+curious illustration of the modernizing practice of Ghirlandajo, he has
+painted an old priest at the foot of the bier, chanting the litanies for
+the dying, with spectacles on his nose, the earliest known
+representation of these useful instruments.
+
+Ghirlandajo painted during four years the choir of the church of Santa
+Maria Novella, Florence, for one of the great Florentine benefactors,
+Giovanni Tornabuone, and there are to be seen some of Ghirlandajo's
+finest frescoes from the history of John the Baptist and the Virgin.
+
+A Madonna and Child with angels in the National Gallery is attributed to
+Ghirlandajo.
+
+Francesco Francia, or Il Francia, was born at Bologna, and was the son
+of a carpenter, whose surname was Raibaloni, but Francesco assumed the
+name of his master, a goldsmith, and worked himself at a goldsmith's
+trade till he was forty years of age. Indeed he may be said never to
+have relinquished his connection with the trade, and certainly he was no
+more ashamed of it than of his calling as a painter, for he signed
+himself indiscriminately 'goldsmith' and 'painter,' and sometimes
+whimsically put 'goldsmith' to his paintings and 'painter' to his
+jewellery. He was a famous designer of dies for coins and medals, and it
+is quite probable, as a countryman of his own has sought to prove, that
+he was the celebrated type-cutter, known as 'Francesco da Bologna.' But
+it is with Francesco '_pictor_' that we have to do.
+
+Though he only began to prosecute the painter's art in middle age, he
+rose with remarkable rapidity to eminence, was the great painter of
+Lombardy in his day, rivalling Squarcione, Mantegna's teacher in his
+school, which numbered two hundred scholars, and becoming the founder of
+the early Bolognese school of painters.
+
+Francia is said to have been very handsome in person, with a kindly
+disposition and an agreeable manner. He was on terms of cordial
+friendship with Raphael, then in his youth, and thirty years Il
+Francia's junior. Il Francia addressed an enthusiastic sonnet to
+Raphael, and there is extant a letter of Raphael's to Il Francia,
+excusing himself for not sending his friend Raphael's portrait, and
+making an exchange of sketches, that of his 'Nativity' for the drawing
+of Il Francia's 'Judith;' while it was to Il Francia's care that Raphael
+committed his picture of St Cecilia, when it was first sent to Bologna.
+These relations between the men and their characters throw discredit on
+the tradition that Il Francia died from jealous grief caused by the
+sight of Raphael's 'St Cecilia.' As Il Francia was seventy years of age
+at the time of his death, one may well attribute it to physical causes.
+Il Francia had at least one son, and another kinsman, painters, whose
+paintings were so good as to be occasionally confounded with those of Il
+Francia.
+
+Il Francia is thought to have united, in his works, a certain calm
+sedateness and frank sincerity to the dreamy imaginativeness of some of
+his contemporaries. His finest works are considered to be the frescoes
+from the life of St Cecilia in the church of St Cecilia at Bologna.
+
+Of a Madonna and Child, by Francia, at Bologna, I shall write down
+another of Dean Alford's descriptions,--many of which I have given for
+this, among other reasons, that these descriptions are not technical or
+professional, but the expression of the ardent admiration and grateful
+comprehension of a sympathetic spectator. 'He,' speaking of the Divine
+Child, 'is lying in simple nakedness on a rich red carpet, and is
+supported by a white pillar, over which the carpet passes. Of these
+accessories every thread is most delicately and carefully painted; no
+slovenly washes of meretricious colour where He is to be served, before
+whom all things are open; no perfunctory sparing of toil in serving Him
+who has given us all that is best. On his right hand kneels the Virgin
+Mother in adoration, her very face a magnificat--praise, lowliness,
+confidence; next to her, Joseph, telling by his looks the wonderful
+story, deeply but simply. Two beautiful angels kneel, one on either
+side--hereafter, perhaps, to kneel in like manner in the tomb. Their
+faces seemed to me notable for that which I have no doubt the painter
+intended to express,--the pure abstraction of reverent adoration,
+unmingled with human sympathies. The face and figure of the Divine
+Infant are full of majesty, as he holds his hands in blessing towards
+the spectator, who symbolizes the world which He has come to save. Close
+to him on the ground, on his right branch in trustful repose; on his
+left springs a plant of the meadow-trefoil. Thus lightly and reverently
+has the master touched the mystery of the Blessed Trinity: the goldfinch
+symbolizing by its colours, the trefoil by the form of its leaf.'
+
+In our own National Gallery is a picture by Il Francia of the enthroned
+Virgin and Child and her mother, St Anne, who is presenting a peach to
+the infant Christ; at the foot of the throne is the little St John; to
+the right and left are St Paul with the sword, St Sebastian bound to a
+pillar and pierced with arrows, and St Lawrence with the emblematical
+grid-iron, etc. etc. Opposite this picture hangs, what once formed part
+of it, a solemn, sorrowful Pietà, as the Italians call a picture
+representing the dead Redeemer mourned over by the Virgin and by the
+other holy women. These pictures were bought by our Government from the
+Duke of Lucca for three thousand five hundred pounds.
+
+Fra Bartolommeo. We come to a second gentle monk, not unlike Fra
+Angelico in his nature, but far less happy than Fra Angelico, in having
+been born in stormy times. Fra Bartolommeo, called also Baccio della
+Porta, or Bartholomew of the gate, from the situation of his lodgings
+when a young man, but scarcely known in Italy by any other name than
+that of Il Frate, or the Friar, was born near Florence, and trained from
+his boyhood to be a painter. In his youth, however, a terrible public
+event convulsed Florence, and revolutionized Baccio della Porta's life.
+He had been employed to paint in that notable Dominican convent of St
+Mark, where Savonarola, its devoted friar, was denouncing the sins of
+the times, including the profligate luxury of the nobles and the
+degradation of the representatives of the Church. Carried away by the
+fervour and sincerity of the speaker, Baccio joined the enthusiasts who
+cast into a burning pile the instruments of pride, vanity, and godless
+intellect denounced by the preacher. Baccio's sacrifice to the flaming
+heap of splendid furniture and dress, and worldly books, was all his
+designs from profane subjects and studies of the undraped figure. A
+little later Savonarola was excommunicated by the Pope and perished as
+a martyr; and Baccio, timid from his natural temper, distracted by
+doubt, and altogether horror-stricken, took a monk's vows, and entered
+the same convent of St Mark, where for four years he never touched a
+pencil.
+
+At the request of his superior Fra Bartolommeo painted again, and when
+Raphael visited Florence, and came with all his conquering sweetness and
+graciousness to greet the monk in his cell, something of Il Frate's old
+love for his art, and delight in its exercise, returned. He even visited
+Rome, but there his health failed him, and the great works of Lionardo,
+Michael Angelo, and Raphael, when he compared his own with theirs,
+seemed to crush and overwhelm him. But he painted better for his visit
+to Rome, even as he had painted better for his intimacy with Raphael.
+Nay, it is said Raphael himself painted better on account of his
+brotherly regard for, and confidence in, Fra Bartolommeo.
+
+Fra Bartolommeo died aged forty-eight years. Among his best pupils was a
+nun of St Catherine's, known as Suor Plautilla.
+
+To Il Frate, as a painter, is attributed great softness and harmony, and
+even majesty, though, like Fra Angelico, he was often deficient in
+strength. He was great in the management of draperies, for the better
+study of which he is said to have invented the lay figure. He indulged
+in the introduction into his pictures of rich architecture. He was fond
+of painting boy-angels--in which he excelled--playing frequently on
+musical instruments, or holding a canopy over the Virgin. Very few of
+his works are out of Italy; the most are in Florence, especially in the
+Pitti Palace. His two greatest works are the Madonna della Misericordia,
+or the Madonna of Mercy, at Lucca, where the Virgin stands with
+outstretched arms pleading for the suppliants, whom she shelters under
+the canopy, and who look to her as she looks to her Son,--and the grand
+single figure of St Mark, with his Gospel in his hand, in the Pitti
+Palace, Florence. Sir David Wilkie said of the Madonna of Mercy, 'that
+it contained the merits of Raphael, of Titian, of Rembrandt, and of
+Rubens.'
+
+Andrea Vanucchi, commonly called Andrea del Sarto, from the occupation
+of his father, who was a tailor (in Italian, _sarto_), was born at
+Florence in 1488. He was first a goldsmith, but soon turned painter,
+winning early the commendatory title of 'Andrea senza errori,' or
+'Andrea the Faultless.' His life is a miserable and tragic history. In
+the early flush of his genius and industry, with its just crown of fame
+and success, he conceived a passion for a beautiful but worthless woman,
+whom, in spite of the opposition of his friends, he married. She
+rendered his home degraded and wretched, and his friends and scholars
+fell off from him. In disgust he quitted Florence, and entered the
+service of Francis I, of France; but his wife, for whom his regard was a
+desperate infatuation, imperiously summoned him back to Florence, to
+which he returned, bringing with him a large sum of money, entrusted to
+him by the king for the purchase of works of art. Instigated by his
+wife, Andrea del Sarto used this money for his, or rather her, purposes,
+and dared not return to France. Even in his native Florence he was
+loaded with reproach and shame. He died of the plague at the age of
+fifty-five years, according to tradition, plundered and abandoned in his
+extremity by the base woman for whom he had sacrificed principle and
+honour. We may read the grievous story of Andrea del Sarto, written by
+one of the greatest of England's modern poets.
+
+As may be imagined, Andrea del Sarto's excellence lay in the charm of
+his execution. His works were deficient in earnestness and high feeling,
+and some will have it, that, evilly haunted as he was, he perpetually
+painted in his Madonnas the beautiful but base-souled face of the woman
+who ruined him. Andrea del Sarto's best works are in Florence,
+particularly in the cloisters of the convent of the Annunziata. In the
+court of the same convent is his famous Riposo (or rest of the Holy
+Family on their way to Egypt), which is known as the 'Madonna of the
+Sack,' from the circumstance of Joseph in the picture leaning against a
+sack. This picture has held a high place in art for hundreds of years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+LIONARDO DA VINCI, 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
+1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566.
+
+
+We have arrived at the triumph of art, not, indeed, in unconsciousness
+and devotion, but in fulness and completeness, as shown in the works of
+four of the greatest painters and men whom the world ever saw. Of the
+first, Lionardo da Vinci, born at Vinci in the neighbourhood of
+Florence, 1452, it may be said that the many-sidedness which
+characterized Italians--above all Italians of his day--reached its
+height in him. Not only was he a painter, a sculptor, an architect, and
+engineer, but also one of the boldest speculators of the generation
+which gave birth to Columbus, and was not less original and ingenious
+than he was universally accomplished--an Admirable Crichton among
+painters. There is a theory that this many-sidedness is a proof of the
+greatest men, indicating a man who might have been great in any way,
+who, had his destiny not found and left him a painter, would have been
+equally great as a philosopher, a man of science, a poet, or a
+statesman. It may be so; but the life of Lionardo tends also to
+illustrate the disadvantage of too wide a grasp and diffusion of genius.
+Beginning much and finishing little, not because he was idle or fickle,
+but because his schemes were so colossal and his aims so high, he spent
+his time in preparation for the attainment of perfect excellence, which
+eluded him. Lionardo was the pioneer, the teacher of others, rather than
+the complete fulfiller of his own dreams; and the life of the proud,
+passionate man was, to him self mortification. This result might, in a
+sense, have been avoided; but Lionardo, great as he was, proved also one
+of those unfortunate men whose noblest efforts are met and marred by
+calamities which could have hardly been foreseen or prevented.
+
+Lionardo da Vinci was the son of a notary, and early showed a taste for
+painting as well as for arithmetic and mathematics. He was apprenticed
+to a painter, but he also sedulously studied physics. He is said,
+indeed, to have made marvellous guesses at truth, in chemistry, botany,
+astronomy, and particularly, as helping him in his art, anatomy. He was,
+according to other accounts, a man of noble person, like Ghirlandajo.
+And one can scarcely doubt this who looks at Lionardo's portrait painted
+by himself, or at any engraving from it, and remarks the grand presence
+of the man in his cap and furred cloak; his piercing wistful eyes;
+stately outline of nose; and sensitive mouth, unshaded by his
+magnificent flowing beard.
+
+He was endowed with surprising bodily strength, and was skilled in the
+knightly exercises of riding, fencing, and dancing. He was a lover of
+social pleasure, and inclined to indulge in expensive habits. While a
+lad he amused himself by inventing machines for swimming, diving, and
+flying, as well as a compass, a hygrometer, etc. etc. In a combination
+from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, etc. etc., with which
+his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a
+nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it
+filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer
+selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money. As something
+beyond amusement, Lionardo planned a canal to unite Florence with Pisa
+(while he executed other canals in the course of his life), and
+suggested the daring but not impossible idea of raising _en masse_, by
+means of levers, the old church of San Giovanni, Florence, till it
+should stand several feet above its original level, and so get rid of
+the half-sunken appearance which destroyed the effect of the fine old
+building. He visited the most frequented places, carrying always with
+him his sketch-book, in which to note down his observations; he followed
+criminals to execution in order to witness the pangs of despair; he
+invited peasants to his house and told them laughable stories, that he
+might pick up from their faces the essence of comic expression.[4] A
+mania for truth--alike in great and little things--possessed him.
+
+Lionardo entered young into the service of the Gonzaga family of Milan,
+being, according to one statement, chosen for the office which he was to
+fill, as the first singer in _improvisatore_ of his time (among his
+other inventions he devised a peculiar kind of lyre). He showed no want
+of confidence in asserting his claims to be elected, for after declaring
+the various works he would undertake, he added with regard to
+painting--'I can do what can be done, as well as any man, be he who he
+may.' He received from the Duke a salary of five hundred crowns a year.
+He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works,
+he painted his 'Cenacolo,' or 'Last Supper,' one of the grandest
+pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice,
+in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican
+convent, Milan. The situation was damp, and the material used proved so
+unsuitable for work on plaster, that, even before it was exposed to the
+reverses which in the course of a French occupation of Milan converted
+the refectory into a stable, the colours had altogether faded, and the
+very substance of the picture was crumbling into ruin.
+
+The equestrian statue of the old Duke of Milan by Lionardo excited so
+much delight in its first freshness, that it was carried in triumph
+through the city, and during the progress it was accidentally broken.
+Lionardo began another, but funds failed for its completion, and
+afterwards the French used the original clay model as a target for their
+bowmen.
+
+Lionardo returned to Florence, and found his great rival, Michael
+Angelo, already in the field. Both of the men, conscious of mighty
+gifts, were intolerant of rivalry. To Lionardo especially, as being much
+the elder man, the originator and promoter of many of the new views in
+art which his opponent had adopted, the competition was very
+distasteful, and to Michael Angelo he used the bitter sarcasm which has
+been handed down to us, 'I was famous before you were born.'
+
+Nevertheless Lionardo consented to compete with Michael Angelo for the
+painting in fresco of one side of the council-hall, by the order of the
+gonfaloniere for the year. Lionardo chose for his subject a victory of
+the Florentines over the Milanese, while Michael Angelo took a scene
+from the Pisan campaigns. Not only was the work never done (some say
+partly because Lionardo _would_ delay in order to make experiments in
+oils) on account of political troubles, but the very cartoons of the two
+masters, which all the artists of the day flocked to see, have been
+broken up, dispersed, and lost; and of one only, that of Michael Angelo,
+a small copy remains, while but a fragment from Lionardo's was preserved
+in a copy made by Rubens.
+
+Lionardo went to Rome in the pontificate of Leo X., but there his
+quarrel with Michael Angelo broke out more violently than ever. The Pope
+too, who loved better a gentler, more accommodating spirit, seemed to
+slight Lionardo, and the great painter not only quitted Rome in disgust,
+but withdrew his services altogether from ungrateful Italy.
+
+At Pavia Lionardo was presented to Francis I, of France, who, zealous
+in patronizing art, engaged the painter to follow Francis's fortunes at
+a salary of seven hundred crowns a year. Lionardo spent the remainder of
+his life in France. His health had long been declining before he died,
+aged sixty-seven years, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had risen high in the
+favour of Francis. From this circumstance, and the generous, chivalrous
+nature of the king, there doubtless arose the tradition that Francis
+visited Lionardo on his death-bed; and that, while in the act of gently
+assisting him to raise himself, the painter died in the king's arms.
+Court chronicles do their best to demolish this story, by proving
+Francis to have been at St Germain on the day when Lionardo died at
+Cloux.
+
+Lionardo was never married, and he left what worldly goods he possessed
+to a favourite scholar. Besides his greater works, he filled many MS.
+volumes, some with singularly accurate studies and sketches, maps, plans
+for machines, scores for music (three volumes of these are in the Royal
+Library at Windsor), and some with writing, which is written--probably
+to serve as a sort of cipher--from right to left, instead of from left
+to right. One of his writings is a valuable 'Treatise' on painting;
+other writings are on scientific and philosophic subjects, and in these
+Lionardo is believed to have anticipated some of the discoveries which
+were reached by lines of close reasoning centuries later.
+
+Lionardo's genius as a painter was expressed by his uniting, in the very
+highest degree, truth and imagination. He was the shrewdest observer of
+ordinary life, and he could also realize the higher mysteries and
+profounder feelings of human nature. He drew exceedingly well. Of
+transparent lights and shadows, or chiaroscuro, he was the greatest
+master; but he was not a good colourist. His works are very rare, and
+many which are attributed to him are the pictures of his scholars, for
+he founded one of the great schools of Milan or Lombardy. There is a
+tradition that he was, as Holbein was once believed to be, ambidextrous,
+or capable of using his left hand as well as his right, and that he
+painted with two brushes--one in each hand. Thus more than fully armed,
+Lionardo da Vinci looms out on us like a Titan through the mists of
+centuries, and he preaches to us the simple homily, that not even a
+Titan can command worldly success; that such men must look to ends as
+the reward of their travail, and before undertaking it they must count
+the cost, and be prepared to renounce the luxurious tastes which clung
+to Lionardo, and which were not for him or for such men as he was.
+
+Lionardo's great painting was his 'Last Supper,' of which, happily, good
+copies exist, as well as the wreck of the picture itself. The original
+is now, after it is too late, carefully guarded and protected in its old
+place in the Dominican convent of the Madonna della Grazia, Milan. The
+assembled company sit at a long table, Christ being seated in the
+middle, the disciples forming two separate groups on each side of the
+Saviour. The gradations of age are preserved, from the tender youth of
+John to the grey hairs of Simon; and all the varied emotions of mind,
+from the deepest sorrow and anxiety to the eager desire of revenge, are
+here portrayed. The well-known words of Christ, 'One of you shall betray
+me,' have caused the liveliest emotion. The two groups to the left of
+Christ are full of impassioned excitement, the figures in the first
+turning to the Saviour, those in the second speaking to each
+other,--horror, astonishment, suspicion, doubt, alternating in the
+various expressions. On the other hand, stillness, low whispers,
+indirect observations, are the prevailing expressions in the groups on
+the right. In the middle of the first group sits the betrayer; a
+cunning, sharp profile, he looks up hastily to Christ, as if speaking
+the words, 'Master, is it I?' while, true to the Scriptural account, his
+left hand and Christ's right hand approach, as if unconsciously, the
+dish that stands before them.[5]
+
+A sketch of the head of Christ for the original picture, which has been
+preserved on a torn and soiled piece of paper at Brera, expresses the
+most elevated seriousness, together with Divine gentleness pain on
+account of the faithless disciple, a full presentiment of his own death,
+and resignation to the will of the Father. It gives a faint idea of what
+the master may have accomplished in the finished picture.
+
+During his stay at Florence Lionardo painted a portrait of that Ginevra
+Benci already mentioned as painted by Ghirlandajo; and a still more
+famous portrait by Lionardo was that of Mona Lisa, the wife of his
+friend Giocondo. This picture is also known as 'La Jaconde.' I wish to
+call attention to it because it is the first of four surpassingly
+beautiful portraits of women which four great painters gave in
+succession to the world. The others, to be spoken of afterwards, are
+Raphael's 'Fornarina,' Titian's 'Bella Donna,' and Rubens' 'Straw Hat.'
+About the original of 'La Jaconde' there never has been a mystery such
+as there has been about the others. At this portrait the unsatisfied
+painter worked at intervals for four years, and when he left it he
+pronounced it still unfinished. 'La Jaconde' is now in the Louvre in
+nearly ruined condition, yet a judge says of it that even now 'there is
+something in this wonderful head of the ripest southern beauty, with its
+airy background of a rocky landscape, which exercises a peculiar
+fascination over the mind.'
+
+There is a painting of the Madonna and Child Christ said to be by
+Lionardo, and probably, at least, by one of his school, and which
+belongs, I think, to the Duke of Buccleuch, and was exhibited lately
+among the works of the old masters. The group has at once something
+touching and exalted in its treatment. The Divine Child in the Mother's
+arms is strangely attracted by the sight of a cross, and turns towards
+it with ineffable longing, while the Virgin Mother, with a pang of
+foreboding, clasping the child in her arms, seeks to draw him back.
+
+The fragment of the cartoon in which Lionardo competed with Michael
+Angelo, may be held to survive in the fine painting by Rubens called
+'the Battle of the Standard.' Of a famous Madonna and St Anne, by
+Lionardo, the original cartoon in black chalk is preserved under glass
+in our Royal Academy.[6]
+
+Michael Angelo Buonarroti, born at Castel Caprese near Tuscany, 1475, is
+the next of these universal geniuses, a term which we are accustomed to
+hold in contempt, because we have only seen it exemplified in parody.
+After Lionardo, indeed, Michael Angelo, though he was also painter,
+sculptor, architect, engineer, poet, musician, might almost be regarded
+as restricted in his pursuits, yet still so manifold was he, that men
+have loved to make a play upon his name and call him 'Michael the
+angel,' and to speak of him as of a king among men.
+
+Michael Angelo was of noble descent, and though his ancient house had
+fallen into comparative poverty, his father was mayor or podesta of
+Chiusi, and governor of the castle of Chiusi and Caprese. Michael Angelo
+was destined for the profession of the law, but so early vindicated his
+taste for art, that at the age of thirteen years he was apprenticed to
+Ghirlandajo. Lorenzo the Magnificent was then ruling Florence, and he
+had made a collection of antique models in his palace and gardens, and
+constituted it an academy for young artists. In this academy Michael
+Angelo developed a strong bias for sculpture, and won the direct
+patronage of the Medici.
+
+To this period of his life belong two characteristic anecdotes. In a
+struggle with a fellow-student, Michael Angelo received a blow from a
+mallet in his face, which, breaking bone and cartilage, lent to his nose
+the rugged bend,
+
+    'The bar of Michael Angelo.'
+
+An ill-advised member of the Medician house, while entertaining a party
+of guests during a snowstorm, sent out the indignant artist to make a
+snow man within sight of the palace windows. These anecdotes bear
+indirectly on the ruling qualities of Michael Angelo--qualities so
+integral that they are wrought into his marble and painted on his
+canvas--proud independence and energy.
+
+Before going farther I wish to guard against a common misapprehension of
+Michael Angelo--that he was a haughty, arrogant man, absolutely narrow
+in his half-idolatrous, half-human worship of art. Michael Angelo was
+severe in place of being sweet; he was impatient of contradiction; he
+was careless and scornful of ceremony; and in his very wrath at flattery
+and hypocrisy, he was liable to sin against his own honesty and
+sincerity. But he was a man with a lofty sense of duty and a profound
+reverence for God. He was, unlike Lionardo, consistently simple, frugal,
+and temperate, throughout his long life. If he held up a high standard
+to others, and enforced it on them with hardness, he held up a higher
+standard to himself, and enforced it on himself more hardly still. He
+was a thoroughly unworldly man, and actions which had their root in
+unworldliness have been ascribed unjustly to a kind of Lucifer pride.
+Greed, and the meanness of greed, were unknown to him. He worked for the
+last ten years of his life (under no less than five different Popes) at
+his designs for St Peter's, steadfastly refusing pay for the work,
+saying that he did it for the honour of God and his own honour. He made
+many enemies and suffered from their enmity, but I cannot learn that,
+except in one instance, he was guilty of dealing an unworthy blow at
+his opponents. He was generous to his scholars, and without jealousy of
+them, suffering them to use his designs for their own purposes. He said,
+'I have no friends, I need none, I wish for none;' but that was in
+feeling himself 'alone before Heaven;' and of the friends whom he did
+possess, he loved them all the more devotedly and faithfully, because
+they were few in number.
+
+One need only be told of his love for his old servant Urbino, whom he
+presented with two thousand crowns to render him independent of service;
+and when the servant was seized with his last illness Michael Angelo
+nursed him tenderly, sleeping in his clothes on a couch that he might be
+ready to attend his patient. When his cares were ended, Michael Angelo
+wrote to a correspondent--'My Urbino is dead--to my infinite grief and
+sorrow. Living, he served me truly; and in his death he taught me how to
+die. Of Michael Angelo's more equal friendship with Vittoria Colonna I
+hope my readers will read at leisure for themselves. No nobler, truer
+friendship ever existed. It began when the high-born and beautiful,
+gifted, and devout Marchesa de Pescara--most loyal of wives and widows,
+was forty-eight, and Michael Angelo sixty-four years of age. After a few
+years of privileged intercourse and correspondence, which were the
+happiest years in Michael Angelo's life, it ended for this world when he
+stood mourning by her lifeless clay. 'I was born a rough model, and it
+was for thee to reform and re-make me,' the great painter had written
+humbly of himself to his liege lady.[7]
+
+Italy, in Michael Angelo's time, as Germany in Albert Dürer's, was all
+quickened and astir with the new wave of religious thought which brought
+about the Reformation. Ochino and Peter Martyr, treading in the
+footsteps of Savonarola, had preached to eager listeners, but 'in Italy
+men did not adopt Lutheranism, though they approached it;' and in all
+the crowd of great Italian artists of the day, Michael Angelo shows
+deepest traces of the conflict--of its trouble, its seriousness, its
+nobleness. He only, among his brethren, acted out his belief that the
+things of the world sank into insignificance before those thoughts of
+God and immortality which were alone fully worthy of the soul. And it
+was, as to a religious work for which he was fitted, that he at last
+gave himself up to the raising of St Peter's. We shall have next in
+order the life of a man who had all the winning qualities which Michael
+Angelo wanted, but we shall hardly, through the whole range of history,
+find a nobler man than Michael Angelo.
+
+After his first visit to Rome, 1496, Michael Angelo executed his
+colossal statue of David. In 1503 he entered into the competition with
+Lionardo for the painting of one end of the Council-hall, in Florence,
+which has been already mentioned. For this object he drew as his
+cartoon, 'Pisan soldiers surprised while bathing by a sudden trumpet
+call to arms.' The grand cartoon, of which only a small copy exists, was
+said to have been torn to pieces as an act of revenge by a
+fellow-sculptor, whom Michael Angelo had offended.
+
+Michael Angelo was invited to Rome by Julius II. in 1504 to aid in
+erecting the unapproachable monument which the Pope projected raising
+for himself. Then commenced a series of contentions and struggles
+between the imperious and petulant Pope and the haughty, uncompromising
+painter, in which the latter certainly had the best of it. At one time
+in the course of the quarrel, Michael Angelo departed from Rome without
+permission or apology, and stoutly refused to return, though followed
+hotly by no less than five different couriers, armed with threats and
+promises, and urged to make the reparation by his own gonfaloniere. At
+last a meeting and a reconciliation between Michael Angelo and the Pope
+were effected at Bologna. Michael Angelo designed for Pope Julius II,
+not only the statue of Pope Julius at Bologna, which was finally
+converted into a cannon, and turned against the very man whose effigy it
+had originally presented, but also for that tomb which was never
+completed, the famous figure of Moses seated, grasping his beard with
+one hand.
+
+While employed at the tomb, Michael Angelo, then in his fortieth year,
+was desired by the Pope to undertake the decoration of the ceiling of
+the Sistine Chapel. Here, again, the hand of an enemy is said to have
+been at work. Michael Angelo, with the first place as a sculptor, was
+inexperienced in fresco painting; while Raphael, who was taking the
+place of Lionardo as Michael Angelo's most formidable rival (yet whom it
+is said Michael Angelo pointed out as the fittest painter of the
+ceiling), and who was then engaged in painting the Vatican chambers, had
+already achieved the utmost renown. It was anticipated by secret
+hostility, so records tradition, that Michael Angelo would fail signally
+in the unaccustomed work, and that his merit as an artist would pale
+altogether before that of Raphael's. I need hardly write how entirely
+malice was balked in the verdict to which posterity has set its seal.
+
+Michael Angelo brought artists from Florence to help him in his great
+undertaking, for over the chapel, whose walls had already been painted
+by older artists--among them Ghirlandajo, was an enormous vault of 150
+feet in length by 50 in breadth, which Michael Angelo was required to
+cover with designs representing the Fall and Redemption of Man. But the
+painter was unable to bear what seemed to him the bungling attempts of
+his assistants; so dismissing them all and destroying their work, he
+shut himself up, and working in solitude and secrecy, set himself to
+evolve from his own inner consciousness the gigantic scenes of a
+tremendous drama. In 22 months (or, as Kugler holds, in three years,
+including the time spent on the designs) he finished gloriously the
+work, the magnitude of which one must see to comprehend. On All Saints'
+Day, 1512, the ceiling was uncovered, and Michael Angelo was hailed,
+little though he cared for such clamorous hailing, as a painter indeed.
+For this piece of work Michael Angelo received 3000 crowns.
+
+Pope Julius died, and was succeeded by Leo X. of the Medician house,
+but, in spite of early associations as well as of mother country,
+Michael Angelo was no more acceptable to the Pope--a brilliantly
+polished, easy-tempered man of the world, who filled the chair of St
+Peter's, than Lionardo had been. Leo X, greatly preferred Raphael, to
+whom all manner of pleasantness as well as of courteous deference was
+natural, to the two others. At the same time, Leo employed Michael
+Angelo, though it was more as an architect than as a painter, and rather
+at Florence than at Rome. At Florence Michael Angelo executed for Pope
+Clement VII., another Medici, the mortuary chapel of San Lorenzo, with
+its six great statues, those of the cousins Lorenzo de Medici and
+Giuliano de Medici, the first called by the Florentines 'Il Pensièro,'
+or 'Pensive Thought,' with the four colossal recumbent figures named
+respectively the Night, the Morning, the Dawn, and the Twilight.
+
+In 1537 Michael Angelo was employed by his fellow citizens to fortify
+his native city against the return of his old patrons the Medici, and
+the city held out for nine months.
+
+Pope Paul III., an old man when elected to the popedom, but bent on
+signalizing his pontificate with as splendid works of art as those
+which had rendered the reigns of his predecessors illustrious, summoned
+another man, grown elderly, Michael Angelo, upwards of sixty years,
+reluctant to accept the commission, to finish the decoration of the
+Sistine Chapel; and Michael Angelo painted on the wall, at the upper
+end, his painting, 'The Last Judgment.' The picture is forty-seven feet
+high by forty-three wide, and it occupied the painter eight years. It
+was during its progress that Michael Angelo entered on his friendship
+with Vittoria Colonna.
+
+For the chapel called the Paolina or Pauline Chapel Michael Angelo also
+painted less-known frescoes, but from that time he devoted his life to
+St Peter's. He had said that he would take the old Pantheon and 'suspend
+it in air,' and he did what he said, though he did not live to see the
+great cathedral completed. His sovereign, the Grand Duke of Florence,
+endeavoured in vain with magnificent offers to lure the painter back to
+his native city. Michael Angelo protested that to leave Rome then would
+be 'a sin and a shame, and the ruin of the greatest religious monument
+in Christian Europe.' Michael Angelo, like Lionardo, did not marry; he
+died at Rome in 1563, in his eighty-ninth year.
+
+His nephew and principal heir,[8] by the orders of the Grand Duke of
+Florence, and it is believed according to Michael Angelo's own wish,
+removed the painter's body to Florence, where it was buried with all
+honours in the church of Santa Croce there.
+
+The traits which recall Michael Angelo personally to us, are the
+prominent arch of the nose, the shaggy brows, the tangled beard, the
+gaunt grandeur of a figure like that of one of his prophets.
+
+While Michael Angelo lived, one Pope rose on his approach, and seated
+the painter on his right hand, and another Pope declined to sit down in
+his painter's presence; but the reason given for the last condescension,
+is that the Pope feared that the painter would follow his example. And
+if the Grand Duke Cosmo uncovered before Michael Angelo, and stood hat
+in hand while speaking to him, we may have the explanation in another
+assertion, that 'sovereigns asked Michael Angelo to put on his cap,
+because the painter would do it unasked.'
+
+The solitary instance in which Michael Angelo is represented as taking
+an unfair advantage of an antagonist, is in connection with the
+painter's rivalry in his art with Raphael. Michael Angelo undervalued
+the genius of Raphael, and was disgusted by what the older man
+considered the immoderate admiration bestowed on the younger. A
+favourite pupil of Michael Angelo's was Sebastian Del Piombo, who being
+a Venetian by birth was an excellent colourist. For one of his
+pictures--the very 'Raising of Lazarus' now in the National Gallery,
+which the Pope had ordered at the same time that he had ordered
+Raphael's 'Transfiguration'--it is rumoured that Michael Angelo gave the
+designs and even drew the figures, leaving Sebastian the credit, and
+trusting that without Michael Angelo's name appearing in the work, by
+the help of his drawing in addition to Sebastian's superb colouring,
+Raphael would be eclipsed, and that by a painter comparatively obscure.
+
+The unwarrantable inference that the whole work was that of one painter,
+constituted a stratagem altogether unworthy of Michael Angelo, and if it
+had any existence, its getting wind disappointed and foiled its authors.
+When the story was repeated to Raphael, his sole protest is said to have
+been to the effect that he was glad that Michael Angelo esteemed him so
+highly as to enter the lists with him.
+
+We can judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without
+having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of
+some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's
+translations of selections from Michael Angelo's poems.
+
+Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a
+painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and
+in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is
+not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable
+dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael
+Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them
+to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding
+a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic
+architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like
+these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.
+
+In Michael Angelo's works of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his
+monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo,
+Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic
+history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded
+the sculptor's meaning in these monuments.
+
+Mrs Jameson quotes an account of Michael Angelo at work. An eye-witness
+has left us a very graphic description of the energy with which, even in
+old age, Michael Angelo handled his chisel:--"I can say that I have
+seen Michael Angelo at the age of sixty, and, with a body announcing
+weakness, make more chips of marble fly about in a quarter of an hour
+than would three of the strongest young sculptors in an hour,--a thing
+almost incredible to him who has not beheld it. He went to work with
+such impetuosity and fury of manner, that I feared almost every moment
+to see the block split into pieces. It would seem as if, inflamed by the
+idea of greatness which inspired him, this great man attacked with a
+Vigenére."
+
+In painting Michael Angelo regarded colouring as of secondary
+importance. He is not known to have executed one painting in oil, and he
+treated oil and easel-painting generally as work only fit for women or
+idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no
+means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness
+and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation
+had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of
+Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and
+his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the
+greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine
+Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the greater part colossal,
+as they were to be looked at, in the distance, from below.
+
+    'The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the most perfect
+    works done by Michael Angelo in his long and active life. Here
+    his great spirit appears in noblest dignity, in its highest
+    purity; here the attention is not disturbed by that arbitrary
+    display to which his great power not unfrequently seduced him in
+    other works. The ceiling forms a flattened arch in its section;
+    the central portion, which is a plain surface, contains a series
+    of large and small pictures, representing the most important
+    events recorded in the book of Genesis--the Creation and Fall of
+    Man, with its immediate consequences. In the large triangular
+    compartments at the springing of the vault are sitting figures
+    of the Prophets and Sibyls, as the foretellers of the coming
+    Saviour. In the soffits of the recesses between these
+    compartments, and in the arches underneath, immediately above
+    the windows, are the ancestors of the Virgin, the series leading
+    the mind directly to the Saviour. The external of these numerous
+    representations is formed by an architectural frame-work of
+    peculiar composition, which encloses the single subjects, tends
+    to make the principal masses conspicuous, and gives to the whole
+    an appearance of that solidity and support so necessary, but so
+    seldom attended to in soffit decorations, which may be
+    considered as if suspended. A great number of figures are also
+    connected with the frame-work; those in unimportant situations
+    are executed in the colour of stone or bronze; in the more
+    important, in natural colours. These serve to support the
+    architectural forms, to fill up and to connect the whole. They
+    may be best described as the living and embodied _genii_ of
+    architecture. It required the unlimited power of an architect,
+    sculptor, and painter, to conceive a structural whole of so much
+    grandeur, to design the decorative figures with the significant
+    repose required by the sculpturesque character, and yet to
+    preserve their subordination to the principal subjects, and to
+    keep the latter in the proportions and relations best adapted to
+    the space to be filled.'--_Kugler_.
+
+The pictures from the Old Testament, beginning from the altar, are:--
+
+     1. The Separation of Light and Darkness.
+     2. The Creation of the Sun and Moon.
+     3. The Creation of Trees and Plants.
+     4. The Creation of Adam.
+     5. The Creation of Eve.
+     6. The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise.
+     7. The Sacrifice of Noah.
+     8. The Deluge.
+     9. The Intoxication of Noah.
+
+     'The scenes from Genesis are the most sublime representations of
+     these subjects;--the Creating Spirit is unveiled before us. The
+     peculiar type which the painter has here given of the form of the
+     Almighty
+     Father has been frequently imitated by his followers, and even by
+     Raphael, but has been surpassed by none. Michael Angelo has
+     represented him in majestic flight, sweeping through the air,
+     surrounded by _genii_, partly supporting, partly borne along with
+     him, covered by his floating drapery; they are the distinct
+     syllables, the separate virtues of his creating word. In the
+     first (large) compartment we see him with extended hands,
+     assigning to the sun and moon their respective paths. In the
+     second, he awakens the first man to life. Adam lies stretched on
+     the verge of the earth in the act of raising himself; the Creator
+     touches him with the point of his finger, and appears thus to
+     endow him with feeling and life. This picture displays a
+     wonderful depth of thought in the composition, and the utmost
+     elevation and majesty in the general treatment and execution. The
+     third subject is not less important, representing the Fall of
+     Man, and his Expulsion from Paradise. The tree of knowledge
+     stands in the midst; the serpent (the upper part of the body
+     being that of a woman) is twined around the
+     stem; she bends down towards the guilty pair, who are in the act
+     of plucking the forbidden fruit. The figures are nobly graceful,
+     particularly that of Eve. Close to the serpent hovers the angel
+     with the sword, ready to drive the fallen beings out of Paradise.
+     In this double action, this union of two separate moments, there
+     is something peculiarly poetic and significant: it is guilt and
+     punishment in one picture. The sudden and lightning-like
+     appearance of the avenging angel behind the demon of darkness has
+     a most impressive effect.'--_Kugler_.
+
+
+The lower portion of the ceiling is divided into triangles, occupied by
+the Prophets and Sibyls in solemn contemplation, accompanied by angels
+and genii. Beginning from the left of the entrance their order is--
+
+      1. Joel.
+      2. Sibylla Erythræa.
+      3. Ezekiel.
+      4. Sibylla Persica.
+      5. Jonah.
+      6. Sibylla Libyca.
+      7. Daniel.
+      8. Sibylla Cumæa.
+      9. Isaiah.
+     10. Sibylla Delphica.
+
+    'The prophets and sibyls in the triangular compartments of the
+    curved portion of the ceiling are the largest figures in the
+    whole work; these, too, are among the most wonderful forms that
+    modern art has called into life. They are all represented
+    seated, employed with books or rolled manuscripts; genii stand
+    near or behind them. These mighty beings sit before us pensive,
+    meditative, inquiring, or looking upwards with inspired
+    countenances. Their forms and movements, indicated by the grand
+    lines and masses of the drapery, are majestic and dignified. We
+    see in them beings, who, while they feel and bear the sorrows of
+    a corrupt and sinful world, have power to look for consolation
+    into the secrets of the future. Yet the greatest variety
+    prevails in the attitudes and expression: each figure is full of
+    individuality. Zacharias is an aged man, busied in calm and
+    circumspect investigation; Jeremiah is bowed down, absorbed in
+    thought, the thought of deep and bitter grief; Ezekiel turns
+    with hasty movements to the genius next to him, who points
+    upwards with joyful expectation, etc. The sibyls are equally
+    characteristic: the Persian, a lofty, majestic woman, very aged;
+    the Erythræan, full of power, like the warrior goddess of
+    wisdom; the Delphic, like Cassandra, youthfully soft and
+    graceful, but with strength to bear the awful seriousness of
+    revelation.'--_Kugler_.
+
+     'The belief of the Roman Catholic Church in the testimony of the
+     sibyl is shown by the well-known hymn, said to have been composed
+     by Pope Innocent III, at the close of the thirteenth century,
+     beginning with the verse--
+
+                "Dies iræ, dies illa,
+                Solvet sæclum in favilla
+                Teste David cum Sibylla."
+
+     It may be inferred that this hymn, admitted into the liturgy of
+     the Roman Church, gave sanction to the adoption of the sibyls
+     into Christian art. They are seen from this time accompanying the
+     prophets and apostles, in the cyclical decorations of the
+     church.... But the highest honour that art has rendered to the
+     sibyls has been by the hand of Michael Angelo,
+     on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here in the conception of a
+     mysterious order of women, placed above and without all
+     considerations of the graceful or the individual, the great
+     master was peculiarly in his element. They exactly fitted his
+     standard, of art, not always sympathetic, nor comprehensible to
+     the average human mind, of which the grand in form and the
+     abstract in expression were the first and last conditions. In
+     this respect, the sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are more
+     Michael Angelesque than their companions the prophets. For these,
+     while types of the highest monumental treatment, are yet men,
+     while the sibyls belong to a distinct class of beings, who convey
+     the impression of the very obscurity in which their history is
+     wrapt--creatures who have lived far from the abodes of men, who
+     are alike devoid of the expression of feminine sweetness, human
+     sympathy, or sacramental beauty; who are neither Christians nor
+     Jewesses, Witches nor Graces, yet living, grand, beautiful, and
+     true, according to laws revealed to the great Florentine genius
+     only.
+
+     Thus their figures may be said to be unique, as the offspring of
+     a peculiar sympathy between the master's mind and his subject. To
+     this sympathy may be ascribed the prominence and size given them,
+     both prophets and sibyls, as compared to their usual relation to
+     the subjects they environ. They sit here on twelve throne-like
+     niches, more like presiding deities, each wrapt in
+     self-contemplation, than as tributary witnesses to the truth and
+     omnipotence of Him they are intended to announce. Thus they form
+     a gigantic frame-work round the subjects of the Creation, of
+     which the birth of Eve, as the type of the Nativity, is the
+     intentional centre. For some reason, the twelve figures are not
+     prophets and sibyls alternately--there being only five sibyls to
+     seven prophets,--so that the prophets come together at one angle.
+     Books and scrolls are given indiscriminately to them.
+
+'The Sibylla Persica, supposed to be the oldest of the sisterhood, holds
+the book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of sight, which fact,
+contradicted as it is by a frame of obviously Herculean strength, gives
+a mysterious intentness to the action.
+
+'The Sibylla Libyca, of equally powerful proportions, but less closely
+draped, is grandly wringing herself to lift a massive volume from a
+height above her head on to her knees.
+
+'The Sibylla Cumana, also aged, and with her head covered, is reading
+with her volume at a distance from her eyes.
+
+'The Sibylla Delphica, with waving hair escaping from her turban, is a
+beautiful young being, the most human of all, gazing into vacancy or
+futurity. She holds a scroll.
+
+'The Sibylla Erythræa, grand, bare-headed creature, sits reading
+intently with crossed legs, about to turn over her book.
+
+'The prophets are equally grand in structure, and though, as we have
+said, not more than men, yet they are the only men that could well bear
+the juxtaposition with their stupendous female colleagues. Ezekiel,
+between Erythræa and Persica, has a scroll in his hand that hangs by his
+side, just cast down, as he turns eagerly to listen to some voice.
+
+'Jeremiah, a magnificent figure, with elbow on knee and head on hand,
+wrapt in meditation appropriate to one called to utter lamentation and
+woe. He has neither book nor scroll.
+
+'Jonah is also without either. His position is strained and ungraceful,
+looking upwards, and apparently remonstrating with the Almighty upon the
+destruction of the gourd, a few leaves of which are seen above him. His
+hands are placed together with a strange and trivial action, supposed to
+denote the counting on his fingers the number of days he was in the
+fish's belly. A formless marine monster is seen at his side.
+
+'Daniel has a book on his lap, with one hand on it. He is young, and a
+piece of lion's skin seems to allude to his history.'[9]
+
+In the recesses between the prophets and sibyls are a series of lovely
+family groups, representing the genealogy of the Virgin, and expressive
+of calm expectation of the future. The four corners of the ceiling
+contain groups illustrative of the power of the Lord displayed in the
+especial deliverances of his chosen people. Near the altar are:
+
+Right, The Deliverance of the Israelites by the Brazen Serpent.
+
+Left, The Execution of Haman.
+
+Near the entrance are:
+
+Right, Judith and Holofernes.
+
+Left, David and Goliath.[10]
+
+Michael Angelo was thirty-nine years of age when he painted the ceiling
+of the Sistine. When he began to paint the 'Day of Judgment' he was
+above sixty years of age, and his great rival, Raphael, had already been
+dead thirteen years.
+
+The picture of the 'Day of Judgment,' with much that renders it
+marvellous and awful, has a certain coarseness of conception and
+execution. The moment chosen is that in which the Lord says, 'Depart
+from me, ye cursed,' and the idea and even attributes of the principal
+figure are taken from Orcagna's old painting in the Campo Santo. But
+with all Michael Angelo's advantages, he has by no means improved on the
+original idea. He has robbed the figure of the Lord of its transcendant
+majesty; he has not been able to impart to the ranks of the blessed the
+look of blessedness which 'Il Beato' himself might have conveyed. The
+chief excellence of the picture is in the ranks of the condemned, who
+writhe and rebel against their agonies. No wonder that the picture is
+sombre and dreadful.
+
+Of the allegorical figures of 'Night' and 'Morning' in the chapel of San
+Lorenzo, there are casts at the Crystal Palace.
+
+A comparison and a contrast have been instituted between Michael Angelo
+and Milton, and Raphael and Shakespeare. There may be something in them,
+but, as in the case of broken metaphors, they will not bear being pushed
+to a logical conclusion or picked to pieces. The very transparent
+comparison which matches Michael Angelo with his own countryman, Dante,
+is after all more felicitous and truer. Michael Angelo with Lionardo are
+the great chiefs of the Florentine School.
+
+Raphael Sanzio, or Santi of Urbino, the head of the Roman School, was
+one of those very exceptional men who seem born to happiness, to inspire
+love and only love, to pass through the world making friends and
+disarming enemies, who are fully armed to confer pleasure while almost
+incapable of either inflicting or receiving pain. To this day his
+exceptional fortune stands Raphael's memory in good stead, since for one
+man or woman who yearns after the austere righteousness and priceless
+tenderness of Michael Angelo, there are ten who yield with all their
+hearts to the gay, sweet gentleness and generosity of Raphael. No doubt
+it was also in his favour as a painter, that though a man of highly
+cultivated tastes, 'in close intimacy and correspondence with most of
+the celebrated men of his time, and interested in all that was going
+forward,' he did not, especially in his youth, spend his strength on a
+variety of studies, but devoted himself to painting. While he thus
+vindicated his share of the breadth of genius of his country and time,
+by giving to the world the loveliest Madonnas and Child-Christs, the
+most dramatic of battle-pieces, the finest of portraits, his noble and
+graceful fertility of invention and matchless skill of execution were
+confined to and concentrated on painting. He did not diverge long or far
+into the sister arts of architecture and sculpture, though his classic
+researches in the excavations of Rome were keen and zealous; a heap of
+ruins having given to the world in 1504 the group of the
+that a writer of his day could record that 'Raphael had sought and found
+in Rome another Rome.'
+
+Raphael was born in the town of Urbino, and was the son of a painter of
+the Umbrian School, who very early destined the boy to his future
+career, and promoted his destination by all the efforts in Giovanni
+Santi's power, including the intention of sending away and apprenticing
+the little lad to the best master of his time, Perugino, so called from
+the town where he resided, Perugia. Raphael's mother died when he was
+only eight years of age, and his father died when he was no more than
+eleven years, before the plans for his education were put into action.
+But no stroke of outward calamity, or loss--however severe, could annul
+Raphael's birthright of universal favour. His step-mother, the uncles
+who were his guardians, his clever, perverse, unscrupulous master, all
+joined in a common love of Raphael and determination to promote his
+interests.
+
+Raphael at the age of twelve years went to Perugia to work under
+Perugino, and remained with his master till he was nearly twenty years
+of age. In that interval he painted industriously, making constant
+progress, always in the somewhat hard, but finished, style of Perugino,
+while already showing a predilection for what was to prove Raphael's
+favourite subject, the Madonna and Child. At this period he painted his
+famous _Lo Sposalizio_ or the 'Espousals,' the marriage of the Virgin
+Mary with Joseph, now at Milan. In 1504 he visited Florence, remaining
+only for a short time, but making the acquaintance of Fra Bartolommeo
+and Ghirlandajo, seeing the cartoons of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, and
+from that time displaying a marked improvement in drawing. Indeed
+nothing is more conspicuous in Raphael's genius in contra-distinction to
+Michael Angelo's, than the receptive character of Raphael's mind, his
+power of catching up an impression from without, and the candour and
+humility with which he availed himself unhesitatingly of the assistance
+lent him by others.
+
+Returning soon to Florence, Raphael remained there till 1508, when he
+was twenty-five years, drawing closer the valuable friendships he had
+already formed, and advancing with rapid strides in his art, until his
+renown was spread all over Italy, and with reason, since already, while
+still young, he had painted his 'Madonna of the Goldfinch,' in the
+Florentine Gallery, and his 'La Belle Jardinière,' or Madonna in a
+garden among flowers, now in the Louvre.
+
+In his twenty-fifth year Raphael was summoned to Rome to paint for Pope
+Julius II. My readers will remember that Michael Angelo in the abrupt
+severity of his prime of manhood, was soon to paint the ceiling of the
+Sistine Chapel for the same despotic and art-loving Pope, who had
+brought Raphael hardly more than a stripling to paint the '_Camere_' or
+'_Stanze_' chambers of the Vatican.
+
+The first of the halls which Raphael painted (though not the first in
+order) is called the Camera della Segnatura (in English, signature), and
+represents Theology, Poetry, Philosophy, with the Sciences, Arts, and
+Jurisprudence. The second is the 'Stanza d'Eliodoro,' or the room of
+Heliodorus, and contains the grandest painting of all, in the expulsion
+of Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem (taken from Maccabees), the
+Miracle of Bolsena, Attila, king of the Huns, terrified by the
+apparition of St Peter and St Paul, and St Peter delivered from prison.
+The third stanza painted by Raphael is the 'Stanza dell' Incendio' (the
+conflagration), so called from the extinguishing of the fire in the
+Borgo by a supposed miracle, being the most conspicuous scene in
+representations of events taken from the lives of Popes Leo III, and
+IV.; and the fourth chamber, which was left unfinished by Raphael, and
+completed by his scholars, is the 'Sala di Constantino,' and contains
+incidents from the life of the Emperor Constantine, including the
+splendid battle-piece between Constantine and Maxentius. At these
+chambers, or at the designs for them, during the popedoms of Julius II.,
+who died in the course of the painting of the Camere, and Leo X., for a
+period of twelve years, till Raphael's death in 1520, after which the
+'Sala di Constantino' was completed by his scholars.
+
+Raphael has also left in the Vatican a series of small pictures from the
+Old Testament, known as Raphael's Bible. This series decorates the
+thirteen cupolas of the 'Loggie,' or open galleries, running round three
+sides of an open court. Another work undertaken by Raphael should have
+still more interest for us. Leo X., resolving to substitute woven for
+painted tapestry round the lower walls of the interior of the Sistine
+Chapel, commanded Raphael to furnish drawings to the Flemish weavers,
+and thence arose eleven cartoons, seven of which have been preserved,
+have become the property of England, and are the glory of the Kensington
+Museum. The subjects of the cartoons in the seven which have been saved,
+are 'The Death of Ananias,' 'Elymas the Sorcerer struck with Blindness,'
+'The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,' 'The
+Miraculous Draught of Fishes,' 'Paul and Barnabas at Lystra,' 'St Paul
+Preaching at Athens,' and 'The Charge to St Peter.' The four cartoons
+which are lost, were 'The Stoning of St Stephen,' 'The Conversion of St
+Paul,' 'Paul in Prison,' and 'The Coronation of the Virgin.'
+
+In those cartoons figures above life-size were drawn with chalk upon
+strong paper, and coloured in distemper, and Raphael received for his
+work four hundred and thirty gold ducats (about _£650_), while the
+Flemish weavers received for their work in wools, silk, and gold, fifty
+thousand gold ducats. The designs were cut up in strips for the
+weavers' use, and while some strips were destroyed, the rest lay in a
+warehouse at Arras, till Rubens became aware of their existence, and
+advised Charles I, to buy the set, to be employed in the tapestry
+manufactory established by James I. at Mortlake. Brought to this country
+in the slips which the weavers had copied, the fate of the cartoons was
+still precarious. Cromwell bought them in Charles I.'s art collection,
+and Louis XIV, sought, but failed, to re-buy them. They fell into
+farther neglect, and were well-nigh forgotten, when Sir Godfrey Kneller
+recalled them to notice, and induced William III, to have the slips
+pasted together, and stretched upon linen, and put in a room set apart
+for them at Hampton Court, whence they were transferred, within the last
+ten years, for the greater advantage of artists and the public, to
+Kensington Museum.
+
+The woven tapestries for which the cartoons were designed had quite as
+chequered a career. In the two sacks of Rome by French soldiers, the
+tapestries were seized, carried off, and two of them burnt for the
+bullion in the thread. At last they were restored to the Vatican, where
+they hang in their faded magnificence, a monument of Leo X, and of
+Raphael. An additional set of ten tapestry cartoons were supplied to the
+Vatican by Raphael's scholars.
+
+Raphael painted for the Chigi family in their palace, which is now the
+Villa Farnesina, scenes from the history of Cupid and Psyche, and the
+Triumph of Galatea, subjects which show how the passion for classical
+mythology that distinguishes the next generation, was beginning to work.
+To these last years belong his 'Madonna di San Sisto,' so named from its
+having been painted for the convent of St Sixtus at Piacenza, and his
+last picture, the 'Transfiguration,' with which he was still engaged
+when death met him unexpectedly.
+
+Raphael, as the Italians say, lived more like a '_principe_' (prince)
+than a '_pittore_' (painter). He had a house in Rome, and a villa in the
+neighbourhood, and on his death left a considerable fortune to his
+heirs. There has not been wanting a rumour that his life of a principe
+was a dissipated and prodigal life; but this ugly rumour, even if it had
+more evidence to support it, is abundantly disproven by the nature of
+Raphael's work, and by the enormous amount of that work, granting him
+the utmost assistance from his crowd of scholars. He had innumerable
+commissions, and retained an immense school from all parts of Italy, the
+members of which adored their master. Raphael had the additional
+advantage of having many of his pictures well engraved by a contemporary
+engraver named Raimondi.
+
+Like Giotto, Raphael was the friend of the most distinguished Italians
+of his day, including Count Castiglione, and the poet Ariosto. He was
+notably the warm friend of his fellow-painters both at home and abroad,
+with the exception of Michael Angelo. A drawing of his own, which
+Raphael sent, in his kindly interchange of such sketches, to Albert
+Dürer, is, I think, preserved at Nüremberg. The sovereign princes of
+Italy, above all Leo X., were not contented with being munificent
+patrons to Raphael, they treated him with the most marked consideration.
+The Cardinal Bibbiena proposed the painter's marriage with his niece,
+ensuring her a dowry of three thousand gold crowns, but Maria di
+Bibbiena died young, ere the marriage could be accomplished; and
+Raphael, who was said to be little disposed to the match, did not long
+survive her. He caught cold, as some report, from his engrossing
+personal superintendence of the Roman excavations; and, as others
+declare, from his courtly assiduity in keeping an appointment with the
+Pope, was attacked by fever, and died on his birth-day, April 6th, 1520,
+having completed his thirty-seventh year.
+
+All Rome and Italy mourned for him. When his body lay in state, to be
+looked at and wept over by multitudes, his great unfinished picture of
+the 'Transfiguration' was hung above the bed. He was buried in a spot
+chosen by himself in his lifetime, and, as it happened, not far from the
+resting-place of his promised bride. Doubts having been raised as to
+Raphael's grave, search was made, and his body was exhumed in 1833, and
+re-buried with great pomp. Raphael's life and that of Rubens form the
+ideal painter's life--bountiful, splendid, unclouded, and terminating
+ere it sees eclipse or decay--to all in whom the artistic temperament is
+united to a genial, sensuous, pleasure-loving nature.
+
+Raphael was not above the middle height, and slightly made. He was
+sallow in colour, with brown eyes, and a full yet delicate mouth; but
+his beautiful face, like that of our English Shakespeare, is familiar to
+most of us. With regard to Raphael's face, the amount of womanliness in
+it is a striking characteristic. One hears sometimes that no man's
+character is complete without its share of womanliness: surely Raphael
+had a double share, for womanliness is the most distinctive quality in
+his face, along with that vague shade of pensiveness which we find not
+infrequently, but strangely enough, in those faces which have been
+associated with the happiest spirits and the brightest fortunes.
+
+Raphael and his scholars painted and drew about nine hundred pictures
+and sketches, including a hundred and twenty Madonnas, eight of which
+are in private collections in England. Of Raphael's greatness, Kugler
+writes that 'it is not so much in kind as in degree. No master left
+behind _so many_ really excellent works as he, whose days were so early
+numbered; in none has there been observed so little that is unpleasant.'
+All authorities agree in ascribing much of Raphael's power to his purely
+unselfish nature and aim. His excellence seems to lie in the nearly
+perfect expression of material beauty and harmony, together with
+grandeur of design and noble working out of thought. We shall see that
+this devotion to material beauty has been made something of a reproach
+to Raphael, as it certainly degenerated into a snare in the hands of his
+followers, while unquestionably the universal appreciation of Raphael's
+work, distinguished from the partial appreciation bestowed on the great
+works of others, proceeds from this evident material beauty which is
+open to all.
+
+Then, again, Raphael, far more than Andrea del Sarto, deserved to be
+called 'faultless;' and this general absence of defects and equality of
+excellence is a great element of Raphael's wide popularity; for, as one
+can observe for one's self, in regarding a work of art, there is always
+a large proportion of the spectators who will seize on an error, dwell
+on it, and be incapable of shaking off its influence, and rising into
+the higher rank of critics, who discover and ponder over beauties. I
+would have it considered also, that this equality of excellence does not
+necessarily proceed always from a higher aim, but may arise rather from
+an unconsciously lower aim.
+
+The single reproach brought against Raphael as a painter is
+that--according to some witnesses only, for most deny the
+implication--Raphael so delighted in material beauty that he became
+enslaved by it, till it diminished his spiritual insight. It is an
+incontestable truth that in Raphael, as in all the great Italian
+painters of his century, there was a falling away from the simple
+earnestness, the exceeding reverence, the endless patience, the
+self-abstraction, and self-devotion of the earliest Italian and Flemish
+painters. Therefore there has been within the last fifty or sixty years
+that movement in modern art, which is called Pre-raphaelitism, and which
+is, in fact, a revolt against subjection to Raphael, and his supposed
+undue exaltation of material beauty, and subjection of truth to
+beauty--so called. But we must not fall into the grave mistake of
+imagining that there was any want of vigour and variety in Raphael's
+grace and tenderness, or that he could not in his greatest works rise
+into a grandeur in keeping with his subject. Tire as we may of hearing
+Raphael called the king of painters, as the Greeks tired of hearing
+Aristides called 'the just,' this fact remains: no painter has left
+behind him such a mass of surpassingly good work; in no other work is
+there the same charm of greatest beauty and harmony.
+
+It is hard for me to give you an idea in so short a space of Raphael's
+work. I must content myself with quoting descriptions of two of his
+Stanze, those of the Heliodorus and the Segnatura. 'Heliodorus driven
+out of the Temple (2 Maccabees iii.). In the background Onias the
+priest is represented praying for Divine interposition;--in the
+foreground Heliodorus, pursued by two avenging angels, is endeavouring
+to bear away the treasures of the temple. Amid the group on the left is
+seen Julius II., in his chair of state, attended by his secretaries. One
+of the bearers in front is Marc-Antonio Raimondi, the engraver of
+Raphael's designs. The man with the inscription, "Jo Petro de Folicariis
+Cremonen," was secretary of briefs to Pope Julius. Here you may fancy
+you hear the thundering approach of the heavenly warrior, and the
+neighing of his steed; while in the different groups who are plundering
+the treasures of the temple, and in those who gaze intently on the
+sudden consternation of Heliodorus, without being able to divine its
+cause, we see the expression of terror, amazement, joy, humility, and
+every passion to which human nature is exposed.'[11]
+
+'The Stanza della Segnatura is so called from a judicial assembly once
+held here. The frescoes in this chamber are illustrative of the Virtues
+of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence, who are represented
+on the ceiling by Raphael, in the midst of arabesques by _Sodoma_. The
+square pictures by Raphael refer:--the Fall of Man to Theology; the
+Study of the Globe to Philosophy; the Flaying of Marsyas to Poetry; and
+the Judgment of Solomon to Jurisprudence.
+
+'_Entrance Wall_.--"The School of Athens." Raphael consulted Ariosto as
+to the arrangement of its 52 figures. In the centre, on the steps of a
+portico, are seen Plato and Aristotle, Plato pointing to heaven and
+Aristotle to earth. On the left is Socrates conversing with his pupils,
+amongst whom is a young warrior, probably Alcibiades. Lying upon the
+steps in front is Diogenes. To his left, Pythagoras is writing on his
+knee, and near him, with ink and pen, is Empedocles. The white mantle is
+Francesco Maria della Rovere, nephew of Julius II. On the right is
+Archimedes drawing a geometrical problem upon the floor. The young man
+near him with uplifted hands is Federigo II., Duke of Mantua. Behind
+these are Zoroaster, Ptolemy, one with a terrestrial, the other with a
+celestial globe, addressing two figures, which represent Raphael and his
+master Perugino. The drawing in brown upon the socle beneath this
+fresco, is by _Pierino del Vaga_, and represents the death of
+Archimedes.
+
+'_Right Wall_.--"Parnassus." Apollo surrounded by the Muses; on his
+right, Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Below on the right, Sappho, supposed to
+be addressing Corinna, Petrarch, Propertius, and Anacreon; on the left
+Pindar and Horace, Sannazzaro, Boccaccio, and others. Beneath this, in
+grisaille, are,--Alexander placing the poems of Homer in the tomb of
+Achilles, and Augustus preventing the burning of Virgil's Æneid.
+
+'_Left Wall_.--Above the window are Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance.
+On the left, Justinian delivers the Pandects to Tribonian. On the right,
+Gregory IX. (with the features of Julius II.) delivers the Decretals to
+a jurist;--Cardinal de' Medici, afterwards Leo X., Cardinal Farnese,
+afterwards Paul III., and Cardinal del Monte, are represented near the
+Pope. In the socle beneath is Solon addressing the people of Athens.
+
+'_Wall of Egress_.--"The Disputa." So called from an impression that it
+represents a Dispute upon the Sacrament. In the upper part of the
+composition the heavenly host are present; Christ between the Virgin and
+St John the Baptist; on the left, St Peter, Adam, St John, David, St
+Stephen, and another; and on the right, St Paul, Abraham, St James,
+Moses, St Lawrence, and St George. Below is an altar surrounded by the
+Latin fathers, Gregory, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. Near St
+Augustine stand St Thomas Aquinas, St Anacletus, with the palm of a
+martyr, and Cardinal Buenaventura reading. Those in front are Innocent
+III., and in the background, Dante, near whom a monk in a black hood is
+pointed out as Savonarola. The Dominican on the extreme left is supposed
+to be Fra Angelico. The other figures are uncertain.' ...
+
+'Raphael commenced his work in the Vatican by painting the ceiling and
+the four walls in the room called _della Segnatura_, on the surface of
+which he had to represent four great compositions, which embraced the
+principal divisions of the encyclopedia of that period; namely,
+Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence.
+
+'It will be conceived, that to an artist imbued with the traditions of
+the Umbrian School, the first of these subjects was an unparalleled
+piece of good fortune: and Raphael, long familiar with the allegorical
+treatment of religious compositions, turned it here to the most
+admirable account; and, not content with the suggestions of his own
+genius, he availed himself of all the instruction he could derive from
+the intelligence of others. From these combined inspirations resulted,
+to the eternal glory of the Catholic faith and of Christian art, a
+composition without a rival in the history of painting, and, we may also
+add, without a name; for to call it lyric or epic is not enough, unless,
+indeed, we mean, by using these expressions, to compare it with the
+allegorical epic of Dante, alone worthy to be ranked with this
+marvellous production of the pencil of Raphael.
+
+'Let no one consider this praise as idle and groundless, for it is
+Raphael himself who forces the comparison upon us, by placing the figure
+of Dante among the favourite sons of the Muses; and, what is still more
+striking, by draping the allegorical figure of Theology in the very
+colours in which Dante has represented Beatrice; namely, the white veil,
+the red tunic, and the green mantle, while on her head he has placed the
+olive crown.
+
+'Of the four allegorical figures which occupy the compartments of the
+ceiling, and which were all painted immediately after Raphael's arrival
+in Rome, Theology and Poetry are incontestably the most remarkable. The
+latter would be easily distinguished by the calm inspiration of her
+glance, even were she without her wings, her starry crown, and her azure
+robe, all having allusion to the elevated region towards which it is her
+privilege to soar. The figure of Theology is quite as admirably suited
+to the subject she personifies; she points to the upper part of the
+grand composition, which takes its name from her, and in which the
+artist has provided inexhaustible food for the sagacity and enthusiasm
+of the spectator.
+
+'This work consists of two grand divisions,--Heaven and Earth--which are
+united to one another by that mystical bond, the Sacrament of the
+Eucharist. The personages whom the Church has most honoured for learning
+and holiness, are ranged in picturesque and animated groups on either
+side of the altar, on which the consecrated wafer is exposed. St
+Augustine dictates his thoughts to one of his disciples; St Gregory, in
+his pontifical robes, seems absorbed in contemplation of celestial
+glory; St Ambrose, in a slightly different attitude, appears to be
+chanting the Te Deum; while St Jerome, seated, rests his hands on a
+large book, which he holds on his knees. Pietro Lombardo, Duns Scotus,
+St Thomas Aquinas, Pope Anacletus, St Buenaventura, and Innocent III.,
+are no less happily characterized; while, behind all these illustrious
+men, whom the Church and succeeding generations have agreed to honour,
+Raphael has ventured to introduce Dante with his laurel crown, and, with
+still greater boldness, the monk Savonarola, publicly burnt ten years
+before as a heretic.
+
+'In the glory, which forms the upper part of the picture, the Three
+Persons of the Trinity are represented, surrounded by patriarchs,
+apostles, and saints: it may, in fact, be considered in some sort as a
+_resumé_ of all the favourite compositions produced during the last
+hundred years by the Umbrian School. A great number of the types, and
+particularly those of Christ and the Virgin, are to be found in the
+earlier works of Raphael himself. The Umbrian artists, from having so
+long exclusively employed themselves on mystical subjects, had certainly
+attained to a marvellous perfection in the representation of celestial
+beatitude, and of those ineffable things of which it has been said that
+the heart of man cannot conceive them, far less, therefore, the pencil
+of man portray; and Raphael, surpassing them in all, and even in this
+instance, while surpassing himself, appears to have fixed the limits,
+beyond which Christian art, properly so called, has never since been
+able to advance.'[12]
+
+Of Raphael's Madonnas, I should like to speak of three. The Madonna di
+San Sisto: 'It represents the Virgin standing in a majestic attitude;
+the infant Saviour _enthroned_ in her arms; and around her head a glory
+of innumerable cherubs melting into light. Kneeling before her we see on
+one side St Sixtus, on the other St Barbara, and beneath her feet two
+heavenly cherubs gaze up in adoration. In execution, as in design, this
+is probably the most perfect picture in the world. It is painted
+throughout by Raphael's own hand; and as no sketch or study of any part
+of it was ever known to exist, and as the execution must have been, from
+the thinness and delicacy of the colours, wonderfully rapid, it is
+supposed that he painted it at once on the canvas--a _creation_ rather
+than a picture. In the beginning of the last century the Elector of
+Saxony, Augustus III., purchased this picture from the monks of the
+convent for the sum of sixty thousand florins (about £6000), and it now
+forms the chief boast and ornament of the Dresden Gallery'[13]
+
+The Madonna del Cardellino (our Lady of the Goldfinch): 'The Virgin is
+sitting on a rock, in a flowery meadow. Behind are the usual light and
+feathery trees, growing on the bank of a stream, which passes off to the
+left in a rocky bend, and is crossed by a bridge of a single arch. To
+the right, the opposite bank slopes upward in a gentle glade, across
+which is a village, backed by two distant mountain-peaks.
+
+'In front of the sitting matronly figure of the Virgin are the holy
+children, our Lord and the Baptist, one on either side of her right
+knee. She has been reading, and the approach of St John has caused her
+to look off her book (which is open in her left hand) at the new comer,
+which she does with a look of holy love and gentleness, at the same
+time caressingly drawing him to her with her right hand, which touches
+his little body under the right arm. In both hands, which rest across
+the Virgin's knee, he holds a captive goldfinch, which he has brought,
+with childish glee, as an offering to the Holy Child. The infant Jesus,
+standing between his mother's knees, with one foot placed on her foot,
+and her hand, with the open book, close above his shoulder, regards the
+Baptist with an upward look of gentle solemnity, at the same time that
+he holds his bent hand over the head of the bird.
+
+'So much for mere description. The inner feeling of the picture, the
+motive which has prompted it, has surely hardly ever been surpassed. The
+Blessed Virgin, in casting her arm round the infant St John, looks down
+on him with a holy complacency for the testimony which he is to bear to
+her Son. Notice the human boyish glee with which the Baptist presents
+the captured goldfinch, and, on the other hand, the divine look, even of
+majesty and creative love, with which the infant Jesus, laying his hand
+on the head of the bird, half reproves St John, as it were saying, "Love
+them and hurt them not." Notice, too, the unfrightened calm of the bird
+itself, passive under the hand of its loving Creator. All these are
+features of the very highest power of human art.
+
+'Again, in accompaniments, all is as it should be. The Virgin, modestly
+and beautifully draped; St John, girt about the loins, not only in
+accord with his well-known prophetic costume, but also as partaking of
+sinful humanity, and therefore needing such cincture: the Child
+Redeemer, with a slight cincture, just to suggest motherly care, but not
+over the part usually concealed, as indeed it never ought to be, seeing
+that in Him was no sin, and that it is this spotless purity which is
+ever the leading idea in representations of Him as an infant. Notice,
+too, his foot, beautifully resting on that of his mother; the unity
+between them being thus wonderfully though slightly kept up. Her eye has
+just been dwelling on the book of the Prophecies open in her hand; and
+thus the spectator's thought is ruled in accordance with the high
+mission of the Holy One of God, and thrown forward into the grand and
+blessed future. It is a holy and wonderful picture; I had not seen any
+in Italy which had struck or refreshed me more.'[14]
+
+And allow me to write two or three words with regard to the 'Madonna
+della Sedia,' or our Lady of the Chair, an engraving of which used to
+charm me when a child. The Virgin, very young and simple-looking in her
+loveliness, is seated on a low chair, clasping the Divine Child, who is
+leaning in weariness on her breast. In the original picture, St John
+with his cross is standing--a boy at the Virgin's knee, but he is absent
+from the old engraving. The meek adoring tenderness in the face of the
+mother, the holy ingenuousness in that of the child, are expressions to
+be long studied.
+
+Of Raphael's cartoons, which, so many of us can see for ourselves, I
+cannot trust myself to do more than to repeat what strikes me as a
+singularly apt phrase of Hazlitt's, given by Mrs Jameson, that the
+cartoons are instances in which 'the corruptible has put on
+incorruption.' That from the very slightness of the materials employed,
+and the very injuries which the cartoons have sustained, we have the
+greatest triumph of art, where 'the sense of power supersedes the
+appearance of effort,' and where the result is the more majestic for
+being in ruins. 'All other pictures look like oil and varnish, we are
+stopped and attracted by the colouring, the penciling, the finishing,
+the instrumentality of art; but the on the canvas.... There is nothing
+between us and the subject; we look through a frame and see Scripture
+histories, and amidst the wreck of colour and the mouldering of material
+beauty, nothing is left but a universe of thought, or the broad imminent
+shadows of calm contemplation and majestic pains.'
+
+And that Raphael did not neglect the minutest details in these sketches,
+will be seen by the accompanying note: 'The foreground of Raphael's two
+cartoons, "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes," and "The Charge to
+Peter," are covered with plants of the common sea cole-wort, of which
+the sinuated leaves and clustered blossoms would have exhausted the
+patience of any other artist; but have appeared worthy of prolonged and
+thoughtful labour to the great mind of Raphael.'--_Ruskin_.
+
+Whole clusters of anecdotes gather round the cartoons, which, as they
+have to do with the work and not the worker, I leave untouched, with
+regret. But I must forewarn my readers by mentioning some of the refuted
+criticisms which have been applied to the cartoons. Reading the
+criticisms and their answers ought to render us modest and wary in
+'picking holes' in great pictures, as forward and flippant critics, old
+and young, are tempted to pick them. With regard to the 'Miraculous
+Draught of Fishes,' a great outcry was once set up that Raphael had made
+the boat too little to hold the figures he has placed in it. But Raphael
+made the boat little advisedly; if he had not done so, the picture would
+have been 'all boat,' a contingency scarcely to be desired; on the
+other hand, if Raphael had diminished the figures to suit the size of
+the boat, these figures would not have suited those of the other
+cartoons, and the cartoon would have lost greatly in dignity and effect.
+
+In the cartoon of the 'Death of Ananias,' carping objectors were ready
+to suggest that Raphael had committed an error in time by introducing
+Sapphira in the background counting her ill-gotten gains, at the moment
+when her no less guilty husband has fallen down in the agonies of death.
+It was hours afterwards that Sapphira entered into the presence of the
+apostles. But we must know that time and space do not exist for
+painters, who have to tell their story at one stroke, as it were.
+
+In the treating of the 'Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,'
+some authorities have found fault with Raphael for breaking the
+composition into parts by the introduction of pillars, and, farther,
+that the shafts are not straight. Yet by this treatment Raphael has
+concentrated the principal action in a sort of frame, and thus has been
+enabled to give more freedom of action to the remaining figures in the
+other divisions of the picture. 'It is evident, moreover, that had the
+shafts been perfectly straight, according to the severest law of good
+taste in architecture, the effect would have been extremely disagreeable
+to the eye; by their winding form they harmonize with the manifold forms
+of the moving figures around, and they illustrate, by their elaborate
+elegance, the Scripture phrase, "the gate which is called
+Beautiful."'--_Mrs Jameson_.
+
+Of Raphael's portraits I must mention that wonderful portrait of Leo X.,
+often reckoned the best portrait in the world for truth of likeness and
+excellence of painting, and those of the so-called 'Fornarina,' or
+'baker'. Two Fornarinas are at Rome and one at Florence. There is a
+story that the original of the first two pictures was a girl of the
+people to whom Raphael was attached; and there is this to be said for
+the tradition, that there is an acknowledged coarseness in the very
+beauty of the half-draped Fornarina of the Barberini Palace. The
+'Fornarina' of Florence is the portrait of a noble woman, holding the
+fur-trimming of her mantle with her right hand, and it is said that the
+picture can hardly represent the same individual as that twice
+represented in Rome. According to one guess the last 'Fornarina' is
+Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa de Pescara, painted by Seba Piombo,
+instead of by Raphael; and according to another, the Roman 'Fornarina'
+is no Fornarina beloved by Raphael, but Beatrice Pio, a celebrated
+improvisatrice of the time.
+
+An 'innovation of modern times is to spell Raphael's name in England as
+the modern Italians spelt it, _Raffaelle_, a word of four syllables, and
+yet to pronounce this Italian word as if it were English, as _Raphael_.
+Vasari wrote Raffaello; he himself wrote Raphael on his pictures, and
+has signed the only autograph letter we have of his, Raphaello.'[15]
+
+Titian, or Tiziano Vecelli, the greatest painter of the Venetian
+School, reckoned worthy to be named with Lionardo, Michael Angelo and
+Raphael, was born of good family at Capo del Cadore in the Venetian
+State, in 1477. There is a tradition that while other painters made
+their first essays in art with chalk or charcoal, the boy Titian, who
+lived to be a glorious colourist, made his earliest trials in painting
+with the juice of flowers. Titian studied in Venice under the Bellini,
+and had Giorgione, who was born in the same year, for his
+fellow-scholar, at first his friend, later his rival. When a young man
+Titian spent some time in Ferrara; there he painted his 'Bacchus and
+Ariadne,' and a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1512, when Titian was
+thirty-five years of age, he was commissioned by the Venetians to
+continue the works in the great council-hall, which the advanced age of
+Gian Bellini kept him from finishing. Along with this commission Titian
+was appointed in 1516 to the office of la Sanseria, which gave him the
+duty and privilege of painting the portraits of the Doges as long as he
+held the office; coupled with the office was a salary of one hundred
+and twenty crowns a year. Titian lived to paint five Doges; two others,
+his age, equal to that of Gian Bellini, prevented him from painting.
+
+In 1516, Titian painted his greatest sacred picture, the 'Assumption of
+the Virgin.' In the same year he painted the poet Ariosto, who mentions
+the painter with high honour in his verse.
+
+In 1530, Titian, a man of fifty-three years, was at Bologna, where there
+was a meeting between Charles V, and Pope Clement VII., when he was
+presented to both princes.
+
+Charles V, and Philip II, became afterwards great patrons and admirers
+of Titian, and it is of Charles V. and Titian that a legend, to which I
+have already referred, is told. The Emperor, visiting the painter while
+he was at work, stooped down and picked up a pencil, which Titian had
+let fall, to the confusion and distress of the painter, when Charles
+paid the princely compliment, 'Titian is worthy of being served by
+Cæsar.' Titian painted many portraits of Charles V., and of the members
+of his house. As Maximilian had created Albrecht Dürer a noble of the
+Empire, Charles V, created Titian a Count Palatine, and a Knight of the
+Order of St Iago, with a pension, which was continued by Philip II., of
+four hundred crowns a year. It is doubtful whether Titian ever visited
+the Spain of his patrons, but Madrid possesses forty-three of his
+pictures, among them some of his finest works.
+
+Titian went to Rome in his later years, but declined to abandon for Rome
+the painter's native Venice, which had lavished her favours on her son.
+He lived in great splendour, paying annual summer visits to his
+birth-place of Cadore, and occasionally dwelling again for a time at
+Ferrara, Urbino, Bologna. In two instances he joined the Emperor at
+Augsburgh. When Henry III, of France landed at Venice, he was
+entertained _en grand seigneur_ by Titian, then a very old man; and when
+the king asked the price of some pictures which pleased him, Titian at
+once presented them as a gift to his royal guest.
+
+Titian married, as has been recently ascertained, and had three
+children,--two sons, the elder a worthless and scandalous priest; the
+second a good son and accomplished painter; and a daughter, the
+beautiful Lavinia, so often painted by her father, and whose name will
+live with his. Titian survived his wife thirty-six years; and his
+daughter, who had married, and was the mother of several children, six
+years. His second son and fellow-painter died of the same plague which
+struck down Titian, in 1566, at the ripe age of eighty-nine years.
+
+Titian is said to have been a man of irritable and passionate temper.
+The hatred between him and the painter, Pordenone, was so bitter, that
+the latter thought his life in danger, and painted with his shield and
+poniard lying ready to his hand. Titian grasped with imperious tenacity
+his supremacy as a painter, sedulously kept the secrets of his skill,
+and was most unmagnanimously jealous of the attainments of his scholars.
+No defect of temper, however, kept Titian from having two inseparable
+convivial companions--one of them the architect, Sansovino, and the
+other the profligate wit, Aretino, who was pleased to style himself the
+'friend of Titian and the scourge of princes.' Though Titian is said, in
+the panic of the great plague, to have died not only neglected, but
+plundered before his eyes, still Venice prized him so highly, that she
+made in his favour the single exception of a public funeral, during the
+appalling devastation wrought by the pestilence.
+
+From an engraving of a portrait of Titian by himself, which is before
+me, I can give the best idea of his person. He looks like one of the
+merchant princes, whom he painted so often and so well, in richly furred
+gown, massive chain, and small cap, far off his broad forehead: a
+stately figure, with a face--in its aquiline nose and keen eyes, full of
+sagacity and fire, which no years could tame.
+
+Towards the close of Titian's life, there was none who even approached
+the old Venetian painter in the art which he practised freely to the
+last. Painting in Italy was everywhere losing its pre-eminence. It had
+become, even when it was not so nominally, thoroughly secularized;--and
+with reason, for the painters by their art-creed and by their lives were
+fitter to represent gods and goddesses, in whom no man believed, than to
+give earnest expression to a living faith. Even Titian, great as he was,
+proved a better painter of heathen mythology than of sacred subjects.
+
+But within certain limits and in certain directions, Titian stands
+unequalled. He has a high place for composition and for drawing, and his
+colouring was, beyond comparison, grand and true. He was great as a
+landscape painter, and he was the best portrait painter whom the world
+ever saw. In his painting is seen, not, indeed, the life of the spirit,
+but the life of the senses 'in its fullest power,' and in Titian there
+was such large mastery of this life, that in his freedom there was no
+violence, but the calmness of supreme strength, the serenity of perfect
+satisfaction. His painting was a reflection of the old Greek idea of the
+life of humanity as a joyous existence, so long as the sun of youth,
+maturity, health, and good fortune shone, without even that strain of
+foreboding pain, and desperate closing with fate, which troubled the
+bliss of ancient poet or sculptor. A large proportion of Titian's
+principal pictures are at Venice and Madrid.
+
+Among Titian's finest sacred pictures, are his 'Assumption of the
+Virgin,' now in the Academy, Venice, where 'the Madonna, a powerful
+figure, is borne rapidly upwards, as if divinely impelled; ..,
+fascinating groups of infant angels surround her, beneath stand the
+apostles, looking up with solemn gestures;' and his 'Entombment of
+Christ,' a picture which is also in Venice. Titian's Madonnas were not
+so numerous as his Venuses, many of which are judged excellent examples
+of the master. His 'Bacchus and Ariadne,' in the National Gallery, is
+described by Mrs Jameson, 'as presenting, on a small scale, an epitome
+of all the beauties which characterize Titian, in the rich, picturesque,
+animated composition, in the ardour of Bacchus, who flings himself from
+his car to pursue Ariadne; the dancing bacchanals, the frantic grace of
+the bacchante, and the little joyous satyr in front, trailing the head of
+the sacrifice.'
+
+Titian's landscapes are the noble backgrounds to many of his pictures.
+These landscapes were not only free, but full. 'The great masters of
+Italy, almost without exception, and Titian, perhaps, more than any
+other (for he had the highest knowledge of landscape), are in the
+constant habit of rendering every detail of their foregrounds with the
+most laborious botanical fidelity; witness the Bacchus and Ariadne, in
+which the foreground is occupied by the common blue iris, the aquilegia,
+and the wild rose; _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.'--_Ruskin_.
+
+In portraits, Titian conveyed to the sitters and transferred to his
+canvas, not only a life-likeness, but a positively noble dignity in that
+likeness. What in Van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds was the bestowing of
+high breeding and dainty refinement, became under Titian's brush
+dignity, pure and simple, very quiet, and wonderfully real. There is
+this peculiarity in connection with the number of portraits which Titian
+executed, that many of them have descended to us without further titles
+than those of 'A Venetian Senator,' 'A Lady,' etc., etc., yet of the
+individual life of the originals no one can doubt. With regard to
+Titian's portraits of women, I have already referred to those of his
+beautiful daughter, Lavinia. In one portrait, in the Berlin Museum, she
+is holding a plate of fruit; in another, in England, the plate of fruit
+is changed into a casket of jewels; in a third, at Madrid, Lavinia is
+Herodias, and bears a charger with the head of John the Baptist. A
+'Violante'--as some say, the daughter of Titian's scholar, Palma, though
+dates disprove this--sat frequently to Titian, and is said to have been
+loved by him.
+
+I have written, in connection with Lionardo's 'Jaconde' and Raphael's
+'Fornarina,' of Titian's 'Bella Donna.' He has various 'Bellas,' but, as
+far as I know, this is _the_ 'Bella Donna,'--'a splendid, serious
+beauty, in a red and blue silk dress,' in the Sciarra Gallery, Rome.
+
+I have read that critics were at one time puzzled by the singular
+yellow, almost straw colour, appearing profusely in the hair of the
+women of the Venetian painters of this time, and that it was only by
+consulting contemporary records that it was learnt that the Venetian
+women indulged in the weak and false vanity of dyeing their black hair a
+pale yellow--a process, in the course of which the women drew the hair
+through the crown of a broad-brimmed hat, and spreading it over the
+brim, submitted patiently to bleaching the hair in a southern sun.
+
+Among Titian's portraits of men, those of the 'Emperor Charles V.' and
+the 'Duke of Alva' are among the most famous.
+
+Titian painted, and painted wonderfully, to the very last. He was
+eighty-one when he painted the 'Martyrdom of St Lawrence,' one of his
+largest and grandest compositions, and in the last year of his life he
+painted--leaving it not quite completed,--a 'Pietà;' showing that his
+hand owned the weight of years,[16] but the conception of the subject is
+still animated and striking, the colours still glowing; while,
+Titian-like, the light still flows around the mighty group in every
+gradation of tone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+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,'
+
+    'For the great painter never dies.'
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+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 fricassée 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 masterpieces, 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. 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 Ion 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. In the 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, etc., etc. Another of Veronese's pictures in the
+National Gallery is 'The Consecration of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+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 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:
+
+    'Let him, who a good painter would be,
+    Acquire the drawing of Rome,
+    Venetian action, and Venetian shadow,
+    And the dignified colouring of Lombardy,
+    The terrible manner of Michael Angelo,
+    Titian's truth and nature,
+    The sovereign purity of Correggio's style,
+    And the true symmetry of Raphael;
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    And a little of Parmegiano'a grace,
+    But without so much study and toil,
+    Let him only apply himself to imitate the works
+    Which our Niccolino has left us here.'
+
+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,' etc. In this intent regard to style,
+and this perfecting of means to an end, thought and 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 'Phoebus 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 a 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+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, etc. etc., 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 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:
+
+    'A man long trained to love the monk's vision 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 the stout horses and 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 that 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' 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
+    peasants cottage.'
+
+Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches
+being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp,
+many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and
+cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at
+Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of
+Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a
+very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his
+own.
+
+First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group,
+distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard
+to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in
+relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An
+enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the
+daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for
+composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the
+bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely
+physical agony--too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime--- an
+earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'
+
+    'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
+     Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow
+     Stream not with blood.'
+
+There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while
+Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by
+re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the
+Magdalene.
+
+With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of
+the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for sixteen
+hundred florins, his usual terms being a hundred florins a-day.
+
+'The Virgin and Serpent' (from the 12th chapter of Revelation) in the
+Munich gallery is very splendid. The Virgin with the new-born Saviour in
+her arms is mounting on the wings of an eagle, surrounded by a flood of
+light. The serpent, encircling the moon on which she stands, is writhing
+beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre
+over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful
+combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the
+child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his
+tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin
+with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with
+impotent rage, and falling with the dragon into the abyss.'
+
+'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects
+from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and
+in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry.' Among
+his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,'
+now at Munich. 'The women are driven back by the Greeks over the river
+Thermodon; two horses are in savage combat on the bridge; one Amazon is
+torn from her horse; a second is dragged along by a sable steed, and
+falling headlong into the river, where others are swimming and
+struggling. No other battle-piece, save that of the Amazons, can compare
+with Raphael's "Battle of Constantine."'
+
+Another great picture is The 'Carrying off of Proserpine.' 'Pluto in his
+car is driven by fiery brown steeds, and is bearing away the goddess,
+resisting and struggling. The picture absolutely glows with genial fire.
+The forms in it are more slender than is general with Rubens. Among the
+companions of Proserpine the figure of Diana is conspicuous for grace
+and beauty. The victorious god of love hovers before the chariot, and
+the blue ocean, warmly tinted with the sunbeams, forms a splendid
+back-ground.'[23]
+
+Rubens was famous for the loveliness and grace of his paintings of
+children. Perhaps the most beautiful is that of 'The Infant Jesus and
+John playing with a Lamb.'
+
+Rubens was a great animal painter. One of his celebrated animal pictures
+is 'Daniel in the Lions' Den,' now at Hamilton Palace, in which each
+lion is a king of beasts checked in his fiercest have been painted by
+Rubens in a fit of pique at a false report which had been circulated
+that he could not paint animals, and that those in his pictures were
+supplied by the animal-painter, his friend and scholar, Schneyders.
+
+Rubens' landscapes are not the least renowned of his pictures. He gave
+to his own rich but prosaic Flanders, all the breadth and breeziness and
+matchless aerial effects of a master of painting, and a true lover of
+nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most
+ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a lover and a man
+of genius would pass by. His 'Prairie of Laacken,' 'with the sun of
+Flanders piercing the dense yellow clouds with the force of fire,' is of
+great repute.
+
+Among his famous portraits I shall mention that called 'The Four
+Philosophers' (Justus Lepsius, Hugo Grotius, Rubens, and his brother),
+with peaked beards and moustaches, in turned-over collars, ruffs and
+fur-trimmed robes, having books and pens, a dog, and a classic bust as
+accessories. The open pillared door is wreathed with a spray from
+without, and there is a landscape in the background. This portrait is
+full of power, freedom, and splendid painting.
+
+Another portrait contains that sweetest of Rubens' not often sweet
+faces, called 'the Lady in the Straw Hat.' Rubens himself did not name
+the picture otherwise in his catalogue. Tradition says the original was
+Mdlle Lundens, the beauty of the seventeen provinces, and that she died
+young and unmarried. Connoisseurs value the picture because of the
+triumph of skill by which Rubens has painted brilliantly a face so much
+in the shade; to those who are not connoisseurs I imagine the picture
+must speak for itself, in its graceful, tender beauty. Forming part of
+the collection of the late Sir Robert Peel (I think he gave three
+thousand pounds for 'the Lady in the Straw Hat'), which has been bought
+for the country, this beautiful portrait is now in the National Gallery.
+
+And now I must speak of the picture of the Arundel Family. But first, a
+word about Thomas, Earl of Arundel. It is impossible to write an English
+work on art and omit a brief account of one of England's greatest art
+benefactors. Thomas, Earl of Arundel, representing in his day the great
+house of Howard, had a love of art which approached to a mania; and
+without being so outrageously vain as Sir Kenelm Digby, there is no
+doubt that the Earl counted on his art collection as a source of
+personal distinction. James I., himself an art collector, so far
+humoured the Earl in his taste as to present him with Lord Somerset's
+forfeited collection, valued at a thousand pounds. But Charles I, and
+the Earl became rival collectors, and little love was lost between them.
+The Earl of Arundel impairing even his great revenues in the pursuit,
+employed agents and ambassadors--notably Petty and Evelyn--all over
+Europe, to obtain for him drawings, pictures, ancient marbles, gems,
+etc., etc. When the civil wars broke out, Lord Arundel conveyed his
+priceless collection for safety to Antwerp and Padua. Eventually it was
+divided among his sons and scattered far and wide. The only portion of
+it which fell to the nation, in the course of another generation, was
+the Greek Marbles, known as the Arundel Marbles, which were finally
+presented to the University of Oxford. But in Rubens' day all this grand
+collection was intact, and displayed in galleries at Arundel House,
+which the mob thought fit to nickname 'Tart Hall;' and through these
+galleries Rubens was conducted by the Earl.
+
+Lord Arundel desired to have an Arundel family portrait painted for him
+by Rubens. The Earl was rather given to having Arundel family portraits,
+for there are no less than three in which he figures. One by Van Somer,
+in which the hero is pointing somewhat comically with his truncheon to
+the statues of his collection in the background, and the last one
+projected by Van Dyck, but executed by an inferior artist, in which
+various family pieces of armour, swords, and shields, worn at Flodden,
+or belonging to the poet Earl of Surrey, are introduced in the hands of
+the sons of the family.
+
+But it is with Rubens' 'Arundel Family,' which, we must remember, ranks
+second in English family pictures, that we have to do. Thomas, Earl of
+Arundel, and the Lady Alathea,[24] are under a portico with twisted
+columns, like those in Raphael's cartoons; a rich curtain, and a
+landscape with a large mansion are seen beyond. The Countess is seated
+in a chair of state, with one hand on the head of a white greyhound; she
+wears a black satin gown, laced ruff, gold bracelets, and pearl
+necklace. Her hair is light, and decked with pearls and plumes. The Earl
+stands behind with a hand on her chair. His head is uncovered, the short
+hair inclining to grey; the whiskers and beard pointed. His vest is
+olive-coloured, and he has a brown mantle lined with crimson over the
+shoulders beneath his ruff. There is a little boy--Earl Thomas's
+grandson, Philip Howard, afterwards Cardinal Howard, in crimson velvet,
+trimmed with gold lace, and a dwarf on the other side of the dog, with
+one hand on its back.
+
+Among other masterpieces of Rubens, including the 'Straw Hat,' which
+are in the National Gallery, there are the 'Rape of the Sabines,' and
+the landscape 'Autumn,' which has a view of his country château, de
+Stein, near Mechlin. In Dulwich Gallery there is an interesting portrait
+by Rubens of an elderly lady in a great Spanish ruff, which is believed
+to be the portrait of his mother.
+
+Rembrandt Van Rhyn is said to have been born near Leyden about 1606 or
+1608, for there is a doubt as to the exact date. His father was a miller
+or maltster, and there is a theory that Rembrandt acquired some of his
+effects of light and shade from the impressions made upon him during his
+life in the mill. He was a pupil at the Latin school of Leyden, and a
+scholar in studios both at Leyden and Amsterdam.
+
+In 1630, when Rembrandt was a mere lad, he seems to have settled in
+Amsterdam, and married there in 1634, when he was six or eight and
+twenty years of age, a young Dutchwoman possessed of a considerable
+fortune, which, in case of her death and of Rembrandt's re-marriage, was
+to pass to her children, a provision that in the end wrought Rembrandt's
+ruin. The troubles of his country in the painter's time rendered his
+prices comparatively small and precarious, and Rembrandt, like Rubens,
+without Rubens' wealth, was eager in making an art collection and
+surrounding himself with those very forms of beauty in the great Italian
+masters' works, in the appreciation of which the Dutch master--judged by
+his own works--might have been reckoned deficient.
+
+Rembrandt's wife died after eight years of marriage, and left him with
+one surviving son, Titus, and Rembrandt, having re-married, was called
+upon to give up the lad's inheritance. This call, together with the
+expenditure of the sums which Rembrandt had lavished on his collection,
+was too heavy upon funds never very ample, and the painter, after
+struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son
+took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the
+painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his
+mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery,
+degradation, and poverty of this period. He lived thirteen years longer,
+but it was in obscurity--out of which the only records which reach us,
+are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose,
+a desperate resort to low company dating from his first wife's death,
+and his gradual downfall.
+
+Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of
+light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.
+
+It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I
+add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt
+painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and
+stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows
+are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded
+by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double
+chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a
+chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging
+across his breast.
+
+Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost
+equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems
+as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht Dürer had in
+Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective
+Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark
+days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight
+in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at
+Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by
+fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat
+grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of
+the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is
+this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good
+painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather
+under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness
+of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in
+that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and
+alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise
+prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have
+coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and
+incidents being _Rembrandtesque_, as we speak of their being
+picturesque.
+
+Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or
+even horror, which he sought to produce, to imagination working in the
+mysterious depths of his shadows. A very famous picture of his is 'Dr
+Deeman (an anatomist) demonstrating from a dead subject.' In another
+picture a man stealing from the gloom is in the act of stabbing in the
+back the unconscious man in the foreground.[25] Rembrandt's originality
+is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in
+painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any
+evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty;
+this can be said of him who spent means not his own on gathering
+together images of beauty and grace produced by the pencils and brushes
+of others. Many of Rembrandt's pictures are in the galleries of
+Amsterdam and the Hague, and we have many in London. The National
+Gallery has several examples, including two of Rembrandt's portraits.
+
+Passing over Van Dyck, whom I reserve, as I have reserved Holbein, to
+class among the foreign painters resident in or closely connected with
+England, I come to the Teniers--father and son. David the elder was born
+at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610.
+David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the
+works of the father are often mistaken for those of the son. The two
+Teniers' class of subjects was the same, being ordinarily 'fairs,
+markets, peasants' merry-makings, beer-houses, guard rooms.'
+
+David the younger had great popularity, was court painter to the
+Archduke of Austria, and earned such an independence, that he bought for
+himself a château at the village of Perck, not very far from the Château
+de Stein of Rubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly
+intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost
+state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers
+married twice, his first wife being the daughter of one of a family of
+Flemish painters, who were known, according to their respective
+proclivities in art, by the names of Peasant Breughel, Velvet Breughel,
+and Hell Breughel. Teniers had many children.
+
+The elder Teniers died at Antwerp in 1649; the younger died at Brussels,
+and was buried at Perck, in 1694.
+
+The distinction of the Teniers was the extreme fidelity and cleverness
+with which they copied (but did not explain) the life they knew--the
+homeliest, humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous
+accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of
+poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even
+coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who
+ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the
+Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to
+those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking
+that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the
+Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos;
+while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the
+life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from
+missing what should be present in every life. Men and women are only
+conscious of the defect when the painters wander, now and then, into
+higher spheres and into sacred subjects, and there is the unavoidable
+recoil from gross blindness. I have taken the Teniers as the
+representatives of a numerous school of Flemish and Dutch artists, whose
+works abound in this country. David Teniers the younger appears at his
+best, several times, in Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery.
+
+Philip Wouverman was born at Haarlem in 1620. He was the son of a
+painter, able, but unrecognized in his own day. Philip Wouverman found
+few patrons, disposed of his pictures by hard bargains to dealers, was
+tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far,
+according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to
+prevent his son pursuing the career which had been to him a career of
+bitter disappointment. He died at Haarlem, 1668, when he was no more
+than forty-eight years of age. Yet some nine hundred paintings bear
+(many of them falsely) Wouverman's name.
+
+With all the truth and excellent execution of his contemporaries and
+countrymen', Philip Wouverman, who had, as he thought, missed his mark,
+had something which those successful men lacked--he had not only a
+feeling for grace, but a touch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly
+'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt
+a higher class of actors--knights and ladies, instead of peasants--there
+is a more refined treatment and a dash of tenderness and melancholy--the
+last possibly born of his own disastrous fortunes. In his love of horses
+and dogs, as adjuncts to his groups, he had as great a fondness for a
+special white horse, as Paul Potter had for black and white cattle.
+
+Albert Cuyp was born at Dort in 1605. He was a brewer by trade, and only
+painted as an amateur. In spite of this, he was a great landscape
+painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing
+his own love of nature. Little is known of Cuyp's life, and the date of
+his death is uncertain, farther than it was later than 1638.
+
+In affected enthusiasm, Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude, but in
+reality, Cuyp surpassed, Claude in some respects. The distinction, which
+Mr Ruskin draws between them, is that, while Claude, in the sense of
+beauty, is the superior to Cuyp, in the sense of truth Claude is the
+inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is
+called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, etc.), but Cuyp's
+triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and
+in 'expressions of yellow sunlight.' Mr Ruskin admits, while he is
+proceeding to censure Cuyp, parts might be chosen out of the good
+pictures of Cuyp which have never been equalled in art.' On another
+occasion, Mr Ruskin has this passage full of dry humour in reference to
+Cuyp:
+
+'Again, look at the large Cuyp in Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt
+considers "finest in the world," and of which he very complimentarily
+says, "the tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple
+light of the hills" have an effect ought to have apologized before now
+for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with
+terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to
+observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet
+more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily
+discovered that Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this
+first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say
+about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. We may see for
+ourselves Cuyp's lovely landscapes both in the National Gallery and at
+Dulwich.
+
+Paul Potter was born at Enkhuysen, in North Holland, in 1625, and was
+the son of a painter. Paul Potter settled, while still very young, at
+the Hague as an animal painter, and died in his thirtieth year, in 1654.
+His career, which was thus brief, had promised to be very successful,
+and he had established his fame, while no more than twenty-two years of
+age, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his
+most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,'
+for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native
+country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is
+considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse,
+representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's
+later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle
+feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now
+regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider
+scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of
+Paul Potter in the National Gallery.
+
+Jan David de Heem[26] and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603,
+the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were
+eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom
+and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish
+and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description.
+I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well
+represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how,
+as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they
+are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted
+and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch
+full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern
+flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to
+introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every
+cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.
+
+From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and
+Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am
+sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to
+other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into
+one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde,
+etc., etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682.
+
+
+Spanish art, from its dawn to the time of Velasquez, had been of a
+'severely devotional character,' austere and formal; and although one
+man did not work a revolution by his independent example, he did
+something to humanize and widen art. In the rich city of Seville in
+1599, Diego Rodriguez, de Silva y Velasquez,--and not, as he is
+incorrectly called, Diego Velasquez de Silva, was born, and, according
+to an Andalusian fashion, took his mother's name of Velasquez, while his
+father was of the Portuguese house de Silva. Velasquez was gently born,
+though his father was in no higher position than that of a lawyer in
+Seville.
+
+The painter was well educated, though, according to his English
+biographer (Sir W. Stirling Maxwell), 'he was still more diligent in
+drawing on his grammars and copybooks than in turning them to their
+legitimate use.' The lad's evident bent induced his father to painter.
+He studied in two different Spanish studios, and married the daughter of
+his second master, whom the talents, assiduity, and good qualities of
+Velasquez had already strongly attached to the young painter.
+
+From the first, Velasquez struck out what was then a new line in Spanish
+art. He gave himself up to the materialistic studies, to which the
+Flemish and Dutch painters were prone, painting diligently 'still life'
+in every form, taking his living subjects from the streets and
+way-sides, and keeping a peasant lad as an apprentice, 'who served him
+for a study in different actions and postures (sometimes crying,
+sometimes laughing), till Velasquez had grappled with every variety of
+expression.' The result of those studies was Velasquez's famous picture
+of the 'Aguador,' or water-carrier of Seville, which was carried off by
+Joseph Buonaparte in his flight from Spain, taken in his carriage at
+Vittoria, and finally presented by Ferdinand VII, of Spain, as a
+grateful offering to the Duke of Wellington, in whose gallery at Apsley
+House the picture remains. 'It is a composition of three figures,' Sir
+W. Stirling Maxwell writes; 'a sunburnt way-worn seller of water,
+dressed in a tattered brown jerkin, with his huge earthen jars, and two
+lads, one of whom receives a sparkling glass of the pure element, whilst
+his companion quenches his thirst from a pipkin. The execution of the
+heads and all the details is perfect; and the ragged trader dispensing a
+few maravidi's worth of his simple stock, maintains, during the
+transaction, a grave dignity of deportment, highly Spanish and
+characteristic, and worthy of an emperor pledging a great vassal in
+Tokay.'
+
+Just such a group may still be seen, or was to be seen till very lately,
+in the quaint streets of Seville. I have read an anecdote of Velasquez
+and this picture, which is quite probable, though I cannot vouch for
+its accuracy. It is said that, while painting the water-carrier day
+after day, when he had been engaged with his work for several hours,
+Velasquez found himself vexed by perceiving, as it were, the effect of a
+shadow cast by some of the drapery. Small flaw as it might have been, it
+appeared to him to interfere with and spoil the picture. Again and
+again, in endeavouring to do away with this 'shadow,' Velasquez undid
+portions of his work, and had to repeat them next day, but always,
+towards the end of his task, the invidious shadow stole upon his vision.
+At last a friend, who was present and full of admiration for the
+picture, heard Velasquez exclaim, 'That shadow again!' and saw him seize
+a brush and prepare to dash it across the canvas. The friend
+remonstrated, besought, and by main force held back the painter, and at
+last induced him to leave the picture untouched till next day, when
+Velasquez discovered, to his great relief, that the shadow had been in
+his own wearied young eyes, and not in his admirable representation of
+the 'Water-carrier.'
+
+Velasquez was in Madrid in 1623, when he was in his twenty-fifth year,
+and having been introduced by the Prime Minister, Olivares, to the King
+of Spain, Philip IV., a king who was only known to smile once or twice
+in his lifetime, whose government was careless and blundering, but who
+had the reputation of being a man of some intelligence and very
+considerable taste,--Velasquez was received into the king's service with
+a monthly salary of twenty ducats, and employed to paint the royal
+portrait.
+
+From the time that he became court painter, Velasquez was largely
+occupied in painting portraits of members of the royal family, with
+special repetitions of the likeness of his most Catholic Majesty. With
+Velasquez's first portrait of Philip in armour, mounted on an Andalusian
+charger, the king was so pleased, that he permitted the picture to be
+publicly exhibited, amidst the plaudits of the spectators, in front of
+the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. Nor was the exhibition a
+barren honour to the painter, for the king not only 'talked of
+collecting and in future Velasquez should have the monopoly of the royal
+countenance,' he paid three hundred ducats for the picture.
+
+About this time our own Charles I., then Prince of Wales, went in his
+incognito of Charles Smith to Madrid on his romantic adventure of
+seeking to woo and win, personally, the Infanta of Spain, and Velasquez
+is said to have gained Charles's notice, and to have at least begun a
+portrait of him. If it were ever completed it has been lost, a
+misfortune which has caused spurious pictures, purporting to be the real
+work, to be offered to the public. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell holds, with
+great show of truth, that this visit of Charles to Madrid, when its
+altars were 'glowing' with the pictures of Titian, confirmed the unhappy
+king's taste for art.
+
+In 1628 Rubens came to Madrid as an envoy from the governess of the
+Netherlands, and the two painters, who had many points in common, and
+who had already corresponded, became fast friends. By the advice of
+Rubens, Velasquez was induced to put into execution his cherished
+desire of visiting Italy, the king granting his favourite painter leave
+of absence, the continuance of his salary, and a special sum for his
+expenses.
+
+Velasquez went to Venice first, and afterwards to Rome, where he was
+offered, and declined, a suite of apartments in the Vatican, asking only
+free access to the papal galleries. There he copied many portions of
+Michael Angelo's 'Last Judgment'--not a hundred years old, and 'yet
+undimmed by the morning and evening incense of centuries,' and portions
+of the frescoes of Raphael. At Rome Velasquez found there before him,
+Domenichino, Guido Reni, alternating 'between the excitements of the
+gaming table and the sweet creations of his smooth flowing pencil;'
+'Nicolas Poussin, an adventurer fresh from his Norman village; and
+Claude Gelée, a pastry-cook's runaway apprentice from Lorraine.'[27]
+Velasquez remained a year in Rome. Besides his studies he painted three
+original pictures, one of them, 'Joseph's Coat,' well known among the
+painter's comparatively rare religious works, and now in the Escurial.
+In this picture his biographer acknowledges, that 'choosing rather to
+display his unrivalled skill in delineating vulgar forms than to risk
+his reputation in the pursuit of a more refined and idealized style,'
+Velasquez's 'Hebrew patriarchs are swineherds of Estramadura or
+shepherds of the Sierra Morena.'
+
+From Rome Velasquez proceeded to Naples, where he was enabled by his
+prudence and forbearance to face without injury the disgraceful 'reign
+of terror' which the Neapolitan artists had established in the south of
+Italy. The Neapolitan artists more than any other Italian artists are
+believed to have influenced Velasquez's style.
+
+In 1639 Velasquez painted his principal religious work, 'The
+Crucifixion,' for the nunnery of San Placido in Madrid, a painting in
+which his power has triumphed successfully over his halting imagination.
+
+With regard to the many court groups which Velasquez was constantly
+taking, I may quote Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's amusing paragraph about a
+curious variety of human beings in the Court Gallery. 'The Alcazar of
+Madrid abounded with dwarfs in the days of Philip IV., who was very fond
+of having them about him, and collected curious specimens of the race,
+like other rarities. The Queen of Spain's gallery is, in consequence,
+rich in portraits of these little monsters, executed by Velasquez. They
+are, for the most part, very ugly, displaying, sometimes in an extreme
+degree, the deformities peculiar to their stunted growth. Maria Barbola,
+immortalized by a place in one of Velasquez's most celebrated pictures,
+was a little dame about three feet and a half in height, with the head
+and shoulders of a large woman, and a countenance much underjawed, and
+almost ferocious in expression. Her companion, Nicolasito Pertusano,
+although better proportioned than the lady, and of a more amicable
+aspect, was very inferior in elegance as a royal plaything to his
+contemporary, the valiant Sir Geoffrey Hudson; or his successor in the
+next reign, the pretty Luisillo of Queen Louisa of Orleans. Velasquez
+painted many portraits of these little creatures, generally seated on
+the ground; and there is a large picture in the Louvre representing two
+of them leading by a cord a great spotted hound, to which they bear the
+same proportion that men of the usual size bear to a horse.'
+
+In 1648 Velasquez again visited Italy, sent by the king this time to
+collect works of art for the royal galleries and the academy about to be
+founded. Velasquez went by Genoa, Milan, Venice (buying there chiefly
+the works of Tintoret), and Parma, to Rome and Naples, returning to
+Rome. At Rome Velasquez painted his splendidly characteristic portrait
+of the Pope Innocent X., 'a man of coarse features and surly expression,
+and perhaps the ugliest of all the successors of St Peter.'
+
+Back at Madrid, Philip continued to load Velasquez and his family with
+favours, appointing the painter Quarter-Master-General of the king's
+household with a salary of three thousand ducats a year, and the right
+of carrying at his girdle a key which opened every lock in the palace.
+
+Philip is said to have raised Velasquez to knighthood in a manner as
+gracious as the manner of Charles V, when he lifted up Titian's pencil.
+In painting one of his most renowned pictures, to which I shall refer
+again, 'The Maids of Honour,' Velasquez included himself at work on a
+large picture of the royal family. The painter represented himself with
+the key of his office at his girdle, and on his breast the red cross of
+the Order of Santiago. Philip, who came every day to see the progress of
+this picture, remarked in reference to the figure of the artist, that
+'one thing was yet wanting, and taking up the brush painted the knightly
+insignia with his own royal fingers, thus conferring the accolade with a
+weapon not recognized in chivalry.'
+
+As it is believed, Velasquez's court office, with all its prestige and
+influence, helped in causing his death. King Philip went in June, 1660,
+to the Isle of Pheasants in the river Bidassa, where, on ground which
+was neither Spanish nor French, the Spanish and French courts were to
+meet and celebrate with the greatest magnificence the marriage of the
+Grand Monarque and the Infanta Maria Teresa. One of Velasquez's
+official duties was to prepare lodgings for the king on his journeys,
+and in this instance the lodging included not only the decoration of the
+castle of Fuenterrabia, but the erection of a sumptuous pavilion in
+which the interviews of the assembled kings and queens and their
+revelries were to be held. Velasquez did his part of the preparations,
+and doubtless shared in the royal festivities, but returned to Madrid so
+worn out by his undertaking, and by constant attendance on his master,
+that he was seized with tertian fever, of which he died a few days
+later, while but in his sixty-first year, to the great grief of his
+countrymen, and above all of his king. Velasquez's wife, Doña Juana,
+died eight days after her husband, and was buried in his grave. The
+couple left one surviving child, a daughter, married to a painter.
+
+In one picture, now at Vienna, Velasquez gives a glimpse of his family
+life at a time when it would seem that he had four sons and two
+daughters, so that the fortunate painter's home had not been free from
+one shadow--that of death, which must have robbed him of five of his
+children. In this pleasant picture, 'his wife dressed in a brown tunic
+over a red petticoat, sits in the foreground of a large room, with a
+pretty little girl leaning on her knees, and the rest of her children
+grouped around her; behind are the men in deep shadow, one of them,
+perhaps, being Mazo, the lover or the husband of the eldest daughter,
+and a nurse with a child; and in an alcove Velasquez himself appears,
+standing before his easel, at work on a portrait of Philip IV. This is
+one of the most important works of the master out of the Peninsula; the
+faces of the family sparkle on the sober background like gems. As a
+piece of easy actual life, the composition has never been surpassed, and
+perhaps it excels even "The Meninas," inasmuch as the hoops and dwarfs
+of the palace have not intruded upon the domestic privacy of the
+painter's home, in the northern gallery.'[28]
+
+Velasquez seems to have been a man of honour and amiability. He filled
+a difficult office at the most jealous court in Europe with credit. He
+was true to his friends, and helpful to his brother artists. His
+biographer writes of Velasquez as handsome in person, and describes his
+costume when he appeared for the last time with his king in the galas at
+Pheasants' Isle:--'over a dress richly laced with silver he wore the
+usual Castilian ruff, and a short cloak embroidered with the red cross
+of Santiago; the badge of the order, sparkling with brilliants, was
+suspended from his neck by a gold chain; and the scabbard and hilt of
+his sword were of silver, exquisitely chased, and of Italian
+workmanship.' In the likeness of Velasquez, which is the frontispiece of
+Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's 'Life,' the painter appears as a man of
+swarthy complexion, with a long compressed upper lip, unconcealed by his
+long, elaborately trimmed moustache; his hair, or wig, is arranged in
+two large frizzed bunches on each side of a face which is inclined to be
+lantern-jawed. He wears a dark doublet with a 'standing white collar.'
+
+Velasquez's excellence as a painter was to be found, like that of
+Rembrandt, in his truth to nature; but the field of truth presented to
+the stately Spaniard, while it had its own ample share of humour, was a
+widely different field from that which offered itself to the Dutch
+burgher. Together with absolute truth, Velasquez had the ease and
+facility in expressing truth which are only acquired by a great master.
+Like Rubens, Velasquez made essays in many branches of painting. In
+sacred art, if we except his 'Crucifixion,' he did not attain a high
+place. With regard to his landscapes, Sir David Wilkie bore
+witness:--'Titian seems his model, but he has also the breadth and
+picturesque effect for which Claude and Salvator Rosa are remarkable;'
+and Sir David added of those landscapes, 'they have the very same sun we
+see, and the air we breathe, the very soul and spirit of nature.'
+
+Velasquez's _genre_ pictures, to which I shall refer by and by, are
+excellent, but the fate was kind which confined him largely to portrait
+painting. It was brought as a reproach against Velasquez in his
+lifetime, that he could paint a head and nothing else, to which he
+replied with mingled spirit, sense, and good nature, that his detractors
+flattered him, 'for he knew nobody of whom it could be said that he
+painted a head thoroughly well.'
+
+Sir W. Stirling Maxwell asserts of Velasquez's portrait painting, that
+no artist 'ever followed nature with more catholic fidelity; his
+cavaliers are as natural as his boors; he neither refined the vulgar,
+nor vulgarized the refined,' and goes on to quote this among other
+criticism:--'his portraits baffle description and praise; he drew the
+minds of men; they live, breathe, and are ready to walk out of the
+frames.' Sir William winds up with the enthusiastic declaration, 'Such
+pictures as these are real history; we know the persons of Philip IV,
+and Olivares, as familiarly as if we had paced the avenues of the Pardo
+with Digby and Howell, and perhaps we think more favourably of their
+characters.'
+
+I shall borrow still further from Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's graphic and
+entertaining book, descriptions of two of Velasquez's _genre_ pictures,
+'The Maids of Honour,' and the more celebrated 'Spinners,' both at
+Madrid. 'The scene (of the first) is a long room in a quarter of the old
+palace which was called the prince's quarter, and the subject, Velasquez
+at work on a large picture of the royal family. To the extreme right of
+the composition is seen the back of the easel and the canvas on which he
+is engaged; and beyond it spalette, pausing to converse, and to observe
+the effect of his performance. In the centre stands the little Infanta
+Maria Margarita, taking a cup of water from a salver which Doña Maria
+Augustina Sarmiento, maid of honour to the queen, presents kneeling. To
+the left, Doña Isabel de Velasco, another meniña, seems to be dropping a
+courtesy; and the dwarfs, Maria Barbolo and Nicolas Pertusano, stand in
+the foreground, the little man putting his foot on the quarters of a
+great tawny hound, which despises the aggression, and continues in a
+state of solemn repose. Some paces behind these figures, Doña Marcela de
+Ulloa, a lady of honour in nun-like weeds, and a _guardadimas,_ are seen
+in conversation; at the far end of the room an open door gives a view of
+a staircase, up which Don Josef Nieto, queen's apasentador, is retiring;
+and near this door there hangs on the wall a mirror, which, reflecting
+the countenance of the king and queen, shows that they form part of the
+principal group, although placed beyond the bounds of the picture. The
+room is hung with paintings which Palomino assures us are works of
+Rubens; and it is lighted by three windows in the left wall, and by the
+open door at the end, an arrangement of which an artist will at once
+comprehend the difficulties. The perfection of art which conceals art,
+was never better attained than in this picture. Velasquez seems to have
+anticipated the discovery of Daguerre, and taking a real room, and real
+chance grouped people, to have fixed them, as it were by magic, for all
+time on his canvas. The little fair-haired Infanta is a pleasing study
+of childhood; with the hanging-lip and full cheek of the Austrian
+family, she has a fresh complexion and lovely blue eyes, and gives a
+promise of beauty which as empress she never fulfilled. Her young
+attendants, girls of thirteen or fourteen, contrast agreeably with the
+ill-favoured dwarf beside them; they are very pretty, especially Doña
+Isabel de Velasco, who died a reigning beauty, and their hands are
+painted with peculiar delicacy. Their dresses are highly absurd, their
+figures being concealed by long stiff corsets and prodigious hoops; for
+these were the days when the mode was--
+
+    "Supporters, pooters, fardingales, above the loynes to weare;"
+
+and the _guardainfante_, the oval hoop peculiar to Spain, was in full
+blow; and the robes of a dowager might have curtained the tun of
+Heidelberg, and the powers of Velasquez were baffled by the perverse
+fancy of "Fribble, the woman's tailor." The gentle and majestic hound,
+stretching himself and winking drowsily, is admirably painted, and seems
+a descendant of the royal breed immortalized by Titian in portraits of
+the Emperor Charles and his son.'
+
+'The Spinners:' 'The scene is a large weaving-room, in which an old
+woman and young one sit, the first at her spinning-wheel, and the
+second winding yarn, with three girls beside them, one of whom plays
+with a cat. In the background, standing within an alcove filled with the
+light from an unseen window, are two other women displaying a large
+piece of tapestry to a lady customer, whose graceful figure recalls that
+which has given its name to Terburg's picture of "The Satin Gown." Of
+the composition, the painter Mengs observed, "it seemed as if the hand
+had no part in it, and it had been the work of pure thought."'
+Velasquez, who must have seen many a bull fight, has left the world a
+fine example of field sports in 'The Boar Hunt,' in our National
+Gallery, a picture which was bought for two thousand two hundred pounds
+from Lord Cowley. When ambassador at the Court of Spain, it was given to
+him by Ferdinand VII. In a circular pen in the Pardo, 'Philip IV. and a
+party of cavaliers display their skill in slaying boars, to a few
+ladies, who sit secure in heavy old-fashioned blue coaches,' while
+motley groups of courtiers and peasants, huntsmen and hounds, postilions
+and their mules fill the foreground. Sir Edwin Landseer remarked of
+this picture that he had never before seen 'so much large art on so
+small a scale.'
+
+Bartolomé Estévan Murillo was born at Seville in 1618, and was therefore
+nearly twenty years younger than his great countryman Velasquez. Murillo
+seems to have been of obscure origin, and to have begun his life in
+humble circumstances. There are traditions of his being self-taught, of
+his studying ragged boys, himself little more than a boy, in the gypsy
+quarter of Triana in Seville; of his painting in the marketplace, where
+he probably found the originals of the heads of saints and Madonnas (by
+which he made a little money in selling them for South America) in the
+peasants who came to Seville with their fruit and vegetables. In 1642,
+Murillo, then twenty-four years of age, visited Madrid, and was kindly
+received, and aided in his art by his senior and fellow artist, the
+court painter, Velasquez. It had been Murillo's intention to proceed to
+England to study under Van Dyck, but the death of the latter put a stop
+to the project. Murillo was prevented from making the painter's
+pilgrimage to Italy by want of means, but the loss of culture was so far
+supplied by the instructions given to him by Velasquez.
+
+In 1645, when Murillo was twenty-seven years of age, he returned to
+Seville, and settled there, becoming as successful as he deserved; and
+being acknowledged as the head of the school of Seville, where he
+established the Academy of Art, and was its first president. Murillo
+married, in 1648, a lady of some fortune, and was accustomed to
+entertain at his house the most exclusive society of Seville.
+
+In 1682, Murillo was at Cadiz painting a picture of the marriage of St
+Catherine in the church of the Capuchins there, when, in consequence of
+the accidental fall of the scaffolding, he received so severe an injury,
+that he was forced to leave his work incomplete, and to return to
+Seville, where he died within a few weeks, aged sixty-four years. He had
+two sons, and an only daughter, who was a nun, having taken the veil
+eight years before her father's death.
+
+Murillo appears to have been in character a gentle, enthusiastic man,
+not without a touch of fun and frolic. He would remain for hours in the
+sacristy of the cathedral of Seville before 'the solemn awful picture of
+the 'Deposition from the Cross,' by Pedro de Campana. When Murillo was
+asked by the sacristan why he stood thus gazing there, the painter
+answered, 'I am waiting till these holy men have finished their work.'
+By his own desire, Murillo was buried before this picture. Before
+another 'too truthful picture of Las dos Cadaveres' in the small church
+of the hospital of the Caridad, Murillo used to hold his nose. One of
+Murillo's pictures has the odd name of 'La Virgen Sarvilleta,' or the
+Virgin of the Napkin. Murillo was working at the Convento de la Merced,
+which is almost filled with his works, when the cook of the convent
+begged a memorial of him, offering as the canvas a napkin, on which
+Murillo at once painted a 'brilliant glowing Madonna,' with a child,
+'which seems quite to bound forward out of the picture.'[29]
+
+Murillo's portrait by himself represents him in a dark doublet having
+wide sleeves and a square collar closed in front. His thumb is in his
+pallet, and the other hand, with fingers taper and delicate as those of
+a hand by Van Dyck, holds one of his brushes. The smooth face, with
+regular features, is pale and thoughtful, and with the womanliness of
+the aspect increased from the dark hair, which is divided slightly to
+one side, being allowed to fall down in long wavy curls on the
+shoulders.
+
+In spite of the naturalistic studies of his early youth, and even of the
+naturalistic treatment which he gave to his first religious work,
+Murillo was possessed of greater and higher imagination than Velasquez
+could claim, and the longer Murillo lived and worked the more refined
+and exalted his ideas became. Unlike Velasquez, Murillo was a great
+religious painter, and during the last years of his life he painted
+sacred subjects almost exclusively. But, like Velasquez, Murillo was
+eminently a Spanish painter--his virgins are dark-eyed,
+olive-complexioned maidens, and even his Holy Child is a Spanish babe.
+
+Without the elevation and the training of the best Italian painters,
+Murillo has left abundant proofs of great original genius. The painter's
+works are widely circulated, but the chief are still in Seville. Six are
+in the church of the Caridad, and these six include his famous 'Moses
+striking the Rock,' and his 'Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes;' seven
+'Murillos' are in the Convento de la Merced, among them Murillo's own
+favourite picture, which he called 'Mi Cicadro' of 'St Thomas of
+Villaneuva.' 'St Thomas was the favourite preacher of Charles V., and
+was created Archbishop of Valencia, where he seemed to spend the whole
+of his revenues in charity, yet never contracted any debt, so that his
+people used to believe that angels must minister to his temporal wants.
+He is represented at his cathedral door, distributing alms, robed in
+black, with a white mitre. A poor cripple kneels at his feet, and other
+mendicants are grouped around.'
+
+In the cathedral, Seville, is Murillo's 'Angel de la Guarda,' 'in which
+a glorious seraph, with spreading wings, leads a little trustful child
+by the hand, and directs him to look beyond earth into the heavenly
+light;' and his 'St Antonio.' 'The saint is represented kneeling in a
+cell, of which all the poor details are faithfully given, while the long
+arcade of the cloister can be seen through the half-open door. Above, in
+a transparent light, which grows from himself, the Child Jesus appears,
+and descends, floating through wreaths of angels, drawn down by the
+power of prayer.'[30]
+
+Another of Murillo's renowned pictures is that of the patron saints of
+Seville, 'Santa Rufina and Santa Justina,' who were stoned to death for
+refusing to bow down to the image of Venus.
+
+With regard to Murillo's pictures of flower-girls and beggar-boys, I
+think my readers are sure to have seen an engraving of one of the
+former, '_The_ Flower-Girl,' as it is called, with a face as fresh and
+radiant as her flowers. In the National Gallery there is a large Holy
+Family of Murillo's, and in Dulwich Gallery there is a laughing boy, an
+irresistible specimen of brown-cheeked, white-teethed drollery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE[31] LORRAINE, 1600-1682--CHARLES
+LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE, 1726-1805.
+
+
+Nicolas Poussin was born at Andely in Normandy in 1594. Of his parentage
+little seems to have been ascertained, but it is believed that he was
+well educated, and his classical learning in after life was reckoned
+great. He was regularly trained to be a painter under a master in his
+native town, and afterwards in Paris.
+
+Dissatisfied with the patronage which he received in Paris, Poussin went
+to Rome when he was about thirty years of age. In Rome he is said to
+have lived on familiar terms with a sculptor whose devotion to antique
+art influenced his taste, and lent it the strong classical bent which it
+retained. Poussin studied regularly in the school of Domenichino. After
+some delay in attracting public notice, 'The Death of Germanicus,' and
+'The Capture of Jerusalem,' which Poussin painted for Cardinal
+Barberini, won general approval. In 1629, when Nicolas Poussin was in
+his thirty-fifth year, he married the sister of his pupil, Gaspar
+Dughet, who took Poussin's name, and is known as a painter, inferior to
+his master, by the name of Gaspar Poussin.
+
+Nicolas Poussin returned to Paris when he was a middle-aged man, was
+presented to the king, Louis XIII., by Cardinal Richelieu, and offered
+apartments in the Tuileries, with the title of painter in ordinary, and
+a salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year. Poussin agreed to settle
+in Paris, but on his going back to Rome to fetch his wife, and on the
+King of France's dying, the attractions of the Eternal City proved too
+great for the painter, and in place of removing his home to his native
+country, he lived for the rest of his years in Rome, and died there in
+1665, when he was seventy-one years of age. Except what can be judged of
+him from his work, I do not know that much has been gathered of the
+private character and life of Nicolas Poussin, notwithstanding that
+there was a biography written of him fifty years ago by Lady Calcott,
+and that his letters have been published in Paris. In the absence of
+conclusive testimony one may conclude with some probability that he was
+'quiet,' like his best paintings; a man who minded his own business, and
+did not trouble the world by astonishing actions, good or bad.[32]
+
+In painting his own picture, from which an engraving has been taken,
+Poussin's classical preferences seem to have passed into the likeness,
+for in the dress of the seventeenth century, the cloak (not unlike a
+toga), the massive hand with the heavy signet-ring resting on what looks
+like a closed portfolio, the painter has something of the severe air and
+haughty expression of an old Roman; still more, perhaps, of the
+French-Romans, if I may call them so, of whom revolutionary times
+nearly two centuries later, afforded so many examples. This is a
+handsome, dignified face, with austerity in its pride. The slightly
+curled hair is thrown back with a certain consciousness from the knit
+brow, and from the shoulders. There is only the faintest shadow of a
+moustache over the cleanly cut, firmly closed mouth.
+
+Poussin painted largely, and his pictures have been often engraved. With
+harmonious composition, good drawing and colouring, his pictures alike
+profited and suffered from the classical atmosphere in which they had
+their being. They gained in that correctness which in its highest form
+becomes noble truthfulness, but they lost in freedom. The figures in the
+pictures had frequently the statuesqueness which in sculpture suits the
+material, but in painting is stiffness.
+
+Nicolas Poussin had an exceptional reputation for a historical painter
+in his day. As a landscape painter, Mr Ruskin, while waging war with
+Nicolas Poussin's brother-in-law and assumed namesake, Gaspar, notably
+excepts Nicolas from his severest strictures, and treats his efforts in
+landscape painting with marked respect. At the same time, however, the
+critic censures the painter for a want of thorough acquaintance with
+nature, and the laws of nature, ignorance not uncommon in any day, and
+nearly universal in Nicolas Poussin's day. 'The great master of elevated
+ideal landscape,' Mr Ruskin calls Nicolas Poussin, and illustrates his
+excellence in one respect, after contrasting it with the slovenliness of
+Sir Joshua Reynolds, by describing the vine in Poussin's 'Nursing of
+Jupiter,' in the Dulwich Gallery, thus:--
+
+'Every vine-leaf, drawn with consummate skill and untiring diligence,
+produces not only a true group of the most perfect grace and beauty, but
+one which in its pure and simple truth belongs to every age of nature,
+and adapts itself to the history of all time.' 'One of the finest
+landscapes that ancient art has produced, the work of a really great
+mind,' Mr Ruskin distinguishes the 'Phocian' of Nicolas Poussin in the
+National Gallery, before proceeding to point out its faults.
+
+Again, Mr Ruskin, writing of the street in the centre of another
+landscape by Nicolas Poussin, indicates it with emphasis:--'the street
+in the centre of the really great landscape of Poussin (great in
+feeling, at least) marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery,' The criticism
+with which Mr Ruskin follows up this praise is so perfect a bit of
+word-painting, that I cannot refrain from writing it down here. 'The
+houses are dead square masses, with a light side and a dark side, and
+black touches for windows. There is no suggestion of anything in any of
+the spaces, the light wall is dead grey, the dark wall dead grey, and
+the windows dead black. How differently would nature have treated us.
+She would have let us see the Indian corn hanging on the walls, and the
+image of the Virgin of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with
+the doves upon them, and the carved Roman capital built into the wall,
+and the white and blue stripes of the mattresses stuffed out of the
+windows, and the flapping corners of the neat blinds. All would have
+been there; not as such, not like the corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not
+to be comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black
+spots and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow;
+microscopic in its minuteness, and filling every atom and space with
+mystery, out of which would have arranged itself the general impression
+of truth and life.' Once more, Mr Ruskin freely admits that 'all the
+landscape of Nicolas Poussin is imagination.'
+
+Mr Ruskin's first definition of ideal landscape is in this manner. Every
+different tree and leaf, every bud, has a perfect form, which, were it
+not for disease or accident, it would have attained; just as every
+individual human face has an ideal form, which but for sin and suffering
+it would present: and the ideal landscape-painter has realized the
+perfect form, and offers it to the world, and that in a sense quite
+distinct from the fallacy of improving nature.
+
+But I wish to take my readers further into imaginative landscape, and to
+show it to them, if possible, under additional lights. I despair of
+succeeding if I cannot do it by one or two simple examples. In passing
+through a gallery we may stop before a picture to be struck, almost
+startled, by the exact copy which it presents of some scene in nature;
+how like the clouds in the sky, the leaves on the trees, the very
+plumage of the birds! But pass on to another picture which may or may
+not have the same exact likeness, and we are possessed with quite
+another feeling; instead of being merely surprised by the cleverness of
+the imitation, we feel a thrill of delight at a reproduction of nature.
+In this picture there are not only the clouds we remember, but we can
+almost feel the shadows which they cast, and the air which stirs them.
+These tree-leaves are not only green, or yellow, or russet, they are
+tender, or crisp living leaves. One half expects to see the birds'
+throats swell, and hear the sweetness or the shrillness of their songs.
+
+The first picture, with all its correctness, brightness, richness, or
+delicacy it may be, remains bare, hard, and barren, compared to the
+second. I cannot explain to my readers the cause of the difference, I
+can Only show it to them as they may see it for themselves, and say
+that I suppose it proceeds from this--that the second painter has seen
+farther into the heart of nature than the first, and has been able by
+subtler touches to make us see with his eyes.
+
+But imaginative landscape is much more than this vivid feeling and
+expression of nature; there is not a cloud, or leaf, or bird too many or
+out of keeping with the place and the hour. The clouds are the very
+clouds of sunset, or sunrise, or high noon--clouds differing widely from
+each other, as you have no doubt observed. The trees are the beeches, or
+chestnuts, or pines, which would grow on the conformation of rocks, in
+the sheltered nook, or on the breezy upland; the birds are the linnets
+or the larks, the thrushes or the lapwings, which frequent these special
+trees, and may be seen and heard at this particular hour.
+
+Again, landscape often tells a story, and tells it inimitably. My
+readers have heard of the ballad of the 'Two Corbies,' which the writer
+of the ballad has made to meet and tell gruesomely where and on what
+carrion their feast has been. Suppose the writer of the ballad had been
+a painter, he might have painted the story as intelligibly by the lone
+hill-side, the bleaching bones of the faithful hound and gallant grey,
+the two loathly blue-black birds satiated with their prey. There is a
+significant old Scotch song with a ballad ring, by Lady Nairne, two
+verses of which form each a complete picture not only of different
+seasons, but of different phases of feeling--happiness and misery.
+
+    'Bonnie ran the burnie down,
+    Wandering and winding;
+    Sweetly sang the birds aboon,
+    Care never minding.
+
+    'But now the burn comes down apace,
+    Roaring and reaming,
+    And for the wee birdies' sang
+    Wild howlets screaming.'
+
+Imagine these two verses painted, and the painter, from a lack of
+comprehension, introducing the 'wild howlets screaming' _beside the
+burnie_, 'wandering and winding,' and the 'wee birdies' foolishly and
+inconsequently singing with their feeble song drowned in the rush of the
+burn (no longer a burnie), 'roaring and reaming,' when the 'spate' is
+spreading desolation on every side. Don't you see how the picture would
+be spoilt, and the story of complete contrast left untold? I have taken
+advisedly an extreme and, therefore an unlikely case of halting
+imagination. But in imaginative landscape every 'white flower with its
+purple stain,' every crushed butterfly, is made to play its part in the
+whole, and at the same time due proportion is never lost sight of, and
+the less is always kept subordinate to the greater.
+
+I have already had occasion to mention examples of Nicolas Poussin in
+the National Gallery and in Dulwich Gallery.
+
+Claude Gelée, better known as Claude Lorraine, was a native of Lorraine,
+and was born at Chateau de Chamagne in the Vosges, in 1600. His parents
+were in humble life, and apprenticed Claude to a baker and pastry-cook.
+According to some biographers the cooks of Lorraine were in such request
+that they occasionally repaired to Rome with their apprentices in their
+train to serve the successor of St Peter, and Claude was thus carried,
+in the way of trade, to the city which might well have been the goal of
+his ambition. According to other writers of art histories, Claude
+abandoned the kneading-trough and the oven; and it was as a runaway
+apprentice that by some occult means he reached Rome. And when he had
+arrived he entered into the service of a landscape painter of good
+repute, to whom he was colour-boy as well as cook. The last is the
+account, so far, which Claude gave of himself to a friend, and it is
+hardly likely either that he misrepresented his history, or that his
+friend invented such details, though lately French authorities have
+questioned the authenticity of the narrative. Claude remained for nearly
+the entire remainder of a long life in Rome. He only once re-visited
+France, while he was yet a young man, under thirty years of age, in 1625
+or 1627. He is supposed to have painted his earliest pictures and
+executed his etchings about this time, 1630 and to have painted his best
+pictures fifteen years later, when he was in the maturity of his life
+and powers. He was counted successful during his life time, as a
+landscape painter, but did not amass a larger fortune than about two
+thousand pounds.[33] He was a slow and careful painter (working a
+fortnight at a picture with little apparent progress); his painstaking
+work, and his custom of keeping a book, in which he verified his
+pictures, are about the most that I can tell you of the habits of one of
+the foreign painters, who has been most fully represented in England,
+and was long in the highest favour with English lovers of art. Claude
+Lorraine died at Rome in the eighty-third year of his age, in 1682.
+
+Claude Lorraine's name has become a very vexed name with art critics.
+There was a time when he had an unsurpassed reputation as a landscape
+painter. The possession of a Claude was enough to confer art glory on a
+country-house, and possibly for this reason England, in public and
+private collections, has more 'Claudes' than are held by any other
+country. But Claude's admirers, among whom Sir George Beaumont, the
+great art critic of his generation, took the lead, have had their day,
+and, if they have not by any means passed away, are on the wane.
+
+The wrathful indignation of the English landscape painter, Turner, at
+the praise which was so glibly lavished on Claude--an indignation that
+caused Turner to bequeath two of his own landscape paintings to the
+trustees of the National Gallery, on the caustic condition that they
+should always be placed between the two celebrated 'Claudes,' known as
+'The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' and 'The Embarkation of the Queen of
+Sheba'--helped to shake the English art world's faith in its former
+idol. Mr Ruskin's adoption and proclamation of Turner's opinion shook
+the old faith still further. This reversal of a verdict with regard to
+Claude is peculiar; it is by no means uncommon for the decision of
+contemporaries to be set aside, and we shall hear of an instance
+presently, in the case of the painter Le Brun. In fact, it is often
+ominous with regard to a man's future fame, when he is 'cried up to the
+skies' in his own day. The probability may be that his easy success has
+been won by something superficial and fleeting. But Claude's great
+popularity has been in another generation, and with another nation.
+English taste may have been in fault; or another explanation seems
+preferable--that Claude's sense of beauty was great, with all its faults
+of expression, and he gave such glimpses of a beautiful world as the
+gazers on his pictures were capable of receiving, which to them proved
+irresistible.
+
+While Claude adopted an original style as a landscape painter, so far as
+his contemporaries were concerned, he was to such a degree self taught,
+and only partially taught, that it is said he never learnt to paint
+figures--those in his pictures were painted by other painters, and that
+Claude even painted animals badly.
+
+Mr Ruskin has been hard on Claude, whether justly or unjustly, I cannot
+pretend to say.
+
+The critic denies the painter not only a sense of truth in art, but all
+imagination as a landscape painter 'Of men of name,' Mr Ruskin writes,
+'Perhaps Claude is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly
+total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much
+feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of
+expression.' Mr Ruskin condemns in the strongest terms 'the mourning and
+murky olive browns and verdigris greens, in which Claude, with the
+industry and intelligence of a Sèvres china painter, drags the laborious
+bramble leaves over his childish foreground.' But Mr Ruskin himself
+acknowledges, with a reservation, Claude's charm in foliage, and
+pronounces more conditionally his power, when it was at its best, in
+skies--a region in which the greater, as well as the less, Poussin was
+declared to fail signally; 'a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of
+Claude,' Mr Ruskin writes, 'is indeed most perfect, and beyond praise,
+in all qualities of air; though even with him I often feel rather that
+there is a great deal of pleasant air between me and the firmament, than
+that the firmament itself is only air.'
+
+When all has been said that can be said, let us look at a mellow or a
+sunny Claude on any wall where it may hang, and judge for ourselves of
+the satisfaction it is calculated to give.
+
+Claude was fond of painting scenes on the Tiber and in the Roman
+Campagna, but while he tried to reproduce the hills and woodlands of
+Italy, he did not seek to paint the mountain landscapes of the
+Apennines.
+
+Besides Claude's numerous works in England and scattered through other
+countries, some of his finest paintings are in the Doria and Sciarra
+palaces in Rome. He rarely put his name to his works; when he did so he
+signed it frequently 'Claudio,' sometimes 'Claudius.' I have spoken of
+his book of sketches, in which he had been wont to note on the back of
+the sketch the date of the completed picture, and to whom sold. This
+book he called the 'Libro di Verita,' or, Book of Truth, and its
+apparent use was to check the sale of spurious paintings in Claude's
+name, even during his lifetime. The 'Book of Truth' is in possession of
+the Duke of Devonshire, and has been employed in recent years with
+reference to the end for which it seemed designed, so woe to that
+country-house which has long pride that 'Claude' does not happen to have
+a place in the 'Book of Truth,' though I do not know that it is at all
+certain that Claude took the precaution of inscribing _every_ painting
+which he painted after a certain date in the 'Book of Truth.'
+
+Claude Lorraine is well represented in the National Gallery. Engravings
+of his pictures are common.
+
+Charles le Brun was born in Paris, in 1619. He was trained to be a
+painter, and went young to Rome, studying there for six years under the
+guidance of Nicolas Poussin. Le Brun returned to Paris, and, through the
+patronage of the Chancellor Segnier, was introduced to the court, and
+got the most favourable opportunities of practising his profession with
+worldly success. He speedily acquired a great name, and was appointed
+painter to the King, Louis XIV. Le Brun had enough influence with his
+royal master, and with the great minister Colbert, to succeed in
+establishing, while the painter was yet a young man, the Royal Academy
+of Art, of which he was the first member, and virtually the head,
+holding, in his own person, the directorship of the Gobelin tapestry
+works, which was to be the privilege of a member of the Academy. Le Brun
+continued in the utmost favour with the King, who, not content with
+employing the painter largely at Fontainebleau and in Versailles,
+invested him with the order of St Michael, bestowed on him letters of
+nobility, and visited him frequently at his work, occasions when there
+were not wanting adroit courtiers to liken the Grand Monarque to the
+Emperor Charles V., and Le Brun to Titian.
+
+Le Brun seems to have been a man of energy, confidence, and industry,
+neither mentally before nor after his time, and by no means too
+retiring, meditative, or original, to fail to profit by his outward good
+fortune. He wrote, as well as painted, artistic treatises, which were
+received as oracular utterances, and entirely deferred to in the schools
+of his day. He died at Paris in 1690, when he was in his seventieth
+year.
+
+Le Brun's real merits as a painter were limited to respectable abilities
+and acquirements, together with florid quickness and ease, and such an
+eye to what was splendid and scenic as suited admirably a decorator of
+palaces in an age which prized sumptuousness, and an exaggeration of
+dramatic effect, over every other quality. Nicolas Poussin's quiet
+refinement of style became in Le Brun what is called academic
+(conventionally learned), pompous, and grandiose, and men decidedly
+preferred the degeneration. But later critics, who have not the natural
+partiality of the French to the old master, return to their first loves,
+and condemn Le Brun's swelling violence, both in the tints and poses of
+his figures. Among his most famous works, which have been magnificently
+engraved, are his 'Battles of Alexander.'
+
+Antoine Watteau was born at Valenciennes in 1684. A very different
+painter from Le Brun, he was yet as characteristic of French art in the
+reign of Louis XIV. I think my readers must be familiar with his name,
+and I dare say they associate it, as I do, not only with the fans which
+were painted largely after his designs, but with mock pastorals and
+Sèvres china. I don't know if his birth-place at Valenciennes, with its
+chief product of dainty lace, had anything to do with it, but the other
+items of poor Watteau's history are considerably removed from the very
+artificial grace which one connects with his name. He was the son of a
+carpenter, and struggled up, by the hard instrumentality of third-rate
+masters and of picture-dealers, to the rank which he attained among
+artists, taking his stand from the first, however, as the painter of
+well-bred, well-apparelled people--the frequenters of _bals masqués,_
+and _fêtes champêtres,_ who were only playing at shepherds and
+shepherdesses.
+
+Watteau was elected an Academician in 1717, when he was thirty-three
+years of age, and he afterwards came to England, but did not remain
+there. He died of consumption at Nogent-sur-Marne in 1721, when he was
+thirty-six years of age.[34] Watteau's gifts were his grace and
+brilliance on a small scale. He did not draw well; as to design, his
+composition may be said to be suited to such a work as the collection of
+'fashionable figures,' which he engraved and left behind him. Yet, if we
+were to see at this moment some of his exquisite groups of ladies in
+sacques and Watteau hats, and cavaliers in flowing wigs and lace,
+cravats, I have no doubt that the most of us would admire them much, for
+they are exceedingly pretty, and exceeding prettiness is attractive,
+particularly to women. But I would have my readers to remember that this
+art is a finical and soulless art, after all. I would fain have them
+take this as their maxim, 'That the art is greatest which conveys to the
+mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of
+the greatest ideas.'
+
+Jean Baptiste Greuze was born at Tournus in Burgundy in 1726. He studied
+painting from his youth in the studios of artists at Lyons, Paris, and
+Rome, and his studies resulted in his being a celebrated genre painter.
+He only painted one historical picture, but, with the touchy vanity
+which seemed natural to the man, he ranked his genre pictures as high
+art; and when he was placed in the ordinary list of genre painters on
+his election as a member of the French Academy of Painting, Greuze
+resented the imputation, and withdrew from the Academy. He died in 1805,
+aged seventy-nine years. Greuze was a showy, clever, but neither earnest
+nor truthful painter of domestic subjects and family pictures. His
+pictures of women and heads of girls, the expression in some of which
+has been severely condemned, are among his best known works, and by
+these he is represented in the National Gallery.[35]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK, 1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO,
+1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723.
+
+
+Hans Holbein, sometimes entitled Hans the Younger, was born at Augsburg
+about 1494 or 1495. He was the son of a painter, and belonged to a
+family of painters, one or more of whom had preceded Hans Holbein in
+leaving Augsburg, and taking up his residence at Basle. There Holbein
+was under the patronage of, and on terms of friendly intercourse with,
+the great scholar Erasmus. One bad result proceeded from this friendly
+familiarity, that of establishing or originating the charge that
+Holbein, as a young man, at least, was coarse and dissipated in his
+habits. The evidence is sufficiently curious. There is still in
+existence the copy of a Latin book, called the 'Praise of Folly,'
+written by Erasmus, which Holbein, not being a scholar, could not have
+read for himself, but which, according to tradition, Erasmus himself,
+or some other friend, read to him, while Holbein was so delighted with
+the satire that he covered the margin of the book with illustrative
+sketches. (The sketches remain, and are unmistakably Holbein's.)
+Opposite a passage, recording the want of common sense and energy in
+many learned men, Holbein had drawn the figure of a student, and written
+below, '_Erasmus_.' The book coming again into the hands of Erasmus, he
+was offended with the liberty taken by the painter., and sought to
+retaliate in kind by writing below the sketch of a rude boor drinking,
+'_Holbein_.' In spite of the rough jesting, the friendship between
+scholar and painter was not interrupted.
+
+In these early days Holbein sometimes practised painting on glass, after
+the example of some of his kinsmen. At Basle, Holbein painted what is
+considered his finest work, the 'Meier Madonna,' now at Darmstadt, with
+a copy in the Dresden Gallery, and there he executed the designs for his
+series of woodcuts of the 'Dance of Death.'
+
+At Basle Holbein married, while still a young man. The presumption that
+the painter's marriage, like that of his countryman, Albert Dürer, was
+unhappy, has rested on the foundation that he left his wife and her
+children behind when he repaired to England, and that although he
+re-visited Basle, and saw his wife and family, they did not return with
+him to England. A fancied confirmation to the unhappiness of the
+marriage is found in the expression of the wife in a portrait which
+Holbein painted of her and his children when he was at Basle.
+'Cross-looking and red-eyed,' one critic calls the unlucky woman;
+another describes her as 'a plain, coarse-looking, middle-aged woman,'
+with an expression 'certainly mysterious and unpleasant.' Holbein's
+latest biographer[36] has proved that the forsaken wife, Elssbeth
+Schmid, was a widow with one son when Holbein married her, and has
+conjectured that she was probably not only older than Holbein, but in
+circumstances which rendered her independent of her husband. So far the
+critic has done something to clear Hans Holbein from the miserable
+accusation often brought against him, that he abandoned his wife and
+children to starve at Basle, while he sunned himself in such court
+favour as could be found in England. But, indeed, while Hans Holbein may
+have been honest and humane enough to have been above such base
+suspicions, there is no trace of him which survives that goes to
+disprove the probability that he was a self-willed, not over-scrupulous
+man, if he was also a vigorous and thorough worker.
+
+Holbein came to England about 1526 or 1527, when he must have been
+thirty-one or thirty-two years of age, and repaired to Chelsea to the
+house of Sir Thomas More, to whom the painter brought a letter of
+introduction, and still better credentials in the present, from Erasmus
+to More, of the portrait of Erasmus, painted by Hans Holbein. There are
+so many portraits and copies of portraits of Erasmus, not only by
+Holbein, but by other painters--for Erasmus was painted by Albert Dürer
+and Quintin Matsys,--that this special portrait, like the true Holbein
+family portrait of the More family, remains very much a subject of
+speculation. Most of us must be well acquainted with the delightful
+account which Erasmus gave of Sir Thomas More's country-house at
+Chelsea, and the life of its occupants. It has been cited hundreds of
+times as an example of what an English family has been, and what it may
+be in dutiful discipline, simple industry, and high cultivation, when
+Sir Thomas's young daughters repeated psalms in Latin to beguile the
+time in the drudging process of churning the butter. During Holbein's
+residence in or visits to the Mores' house at Chelsea, he sketched or
+painted the original of the More family picture.
+
+Holbein was introduced to Henry VIII, by Sir Thomas More, and was
+immediately taken into favour by the king, and received into his
+service, with a lodging in the palace, a general salary of thirty pounds
+a year, and separate payment for his paintings. According to Horace
+Walpole, Holbein's palace lodging was probably 'the little study called
+the new library' of square glazed bricks of different colours, designed
+by the painter at Whitehall. (This gateway, with the porch at Wilton,
+were the painter's chief architectural achievements.) By another
+statement, Holbein's house was on London Bridge, where it was destroyed
+in the great fire.
+
+I have already alluded to the anecdote of the value which Henry VIII,
+put on Holbein. It was to this effect: that when an aggrieved courtier
+complained to the king that the painter had taken precedence of him--a
+nobleman, the king replied, 'I have many noblemen, but I have only one
+Hans Holbein.' In fact, Holbein received nothing save kindness from
+Henry VIII.; and for that matter, there seemed to be something in common
+between bluff King Hal and the equally bluff German Hans. But on one
+occasion Hans Holbein was said to have run the risk of forfeiting his
+imperious master's favour by the too favourable miniature which the
+painter was accused of painting of Anne of Cleves.
+
+At Henry's court Holbein painted many a member of the royal family,
+noble and knight, and English gentleman and lady. His fortune had made
+him a portrait painter, but he was fully equal to other branches of art,
+as shown by his 'Meier Madonna,' and still more by the designs which
+have been preserved of his famous allegory of 'the Triumphs of Riches
+and Poverty,' painted for the hall of the Easterling Steelyard, the
+quarters of the merchants of Allemagne, then traders in London. In
+addition to painting portraits Holbein designed dagger hilts, clasps,
+cups, as some say after a study of the goldsmith's work of Cellini.
+
+For a long time it was believed that Hans Holbein died after Mary Tudor
+succeeded to the English throne; indeed, some said that his death had
+been occasioned or hastened by that change in the affairs of men, which
+compelled him to quit his lodgings in the palace to make room for 'the
+new painter,' Sir Antony More, who came in the suite of Mary's
+well-beloved husband, Philip of Spain. There was even a theory,
+creditable to Hans Holbein, drawn from this conclusion, that he might
+have adopted the Protestant views of his late gracious master, and have
+stood by them stoutly, and so far forfeited all recognition from the
+bitter Catholic Mary. But, unfortunately for the tradition and theory,
+and for the later pictures attributed to Hans Holbein, his will has been
+discovered, and that quite recently, proving, from the date of its
+administration, his death of the plague (so far only the tradition had
+been right), when yet only in his forty-eighth year, as early as 1543,
+four years before the death of Henry VIII. In spite of court patronage
+Holbein did not die a rich man, and there is an impression that he was
+recklessly improvident in his habits.
+
+Holbein had re-visited Basle several times, and the council had settled
+on him a pension of fifty florins a year, provided he would return and
+reside in Basle within two years, while his wife was to receive a
+pension of forty florins a year during Holbein's two years' absence.
+Holbein did not comply with the terms of the settlement. About the time
+of his death his son Philip, then a lad of eighteen, was a goldsmith in
+Paris. Of Hans Holbein's portraits I have two to draw from; one,
+painted in his youth at Basle, shows the painter in an open doublet, and
+curious stomacher-like shirt, and having on his head a great flapping
+hat. His face is broad and smooth-skinned, with little hair seen, and
+the features, the eyes especially, rather small for such an expanse of
+cheek and chin. The other picture of Holbein to which I have referred
+belongs certainly to a considerably later period of his life, and
+represents him with short but bushy hair, and short bushy beard and
+moustache, a man having a broad stout person with a mixture of
+dauntlessness and _bonhommie_ in his massive face.
+
+Mr Ruskin says of Holbein, as a painter, that he was complete in
+intellect; what he saw he saw with his whole soul, and what he painted
+he painted with his whole might.
+
+In deep and reverential feeling Holbein was far behind his countryman
+Albert Dürer, but Holbein was far more fully furnished than Dürer
+(unless indeed as Albrecht Dürer showed himself in that last picture of
+'the Apostles') in the means of his art; he was a better draughtsman in
+the maturity of his powers, and a far better colourist. For Hans Holbein
+was not more famous for the living truthfulness of his likenesses ('a
+man very excellent in making physiognomies'), than for the 'inimitable
+bloom' that he imparted to his pictures, which 'he touched, till not a
+touch became discernible.' Yet beneath this bloom, along with his
+truthfulness, there was a dryness and hardness in Holbein's treatment of
+his subjects, and he is far below Titian, Rubens, and even Rembrandt as
+a portrait painter.
+
+Holbein was in the habit of painting his larger portraits on a peculiar
+green, and his miniatures on a blue background. He drew his portrait
+sketches with black and red chalk on a paper tinted flesh-colour. It is
+said, that with the exception, of Philip Wouwermann, no painter has been
+so unfortunate in having the works of other painters attributed to him
+as Hans Holbein has been, and 'that three out of every four pictures
+ascribed to him are misnamed.'[37]
+
+The 'Meier, or Meyer Madonna,' is otherwise called 'the Meier Family
+adoring the infant Christ in the arms of the Virgin.' The subject is
+understood to prove that it must have been painted in Holbein's youth,
+before Protestantism was triumphant at Basle. The figures are the
+Burgomaster Meier and his wife, whom Holbein painted twice; their son,
+with a little boy _nude_ beside him; another woman, elderly, conjectured
+to be a grandmother of the family, and beside her the young daughter of
+the house. In the centre on a turkey carpet stands the Madonna, holding
+in her arms an infant stretching out its left hand to the group of
+worshippers. In course of time, and in its transfer from hand to hand, a
+doubt has arisen with regard to the subject of this picture. Some
+critics have regarded it as a votive picture dedicated in a private
+chapel to commemorate the recovery from sickness or the death of a
+child. This conjecture seems to rest mainly on the fact, that the child
+in the Dresden copy (it is said to be otherwise in the Darmstadt
+picture) is of an aspect so sickly, as to have given rise to the
+impression that it represented an ailing, or even a dead child, and no
+glorious child Christ. Critics have gone still farther, and imagined
+that the child is a figure of the soul of a dead child (souls were
+sometimes painted by the old painters as new-born children), or of the
+soul of the elder and somewhat muffled-up woman who might have been
+recently dead. Mr Ruskin regards the picture as an offering for the
+recovery of a sick child, and thus illustrates it:
+
+     'The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is
+     beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father
+     and a mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child.
+     She appears to them, her own child Christ in her arms; she puts
+     down her child beside them, takes their child into her arms
+     instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hand to
+     its father and mother, saying farewell.'
+
+Yet another much more prosaic and less attractive interpretation of the
+picture has been suggested by Holbein's biographer, that the two
+children may represent the same child. The child standing by his brother
+may be the boy restored to health, the feeble child in the arms of the
+Virgin may indicate the same child in its sickness, while the extended
+arm may point to the seat of the disease in an arm broken or injured.
+After all, the child may simply be a child Christ, marred in execution.
+I have given this dispute at length, because I think it is interesting,
+and, so far as I know, unique in reference to such a picture. By an odd
+enough mistake this very picture was once said to be the famous More
+Family picture.
+
+The idea of the 'Dance of Death' did not originate with Holbein, neither
+is he supposed to have done more than touch, if he did touch, the
+paintings called the 'Dance of Death,' on the wall of the Dominican
+burial-ground, Basle, painted long before Holbein's day, by the order of
+the council after the plague visited Basle, and considered to have for
+its meaning simply a warning of the universality of death. But Holbein
+certainly availed himself of the older painting, to draw from it the
+grim satire of his woodcuts. Of these there are thirty-seven designs,
+the first, 'The Creation;' the second, 'Adam and Eve in Paradise;' the
+third, 'The Expulsion from Paradise;' the fourth, 'Adam Tilling the
+Earth;' the fifth, 'The Bones of all People;' till the dance really
+begins in the sixth. Death, a skeleton, as seen through the rest of the
+designs, sometimes playing on a guitar or lute, sometimes carrying a
+drum, bagpipes, a dulcimer, or a fiddle, now appearing with mitre on
+head and crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the
+parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he
+seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going
+down impartially through Emperor of Francis I., nobleman, advocate,
+physician, ploughman, countess, old woman, little child, etc., etc., and
+leading each unwilling or willing victim in turn to the terrible dance.
+One woman meets her doom by Death in the character of a robber in a
+wood. Another, the Duchess, sits up in bed fully dressed, roused from
+her sleep by two skeletons, one of them playing a fiddle.
+
+Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of
+these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of
+Albrecht Dürer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil,' or Orcagna's
+'Triumph of Death.' In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling
+faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable
+fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the
+time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and
+told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer
+resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners
+during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the
+guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as
+represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the arrival of
+the cholera.
+
+Of the 'More Family' there are so many duplicates or versions, that, as
+in the case of Erasmus's picture, it is hard to say which is the
+original picture, or whether Holbein did more than sketch the original,
+or merely sketch the various heads to be afterwards put together by an
+inferior artist. A singular distribution of the light in the best
+authenticated picture has been supposed to favour this conjecture. But
+under any supposition, this, the second of the three noted English
+family pictures, is of the greatest interest. I shall record a minute
+and curious description given of this 'More Family,' which is still in
+the possession of a descendant of the Mores and Ropers.
+
+'The room which is here represented seemed to be a large dining-room. At
+the upper end of it stands a chamber-organ on a cupboard, with a curtain
+drawn before it. On each end of the cupboard, which is covered with a
+carpet of tapestry, stands a flower-pot of flowers, and on the cupboard
+are laid a lute, a base-viol, a pint pot or ewer covered in part with a
+cloth folded several times, and _Boetius de Consolatione Philosophiæ_,
+with two other books upon it. By this cupboard stands a daughter of Sir
+Thomas More's, putting on her right-hand glove, and having under her arm
+a book bound in red Turkey leather and gilt, with this inscription round
+the outside of the cover--_Epistolica Senecæ_. Over her head is written
+in Latin, _Elizabeth Dancy_, daughter of Sir Thomas More, aged 21.
+
+'Behind her stands a woman holding a book open with both her hands, over
+whose head is written _Spouse of John Clements_.[38]
+
+'Next to Mrs Dancy is Sir John More in his robes as one of the justices
+of the King's Bench, and by him Sir Thomas in his chancellor's robes,
+and collar of SS, with a rose pendant before. They are both sitting on a
+sort of tressel or armed bench, one of the arms and legs and one of the
+tassels of the cushion appear on the left side of Sir Thomas. At the
+feet of Sir John lies a cur-dog, and at Sir Thomas's a Bologna shock.
+Over Sir John's head is written, _John More, father, aged_ 76. Over Sir
+Thomas's, _Thomas More, aged_ 50. Between them, behind, stands the wife
+of John More, Sir Thomas's son, over whose head is written _Anne
+Cresacre, wife of John More, aged_ 15. Behind Sir Thomas, on his left
+hand stands his only son, John More, pictured with a very foolish
+aspect, and looking earnestly in a book which he holds open with both
+his hands. Over his head is written, _John, son of Thomas More, aged_
+19.' (The only and witless son of the family, on whom Sir Thomas made
+the comment to his wife:--'You long wished for a boy, and you have got
+one--for all his life.')
+
+'A little to the left of Sir Thomas are sitting on low stools his two
+daughters, Cecilia and Margaret. Next him is Cecilia, who has a boot in
+her lap, clasped. By her side sits her sister Margaret, who has likewise
+a book on her lap, but wide open, in which is written, _L. An.
+Senecæ--Oedipus--Fata si liceat mihi fingere arbitrio meo, temperem
+zephyro levi_. On Cecilia's petticoat is written, _Cecilia Heron,
+daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 20, and on Margaret's, _Margaret Roper_,
+_daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 22.' (The best beloved, most
+amiable, and most learned of Sir Thomas's daughters, who visited
+him in the Tower and encouraged him to remain true to his
+convictions, while her step-mother urged him to abjure his faith.
+Margaret Roper intercepted her father on his return to the Tower
+after his trial, and penetrating the circle of the Guards, hung on
+his neck and bade him farewell. There is a tradition that she
+caused her father's head to be stolen from the spike of the bridge
+on which it was exposed, and, getting it preserved, kept it in a
+casket. She and her husband, William Roper, wrote together the
+biography of her father, Sir Thomas More.)
+
+'Just by Mrs Roper sits Sir Thomas's lady in an elbow-chair (?), holding
+a book open in her hands. About her neck she has a gold chain, with a
+cross hanging to it before. On her left hand is a monkey chained, and
+holding part of it with one paw and part of it with the other. Over her
+head is written '_spouse of Thomas More, aged_ 57.'
+
+(Dame Alice More, the second wife of Sir Thomas More, a foolish and
+mean-spirited woman.)
+
+'Behind her is a large arched window, in which is placed a flower-pot (a
+vase) of flowers, and a couple of oranges. Behind the two ladies stands
+Sir Thomas's fool, who, it seems, was bereft of his judgment by
+distraction. He has his cap on, and in it are stuck a red and white
+rose, and on the brim of it is a shield with a red cross on it, and a
+sort of seal pendant. About his neck he wears a black string with a
+cross hanging before him, and his left thumb is stuck in a broad
+leathern girdle clasp'd about him. Over his head is written _Henry
+Pattison, servant_ of Thomas More. At the entrance of the room where Sir
+Thomas and his family are, stands a man in the portal who has in his
+left hand a roll of papers or parchments with two seals appendant, as if
+he was some way belonging to Sir Thomas as Lord Chancellor. Over his
+head is written _Joannes Heresius, Thomae Mori famulus_. In another room
+at some distance is seen through the door-case a man standing at a large
+sleeved gown of a sea-green colour, and under it a garment of a
+blossom-colour, holding a book open in his hands written or printed
+in the black letter, and reading very earnestly in it. About the
+middle of the room, over against Sir Thomas, hangs a clock with
+strings and leaden weights without any case.'[39]
+
+It is notable that not one of Sir Thomas's sons-in-law is in this
+picture, neither is there a grandchild, though one or more is known to
+have been born at the date.
+
+The miniature of Anne of Cleves, if it ever existed, is lost; it is
+probable that what was really referred to was the portrait of Anne by
+Holbein in the Louvre, where she appears 'as a kindly and comely woman
+in spite of her broad nose and swarthy complexion, but by no means such
+a painted Venus as might have deceived King Hal.'[40]
+
+A well-known portrait by Holbein is that of a 'Cornish Gentleman,' with
+reddish hair and beard. I saw this portrait not long ago, as it was
+exhibited among the works of the Old Masters, and so much did it look
+as though the figure would step from the frame, that it was hard to
+believe that more than three hundred years had passed since the original
+walked the earth.[41]
+
+Doubtless the last of Holbein's portrait pieces, which it is reported he
+left uncompleted when he died, is that of the 'Barber Surgeons,' painted
+on the occasion of the united company receiving their charter from the
+king, and including the king's portrait. This picture still hangs in the
+old company's hall.
+
+I have only to say a few more words of those sketches which survive the
+destruction of the picture--Holbein's allegory of the 'Triumph of
+Riches,' and the 'Triumph of Poverty,' and of his portrait sketches. In
+the 'Triumph of Riches,' Plutus, an old man bent double, drives in a
+car, drawn by four white horses; before him, Fortune, blind, scatters
+money. The car is followed by Croesus, Midas, and other noted misers and
+spendthrifts--for Cleopatra, the only woman present, is included in the
+group. In the 'Triumph of Poverty,' Poverty is an old woman in squalor
+and rags, who is seated in a shattered vehicle, drawn by asses and oxen,
+and guided by Hope and Diligence. The designs are large and bold. In the
+first, a resemblance to Henry VIII, is found in Croesus. If the
+resemblance were intentional on Holbein's part, it showed the same want
+of tact and feeling which the painter early betrayed in his caricature
+of Erasmus.
+
+But the best of Holbein's drawings are his portrait sketches with
+chalks, on flesh-tinted paper. These sketches have a history of their
+own, subsequent to their execution by Holbein. After being in the
+possession of the art-loving Earl of Arundel, and carried to France,
+they were lost sight of altogether for the space of a century, until
+they were discovered by Queen Caroline, wife of George II., in a bureau
+at Kensington. You will hear a little later that the finest collection
+of miniatures in England went through the same process of disappearance
+and recovery.[42] These original sketches, in addition to their great
+artistic merit, form a wonderful collection of speaking likenesses,
+belonging to the court of Henry VIII.,--likenesses which had been
+happily identified in time by Sir John Cheke (in the reign of
+Elizabeth), since the names of the originals have been inscribed on the
+back of each drawing, as it is believed, by Sir John Cheke's hand. The
+collection is now in the Queen's library, Windsor, with photographs at
+Kensington Museum. There are one or two of Holbein's reputed portraits
+at Hampton Court.
+
+I must pass over some painters as not being sufficiently represented for
+my purpose. Among these is Sir Antony More, Philip II, of Spain's
+friend. It is recorded that Philip having rested his hand on the
+shoulder of More while at work, the bold painter turned round, and
+daubed the royal hand with vermilion. This gave rise to the
+courtier-saying that Philip 'made slaves of his friends, and friends of
+his painters.' Another is Zucchero, one of the painters who was
+requested by Queen Elizabeth to paint her picture without shade, the
+result being 'a woman with a Roman nose, a huge ruff and farthingale,
+and a bushel of pearls.' There are also Van Somer,--Janssens, who
+painted Lady Bowyer, named for her exquisite beauty, 'The star of the
+East,' and Susanna Lister, the most beautiful woman at court, when
+presented in marriage to Sir Geoffrey Thornhurst by James I, in
+person,[43]--and Daniel Myttens, all foreigners, Flemish or Dutch, whom
+we must thus briefly dismiss. And now we come to Van Dyck.
+
+Antony Van Dyck was born at Antwerp, in 1599. His father was a merchant;
+his mother was famous for painting flowers in small, and for needlework
+in silk. The fashion of painting 'in small' had prevailed for some time.
+Horace Walpole mentions that the mother of Lucas de Heere, a Flemish
+painter, born in 1534, could paint with such 'diminutive neatness' that
+she had executed 'a landscape with a windmill, miller, a cart and horse,
+and passengers,' which half a grain of corn could cover. At ten years of
+age, Van Dyck began to study as a painter, and he soon became a pupil,
+and afterwards a favourite pupil, of Rubens. In 1618, when Van Dyck was
+but a lad of seventeen years, he was admitted as a master into the
+painters' guild of St Luke. Two years later, he was still working with
+Rubens, who, seeing his lameness of invention, counselled him to abide
+by portrait painting, and to visit Italy. A year later, in 1621, when
+Van Dyck was twenty years of age, he came to London, already becoming a
+resort of Flemish painters, and lodging with a countryman of his own,
+worked for a short time in the service of James I.
+
+On Van Dyck's return to Flanders, and on the death of his father, he was
+able to take Rubens' advice, and in 1623, when Van Dyck was still only
+twenty-two years of age, he set out for Venice, the Rome of the Flemish
+painters. Before quitting Antwerp, Van Dyck, in proof of the friendship
+which existed between the painters, presented Rubens with several of the
+former's pictures, among them his famous portrait of 'Rubens' wife.' As
+a pendant to this generosity, when Van Dyck came back to Antwerp, and
+complained to Rubens that he--Van Dyck--could not live on the profits of
+his painting, Rubens went next day and bought every picture of Van
+Dyck's which was for sale.
+
+Van Dyck spent five years in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, and
+Palermo, but residing principally at Genoa. In Italy, he began to
+indulge in his love of splendid extravagance, and in the fastidious
+fickleness which belonged to the evil side of his character. At Rome he
+was called 'the cavalier painter,' yet his first complaint on his return
+to Antwerp was, that he could not live on the profits of his painting!
+He avoided the society of his homelier countrymen.
+
+At Palermo, Van Dyck knew, and according to some accounts, painted the
+portrait of Sophonisba Anguisciola, who claimed to be the most eminent
+portrait painter among women. She was then about ninety years of age,
+and blind, but she still delighted in having in her house a kind of
+academy of painting, to which all the painters visiting Palermo
+resorted. Van Dyck asserted that he owed more to her conversation than
+to the teaching of all the schools. A book of his sketches, which was
+recovered, showed many drawings 'after Sophonisba Anguisciola.' She is
+said to have been born at Cremona, was invited at the age of twenty-six
+by Philip II, to Spain, and was presented by him with a Spanish don for
+a husband, and a pension of a thousand crowns a-year from the customs of
+Palermo.
+
+The plague drove Van Dyck from Italy back to Flanders, where he painted
+for a time, and presented his picture of the 'Crucifixion' to the
+Dominicans as a memorial gift in honour of his father, but in Flanders
+Rubens' fame overshadowed that of every other painter, and Van Dyck,
+recalling an invitation which he had received from the Countess of
+Arundel while still in Italy, came a second time to England, in 1630,
+when he was about thirty years of age, and lodged again with a
+fellow-countryman and painter named Gildorp. But his sensitive vanity
+was wounded by his not at once receiving an introduction to the king, or
+the countenance which the painter considered his due, and the
+restlessness, which was a prominent feature in his character, being
+re-awakened, he withdrew once more from England, and returned to the Low
+Countries in 1631. At last, a year later, in 1632, Van Dyck's pride was
+propitiated by receiving a formal invitation from Charles I., through
+Sir Kenelm Digby, to visit England, and this time the painter had no
+cause to complain of an unworthy reception. He was lodged by the king
+among his artists at Blackfriars, having no intercourse with the city,
+save by water. He had the king, with his wife and children, to sit to
+him, and was granted a pension of two hundred a-year, with the
+distinction of being named painter to his Majesty.
+
+A year later Van Dyck was knighted. Royal and noble commissions flowed
+upon him, and the king, who had a hereditary love of art, visited the
+painter continually, and spent some of the happiest and most innocent
+hours of his brief and clouded life in Van Dyck's company. Thus began
+Van Dyck's success in England.
+
+To give you an example of how often, and in how many different manners,
+Van Dyck painted the king and royal family, I shall quote from a list of
+his pictures--
+
+     'King Charles in coronation robes.'
+
+     'King Charles in armour' (twice).
+
+     'King Charles in white satin, with his hat on, just
+     descended from his horse; in the distance, view of the
+     Isle of Wight.'
+
+     'King Charles in armour, on a white horse; Monsieur
+     de St Antoine, his equerry, holding the king's
+     helmet.'
+
+     'The King and Queen sitting; Prince Charles,
+     very young, standing at the King's side; the Duke of
+     York, an infant, on the Queen's knee.'
+
+     'The King and Queen holding a crown of laurel
+     between them.'
+
+     'The Queen in white.'
+
+     'Prince Charles in armour' (two or three times).
+
+     'King, Queen, Prince Charles, and Princess Mary.'
+
+     'Queen with her five children.'
+
+     'Queen with dwarfs,[44] Sir Geoffrey Hudson having
+     a monkey on his shoulder.'
+
+Van Dyck had several great patrons, after the king. For the Earl of
+Arundel, in addition to portraits of the Earl and Countess, the painter
+designed a second Arundel family picture, which was painted by
+Fruitiers. For George, Duke of Buckingham, Van Dyck painted one of his
+finest double portraits of the Duke's two sons, when children. For the
+Northumberland family Van Dyck painted, besides portraits of Henry and
+Algernon, Earls of Northumberland, another famous picture, that of the
+two beautiful sisters, Lady Dorothy Percy, afterwards Countess of
+Leicester, and her sister, Lady Lucy Percy, afterwards Countess of
+Carlisle, whose charms figure frequently in the memoirs of her time.
+William and Philip, Earls of Pembroke, were also among his patrons, and
+for the second he painted his great family picture, 'The Wilton
+Family.' Sir Kenelm Digby, too, whose wife Venitia was more frequently
+painted than any woman of her day, and was not more distinguished for
+her beauty than for her lack of nobler qualities. Van Dyck alone painted
+her several times, the last after her sudden death, for her vain and
+eccentric, if gallant, husband, who in the end was no friend to Van
+Dyck.
+
+But these high names by no means exhaust the list of patrons of a
+painter who, among various contradictory qualities, was indefatigably
+industrious. His work is widely distributed among the Scotch as well as
+the English descendants of the nobility whom he painted, so that the
+possession of at least one ancestral 'Van Dyck' accompanies very many
+patents of nobility, and is equivalent to a warrant of gentle birth.
+
+The Earl of Clarendon, in the next reign, had a great partiality for Van
+Dyck's pictures, and was said to be courted by gifts of them until his
+apartments at Cornbury were furnished with full-length 'Van Dycks.' A
+third of his collection went to Kitty Hyde, Duchess of Queensberry, one
+of the Earl's three co-heiresses. Through the Rich family many of these
+'Van Dycks' passed to Taymouth Castle, where by a coincidence they were
+lodged in the company of numerous works of George Jamieson of Aberdeen,
+who is said to have been for a short time a fellow-pupil of Van Dyck's
+under Rubens, who has been called 'the Scotch Van Dyck,' and who is
+certainly the first native painter who deserves honourable mention.
+Since the death of the last Marquis of Breadalbane these travelled 'Van
+Dycks' have gone back to the English representative of the Rich family.
+
+Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a
+whole-length picture;--for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their
+children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had
+five hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Van Dyck soon impaired his
+fortune. He was not content with having a country-house at Eltham in
+Kent, where he spent a portion of each summer; he would emulate in his
+expenditure the most spendthrift noble of that reign. 'He always went
+magnific so good a table in his apartment that few princes were more
+visited and better served.' His marriage was not calculated to teach him
+moderation. In his thirty-ninth year the King gave him the hand of Marie
+Ruthven, who was nearly related to the unhappy Earl of Gowrie. She was
+his niece, her father having been the scarcely less unhappy younger
+brother Patrick, a physician, who, apprehended when a young man on the
+charge of being concerned in the treason of his elder brothers, spent
+his manhood in the Tower. He was kept a prisoner there from 1584 to
+1619, nearly forty years, and was only released in his age and infirmity
+when his mind was giving way. Patrick Ruthven's infant daughter had been
+adopted, either through charity or perversity, by Anne of Denmark, and
+brought up first at the court of Anne, and afterwards at that of
+Henrietta Maria. The assertion that Marie Ruthven was a very beautiful
+woman has been contradicted. It was said that 'she was bestowed in
+marriage on Sir Antony Van Dyck as much to humble further the already
+humbled and still detested family of Ruthven, as to honour the painter;
+but this does not seem consistent with King Charles's known favour for
+Van Dyck. Yet such a view might have been entertained by Marie Ruthven
+herself, who, according to tradition, held herself degraded by the
+marriage, and never forgave the degradation. She was not a loving wife
+to a man who could hardly have been a very loving or loyal husband. And
+certainly the marriage did not unite the painter closer to the king.
+
+With his professional industry, Van Dyck combined an equally
+unquenchable love of pleasure, which, with his luxurious and sedentary
+habits, induced paroxysms of gout, from which Rubens also suffered
+severely. This must have ultimately disqualified him for good work, and
+when his debts accumulated in greater proportion even than his receipts,
+in place of having recourse, like Rubens, to his painting-room, Van Dyck
+tried a shorter road to get rich, by following the idle example of Sir
+Kenelm Digby in his pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher's stone.
+
+In the year of his marriage, Van Dyck re-visited Flanders, in company
+with his wife, and then repaired to France, it is understood with the
+intention of settling there. He was instigated to the step by his wife,
+and his own ambition of rivalling Rubens' triumphs at the Luxembourg;
+but the preference which the French gave to the works of their
+countryman, Nicolas Poussin, roused his latent jealousy, and so
+mortified him as to induce him to renounce his intention. He determined
+to return to England, and was, to his credit, confirmed in his
+resolution by the threatening civil war which was to shake his royal
+master's throne to the foundation, rather than deterred from it.
+
+Again in England, Van Dyck employed Sir Kenelm Digby to make an offer on
+the painter's part that for eight hundred pounds he would paint the
+history, and a procession of the Knights of the Garter on the walls of
+the Knights' banqueting-room at Whitehall--that palace which was to
+have surpassed the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Escurial, and from one
+of the windows of which Charles stepped out on his scaffold. But the
+proposal was rejected, and immediately afterwards the civil war broke
+out, and was speedily followed by the death of Van Dyck, about a year
+after his marriage, when he was a little over forty years old, at
+Blackfriars, in 1641. He was buried in old St Paul's, near the tomb of
+John of Gaunt. His daughter, Justiniana, was born a short time--some say
+only eight days--before her father died, and was baptized on the day of
+his death. Van Dyck left effects and sums due to him to the amount of
+twenty thousand pounds; but the greater part of the debts were found
+beyond recovery at the close of the civil war. His daughter grew up, and
+married a Mr Stepney, 'who rode in King Charles's life guards.' His
+widow re-married; her second husband was a Welsh knight.
+
+Van Dyck's contradictory elements. He was actuated by opposite motives
+which are hard to analyze, and which in their instability have within
+themselves, whatever their outward advantages, the doom of failure in
+the highest excellence. He was a proud man, dissatisfied both with
+himself and his calling, resenting, with less reason than Hans Holbein
+showed, that he should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no
+means undervaluing or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the
+persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their
+countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter,
+sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not
+once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck
+appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater
+things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his
+weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as
+spoiled his greatest successes.
+
+I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to
+get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that
+of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose,
+a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse
+and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is
+an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare.
+The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the
+best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his
+complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and
+whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.
+
+In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a
+delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master,
+both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement
+which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of
+conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness
+and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true,
+and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the
+refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I.,
+whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus
+lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a
+noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who
+have maintained that Charles,--the son of a plain uncouth father, and of
+a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in
+his childhood a sickly rickety child,--was by no means so well endowed
+in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of old
+gossip and close investigation, have alleged that Charles was long and
+lanky, after he had ceased to be Baby Charles; that his nose was too
+large, and, alas! apt to redden; that his eyes were vacillating; and his
+mouth, the loosely hung mouth of a man who begins by being irresolute,
+and ends by being obstinate.[45] Again, in the hands of a sitter, which
+Van Dyck was supposed to paint with special care and elegance, it has
+been argued that he copied always the same hand, probably his own, in
+ignorance, or in defiance of the fact that hands have nearly as much and
+as varying character as a painter can discover in faces. Though Van Dyck
+painted many beautiful women, he did not excel in rendering them
+beautiful on canvas, so that succeeding generations, in gazing on Van
+Dyck's versions of Venitia, Lady Digby, and Dorothy Sydney--Waller's
+Sacharissa,--have wondered how Sir Kenelm, Waller, and their
+contemporaries, could find these ladies so beautiful.
+
+Van Dyck certainly owed something of the charm of his pictures to the
+dress of the period, with regard to which he received this credit that
+'Van Dyck was the first painter who e'er put ladies' dress into a
+careless romance.' But in reality never was costume better suited for a
+painter like Van Dyck.
+
+The hair in the men was allowed to flow to the shoulders or gathered in
+a love knot, while the whiskers and beard formed a point. In the women
+the hair was crisped in curls round the face. The ruff in men and women
+had yielded to the broad, rich, falling collar, with deep scallops of
+point lace. Vest and cloak were of the richest velvet or satin, or else,
+on the breaking out of the civil war, men appeared in armour. The man's
+hat was broad and flapping, usually turned up at one side, and having an
+ostrich feather in the band; his long wide boots were of Spanish
+leather, and he wore gauntlet gloves, and rich ruffles at his wrists.
+The women wore hoods and mantles, short bodices, ample trains, and wide
+sleeves terminating in loose ruffles at the elbow, which left half of
+the arm bare. Pearl necklaces and bracelets, round feather fans, and
+'knots of flowers,' were the almost universal ornaments of women.
+Another ornament of both men and women, which belonged to the day, and
+was very common in the quarters I have been referring to, was a
+miniature enclosed in a small case of ivory or ebony, carved like a
+rose, and worn on the left side in token of betrothal.[46] Van Dyck,
+along with the appreciation of black draperies which he held in common
+with Rubens, was specially fond of painting white or blue satin. He is
+said to have used a brown preparation of pounded peach-stones for
+glazing the hair in his pictures.
+
+In the end, with all the aids that critics may have given him, and all
+the faults they may find in him, Van Dyck was a great, and in the main
+an earnest portrait painter. Perhaps 'Charles in white satin, just
+descended from his horse,' is the best of the single portraits which
+were held to be Van Dyck's forte.
+
+I must try to give my readers some idea of Van Dyck's 'Wilton Family.'
+It has been so praised, that some have said 'it might have been covered
+with gold as a price to obtain it;' on the other hand, it has not
+escaped censure. One critic asserts that there is no common action
+uniting the figures, and that the faces are so different in
+complexion--one yellow-faced boy appearing either jaundiced or burnt by
+a tropical sun, that the family might have lived in different climates.
+
+This is the story of the picture. 'Earl Philip of Pembroke having
+caused his family to meet, informs them with great emotion of the
+necessity of his eldest son Charles, Lord Herbert, going into the army
+of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, there to acquire military honour and
+experience, notwithstanding his having just married Mary, daughter of
+George, Duke of Buckingham. Lord Herbert is receiving the news with
+ardour, the young bride is turning aside her fair face to hide her
+tears. (Charles Lord Herbert was married Christmas, 1634, went to
+Florence, and died there of small pox, January, 1636.)
+
+'In the Pembroke picture (or "Wilton Family") there are ten figures. The
+Earl and Countess are seated on a dais, under a coat of arms. He wears a
+great lace collar, an order on his breast, a key at his girdle, and has
+great shoes with roses. She has flowing curls, hanging sleeves, arms
+crossed, necklace on the bare neck. (The Countess of Pembroke was the
+Earl's second wife, Anne Clifford, daughter of George, Earl of
+Cumberland, the brave lady who defied Cromwell, and was fond of signing
+her name with the long string of titles derived from her two husbands,
+"Anne Dorset, Pembroke, Montgomery.") Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon,
+is introduced with his wife, Lady Anne Sophia Herbert, daughter of Earl
+Philip; they are on the Countess's left hand. The daughter-in-law, about
+to be parted from her husband, stands on the lowest step of the dais;
+she is elegantly dressed, with hanging sleeves knotted with bows from
+shoulder to elbow. Two young men, the bridegroom and his brother, are at
+their father's right hand; they wear great falling collars and cloaks.
+There are three half-grown boys in tunics without collars, and great
+roses in their shoes, with a dare three daughters of the family who died
+in infancy.'
+
+Van Dyck's finest sacred pictures were his early 'Crucifixion,' and a
+Pieta, at Antwerp. In these he gave a promise of nobler and deeper
+pathos than he afterwards fulfilled. His pictures are to be found
+freely, as I have written, in old English mansions, such as Arundel and
+Alnwick Castles, Knowsley, Knole, Petworth, etc. A head said to be by
+Van Dyck is in the National Gallery.
+
+Van Dyck had few pupils: one, an Englishman named Dobson, earned an
+honourable reputation as a painter.
+
+From Sir Antony More's time down to that of Leíly and Kneller, the rage
+for portraits was continually increasing, and took largely the form of
+miniatures, which were painted chiefly by foreigners; notably by
+Hilliard and two Olivers or Oliviers, a father and son of French
+extraction, and by a Swiss named Petitot. A collection of miniatures by
+the Oliviers, including no less than six of Venitia, Lady Digby, had a
+similar fate to that of Holbein's drawings. The miniatures had been
+packed in a wainscot box and conveyed to the country-house in Wales of
+Mr Watkin Williams, who was a descendant of the Digby family. In course
+of time the box with its contents, doubtless forgotten, had been
+transferred to a garret, where it had lain undiscovered for, it has been
+supposed, fully a hundred years. It was two hundred years after the
+date of the painting of the miniatures, that on some turning over of the
+lumber in the garret, the exquisite miniatures, fresh as on the day when
+they were painted, were accidentally brought to light.[47]
+
+Sir Peter Lely was born in Westphalia in 1618. His real name was Vander
+Facs, and his father was a 'Captain of Foot,' who, having chanced to be
+born in rooms over a perfumer's shop which bore the sign of a lily, took
+fantastically enough the name of Du Lys, or Lely, which he transmitted
+to his son. Sir Peter Lely, after studying in a studio at Haarlem, came
+to England when he was twenty-three years of age, in 1641, and set
+himself to copy the pictures of Van Dyck, who died in the year of Lely's
+arrival in England, and whom he succeeded as court painter. Lely was
+knighted by Charles II., married an English woman, and had a son and a
+daughter, who died young. He made a large fortune, dying at last of
+apoplexy, with which he was seized as he was painting the Duchess of
+Somerset, when he was sixty-two years of age, in 1680.
+
+With regard to Lely's character, we may safely judge from his works that
+he was such a man as Samuel Pepys, 'of easy virtue,' a man holding a low
+enough standard by which to measure himself and others. Mr Palgrave
+quotes from Mr Leslie the following characteristic anecdote of Lely,
+which seems to prove that he was aware of, and coolly accepted, the
+decline of art in his generation and person. A nobleman said to Lely,
+'How is it that you have so great a reputation, when you know, as well
+as I do, that you are no painter?' 'True, but I am the best you have,'
+was the answer. Lely's punishment followed him into his art, for
+beginning by copying Van Dyck, it is said of Lely that he degenerated in
+his work till it bore the very 'stamp of the depravity of the age.'
+
+Lely's sitters were mostly women. Among them was one who deserved a
+fitter painter, Mistress Anne Killigrew, Dryden's--
+
+    'Youngest virgin daughter of the skies.'
+
+In Lely's portrait of her, she is a neat, slightly prim, delicate
+beauty, with very fine features, and such sleepy eyes, as were probably
+the gift of Lely, since he has bestowed them generally on the women whom
+he painted. Mistress Anne Killigrew's hair is in curls, piled up in
+front, but hanging down loosely behind. Her bodice is gathered together
+by a brooch, and she has another brooch on one shoulder. She wears a
+light pearl necklace, and 'drops' shaped like shamrocks in her ears.
+
+Lely painted both Charles I, and Cromwell, who desired his painters to
+omit 'no pimple or wart,' but to paint his face as they saw it.
+
+Among less notable personages Lely painted Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and
+his rough Duchess, once a camp follower, according to popular rumour,
+and named familiarly by the contemptuous wits of the day 'Nan Clarges.'
+It is with not more honourable originals than poor 'Nan Clarges' that
+Lely's name as a painter is chiefly associated. We know what an evil
+time the years after the Restoration proved in England, and it was to
+immortalize, as far as he could, the vain, light women of the
+generation that Lely lent what skill he possessed. There their pictures
+hang in what has been called 'the Beauty Room' at Hampton Court, and no
+good man or woman can look at them without holding such beauty
+detestable.
+
+At Hampton Court also there are several of the eleven portraits of
+Admirals whom Lely painted for James II, when Duke of York.
+
+Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, incorrectly Canaletti, was born at
+Venice in 1697. He was the son of a scene painter at the theatre. In his
+youth he worked under his father; a little later he went to Rome, and
+studied for some time there. Then he came to England, where he remained
+only for two years. I have hesitated about placing his name among those
+of the foreign painters resident in England, but so many of his works
+are in this country that he seems to belong to it in an additional
+sense. He is said to have 'made many pictures and much money.' He died
+at Venice when he was seventy years of age, in 1768. As a painter he
+was famous for his correctness of perspective and precision of outline
+(in which it is alleged he aided himself by the use of the camera),
+qualities specially valuable in the architectural subjects of which he
+was fond, drawing them principally from his native Venice. But his very
+excellence was mechanical, and he showed so little originality or, for
+that matter, fidelity of genius, that he painted his landscapes in
+invariable sunshine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The great wood-carver Grinling Gibbons deserves mention among the
+artists of this date. He was a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in
+1648. He came to London with other carvers the year after the great fire
+of London, and was introduced by Evelyn to Charles II., who took him
+into his employment. 'Gibbons was appointed master carver in wood to
+George I., with a salary of eighteen-pence a day.' He died at his house
+in Bow Street in the sixty-third year of his age, in 1721. It is said
+that no man before Gibbons 'gave to wood the lightness of flowers.' For
+the great houses of Burghley, Petworth, and Chatsworth, Gibbons carved
+exquisite work, in festoons for screens, and chimney-pieces, and panels
+for pictures, of fruit, flowers, shells, and birds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sir Godfrey Kneller was born at Lübeck in 1646, and was the son of an
+architect. He is said to have studied under Rembrandt; but if this be
+true, it must have been in Kneller's early youth. It is more certain
+that he travelled in Italy and returned to settle in Hamburg, but
+changing his plans, he came to England, when he was about thirty years
+of age, in 1675. London became his home. There he painted portraits with
+great success; his prices being fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if
+with one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole-length portrait.
+Charles II, sat at the same time to Kneller and to Lely. Not Titian
+himself painted more crowned heads than it fell to the lot of Kneller to
+paint--not less than six reigning kings and queens of England, and, in
+addition, Louis XIV. of France, Charles VI, of Spain, and the Czar Peter
+of Russia.
+
+William III, created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the
+painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his
+conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled
+more in his conversation than in any originality of observation
+displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite
+qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or
+slovenliness, whether in the man or the artist, did not interfere with
+an immense capacity for work, such as it was, but if Horace Walpole be
+right, that Kneller employed many Flemish painters under him to
+undertake the wigs, draperies, etc. etc., the amount of work in portrait
+painting which Sir Godfrey Kneller accomplished is so far explained. He
+attained the end of being a very rich man, and married an English woman,
+but left no family to succeed to his wealth and his country-seat of
+Whitton, when he died at his house in London in his seventy-eighth year,
+in 1723.
+
+As a painter Sir Godfrey Kneller showed considerable talent in drawing,
+and a certain cumbrous dignity of design, but he had much more industry
+of a certain kind than artistic feeling or taste. When he and Lely
+painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of
+execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the
+better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when
+Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden,
+Addison, Prior, and Steele. Apropos of these writers, among the most
+famous works of Kneller are the forty-three portraits, painted
+originally for Tonson, the bookseller, of the members of the Kit Cat
+club, the social and literary club of the day, which got its name from
+the chance of its holding its meetings in a house the owner of which
+bore the unique name of Christopher Cat. Another series of portraits by
+Kneller are what ought to be, in their designation, the Hampton Court
+Beauties. These are still, like the other 'Beauties,' at Hampton. The
+second series was proposed by William's Queen Mary, and included
+herself, Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, and Mary Bentinck. To
+Sarah Jennings men did award the palm of beauty, but poor Queen Mary,
+who had a modest, simple, comely, English face as a princess, had lost
+her fresh youthful charm by the time she became Queen of England, and
+was still further disfigured by the swelling of the face to which she
+was liable. Her proposal to substitute the worthier women of her court
+for the unworthy beauties of her uncle King Charles' court was not
+relished, and helped to render Mary unpopular--among the women, at
+least, of her nobility. Neither was Sir Godfrey Kneller qualified to
+enhance the attractions of Mary's maids of honour and ladies in waiting,
+who, to complete their disadvantages, lived at a period when it had
+become the fashion for women to crown their persons by an erection on
+their natural heads of artificial 'edifices of three heads.'
+
+To Kneller, as I have already written, we owe the preservation of
+Raphael's cartoons.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.[48]
+
+ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES--TADDEO
+GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO, 1412-1469--BENOZZO
+GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
+1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO, 1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND
+PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI--FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN
+1460--ANTONELLA DA MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE,
+1496--GAROPALO, 1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO
+HAVE DIED ABOUT 1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO
+SPAGNA, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS
+BORDONE, 1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO,
+1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO, 1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO,
+1592-1666--ALBANO, 1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1685--VASARI,
+1513-1574--SOFONISBA ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1620--LAVINIA FONTANA,
+1552-1614.
+
+
+Taddeo Gaddi, the most important of Giotto's scholars, was born in 1300,
+and was held at the baptismal font by Giotto himself. Gaddi rather went
+back on earlier traditions and faults. His excellence lay in his purity
+and simplicity of feeling. His finest pictures are from the life of the
+Virgin, in S. Croce, Florence. He was, like his master, a great
+architect as well as painter. He furnished the plans for the Ponte
+Vecchio and Campanile, Florence, after Giotto's death. He was possessed
+of great activity and industry. He is supposed to have died in 1366, and
+rests in the scene of his labours, since he was buried in the cloisters
+of S. Croce.
+
+Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, a Carmelite friar. The romantic, scandalous
+life, including his slavery in Barbary, attributed to him by Vasari, the
+great biographer of the early Italian painters, has received no
+corroboration from modern researches. It is rather refuted. He always
+signed his pictures 'Frater Filippus,' and his death is entered in the
+register of the Carmine convent as that of 'Frater Filippus.' In all
+probability he was from first to last a monk, and not a disreputable
+one. He describes himself as the poorest friar in Florence, with six
+marriageable nieces dependent on him, and he is said to have been
+involved in debt.
+
+His colouring was 'golden and broad,' in anticipation of that of Titian;
+his draperies were fine. He was wanting in the ideal, but full of human
+feeling, which was apt to get rude and boisterous; his angels were 'like
+great high-spirited boys.' Withal, his style of composition was stately.
+Among the best examples of his work are scenes from the life of St John
+the Baptist in frescoes in the choir of the Duomo at Prato. His panel
+pictures are rather numerous. There are two lunette[49] pictures by Fra
+Filippo in the National Gallery.
+
+Benozzo Gozzoli, 1424-1496, a scholar of Fra Angelico, but resembling
+him only in light and cheerful colouring. He is said to have been the
+first Italian painter smitten with the beauty of the natural world. He
+was the first to create rich landscape backgrounds, and he enlivened
+his landscapes with animals. He displayed a fine fancy for architectural
+effects, introducing into his pictures open porticoes, arcades,
+balconies, and galleries. He liked to have subsidiary groups and circles
+of spectators about his principal figures. In these groups he introduced
+portraits of his contemporaries, true to nature and full of expression
+and delicate feeling. His best work is in the Campo Santo, Pisa, scenes
+from the history of the Old Testament, ranging from Noah to the Queen of
+Sheba. The Pisans were so pleased with his work as to present him, in
+1478, with a sarcophagus intended to contain his remains when they
+should be deposited in the Campo Santo. He survived the gift eighteen
+years, dying in 1496. His easel pictures are rare, and do not offer good
+representations of the master. There is one in the National Gallery--a
+Virgin and Child, with saints and angels.
+
+Luca d'Egidio di Ventura, called also Luca 'da Cortona,' from his
+birth-place, and Luca Signorelli, 1441, supposed to have died about
+1524. His is a great name in the Tuscan School. He played an important
+part in the painting of the Sistine Chapel, though he is only
+represented by one wall picture, the History of Moses. At his best he
+anticipated Michael Angelo in power and grandeur, but he was given to
+exaggeration. His fame rests principally on his frescoes at Orvieto,
+where, by a strange chance, he was appointed, after an interval of time,
+to continue and complete the work begun by Fra Angelico, the master most
+opposed to Signorelli in style. Luca added the great dramatic scenes
+which include the history of Antichrist, executed with a grandeur which
+'only Lionardo among the painters sharing a realistic tendency could
+have surpassed.' These scenes, which contain The Resurrection, Hell, and
+Paradise, bear a strong resemblance to the work of Michael Angelo. In
+his fine drawing of the human figure Signorelli may be known by 'the
+squareness of his forms in joints and extremities.' A conspicuous detail
+in his pictures is frequently a bright-coloured Roman scarf. His work is
+rarely seen north of the Alps.
+
+Sandro Filipepi, called Botticelli, 1447-1515. He was an apprentice to
+a goldsmith, and then became a scholar of Filippo Lipi's. Botticelli was
+vehement and impetuous, full of passion and poetry, seeking to express
+movement. He was the most dramatic painter of his school. Occasionally
+he rises to a grandeur that allies him to Signorelli and Michael Angelo.
+His circular pictures of the Madonna and Child, with angels, are
+numerous. Like Fra Filippo, Botticelli's angels are noble youths, some
+of them belonging to the great families of the time. They are prone to
+be ecstatic with joy or frantic with grief. There is a grand Coronation
+of the Virgin, by Botticelli at Hamilton Palace, and a beautiful
+Nativity by the old master belongs to Mr Fuller Maitland. His Madonna
+and Child are grand and tragic figures always. Botticelli's noble
+frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are apt to be overlooked because of
+Michael Angelo's 'sublime work' on the ceiling. There has been a revival
+of Botticelli's renown within late years, partly due to the new
+interest in the earlier Italian painters which Mr Browning has done
+something to stimulate.
+
+I quote some thoughtful remarks on Botticelli by W.C. Lefroy in
+_Macmillan's Magazine_: 'Mr Ruskin, we know, divides Italian art into
+the art of faith, beginning with Giotto, and lasting rather more than
+200 years, and the art of unbelief, or at least of cold and inoperative
+faith, beginning in the middle of Raphael's life. But whatever division
+we adopt, we must remember that the revival of Paganism, as a matter of
+fact, affected men in different ways. Right across the schools this new
+spirit draws its line, but the line is not a hard and sharp one. Some
+men lie wholly on one side of it, with Giotto, Angelico, and Orcagna;
+some wholly upon the other, with Titian and Correggio, but there are
+some on whom it seems to fall as a rainbow falls upon a hill-side. Such,
+for instance, is Botticelli. Now he tries to paint as men painted in the
+old days of unpolluted faith, and then again he breaks away and paints
+like a very heathen.
+
+'The interest which this artist has excited in the present generation
+has been exaggerated into something like a fashion, and recent criticism
+has delighted to find or imagine in him the idiosyncrasies of recent
+thought. To us it may be he does in truth say more than he or his
+contemporaries dreamed of, but while true criticism will sternly refuse
+to help us to see in his pictures that which is purely subjective, it
+will, I think, recognise the fact that a day like ours is capable of
+reading in the subtle suggestions of ancient art thoughts which have
+only now come to be frankly defined or exquisitely analysed. To us,
+moreover, Botticelli presents not only the poem of the apparition of the
+young and beautiful manhood of humanism before the brooding and
+entranced, yet half expectant, maidenhood of mediævalism, but also the
+poem of the painter's own peculiar relation to that crisis. For us there
+is the poetry of the thing itself, and also the poetry of Botticelli's
+attempt to express it. The work of Botticelli does not supply a
+universal utterance for mankind like Shakespeare's plays, but when we
+stand before the screen on which his "Nativity" is hung, or contemplate
+in the adjoining room his two perplexed conceptions of "Aphrodite," we
+are face to face with a genuine outcome of that memorable meeting,
+mediævalism, humanism, and Savonarola, which no generation can afford to
+ignore, and our own especially delights to contemplate. There has been
+much dispute about the date of Botticelli's "Nativity," and some
+defenders of Savonarola have hoped to read 1511 in the strange character
+of its inscription, so that this beautiful picture, standing forth as
+the work of one for many years under the influence of "the Frate," may
+refute the common calumny that that influence was unfriendly to art. Our
+catalogue, indeed, unhesitatingly asserts of Botticelli, that "he became
+a follower of Savonarola and no doubt suffered from it;" but though
+there seems to be really little doubt that the "Nativity" was painted in
+1500, the inscription, with its mystic allusion to the Apocalypse, and
+the whole character of the picture, afford unmistakable evidence of the
+influence of Savonarola.'
+
+Pietro Perugino, 1446, died of the plague at Frontignano in 1522.
+Perugino is another painter who has been indebted to the last
+Renaissance. His fame, in this country rested chiefly on the
+circumstance that he was Raphael's master, whom the generous prince of
+painters delighted to honour, till the tide of fashion in art rose
+suddenly and floated old Pietro once more to the front. At his best he
+had luminous colour, grace, softness, and enthusiastic earnestness,
+especially in his young heads. His defects were monotony, and formality,
+together with comparative ignorance of the principles of his art. His
+conception of his calling in its true dignity was not high. His attempts
+at expressing ardour degenerated into mannerism, and he acquired habits
+and tricks of arrangement and style, among which figured his favourite
+upturned heads, that in the end were ill drawn, and, like every other
+affectation, became wearisome. In the process of falling off as an
+artist, when mere manual dexterity took the place of earnest devotion
+and honest pains, Perugino had a large studio where many pupils executed
+his commissions, and where, working for gain instead of excellence in
+art, he had the satisfaction, doubtless, of amassing a large fortune.
+Among his finest works is the picture of an enthroned Madonna and Child
+in the gallery of the Uffizi. Another fine Madonna with Saints is at
+Cremona. His frescoes in the Sala del Campio at Perugia are among his
+best works. The subjects of these frescoes are partly scriptural; partly
+mythological. In the execution there is excellence alike in drawing,
+colouring, and the disposal of drapery. A _chef d'oeuvre_ by the master
+is the Madonna of the Certosa at Pavia, now in, the National Gallery.
+Yet it is said to have been painted at the very period when Michael
+Angelo ridiculed Perugino's work as 'absurd and antiquated.' Vittore
+Carpaccio, date and place of birth unknown, though he is said to have
+been a native of Istria. He was a historical painter of the early
+Venetian School and a follower of the Bellini. His romantic _genre_
+pictures show the daily life of the Venice of his time, and are
+furnished with landscape and architectural backgrounds. His masterly and
+rich work is mostly in Venice. He introduces animals freely and well in
+his designs.
+
+Carlo Crivelli was another master of the fifteenth century who deserves
+notice. He had strong individuality, yet was influenced by the Paduan
+and Venetian Schools. He displayed an old-fashioned preference for
+painting in tempera. Sometimes his drawing approaches that of Mantegna,
+while he has a gorgeousness of colouring all his own. His pictures
+occasionally show dignity of composition in combination with grace and
+daintiness; but he could be guilty of exaggerated vehemence of
+expression. He frequently introduced fruit, flowers, and birds in his
+work. He is fully represented in the National Gallery, his works there
+ranging from 'small tender pictures of the dead Christ with angels, to a
+sumptuous altar-piece in numerous compartments.'
+
+Filippino Lipi was an adopted son and probably a relation of Fra
+Filippo's, though a scholar's use of his master's name was not uncommon.
+The date of his birth is earlier than 1460. Filippino was also a pupil
+of Botticelli's, while there was a higher sense of beauty and grace in
+the pupil than in the teacher. Among his last works is the Vision of St
+Bernard, an easel picture in the Badia at Florence. The apparition of
+the Madonna in this picture is said to be 'full of charm.' In his larger
+works he is one of the greatest historical painters of his country.
+Roman antiquities had the same keen interest for him which they held for
+the greatest of his contemporaries, and he made free use of them in the
+architecture of his pictures. He has fine work in the Carmelite Church,
+Florence, and in S. Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome. Much of some of his
+pictures is painted over. The National Gallery has a picture of
+Filippino's 'of grand execution,' though almost colourless--the Madonna
+and Child, with St Jerome and St Francis.
+
+Antonella da Messina was the Neapolitan painter who brought the practice
+of painting in oils from the Netherlands into Italy, though it is now
+believed, from stubborn discrepancies in dates, that the story of his
+great friendship with Jan Van Eyck, as given by Vasari, is apochryphal.
+Very likely Hans Memling, called also 'John of Bruges,' was the real
+friend and leader of Antonella. His best work consisted of portraits. He
+is believed to have died at Venice in 1496.
+
+Benvenuto Tisio, surnamed from the place of his birth Garofalo, was born
+in 1481, and died in 1559. He passed from the early school of Ferrara to
+that of Raphael. His conception was apt to be fantastic, while his
+colouring was vivid to abruptness, and he was deficient in charm of
+expression. He fell into the fault of monotonous ideality. At the same
+time his heads are beautiful, and his drapery is classic. His finest
+work is an 'Entombment' in the Borghese Palace, Rome. There is an
+altar-piece by Garofalo, a Madonna and Child with angels, in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Bernardo Luini, who stands foremost among the scholars of Lionardo da
+Vinci, was born by the Lago Maggiore, the date unknown, came to Milan in
+1500, was elderly in 1525, and is supposed to have died not long after
+1530. His work is chiefly found in Milan. His great merit has been only
+lately acknowledged. He is not 'very powerful or original,' but for
+'purity, grace, and spiritual expression,' he ranks very high. He unites
+the earnestness of the older masters with the prevailing feeling for
+beauty of the great masters of Italian Art. His pictures were long
+mistaken for those of his master, Lionardo, though it is said that when
+the difference between them is once pointed out, it is easily
+recognised; indeed, the resemblance is confined to a smiling beatific
+expression in the countenances, which abounds more in Luini's pictures.
+His heads of women, children, and angels present every degree of
+serenity, sweet cheerfulness and happiness, up to ecstatic rapture.
+'Christ Disputing with the Doctors,' in the National Gallery, formerly
+called a Lionardo, is now known to be a Luini. He painted much, whether
+in tempera, fresco, or oil. His favourite subjects in oil were the
+Madonna and Child, with St John and the Lamb, and the Marriage of St
+Catherine. Probable he appears to greatest advantage in frescoes. He is
+said to have reached his highest perfection in the figure of St John in
+a Crucifixion in the Monasterio Maggiore, Milan.
+
+Jacopo Palma, called Il Palma Vecchio, was born about 1480 near Bergamo,
+and died in 1528. He is believed to have studied under Giovanni Bellini,
+while he is also the chief follower of Giorgione. His characteristics
+are ample forms and gorgeous breadth of drapery. His female saints, with
+their large rounded figures, have a soft yet commanding expression. He
+had an enchanting feeling for landscape, which seems to have been the
+birthright of the Venetian painters. To Palma is owing what are called
+'Santa Conversazione,' where there are numerous groups round the Virgin
+and Child, as if they are holding a court in a retired and beautiful
+country nook. Palma rivalled Giorgione and Titian as a painter of
+women's portraits. Among these is that of his daughter Violante,
+believed to have been loved by Titian. 'Palma's three Daughters,' in the
+Dresden Gallery, is a masterpiece of 'fair, full-blown beauty.' The hair
+of the women is of the curiously bleached yellow tint affected then by
+the Venetian ladies. Palma painted many pictures, leaving at his death
+forty-our unfinished.
+
+Giovanni Antonio da Pardenone, born 1483, died 1538. He had many names,
+'Pardenone' from his birth-place, 'Corticellis' from that of his father,
+and he is believed to have assumed the name 'Regillo' after he received
+knighthood from the King of Hungary. He was Venetian in his artistic
+qualities. Many of his works are in his native Pardetowns near. All have
+suffered and some are now hidden by whitewash. His chief strength lay in
+fresco. His scenes from the Passion in the cathedral, Cremona, are
+greatly damaged and wretchedly restored, but they still reveal the
+painter as a great master. They have 'fine drawing, action, excellent
+colouring, grand management of light and shade, with freedom of hand and
+dignity of conception.' In the prophets and sibyls around the cupola of
+the Madonna di Campagna, Piacenza, Pardenone's power is fully proven.
+His immense works in fresco account for the rarity of his oil pictures
+and their comparative inferiority. There is only one picture, and that a
+portrait, indisputably assigned to Pardenone in England, in the Baring
+Collection.
+
+Giovanni di Pietro, known as Lo Spagna (the Spaniard), was a
+contemporary of Raphael's, a fellow-pupil of his under Perugino. There
+is no record of the time and place of Lo Spagna's birth. He died in
+1533. He was a careful, conscientious follower of Perugino and Raphael,
+doing finished and delicate work; an 'Assumption' in a church at Trevi
+is a fine example of his qualities. His best picture was painted in
+1516, and is at Assisi. It represents the Madonna enthroned with three
+saints on each side. In his later works he betrayed feebleness. Pictures
+by Lo Spagna are often attributed to Raphael.
+
+Giulio Pippi, surnamed Romano, born in 1492, died in 1546, was a very
+different painter, while he was the most celebrated of Raphael's
+scholars. He had a vigorous, daring spirit, with a free hand and a bold
+fancy. So long as he painted under Raphael, Giulio followed his master
+closely, especially in his study of the antique, but he lacked the
+purity and grace of his teacher, on whose death, the pupil leaving Rome,
+pursued his own coarser, more vehement impulses. The frescoes in the
+Villa Modama, Rome, are good examples of his style, so is the
+altar-piece of the Martyrdom of St Stephen in S. Stefano, Genoa. Giulio
+Romano was the architect who designed the rebuilding of half Mantua.
+His best easel picture in England is the 'Education of Jupiter by Nymphs
+and Corybantes,' in the National Gallery. In Raphael's lifetime his
+principal scholar was accustomed to work on the master's pictures, and
+on his death Giulio, together with another pupil, Gianfrancesco Penni,
+were left executors of Raphael's will and heirs of his designs.
+
+Paris Bordone was born at Treviso in 1500 and died in 1570. He was
+educated in the Venetian School, and remained remarkable for delicate
+rosy colour in his flesh tints and for purple, crimson, and shot hues in
+his draperies, which were usually small and in crumpled folds. His _chef
+d'oeuvre_ is in the Venetian Academy. It is a fisherman presenting a ring
+to the Doge, and is a large and fine picture with many figures. He dealt
+frequently in mythological or poetic subjects. There is an example of
+the first in the National Gallery. He was great in single female
+subjects and women's portraits. There is a portrait by Bordone of a
+lovely woman of nineteen belonging to the Brignole family, in the
+National Gallery. He had often fine landscape and grand architecture in
+his pictures.
+
+Il Parmigianino, born 1503, died 1540, was a follower of Correggio's. In
+Parmigianino's case the danger of the master's peculiarities became
+apparent by the lapse into affectation and frivolity. 'His Madonnas are
+empty and condescending, his female saints like ladies in waiting.'
+Still there were certain indestructible beauties of the master which yet
+clung to the scholar. He had clear warm colouring, decision, and good
+conception of human life. He was highly successful in portraits. There
+is a splendid portrait by Parmigianino, said to be Columbus, in Naples.
+Among his celebrated pictures is 'The Madonna with the Long Neck,' in
+the Pitti Palace. An altar-piece in the National Gallery, which
+represents a Madonna in the clouds with St John the Baptist appearing
+to St Jerome, is a good example of Parmigianino. It is said that he was
+engrossed with this picture during the siege of Rome in 1527. The
+soldiers entered the studio intent on pillage, but surprising the
+master at his work, respected his enthusiasm and protected him.
+
+Federigo Baroccio, of Urbino, born in 1528, died in 1612, was also a
+follower of Correggio's, and made a stand against the decline of art in
+his day. He was tender and idyllic, though apt in his turn to be
+affected and sentimental. When painting in the Vatican, Rome, his rivals
+sought to take his life by poison. The attempt caused Baroccio to return
+to Urbino, where he established himself and executed his commissions.
+
+Amirighi da Caravaggio was born at Caravaggio in 1569, and died at Porto
+Ercole in 1609. He was chief of the naturalistic school, the members of
+which painted common nature and violent passions in bitter opposition to
+the eclectics, especially the Caracci. The feud was sometimes carried on
+appositely enough on the side of the naturalistic painters by poison and
+dagger. Caravaggio was distinguished by his wild temper and stormy life,
+in keeping with his pictures. He resided principally in Rome, but dwelt
+also in Naples. He is vulgar but striking, even pathetic in some of his
+pictures. The 'Beheading of John the Baptist,' in the Cathedral, Malta,
+is one of his masterpieces. His Holy Families now and then resemble
+gipsy _ménages_.
+
+Guiseppe Ribiera, a Spaniard, and so called Lo Spagnoletto, was born
+1593 and died 1656. He followed Caravaggio, while he retained
+reminiscences of the Spanish School and of the Venetian masters. Some of
+his best pictures, such as 'the Pieta with the Marys and the Disciples,'
+and his 'Last Supper,' are in Naples. He had a wild fancy with a
+preference for horrible subjects--executions, tortures--in this respect
+resembling Domenichino. Lo Spagnoletto is said to be particularly
+unpleasant in his mythological scenes. Many of his pictures have
+blackened with time. His 'Mary of Egypt standing by her open Grave' is a
+remarkable picture in the Dresden Gallery.
+
+Giovanni Francesco Barbiera, surnamed Guercino da Cinto, approached the
+school of the Caracci. In his art he resembled Guido Reni, with the same
+sweetness, greater liveliness, and fine chiaroscuro. 'Dido's Last
+Moments' and 'St Peter raising Tabitha' in Rome and in the Pitti Palace
+are fine examples of Guercino's work. His later pictures, like Guido's,
+are fascinating in softness, delicate colouring and tender sentiment,
+degenerating, however, into mannerism and insipidity, while his
+colouring becomes at last pale and washy.
+
+Albano, born 1578, died 1660. He had elegance and cheerfulness which
+hardly rose to grace. He painted mostly scenes from ancient mythology,
+such as 'Venus and her Companions.' Religious subjects were
+comparatively rare with him; one, however, often repeated was the
+'Infant Christ sleeping on the Cross.'
+
+Giovanni Battista Salvi, surnamed from his birth-place Sassoferrato, was
+born in 1605 and died in 1685. He followed the scholars of the Caracci,
+but with some independence, returning to older and greater masters. His
+art was distinguished by a peculiar but slightly affected gentleness of
+conception, pleasing and sweet--with the sweetness verging on weakness.
+He finished with minute care. He gave constant representations of the
+Madonna and Child and Holy Families in a domestic character. In one of
+his pictures in Naples the Madonna is engaged in sewing. His most
+celebrated, 'Madonna del Rosario,' is in S. Sabina, Rome. The Madonna
+bending in ecstatic worship over an infant Christ lying on a cushion is
+in the Dresden Gallery.
+
+Giorgio Vasari was born at Arezzo in 1512 and died at Florence in 1574.
+He was an architect, or jeweller, and a historical painter of heavy
+crowded pictures. His lives of the early Italian painters and sculptors
+up to his own time, the sixteenth century, though full of traditional
+gossip, are invaluable as graphic chronicles of much interesting
+information which would otherwise have been lost.
+
+Sofonisba Anguisciola, born 1535, died about 1620, was a pupil of
+Bernardino Campi about the close of the sixteenth century at Cremona.
+She is justly praised by Vasari. Though her works are rare there are a
+few in England and Scotland. Three of her pictures which are mentioned
+with high commendation by Dr. Waagen are, 'a nun in the white robes of
+her order, nobly conceived and delicately coloured,' in Lord
+Yarborough's collection; in Mr Harcourt's collection, 'her own
+portrait, still very youthful, delicate, charming, and clear;' and in
+the collection of the late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, 'another portrait of
+herself at an easel painting the Virgin and Child on wood, delicately
+conceived, clear in colour, and very careful.'
+
+Lavinia Fontana, born in 1552, died 1614, was a daughter of Prospero
+Fontana, who belonged to the fast degenerating Bolognese artists at the
+close of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. She was
+a better artist than her fellow painters, worked cleverly and boldly,
+and showed truth to nature. She has left excellent portraits. In the
+late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's collection there is a picture by her,
+'Two girls in a boat with a youth rowing,' on wood, 'of very graceful
+motive and careful treatment.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.[50]
+
+GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE EIGHTEENTH
+CENTURY--VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--VAN
+LEYDEN, 1494-1533--VAN SOMER, 1570-1624--SNYDERS, 1579-1657--G.
+HONTHORST, 1592-1662--JAN STEEN, 1626-1679--GERARD DOW, 1613-1680--DE
+HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--VAN OSTADE, 1610-1685--MAAS,
+1632-1693--METZU, 1615, STILL ALIVE IN 1667--TERBURG,
+1608-1681--NETCHER, 1639-1684--BOL, 1611-1680--VAN DER HELST,
+1613-1670--RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682--HOBBEMA, 1638-1709--BERCHEM,
+1620-1683--BOTH, 1610 (?)-1650 (?)--DU JARDIN, 1625-1678--ADRIAN VAN DE
+VELDE, 1639-1672--VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712--DE WITTE, 1607-1692--VAN
+DER NEER, 1619(?)-1683--WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE THE YOUNGER,
+1633-1707--BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708--VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
+1653--HONDECOETER, 1636-1695--JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719--PATER SEGERS,
+1590-1661--VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749--VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722--MENGS,
+1728-1774.
+
+
+Roger van der Weyden was a contemporary of the Van Eycks, born at
+Tournai. His early pictures in Brussels are lost. He visited Italy in
+1439, and was treated with distinction at Ferrara. His Flemish realistic
+cast of mind and artistic power remained utterly unaffected by the grand
+Italian pictures with which he came in contact; so did his profound
+earnestness, which must have been great indeed, since its effects are
+felt through all impediments down to the present day. His expressive
+realism chose subjects in which the sentiments of grief and pity could
+be most fitly shown. He sternly rejected any suggestion to idealise the
+human form, and paint heads, hands, or feet different from those in
+ordinary life. 'It is the simplicity with which he gives expression by
+large and melancholy eyes, thought by projections of the forehead, grief
+by contracted muscles, and suffering by attenuation of the flesh which
+touches us.' The deadly earnestness of the man impresses the spectator
+at this distant date. 'There is no smile in any of his faces, but there
+is many a face wrung with agony, and there is many a tear.' He objected
+to shadow in every form, and filled his pictures with an invariable
+atmosphere and light--those which belong to dawn before sunrise. Among
+his finer works are a triptych[51] belonging to the Duke of Westminster,
+a 'Last Judgment' in the Hospital at Bearne, and a large 'Descent from
+the Cross' in Madrid. In the triptych in the centre is Christ with black
+hair, which is unusual, in his left hand the globe. On his right is the
+Virgin Mary, on his left St John the Evangelist; on the right wing is
+St John the Baptist, on his left the Magdalene.
+
+Lucas Van Leyden was born in 1494 and died in 1533. He painted both
+scriptural subjects and everyday scenes, being a man of varied powers.
+He worked admirably for his time, and added to his art that of an
+engraver. He followed the Van Eycks, but lowered their treatment of
+sacred subjects. In incidents taken from common life he showed himself
+full of observation, and possessed of some humour. His pictures are
+rare. A 'Last Judgment,' in the Town House, Leyden, is a striking but
+unpleasant example of Lucas Van Leyden's work.
+
+Paul Van Somer was born at Antwerp in 1570, and died in 1624. He worked
+for many years in England, where his best works--portraits--remain. He
+was truthful, a good colourist, and finished carefully. His portraits of
+Lord Bacon at Panshanger and of the Earl and Countess of Arundel at
+Arundel Castle are well known.
+
+Frans Snyders was born in 1579, and died, at Antwerp in 1657. After
+Rubens, Snyders was the greatest Flemish animal painter. He painted
+along with Rubens often, Snyders supplying the animals and Rubens the
+figures. Frans Snyders paid a visit to Italy and Rome, from which he
+seems to have profited, judging by his skill in arrangement. This skill
+he displayed also in his kitchen-pieces (magnificent shows of fruit,
+vegetables, game, fish, etc.), which, like his animal pictures, are
+numerous. In one of these kitchen-pieces in the Dresden Gallery, Rubens
+and his second wife are said to figure as the cooks. Princes and nobles
+bade for Snyders' pictures. There is a famous 'Boar Hunt' in the Louvre,
+in Munich 'Lionesses Pursuing a Roebuck,' in Vienna 'Boar attacked by
+Nine Dogs.' Snyders' animal pictures are full of energetic action and
+fierce passion. To these qualities is frequently added hideous realism
+in detail. There are many Snyders in English galleries.
+
+Gerard Honthorst was born at Utrecht in 1592, and died in 1662. He was a
+follower of Caravaggio. He visited Italy and found favour in Rome, where
+he got from his night-pieces Correggio's name, 'Della Notte.' Honthorst
+was summoned to England by Charles I., for whom he painted several
+pictures. He entered the service of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange,
+and painted also for the King of Denmark. He left an extraordinary
+number of works, sacred, mythological, historical, and latterly many
+portraits. He drew well and painted powerfully, but was coarsely
+realistic in his treatment. At Hampton Court there are two of his best
+portraits, those of the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia and the Duke of
+Buckingham and his family. Gerard Honthorst's younger brother, William,
+was a portrait painter not unlike the elder brother in style.
+
+Jan Steen was born at Leyden in 1626, and died in 1679. He was great as
+a _genre_ painter. He is said to have been, after Rembrandt, the most
+humorous of Dutch painters, full of animal spirits and fun. At his best,
+composition, colouring, and execution were all in excellent keeping. At
+his worst, he was vulgar and repulsive in his heads, and careless and
+faulty in his work. He was very rarely either kindly or reverent in his
+subjects, though, in spite of what is known to have been his riotous
+life, he is comparatively free from the grossness which is often the
+shame of Flemish and Dutch art. Jan Steen succeeded his father as a
+brewer and tavern-keeper at Delft. He renounced the brewery, in which he
+did not succeed, and joined the Painters' Guild, Haarlem; but his
+position as a tavern-keeper is reflected in his pictures, of which
+eating and drinking, card-playing, etc., are frequently the _motifs_.
+His family relations were not conducive to higher principles and tastes.
+He is said to have been so lost to common feeling as to have painted his
+first wife when she was in a state of intoxication.[52] His second wife
+may have been a worthier woman, but she was drawn from the lowest class,
+and had been accustomed to sell sheeps' heads and trotters in the
+butchers' market. Without doubt Jan Steen had extraordinary genius
+coexisting with his coarse, careless nature and jovial habits, and he
+must have worked with great facility, since, in spite of his idleness
+and comparatively early death, he left as many as two hundred pictures,
+rendered him extremely popular. Besides his favourite subjects, such as
+'The Family Jollification,' 'The Feast of the Bean King,' 'Game of
+Skittles,' he has pictures in a slightly higher atmosphere, such as 'A
+Pastor Visiting a Young Girl,' 'The Parrot,' 'Schoolmaster with
+Unmanageable Boys,' 'The Pursuit of Alchemy.' Among the latter a good
+example is 'The Music Master' in the National Gallery.
+
+Gerard Dow was born in 1613 and died in 1680. He was a _genre_ painter
+of great merit. He belonged to Leyden, and was a pupil of Rembrandt. He
+began with portraiture, often painting his own face, and went on to
+scenes from low and middle-class life, but rarely attempted to represent
+high society. Compared to Jan Steen, however, he is refined. He had a
+curious fondness for painting hermits. The lighting of his pictures is
+frequently by lantern or candle. They are mostly small, and without
+animated action, but are full of picturesqueness. He was a good
+colourist, 'with a rare truth to nature and a marvellous distinctness of
+eye and precision of hand.' Minute as his execution was, his touch was
+'free and soft.' His best pictures are 'like nature's self seen through
+the camera obscura.' An instance often given of his exquisite finish is
+that of a broom in the corner of one of his pictures. Some contemporary
+had remarked how careful and elaborate was the labour bestowed on it,
+when the painter answered that he was still to give it several hours'
+work. He must have been exceedingly industrious as well as painstaking,
+since he left two hundred pictures as his contribution to Dutch art.
+Among his finer pictures are 'An Old Woman reading the Bible to her
+Husband,' in the Louvre; 'The Poulterer's Shop,' in the National
+Gallery. His _chef d'oeuvre_, 'The Woman Sick of the Dropsy,' is in the
+Louvre. His candlelight is the finest rendered by any master. There is a
+good example of it in 'The Evening School,' in the Amsterdam Gallery.
+
+Peter de Hooch--spelt often, De Hooge--was the _genre_ painter of full,
+clear sunlight. The dates of his birth and death can only be guessed by
+those of his pictures, which extend from 1656 to 1670. His groups are
+generally playing cards, smoking, drinking, or engaged in domestic
+occupations--almost always in the open air. No other _genre_ painter can
+compare with him in reproducing the effects of sunlight. His prevailing
+colour is red, varied and repeated with great delicacy. English lovers
+of art brought De Hooch into favour, and many of his pictures are in
+England. There are fine examples--'The Court of a Dutch House' and 'A
+Courtyard'--in the National Gallery.
+
+Adrian van Ostade was born at Haarlem in 1610 and died in his native
+town in 1685. He has been called 'the Rembrandt of _genre_ painters,'
+and, like Rembrandt, he was without the sense of human beauty and grace,
+for even his children are ugly; yet it is the purer, happier side of
+national life which he constantly represents, and he had great feeling
+for nature, with picturesqueness and harmony of design and colouring, as
+well as mastery of the technique of his art. He suffered many hardships
+in his youth, and grew up a quiet, industrious, family man. He left a
+very large number of pictures, nearly four hundred, many of them good,
+and not a few in England. 'The Alchemist'[53] is in the National
+Gallery.
+
+Maas, born in 1632, died in 1693, is a much-prized _genre_ painter,
+whose pictures are rare. He was a pupil of Rembrandt. He is said to have
+treated 'very simple subjects with naïve homeliness and kindly humour.'
+His pictures are 'well lit, with deep warm harmony, and a vigorous
+touch.' 'The Idle Servant-maid,' in the National Gallery, is a
+masterpiece.
+
+Metzu, like Terburg, is _par excellence_ one of the two painters of
+Dutch high life. Metzu was born in 1615, and is known to have been alive
+in 1667. He painted both on a large and a small scale, and occasionally
+departed from his peculiar province to represent market-scenes, etc. He
+is the most refined and picturesque of _genre_ painters on a small
+scale. Among his _chefs d'oeuvre_ are a 'Lady holding a Glass of Wine and
+receiving an Officer,' in the Louvre; and a 'Girl writing, a Gentleman
+leaning on her chair and another girl opposite playing the Lute,' in the
+Hague Gallery. The fine 'Duet,' and the 'Music Lesson' are both in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Gerard Terburg was born at Zwol, in 1608, and died in 1681. He visited
+Germany and Italy in his youth. His small groups and single figures,
+taken from the wealthier classes, with their luxurious surroundings, are
+'given with exquisite delicacy and refinement.' Included in his
+masterpieces are a 'Girl in white satin (a texture which he rendered
+marvellously) washing her hands in a basin held before her by a
+maid-servant,' in the Dresden Gallery; an 'Officer in confidential talk
+with a Young Girl, and a Trumpeter who has brought him a Letter,' in the
+Hague Gallery; a 'Young Lady in white satin sitting playing the Lute,'
+in the Chateau of Wilhelmshöe, at Cassell. There are twenty-three
+Terburgs in England and Scotland.
+
+Caspar Netcher, born in 1639, died in 1684. He formed himself upon Metzu
+and Terburg. He is the great Dutch painter of childhood. His finest
+works are in the Dresden Gallery. In the National Gallery is his
+'Children blowing Bubbles.'
+
+Ferdinand Bol was born at Dordrecht in 1611, and died at Amsterdam in
+1680. He was a student of Rembrandt's, and distinguished himself in
+sacred and historical pictures, and especially in portraits. He followed
+his master in his youth, fell off in his art in middle life, but became
+again excellent in his later years. Among his fine pictures are 'David's
+Charge to Solomon,' in the Dublin National Gallery; and 'Joseph
+presenting his father Jacob to Pharaoh,' in the Dresden Gallery. His
+last portraits are considered very fine. They are taken in the fullest
+light, and have a surprising amount of animation. Such a portrait,
+called 'The Astronomer,' is in the National Gallery.[54]
+
+Jacob Ruysdael was born in 1625(?) at Haarlem. In 1668 he was in
+Amsterdam, and acted as witness to the marriage of Hobbema, whose lack
+of worldly prosperity Ruysdael shared. He himself was unmarried, and
+maintained his father in his old age. In the prime of life Jacob
+Ruysdael in turn fell into extreme poverty, and died an inmate of the
+Haarlem Almshouse in 1682--a sad record of Holland's greatest landscape
+painter, for 'beyond dispute' Ruysdael is the first of the famous Dutch
+landscape painters.
+
+'In no other is there the feeling for the poetry of Northern nature
+united with perfect execution, admirable drawing, great knowledge of
+chiaroscuro, powerful colouring, and a mastery of the brush which ranged
+from the minutest touch to broad, free execution.' His prevailing tone
+of colour is a full, decided green, though age has given many of his
+pictures a brown tone. A considerable number of his pictures are in a
+greyish, clear, cool tone (good examples of the last are to be seen in
+the Dresden Gallery). He generally painted the flat Dutch country in
+tranquil repose. He dealt usually in heavy clouded skies which told of
+showers past and coming, and dark sheets of water overshadowed by
+trees, lending a melancholy sentiment to the picture. He was fond of
+wide expanses of land and water, fond also of introducing the spires of
+his native Haarlem, touching the horizon line. He has left a few
+sea-pieces, always with cloudy heavens and heaving or raging seas;[55]
+where he has given sketches of sea, and shore, the ærial perspective is
+rendered in tender gradations 'full of pathos.' He has other pictures
+representing hilly, even mountainous, landscapes. In these foaming
+waterfalls form a prominent feature. Ruysdael was weak in his drawing of
+men and animals, in which he was occasionally assisted by
+fellow-artists, such as Berchem and Van de Velde. Among his finest
+pictures are 'A View of the Country round Haarlem,' in the Museum of the
+Hague; 'A flat country, with a road leading to a village and fields with
+wheat sheaves,' in the Dresden Gallery; 'A hilly bare country through
+which a river runs; the horseman and beggar on a bridge, by
+Wouvermans,' in the Louvre. His most remarkable waterfall is in the
+Hague Museum. In the Dresden Gallery there is 'A Jewish Cemetery,' 'full
+of melancholy.' Three of Ruysdael's fine waterfalls are in the National
+Gallery. Of two very grand storms which he painted one is in the Louvre,
+the other in the collection of the Marquis of Lansdowne at Bowood. There
+are many of Ruysdael's pictures in England. In the great landscape
+painter, as in the other renowned Dutch artists of the seventeenth
+century, the influence of Rembrandt is marked.
+
+Meindert Hobbema was born in 1638, married in 1638, and died in poverty
+at Amsterdam in 1709. His works, which were neglected in his lifetime,
+now fetch much more than their weight in gold. Sums as large as four
+thousand pounds have been paid more than once for a Hobbema, yet his
+name was not found in any dictionary of art or artists for more than a
+century after his death. The English were the first to acknowledge
+Hobbema's merit, and nine-tenths of his works are in England, where he
+is the most popular Dutch landscape painter. But he is said by judges to
+have less invention and less poetic sensibility than his contemporary
+and friend Ruysdael. Hobbema's subjects are usually villages surrounded
+by trees like those in Guelderland, water-mills, a slightly broken
+country, with groups of trees, wheatfields, meadows, and small pools,
+more rarely portions of towns, and still more seldom old castles and
+stately mansions.[56] He has all the lifelike truthfulness of the Dutch
+artists. In tone he is as warm and golden as Ruysdael is cool in his
+greens. In the National Gallery there are excellent specimens of
+Hobbema, such as 'The Avenue Middelharnis' and 'A Landscape in Showery
+Weather.'
+
+Nicolas Berchem, often spelt Berghem, was born at Haarlem in 1620, and
+died at Amsterdam in 1683. He was an excellent Dutch landscape painter.
+He had evidently visited Italy, and displayed great fondness for
+Italian subjects. His pictures show 'varied composition, good drawing,
+fine ærial effects, freedom, playfulness, and spirit.' As a colourist he
+was unequal, being often warm and harmonious, but at other times heavy
+and cold. It is clear that he was no student of life, from the monotony
+of his shepherds and shepherdesses and the sameness of his animals. He
+was naturally industrious, and was spurred on, as a still greater artist
+is said to have been, by the greed of his wife. He painted upwards of
+four hundred pictures, besides doing figures and animals for other
+painters. The great northern European galleries are rich in his works.
+One of his best pictures, 'A Shepherdess driving her cattle through a
+ford in a rocky landscape,' where the cool tone of the landscape is
+contrasted with the golden tone of the cattle, is in the Louvre. Another
+fine picture, 'Crossing the Ford,' is in the National Gallery.
+
+Jan Both, born in 1610 (?), died in 1650 (?), was another Dutch
+landscape painter still more spellbound by Italy,[57] which he visited,
+and where he fell under the influence of Claude Lorraine. Both devoted
+himself thenceforth to Italian landscape to a greater degree than was
+practised by any other Dutch painter. He was excellent in drawing and
+skilful in rendering the golden glories of Italian sunsets. He painted
+freely and with solidity. The figures of men and animals in his pictures
+were often introduced by his brother Andreas. Jan Both excelled both in
+large and small pictures, but he was most uninterestingly uniform in
+design. He had generally a foreground of lofty trees, and for a
+background a range of mountains rising step by step, with a wide plain
+at their feet. Sometimes he introduced a waterfall or a lake. He rarely
+painted particular points in a landscape. His life was not a long one,
+so that his pictures do not number more than a hundred and fifty.
+Occasionally his warm tone of colouring degenerates to a foxy red. One
+of Both's best pictures--a landscape in which the fresh light of
+morning is apparent--is in the National Gallery.
+
+Karil du Jardin, born in 1625, died in 1678, is a third great Dutch
+landscape painter, whose fancy Italy laid hold of, so that he settled in
+the country, dying at Venice. He was, it is said, a pupil of Berchem's,
+from whom he may have first drawn his Italian proclivities. He has more
+truth and feeling for animated nature than Berchem. Indeed, in this
+respect Du Jardin followed Paul Potter. According to contemporary
+accounts, Du Jardin, who had his share of the national humour, wasted
+his time in the pursuit of pleasure, and did not leave more pictures
+behind him than Both left. Du Jardin's best works are in the Louvre, but
+there are also many of his pictures in England. Among his masterpieces,
+'Cattle of all kinds in a meadow surrounded by rocks, and watered by a
+cascade; a horseman giving alms to a peasant boy;' and his celebrated
+'Charlatan,' full of observation and humour, are in the Louvre. A fine
+picture, 'Figures of Animals under the shade of a Tree,' is in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Adrian Van de Velde, born in 1639, died in 1672, the younger brother of
+a great marine painter, ranks almost as high as Paul Potter in cattle
+painting. If 'inferior in modelling and solidity' to his rival, Adrian
+Van de Velde is superior in variety, taste, and feeling. Like the great
+English animal painter, Landseer, Van de Velde was a distinguished
+artist when a mere boy of fourteen. Like his compatriot, Paul Potter,
+Van de Velde died young, at the age of thirty-two. He generally disposed
+of his cattle among broken ground with trees and pools of water.
+Sometimes he has a herdsman or a shepherdess, sometimes there is a
+hunting party passing. His scenery is reckoned masterly. It is mostly
+taken from the coast of Scheveningen. He often painted in men, horses,
+and dogs for other painters. He must have been very industrious, with
+great facility in his work, since, in spite of his premature death, he
+had painted nearly two hundred pictures. 'A brown cow grazing and a
+grey cow resting,' which is in the Berlin Museum, was done at the age of
+sixteen, yet it is full of observation, delicacy, and execution. 'Cattle
+grazing before a peasant's cottage,' which is in the Dresden Gallery, is
+considered very fine. A fine 'Winter Landscape,' and a 'Farm Cottage,'
+are in the National Gallery. Some of Adrian Van de Velde's best work, as
+well as his brother's, is in England.
+
+Jan Van der Heyden, 'the Gerard Dow of architectural painters,' was born
+in 1637 and died in 1712. He combined an unspeakable minuteness of
+detail with the closest observation of nature. His subjects, which he
+selected with great taste, were chiefly well-known buildings, palaces,
+churches, and canal banks in Holland and Belgium. He painted in a warm
+transparent tone, with close application of the laws of perspective. The
+figures in his pictures, in excellent keeping, were often introduced by
+Adrian Van de Velde. Van der Heyden's productiveness as a painter was
+lessened by the circumstance that his mechanical talent led him to make
+an invention by which the construction of the fire-engines of his day
+was greatly improved. In consequence he was placed by the magistrates of
+Amsterdam at the head of their fire-engine establishment, which had thus
+many claims on his time. A beautiful 'Street in Cologne' is in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Emanuel De Witte, born in 1607, died in 1692, was great in architectural
+interiors, especially in churches of Italian architecture. He stood to
+this branch of Dutch art in the same relation that Ruysdael did to
+landscape and William Van de Velde to seascape.
+
+Aart Van der Neer was born in 1619(?), died in 1683. He is famous for
+his canal banks by moonlight, and fine disposal of broad masses of
+shadow. After his moonlights come his sunsets, conflagrations, and
+winter scenes. He rarely painted full daylight. He sometimes painted on
+the same Van der Neer in the National Gallery. Many of his works are in
+England.
+
+William Van de Velde the younger, the elder brother of Adrian Van de
+Velde, the cattle painter, was born at Amsterdam in 1633, and died at
+Greenwich in 1707. His early life was spent in Holland. He followed his
+father, William Van de Velde, a painter also, to England, where, under
+the patronage of Charles II, and James II., William the younger painted
+the naval victories of the English over the Dutch, just as in Holland he
+had already painted the naval victories of the Dutch over the English.
+He was a greater and more consistent artist than he was a patriot.
+Without question he is the first marine painter of the Dutch School. He
+was untiring in his study of nature, so that his perfect knowledge of
+perspective and the incomparable mastery of technical qualities which he
+inherited from his school, enabled him to render sea and sky under every
+aspect. His vessels 'were drawn with a knowledge which extended to every
+rope.' He has been an exceedingly popular painter both with the Dutch
+and the English. Of upwards of three hundred pictures left by him many
+are in Holland and still more in England, where in his lifetime he was
+largely employed by the English nobility and gentry. William Van de
+Velde has a great picture in the Amsterdam Museum, where the English
+flag-ship, the _Princess Royal_, is represented as striking her colours
+to the Dutch fleet in 1666. In the companion picture, also by Van de
+Velde, 'Four English men-of-war brought in as prizes,' the painter
+introduces himself in the small boat from which he witnessed the fight.
+William Van de Velde's triumphs in calm seas are seen especially in his
+pictures at the Hague and in Munich. Some of Van de Velde's best works
+are in the National Gallery.
+
+Backhuysen born in 1631, died at Amsterdam in 1708, was another
+admirable marine painter. He did not study painting till he had followed
+a trade up to the age of eighteen years; he then gave himself with
+ardour to art, making many studies of skies, coasts, and vessels. He was
+inferior to William Van de Velde in his colouring, which was heavy, with
+a cold effect. But he had in full a Dutch painter's truthfulness, while
+his 'stormy waves and rent clouds' are given with poetic feeling. He was
+an industrious and successful man, painting nearly two hundred pictures,
+and receiving many commissions from the King of Prussia, Grand Duke of
+Tuscany, etc. One of his finest works, 'A View of the River from the
+Landing-place called the Mosselsteiger,' is in Amsterdam Museum. In the
+Louvre is 'A view of the Mouth of the Texel, with ten Men-of-war Sailing
+before a Fresh Wind.' 'Dutch Shipping' is in the National Gallery.
+
+Van de Capella is another capital marine painter, though little is known
+of him. He was a native of Amsterdam about 1653. His favourite subject
+is a quiet sea in sunny weather. His work bears some resemblance to that
+of Cuyp. His best pictures are in England. 'A Calm at Low Water' is in
+the National Gallery.
+
+Melchior de Hondecoeter, born in 1636, died in 1695, chose the feathered
+tribe for his subjects. He has been called 'the Raphael of bird
+painters.' He painted especially poultry, peacocks, turkeys, and
+pigeons, which he usually represented alive, and treated with great
+truthfulness and picturesque feeling. Among his best pictures are 'The
+Floating Feather,' a feather given with singular lightness drifting in a
+pool, with different birds on the water and the shore--a pelican
+prominent--in Amsterdam Museum, and 'A Hen defending her Chickens
+against the attacks of a Pea-hen, with a Peacock, a Pigeon, a Cassowary,
+and a Crane,' also in Amsterdam.
+
+Jan Weenix, born in 1644, died in 1719. He was a painter of 'still
+life,' and was especially famous for his dead hares, 'which in form and
+colour, down to the rendering of every hair, are marvels of execution.'
+He painted sometimes, though rarely, a living dog in his pieces. A fine
+Weenix sometimes painted flower pieces.[58]
+
+Pater Segers, so called because he was a Father in a Jesuit convent,
+which he entered at twenty-four years of age. He was born in 1590, and
+died in the Jesuit convent, Antwerp, 1661. He was a famous flower
+painter, but did not paint flowers by themselves; he painted them in
+conjunction with the historical and sacred subjects of other painters.
+He added many a wreath to the Virgin and Child. He worked in this
+fashion with Rubens, but painted more frequently along with painters of
+a lower rank in art. Pater Segers' flowers are finely drawn and
+tastefully arranged. The red of his roses has remained unchanged by
+years, while the roses of other painters have become violet or faded
+altogether. He had endless royal commissions. There are six of his
+pictures of much merit in the Dresden Gallery.
+
+Besides the elder and younger De Heem and Maria Von Oesterwyck mentioned
+at page 258, Jan Van Huysum, 1682-1749, was great in flower painting,
+choosing flowers rather than fruit for his brush. If De Heem has been
+called the Titian, Van Huysum has been defined as the Correggio, of
+flowers and fruit. He reversed the ordinary course of artists by
+beginning in a broad style, and progressing into an execution of the
+finest details. In masterly drawing and truthfulness he was not inferior
+to De Heem, though hardly reckoned his equal in other respects. Even in
+Van Huysum's lifetime there was an eager demand for his pictures, of
+which he left more than a hundred. There is an excellent fruit and
+flower piece by him in Dulwich Gallery, and a masterpiece, 'A Vase with
+Flowers,' is in the National Gallery.
+
+Andrian Van der Werff was born in 1659, and died in 1722. He is
+honourably distinguished for his pursuit of the ideal, in which he stood
+alone among the Dutch artists of his day. He showed much sense of beauty
+and elegance of form with great finish, but he had more than
+counterbalancing faults. His grouping was artificial, his heads
+monotonous, his colouring 'cold and heavy,' with 'a frosty feeling' in
+his pictures. His flesh tints resembled ivory, yet his elegance was so
+highly prized that he had many royal and noble patrons, for whom he
+executed sculptural and mythological pieces. Many of his pictures are in
+the Munich Gallery.
+
+Anton Raphael Mengs was born in Bohemia 1728, and died in Rome 1774. His
+father was a distinguished miniature painter, and gave his son a careful
+education, training him to copy the masterpieces of Michael Angelo and
+Raphael from his twelfth year. Unfortunately he remained a copyist and
+an eclectic. He drew well, learnt chiaroscuro from studying Correggio,
+and colouring from analysing Titian. He was acquainted with the best
+technical processes in oil and fresco. All that teaching could do for a
+man was done, and to a great extent in vain. For though he worked with
+great conscientiousness, fancy and feeling were either originally
+lacking, or they were overlaid and stifled by his excess of culture and
+severe education. The most successful of his works are portraits, in
+which masterly treatment makes up to some extent for the absence of
+originality and subtle sympathy. But in his day, and with some reason,
+Raphael Mengs was greatly prized, since he figured among a host of
+ignorant, careless, and conceited painters. At the age of seventeen he
+was appointed court painter to King Augustus of Saxony. He was summoned
+to Spain by Charles III., who gave him a high salary. Among his good
+works is an 'Assumption' on the high altar of the Catholic Church,
+Dresden. An allegorical subject in fresco on the ceiling of the Camera
+de Papini in the Vatican has 'beauty of form, delicate observation, and
+masterly modelling.' Mengs wrote well on art, though in his writing also
+his eclecticism comes out.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO PAGE 96.
+
+
+     'I have been told that I have not done justice to Lionardo in
+     this short sketch. I give in an abridged form the accurate
+     appreciative analysis of the man and his work in Sir C, and Lady
+     Eastlake.'--KUGLER. It is stated that the versatility of
+     Lionardo was against him. He attempted too much for one man and
+     one life. An additional impediment was produced by his
+     temperament, 'dreamy, perfidious, procrastinating,' withal
+     desirous of shining in society. His ideal of the Lord's head is
+     the highest that art has realised. The apostles' heads are among
+     the truest and noblest. The countenances of his Madonnas are full
+     of ineffable sweetness and pathos. 'At the same time he analysed
+     the monstrous and misshapen, and has left us caricatures in which
+     he seems to have gloated over hideousness half human, half
+     brute. He altered and retouched without ceasing, always deferring
+     the conclusion of the task which he executed with untiring labour
+     and ceaseless dissatisfaction.' The wonder is not that he should
+     have left so little, but that he left enough to prove the
+     transcendent nature of his art. 'There is nothing stranger in
+     history than the fact that his great fame rests on one single
+     picture--long reduced to a shadow--on half-a-dozen pictures for
+     which his hand is alternately claimed and denied, and on
+     unfinished fragments which he himself condemned.' Lionardo was
+     too universal to be of any school.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+                               PAGE
+
+     Albino                     387
+     Angelico, Fra               36
+     Anguisciola                388
+     Backhuysen                 415
+     Baroccio                   385
+     Bartolommeo, Fra            77
+     Bellini, The                54
+     Berchem                    407
+     Bol                        402
+     Bordone                    393
+     Both                       418
+     Botticelli                 369
+     Canaletto                  358
+     Capella, Van de            416
+     Caravaggio                 385
+     Carpaccio                  375
+     Carracci, The              212
+     Cellini                     69
+     Claude Loraine             296
+     Correggio                  185
+     Crivelli                   375
+     Cuyp                       255
+     Domenichino                220
+     Dow                        398
+     Du Jardin                  410
+     Dürer                      169
+     Eycks, The Van              41
+     Filippo, Fra               365
+     Fontana                    389
+     Francia, Il                 73
+     Gaddi                      374
+     Garofalo                   377
+     Ghiberti                    31
+     Ghirlandajo                 69
+     Gibbons, Grinling          359
+     Giorgione                  181
+     Giotto                       8
+     Gozzoli                    366
+     Greuze                     307
+     Guercino                   386
+     Guido                      218
+     Heem, De                   258
+     Helst, Van der             403
+     Heyden, Van der            412
+     Hobbema                    406
+     Holbein                    309
+     Hondecoeter                416
+     Honthorst                  395
+     Hooch                      399
+     Huysum, Van                418
+     Kneller                    359
+     Le Brun                    303
+     Lely                       355
+     Leyden, Van                393
+     Lionardo da Vinci           83
+     Lipi                       376
+     Luini                      378
+     Maas                       401
+     Mabuse                      48
+     Mantegna                    64
+     Masaccio                    34
+     Matsys                      50
+     Memling                     48
+     Mengs                      420
+     Messina, Da                377
+     Metzu                 259, 401
+     Michael Angelo              96
+     Murillo                    280
+     Netcher                    402
+     Orcagna                     24
+     Ostade, Van                400
+     Palma                      379
+     Pardenone                  380
+     Parmigianino               384
+     Perugino                   373
+     Pisano                      23
+     Potter                     257
+     Poussin                    286
+     Raphael                    125
+     Rembrandt                  245
+     Romano                     382
+     Rubens                     225
+     Ruysdael                   403
+     Salvator Rosa              222
+     Sarto, Del                  81
+     Sassa errato               387
+     Segers                     418
+     Signorelli                 367
+     Snyders                    394
+     Somer, Van                 394
+     Spagna                     381
+     Spagnoletto                386
+     Steen                      396
+     Teniers, Father and Son    251
+     Terburg               259, 402
+     Tintoretto                 194
+     Titian                     157
+     Van Dyck                   333
+     Vasari                     388
+     Velasquez                  360
+     Velde, Van de              411
+     Velde, Van de, The Younger 414
+     Veronese                   205
+     Watteau                    305
+     Wouvermans                 253
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] It is in their unconsciousness and earnestness that a parallel is
+drawn between the first Italian painters and the Elizabethean poets. In
+other respects the comparison may be reversed, for the early Italian
+painters, from their restriction to religious painting, with even that
+treated according to tradition, were as destitute of the breadth of
+scope and fancy attained by their successors, as the Elizabethean poets
+were distinguished by the exuberant freedom which failed in the more
+formal scholars of Anne's reign.
+
+[2] Kugler's Handbook of Art.
+
+[3] While writing of goldsmiths that became painters, I may say a word
+of a goldsmith who, without quitting his trade, was an unrivalled artist
+in his line. I mean Benvenuto Cellini, 1500--1571, a man of violent
+passions and little principle, who led a wild troubled life, of which he
+has left an account as shameless as his character, in an autobiography.
+Cellini was the most distinguished worker in gold and silver of his day,
+and his richly chased dishes, goblets, and salt cellars, are still in
+great repute.
+
+[4] Kugler's _Handbook of Painting_.
+
+[5] Kugler's _Handbook of Painting_.
+
+[6] See note, page 422.
+
+[7] Mrs Roscoe's _Life of Vittoria Colonna_
+
+[8] Michael Angelo's will was very simple. 'I bequeath my soul to God,
+my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest relations.'
+
+[9] Lady Eastlake, _History of Our Lord_.
+
+[10] Hare, _Walks in Rome_.
+
+[11] Lanzi, in Hare's _Walks in Rome_.
+
+[12] Rio. _Poetry of Christian Art_, in Hare's _Walks in Rome._
+
+[13] Mrs Jameson.
+
+[14] Dean Alford.
+
+[15] _Imperial Biographical Dictionary_.
+
+[16] Titian's age is variously given; some authorities make it
+ninety-nine years, placing the date of his death in 1570 or 7.
+
+[17] Kugler.
+
+[18] The term originated in the French expression, '_du genre bas_.'
+
+[19] He had a peculiar fondness for blue and bronze hues.
+
+[20] It is due to Tintoret to say, that there are modern critics, who
+look below the surface, and are at this date deeply enamoured of his
+pictures. Tintoret's name now stands very high in art.
+
+[21] Mrs Jameson.
+
+[22] Guido said of Rubens: 'Does this painter mix blood with his
+colours?'
+
+[23] _Life of Rubens_.
+
+[24] If I mistake not, this is the same Countess of Arundel who, in her
+widowhood, resided in Italy in order to be near her young sons then at
+Padua. Having provoked the suspicion of the Doge and Council of Venice,
+she was arrested by them on a charge of treason, and brought before the
+tribunal, where she successfully pled her own cause, and obtained her
+release, the only woman who ever braved triumphantly the terrible 'ten.'
+
+[25] Here is the description of a very different Rembrandt which appears
+in this year's Exhibition of the Works by Old Masters: 'There is no
+portrait here which equals Rembrandt's picture, from Windsor, "A Lady
+Opening a Casement;" a not particularly appropriate name, because the
+picture represents no such action. The lady is simply looking from an
+open window, her left hand raised and resting at the side of the
+opening. We believe there is nothing left to tell who this lady was,
+with the grave, sad eyes, and lips that seem to quiver with a trouble
+hardly yet assuaged collar, almost a tippet, for it falls below her
+shoulders, together with lace cuffs. A triple band of large pearls goes
+about her neck, and she has similar ornaments round each wrist. She
+wears a mourning robe and black jewellery.... This picture, which
+resembles in most of its qualities a pair, of somewhat larger size,
+which were here last year, and also came from the Royal collection, is
+signed and dated "Rembrandt, F. 1671." It is, therefore, a late work of
+his. What wonderful harmony is here, of light, of colour, of tone. How
+nearly perfect is the keeping of the whole picture; as a whole, and also
+in respect of part to part. Could anything be truer than the breadth of
+the chiaroscuro? Notice how beautifully, and with what subtle
+gradations, the light reflected from her white collar strikes on her
+slightly faded cheek; how tenderly it seems to play among the soft
+tangles of the hair that time has thinned.'--_Athenæum_.
+
+[26] He had been called the Titian of flower and fruit painters. He
+preferred fruit for his subject. His works are not common in England.
+His masterpiece, 'The Chalice of the Sacrament,' crowned with a stately
+wreath, and sheaves of corn and bunches of grapes among the flowers, is
+at Vienna.
+
+[27] Sir W. Stirling Maxwell.
+
+[28] Sir W. Stirling Maxwell.
+
+[29] Hare, _Wanderings in Spain_.
+
+[30] Hare's _Wanderings in Spain_.
+
+[31] The spelling is an English corruption of the French Claude.
+
+[32] Poussin had a villa near Ponte Molle, and the road by which he used
+to go to it is still called in Rome 'Poussin's walk.'
+
+[33] Claude's summer villa is still pointed out near Rome.
+
+[34] _Imperial Biographical Dictionary_.
+
+[35] Madame Le Brun, whose maiden name was Vigée, born 1755, died 1842,
+was an excellent portrait painter.
+
+[36] Wornum.
+
+[37] Wornum.
+
+[38] Supposed to be a niece of Sir Thomas More's.
+
+[39] Rev. J. Lewis, 1731.
+
+[40] Wornum.
+
+[41] A still more famous picture by Holbein is that called 'The Two
+Ambassadors,' and believed to represent Sir Thomas Wyatt and his
+secretary.
+
+[42] Walpole.
+
+[43] Walpole.
+
+[44] Dwarfs figured at Charles's court, as at the court of Philip IV. of
+Spain.
+
+[45] The notion that Van Dyck sacrificed truth to grace is absolutely
+contradicted by certain critics, who bring forward as a proof of their
+contradiction what they consider the 'over-true' picture of the Queen
+Henrietta Maria, shown at the last exhibition of the works of Old
+Masters. The picture seems hardly to warrant the strong opinion of the
+critics.
+
+[46] Walpole.
+
+[47] Walpole.
+
+[48] Lady Eastlake and Dr. Waagen's works on Italian, Flemish, and Dutch
+Art, modelled on Kugler.
+
+[49] A lunette is a small picture, generally semicircular, surmounting
+the main picture in an altar-piece.
+
+[50] The Dutch still more than the Italian artists belonged largely to
+families of artists bearing the same surnames.
+
+[51] A picture with one door of two panels is called a diptych, with two
+doors of three panels a triptych, with many doors and panels a
+polyptych.
+
+[52] Fairholt's 'Homes and Haunts of Foreign Artists.'
+
+[53] Alchemists, like hermits, still existed in the seventeenth century.
+
+[54] Bartholomew Van der Helst, 1613-1670, was another great Dutch
+portrait painter. His portrait pieces with many figures are famous. An
+'Archery Festival,' commemorating the Peace of Westphalia, includes
+twenty-four figures full of individuality and finely drawn and coloured.
+One of his best works is 'In the Workhouse,' at Amsterdam. Two women and
+two men are conversing together in the foreground. There is a man with a
+book, and a preacher delivering a sermon in the background.
+
+[55] It may be that Ruysdael's straggling life was reflected in his
+lowering skies and stormy seas.
+
+[56] Other eminent painters, such as Van de Velde, Wouvermans, and
+Berchem often supplied cattle and figures to Hobbema's landscapes.
+
+[57] Was the apparently greater success of these partly denaturalised
+Dutch landscape painters, as contrasted with the adversity of Ruysdael
+and Hobbema, due to the classic mania?
+
+[58] Peter Gysels was another painter of 'still life.' His butterflies
+are said to have been rendered with 'exquisite finish.'
+
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+         A Story of Golden Lane. By L.T. MEADE.
+             With Thirty Illustrations.
+     "In every respect entitled to a place among the best reward books
+     of the season."--_Schoolmaster_.
+
+KING FROST.
+
+         The Wonders of Snow and Ice. By Mrs. THORPE.
+             With Seventy Illustrations.
+     "Exceedingly able, and without an unattractive
+     page."--_School Board Chronicle_.
+     "Full of charming little pictures and instructive descriptions of
+     the phenomena      which attend the presence of the Ice
+     King."--_Christian World_.
+
+UP THE NILE.
+
+        A Boy's Voyage to Khartoum. By H. MAJOR, B. Sc.
+            With Forty Illustrations.
+     "Must be placed amongst the best of the books for boys and girls
+     which have been issued this season. A very excellent
+     book."--_Nottingham Guardian._
+
+THE STRENGTH OF HER YOUTH.
+
+         A Story for Girls. By S. DOUDNEY. With Twenty Illustrations.
+     "The story is simple enough, but Miss Doudney handles it
+     well."--_Spectator_.
+     "Sound and healthy in tone, yet not without movement and variety.
+     Carefully      illustrated and tastefully bound."--_Daily News_.
+
+WE THREE;
+
+     A Bit of Our Lives.
+        By the Author of "Worth a Threepenny Bit," etc.
+           With Thirty Illustrations.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+_TWO SHILLING VOLUMES._
+
+Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt edges.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A BAND OF THREE.
+
+        By L.T. MEADE, Author of "Scamp and I," etc.
+           Illustrated by Barnes.
+     "An exquisite little tale. Since the days of 'Little Meg's
+     Children' there has been no sketch approaching the pathos of
+     child-life in      'A Band of Three.'"--_Christian Leader_.
+     "Full of pathos and interest."--_Guardian_.
+
+MY BACK-YARD ZOO.
+
+        A Course of Natural History. By Rev. J.G. WOOD, M.A., Author
+           of "Homes without Hands," etc.
+              With Seventy Illustrations.
+     "A book that will delight young people. It is well illustrated and
+     thoroughly reliable."--_Morning Post_.
+
+     "Really a complete course of natural history."--_Times_.
+
+FROM THE EQUATOR TO THE POLE.
+
+     IN THE HEART OF AFRICA. By JOSEPH THOMSON.
+     CLIMBING THE HIMALAYAS. By W.W. GRAHAM.
+     ON THE ROAD TO THE POLE. By Captain A.H. MARKHAM.
+         With Forty-five Illustrations.
+     "A more delightful prize or present for boys than this it would be
+     hard to find."
+                                                       _Record_.
+
+FAITHFUL FRIENDS.
+
+         Stories of Struggle and Victory.
+           By L.T. MEADE and others.
+             With Twenty Illustrations by French, Barnes, etc.
+     "A carefully illustrated little book.... With truth and
+     pathos."--_Daily News_.
+     "Capital reading for young folks.... All brisk and
+     wholesome."--_Scotsman_.
+
+HEROES AND MARTYRS OF SCIENCE.
+
+         By HENRY C. EWART. With Thirty Illustrations.
+     "It is an admirable book of its order, full of the inspiration of
+     great lives."
+                                _School Board Chronicle_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+15 & 16, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
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+
+Project Gutenberg's The Old Masters and Their Pictures, by Sarah Tytler
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Old Masters and Their Pictures
+       For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art
+
+Author: Sarah Tytler
+
+Release Date: November 19, 2006 [EBook #19863]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Yearsley, Ted Garvin and the Online
+Distributed Proofreaders Europe at http://dp.rastko.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES</h1>
+
+<h4><i>For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art</i>
+</h4>
+
+<h2>BY SARAH TYTLER</h2>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS" ETC.</h3>
+
+
+<h3><i>NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION</i></h3>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p class="center">LONDON</p>
+
+<p class="center">ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED</p>
+
+<p class="center">15 &amp; 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN</p>
+
+<h3>1893</h3>
+
+<h5>[<i>The Right of Translation is Reserved</i>]</h5>
+
+<p class="center">LONDON:<br />
+
+PRINTED BY J.S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,<br />
+
+CITY ROAD.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE_TO_FIRST_EDITION" id="PREFACE_TO_FIRST_EDITION"></a>PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.</h2>
+
+
+<p>I wish to say, in a very few words, that this book is intended to be a
+simple account of the great Old Masters in painting of every age and
+country, with descriptions of their most famous works, for the use of
+learners and outsiders in art. The book is not, and could not well be,
+exhaustive in its nature. I have avoided definitions of schools,
+considering that these should form a later and more elaborate portion of
+art education, and preferring to group my 'painters' according to what I
+hold to be the primitive arrangements of time, country, and rank in
+art.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE_TO_NEW_EDITION" id="PREFACE_TO_NEW_EDITION"></a>PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The restrictions with regard to space under which the little volume
+called "The Old Masters" was originally written, caused me to omit, to
+my regret, many names great, though not first, in art. The circulation
+which the book has attained induces me to do what I can to remedy the
+defect, and render the volume more useful by adding two chapters&mdash;the
+one on Italian and the other on German, Dutch, and Flemish masters.
+These chapters consist almost entirely of condensed notes taken from two
+trustworthy sources, to which I have been already much indebted&mdash;Sir C,
+and Lady Eastlake's version of Kugler's "Handbook of Italian Art," and
+Dr. Waagen's "Handbook,"&mdash;remodelled from Kugler&mdash;of German, Dutch, and
+Flemish art, revised by J.A. Crowe. I have purposely given numerous
+records of those Dutch painters whose art has been specially popular in
+England and who are in some cases better represented in our country than
+in their own.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I.</b></a> EARLY ITALIAN ART&mdash;GIOTTO, 1276-1337&mdash;ANDREA PISANO,
+1280-1345&mdash;ORCAGNA, 1315-1376&mdash;GHIBERTI, 1381-1455&mdash;MASACCIO, 1402-1428
+<i>OR</i> 1429&mdash;FRA ANGELICO, 1387-1455 1</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II.</b></a> EARLY FLEMISH ART&mdash;THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442&mdash;MABUSE, <i>ABOUT</i>
+1470-1532&mdash;MEMLING, <i>ABOUT</i> 1478-1499&mdash;QUINTIN MATSYS, 1460-1530 OR 31
+41</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III.</b></a> IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART&mdash;THE BELLINI, 1422-1512&mdash;MANTEGNA,
+1431-1506&mdash;GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498&mdash;- IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518&mdash;FRA
+BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517&mdash;ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530 53</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV.</b></a> LIONARDO DA VINCI. 1452-1519&mdash;MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564&mdash;RAPHAEL,
+1483-1520&mdash;TITIAN, 1477-1566 83</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V.</b></a> GERMAN ART&mdash;ALBRECHT D&Uuml;RER, 1471-1528 169</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI.</b></a> LATER ITALIAN ART&mdash;GIORGIONE, 1477-1511&mdash;CORREGGIO, <i>ABOUT</i>
+1493-1534&mdash;TINTORETTO, 1512-1594&mdash;VERONESE, 1530-1588 181</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII.</b></a> CARRACCI, 1555-1609&mdash;GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642&mdash;DOMENICHINO,
+1581-1641&mdash;SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673 212</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII.</b></a> LATER FLEMISH ART&mdash;RUBENS, 1577-1640&mdash;REMBRANDT, 1606 <i>OR</i>
+1608-1669&mdash;TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694&mdash;WOUVERMAN,
+1620-1668&mdash;CUYP, 1605; <i>STILL LIVING</i>, 1638&mdash;PAUL POTTER,
+1625-1654&mdash;CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630 225</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX.</b></a> SPANISH ART&mdash;VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660&mdash;MURILLO, 1618-1682 260</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X.</b></a> FRENCH ART&mdash;NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665&mdash;CLAUDE LORRAINE,
+1600-1682&mdash;CHARLES LE BRUN, 1619-1690&mdash;WATTEAU, 1684-1721&mdash;GREUZE,
+1726-1805 286</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI.</b></a> FOREIGN ARTISTS IN ENGLAND&mdash;HOLBEIN, 1494-1543&mdash;VAN DYCK,
+1599-1641&mdash;LELY, 1618-1680&mdash;CANALETTO, 1697-1768&mdash;KNELLER, 1646-1723 309</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_XII48"><b>CHAPTER XII.</b></a> ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH
+CENTURIES&mdash;TADDEO GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366&mdash;FRA FILIPPO,
+1412-1469&mdash;BENOZZO GOZZOLI, 1424-1496&mdash;LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED
+TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1524&mdash;BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515&mdash;PERUGINO,
+1446-1522&mdash;CARPACCIO, DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH
+UNKNOWN&mdash;CRIVELLI, FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN 1460&mdash;ANTONELLA DA
+MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE, 1416&mdash;GAROPALO,
+1481-1559&mdash;LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
+1530&mdash;PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528&mdash;PARDENONE, 1483-1538&mdash;LO SPAGNA, DATE OF
+BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533&mdash;GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546&mdash;PARIS BORDONE,
+1500-1570&mdash;IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540&mdash;BAROCCIO, 1528-1612&mdash;CARAVAGGIO,
+1569-1609&mdash;LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656&mdash;GUERCINO, 1592-1666&mdash;ALBANO,
+1578-1660&mdash;SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1615&mdash;VASARI, 1512-1574&mdash;SOFONISBA
+ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1626&mdash;LAVINIA FONTANA, 1552-1614 364</p>
+
+<p><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII50"><b>CHAPTER XIII.</b></a> GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE
+EIGHTEENTH CENTURY&mdash;VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS,
+1366-1442&mdash;VAN LEYDEN, 1494-1533&mdash;VAN SOMER, 1570-1624&mdash;SNYDERS,
+1579-1657&mdash;G. HONTHORST, 1592-1662&mdash;JAN STEEN, 1626-1679&mdash;GERARD DOW,
+1613-1680&mdash;DE HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN&mdash;VAN OSTADE,
+1610-1685&mdash;MAAS, 1632-1693&mdash;METZU, 1615. STILL ALIVE IN 1667&mdash;TERBURG,
+1608-1681&mdash;NETCHER, 1639-1684&mdash;BOL, 1611-1680&mdash;VAN DER HELST,
+1613-1670&mdash;RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682&mdash;HOBBEMA, 1638-1709&mdash;BERCHEM,
+1620-1683&mdash;BOTH 1600 (?)-1650(?) DU JARDIN, 1625-1678&mdash;ADRIAN VAN DE
+VELDE, 1639-1672&mdash;VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712&mdash;DE WITTE, 1607-1692&mdash;VAN
+DER NEER, 1619 (?)-1683&mdash;WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE, THE YOUNGER,
+1633-1707&mdash;BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708&mdash;VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
+1653&mdash;HONDECOETER, 1636-1695&mdash;JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719&mdash;PATER SEGERS,
+1590-1661&mdash;VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749&mdash;VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722&mdash;MENGS,
+1728-1774 391</p>
+
+<p><a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX.</b></a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+
+<h2>THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES.</h2>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<p>EARLY ITALIAN ART&mdash;GIOTTO, 1276-1337&mdash;ANDREA PISANO. 1280-1345&mdash;ORCAGNA,
+1315-1376 GHIBERTI, 1381-1455&mdash;MASACCIO, 1402-1428 OR 1429&mdash;FRA
+ANGELICO, 1387-1455.</p>
+
+
+<p>A pencil and paper, a box of colours, and a scrap-book, form so often a
+child's favourite toys that one might expect that a very large portion
+of men and women would prove painters. But, as we grow in years and
+knowledge, the discrepancy between nature and our attempts to copy
+nature, strike us more and more, until we turn in dissatisfaction and
+disgust from the vain effort.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one old woman in an Esquimaux tribe who could be called
+forward to draw with a stick on the sand a sufficiently graphic likeness
+of the Erebus and the Terror. It is only a few groups of men belonging
+to different countries, throughout the centuries, who have been able to
+give us paintings to which we turn in wonder and admiration, and say
+that these are in their degree fair exponents of nature. The old
+painter's half-haughty, half-humble protest was true&mdash;it is 'God
+Almighty,' who in raising here and there men above their fellows, 'makes
+painters.'</p>
+
+<p>But let us be thankful that the old propensity to delight in a
+facsimile, or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very
+common satisfaction and joy&mdash;whether cultivated or uncultivated&mdash;-
+derived from looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving
+to understand the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to
+consider the lives and times which throw light on works of genius. Music
+itself is not more universally and gladly listened and responded to,
+than pictures are looked at and remembered.</p>
+
+<p>Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my
+subject if I can only treat it sympathetically,&mdash;enter at a humble
+distance into the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and
+place before you some of the paintings by reverent and loving
+word-painting such as others have achieved, and such as I may strive to
+attain to, that you may be in a sort early familiar with these
+paintings, before you see them in engravings and photographs, and on
+canvas and in fresco, as I trust you may be privileged to see many of
+them, when you may hail them not only for what they are, the glories of
+art, but for what they have been to you in thoughts of beauty and high
+desires.</p>
+
+<p>Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
+dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything, and
+of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after the fall
+of Constantinople I need only write a few words. While Greece was to
+Europe the birthplace of painting as of other arts, that Greek painting
+which illustrated early Christianity, was painting in its decline and
+decay, borrowing not only superstitious conventionalities, but barbaric
+attributes of gilding and blazoning to hide its infirmity and poverty.
+Virgins of the same weak and meaningless type, between attenuated saints
+or angels, and doll-like child-Christs in the one invariable attitude
+holding up two fingers of a baby hand to bless the spectator and
+worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a similar manner the instances
+of rude or meagre contemporary paintings with which the early Christians
+adorned their places of worship and the sepulchres of their dead in the
+basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are very curious and interesting for
+their antiquity and their associations, and as illustrations of faith;
+but they present no intrinsic beauty or worth. They are not only clumsy
+and childish designs ill executed, but they are rendered unintelligible
+to all save the initiated in such hieroglyphics, by offering an
+elaborate ground-work of type, antitype, and symbol, on which the artist
+probably spent a large part of his strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents,
+vines, fishes, dolphins, ph&#339;nixes, cocks, anchors, and javelins played
+nearly as conspicuous a part in this art as did the dead believer, or
+his or her patron saint, who might have been supposed to form the
+principal figure in the picture.</p>
+
+<p>Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but
+quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the
+stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the
+old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But
+first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.
+Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting in
+fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or
+with size, egg, or fig-juice&mdash;the latter practices termed <i>tempera</i> (in
+English in distemper) before oil was used to mix colours. But painters
+did not confine themselves then to painting with pencil or brush, else
+they might have attained technical excellence sooner. It has been well
+said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so the
+earlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them
+called&mdash;referring to its durability&mdash;'painting for eternity;' and in
+metals. Many of them were the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves;
+they worked in iron as well as in gold and silver, and they were
+sculptors and architects as well as painters; engineers also, so far as
+engineering in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, was known
+in those days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so
+that drawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of
+distance, and the management of light and shade, were feebly developed.
+Even the fore-shortening of figures was so difficult to the old Italian
+painters that they could not carry it into the extremities, and men and
+women seem as though standing on the points of their toes.
+Landscape-painting did not exist farther than that a rock or a bush, or
+a few blue lines, with fishes out of proportion prominently interposed,
+indicated, as on the old stage, that a desert, a forest, or a sea, was
+to play its part in the story of the picture. So also portrait-painting
+was not thought of, unless it occurred in the likeness of a great man
+belonging to the time and place of the painter, who was the donor of
+some picture to chapel or monastery, or of the painter himself, alike
+introduced into sacred groups and scenes; for pictures were uniformly of
+a religious character, until a little later, when they merged into
+allegorical representations, just as one remembers that miracle plays
+passed into moral plays before ordinary human life was reproduced. Until
+this period, what we call dramatic expression in making a striking
+situation, or even in bringing the look of joy or sorrow, pleasure or
+pain, into a face, had hardly been attained.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps you will ask, what merit had the old paintings of the middle
+ages to compensate for so many great disadvantages and incongruities?
+Certainly before the time I have reached, they have, with rare
+exceptions, little merit, save that fascination of pathos, half-comic,
+half-tragic, which belongs to the struggling dawn of all great
+endeavours, and especially of all endeavours in art. But just at this
+epoch, art, in one man, took a great stride, began, as I shall try to
+show, to exert an influence so true, deep, and high that it extends, in
+the noblest forms, to the present day, and much more than compensates to
+the thoughtful and poetic for a protracted train of technical blunders
+and deficiencies.</p>
+
+<p><b>Giotto,</b> <a name="Giot" id="Giot"></a>known also as Magister Joctus, was born in 1276 near Florence. I
+dare say many have heard one legend of him, and I mean to tell the
+legends of the painters, because even when they are most doubtful they
+give the most striking indications of the times and the light in which
+painters and their paintings were regarded by the world of artists, and
+by the world at large; but so far as I have heard this legend of Giotto
+has not been disproven. The only objection which can be urged against
+it, is that it is found preserved in various countries, of very
+different individuals&mdash;a crowning objection also to the legend of
+William Tell. Giotto was a shepherd boy keeping his father's sheep and
+amusing himself by drawing with chalk on a stone the favourites of the
+flock, when his drawings attracted the attention of a traveller passing
+from the heights into the valley. This traveller was the well-born and
+highly-esteemed painter Cimabue, who was so delighted with the little
+lad's rough outlines, that getting the consent of Giotto's father,
+Cimabue adopted the boy, carried him off to the city of Florence,
+introduced him to his studio, and so far as man could supplement the
+work of God, made a painter of the youthful genius. I may add here a
+later legend of Giotto. Pope Boniface VIII, requested specimens of skill
+from various artists with the view to the appointment of a painter to
+decorate St Peter's. Giotto, either in impatient disdain, or to show a
+careless triumph of skill, with one flourish of his hand, without the
+aid of compass, executed a perfect circle in red chalk, and sent the
+circle as his contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The
+audacious specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was
+chosen as the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident
+arose the Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the
+friend of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom
+the grandeur of some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough
+attributed. The poet of the 'Inferno' wrote of his friend:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">'&mdash;&mdash; Cimabue thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To lord it over painting's field; and now<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>Petrarch bequeathed in his will a Madonna by Giotto and mentioned it as
+a rare treasure of art. Boccaccio wrote a merry anecdote of his comrade
+the painter's wit, in the course of which he referred with notable
+plain-speaking to Giotto's 'flat currish' plainness of face.</p>
+
+<p>The impression handed down of Giotto's character is that of an
+independent, high-spirited man, full of invention, full of imagination,
+and also, by a precious combination, full of shrewdness and common
+sense; a man genial, given to repartee, and at the same time not
+deficient in the tact which deprives repartee of its sting. While he was
+working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the painter
+on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I would
+leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I, sire, if
+I were <i>you</i>,' replied the wag.</p>
+
+<p>I need scarcely add that Giotto was a man highly esteemed and very
+prosperous in his day; one account reports him as the head of a family
+and the father of four sons and four daughters. I have purposely written
+first of the fame, the reputed character, and the circumstances of
+Giotto before I proceed to his work. This great work was, in brief, to
+breathe into painting the living soul which had till then&mdash;in medi&aelig;val
+times&mdash;been largely absent. Giotto went to Nature for his inspiration,
+and not content with the immense innovation of superseding by the actual
+representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the
+rigid traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their
+faces&mdash;the melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so
+simple, filled Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with
+astonishment and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
+commonest deed even coarsely life-like, as in the case of a sailor in a
+boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
+sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding
+expression, as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the
+whole figure of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was
+no mere realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the
+highest light an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and
+noble; he rose above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of
+which the real is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a
+crucifixion robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the
+agony which is at its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and
+love.</p>
+
+<p>Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
+earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
+idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
+be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate
+successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance,
+crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure
+these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their
+originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would
+seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they
+appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence
+their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest
+qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the
+Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more
+accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of
+another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed
+fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and
+in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
+that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
+the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the
+unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of
+Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the
+same in kind.<a id="footnotetag1" name="footnotetag1"></a>
+<a href="#footnote1"><sup class="sml">1</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>I wish you, my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to
+learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any
+half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke
+transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you
+have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern
+marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight
+figures with long hands, wooden feet, and clinging draperies, while your
+eyes have been familiar with well-modelled frames and limbs and flowing
+lines. But we must look deeper if we would not be slaves to superficial
+prettiness, or even superficial correctness; we must try to go into the
+spirit of a painting and value it more in proportion as it teaches art's
+noblest lesson&mdash;the divinity of the divine, the serenity of utmost
+strength, the single-heartedness of passion.</p>
+
+<p>I have only space to tell you of three or four of the famous works of
+Giotto. First, his allegories in the great church, in honour of St
+Francis, at Assisi, in relation to which, writing of its German
+architect, an author says: 'He built boldly against the mountain, piling
+one church upon another; the upper vast, lofty, and admitting through
+its broad windows the bright rays of the sun: the lower as if in the
+bowels of the earth&mdash;low, solemn, and almost shutting out the light of
+day. Around the lofty edifice grew the convent, a vast building, resting
+upon a long line of arches clinging to the hill-sides. As the evening
+draws nigh, casting its deep shadows across the valley, the traveller
+beneath gazes upwards with feelings of wonder and delight at this
+graceful arcade supporting the massy convent; the ancient towers and
+walls of the silent town gathering around, and the purple rocks rising
+high above&mdash;all still glowing in the lingering sunbeams&mdash;a scene
+scarcely to be surpassed in any clime for its sublime beauty.' The
+upper church contains frescoes wonderfully fresh, by Cimabue, of
+Scriptural subjects, and frescoes of scenes from the life vowed to
+poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis,
+are the four master-pieces with which we have to do. These are the three
+vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and
+grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been
+attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her
+rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The
+fourth fresco pictures the saint who died, 'covered by another's cloak
+cast over his wasted body eaten with sores,' enthroned and glorified
+amidst the host of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>I have chosen the second example of the art of Giotto because you may
+with comparative ease see it for yourselves. It is in the National
+Gallery, London, having belonged to the collection of the late Samuel
+Rogers. It is a fragment of an old fresco which had been part of a
+series illustrating the life of John the Baptist in the church of the
+Carmine, Florence, a church which was destroyed by fire in 1771. The
+fragment in the National Gallery has two fine heads of apostles bending
+sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do
+it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents
+of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in
+regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before
+Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed to tell the
+Bible's stories.</p>
+
+<p>The third instance I have chosen to quote is Giotto's portrait of Dante
+which was so strangely lost for many years. The portrait occurs in a
+painting, the first recorded performance of Giotto's, in which he was
+said to have introduced the likeness of many of his contemporaries, on
+the wall of the Palazzo dell' Podest&agrave; or Council Chamber of Florence.
+During the banishment of Dante the wall was plastered or white-washed
+over, through the influence of his enemies, and though believed to
+exist, the picture was hidden down to 1840, when, after various futile
+efforts to recover it, the figures were again brought to light.</p>
+
+<p>This portrait of Dante is altogether removed from the later portraits of
+the indignant and weary man, of whom the Italian market-women said that
+he had been in Hell as well as in exile. Giotto's Dante on the walls of
+the Council Chamber is a noble young man of thirty, full of ambitious
+hope and early distinction. The face is slightly pointed, with broad
+forehead, hazel eyes, straight brows and nose, mouth and chin a little
+projecting. The close cloak or vest with sleeves, and cap in folds
+hanging down on the shoulder, the hand holding the triple fruit, in
+prognostication of the harvest of virtue and renown which was to be so
+bitter as well as so glorious, are all in keeping and have a majesty of
+their own. The picture is probably known by engravings to many of my
+readers.</p>
+
+<p>The last example of Giotto's, is the one which of all his works is most
+potent and patent in its beauty, and has struck, and, in so far as we
+can tell, will for ages strike, with its greatness multitudes of widely
+different degrees of cultivation whose intellectual capacity is as far
+apart as their critical faculty. I mean the matchless Campanile or
+bell-tower 'towering over the Dome of Brunelleschi' at Florence, formed
+of coloured marbles&mdash;for which Giotto framed the designs, and even
+executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture. With this
+lovely sight Dean Alford's description is more in keeping than the
+prosaic saying of Charles V., that 'the Campanile ought to be kept under
+glass.' Dean Alford's enthusiasm thus expresses itself:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'A mass of varied light written on the cloudless sky of
+unfathomed blue; varied but blended, as never in any other
+building that we had seen; the warm yellow of the lighter marbles
+separated but not disunited by the ever-recurring bands of dark;
+or glowing into red where the kisses of the sun had been hottest;
+or fading again into white where the shadows mostly haunted, or
+where the renovating hand had been waging conflict with decay.'</p></div>
+
+<p>It is known that Giotto, together with his friend Dante, died before
+this&mdash;Giotto's last great work&mdash;was finally constructed by Giotto's
+pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, and that therefore neither of the friends could
+have really looked on 'Giotto's Tower,' though Italian Ciceroni point
+out, and strangers love to contemplate, the very stone on which 'Grim
+Dante' sat and gazed with admiration in the calm light of evening on the
+enduring memorial of the painter.</p>
+
+<p>Giotto died in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a
+good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he
+painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling
+in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the
+Cross.' The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been
+the practice which painted the Virgin Mother now as a brown Italian, now
+as a red and white Fleming, and again as a flaxen-haired German or as a
+swarthy Spaniard, and draped her and all the minor figures in the
+grandest drama the world ever saw&mdash;as well as the characters in older
+Scripture histories, in the Florentine, Venetian, and Antwerp fashions
+of the day. The defence of the practice is, that the Bible is for
+universal time, that its Virgin Mother, its apostles and saints, were
+types of other mothers and of other heroes running down the stream of
+history; that even the one central and holy figure, if He may be
+represented at all, as the Divine brother of all humanity, may be clad
+not inaptly in the garments of all. It appears to me that there is
+reason in this answer, and that viewed in its light the criticism which
+constantly demands historic fidelity is both carping and narrow. I do
+not mean, however, to underrate historic accuracy in itself, or to
+depreciate that longing for completeness in every particular, which
+drives our modern painters to the East to study patiently for months the
+aspects of nature under its Oriental climate, with its peculiar people
+and animals, its ancient costumes and architecture.</p>
+
+<p>Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest
+of the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the
+church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been
+buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his
+effigy in marble.</p>
+
+<p>In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little. I have already
+mentioned how closely painting was in the beginning allied with working
+in metals as well as with sculpture and architecture. It is thus
+necessary to write of a magnificent work in metal, the study and
+admiration of generations of painters, begun in the life of Giotto, and
+completed in two divisions, extending over a period of nearly a hundred
+years. We shall proceed to deal with the first division, and recur to
+the second a little later.</p>
+
+<p>Let me first say a word to explain the extent of the treasures of art in
+the old Italian cities. They were then the great merchant cities of the
+world, more or less republican in their constitution. They stood to the
+citizens, who rarely left their walls, at once as peculiar possessions
+and as native countries rather than as cities alone, while they excited
+all the patriotism, pride, and love that were elsewhere expended on a
+whole country&mdash;which after all was held as belonging largely to its king
+and nobles. The old Italian merchant guilds, and wealthy merchants as
+individuals, vied with each other in signalizing their good citizenship
+by presenting&mdash;as gifts identified with their names&mdash;to their cities,
+those palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight
+of the world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily
+of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni
+or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some
+competition the gates were intrusted to <b>Andrea Pisano,</b><a name="Pis" id="Pis"></a> one of a great
+group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named,
+as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea
+executed a series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the
+Baptist, which were cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre
+door-way. I shall leave the rest of the gates, still more exquisitely
+wrought, till their proper time, only observing that the Pisani group of
+carvers and founders are supposed to have attained their extraordinary
+superiority in skill and grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in
+consequence of one of them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to
+the study of some ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.</p>
+
+<p>Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come back
+to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument&mdash;in itself
+very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians' love
+to their cities. <b>Andrea Orcagna,</b><a name="Orc" id="Orc"></a> otherwise known as <b>Andrea di Cione,</b> one
+of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about 1315. His
+greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.</p>
+
+<p>This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation,
+alas, will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial,
+though no longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an
+arcade, something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running
+round, and having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for
+the dead were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth
+brought from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered
+with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross
+in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and
+contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments&mdash;among them the
+Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of
+the Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
+opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
+artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of
+the walls was continued at intervals, during two hundred years. The
+havoc wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the
+pictures faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated
+fragments, 'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's
+illustrations of the book of Job have thus perished. Still Orcagna's
+work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in
+his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to
+borrow from it in design and arrangement. Dean Alford has thus described
+Orcagna's mournful, thoughtful 'Triumph of Death:'</p>
+
+<p>'The picture is one of crowded action, and contains very many
+personages. The action may be supposed to begin in the lower corner on
+the right hand. There we see what appears to be a wedding-party seated
+in festivity under a grove of orange-trees laden with fruit. Over two of
+them a pair of winged loves flutter in the air, and musicians are
+entertaining them with merry strains. But close to them on the left
+comes swooping down on bats' wings, and armed with the inevitable
+scythe, the genius of Death. Her wild hair streams in the wind, her
+bosom is invulnerable, being closed in a trellised armour of steel.
+Beneath her, on the ground, are a heap of corpses, shown by their attire
+to be the great and wealthy of the world. Three winged figures, two
+fiends and one angel, are drawing souls, in the form of children, out
+of the mouths of three of these corpses. Above, the air is full of
+flying spirits, angels and demons: the former beautiful and saintly, the
+latter hideous and bestial. Some are dragging, or bearing upwards, human
+souls: others are on their way to fetch them from the heaps of dead:
+others, again, are flying about apparently without aim. Further yet to
+the left, a company of wretched ones, lame and in rags, are invoking
+Death with outstretched arms to come to their relief; but she sweeps by
+and heeds them not.</p>
+
+<p>'Dividing one half of the picture from the other, is a high range of
+rocks, terminating in a fiery mountain, into which the demons are
+casting the unhappy souls which they have carried off. Beyond that seems
+to be a repetition of the same lesson respecting Death in another form.
+A party of knights and dames are issuing on horseback from a mountain
+pass. In the left hand of the picture there lie in their path three
+corpses in coffins, with coronets on their heads. One is newly dead; on
+the second, decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a
+grinning skeleton. The impression produced on the gay party by the sight
+is very various. Some look on carelessly; one holds his nose in disgust;
+one, a lady jewelled and crowned, leans her head on her hand in solemn
+thought. Above, on a rising ground, an aged monk (it is said, Saint
+Macarius) is holding a scroll, and pointing out to passengers the moral
+of the sight which meets them. The path winds up a hill crowned with a
+church, and by its side at various points are hermits sitting in calm
+security, or following peaceful occupations. One of them is milking a
+doe; another is reading; a third is calmly contemplating from a distance
+the valley of Death. About them are various animals and birds. The idea
+evidently intended to be conveyed is that deliverance from the fear of
+death is to be found not in gaiety and dissipation, but in contemplation
+and communion with God.</p>
+
+<p>'Such is the wonderful fresco, and the execution is as wonderful as the
+conception. Belonging as the painter did to a rude and early period of
+art, he yet had the power of endowing his figures with both majesty and
+tenderness of expression.'</p>
+
+<p>The Last Judgment is no less solemn and sad, with hope tempering its
+sadness. Mrs Jameson's note of it is: 'Above, in the centre, Christ and
+the Virgin are throned in separate glories. He turns to the left,
+towards the condemned, while he uncovers the wound in his side, and
+raises his right arm with a menacing gesture, his countenance full of
+majestic wrath. The Virgin, on the right of her Son, is the picture of
+heavenly mercy, and, as if terrified at the words of eternal
+condemnation, she turns away. On either side are ranged the Prophets of
+the Old Testament, the Apostles and other saints, severe, solemn,
+dignified figures. Angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, hover
+over Christ and the Virgin; under them is a group of archangels. The
+archangel Michael stands in the midst holding a scroll in each hand;
+immediately before him another archangel, supposed to represent Raphael,
+the guardian angel of humanity, cowers down, shuddering, while two
+others sound the awful trumpets of doom. Lower down is the earth where
+men are seen rising from their graves; armed angels direct them to the
+right and left. Here is seen King Solomon, who, whilst he rises, seems
+doubtful to which side he should turn; here a hypocritical monk, whom an
+angel draws back by the hair from the host of the blessed; and there a
+youth in a gay and rich costume, whom another angel leads away to
+Paradise. There is wonderful and even terrible power of expression in
+some of the heads; and it is said that among them are many portraits of
+contemporaries, but unfortunately no circumstantial traditions as to
+particular figures have reached us.'</p>
+
+<p>One of Orcagna's altar-pieces, that of 'the coronation of the Virgin,'
+containing upwards of a hundred figures, and with the colouring still
+rich, is in our National Gallery. As an architect, Orcagna designed the
+famous Loggia de' Lanzi of the grand ducal palace at Florence.</p>
+
+<p>Now I must take you back to the bronze gates of the Baptistery in their
+triumphant completion nearly a hundred years after the first gate was
+executed by Andrea Pisano. I should have liked, but for our limits, to
+tell in full the legend of the election of Lorenzo Ghiberti, <a name="Ghib" id="Ghib"></a>the
+step-son of a goldsmith, and skilled in chasing and enamelling, to
+design the second gate; when yet a lad of twenty-three, how he and two
+other young men, one of them still younger than Ghiberti, were declared
+the most promising competitors in the trial for the work; how the last
+two voluntarily withdrew from the contest, magnanimously proclaiming
+Lorenzo Ghiberti their superior; how all the three lived to be famous,
+the one as a founder in metal, the others as an architect and a
+sculptor, and remained sworn brothers in art till death.</p>
+
+<p>Lorenzo Ghiberti has left us an expression of the feeling with which he
+set about his task, an expression so suggestive that, even had we no
+other indication, it is enough to stamp the true and tender nature of
+the man. He prepared for his achievement 'with infinite diligence and
+love'&mdash;the words deserve to be pondered over. He took at least
+twenty-two years to his work, receiving for it eleven hundred florins.
+He chose his subjects from the life and death of the Lord, working them
+out in twenty panels, ten on each side of the folding doors, and below
+these were eight panels containing full-length figures of the four
+evangelists and four doctors of the Latin Church, with a complete border
+of fruit and foliage, having heads of prophets and sibyls interspersed.
+So entire was the satisfaction the superb gate gave, that Lorenzo was
+not merely loaded with praise, he received a commission to design and
+cast a third and central gate which should surpass the others, that were
+thenceforth to be the side entrances.</p>
+
+<p>For his second gate Lorenzo Ghiberti repaired to the Old Testament for
+subjects, beginning with the creation and ending with the meeting of
+Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and represented them in ten compartments
+enclosed in a rich border of fruit and foliage, with twenty-four
+full-length figures of the Hebrew heroes and prophets, clearly and
+delicately designed and finished, occupying corresponding niches. This
+crowning gate engaged the founder upwards of eighteen years&mdash;forty-nine
+years are given as the term of the work of both the gates.</p>
+
+<p>The single defect which is found in those marvellous gates&mdash;left to us
+as a testimony of what the life-long devotion of genius could
+produce&mdash;is that they abound floridly both in ornament and action, in
+place of being severely simple and restrained according to the classical
+standard.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo called these gates 'worthy to be the gates of Paradise,'
+and they are still one of the glories of Florence. Casts of the gates
+are to be found in the School for Art at Kensington, and at the Crystal
+Palace.</p>
+
+<p>A young village boy learned to draw and model from Ghiberti's gates. He
+in his turn was to create in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the
+Carmine at Florence a school of painters scarcely less renowned and
+powerful in its effects than that produced by the works in the Campo
+Santa. You will find the Italian painters not unfrequently known by
+nicknames, quite as often by their father's trades as by their father's
+surnames, and still oftener by the town which was their place of birth
+or nurture. This <b>Tommaso Guido</b>, or Maso de San Giovanni (from his
+village birth-place), was commonly called Masaccio, <a name="Mas" id="Mas"></a>short for
+Tomasaccio, 'hulking Tom,' as I have heard it translated, on account of
+his indifferent, slovenly habits. I think there is a tradition that he
+entered a studio in Florence as a colour boy, and electrified the
+painter and his scholars, by <i>brownie</i> like freaks of painting at their
+unfinished work, in their absence, better than any of his masters, and
+by the dexterity with which he perpetrated the frolic of putting the
+facsimile of a fly on one of the faces on the easels. His end was a
+tragic conclusion to such light comedy. At the age of twenty-six, he
+quitted Florence for Rome so suddenly that he left his finest frescoes
+unfinished. It was said that he was summoned thither by the Pope. At
+Rome, where little or nothing of Masaccio's life is known, he died
+shortly afterwards, not without a suspicion of his having been
+poisoned.</p>
+
+<p>A curious anecdote exists of the identification of the time when he
+forsook Florence to meet his death in Rome. Just as we have read, that
+the period of the death of Massinger the dramatist has been settled by
+an entry in an old parish register, 'died, Philip Massinger a stranger,'
+so there has been found some quaint equivalent to a modern tax-paper
+which had been delivered at the dwelling of Masaccio when the word
+'gone' was written down.</p>
+
+<p>There is a further tradition&mdash;not very probable under the
+circumstances&mdash;that Masaccio is buried, without name or stone, under the
+Brancacci Chapel. Be that as it may, he very early rose to eminence,
+surpassing all his predecessors in drawing and colouring, and he
+combined with those acquirements such animation and variety of
+expression in his characters, that it was said of him 'he painted souls
+as well as bodies,' while his invention was not less bold and fresh.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to indicate Masaccio's pictures because some of them
+have been repainted and destroyed. As to those in the Brancacci Chapel
+from the life of St Peter, (with the exception of two,) considerable
+confusion has arisen as to which are Masaccio's, and which belong to
+his scholar Filippino Lippi. The fresco which Masaccio left unfinished,
+that of the Apostles Peter and Paul raising a dead youth (from
+traditional history), was finished by Lippi. In the fresco of Peter
+baptizing the converts, generally attributed to Masaccio, there is a lad
+who has thrown off his garments, and stands shivering with cold, whose
+figure, according to authority, formed an epoch in art. Lionardo da
+Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, all studied
+their art in this chapel. Raphael borrowed the grand figure of St Paul
+preaching at Athens in one of the cartoons, from one of Masaccio's or
+Filippo Lippi's frescoes. Masaccio's excellence as an artist, reached at
+an immature age, is very remarkable.</p>
+
+<p>I have come to the last and probably the best appreciated among modems
+of the early Italian painters. Fra <a name="Angelico" id="Angelico"></a><b>Angelico da Fiesole</b>, the gentle
+devout monk whom Italians called '<i>Il Beato</i>,' the Blessed, and who
+probably did receive the distinction of beatification, a distinction
+only second in the Roman Catholic Church to that of canonization. He was
+born at the lovely little mountain-town of Fiesole near Florence, 1387,
+and his worldly name, which he bore only till his twenty-first year, was
+Guido Petri de Mugello. In his youth, with his gift already recognized,
+so that he might well have won ease and honour in the world, he entered
+the Dominican Convent of St Mark, Florence, for what he deemed the good
+and peace of his soul. He seldom afterwards left it, and that only as
+directed by his convent superior, or summoned by the Pope. He was a man
+devoid of personal ambition, pure, humble, and meek. When offered the
+Archbishopric of Florence as a tribute to his sanctity, he declined it
+on account of his unworthiness for the office. He would not work for
+money, and only painted at the command of his prior. He began his
+painting with fasting and prayer. Believing himself inspired in his
+work, he steadfastly refused to make any alteration in the originals. It
+is said that he was found dead at his easel with a completed picture
+before him. It is not wonderful, that from such a man should come one
+side of the perfection of that idealism which Giotto had begun. Fra
+Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and Virgin are more divinely calm,
+pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting saintliness, a more immortal
+youth and joy, and a more utter self-abnegation and sympathetic
+tenderness than are to be found in the saints and the angels, the
+Saviour and the Virgin of other painters. Neither is it surprising that
+Fra Angelico's defects, besides that of the bad drawing which shows more
+in his large than in his small pictures, are those of a want of human
+knowledge, power, and freedom. His wicked&mdash;even his more earthly-souled
+characters, are weak and faulty in action. What should the reverent and
+guileless dreamer know, unless indeed by inspiration of the rude
+conflicts, the fire and fury of human passions intensified in the malice
+and anguish of devils? But Fra Angelico's singular successes far
+transcend his failures. In addition to the sublime serenity and positive
+radiance of expression which he could impart to his heads, his notions
+of grouping and draping were full of grace, sometimes of splendour and
+magnificence. In harmony with his happy temperament and fortunes, he was
+fond of gay yet delicate colours 'like spring flowers,' and used a
+profusion of gold ornaments which do not seem out of keeping in his
+pictures. The most of Fra Angelico's pictures are in Florence&mdash;the best
+in his own old convent of St Mark, where he lovingly adorned not only
+chapter-hall and court, but the cells of his brother friars. A crucifix
+with adoring saints worshipping their crucified Saviour is regarded as
+his master-piece in St Mark's. A famous coronation of the Virgin, which
+Fra Angelico painted for a church in his native town, and which is now
+in the Louvre, Paris, is thus described by Mrs Jameson: 'It represents a
+throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to which there is an ascent of nine
+steps; on the highest kneels the Virgin, veiled, her hands crossed on
+her bosom. She is clothed in a red tunic, a blue robe over it, and a
+royal mantle with a rich border flowing down behind. The features are
+most delicately lovely, and the expression of the face full of humility
+and adoration. Christ, seated on the throne, bends forward, and is in
+the act of placing the crown on her head; on each side are twelve
+angels, who are playing a heavenly concert with guitars, tambourines,
+trumpets, viols, and other musical instruments; lower than these, on
+each side, are forty holy personages of the Old and New Testament; and
+at the foot of the throne kneel several saints, male and female, among
+them St Catherine with her wheel, St Agnes with her lamb, and St Cecilia
+crowned with flowers. Beneath the principal picture there is a row of
+seven small ones, forming a border, and representing various incidents
+in the life of St Dominic.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<p>EARLY FLEMISH ART&mdash;THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442&mdash;MABUSE, MATSYS, 1460-1530
+OR 31.</p>
+
+
+<p>In the Low Countries painting had very much the same history that it had
+in Italy, but the dates are later, and there may be a longer interval
+given to each stage of development. Religious painting, profuse in
+symbolism, with masses of details elaborately worked in, meets us in the
+first place. This style of painting reached its culmination, in which it
+included (as it did not include in its representation in the Italian
+pictures) many and varied excellencies, among them the establishment of
+painting in oil in the pictures of the Flemish family of painters&mdash;the Van Eycks.</p>
+<p><a name="Eycks" id="Eycks"></a>
+Before going into the little that is known of the family history of the
+<b>Van Eycks,</b> I should like to call attention to the numerous painter
+families in the middle ages. What a union, and repose, and happy
+sympathy of art-life it indicates, which we appear to have lost in the
+restlessness and separate interests of modern life. The Van Eycks
+consisted of no less than four members of a family, three brothers,
+Hubert, John, and Lambert, and one sister, Margaret, devoted, like her
+brothers, to her art. There is a suggestion that they belonged to a
+small village of Limburg called Eyck, and repaired to Bruges in order to
+pursue their art. Hubert was thirty years older than John, and it is
+said that he was a serious-minded man as well as an ardent painter, and
+belonged to the religious fraternity of our Lady of Ghent. He died in
+1426. John, though of so much consideration in his profession as to be
+believed to be 'the Flemish Painter' sent by Duke Philip the Good of
+Flanders and Burgundy with a mission to Portugal to solicit the hand of
+a princess in marriage, is reported to have died very poor in 1449, and
+has the suspicion attached to him of having been a lover of pleasure and
+a spendthrift. Of Lambert, the third brother, almost nothing is known;
+indeed, the fact of his existence has only lately come to light.
+Margaret lived and died unmarried, and belonged, like her brother
+Hubert, to the religious society of our Lady of Ghent. She died about
+1432.</p>
+
+<p>The invention of painting in oil, for which the Van Eycks are commonly
+known, was not literally that of mixing colours with oil, which was
+occasionally done before their day. It was the combining oil with resin,
+so as to produce at once a good varnish, and avoid the necessity of
+drying pictures in the sun, a bright thought, which may stand in the
+same rank with the construction, by James Watt, of that valve which
+rendered practicable the application of steam to machinery. The thought,
+occasioned by the cracking of a picture in tempera exposed to the sun,
+is due to Hubert Van Eyck.</p>
+
+<p>The great picture of the Van Eycks, which was worked at for a number of
+years by both Hubert and John, and, as some reckon, touched by the whole
+family, is the 'Adoration of the Lamb,' at St Bavon's, Ghent. I should
+like to give a faint idea of this extraordinary picture, which was
+painted for a burgomaster of Ghent and his wife in order to adorn their
+mortuary chapel in the cathedral. It was an altar piece on separate
+panels, now broken up and dispersed, only a portion of it being retained
+in Ghent.</p>
+
+<p>It may strike some as strange that a picture should be on panels, but
+those of the old pictures which were not on plastered walls were
+commonly on panels, many of them on the lids and sides of chests and
+presses which were used to hold sacred vessels and priestly raiment.</p>
+
+<p>When the wings of the Van Eycks' altar-piece of the 'Adoration of the
+Lamb' were opened on festivals, the subjects of the upper central
+picture were seen, consisting of the Triune God, a majestic figure, and
+at his side in stately calm the Virgin and the Baptist. On the inside of
+the wings were angels, at the two extremities Adam and Eve. The lower
+central picture shows the Lamb of the Revelation, whose blood flows into
+a cup; over it is the dove of the Holy Spirit. Angels, who hold the
+instruments of the Passion, worship the Lamb. Four groups of many
+persons advance from the sides, these are the holy martyrs, men and
+women, priests and laymen. In the foreground is the fountain of life; in
+the distance are the towers of the heavenly Jerusalem. On the wings
+other groups are coming up to adore the Lamb; on the left those who have
+laboured for the Kingdom of the Lord by worldly deeds&mdash;the soldiers of
+Christ led by St George, St Sebastian, and St Michael, the patron saints
+of the old Flemish guilds, followed by emperors and kings&mdash;a goodly
+company. Beyond the soldiers and princes, on the left, are the righteous
+judges, also on horseback. In front of them, on a splendidly caparisoned
+gray, rides a mild, benevolent old man in blue velvet trimmed with fur.
+This is the likeness of Hubert Van Eyck, painted after his death by his
+brother John, and John himself is in the group, clothed in black, with a
+shrewd, sharp countenance. On the right are the saints who by
+self-renunciation have served the Lamb in the spirit, hermits and
+pilgrims, among them St Christopher, St Anthony, St Paul the hermit,
+Mary Magdalene, and St Mary of Egypt. A compartment underneath, which
+represented hell, finished the whole&mdash;yet only the whole on one side,
+for the wings when closed presented another series of finely thought-out
+and finished pictures&mdash;the Annunciation; figures of Micah and Zechariah;
+statues of the two St Johns, with the likenesses of the donors who gave
+to the world so great a work of art, kneeling humbly side by side, the
+burgomaster somewhat mean-looking in such company in spite of the proof
+of his liberality, but his wife noble enough in feature and expression
+to have been the originator of this glory of early Flemish painting. The
+upper part of the picture is painted on a gold ground, round the central
+figure of the Lamb is vivid green grass with masses of trees and
+flowers&mdash;indeed there is much lovely landscape no longer indicated by a
+rock or a bush, but betokening close observation of nature, whether in a
+fruitful valley, or a rocky defile, or mountain ridges with fleecy
+clouds overhead. The expression of the immense number of figures is as
+varied and characteristic as their grouping.<a id="footnotetag2" name="footnotetag2"></a>
+<a href="#footnote2"><sup class="sml">2</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Hubert Van Eyck died while this work was in progress, and it was
+finished by his brother John six years after Hubert's death. When one
+thinks of the intense application and devotion which such a work costs,
+and recalls the bronze gates of St John that occupied Lorenzo Ghiberti
+49 years, and when we read, as we shall read a few chapters farther on,
+of large paintings which were begun and ended in so many days&mdash;even so
+many hours, one can better understand what is the essential difference
+between the works of the early and the later painters, a difference
+which no skill, no power even can bridge over. John Van Eyck, who had
+lived late enough to have departed from the painting of sacred pictures
+alone, so that he left portraits and an otter hunt among his works, is
+three times represented in our National Gallery, in three greatly
+esteemed portraits, one a double portrait, believed to be the likenesses
+of the painter and his wife, standing hand in hand with a terrier dog
+at their feet.</p>
+
+<p><b>Gossaert,</b> called <b>de Mabuse</b> <a name="Mab" id="Mab"></a> from his native town of Mabeuze, sometimes
+signing his name Joannes Malbodius, followed in the steps of the Van
+Eycks, particularly in his great picture of the 'Adoration of the
+Kings,' which is at Castle Howard, the seat of the Earl of Carlisle.
+Mabuse was in England and painted the children of Henry VII, in a
+picture, which is at Hampton Court. There is a picture in the palace of
+Holyrood, Edinburgh, which has been attributed to Mabuse. It represents
+on the sides of a triptych or diptych (somewhat like a folding screen)
+James III. and his queen with attendants. The fur on the queen's dress
+displays already that marvellous technical skill for which Flemish
+painting is so celebrated.</p>
+
+<p>Hans Memling <a name="Mem" id="Mem"></a>belonged to Bruges. There is a tradition of him, which is
+to a certain extent disproven, that he was a poor soldier relieved by
+the hospital of St John, Bruges, and that in gratitude he executed for
+the hospital the well-known reliquary of St Ursula. However it might
+have originated, this is the most noted work of a painter, who was
+distinguished frequently by his minute missal-like painting (he was also
+an illuminator of missals), in which he would introduce fifteen hundred
+small figures in a picture two feet eight inches, by six feet five
+inches in size, and work out every detail with the utmost niceness and
+care. The reliquary, or 'chasse,' is a wooden coffer or shrine about
+four feet in length, its style and form those of a rich Gothic church,
+its purpose to hold an arm of the saint. The whole exterior is covered
+with miniatures by Memling, nearly the whole of them giving incidents in
+the legendary history of St Ursula, a 'virgin princess of Brittany,' or
+of England, who, setting out with eleven thousand virgins&mdash;her
+companions, her lover, and an escort of knights on a pilgrimage to Rome,
+was, with her whole company, met and murdered, by a horde of heathen
+Huns, when they had reached Cologne, on their return. My readers may be
+aware that the supposed bones of the virgins and St Ursula form the
+ghastly adornment of the church founded in her honour at Cologne. It is
+absolutely filled with bones, built into the walls, stowed under the
+pavement, ranged in glass cases about the choir. Hans Memling's is a
+pleasanter commemoration of St Ursula.</p>
+
+<p><b>Quintin Matsys,</b><a name="Matsys" id="Matsys"></a> the blacksmith of Antwerp, was born at Louvain about
+1460. Though he worked first as a smith he is said by Kugler to have
+belonged to a family of painters, which somewhat takes from the romance,
+though it adds to the probability of his story. Another painter in
+Antwerp having offered the hand and dowry of his daughter&mdash;beloved by
+Quintin Matsys&mdash;as a prize to the painter who should paint the best
+picture in a competition for her hand, the doughty smith took up the
+art, entered the lists, and carried off the maiden and her portion from
+all his more experienced rivals. The vitality of the legend is indicated
+by the inscription on a tablet to the memory of Quintin Matsys in the
+Cathedral, Antwerp. The Latin inscription reads thus in English:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'&acute;Twas love connubial taught the smith to paint,'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Quintin Matsys lived and died a respected burgher of Antwerp, a member
+of the great Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke. He was twice married,
+and had thirteen children.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever might have been his source of inspiration, Quintin Matsys was
+an apt scholar. His 'Descent from the Cross,' now in the Museum,
+Antwerp, was <i>the</i> 'Descent from the Cross,' and <i>the</i> picture in the
+Cathedral, until superseded by Rubens&acute; master-piece on the same subject.
+Still Quintin Matsys&acute; version remains, and is in some respects an
+unsurpassed picture. There is a traditional grouping of this Divine
+tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the
+Lord is supported by two venerable old men&mdash;Joseph of Arimathea and
+Nicodemus&mdash;while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the
+Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full
+of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos. For this
+picture Quintin Matsys&mdash;popular painter as he was&mdash;got only three
+hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, of course,
+the value of money was much greater in those days). The Joiners&acute;
+Company, for whom he painted the 'Descent from the Cross,' sold the
+picture to the City of Antwerp for five times the original amount, and
+it is said Queen Elizabeth offered the City nearly twenty times the
+first sum for it, in vain.</p>
+
+<p>Quintin Matsys painted frequently half-length figures of the Virgin and
+Child, an example of which is in the National Gallery. He excelled in
+the 'figure painting' of familiar subjects, then just beginning to be
+established, affording a token of the direction which the future
+eminence of the Flemish painters would take. One of his famous pictures
+of this kind is 'The Misers,' in the Queen's collection at Windsor. Two
+figures in the Flemish costume of the time, are seated at a table;
+before them are a heap of money and a book, in which one is writing with
+his right hand, while he tells down the money with his left. The faces
+express craft and cupidity. The details of the ink-horn on the table,
+and the bird on its perch behind, have the Flemish graphic exactness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<p>IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART&mdash;THE BELLINI, 1422-1512&mdash;MANTEGNA,
+1431-1506&mdash;GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498&mdash;IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518&mdash;FRA
+BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517&mdash;ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530.</p>
+
+
+<p>I have come to the period when Italian art is divided into many
+schools&mdash;Paduan, Venetian, Umbrian, Florentine, Roman, Bolognese, &amp;c.,
+&amp;c. With the schools and their definitions I do not mean to meddle,
+except it may be to mention to which school a great painter belonged.
+Another difficulty meets me here. I have been trying so far as I could
+to give the representative painters in the order of time. I can no
+longer follow this rule strictly, and the grouping of this chapter is
+made on the principle of leading my readers up by some of the
+predecessors who linked the older to the later Italian painters, and by
+some of the contemporaries of these later painters, to that central
+four, Lionardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, who
+occupy so great a place in the history of art.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Bellini" id="Bellini"></a>In the brothers <b>Bellini</b> and their native Venice, we must first deal with
+that excellence of colouring for which the Venetian painters were
+signally noted, while they comparatively neglected and underrated
+drawing. A somewhat fanciful theory has been started, that as Venice,
+Holland, and England have been distinguished for colour in art, and as
+all those States are by the sea, so a sea atmosphere has something to do
+with a passion for colour. Within more reasonable bounds, in reference
+to the Venetians, is the consideration that no colouring is richer,
+mellower, more exquisitely tinted than that which belongs to the blue
+Italian sky over the blue Adriatic, with those merged shades of violet,
+green, and amber, and that magical soft haze which has to do with a
+moist climate.</p>
+
+<p>The two brothers <b>Gentile</b> and <b>Gian</b> or <b>John Bellini,</b> the latter the more
+famous of the two, were the sons of an old Venetian painter, with regard
+to whom the worthy speech is preserved, that he said it was like the
+Tuscans for son to beat father, and he hoped, in God's name, that
+Giovanni or Gian would outstrip him, and Gentile, the elder, outstrip
+both. The brothers worked together and were true and affectionate
+brothers, encouraging and appreciating each other.</p>
+
+<p>Gentile was sent by the Doge at the request of the Sultan&mdash;either
+Mahommed II, or Bajazet II., to Constantinople, where Gentile Bellini
+painted the portrait of the Sultan and the Sultana his mother, now in
+the British Museum. The painter also painted the head of John the
+Baptist in a charger as an offering&mdash;only too suitable&mdash;from him to the
+Grand Turk. The legend goes on to tell that in the course of the
+presentation of the gift, an incident occurred which induced Gentile
+Bellini to quit the Ottoman Court with all haste. The Sultan had
+criticized the appearance of the neck in John the Baptist's severed
+head, and when Gentile ventured to defend his work, the Sultan proceeded
+to prove the correctness of his criticism, by drawing his scimitar and
+cutting off at a stroke the head of a kneeling slave, and pointing to
+the spouting blood and the shrinking muscle, gave the horrified painter
+a lesson in practical anatomy. On Gentile's return from the East, he was
+pensioned by his State, and lived on painting, till he was eighty years
+of age, dying in 1501.</p>
+
+<p>Gian Bellini is said to have obtained by a piece of deceit, which is not
+in keeping with his manly and honourable character, the secret,
+naturally coveted by a Venetian, of mixing colours with resin and oil. A
+Venetian painter had brought the secret from Flanders, and communicated
+it to a friend, who, in turn, communicated it to a third painter, and
+was murdered by that third painter for his pains, so greedy and criminal
+was the craving, not only to possess, but to be as far as possible the
+sole possessor of, the grand discovery. Gian Bellini was much less
+guilty, if he were really guilty. Disguised as a Venetian nobleman, he
+proposed to sit for his portrait to that Antonella who first brought the
+secret from Flanders, and while Antonella worked with unsuspicious
+openness, Gian Bellini watched the process and stole the secret.</p>
+
+<p>Gian Bellini lived to the age of ninety, and had among his admirers the
+poet Ariosto and Albrecht D&uuml;rer. The latter saw Gian Bellini in his age,
+and said of him, when foolish mockers had risen up to scout at the old
+man, and his art now become classic, 'He is very old, but he is still
+the best of our painters.' Gian Bellini had illustrious pupils,
+including in their number Titian and Giorgione.</p>
+
+<p>The portraits of Gentile and Gian, which are preserved in a painting by
+Gian, show Gentile fair-complexioned and red-haired, and Gian with dark
+hair.</p>
+
+<p>Gian Bellini is considered to have been less gifted with imagination
+than some of his great brother artists; but he has proved himself a man
+of high moral sense, and while he stopped short at the boundary between
+the seen and the unseen, it is certain he must still have painted with
+much of 'the divine patience' and devout consecration of all his powers,
+and of every part of his work, which are the attributes of the earliest
+Italian painters. When he and his brother began to paint, Venetian art
+had already taken its distinctive character for open-air effects, rich
+scenic details in architecture, furniture and dress (said to be
+conspicuous in commercial communities), and a growing tendency to
+portraiture. Gian went with the tide, but he guided it to noble results.
+His simplicity and good sense, with his purity and dignity of mind, were
+always present. He introduced into his pictures 'singing boys, dancing
+cherubs, glittering thrones, and dewy flowers,' pressing the outer world
+into his service and that of religious art. It is said also that his
+Madonnas seem 'amiable beings imbued with a lofty grace;' while his
+saints are 'powerful and noble forms.' But he never descended to the
+paltry or the vulgar. He knew from the depths of his own soul how to
+invest a face with moral grandeur. Especially in his representations of
+our Saviour Gian Bellini 'displays a perception of moral power and
+grandeur seldom equalled in the history of art.' The example given is
+that of the single figure of the Lord in the Dresden Gallery, where the
+Son of God, without nimbus, or glory, stands forth as the 'ideal of
+elevated humanity.'</p>
+
+<p>The greater portion of Gian Bellini's pictures remain in the churches
+and galleries of Venice. But the first great work at which the two
+brothers in their youth worked in company&mdash;the painting of the Hall of
+Council in the palace of the Doge, with a series of historical and
+legendary pictures of the Venetian wars with the Emperor Frederick
+Barbarossa (1177), including the Doge Ziani's receiving from the Pope
+the gold ring with which the Doge espoused the Adriatic, in token of
+perpetual dominion over the sea&mdash;was unfortunately destroyed by fire in
+1577. Giovanni Bellini's greatest work, now at St Salvatore, is Christ
+at Emmaus, with Venetian senators and a Turkish dragoman introduced as
+spectators of the risen Lord.</p>
+
+<p>Of another great work at Vicenza, painted in Gian Bellini's old age,
+when neither his skill nor his strength was abated, 'The Baptism of
+Christ,' Dean Alford writes thus:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Let us remain long and look earnestly, for there is indeed much
+to be seen. That central figure, standing with hands folded on
+His bosom, so gentle, so majestic, so perfect in blameless
+humanity, oh what labour of reverent thought; what toil of
+ceaseless meditation; what changes of fair purpose, oscillating
+into clearest vision of ideal truth, must it have cost the great
+painter, before he put forth that which we see now! It is as
+impossible to find aught but love and majesty in the Divine
+countenance, as it is to discover a blemish on the complexion of
+that body, which seems to give forth light from itself, as He
+stands in obedience, fulfilling all righteousness.</p>
+
+<p>'And even on the accessories to this figure, we see the same
+loving and reverent toil bestowed. The cincture, where alone the
+body is hidden from view, is no web of man's weaving; or, if it
+were, it is of hers whose heart was full of divine thoughts as
+she wove: so bright and clear is the tint, so exquisitely careful
+and delicate every fold where</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>light may play or colour vary. And look under the sacred feet, on
+the ground blessed by their pressure; no dash of hurrying brush
+has been there: less than a long day's light, from morn to dewy
+eve, did not suffice to give in individual shape and shade every
+minutest pebble and mote of that shore of Jordan. Every one of
+them was worth painting, for we are viewing them as in the light
+of His presence who made them all and knew them all.</p>
+
+<p>'And now let us pass to the other figures: to that living and glowing
+angelic group in the left hand of the picture. Three of the heavenly
+host are present, variously affected by that which they behold. The
+first, next the spectator, in the corner of the picture, is standing in
+silent adoration, tender and gentle in expression, the hands together,
+but only the points of the fingers touching, his very reverence being
+chastened by angelic modesty; the second turns on that which he sees a
+look of earnest inquiry, but kneels as he looks; and indeed that which
+he sees is one of the things which angels</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>desire to look into. The third, a majestic herald-like figure,
+stands, as one speaking, looking to the spectator, with his right
+hand on his garment, and his left out as in demonstration,
+unmistakeably saying to us who look on, "Behold what love is here!"
+Then, hardly noticing what might well be much noticed, the grand
+dark figure of the Baptist on the right, let us observe how
+beautifully and accurately all the features of the landscape are
+given.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Of the same work another critic records: 'The attendant angels in this
+work (signed by the artist) are of special interest, instinct with an
+indefinable purity and depth of reverential tenderness elsewhere hardly
+rivalled. But the picture, like that in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, with
+which it is nearly contemporary, is almost more interesting from the
+astonishing truth and beauty of its landscape portions. <i>These</i> form
+here a feature more important, perhaps, than in any work of that period;
+the stratification and form of the rocks in the fore-ground, the palms
+and other trees relieved against the lucid distance, and the
+mountain-ranges of tender blue beyond, are as much beyond praise for
+their beauty and their truth, as they have been beyond imitation from
+the solidity and transparent strength of their execution! The minute
+finish is Nature's, and the colouring more gem-like than gems.'</p>
+
+<p>No praise can exceed that bestowed on Gian Bellini's colouring for its
+intensity and transparency. 'Many of his draperies are like crystal of
+the clearest and deepest colour,' declares an authority; and another
+states' his best works have a clear jewel brightness, an internal
+gem-like fire such as warms a summer twilight. The shadows are intense
+and yet transparent, like the Adriatic waves when they lie out of the
+sun under the palace bridges.'</p>
+
+<p>Portrait-painting, just beginning, was established in Venice, its later
+stronghold, by Gian Bellini. His truthful portrait of the Doge Loredano,
+one of the earliest of that series of Doges' portraits which once hung
+in state in the ducal palace, is now in our National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Of Gentile Bellini, whose work was softer, but less vigorous than his
+brother's, the best painting extant is that at Milan of St Mark
+preaching at Alexandria, in which the painter showed how he had profited
+by his residence at Constantinople in the introduction of much rich
+Turkish costume, and of an animal unknown to Europe at the time&mdash;a
+camelopard.</p>
+
+<p><b>Andrea Mantegna</b><a name="Mantegna" id="Mantegna"></a> was born near Padua. He was the son of a farmer. His
+early history, according to tradition, is very similar to that of
+Giotto. Just as Cimabue adopted Giotto, Squarcione, a painter who had
+travelled in Italy and Greece, and made a great collection of antiques,
+from which he taught in a famous school of painters, adopted Andrea
+Mantegna at the early age of ten years. It was long believed that
+Mantegna, in the end, forfeited the favour of his master by marrying
+Nicolosa Bellini, the sister of Gentile and Gian Bellini, whose father
+was the great rival of Squarcione; and farther, that Mantegna's style of
+painting had been considerably influenced by his connection with the
+Bellini. Modern researches, which have substituted another surname for
+that of Bellini as the surname of Andrea Mantegna's wife, contradict
+this story.</p>
+
+<p>Andrea Mantegna, a man of much energy and fancy, entered young into the
+service of the Gonzaga lords of Mantua, receiving from them a salary of
+thirty pounds a year and a piece of land, on which the painter built a
+house, and painted it within and without&mdash;the latter one of the first
+examples of artistic waste, followed later by Tintoret and Veronese,
+regardless of the fact that painting could not survive in the open air
+of Northern Italy.</p>
+
+<p>Andrea Mantegna had his home at Mantua, except when he was called to
+Rome to paint for the Pope, Innocent VIII. An anecdote is told by Mrs
+Jameson of this commission. It seems the Pope's payments were irregular;
+and one day when he visited his painter at work, and his Holiness asked
+the meaning of a certain allegorical female figure in the design, Andrea
+answered, with somewhat audacious point, that he was trying to
+represent <i>Patience</i>. The Pope, understanding the allusion, paid the
+painter in his own coin, by remarking in reply, 'If you would place
+Patience in fitting company, you would paint Discretion at her side.'
+Andrea took the hint, said no more, and when his work was finished not
+only received his money, but was munificently rewarded.</p>
+
+<p>Andrea Mantegna had two sons and a daughter. One of his sons painted
+with his father, and, after Andrea Mantegna's death, completed some of
+his pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Andrea Mantegna's early study of antique sculpture moulded his whole
+life's work. He took great delight in modelling, in perspective, of
+which he made himself a master, and in chiaroscuro, or light and shade.
+Had his powers of invention and grace not kept pace with his skill, he
+would have been a stiff and formal worker; as it was, he carried the
+austerity of sculpture into painting, and his greatest work, the
+'Triumph of Julius C&aelig;sar,' would have been better suited for the
+chiselled frieze of a temple than it is for the painted frieze of the
+hall of a palace. Yet he was a great leader and teacher in art, and the
+true proportions of his drawing are grand, if his colouring is harsh. I
+am happy to say that Mantegna's 'Triumph of Julius C&aelig;sar' is in England
+at Hampton Court, having been bought from the Duke of Mantua by Charles
+I. These cartoons, nine in number, are sketches in water-colour or
+distemper on paper fixed on cloth. They are faded and dilapidated, as
+they well may be, considering the slightness of the materials and their
+age, about four hundred years. At the same time, they are, after the
+cartoons of Raphael (which formed part of the same art collection of
+Charles I.), perhaps the most valuable and interesting relic of art in
+England.</p>
+
+<p>The series of the 'Triumph' contain the different parts, originally
+separated by pillars, of a long and splendid procession. There are
+trumpeters and standard bearers, the statues of the gods borne aloft,
+battering-rams and heaps of glittering armour, trophies of conquest in
+huge vases filled with coin, garlanded oxen, and elephants. The second
+last of the series, presents the ranks of captives forming part of the
+show, rebellious men, submissive women, and unconscious children&mdash;a
+moving picture. In the last of the series comes the great conqueror in
+his chariot, a youth in the crowd following him, carrying his banner, on
+which is inscribed C&aelig;sar's notable despatch, 'Veni, vidi, vici;' 'I
+came, I saw, I conquered.'</p>
+
+<p>Another of Mantegna's best pictures is in distemper&mdash;in which, and on
+fresco, Mantegna chiefly painted,&mdash;and is in the Louvre, Paris. It is
+the Madonna of Victory, so called from its being painted to commemorate
+the deliverance of Italy from the French army under Charles VIII., a
+name which has acquired a sardonic meaning from the ultimate destination
+of the picture. This picture&mdash;which represents the Virgin and Child on a
+throne, in an arbour of fruit and flowers, between the archangels,
+Michael and St Maurice, in complete armour, with the patron saints of
+Mantua and the infant St John in the front, and the Marquis Ludovico of
+Mantua and his wife, Isabella D'Este, kneeling to return thanks&mdash;was
+painted by Mantegna at the age of seventy years; and, as if the art of
+the man had mellowed with time, it is the softest and tenderest of his
+pictures in execution. A beautiful Madonna of Mantegna's, still later in
+time, is in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>When Mantegna was sixty years old he took up the art of engraving, and
+prosecuted it with zeal and success, being one of the earliest painters
+who engraved his own pictures, and this accomplishment spread them
+abroad a hundredfold.</p>
+
+<p><b>Domenico Ghirlandajo</b> <a name="dajo" id="dajo"></a>was properly <b>Domenico Bicordi,</b> but inherited from
+his father, a goldsmith in Florence,<a id="footnotetag3" name="footnotetag3"></a>
+<a href="#footnote3"><sup class="sml">3</sup></a> the by-name of <b>Ghirlandajo</b> or
+Garland-maker&mdash;a distinctive appellation said to have been acquired by
+the elder man from his skill in making silver garlands for the heads of
+Florentine women and children. Domenico Ghirlandajo worked at his
+father's craft till he was twenty-four years of age, when, having in the
+mean time evinced great cleverness in taking the likenesses of the
+frequenters of Ghirlandajo the elder's shop, the future painter
+abandoned the goldsmith's trade for art pure and simple. He soon
+vindicated the wisdom of the step which he had taken by giving proofs of
+something of the strength of Masaccio, united with a reflection of the
+feeling of Fra Angelico.</p>
+
+<p>Ghirlandajo was summoned soon to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel,
+afterwards to be so glorious; but his greatest works were done in the
+prime of his manhood, in his native city, Florence, where he was chosen
+as the teacher of Michael Angelo, who was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo for
+three years.</p>
+
+<p>While still in the flower of his age and crowned with golden opinions,
+being, it is said with effusion, 'the delight of his city,' Ghirlandajo
+died after a short illness, in Ghirlandajo's time Florence had reached
+her meridian, and her citizens outvied each other in the magnificence of
+their gifts to their fair mother city. Ghirlandajo was fitted to be
+their painter; himself a generous-spirited artist, in the exuberance of
+life and power, he wished that his fellow-citizens would give him all
+the walls of the city to cover with frescoes. He was content with the
+specified sum for his painting, desiring more the approbation of his
+employers than additional crowns. His genius lying largely in the
+direction of portrait painting, he introduced frequently the portraits
+of contemporaries, causing them to figure as spectators of his sacred
+scenes. One of these contemporaries thus presented, was Amerigo
+Vespucci, who was to give his name to a continent. Another was a
+Florentine beauty, a woman of rank, Ginevra de Benci.</p>
+
+<p>Ghirlandajo was lavish in his employment of rich Florentine costumes and
+architecture. He even made the legends of the saints and the histories
+of the Bible appear as if they had happened under the shadow of
+Brunelleschi's duomo and Giotto's campanile, and within sound of the
+flow of the Arno. In the peculiar colouring used in fresco painting
+Ghirlandajo excelled.</p>
+
+<p>He painted a chapel for a Florentine citizen, Francesco Sasetti, in the
+church of the Trinit&agrave;, Florence, with scenes from the life of St
+Francis. Of these, the death of St Francis, surrounded by the sorrowing
+monks of his order, with the figures of Francesco Sasetti and his wife,
+Madonna Nera, on one side of the picture, is considered the best. As a
+curious illustration of the modernizing practice of Ghirlandajo, he has
+painted an old priest at the foot of the bier, chanting the litanies for
+the dying, with spectacles on his nose, the earliest known
+representation of these useful instruments.</p>
+
+<p>Ghirlandajo painted during four years the choir of the church of Santa
+Maria Novella, Florence, for one of the great Florentine benefactors,
+Giovanni Tornabuone, and there are to be seen some of Ghirlandajo's
+finest frescoes from the history of John the Baptist and the Virgin.</p>
+
+<p>A Madonna and Child with angels in the National Gallery is attributed to
+Ghirlandajo.</p>
+
+<p><b>Francesco Francia,</b> or <b>Il Francia,</b> was born at Bologna, and was the son
+<a name="Fran" id="Fran"></a>of a carpenter, whose surname was Raibaloni, but Francesco assumed the
+name of his master, a goldsmith, and worked himself at a goldsmith's
+trade till he was forty years of age. Indeed he may be said never to
+have relinquished his connection with the trade, and certainly he was no
+more ashamed of it than of his calling as a painter, for he signed
+himself indiscriminately 'goldsmith' and 'painter,' and sometimes
+whimsically put 'goldsmith' to his paintings and 'painter' to his
+jewellery. He was a famous designer of dies for coins and medals, and it
+is quite probable, as a countryman of his own has sought to prove, that
+he was the celebrated type-cutter, known as 'Francesco da Bologna.' But
+it is with Francesco '<i>pictor</i>' that we have to do.</p>
+
+<p>Though he only began to prosecute the painter's art in middle age, he
+rose with remarkable rapidity to eminence, was the great painter of
+Lombardy in his day, rivalling Squarcione, Mantegna's teacher in his
+school, which numbered two hundred scholars, and becoming the founder of
+the early Bolognese school of painters.</p>
+
+<p>Francia is said to have been very handsome in person, with a kindly
+disposition and an agreeable manner. He was on terms of cordial
+friendship with Raphael, then in his youth, and thirty years Il
+Francia's junior. Il Francia addressed an enthusiastic sonnet to
+Raphael, and there is extant a letter of Raphael's to Il Francia,
+excusing himself for not sending his friend Raphael's portrait, and
+making an exchange of sketches, that of his 'Nativity' for the drawing
+of Il Francia's 'Judith;' while it was to Il Francia's care that Raphael
+committed his picture of St Cecilia, when it was first sent to Bologna.
+These relations between the men and their characters throw discredit on
+the tradition that Il Francia died from jealous grief caused by the
+sight of Raphael's 'St Cecilia.' As Il Francia was seventy years of age
+at the time of his death, one may well attribute it to physical causes.
+Il Francia had at least one son, and another kinsman, painters, whose
+paintings were so good as to be occasionally confounded with those of Il
+Francia.</p>
+
+<p>Il Francia is thought to have united, in his works, a certain calm
+sedateness and frank sincerity to the dreamy imaginativeness of some of
+his contemporaries. His finest works are considered to be the frescoes
+from the life of St Cecilia in the church of St Cecilia at Bologna.</p>
+
+<p>Of a Madonna and Child, by Francia, at Bologna, I shall write down
+another of Dean Alford's descriptions,&mdash;many of which I have given for
+this, among other reasons, that these descriptions are not technical or
+professional, but the expression of the ardent admiration and grateful
+comprehension of a sympathetic spectator. 'He,' speaking of the Divine
+Child, 'is lying in simple nakedness on a rich red carpet, and is
+supported by a white pillar, over which the carpet passes. Of these
+accessories every thread is most delicately and carefully painted; no
+slovenly washes of meretricious colour where He is to be served, before
+whom all things are open; no perfunctory sparing of toil in serving Him
+who has given us all that is best. On his right hand kneels the Virgin
+Mother in adoration, her very face a magnificat&mdash;praise, lowliness,
+confidence; next to her, Joseph, telling by his looks the wonderful
+story, deeply but simply. Two beautiful angels kneel, one on either
+side&mdash;hereafter, perhaps, to kneel in like manner in the tomb. Their
+faces seemed to me notable for that which I have no doubt the painter
+intended to express,&mdash;the pure abstraction of reverent adoration,
+unmingled with human sympathies. The face and figure of the Divine
+Infant are full of majesty, as he holds his hands in blessing towards
+the spectator, who symbolizes the world which He has come to save. Close
+to him on the ground, on his right, two beautiful goldfinches sit on a
+branch in trustful repose; on his left springs a plant of the
+meadow-trefoil. Thus lightly and reverently has the master touched the
+mystery of the Blessed Trinity: the goldfinch symbolizing by its
+colours, the trefoil by the form of its leaf.'</p>
+
+<p>In our own National Gallery is a picture by Il Francia of the enthroned
+Virgin and Child and her mother, St Anne, who is presenting a peach to
+the infant Christ; at the foot of the throne is the little St John; to
+the right and left are St Paul with the sword, St Sebastian bound to a
+pillar and pierced with arrows, and St Lawrence with the emblematical
+grid-iron, &amp;c. &amp;c. Opposite this picture hangs, what once formed part of
+it, a solemn, sorrowful Piet&agrave;, as the Italians call a picture
+representing the dead Redeemer mourned over by the Virgin and by the
+other holy women. These pictures were bought by our Government from the
+Duke of Lucca for three thousand five hundred pounds.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Bartolommeo" id="Bartolommeo"></a><b>Fra Bartolommeo.</b> We come to a second gentle monk, not unlike Fra
+Angelico in his nature, but far less happy than Fra Angelico, in having
+been born in stormy times. Fra Bartolommeo, called also <b>Baccio della
+Porta,</b> or Bartholomew of the gate, from the situation of his lodgings
+when a young man, but scarcely known in Italy by any other name than
+that of <b>Il Frate</b>, or the Friar, was born near Florence, and trained from
+his boyhood to be a painter. In his youth, however, a terrible public
+event convulsed Florence, and revolutionized Baccio della Porta's life.
+He had been employed to paint in that notable Dominican convent of St
+Mark, where Savonarola, its devoted friar, was denouncing the sins of
+the times, including the profligate luxury of the nobles and the
+degradation of the representatives of the Church. Carried away by the
+fervour and sincerity of the speaker, Baccio joined the enthusiasts who
+cast into a burning pile the instruments of pride, vanity, and godless
+intellect denounced by the preacher. Baccio's sacrifice to the flaming
+heap of splendid furniture and dress, and worldly books, was all his
+designs from profane subjects and studies of the undraped figure. A
+little later Savonarola was excommunicated by the Pope and perished as
+a martyr; and Baccio, timid from his natural temper, distracted by
+doubt, and altogether horror-stricken, took a monk's vows, and entered
+the same convent of St Mark, where for four years he never touched a
+pencil.</p>
+
+<p>At the request of his superior Fra Bartolommeo painted again, and when
+Raphael visited Florence, and came with all his conquering sweetness and
+graciousness to greet the monk in his cell, something of Il Frate's old
+love for his art, and delight in its exercise, returned. He even visited
+Rome, but there his health failed him, and the great works of Lionardo,
+Michael Angelo, and Raphael, when he compared his own with theirs,
+seemed to crush and overwhelm him. But he painted better for his visit
+to Rome, even as he had painted better for his intimacy with Raphael.
+Nay, it is said Raphael himself painted better on account of his
+brotherly regard for, and confidence in, Fra Bartolommeo.</p>
+
+<p>Fra Bartolommeo died aged forty-eight years. Among his best pupils was a
+nun of St Catherine's, known as Suor Plautilla.</p>
+
+<p>To Il Frate, as a painter, is attributed great softness and harmony, and
+even majesty, though, like Fra Angelico, he was often deficient in
+strength. He was great in the management of draperies, for the better
+study of which he is said to have invented the lay figure. He indulged
+in the introduction into his pictures of rich architecture. He was fond
+of painting boy-angels&mdash;in which he excelled&mdash;playing frequently on
+musical instruments, or holding a canopy over the Virgin. Very few of
+his works are out of Italy; the most are in Florence, especially in the
+Pitti Palace. His two greatest works are the Madonna della Misericordia,
+or the Madonna of Mercy, at Lucca, where the Virgin stands with
+outstretched arms pleading for the suppliants, whom she shelters under
+the canopy, and who look to her as she looks to her Son,&mdash;and the grand
+single figure of St Mark, with his Gospel in his hand, in the Pitti
+Palace, Florence. Sir David Wilkie said of the Madonna of Mercy, 'that
+it contained the merits of Raphael, of Titian, of Rembrandt, and of
+Rubens.'</p>
+
+<p><a name="Sarto" id="Sarto"></a><b>Andrea Vanucchi,</b> commonly called<b> Andrea del Sarto,</b> from the occupation
+of his father, who was a tailor (in Italian, <i>sarto</i>), was born at
+Florence in 1488. He was first a goldsmith, but soon turned painter,
+winning early the commendatory title of 'Andrea senza errori,' or
+'Andrea the Faultless.' His life is a miserable and tragic history. In
+the early flush of his genius and industry, with its just crown of fame
+and success, he conceived a passion for a beautiful but worthless woman,
+whom, in spite of the opposition of his friends, he married. She
+rendered his home degraded and wretched, and his friends and scholars
+fell off from him. In disgust he quitted Florence, and entered the
+service of Francis I, of France; but his wife, for whom his regard was a
+desperate infatuation, imperiously summoned him back to Florence, to
+which he returned, bringing with him a large sum of money, entrusted to
+him by the king for the purchase of works of art. Instigated by his
+wife, Andrea del Sarto used this money for his, or rather her, purposes,
+and dared not return to France. Even in his native Florence he was
+loaded with reproach and shame. He died of the plague at the age of
+fifty-five years, according to tradition, plundered and abandoned in his
+extremity by the base woman for whom he had sacrificed principle and
+honour. We may read the grievous story of Andrea del Sarto, written by
+one of the greatest of England's modern poets.</p>
+
+<p>As may be imagined, Andrea del Sarto's excellence lay in the charm of
+his execution. His works were deficient in earnestness and high feeling,
+and some will have it, that, evilly haunted as he was, he perpetually
+painted in his Madonnas the beautiful but base-souled face of the woman
+who ruined him. Andrea del Sarto's best works are in Florence,
+particularly in the cloisters of the convent of the Annunziata. In the
+court of the same convent is his famous Riposo (or rest of the Holy
+Family on their way to Egypt), which is known as the 'Madonna of the
+Sack,' from the circumstance of Joseph in the picture leaning against a
+sack. This picture has held a high place in art for hundreds of years.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<p>LIONARDO DA VINCI, 1452-1519&mdash;MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564&mdash;RAPHAEL,
+1483-1520&mdash;TITIAN, 1477-1566.</p>
+
+
+<p>We have arrived at the triumph of art, not, indeed, in unconsciousness
+and devotion, but in fulness and completeness, as shown in the works of
+four of the greatest painters and men whom the world ever saw. Of the
+first, <b>Lionardo da Vinci,</b><a name="Lion" id="Lion"></a> born at Vinci in the neighbourhood of
+Florence, 1452, it may be said that the many-sidedness which
+characterized Italians&mdash;above all Italians of his day&mdash;reached its
+height in him. Not only was he a painter, a sculptor, an architect, and
+engineer, but also one of the boldest speculators of the generation
+which gave birth to Columbus, and was not less original and ingenious
+than he was universally accomplished&mdash;an Admirable Crichton among
+painters. There is a theory that this many-sidedness is a proof of the
+greatest men, indicating a man who might have been great in any way,
+who, had his destiny not found and left him a painter, would have been
+equally great as a philosopher, a man of science, a poet, or a
+statesman. It may be so; but the life of Lionardo tends also to
+illustrate the disadvantage of too wide a grasp and diffusion of genius.
+Beginning much and finishing little, not because he was idle or fickle,
+but because his schemes were so colossal and his aims so high, he spent
+his time in preparation for the attainment of perfect excellence, which
+eluded him. Lionardo was the pioneer, the teacher of others, rather than
+the complete fulfiller of his own dreams; and the life of the proud,
+passionate man was, to himself at least, a life of failure and
+mortification. This result might, in a sense, have been avoided; but
+Lionardo, great as he was, proved also one of those unfortunate men
+whose noblest efforts are met and marred by calamities which could have
+hardly been foreseen or prevented.</p>
+
+<p>Lionardo da Vinci was the son of a notary, and early showed a taste for
+painting as well as for arithmetic and mathematics. He was apprenticed
+to a painter, but he also sedulously studied physics. He is said,
+indeed, to have made marvellous guesses at truth, in chemistry, botany,
+astronomy, and particularly, as helping him in his art, anatomy. He was,
+according to other accounts, a man of noble person, like Ghirlandajo.
+And one can scarcely doubt this who looks at Lionardo's portrait painted
+by himself, or at any engraving from it, and remarks the grand presence
+of the man in his cap and furred cloak; his piercing wistful eyes;
+stately outline of nose; and sensitive mouth, unshaded by his
+magnificent flowing beard.</p>
+
+<p>He was endowed with surprising bodily strength, and was skilled in the
+knightly exercises of riding, fencing, and dancing. He was a lover of
+social pleasure, and inclined to indulge in expensive habits. While a
+lad he amused himself by inventing machines for swimming, diving, and
+flying, as well as a compass, a hygrometer, &amp;c. &amp;c. In a combination
+from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, &amp;c. &amp;c., with which
+his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a
+nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it
+filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer
+selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money. As something
+beyond amusement, Lionardo planned a canal to unite Florence with Pisa
+(while he executed other canals in the course of his life), and
+suggested the daring but not impossible idea of raising <i>en masse</i>, by
+means of levers, the old church of San Giovanni, Florence, till it
+should stand several feet above its original level, and so get rid of
+the half-sunken appearance which destroyed the effect of the fine old
+building. He visited the most frequented places, carrying always with
+him his sketch-book, in which to note down his observations; he followed
+criminals to execution in order to witness the pangs of despair; he
+invited peasants to his house and told them laughable stories, that he
+might pick up from their faces the essence of comic expression.<a id="footnotetag4" name="footnotetag4"></a>
+<a href="#footnote4"><sup class="sml">4</sup></a> A
+mania for truth&mdash;alike in great and little things&mdash;possessed him.</p>
+
+<p>Lionardo entered young into the service of the Gonzaga family of Milan,
+being, according to one statement, chosen for the office which he was to
+fill, as the first singer in <i>improvisatore</i> of his time (among his
+other inventions he devised a peculiar kind of lyre). He showed no want
+of confidence in asserting his claims to be elected, for after declaring
+the various works he would undertake, he added with regard to
+painting&mdash;'I can do what can be done, as well as any man, be he who he
+may.' He received from the Duke a salary of five hundred crowns a year.
+He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works,
+he painted his 'Cenacolo,' or 'Last Supper,' one of the grandest
+pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice,
+in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican
+convent, Milan. The situation was damp, and the material used proved so
+unsuitable for work on plaster, that, even before it was exposed to the
+reverses which in the course of a French occupation of Milan converted
+the refectory into a stable, the colours had altogether faded, and the
+very substance of the picture was crumbling into ruin.</p>
+
+<p>The equestrian statue of the old Duke of Milan by Lionardo excited so
+much delight in its first freshness, that it was carried in triumph
+through the city, and during the progress it was accidentally broken.
+Lionardo began another, but funds failed for its completion, and
+afterwards the French used the original clay model as a target for their
+bowmen.</p>
+
+<p>Lionardo returned to Florence, and found his great rival, Michael
+Angelo, already in the field. Both of the men, conscious of mighty
+gifts, were intolerant of rivalry. To Lionardo especially, as being much
+the elder man, the originator and promoter of many of the new views in
+art which his opponent had adopted, the competition was very
+distasteful, and to Michael Angelo he used the bitter sarcasm which has
+been handed down to us, 'I was famous before you were born.'</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless Lionardo consented to compete with Michael Angelo for the
+painting in fresco of one side of the council-hall, by the order of the
+gonfaloniere for the year. Lionardo chose for his subject a victory of
+the Florentines over the Milanese, while Michael Angelo took a scene
+from the Pisan campaigns. Not only was the work never done (some say
+partly because Lionardo <i>would</i> delay in order to make experiments in
+oils) on account of political troubles, but the very cartoons of the two
+masters, which all the artists of the day flocked to see, have been
+broken up, dispersed, and lost; and of one only, that of Michael Angelo,
+a small copy remains, while but a fragment from Lionardo's was preserved
+in a copy made by Rubens.</p>
+
+<p>Lionardo went to Rome in the pontificate of Leo X., but there his
+quarrel with Michael Angelo broke out more violently than ever. The Pope
+too, who loved better a gentler, more accommodating spirit, seemed to
+slight Lionardo, and the great painter not only quitted Rome in disgust,
+but withdrew his services altogether from ungrateful Italy.</p>
+
+<p>At Pavia Lionardo was presented to Francis 1, of France, who, zealous
+in patronizing art, engaged the painter to follow Francis's fortunes at
+a salary of seven hundred crowns a year. Lionardo spent the remainder of
+his life in France. His health had long been declining before he died,
+aged sixty-seven years, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had risen high in the
+favour of Francis. From this circumstance, and the generous, chivalrous
+nature of the king, there doubtless arose the tradition that Francis
+visited Lionardo on his death-bed; and that, while in the act of gently
+assisting him to raise himself, the painter died in the king's arms.
+Court chronicles do their best to demolish this story, by proving
+Francis to have been at St Germain on the day when Lionardo died at
+Cloux.</p>
+
+<p>Lionardo was never married, and he left what worldly goods he possessed
+to a favourite scholar. Besides his greater works, he filled many MS.
+volumes, some with singularly accurate studies and sketches, maps, plans
+for machines, scores for music (three volumes of these are in the Royal
+Library at Windsor), and some with writing, which is written&mdash;probably
+to serve as a sort of cipher&mdash;from right to left, instead of from left
+to right. One of his writings is a valuable 'Treatise' on painting;
+other writings are on scientific and philosophic subjects, and in these
+Lionardo is believed to have anticipated some of the discoveries which
+were reached by lines of close reasoning centuries later.</p>
+
+<p>Lionardo's genius as a painter was expressed by his uniting, in the very
+highest degree, truth and imagination. He was the shrewdest observer of
+ordinary life, and he could also realize the higher mysteries and
+profounder feelings of human nature. He drew exceedingly well. Of
+transparent lights and shadows, or chiaroscuro, he was the greatest
+master; but he was not a good colourist. His works are very rare, and
+many which are attributed to him are the pictures of his scholars, for
+he founded one of the great schools of Milan or Lombardy. There is a
+tradition that he was, as Holbein was once believed to be, ambidextrous,
+or capable of using his left hand as well as his right, and that he
+painted with two brushes&mdash;one in each hand. Thus more than fully
+armed, Lionardo da Vinci looms out on us like a Titan through the mists
+of centuries, and he preaches to us the simple homily, that not even a
+Titan can command worldly success; that such men must look to higher
+ends as the reward of their travail, and before undertaking it they must
+count the cost, and be prepared to renounce the luxurious tastes which
+clung to Lionardo, and which were not for him or for such men as he was.</p>
+
+<p>Lionardo's great painting was his 'Last Supper,' of which, happily, good
+copies exist, as well as the wreck of the picture itself. The original
+is now, after it is too late, carefully guarded and protected in its old
+place in the Dominican convent of the Madonna della Grazia, Milan. The
+assembled company sit at a long table, Christ being seated in the
+middle, the disciples forming two separate groups on each side of the
+Saviour. The gradations of age are preserved, from the tender youth of
+John to the grey hairs of Simon; and all the varied emotions of mind,
+from the deepest sorrow and anxiety to the eager desire of revenge, are
+here portrayed. The well-known words of Christ, 'One of you shall betray
+me,' have caused the liveliest emotion. The two groups to the left of
+Christ are full of impassioned excitement, the figures in the first
+turning to the Saviour, those in the second speaking to each
+other,&mdash;horror, astonishment, suspicion, doubt, alternating in the
+various expressions. On the other hand, stillness, low whispers,
+indirect observations, are the prevailing expressions in the groups on
+the right. In the middle of the first group sits the betrayer; a
+cunning, sharp profile, he looks up hastily to Christ, as if speaking
+the words, 'Master, is it I?' while, true to the Scriptural account, his
+left hand and Christ's right hand approach, as if unconsciously, the
+dish that stands before them.<a id="footnotetag5" name="footnotetag5"></a>
+<a href="#footnote5"><sup class="sml">5</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>A sketch of the head of Christ for the original picture, which has been
+preserved on a torn and soiled piece of paper at Brera, expresses the
+most elevated seriousness, together with Divine gentleness pain on
+account of the faithless disciple, a full presentiment of his own death,
+and resignation to the will of the Father. It gives a faint idea of what
+the master may have accomplished in the finished picture.</p>
+
+<p>During his stay at Florence Lionardo painted a portrait of that Ginevra
+Benci already mentioned as painted by Ghirlandajo; and a still more
+famous portrait by Lionardo was that of Mona Lisa, the wife of his
+friend Giocondo. This picture is also known as 'La Jaconde.' I wish to
+call attention to it because it is the first of four surpassingly
+beautiful portraits of women which four great painters gave in
+succession to the world. The others, to be spoken of afterwards, are
+Raphael's 'Fornarina,' Titian's 'Bella Donna,' and Rubens' 'Straw Hat.'
+About the original of 'La Jaconde' there never has been a mystery such
+as there has been about the others. At this portrait the unsatisfied
+painter worked at intervals for four years, and when he left it he
+pronounced it still unfinished. 'La Jaconde' is now in the Louvre in
+nearly ruined condition, yet a judge says of it that even now 'there is
+something in this wonderful head of the ripest southern beauty, with its
+airy background of a rocky landscape, which exercises a peculiar
+fascination over the mind.'</p>
+
+<p>There is a painting of the Madonna and Child Christ said to be by
+Lionardo, and probably, at least, by one of his school, and which
+belongs, I think, to the Duke of Buccleuch, and was exhibited lately
+among the works of the old masters. The group has at once something
+touching and exalted in its treatment. The Divine Child in the Mother's
+arms is strangely attracted by the sight of a cross, and turns towards
+it with ineffable longing, while the Virgin Mother, with a pang of
+foreboding, clasping the child in her arms, seeks to draw him back.</p>
+
+<p>The fragment of the cartoon in which Lionardo competed with Michael
+Angelo, may be held to survive in the fine painting by Rubens called
+'the Battle of the Standard.' Of a famous Madonna and St Anne, by
+Lionardo, the original cartoon in black chalk is preserved under glass
+in our Royal Academy.<a id="footnotetag6" name="footnotetag6"></a>
+<a href="#footnote6"><sup class="sml">6</sup></a></p>
+
+<p><b>Michael Angelo Buonarroti,</b><a name="Michel" id="Michel"></a> born at Castel Caprese near Arezzo in
+Tuscany, 1475, is the next of these universal geniuses, a term which we
+are accustomed to hold in contempt, because we have only seen it
+exemplified in parody. After Lionardo, indeed, Michael Angelo, though he
+was also painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, poet, musician, might
+almost be regarded as restricted in his pursuits, yet still so manifold
+was he, that men have loved to make a play upon his name and call him
+'Michael the angel,' and to speak of him as of a king among men.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo was of noble descent, and though his ancient house had
+fallen into comparative poverty, his father was mayor or podesta of
+Chiusi, and governor of the castle of Chiusi and Caprese. Michael Angelo
+was destined for the profession of the law, but so early vindicated his
+taste for art, that at the age of thirteen years he was apprenticed to
+Ghirlandajo. Lorenzo the Magnificent was then ruling Florence, and he
+had made a collection of antique models in his palace and gardens, and
+constituted it an academy for young artists. In this academy Michael
+Angelo developed a strong bias for sculpture, and won the direct
+patronage of the Medici.</p>
+
+<p>To this period of his life belong two characteristic anecdotes. In a
+struggle with a fellow-student, Michael Angelo received a blow from a
+mallet in his face, which, breaking bone and cartilage, lent to his nose
+the rugged bend,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The bar of Michael Angelo.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>An ill-advised member of the Medician house, while entertaining a party
+of guests during a snowstorm, sent out the indignant artist to make a
+snow man within sight of the palace windows. These anecdotes bear
+indirectly on the ruling qualities of Michael Angelo&mdash;qualities so
+integral that they are wrought into his marble and painted on his
+canvas&mdash;proud independence and energy.</p>
+
+<p>Before going farther I wish to guard against a common misapprehension of
+Michael Angelo&mdash;that he was a haughty, arrogant man, absolutely narrow
+in his half-idolatrous, half-human worship of art. Michael Angelo was
+severe in place of being sweet; he was impatient of contradiction; he
+was careless and scornful of ceremony; and in his very wrath at flattery
+and hypocrisy, he was liable to sin against his own honesty and
+sincerity. But he was a man with a lofty sense of duty and a profound
+reverence for God. He was, unlike Lionardo, consistently simple, frugal,
+and temperate, throughout his long life. If he held up a high standard
+to others, and enforced it on them with hardness, he held up a higher
+standard to himself, and enforced it on himself more hardly still. He
+was a thoroughly unworldly man, and actions which had their root in
+unworldliness have been ascribed unjustly to a kind of Lucifer pride.
+Greed, and the meanness of greed, were unknown to him. He worked for the
+last ten years of his life (under no less than five different Popes) at
+his designs for St Peter's, steadfastly refusing pay for the work,
+saying that he did it for the honour of God and his own honour. He made
+many enemies and suffered from their enmity, but I cannot learn that,
+except in one instance, he was guilty of dealing an unworthy blow at
+his opponents. He was generous to his scholars, and without jealousy of
+them, suffering them to use his designs for their own purposes. He said,
+'I have no friends, I need none, I wish for none;' but that was in
+feeling himself 'alone before Heaven;' and of the friends whom he did
+possess, he loved them all the more devotedly and faithfully, because
+they were few in number.</p>
+
+<p>One need only be told of his love for his old servant Urbino, whom he
+presented with two thousand crowns to render him independent of service;
+and when the servant was seized with his last illness Michael Angelo
+nursed him tenderly, sleeping in his clothes on a couch that he might be
+ready to attend his patient. When his cares were ended, Michael Angelo
+wrote to a correspondent&mdash;'My Urbino is dead&mdash;to my infinite grief and
+sorrow. Living, he served me truly; and in his death he taught me how to
+die. I have now no other hope than to rejoin him in Paradise.'</p>
+
+<p>Of Michael Angelo's more equal friendship with Vittoria Colonna I hope
+my readers will read at leisure for themselves. No nobler, truer
+friendship ever existed. It began when the high-born and beautiful,
+gifted, and devout Marchesa de Pescara&mdash;most loyal of wives and widows,
+was forty-eight, and Michael Angelo sixty-four years of age. After a few
+years of privileged intercourse and correspondence, which were the
+happiest years in Michael Angelo's life, it ended for this world when he
+stood mourning by her lifeless clay. 'I was born a rough model, and it
+was for thee to reform and re-make me,' the great painter had written
+humbly of himself to his liege lady.<a id="footnotetag7" name="footnotetag7"></a>
+<a href="#footnote7"><sup class="sml">7</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Italy, in Michael Angelo's time, as Germany in Albert D&uuml;rer's, was all
+quickened and astir with the new wave of religious thought which brought
+about the Reformation. Ochino and Peter Martyr, treading in the
+footsteps of Savonarola, had preached to eager listeners, but 'in Italy
+men did not adopt Lutheranism, though they approached it;' and in all
+the crowd of great Italian artists of the day, Michael Angelo shows
+deepest traces of the conflict&mdash;of its trouble, its seriousness, its
+nobleness. He only, among his brethren, acted out his belief that the
+things of the world sank into insignificance before those thoughts of
+God and immortality which were alone fully worthy of the soul. And it
+was, as to a religious work for which he was fitted, that he at last
+gave himself up to the raising of St Peter's. We shall have next in
+order the life of a man who had all the winning qualities which Michael
+Angelo wanted, but we shall hardly, through the whole range of history,
+find a nobler man than Michael Angelo.</p>
+
+<p>After his first visit to Rome, 1496, Michael Angelo executed his
+colossal statue of David. In 1503 he entered into the competition with
+Lionardo for the painting of one end of the Council-hall, in Florence,
+which has been already mentioned. For this object he drew as his
+cartoon, 'Pisan soldiers surprised while bathing by a sudden trumpet
+call to arms.' The grand cartoon, of which only a small copy exists, was
+said to have been torn to pieces as an act of revenge by a
+fellow-sculptor, whom Michael Angelo had offended.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo was invited to Rome by Julius II. in 1504 to aid in
+erecting the unapproachable monument which the Pope projected raising
+for himself. Then commenced a series of contentions and struggles
+between the imperious and petulant Pope and the haughty, uncompromising
+painter, in which the latter certainly had the best of it. At one time
+in the course of the quarrel, Michael Angelo departed from Rome without
+permission or apology, and stoutly refused to return, though followed
+hotly by no less than five different couriers, armed with threats and
+promises, and urged to make the reparation by his own gonfaloniere. At
+last a meeting and a reconciliation between Michael Angelo and the Pope
+were effected at Bologna. Michael Angelo designed for Pope Julius II,
+not only the statue of Pope Julius at Bologna, which was finally
+converted into a cannon, and turned against the very man whose effigy it
+had originally presented, but also for that tomb which was never
+completed, the famous figure of Moses seated, grasping his beard with
+one hand.</p>
+
+<p>While employed at the tomb, Michael Angelo, then in his fortieth year,
+was desired by the Pope to undertake the decoration of the ceiling of
+the Sistine Chapel. Here, again, the hand of an enemy is said to have
+been at work. Michael Angelo, with the first place as a sculptor, was
+inexperienced in fresco painting; while Raphael, who was taking the
+place of Lionardo as Michael Angelo's most formidable rival (yet whom it
+is said Michael Angelo pointed out as the fittest painter of the
+ceiling), and who was then engaged in painting the Vatican chambers, had
+already achieved the utmost renown. It was anticipated by secret
+hostility, so records tradition, that Michael Angelo would fail signally
+in the unaccustomed work, and that his merit as an artist would pale
+altogether before that of Raphael's. I need hardly write how entirely
+malice was balked in the verdict to which posterity has set its seal.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo brought artists from Florence to help him in his great
+undertaking, for over the chapel, whose walls had already been painted
+by older artists&mdash;among them Ghirlandajo, was an enormous vault of 150
+feet in length by 50 in breadth, which Michael Angelo was required to
+cover with designs representing the Fall and Redemption of Man. But the
+painter was unable to bear what seemed to him the bungling attempts of
+his assistants; so dismissing them all and destroying their work, he
+shut himself up, and working in solitude and secrecy, set himself to
+evolve from his own inner consciousness the gigantic scenes of a
+tremendous drama. In 22 months (or, as Kugler holds, in three years,
+including the time spent on the designs) he finished gloriously the
+work, the magnitude of which one must see to comprehend. On All Saints'
+Day, 1512, the ceiling was uncovered, and Michael Angelo was hailed,
+little though he cared for such clamorous hailing, as a painter indeed.
+For this piece of work Michael Angelo received 3000 crowns.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Julius died, and was succeeded by Leo X. of the Medician house,
+but, in spite of early associations as well as of mother country,
+Michael Angelo was no more acceptable to the Pope&mdash;a brilliantly
+polished, easy-tempered man of the world, who filled the chair of St
+Peter's, than Lionardo had been. Leo X, greatly preferred Raphael, to
+whom all manner of pleasantness as well as of courteous deference was
+natural, to the two others. At the same time, Leo employed Michael
+Angelo, though it was more as an architect than as a painter, and rather
+at Florence than at Rome. At Florence Michael Angelo executed for Pope
+Clement VII., another Medici, the mortuary chapel of San Lorenzo, with
+its six great statues, those of the cousins Lorenzo de Medici and
+Giuliano de Medici, the first called by the Florentines 'Il Pensi&egrave;ro,'
+or 'Pensive Thought,' with the four colossal recumbent figures named
+respectively the Night, the Morning, the Dawn, and the Twilight.</p>
+
+<p>In 1537 Michael Angelo was employed by his fellow citizens to fortify
+his native city against the return of his old patrons the Medici, and
+the city held out for nine months.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Paul III., an old man when elected to the popedom, but bent on
+signalizing his pontificate with as splendid works of art as those
+which had rendered the reigns of his predecessors illustrious, summoned
+another man, grown elderly, Michael Angelo, upwards of sixty years,
+reluctant to accept the commission, to finish the decoration of the
+Sistine Chapel; and Michael Angelo painted on the wall, at the upper
+end, his painting, 'The Last Judgment.' The picture is forty-seven feet
+high by forty-three wide, and it occupied the painter eight years. It
+was during its progress that Michael Angelo entered on his friendship
+with Vittoria Colonna.</p>
+
+<p>For the chapel called the Paolina or Pauline Chapel Michael Angelo also
+painted less-known frescoes, but from that time he devoted his life to
+St Peter's. He had said that he would take the old Pantheon and 'suspend
+it in air,' and he did what he said, though he did not live to see the
+great cathedral completed. His sovereign, the Grand Duke of Florence,
+endeavoured in vain with magnificent offers to lure the painter back to
+his native city. Michael Angelo protested that to leave Rome then would
+be 'a sin and a shame, and the ruin of the greatest religious monument
+in Christian Europe.' Michael Angelo, like Lionardo, did not marry; he
+died at Rome in 1563, in his eighty-ninth year.</p>
+
+<p>His nephew and principal heir,<a id="footnotetag8" name="footnotetag8"></a>
+<a href="#footnote8"><sup class="sml">8</sup></a> by the orders of the Grand Duke of
+Florence, and it is believed according to Michael Angelo's own wish,
+removed the painter's body to Florence, where it was buried with all
+honours in the church of Santa Croce there.</p>
+
+<p>The traits which recall Michael Angelo personally to us, are the
+prominent arch of the nose, the shaggy brows, the tangled beard, the
+gaunt grandeur of a figure like that of one of his prophets.</p>
+
+<p>While Michael Angelo lived, one Pope rose on his approach, and seated
+the painter on his right hand, and another Pope declined to sit down in
+his painter's presence; but the reason given for the last condescension,
+is that the Pope feared that the painter would follow his example. And
+if the Grand Duke Cosmo uncovered before Michael Angelo, and stood hat
+in hand while speaking to him, we may have the explanation in another
+assertion, that 'sovereigns asked Michael Angelo to put on his cap,
+because the painter would do it unasked.'</p>
+
+<p>The solitary instance in which Michael Angelo is represented as taking
+an unfair advantage of an antagonist, is in connection with the
+painter's rivalry in his art with Raphael. Michael Angelo undervalued
+the genius of Raphael, and was disgusted by what the older man
+considered the immoderate admiration bestowed on the younger. A
+favourite pupil of Michael Angelo's was Sebastian Del Piombo, who being
+a Venetian by birth was an excellent colourist. For one of his
+pictures&mdash;the very 'Raising of Lazarus' now in the National Gallery,
+which the Pope had ordered at the same time that he had ordered
+Raphael's 'Transfiguration'&mdash;it is rumoured that Michael Angelo gave the
+designs and even drew the figures, leaving Sebastian the credit, and
+trusting that without Michael Angelo's name appearing in the work, by
+the help of his drawing in addition to Sebastian's superb colouring,
+Raphael would be eclipsed, and that by a painter comparatively obscure.</p>
+
+<p>The unwarrantable inference that the whole work was that of one painter,
+constituted a stratagem altogether unworthy of Michael Angelo, and if it
+had any existence, its getting wind disappointed and foiled its authors.
+When the story was repeated to Raphael, his sole protest is said to have
+been to the effect that he was glad that Michael Angelo esteemed him so
+highly as to enter the lists with him.</p>
+
+<p>We can judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without
+having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of
+some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's
+translations of selections from Michael Angelo's poems.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a
+painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and
+in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is
+not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable
+dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael
+Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them
+to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding
+a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic
+architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like
+these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.</p>
+
+<p>In Michael Angelo's works of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his
+monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo,
+Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic
+history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded
+the sculptor's meaning in these monuments.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Jameson quotes an account of Michael Angelo at work. 'An eye-witness
+has left us a very graphic description of the energy with which, even in
+old age, Michael Angelo handled his chisel:&mdash;"I can say that I have
+seen Michael Angelo at the age of sixty, and, with a body announcing
+weakness, make more chips of marble fly about in a quarter of an hour
+than would three of the strongest young sculptors in an hour,&mdash;a thing
+almost incredible to him who has not beheld it. He went to work with
+such impetuosity and fury of manner, that I feared almost every moment
+to see the block split into pieces. It would seem as if, inflamed by the
+idea of greatness which inspired him, this great man attacked with a
+species of fury the marble which concealed the Statue."'&mdash;<i>Blaise de
+Vigen&eacute;re</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In painting Michael Angelo regarded colouring as of secondary
+importance. He is not known to have executed one painting in oil, and he
+treated oil and easel-painting generally as work only fit for women or
+idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no
+means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness
+and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation
+had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of
+Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and
+his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the
+greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine
+Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the greater part colossal,
+as they were to be looked at, in the distance, from below.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the most perfect
+works done by Michael Angelo in his long and active life. Here
+his great spirit appears in noblest dignity, in its highest
+purity; here the attention is not disturbed by that arbitrary
+display to which his great power not unfrequently seduced him in
+other works. The ceiling forms a flattened arch in its section;
+the central portion, which is a plain surface, contains a series
+of large and small pictures, representing the most important
+events recorded in the book of Genesis&mdash;the Creation and Fall of
+Man, with its immediate consequences. In the large triangular
+compartments at the springing of the vault are sitting figures of
+the Prophets and Sibyls, as the</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>foretellers of the coming Saviour. In the soffits of the recesses
+between these compartments, and in the arches underneath,
+immediately above the windows, are the ancestors of the Virgin,
+the series leading the mind directly to the Saviour. The external
+of these numerous representations is formed by an architectural
+frame-work of peculiar composition, which encloses the single
+subjects, tends to make the principal masses conspicuous, and
+gives to the whole an appearance of that solidity and support so
+necessary, but so seldom attended to in soffit decorations, which
+may be considered as if suspended. A great number of figures are
+also connected with the framework; those in unimportant
+situations are executed in the colour of stone or bronze; in the
+more important, in natural colours. These serve to support the
+architectural forms, to fill up and to connect the whole. They
+may be best described as the living and embodied <i>genii</i> of
+architecture. It required the unlimited power of an architect,
+sculptor, and painter, to conceive a structural whole of so much
+grandeur,</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>to design the decorative figures with the significant repose
+required by the sculpturesque character, and yet to preserve
+their subordination to the principal subjects, and to keep the
+latter in the proportions and relations best adapted to the space
+to be filled.'&mdash;<i>Kugler</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>The pictures from the Old Testament, beginning from the altar, are:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">1. The Separation of Light and Darkness.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">2. The Creation of the Sun and Moon.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">3. The Creation of Trees and Plants.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">4. The Creation of Adam.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">5. The Creation of Eve.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">6. The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">7. The Sacrifice of Noah.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">8. The Deluge.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">9. The Intoxication of Noah.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The scenes from Genesis are the most sublime representations of
+these subjects;&mdash;the Creating Spirit is unveiled before us. The
+peculiar type which the painter has here given of the form of the
+Almighty</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Father has been frequently imitated by his followers, and even by
+Raphael, but has been surpassed by none. Michael Angelo has
+represented him in majestic flight, sweeping through the air,
+surrounded by <i>genii</i>, partly supporting, partly borne along with
+him, covered by his floating drapery; they are the distinct
+syllables, the separate virtues of his creating word. In the
+first (large) compartment we see him with extended hands,
+assigning to the sun and moon their respective paths. In the
+second, he awakens the first man to life. Adam lies stretched on
+the verge of the earth in the act of raising himself; the Creator
+touches him with the point of his finger, and appears thus to
+endow him with feeling and life. This picture displays a
+wonderful depth of thought in the composition, and the utmost
+elevation and majesty in the general treatment and execution. The
+third subject is not less important, representing the Fall of
+Man, and his Expulsion from Paradise. The tree of knowledge
+stands in the midst; the serpent (the upper part of the body
+being that of a woman) is twined around the</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>stem; she bends down towards the guilty pair, who are in the act
+of plucking the forbidden fruit. The figures are nobly graceful,
+particularly that of Eve. Close to the serpent hovers the angel
+with the sword, ready to drive the fallen beings out of Paradise.
+In this double action, this union of two separate moments, there
+is something peculiarly poetic and significant: it is guilt and
+punishment in one picture. The sudden and lightning-like
+appearance of the avenging angel behind the demon of darkness has
+a most impressive effect.'&mdash;<i>Kugler</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>The lower portion of the ceiling is divided into triangles, occupied by
+the Prophets and Sibyls in solemn contemplation, accompanied by angels
+and genii. Beginning from the left of the entrance their order is&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">1. Joel.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">2. Sibylla Erythr&aelig;a.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">3. Ezekiel.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">4. Sibylla Persica.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">5. Jonah.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">6. Sibylla Libyca.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">7. Daniel.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">8. Sibylla Cum&aelig;a.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">9. Isaiah.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">10. Sibylla Delphica.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The prophets and sibyls in the triangular compartments of the
+curved portion of the ceiling are the largest figures in the
+whole work; these, too, are among the most wonderful forms that
+modern art has called into life. They are all represented seated,
+employed with books or rolled manuscripts; genii stand near or
+behind them. These mighty beings sit before us pensive,
+meditative, inquiring, or looking upwards with inspired
+countenances. Their forms and movements, indicated by the grand
+lines and masses of the drapery, are majestic and dignified. We
+see in them beings, who, while they feel and bear the sorrows of
+a corrupt and sinful world, have power to look for consolation
+into the secrets of the future. Yet the greatest variety prevails
+in the attitudes and expression: each figure is full of
+individuality. Zacharias is an aged man, busied in calm and
+circumspect investigation; Jeremiah is bowed down, absorbed in
+thought, the thought of deep and bitter grief; Ezekiel turns with
+hasty movements to the genius next to him, who points upwards
+with joyful</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>expectation, etc. The sibyls are equally characteristic: the
+Persian, a lofty, majestic woman, very aged; the Erythr&aelig;an, full
+of power, like the warrior goddess of wisdom; the Delphic, like
+Cassandra, youthfully soft and graceful, but with strength to
+bear the awful seriousness of revelation.'&mdash;<i>Kugler</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The belief of the Roman Catholic Church in the testimony of the
+sibyl is shown by the well-known hymn, said to have been composed
+by Pope Innocent III, at the close of the thirteenth century,
+beginning with the  verse&mdash;</p></div>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Dies ir&aelig;, dies illa,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Solvet s&aelig;clum in favilla<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Teste David cum Sibylla."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It may be inferred that this hymn, admitted into the liturgy of
+the Roman Church, gave sanction to the adoption of the sibyls
+into Christian art. They are seen from this time accompanying the
+prophets and apostles, in the cyclical decorations of the
+church.... But the highest honour that art has rendered to the
+sibyls has been by the hand of Michael Angelo,</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here in the conception of a
+mysterious order of women, placed above and without all
+considerations of the graceful or the individual, the great
+master was peculiarly in his element. They exactly fitted his
+standard, of art, not always sympathetic, nor comprehensible to
+the average human mind, of which the grand in form and the
+abstract in expression were the first and last conditions. In
+this respect, the sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are more
+Michael Angelesque than their companions the prophets. For these,
+while types of the highest monumental treatment, are yet men,
+while the sibyls belong to a distinct class of beings, who convey
+the impression of the very obscurity in which their history is
+wrapt&mdash;creatures who have lived far from the abodes of men, who
+are alike devoid of the expression of feminine sweetness, human
+sympathy, or sacramental beauty; who are neither Christians nor
+Jewesses, Witches nor Graces, yet living, grand, beautiful, and
+true, according to laws revealed to the great Florentine genius
+only.</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Thus their figures may be said to be unique, as the offspring of
+a peculiar sympathy between the master's mind and his subject. To
+this sympathy may be ascribed the prominence and size given them,
+both prophets and sibyls, as compared to their usual relation to
+the subjects they environ. They sit here on twelve throne-like
+niches, more like presiding deities, each wrapt in
+self-contemplation, than as tributary witnesses to the truth and
+omnipotence of Him they are intended to announce. Thus they form
+a gigantic frame-work round the subjects of the Creation, of
+which the birth of Eve, as the type of the Nativity, is the
+intentional centre. For some reason, the twelve figures are not
+prophets and sibyls alternately&mdash;there being only five sibyls to
+seven prophets,&mdash;so that the prophets come together at one angle.
+Books and scrolls are given indiscriminately to them.</p>
+
+<p>'The Sibylla Persica, supposed to be the oldest of the sisterhood, holds
+the book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of sight, which fact,
+contradicted as it is</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>by a frame of obviously Herculean strength, gives a mysterious
+intentness to the action.</p>
+
+<p>'The Sibylla Libyca, of equally powerful proportions, but less closely
+draped, is grandly wringing herself to lift a massive volume from a
+height above her head on to her knees.</p>
+
+<p>'The Sibylla Cumana, also aged, and with her head covered, is reading
+with her volume at a distance from her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>'The Sibylla Delphica, with waving hair escaping from her turban, is a
+beautiful young being, the most human of all, gazing into vacancy or
+futurity. She holds a scroll.</p>
+
+<p>'The Sibylla Erythr&aelig;a, grand, bare-headed creature, sits reading
+intently with crossed legs, about to turn over her book.</p>
+
+<p>'The prophets are equally grand in structure, and though, as we have
+said, not more than men, yet they are the only men that could well bear
+the juxtaposition with their stupendous female colleagues. Ezekiel,
+between Erythr&aelig;a and Persica, has a scroll in his</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>hand that hangs by his side, just cast down, as he turns eagerly to
+listen to some voice.</p>
+
+<p>'Jeremiah, a magnificent figure, with elbow on knee and head on hand,
+wrapt in meditation appropriate to one called to utter lamentation and
+woe. He has neither book nor scroll.</p>
+
+<p>'Jonah is also without either. His position is strained and ungraceful,
+looking upwards, and apparently remonstrating with the Almighty upon the
+destruction of the gourd, a few leaves of which are seen above him. His
+hands are placed together with a strange and trivial action, supposed to
+denote the counting on his fingers the number of days he was in the
+fish's belly. A formless marine monster is seen at his side.</p>
+
+<p>'Daniel has a book on his lap, with one hand on it. He is young, and a
+piece of lion's skin seems to allude to his history.'<a id="footnotetag9" name="footnotetag9"></a>
+<a href="#footnote9"><sup class="sml">9</sup></a></p></div>
+
+
+<p>In the recesses between the prophets and sibyls are a series of lovely
+family groups, representing the genealogy of the Virgin, and expressive
+of calm expectation of the future. The four corners of the ceiling
+contain groups illustrative of the power of the Lord displayed in the
+especial deliverances of his chosen people. Near the altar are:</p>
+
+<p>Right, The Deliverance of the Israelites by the Brazen Serpent.</p>
+
+<p>Left, The Execution of Haman.</p>
+
+<p>Near the entrance are:</p>
+
+<p>Right, Judith and Holofernes.</p>
+
+<p>Left, David and Goliath.<a id="footnotetag10" name="footnotetag10"></a>
+<a href="#footnote10"><sup class="sml">10</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo was thirty-nine years of age when he painted the ceiling
+of the Sistine. When he began to paint the 'Day of Judgment' he was
+above sixty years of age, and his great rival, Raphael, had already been
+dead thirteen years.</p>
+
+<p>The picture of the 'Day of Judgment,' with much that renders it
+marvellous and awful, has a certain coarseness of conception and
+execution. The moment chosen is that in which the Lord says, 'Depart
+from me, ye cursed,' and the idea and even attributes of the principal
+figure are taken from Orcagna's old painting in the Campo Santo. But
+with all Michael Angelo's advantages, he has by no means improved on the
+original idea. He has robbed the figure of the Lord of its transcendant
+majesty; he has not been able to impart to the ranks of the blessed the
+look of blessedness which 'Il Beato' himself might have conveyed. The
+chief excellence of the picture is in the ranks of the condemned, who
+writhe and rebel against their agonies. No wonder that the picture is
+sombre and dreadful.</p>
+
+<p>Of the allegorical figures of 'Night' and 'Morning' in the chapel of San
+Lorenzo, there are casts at the Crystal Palace.</p>
+
+<p>A comparison and a contrast have been instituted between Michael Angelo
+and Milton, and Raphael and Shakespeare. There may be something in them,
+but, as in the case of broken metaphors, they will not bear being pushed
+to a logical conclusion or picked to pieces. The very transparent
+comparison which matches Michael Angelo with his own countryman, Dante,
+is after all more felicitous and truer. Michael Angelo with Lionardo are
+the great chiefs of the Florentine School.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Raph" id="Raph"></a><b>Raphael Sanzio,</b> or <b>Santi of Urbino,</b> the head of the Roman School, was
+one of those very exceptional men who seem born to happiness, to inspire
+love and only love, to pass through the world making friends and
+disarming enemies, who are fully armed to confer pleasure while almost
+incapable of either inflicting or receiving pain. To this day his
+exceptional fortune stands Raphael's memory in good stead, since for one
+man or woman who yearns after the austere righteousness and priceless
+tenderness of Michael Angelo, there are ten who yield with all their
+hearts to the gay, sweet gentleness and generosity of Raphael. No doubt
+it was also in his favour as a painter, that though a man of highly
+cultivated tastes, 'in close intimacy and correspondence with most of
+the celebrated men of his time, and interested in all that was going
+forward,' he did not, especially in his youth, spend his strength on a
+variety of studies, but devoted himself to painting. While he thus
+vindicated his share of the breadth of genius of his country and time,
+by giving to the world the loveliest Madonnas and Child-Christs, the
+most dramatic of battle-pieces, the finest of portraits, his noble and
+graceful fertility of invention and matchless skill of execution were
+confined to and concentrated on painting. He did not diverge long or far
+into the sister arts of architecture and sculpture, though his classic
+researches in the excavations of Rome were keen and zealous (a heap of
+ruins having given to the world in 1504 the group of the Laocoon), so
+that a writer of his day could record that 'Raphael had sought and found
+in Rome another Rome.'</p>
+
+<p>Raphael was born in the town of Urbino, and was the son of a painter of
+the Umbrian School, who very early destined the boy to his future
+career, and promoted his destination by all the efforts in Giovanni
+Santi's power, including the intention of sending away and apprenticing
+the little lad to the best master of his time, Perugino, so called from
+the town where he resided, Perugia. Raphael's mother died when he was
+only eight years of age, and his father died when he was no more than
+eleven years, before the plans for his education were put into action.
+But no stroke of outward calamity, or loss&mdash;however severe, could annul
+Raphael's birthright of universal favour. His step-mother, the uncles
+who were his guardians, his clever, perverse, unscrupulous master, all
+joined in a common love of Raphael and determination to promote his
+interests.</p>
+
+<p>Raphael at the age of twelve years went to Perugia to work under
+Perugino, and remained with his master till he was nearly twenty years
+of age. In that interval he painted industriously, making constant
+progress, always in the somewhat hard, but finished, style of Perugino,
+while already showing a predilection for what was to prove Raphael's
+favourite subject, the Madonna and Child. At this period he painted his
+famous <i>Lo Sposalizio</i> or the 'Espousals,' the marriage of the Virgin
+Mary with Joseph, now at Milan. In 1504 he visited Florence, remaining
+only for a short time, but making the acquaintance of Fra Bartolommeo
+and Ghirlandajo, seeing the cartoons of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, and
+from that time displaying a marked improvement in drawing. Indeed
+nothing is more conspicuous in Raphael's genius in contra-distinction to
+Michael Angelo's, than the receptive character of Raphael's mind, his
+power of catching up an impression from without, and the candour and
+humility with which he availed himself unhesitatingly of the assistance
+lent him by others.</p>
+
+<p>Returning soon to Florence, Raphael remained there till 1508, when he
+was twenty-five years, drawing closer the valuable friendships he had
+already formed, and advancing with rapid strides in his art, until his
+renown was spread all over Italy, and with reason, since already, while
+still young, he had painted his 'Madonna of the Goldfinch,' in the
+Florentine Gallery, and his 'La Belle Jardiniere,' or Madonna in a
+garden among flowers, now in the Louvre.</p>
+
+<p>In his twenty-fifth year Raphael was summoned to Rome to paint for Pope
+Julius II. My readers will remember that Michael Angelo in the abrupt
+severity of his prime of manhood, was soon to paint the ceiling of the
+Sistine Chapel for the same despotic and art-loving Pope, who had
+brought Raphael hardly more than a stripling to paint the '<i>Camere</i>' or
+'<i>Stanze</i>' chambers of the Vatican.</p>
+
+<p>The first of the halls which Raphael painted (though not the first in
+order) is called the Camera della Segnatura (in English, signature), and
+represents Theology, Poetry, Philosophy, with the Sciences, Arts, and
+Jurisprudence. The second is the 'Stanza d'Eliodoro,' or the room of
+Heliodorus, and contains the grandest painting of all, in the expulsion
+of Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem (taken from Maccabees), the
+Miracle of Bolsena, Attila, king of the Huns, terrified by the
+apparition of St Peter and St Paul, and St Peter delivered from prison.
+The third stanza painted by Raphael is the 'Stanza dell' Incendio' (the
+conflagration), so called from the extinguishing of the fire in the
+Borgo by a supposed miracle, being the most conspicuous scene in
+representations of events taken from the lives of Popes Leo III, and
+IV.; and the fourth chamber, which was left unfinished by Raphael, and
+completed by his scholars, is the 'Sala di Constantino,' and contains
+incidents from the life of the Emperor Constantine, including the
+splendid battle-piece between Constantine and Maxentius. At these
+chambers, or at the designs for them, Raphael worked at intervals,
+during the popedoms of Julius II., who died in the course of the
+painting of the Camere, and Leo X., for a period of twelve years, till
+Raphael's death in 1520, after which the 'Sala di Constantino' was
+completed by his scholars.</p>
+
+<p>Raphael has also left in the Vatican a series of small pictures from the
+Old Testament, known as Raphael's Bible. This series decorates the
+thirteen cupolas of the 'Loggie,' or open galleries, running round three
+sides of an open court. Another work undertaken by Raphael should have
+still more interest for us. Leo X., resolving to substitute woven for
+painted tapestry round the lower walls of the interior of the Sistine
+Chapel, commanded Raphael to furnish drawings to the Flemish weavers,
+and thence arose eleven cartoons, seven of which have been preserved,
+have become the property of England, and are the glory of the Kensington
+Museum. The subjects of the cartoons in the seven which have been saved,
+are 'The Death of Ananias,' 'Elymas the Sorcerer struck with Blindness,'
+'The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,' 'The
+Miraculous Draught of Fishes,' 'Paul and Barnabas at Lystra,' 'St Paul
+Preaching at Athens,' and 'The Charge to St Peter.' The four cartoons
+which are lost, were 'The Stoning of St Stephen,' 'The Conversion of St
+Paul,' 'Paul in Prison,' and 'The Coronation of the Virgin.'</p>
+
+<p>In those cartoons figures above life-size were drawn with chalk upon
+strong paper, and coloured in distemper, and Raphael received for his
+work four hundred and thirty gold ducats (about <i>&pound;650</i>), while the
+Flemish weavers received for their work in wools, silk, and gold, fifty
+thousand gold ducats. The designs were cut up in strips for the
+weavers' use, and while some strips were destroyed, the rest lay in a
+warehouse at Arras, till Rubens became aware of their existence, and
+advised Charles I, to buy the set, to be employed in the tapestry
+manufactory established by James I. at Mortlake. Brought to this country
+in the slips which the weavers had copied, the fate of the cartoons was
+still precarious. Cromwell bought them in Charles I.'s art collection,
+and Louis XIV, sought, but failed, to re-buy them. They fell into
+farther neglect, and were well-nigh forgotten, when Sir Godfrey Kneller
+recalled them to notice, and induced William III, to have the slips
+pasted together, and stretched upon linen, and put in a room set apart
+for them at Hampton Court, whence they were transferred, within the last
+ten years, for the greater advantage of artists and the public, to
+Kensington Museum.</p>
+
+<p>The woven tapestries for which the cartoons were designed had quite as
+chequered a career. In the two sacks of Rome by French soldiers, the
+tapestries were seized, carried off, and two of them burnt for the
+bullion in the thread. At last they were restored to the Vatican, where
+they hang in their faded magnificence, a monument of Leo X, and of
+Raphael. An additional set of ten tapestry cartoons were supplied to the
+Vatican by Raphael's scholars.</p>
+
+<p>Raphael painted for the Chigi family in their palace, which is now the
+Villa Farnesina, scenes from the history of Cupid and Psyche, and the
+Triumph of Galatea, subjects which show how the passion for classical
+mythology that distinguishes the next generation, was beginning to work.
+To these last years belong his 'Madonna di San Sisto,' so named from its
+having been painted for the convent of St Sixtus at Piacenza, and his
+last picture, the 'Transfiguration,' with which he was still engaged
+when death met him unexpectedly.</p>
+
+<p>Raphael, as the Italians say, lived more like a '<i>principe</i>' (prince)
+than a '<i>pittore</i>' (painter). He had a house in Rome, and a villa in the
+neighbourhood, and on his death left a considerable fortune to his
+heirs. There has not been wanting a rumour that his life of a principe
+was a dissipated and prodigal life; but this ugly rumour, even if it had
+more evidence to support it, is abundantly disproven by the nature of
+Raphael's work, and by the enormous amount of that work, granting him
+the utmost assistance from his crowd of scholars. He had innumerable
+commissions, and retained an immense school from all parts of Italy, the
+members of which adored their master. Raphael had the additional
+advantage of having many of his pictures well engraved by a contemporary
+engraver named Raimondi.</p>
+
+<p>Like Giotto, Raphael was the friend of the most distinguished Italians
+of his day, including Count Castiglione, and the poet Ariosto. He was
+notably the warm friend of his fellow-painters both at home and abroad,
+with the exception of Michael Angelo. A drawing of his own, which
+Raphael sent, in his kindly interchange of such sketches, to Albert
+D&uuml;rer, is, I think, preserved at N&uuml;remberg. The sovereign princes of
+Italy, above all Leo X., were not contented with being munificent
+patrons to Raphael, they treated him with the most marked consideration.
+The Cardinal Bibbiena proposed the painter's marriage with his niece,
+ensuring her a dowry of three thousand gold crowns, but Maria di
+Bibbiena died young, ere the marriage could be accomplished; and
+Raphael, who was said to be little disposed to the match, did not long
+survive her. He caught cold, as some report, from his engrossing
+personal superintendence of the Roman excavations; and, as others
+declare, from his courtly assiduity in keeping an appointment with the
+Pope, was attacked by fever, and died on his birth-day, April 6th, 1520,
+having completed his thirty-seventh year.</p>
+
+<p>All Rome and Italy mourned for him. When his body lay in state, to be
+looked at and wept over by multitudes, his great unfinished picture of
+the 'Transfiguration' was hung above the bed. He was buried in a spot
+chosen by himself in his lifetime, and, as it happened, not far from the
+resting-place of his promised bride. Doubts having been raised as to
+Raphael's grave, search was made, and his body was exhumed in 1833, and
+re-buried with great pomp. Raphael's life and that of Rubens form the
+ideal painter's life&mdash;bountiful, splendid, unclouded, and terminating
+ere it sees eclipse or decay&mdash;to all in whom the artistic temperament is
+united to a genial, sensuous, pleasure-loving nature.</p>
+
+<p>Raphael was not above the middle height, and slightly made. He was
+sallow in colour, with brown eyes, and a full yet delicate mouth; but
+his beautiful face, like that of our English Shakespeare, is familiar to
+most of us. With regard to Raphael's face, the amount of womanliness in
+it is a striking characteristic. One hears sometimes that no man's
+character is complete without its share of womanliness: surely Raphael
+had a double share, for womanliness is the most distinctive quality in
+his face, along with that vague shade of pensiveness which we find not
+infrequently, but strangely enough, in those faces which have been
+associated with the happiest spirits and the brightest fortunes.</p>
+
+<p>Raphael and his scholars painted and drew about nine hundred pictures
+and sketches, including a hundred and twenty Madonnas, eight of which
+are in private collections in England. Of Raphael's greatness, Kugler
+writes that 'it is not so much in kind as in degree. No master left
+behind <i>so many</i> really excellent works as he, whose days were so early
+numbered; in none has there been observed so little that is unpleasant.'
+All authorities agree in ascribing much of Raphael's power to his purely
+unselfish nature and aim. His excellence seems to lie in the nearly
+perfect expression of material beauty and harmony, together with
+grandeur of design and noble working out of thought. We shall see that
+this devotion to material beauty has been made something of a reproach
+to Raphael, as it certainly degenerated into a snare in the hands of his
+followers, while unquestionably the universal appreciation of Raphael's
+work, distinguished from the partial appreciation bestowed on the great
+works of others, proceeds from this evident material beauty which is
+open to all.</p>
+
+<p>Then, again, Raphael, far more than Andrea del Sarto, deserved to be
+called 'faultless;' and this general absence of defects and equality of
+excellence is a great element of Raphael's wide popularity; for, as one
+can observe for one's self, in regarding a work of art, there is always
+a large proportion of the spectators who will seize on an error, dwell
+on it, and be incapable of shaking off its influence, and rising into
+the higher rank of critics, who discover and ponder over beauties. I
+would have it considered also, that this equality of excellence does not
+necessarily proceed always from a higher aim, but may arise rather from
+an unconsciously lower aim.</p>
+
+<p>The single reproach brought against Raphael as a painter is
+that&mdash;according to some witnesses only, for most deny the
+implication&mdash;Raphael so delighted in material beauty that he became
+enslaved by it, till it diminished his spiritual insight. It is an
+incontestable truth that in Raphael, as in all the great Italian
+painters of his century, there was a falling away from the simple
+earnestness, the exceeding reverence, the endless patience, the
+self-abstraction, and self-devotion of the earliest Italian and Flemish
+painters. Therefore there has been within the last fifty or sixty years
+that movement in modern art, which is called Pre-raphaelitism, and which
+is, in fact, a revolt against subjection to Raphael, and his supposed
+undue exaltation of material beauty, and subjection of truth to
+beauty&mdash;so called. But we must not fall into the grave mistake of
+imagining that there was any want of vigour and variety in Raphael's
+grace and tenderness, or that he could not in his greatest works rise
+into a grandeur in keeping with his subject. Tire as we may of hearing
+Raphael called the king of painters, as the Greeks tired of hearing
+Aristides called 'the just,' this fact remains: no painter has left
+behind him such a mass of surpassingly good work; in no other work is
+there the same charm of greatest beauty and harmony.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard for me to give you an idea in so short a space of Raphael's
+work. I must content myself with quoting descriptions of two of his
+Stanze, those of the Heliodorus and the Segnatura. 'Heliodorus driven
+out of the Temple (2 Maccabees iii.). In the background Onias the
+priest is represented praying for Divine interposition;&mdash;in the
+foreground Heliodorus, pursued by two avenging angels, is endeavouring
+to bear away the treasures of the temple. Amid the group on the left is
+seen Julius II., in his chair of state, attended by his secretaries. One
+of the bearers in front is Marc-Antonio Raimondi, the engraver of
+Raphael's designs. The man with the inscription, "Jo Petro de Folicariis
+Cremonen," was secretary of briefs to Pope Julius. Here you may fancy
+you hear the thundering approach of the heavenly warrior, and the
+neighing of his steed; while in the different groups who are plundering
+the treasures of the temple, and in those who gaze intently on the
+sudden consternation of Heliodorus, without being able to divine its
+cause, we see the expression of terror, amazement, joy, humility, and
+every passion to which human nature is exposed.'<a id="footnotetag11" name="footnotetag11"></a>
+<a href="#footnote11"><sup class="sml">11</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>'The Stanza della Segnatura is so called from a judicial assembly once
+held here. The frescoes in this chamber are illustrative of the Virtues
+of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence, who are represented
+on the ceiling by Raphael, in the midst of arabesques by <i>Sodoma</i>. The
+square pictures by Raphael refer:&mdash;the Fall of Man to Theology; the
+Study of the Globe to Philosophy; the Flaying of Marsyas to Poetry; and
+the Judgment of Solomon to Jurisprudence.</p>
+
+<p>'<i>Entrance Wall</i>.&mdash;"The School of Athens." Raphael consulted Ariosto as
+to the arrangement of its 52 figures. In the centre, on the steps of a
+portico, are seen Plato and Aristotle, Plato pointing to heaven and
+Aristotle to earth. On the left is Socrates conversing with his pupils,
+amongst whom is a young warrior, probably Alcibiades. Lying upon the
+steps in front is Diogenes. To his left, Pythagoras is writing on his
+knee, and near him, with ink and pen, is Empedocles. The youth in the
+white mantle is Francesco Maria della Rovere, nephew of Julius II. On
+the right is Archimedes drawing a geometrical problem upon the floor.
+The young man near him with uplifted hands is Federigo II., Duke of
+Mantua. Behind these are Zoroaster, Ptolemy, one with a terrestrial, the
+other with a celestial globe, addressing two figures, which represent
+Raphael and his master Perugino. The drawing in brown upon the socle
+beneath this fresco, is by <i>Pierino del Vaga</i>, and represents the death
+of Archimedes.</p>
+
+<p>'<i>Right Wall</i>.&mdash;"Parnassus." Apollo surrounded by the Muses; on his
+right, Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Below on the right, Sappho, supposed to
+be addressing Corinna, Petrarch, Propertius, and Anacreon; on the left
+Pindar and Horace, Sannazzaro, Boccaccio, and others. Beneath this, in
+grisaille, are,&mdash;Alexander placing the poems of Homer in the tomb of
+Achilles, and Augustus preventing the burning of Virgil's &AElig;neid.</p>
+
+<p>'<i>Left Wall</i>.&mdash;Above the window are Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance.
+On the left, Justinian delivers the Pandects to Tribonian. On the right,
+Gregory IX. (with the features of Julius II.) delivers the Decretals to
+a jurist;&mdash;Cardinal de' Medici, afterwards Leo X., Cardinal Farnese,
+afterwards Paul III., and Cardinal del Monte, are represented near the
+Pope. In the socle beneath is Solon addressing the people of Athens.</p>
+
+<p>'<i>Wall of Egress</i>.&mdash;"The Disputa." So called from an impression that it
+represents a Dispute upon the Sacrament. In the upper part of the
+composition the heavenly host are present; Christ between the Virgin and
+St John the Baptist; on the left, St Peter, Adam, St John, David, St
+Stephen, and another; and on the right, St Paul, Abraham, St James,
+Moses, St Lawrence, and St George. Below is an altar surrounded by the
+Latin fathers, Gregory, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. Near St
+Augustine stand St Thomas Aquinas, St Anacletus, with the palm of a
+martyr, and Cardinal Buenaventura reading. Those in front are Innocent
+III., and in the background, Dante, near whom a monk in a black hood is
+pointed out as Savonarola. The Dominican on the extreme left is supposed
+to be Fra Angelico. The other figures are uncertain.' ...</p>
+
+<p>'Raphael commenced his work in the Vatican by painting the ceiling and
+the four walls in the room called <i>della Segnatura</i>, on the surface of
+which he had to represent four great compositions, which embraced the
+principal divisions of the encyclopedia of that period; namely,
+Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence.</p>
+
+<p>'It will be conceived, that to an artist imbued with the traditions of
+the Umbrian School, the first of these subjects was an unparalleled
+piece of good fortune: and Raphael, long familiar with the allegorical
+treatment of religious compositions, turned it here to the most
+admirable account; and, not content with the suggestions of his own
+genius, he availed himself of all the instruction he could derive from
+the intelligence of others. From these combined inspirations resulted,
+to the eternal glory of the Catholic faith and of Christian art, a
+composition without a rival in the history of painting, and, we may also
+add, without a name; for to call it lyric or epic is not enough, unless,
+indeed, we mean, by using these expressions, to compare it with the
+allegorical epic of Dante, alone worthy to be ranked with this
+marvellous production of the pencil of Raphael.</p>
+
+<p>'Let no one consider this praise as idle and groundless, for it is
+Raphael himself who forces the comparison upon us, by placing the figure
+of Dante among the favourite sons of the Muses; and, what is still more
+striking, by draping the allegorical figure of Theology in the very
+colours in which Dante has represented Beatrice; namely, the white veil,
+the red tunic, and the green mantle, while on her head he has placed the
+olive crown.</p>
+
+<p>'Of the four allegorical figures which occupy the compartments of the
+ceiling, and which were all painted immediately after Raphael's arrival
+in Rome, Theology and Poetry are incontestably the most remarkable. The
+latter would be easily distinguished by the calm inspiration of her
+glance, even were she without her wings, her starry crown, and her azure
+robe, all having allusion to the elevated region towards which it is her
+privilege to soar. The figure of Theology is quite as admirably suited
+to the subject she personifies; she points to the upper part of the
+grand composition, which takes its name from her, and in which the
+artist has provided inexhaustible food for the sagacity and enthusiasm
+of the spectator.</p>
+
+<p>'This work consists of two grand divisions,&mdash;Heaven and Earth&mdash;which are
+united to one another by that mystical bond, the Sacrament of the
+Eucharist. The personages whom the Church has most honoured for learning
+and holiness, are ranged in picturesque and animated groups on either
+side of the altar, on which the consecrated wafer is exposed. St
+Augustine dictates his thoughts to one of his disciples; St Gregory, in
+his pontifical robes, seems absorbed in contemplation of celestial
+glory; St Ambrose, in a slightly different attitude, appears to be
+chanting the Te Deum; while St Jerome, seated, rests his hands on a
+large book, which he holds on his knees. Pietro Lombardo, Duns Scotus,
+St Thomas Aquinas, Pope Anacletus, St Buenaventura, and Innocent III.,
+are no less happily characterized; while, behind all these illustrious
+men, whom the Church and succeeding generations have agreed to honour,
+Raphael has ventured to introduce Dante with his laurel crown, and, with
+still greater boldness, the monk Savonarola, publicly burnt ten years
+before as a heretic.</p>
+
+<p>'In the glory, which forms the upper part of the picture, the Three
+Persons of the Trinity are represented, surrounded by patriarchs,
+apostles, and saints: it may, in fact, be considered in some sort as a
+<i>resum&eacute;</i> of all the favourite compositions produced during the last
+hundred years by the Umbrian School. A great number of the types, and
+particularly those of Christ and the Virgin, are to be found in the
+earlier works of Raphael himself. The Umbrian artists, from having so
+long exclusively employed themselves on mystical subjects, had certainly
+attained to a marvellous perfection in the representation of celestial
+beatitude, and of those ineffable things of which it has been said that
+the heart of man cannot conceive them, far less, therefore, the pencil
+of man portray; and Raphael, surpassing them in all, and even in this
+instance, while surpassing himself, appears to have fixed the limits,
+beyond which Christian art, properly so called, has never since been
+able to advance.'<a id="footnotetag12" name="footnotetag12"></a>
+<a href="#footnote12"><sup class="sml">12</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Of Raphael's Madonnas, I should like to speak of three. The Madonna di
+San Sisto: 'It represents the Virgin standing in a majestic attitude;
+the infant Saviour <i>enthroned</i> in her arms; and around her head a glory
+of innumerable cherubs melting into light. Kneeling before her we see on
+one side St Sixtus, on the other St Barbara, and beneath her feet two
+heavenly cherubs gaze up in adoration. In execution, as in design, this
+is probably the most perfect picture in the world. It is painted
+throughout by Raphael's own hand; and as no sketch or study of any part
+of it was ever known to exist, and as the execution must have been, from
+the thinness and delicacy of the colours, wonderfully rapid, it is
+supposed that he painted it at once on the canvas&mdash;a <i>creation</i> rather
+than a picture. In the beginning of the last century the Elector of
+Saxony, Augustus III., purchased this picture from the monks of the
+convent for the sum of sixty thousand florins (about &pound;6000), and it now
+forms the chief boast and ornament of the Dresden Gallery'<a id="footnotetag13" name="footnotetag13"></a>
+<a href="#footnote13"><sup class="sml">13</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The Madonna del Cardellino (our Lady of the Goldfinch): 'The Virgin is
+sitting on a rock, in a flowery meadow. Behind are the usual light and
+feathery trees, growing on the bank of a stream, which passes off to the
+left in a rocky bend, and is crossed by a bridge of a single arch. To
+the right, the opposite bank slopes upward in a gentle glade, across
+which is a village, backed by two distant mountain-peaks.</p>
+
+<p>'In front of the sitting matronly figure of the Virgin are the holy
+children, our Lord and the Baptist, one on either side of her right
+knee. She has been reading, and the approach of St John has caused her
+to look off her book (which is open in her left hand) at the new comer,
+which she does with a look of holy love and gentleness, at the same
+time caressingly drawing him to her with her right hand, which touches
+his little body under the right arm. In both hands, which rest across
+the Virgin's knee, he holds a captive goldfinch, which he has brought,
+with childish glee, as an offering to the Holy Child. The infant Jesus,
+standing between his mother's knees, with one foot placed on her foot,
+and her hand, with the open book, close above his shoulder, regards the
+Baptist with an upward look of gentle solemnity, at the same time that
+he holds his bent hand over the head of the bird.</p>
+
+<p>'So much for mere description. The inner feeling of the picture, the
+motive which has prompted it, has surely hardly ever been surpassed. The
+Blessed Virgin, in casting her arm round the infant St John, looks down
+on him with a holy complacency for the testimony which he is to bear to
+her Son. Notice the human boyish glee with which the Baptist presents
+the captured goldfinch, and, on the other hand, the divine look, even of
+majesty and creative love, with which the infant Jesus, laying his hand
+on the head of the bird, half reproves St John, as it were saying, "Love
+them and hurt them not." Notice, too, the unfrightened calm of the bird
+itself, passive under the hand of its loving Creator. All these are
+features of the very highest power of human art.</p>
+
+<p>'Again, in accompaniments, all is as it should be. The Virgin, modestly
+and beautifully draped; St John, girt about the loins, not only in
+accord with his well-known prophetic costume, but also as partaking of
+sinful humanity, and therefore needing such cincture: the Child
+Redeemer, with a slight cincture, just to suggest motherly care, but not
+over the part usually concealed, as indeed it never ought to be, seeing
+that in Him was no sin, and that it is this spotless purity which is
+ever the leading idea in representations of Him as an infant. Notice,
+too, his foot, beautifully resting on that of his mother; the unity
+between them being thus wonderfully though slightly kept up. Her eye has
+just been dwelling on the book of the Prophecies open in her hand; and
+thus the spectator's thought is ruled in accordance with the high
+mission of the Holy One of God, and thrown forward into the grand and
+blessed future. It is a holy and wonderful picture; I had not seen any
+in Italy which had struck or refreshed me more.'<a id="footnotetag14" name="footnotetag14"></a>
+<a href="#footnote14"><sup class="sml">14</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>And allow me to write two or three words with regard to the 'Madonna
+della Sedia,' or our Lady of the Chair, an engraving of which used to
+charm me when a child. The Virgin, very young and simple-looking in her
+loveliness, is seated on a low chair, clasping the Divine Child, who is
+leaning in weariness on her breast. In the original picture, St John
+with his cross is standing&mdash;a boy at the Virgin's knee, but he is absent
+from the old engraving. The meek adoring tenderness in the face of the
+mother, the holy ingenuousness in that of the child, are expressions to
+be long studied.</p>
+
+<p>Of Raphael's cartoons, which, so many of us can see for ourselves, I
+cannot trust myself to do more than to repeat what strikes me as a
+singularly apt phrase of Hazlitt's, given by Mrs Jameson, that the
+cartoons are instances in which 'the corruptible has put on
+incorruption.' That from the very slightness of the materials employed,
+and the very injuries which the cartoons have sustained, we have the
+greatest triumph of art, where 'the sense of power supersedes the
+appearance of effort,' and where the result is the more majestic for
+being in ruins. 'All other pictures look like oil and varnish, we are
+stopped and attracted by the colouring, the penciling, the finishing,
+the instrumentality of art; but the painter seems to have flung his mind
+on the canvas.... There is nothing between us and the subject; we look
+through a frame and see Scripture histories, and amidst the wreck of
+colour and the mouldering of material beauty, nothing is left but a
+universe of thought, or the broad imminent shadows of calm contemplation
+and majestic pains.'</p>
+
+<p>And that Raphael did not neglect the minutest details in these sketches,
+will be seen by the accompanying note: 'The foreground of Raphael's two
+cartoons, "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes," and "The Charge to
+Peter," are covered with plants of the common sea cole-wort, of which
+the sinuated leaves and clustered blossoms would have exhausted the
+patience of any other artist; but have appeared worthy of prolonged and
+thoughtful labour to the great mind of Raphael.'&mdash;<i>Ruskin</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Whole clusters of anecdotes gather round the cartoons, which, as they
+have to do with the work and not the worker, I leave untouched, with
+regret. But I must forewarn my readers by mentioning some of the refuted
+criticisms which have been applied to the cartoons. Reading the
+criticisms and their answers ought to render us modest and wary in
+'picking holes' in great pictures, as forward and flippant critics, old
+and young, are tempted to pick them. With regard to the 'Miraculous
+Draught of Fishes,' a great outcry was once set up that Raphael had made
+the boat too little to hold the figures he has placed in it. But Raphael
+made the boat little advisedly; if he had not done so, the picture would
+have been 'all boat,' a contingency scarcely to be desired; on the
+other hand, if Raphael had diminished the figures to suit the size of
+the boat, these figures would not have suited those of the other
+cartoons, and the cartoon would have lost greatly in dignity and effect.</p>
+
+<p>In the cartoon of the 'Death of Ananias,' carping objectors were ready
+to suggest that Raphael had committed an error in time by introducing
+Sapphira in the background counting her ill-gotten gains, at the moment
+when her no less guilty husband has fallen down in the agonies of death.
+It was hours afterwards that Sapphira entered into the presence of the
+apostles. But we must know that time and space do not exist for
+painters, who have to tell their story at one stroke, as it were.</p>
+
+<p>In the treating of the 'Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,'
+some authorities have found fault with Raphael for breaking the
+composition into parts by the introduction of pillars, and, farther,
+that the shafts are not straight. Yet by this treatment Raphael has
+concentrated the principal action in a sort of frame, and thus has been
+enabled to give more freedom of action to the remaining figures in the
+other divisions of the picture. 'It is evident, moreover, that had the
+shafts been perfectly straight, according to the severest law of good
+taste in architecture, the effect would have been extremely disagreeable
+to the eye; by their winding form they harmonize with the manifold forms
+of the moving figures around, and they illustrate, by their elaborate
+elegance, the Scripture phrase, "the gate which is called
+Beautiful."'&mdash;<i>Mrs Jameson</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Of Raphael's portraits I must mention that wonderful portrait of Leo X.,
+often reckoned the best portrait in the world for truth of likeness and
+excellence of painting, and those of the so-called 'Fornarina,' or
+'baker'. Two Fornarinas are at Rome and one at Florence. There is a
+story that the original of the first two pictures was a girl of the
+people to whom Raphael was attached; and there is this to be said for
+the tradition, that there is an acknowledged coarseness in the very
+beauty of the half-draped Fornarina of the Barberini Palace. The
+'Fornarina' of Florence is the portrait of a noble woman, holding the
+fur-trimming of her mantle with her right hand, and it is said that the
+picture can hardly represent the same individual as that twice
+represented in Rome. According to one guess the last 'Fornarina' is
+Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa de Pescara, painted by Sebastian del
+Piombo, instead of by Raphael; and according to another, the Roman
+'Fornarina' is no Fornarina beloved by Raphael, but Beatrice Pio, a
+celebrated improvisatrice of the time.</p>
+
+<p>An 'innovation of modern times is to spell Raphael's name in England as
+the modern Italians spelt it, <i>Raffaelle</i>, a word of four syllables, and
+yet to pronounce this Italian word as if it were English, as <i>Raphael</i>.
+Vasari wrote Raffaello; he himself wrote Raphael on his pictures, and
+has signed the only autograph letter we have of his, Raphaello.'<a id="footnotetag15" name="footnotetag15"></a>
+<a href="#footnote15"><sup class="sml">15</sup></a></p>
+
+<p><b>Titian,</b> or <b>Tiziano Vecelli,</b><a name="Tit" id="Tit"></a> the greatest painter of the Venetian
+School, reckoned worthy to be named with Lionardo, Michael Angelo and
+Raphael, was born of good family at Capo del Cadore in the Venetian
+State, in 1477. There is a tradition that while other painters made
+their first essays in art with chalk or charcoal, the boy Titian, who
+lived to be a glorious colourist, made his earliest trials in painting
+with the juice of flowers. Titian studied in Venice under the Bellini,
+and had Giorgione, who was born in the same year, for his
+fellow-scholar, at first his friend, later his rival. When a young man
+Titian spent some time in Ferrara; there he painted his 'Bacchus and
+Ariadne,' and a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1512, when Titian was
+thirty-five years of age, he was commissioned by the Venetians to
+continue the works in the great council-hall, which the advanced age of
+Gian Bellini kept him from finishing. Along with this commission Titian
+was appointed in 1516 to the office of la Sanseria, which gave him the
+duty and privilege of painting the portraits of the Doges as long as he
+held the office; coupled with the office was a salary of one hundred
+and twenty crowns a year. Titian lived to paint five Doges; two others,
+his age, equal to that of Gian Bellini, prevented him from painting.</p>
+
+<p>In 1516, Titian painted his greatest sacred picture, the 'Assumption of
+the Virgin.' In the same year he painted the poet Ariosto, who mentions
+the painter with high honour in his verse.</p>
+
+<p>In 1530, Titian, a man of fifty-three years, was at Bologna, where there
+was a meeting between Charles V, and Pope Clement VII., when he was
+presented to both princes.</p>
+
+<p>Charles V, and Philip II, became afterwards great patrons and admirers
+of Titian, and it is of Charles V. and Titian that a legend, to which I
+have already referred, is told. The Emperor, visiting the painter while
+he was at work, stooped down and picked up a pencil, which Titian had
+let fall, to the confusion and distress of the painter, when Charles
+paid the princely compliment, 'Titian is worthy of being served by
+C&aelig;sar.' Titian painted many portraits of Charles V., and of the members
+of his house. As Maximilian had created Albrecht D&uuml;rer a noble of the
+Empire, Charles V, created Titian a Count Palatine, and a Knight of the
+Order of St Iago, with a pension, which was continued by Philip II., of
+four hundred crowns a year. It is doubtful whether Titian ever visited
+the Spain of his patrons, but Madrid possesses forty-three of his
+pictures, among them some of his finest works.</p>
+
+<p>Titian went to Rome in his later years, but declined to abandon for Rome
+the painter's native Venice, which had lavished her favours on her son.
+He lived in great splendour, paying annual summer visits to his
+birth-place of Cadore, and occasionally dwelling again for a time at
+Ferrara, Urbino, Bologna. In two instances he joined the Emperor at
+Augsburgh. When Henry III, of France landed at Venice, he was
+entertained <i>en grand seigneur</i> by Titian, then a very old man; and when
+the king asked the price of some pictures which pleased him, Titian at
+once presented them as a gift to his royal guest.</p>
+
+<p>Titian married, as has been recently ascertained, and had three
+children,&mdash;two sons, the elder a worthless and scandalous priest; the
+second a good son and accomplished painter; and a daughter, the
+beautiful Lavinia, so often painted by her father, and whose name will
+live with his. Titian survived his wife thirty-six years; and his
+daughter, who had married, and was the mother of several children, six
+years. His second son and fellow-painter died of the same plague which
+struck down Titian, in 1566, at the ripe age of eighty-nine years.</p>
+
+<p>Titian is said to have been a man of irritable and passionate temper.
+The hatred between him and the painter, Pordenone, was so bitter, that
+the latter thought his life in danger, and painted with his shield and
+poniard lying ready to his hand. Titian grasped with imperious tenacity
+his supremacy as a painter, sedulously kept the secrets of his skill,
+and was most unmagnanimously jealous of the attainments of his scholars.
+No defect of temper, however, kept Titian from having two inseparable
+convivial companions&mdash;one of them the architect, Sansovino, and the
+other the profligate wit, Aretino, who was pleased to style himself the
+'friend of Titian and the scourge of princes.' Though Titian is said, in
+the panic of the great plague, to have died not only neglected, but
+plundered before his eyes, still Venice prized him so highly, that she
+made in his favour the single exception of a public funeral, during the
+appalling devastation wrought by the pestilence.</p>
+
+<p>From an engraving of a portrait of Titian by himself, which is before
+me, I can give the best idea of his person. He looks like one of the
+merchant princes, whom he painted so often and so well, in richly furred
+gown, massive chain, and small cap, far off his broad forehead: a
+stately figure, with a face&mdash;in its aquiline nose and keen eyes, full of
+sagacity and fire, which no years could tame.</p>
+
+<p>Towards the close of Titian's life, there was none who even approached
+the old Venetian painter in the art which he practised freely to the
+last. Painting in Italy was everywhere losing its pre-eminence. It had
+become, even when it was not so nominally, thoroughly secularized;&mdash;and
+with reason, for the painters by their art-creed and by their lives were
+fitter to represent gods and goddesses, in whom no man believed, than to
+give earnest expression to a living faith. Even Titian, great as he was,
+proved a better painter of heathen mythology than of sacred subjects.</p>
+
+<p>But within certain limits and in certain directions, Titian stands
+unequalled. He has a high place for composition and for drawing, and his
+colouring was, beyond comparison, grand and true. He was great as a
+landscape painter, and he was the best portrait painter whom the world
+ever saw. In his painting is seen, not, indeed, the life of the spirit,
+but the life of the senses 'in its fullest power,' and in Titian there
+was such large mastery of this life, that in his freedom there was no
+violence, but the calmness of supreme strength, the serenity of perfect
+satisfaction. His painting was a reflection of the old Greek idea of the
+life of humanity as a joyous existence, so long as the sun of youth,
+maturity, health, and good fortune shone, without even that strain of
+foreboding pain, and desperate closing with fate, which troubled the
+bliss of ancient poet or sculptor. A large proportion of Titian's
+principal pictures are at Venice and Madrid.</p>
+
+<p>Among Titian's finest sacred pictures, are his 'Assumption of the
+Virgin,' now in the Academy, Venice, where 'the Madonna, a powerful
+figure, is borne rapidly upwards, as if divinely impelled; ..,
+fascinating groups of infant angels surround her, beneath stand the
+apostles, looking up with solemn gestures;' and his 'Entombment of
+Christ,' a picture which is also in Venice. Titian's Madonnas were not
+so numerous as his Venuses, many of which are judged excellent examples
+of the master. His 'Bacchus and Ariadne,' in the National Gallery, is
+described by Mrs Jameson, 'as presenting, on a small scale, an epitome
+of all the beauties which characterize Titian, in the rich, picturesque,
+animated composition, in the ardour of Bacchus, who flings himself from
+his car to pursue Ariadne; the dancing bacchanals, the frantic grace of
+the bacchante, and the little joyous satyr in front, trailing the head
+of the sacrifice.'</p>
+
+<p>Titian's landscapes are the noble backgrounds to many of his pictures.
+These landscapes were not only free, but full. 'The great masters of
+Italy, almost without exception, and Titian, perhaps, more than any
+other (for he had the highest knowledge of landscape), are in the
+constant habit of rendering every detail of their foregrounds with the
+most laborious botanical fidelity; witness the Bacchus and Ariadne, in
+which the foreground is occupied by the common blue iris, the aquilegia,
+and the wild rose; <i>every stamen</i> 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.'&mdash;<i>Ruskin</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In portraits, Titian conveyed to the sitters and transferred to his
+canvas, not only a life-likeness, but a positively noble dignity in that
+likeness. What in Van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds was the bestowing of
+high breeding and dainty refinement, became under Titian's brush
+dignity, pure and simple, very quiet, and wonderfully real. There is
+this peculiarity in connection with the number of portraits which Titian
+executed, that many of them have descended to us without further titles
+than those of 'A Venetian Senator,' 'A Lady,' &amp;c., &amp;c., yet of the
+individual life of the originals no one can doubt. With regard to
+Titian's portraits of women, I have already referred to those of his
+beautiful daughter, Lavinia. In one portrait, in the Berlin Museum, she
+is holding a plate of fruit; in another, in England, the plate of fruit
+is changed into a casket of jewels; in a third, at Madrid, Lavinia is
+Herodias, and bears a charger with the head of John the Baptist. A
+'Violante'&mdash;as some say, the daughter of Titian's scholar, Palma, though
+dates disprove this&mdash;sat frequently to Titian, and is said to have been
+loved by him.</p>
+
+<p>I have written, in connection with Lionardo's 'Jaconde' and Raphael's
+'Fornarina,' of Titian's 'Bella Donna.' He has various 'Bellas,' but, as
+far as I know, this is <i>the</i> 'Bella Donna,'&mdash;'a splendid, serious
+beauty, in a red and blue silk dress,' in the Sciarra Gallery, Rome.</p>
+
+<p>I have read that critics were at one time puzzled by the singular
+yellow, almost straw colour, appearing profusely in the hair of the
+women of the Venetian painters of this time, and that it was only by
+consulting contemporary records that it was learnt that the Venetian
+women indulged in the weak and false vanity of dyeing their black hair a
+pale yellow&mdash;a process, in the course of which the women drew the hair
+through the crown of a broad-brimmed hat, and spreading it over the
+brim, submitted patiently to bleaching the hair in a southern sun.</p>
+
+<p>Among Titian's portraits of men, those of the 'Emperor Charles V.' and
+the 'Duke of Alva' are among the most famous.</p>
+
+<p>Titian painted, and painted wonderfully, to the very last. He was
+eighty-one when he painted the 'Martyrdom of St Lawrence,' one of his
+largest and grandest compositions, and in the last year of his life he
+painted&mdash;leaving it not quite completed,&mdash;a 'Piet&agrave;;' showing that his
+hand owned the weight of years,<a id="footnotetag16" name="footnotetag16"></a>
+<a href="#footnote16"><sup class="sml">16</sup></a> but the conception of the subject is
+still animated and striking, the colours still glowing; while,
+Titian-like, the light still flows around the mighty group in every
+gradation of tone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<p>GERMAN ART&mdash;ALBRECHT D&Uuml;RER, 1471-1528.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Durer" id="Durer"></a>
+Albrecht D&uuml;rer 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.</p>
+
+<p><b>Albrecht D&uuml;rer</b> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On his return from his travels, Albrecht D&uuml;rer'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 D&uuml;rer'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 D&uuml;rer was a shrew and a miser, was
+Albrecht D&uuml;rer 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 D&uuml;rer 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 D&uuml;rer.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In 1506 Albrecht D&uuml;rer 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 D&uuml;rer's designs to the German's serious loss and
+inconvenience.</p>
+
+<p>A little later Albrecht D&uuml;rer, accompanied by his wife, visited the
+Netherlands. The Emperor Maximilian treated the painter with great
+favour, and a legend survives of their relations:&mdash;D&uuml;rer 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 D&uuml;rer 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 D&uuml;rer 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.</p>
+
+<p>Germany was then in the terrible throes of the Reformation, and Albrecht
+D&uuml;rer, 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&mdash;though in Albrecht
+D&uuml;rer's case the change was never openly professed&mdash;the doctrines of the
+Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>There is a portrait of Albrecht D&uuml;rer, 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 D&uuml;rer, but I imagine it proceeds simply
+from the noble scars of work and time; and that when Albrecht D&uuml;rer 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 D&uuml;rer 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,'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'For the great painter never dies.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Albrecht D&uuml;rer'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 D&uuml;rer 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.</p>
+
+<p>Among Albrecht D&uuml;rer'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 D&uuml;rer 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.'</p>
+
+<p>But I prefer to say something of Albrecht D&uuml;rer'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.'</p>
+
+<p>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 D&uuml;rer'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.</p>
+
+<p>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 D&uuml;rer 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 na&iuml;ve 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.<a id="footnotetag17" name="footnotetag17"></a>
+<a href="#footnote17"><sup class="sml">17</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>I shall mention only one more work of Albrecht D&uuml;rer'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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<p>LATER ITALIAN ART&mdash;GIORGIONE, 1477-1511&mdash;CORREGGIO. ABOUT
+1493-1534&mdash;TINTORETTO, 1512-1574&mdash;VERONESE, 1530-1588.</p>
+
+
+<p><a name="Gior" id="Gior"></a><b>Giorgio Barbarelli,</b> known as <b>'Giorgione,</b>&mdash;in Italian, 'big,' or, as I
+have heard it better translated, 'strapping George'&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Giorgione soon became known. According to one account, he painted the
+fa&ccedil;ade 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 fa&ccedil;ades, 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.</p>
+
+<p>He had no school, and his love of music and society&mdash;the last taste
+found not seldom, an apparent anomaly, in silent, brooding
+natures&mdash;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<a id="footnotetag18" name="footnotetag18"></a>
+<a href="#footnote18"><sup class="sml">18</sup></a> 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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.'</p>
+
+<p>Giorgione was, like Titian, grand and free in drawing and composition,
+and superb in colour.<a id="footnotetag19" name="footnotetag19"></a>
+<a href="#footnote19"><sup class="sml">19</sup></a> 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.'</p>
+
+<p>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 na&iuml;vet&eacute; 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 <i>preux
+chevaliers</i>, 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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Corr" id="Corr"></a><b>Correggio's</b> real name was <b>Antonio Allegri,</b> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &pound;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.</p>
+
+<p>Correggio was a second time called upon to paint a great religious work
+in Parma&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 D&uuml;rer, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 fricass&#263;e 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the Dresden Gallery in addition to the 'Notte' are five pictures, one
+of the marriage of St Catherine as the Church&mdash;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,'&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><b>Tintoretto</b><a name="Tint" id="Tint"></a> 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, <b>Jacopo Robusti.</b> 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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a id="footnotetag20" name="footnotetag20"></a>
+<a href="#footnote20"><sup class="sml">20</sup></a> 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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.'</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'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&mdash;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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.'</p>
+
+<p>'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.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Ver" id="Ver"></a><b>Paul C&aacute;gliari</b> of Verona is far better known as <b>Paul Veronese.</b> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>to paint</i>, and so
+altogether to despise those men, Veronese and Rubens for instance, who
+were painters, <i>par excellence</i>, 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 <i>painter</i>, and it was wrong of him to
+paint.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.'<a id="footnotetag21" name="footnotetag21"></a>
+<a href="#footnote21"><sup class="sml">21</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>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, &amp;c., &amp;c. Another of Veronese's pictures in the
+National Gallery is 'The Consecration of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<p>CARRACCI, 1555-1609&mdash;GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642&mdash;DOMENICHINO,
+1581-1641&mdash;SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673.</p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Carr" id="Carr"></a>The <b>Carracci</b> 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 <i>eclectic</i> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Let him, who a good painter would be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Acquire the drawing of Rome,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Venetian action, and Venetian shadow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the dignified colouring of Lombardy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The terrible manner of Michael Angelo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Titian's truth and nature,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sovereign purity of Correggio's style,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the true symmetry of Raphael;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And a little of Parmegiano'a grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But without so much study and toil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let him only apply himself to imitate the works<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which our Niccolino has left us here.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Lodovico opened a school of painting at Bologna, in which he was for a
+time largely assisted by his cousins. He died 1619.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Agostino died at Parma when he was a little over forty, and was buried
+in the cathedral there, in 1602.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,' &amp;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
+'Piet&aacute;s,' 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><b>Guido Reni</b>, commonly called <b>'Guido,'</b><a name="Guido" id="Guido"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>His finest work is the large painting of 'Ph&#339;bus 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.</p>
+
+<p><b>Domenico Zampieri,</b> commonly called <b>Domenichino,</b> was another Bolognese
+<a name="Dom" id="Dom"></a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a Roman on this occasion&mdash;destroyed what was left of
+Domenichino's work in Naples.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <a name="Rosa" id="Rosa"></a><b>Salvator Rosa,</b>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>dramatis person&aelig;</i>, 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<p>RUBENS, 1577-1640&mdash;REMBRANDT, 1606 OR 1608-1669&mdash;TENIERS, FATHER AND
+SON, 1582-1694&mdash;WOUVERMAN, 1620-1668&mdash;CUYP, 1605; STILL LIVING,
+1638&mdash;PAUL POTTER, 1625-1654&mdash;CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630.</p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><b>Peter Paul Rubens</b><a name="Rubens" id="Rubens"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a id="footnotetag22" name="footnotetag22"></a>
+<a href="#footnote22"><sup class="sml">22</sup></a> at the
+height of their fame, Venice and Genoa, 'leaving portraits where he
+went.'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, &amp;c. &amp;c., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep
+house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain
+friends&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 d&eacute;bonnairet&eacute; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>the best workman with his tools</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Of the general distinction between Rubens and some of his predecessors I
+should like to quote Mr Ruskin's passage in his defence:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'A man long trained to love the monk's vision 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 <i>olive shade</i>, there was
+different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders:&mdash;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 the stout horses and 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</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>imaginations; fleshy, substantial, iron-shod humanities, but
+humanities still,&mdash;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 that 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' 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&mdash;perhaps great and lamentable faults,&mdash;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 peasants cottage.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches
+being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp,
+many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and
+cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at
+Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of
+Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a
+very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his
+own.</p>
+
+<p>First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group,
+distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard
+to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in
+relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An
+enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the
+daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for
+composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the
+bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely
+physical agony&mdash;too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime&mdash;- an
+earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Stream not with blood.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while
+Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by
+re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the
+Magdalene.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of
+the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for sixteen
+hundred florins, his usual terms being a hundred florins a-day.</p>
+
+<p>'The Virgin and Serpent' (from the 12th chapter of Revelation) in the
+Munich gallery is very splendid. The Virgin with the new-born Saviour in
+her arms is mounting on the wings of an eagle, surrounded by a flood of
+light. The serpent, encircling the moon on which she stands, is writhing
+beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre
+over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful
+combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the
+child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his
+tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin
+with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with
+impotent rage, and falling with the dragon into the abyss.'</p>
+
+<p>'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects
+from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and
+in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry.' Among
+his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,'
+now at Munich. 'The women are driven back by the Greeks over the river
+Thermodon; two horses are in savage combat on the bridge; one Amazon is
+torn from her horse; a second is dragged along by a sable steed, and
+falling headlong into the river, where others are swimming and
+struggling. No other battle-piece, save that of the Amazons, can compare
+with Raphael's "Battle of Constantine."'</p>
+
+<p>Another great picture is The 'Carrying off of Proserpine.' 'Pluto in his
+car is driven by fiery brown steeds, and is bearing away the goddess,
+resisting and struggling. The picture absolutely glows with genial fire.
+The forms in it are more slender than is general with Rubens. Among the
+companions of Proserpine the figure of Diana is conspicuous for grace
+and beauty. The victorious god of love hovers before the chariot, and
+the blue ocean, warmly tinted with the sunbeams, forms a splendid
+back-ground.'<a id="footnotetag23" name="footnotetag23"></a>
+<a href="#footnote23"><sup class="sml">23</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Rubens was famous for the loveliness and grace of his paintings of
+children. Perhaps the most beautiful is that of 'The Infant Jesus and
+John playing with a Lamb.'</p>
+
+<p>Rubens was a great animal painter. One of his celebrated animal pictures
+is 'Daniel in the Lions' Den,' now at Hamilton Palace, in which each
+lion is a king of beasts checked in his fiercest wrath. It is said to
+have been painted by Rubens in a fit of pique at a false report which
+had been circulated that he could not paint animals, and that those in
+his pictures were supplied by the animal-painter, his friend and
+scholar, Schneyders.</p>
+
+<p>Rubens' landscapes are not the least renowned of his pictures. He gave
+to his own rich but prosaic Flanders, all the breadth and breeziness and
+matchless a&euml;rial effects of a master of painting, and a true lover of
+nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most
+ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a lover and a man
+of genius would pass by. His 'Prairie of Laacken,' 'with the sun of
+Flanders piercing the dense yellow clouds with the force of fire,' is of
+great repute.</p>
+
+<p>Among his famous portraits I shall mention that called 'The Four
+Philosophers' (Justus Lepsius, Hugo Grotius, Rubens, and his brother),
+with peaked beards and moustaches, in turned-over collars, ruffs and
+fur-trimmed robes, having books and pens, a dog, and a classic bust as
+accessories. The open pillared door is wreathed with a spray from
+without, and there is a landscape in the background. This portrait is
+full of power, freedom, and splendid painting.</p>
+
+<p>Another portrait contains that sweetest of Rubens' not often sweet
+faces, called 'the Lady in the Straw Hat.' Rubens himself did not name
+the picture otherwise in his catalogue. Tradition says the original was
+Mdlle Lundens, the beauty of the seventeen provinces, and that she died
+young and unmarried. Connoisseurs value the picture because of the
+triumph of skill by which Rubens has painted brilliantly a face so much
+in the shade; to those who are not connoisseurs I imagine the picture
+must speak for itself, in its graceful, tender beauty. Forming part of
+the collection of the late Sir Robert Peel (I think he gave three
+thousand pounds for 'the Lady in the Straw Hat'), which has been bought
+for the country, this beautiful portrait is now in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>And now I must speak of the picture of the Arundel Family. But first, a
+word about Thomas, Earl of Arundel. It is impossible to write an English
+work on art and omit a brief account of one of England's greatest art
+benefactors. Thomas, Earl of Arundel, representing in his day the great
+house of Howard, had a love of art which approached to a mania; and
+without being so outrageously vain as Sir Kenelm Digby, there is no
+doubt that the Earl counted on his art collection as a source of
+personal distinction. James I., himself an art collector, so far
+humoured the Earl in his taste as to present him with Lord Somerset's
+forfeited collection, valued at a thousand pounds. But Charles I, and
+the Earl became rival collectors, and little love was lost between them.
+The Earl of Arundel impairing even his great revenues in the pursuit,
+employed agents and ambassadors&mdash;notably Petty and Evelyn&mdash;all over
+Europe, to obtain for him drawings, pictures, ancient marbles, gems, &amp;c.
+&amp;c. When the civil wars broke out, Lord Arundel conveyed his priceless
+collection for safety to Antwerp and Padua. Eventually it was divided
+among his sons and scattered far and wide. The only portion of it which
+fell to the nation, in the course of another generation, was the Greek
+Marbles, known as the Arundel Marbles, which were finally presented to
+the University of Oxford. But in Rubens' day all this grand collection
+was intact, and displayed in galleries at Arundel House, which the mob
+thought fit to nickname 'Tart Hall;' and through these galleries Rubens
+was conducted by the Earl.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Arundel desired to have an Arundel family portrait painted for him
+by Rubens. The Earl was rather given to having Arundel family portraits,
+for there are no less than three in which he figures. One by Van Somer,
+in which the hero is pointing somewhat comically with his truncheon to
+the statues of his collection in the background, and the last one
+projected by Van Dyck, but executed by an inferior artist, in which
+various family pieces of armour, swords, and shields, worn at Flodden,
+or belonging to the poet Earl of Surrey, are introduced in the hands of
+the sons of the family.</p>
+
+<p>But it is with Rubens' 'Arundel Family,' which, we must remember, ranks
+second in English family pictures, that we have to do. Thomas, Earl of
+Arundel, and the Lady Alathea,<a id="footnotetag24" name="footnotetag24"></a>
+<a href="#footnote24"><sup class="sml">24</sup></a> are under a portico with twisted
+columns, like those in Raphael's cartoons; a rich curtain, and a
+landscape with a large mansion are seen beyond. The Countess is seated
+in a chair of state, with one hand on the head of a white greyhound; she
+wears a black satin gown, laced ruff, gold bracelets, and pearl
+necklace. Her hair is light, and decked with pearls and plumes. The Earl
+stands behind with a hand on her chair. His head is uncovered, the short
+hair inclining to grey; the whiskers and beard pointed. His vest is
+olive-coloured, and he has a brown mantle lined with crimson over the
+shoulders beneath his ruff. There is a little boy&mdash;Earl Thomas's
+grandson, Philip Howard, afterwards Cardinal Howard, in crimson velvet,
+trimmed with gold lace, and a dwarf on the other side of the dog, with
+one hand on its back.</p>
+
+<p>Among other master-pieces of Rubens, including the 'Straw Hat,' which
+are in the National Gallery, there are the 'Rape of the Sabines,' and
+the landscape 'Autumn,' which has a view of his country ch&acirc;teau, de
+Stein, near Mechlin. In Dulwich Gallery there is an interesting portrait
+by Rubens of an elderly lady in a great Spanish ruff, which is believed
+to be the portrait of his mother.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Rem" id="Rem"></a><b>Rembrandt Van Rhyn</b> is said to have been born near Leyden about 1606 or
+1608, for there is a doubt as to the exact date. His father was a miller
+or maltster, and there is a theory that Rembrandt acquired some of his
+effects of light and shade from the impressions made upon him during his
+life in the mill. He was a pupil at the Latin school of Leyden, and a
+scholar in studios both at Leyden and Amsterdam.</p>
+
+<p>In 1630, when Rembrandt was a mere lad, he seems to have settled in
+Amsterdam, and married there in 1634, when he was six or eight and
+twenty years of age, a young Dutchwoman possessed of a considerable
+fortune, which, in case of her death and of Rembrandt's re-marriage, was
+to pass to her children, a provision that in the end wrought Rembrandt's
+ruin. The troubles of his country in the painter's time rendered his
+prices comparatively small and precarious, and Rembrandt, like Rubens,
+without Rubens' wealth, was eager in making an art collection and
+surrounding himself with those very forms of beauty in the great Italian
+masters' works, in the appreciation of which the Dutch master&mdash;judged by
+his own works&mdash;might have been reckoned deficient.</p>
+
+<p>Rembrandt's wife died after eight years of marriage, and left him with
+one surviving son, Titus, and Rembrandt, having re-married, was called
+upon to give up the lad's inheritance. This call, together with the
+expenditure of the sums which Rembrandt had lavished on his collection,
+was too heavy upon funds never very ample, and the painter, after
+struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son
+took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the
+painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his
+mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery,
+degradation, and poverty of this period. He lived thirteen years longer,
+but it was in obscurity&mdash;out of which the only records which reach us,
+are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose,
+a desperate resort to low company dating from his first wife's death,
+and his gradual downfall.</p>
+
+<p>Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of
+light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.</p>
+
+<p>It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I
+add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt
+painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and
+stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows
+are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded
+by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double
+chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a
+chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging
+across his breast.</p>
+
+<p>Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost
+equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems
+as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht D&uuml;rer had in
+Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective
+Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark
+days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight
+in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at
+Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by
+fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat
+grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of
+the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is
+this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good
+painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather
+under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness
+of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in
+that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and
+alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise
+prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have
+coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and
+incidents being <i>Rembrandtesque</i>, as we speak of their being
+picturesque.</p>
+
+<p>Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or
+even horror, which he sought to produce, to imagination working in the
+mysterious depths of his shadows. A very famous picture of his is 'Dr
+Deeman (an anatomist) demonstrating from a dead subject.' In another
+picture a man stealing from the gloom is in the act of stabbing in the
+back the unconscious man in the foreground.<a id="footnotetag25" name="footnotetag25"></a>
+<a href="#footnote25"><sup class="sml">25</sup></a> Rembrandt's originality
+is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in
+painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any
+evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty;
+this can be said of him who spent means not his own on gathering
+together images of beauty and grace produced by the pencils and brushes
+of others. Many of Rembrandt's pictures are in the galleries of
+Amsterdam and the Hague, and we have many in London. The National
+Gallery has several examples, including two of Rembrandt's portraits.</p>
+
+<p>Passing over Van Dyck, whom I reserve, as I have reserved Holbein, to
+class among the foreign painters resident in or closely connected with
+England, I come to the <a name="Ten" id="Ten"></a><b>Teniers</b>&mdash;father and son. David the elder was born
+at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610.
+David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the
+works of the father are often mistaken for those of the son. The two
+Teniers' class of subjects was the same, being ordinarily 'fairs,
+markets, peasants' merry-makings, beer-houses, guard rooms.'</p>
+
+<p>David the younger had great popularity, was court painter to the
+Archduke of Austria, and earned such an independence, that he bought for
+himself a ch&acirc;teau at the village of Perck, not very far from the Ch&acirc;teau
+de Stein of Rubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly
+intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost
+state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers
+married twice, his first wife being the daughter of one of a family of
+Flemish painters, who were known, according to their respective
+proclivities in art, by the names of Peasant Breughel, Velvet Breughel,
+and Hell Breughel. Teniers had many children.</p>
+
+<p>The elder Teniers died at Antwerp in 1649; the younger died at Brussels,
+and was buried at Perck, in 1694.</p>
+
+<p>The distinction of the Teniers was the extreme fidelity and cleverness
+with which they copied (but did not explain) the life they knew&mdash;the
+homeliest, humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous
+accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of
+poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even
+coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who
+ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the
+Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to
+those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking
+that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the
+Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos;
+while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the
+life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from
+missing what should be present in every life. Men and women are only
+conscious of the defect when the painters wander, now and then, into
+higher spheres and into sacred subjects, and there is the unavoidable
+recoil from gross blindness. I have taken the Teniers as the
+representatives of a numerous school of Flemish and Dutch artists, whose
+works abound in this country. David Teniers the younger appears at his
+best, several times, in Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Philip Wouverman</b><a name="Wouver" id="Wouver"></a> was born at Haarlem in 1620. He was the son of a
+painter, able, but unrecognized in his own day. Philip Wouverman found
+few patrons, disposed of his pictures by hard bargains to dealers, was
+tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far,
+according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to
+prevent his son pursuing the career which had been to him a career of
+bitter disappointment. He died at Haarlem, 1668, when he was no more
+than forty-eight years of age. Yet some nine hundred paintings bear
+(many of them falsely) Wouverman's name.</p>
+
+<p>With all the truth and excellent execution of his contemporaries and
+countrymen', Philip Wouverman, who had, as he thought, missed his mark,
+had something which those successful men lacked&mdash;he had not only a
+feeling for grace, but a touch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly
+'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt
+a higher class of actors&mdash;knights and ladies, instead of peasants&mdash;there
+is a more refined treatment and a dash of tenderness and melancholy&mdash;the
+last possibly born of his own disastrous fortunes. In his love of horses
+and dogs, as adjuncts to his groups, he had as great a fondness for a
+special white horse, as Paul Potter had for black and white cattle.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Cuyp" id="Cuyp"></a><b>Albert Cuyp</b> was born at Dort in 1605. He was a brewer by trade, and only
+painted as an amateur. In spite of this, he was a great landscape
+painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing
+his own love of nature. Little is known of Cuyp's life, and the date of
+his death is uncertain, farther than it was later than 1638.</p>
+
+<p>In affected enthusiasm, Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude, but in
+reality, Cuyp surpassed, Claude in some respects. The distinction, which
+Mr Ruskin draws between them, is that, while Claude, in the sense of
+beauty, is the superior to Cuyp, in the sense of truth Claude is the
+inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is
+called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, &amp;c.), but Cuyp's
+triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and
+in 'expressions of yellow sunlight.' Mr Ruskin admits, while he is
+proceeding to censure Cuyp, parts might be chosen out of the good
+pictures of Cuyp which have never been equalled in art.' On another
+occasion, Mr Ruskin has this passage full of dry humour in reference to
+Cuyp:</p>
+
+<p>'Again, look at the large Cuyp in Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt
+considers "finest in the world," and of which he very complimentarily
+says, "the tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple
+light of the hills" have an effect like <i>down</i> on an unripe nectarine!"
+I ought to have apologized before now for not having studied
+sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with terms of correct and
+classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to observe, the other
+day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet more gratifying
+information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily discovered that
+Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this first-rate Cuyp is
+very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say about it is, that
+it is exceedingly unlike a sky. We may see for ourselves Cuyp's lovely
+landscapes both in the National Gallery and at Dulwich.</p>
+
+<p><b>Paul Potter</b><a name="Pot" id="Pot"></a> was born at Enkhuysen, in North Holland, in 1625, and was
+the son of a painter. Paul Potter settled, while still very young, at
+the Hague as an animal painter, and died in his thirtieth year, in 1654.
+His career, which was thus brief, had promised to be very successful,
+and he had established his fame, while no more than twenty-two years of
+age, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his
+most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,'
+for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native
+country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is
+considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse,
+representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's
+later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle
+feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now
+regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider
+scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of
+Paul Potter in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Heem" id="Heem"></a><b>Jan David de Heem</b><a id="footnotetag26" name="footnotetag26"></a>
+<a href="#footnote26"><sup class="sml">26</sup></a> and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603,
+the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were
+eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom
+and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish
+and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description.
+I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well
+represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how,
+as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they
+are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted
+and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch
+full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern
+flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to
+introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every
+cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.</p>
+
+<p>From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and
+Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am
+sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to
+other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into
+one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde,
+&amp;c., &amp;c.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<p>SPANISH ART&mdash;VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660&mdash;MURILLO, 1618-1682.</p>
+
+
+<p>Spanish art, from its dawn to the time of Velasquez, had been of a
+'severely devotional character,' austere and formal; and although one
+man did not work a revolution by his independent example, he did
+something to humanize and widen art. In the rich city of Seville in
+1599, <a name="Vela" id="Vela"></a><b>Diego Rodriguez, de Silva y Velasquez,</b>&mdash;and not, as he is
+incorrectly called, <b>Diego Velasquez de Silva</b>, was born, and, according
+to an Andalusian fashion, took his mother's name of Velasquez, while his
+father was of the Portuguese house de Silva. Velasquez was gently born,
+though his father was in no higher position than that of a lawyer in
+Seville.</p>
+
+<p>The painter was well educated, though, according to his English
+biographer (Sir W. Stirling Maxwell), 'he was still more diligent in
+drawing on his grammars and copybooks than in turning them to their
+legitimate use.' The lad's evident bent induced his father to make him a
+painter. He studied in two different Spanish studios, and married the
+daughter of his second master, whom the talents, assiduity, and good
+qualities of Velasquez had already strongly attached to the young
+painter.</p>
+
+<p>From the first, Velasquez struck out what was then a new line in Spanish
+art. He gave himself up to the materialistic studies, to which the
+Flemish and Dutch painters were prone, painting diligently 'still life'
+in every form, taking his living subjects from the streets and
+way-sides, and keeping a peasant lad as an apprentice, 'who served him
+for a study in different actions and postures (sometimes crying,
+sometimes laughing), till Velasquez had grappled with every variety of
+expression.' The result of those studies was Velasquez's famous picture
+of the 'Aguador,' or water-carrier of Seville, which was carried off by
+Joseph Buonaparte in his flight from Spain, taken in his carriage at
+Vittoria, and finally presented by Ferdinand VII, of Spain, as a
+grateful offering to the Duke of Wellington, in whose gallery at Apsley
+House the picture remains. 'It is a composition of three figures,' Sir
+W. Stirling Maxwell writes; 'a sunburnt way-worn seller of water,
+dressed in a tattered brown jerkin, with his huge earthen jars, and two
+lads, one of whom receives a sparkling glass of the pure element, whilst
+his companion quenches his thirst from a pipkin. The execution of the
+heads and all the details is perfect; and the ragged trader dispensing a
+few maravidi's worth of his simple stock, maintains, during the
+transaction, a grave dignity of deportment, highly Spanish and
+characteristic, and worthy of an emperor pledging a great vassal in
+Tokay.'</p>
+
+<p>Just such a group may still be seen, or was to be seen till very lately,
+in the quaint streets of Seville. I have read an anecdote of Velasquez
+and this picture, which is quite probable, though I cannot vouch for
+its accuracy. It is said that, while painting the water-carrier day
+after day, when he had been engaged with his work for several hours,
+Velasquez found himself vexed by perceiving, as it were, the effect of a
+shadow cast by some of the drapery. Small flaw as it might have been, it
+appeared to him to interfere with and spoil the picture. Again and
+again, in endeavouring to do away with this 'shadow,' Velasquez undid
+portions of his work, and had to repeat them next day, but always,
+towards the end of his task, the invidious shadow stole upon his vision.
+At last a friend, who was present and full of admiration for the
+picture, heard Velasquez exclaim, 'That shadow again!' and saw him seize
+a brush and prepare to dash it across the canvas. The friend
+remonstrated, besought, and by main force held back the painter, and at
+last induced him to leave the picture untouched till next day, when
+Velasquez discovered, to his great relief, that the shadow had been in
+his own wearied young eyes, and not in his admirable representation of
+the 'Water-carrier.'</p>
+
+<p>Velasquez was in Madrid in 1623, when he was in his twenty-fifth year,
+and having been introduced by the Prime Minister, Olivares, to the King
+of Spain, Philip IV., a king who was only known to smile once or twice
+in his life-time, whose government was careless and blundering, but who
+had the reputation of being a man of some intelligence and very
+considerable taste,&mdash;Velasquez was received into the king's service with
+a monthly salary of twenty ducats, and employed to paint the royal
+portrait.</p>
+
+<p>From the time that he became court painter, Velasquez was largely
+occupied in painting portraits of members of the royal family, with
+special repetitions of the likeness of his most Catholic Majesty. With
+Velasquez's first portrait of Philip in armour, mounted on an Andalusian
+charger, the king was so pleased, that he permitted the picture to be
+publicly exhibited, amidst the plaudits of the spectators, in front of
+the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. Nor was the exhibition a
+barren honour to the painter, for the king not only 'talked of
+collecting and cancelling his existing portraits,' and 'resolved that
+in future Velasquez should have the monopoly of the royal countenance,'
+he paid three hundred ducats for the picture.</p>
+
+<p>About this time our own Charles I., then Prince of Wales, went in his
+incognito of Charles Smith to Madrid on his romantic adventure of
+seeking to woo and win, personally, the Infanta of Spain, and Velasquez
+is said to have gained Charles's notice, and to have at least begun a
+portrait of him. If it were ever completed it has been lost, a
+misfortune which has caused spurious pictures, purporting to be the real
+work, to be offered to the public. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell holds, with
+great show of truth, that this visit of Charles to Madrid, when its
+altars were 'glowing' with the pictures of Titian, confirmed the unhappy
+king's taste for art.</p>
+
+<p>In 1628 Rubens came to Madrid as an envoy from the governess of the
+Netherlands, and the two painters, who had many points in common, and
+who had already corresponded, became fast friends. By the advice of
+Rubens, Velasquez was induced to put into execution his cherished
+desire of visiting Italy, the king granting his favourite painter leave
+of absence, the continuance of his salary, and a special sum for his
+expenses.</p>
+
+<p>Velasquez went to Venice first, and afterwards to Rome, where he was
+offered, and declined, a suite of apartments in the Vatican, asking only
+free access to the papal galleries. There he copied many portions of
+Michael Angelo's 'Last Judgment'&mdash;not a hundred years old, and 'yet
+undimmed by the morning and evening incense of centuries,' and portions
+of the frescoes of Raphael. At Rome Velasquez found there before him,
+Domenichino, Guido Reni, alternating 'between the excitements of the
+gaming table and the sweet creations of his smooth flowing pencil;'
+'Nicolas Poussin, an adventurer fresh from his Norman village; and
+Claude Gel&eacute;e, a pastry-cook's runaway apprentice from Lorraine.'<a id="footnotetag27" name="footnotetag27"></a>
+<a href="#footnote27"><sup class="sml">27</sup></a>
+Velasquez remained a year in Rome. Besides his studies he painted three
+original pictures, one of them, 'Joseph's Coat,' well known among the
+painter's comparatively rare religious works, and now in the Escurial.
+In this picture his biographer acknowledges, that 'choosing rather to
+display his unrivalled skill in delineating vulgar forms than to risk
+his reputation in the pursuit of a more refined and idealized style,'
+Velasquez's 'Hebrew patriarchs are swineherds of Estramadura or
+shepherds of the Sierra Morena.'</p>
+
+<p>From Rome Velasquez proceeded to Naples, where he was enabled by his
+prudence and forbearance to face without injury the disgraceful 'reign
+of terror' which the Neapolitan artists had established in the south of
+Italy. The Neapolitan artists more than any other Italian artists are
+believed to have influenced Velasquez's style.</p>
+
+<p>In 1639 Velasquez painted his principal religious work, 'The
+Crucifixion,' for the nunnery of San Placido in Madrid, a painting in
+which his power has triumphed successfully over his halting imagination.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the many court groups which Velasquez was constantly
+taking, I may quote Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's amusing paragraph about a
+curious variety of human beings in the Court Gallery. 'The Alcazar of
+Madrid abounded with dwarfs in the days of Philip IV., who was very fond
+of having them about him, and collected curious specimens of the race,
+like other rarities. The Queen of Spain's gallery is, in consequence,
+rich in portraits of these little monsters, executed by Velasquez. They
+are, for the most part, very ugly, displaying, sometimes in an extreme
+degree, the deformities peculiar to their stunted growth. Maria Barbola,
+immortalized by a place in one of Velasquez's most celebrated pictures,
+was a little dame about three feet and a half in height, with the head
+and shoulders of a large woman, and a countenance much underjawed, and
+almost ferocious in expression. Her companion, Nicolasito Pertusano,
+although better proportioned than the lady, and of a more amicable
+aspect, was very inferior in elegance as a royal plaything to his
+contemporary, the valiant Sir Geoffrey Hudson; or his successor in the
+next reign, the pretty Luisillo of Queen Louisa of Orleans. Velasquez
+painted many portraits of these little creatures, generally seated on
+the ground; and there is a large picture in the Louvre representing two
+of them leading by a cord a great spotted hound, to which they bear the
+same proportion that men of the usual size bear to a horse.'</p>
+
+<p>In 1648 Velasquez again visited Italy, sent by the king this time to
+collect works of art for the royal galleries and the academy about to be
+founded. Velasquez went by Genoa, Milan, Venice (buying there chiefly
+the works of Tintoret), and Parma, to Rome and Naples, returning to
+Rome. At Rome Velasquez painted his splendidly characteristic portrait
+of the Pope Innocent X., 'a man of coarse features and surly expression,
+and perhaps the ugliest of all the successors of St Peter.'</p>
+
+<p>Back at Madrid, Philip continued to load Velasquez and his family with
+favours, appointing the painter Quarter-Master-General of the king's
+household with a salary of three thousand ducats a year, and the right
+of carrying at his girdle a key which opened every lock in the palace.</p>
+
+<p>Philip is said to have raised Velasquez to knighthood in a manner as
+gracious as the manner of Charles V, when he lifted up Titian's pencil.
+In painting one of his most renowned pictures, to which I shall refer
+again, 'The Maids of Honour,' Velasquez included himself at work on a
+large picture of the royal family. The painter represented himself with
+the key of his office at his girdle, and on his breast the red cross of
+the Order of Santiago. Philip, who came every day to see the progress of
+this picture, remarked in reference to the figure of the artist, that
+'one thing was yet wanting, and taking up the brush painted the knightly
+insignia with his own royal fingers, thus conferring the accolade with a
+weapon not recognized in chivalry.'</p>
+
+<p>As it is believed, Velasquez's court office, with all its prestige and
+influence, helped in causing his death. King Philip went in June, 1660,
+to the Isle of Pheasants in the river Bidassa, where, on ground which
+was neither Spanish nor French, the Spanish and French courts were to
+meet and celebrate with the greatest magnificence the marriage of the
+Grand Monarque and the Infanta Maria Teresa. One of Velasquez's
+official duties was to prepare lodgings for the king on his journeys,
+and in this instance the lodging included not only the decoration of the
+castle of Fuenterrabia, but the erection of a sumptuous pavilion in
+which the interviews of the assembled kings and queens and their
+revelries were to be held. Velasquez did his part of the preparations,
+and doubtless shared in the royal festivities, but returned to Madrid so
+worn out by his undertaking, and by constant attendance on his master,
+that he was seized with tertian fever, of which he died a few days
+later, while but in his sixty-first year, to the great grief of his
+countrymen, and above all of his king. Velasquez's wife, Do&ntilde;a Juana,
+died eight days after her husband, and was buried in his grave. The
+couple left one surviving child, a daughter, married to a painter.</p>
+
+<p>In one picture, now at Vienna, Velasquez gives a glimpse of his family
+life at a time when it would seem that he had four sons and two
+daughters, so that the fortunate painter's home had not been free from
+one shadow&mdash;that of death, which must have robbed him of five of his
+children. In this pleasant picture, 'his wife dressed in a brown tunic
+over a red petticoat, sits in the foreground of a large room, with a
+pretty little girl leaning on her knees, and the rest of her children
+grouped around her; behind are the men in deep shadow, one of them,
+perhaps, being Mazo, the lover or the husband of the eldest daughter,
+and a nurse with a child; and in an alcove Velasquez himself appears,
+standing before his easel, at work on a portrait of Philip IV. This is
+one of the most important works of the master out of the Peninsula; the
+faces of the family sparkle on the sober background like gems. As a
+piece of easy actual life, the composition has never been surpassed, and
+perhaps it excels even "The Meninas," inasmuch as the hoops and dwarfs
+of the palace have not intruded upon the domestic privacy of the
+painter's home, in the northern gallery.'<a id="footnotetag28" name="footnotetag28"></a>
+<a href="#footnote28"><sup class="sml">28</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Velasquez seems to have been a man of honour and amiability. He filled
+a difficult office at the most jealous court in Europe with credit. He
+was true to his friends, and helpful to his brother artists. His
+biographer writes of Velasquez as handsome in person, and describes his
+costume when he appeared for the last time with his king in the galas at
+Pheasants' Isle:&mdash;'over a dress richly laced with silver he wore the
+usual Castilian ruff, and a short cloak embroidered with the red cross
+of Santiago; the badge of the order, sparkling with brilliants, was
+suspended from his neck by a gold chain; and the scabbard and hilt of
+his sword were of silver, exquisitely chased, and of Italian
+workmanship.' In the likeness of Velasquez, which is the frontispiece of
+Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's 'Life,' the painter appears as a man of
+swarthy complexion, with a long compressed upper lip, unconcealed by his
+long, elaborately trimmed moustache; his hair, or wig, is arranged in
+two large frizzed bunches on each side of a face which is inclined to be
+lantern-jawed. He wears a dark doublet with a 'standing white collar.'</p>
+
+<p>Velasquez's excellence as a painter was to be found, like that of
+Rembrandt, in his truth to nature; but the field of truth presented to
+the stately Spaniard, while it had its own ample share of humour, was a
+widely different field from that which offered itself to the Dutch
+burgher. Together with absolute truth, Velasquez had the ease and
+facility in expressing truth which are only acquired by a great master.
+Like Rubens, Velasquez made essays in many branches of painting. In
+sacred art, if we except his 'Crucifixion,' he did not attain a high
+place. With regard to his landscapes, Sir David Wilkie bore
+witness:&mdash;'Titian seems his model, but he has also the breadth and
+picturesque effect for which Claude and Salvator Rosa are remarkable;'
+and Sir David added of those landscapes, 'they have the very same sun we
+see, and the air we breathe, the very soul and spirit of nature.'</p>
+
+<p>Velasquez's <i>genre</i> pictures, to which I shall refer by and by, are
+excellent, but the fate was kind which confined him largely to portrait
+painting. It was brought as a reproach against Velasquez in his
+lifetime, that he could paint a head and nothing else, to which he
+replied with mingled spirit, sense, and good nature, that his detractors
+flattered him, 'for he knew nobody of whom it could be said that he
+painted a head thoroughly well.'</p>
+
+<p>Sir W. Stirling Maxwell asserts of Velasquez's portrait painting, that
+no artist 'ever followed nature with more catholic fidelity; his
+cavaliers are as natural as his boors; he neither refined the vulgar,
+nor vulgarized the refined,' and goes on to quote this among other
+criticism:&mdash;'his portraits baffle description and praise; he drew the
+minds of men; they live, breathe, and are ready to walk out of the
+frames.' Sir William winds up with the enthusiastic declaration, 'Such
+pictures as these are real history; we know the persons of Philip IV,
+and Olivares, as familiarly as if we had paced the avenues of the Pardo
+with Digby and Howell, and perhaps we think more favourably of their
+characters.'</p>
+
+<p>I shall borrow still further from Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's graphic and
+entertaining book, descriptions of two of Velasquez's <i>genre</i> pictures,
+'The Maids of Honour,' and the more celebrated 'Spinners,' both at
+Madrid. 'The scene (of the first) is a long room in a quarter of the old
+palace which was called the prince's quarter, and the subject, Velasquez
+at work on a large picture of the royal family. To the extreme right of
+the composition is seen the back of the easel and the canvas on which he
+is engaged; and beyond it stands the painter, with his pencils and
+palette, pausing to converse, and to observe the effect of his
+performance. In the centre stands the little Infanta Maria Margarita,
+taking a cup of water from a salver which Do&ntilde;a Maria Augustina
+Sarmiento, maid of honour to the queen, presents kneeling. To the left,
+Do&ntilde;a Isabel de Velasco, another meni&ntilde;a, seems to be dropping a courtesy;
+and the dwarfs, Maria Barbolo and Nicolas Pertusano, stand in the
+foreground, the little man putting his foot on the quarters of a great
+tawny hound, which despises the aggression, and continues in a state of
+solemn repose. Some paces behind these figures, Do&ntilde;a Marcela de Ulloa, a
+lady of honour in nun-like weeds, and a <i>guardadimas,</i> are seen in
+conversation; at the far end of the room an open door gives a view of a
+staircase, up which Don Josef Nieto, queen's apasentador, is retiring;
+and near this door there hangs on the wall a mirror, which, reflecting
+the countenance of the king and queen, shows that they form part of the
+principal group, although placed beyond the bounds of the picture. The
+room is hung with paintings which Palomino assures us are works of
+Rubens; and it is lighted by three windows in the left wall, and by the
+open door at the end, an arrangement of which an artist will at once
+comprehend the difficulties. The perfection of art which conceals art,
+was never better attained than in this picture. Velasquez seems to have
+anticipated the discovery of Daguerre, and taking a real room, and real
+chance grouped people, to have fixed them, as it were by magic, for all
+time on his canvas. The little fair-haired Infanta is a pleasing study
+of childhood; with the hanging-lip and full cheek of the Austrian
+family, she has a fresh complexion and lovely blue eyes, and gives a
+promise of beauty which as empress she never fulfilled. Her young
+attendants, girls of thirteen or fourteen, contrast agreeably with the
+ill-favoured dwarf beside them; they are very pretty, especially Do&ntilde;a
+Isabel de Velasco, who died a reigning beauty, and their hands are
+painted with peculiar delicacy. Their dresses are highly absurd, their
+figures being concealed by long stiff corsets and prodigious hoops; for
+these were the days when the mode was&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Supporters, pooters, fardingales, above the loynes to weare;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and the <i>guardainfante</i>, the oval hoop peculiar to Spain, was in full
+blow; and the robes of a dowager might have curtained the tun of
+Heidelberg, and the powers of Velasquez were baffled by the perverse
+fancy of "Fribble, the woman's tailor." The gentle and majestic hound,
+stretching himself and winking drowsily, is admirably painted, and seems
+a descendant of the royal breed immortalized by Titian in portraits of
+the Emperor Charles and his son.'</p>
+
+<p>'The Spinners:' 'The scene is a large weaving-room, in which an old
+woman and young one sit, the first at her spinning-wheel, and the
+second winding yarn, with three girls beside them, one of whom plays
+with a cat. In the background, standing within an alcove filled with the
+light from an unseen window, are two other women displaying a large
+piece of tapestry to a lady customer, whose graceful figure recalls that
+which has given its name to Terburg's picture of "The Satin Gown." Of
+the composition, the painter Mengs observed, "it seemed as if the hand
+had no part in it, and it had been the work of pure thought."'
+Velasquez, who must have seen many a bull fight, has left the world a
+fine example of field sports in 'The Boar Hunt,' in our National
+Gallery, a picture which was bought for two thousand two hundred pounds
+from Lord Cowley. When ambassador at the Court of Spain, it was given to
+him by Ferdinand VII. In a circular pen in the Pardo, 'Philip IV. and a
+party of cavaliers display their skill in slaying boars, to a few
+ladies, who sit secure in heavy old-fashioned blue coaches,' while
+motley groups of courtiers and peasants, huntsmen and hounds, postilions
+and their mules fill the foreground. Sir Edwin Landseer remarked of
+this picture that he had never before seen 'so much large art on so
+small a scale.'</p>
+<p><a name="Murillo" id="Murillo"></a>
+<b>Bartolom&eacute; Est&eacute;van Murillo</b> was born at Seville in 1618, and was therefore
+nearly twenty years younger than his great countryman Velasquez. Murillo
+seems to have been of obscure origin, and to have begun his life in
+humble circumstances. There are traditions of his being self-taught, of
+his studying ragged boys, himself little more than a boy, in the gypsy
+quarter of Triana in Seville; of his painting in the marketplace, where
+he probably found the originals of the heads of saints and Madonnas (by
+which he made a little money in selling them for South America) in the
+peasants who came to Seville with their fruit and vegetables. In 1642,
+Murillo, then twenty-four years of age, visited Madrid, and was kindly
+received, and aided in his art by his senior and fellow artist, the
+court painter, Velasquez. It had been Murillo's intention to proceed to
+England to study under Van Dyck, but the death of the latter put a stop
+to the project. Murillo was prevented from making the painter's
+pilgrimage to Italy by want of means, but the loss of culture was so far
+supplied by the instructions given to him by Velasquez.</p>
+
+<p>In 1645, when Murillo was twenty-seven years of age, he returned to
+Seville, and settled there, becoming as successful as he deserved; and
+being acknowledged as the head of the school of Seville, where he
+established the Academy of Art, and was its first president. Murillo
+married, in 1648, a lady of some fortune, and was accustomed to
+entertain at his house the most exclusive society of Seville.</p>
+
+<p>In 1682, Murillo was at Cadiz painting a picture of the marriage of St
+Catherine in the church of the Capuchins there, when, in consequence of
+the accidental fall of the scaffolding, he received so severe an injury,
+that he was forced to leave his work incomplete, and to return to
+Seville, where he died within a few weeks, aged sixty-four years. He had
+two sons, and an only daughter, who was a nun, having taken the veil
+eight years before her father's death.</p>
+
+<p>Murillo appears to have been in character a gentle, enthusiastic man,
+not without a touch of fun and frolic. He would remain for hours in the
+sacristy of the cathedral of Seville before 'the solemn awful picture of
+the 'Deposition from the Cross,' by Pedro de Campana. When Murillo was
+asked by the sacristan why he stood thus gazing there, the painter
+answered, 'I am waiting till these holy men have finished their work.'
+By his own desire, Murillo was buried before this picture. Before
+another 'too truthful picture of Las dos Cadaveres' in the small church
+of the hospital of the Caridad, Murillo used to hold his nose. One of
+Murillo's pictures has the odd name of 'La Virgen Sarvilleta,' or the
+Virgin of the Napkin. Murillo was working at the Convento de la Merced,
+which is almost filled with his works, when the cook of the convent
+begged a memorial of him, offering as the canvas a napkin, on which
+Murillo at once painted a 'brilliant glowing Madonna,' with a child,
+'which seems quite to bound forward out of the picture.'<a id="footnotetag29" name="footnotetag29"></a>
+<a href="#footnote29"><sup class="sml">29</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Murillo's portrait by himself represents him in a dark doublet having
+wide sleeves and a square collar closed in front. His thumb is in his
+pallet, and the other hand, with fingers taper and delicate as those of
+a hand by Van Dyck, holds one of his brushes. The smooth face, with
+regular features, is pale and thoughtful, and with the womanliness of
+the aspect increased from the dark hair, which is divided slightly to
+one side, being allowed to fall down in long wavy curls on the
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the naturalistic studies of his early youth, and even of the
+naturalistic treatment which he gave to his first religious work,
+Murillo was possessed of greater and higher imagination than Velasquez
+could claim, and the longer Murillo lived and worked the more refined
+and exalted his ideas became. Unlike Velasquez, Murillo was a great
+religious painter, and during the last years of his life he painted
+sacred subjects almost exclusively. But, like Velasquez, Murillo was
+eminently a Spanish painter&mdash;his virgins are dark-eyed,
+olive-complexioned maidens, and even his Holy Child is a Spanish babe.</p>
+
+<p>Without the elevation and the training of the best Italian painters,
+Murillo has left abundant proofs of great original genius. The painter's
+works are widely circulated, but the chief are still in Seville. Six are
+in the church of the Caridad, and these six include his famous 'Moses
+striking the Rock,' and his 'Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes;' seven
+'Murillos' are in the Convento de la Merced, among them Murillo's own
+favourite picture, which he called 'Mi Cicadro' of 'St Thomas of
+Villaneuva.' 'St Thomas was the favourite preacher of Charles V., and
+was created Archbishop of Valencia, where he seemed to spend the whole
+of his revenues in charity, yet never contracted any debt, so that his
+people used to believe that angels must minister to his temporal wants.
+He is represented at his cathedral door, distributing alms, robed in
+black, with a white mitre. A poor cripple kneels at his feet, and other
+mendicants are grouped around.'</p>
+
+<p>In the cathedral, Seville, is Murillo's 'Angel de la Guarda,' 'in which
+a glorious seraph, with spreading wings, leads a little trustful child
+by the hand, and directs him to look beyond earth into the heavenly
+light;' and his 'St Antonio.' 'The saint is represented kneeling in a
+cell, of which all the poor details are faithfully given, while the long
+arcade of the cloister can be seen through the half-open door. Above, in
+a transparent light, which grows from himself, the Child Jesus appears,
+and descends, floating through wreaths of angels, drawn down by the
+power of prayer.'<a id="footnotetag30" name="footnotetag30"></a>
+<a href="#footnote30"><sup class="sml">30</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Another of Murillo's renowned pictures is that of the patron saints of
+Seville, 'Santa Rufina and Santa Justina,' who were stoned to death for
+refusing to bow down to the image of Venus.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to Murillo's pictures of flower-girls and beggar-boys, I
+think my readers are sure to have seen an engraving of one of the
+former, '<i>The</i> flower-Girl,' as it is called, with a face as fresh and
+radiant as her flowers. In the National Gallery there is a large Holy
+Family of Murillo's, and in Dulwich Gallery there is a laughing boy, an
+irresistible specimen of brown-cheeked, white-teethed drollery.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+<p>ART&mdash;NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665&mdash;CLAUDE<a id="footnotetag31" name="footnotetag31"></a>
+<a href="#footnote31"><sup class="sml">31</sup></a> LORRAINE, 1600-1682&mdash;CHARLES
+LE BRUN, 1619-1690&mdash;WATTEAU, 1684-1721&mdash;GREUZE, 1726-1805.</p>
+
+
+<p><a name="Pous" id="Pous"></a><b>Nicolas Poussin</b> was born at Andely in Normandy in 1594. Of his parentage
+little seems to have been ascertained, but it is believed that he was
+well educated, and his classical learning in after life was reckoned
+great. He was regularly trained to be a painter under a master in his
+native town, and afterwards in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Dissatisfied with the patronage which he received in Paris, Poussin went
+to Rome when he was about thirty years of age. In Rome he is said to
+have lived on familiar terms with a sculptor whose devotion to antique
+art influenced his taste, and lent it the strong classical bent which it
+retained. Poussin studied regularly in the school of Domenichino. After
+some delay in attracting public notice, 'The Death of Germanicus,' and
+'The Capture of Jerusalem,' which Poussin painted for Cardinal
+Barberini, won general approval. In 1629, when Nicolas Poussin was in
+his thirty-fifth year, he married the sister of his pupil, Gaspar
+Dughet, who took Poussin's name, and is known as a painter, inferior to
+his master, by the name of Gaspar Poussin.</p>
+
+<p>Nicolas Poussin returned to Paris when he was a middle-aged man, was
+presented to the king, Louis XIII., by Cardinal Richelieu, and offered
+apartments in the Tuileries, with the title of painter in ordinary, and
+a salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year. Poussin agreed to settle
+in Paris, but on his going back to Rome to fetch his wife, and on the
+King of France's dying, the attractions of the Eternal City proved too
+great for the painter, and in place of removing his household and studio
+to his native country, he lived for the rest of his years in Rome, and
+died there in 1665, when he was seventy-one years of age. Except what
+can be judged of him from his work, I do not know that much has been
+gathered of the private character and life of Nicolas Poussin,
+notwithstanding that there was a biography written of him fifty years
+ago by Lady Calcott, and that his letters have been published in Paris.
+In the absence of conclusive testimony one may conclude with some
+probability that he was 'quiet,' like his best paintings; a man who
+minded his own business, and did not trouble the world by astonishing
+actions, good or bad.<a id="footnotetag32" name="footnotetag32"></a>
+<a href="#footnote32"><sup class="sml">32</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In painting his own picture, from which an engraving has been taken,
+Poussin's classical preferences seem to have passed into the likeness,
+for in the dress of the seventeenth century, the cloak (not unlike a
+toga), the massive hand with the heavy signet-ring resting on what looks
+like a closed portfolio, the painter has something of the severe air and
+haughty expression of an old Roman; still more, perhaps, of the
+French-Romans, if I may call them so, of whom revolutionary times
+nearly two centuries later, afforded so many examples. This is a
+handsome, dignified face, with austerity in its pride. The slightly
+curled hair is thrown back with a certain consciousness from the knit
+brow, and from the shoulders. There is only the faintest shadow of a
+moustache over the cleanly cut, firmly closed mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Poussin painted largely, and his pictures have been often engraved. With
+harmonious composition, good drawing and colouring, his pictures alike
+profited and suffered from the classical atmosphere in which they had
+their being. They gained in that correctness which in its highest form
+becomes noble truthfulness, but they lost in freedom. The figures in the
+pictures had frequently the statuesqueness which in sculpture suits the
+material, but in painting is stiffness.</p>
+
+<p>Nicolas Poussin had an exceptional reputation for a historical painter
+in his day. As a landscape painter, Mr Ruskin, while waging war with
+Nicolas Poussin's brother-in-law and assumed namesake, Gaspar, notably
+excepts Nicolas from his severest strictures, and treats his efforts in
+landscape painting with marked respect. At the same time, however, the
+critic censures the painter for a want of thorough acquaintance with
+nature, and the laws of nature, ignorance not uncommon in any day, and
+nearly universal in Nicolas Poussin's day. 'The great master of elevated
+ideal landscape,' Mr Ruskin calls Nicolas Poussin, and illustrates his
+excellence in one respect, after contrasting it with the slovenliness of
+Sir Joshua Reynolds, by describing the vine in Poussin's 'Nursing of
+Jupiter,' in the Dulwich Gallery, thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Every vine-leaf, drawn with consummate skill and untiring diligence,
+produces not only a true group of the most perfect grace and beauty, but
+one which in its pure and simple truth belongs to every age of nature,
+and adapts itself to the history of all time.' 'One of the finest
+landscapes that ancient art has produced, the work of a really great
+mind,' Mr Ruskin distinguishes the 'Phocian' of Nicolas Poussin in the
+National Gallery, before proceeding to point out its faults.</p>
+
+<p>Again, Mr Ruskin, writing of the street in the centre of another
+landscape by Nicolas Poussin, indicates it with emphasis:&mdash;'the street
+in the centre of the really great landscape of Poussin (great in
+feeling, at least) marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery,' The criticism
+with which Mr Ruskin follows up this praise is so perfect a bit of
+word-painting, that I cannot refrain from writing it down here. 'The
+houses are dead square masses, with a light side and a dark side, and
+black touches for windows. There is no suggestion of anything in any of
+the spaces, the light wall is dead grey, the dark wall dead grey, and
+the windows dead black. How differently would nature have treated us.
+She would have let us see the Indian corn hanging on the walls, and the
+image of the Virgin at the angles; and the sharp, broken, broad shadows
+of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with the doves upon them,
+and the carved Roman capital built into the wall, and the white and blue
+stripes of the mattresses stuffed out of the windows, and the flapping
+corners of the neat blinds. All would have been there; not as such, not
+like the corn, nor blinds, n or tiles, not to be comprehended nor
+understood, but a confusion of yellow and black spots and strokes,
+carried far too fine for the eye to follow; microscopic in its
+minuteness, and filling every atom and space with mystery, out of which
+would have arranged itself the general impression of truth and life.'
+Once more, Mr Ruskin freely admits that 'all the landscape of Nicolas
+Poussin is imagination.'</p>
+
+<p>Mr Ruskin's first definition of ideal landscape is in this manner. Every
+different tree and leaf, every bud, has a perfect form, which, were it
+not for disease or accident, it would have attained; just as every
+individual human face has an ideal form, which but for sin and suffering
+it would present: and the ideal landscape-painter has realized the
+perfect form, and offers it to the world, and that in a sense quite
+distinct from the fallacy of improving nature.</p>
+
+<p>But I wish to take my readers further into imaginative landscape, and to
+show it to them, if possible, under additional lights. I despair of
+succeeding if I cannot do it by one or two simple examples. In passing
+through a gallery we may stop before a picture to be struck, almost
+startled, by the exact copy which it presents of some scene in nature;
+how like the clouds in the sky, the leaves on the trees, the very
+plumage of the birds! But pass on to another picture which may or may
+not have the same exact likeness, and we are possessed with quite
+another feeling; instead of being merely surprised by the cleverness of
+the imitation, we feel a thrill of delight at a reproduction of nature.
+In this picture there are not only the clouds we remember, but we can
+almost feel the shadows which they cast, and the air which stirs them.
+These tree-leaves are not only green, or yellow, or russet, they are
+tender, or crisp living leaves. One half expects to see the birds'
+throats swell, and hear the sweetness or the shrillness of their songs.</p>
+
+<p>The first picture, with all its correctness, brightness, richness, or
+delicacy it may be, remains bare, hard, and barren, compared to the
+second. I cannot explain to my readers the cause of the difference, I
+can Only show it to them as they may see it for themselves, and say
+that I suppose it proceeds from this&mdash;that the second painter has seen
+farther into the heart of nature than the first, and has been able by
+subtler touches to make us see with his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>But imaginative landscape is much more than this vivid feeling and
+expression of nature; there is not a cloud, or leaf, or bird too many or
+out of keeping with the place and the hour. The clouds are the very
+clouds of sunset, or sunrise, or high noon&mdash;clouds differing widely from
+each other, as you have no doubt observed. The trees are the beeches, or
+chestnuts, or pines, which would grow on the conformation of rocks, in
+the sheltered nook, or on the breezy upland; the birds are the linnets
+or the larks, the thrushes or the lapwings, which frequent these special
+trees, and may be seen and heard at this particular hour.</p>
+
+<p>Again, landscape often tells a story, and tells it inimitably. My
+readers have heard of the ballad of the 'Twa Corbies,' which the writer
+of the ballad has made to meet and tell gruesomely where and on what
+carrion their feast has been. Suppose the writer of the ballad had been
+a painter, he might have painted the story as intelligibly by the lone
+hill-side, the bleaching bones of the faithful hound and gallant grey,
+the two loathly blue-black birds satiated with their prey. There is a
+significant old Scotch song with a ballad ring, by Lady Nairne, two
+verses of which form each a complete picture not only of different
+seasons, but of different phases of feeling&mdash;happiness and misery.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Bonnie ran the burnie down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wandering and winding;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweetly sang the birds aboon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Care never minding.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'But now the burn comes down apace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Roaring and reaming,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And for the wee birdies' sang<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wild howlets screaming.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Imagine these two verses painted, and the painter, from a lack of
+comprehension, introducing the 'wild howlets screaming' beside the
+burnie, 'wandering and winding,' and the 'wee birdies' foolishly and
+inconsequently singing with their feeble song drowned in the rush of the
+burn (no longer a burnie), 'roaring and reaming,' when the 'spate' is
+spreading desolation on every side. Don't you see how the picture would
+be spoilt, and the story of complete contrast left untold? I have taken
+advisedly an extreme and, therefore an unlikely case of halting
+imagination. But in imaginative landscape every 'white flower with its
+purple stain,' every crushed butterfly, is made to play its part in the
+whole, and at the same time due proportion is never lost sight of, and
+the less is always kept subordinate to the greater.</p>
+
+<p>I have already had occasion to mention examples of Nicolas Poussin in
+the National Gallery and in Dulwich Gallery.</p>
+<p><a name="Claude" id="Claude"></a>
+<b>Claude Gel&eacute;e,</b> better known as <b>Claude Lorraine,</b> was a native of Lorraine,
+and was born at Chateau de Chamagne in the Vosges, in 1600. His parents
+were in humble life, and apprenticed Claude to a baker and pastry-cook.
+According to some biographers the cooks of Lorraine were in such request
+that they occasionally repaired to Rome with their apprentices in their
+train to serve the successor of St Peter, and Claude was thus carried,
+in the way of trade, to the city which might well have been the goal of
+his ambition. According to other writers of art histories, Claude
+abandoned the kneading-trough and the oven; and it was as a runaway
+apprentice that by some occult means he reached Rome. And when he had
+arrived he entered into the service of a landscape painter of good
+repute, to whom he was colour-boy as well as cook. The last is the
+account, so far, which Claude gave of himself to a friend, and it is
+hardly likely either that he misrepresented his history, or that his
+friend invented such details, though lately French authorities have
+questioned the authenticity of the narrative. Claude remained for nearly
+the entire remainder of a long life in Rome. He only once re-visited
+France, while he was yet a young man, under thirty years of age, in 1625
+or 1627. He is supposed to have painted his earliest pictures and
+executed his etchings about this time, 1630 and to have painted his best
+pictures fifteen years later, when he was in the maturity of his life
+and powers. He was counted successful during his life time, as a
+landscape painter, but did not amass a larger fortune than about two
+thousand pounds.<a id="footnotetag33" name="footnotetag33"></a>
+<a href="#footnote33"><sup class="sml">33</sup></a> He was a slow and careful painter (working a
+fortnight at a picture with little apparent progress); his painstaking
+work, and his custom of keeping a book, in which he verified his
+pictures, are about the most that I can tell you of the habits of one of
+the foreign painters, who has been most fully represented in England,
+and was long in the highest favour with English lovers of art. Claude
+Lorraine died at Rome in the eighty-third year of his age, in 1682.</p>
+
+<p>Claude Lorraine's name has become a very vexed name with art critics.
+There was a time when he had an unsurpassed reputation as a landscape
+painter. The possession of a Claude was enough to confer art glory on a
+country-house, and possibly for this reason England, in public and
+private collections, has more 'Claudes' than are held by any other
+country. But Claude's admirers, among whom Sir George Beaumont, the
+great art critic of his generation, took the lead, have had their day,
+and, if they have not by any means passed away, are on the wane.</p>
+
+<p>The wrathful indignation of the English landscape painter, Turner, at
+the praise which was so glibly lavished on Claude&mdash;an indignation that
+caused Turner to bequeath two of his own landscape paintings to the
+trustees of the National Gallery, on the caustic condition that they
+should always be placed between the two celebrated 'Claudes,' known as
+'The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' and 'The Embarkation of the Queen of
+Sheba'&mdash;helped to shake the English art world's faith in its former
+idol. Mr Ruskin's adoption and proclamation of Turner's opinion shook
+the old faith still further. This reversal of a verdict with regard to
+Claude is peculiar; it is by no means uncommon for the decision of
+contemporaries to be set aside, and we shall hear of an instance
+presently, in the case of the painter Le Brun. In fact, it is often
+ominous with regard to a man's future fame, when he is 'cried up to the
+skies' in his own day. The probability may be that his easy success has
+been won by something superficial and fleeting. But Claude's great
+popularity has been in another generation, and with another nation.
+English taste may have been in fault; or another explanation seems
+preferable&mdash;that Claude's sense of beauty was great, with all its faults
+of expression, and he gave such glimpses of a beautiful world as the
+gazers on his pictures were capable of receiving, which to them proved
+irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>While Claude adopted an original style as a landscape painter, so far as
+his contemporaries were concerned, he was to such a degree self taught,
+and only partially taught, that it is said he never learnt to paint
+figures&mdash;those in his pictures were painted by other painters, and that
+Claude even painted animals badly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Ruskin has been hard on Claude, whether justly or unjustly, I cannot
+pretend to say.</p>
+
+<p>The critic denies the painter not only a sense of truth in art, but all
+imagination as a landscape painter 'Of men of name,' Mr Ruskin writes,
+'Perhaps Claude is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly
+total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much
+feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of
+expression.' Mr Ruskin condemns in the strongest terms 'the mourning and
+murky olive browns and verdigris greens, in which Claude, with the
+industry and intelligence of a Sevres china painter, drags the laborious
+bramble leaves over his childish foreground.' But Mr Ruskin himself
+acknowledges, with a reservation, Claude's charm in foliage, and
+pronounces more conditionally his power, when it was at its best, in
+skies&mdash;a region in which the greater, as well as the less, Poussin was
+declared to fail signally; 'a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of
+Claude,' Mr Ruskin writes, 'is indeed most perfect, and beyond praise,
+in all qualities of air; though even with him I often feel rather that
+there is a great deal of pleasant air between me and the firmament, than
+that the firmament itself is only air.'</p>
+
+<p>When all has been said that can be said, let us look at a mellow or a
+sunny Claude on any wall where it may hang, and judge for ourselves of
+the satisfaction it is calculated to give.</p>
+
+<p>Claude was fond of painting scenes on the Tiber and in the Roman
+Campagna, but while he tried to reproduce the hills and woodlands of
+Italy, he did not seek to paint the mountain landscapes of the
+Apennines.</p>
+
+<p>Besides Claude's numerous works in England and scattered through other
+countries, some of his finest paintings are in the Doria and Sciarra
+palaces in Rome. He rarely put his name to his works; when he did so he
+signed it frequently 'Claudio,' sometimes 'Claudius.' I have spoken of
+his book of sketches, in which he had been wont to note on the back of
+the sketch the date of the completed picture, and to whom sold. This
+book he called the 'Libro di Verita,' or, Book of Truth, and its
+apparent use was to check the sale of spurious paintings in Claude's
+name, even during his lifetime. The ' Book of Truth' is in possession of
+the Duke of Devonshire, and has been employed in recent years with
+reference to the end for which it seemed designed, so woe to that
+country-house which has long prided itself on possessing a 'Claude,' if
+that 'Claude' does not happen to have a place in the 'Book of Truth,'
+though I do not know that it is at all certain that Claude took the
+precaution of inscribing <i>every</i> painting which he painted after a
+certain date in the 'Book of Truth.'</p>
+
+<p>Claude Lorraine is well represented in the National Gallery. Engravings
+of his pictures are common.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Brun" id="Brun"></a><b>Charles le Brun</b> was born in Paris, in 1619. He was trained to be a
+painter, and went young to Rome, studying there for six years under the
+guidance of Nicolas Poussin. Le Brun returned to Paris, and, through the
+patronage of the Chancellor Segnier, was introduced to the court, and
+got the most favourable opportunities of practising his profession with
+worldly success. He speedily acquired a great name, and was appointed
+painter to the King, Louis XIV. Le Brun had enough influence with his
+royal master, and with the great minister Colbert, to succeed in
+establishing, while the painter was yet a young man, the Royal Academy
+of Art, of which he was the first member, and virtually the head,
+holding, in his own person, the directorship of the Gobelin tapestry
+works, which was to be the privilege of a member of the Academy. Le Brun
+continued in the utmost favour with the King, who, not content with
+employing the painter largely at Fontainebleau and in Versailles,
+invested him with the order of St Michael, bestowed on him letters of
+nobility, and visited him frequently at his work, occasions when there
+were not wanting adroit courtiers to liken the Grand Monarque to the
+Emperor Charles V., and Le Brun to Titian.</p>
+
+<p>Le Brun seems to have been a man of energy, confidence, and industry,
+neither mentally before nor after his time, and by no means too
+retiring, meditative, or original, to fail to profit by his outward good
+fortune. He wrote, as well as painted, artistic treatises, which were
+received as oracular utterances, and entirely deferred to in the schools
+of his day. He died at Paris in 1690, when he was in his seventieth
+year.</p>
+
+<p>Le Brun's real merits as a painter were limited to respectable abilities
+and acquirements, together with florid quickness and ease, and such an
+eye to what was splendid and scenic as suited admirably a decorator of
+palaces in an age which prized sumptuousness, and an exaggeration of
+dramatic effect, over every other quality. Nicolas Poussin's quiet
+refinement of style became in Le Brun what is called academic
+(conventionally learned), pompous, and grandiose, and men decidedly
+preferred the degeneration. But later critics, who have not the natural
+partiality of the French to the old master, return to their first loves,
+and condemn Le Brun's swelling violence, both in the tints and poses of
+his figures. Among his most famous works, which have been magnificently
+engraved, are his 'Battles of Alexander.'</p>
+
+<p><a name="Wat" id="Wat"></a><b>Antoine Watteau</b> was born at Valenciennes in 1684. A very different
+painter from Le Brun, he was yet as characteristic of French art in the
+reign of Louis XIV. I think my readers must be familiar with his name,
+and I dare say they associate it, as I do, not only with the fans which
+were painted largely after his designs, but with mock pastorals and
+S&egrave;vres china. I don't know if his birth-place at Valenciennes, with its
+chief product of dainty lace, had anything to do with it, but the other
+items of poor Watteau's history are considerably removed from the very
+artificial grace which one connects with his name. He was the son of a
+carpenter, and struggled up, by the hard instrumentality of third-rate
+masters and of picture-dealers, to the rank which he attained among
+artists, taking his stand from the first, however, as the painter of
+well-bred, well-apparelled people&mdash;the frequenters of <i>bals masqu&eacute;s,</i>
+and <i>f&ecirc;tes champ&ecirc;tres,</i> who were only playing at shepherds and
+shepherdesses.</p>
+
+<p>Watteau was elected an Academician in 1717, when he was thirty-three
+years of age, and he afterwards came to England, but did not remain
+there. He died of consumption at Nogent-sur-Marne in 1721, when he was
+thirty-six years of age.<a id="footnotetag34" name="footnotetag34"></a>
+<a href="#footnote34"><sup class="sml">34</sup></a> Watteau's gifts were his grace and
+brilliance on a small scale. He did not draw well; as to design, his
+composition may be said to be suited to such a work as the collection of
+'fashionable figures,' which he engraved and left behind him. Yet, if we
+were to see at this moment some of his exquisite groups of ladies in
+sacques and Watteau hats, and cavaliers in flowing wigs and lace,
+cravats, I have no doubt that the most of us would admire them much, for
+they are exceedingly pretty, and exceeding prettiness is attractive,
+particularly to women. But I would have my readers to remember that this
+art is a finical and soulless art, after all. I would fain have them
+take this as their maxim, 'That the art is greatest which conveys to the
+mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of
+the greatest ideas.'</p>
+
+<p><b>Jean Baptiste Greuze</b> <a name="Greuze" id="Greuze"></a>was born at Tournus in Burgundy in 1726. He studied
+painting from his youth in the studios of artists at Lyons, Paris, and
+Rome, and his studies resulted in his being a celebrated genre painter.
+He only painted one historical picture, but, with the touchy vanity
+which seemed natural to the man, he ranked his genre pictures as high
+art; and when he was placed in the ordinary list of genre painters on
+his election as a member of the French Academy of Painting, Greuze
+resented the imputation, and withdrew from the Academy. He died in 1805,
+aged seventy-nine years. Greuze was a showy, clever, but neither earnest
+nor truthful painter of domestic subjects and family pictures. His
+pictures of women and heads of girls, the expression in some of which
+has been severely condemned, are among his best known works, and by
+these he is represented in the National Gallery.<a id="footnotetag35" name="footnotetag35"></a>
+<a href="#footnote35"><sup class="sml">35</sup></a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+<p>HOLBEIN, 1494-1543&mdash;VAN DYCK, 1599-1641&mdash;LELY, 1618-1680&mdash;CANALETTO,
+1697-1768&mdash;KNELLER, 1646-1723.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>Hans Holbein,</b><a name="Hol" id="Hol"></a> sometimes entitled Hans the Younger, was born at Augsburg
+about 1494 or 1495. He was the son of a painter, and belonged to a
+family of painters, one or more of whom had preceded Hans Holbein in
+leaving Augsburg, and taking up his residence at Basle. There Holbein
+was under the patronage of, and on terms of friendly intercourse with,
+the great scholar Erasmus. One bad result proceeded from this friendly
+familiarity, that of establishing or originating the charge that
+Holbein, as a young man, at least, was coarse and dissipated in his
+habits. The evidence is sufficiently curious. There is still in
+existence the copy of a Latin book, called the 'Praise of Folly,'
+written by Erasmus, which Holbein, not being a scholar, could not have
+read for himself, but which, according to tradition, Erasmus himself,
+or some other friend, read to him, while Holbein was so delighted with
+the satire that he covered the margin of the book with illustrative
+sketches. (The sketches remain, and are unmistakably Holbein's.)
+Opposite a passage, recording the want of common sense and energy in
+many learned men, Holbein had drawn the figure of a student, and written
+below, '<i>Erasmus</i>.' The book coming again into the hands of Erasmus, he
+was offended with the liberty taken by the painter., and sought to
+retaliate in kind by writing below the sketch of a rude boor drinking,
+'<i>Holbein</i>.' In spite of the rough jesting, the friendship between
+scholar and painter was not interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>In these early days Holbein sometimes practised painting on glass, after
+the example of some of his kinsmen. At Basle, Holbein painted what is
+considered his finest work, the 'Meier Madonna,' now at Darmstadt, with
+a copy in the Dresden Gallery, and there he executed the designs for his
+series of woodcuts of the 'Dance of Death.'</p>
+
+<p>At Basle Holbein married, while still a young man. The presumption that
+the painter's marriage, like that of his countryman, Albert D&uuml;rer, was
+unhappy, has rested on the foundation that he left his wife and her
+children behind when he repaired to England, and that although he
+re-visited Basle, and saw his wife and family, they did not return with
+him to England. A fancied confirmation to the unhappiness of the
+marriage is found in the expression of the wife in a portrait which
+Holbein painted of her and his children when he was at Basle.
+'Cross-looking and red-eyed,' one critic calls the unlucky woman;
+another describes her as 'a plain, coarse-looking, middle-aged woman,'
+with an expression 'certainly mysterious and unpleasant.' Holbein's
+latest biographer<a id="footnotetag36" name="footnotetag36"></a>
+<a href="#footnote36"><sup class="sml">36</sup></a> has proved that the forsaken wife, Elssbeth
+Schmid, was a widow with one son when Holbein married her, and has
+conjectured that she was probably not only older than Holbein, but in
+circumstances which rendered her independent of her husband. So far the
+critic has done something to clear Hans Holbein from the miserable
+accusation often brought against him, that he abandoned his wife and
+children to starve at Basle, while he sunned himself in such court
+favour as could be found in England. But, indeed, while Hans Holbein may
+have been honest and humane enough to have been above such base
+suspicions, there is no trace of him which survives that goes to
+disprove the probability that he was a self-willed, not over-scrupulous
+man, if he was also a vigorous and thorough worker.</p>
+
+<p>Holbein came to England about 1526 or 1527, when he must have been
+thirty-one or thirty-two years of age, and repaired to Chelsea to the
+house of Sir Thomas More, to whom the painter brought a letter of
+introduction, and still better credentials in the present, from Erasmus
+to More, of the portrait of Erasmus, painted by Hans Holbein. There are
+so many portraits and copies of portraits of Erasmus, not only by
+Holbein, but by other painters&mdash;for Erasmus was painted by Albert D&uuml;rer
+and Quintin Matsys,&mdash;that this special portrait, like the true Holbein
+family portrait of the More family, remains very much a subject of
+speculation. Most of us must be well acquainted with the delightful
+account which Erasmus gave of Sir Thomas More's country-house at
+Chelsea, and the life of its occupants. It has been cited hundreds of
+times as an example of what an English family has been, and what it may
+be in dutiful discipline, simple industry, and high cultivation, when
+Sir Thomas's young daughters repeated psalms in Latin to beguile the
+time in the drudging process of churning the butter. During Holbein's
+residence in or visits to the Mores' house at Chelsea, he sketched or
+painted the original of the More family picture.</p>
+
+<p>Holbein was introduced to Henry VIII, by Sir Thomas More, and was
+immediately taken into favour by the king, and received into his
+service, with a lodging in the palace, a general salary of thirty pounds
+a year, and separate payment for his paintings. According to Horace
+Walpole, Holbein's palace lodging was probably 'the little study called
+the new library' of square glazed bricks of different colours, designed
+by the painter at Whitehall. (This gateway, with the porch at Wilton,
+were the painter's chief architectural achievements.) By another
+statement, Holbein's house was on London Bridge, where it was destroyed
+in the great fire.</p>
+
+<p>I have already alluded to the anecdote of the value which Henry VIII,
+put on Holbein. It was to this effect: that when an aggrieved courtier
+complained to the king that the painter had taken precedence of him&mdash;a
+nobleman, the king replied, 'I have many noblemen, but I have only one
+Hans Holbein.' In fact, Holbein received nothing save kindness from
+Henry VIII.; and for that matter, there seemed to be something in common
+between bluff King Hal and the equally bluff German Hans. But on one
+occasion Hans Holbein was said to have run the risk of forfeiting his
+imperious master's favour by the too favourable miniature which the
+painter was accused of painting of Anne of Cleves.</p>
+
+<p>At Henry's court Holbein painted many a member of the royal family,
+noble and knight, and English gentleman and lady. His fortune had made
+him a portrait painter, but he was fully equal to other branches of art,
+as shown by his 'Meier Madonna,' and still more by the designs which
+have been preserved of his famous allegory of 'the Triumphs of Riches
+and Poverty,' painted for the hall of the Easterling Steelyard, the
+quarters of the merchants of Allemagne, then traders in London. In
+addition to painting portraits Holbein designed dagger hilts, clasps,
+cups, as some say after a study of the goldsmith's work of Cellini.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time it was believed that Hans Holbein died after Mary Tudor
+succeeded to the English throne; indeed, some said that his death had
+been occasioned or hastened by that change in the affairs of men, which
+compelled him to quit his lodgings in the palace to make room for 'the
+new painter,' Sir Antony More, who came in the suite of Mary's
+well-beloved husband, Philip of Spain. There was even a theory,
+creditable to Hans Holbein, drawn from this conclusion, that he might
+have adopted the Protestant views of his late gracious master, and have
+stood by them stoutly, and so far forfeited all recognition from the
+bitter Catholic Mary. But, unfortunately for the tradition and theory,
+and for the later pictures attributed to Hans Holbein, his will has been
+discovered, and that quite recently, proving, from the date of its
+administration, his death of the plague (so far only the tradition had
+been right), when yet only in his forty-eighth year, as early as 1543,
+four years before the death of Henry VIII. In spite of court patronage
+Holbein did not die a rich man, and there is an impression that he was
+recklessly improvident in his habits.</p>
+
+<p>Holbein had revisited Basle several times, and the council had settled
+on him a pension of fifty florins a year, provided he would return and
+reside in Basle within two years, while his wife was to receive a
+pension of forty florins a year during Holbein's two years' absence.
+Holbein did not comply with the terms of the settlement. About the time
+of his death his son Philip, then a lad of eighteen, was a goldsmith in
+Paris. Of Hans Holbein's portraits I have two to draw from; one,
+painted in his youth at Basle, shows the painter in an open doublet, and
+curious stomacher-like shirt, and having on his head a great flapping
+hat. His face is broad and smooth-skinned, with little hair seen, and
+the features, the eyes especially, rather small for such an expanse of
+cheek and chin. The other picture of Holbein to which I have referred
+belongs certainly to a considerably later period of his life, and
+represents him with short but bushy hair, and short bushy beard and
+moustache, a man having a broad stout person with a mixture of
+dauntlessness and <i>bonhommie</i> in his massive face.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Ruskin says of Holbein, as a painter, that he was complete in
+intellect; what he saw he saw with his whole soul, and what he painted
+he painted with his whole might.</p>
+
+<p>In deep and reverential feeling Holbein was far behind his countryman
+Albert D&uuml;rer, but Holbein was far more fully furnished than D&uuml;rer
+(unless indeed as Albrecht D&uuml;rer showed himself in that last picture of
+'the Apostles') in the means of his art; he was a better draughtsman in
+the maturity of his powers, and a far better colourist. For Hans Holbein
+was not more famous for the living truthfulness of his likenesses ('a
+man very excellent in making physiognomies'), than for the 'inimitable
+bloom' that he imparted to his pictures, which 'he touched, till not a
+touch became discernible.' Yet beneath this bloom, along with his
+truthfulness, there was a dryness and hardness in Holbein's treatment of
+his subjects, and he is far below Titian, Rubens, and even Rembrandt as
+a portrait painter.</p>
+
+<p>Holbein was in the habit of painting his larger portraits on a peculiar
+green, and his miniatures on a blue background. He drew his portrait
+sketches with black and red chalk on a paper tinted flesh-colour. It is
+said, that with the exception, of Philip Wouwermann, no painter has been
+so unfortunate in having the works of other painters attributed to him
+as Hans Holbein has been, and 'that three out of every four pictures
+ascribed to him are misnamed.'<a id="footnotetag37" name="footnotetag37"></a>
+<a href="#footnote37"><sup class="sml">37</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The 'Meier, or Meyer Madonna,' is otherwise called 'the Meier Family
+adoring the infant Christ in the arms of the Virgin.' The subject is
+understood to prove that it must have been painted in Holbein's youth,
+before Protestantism was triumphant at Basle. The figures are the
+Burgomaster Meier and his wife, whom Holbein painted twice; their son,
+with a little boy <i>nude</i> beside him; another woman, elderly, conjectured
+to be a grandmother of the family, and beside her the young daughter of
+the house. In the centre on a turkey carpet stands the Madonna, holding
+in her arms an infant stretching out its left hand to the group of
+worshippers. In course of time, and in its transfer from hand to hand, a
+doubt has arisen with regard to the subject of this picture. Some
+critics have regarded it as a votive picture dedicated in a private
+chapel to commemorate the recovery from sickness or the death of a
+child. This conjecture seems to rest mainly on the fact, that the child
+in the Dresden copy (it is said to be otherwise in the Darmstadt
+picture) is of an aspect so sickly, as to have given rise to the
+impression that it represented an ailing, or even a dead child, and no
+glorious child Christ. Critics have gone still farther, and imagined
+that the child is a figure of the soul of a dead child (souls were
+sometimes painted by the old painters as new-born children), or of the
+soul of the elder and somewhat muffled-up woman who might have been
+recently dead. Mr Ruskin regards the picture as an offering for the
+recovery of a sick child, and thus illustrates it:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is
+beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father
+and a mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child.
+She appears to them, her own child Christ in her arms; she puts
+down her child beside them, takes their child into her arms
+instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hand to
+its father and mother, saying farewell.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Yet another much more prosaic and less attractive interpretation of the
+picture has been suggested by Holbein's biographer, that the two
+children may represent the same child. The child standing by his brother
+may be the boy restored to health, the feeble child in the arms of the
+Virgin may indicate the same child in its sickness, while the extended
+arm may point to the seat of the disease in an arm broken or injured.
+After all, the child may simply be a child Christ, marred in execution.
+I have given this dispute at length, because I think it is interesting,
+and, so far as I know, unique in reference to such a picture. By an odd
+enough mistake this very picture was once said to be the famous More
+Family picture.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of the 'Dance of Death' did not originate with Holbein, neither
+is he supposed to have done more than touch, if he did touch, the
+paintings called the 'Dance of Death,' on the wall of the Dominican
+burial-ground, Basle, painted long before Holbein's day, by the order of
+the council after the plague visited Basle, and considered to have for
+its meaning simply a warning of the universality of death. But Holbein
+certainly availed himself of the older painting, to draw from it the
+grim satire of his wood-cuts. Of these there are thirty-seven designs,
+the first, 'The Creation;' the second, 'Adam and Eve in Paradise;' the
+third, 'The Expulsion from Paradise;' the fourth, 'Adam Tilling the
+Earth;' the fifth, 'The Bones of all People;' till the dance really
+begins in the sixth. Death, a skeleton, as seen through the rest of the
+designs, sometimes playing on a guitar or lute, sometimes carrying a
+drum, bagpipes, a dulcimer, or a fiddle, now appearing with mitre on
+head and crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the
+parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he
+seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going
+down impartially through Emperor, King (the face is supposed to be that
+of Francis I.), nobleman, advocate, physician, ploughman, countess, old
+woman, little child, &amp;c. &amp;c., and leading each unwilling or willing
+victim in turn to the terrible dance. One woman meets her doom by Death
+in the character of a robber in a wood. Another, the Duchess, sits up
+in bed fully dressed, roused from her sleep by two skeletons, one of
+them playing a fiddle.</p>
+
+<p>Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of
+these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of
+Albrecht D&uuml;rer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil,' or Orcagna's
+'Triumph of Death.' In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling
+faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable
+fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the
+time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and
+told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer
+resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners
+during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the
+guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as
+represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the arrival of
+the cholera.</p>
+
+<p>Of the 'More Family' there are so many duplicates or versions, that, as
+in the case of Erasmus's picture, it is hard to say which is the
+original picture, or whether Holbein did more than sketch the original,
+or merely sketch the various heads to be afterwards put together by an
+inferior artist. A singular distribution of the light in the best
+authenticated picture has been supposed to favour this conjecture. But
+under any supposition, this, the second of the three noted English
+family pictures, is of the greatest interest. I shall record a minute
+and curious description given of this 'More Family,' which is still in
+the possession of a descendant of the Mores and Ropers.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The room which is here represented seemed to be a large
+dining-room. At the upper end of it stands a chamber-organ on a
+cupboard, with a curtain drawn before it. On each end of the
+cupboard, which is covered with a carpet of tapestry, stands a
+flower-pot of flowers, and on the cupboard are laid a lute, a
+base-viol, a pint pot or ewer covered in part with a cloth folded
+several times, and <i>Boetius de Consolatione Philosophi&aelig;</i>, with
+two other books upon it. By this</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>cupboard stands a daughter of Sir Thomas More's, putting on her
+right-hand glove, and having under her arm a book bound in red
+Turkey leather and gilt, with this inscription round the outside
+of the cover&mdash;<i>Epistolica Senec&aelig;</i>. Over her head is written in
+Latin, <i>Elizabeth Dancy</i>, daughter of Sir Thomas More, aged 21.</p>
+
+<p>'Behind her stands a woman holding a book open with both her hands, over
+whose head is written <i>Spouse of John Clements</i>.<a id="footnotetag38" name="footnotetag38"></a>
+<a href="#footnote38"><sup class="sml">38</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>'Next to Mrs Dancy is Sir John More in his robes as one of the justices
+of the King's Bench, and by him Sir Thomas in his chancellor's robes
+(?), and collar of SS, with a rose pendant before. They are both sitting
+on a sort of tressel or armed bench, one of the arms and legs and one of
+the tassels of the cushion appear on the left side of Sir Thomas. At the
+feet of Sir John lies a cur-dog, and at Sir Thomas's a Bologna shock.
+Over Sir John's head is written, <i>John More, father, aged</i> 76. Over Sir
+Thomas's,</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Thomas More, aged</i> 50. Between them, behind, stands the wife of
+John More, Sir Thomas's son, over whose head is written <i>Anne
+Cresacre, wife of John More, aged</i> 15. Behind Sir Thomas, on his
+left hand stands his only son, John More, pictured with a very
+foolish aspect, and looking earnestly in a book which he holds open
+with both his hands. Over his head is written, <i>John, son of Thomas
+More, aged</i> 19.' (The only and witless son of the family, on whom
+Sir Thomas made the comment to his wife:&mdash;'You long wished for a
+boy, and you have got one&mdash;for all his life.')</p>
+
+<p>'A little to the left of Sir Thomas are sitting on low stools his two
+daughters, Cecilia and Margaret. Next him is Cecilia, who has a boot in
+her lap, clasped. By her side sits her sister Margaret, who has likewise
+a book on her lap, but wide open, in which is written, <i>L. An.
+Senec&aelig;&mdash;Oedipus&mdash;Fata si liceat mihi fingere arbitrio meo, temperem
+zephyro levi</i>. On Cecilia's petticoat is written, <i>Cecilia Heron,
+Daughter of Thomas More, aged</i> 20, and on Margaret's, <i>Margaret Roper</i>,</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>daughter of Thomas More, aged</i> 22.' (The best beloved, most
+amiable, and most learned of Sir Thomas's daughters, who visited
+him in the Tower and encouraged him to remain true to his
+convictions, while her step-mother urged him to abjure his faith.
+Margaret Roper intercepted her father on his return to the Tower
+after his trial, and penetrating the circle of the Guards, hung on
+his neck and bade him farewell. There is a tradition that she
+caused her father's head to be stolen from the spike of the bridge
+on which it was exposed, and, getting it preserved, kept it in a
+casket. She and her husband, William Roper, wrote together the
+biography of her father, Sir Thomas More.)</p>
+
+<p>'Just by Mrs Roper sits Sir Thomas's lady in an elbow-chair (?), holding
+a book open in her hands. About her neck she has a gold chain, with a
+cross hanging to it before. On her left hand is a monkey chained, and
+holding part of it with one paw and part of it with the other. Over her
+head is written '<i>spouse of Thomas More, aged</i> 57.'</p>
+
+<p>(Dame Alice More, the second wife of Sir Thomas More, a foolish and
+mean-spirited woman.)</p>
+
+<p>'Behind her is a large arched window, in which is placed a flower-pot (a
+vase) of flowers, and a couple of oranges. Behind the two ladies stands
+Sir Thomas's fool, who, it seems, was bereft of his judgment by
+distraction. He has his cap on, and in it are stuck a red and white
+rose, and on the brim of it is a shield with a red cross on it, and a
+sort of seal pendant. About his neck he wears a black string with a
+cross hanging before him, and his left thumb is stuck in a broad
+leathern girdle clasp'd about him. Over his head is written <i>Henry
+Pattison, servant</i> of Thomas More. At the entrance of the room where Sir
+Thomas and his family are, stands a man in the portal who has in his
+left hand a roll of papers or parchments with two seals appendant, as if
+he was some way belonging to Sir Thomas as Lord Chancellor. Over his
+head is written <i>Joannes Heresius, Thomae Mori famulus</i>. In another room
+at some distance is seen through the door-case a man standing at a large
+bow-window, with short black hair, in an open</p></div>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>sleeved gown of a sea-green colour, and under it a garment of a
+blossom-colour, holding a book open in his hands written or printed
+in the black letter, and reading very earnestly in it. About the
+middle of the room, over against Sir Thomas, hangs a clock with
+strings and leaden weights without any case.'<a id="footnotetag39" name="footnotetag39"></a>
+<a href="#footnote39"><sup class="sml">39</sup></a></p></div>
+
+<p>It is notable that not one of Sir Thomas's sons-in-law is in this
+picture, neither is there a grandchild, though one or more is known to
+have been born at the date.</p>
+
+<p>The miniature of Anne of Cleves, if it ever existed, is lost; it is
+probable that what was really referred to was the portrait of Anne by
+Holbein in the Louvre, where she appears 'as a kindly and comely woman
+in spite of her broad nose and swarthy complexion, but by no means such
+a painted Venus as might have deceived King Hal.'<a id="footnotetag40" name="footnotetag40"></a>
+<a href="#footnote40"><sup class="sml">40</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>A well-known portrait by Holbein is that of a 'Cornish Gentleman,' with
+reddish hair and beard. I saw this portrait not long ago, as it was
+exhibited among the works of the Old Masters, and so much did it look
+as though the figure would step from the frame, that it was hard to
+believe that more than three hundred years had passed since the original
+walked the earth.<a id="footnotetag41" name="footnotetag41"></a>
+<a href="#footnote41"><sup class="sml">41</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the last of Holbein's portrait pieces, which it is reported he
+left uncompleted when he died, is that of the 'Barber Surgeons,' painted
+on the occasion of the united company receiving their charter from the
+king, and including the king's portrait. This picture still hangs in the
+old company's hall.</p>
+
+<p>I have only to say a few more words of those sketches which survive the
+destruction of the picture&mdash;Holbein's allegory of the 'Triumph of
+Riches,' and the 'Triumph of Poverty,' and of his portrait sketches. In
+the 'Triumph of Riches,' Plutus, an old man bent double, drives in a
+car, drawn by four white horses; before him, Fortune, blind, scatters
+money. The car is followed by Cr&#339;sus, Midas, and other noted misers and
+spendthrifts&mdash;for Cleopatra, the only woman present, is included in the
+group. In the 'Triumph of Poverty,' Poverty is an old woman in squalor
+and rags, who is seated in a shattered vehicle, drawn by asses and oxen,
+and guided by Hope and Diligence. The designs are large and bold. In the
+first, a resemblance to Henry VIII, is found in Cr&#339;sus. If the
+resemblance were intentional on Holbein's part, it showed the same want
+of tact and feeling which the painter early betrayed in his caricature
+of Erasmus.</p>
+
+<p>But the best of Holbein's drawings are his portrait sketches with
+chalks, on flesh-tinted paper. These sketches have a history of their
+own, subsequent to their execution by Holbein. After being in the
+possession of the art-loving Earl of Arundel, and carried to France,
+they were lost sight of altogether for the space of a century, until
+they were discovered by Queen Caroline, wife of George II., in a bureau
+at Kensington. You will hear a little later that the finest collection
+of miniatures in England went through the same process of disappearance
+and recovery.<a id="footnotetag42" name="footnotetag42"></a>
+<a href="#footnote42"><sup class="sml">42</sup></a> These original sketches, in addition to their great
+artistic merit, form a wonderful collection of speaking likenesses,
+belonging to the court of Henry VIII.,&mdash;likenesses which had been
+happily identified in time by Sir John Cheke (in the reign of
+Elizabeth), since the names of the originals have been inscribed on the
+back of each drawing, as it is believed, by Sir John Cheke's hand. The
+collection is now in the Queen's library, Windsor, with photographs at
+Kensington Museum. There are one or two of Holbein's reputed portraits
+at Hampton Court.</p>
+
+<p>I must pass over some painters as not being sufficiently represented for
+my purpose. Among these is Sir Antony More, Philip II, of Spain's
+friend. It is recorded that Philip having rested his hand on the
+shoulder of More while at work, the bold painter turned round, and
+daubed the royal hand with vermilion. This gave rise to the
+courtier-saying that Philip 'made slaves of his friends, and friends of
+his painters.' Another is Zucchero, one of the painters who was
+requested by Queen Elizabeth to paint her picture without shade, the
+result being 'a woman with a Roman nose, a huge ruff and farthingale,
+and a bushel of pearls.' There are also Van Somer,&mdash;Janssens, who
+painted Lady Bowyer, named for her exquisite beauty, 'The star of the
+East,' and Susanna Lister, the most beautiful woman at court, when
+presented in marriage to Sir Geoffry Thornhurst by James I, in
+person,<a id="footnotetag43" name="footnotetag43"></a>
+<a href="#footnote43"><sup class="sml">43</sup></a>&mdash;and Daniel Myttens, all foreigners, Flemish or Dutch, whom
+we must thus briefly dismiss. And now we come to Van Dyck.</p>
+
+<p><b>Antony Van Dyck</b><a name="Dyck" id="Dyck"></a> was born at Antwerp, in 1599. His father was a merchant;
+his mother was famous for painting flowers in small, and for needlework
+in silk. The fashion of painting 'in small' had prevailed for some time.
+Horace Walpole mentions that the mother of Lucas de Heere, a Flemish
+painter, born in 1534, could paint with such 'diminutive neatness' that
+she had executed 'a landscape with a windmill, miller, a cart and horse,
+and passengers,' which half a grain of corn could cover. At ten years of
+age, Van Dyck began to study as a painter, and he soon became a pupil,
+and afterwards a favourite pupil, of Rubens. In 1618, when Van Dyck was
+but a lad of seventeen years, he was admitted as a master into the
+painters' guild of St Luke. Two years later, he was still working with
+Rubens, who, seeing his lameness of invention, counselled him to abide
+by portrait painting, and to visit Italy. A year later, in 1621, when
+Van Dyck was twenty years of age, he came to London, already becoming a
+resort of Flemish painters, and lodging with a countryman of his own,
+worked for a short time in the service of James I.</p>
+
+<p>On Van Dyck's return to Flanders, and on the death of his father, he was
+able to take Rubens' advice, and in 1623, when Van Dyck was still only
+twenty-two years of age, he set out for Venice, the Rome of the Flemish
+painters. Before quitting Antwerp, Van Dyck, in proof of the friendship
+which existed between the painters, presented Rubens with several of the
+former's pictures, among them his famous portrait of 'Rubens' wife.' As
+a pendant to this generosity, when Van Dyck came back to Antwerp, and
+complained to Rubens that he&mdash;Van Dyck&mdash;could not live on the profits of
+his painting, Rubens went next day and bought every picture of Van
+Dyck's which was for sale.</p>
+
+<p>Van Dyck spent five years in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, and
+Palermo, but residing principally at Genoa. In Italy, he began to
+indulge in his love of splendid extravagance, and in the fastidious
+fickleness which belonged to the evil side of his character. At Rome he
+was called 'the cavalier painter,' yet his first complaint on his return
+to Antwerp was, that he could not live on the profits of his painting!
+He avoided the society of his homelier countrymen.</p>
+
+<p>At Palermo, Van Dyck knew, and according to some accounts, painted the
+portrait of Sophonisba Anguisciola, who claimed to be the most eminent
+portrait painter among women. She was then about ninety years of age,
+and blind, but she still delighted in having in her house a kind of
+academy of painting, to which all the painters visiting Palermo
+resorted. Van Dyck asserted that he owed more to her conversation than
+to the teaching of all the schools. A book of his sketches, which was
+recovered, showed many drawings 'after Sophonisba Anguisciola.' She is
+said to have been born at Cremona, was invited at the age of twenty-six
+by Philip II, to Spain, and was presented by him with a Spanish don for
+a husband, and a pension of a thousand crowns a-year from the customs of
+Palermo.</p>
+
+<p>The plague drove Van Dyck from Italy back to Flanders, where he painted
+for a time, and presented his picture of the 'Crucifixion' to the
+Dominicans as a memorial gift in honour of his father, but in Flanders
+Rubens' fame overshadowed that of every other painter, and Van Dyck,
+recalling an invitation which he had received from the Countess of
+Arundel while still in Italy, came a second time to England, in 1630,
+when he was about thirty years of age, and lodged again with a
+fellow-countryman and painter named Gildorp. But his sensitive vanity
+was wounded by his not at once receiving an introduction to the king, or
+the countenance which the painter considered his due, and the
+restlessness, which was a prominent feature in his character, being
+re-awakened, he withdrew once more from England, and returned to the Low
+Countries in 1631. At last, a year later, in 1632, Van Dyck's pride was
+propitiated by receiving a formal invitation from Charles I., through
+Sir Kenelm Digby, to visit England, and this time the painter had no
+cause to complain of an unworthy reception. He was lodged by the king
+among his artists at Blackfriars, having no intercourse with the city,
+save by water. He had the king, with his wife and children, to sit to
+him, and was granted a pension of two hundred a-year, with the
+distinction of being named painter to his Majesty.</p>
+
+<p>A year later Van Dyck was knighted. Royal and noble commissions flowed
+upon him, and the king, who had a hereditary love of art, visited the
+painter continually, and spent some of the happiest and most innocent
+hours of his brief and clouded life in Van Dyck's company. Thus began
+Van Dyck's success in England, and it rested with himself whether that
+success was to be real or only apparent, enduring or temporary.</p>
+
+<p>To give you an example of how often, and in how many different manners,
+Van Dyck painted the king and royal family, I shall quote from a list of
+his pictures&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'King Charles in coronation robes.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'King Charles in armour' (twice).</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'King Charles in white satin, with his hat on, just</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">descended from his horse; in the distance, view of the</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Isle of Wight.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'King Charles in armour, on a white horse; Monsieur</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">de St Antoine, his equerry, holding the king's</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">helmet.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'The King and Queen sitting; Prince Charles,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">very young, standing at the King's side; the Duke of</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">York, an infant, on the Queen's knee.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'The King and Queen holding a crown of laurel</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">between them.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'The Queen in white.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'Prince Charles in armour' (two or three times).</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'King, Queen, Prince Charles, and Princess Mary.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'Queen with her five children.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'Queen with dwarfs,<a id="footnotetag44" name="footnotetag44"></a>
+<a href="#footnote44"><sup class="sml">44</sup></a> Sir Geoffrey Hudson having</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">a monkey on his shoulder.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Van Dyck had several great patrons, after the king. For the Earl of
+Arundel, in addition to portraits of the Earl and Countess, the painter
+designed a second Arundel family picture, which was painted by
+Fruitiers. For George, Duke of Buckingham, Van Dyck painted one of his
+finest double portraits of the Duke's two sons, when children. For the
+Northumberland family Van Dyck painted, besides portraits of Henry and
+Algernon, Earls of Northumberland, another famous picture, that of the
+two beautiful sisters, Lady Dorothy Percy, afterwards Countess of
+Leicester, and her sister, Lady Lucy Percy, afterwards Countess of
+Carlisle, whose charms figure frequently in the memoirs of her time.
+William and Philip, Earls of Pembroke, were also among his patrons, and
+for the second he painted his great family picture, 'The Wilton
+Family.' Sir Kenelm Digby, too, whose wife Venitia was more frequently
+painted than any woman of her day, and was not more distinguished for
+her beauty than for her lack of nobler qualities. Van Dyck alone painted
+her several times, the last after her sudden death, for her vain and
+eccentric, if gallant, husband, who in the end was no friend to Van
+Dyck.</p>
+
+<p>But these high names by no means exhaust the list of patrons of a
+painter who, among various contradictory qualities, was indefatigably
+industrious. His work is widely distributed among the Scotch as well as
+the English descendants of the nobility whom he painted, so that the
+possession of at least one ancestral 'Van Dyck' accompanies very many
+patents of nobility, and is equivalent to a warrant of gentle birth.</p>
+
+<p>The Earl of Clarendon, in the next reign, had a great partiality for Van
+Dyck's pictures, and was said to be courted by gifts of them until his
+apartments at Cornbury were furnished with full-length 'Van Dycks.' A
+third of his collection went to Kitty Hyde, Duchess of Queensberry, one
+of the Earl's three co-heiresses. Through the Rich family many of these
+'Van Dycks' passed to Taymouth Castle, where by a coincidence they were
+lodged in the company of numerous works of George Jamieson of Aberdeen,
+who is said to have been for a short time a fellow-pupil of Van Dyck's
+under Rubens, who has been called 'the Scotch Van Dyck,' and who is
+certainly the first native painter who deserves honourable mention.
+Since the death of the last Marquis of Breadalbane these travelled 'Van
+Dycks' have gone back to the English representative of the Rich family.</p>
+
+<p>Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a
+whole-length picture;&mdash;for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their
+children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had
+five hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Van Dyck soon impaired his
+fortune. He was not content with having a country-house at Eltham in
+Kent, where he spent a portion of each summer; he would emulate in his
+expenditure the most spendthrift noble of that reign. 'He always went
+magnificently dressed, and had a numerous and gallant equipage, and kept
+so good a table in his apartment that few princes were more visited and
+better served.' His marriage was not calculated to teach him moderation.
+In his thirty-ninth year the King gave him the hand of Marie Ruthven,
+who was nearly related to the unhappy Earl of Gowrie. She was his niece,
+her father having been the scarcely less unhappy younger brother
+Patrick, a physician, who, apprehended when a young man on the charge of
+being concerned in the treason of his elder brothers, spent his manhood
+in the Tower. He was kept a prisoner there from 1584 to 1619, nearly
+forty years, and was only released in his age and infirmity when his
+mind was giving way. Patrick Ruthven's infant daughter had been adopted,
+either through charity or perversity, by Anne of Denmark, and brought up
+first at the court of Anne, and afterwards at that of Henrietta Maria.
+The assertion that Marie Ruthven was a very beautiful woman has been
+contradicted. It was said that 'she was bestowed in marriage on Sir
+Antony Van Dyck as much to humble further the already humbled and still
+detested family of Ruthven, as to honour the painter; but this does not
+seem consistent with King Charles's known favour for Van Dyck. Yet such
+a view might have been entertained by Marie Ruthven herself, who,
+according to tradition, held herself degraded by the marriage, and never
+forgave the degradation. She was not a loving wife to a man who could
+hardly have been a very loving or loyal husband. And certainly the
+marriage did not unite the painter closer to the king.</p>
+
+<p>With his professional industry, Van Dyck combined an equally
+unquenchable love of pleasure, which, with his luxurious and sedentary
+habits, induced paroxysms of gout, from which Rubens also suffered
+severely. This must have ultimately disqualified him for good work, and
+when his debts accumulated in greater proportion even than his receipts,
+in place of having recourse, like Rubens, to his painting-room, Van Dyck
+tried a shorter road to get rich, by following the idle example of Sir
+Kenelm Digby in his pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher's stone.</p>
+
+<p>In the year of his marriage, Van Dyck re-visited Flanders, in company
+with his wife, and then repaired to France, it is understood with the
+intention of settling there. He was instigated to the step by his wife,
+and his own ambition of rivalling Rubens' triumphs at the Luxembourg;
+but the preference which the French gave to the works of their
+countryman, Nicolas Poussin, roused his latent jealousy, and so
+mortified him as to induce him to renounce his intention. He determined
+to return to England, and was, to his credit, confirmed in his
+resolution by the threatening civil war which was to shake his royal
+master's throne to the foundation, rather than deterred from it.</p>
+
+<p>Again in England, Van Dyck employed Sir Kenelm Digby to make an offer on
+the painter's part that for eight hundred pounds he would paint the
+history, and a procession of the Knights of the Garter on the walls of
+the Knights' banqueting-room at Whitehall&mdash;that palace which was to
+have surpassed the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Escurial, and from one
+of the windows of which Charles stepped out on his scaffold. But the
+proposal was rejected, and immediately afterwards the civil war broke
+out, and was speedily followed by the death of Van Dyck, about a year
+after his marriage, when he was a little over forty years old, at
+Blackfriars, in 1641. He was buried in old St Paul's, near the tomb of
+John of Gaunt. His daughter, Justiniana, was born a short time&mdash;some say
+only eight days&mdash;before her father died, and was baptized on the day of
+his death. Van Dyck left effects and sums due to him to the amount of
+twenty thousand pounds; but the greater part of the debts were found
+beyond recovery at the close of the civil war. His daughter grew up, and
+married a Mr Stepney, 'who rode in King Charles's life guards.' His
+widow re-married; her second husband was a Welsh knight.</p>
+
+<p>Van Dyck's character was one of those that are made of very
+contradictory elements. He was actuated by opposite motives which are
+hard to analyze, and which in their instability have within themselves,
+whatever their outward advantages, the doom of failure in the highest
+excellence. He was a proud man, dissatisfied both with himself and his
+calling, resenting, with less reason than Hans Holbein showed, that he
+should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no means undervaluing
+or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the persons who sat to him
+to dinner for an opportunity of studying their countenances and
+re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter, sitting to him seven
+entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not once let the man see
+the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck appears to have been
+a man with the possibilities in him of greater things than he attained,
+possibilities which were baffled by his weakness and self-indulgence,
+leaving him with such a sense of this as spoiled his greatest successes.</p>
+
+<p>I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to
+get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that
+of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose,
+a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse
+and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is
+an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare.
+The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the
+best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his
+complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and
+whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.</p>
+
+<p>In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a
+delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master,
+both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement
+which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of
+conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness
+and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true,
+and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the
+refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I.,
+whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus
+lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a
+noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who
+have maintained that Charles,&mdash;the son of a plain uncouth father, and of
+a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in
+his childhood a sickly rickety child,&mdash;was by no means so well endowed
+in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of old
+gossip and close investigation, have alleged that Charles was long and
+lanky, after he had ceased to be Baby Charles; that his nose was too
+large, and, alas! apt to redden; that his eyes were vacillating; and his
+mouth, the loosely hung mouth of a man who begins by being irresolute,
+and ends by being obstinate.<a id="footnotetag45" name="footnotetag45"></a>
+<a href="#footnote45"><sup class="sml">45</sup></a> Again, in the hands of a sitter, which
+Van Dyck was supposed to paint with special care and elegance, it has
+been argued that he copied always the same hand, probably his own, in
+ignorance, or in defiance of the fact that hands have nearly as much and
+as varying character as a painter can discover in faces. Though Van Dyck
+painted many beautiful women, he did not excel in rendering them
+beautiful on canvas, so that succeeding generations, in gazing on Van
+Dyck's versions of Venitia, Lady Digby, and Dorothy Sydney&mdash;Waller's
+Sacharissa,&mdash;have wondered how Sir Kenelm, Waller, and their
+contemporaries, could find these ladies so beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Van Dyck certainly owed something of the charm of his pictures to the
+dress of the period, with regard to which he received this credit that
+'Van Dyck was the first painter who e'er put ladies' dress into a
+careless romance.' But in reality never was costume better suited for a
+painter like Van Dyck. The hair in the men was allowed to flow to the
+shoulders or gathered in a love knot, while the whiskers and beard
+formed a point. In the women the hair was crisped in curls round the
+face. The ruff in men and women had yielded to the broad, rich, falling
+collar, with deep scallops of point lace. Vest and cloak were of the
+richest velvet or satin, or else, on the breaking out of the civil war,
+men appeared in armour. The man's hat was broad and flapping, usually
+turned up at one side, and having an ostrich feather in the band; his
+long wide boots were of Spanish leather, and he wore gauntlet gloves,
+and rich ruffles at his wrists. The women wore hoods and mantles, short
+bodices, ample trains, and wide sleeves terminating in loose ruffles at
+the elbow, which left half of the arm bare. Pearl necklaces and
+bracelets, round feather fans, and 'knots of flowers,' were the almost
+universal ornaments of women. Another ornament of both men and women,
+which belonged to the day, and was very common in the quarters I have
+been referring to, was a miniature enclosed in a small case of ivory or
+ebony, carved like a rose, and worn on the left side in token of
+betrothal.<a id="footnotetag46" name="footnotetag46"></a>
+<a href="#footnote46"><sup class="sml">46</sup></a> Van Dyck, along with the appreciation of black draperies
+which he held in common with Rubens, was specially fond of painting
+white or blue satin. He is said to have used a brown preparation of
+pounded peach-stones for glazing the hair in his pictures.</p>
+
+<p>In the end, with all the aids that critics may have given him, and all
+the faults they may find in him, Van Dyck was a great, and in the main
+an earnest portrait painter. Perhaps 'Charles in white satin, just
+descended from his horse,' is the best of the single portraits which
+were held to be Van Dyck's forte.</p>
+
+<p>I must try to give my readers some idea of Van Dyck's 'Wilton Family.'
+It has been so praised, that some have said 'it might have been covered
+with gold as a price to obtain it;' on the other hand, it has not
+escaped censure. One critic asserts that there is no common action
+uniting the figures, and that the faces are so different in
+complexion&mdash;one yellow-faced boy appearing either jaundiced or burnt by
+a tropical sun, that the family might have lived in different climates.</p>
+
+<p>This is the story of the picture. 'Earl Philip of Pembroke having
+caused his family to meet, informs them with great emotion of the
+necessity of his eldest son Charles, Lord Herbert, going into the army
+of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, there to acquire military honour and
+experience, notwithstanding his having just married Mary, daughter of
+George, Duke of Buckingham. Lord Herbert is receiving the news with
+ardour, the young bride is turning aside her fair face to hide her
+tears. (Charles Lord Herbert was married Christmas, 1634, went to
+Florence, and died there of small pox, January, 1636.)</p>
+
+<p>'In the Pembroke picture (or "Wilton Family") there are ten figures. The
+Earl and Countess are seated on a dais, under a coat of arms. He wears a
+great lace collar, an order on his breast, a key at his girdle, and has
+great shoes with roses. She has flowing curls, hanging sleeves, arms
+crossed, necklace on the bare neck. (The Countess of Pembroke was the
+Earl's second wife, Anne Clifford, daughter of George, Earl of
+Cumberland, the brave lady who defied Cromwell, and was fond of signing
+her name with the long string of titles derived from her two husbands,
+"Anne Dorset, Pembroke, Montgomery.") Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon,
+is introduced with his wife, Lady Anne Sophia Herbert, daughter of Earl
+Philip; they are on the Countess's left hand. The daughter-in-law, about
+to be parted from her husband, stands on the lowest step of the dais;
+she is elegantly dressed, with hanging sleeves knotted with bows from
+shoulder to elbow. Two young men, the bridegroom and his brother, are at
+their father's right hand; they wear great falling collars and cloaks.
+There are three half-grown boys in tunics without collars, and great
+roses in their shoes, with a dog. The three little angels in the clouds
+are three daughters of the family who died in infancy.'</p>
+
+<p>Van Dyck's finest sacred pictures were his early 'Crucifixion,' and a
+Pieta, at Antwerp. In these he gave a promise of nobler and deeper
+pathos than he afterwards fulfilled. His pictures are to be found
+freely, as I have written, in old English mansions, such as Arundel and
+Alnwick Castles, Knowsley, Knole, Petworth, &amp;c. A head said to be by
+Van Dyck is in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Van Dyck had few pupils: one, an Englishman named Dobson, earned an
+honourable reputation as a painter.</p>
+
+<p>From Sir Antony More's time down to that of Le&iacute;ly and Kneller, the rage
+for portraits was continually increasing, and took largely the form of
+miniatures, which were painted chiefly by foreigners; notably by
+Hilliard and two Olivers or Oliviers, a father and son of French
+extraction, and by a Swiss named Petitot. A collection of miniatures by
+the Oliviers, including no less than six of Venitia, Lady Digby, had a
+similar fate to that of Holbein's drawings. The miniatures had been
+packed in a wainscot box and conveyed to the country-house in Wales of
+Mr Watkin Williams, who was a descendant of the Digby family. In course
+of time the box with its contents, doubtless forgotten, had been
+transferred to a garret, where it had lain undiscovered for, it has been
+supposed, fully a hundred years. It was two hundred years after the
+date of the painting of the miniatures, that on some turning over of the
+lumber in the garret, the exquisite miniatures, fresh as on the day when
+they were painted, were accidentally brought to light.<a id="footnotetag47" name="footnotetag47"></a>
+<a href="#footnote47"><sup class="sml">47</sup></a></p>
+
+<p><b>Sir Peter Lely</b><a name="Lely" id="Lely"></a> was born in Westphalia in 1618. His real name was Vander
+Facs, and his father was a 'Captain of Foot,' who, having chanced to be
+born in rooms over a perfumer's shop which bore the sign of a lily, took
+fantastically enough the name of Du Lys, or Lely, which he transmitted
+to his son. Sir Peter Lely, after studying in a studio at Haarlem, came
+to England when he was twenty-three years of age, in 1641, and set
+himself to copy the pictures of Van Dyck, who died in the year of Lely's
+arrival in England, and whom he succeeded as court painter. Lely was
+knighted by Charles II., married an English woman, and had a son and a
+daughter, who died young. He made a large fortune, dying at last of
+apoplexy, with which he was seized as he was painting the Duchess of
+Somerset, when he was sixty-two years of age, in 1680.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to Lely's character, we may safely judge from his works that
+he was such a man as Samuel Pepys, 'of easy virtue,' a man holding a low
+enough standard by which to measure himself and others. Mr Palgrave
+quotes from Mr Leslie the following characteristic anecdote of Lely,
+which seems to prove that he was aware of, and coolly accepted, the
+decline of art in his generation and person. A nobleman said to Lely,
+'How is it that you have so great a reputation, when you know, as well
+as I do, that you are no painter?' 'True, but I am the best you have,'
+was the answer. Lely's punishment followed him into his art, for
+beginning by copying Van Dyck, it is said of Lely that he degenerated in
+his work till it bore the very 'stamp of the depravity of the age.'</p>
+
+<p>Lely's sitters were mostly women. Among them was one who deserved a
+fitter painter, Mistress Anne Killigrew, Dryden's&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Youngest virgin daughter of the skies.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In Lely's portrait of her, she is a neat, slightly prim, delicate
+beauty, with very fine features, and such sleepy eyes, as were probably
+the gift of Lely, since he has bestowed them generally on the women whom
+he painted. Mistress Anne Killigrew's hair is in curls, piled up in
+front, but hanging down loosely behind. Her bodice is gathered together
+by a brooch, and she has another brooch on one shoulder. She wears a
+light pearl necklace, and 'drops' shaped like shamrocks in her ears.</p>
+
+<p>Lely painted both Charles I, and Cromwell, who desired his painters to
+omit 'no pimple or wart,' but to paint his face as they saw it.</p>
+
+<p>Among less notable personages Lely painted Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and
+his rough Duchess, once a camp follower, according to popular rumour,
+and named familiarly by the contemptuous wits of the day 'Nan Clarges.'
+It is with not more honourable originals than poor 'Nan Clarges' that
+Lely's name as a painter is chiefly associated. We know what an evil
+time the years after the Restoration proved in England, and it was to
+immortalize, as far as he could, the vain, light women of the
+generation that Lely lent what skill he possessed. There their pictures
+hang in what has been called 'the Beauty Room' at Hampton Court, and no
+good man or woman can look at them without holding such beauty
+detestable.</p>
+
+<p>At Hampton Court also there are several of the eleven portraits of
+Admirals whom Lely painted for James II, when Duke of York.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Canal" id="Canal"></a><b>Antonio Canal,</b> called <b>Canaletto,</b> incorrectly Canaletti, was born at
+Venice in 1697. He was the son of a scene painter at the theatre. In his
+youth he worked under his father; a little later he went to Rome, and
+studied for some time there. Then he came to England, where he remained
+only for two years. I have hesitated about placing his name among those
+of the foreign painters resident in England, but so many of his works
+are in this country that he seems to belong to it in an additional
+sense. He is said to have 'made many pictures and much money.' He died
+at Venice when he was seventy years of age, in 1768. As a painter he
+was famous for his correctness of perspective and precision of outline
+(in which it is alleged he aided himself by the use of the camera),
+qualities specially valuable in the architectural subjects of which he
+was fond, drawing them principally from his native Venice. But his very
+excellence was mechanical, and he showed so little originality or, for
+that matter, fidelity of genius, that he painted his landscapes in
+invariable sunshine.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The great wood-carver <b>Grinling Gibbons</b> <a name="Gibb" id="Gibb"></a>deserves mention among the
+artists of this date. He was a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in
+1648. He came to London with other carvers the year after the great fire
+of London, and was introduced by Evelyn to Charles II., who took him
+into his employment. 'Gibbons was appointed master carver in wood to
+George I., with a salary of eighteen-pence a day.' He died at his house
+in Bow Street in the sixty-third year of his age, in 1721. It is said
+that no man before Gibbons 'gave to wood the lightness of flowers.' For
+the great houses of Burghley, Petworth, and Chatsworth, Gibbons carved
+exquisite work, in festoons for screens, and chimney-pieces, and panels
+for pictures, of fruit, flowers, shells, and birds.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><b>Sir Godfrey Kneller</b><a name="god" id="god"></a> was born at L&uuml;beck in 1646, and was the son of an
+architect. He is said to have studied under Rembrandt; but if this be
+true, it must have been in Kneller's early youth. It is more certain
+that he travelled in Italy and returned to settle in Hamburg, but
+changing his plans, he came to England, when he was about thirty years
+of age, in 1675. London became his home. There he painted portraits with
+great success; his prices being fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if
+with one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole-length portrait.
+Charles II, sat at the same time to Kneller and to Lely. Not Titian
+himself painted more crowned heads than it fell to the lot of Kneller to
+paint&mdash;not less than six reigning kings and queens of England, and, in
+addition, Louis XIV. of France, Charles VI, of Spain, and the Czar Peter
+of Russia.</p>
+
+<p>William III, created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the
+painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his
+conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled
+more in his conversation than in any originality of observation
+displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite
+qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or
+slovenliness, whether in the man or the artist, did not interfere with
+an immense capacity for work, such as it was, but if Horace Walpole be
+right, that Kneller employed many Flemish painters under him to
+undertake the wigs, draperies, &amp;c. &amp;c., the amount of work in portrait
+painting which Sir Godfrey Kneller accomplished is so far explained. He
+attained the end of being a very rich man, and married an English woman,
+but left no family to succeed to his wealth and his country-seat of
+Whitton, when he died at his house in London in his seventy-eighth year,
+in 1723.</p>
+
+<p>As a painter Sir Godfrey Kneller showed considerable talent in drawing,
+and a certain cumbrous dignity of design, but he had much more industry
+of a certain kind than artistic feeling or taste. When he and Lely
+painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of
+execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the
+better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when
+Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden,
+Addison, Prior, and Steele. Apropos of these writers, among the most
+famous works of Kneller are the forty-three portraits, painted
+originally for Tonson, the bookseller, of the members of the Kit Cat
+club, the social and literary club of the day, which got its name from
+the chance of its holding its meetings in a house the owner of which
+bore the unique name of Christopher Cat. Another series of portraits by
+Kneller are what ought to be, in their designation, the Hampton Court
+Beauties. These are still, like the other 'Beauties,' at Hampton. The
+second series was proposed by William's Queen Mary, and included
+herself, Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, and Mary Bentinck. To
+Sarah Jennings men did award the palm of beauty, but poor Queen Mary,
+who had a modest, simple, comely, English face as a princess, had lost
+her fresh youthful charm by the time she became Queen of England, and
+was still further disfigured by the swelling of the face to which she
+was liable. Her proposal to substitute the worthier women of her court
+for the unworthy beauties of her uncle King Charles' court was not
+relished, and helped to render Mary unpopular&mdash;among the women, at
+least, of her nobility. Neither was Sir Godfrey Kneller qualified to
+enhance the attractions of Mary's maids of honour and ladies in waiting,
+who, to complete their disadvantages, lived at a period when it had
+become the fashion for women to crown their persons by an erection on
+their natural heads of artificial 'edifices of three heads.'</p>
+
+<p>To Kneller, as I have already written, we owe the preservation of
+Raphael's cartoons.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII48" id="CHAPTER_XII48"></a>CHAPTER XII.<a id="footnotetag48" name="footnotetag48"></a>
+<a href="#footnote48"><sup class="sml">48</sup></a></h2>
+
+<p>ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES&mdash;TADDEO
+GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366&mdash;FRA FILIPPO, 1412-1469&mdash;BENOZZO
+GOZZOLI, 1424-1496&mdash;LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
+1524&mdash;BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515&mdash;PERUGINO, 1446-1522&mdash;CARPACCIO, DATE AND
+PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN&mdash;CRIVELLI&mdash;FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN
+1460&mdash;ANTONELLA DA MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE,
+1496&mdash;GAROFALO, 1481-1559&mdash;LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO
+HAVE DIED ABOUT 1530&mdash;PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528&mdash;PARDENONE, 1483-1538&mdash;LO
+SPAGNA, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533&mdash;GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546&mdash;PARIS
+BORDONE, 1500-1570&mdash;IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540&mdash;BAROCCIO,
+1528-1612&mdash;CARAVAGGIO, 1569-1609&mdash;LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656&mdash;GUERCINO,
+1592-1666&mdash;ALBANO, 1578-1660&mdash;SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1685&mdash;VASARI,
+1513-1574&mdash;SOFONISBA ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1620&mdash;LAVINIA FONTANA,
+1552-1614.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>Taddeo Gaddi,</b> <a name="Gad" id="Gad"></a>the most important of Giotto's scholars, was born in 1300,
+and was held at the baptismal font by Giotto himself. Gaddi rather went
+back on earlier traditions and faults. His excellence lay in his purity
+and simplicity of feeling. His finest pictures are from the life of the
+Virgin, in S. Croce, Florence. He was, like his master, a great
+architect as well as painter. He furnished the plans for the Ponte
+Vecchio and the Ponte della Trinit&agrave;, and conducted the works of the
+campanile, Florence, after Giotto's death. He was possessed of great
+activity and industry. He is supposed to have died in 1366, and rests in
+the scene of his labours, since he was buried in the cloisters of S.
+Croce.</p>
+
+<p><b>Fra Filippo,</b> 1412-1469, a Carmelite friar. The romantic, scandalous
+<a name="Filippo" id="Filippo"></a>life, including his slavery in Barbary, attributed to him by Vasari, the
+great biographer of the early Italian painters, has received no
+corroboration from modern researches. It is rather refuted. He always
+signed his pictures 'Frater Filippus,' and his death is entered in the
+register of the Carmine convent as that of 'Frater Filippus.' In all
+probability he was from first to last a monk, and not a disreputable
+one. He describes himself as the poorest friar in Florence, with six
+marriageable nieces dependent on him, and he is said to have been
+involved in debt.</p>
+
+<p>His colouring was 'golden and broad,' in anticipation of that of Titian;
+his draperies were fine. He was wanting in the ideal, but full of human
+feeling, which was apt to get rude and boisterous; his angels were 'like
+great high-spirited boys.' Withal, his style of composition was stately.
+Among the best examples of his work are scenes from the life of St John
+the Baptist in frescoes in the choir of the Duomo at Prato. His panel
+pictures are rather numerous. There are two lunette<a id="footnotetag49" name="footnotetag49"></a>
+<a href="#footnote49"><sup class="sml">49</sup></a> pictures by Fra
+Filippo in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Benozzo Gozzoli,</b> <a name="Gozz" id="Gozz"></a>1424&mdash;1496, a scholar of Fra Angelico, but resembling
+him only in light and cheerful colouring. He is said to have been the
+first Italian painter smitten with the beauty of the natural world. He
+was the first to create rich landscape backgrounds, and he enlivened
+his landscapes with animals. He displayed a fine fancy for architectural
+effects, introducing into his pictures open porticoes, arcades,
+balconies, and galleries. He liked to have subsidiary groups and circles
+of spectators about his principal figures. In these groups he introduced
+portraits of his contemporaries, true to nature and full of expression
+and delicate feeling. His best work is in the Campo Santo, Pisa, scenes
+from the history of the Old Testament, ranging from Noah to the Queen of
+Sheba. The Pisans were so pleased with his work as to present him, in
+1478, with a sarcophagus intended to contain his remains when they
+should be deposited in the Campo Santo. He survived the gift eighteen
+years, dying in 1496. His easel pictures are rare, and do not offer good
+representations of the master. There is one in the National Gallery&mdash;a
+Virgin and Child, with saints and angels.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Sig" id="Sig"></a><b>Luca d'Egidio di Ventura,</b> called also <b>Luca 'da Cortona,'</b> from his
+birthplace, and <b>Luca Signorelli,</b> 1441, supposed to have died about 1524.
+His is a great name in the Tuscan School. He played an important part
+in the painting of the Sistine Chapel, though he is only represented by
+one wall picture, the History of Moses. At his best he anticipated
+Michael Angelo in power and grandeur, but he was given to exaggeration.
+His fame rests principally on his frescoes at Orvieto, where, by a
+strange chance, he was appointed, after an interval of time, to continue
+and complete the work begun by Fra Angelico, the master most opposed to
+Signorelli in style. Luca added the great dramatic scenes which include
+the history of Antichrist, executed with a grandeur which 'only Lionardo
+among the painters sharing a realistic tendency could have surpassed.'
+These scenes, which contain The Resurrection, Hell, and Paradise, bear a
+strong resemblance to the work of Michael Angelo. In his fine drawing of
+the human figure Signorelli may be known by 'the squareness of his forms
+in joints and extremities.' A conspicuous detail in his pictures is
+frequently a bright-coloured Roman scarf. His work is rarely seen north
+of the Alps.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Botticelli" id="Botticelli"></a><b>Sandro Filipepi,</b> called <b>Botticelli,</b> 1447&mdash;1515. He was an apprentice to
+a goldsmith, and then became a scholar of Filippo Lipi's. Botticelli was
+vehement and impetuous, full of passion and poetry, seeking to express
+movement. He was the most dramatic painter of his school. Occasionally
+he rises to a grandeur that allies him to Signorelli and Michael Angelo.
+His circular pictures of the Madonna and Child, with angels, are
+numerous. Like Fra Filippo, Botticelli's angels are noble youths, some
+of them belonging to the great families of the time. They are prone to
+be ecstatic with joy or frantic with grief. There is a grand Coronation
+of the Virgin, by Botticelli at Hamilton Palace, and a beautiful
+Nativity by the old master belongs to Mr Fuller Maitland. His Madonna
+and Child are grand and tragic figures always. Botticelli's noble
+frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are apt to be overlooked because of
+Michael Angelo's 'sublime work' on the ceiling. There has been a revival
+of Botticelli's renown within late years, partly due to the new
+interest in the earlier Italian painters which Mr Browning has done
+something to stimulate.</p>
+
+<p>I quote some thoughtful remarks on Botticelli by W.C. Lefroy in
+<i>Macmillan's Magazine</i>: 'Mr Ruskin, we know, divides Italian art into
+the art of faith, beginning with Giotto, and lasting rather more than
+200 years, and the art of unbelief, or at least of cold and inoperative
+faith, beginning in the middle of Raphael's life. But whatever division
+we adopt, we must remember that the revival of Paganism, as a matter of
+fact, affected men in different ways. Right across the schools this new
+spirit draws its line, but the line is not a hard and sharp one. Some
+men lie wholly on one side of it, with Giotto, Angelico, and Orcagna;
+some wholly upon the other, with Titian and Correggio, but there are
+some on whom it seems to fall as a rainbow falls upon a hill-side. Such,
+for instance, is Botticelli. Now he tries to paint as men painted in the
+old days of unpolluted faith, and then again he breaks away and paints
+like a very heathen.</p>
+
+<p>'The interest which this artist has excited in the present generation
+has been exaggerated into something like a fashion, and recent criticism
+has delighted to find or imagine in him the idiosyncrasies of recent
+thought. To us it may be he does in truth say more than he or his
+contemporaries dreamed of, but while true criticism will sternly refuse
+to help us to see in his pictures that which is purely subjective, it
+will, I think, recognise the fact that a day like ours is capable of
+reading in the subtle suggestions of ancient art thoughts which have
+only now come to be frankly defined or exquisitely analysed. To us,
+moreover, Botticelli presents not only the poem of the apparition of the
+young and beautiful manhood of humanism before the brooding and
+entranced, yet half expectant, maidenhood of medi&aelig;valism, but also the
+poem of the painter's own peculiar relation to that crisis. For us there
+is the poetry of the thing itself, and also the poetry of Botticelli's
+attempt to express it. The work of Botticelli does not supply a
+universal utterance for mankind like Shakespeare's plays, but when we
+stand before the screen on which his "Nativity" is hung, or contemplate
+in the adjoining room his two perplexed conceptions of "Aphrodite," we
+are face to face with a genuine outcome of that memorable meeting,
+medi&aelig;valism, humanism, and Savonarola, which no generation can afford to
+ignore, and our own especially delights to contemplate. There has been
+much dispute about the date of Botticelli's "Nativity," and some
+defenders of Savonarola have hoped to read 1511 in the strange character
+of its inscription, so that this beautiful picture, standing forth as
+the work of one for many years under the influence of "the Frate," may
+refute the common calumny that that influence was unfriendly to art. Our
+catalogue, indeed, unhesitatingly asserts of Botticelli, that "he became
+a follower of Savonarola and no doubt suffered from it;" but though
+there seems to be really little doubt that the "Nativity" was painted in
+1500, the inscription, with its mystic allusion to the Apocalypse, and
+the whole character of the picture, afford unmistakable evidence of the
+influence of Savonarola.'</p>
+
+<p><b>Pietro Perugino,</b><a name="Per" id="Per"></a> 1446, died of the plague at Frontignano in 1522.
+Perugino is another painter who has been indebted to the last
+Renaissance. His fame, in this country rested chiefly on the
+circumstance that he was Raphael's master, whom the generous prince of
+painters delighted to honour, till the tide of fashion in art rose
+suddenly and floated old Pietro once more to the front. At his best he
+had luminous colour, grace, softness, and enthusiastic earnestness,
+especially in his young heads. His defects were monotony, and formality,
+together with comparative ignorance of the principles of his art. His
+conception of his calling in its true dignity was not high. His attempts
+at expressing ardour degenerated into mannerism, and he acquired habits
+and tricks of arrangement and style, among which figured his favourite
+upturned heads, that in the end were ill drawn, and, like every other
+affectation, became wearisome. In the process of falling off as an
+artist, when mere manual dexterity took the place of earnest devotion
+and honest pains, Perugino had a large studio where many pupils executed
+his commissions, and where, working for gain instead of excellence in
+art, he had the satisfaction, doubtless, of amassing a large fortune.
+Among his finest works is the picture of an enthroned Madonna and Child
+in the gallery of the Uffizi. Another fine Madonna with Saints is at
+Cremona. His frescoes in the Sala del Campio at Perugia are among his
+best works. The subjects of these frescoes are partly scriptural; partly
+mythological. In the execution there is excellence alike in drawing,
+colouring, and the disposal of drapery. A <i>chef d'&#339;uvre</i> by the master
+is the Madonna of the Certosa at Pavia, now in, the National Gallery.
+Yet it is said to have been painted at the very period when Michael
+Angelo ridiculed Perugino's work as 'absurd and antiquated.' <b>Vittore
+Carpaccio,</b><a name="Carp" id="Carp"></a> date and place of birth unknown, though he is said to have
+been a native of Istria. He was a historical painter of the early
+Venetian School and a follower of the Bellini. His romantic <i>genre</i>
+pictures show the daily life of the Venice of his time, and are
+furnished with landscape and architectural backgrounds. His masterly and
+rich work is mostly in Venice. He introduces animals freely and well in
+his designs.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Crivelli" id="Crivelli"></a><b>Carlo Crivelli</b> was another master of the fifteenth century who deserves
+notice. He had strong individuality, yet was influenced by the Paduan
+and Venetian Schools. He displayed an old-fashioned preference for
+painting in tempera. Sometimes his drawing approaches that of Mantegna,
+while he has a gorgeousness of colouring all his own. His pictures
+occasionally show dignity of composition in combination with grace and
+daintiness; but he could be guilty of exaggerated vehemence of
+expression. He frequently introduced fruit, flowers, and birds in his
+work. He is fully represented in the National Gallery, his works there
+ranging from 'small tender pictures of the dead Christ with angels, to a
+sumptuous altar-piece in numerous compartments.'</p>
+
+<p><b>Filippino Lipi</b><a name="Lipi" id="Lipi"></a> was an adopted son and probably a relation of Fra
+Filippo's, though a scholar's use of his master's name was not uncommon.
+The date of his birth is earlier than 1460. Filippino was also a pupil
+of Botticelli's, while there was a higher sense of beauty and grace in
+the pupil than in the teacher. Among his last works is the Vision of St
+Bernard, an easel picture in the Badia at Florence. The apparition of
+the Madonna in this picture is said to be 'full of charm.' In his larger
+works he is one of the greatest historical painters of his country.
+Roman antiquities had the same keen interest for him which they held for
+the greatest of his contemporaries, and he made free use of them in the
+architecture of his pictures. He has fine work in the Carmelite Church,
+Florence, and in S. Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome. Much of some of his
+pictures is painted over. The National Gallery has a picture of
+Filippino's 'of grand execution,' though almost colourless&mdash;the Madonna
+and Child, with St Jerome and St Francis.</p>
+
+<p><b>Antonella da Messina</b><a name="Mess" id="Mess"></a> was the Neapolitan painter who brought the practice
+of painting in oils from the Netherlands into Italy, though it is now
+believed, from stubborn discrepancies in dates, that the story of his
+great friendship with Jan Van Eyck, as given by Vasari, is apochryphal.
+Very likely Hans Memling, called also 'John of Bruges,' was the real
+friend and leader of Antonella. His best work consisted of portraits. He
+is believed to have died at Venice in 1496.</p>
+
+<p><b>Benvenuto Tisio,</b> surnamed from the place of his birth <b>Garofalo,</b> <a name="Garo" id="Garo"></a>was born
+in 1481, and died in 1559. He passed from the early school of Ferrara to
+that of Raphael. His conception was apt to be fantastic, while his
+colouring was vivid to abruptness, and he was deficient in charm of
+expression. He fell into the fault of monotonous ideality. At the same
+time his heads are beautiful, and his drapery is classic. His finest
+work is an 'Entombment' in the Borghese Palace, Rome. There is an
+altar-piece by Garofalo, a Madonna and Child with angels, in the
+National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Bernardo Luini,</b><a name="Luin" id="Luin"></a> who stands foremost among the scholars of Lionardo da
+Vinci, was born by the Lago Maggiore, the date unknown, came to Milan in
+1500, was elderly in 1525, and is supposed to have died not long after
+1530. His work is chiefly found in Milan. His great merit has been only
+lately acknowledged. He is not 'very powerful or original,' but for
+'purity, grace, and spiritual expression,' he ranks very high. He unites
+the earnestness of the older masters with the prevailing feeling for
+beauty of the great masters of Italian Art. His pictures were long
+mistaken for those of his master, Lionardo, though it is said that when
+the difference between them is once pointed out, it is easily
+recognised; indeed, the resemblance is confined to a smiling beatific
+expression in the countenances, which abounds more in Luini's pictures.
+His heads of women, children, and angels present every degree of
+serenity, sweet cheerfulness and happiness, up to ecstatic rapture.
+'Christ Disputing with the Doctors,' in the National Gallery, formerly
+called a Lionardo, is now known to be a Luini. He painted much, whether
+in tempera, fresco, or oil. His favourite subjects in oil were the
+Madonna and Child, with St John and the Lamb, and the Marriage of St
+Catherine. Probable he appears to greatest advantage in frescoes. He is
+said to have reached his highest perfection in the figure of St John in
+a Crucifixion in the Monasterio Maggiore, Milan.</p>
+
+<p><b>Jacopo Palma,</b> called <b>Il Palma Vecchio,</b><a name="Palma" id="Palma"></a> was born about 1480 near Bergamo,
+and died in 1528. He is believed to have studied under Giovanni Bellini,
+while he is also the chief follower of Giorgione. His characteristics
+are ample forms and gorgeous breadth of drapery. His female saints, with
+their large rounded figures, have a soft yet commanding expression. He
+had an enchanting feeling for landscape, which seems to have been the
+birthright of the Venetian painters. To Palma is owing what are called
+'Santa Conversazione,' where there are numerous groups round the Virgin
+and Child, as if they are holding a court in a retired and beautiful
+country nook. Palma rivalled Giorgione and Titian as a painter of
+women's portraits. Among these is that of his daughter Violante,
+believed to have been loved by Titian. 'Palma's three Daughters,' in the
+Dresden Gallery, is a masterpiece of 'fair, full-blown beauty.' The hair
+of the women is of the curiously bleached yellow tint affected then by
+the Venetian ladies. Palma painted many pictures, leaving at his death
+forty-our unfinished.</p>
+
+<p><b>Giovanni Antonio da Pardenone,</b><a name="Pard" id="Pard"></a> born 1483, died 1538. He had many names,
+'Pardenone' from his birthplace, 'Corticellis' from that of his father,
+and he is believed to have assumed the name 'Regillo' after he received
+knighthood from the King of Hungary. He was Venetian in his artistic
+qualities. Many of his works are in his native Pardenone and in obscure
+towns near. All have suffered and some are now hidden by whitewash. His
+chief strength lay in fresco. His scenes from the Passion in the
+cathedral, Cremona, are greatly damaged and wretchedly restored, but
+they still reveal the painter as a great master. They have 'fine
+drawing, action, excellent colouring, grand management of light and
+shade, with freedom of hand and dignity of conception.' In the prophets
+and sybils around the cupola of the Madonna di Campagna, Piacenza,
+Pardenone's power is fully proven. His immense works in fresco account
+for the rarity of his oil pictures and their comparative inferiority.
+There is only one picture, and that a portrait, indisputably assigned to
+Pardenone in England, in the Baring Collection.</p>
+
+<p><b>Giovanni di Pietro,<a name="Spagna" id="Spagna"></a></b> known as <b>Lo Spagna (the Spaniard),</b> was a
+contemporary of Raphael's, a fellow-pupil of his under Perugino. There
+is no record of the time and place of Lo Spagna's birth. He died in
+1533. He was a careful, conscientious follower of Perugino and Raphael,
+doing finished and delicate work; an 'Assumption' in a church at Trevi
+is a fine example of his qualities. His best picture was painted in
+1516, and is at Assisi. It represents the Madonna enthroned with three
+saints on each side. In his later works he betrayed feebleness. Pictures
+by Lo Spagna are often attributed to Raphael.</p>
+
+<p><b>Giulio Pippi,</b> surnamed <b>Romano,</b><a name="Romano" id="Romano"></a> born in 1492, died in 1546, was a very
+different painter, while he was the most celebrated of Raphael's
+scholars. He had a vigorous, daring spirit, with a free hand and a bold
+fancy. So long as he painted under Raphael, Giulio followed his master
+closely, especially in his study of the antique, but he lacked the
+purity and grace of his teacher, on whose death, the pupil leaving Rome,
+pursued his own coarser, more vehement impulses. The frescoes in the
+Villa Modama, Rome, are good examples of his style, so is the
+altar-piece of the Martyrdom of St Stephen in S. Stefano, Genoa. Giulio
+Romano was the architect who designed the rebuilding of half Mantua.
+His best easel picture in England is the 'Education of Jupiter by Nymphs
+and Corybantes,' in the National Gallery. In Raphael's lifetime his
+principal scholar was accustomed to work on the master's pictures, and
+on his death Giulio, together with another pupil, Gianfrancesco Penni,
+were left executors of Raphael's will and heirs of his designs.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Bordone" id="Bordone"></a><b>Paris Bordone</b> was born at Treviso in 1500 and died in 1570. He was
+educated in the Venetian School, and remained remarkable for delicate
+rosy colour in his flesh tints and for purple, crimson, and shot hues in
+his draperies, which were usually small and in crumpled folds. His <i>chef
+d'&#339;uvre</i> is in the Venetian Academy. It is a fisherman presenting a ring
+to the Doge, and is a large and fine picture with many figures. He dealt
+frequently in mythological or poetic subjects. There is an example of
+the first in the National Gallery. He was great in single female
+subjects and women's portraits. There is a portrait by Bordone of a
+lovely woman of nineteen belonging to the Brignole family, in the
+National Gallery. He had often fine landscape and grand architecture in
+his pictures.</p>
+
+<p><b>Il Parmigianino,</b><a name="Parm" id="Parm"></a> born 1503, died 1540, was a follower of Correggio's. In
+Parmigianino's case the danger of the master's peculiarities became
+apparent by the lapse into affectation and frivolity. 'His Madonnas are
+empty and condescending, his female saints like ladies in waiting.'
+Still there were certain indestructible beauties of the master which yet
+clung to the scholar. He had clear warm colouring, decision, and good
+conception of human life. He was highly successful in portraits. There
+is a splendid portrait by Parmigianino, said to be Columbus, in Naples.
+Among his celebrated pictures is 'The Madonna with the Long Neck,' in
+the Pitti Palace. An altar-piece in the National Gallery, which
+represents a Madonna in the clouds with St John the Baptist appearing
+to St Jerome, is a good example of Parmigianino. It is said that he was
+engrossed with this picture during the siege of Rome in 1527. The
+soldiers entered the studio intent on pillage, but surprising the
+master at his work, respected his enthusiasm and protected him.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Bar" id="Bar"></a>
+<b>Federigo Baroccio,</b> of Urbino, born in 1528, died in 1612, was also a
+follower of Correggio's, and made a stand against the decline of art in
+his day. He was tender and idyllic, though apt in his turn to be
+affected and sentimental. When painting in the Vatican, Rome, his rivals
+sought to take his life by poison. The attempt caused Baroccio to return
+to Urbino, where he established himself and executed his commissions.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Cara" id="Cara"></a><b>Amirighi da Caravaggio</b> was born at Caravaggio in 1569, and died at Porto
+Ercole in 1609. He was chief of the naturalistic school, the members of
+which painted common nature and violent passions in bitter opposition to
+the eclectics, especially the Caracci. The feud was sometimes carried on
+appositely enough on the side of the naturalistic painters by poison and
+dagger. Caravaggio was distinguished by his wild temper and stormy life,
+in keeping with his pictures. He resided principally in Rome, but dwelt
+also in Naples. He is vulgar but striking, even pathetic in some of his
+pictures. The 'Beheading of John the Baptist,' in the Cathedral, Malta,
+is one of his masterpieces. His Holy Families now and then resemble
+gipsy <i>m&eacute;nages</i>.</p>
+
+<p><b>Guiseppe Ribiera,</b> a Spaniard, and so called <b>Lo Spagnoletto,</b><a name="LoSpag" id="LoSpag"></a> was born
+1593 and died 1656. He followed Caravaggio, while he retained
+reminiscences of the Spanish School and of the Venetian masters. Some of
+his best pictures, such as 'the Pieta with the Marys and the Disciples,'
+and his 'Last Supper,' are in Naples. He had a wild fancy with a
+preference for horrible subjects&mdash;executions, tortures&mdash;in this respect
+resembling Domenichino. Lo Spagnoletto is said to be particularly
+unpleasant in his mythological scenes. Many of his pictures have
+blackened with time. His 'Mary of Egypt standing by her open Grave' is a
+remarkable picture in the Dresden Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Giovanni Francesco Barbiera, surnamed<a name="Guer" id="Guer"></a> Guercino da Cinto, approached the
+school of the Caracci. In his art he resembled Guido Reni, with the same
+sweetness, greater liveliness, and fine chiaroscuro. 'Dido's Last
+Moments' and 'St Peter raising Tabitha' in Rome and in the Pitti Palace
+are fine examples of Guercino's work. His later pictures, like Guido's,
+are fascinating in softness, delicate colouring and tender sentiment,
+degenerating, however, into mannerism and insipidity, while his
+colouring becomes at last pale and washy.</p>
+
+<p><b>Albano,</b><a name="Alb" id="Alb"></a> born 1578, died 1660. He had elegance and cheerfulness which
+hardly rose to grace. He painted mostly scenes from ancient mythology,
+such as 'Venus and her Companions.' Religious subjects were
+comparatively rare with him; one, however, often repeated was the
+'Infant Christ sleeping on the Cross.'</p>
+
+<p><b>Giovanni Battista Salvi,</b> surnamed from his birthplace <b>Sassoferrato,</b><a name="Sasso" id="Sasso"></a> was
+born in 1605 and died in 1685. He followed the scholars of the Caracci,
+but with some independence, returning to older and greater masters. His
+art was distinguished by a peculiar but slightly affected gentleness of
+conception, pleasing and sweet&mdash;with the sweetness verging on weakness.
+He finished with minute care. He gave constant representations of the
+Madonna and Child and Holy Families in a domestic character. In one of
+his pictures in Naples the Madonna is engaged in sewing. His most
+celebrated, 'Madonna del Rosario,' is in S. Sabina, Rome. The Madonna
+bending in ecstatic worship over an infant Christ lying on a cushion is
+in the Dresden Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Giorgio Vasari</b><a name="Vasa" id="Vasa"></a> was born at Arezzo in 1512 and died at Florence in 1574.
+He was an architect, or jeweller, and a historical painter of heavy
+crowded pictures. His lives of the early Italian painters and sculptors
+up to his own time, the sixteenth century, though full of traditional
+gossip, are invaluable as graphic chronicles of much interesting
+information which would otherwise have been lost.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Anguisciola" id="Anguisciola"></a><b>Sofonisba Anguisciola,</b> born 1535, died about 1620, was a pupil of
+Bernardino Campi about the close of the sixteenth century at Cremona.
+She is justly praised by Vasari. Though her works are rare there are a
+few in England and Scotland. Three of her pictures which are mentioned
+with high commendation by Dr. Waagen are, 'a nun in the white robes of
+her order, nobly conceived and delicately coloured,' in Lord
+Yarborough's collection; in Mr Harcourt's collection, 'her own
+portrait, still very youthful, delicate, charming, and clear;' and in
+the collection of the late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, 'another portrait of
+herself at an easel painting the Virgin and Child on wood, delicately
+conceived, clear in colour, and very careful.'</p>
+
+<p><b>Lavinia Fontana,</b> born in 1552, died 1614, was a daughter of Prospero
+<a name="Fon" id="Fon"></a>Fontana, who belonged to the fast degenerating Bolognese artists at the
+close of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. She was
+a better artist than her fellow painters, worked cleverly and boldly,
+and showed truth to nature. She has left excellent portraits. In the
+late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's collection there is a picture by her,
+'Two girls in a boat with a youth rowing,' on wood, 'of very graceful
+motive and careful treatment,'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII50" id="CHAPTER_XIII50"></a>CHAPTER XIII.<a id="footnotetag50" name="footnotetag50"></a>
+<a href="#footnote50"><sup class="sml">50</sup></a></h2>
+
+<p>GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE EIGHTEENTH
+CENTURY&mdash;VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442&mdash;VAN
+LEYDEN, 1494-1533&mdash;VAN SOMER, 1570-1624&mdash;SNYDERS, 1579-1657&mdash;G.
+HONTHORST, 1592-1662&mdash;JAN STEEN, 1626-1679&mdash;GERARD DOW, 1613-1680&mdash;DE
+HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN&mdash;VAN OSTADE, 1610-1685&mdash;MAAS,
+1632-1693&mdash;METZU, 1615, STILL ALIVE IN 1667&mdash;TERBURG,
+1608-1681&mdash;NETCHER, 1639-1684&mdash;BOL, 1611-1680&mdash;VAN DER HELST,
+1613-1670&mdash;RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682&mdash;HOBBEMA, 1638-1709&mdash;BERCHEM,
+1620-1683&mdash;BOTH, 1610 (?)-1650 (?)&mdash;DU JARDIN, 1625-1678&mdash;ADRIAN VAN DE
+VELDE, 1639-1672&mdash;VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712&mdash;DE WITTE, 1607-1692&mdash;VAN
+DER NEER, 1619(?)-1683&mdash;WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE THE YOUNGER,
+1633-1707&mdash;BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708&mdash;VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
+1653&mdash;HONDECOETER, 1636-1695&mdash;JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719&mdash;PATER SEGERS,
+1590-1661&mdash;VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749&mdash;VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722&mdash;MENGS,
+1728-1774.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>Roger van der Weyden</b> was a contemporary of the Van Eycks, born at
+Tournai. His early pictures in Brussels are lost. He visited Italy in
+1439, and was treated with distinction at Ferrara. His Flemish realistic
+cast of mind and artistic power remained utterly unaffected by the grand
+Italian pictures with which he came in contact; so did his profound
+earnestness, which must have been great indeed, since its effects are
+felt through all impediments down to the present day. His expressive
+realism chose subjects in which the sentiments of grief and pity could
+be most fitly shown. He sternly rejected any suggestion to idealise the
+human form, and paint heads, hands, or feet different from those in
+ordinary life. 'It is the simplicity with which he gives expression by
+large and melancholy eyes, thought by projections of the forehead, grief
+by contracted muscles, and suffering by attenuation of the flesh which
+touches us.' The deadly earnestness of the man impresses the spectator
+at this distant date. 'There is no smile in any of his faces, but there
+is many a face wrung with agony, and there is many a tear.' He objected
+to shadow in every form, and filled his pictures with an invariable
+atmosphere and light&mdash;those which belong to dawn before sunrise. Among
+his finer works are a triptych<a id="footnotetag51" name="footnotetag51"></a>
+<a href="#footnote51"><sup class="sml">51</sup></a> belonging to the Duke of Westminster,
+a 'Last Judgment' in the Hospital at Bearne, and a large 'Descent from
+the Cross' in Madrid. In the triptych in the centre is Christ with black
+hair, which is unusual, in his left hand the globe. On his right is the
+Virgin Mary, on his left St John the Evangelist; on the right wing is
+St John the Baptist, on his left the Magdalene.</p>
+
+<p><b>Lucas Van Leyden</b><a name="Ley" id="Ley"></a> was born in 1494 and died in 1533. He painted both
+scriptural subjects and everyday scenes, being a man of varied powers.
+He worked admirably for his time, and added to his art that of an
+engraver. He followed the Van Eycks, but lowered their treatment of
+sacred subjects. In incidents taken from common life he showed himself
+full of observation, and possessed of some humour. His pictures are
+rare. A 'Last Judgment,' in the Town House, Leyden, is a striking but
+unpleasant example of Lucas Van Leyden's work.</p>
+
+<p><b>Paul Van Somer</b><a name="Somer" id="Somer"></a> was born at Antwerp in 1570, and died in 1624. He worked
+for many years in England, where his best works&mdash;portraits&mdash;remain. He
+was truthful, a good colourist, and finished carefully. His portraits of
+Lord Bacon at Panshanger and of the Earl and Countess of Arundel at
+Arundel Castle are well known.</p>
+
+<p><b>Frans Snyders</b><a name="Snyders" id="Snyders"></a> was born in 1579, and died, at Antwerp in 1657. After
+Rubens, Snyders was the greatest Flemish animal painter. He painted
+along with Rubens often, Snyders supplying the animals and Rubens the
+figures. Frans Snyders paid a visit to Italy and Rome, from which he
+seems to have profited, judging by his skill in arrangement. This skill
+he displayed also in his kitchen-pieces (magnificent shows of fruit,
+vegetables, game, fish, &amp;c.), which, like his animal pictures, are
+numerous. In one of these kitchen-pieces in the Dresden Gallery, Rubens
+and his second wife are said to figure as the cooks. Princes and nobles
+bade for Snyders' pictures. There is a famous 'Boar Hunt' in the Louvre,
+in Munich 'Lionesses Pursuing a Roebuck,' in Vienna 'Boar attacked by
+Nine Dogs.' Snyders' animal pictures are full of energetic action and
+fierce passion. To these qualities is frequently added hideous realism
+in detail. There are many Snyders in English galleries.</p>
+
+<p><b>Gerard Honthorst</b><a name="Hont" id="Hont"></a> was born at Utrecht in 1592, and died in 1662. He was a
+follower of Caravaggio. He visited Italy and found favour in Rome, where
+he got from his night-pieces Correggio's name, 'Della Notte.' Honthorst
+was summoned to England by Charles I., for whom he painted several
+pictures. He entered the service of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange,
+and painted also for the King of Denmark. He left an extraordinary
+number of works, sacred, mythological, historical, and latterly many
+portraits. He drew well and painted powerfully, but was coarsely
+realistic in his treatment. At Hampton Court there are two of his best
+portraits, those of the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia and the Duke of
+Buckingham and his family. Gerard Honthorst's younger brother, William,
+was a portrait painter not unlike the elder brother in style.</p>
+
+<p><b>Jan Steen</b><a name="Steen" id="Steen"></a> was born at Leyden in 1626, and died in 1679. He was great as
+a <i>genre</i> painter. He is said to have been, after Rembrandt, the most
+humorous of Dutch painters, full of animal spirits and fun. At his best,
+composition, colouring, and execution were all in excellent keeping. At
+his worst, he was vulgar and repulsive in his heads, and careless and
+faulty in his work. He was very rarely either kindly or reverent in his
+subjects, though, in spite of what is known to have been his riotous
+life, he is comparatively free from the grossness which is often the
+shame of Flemish and Dutch art. Jan Steen succeeded his father as a
+brewer and tavern-keeper at Delft. He renounced the brewery, in which he
+did not succeed, and joined the Painters' Guild, Haarlem; but his
+position as a tavern-keeper is reflected in his pictures, of which
+eating and drinking, card-playing, &amp;c., are frequently the <i>motifs</i>.
+His family relations were not conducive to higher principles and tastes.
+He is said to have been so lost to common feeling as to have painted his
+first wife when she was in a state of intoxication.<a id="footnotetag52" name="footnotetag52"></a>
+<a href="#footnote52"><sup class="sml">52</sup></a> His second wife
+may have been a worthier woman, but she was drawn from the lowest class,
+and had been accustomed to sell sheeps' heads and trotters in the
+butchers' market. Without doubt Jan Steen had extraordinary genius
+coexisting with his coarse, careless nature and jovial habits, and he
+must have worked with great facility, since, in spite of his idleness
+and comparatively early death, he left as many as two hundred pictures,
+of which two-thirds are in this country, where his broad humour has
+rendered him extremely popular. Besides his favourite subjects, such as
+'The Family Jollification,' 'The Feast of the Bean King,' 'Game of
+Skittles,' he has pictures in a slightly higher atmosphere, such as 'A
+Pastor Visiting a Young Girl,' 'The Parrot,' 'Schoolmaster with
+Unmanageable Boys,' 'The Pursuit of Alchemy.' Among the latter a good
+example is 'The Music Master' in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Dow" id="Dow"></a><b>Gerard Dow</b> was born in 1613 and died in 1680. He was a <i>genre</i> painter
+of great merit. He belonged to Leyden, and was a pupil of Rembrandt. He
+began with portraiture, often painting his own face, and went on to
+scenes from low and middle-class life, but rarely attempted to represent
+high society. Compared to Jan Steen, however, he is refined. He had a
+curious fondness for painting hermits. The lighting of his pictures is
+frequently by lantern or candle. They are mostly small, and without
+animated action, but are full of picturesqueness. He was a good
+colourist, 'with a rare truth to nature and a marvellous distinctness of
+eye and precision of hand.' Minute as his execution was, his touch was
+'free and soft.' His best pictures are 'like nature's self seen through
+the camera obscura.' An instance often given of his exquisite finish is
+that of a broom in the corner of one of his pictures. Some contemporary
+had remarked how careful and elaborate was the labour bestowed on it,
+when the painter answered that he was still to give it several hours'
+work. He must have been exceedingly industrious as well as painstaking,
+since he left two hundred pictures as his contribution to Dutch art.
+Among his finer pictures are 'An Old Woman reading the Bible to her
+Husband,' in the Louvre; 'The Poulterer's Shop,' in the National
+Gallery. His <i>chef d'&#339;uvre</i>, 'The Woman Sick of the Dropsy,' is in the
+Louvre. His candlelight is the finest rendered by any master. There is a
+good example of it in 'The Evening School,' in the Amsterdam Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Peter de Hooch</b>&mdash;spelt often, <b>De Hooge</b><a name="Hooch" id="Hooch"></a>&mdash;was the <i>genre</i> painter of full,
+clear sunlight. The dates of his birth and death can only be guessed by
+those of his pictures, which extend from 1656 to 1670. His groups are
+generally playing cards, smoking, drinking, or engaged in domestic
+occupations&mdash;almost always in the open air. No other <i>genre</i> painter can
+compare with him in reproducing the effects of sunlight. His prevailing
+colour is red, varied and repeated with great delicacy. English lovers
+of art brought De Hooch into favour, and many of his pictures are in
+England. There are fine examples&mdash;'The Court of a Dutch House' and 'A
+Courtyard'&mdash;in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Adrian van Ostade</b><a name="Ost" id="Ost"></a> was born at Haarlem in 1610 and died in his native
+town in 1685. He has been called 'the Rembrandt of <i>genre</i> painters,'
+and, like Rembrandt, he was without the sense of human beauty and grace,
+for even his children are ugly; yet it is the purer, happier side of
+national life which he constantly represents, and he had great feeling
+for nature, with picturesqueness and harmony of design and colouring, as
+well as mastery of the technique of his art. He suffered many hardships
+in his youth, and grew up a quiet, industrious, family man. He left a
+very large number of pictures, nearly four hundred, many of them good,
+and not a few in England. 'The Alchemist'<a id="footnotetag53" name="footnotetag53"></a>
+<a href="#footnote53"><sup class="sml">53</sup></a> is in the National
+Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Maas,</b> <a name="Maas" id="Maas"></a>born in 1632, died in 1693, is a much-prized <i>genre</i> painter,
+whose pictures are rare. He was a pupil of Rembrandt. He is said to have
+treated 'very simple subjects with na&iuml;ve homeliness and kindly humour.'
+His pictures are 'well lit, with deep warm harmony, and a vigorous
+touch.' 'The Idle Servant-maid,' in the National Gallery, is a
+masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p><b>Metzu,</b><a name="Met" id="Met"></a> like Terburg, is <i>par excellence</i> one of the two painters of
+Dutch high life. Metzu was born in 1615, and is known to have been alive
+in 1667. He painted both on a large and a small scale, and occasionally
+departed from his peculiar province to represent market-scenes, &amp;c. He
+is the most refined and picturesque of <i>genre</i> painters on a small
+scale. Among his <i>chefs d'&#339;uvre</i> are a 'Lady holding a Glass of Wine and
+receiving an Officer,' in the Louvre; and a 'Girl writing, a Gentleman
+leaning on her chair and another girl opposite playing the Lute,' in the
+Hague Gallery. The fine 'Duet,' and the 'Music Lesson' are both in the
+National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Gerard Terburg</b> <a name="Ter" id="Ter"></a>was born at Zwol, in 1608, and died in 1681. He visited
+Germany and Italy in his youth. His small groups and single figures,
+taken from the wealthier classes, with their luxurious surroundings, are
+'given with exquisite delicacy and refinement.' Included in his
+masterpieces are a 'Girl in white satin (a texture which he rendered
+marvellously) washing her hands in a basin held before her by a
+maid-servant,' in the Dresden Gallery; an 'Officer in confidential talk
+with a Young Girl, and a Trumpeter who has brought him a Letter,' in the
+Hague Gallery; a 'Young Lady in white satin sitting playing the Lute,'
+in the Chateau of Wilhelmsh&ouml;e, at Cassell. There are twenty-three
+Terburgs in England and Scotland.</p>
+
+<p><b>Caspar Netcher,</b><a name="Net" id="Net"></a> born in 1639, died in 1684. He formed himself upon Metzu
+and Terburg. He is the great Dutch painter of childhood. His finest
+works are in the Dresden Gallery. In the National Gallery is his
+'Children blowing Bubbles.'</p>
+
+<p><a name="Bol" id="Bol"></a>
+<b>Ferdinand Bol</b> was born at Dordrecht in 1611, and died at Amsterdam in
+1680. He was a student of Rembrandt's, and distinguished himself in
+sacred and historical pictures, and especially in portraits. He followed
+his master in his youth, fell off in his art in middle life, but became
+again excellent in his later years. Among his fine pictures are 'David's
+Charge to Solomon,' in the Dublin National Gallery; and 'Joseph
+presenting his father Jacob to Pharaoh,' in the Dresden Gallery. His
+last portraits are considered very fine. They are taken in the fullest
+light, and have a surprising amount of animation. Such a portrait,
+called 'The Astronomer,' is in the National Gallery.<a id="footnotetag54" name="footnotetag54"></a>
+<a href="#footnote54"><sup class="sml">54</sup></a></p>
+
+<p><b>Jacob Ruysdael</b><a name="Ruys" id="Ruys"></a> was born in 1625(?) at Haarlem. In 1668 he was in
+Amsterdam, and acted as witness to the marriage of Hobbema, whose lack
+of worldly prosperity Ruysdael shared. He himself was unmarried, and
+maintained his father in his old age. In the prime of life Jacob
+Ruysdael in turn fell into extreme poverty, and died an inmate of the
+Haarlem Almshouse in 1682&mdash;a sad record of Holland's greatest landscape
+painter, for 'beyond dispute' Ruysdael is the first of the famous Dutch
+landscape painters.</p>
+
+<p>'In no other is there the feeling for the poetry of Northern nature
+united with perfect execution, admirable drawing, great knowledge of
+chiaroscuro, powerful colouring, and a mastery of the brush which ranged
+from the minutest touch to broad, free execution.' His prevailing tone
+of colour is a full, decided green, though age has given many of his
+pictures a brown tone. A considerable number of his pictures are in a
+greyish, clear, cool tone (good examples of the last are to be seen in
+the Dresden Gallery). He generally painted the flat Dutch country in
+tranquil repose. He dealt usually in heavy clouded skies which told of
+showers past and coming, and dark sheets of water overshadowed by
+trees, lending a melancholy sentiment to the picture. He was fond of
+wide expanses of land and water, fond also of introducing the spires of
+his native Haarlem, touching the horizon line. He has left a few
+sea-pieces, always with cloudy heavens and heaving or raging seas;<a id="footnotetag55" name="footnotetag55"></a>
+<a href="#footnote55"><sup class="sml">55</sup></a>
+where he has given sketches of sea, and shore, the &aelig;rial perspective is
+rendered in tender gradations 'full of pathos.' He has other pictures
+representing hilly, even mountainous, landscapes. In these foaming
+waterfalls form a prominent feature. Ruysdael was weak in his drawing of
+men and animals, in which he was occasionally assisted by
+fellow-artists, such as Berchem and Van de Velde. Among his finest
+pictures are 'A View of the Country round Haarlem,' in the Museum of the
+Hague; 'A flat country, with a road leading to a village and fields with
+wheat sheaves,' in the Dresden Gallery; 'A hilly bare country through
+which a river runs; the horseman and beggar on a bridge, by
+Wouvermans,' in the Louvre. His most remarkable waterfall is in the
+Hague Museum. In the Dresden Gallery there is 'A Jewish Cemetery,' 'full
+of melancholy.' Three of Ruysdael's fine waterfalls are in the National
+Gallery. Of two very grand storms which he painted one is in the Louvre,
+the other in the collection of the Marquis of Lansdowne at Bowood. There
+are many of Ruysdael's pictures in England. In the great landscape
+painter, as in the other renowned Dutch artists of the seventeenth
+century, the influence of Rembrandt is marked.</p>
+
+<p><b>Meindert Hobbema</b><a name="Hobbe" id="Hobbe"></a>
+ was born in 1638, married in 1638, and died in poverty
+at Amsterdam in 1709. His works, which were neglected in his lifetime,
+now fetch much more than their weight in gold. Sums as large as four
+thousand pounds have been paid more than once for a Hobbema, yet his
+name was not found in any dictionary of art or artists for more than a
+century after his death. The English were the first to acknowledge
+Hobbema's merit, and nine-tenths of his works are in England, where he
+is the most popular Dutch landscape painter. But he is said by judges to
+have less invention and less poetic sensibility than his contemporary
+and friend Ruysdael. Hobbema's subjects are usually villages surrounded
+by trees like those in Guelderland, water-mills, a slightly broken
+country, with groups of trees, wheatfields, meadows, and small pools,
+more rarely portions of towns, and still more seldom old castles and
+stately mansions.<a id="footnotetag56" name="footnotetag56"></a>
+<a href="#footnote56"><sup class="sml">56</sup></a> He has all the lifelike truthfulness of the Dutch
+artists. In tone he is as warm and golden as Ruysdael is cool in his
+greens. In the National Gallery there are excellent specimens of
+Hobbema, such as 'The Avenue Middelharnis' and 'A Landscape in Showery
+Weather.'</p>
+
+<p><a name="Berchem" id="Berchem"></a><b>Nicolas Berchem,</b> often spelt <b>Berghem,</b> was born at Haarlem in 1620, and
+died at Amsterdam in 1683. He was an excellent Dutch landscape painter.
+He had evidently visited Italy, and displayed great fondness for
+Italian subjects. His pictures show 'varied composition, good drawing,
+fine &aelig;rial effects, freedom, playfulness, and spirit.' As a colourist he
+was unequal, being often warm and harmonious, but at other times heavy
+and cold. It is clear that he was no student of life, from the monotony
+of his shepherds and shepherdesses and the sameness of his animals. He
+was naturally industrious, and was spurred on, as a still greater artist
+is said to have been, by the greed of his wife. He painted upwards of
+four hundred pictures, besides doing figures and animals for other
+painters. The great northern European galleries are rich in his works.
+One of his best pictures, 'A Shepherdess driving her cattle through a
+ford in a rocky landscape,' where the cool tone of the landscape is
+contrasted with the golden tone of the cattle, is in the Louvre. Another
+fine picture, 'Crossing the Ford,' is in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Both" id="Both"></a><b>Jan Both,</b> born in 1610 (?), died in 1650 (?), was another Dutch
+landscape painter still more spellbound by Italy,<a id="footnotetag57" name="footnotetag57"></a>
+<a href="#footnote57"><sup class="sml">57</sup></a> which he visited,
+and where he fell under the influence of Claude Lorraine. Both devoted
+himself thenceforth to Italian landscape to a greater degree than was
+practised by any other Dutch painter. He was excellent in drawing and
+skilful in rendering the golden glories of Italian sunsets. He painted
+freely and with solidity. The figures of men and animals in his pictures
+were often introduced by his brother Andreas. Jan Both excelled both in
+large and small pictures, but he was most uninterestingly uniform in
+design. He had generally a foreground of lofty trees, and for a
+background a range of mountains rising step by step, with a wide plain
+at their feet. Sometimes he introduced a waterfall or a lake. He rarely
+painted particular points in a landscape. His life was not a long one,
+so that his pictures do not number more than a hundred and fifty.
+Occasionally his warm tone of colouring degenerates to a foxy red. One
+of Both's best pictures&mdash;a landscape in which the fresh light of
+morning is apparent&mdash;is in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Karil du Jardin,</b> <a name="Du" id="Du"></a>born in 1625, died in 1678, is a third great Dutch
+landscape painter, whose fancy Italy laid hold of, so that he settled in
+the country, dying at Venice. He was, it is said, a pupil of Berchem's,
+from whom he may have first drawn his Italian proclivities. He has more
+truth and feeling for animated nature than Berchem. Indeed, in this
+respect Du Jardin followed Paul Potter. According to contemporary
+accounts, Du Jardin, who had his share of the national humour, wasted
+his time in the pursuit of pleasure, and did not leave more pictures
+behind him than Both left. Du Jardin's best works are in the Louvre, but
+there are also many of his pictures in England. Among his masterpieces,
+'Cattle of all kinds in a meadow surrounded by rocks, and watered by a
+cascade; a horseman giving alms to a peasant boy;' and his celebrated
+'Charlatan,' full of observation and humour, are in the Louvre. A fine
+picture, 'Figures of Animals under the shade of a Tree,' is in the
+National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Adrian Van de Velde,</b><a name="Velde" id="Velde"></a> born in 1639, died in 1672, the younger brother of
+a great marine painter, ranks almost as high as Paul Potter in cattle
+painting. If 'inferior in modelling and solidity' to his rival, Adrian
+Van de Velde is superior in variety, taste, and feeling. Like the great
+English animal painter, Landseer, Van de Velde was a distinguished
+artist when a mere boy of fourteen. Like his compatriot, Paul Potter,
+Van de Velde died young, at the age of thirty-two. He generally disposed
+of his cattle among broken ground with trees and pools of water.
+Sometimes he has a herdsman or a shepherdess, sometimes there is a
+hunting party passing. His scenery is reckoned masterly. It is mostly
+taken from the coast of Scheveningen. He often painted in men, horses,
+and dogs for other painters. He must have been very industrious, with
+great facility in his work, since, in spite of his premature death, he
+had painted nearly two hundred pictures. 'A brown cow grazing and a
+grey cow resting,' which is in the Berlin Museum, was done at the age of
+sixteen, yet it is full of observation, delicacy, and execution. 'Cattle
+grazing before a peasant's cottage,' which is in the Dresden Gallery, is
+considered very fine. A fine 'Winter Landscape,' and a 'Farm Cottage,'
+are in the National Gallery. Some of Adrian Van de Velde's best work, as
+well as his brother's, is in England.</p>
+
+<p><b>Jan Van der Heyden,</b><a name="Heyden" id="Heyden"></a> 'the Gerard Dow of architectural painters,' was born
+in 1637 and died in 1712. He combined an unspeakable minuteness of
+detail with the closest observation of nature. His subjects, which he
+selected with great taste, were chiefly well-known buildings, palaces,
+churches, and canal banks in Holland and Belgium. He painted in a warm
+transparent tone, with close application of the laws of perspective. The
+figures in his pictures, in excellent keeping, were often introduced by
+Adrian Van de Velde. Van der Heyden's productiveness as a painter was
+lessened by the circumstance that his mechanical talent led him to make
+an invention by which the construction of the fire-engines of his day
+was greatly improved. In consequence he was placed by the magistrates of
+Amsterdam at the head of their fire-engine establishment, which had thus
+many claims on his time. A beautiful 'Street in Cologne' is in the
+National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Emanuel De Witte,</b><a name="Wit" id="Wit"></a> born in 1607, died in 1692, was great in architectural
+interiors, especially in churches of Italian architecture. He stood to
+this branch of Dutch art in the same relation that Ruysdael did to
+landscape and William Van de Velde to seascape.</p>
+
+<p><b>Aart Van der Neer</b><a name="Neer" id="Neer"></a> was born in 1619(?), died in 1683. He is famous for
+his canal banks by moonlight, and fine disposal of broad masses of
+shadow. After his moonlights come his sunsets, conflagrations, and
+winter scenes. He rarely painted full daylight. He sometimes painted on
+the same canvas with Cuyp. There is a fine small moonlight picture by
+Van der Neer in the National Gallery. Many of his works are in England.</p>
+
+<p><b>William Van de Velde the younger,</b><a name="younger" id="younger"></a> the elder brother of Adrian Van de
+Velde, the cattle painter, was born at Amsterdam in 1633, and died at
+Greenwich in 1707. His early life was spent in Holland. He followed his
+father, William Van de Velde, a painter also, to England, where, under
+the patronage of Charles II, and James II., William the younger painted
+the naval victories of the English over the Dutch, just as in Holland he
+had already painted the naval victories of the Dutch over the English.
+He was a greater and more consistent artist than he was a patriot.
+Without question he is the first marine painter of the Dutch School. He
+was untiring in his study of nature, so that his perfect knowledge of
+perspective and the incomparable mastery of technical qualities which he
+inherited from his school, enabled him to render sea and sky under every
+aspect. His vessels 'were drawn with a knowledge which extended to every
+rope.' He has been an exceedingly popular painter both with the Dutch
+and the English. Of upwards of three hundred pictures left by him many
+are in Holland and still more in England, where in his lifetime he was
+largely employed by the English nobility and gentry. William Van de
+Velde has a great picture in the Amsterdam Museum, where the English
+flag-ship, the <i>Princess Royal</i>, is represented as striking her colours
+to the Dutch fleet in 1666. In the companion picture, also by Van de
+Velde, 'Four English men-of-war brought in as prizes,' the painter
+introduces himself in the small boat from which he witnessed the fight.
+William Van de Velde's triumphs in calm seas are seen especially in his
+pictures at the Hague and in Munich. Some of Van de Velde's best works
+are in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Backhuysen</b><a name="Back" id="Back"></a> born in 1631, died at Amsterdam in 1708, was another
+admirable marine painter. He did not study painting till he had followed
+a trade up to the age of eighteen years; he then gave himself with
+ardour to art, making many studies of skies, coasts, and vessels. He was
+inferior to William Van de Velde in his colouring, which was heavy, with
+a cold effect. But he had in full a Dutch painter's truthfulness, while
+his 'stormy waves and rent clouds' are given with poetic feeling. He was
+an industrious and successful man, painting nearly two hundred pictures,
+and receiving many commissions from the King of Prussia, Grand Duke of
+Tuscany, &amp;c. One of his finest works, 'A View of the River from the
+Landing-place called the Mosselsteiger,' is in Amsterdam Museum. In the
+Louvre is 'A view of the Mouth of the Texel, with ten Men-of-war Sailing
+before a Fresh Wind.' 'Dutch Shipping' is in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><b>Van de Capella</b> <a name="Capella" id="Capella"></a>is another capital marine painter, though little is known
+of him. He was a native of Amsterdam about 1653. His favourite subject
+is a quiet sea in sunny weather. His work bears some resemblance to that
+of Cuyp. His best pictures are in England. 'A Calm at Low Water' is in
+the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Mel" id="Mel"></a><b>Melchior de Hondecoeter,</b> born in 1636, died in 1695, chose the feathered
+tribe for his subjects. He has been called 'the Raphael of bird
+painters.' He painted especially poultry, peacocks, turkeys, and
+pigeons, which he usually represented alive, and treated with great
+truthfulness and picturesque feeling. Among his best pictures are 'The
+Floating Feather,' a feather given with singular lightness drifting in a
+pool, with different birds on the water and the shore&mdash;a pelican
+prominent&mdash;in Amsterdam Museum, and 'A Hen defending her Chickens
+against the attacks of a Pea-hen, with a Peacock, a Pigeon, a Cassowary,
+and a Crane,' also in Amsterdam.</p>
+
+<p><b>Jan Weenix,</b><a name="Ween" id="Ween"></a> born in 1644, died in 1719. He was a painter of 'still
+life,' and was especially famous for his dead hares, 'which in form and
+colour, down to the rendering of every hair, are marvels of execution.'
+He painted sometimes, though rarely, a living dog in his pieces. A fine
+example of his work, 'Dead Game with a Dog,' is in the National Gallery.
+Weenix sometimes painted flower pieces.<a id="footnotetag58" name="footnotetag58"></a>
+<a href="#footnote58"><sup class="sml">58</sup></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="Seg" id="Seg"></a>
+<b>Pater Segers,</b> so called because he was a Father in a Jesuit convent,
+which he entered at twenty-four years of age. He was born in 1590, and
+died in the Jesuit convent, Antwerp, 1661. He was a famous flower
+painter, but did not paint flowers by themselves; he painted them in
+conjunction with the historical and sacred subjects of other painters.
+He added many a wreath to the Virgin and Child. He worked in this
+fashion with Rubens, but painted more frequently along with painters of
+a lower rank in art. Pater Segers' flowers are finely drawn and
+tastefully arranged. The red of his roses has remained unchanged by
+years, while the roses of other painters have become violet or faded
+altogether. He had endless royal commissions. There are six of his
+pictures of much merit in the Dresden Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the elder and younger De Heem and Maria Von Oesterwyck mentioned
+at page 258, <b>Jan Van Huysum,</b><a name="Huysum" id="Huysum"></a> 1682&mdash;1749, was great in flower painting,
+choosing flowers rather than fruit for his brush. If De Heem has been
+called the Titian, Van Huysum has been defined as the Correggio, of
+flowers and fruit. He reversed the ordinary course of artists by
+beginning in a broad style, and progressing into an execution of the
+finest details. In masterly drawing and truthfulness he was not inferior
+to De Heem, though hardly reckoned his equal in other respects. Even in
+Van Huysum's lifetime there was an eager demand for his pictures, of
+which he left more than a hundred. There is an excellent fruit and
+flower piece by him in Dulwich Gallery, and a masterpiece, 'A Vase with
+Flowers,' is in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Werff" id="Werff"></a><b>Andrian Van der Werff</b> was born in 1659, and died in 1722. He is
+honourably distinguished for his pursuit of the ideal, in which he stood
+alone among the Dutch artists of his day. He showed much sense of beauty
+and elegance of form with great finish, but he had more than
+counterbalancing faults. His grouping was artificial, his heads
+monotonous, his colouring 'cold and heavy,' with 'a frosty feeling' in
+his pictures. His flesh tints resembled ivory, yet his elegance was so
+highly prized that he had many royal and noble patrons, for whom he
+executed sculptural and mythological pieces. Many of his pictures are in
+the Munich Gallery.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Mengs" id="Mengs"></a><b>Anton Raphael Mengs</b> was born in Bohemia 1728, and died in Rome 1774. His
+father was a distinguished miniature painter, and gave his son a careful
+education, training him to copy the masterpieces of Michael Angelo and
+Raphael from his twelfth year. Unfortunately he remained a copyist and
+an eclectic. He drew well, learnt chiaroscuro from studying Correggio,
+and colouring from analysing Titian. He was acquainted with the best
+technical processes in oil and fresco. All that teaching could do for a
+man was done, and to a great extent in vain. For though he worked with
+great conscientiousness, fancy and feeling were either originally
+lacking, or they were overlaid and stifled by his excess of culture and
+severe education. The most successful of his works are portraits, in
+which masterly treatment makes up to some extent for the absence of
+originality and subtle sympathy. But in his day, and with some reason,
+Raphael Mengs was greatly prized, since he figured among a host of
+ignorant, careless, and conceited painters. At the age of seventeen he
+was appointed court painter to King Augustus of Saxony. He was summoned
+to Spain by Charles III., who gave him a high salary. Among his good
+works is an 'Assumption' on the high altar of the Catholic Church,
+Dresden. An allegorical subject in fresco on the ceiling of the Camera
+de Papini in the Vatican has 'beauty of form, delicate observation, and
+masterly modelling.' Mengs wrote well on art, though in his writing also
+his eclecticism comes out.</p>
+
+<p>NOTE TO PAGE 96.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I have been told that I have not done justice to Lionardo in
+this short sketch. I give in an abridged form the accurate and
+appreciative analysis of the man and his work in Sir C, and Lady
+Eastlake.'&mdash;<span class="smcap">Kugler</span>. It is stated that the versatility of
+Lionardo was against him. He attempted too much for one man and
+one life. An additional impediment was produced by his
+temperament, 'dreamy, perfidious, procrastinating,' withal
+desirous of shining in society. His ideal of the Lord's head is
+the highest that art has realised. The apostles' heads are among
+the truest and noblest. The countenances of his Madonnas are full
+of ineffable sweetness and pathos. 'At the same time he analysed
+the monstrous and misshapen, and has left us caricatures in which
+he seems to have gloated over hideousness half human, half
+brute. He altered and retouched without ceasing, always deferring
+the conclusion of the task which he executed with untiring labour
+and ceaseless dissatisfaction.' The wonder is not that he should
+have left so little, but that he left enough to prove the
+transcendent nature of his art. 'There is nothing stranger in
+history than the fact that his great fame rests on one single
+picture&mdash;long reduced to a shadow&mdash;on half-a-dozen pictures for
+which his hand is alternately claimed and denied, and on
+unfinished fragments which he himself condemned.' Lionardo was
+too universal to be of any school.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<br />
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Alb">Albano</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Angelico">Angelico, Fra</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Anguisciola">Anguisciola</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Back">Buckhuysen</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Bar">Baroccio</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Bartolommeo">Bartolommeo, Fra</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Bellini">Bellini, The</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Berchem">Berchem</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Bol">Bol</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Bordone">Bordone</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Both">Both</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Botticelli">Botticelli</a></span></td></tr>
+
+
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Canal">Canaletto</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Capella">Capella, Van de</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Cara">Caravaggio</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Carp">Carpaccio</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Carr">Carracci, The</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Cell">Cellini</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Claude">Claude Loraine</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Corr">Correggio</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Crivelli">Crivelli</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Cuyp">Cuyp</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Dom">Domenichino</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Dow">Dow</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Du">Du Jardin</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Durer">D&uuml;rer</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Eycks">Eycks, The Van</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Filippo">Filippo, Fra</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Fon">Fontana</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Fran">Francia, Il</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Gad">Gaddi</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Garo">Garofalo</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ghib">Ghiberti</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#dajo">Ghirlandajo</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Gibb">Gibbons, Grinling</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Gior">Giorgione</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Giot">Giotto</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Gozz">Gozzoli</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Greuze">Greuze</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Guer">Guercino</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Guido">Guido</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Heem">Heem, De</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Helst">Helst, Van der</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Heyden">Heyden, Van der</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Hobbe">Hobbema</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Hol">Holbein</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Mel">Hondecoeter</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Hont">Honthorst</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Hooch">Hooch</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Huysum">Huysum, Van</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#god">Kneller</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Brun">Le Brun</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Lely">Lely</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ley">Leyden, Van</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Lion">Lionardo da Vinci</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Lipi">Lipi</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Luin">Luini</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Maas">Maas</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Mab">Mabuse</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Mantegna">Mantegna</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Mas">Masaccio</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Matsys">Matsys</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Mem">Memling</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Mengs">Mengs</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Mess">Messina, Da</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Met">Metzu</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Michel">Michael Angelo</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Murillo">Murillo</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Neer">Neer</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Net">Netcher</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Orc">Orcagna</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ost">Ostade, Van</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Palma">Palma</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Pard">Pardenone</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Parm">Parmigianino</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Per">Perugino</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Pis">Pisano</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Pot">Potter</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Pous">Poussin</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Raph">Raphael</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Rem">Rembrandt</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Romano">Romano</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Rubens">Rubens</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ruys">Ruysdael</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Rosa">Salvator Rosa</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Sarto">Sarto, Del</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Sasso">Sassoferrato</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Seg">Segers</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Sig">Signorelli</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Snyders">Snyders</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Somer">Somer, Van</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Spagna">Spagna</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#LoSpag">Spagnoletto</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Steen">Steen</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ten">Teniers, Father and Son</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ter">Terburg</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Tint">Tintoretto</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Tit">Titian</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Dyck">Van Dyck</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Vasa">Vasari</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Vela">Velasquez</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Velde">Velde, Van de</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#younger">Velde, Van de, The Younger</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ver">Veronese</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Wat">Watteau</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Ween">Weenix</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Werff">Werff</a></span></td>
+<td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Wit">Witte</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Wouver">Wouvermans</a></span></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote1"
+name="footnote1"></a><b>Note 1:</b><a href="#footnotetag1">
+(return) </a>
+It is in their unconsciousness and earnestness that a parallel is
+drawn between the first Italian painters and the Elizabethean poets. In
+other respects the comparison may be reversed, for the early Italian
+painters, from their restriction to religious painting, with even that
+treated according to tradition, were as destitute of the breadth of
+scope and fancy attained by their successors, as the Elizabethean poets
+were distinguished by the exuberant freedom which failed in the more
+formal scholars of Anne's reign.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote2"
+name="footnote2"></a><b>Note 2:</b><a href="#footnotetag2">
+(return) </a> Kugler's Handbook of Art.</blockquote>
+
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote3"
+name="footnote3"></a><b>Note 3:</b><a href="#footnotetag3">
+(return) </a> While writing of goldsmiths that became painters, I may say a word
+of a goldsmith who, without quitting his trade, was an unrivalled artist
+in his line. I mean Benvenuto Cellini, 1500&mdash;1571,<a name="Cell" id="Cell"></a> a man of violent
+passions and little principle, who led a wild troubled life, of which he
+has left an account as shameless as his character, in an autobiography.
+Cellini was the most distinguished worker in gold and silver of his day,
+and his richly chased dishes, goblets, and salt cellars, are still in
+great repute.</blockquote>
+
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote4"
+name="footnote4"></a><b>Note 4:</b><a href="#footnotetag4">
+(return) </a> Kugler's <i>Hand-book of Painting</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote5"
+name="footnote5"></a><b>Note 5:</b><a href="#footnotetag5">
+(return) </a> Kugler's <i>Hand-book of Painting</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote6"
+name="footnote6"></a><b>Note 6:</b><a href="#footnotetag6">
+(return) </a> See note, page 422.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote7"
+name="footnote7"></a><b>Note 7:</b><a href="#footnotetag7">
+(return) </a> Mrs Roscoe's <i>Life of Vittoria Colonna</i></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote8"
+name="footnote8"></a><b>Note 8:</b><a href="#footnotetag8">
+(return) </a> Michael Angelo's will was very simple. 'I bequeath my soul to God,
+my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest relations.'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote9"
+name="footnote9"></a><b>Note 9:</b><a href="#footnotetag9">
+(return) </a> Lady Eastlake, <i>History of Our Lord</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote10"
+name="footnote10"></a><b>Note 10:</b><a href="#footnotetag10">
+(return) </a> Hare, <i>Walks in Rome</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote11"
+name="footnote11"></a><b>Note 11:</b><a href="#footnotetag11">
+(return) </a> Lanzi, in Hare's <i>Walks in Rome</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote12"
+name="footnote12"></a><b>Note 12:</b><a href="#footnotetag12">
+(return) </a> Rio. <i>Poetry of Christian Art</i>, in Hare's <i>Walks in Rome.</i></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote13"
+name="footnote13"></a><b>Note 13:</b><a href="#footnotetag13">
+(return) </a> Mrs Jameson.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote14"
+name="footnote14"></a><b>Note 14:</b><a href="#footnotetag14">
+(return) </a> Dean Alford.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote15"
+name="footnote15"></a><b>Note 15:</b><a href="#footnotetag15">
+(return) </a> <i>Imperial Biographical Dictionary</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote16"
+name="footnote16"></a><b>Note 16:</b><a href="#footnotetag16">
+(return) </a> Titian's age is variously given; some authorities make it
+ninety-nine years, placing the date of his death in 1570 or 7.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote17"
+name="footnote17"></a><b>Note 17:</b><a href="#footnotetag17">
+(return) </a> Kugler.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote18"
+name="footnote18"></a><b>Note 18:</b><a href="#footnotetag18">
+(return) </a> The term originated in the French expression, '<i>du genre bas</i>.'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote19"
+name="footnote19"></a><b>Note 19:</b><a href="#footnotetag19">
+(return) </a> He had a peculiar fondness for blue and bronze hues.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote20"
+name="footnote20"></a><b>Note 20:</b><a href="#footnotetag20">
+(return) </a> It is due to Tintoret to say, that there are modern critics, who
+look below the surface, and are at this date deeply enamoured of his
+pictures. Tintoret's name now stands very high in art.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote21"
+name="footnote21"></a><b>Note 21:</b><a href="#footnotetag21">
+(return) </a> Mrs Jameson.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote22"
+name="footnote22"></a><b>Note 22:</b><a href="#footnotetag22">
+(return) </a> Guido said of Rubens: 'Does this painter mix blood with his
+colours?'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote23"
+name="footnote23"></a><b>Note 23:</b><a href="#footnotetag23">
+(return) </a> <i>Life of Rubens</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote24"
+name="footnote24"></a><b>Note 24:</b><a href="#footnotetag24">
+(return) </a> If I mistake not, this is the same Countess of Arundel who, in her
+widowhood, resided in Italy in order to be near her young sons then at
+Padua. Having provoked the suspicion of the Doge and Council of Venice,
+she was arrested by them on a charge of treason, and brought before the
+tribunal, where she successfully pled her own cause, and obtained her
+release, the only woman who ever braved triumphantly the terrible 'ten.'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote25"
+name="footnote25"></a><b>Note 25:</b><a href="#footnotetag25">
+(return) </a> Here is the description of a very different Rembrandt which appears
+in this year's Exhibition of the Works by Old Masters: 'There is no
+portrait here which equals Rembrandt's picture, from Windsor, "A Lady
+Opening a Casement;" a not particularly appropriate name, because the
+picture represents no such action. The lady is simply looking from an
+open window, her left hand raised and resting at the side of the
+opening. We believe there is nothing left to tell who this lady was,
+with the grave, sad eyes, and lips that seem to quiver with a trouble
+hardly yet assuaged by time. She wears a lace coif, and broad rich lace
+collar, almost a tippet, for it falls below her shoulders, together with
+lace cuffs. A triple band of large pearls goes about her neck, and she
+has similar ornaments round each wrist. She wears a mourning robe and
+black jewellery.... This picture, which resembles in most of its
+qualities a pair, of somewhat larger size, which were here last year,
+and also came from the Royal collection, is signed and dated "Rembrandt,
+F. 1671." It is, therefore, a late work of his. What wonderful harmony
+is here, of light, of colour, of tone. How nearly perfect is the keeping
+of the whole picture; as a whole, and also in respect of part to part.
+Could anything be truer than the breadth of the chiaroscuro? Notice how
+beautifully, and with what subtle gradations, the light reflected from
+her white collar strikes on her slightly faded cheek; how tenderly it
+seems to play among the soft tangles of the hair that time has
+thinned.'&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote26"
+name="footnote26"></a><b>Note 26:</b><a href="#footnotetag26">
+(return) </a> He had been called the Titian of flower and fruit painters. He
+preferred fruit for his subject. His works are not common in England.
+His masterpiece, 'The Chalice of the Sacrament,' crowned with a stately
+wreath, and sheaves of corn and bunches of grapes among the flowers, is
+at Vienna.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote27"
+name="footnote27"></a><b>Note 27:</b><a href="#footnotetag27">
+(return) </a> Sir W. Stirling Maxwell.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote28"
+name="footnote28"></a><b>Note 28:</b><a href="#footnotetag28">
+(return) </a> Sir W. Stirling Maxwell.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote29"
+name="footnote29"></a><b>Note 29:</b><a href="#footnotetag29">
+(return) </a> Hare, <i>Wanderings in Spain</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote30"
+name="footnote30"></a><b>Note 30:</b><a href="#footnotetag30">
+(return) </a> Hare's <i>Wanderings in Spain</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote31"
+name="footnote31"></a><b>Note 31:</b><a href="#footnotetag31">
+(return) </a> The spelling is an English corruption of the French Claud.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote32"
+name="footnote32"></a><b>Note 32:</b><a href="#footnotetag32">
+(return) </a> Poussin had a villa near Ponte Molle, and the road by which he used
+to go to it is still called in Rome 'Poussin's walk.'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote33"
+name="footnote33"></a><b>Note 33:</b><a href="#footnotetag33">
+(return) </a> Claude's summer villa is still pointed out near Rome.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote34"
+name="footnote34"></a><b>Note 34:</b><a href="#footnotetag34">
+(return) </a> <i>Imperial Biographical Dictionary</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote35"
+name="footnote35"></a><b>Note 35:</b><a href="#footnotetag35">
+(return) </a> Madame Le Brun, whose maiden name was Vig&eacute;e, born 1755, died 1842,
+was an excellent portrait painter.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote36"
+name="footnote36"></a><b>Note 36:</b><a href="#footnotetag36">
+(return) </a> Wornum.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote37"
+name="footnote37"></a><b>Note 37:</b><a href="#footnotetag37">
+(return) </a> Wornum.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote38"
+name="footnote38"></a><b>Note 38:</b><a href="#footnotetag38">
+(return) </a> Supposed to be a niece of Sir Thomas More's.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote39"
+name="footnote39"></a><b>Note 39:</b><a href="#footnotetag39">
+(return) </a> Rev. J. Lewis, 1731.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote40"
+name="footnote40"></a><b>Note 40:</b><a href="#footnotetag40">
+(return) </a> Wornum.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote41"
+name="footnote41"></a><b>Note 41:</b><a href="#footnotetag41">
+(return) </a> A still more famous picture by Holbein is that called 'The Two
+Ambassadors,' and believed to represent Sir Thomas Wyatt and his
+secretary.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote42"
+name="footnote42"></a><b>Note 42:</b><a href="#footnotetag42">
+(return) </a> Walpole.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote43"
+name="footnote43"></a><b>Note 43:</b><a href="#footnotetag43">
+(return) </a> Walpole.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote44"
+name="footnote44"></a><b>Note 44:</b><a href="#footnotetag44">
+(return) </a> Dwarfs figured at Charles's court, as at the court of Philip IV. of
+Spain.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote45"
+name="footnote45"></a><b>Note 45:</b><a href="#footnotetag45">
+(return) </a> The notion that Van Dyck sacrificed truth to grace is absolutely
+contradicted by certain critics, who bring forward as a proof of their
+contradiction what they consider the 'over-true' picture of the Queen
+Henrietta Maria, shown at the last exhibition of the works of Old
+Masters. The picture seems hardly to warrant the strong opinion of the
+critics.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote46"
+name="footnote46"></a><b>Note 46:</b><a href="#footnotetag46">
+(return) </a> Walpole.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote47"
+name="footnote47"></a><b>Note 47:</b><a href="#footnotetag47">
+(return) </a> Walpole.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote48"
+name="footnote48"></a><b>Note 48:</b><a href="#footnotetag48">
+(return) </a> Lady Eastlake and Dr. Waagen's works on Italian, Flemish, and Dutch
+Art, modelled on Kugler.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote49"
+name="footnote49"></a><b>Note 49:</b><a href="#footnotetag49">
+(return) </a> A lunette is a small picture, generally semicircular, surmounting
+the main picture in an altar-piece.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote50"
+name="footnote50"></a><b>Note 50:</b><a href="#footnotetag50">
+(return) </a> The Dutch still more than the Italian artists belonged largely to
+families of artists bearing the same surnames.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote51"
+name="footnote51"></a><b>Note 51:</b><a href="#footnotetag51">
+(return) </a> A picture with one door of two panels is called a diptych, with two
+doors of three panels a triptych, with many doors and panels a
+polyptych.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote52"
+name="footnote52"></a><b>Note 52:</b><a href="#footnotetag52">
+(return) </a> Fairholt's 'Homes and Haunts of Foreign Artists.'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote53"
+name="footnote53"></a><b>Note 53:</b><a href="#footnotetag53">
+(return) </a> Alchemists, like hermits, still existed in the seventeenth century.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote54"
+name="footnote54"></a><b>Note 54:</b><a href="#footnotetag54">
+(return) </a> <b>Bartholomew Van der Helst,</b><a name="Helst" id="Helst"></a> 1613-1670, was another great Dutch
+portrait painter. His portrait pieces with many figures are famous. An
+'Archery Festival,' commemorating the Peace of Westphalia, includes
+twenty-four figures full of individuality and finely drawn and coloured.
+One of his best works is 'In the Workhouse,' at Amsterdam. Two women and
+two men are conversing together in the foreground. There is a man with a
+book, and a preacher delivering a sermon in the background.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote55"
+name="footnote55"></a><b>Note 55:</b><a href="#footnotetag55">
+(return) </a> It may be that Ruysdael's straggling life was reflected in his
+lowering skies and stormy seas.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote56"
+name="footnote56"></a><b>Note 56:</b><a href="#footnotetag56">
+(return) </a> Other eminent painters, such as Van de Velde, Wouvermans, and
+Berchem often supplied cattle and figures to Hobbema's landscapes.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote57"
+name="footnote57"></a><b>Note 57:</b><a href="#footnotetag57">
+(return) </a> Was the apparently greater success of these partly denaturalised
+Dutch landscape painters, as contrasted with the adversity of Ruysdael
+and Ttobbema, due to the classic mania?</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote58"
+name="footnote58"></a><b>Note 58:</b><a href="#footnotetag58">
+(return) </a> Peter Gysels was another painter of 'still life.' His butterflies
+are said to have been rendered with 'exquisite finish.'</blockquote>
+
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>ISBISTERS' PRIZE AND GIFT BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"<i>Charming prize books. If anything can make the children of the present
+day take kindly to useful information, it will be such books as these,
+full of excellent illustrations, and in easy as well as interesting
+language."</i>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Guardian</span>.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>ONE SHILLING VOLUMES.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><b>ANIMAL STORIES FOR THE YOUNG.</b></p>
+
+<p>In Three handsome little Volumes full of Illustrations.'</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">1. HEADS WITHOUT HANDS;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">Or, Stories of Animal Wisdom.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">2. HEARTS WITHOUT HANDS;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">Or, Fine Feeling among Brutes,</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">3. SENSE WITHOUT SPEECH;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">Or, Animal Notions of Right and Wrong.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>MOU-SETS&Eacute;.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">A Negro Hero. By L.T. MEADE</span>.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">With Illustrations. Small 8vo.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>HALF-CROWN VOLUMES.</i></p>
+
+<p>Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><b>AMONG THE BUTTERFLIES.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">A Book for Young Collectors.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">By B.G. JOHNS, M.A.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">With Twelve Full-page Plates, &amp;c. Crown 8vo.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"This is such a book as should be abundantly given as a prize in schools."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;"><i>Glasgow Herald.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>MOTHER HERRING'S CHICKEN.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">An East-end Story. By L.T. MEADE.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Illustrated by BARNES. Crown 8vo.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"One of the most pleasing little tales which was ever written for young people; ay,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">and even for old people."&mdash;<i>Newcastle Chronicle.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>A DWELLER IN TENTS.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">By L.T. MEADE. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"It surprises us with a study of human character of no ordinary merit and intensity."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 18.5em;"><i>Pall Mall Gazette.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>ANDREW HARVEY'S WIFE.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">By L.T. MEADE. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"The characters are well drawn, and the story well developed."&mdash;<i>Literary World.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Decidedly strong and well wrought out."&mdash;<i>Scotsman</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>IN PRISON AND OUT.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">By HESBA STRETTON.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">10th Thousand. Illustrated by R. BARNES. Crown 8vo.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Told with all the pathos and captivating interest of the authoress of 'Jessica's</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">First Prayer.'"&mdash;<i>Guardian</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE BY POST.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>TWO SHILLING VOLUMES.</i></p>
+
+<p>Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt edges.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><b>THREE LITTLE HEROES.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">WILLIE HARDY.&mdash;LITTLE RAINBOW.&mdash;JEAN BAPTISTE.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">By Mrs. CHARLES GARNETT. With Thirty Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Touching and graceful sketches."&mdash;<i>Literary World</i>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Drawn from life we should say.... So vivid and natural in colouring."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 27.5em;"><i>Church Bells</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>NOBODY'S NEIGHBOURS.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">A Story of Golden Lane. By L.T. MEADE.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">With Thirty Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"In every respect entitled to a place among the best reward books of the season."&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;"><i>Schoolmaster</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>KING FROST.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">The Wonders of Snow and Ice. By Mrs. THORPE.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">With Seventy Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Exceedingly able, and without an unattractive page."&mdash;<i>School Board Chronicle</i>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Full of charming little pictures and instructive descriptions of the phenomena</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">which attend the presence of the Ice King."&mdash;<i>Christian World</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>UP THE NILE.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">A Boy's Voyage to Khartoum. By H. MAJOR, B. Sc.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">With Forty Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Must be placed amongst the best of the books for boys and girls which have been</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">issued this season. A very excellent book."&mdash;<i>Nottingham Guardian.</i></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>THE STRENGTH OF HER YOUTH.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">A Story for Girls. By S. DOUDNEY. With Twenty Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"The story is simple enough, but Miss Doudney handles it well."&mdash;<i>Spectator</i>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Sound and healthy in tone, yet not without movement and variety. Carefully</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">illustrated and tastefully bound."&mdash;<i>Daily News</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>WE THREE;</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">A Bit of Our Lives.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">By the Author of "Worth a Threepenny Bit," &amp;c.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">With Thirty Illustrations.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><a name="TWO_SHILLING_VOLUMES" id="TWO_SHILLING_VOLUMES"></a><i>TWO SHILLING VOLUMES.</i></p>
+
+<p>Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt edges.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><b>A BAND OF THREE.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">By L.T. MEADE, Author of "Scamp and I," &amp;c.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">Illustrated by Barnes.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"An exquisite little tale. Since the days of 'Little Meg's Children' there has been</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">no sketch approaching the pathos of child-life in 'A Band of Three.'"</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;"><i>Christian Leader</i>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Full of pathos and interest."&mdash;<i>Guardian</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>MY BACK-YARD ZOO.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">A Course of Natural History. By Rev. J.G. WOOD, M.A., Author</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">of "Homes without Hands," &amp;c.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">With Seventy Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"A book that will delight young people. It is well illustrated and thoroughly</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">reliable."&mdash;<i>Morning Post</i>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Really a complete course of natural history."&mdash;<i>Times</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>FROM THE EQUATOR TO THE POLE.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">IN THE HEART OF AFRICA. By JOSEPH THOMSON.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">CLIMBING THE HIMALAYAS. By W.W. GRAHAM.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">ON THE ROAD TO THE POLE. By Captain A.H. MARKHAM.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">With Forty-five Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"A more delightful prize or present for boys than this it would be hard to find."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 27.5em;"><i>Record</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>FAITHFUL FRIENDS.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Stories of Struggle and Victory.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">By L.T. MEADE and others.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6.5em;">With Twenty Illustrations by French, Barnes, &amp;c.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"A carefully illustrated little book.... With truth and pathos."&mdash;<i>Daily News</i>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Capital reading for young folks.... All brisk and wholesome."&mdash;<i>Scotsman</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><b>HEROES AND MARTYRS OF SCIENCE.</b></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">By HENRY C. EWART. With Thirty Illustrations.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"It is an admirable book of its order, full of the inspiration of great lives."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;"><i>School Board Chronicle</i>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>15 &amp; 16, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Old Masters and Their Pictures, by Sarah Tytler
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 19863-h.htm or 19863-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/9/8/6/19863/
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+Project Gutenberg's The Old Masters and Their Pictures, by Sarah Tytler
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Old Masters and Their Pictures
+       For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art
+
+Author: Sarah Tytler
+
+Release Date: November 19, 2006 [EBook #19863]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Yearsley, Ted Garvin and the Online
+Distributed Proofreaders Europe at http://dp.rastko.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES
+
+_For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art_
+
+
+BY SARAH TYTLER
+
+AUTHOR OF "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS" ETC.
+
+
+_NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LONDON
+ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED
+15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
+1893
+
+[_The Right of Translation is Reserved_]
+
+LONDON:
+
+PRINTED BY J.S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,
+CITY ROAD.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+I wish to say, in a very few words, that this book is intended to be a
+simple account of the great Old Masters in painting of every age and
+country, with descriptions of their most famous works, for the use of
+learners and outsiders in art. The book is not, and could not well be,
+exhaustive in its nature. I have avoided definitions of schools,
+considering that these should form a later and more elaborate portion of
+art education, and preferring to group my 'painters' according to what I
+hold to be the primitive arrangements of time, country, and rank in
+art.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
+
+
+The restrictions with regard to space under which the little volume
+called "The Old Masters" was originally written, caused me to omit, to
+my regret, many names great, though not first, in art. The circulation
+which the book has attained induces me to do what I can to remedy the
+defect, and render the volume more useful by adding two chapters--the
+one on Italian and the other on German, Dutch, and Flemish masters.
+These chapters consist almost entirely of condensed notes taken from two
+trustworthy sources, to which I have been already much indebted--Sir C,
+and Lady Eastlake's version of Kugler's "Handbook of Italian Art," and
+Dr. Waagen's "Handbook,"--remodelled from Kugler--of German, Dutch, and
+Flemish art, revised by J.A. Crowe. I have purposely given numerous
+records of those Dutch painters whose art has been specially popular in
+England and who are in some cases better represented in our country than
+in their own.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO,
+1280-1345--ORCAGNA, 1315-1376--GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428
+_OR_ 1429--FRA ANGELICO, 1387-1455 1
+
+II. EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, _ABOUT_
+1470-1532--MEMLING, _ABOUT_ 1478-1499--QUINTIN MATSYS, 1460-1530 OR 31
+41
+
+III. IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
+1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--- IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
+BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530 53
+
+IV. LIONARDO DA VINCI. 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
+1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566 83
+
+V. GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DUeRER, 1471-1528 169
+
+VI. LATER ITALIAN ART--GIORGIONE, 1477-1511--CORREGGIO, _ABOUT_
+1493-1534--TINTORETTO, 1512-1594--VERONESE, 1530-1588 181
+
+VII. CARRACCI, 1555-1609--GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642--DOMENICHINO,
+1581-1641--SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673 212
+
+VIII. LATER FLEMISH ART--RUBENS, 1577-1640--REMBRANDT, 1606 _OR_
+1608-1669--TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694--WOUVVERMAN,
+1620-1668--CUYP, 1605; _STILL LIVING_, 1638--PAUL POTTER,
+1625-1654--CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630 225
+
+IX. SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682 260
+
+X. FRENCH ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE LORRAINE,
+1600-1682--CHARLES LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE,
+1726-1805 286
+
+XI. FOREIGN ARTISTS IN ENGLAND--HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK,
+1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO, 1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723 309
+
+XII. ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH
+CENTURIES--TADDEO GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO,
+1412-1469--BENOZZO GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED
+TO HAVE DIED ABOUT 1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO,
+1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH
+UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI, FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN 1460--ANTONELLA DA
+MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE, 1416--GAROPALO,
+1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
+1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO SPAGNA, DATE OF
+BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS BORDONE,
+1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO, 1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO,
+1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO, 1592-1666--ALBANO,
+1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1615--VASARI, 1512-1574--SOFONISBA
+ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1626--LAVINIA FONTANA, 1552-1614 364
+
+XIII. GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE
+EIGHTEENTH CENTURY--VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS,
+1366-1442--VAN LEYDEN, 1494-1533--VAN SOMER, 1570-1624--SNYDERS,
+1579-1657--G. HONTHORST, 1592-1662--JAN STEEN, 1626-1679--GERARD DOW,
+1613-1680--DE HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--VAN OSTADE,
+1610-1685--MAAS, 1632-1693--METZU, 1615. STILL ALIVE IN 1667--TERBURG,
+1608-1681--NETCHER, 1639-1684--BOL, 1611-1680--VAN DER HELST,
+1613-1670--RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682--HOBBEMA, 1638-1709--BERCHEM,
+1620-1683--BOTH 1600 (?)-1650(?) DU JARDIN, 1625-1678--ADRIAN VAN DE
+VELDE, 1639-1672--VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712--DE WITTE, 1607-1692--VAN
+DER NEER, 1619 (?)-1683--WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE, THE YOUNGER,
+1633-1707--BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708--VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
+1653--HONDECOETER, 1636-1695--JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719--PATER SEGERS,
+1590-1661--VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749--VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722--MENGS,
+1728-1774 391
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+EARLY ITALIAN ART--GIOTTO, 1276-1337--ANDREA PISANO. 1280-1345--ORCAGNA,
+1315-1376 GHIBERTI, 1381-1455--MASACCIO, 1402-1428 OR 1429--FRA
+ANGELICO, 1387-1455.
+
+
+A pencil and paper, a box of colours, and a scrap-book, form so often a
+child's favourite toys that one might expect that a very large portion
+of men and women would prove painters. But, as we grow in years and
+knowledge, the discrepancy between nature and our attempts to copy
+nature, strike us more and more, until we turn in dissatisfaction and
+disgust from the vain effort.
+
+There was only one old woman in an Esquimaux tribe who could be called
+forward to draw with a stick on the sand a sufficiently graphic likeness
+of the Erebus and the Terror. It is only a few groups of men belonging
+to different countries, throughout the centuries, who have been able to
+give us paintings to which we turn in wonder and admiration, and say
+that these are in their degree fair exponents of nature. The old
+painter's half-haughty, half-humble protest was true--it is 'God
+Almighty,' who in raising here and there men above their fellows, 'makes
+painters.'
+
+But let us be thankful that the old propensity to delight in a
+facsimile, or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very
+common satisfaction and joy--whether cultivated or uncultivated---
+derived from looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving
+to understand the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to
+consider the lives and times which throw light on works of genius. Music
+itself is not more universally and gladly listened and responded to,
+than pictures are looked at and remembered.
+
+Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my
+subject if I can only treat it sympathetically,--enter at a humble
+distance into the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and
+place before you some of the paintings by reverent and loving
+word-painting such as others have achieved, and such as I may strive to
+attain to, that you may be in a sort early familiar with these
+paintings, before you see them in engravings and photographs, and on
+canvas and in fresco, as I trust you may be privileged to see many of
+them, when you may hail them not only for what they are, the glories of
+art, but for what they have been to you in thoughts of beauty and high
+desires.
+
+Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
+dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything, and
+of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after the fall
+of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting as of
+other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity,
+was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious
+conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to
+hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and meaningless
+type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs
+in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to
+bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a
+similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings
+with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the
+sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are
+very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations,
+and as illustrations of faith; but they present no intrinsic beauty or
+worth. They are not only clumsy and childish designs ill executed, but
+they are rendered unintelligible to all save the initiated in such
+hieroglyphics, by offering an elaborate ground-work of type, antitype,
+and symbol, on which the artist probably spent a large part of his
+strength. Lambs and lilies, serpents, vines, fishes, dolphins,
+phoenixes, cocks, anchors, and javelins played nearly as conspicuous a
+part in this art as did the dead believer, or his or her patron saint,
+who might have been supposed to form the principal figure in the
+picture.
+
+Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but
+quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the
+stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the
+old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But
+first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.
+Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting in
+fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or
+with size, egg, or fig-juice--the latter practices termed _tempera_ (in
+English in distemper) before oil was used to mix colours. But painters
+did not confine themselves then to painting with pencil or brush, else
+they might have attained technical excellence sooner. It has been well
+said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so the
+earlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them
+called--referring to its durability--'painting for eternity;' and in
+metals. Many of them were the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves;
+they worked in iron as well as in gold and silver, and they were
+sculptors and architects as well as painters; engineers also, so far as
+engineering in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, was known
+in those days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so
+that drawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of
+distance, and the management of light and shade, were feebly developed.
+Even the fore-shortening of figures was so difficult to the old Italian
+painters that they could not carry it into the extremities, and men and
+women seem as though standing on the points of their toes.
+Landscape-painting did not exist farther than that a rock or a bush, or
+a few blue lines, with fishes out of proportion prominently interposed,
+indicated, as on the old stage, that a desert, a forest, or a sea, was
+to play its part in the story of the picture. So also portrait-painting
+was not thought of, unless it occurred in the likeness of a great man
+belonging to the time and place of the painter, who was the donor of
+some picture to chapel or monastery, or of the painter himself, alike
+introduced into sacred groups and scenes; for pictures were uniformly of
+a religious character, until a little later, when they merged into
+allegorical representations, just as one remembers that miracle plays
+passed into moral plays before ordinary human life was reproduced. Until
+this period, what we call dramatic expression in making a striking
+situation, or even in bringing the look of joy or sorrow, pleasure or
+pain, into a face, had hardly been attained.
+
+Perhaps you will ask, what merit had the old paintings of the middle
+ages to compensate for so many great disadvantages and incongruities?
+Certainly before the time I have reached, they have, with rare
+exceptions, little merit, save that fascination of pathos, half-comic,
+half-tragic, which belongs to the struggling dawn of all great
+endeavours, and especially of all endeavours in art. But just at this
+epoch, art, in one man, took a great stride, began, as I shall try to
+show, to exert an influence so true, deep, and high that it extends, in
+the noblest forms, to the present day, and much more than compensates to
+the thoughtful and poetic for a protracted train of technical blunders
+and deficiencies.
+
+Giotto, known also as Magister Joctus, was born in 1276 near Florence. I
+dare say many have heard one legend of him, and I mean to tell the
+legends of the painters, because even when they are most doubtful they
+give the most striking indications of the times and the light in which
+painters and their paintings were regarded by the world of artists, and
+by the world at large; but so far as I have heard this legend of Giotto
+has not been disproven. The only objection which can be urged against
+it, is that it is found preserved in various countries, of very
+different individuals--a crowning objection also to the legend of
+William Tell. Giotto was a shepherd boy keeping his father's sheep and
+amusing himself by drawing with chalk on a stone the favourites of the
+flock, when his drawings attracted the attention of a traveller passing
+from the heights into the valley. This traveller was the well-born and
+highly-esteemed painter Cimabue, who was so delighted with the little
+lad's rough outlines, that getting the consent of Giotto's father,
+Cimabue adopted the boy, carried him off to the city of Florence,
+introduced him to his studio, and so far as man could supplement the
+work of God, made a painter of the youthful genius. I may add here a
+later legend of Giotto. Pope Boniface VIII, requested specimens of skill
+from various artists with the view to the appointment of a painter to
+decorate St Peter's. Giotto, either in impatient disdain, or to show a
+careless triumph of skill, with one flourish of his hand, without the
+aid of compass, executed a perfect circle in red chalk, and sent the
+circle as his contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The
+audacious specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was
+chosen as the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident
+arose the Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the
+friend of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom
+the grandeur of some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough
+attributed. The poet of the 'Inferno' wrote of his friend:
+
+                   '......... Cimabue thought
+    To lord it over painting's field; and now
+    The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'
+
+Petrarch bequeathed in his will a Madonna by Giotto and mentioned it as
+a rare treasure of art. Boccaccio wrote a merry anecdote of his comrade
+the painter's wit, in the course of which he referred with notable
+plain-speaking to Giotto's 'flat currish' plainness of face.
+
+The impression handed down of Giotto's character is that of an
+independent, high-spirited man, full of invention, full of imagination,
+and also, by a precious combination, full of shrewdness and common
+sense; a man genial, given to repartee, and at the same time not
+deficient in the tact which deprives repartee of its sting. While he was
+working to King Robert of Naples, the king, who was watching the painter
+on a very hot day, said, with a shrug, 'If I were you, Giotto, I would
+leave off work and rest myself this fine day, 'And so would I, sire, if
+I were _you_,' replied the wag.
+
+I need scarcely add that Giotto was a man highly esteemed and very
+prosperous in his day; one account reports him as the head and the
+father of four sons and four daughters. I have purposely written first
+of the fame, the reputed character, and the circumstances of Giotto
+before I proceed to his work. This great work was, in brief, to breathe
+into painting the living soul which had till then--in mediaeval
+times--been largely absent. Giotto went to Nature for his inspiration,
+and not content with the immense innovation of superseding by the actual
+representation of men and women in outline, tint, and attitude, the
+rigid traditions of his predecessors, he put men's passions in their
+faces--the melancholy looked sad, the gay glad. This result, to us so
+simple, filled Giotto's lively countrymen, who had seldom seen it, with
+astonishment and delight. They cried out as at a marvel when he made the
+commonest deed even coarsely lifelike, as in the case of a sailor in a
+boat, who turned round with his hand before his face and spat into the
+sea; and when he illustrated the deed with the corresponding expression,
+as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure
+of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere
+realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light
+an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose
+above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real
+is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion
+robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which
+is at its bidding, and invested with the divinity of awe and love.
+
+Giotto's work did not end with himself; he was the founder of the
+earliest worthy school of Italian art, so worthy in this very glorious
+idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to
+be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate
+successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance,
+crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure
+these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their
+originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would
+seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they
+appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence
+their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest
+qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the
+Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more
+accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of
+another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed
+fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and
+in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.
+
+The difference between the two classes of painters in not so wide as
+that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and
+the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the
+unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of
+Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the
+same in kind.[1]
+
+I wish you, my readers, to note it in the very commencement, and to
+learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any
+half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke
+transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you
+have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern
+marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight
+figures with long hands, wooden feet, and clinging draperies, while your
+eyes have been familiar with well-modelled frames and limbs and flowing
+lines. But we must look deeper if we would not be slaves to superficial
+prettiness, or even superficial correctness; we must try to go into the
+spirit of a painting and value it more in proportion as it teaches art's
+noblest lesson--the divinity of the divine, the serenity of utmost
+strength, the single-heartedness of passion.
+
+I have only space to tell you of three or four of the famous works of
+Giotto. First, his allegories in the great church, in honour of St
+Francis, at Assisi, in relation to which, writing of its German
+architect, an author says: 'He built boldly against the mountain, piling
+one church upon another; the upper vast, lofty, and admitting through
+its broad windows the bright rays of the sun: the lower as if in the
+bowels of the earth--low, solemn, and almost shutting out the light of
+day. Around the lofty edifice grew the convent, a vast building, resting
+upon a long line of arches clinging to the hill-sides. As the evening
+draws nigh, casting its deep shadows across the valley, the traveller
+beneath gazes upwards with feelings of wonder and delight at this
+graceful arcade supporting the massy convent; the ancient towers and
+walls of the silent town gathering around, and the purple rocks rising
+high above--all still glowing in the lingering sunbeams--a scene
+scarcely to be surpassed in any clime for its sublime beauty.' The
+upper church contains frescoes wonderfully fresh, by Cimabue, of
+Scriptural subjects, and frescoes of scenes from the life vowed to
+poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis,
+are the four masterpieces with which we have to do. These are the three
+vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and
+grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been
+attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her
+rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The
+fourth fresco pictures the saint who died, 'covered by another's cloak
+cast over his wasted body eaten with sores,' enthroned and glorified
+amidst the host of Heaven.
+
+I have chosen the second example of the art of Giotto because you may
+with comparative ease see it for yourselves. It is in the National
+Gallery, London, having belonged to the collection of the late Samuel
+Rogers. It is a fragment of an old fresco which had been part of a
+series illustrating the life of John the Baptist in the church of the
+Carmine, Florence, a church which was destroyed by fire in 1771. The
+fragment in the National Gallery has two fine heads of apostles bending
+sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do
+it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents
+of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in
+regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before
+Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed to tell the
+Bible's stories.
+
+The third instance I have chosen to quote is Giotto's portrait of Dante
+which was so strangely lost for many years. The portrait occurs in a
+painting, the first recorded performance of Giotto's, in which he was
+said to have introduced the likeness of many of his contemporaries, on
+the wall of the Palazzo dell' Podesta or Council Chamber of Florence.
+During the banishment of Dante the wall was plastered or white-washed
+over, through the influence of his enemies, and though believed to
+exist, the picture was hidden down to 1840, when, after various futile
+efforts to recover it, the figures were again brought to light.
+
+This portrait of Dante is altogether removed from the later portraits of
+the indignant and weary man, of whom the Italian market-women said that
+he had been in Hell as well as in exile. Giotto's Dante on the walls of
+the Council Chamber is a noble young man of thirty, full of ambitious
+hope and early distinction. The face is slightly pointed, with broad
+forehead, hazel eyes, straight brows and nose, mouth and chin a little
+projecting. The close cloak or vest with sleeves, and cap in folds
+hanging down on the shoulder, the hand holding the triple fruit, in
+prognostication of the harvest of virtue and renown which was to be so
+bitter as well as so glorious, are all in keeping and have a majesty of
+their own. The picture is probably known by engravings to many of my
+readers.
+
+The last example of Giotto's, is the one which of all his works is most
+potent and patent in its beauty, and has struck, and, in so far as we
+can tell, will for ages strike, with its greatness multitudes of widely
+different degrees of cultivation whose intellectual capacity is as far
+apart as their critical faculty. I mean the matchless Campanile or
+bell-tower 'towering over the Dome of Brunelleschi' at Florence, formed
+of coloured marbles--for which Giotto framed the designs, and even
+executed with his own hands the models for the sculpture. With this
+lovely sight Dean Alford's description is more in keeping than the
+prosaic saying of Charles V., that 'the Campanile ought to be kept under
+glass.' Dean Alford's enthusiasm thus expresses itself:
+
+     'A mass of varied light written on the cloudless sky of
+     unfathomed blue; varied but blended, as never in any other
+     building that we had seen; the warm yellow of the lighter marbles
+     separated but not disunited by the ever-recurring bands of dark;
+     or glowing into red where the kisses of the sun had been hottest;
+     or fading again into white where the shadows mostly haunted, or
+     where the renovating hand had been waging conflict with decay.'
+
+It is known that Giotto, together with his friend Dante, died before
+this--Giotto's last great work--was finally constructed by Giotto's
+pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, and that therefore neither of the friends could
+have really looked on 'Giotto's Tower,' though Italian Ciceroni point
+out, and strangers love to contemplate, the very stone on which 'Grim
+Dante' sat and gazed with admiration in the calm light of evening on the
+enduring memorial of the painter.
+
+Giotto died in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a
+good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he
+painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling
+in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the
+Cross.' The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been
+the practice which painted the Virgin Mother now as a brown Italian, now
+as a red and white Fleming, and again as a flaxen-haired German or as a
+swarthy Spaniard, and draped her and all the minor figures in the
+grandest drama the world ever saw--as well as the characters in older
+Scripture histories, in the Florentine, Venetian, and Antwerp fashions
+of the day. The defence of the practice is, that the Bible is for
+universal time, that its Virgin Mother, its apostles and saints, were
+types of other mothers and of other heroes running down the stream of
+history; that even the one central and holy figure, if He may be
+represented at all, as the Divine brother of all humanity, may be clad
+not inaptly in the garments of all. It appears to me that there is
+reason in this answer, and that viewed in its light the criticism which
+constantly demands historic fidelity is both carping and narrow. I do
+not mean, however, to underrate historic accuracy in itself, or to
+depreciate that longing for completeness in every particular, which
+drives our modern painters to the East to study patiently for months the
+aspects of nature under its Oriental climate, with its peculiar people
+and animals, its ancient costumes and architecture.
+
+Giotto was buried with suitable honours by a city which, like the rest
+of the nation, has magnified its painters amongst its great men, in the
+church of Santa Maria del Fiore, where his master Cimabue had been
+buried. Lorenzo de' Medici afterwards placed over Giotto's tomb his
+effigy in marble.
+
+In chronicling ancient art I must here diverge a little. I have already
+mentioned how closely painting was in the beginning allied with working
+in metals as well as with sculpture and architecture. It is thus
+necessary to write of a magnificent work in metal, the study and
+admiration of generations of painters, begun in the life of Giotto, and
+completed in two divisions, extending over a period of nearly a hundred
+years. We shall proceed to deal with the first division, and recur to
+the second a little later.
+
+The old Italian cities. They were then the great merchant cities of the
+world, more or less republican in their constitution. They stood to the
+citizens, who rarely left their walls, at once as peculiar possessions
+and as native countries rather than as cities alone, while they excited
+all the patriotism, pride, and love that were elsewhere expended on a
+whole country--which after all was held as belonging largely to its king
+and nobles. The old Italian merchant guilds, and wealthy merchants as
+individuals, vied with each other in signalizing their good citizenship
+by presenting--as gifts identified with their names--to their cities,
+those palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight
+of the world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily
+of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni
+or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some
+competition the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great
+group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named,
+as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea
+executed a series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the
+Baptist, which were cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre
+door-way. I shall leave the rest of the gates, still more exquisitely
+wrought, till their proper time, only observing that the Pisani group of
+carvers and founders are supposed to have attained their extraordinary
+superiority in skill and grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in
+consequence of one of them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to
+the study of some ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.
+
+Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come back
+to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument--in itself
+very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians' love
+to their cities. Andrea Orcagna, otherwise known as Andrea di Cione, one
+of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about 1315. His
+greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.
+
+This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation,
+alas, will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial,
+though no longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an
+arcade, something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running
+round, and having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for
+the dead were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth
+brought from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered
+with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross
+in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and
+contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments--among them the
+Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of
+the Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
+opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
+artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of
+the walls was continued at intervals, during two hundred years. The
+havoc wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the
+pictures faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated
+fragments, 'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's
+illustrations of the book of Job have thus perished. Still Orcagna's
+work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in
+his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to
+borrow from it in design and arrangement. Dean Alford has thus described
+Orcagna's mournful, thoughtful 'Triumph of Death:'
+
+'The picture is one of crowded action, and contains very many
+personages. The action may be supposed to begin in the lower corner on
+the right hand. There we see what appears to be a wedding-party seated
+in festivity under a grove of orange-trees laden with fruit. Over two of
+them a pair entertaining them with merry strains. But close to them on
+the left comes swooping down on bats' wings, and armed with the
+inevitable scythe, the genius of Death. Her wild hair streams in the
+wind, her bosom is invulnerable, being closed in a trellised armour of
+steel. Beneath her, on the ground, are a heap of corpses, shown by their
+attire to be the great and wealthy of the world. Three winged figures,
+two fiends and one angel, are drawing souls, in the form of children,
+out of the mouths of three of these corpses. Above, the air is full of
+flying spirits, angels and demons: the former beautiful and saintly, the
+latter hideous and bestial. Some are dragging, or bearing upwards, human
+souls: others are on their way to fetch them from the heaps of dead:
+others, again, are flying about apparently without aim. Further yet to
+the left, a company of wretched ones, lame and in rags, are invoking
+Death with outstretched arms to come to their relief; but she sweeps by
+and heeds them not.
+
+'Dividing one half of the picture from the other, is a high range of
+rocks, terminating in a fiery mountain, into which the demons are
+casting the unhappy souls which they have carried off. Beyond that seems
+to be a repetition of the same lesson respecting Death in another form.
+A party of knights and dames are issuing on horseback from a mountain
+pass. In the left hand of the picture there lie in their path three
+corpses in coffins, with coronets on their heads. One is newly dead; on
+the second, decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a
+grinning skeleton. The impression produced on the gay party by the sight
+is very various. Some look on carelessly; one holds his nose in disgust;
+one, a lady jewelled and crowned, leans her head on her hand in solemn
+thought. Above, on a rising ground, an aged monk (it is said, Saint
+Macarius) is holding a scroll, and pointing out to passengers the moral
+of the sight which meets them. The path winds up a hill crowned with a
+church, and by its side at various points are hermits sitting in calm
+security, or following peaceful occupations. One of them is milking a
+doe; another is reading; a third is calmly contemplating from a distance
+the valley of Death. About them are various animals and birds. The idea
+evidently intended to be conveyed is that deliverance from the fear of
+death is to be found not in gaiety and dissipation, but in contemplation
+and communion with God.
+
+'Such is the wonderful fresco, and the execution is as wonderful as the
+conception. Belonging as the painter did to a rude and early period of
+art, he yet had the power of endowing his figures with both majesty and
+tenderness of expression.'
+
+The Last Judgment is no less solemn and sad, with hope tempering its
+sadness. Mrs Jameson's note of it is: 'Above, in the centre, Christ and
+the Virgin are throned in separate glories. He turns to the left,
+towards the condemned, while he uncovers the wound in his side, and
+raises his right arm with a menacing gesture, his countenance full of
+majestic wrath. The Virgin, on the right of her Son, is the picture of
+heavenly mercy, and, as if terrified at the words of eternal
+condemnation, she turns away. On either side are ranged the Prophets of
+the Old Testament, the Apostles and other saints, severe, solemn,
+dignified figures. Angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, hover
+over Christ and the Virgin; under them is a group of archangels. The
+archangel Michael stands in the midst holding a scroll in each hand;
+immediately before him another archangel, supposed to represent Raphael,
+the guardian angel of humanity, cowers down, shuddering, while two
+others sound the awful trumpets of doom. Lower down is the earth where
+men are seen rising from their graves; armed angels direct them to the
+right and left. Here is seen King Solomon, who, whilst he rises, seems
+doubtful to which side he should turn; here a hypocritical monk, whom an
+angel draws back by the hair from the host of the youth in a gay and
+rich costume, whom another angel leads away to Paradise. There is
+wonderful and even terrible power of expression in some of the heads;
+and it is said that among them are many portraits of contemporaries, but
+unfortunately no circumstantial traditions as to particular figures have
+reached us.'
+
+One of Orcagna's altar-pieces, that of 'the coronation of the Virgin,'
+containing upwards of a hundred figures, and with the colouring still
+rich, is in our National Gallery. As an architect, Orcagna designed the
+famous Loggia de' Lanzi of the grand ducal palace at Florence.
+
+Now I must take you back to the bronze gates of the Baptistery in their
+triumphant completion nearly a hundred years after the first gate was
+executed by Andrea Pisano. I should have liked, but for our limits, to
+tell in full the legend of the election of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the
+step-son of a goldsmith, and skilled in chasing and enamelling, to
+design the second gate; when yet a lad of twenty-three, how he and two
+other young men, one of them still younger than Ghiberti, were declared
+the most promising competitors in the trial for the work; how the last
+two voluntarily withdrew from the contest, magnanimously proclaiming
+Lorenzo Ghiberti their superior; how all the three lived to be famous,
+the one as a founder in metal, the others as an architect and a
+sculptor, and remained sworn brothers in art till death.
+
+Lorenzo Ghiberti has left us an expression of the feeling with which he
+set about his task, an expression so suggestive that, even had we no
+other indication, it is enough to stamp the true and tender nature of
+the man. He prepared for his achievement 'with infinite diligence and
+love'--the words deserve to be pondered over. He took at least
+twenty-two years to his work, receiving for it eleven hundred florins.
+He chose his subjects from the life and death of the Lord, working them
+out in twenty panels, ten on each side of the folding doors, and below
+these were eight panels containing full-length figures of the four
+evangelists and four doctors of the Latin Church, with a complete border
+of fruit and foliage, having heads of prophets and sibyls interspersed.
+So entire was the satisfaction the superb gate gave, that Lorenzo was
+not merely loaded with praise, he received a commission to design and
+cast a third and central gate which should surpass the others, that were
+thenceforth to be the side entrances.
+
+For his second gate Lorenzo Ghiberti repaired to the Old Testament for
+subjects, beginning with the creation and ending with the meeting of
+Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and represented them in ten compartments
+enclosed in a rich border of fruit and foliage, with twenty-four
+full-length figures of the Hebrew heroes and prophets, clearly and
+delicately designed and finished, occupying corresponding niches. This
+crowning gate engaged the founder upwards of eighteen years--forty-nine
+years are given as the term of the work of both the gates.
+
+The single defect which is found in those marvellous gates--left to us
+as a testimony of what the life-long devotion of genius could
+produce--is that they abound floridly both in ornament and action, in
+place of being severely simple and restrained according to the classical
+standard.
+
+Michael Angelo called these gates 'worthy to be the gates of Paradise,'
+and they are still one of the glories of Florence. Casts of the gates
+are to be found in the School for Art at Kensington, and at the Crystal
+Palace.
+
+A young village boy learned to draw and model from Ghiberti's gates. He
+in his turn was to create in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the
+Carmine at Florence a school of painters scarcely less renowned and
+powerful in its effects than that produced by the works in the Campo
+Santa. You will find the Italian painters not unfrequently known by
+nicknames, quite as often by their father's trades as by their father's
+surnames, and still oftener by the town which was their place of birth
+or nurture. This Tom village birth-place, was commonly called Masaccio,
+short for Tomasaccio, 'hulking Tom,' as I have heard it translated, on
+account of his indifferent, slovenly habits. I think there is a
+tradition that he entered a studio in Florence as a colour boy, and
+electrified the painter and his scholars, by _brownie_ like freaks of
+painting at their unfinished work, in their absence, better than any of
+his masters, and by the dexterity with which he perpetrated the frolic
+of putting the facsimile of a fly on one of the faces on the easels. His
+end was a tragic conclusion to such light comedy. At the age of
+twenty-six, he quitted Florence for Rome so suddenly that he left his
+finest frescoes unfinished. It was said that he was summoned thither by
+the Pope. At Rome, where little or nothing of Masaccio's life is known,
+he died shortly afterwards, not without a suspicion of his having been
+poisoned.
+
+A curious anecdote exists of the identification of the time when he
+forsook Florence to meet his death in Rome. Just as we have read, that
+the period of the death of Massinger the dramatist has been settled by
+an entry in an old parish register, 'died, Philip Massinger a stranger,'
+so there has been found some quaint equivalent to a modern tax-paper
+which had been delivered at the dwelling of Masaccio when the word
+'gone' was written down.
+
+There is a further tradition--not very probable under the
+circumstances--that Masaccio is buried, without name or stone, under the
+Brancacci Chapel. Be that as it may, he very early rose to eminence,
+surpassing all his predecessors in drawing and colouring, and he
+combined with those acquirements such animation and variety of
+expression in his characters, that it was said of him 'he painted souls
+as well as bodies,' while his invention was not less bold and fresh.
+
+It is difficult to indicate Masaccio's pictures because some of them
+have been repainted and destroyed. As to those in the Brancacci Chapel
+from the life of St Peter, (with the exception of two,) considerable
+confusion has arisen as to which are Masaccio's, and which belong to
+his scholar Filippino Lippi. The fresco which Masaccio left unfinished,
+that of the Apostles Peter and Paul raising a dead youth (from
+traditional history), was finished by Lippi. In the fresco of Peter
+baptizing the converts, generally attributed to Masaccio, there is a lad
+who has thrown off his garments, and stands shivering with cold, whose
+figure, according to authority, formed an epoch in art. Lionardo da
+Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, all studied
+their art in this chapel. Raphael borrowed the grand figure of St Paul
+preaching at Athens in one of the cartoons, from one of Masaccio's or
+Filippo Lippi's frescoes. Masaccio's excellence as an artist, reached at
+an immature age, is very remarkable.
+
+I have come to the last and probably the best appreciated among modems
+of the early Italian painters. Fra Angelico da Fiesole, the gentle
+devout monk whom Italians called '_Il Beato_,' the Blessed, and who
+probably did receive the distinction of beatification, a distinction
+only second in the Roman Catholic Church to that of canonization. He was
+born at the lovely little mountain-town of Fiesole near Florence, 1387,
+and his worldly name, which he bore only till his twenty-first year, was
+Guido Petri de Mugello. In his youth, with his gift already recognized,
+so that he might well have won ease and honour in the world, he entered
+the Dominican Convent of St Mark, Florence, for what he deemed the good
+and peace of his soul. He seldom afterwards left it, and that only as
+directed by his convent superior, or summoned by the Pope. He was a man
+devoid of personal ambition, pure, humble, and meek. When offered the
+Archbishopric of Florence as a tribute to his sanctity, he declined it
+on account of his unworthiness for the office. He would not work for
+money, and only painted at the command of his prior. He began his
+painting with fasting and work, he steadfastly refused to make any
+alteration in the originals. It is said that he was found dead at his
+easel with a completed picture before him. It is not wonderful, that
+from such a man should come one side of the perfection of that idealism
+which Giotto had begun. Fra Angelico's angels, saints, Saviour, and
+Virgin are more divinely calm, pure, sweet, endowed with a more exulting
+saintliness, a more immortal youth and joy, and a more utter
+self-abnegation and sympathetic tenderness than are to be found in the
+saints and the angels, the Saviour and the Virgin of other painters.
+Neither is it surprising that Fra Angelico's defects, besides that of
+the bad drawing which shows more in his large than in his small
+pictures, are those of a want of human knowledge, power, and freedom.
+His wicked--even his more earthly-souled characters, are weak and faulty
+in action. What should the reverent and guileless dreamer know, unless
+indeed by inspiration of the rude conflicts, the fire and fury of human
+passions intensified in the malice and anguish of devils? But Fra
+Angelico's singular successes far transcend his failures. In addition to
+the sublime serenity and positive radiance of expression which he could
+impart to his heads, his notions of grouping and draping were full of
+grace, sometimes of splendour and magnificence. In harmony with his
+happy temperament and fortunes, he was fond of gay yet delicate colours
+'like spring flowers,' and used a profusion of gold ornaments which do
+not seem out of keeping in his pictures. The most of Fra Angelico's
+pictures are in Florence--the best in his own old convent of St Mark,
+where he lovingly adorned not only chapter-hall and court, but the cells
+of his brother friars. A crucifix with adoring saints worshipping their
+crucified Saviour is regarded as his masterpiece in St Mark's. A famous
+coronation of the Virgin, which Fra Angelico painted for a church in his
+native town, and which is now in the Louvre, Paris, is thus described by
+Mrs Jameson: 'It represents a throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to
+which there is an ascent of nine steps; on the highest kneels the
+Virgin, veiled, her hands crossed on her bosom. She is clothed in a red
+tunic, a blue robe over it, and a royal mantle with a rich border
+flowing down behind. The features are most delicately lovely, and the
+expression of the face full of humility and adoration. Christ, seated on
+the throne, bends forward, and is in the act of placing the crown on her
+head; on each side are twelve angels, who are playing a heavenly concert
+with guitars, tambourines, trumpets, viols, and other musical
+instruments; lower than these, on each side, are forty holy personages
+of the Old and New Testament; and at the foot of the throne kneel
+several saints, male and female, among them St Catherine with her wheel,
+St Agnes with her lamb, and St Cecilia crowned with flowers. Beneath the
+principal picture there is a row of seven small ones, forming a border,
+and representing various incidents in the life of St Dominic.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+EARLY FLEMISH ART--THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--MABUSE, MATSYS, 1460-1530
+OR 31.
+
+
+In the Low Countries painting had very much the same history that it had
+in Italy, but the dates are later, and there may be a longer interval
+given to each stage of development. Religious painting, profuse in
+symbolism, with masses of details elaborately worked in, meets us in the
+first place. This style of painting reached its culmination, in which it
+included (as it did not include in its representation in the Italian
+pictures) many and varied excellencies, among them the establishment of
+painting in oil in the pictures of the Flemish family of painters--the
+Van Eycks.
+
+Before going into the little that is known of the family history of the
+Van Eycks, I should like to call attention to the numerous painter
+families in the middle ages. What a union, and repose, and happy
+sympathy of art-life it indicates, which we appear to restlessness and
+separate interests of modern life. The Van Eycks consisted of no less
+than four members of a family, three brothers, Hubert, John, and
+Lambert, and one sister, Margaret, devoted, like her brothers, to her
+art. There is a suggestion that they belonged to a small village of
+Limburg called Eyck, and repaired to Bruges in order to pursue their
+art. Hubert was thirty years older than John, and it is said that he was
+a serious-minded man as well as an ardent painter, and belonged to the
+religious fraternity of our Lady of Ghent. He died in 1426. John, though
+of so much consideration in his profession as to be believed to be 'the
+Flemish Painter' sent by Duke Philip the Good of Flanders and Burgundy
+with a mission to Portugal to solicit the hand of a princess in
+marriage, is reported to have died very poor in 1449, and has the
+suspicion attached to him of having been a lover of pleasure and a
+spendthrift. Of Lambert, the third brother, almost nothing is known;
+indeed, the fact of his existence has only lately come to light.
+Margaret lived and died unmarried, and belonged, like her brother
+Hubert, to the religious society of our Lady of Ghent. She died about
+1432.
+
+The invention of painting in oil, for which the Van Eycks are commonly
+known, was not literally that of mixing colours with oil, which was
+occasionally done before their day. It was the combining oil with resin,
+so as to produce at once a good varnish, and avoid the necessity of
+drying pictures in the sun, a bright thought, which may stand in the
+same rank with the construction, by James Watt, of that valve which
+rendered practicable the application of steam to machinery. The thought,
+occasioned by the cracking of a picture in tempera exposed to the sun,
+is due to Hubert Van Eyck.
+
+The great picture of the Van Eycks, which was worked at for a number of
+years by both Hubert and John, and, as some reckon, touched by the whole
+family, is the 'Adoration of the Lamb,' at St Bavon's, Ghent. I should
+like to give a faint idea of this extraordinary picture, which was
+painted for a burgomaster of Ghent and his wife in order to adorn their
+mortuary chapel in the cathedral. It was an altar piece on separate
+panels, now broken up and dispersed, only a portion of it being retained
+in Ghent.
+
+It may strike some as strange that a picture should be on panels, but
+those of the old pictures which were not on plastered walls were
+commonly on panels, many of them on the lids and sides of chests and
+presses which were used to hold sacred vessels and priestly raiment.
+
+When the wings of the Van Eycks' altar-piece of the 'Adoration of the
+Lamb' were opened on festivals, the subjects of the upper central
+picture were seen, consisting of the Triune God, a majestic figure, and
+at his side in stately calm the Virgin and the Baptist. On the inside of
+the wings were angels, at the two extremities Adam and Eve. The lower
+central picture shows the Lamb of the Revelation, whose blood flows into
+a cup; over it is the dove of the Holy Spirit. Angels, who hold the
+instruments of the Passion, worship the Lamb. Four groups of many
+persons advance from the sides, these are the holy martyrs, men and
+women, priests and laymen. In the foreground is the fountain of life; in
+the distance are the towers of the heavenly Jerusalem. On the wings
+other groups are coming up to adore the Lamb; on the left those who have
+laboured for the Kingdom of the Lord by worldly deeds--the soldiers of
+Christ led by St George, St Sebastian, and St Michael, the patron saints
+of the old Flemish guilds, followed by emperors and kings--a goodly
+company. Beyond the soldiers and princes, on the left, are the righteous
+judges, also on horseback. In front of them, on a splendidly caparisoned
+gray, rides a mild, benevolent old man in blue velvet trimmed with fur.
+This is the likeness of Hubert Van Eyck, painted after his death by his
+brother John, and John himself is in the group, clothed in black, with a
+shrewd, sharp countenance. On the self-renunciation have served the Lamb
+in the spirit, hermits and pilgrims, among them St Christopher, St
+Anthony, St Paul the hermit, Mary Magdalene, and St Mary of Egypt. A
+compartment underneath, which represented hell, finished the whole--yet
+only the whole on one side, for the wings when closed presented another
+series of finely thought-out and finished pictures--the Annunciation;
+figures of Micah and Zechariah; statues of the two St Johns, with the
+likenesses of the donors who gave to the world so great a work of art,
+kneeling humbly side by side, the burgomaster somewhat mean-looking in
+such company in spite of the proof of his liberality, but his wife noble
+enough in feature and expression to have been the originator of this
+glory of early Flemish painting. The upper part of the picture is
+painted on a gold ground, round the central figure of the Lamb is vivid
+green grass with masses of trees and flowers--indeed there is much
+lovely landscape no longer indicated by a rock or a bush, but betokening
+close observation of nature, whether in a fruitful valley, or a rocky
+defile, or mountain ridges with fleecy clouds overhead. The expression
+of the immense number of figures is as varied and characteristic as
+their grouping.[2]
+
+Hubert Van Eyck died while this work was in progress, and it was
+finished by his brother John six years after Hubert's death. When one
+thinks of the intense application and devotion which such a work costs,
+and recalls the bronze gates of St John that occupied Lorenzo Ghiberti
+49 years, and when we read, as we shall read a few chapters farther on,
+of large paintings which were begun and ended in so many days--even so
+many hours, one can better understand what is the essential difference
+between the works of the early and the later painters, a difference
+which no skill, no power even can bridge over. John Van Eyck, who had
+lived late enough to have departed from the painting of sacred pictures
+alone, so that he left portraits and an otter hunt among his works, is
+three times represented in our National Gallery, in three greatly
+esteemed portraits, one a double portrait, believed to be the likenesses
+of the painter and his wife, standing hand in hand with a terrier dog
+at their feet.
+
+Gossaert, called de Mabuse from his native town of Mabeuze, sometimes
+signing his name Joannes Malbodius, followed in the steps of the Van
+Eycks, particularly in his great picture of the 'Adoration of the
+Kings,' which is at Castle Howard, the seat of the Earl of Carlisle.
+Mabuse was in England and painted the children of Henry VII, in a
+picture, which is at Hampton Court. There is a picture in the palace of
+Holyrood, Edinburgh, which has been attributed to Mabuse. It represents
+on the sides of a triptych or diptych (somewhat like a folding screen)
+James III. and his queen with attendants. The fur on the queen's dress
+displays already that marvellous technical skill for which Flemish
+painting is so celebrated.
+
+Hans Memling belonged to Bruges. There is a tradition of him, which is
+to a certain extent disproven, that he was a poor soldier relieved by
+the hospital of St John, Bruges, and that in gratitude he executed for
+the hospital the well-known reliquary of St Ursula. However it might
+have originated, this is the most noted work of a painter, who was
+distinguished frequently by his minute missal-like painting (he was also
+an illuminator of missals), in which he would introduce fifteen hundred
+small figures in a picture two feet eight inches, by six feet five
+inches in size, and work out every detail with the utmost niceness and
+care. The reliquary, or 'chasse,' is a wooden coffer or shrine about
+four feet in length, its style and form those of a rich Gothic church,
+its purpose to hold an arm of the saint. The whole exterior is covered
+with miniatures by Memling, nearly the whole of them giving incidents in
+the legendary history of St Ursula, a 'virgin princess of Brittany,' or
+of England, who, setting out with eleven thousand companions, her lover,
+and an escort of knights on a pilgrimage to Rome, was, with her whole
+company, met and murdered, by a horde of heathen Huns, when they had
+reached Cologne, on their return. My readers may be aware that the
+supposed bones of the virgins and St Ursula form the ghastly adornment
+of the church founded in her honour at Cologne. It is absolutely filled
+with bones, built into the walls, stowed under the pavement, ranged in
+glass cases about the choir. Hans Memling's is a pleasanter
+commemoration of St Ursula.
+
+Quintin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, was born at Louvain about
+1460. Though he worked first as a smith he is said by Kugler to have
+belonged to a family of painters, which somewhat takes from the romance,
+though it adds to the probability of his story. Another painter in
+Antwerp having offered the hand and dowry of his daughter--beloved by
+Quintin Matsys--as a prize to the painter who should paint the best
+picture in a competition for her hand, the doughty smith took up the
+art, entered the lists, and carried off the maiden and her portion from
+all his more experienced rivals. The vitality of the legend is indicated
+by the inscription on a tablet to the memory of Quintin Matsys in the
+Cathedral, Antwerp. The Latin inscription reads thus in English:
+
+    'Twas love connubial taught the smith to paint,'
+
+Quintin Matsys lived and died a respected burgher of Antwerp, a member
+of the great Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke. He was twice married,
+and had thirteen children.
+
+Whatever might have been his source of inspiration, Quintin Matsys was
+an apt scholar. His 'Descent from the Cross,' now in the Museum,
+Antwerp, was _the_ 'Descent from the Cross,' and _the_ picture in the
+Cathedral, until superseded by Rubens' masterpiece on the same subject.
+Still Quintin Matsys version remains, and is in some respects an
+unsurpassed picture. There is a traditional grouping of this Divine
+tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the
+Lord is supported by two venerable old men--Joseph of Arimathea and
+Nicodemus--while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the
+Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full
+of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos. For this
+picture Quintin Matsys--popular painter as he was--got only three
+hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, of course,
+the value of money was much greater in those days). The Joiners'
+Company, for whom he painted the 'Descent from the Cross,' sold the
+picture to the City of Antwerp for five times the original amount, and
+it is said Queen Elizabeth offered the City nearly twenty times the
+first sum for it, in vain.
+
+Quintin Matsys painted frequently half-length figures of the Virgin and
+Child, an example of which is in the National Gallery. He excelled in
+the 'figure painting' of familiar subjects, then just beginning to be
+established, affording a token of the direction which the future
+eminence of the Flemish painters would take. One of his famous pictures
+of this kind is 'The Misers,' in the Queen's collection at Windsor. Two
+figures in the Flemish costume of the time, are seated at a table;
+before them are a heap of money and a book, in which one is writing with
+his right hand, while he tells down the money with his left. The faces
+express craft and cupidity. The details of the ink-horn on the table,
+and the bird on its perch behind, have the Flemish graphic exactness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
+1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
+BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530.
+
+
+I have come to the period when Italian art is divided into many
+schools--Paduan, Venetian, Umbrian, Florentine, Roman, Bolognese, etc.,
+etc. With the schools and their definitions I do not mean to meddle,
+except it may be to mention to which school a great painter belonged.
+Another difficulty meets me here. I have been trying so far as I could
+to give the representative painters in the order of time. I can no
+longer follow this rule strictly, and the grouping of this chapter is
+made on the principle of leading my readers up by some of the
+predecessors who linked the older to the later Italian painters, and by
+some of the contemporaries of these later painters, to that central
+four, Lionardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, who
+occupy so great a place in the history of art.
+
+In the brothers Bellini and their native Venice, we must first deal with
+that excellence of colouring for which the Venetian painters were
+signally noted, while they comparatively neglected and underrated
+drawing. A somewhat fanciful theory has been started, that as Venice,
+Holland, and England have been distinguished for colour in art, and as
+all those States are by the sea, so a sea atmosphere has something to do
+with a passion for colour. Within more reasonable bounds, in reference
+to the Venetians, is the consideration that no colouring is richer,
+mellower, more exquisitely tinted than that which belongs to the blue
+Italian sky over the blue Adriatic, with those merged shades of violet,
+green, and amber, and that magical soft haze which has to do with a
+moist climate.
+
+The two brothers Gentile and Gian or John Bellini, the latter the more
+famous of the two, were the sons of an old Venetian painter, with regard
+to whom the worthy speech is preserved, that he said it was like the
+Tuscans for son to beat father, and he hoped, in God's name, that
+Giovanni or Gian would outstrip him, and Gentile, the elder, outstrip
+both. The brothers worked together and were true and affectionate
+brothers, encouraging and appreciating each other.
+
+Gentile was sent by the Doge at the request of the Sultan--either
+Mahommed II, or Bajazet II., to Constantinople, where Gentile Bellini
+painted the portrait of the Sultan and the Sultana his mother, now in
+the British Museum. The painter also painted the head of John the
+Baptist in a charger as an offering--only too suitable--from him to the
+Grand Turk. The legend goes on to tell that in the course of the
+presentation of the gift, an incident occurred which induced Gentile
+Bellini to quit the Ottoman Court with all haste. The Sultan had
+criticized the appearance of the neck in John the Baptist's severed
+head, and when Gentile ventured to defend his work, the Sultan proceeded
+to prove the correctness of his criticism, by drawing his scimitar and
+cutting off at a stroke the head of a kneeling slave, and pointing to
+the spouting blood and the shrinking muscle, gave the horrified painter
+a lesson in practical anatomy. On Gentile's return from the East, he was
+pensioned by his State, and lived on painting, till he was eighty years
+of age, dying in 1501.
+
+Gian Bellini is said to have obtained by a piece of deceit, which is not
+in keeping with his manly and honourable character, the secret,
+naturally coveted by a Venetian, of mixing colours with resin and oil. A
+Venetian painter had brought the secret from Flanders, and communicated
+it to a friend, who, in turn, communicated it to a third painter, and
+was murdered by that third painter for his pains, so greedy and criminal
+was the craving, not only to possess, but to be as far as possible the
+sole possessor of, the grand discovery. Gian Bellini was much less
+guilty, if he were really guilty. Disguised as a Venetian nobleman, he
+proposed to sit for his portrait to that Antonella who first brought the
+secret from Flanders, and while Antonella worked with unsuspicious
+openness, Gian Bellini watched the process and stole the secret.
+
+Gian Bellini lived to the age of ninety, and had among his admirers the
+poet Ariosto and Albrecht Duerer. The latter saw Gian Bellini in his age,
+and said of him, when foolish mockers had risen up to scout at the old
+man, and his art now become classic, 'He is very old, but he is still
+the best of our painters.' Gian Bellini had illustrious pupils,
+including in their number Titian and Giorgione.
+
+The portraits of Gentile and Gian, which are preserved in a painting by
+Gian, show Gentile fair-complexioned and red-haired, and Gian with dark
+hair.
+
+Gian Bellini is considered to have been less gifted with imagination
+than some of his great brother artists; but he has proved himself a man
+of high moral sense, and while he stopped short at the boundary between
+the seen and the unseen, it is certain he must still have painted with
+much of 'the divine patience' and devout consecration of all his powers,
+and of every part of his work, which are the attributes of the earliest
+Italian painters. When he and his brother began to paint, Venetian art
+had already taken its distinctive character for open-air effects, rich
+scenic details in architecture, furniture and dress (said to be
+conspicuous in commercial communities), and a growing tendency to
+portraiture. Gian went with the tide, but he guided it to noble results.
+His simplicity and good sense, with his purity and dignity of mind, were
+always present. He introduced into his pictures 'singing boys, dancing
+cherubs, glittering thrones, and dewy flowers,' pressing the outer world
+into his service and that of religious art. It is said also that his
+Madonnas seem 'amiable beings imbued with a lofty grace;' while his
+saints are 'powerful and noble forms.' But he never descended to the
+paltry or the vulgar. He knew from the depths of his own soul how to
+invest a face with moral grandeur. Especially in his representations of
+our Saviour Gian Bellini 'displays a perception of moral power and
+grandeur seldom equalled in the history of art.' The example given is
+that of the single figure of the Lord in the Dresden Gallery, where the
+Son of God, without nimbus, or glory, stands forth as the 'ideal of
+elevated humanity.'
+
+The greater portion of Gian Bellini's pictures remain in the churches
+and galleries of Venice. But the first great work at which the two
+brothers in their youth worked in company--the painting of the Hall of
+Council in the palace of the Doge, with a series of historical and
+legendary pictures of the Venetian wars with the Emperor Frederick
+Barbarossa (1177), including the Doge Ziani's receiving from the Pope
+the gold ring with which the Doge espoused the Adriatic, in token of
+perpetual dominion over the sea--was unfortunately destroyed by fire in
+1577. Giovanni Bellini's greatest work, now at St Salvatore, is Christ
+at Emmaus, with Venetian senators and a Turkish dragoman introduced as
+spectators of the risen Lord.
+
+Of another great work at Vicenza, painted in Gian Bellini's old age,
+when neither his skill nor his strength was abated, 'The Baptism of
+Christ,' Dean Alford writes thus:
+
+     'Let us remain long and look earnestly, for there is indeed much
+     to be seen. That central figure, standing with hands folded on
+     His bosom, so gentle, so majestic, so perfect in blameless
+     humanity, oh what labour of reverent thought; what toil of
+     ceaseless meditation; what changes of fair purpose, oscillating
+     into clearest vision of ideal truth, must it have cost the great
+     painter, before he put forth that which we see now! It is as
+     impossible to find aught but love and majesty in the Divine
+     countenance, as it is to discover a blemish on the complexion of
+     that body, which seems to give forth light from itself, as He
+     stands in obedience, fulfilling all righteousness.
+
+    'And even on the accessories to this figure, we see the same
+    loving and reverent toil bestowed. The cincture, where alone the
+    body is hidden from view, is no web of man's weaving; or, if it
+    were, it is of hers whose heart was full of divine thoughts as
+    she wove: so bright and clear is the tint, so exquisitely
+    careful and delicate every fold where light may play or colour
+    vary. And look under the sacred feet, on the ground blessed by
+    their pressure; no dash of hurrying brush has been there: less
+    than a long day's light, eve, did not suffice to give in
+    individual shape and shade every minutest pebble and mote of
+    that shore of Jordan. Every one of them was worth painting, for
+    we are viewing them as in the light of His presence who made
+    them all and knew them all.
+
+    'And now let us pass to the other figures: to that living and
+    glowing angelic group in the left hand of the picture. Three of
+    the heavenly host are present, variously affected by that which
+    they behold. The first, next the spectator, in the corner of the
+    picture, is standing in silent adoration, tender and gentle in
+    expression, the hands together, but only the points of the
+    fingers touching, his very reverence being chastened by angelic
+    modesty; the second turns on that which he sees a look of
+    earnest inquiry, but kneels as he looks; and indeed that which
+    he sees is one of the things which angels desire to look into.
+    The third, a majestic herald-like figure, stands, as one
+    speaking, looking to the spectator, with his right hand on his
+    garment, and his left out as in demonstration, unmistakeably
+    saying to us who look on, "Behold what love is here!" Then,
+    hardly noticing what might well be much noticed, the grand dark
+    figure of the Baptist on the right, let us observe how
+    beautifully and accurately all the features of the landscape are
+    given.'
+
+Of the same work another critic records: 'The attendant angels in this
+work (signed by the artist) are of special interest, instinct with an
+indefinable purity and depth of reverential tenderness elsewhere hardly
+rivalled. But the picture, like that in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, with
+which it is nearly contemporary, is almost more interesting from the
+astonishing truth and beauty of its landscape portions. _These_ form
+here a feature more important, perhaps, than in any work of that period;
+the stratification and form of the rocks in the foreground, the palms
+and other trees relieved against the lucid distance, and the
+mountain-ranges of tender blue beyond, are as much beyond praise for
+their beauty and their truth, as they have been beyond imitation from
+the solidity and transparent strength of their execution! The minute
+finish is Nature's, and the colouring more gem-like than gems.'
+
+No praise can exceed that bestowed on Gian Bellini's colouring for its
+intensity and transparency. 'Many of his draperies are like crystal of
+the clearest and deepest colour,' declares an authority; and another
+states' his best works have a clear jewel brightness, an internal
+gem-like fire such as warms a summer twilight. The shadows are intense
+and yet transparent, like the Adriatic waves when they lie out of the
+sun under the palace bridges.'
+
+Portrait-painting, just beginning, was established in Venice, its later
+stronghold, by Gian Bellini. His truthful portrait of the Doge Loredano,
+one of the earliest of that series of Doges' portraits which once hung
+in state in the ducal palace, is now in our National Gallery.
+
+Of Gentile Bellini, whose work was softer, but less vigorous than his
+brother's, the best painting extant is that at Milan of St Mark
+preaching at Alexandria, in which the painter showed how he had profited
+by his residence at Constantinople in the introduction of much rich
+Turkish costume, and of an animal unknown to Europe at the time--a
+camelopard.
+
+Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua. He was the son of a farmer. His
+early history, according to tradition, is very similar to that of
+Giotto. Just as Cimabue adopted Giotto, Squarcione, a painter who had
+travelled in Italy and Greece, and made a great collection of antiques,
+from which he taught in a famous school of painters, adopted Andrea
+Mantegna at the early age of ten years. It was long believed that
+Mantegna, in the end, forfeited the favour of his master by marrying
+Nicolosa Bellini, the sister of Gentile and Gian Bellini, whose father
+was the great rival of Squarcione; and farther, that Mantegna's style of
+painting had been considered Bellini. Modern researches, which have
+substituted another surname for that of Bellini as the surname of Andrea
+Mantegna's wife, contradict this story.
+
+Andrea Mantegna, a man of much energy and fancy, entered young into the
+service of the Gonzaga lords of Mantua, receiving from them a salary of
+thirty pounds a year and a piece of land, on which the painter built a
+house, and painted it within and without--the latter one of the first
+examples of artistic waste, followed later by Tintoret and Veronese,
+regardless of the fact that painting could not survive in the open air
+of Northern Italy.
+
+Andrea Mantegna had his home at Mantua, except when he was called to
+Rome to paint for the Pope, Innocent VIII. An anecdote is told by Mrs
+Jameson of this commission. It seems the Pope's payments were irregular;
+and one day when he visited his painter at work, and his Holiness asked
+the meaning of a certain allegorical female figure in the design, Andrea
+answered, with somewhat audacious point, that he was trying to
+represent _Patience_. The Pope, understanding the allusion, paid the
+painter in his own coin, by remarking in reply, 'If you would place
+Patience in fitting company, you would paint Discretion at her side.'
+Andrea took the hint, said no more, and when his work was finished not
+only received his money, but was munificently rewarded.
+
+Andrea Mantegna had two sons and a daughter. One of his sons painted
+with his father, and, after Andrea Mantegna's death, completed some of
+his pictures.
+
+Andrea Mantegna's early study of antique sculpture moulded his whole
+life's work. He took great delight in modelling, in perspective, of
+which he made himself a master, and in chiaroscuro, or light and shade.
+Had his powers of invention and grace not kept pace with his skill, he
+would have been a stiff and formal worker; as it was, he carried the
+austerity of sculpture into painting, and his greatest work, the
+'Triumph of Julius Caesar,' would have been better suited for the
+chiselled frieze of a temple than it is for the painted frieze of the
+hall of a palace. Yet he was a great leader and teacher in art, and the
+true proportions of his drawing are grand, if his colouring is harsh. I
+am happy to say that Mantegna's 'Triumph of Julius Caesar' is in England
+at Hampton Court, having been bought from the Duke of Mantua by Charles
+I. These cartoons, nine in number, are sketches in water-colour or
+distemper on paper fixed on cloth. They are faded and dilapidated, as
+they well may be, considering the slightness of the materials and their
+age, about four hundred years. At the same time, they are, after the
+cartoons of Raphael (which formed part of the same art collection of
+Charles I.), perhaps the most valuable and interesting relic of art in
+England.
+
+The series of the 'Triumph' contain the different parts, originally
+separated by pillars, of a long and splendid procession. There are
+trumpeters and standard bearers, the statues of the gods borne aloft,
+battering-rams and heaps of glittering armour, trophies of conquest in
+huge vases filled with coin, garlanded oxen, and elephants. The second
+last of the series, presents the ranks of captives forming part of the
+show, rebellious men, submissive women, and unconscious children--a
+moving picture. In the last of the series comes the great conqueror in
+his chariot, a youth in the crowd following him, carrying his banner, on
+which is inscribed Caesar's notable despatch, 'Veni, vidi, vici;' 'I
+came, I saw, I conquered.'
+
+Another of Mantegna's best pictures is in distemper--in which, and on
+fresco, Mantegna chiefly painted,--and is in the Louvre, Paris. It is
+the Madonna of Victory, so called from its being painted to commemorate
+the deliverance of Italy from the French army under Charles VIII., a
+name which has acquired a sardonic meaning from the ultimate destination
+of the picture. This picture--which represents the Virgin and Child on a
+throne, in an arbour of fruit and flowers, between the archangels,
+Michael and St Maurice, in complete armour, with the patron saints of
+Mantua and the infant St John in the front, and the Marquis Ludovico of
+Mantua and his wife, Isabella D'Este, kneeling to return thanks--was
+painted by Mantegna at the age of seventy years; and, as if the art of
+the man had mellowed with time, it is the softest and tenderest of his
+pictures in execution. A beautiful Madonna of Mantegna's, still later in
+time, is in the National Gallery.
+
+When Mantegna was sixty years old he took up the art of engraving, and
+prosecuted it with zeal and success, being one of the earliest painters
+who engraved his own pictures, and this accomplishment spread them
+abroad a hundredfold.
+
+Domenico Ghirlandajo was properly Domenico Bicordi, but inherited from
+his father, a goldsmith in Florence,[3] the by-name of Ghirlandajo or
+Garland-maker--a distinctive appellation said to have been acquired by
+the elder man from his skill in making silver garlands for the heads of
+Florentine women and children. Domenico Ghirlandajo worked at his
+father's craft till he was twenty-four years of age, when, having in the
+mean time evinced great cleverness in taking the likenesses of the
+frequenters of Ghirlandajo the elder's shop, the future painter
+abandoned the goldsmith's trade for art pure and simple. He soon
+vindicated the wisdom of the step which he had taken by giving proofs of
+something of the strength of Masaccio, united with a reflection of the
+feeling of Fra Angelico.
+
+Ghirlandajo was summoned soon to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel,
+afterwards to be so glorious; but his greatest works were done in the
+prime of his manhood, in his native city, Florence, where he was chosen
+as the teacher of Michael Angelo, who was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo for
+three years.
+
+While still in the flower of his age and crowned with golden opinions,
+being, it is said with effusion, 'the delight of his city,' Ghirlandajo
+died after a short illness, in Ghirlandajo's time Florence had reached
+her meridian, and her citizens outvied each other in the magnificence of
+their gifts to their fair mother city. Ghirlandajo was fitted to be
+their painter; himself a generous-spirited artist, in the exuberance of
+life and power, he wished that his fellow-citizens would give him all
+the walls of the city to cover with frescoes. He was content with the
+specified sum for his painting, desiring more the approbation of his
+employers than additional crowns. His genius lying largely in the
+direction of portrait painting, he introduced frequently the portraits
+of contemporaries, causing them to figure as spectators of his sacred
+scenes. One of these contemporaries thus presented, was Amerigo
+Vespucci, who was to give his name to a continent. Another was a
+Florentine beauty, a woman of rank, Ginevra de Benci.
+
+Ghirlandajo was lavish in his employment of rich Florentine costumes and
+architecture. He even made the legends of the saints and the histories
+of the Bible appear as if they had happened under the shadow of
+Brunelleschi's duomo and Giotto's campanile, and within sound of the
+flow of the Arno. In the peculiar colouring used in fresco painting
+Ghirlandajo excelled.
+
+He painted a chapel for a Florentine citizen, Francesco Sasetti, in the
+church of the Trinita, Florence, with scenes from the life of St
+Francis. Of these, the death of St Francis, surrounded by the sorrowing
+monks of his order, with the figures of Francesco Sasetti and his wife,
+Madonna Nera, on one side of the picture, is considered the best. As a
+curious illustration of the modernizing practice of Ghirlandajo, he has
+painted an old priest at the foot of the bier, chanting the litanies for
+the dying, with spectacles on his nose, the earliest known
+representation of these useful instruments.
+
+Ghirlandajo painted during four years the choir of the church of Santa
+Maria Novella, Florence, for one of the great Florentine benefactors,
+Giovanni Tornabuone, and there are to be seen some of Ghirlandajo's
+finest frescoes from the history of John the Baptist and the Virgin.
+
+A Madonna and Child with angels in the National Gallery is attributed to
+Ghirlandajo.
+
+Francesco Francia, or Il Francia, was born at Bologna, and was the son
+of a carpenter, whose surname was Raibaloni, but Francesco assumed the
+name of his master, a goldsmith, and worked himself at a goldsmith's
+trade till he was forty years of age. Indeed he may be said never to
+have relinquished his connection with the trade, and certainly he was no
+more ashamed of it than of his calling as a painter, for he signed
+himself indiscriminately 'goldsmith' and 'painter,' and sometimes
+whimsically put 'goldsmith' to his paintings and 'painter' to his
+jewellery. He was a famous designer of dies for coins and medals, and it
+is quite probable, as a countryman of his own has sought to prove, that
+he was the celebrated type-cutter, known as 'Francesco da Bologna.' But
+it is with Francesco '_pictor_' that we have to do.
+
+Though he only began to prosecute the painter's art in middle age, he
+rose with remarkable rapidity to eminence, was the great painter of
+Lombardy in his day, rivalling Squarcione, Mantegna's teacher in his
+school, which numbered two hundred scholars, and becoming the founder of
+the early Bolognese school of painters.
+
+Francia is said to have been very handsome in person, with a kindly
+disposition and an agreeable manner. He was on terms of cordial
+friendship with Raphael, then in his youth, and thirty years Il
+Francia's junior. Il Francia addressed an enthusiastic sonnet to
+Raphael, and there is extant a letter of Raphael's to Il Francia,
+excusing himself for not sending his friend Raphael's portrait, and
+making an exchange of sketches, that of his 'Nativity' for the drawing
+of Il Francia's 'Judith;' while it was to Il Francia's care that Raphael
+committed his picture of St Cecilia, when it was first sent to Bologna.
+These relations between the men and their characters throw discredit on
+the tradition that Il Francia died from jealous grief caused by the
+sight of Raphael's 'St Cecilia.' As Il Francia was seventy years of age
+at the time of his death, one may well attribute it to physical causes.
+Il Francia had at least one son, and another kinsman, painters, whose
+paintings were so good as to be occasionally confounded with those of Il
+Francia.
+
+Il Francia is thought to have united, in his works, a certain calm
+sedateness and frank sincerity to the dreamy imaginativeness of some of
+his contemporaries. His finest works are considered to be the frescoes
+from the life of St Cecilia in the church of St Cecilia at Bologna.
+
+Of a Madonna and Child, by Francia, at Bologna, I shall write down
+another of Dean Alford's descriptions,--many of which I have given for
+this, among other reasons, that these descriptions are not technical or
+professional, but the expression of the ardent admiration and grateful
+comprehension of a sympathetic spectator. 'He,' speaking of the Divine
+Child, 'is lying in simple nakedness on a rich red carpet, and is
+supported by a white pillar, over which the carpet passes. Of these
+accessories every thread is most delicately and carefully painted; no
+slovenly washes of meretricious colour where He is to be served, before
+whom all things are open; no perfunctory sparing of toil in serving Him
+who has given us all that is best. On his right hand kneels the Virgin
+Mother in adoration, her very face a magnificat--praise, lowliness,
+confidence; next to her, Joseph, telling by his looks the wonderful
+story, deeply but simply. Two beautiful angels kneel, one on either
+side--hereafter, perhaps, to kneel in like manner in the tomb. Their
+faces seemed to me notable for that which I have no doubt the painter
+intended to express,--the pure abstraction of reverent adoration,
+unmingled with human sympathies. The face and figure of the Divine
+Infant are full of majesty, as he holds his hands in blessing towards
+the spectator, who symbolizes the world which He has come to save. Close
+to him on the ground, on his right branch in trustful repose; on his
+left springs a plant of the meadow-trefoil. Thus lightly and reverently
+has the master touched the mystery of the Blessed Trinity: the goldfinch
+symbolizing by its colours, the trefoil by the form of its leaf.'
+
+In our own National Gallery is a picture by Il Francia of the enthroned
+Virgin and Child and her mother, St Anne, who is presenting a peach to
+the infant Christ; at the foot of the throne is the little St John; to
+the right and left are St Paul with the sword, St Sebastian bound to a
+pillar and pierced with arrows, and St Lawrence with the emblematical
+grid-iron, etc. etc. Opposite this picture hangs, what once formed part
+of it, a solemn, sorrowful Pieta, as the Italians call a picture
+representing the dead Redeemer mourned over by the Virgin and by the
+other holy women. These pictures were bought by our Government from the
+Duke of Lucca for three thousand five hundred pounds.
+
+Fra Bartolommeo. We come to a second gentle monk, not unlike Fra
+Angelico in his nature, but far less happy than Fra Angelico, in having
+been born in stormy times. Fra Bartolommeo, called also Baccio della
+Porta, or Bartholomew of the gate, from the situation of his lodgings
+when a young man, but scarcely known in Italy by any other name than
+that of Il Frate, or the Friar, was born near Florence, and trained from
+his boyhood to be a painter. In his youth, however, a terrible public
+event convulsed Florence, and revolutionized Baccio della Porta's life.
+He had been employed to paint in that notable Dominican convent of St
+Mark, where Savonarola, its devoted friar, was denouncing the sins of
+the times, including the profligate luxury of the nobles and the
+degradation of the representatives of the Church. Carried away by the
+fervour and sincerity of the speaker, Baccio joined the enthusiasts who
+cast into a burning pile the instruments of pride, vanity, and godless
+intellect denounced by the preacher. Baccio's sacrifice to the flaming
+heap of splendid furniture and dress, and worldly books, was all his
+designs from profane subjects and studies of the undraped figure. A
+little later Savonarola was excommunicated by the Pope and perished as
+a martyr; and Baccio, timid from his natural temper, distracted by
+doubt, and altogether horror-stricken, took a monk's vows, and entered
+the same convent of St Mark, where for four years he never touched a
+pencil.
+
+At the request of his superior Fra Bartolommeo painted again, and when
+Raphael visited Florence, and came with all his conquering sweetness and
+graciousness to greet the monk in his cell, something of Il Frate's old
+love for his art, and delight in its exercise, returned. He even visited
+Rome, but there his health failed him, and the great works of Lionardo,
+Michael Angelo, and Raphael, when he compared his own with theirs,
+seemed to crush and overwhelm him. But he painted better for his visit
+to Rome, even as he had painted better for his intimacy with Raphael.
+Nay, it is said Raphael himself painted better on account of his
+brotherly regard for, and confidence in, Fra Bartolommeo.
+
+Fra Bartolommeo died aged forty-eight years. Among his best pupils was a
+nun of St Catherine's, known as Suor Plautilla.
+
+To Il Frate, as a painter, is attributed great softness and harmony, and
+even majesty, though, like Fra Angelico, he was often deficient in
+strength. He was great in the management of draperies, for the better
+study of which he is said to have invented the lay figure. He indulged
+in the introduction into his pictures of rich architecture. He was fond
+of painting boy-angels--in which he excelled--playing frequently on
+musical instruments, or holding a canopy over the Virgin. Very few of
+his works are out of Italy; the most are in Florence, especially in the
+Pitti Palace. His two greatest works are the Madonna della Misericordia,
+or the Madonna of Mercy, at Lucca, where the Virgin stands with
+outstretched arms pleading for the suppliants, whom she shelters under
+the canopy, and who look to her as she looks to her Son,--and the grand
+single figure of St Mark, with his Gospel in his hand, in the Pitti
+Palace, Florence. Sir David Wilkie said of the Madonna of Mercy, 'that
+it contained the merits of Raphael, of Titian, of Rembrandt, and of
+Rubens.'
+
+Andrea Vanucchi, commonly called Andrea del Sarto, from the occupation
+of his father, who was a tailor (in Italian, _sarto_), was born at
+Florence in 1488. He was first a goldsmith, but soon turned painter,
+winning early the commendatory title of 'Andrea senza errori,' or
+'Andrea the Faultless.' His life is a miserable and tragic history. In
+the early flush of his genius and industry, with its just crown of fame
+and success, he conceived a passion for a beautiful but worthless woman,
+whom, in spite of the opposition of his friends, he married. She
+rendered his home degraded and wretched, and his friends and scholars
+fell off from him. In disgust he quitted Florence, and entered the
+service of Francis I, of France; but his wife, for whom his regard was a
+desperate infatuation, imperiously summoned him back to Florence, to
+which he returned, bringing with him a large sum of money, entrusted to
+him by the king for the purchase of works of art. Instigated by his
+wife, Andrea del Sarto used this money for his, or rather her, purposes,
+and dared not return to France. Even in his native Florence he was
+loaded with reproach and shame. He died of the plague at the age of
+fifty-five years, according to tradition, plundered and abandoned in his
+extremity by the base woman for whom he had sacrificed principle and
+honour. We may read the grievous story of Andrea del Sarto, written by
+one of the greatest of England's modern poets.
+
+As may be imagined, Andrea del Sarto's excellence lay in the charm of
+his execution. His works were deficient in earnestness and high feeling,
+and some will have it, that, evilly haunted as he was, he perpetually
+painted in his Madonnas the beautiful but base-souled face of the woman
+who ruined him. Andrea del Sarto's best works are in Florence,
+particularly in the cloisters of the convent of the Annunziata. In the
+court of the same convent is his famous Riposo (or rest of the Holy
+Family on their way to Egypt), which is known as the 'Madonna of the
+Sack,' from the circumstance of Joseph in the picture leaning against a
+sack. This picture has held a high place in art for hundreds of years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+LIONARDO DA VINCI, 1452-1519--MICHAEL ANGELO, 1475-1564--RAPHAEL,
+1483-1520--TITIAN, 1477-1566.
+
+
+We have arrived at the triumph of art, not, indeed, in unconsciousness
+and devotion, but in fulness and completeness, as shown in the works of
+four of the greatest painters and men whom the world ever saw. Of the
+first, Lionardo da Vinci, born at Vinci in the neighbourhood of
+Florence, 1452, it may be said that the many-sidedness which
+characterized Italians--above all Italians of his day--reached its
+height in him. Not only was he a painter, a sculptor, an architect, and
+engineer, but also one of the boldest speculators of the generation
+which gave birth to Columbus, and was not less original and ingenious
+than he was universally accomplished--an Admirable Crichton among
+painters. There is a theory that this many-sidedness is a proof of the
+greatest men, indicating a man who might have been great in any way,
+who, had his destiny not found and left him a painter, would have been
+equally great as a philosopher, a man of science, a poet, or a
+statesman. It may be so; but the life of Lionardo tends also to
+illustrate the disadvantage of too wide a grasp and diffusion of genius.
+Beginning much and finishing little, not because he was idle or fickle,
+but because his schemes were so colossal and his aims so high, he spent
+his time in preparation for the attainment of perfect excellence, which
+eluded him. Lionardo was the pioneer, the teacher of others, rather than
+the complete fulfiller of his own dreams; and the life of the proud,
+passionate man was, to him self mortification. This result might, in a
+sense, have been avoided; but Lionardo, great as he was, proved also one
+of those unfortunate men whose noblest efforts are met and marred by
+calamities which could have hardly been foreseen or prevented.
+
+Lionardo da Vinci was the son of a notary, and early showed a taste for
+painting as well as for arithmetic and mathematics. He was apprenticed
+to a painter, but he also sedulously studied physics. He is said,
+indeed, to have made marvellous guesses at truth, in chemistry, botany,
+astronomy, and particularly, as helping him in his art, anatomy. He was,
+according to other accounts, a man of noble person, like Ghirlandajo.
+And one can scarcely doubt this who looks at Lionardo's portrait painted
+by himself, or at any engraving from it, and remarks the grand presence
+of the man in his cap and furred cloak; his piercing wistful eyes;
+stately outline of nose; and sensitive mouth, unshaded by his
+magnificent flowing beard.
+
+He was endowed with surprising bodily strength, and was skilled in the
+knightly exercises of riding, fencing, and dancing. He was a lover of
+social pleasure, and inclined to indulge in expensive habits. While a
+lad he amused himself by inventing machines for swimming, diving, and
+flying, as well as a compass, a hygrometer, etc. etc. In a combination
+from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, etc. etc., with which
+his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a
+nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it
+filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer
+selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money. As something
+beyond amusement, Lionardo planned a canal to unite Florence with Pisa
+(while he executed other canals in the course of his life), and
+suggested the daring but not impossible idea of raising _en masse_, by
+means of levers, the old church of San Giovanni, Florence, till it
+should stand several feet above its original level, and so get rid of
+the half-sunken appearance which destroyed the effect of the fine old
+building. He visited the most frequented places, carrying always with
+him his sketch-book, in which to note down his observations; he followed
+criminals to execution in order to witness the pangs of despair; he
+invited peasants to his house and told them laughable stories, that he
+might pick up from their faces the essence of comic expression.[4] A
+mania for truth--alike in great and little things--possessed him.
+
+Lionardo entered young into the service of the Gonzaga family of Milan,
+being, according to one statement, chosen for the office which he was to
+fill, as the first singer in _improvisatore_ of his time (among his
+other inventions he devised a peculiar kind of lyre). He showed no want
+of confidence in asserting his claims to be elected, for after declaring
+the various works he would undertake, he added with regard to
+painting--'I can do what can be done, as well as any man, be he who he
+may.' He received from the Duke a salary of five hundred crowns a year.
+He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works,
+he painted his 'Cenacolo,' or 'Last Supper,' one of the grandest
+pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice,
+in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican
+convent, Milan. The situation was damp, and the material used proved so
+unsuitable for work on plaster, that, even before it was exposed to the
+reverses which in the course of a French occupation of Milan converted
+the refectory into a stable, the colours had altogether faded, and the
+very substance of the picture was crumbling into ruin.
+
+The equestrian statue of the old Duke of Milan by Lionardo excited so
+much delight in its first freshness, that it was carried in triumph
+through the city, and during the progress it was accidentally broken.
+Lionardo began another, but funds failed for its completion, and
+afterwards the French used the original clay model as a target for their
+bowmen.
+
+Lionardo returned to Florence, and found his great rival, Michael
+Angelo, already in the field. Both of the men, conscious of mighty
+gifts, were intolerant of rivalry. To Lionardo especially, as being much
+the elder man, the originator and promoter of many of the new views in
+art which his opponent had adopted, the competition was very
+distasteful, and to Michael Angelo he used the bitter sarcasm which has
+been handed down to us, 'I was famous before you were born.'
+
+Nevertheless Lionardo consented to compete with Michael Angelo for the
+painting in fresco of one side of the council-hall, by the order of the
+gonfaloniere for the year. Lionardo chose for his subject a victory of
+the Florentines over the Milanese, while Michael Angelo took a scene
+from the Pisan campaigns. Not only was the work never done (some say
+partly because Lionardo _would_ delay in order to make experiments in
+oils) on account of political troubles, but the very cartoons of the two
+masters, which all the artists of the day flocked to see, have been
+broken up, dispersed, and lost; and of one only, that of Michael Angelo,
+a small copy remains, while but a fragment from Lionardo's was preserved
+in a copy made by Rubens.
+
+Lionardo went to Rome in the pontificate of Leo X., but there his
+quarrel with Michael Angelo broke out more violently than ever. The Pope
+too, who loved better a gentler, more accommodating spirit, seemed to
+slight Lionardo, and the great painter not only quitted Rome in disgust,
+but withdrew his services altogether from ungrateful Italy.
+
+At Pavia Lionardo was presented to Francis I, of France, who, zealous
+in patronizing art, engaged the painter to follow Francis's fortunes at
+a salary of seven hundred crowns a year. Lionardo spent the remainder of
+his life in France. His health had long been declining before he died,
+aged sixty-seven years, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had risen high in the
+favour of Francis. From this circumstance, and the generous, chivalrous
+nature of the king, there doubtless arose the tradition that Francis
+visited Lionardo on his death-bed; and that, while in the act of gently
+assisting him to raise himself, the painter died in the king's arms.
+Court chronicles do their best to demolish this story, by proving
+Francis to have been at St Germain on the day when Lionardo died at
+Cloux.
+
+Lionardo was never married, and he left what worldly goods he possessed
+to a favourite scholar. Besides his greater works, he filled many MS.
+volumes, some with singularly accurate studies and sketches, maps, plans
+for machines, scores for music (three volumes of these are in the Royal
+Library at Windsor), and some with writing, which is written--probably
+to serve as a sort of cipher--from right to left, instead of from left
+to right. One of his writings is a valuable 'Treatise' on painting;
+other writings are on scientific and philosophic subjects, and in these
+Lionardo is believed to have anticipated some of the discoveries which
+were reached by lines of close reasoning centuries later.
+
+Lionardo's genius as a painter was expressed by his uniting, in the very
+highest degree, truth and imagination. He was the shrewdest observer of
+ordinary life, and he could also realize the higher mysteries and
+profounder feelings of human nature. He drew exceedingly well. Of
+transparent lights and shadows, or chiaroscuro, he was the greatest
+master; but he was not a good colourist. His works are very rare, and
+many which are attributed to him are the pictures of his scholars, for
+he founded one of the great schools of Milan or Lombardy. There is a
+tradition that he was, as Holbein was once believed to be, ambidextrous,
+or capable of using his left hand as well as his right, and that he
+painted with two brushes--one in each hand. Thus more than fully armed,
+Lionardo da Vinci looms out on us like a Titan through the mists of
+centuries, and he preaches to us the simple homily, that not even a
+Titan can command worldly success; that such men must look to ends as
+the reward of their travail, and before undertaking it they must count
+the cost, and be prepared to renounce the luxurious tastes which clung
+to Lionardo, and which were not for him or for such men as he was.
+
+Lionardo's great painting was his 'Last Supper,' of which, happily, good
+copies exist, as well as the wreck of the picture itself. The original
+is now, after it is too late, carefully guarded and protected in its old
+place in the Dominican convent of the Madonna della Grazia, Milan. The
+assembled company sit at a long table, Christ being seated in the
+middle, the disciples forming two separate groups on each side of the
+Saviour. The gradations of age are preserved, from the tender youth of
+John to the grey hairs of Simon; and all the varied emotions of mind,
+from the deepest sorrow and anxiety to the eager desire of revenge, are
+here portrayed. The well-known words of Christ, 'One of you shall betray
+me,' have caused the liveliest emotion. The two groups to the left of
+Christ are full of impassioned excitement, the figures in the first
+turning to the Saviour, those in the second speaking to each
+other,--horror, astonishment, suspicion, doubt, alternating in the
+various expressions. On the other hand, stillness, low whispers,
+indirect observations, are the prevailing expressions in the groups on
+the right. In the middle of the first group sits the betrayer; a
+cunning, sharp profile, he looks up hastily to Christ, as if speaking
+the words, 'Master, is it I?' while, true to the Scriptural account, his
+left hand and Christ's right hand approach, as if unconsciously, the
+dish that stands before them.[5]
+
+A sketch of the head of Christ for the original picture, which has been
+preserved on a torn and soiled piece of paper at Brera, expresses the
+most elevated seriousness, together with Divine gentleness pain on
+account of the faithless disciple, a full presentiment of his own death,
+and resignation to the will of the Father. It gives a faint idea of what
+the master may have accomplished in the finished picture.
+
+During his stay at Florence Lionardo painted a portrait of that Ginevra
+Benci already mentioned as painted by Ghirlandajo; and a still more
+famous portrait by Lionardo was that of Mona Lisa, the wife of his
+friend Giocondo. This picture is also known as 'La Jaconde.' I wish to
+call attention to it because it is the first of four surpassingly
+beautiful portraits of women which four great painters gave in
+succession to the world. The others, to be spoken of afterwards, are
+Raphael's 'Fornarina,' Titian's 'Bella Donna,' and Rubens' 'Straw Hat.'
+About the original of 'La Jaconde' there never has been a mystery such
+as there has been about the others. At this portrait the unsatisfied
+painter worked at intervals for four years, and when he left it he
+pronounced it still unfinished. 'La Jaconde' is now in the Louvre in
+nearly ruined condition, yet a judge says of it that even now 'there is
+something in this wonderful head of the ripest southern beauty, with its
+airy background of a rocky landscape, which exercises a peculiar
+fascination over the mind.'
+
+There is a painting of the Madonna and Child Christ said to be by
+Lionardo, and probably, at least, by one of his school, and which
+belongs, I think, to the Duke of Buccleuch, and was exhibited lately
+among the works of the old masters. The group has at once something
+touching and exalted in its treatment. The Divine Child in the Mother's
+arms is strangely attracted by the sight of a cross, and turns towards
+it with ineffable longing, while the Virgin Mother, with a pang of
+foreboding, clasping the child in her arms, seeks to draw him back.
+
+The fragment of the cartoon in which Lionardo competed with Michael
+Angelo, may be held to survive in the fine painting by Rubens called
+'the Battle of the Standard.' Of a famous Madonna and St Anne, by
+Lionardo, the original cartoon in black chalk is preserved under glass
+in our Royal Academy.[6]
+
+Michael Angelo Buonarroti, born at Castel Caprese near Tuscany, 1475, is
+the next of these universal geniuses, a term which we are accustomed to
+hold in contempt, because we have only seen it exemplified in parody.
+After Lionardo, indeed, Michael Angelo, though he was also painter,
+sculptor, architect, engineer, poet, musician, might almost be regarded
+as restricted in his pursuits, yet still so manifold was he, that men
+have loved to make a play upon his name and call him 'Michael the
+angel,' and to speak of him as of a king among men.
+
+Michael Angelo was of noble descent, and though his ancient house had
+fallen into comparative poverty, his father was mayor or podesta of
+Chiusi, and governor of the castle of Chiusi and Caprese. Michael Angelo
+was destined for the profession of the law, but so early vindicated his
+taste for art, that at the age of thirteen years he was apprenticed to
+Ghirlandajo. Lorenzo the Magnificent was then ruling Florence, and he
+had made a collection of antique models in his palace and gardens, and
+constituted it an academy for young artists. In this academy Michael
+Angelo developed a strong bias for sculpture, and won the direct
+patronage of the Medici.
+
+To this period of his life belong two characteristic anecdotes. In a
+struggle with a fellow-student, Michael Angelo received a blow from a
+mallet in his face, which, breaking bone and cartilage, lent to his nose
+the rugged bend,
+
+    'The bar of Michael Angelo.'
+
+An ill-advised member of the Medician house, while entertaining a party
+of guests during a snowstorm, sent out the indignant artist to make a
+snow man within sight of the palace windows. These anecdotes bear
+indirectly on the ruling qualities of Michael Angelo--qualities so
+integral that they are wrought into his marble and painted on his
+canvas--proud independence and energy.
+
+Before going farther I wish to guard against a common misapprehension of
+Michael Angelo--that he was a haughty, arrogant man, absolutely narrow
+in his half-idolatrous, half-human worship of art. Michael Angelo was
+severe in place of being sweet; he was impatient of contradiction; he
+was careless and scornful of ceremony; and in his very wrath at flattery
+and hypocrisy, he was liable to sin against his own honesty and
+sincerity. But he was a man with a lofty sense of duty and a profound
+reverence for God. He was, unlike Lionardo, consistently simple, frugal,
+and temperate, throughout his long life. If he held up a high standard
+to others, and enforced it on them with hardness, he held up a higher
+standard to himself, and enforced it on himself more hardly still. He
+was a thoroughly unworldly man, and actions which had their root in
+unworldliness have been ascribed unjustly to a kind of Lucifer pride.
+Greed, and the meanness of greed, were unknown to him. He worked for the
+last ten years of his life (under no less than five different Popes) at
+his designs for St Peter's, steadfastly refusing pay for the work,
+saying that he did it for the honour of God and his own honour. He made
+many enemies and suffered from their enmity, but I cannot learn that,
+except in one instance, he was guilty of dealing an unworthy blow at
+his opponents. He was generous to his scholars, and without jealousy of
+them, suffering them to use his designs for their own purposes. He said,
+'I have no friends, I need none, I wish for none;' but that was in
+feeling himself 'alone before Heaven;' and of the friends whom he did
+possess, he loved them all the more devotedly and faithfully, because
+they were few in number.
+
+One need only be told of his love for his old servant Urbino, whom he
+presented with two thousand crowns to render him independent of service;
+and when the servant was seized with his last illness Michael Angelo
+nursed him tenderly, sleeping in his clothes on a couch that he might be
+ready to attend his patient. When his cares were ended, Michael Angelo
+wrote to a correspondent--'My Urbino is dead--to my infinite grief and
+sorrow. Living, he served me truly; and in his death he taught me how to
+die. Of Michael Angelo's more equal friendship with Vittoria Colonna I
+hope my readers will read at leisure for themselves. No nobler, truer
+friendship ever existed. It began when the high-born and beautiful,
+gifted, and devout Marchesa de Pescara--most loyal of wives and widows,
+was forty-eight, and Michael Angelo sixty-four years of age. After a few
+years of privileged intercourse and correspondence, which were the
+happiest years in Michael Angelo's life, it ended for this world when he
+stood mourning by her lifeless clay. 'I was born a rough model, and it
+was for thee to reform and re-make me,' the great painter had written
+humbly of himself to his liege lady.[7]
+
+Italy, in Michael Angelo's time, as Germany in Albert Duerer's, was all
+quickened and astir with the new wave of religious thought which brought
+about the Reformation. Ochino and Peter Martyr, treading in the
+footsteps of Savonarola, had preached to eager listeners, but 'in Italy
+men did not adopt Lutheranism, though they approached it;' and in all
+the crowd of great Italian artists of the day, Michael Angelo shows
+deepest traces of the conflict--of its trouble, its seriousness, its
+nobleness. He only, among his brethren, acted out his belief that the
+things of the world sank into insignificance before those thoughts of
+God and immortality which were alone fully worthy of the soul. And it
+was, as to a religious work for which he was fitted, that he at last
+gave himself up to the raising of St Peter's. We shall have next in
+order the life of a man who had all the winning qualities which Michael
+Angelo wanted, but we shall hardly, through the whole range of history,
+find a nobler man than Michael Angelo.
+
+After his first visit to Rome, 1496, Michael Angelo executed his
+colossal statue of David. In 1503 he entered into the competition with
+Lionardo for the painting of one end of the Council-hall, in Florence,
+which has been already mentioned. For this object he drew as his
+cartoon, 'Pisan soldiers surprised while bathing by a sudden trumpet
+call to arms.' The grand cartoon, of which only a small copy exists, was
+said to have been torn to pieces as an act of revenge by a
+fellow-sculptor, whom Michael Angelo had offended.
+
+Michael Angelo was invited to Rome by Julius II. in 1504 to aid in
+erecting the unapproachable monument which the Pope projected raising
+for himself. Then commenced a series of contentions and struggles
+between the imperious and petulant Pope and the haughty, uncompromising
+painter, in which the latter certainly had the best of it. At one time
+in the course of the quarrel, Michael Angelo departed from Rome without
+permission or apology, and stoutly refused to return, though followed
+hotly by no less than five different couriers, armed with threats and
+promises, and urged to make the reparation by his own gonfaloniere. At
+last a meeting and a reconciliation between Michael Angelo and the Pope
+were effected at Bologna. Michael Angelo designed for Pope Julius II,
+not only the statue of Pope Julius at Bologna, which was finally
+converted into a cannon, and turned against the very man whose effigy it
+had originally presented, but also for that tomb which was never
+completed, the famous figure of Moses seated, grasping his beard with
+one hand.
+
+While employed at the tomb, Michael Angelo, then in his fortieth year,
+was desired by the Pope to undertake the decoration of the ceiling of
+the Sistine Chapel. Here, again, the hand of an enemy is said to have
+been at work. Michael Angelo, with the first place as a sculptor, was
+inexperienced in fresco painting; while Raphael, who was taking the
+place of Lionardo as Michael Angelo's most formidable rival (yet whom it
+is said Michael Angelo pointed out as the fittest painter of the
+ceiling), and who was then engaged in painting the Vatican chambers, had
+already achieved the utmost renown. It was anticipated by secret
+hostility, so records tradition, that Michael Angelo would fail signally
+in the unaccustomed work, and that his merit as an artist would pale
+altogether before that of Raphael's. I need hardly write how entirely
+malice was balked in the verdict to which posterity has set its seal.
+
+Michael Angelo brought artists from Florence to help him in his great
+undertaking, for over the chapel, whose walls had already been painted
+by older artists--among them Ghirlandajo, was an enormous vault of 150
+feet in length by 50 in breadth, which Michael Angelo was required to
+cover with designs representing the Fall and Redemption of Man. But the
+painter was unable to bear what seemed to him the bungling attempts of
+his assistants; so dismissing them all and destroying their work, he
+shut himself up, and working in solitude and secrecy, set himself to
+evolve from his own inner consciousness the gigantic scenes of a
+tremendous drama. In 22 months (or, as Kugler holds, in three years,
+including the time spent on the designs) he finished gloriously the
+work, the magnitude of which one must see to comprehend. On All Saints'
+Day, 1512, the ceiling was uncovered, and Michael Angelo was hailed,
+little though he cared for such clamorous hailing, as a painter indeed.
+For this piece of work Michael Angelo received 3000 crowns.
+
+Pope Julius died, and was succeeded by Leo X. of the Medician house,
+but, in spite of early associations as well as of mother country,
+Michael Angelo was no more acceptable to the Pope--a brilliantly
+polished, easy-tempered man of the world, who filled the chair of St
+Peter's, than Lionardo had been. Leo X, greatly preferred Raphael, to
+whom all manner of pleasantness as well as of courteous deference was
+natural, to the two others. At the same time, Leo employed Michael
+Angelo, though it was more as an architect than as a painter, and rather
+at Florence than at Rome. At Florence Michael Angelo executed for Pope
+Clement VII., another Medici, the mortuary chapel of San Lorenzo, with
+its six great statues, those of the cousins Lorenzo de Medici and
+Giuliano de Medici, the first called by the Florentines 'Il Pensiero,'
+or 'Pensive Thought,' with the four colossal recumbent figures named
+respectively the Night, the Morning, the Dawn, and the Twilight.
+
+In 1537 Michael Angelo was employed by his fellow citizens to fortify
+his native city against the return of his old patrons the Medici, and
+the city held out for nine months.
+
+Pope Paul III., an old man when elected to the popedom, but bent on
+signalizing his pontificate with as splendid works of art as those
+which had rendered the reigns of his predecessors illustrious, summoned
+another man, grown elderly, Michael Angelo, upwards of sixty years,
+reluctant to accept the commission, to finish the decoration of the
+Sistine Chapel; and Michael Angelo painted on the wall, at the upper
+end, his painting, 'The Last Judgment.' The picture is forty-seven feet
+high by forty-three wide, and it occupied the painter eight years. It
+was during its progress that Michael Angelo entered on his friendship
+with Vittoria Colonna.
+
+For the chapel called the Paolina or Pauline Chapel Michael Angelo also
+painted less-known frescoes, but from that time he devoted his life to
+St Peter's. He had said that he would take the old Pantheon and 'suspend
+it in air,' and he did what he said, though he did not live to see the
+great cathedral completed. His sovereign, the Grand Duke of Florence,
+endeavoured in vain with magnificent offers to lure the painter back to
+his native city. Michael Angelo protested that to leave Rome then would
+be 'a sin and a shame, and the ruin of the greatest religious monument
+in Christian Europe.' Michael Angelo, like Lionardo, did not marry; he
+died at Rome in 1563, in his eighty-ninth year.
+
+His nephew and principal heir,[8] by the orders of the Grand Duke of
+Florence, and it is believed according to Michael Angelo's own wish,
+removed the painter's body to Florence, where it was buried with all
+honours in the church of Santa Croce there.
+
+The traits which recall Michael Angelo personally to us, are the
+prominent arch of the nose, the shaggy brows, the tangled beard, the
+gaunt grandeur of a figure like that of one of his prophets.
+
+While Michael Angelo lived, one Pope rose on his approach, and seated
+the painter on his right hand, and another Pope declined to sit down in
+his painter's presence; but the reason given for the last condescension,
+is that the Pope feared that the painter would follow his example. And
+if the Grand Duke Cosmo uncovered before Michael Angelo, and stood hat
+in hand while speaking to him, we may have the explanation in another
+assertion, that 'sovereigns asked Michael Angelo to put on his cap,
+because the painter would do it unasked.'
+
+The solitary instance in which Michael Angelo is represented as taking
+an unfair advantage of an antagonist, is in connection with the
+painter's rivalry in his art with Raphael. Michael Angelo undervalued
+the genius of Raphael, and was disgusted by what the older man
+considered the immoderate admiration bestowed on the younger. A
+favourite pupil of Michael Angelo's was Sebastian Del Piombo, who being
+a Venetian by birth was an excellent colourist. For one of his
+pictures--the very 'Raising of Lazarus' now in the National Gallery,
+which the Pope had ordered at the same time that he had ordered
+Raphael's 'Transfiguration'--it is rumoured that Michael Angelo gave the
+designs and even drew the figures, leaving Sebastian the credit, and
+trusting that without Michael Angelo's name appearing in the work, by
+the help of his drawing in addition to Sebastian's superb colouring,
+Raphael would be eclipsed, and that by a painter comparatively obscure.
+
+The unwarrantable inference that the whole work was that of one painter,
+constituted a stratagem altogether unworthy of Michael Angelo, and if it
+had any existence, its getting wind disappointed and foiled its authors.
+When the story was repeated to Raphael, his sole protest is said to have
+been to the effect that he was glad that Michael Angelo esteemed him so
+highly as to enter the lists with him.
+
+We can judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without
+having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of
+some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's
+translations of selections from Michael Angelo's poems.
+
+Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a
+painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and
+in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is
+not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable
+dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael
+Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them
+to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding
+a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic
+architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like
+these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.
+
+In Michael Angelo's works of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his
+monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo,
+Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic
+history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded
+the sculptor's meaning in these monuments.
+
+Mrs Jameson quotes an account of Michael Angelo at work. An eye-witness
+has left us a very graphic description of the energy with which, even in
+old age, Michael Angelo handled his chisel:--"I can say that I have
+seen Michael Angelo at the age of sixty, and, with a body announcing
+weakness, make more chips of marble fly about in a quarter of an hour
+than would three of the strongest young sculptors in an hour,--a thing
+almost incredible to him who has not beheld it. He went to work with
+such impetuosity and fury of manner, that I feared almost every moment
+to see the block split into pieces. It would seem as if, inflamed by the
+idea of greatness which inspired him, this great man attacked with a
+Vigenere."
+
+In painting Michael Angelo regarded colouring as of secondary
+importance. He is not known to have executed one painting in oil, and he
+treated oil and easel-painting generally as work only fit for women or
+idle men. While he approached the sublime in his painting, it was by no
+means faultless. Even in form his efforts were apt to tend to heaviness
+and exaggeration, and the fascination which robust muscular delineation
+had for him, betrayed him into materialism. Fuseli's criticism of
+Michael Angelo's work, that Michael Angelo's women were female men, and
+his children diminutive giants, is judged correct. Incomparably the
+greatest painting of Michael Angelo's is his ceiling of the Sistine
+Chapel. It includes upwards of 200 figures, the greater part colossal,
+as they were to be looked at, in the distance, from below.
+
+    'The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the most perfect
+    works done by Michael Angelo in his long and active life. Here
+    his great spirit appears in noblest dignity, in its highest
+    purity; here the attention is not disturbed by that arbitrary
+    display to which his great power not unfrequently seduced him in
+    other works. The ceiling forms a flattened arch in its section;
+    the central portion, which is a plain surface, contains a series
+    of large and small pictures, representing the most important
+    events recorded in the book of Genesis--the Creation and Fall of
+    Man, with its immediate consequences. In the large triangular
+    compartments at the springing of the vault are sitting figures
+    of the Prophets and Sibyls, as the foretellers of the coming
+    Saviour. In the soffits of the recesses between these
+    compartments, and in the arches underneath, immediately above
+    the windows, are the ancestors of the Virgin, the series leading
+    the mind directly to the Saviour. The external of these numerous
+    representations is formed by an architectural frame-work of
+    peculiar composition, which encloses the single subjects, tends
+    to make the principal masses conspicuous, and gives to the whole
+    an appearance of that solidity and support so necessary, but so
+    seldom attended to in soffit decorations, which may be
+    considered as if suspended. A great number of figures are also
+    connected with the frame-work; those in unimportant situations
+    are executed in the colour of stone or bronze; in the more
+    important, in natural colours. These serve to support the
+    architectural forms, to fill up and to connect the whole. They
+    may be best described as the living and embodied _genii_ of
+    architecture. It required the unlimited power of an architect,
+    sculptor, and painter, to conceive a structural whole of so much
+    grandeur, to design the decorative figures with the significant
+    repose required by the sculpturesque character, and yet to
+    preserve their subordination to the principal subjects, and to
+    keep the latter in the proportions and relations best adapted to
+    the space to be filled.'--_Kugler_.
+
+The pictures from the Old Testament, beginning from the altar, are:--
+
+     1. The Separation of Light and Darkness.
+     2. The Creation of the Sun and Moon.
+     3. The Creation of Trees and Plants.
+     4. The Creation of Adam.
+     5. The Creation of Eve.
+     6. The Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise.
+     7. The Sacrifice of Noah.
+     8. The Deluge.
+     9. The Intoxication of Noah.
+
+     'The scenes from Genesis are the most sublime representations of
+     these subjects;--the Creating Spirit is unveiled before us. The
+     peculiar type which the painter has here given of the form of the
+     Almighty
+     Father has been frequently imitated by his followers, and even by
+     Raphael, but has been surpassed by none. Michael Angelo has
+     represented him in majestic flight, sweeping through the air,
+     surrounded by _genii_, partly supporting, partly borne along with
+     him, covered by his floating drapery; they are the distinct
+     syllables, the separate virtues of his creating word. In the
+     first (large) compartment we see him with extended hands,
+     assigning to the sun and moon their respective paths. In the
+     second, he awakens the first man to life. Adam lies stretched on
+     the verge of the earth in the act of raising himself; the Creator
+     touches him with the point of his finger, and appears thus to
+     endow him with feeling and life. This picture displays a
+     wonderful depth of thought in the composition, and the utmost
+     elevation and majesty in the general treatment and execution. The
+     third subject is not less important, representing the Fall of
+     Man, and his Expulsion from Paradise. The tree of knowledge
+     stands in the midst; the serpent (the upper part of the body
+     being that of a woman) is twined around the
+     stem; she bends down towards the guilty pair, who are in the act
+     of plucking the forbidden fruit. The figures are nobly graceful,
+     particularly that of Eve. Close to the serpent hovers the angel
+     with the sword, ready to drive the fallen beings out of Paradise.
+     In this double action, this union of two separate moments, there
+     is something peculiarly poetic and significant: it is guilt and
+     punishment in one picture. The sudden and lightning-like
+     appearance of the avenging angel behind the demon of darkness has
+     a most impressive effect.'--_Kugler_.
+
+
+The lower portion of the ceiling is divided into triangles, occupied by
+the Prophets and Sibyls in solemn contemplation, accompanied by angels
+and genii. Beginning from the left of the entrance their order is--
+
+      1. Joel.
+      2. Sibylla Erythraea.
+      3. Ezekiel.
+      4. Sibylla Persica.
+      5. Jonah.
+      6. Sibylla Libyca.
+      7. Daniel.
+      8. Sibylla Cumaea.
+      9. Isaiah.
+     10. Sibylla Delphica.
+
+    'The prophets and sibyls in the triangular compartments of the
+    curved portion of the ceiling are the largest figures in the
+    whole work; these, too, are among the most wonderful forms that
+    modern art has called into life. They are all represented
+    seated, employed with books or rolled manuscripts; genii stand
+    near or behind them. These mighty beings sit before us pensive,
+    meditative, inquiring, or looking upwards with inspired
+    countenances. Their forms and movements, indicated by the grand
+    lines and masses of the drapery, are majestic and dignified. We
+    see in them beings, who, while they feel and bear the sorrows of
+    a corrupt and sinful world, have power to look for consolation
+    into the secrets of the future. Yet the greatest variety
+    prevails in the attitudes and expression: each figure is full of
+    individuality. Zacharias is an aged man, busied in calm and
+    circumspect investigation; Jeremiah is bowed down, absorbed in
+    thought, the thought of deep and bitter grief; Ezekiel turns
+    with hasty movements to the genius next to him, who points
+    upwards with joyful expectation, etc. The sibyls are equally
+    characteristic: the Persian, a lofty, majestic woman, very aged;
+    the Erythraean, full of power, like the warrior goddess of
+    wisdom; the Delphic, like Cassandra, youthfully soft and
+    graceful, but with strength to bear the awful seriousness of
+    revelation.'--_Kugler_.
+
+     'The belief of the Roman Catholic Church in the testimony of the
+     sibyl is shown by the well-known hymn, said to have been composed
+     by Pope Innocent III, at the close of the thirteenth century,
+     beginning with the verse--
+
+                "Dies irae, dies illa,
+                Solvet saeclum in favilla
+                Teste David cum Sibylla."
+
+     It may be inferred that this hymn, admitted into the liturgy of
+     the Roman Church, gave sanction to the adoption of the sibyls
+     into Christian art. They are seen from this time accompanying the
+     prophets and apostles, in the cyclical decorations of the
+     church.... But the highest honour that art has rendered to the
+     sibyls has been by the hand of Michael Angelo,
+     on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here in the conception of a
+     mysterious order of women, placed above and without all
+     considerations of the graceful or the individual, the great
+     master was peculiarly in his element. They exactly fitted his
+     standard, of art, not always sympathetic, nor comprehensible to
+     the average human mind, of which the grand in form and the
+     abstract in expression were the first and last conditions. In
+     this respect, the sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are more
+     Michael Angelesque than their companions the prophets. For these,
+     while types of the highest monumental treatment, are yet men,
+     while the sibyls belong to a distinct class of beings, who convey
+     the impression of the very obscurity in which their history is
+     wrapt--creatures who have lived far from the abodes of men, who
+     are alike devoid of the expression of feminine sweetness, human
+     sympathy, or sacramental beauty; who are neither Christians nor
+     Jewesses, Witches nor Graces, yet living, grand, beautiful, and
+     true, according to laws revealed to the great Florentine genius
+     only.
+
+     Thus their figures may be said to be unique, as the offspring of
+     a peculiar sympathy between the master's mind and his subject. To
+     this sympathy may be ascribed the prominence and size given them,
+     both prophets and sibyls, as compared to their usual relation to
+     the subjects they environ. They sit here on twelve throne-like
+     niches, more like presiding deities, each wrapt in
+     self-contemplation, than as tributary witnesses to the truth and
+     omnipotence of Him they are intended to announce. Thus they form
+     a gigantic frame-work round the subjects of the Creation, of
+     which the birth of Eve, as the type of the Nativity, is the
+     intentional centre. For some reason, the twelve figures are not
+     prophets and sibyls alternately--there being only five sibyls to
+     seven prophets,--so that the prophets come together at one angle.
+     Books and scrolls are given indiscriminately to them.
+
+'The Sibylla Persica, supposed to be the oldest of the sisterhood, holds
+the book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of sight, which fact,
+contradicted as it is by a frame of obviously Herculean strength, gives
+a mysterious intentness to the action.
+
+'The Sibylla Libyca, of equally powerful proportions, but less closely
+draped, is grandly wringing herself to lift a massive volume from a
+height above her head on to her knees.
+
+'The Sibylla Cumana, also aged, and with her head covered, is reading
+with her volume at a distance from her eyes.
+
+'The Sibylla Delphica, with waving hair escaping from her turban, is a
+beautiful young being, the most human of all, gazing into vacancy or
+futurity. She holds a scroll.
+
+'The Sibylla Erythraea, grand, bare-headed creature, sits reading
+intently with crossed legs, about to turn over her book.
+
+'The prophets are equally grand in structure, and though, as we have
+said, not more than men, yet they are the only men that could well bear
+the juxtaposition with their stupendous female colleagues. Ezekiel,
+between Erythraea and Persica, has a scroll in his hand that hangs by his
+side, just cast down, as he turns eagerly to listen to some voice.
+
+'Jeremiah, a magnificent figure, with elbow on knee and head on hand,
+wrapt in meditation appropriate to one called to utter lamentation and
+woe. He has neither book nor scroll.
+
+'Jonah is also without either. His position is strained and ungraceful,
+looking upwards, and apparently remonstrating with the Almighty upon the
+destruction of the gourd, a few leaves of which are seen above him. His
+hands are placed together with a strange and trivial action, supposed to
+denote the counting on his fingers the number of days he was in the
+fish's belly. A formless marine monster is seen at his side.
+
+'Daniel has a book on his lap, with one hand on it. He is young, and a
+piece of lion's skin seems to allude to his history.'[9]
+
+In the recesses between the prophets and sibyls are a series of lovely
+family groups, representing the genealogy of the Virgin, and expressive
+of calm expectation of the future. The four corners of the ceiling
+contain groups illustrative of the power of the Lord displayed in the
+especial deliverances of his chosen people. Near the altar are:
+
+Right, The Deliverance of the Israelites by the Brazen Serpent.
+
+Left, The Execution of Haman.
+
+Near the entrance are:
+
+Right, Judith and Holofernes.
+
+Left, David and Goliath.[10]
+
+Michael Angelo was thirty-nine years of age when he painted the ceiling
+of the Sistine. When he began to paint the 'Day of Judgment' he was
+above sixty years of age, and his great rival, Raphael, had already been
+dead thirteen years.
+
+The picture of the 'Day of Judgment,' with much that renders it
+marvellous and awful, has a certain coarseness of conception and
+execution. The moment chosen is that in which the Lord says, 'Depart
+from me, ye cursed,' and the idea and even attributes of the principal
+figure are taken from Orcagna's old painting in the Campo Santo. But
+with all Michael Angelo's advantages, he has by no means improved on the
+original idea. He has robbed the figure of the Lord of its transcendant
+majesty; he has not been able to impart to the ranks of the blessed the
+look of blessedness which 'Il Beato' himself might have conveyed. The
+chief excellence of the picture is in the ranks of the condemned, who
+writhe and rebel against their agonies. No wonder that the picture is
+sombre and dreadful.
+
+Of the allegorical figures of 'Night' and 'Morning' in the chapel of San
+Lorenzo, there are casts at the Crystal Palace.
+
+A comparison and a contrast have been instituted between Michael Angelo
+and Milton, and Raphael and Shakespeare. There may be something in them,
+but, as in the case of broken metaphors, they will not bear being pushed
+to a logical conclusion or picked to pieces. The very transparent
+comparison which matches Michael Angelo with his own countryman, Dante,
+is after all more felicitous and truer. Michael Angelo with Lionardo are
+the great chiefs of the Florentine School.
+
+Raphael Sanzio, or Santi of Urbino, the head of the Roman School, was
+one of those very exceptional men who seem born to happiness, to inspire
+love and only love, to pass through the world making friends and
+disarming enemies, who are fully armed to confer pleasure while almost
+incapable of either inflicting or receiving pain. To this day his
+exceptional fortune stands Raphael's memory in good stead, since for one
+man or woman who yearns after the austere righteousness and priceless
+tenderness of Michael Angelo, there are ten who yield with all their
+hearts to the gay, sweet gentleness and generosity of Raphael. No doubt
+it was also in his favour as a painter, that though a man of highly
+cultivated tastes, 'in close intimacy and correspondence with most of
+the celebrated men of his time, and interested in all that was going
+forward,' he did not, especially in his youth, spend his strength on a
+variety of studies, but devoted himself to painting. While he thus
+vindicated his share of the breadth of genius of his country and time,
+by giving to the world the loveliest Madonnas and Child-Christs, the
+most dramatic of battle-pieces, the finest of portraits, his noble and
+graceful fertility of invention and matchless skill of execution were
+confined to and concentrated on painting. He did not diverge long or far
+into the sister arts of architecture and sculpture, though his classic
+researches in the excavations of Rome were keen and zealous; a heap of
+ruins having given to the world in 1504 the group of the
+that a writer of his day could record that 'Raphael had sought and found
+in Rome another Rome.'
+
+Raphael was born in the town of Urbino, and was the son of a painter of
+the Umbrian School, who very early destined the boy to his future
+career, and promoted his destination by all the efforts in Giovanni
+Santi's power, including the intention of sending away and apprenticing
+the little lad to the best master of his time, Perugino, so called from
+the town where he resided, Perugia. Raphael's mother died when he was
+only eight years of age, and his father died when he was no more than
+eleven years, before the plans for his education were put into action.
+But no stroke of outward calamity, or loss--however severe, could annul
+Raphael's birthright of universal favour. His step-mother, the uncles
+who were his guardians, his clever, perverse, unscrupulous master, all
+joined in a common love of Raphael and determination to promote his
+interests.
+
+Raphael at the age of twelve years went to Perugia to work under
+Perugino, and remained with his master till he was nearly twenty years
+of age. In that interval he painted industriously, making constant
+progress, always in the somewhat hard, but finished, style of Perugino,
+while already showing a predilection for what was to prove Raphael's
+favourite subject, the Madonna and Child. At this period he painted his
+famous _Lo Sposalizio_ or the 'Espousals,' the marriage of the Virgin
+Mary with Joseph, now at Milan. In 1504 he visited Florence, remaining
+only for a short time, but making the acquaintance of Fra Bartolommeo
+and Ghirlandajo, seeing the cartoons of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, and
+from that time displaying a marked improvement in drawing. Indeed
+nothing is more conspicuous in Raphael's genius in contra-distinction to
+Michael Angelo's, than the receptive character of Raphael's mind, his
+power of catching up an impression from without, and the candour and
+humility with which he availed himself unhesitatingly of the assistance
+lent him by others.
+
+Returning soon to Florence, Raphael remained there till 1508, when he
+was twenty-five years, drawing closer the valuable friendships he had
+already formed, and advancing with rapid strides in his art, until his
+renown was spread all over Italy, and with reason, since already, while
+still young, he had painted his 'Madonna of the Goldfinch,' in the
+Florentine Gallery, and his 'La Belle Jardiniere,' or Madonna in a
+garden among flowers, now in the Louvre.
+
+In his twenty-fifth year Raphael was summoned to Rome to paint for Pope
+Julius II. My readers will remember that Michael Angelo in the abrupt
+severity of his prime of manhood, was soon to paint the ceiling of the
+Sistine Chapel for the same despotic and art-loving Pope, who had
+brought Raphael hardly more than a stripling to paint the '_Camere_' or
+'_Stanze_' chambers of the Vatican.
+
+The first of the halls which Raphael painted (though not the first in
+order) is called the Camera della Segnatura (in English, signature), and
+represents Theology, Poetry, Philosophy, with the Sciences, Arts, and
+Jurisprudence. The second is the 'Stanza d'Eliodoro,' or the room of
+Heliodorus, and contains the grandest painting of all, in the expulsion
+of Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem (taken from Maccabees), the
+Miracle of Bolsena, Attila, king of the Huns, terrified by the
+apparition of St Peter and St Paul, and St Peter delivered from prison.
+The third stanza painted by Raphael is the 'Stanza dell' Incendio' (the
+conflagration), so called from the extinguishing of the fire in the
+Borgo by a supposed miracle, being the most conspicuous scene in
+representations of events taken from the lives of Popes Leo III, and
+IV.; and the fourth chamber, which was left unfinished by Raphael, and
+completed by his scholars, is the 'Sala di Constantino,' and contains
+incidents from the life of the Emperor Constantine, including the
+splendid battle-piece between Constantine and Maxentius. At these
+chambers, or at the designs for them, during the popedoms of Julius II.,
+who died in the course of the painting of the Camere, and Leo X., for a
+period of twelve years, till Raphael's death in 1520, after which the
+'Sala di Constantino' was completed by his scholars.
+
+Raphael has also left in the Vatican a series of small pictures from the
+Old Testament, known as Raphael's Bible. This series decorates the
+thirteen cupolas of the 'Loggie,' or open galleries, running round three
+sides of an open court. Another work undertaken by Raphael should have
+still more interest for us. Leo X., resolving to substitute woven for
+painted tapestry round the lower walls of the interior of the Sistine
+Chapel, commanded Raphael to furnish drawings to the Flemish weavers,
+and thence arose eleven cartoons, seven of which have been preserved,
+have become the property of England, and are the glory of the Kensington
+Museum. The subjects of the cartoons in the seven which have been saved,
+are 'The Death of Ananias,' 'Elymas the Sorcerer struck with Blindness,'
+'The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,' 'The
+Miraculous Draught of Fishes,' 'Paul and Barnabas at Lystra,' 'St Paul
+Preaching at Athens,' and 'The Charge to St Peter.' The four cartoons
+which are lost, were 'The Stoning of St Stephen,' 'The Conversion of St
+Paul,' 'Paul in Prison,' and 'The Coronation of the Virgin.'
+
+In those cartoons figures above life-size were drawn with chalk upon
+strong paper, and coloured in distemper, and Raphael received for his
+work four hundred and thirty gold ducats (about _L650_), while the
+Flemish weavers received for their work in wools, silk, and gold, fifty
+thousand gold ducats. The designs were cut up in strips for the
+weavers' use, and while some strips were destroyed, the rest lay in a
+warehouse at Arras, till Rubens became aware of their existence, and
+advised Charles I, to buy the set, to be employed in the tapestry
+manufactory established by James I. at Mortlake. Brought to this country
+in the slips which the weavers had copied, the fate of the cartoons was
+still precarious. Cromwell bought them in Charles I.'s art collection,
+and Louis XIV, sought, but failed, to re-buy them. They fell into
+farther neglect, and were well-nigh forgotten, when Sir Godfrey Kneller
+recalled them to notice, and induced William III, to have the slips
+pasted together, and stretched upon linen, and put in a room set apart
+for them at Hampton Court, whence they were transferred, within the last
+ten years, for the greater advantage of artists and the public, to
+Kensington Museum.
+
+The woven tapestries for which the cartoons were designed had quite as
+chequered a career. In the two sacks of Rome by French soldiers, the
+tapestries were seized, carried off, and two of them burnt for the
+bullion in the thread. At last they were restored to the Vatican, where
+they hang in their faded magnificence, a monument of Leo X, and of
+Raphael. An additional set of ten tapestry cartoons were supplied to the
+Vatican by Raphael's scholars.
+
+Raphael painted for the Chigi family in their palace, which is now the
+Villa Farnesina, scenes from the history of Cupid and Psyche, and the
+Triumph of Galatea, subjects which show how the passion for classical
+mythology that distinguishes the next generation, was beginning to work.
+To these last years belong his 'Madonna di San Sisto,' so named from its
+having been painted for the convent of St Sixtus at Piacenza, and his
+last picture, the 'Transfiguration,' with which he was still engaged
+when death met him unexpectedly.
+
+Raphael, as the Italians say, lived more like a '_principe_' (prince)
+than a '_pittore_' (painter). He had a house in Rome, and a villa in the
+neighbourhood, and on his death left a considerable fortune to his
+heirs. There has not been wanting a rumour that his life of a principe
+was a dissipated and prodigal life; but this ugly rumour, even if it had
+more evidence to support it, is abundantly disproven by the nature of
+Raphael's work, and by the enormous amount of that work, granting him
+the utmost assistance from his crowd of scholars. He had innumerable
+commissions, and retained an immense school from all parts of Italy, the
+members of which adored their master. Raphael had the additional
+advantage of having many of his pictures well engraved by a contemporary
+engraver named Raimondi.
+
+Like Giotto, Raphael was the friend of the most distinguished Italians
+of his day, including Count Castiglione, and the poet Ariosto. He was
+notably the warm friend of his fellow-painters both at home and abroad,
+with the exception of Michael Angelo. A drawing of his own, which
+Raphael sent, in his kindly interchange of such sketches, to Albert
+Duerer, is, I think, preserved at Nueremberg. The sovereign princes of
+Italy, above all Leo X., were not contented with being munificent
+patrons to Raphael, they treated him with the most marked consideration.
+The Cardinal Bibbiena proposed the painter's marriage with his niece,
+ensuring her a dowry of three thousand gold crowns, but Maria di
+Bibbiena died young, ere the marriage could be accomplished; and
+Raphael, who was said to be little disposed to the match, did not long
+survive her. He caught cold, as some report, from his engrossing
+personal superintendence of the Roman excavations; and, as others
+declare, from his courtly assiduity in keeping an appointment with the
+Pope, was attacked by fever, and died on his birth-day, April 6th, 1520,
+having completed his thirty-seventh year.
+
+All Rome and Italy mourned for him. When his body lay in state, to be
+looked at and wept over by multitudes, his great unfinished picture of
+the 'Transfiguration' was hung above the bed. He was buried in a spot
+chosen by himself in his lifetime, and, as it happened, not far from the
+resting-place of his promised bride. Doubts having been raised as to
+Raphael's grave, search was made, and his body was exhumed in 1833, and
+re-buried with great pomp. Raphael's life and that of Rubens form the
+ideal painter's life--bountiful, splendid, unclouded, and terminating
+ere it sees eclipse or decay--to all in whom the artistic temperament is
+united to a genial, sensuous, pleasure-loving nature.
+
+Raphael was not above the middle height, and slightly made. He was
+sallow in colour, with brown eyes, and a full yet delicate mouth; but
+his beautiful face, like that of our English Shakespeare, is familiar to
+most of us. With regard to Raphael's face, the amount of womanliness in
+it is a striking characteristic. One hears sometimes that no man's
+character is complete without its share of womanliness: surely Raphael
+had a double share, for womanliness is the most distinctive quality in
+his face, along with that vague shade of pensiveness which we find not
+infrequently, but strangely enough, in those faces which have been
+associated with the happiest spirits and the brightest fortunes.
+
+Raphael and his scholars painted and drew about nine hundred pictures
+and sketches, including a hundred and twenty Madonnas, eight of which
+are in private collections in England. Of Raphael's greatness, Kugler
+writes that 'it is not so much in kind as in degree. No master left
+behind _so many_ really excellent works as he, whose days were so early
+numbered; in none has there been observed so little that is unpleasant.'
+All authorities agree in ascribing much of Raphael's power to his purely
+unselfish nature and aim. His excellence seems to lie in the nearly
+perfect expression of material beauty and harmony, together with
+grandeur of design and noble working out of thought. We shall see that
+this devotion to material beauty has been made something of a reproach
+to Raphael, as it certainly degenerated into a snare in the hands of his
+followers, while unquestionably the universal appreciation of Raphael's
+work, distinguished from the partial appreciation bestowed on the great
+works of others, proceeds from this evident material beauty which is
+open to all.
+
+Then, again, Raphael, far more than Andrea del Sarto, deserved to be
+called 'faultless;' and this general absence of defects and equality of
+excellence is a great element of Raphael's wide popularity; for, as one
+can observe for one's self, in regarding a work of art, there is always
+a large proportion of the spectators who will seize on an error, dwell
+on it, and be incapable of shaking off its influence, and rising into
+the higher rank of critics, who discover and ponder over beauties. I
+would have it considered also, that this equality of excellence does not
+necessarily proceed always from a higher aim, but may arise rather from
+an unconsciously lower aim.
+
+The single reproach brought against Raphael as a painter is
+that--according to some witnesses only, for most deny the
+implication--Raphael so delighted in material beauty that he became
+enslaved by it, till it diminished his spiritual insight. It is an
+incontestable truth that in Raphael, as in all the great Italian
+painters of his century, there was a falling away from the simple
+earnestness, the exceeding reverence, the endless patience, the
+self-abstraction, and self-devotion of the earliest Italian and Flemish
+painters. Therefore there has been within the last fifty or sixty years
+that movement in modern art, which is called Pre-raphaelitism, and which
+is, in fact, a revolt against subjection to Raphael, and his supposed
+undue exaltation of material beauty, and subjection of truth to
+beauty--so called. But we must not fall into the grave mistake of
+imagining that there was any want of vigour and variety in Raphael's
+grace and tenderness, or that he could not in his greatest works rise
+into a grandeur in keeping with his subject. Tire as we may of hearing
+Raphael called the king of painters, as the Greeks tired of hearing
+Aristides called 'the just,' this fact remains: no painter has left
+behind him such a mass of surpassingly good work; in no other work is
+there the same charm of greatest beauty and harmony.
+
+It is hard for me to give you an idea in so short a space of Raphael's
+work. I must content myself with quoting descriptions of two of his
+Stanze, those of the Heliodorus and the Segnatura. 'Heliodorus driven
+out of the Temple (2 Maccabees iii.). In the background Onias the
+priest is represented praying for Divine interposition;--in the
+foreground Heliodorus, pursued by two avenging angels, is endeavouring
+to bear away the treasures of the temple. Amid the group on the left is
+seen Julius II., in his chair of state, attended by his secretaries. One
+of the bearers in front is Marc-Antonio Raimondi, the engraver of
+Raphael's designs. The man with the inscription, "Jo Petro de Folicariis
+Cremonen," was secretary of briefs to Pope Julius. Here you may fancy
+you hear the thundering approach of the heavenly warrior, and the
+neighing of his steed; while in the different groups who are plundering
+the treasures of the temple, and in those who gaze intently on the
+sudden consternation of Heliodorus, without being able to divine its
+cause, we see the expression of terror, amazement, joy, humility, and
+every passion to which human nature is exposed.'[11]
+
+'The Stanza della Segnatura is so called from a judicial assembly once
+held here. The frescoes in this chamber are illustrative of the Virtues
+of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence, who are represented
+on the ceiling by Raphael, in the midst of arabesques by _Sodoma_. The
+square pictures by Raphael refer:--the Fall of Man to Theology; the
+Study of the Globe to Philosophy; the Flaying of Marsyas to Poetry; and
+the Judgment of Solomon to Jurisprudence.
+
+'_Entrance Wall_.--"The School of Athens." Raphael consulted Ariosto as
+to the arrangement of its 52 figures. In the centre, on the steps of a
+portico, are seen Plato and Aristotle, Plato pointing to heaven and
+Aristotle to earth. On the left is Socrates conversing with his pupils,
+amongst whom is a young warrior, probably Alcibiades. Lying upon the
+steps in front is Diogenes. To his left, Pythagoras is writing on his
+knee, and near him, with ink and pen, is Empedocles. The white mantle is
+Francesco Maria della Rovere, nephew of Julius II. On the right is
+Archimedes drawing a geometrical problem upon the floor. The young man
+near him with uplifted hands is Federigo II., Duke of Mantua. Behind
+these are Zoroaster, Ptolemy, one with a terrestrial, the other with a
+celestial globe, addressing two figures, which represent Raphael and his
+master Perugino. The drawing in brown upon the socle beneath this
+fresco, is by _Pierino del Vaga_, and represents the death of
+Archimedes.
+
+'_Right Wall_.--"Parnassus." Apollo surrounded by the Muses; on his
+right, Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Below on the right, Sappho, supposed to
+be addressing Corinna, Petrarch, Propertius, and Anacreon; on the left
+Pindar and Horace, Sannazzaro, Boccaccio, and others. Beneath this, in
+grisaille, are,--Alexander placing the poems of Homer in the tomb of
+Achilles, and Augustus preventing the burning of Virgil's AEneid.
+
+'_Left Wall_.--Above the window are Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance.
+On the left, Justinian delivers the Pandects to Tribonian. On the right,
+Gregory IX. (with the features of Julius II.) delivers the Decretals to
+a jurist;--Cardinal de' Medici, afterwards Leo X., Cardinal Farnese,
+afterwards Paul III., and Cardinal del Monte, are represented near the
+Pope. In the socle beneath is Solon addressing the people of Athens.
+
+'_Wall of Egress_.--"The Disputa." So called from an impression that it
+represents a Dispute upon the Sacrament. In the upper part of the
+composition the heavenly host are present; Christ between the Virgin and
+St John the Baptist; on the left, St Peter, Adam, St John, David, St
+Stephen, and another; and on the right, St Paul, Abraham, St James,
+Moses, St Lawrence, and St George. Below is an altar surrounded by the
+Latin fathers, Gregory, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. Near St
+Augustine stand St Thomas Aquinas, St Anacletus, with the palm of a
+martyr, and Cardinal Buenaventura reading. Those in front are Innocent
+III., and in the background, Dante, near whom a monk in a black hood is
+pointed out as Savonarola. The Dominican on the extreme left is supposed
+to be Fra Angelico. The other figures are uncertain.' ...
+
+'Raphael commenced his work in the Vatican by painting the ceiling and
+the four walls in the room called _della Segnatura_, on the surface of
+which he had to represent four great compositions, which embraced the
+principal divisions of the encyclopedia of that period; namely,
+Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Jurisprudence.
+
+'It will be conceived, that to an artist imbued with the traditions of
+the Umbrian School, the first of these subjects was an unparalleled
+piece of good fortune: and Raphael, long familiar with the allegorical
+treatment of religious compositions, turned it here to the most
+admirable account; and, not content with the suggestions of his own
+genius, he availed himself of all the instruction he could derive from
+the intelligence of others. From these combined inspirations resulted,
+to the eternal glory of the Catholic faith and of Christian art, a
+composition without a rival in the history of painting, and, we may also
+add, without a name; for to call it lyric or epic is not enough, unless,
+indeed, we mean, by using these expressions, to compare it with the
+allegorical epic of Dante, alone worthy to be ranked with this
+marvellous production of the pencil of Raphael.
+
+'Let no one consider this praise as idle and groundless, for it is
+Raphael himself who forces the comparison upon us, by placing the figure
+of Dante among the favourite sons of the Muses; and, what is still more
+striking, by draping the allegorical figure of Theology in the very
+colours in which Dante has represented Beatrice; namely, the white veil,
+the red tunic, and the green mantle, while on her head he has placed the
+olive crown.
+
+'Of the four allegorical figures which occupy the compartments of the
+ceiling, and which were all painted immediately after Raphael's arrival
+in Rome, Theology and Poetry are incontestably the most remarkable. The
+latter would be easily distinguished by the calm inspiration of her
+glance, even were she without her wings, her starry crown, and her azure
+robe, all having allusion to the elevated region towards which it is her
+privilege to soar. The figure of Theology is quite as admirably suited
+to the subject she personifies; she points to the upper part of the
+grand composition, which takes its name from her, and in which the
+artist has provided inexhaustible food for the sagacity and enthusiasm
+of the spectator.
+
+'This work consists of two grand divisions,--Heaven and Earth--which are
+united to one another by that mystical bond, the Sacrament of the
+Eucharist. The personages whom the Church has most honoured for learning
+and holiness, are ranged in picturesque and animated groups on either
+side of the altar, on which the consecrated wafer is exposed. St
+Augustine dictates his thoughts to one of his disciples; St Gregory, in
+his pontifical robes, seems absorbed in contemplation of celestial
+glory; St Ambrose, in a slightly different attitude, appears to be
+chanting the Te Deum; while St Jerome, seated, rests his hands on a
+large book, which he holds on his knees. Pietro Lombardo, Duns Scotus,
+St Thomas Aquinas, Pope Anacletus, St Buenaventura, and Innocent III.,
+are no less happily characterized; while, behind all these illustrious
+men, whom the Church and succeeding generations have agreed to honour,
+Raphael has ventured to introduce Dante with his laurel crown, and, with
+still greater boldness, the monk Savonarola, publicly burnt ten years
+before as a heretic.
+
+'In the glory, which forms the upper part of the picture, the Three
+Persons of the Trinity are represented, surrounded by patriarchs,
+apostles, and saints: it may, in fact, be considered in some sort as a
+_resume_ of all the favourite compositions produced during the last
+hundred years by the Umbrian School. A great number of the types, and
+particularly those of Christ and the Virgin, are to be found in the
+earlier works of Raphael himself. The Umbrian artists, from having so
+long exclusively employed themselves on mystical subjects, had certainly
+attained to a marvellous perfection in the representation of celestial
+beatitude, and of those ineffable things of which it has been said that
+the heart of man cannot conceive them, far less, therefore, the pencil
+of man portray; and Raphael, surpassing them in all, and even in this
+instance, while surpassing himself, appears to have fixed the limits,
+beyond which Christian art, properly so called, has never since been
+able to advance.'[12]
+
+Of Raphael's Madonnas, I should like to speak of three. The Madonna di
+San Sisto: 'It represents the Virgin standing in a majestic attitude;
+the infant Saviour _enthroned_ in her arms; and around her head a glory
+of innumerable cherubs melting into light. Kneeling before her we see on
+one side St Sixtus, on the other St Barbara, and beneath her feet two
+heavenly cherubs gaze up in adoration. In execution, as in design, this
+is probably the most perfect picture in the world. It is painted
+throughout by Raphael's own hand; and as no sketch or study of any part
+of it was ever known to exist, and as the execution must have been, from
+the thinness and delicacy of the colours, wonderfully rapid, it is
+supposed that he painted it at once on the canvas--a _creation_ rather
+than a picture. In the beginning of the last century the Elector of
+Saxony, Augustus III., purchased this picture from the monks of the
+convent for the sum of sixty thousand florins (about L6000), and it now
+forms the chief boast and ornament of the Dresden Gallery'[13]
+
+The Madonna del Cardellino (our Lady of the Goldfinch): 'The Virgin is
+sitting on a rock, in a flowery meadow. Behind are the usual light and
+feathery trees, growing on the bank of a stream, which passes off to the
+left in a rocky bend, and is crossed by a bridge of a single arch. To
+the right, the opposite bank slopes upward in a gentle glade, across
+which is a village, backed by two distant mountain-peaks.
+
+'In front of the sitting matronly figure of the Virgin are the holy
+children, our Lord and the Baptist, one on either side of her right
+knee. She has been reading, and the approach of St John has caused her
+to look off her book (which is open in her left hand) at the new comer,
+which she does with a look of holy love and gentleness, at the same
+time caressingly drawing him to her with her right hand, which touches
+his little body under the right arm. In both hands, which rest across
+the Virgin's knee, he holds a captive goldfinch, which he has brought,
+with childish glee, as an offering to the Holy Child. The infant Jesus,
+standing between his mother's knees, with one foot placed on her foot,
+and her hand, with the open book, close above his shoulder, regards the
+Baptist with an upward look of gentle solemnity, at the same time that
+he holds his bent hand over the head of the bird.
+
+'So much for mere description. The inner feeling of the picture, the
+motive which has prompted it, has surely hardly ever been surpassed. The
+Blessed Virgin, in casting her arm round the infant St John, looks down
+on him with a holy complacency for the testimony which he is to bear to
+her Son. Notice the human boyish glee with which the Baptist presents
+the captured goldfinch, and, on the other hand, the divine look, even of
+majesty and creative love, with which the infant Jesus, laying his hand
+on the head of the bird, half reproves St John, as it were saying, "Love
+them and hurt them not." Notice, too, the unfrightened calm of the bird
+itself, passive under the hand of its loving Creator. All these are
+features of the very highest power of human art.
+
+'Again, in accompaniments, all is as it should be. The Virgin, modestly
+and beautifully draped; St John, girt about the loins, not only in
+accord with his well-known prophetic costume, but also as partaking of
+sinful humanity, and therefore needing such cincture: the Child
+Redeemer, with a slight cincture, just to suggest motherly care, but not
+over the part usually concealed, as indeed it never ought to be, seeing
+that in Him was no sin, and that it is this spotless purity which is
+ever the leading idea in representations of Him as an infant. Notice,
+too, his foot, beautifully resting on that of his mother; the unity
+between them being thus wonderfully though slightly kept up. Her eye has
+just been dwelling on the book of the Prophecies open in her hand; and
+thus the spectator's thought is ruled in accordance with the high
+mission of the Holy One of God, and thrown forward into the grand and
+blessed future. It is a holy and wonderful picture; I had not seen any
+in Italy which had struck or refreshed me more.'[14]
+
+And allow me to write two or three words with regard to the 'Madonna
+della Sedia,' or our Lady of the Chair, an engraving of which used to
+charm me when a child. The Virgin, very young and simple-looking in her
+loveliness, is seated on a low chair, clasping the Divine Child, who is
+leaning in weariness on her breast. In the original picture, St John
+with his cross is standing--a boy at the Virgin's knee, but he is absent
+from the old engraving. The meek adoring tenderness in the face of the
+mother, the holy ingenuousness in that of the child, are expressions to
+be long studied.
+
+Of Raphael's cartoons, which, so many of us can see for ourselves, I
+cannot trust myself to do more than to repeat what strikes me as a
+singularly apt phrase of Hazlitt's, given by Mrs Jameson, that the
+cartoons are instances in which 'the corruptible has put on
+incorruption.' That from the very slightness of the materials employed,
+and the very injuries which the cartoons have sustained, we have the
+greatest triumph of art, where 'the sense of power supersedes the
+appearance of effort,' and where the result is the more majestic for
+being in ruins. 'All other pictures look like oil and varnish, we are
+stopped and attracted by the colouring, the penciling, the finishing,
+the instrumentality of art; but the on the canvas.... There is nothing
+between us and the subject; we look through a frame and see Scripture
+histories, and amidst the wreck of colour and the mouldering of material
+beauty, nothing is left but a universe of thought, or the broad imminent
+shadows of calm contemplation and majestic pains.'
+
+And that Raphael did not neglect the minutest details in these sketches,
+will be seen by the accompanying note: 'The foreground of Raphael's two
+cartoons, "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes," and "The Charge to
+Peter," are covered with plants of the common sea cole-wort, of which
+the sinuated leaves and clustered blossoms would have exhausted the
+patience of any other artist; but have appeared worthy of prolonged and
+thoughtful labour to the great mind of Raphael.'--_Ruskin_.
+
+Whole clusters of anecdotes gather round the cartoons, which, as they
+have to do with the work and not the worker, I leave untouched, with
+regret. But I must forewarn my readers by mentioning some of the refuted
+criticisms which have been applied to the cartoons. Reading the
+criticisms and their answers ought to render us modest and wary in
+'picking holes' in great pictures, as forward and flippant critics, old
+and young, are tempted to pick them. With regard to the 'Miraculous
+Draught of Fishes,' a great outcry was once set up that Raphael had made
+the boat too little to hold the figures he has placed in it. But Raphael
+made the boat little advisedly; if he had not done so, the picture would
+have been 'all boat,' a contingency scarcely to be desired; on the
+other hand, if Raphael had diminished the figures to suit the size of
+the boat, these figures would not have suited those of the other
+cartoons, and the cartoon would have lost greatly in dignity and effect.
+
+In the cartoon of the 'Death of Ananias,' carping objectors were ready
+to suggest that Raphael had committed an error in time by introducing
+Sapphira in the background counting her ill-gotten gains, at the moment
+when her no less guilty husband has fallen down in the agonies of death.
+It was hours afterwards that Sapphira entered into the presence of the
+apostles. But we must know that time and space do not exist for
+painters, who have to tell their story at one stroke, as it were.
+
+In the treating of the 'Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple,'
+some authorities have found fault with Raphael for breaking the
+composition into parts by the introduction of pillars, and, farther,
+that the shafts are not straight. Yet by this treatment Raphael has
+concentrated the principal action in a sort of frame, and thus has been
+enabled to give more freedom of action to the remaining figures in the
+other divisions of the picture. 'It is evident, moreover, that had the
+shafts been perfectly straight, according to the severest law of good
+taste in architecture, the effect would have been extremely disagreeable
+to the eye; by their winding form they harmonize with the manifold forms
+of the moving figures around, and they illustrate, by their elaborate
+elegance, the Scripture phrase, "the gate which is called
+Beautiful."'--_Mrs Jameson_.
+
+Of Raphael's portraits I must mention that wonderful portrait of Leo X.,
+often reckoned the best portrait in the world for truth of likeness and
+excellence of painting, and those of the so-called 'Fornarina,' or
+'baker'. Two Fornarinas are at Rome and one at Florence. There is a
+story that the original of the first two pictures was a girl of the
+people to whom Raphael was attached; and there is this to be said for
+the tradition, that there is an acknowledged coarseness in the very
+beauty of the half-draped Fornarina of the Barberini Palace. The
+'Fornarina' of Florence is the portrait of a noble woman, holding the
+fur-trimming of her mantle with her right hand, and it is said that the
+picture can hardly represent the same individual as that twice
+represented in Rome. According to one guess the last 'Fornarina' is
+Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa de Pescara, painted by Seba Piombo,
+instead of by Raphael; and according to another, the Roman 'Fornarina'
+is no Fornarina beloved by Raphael, but Beatrice Pio, a celebrated
+improvisatrice of the time.
+
+An 'innovation of modern times is to spell Raphael's name in England as
+the modern Italians spelt it, _Raffaelle_, a word of four syllables, and
+yet to pronounce this Italian word as if it were English, as _Raphael_.
+Vasari wrote Raffaello; he himself wrote Raphael on his pictures, and
+has signed the only autograph letter we have of his, Raphaello.'[15]
+
+Titian, or Tiziano Vecelli, the greatest painter of the Venetian
+School, reckoned worthy to be named with Lionardo, Michael Angelo and
+Raphael, was born of good family at Capo del Cadore in the Venetian
+State, in 1477. There is a tradition that while other painters made
+their first essays in art with chalk or charcoal, the boy Titian, who
+lived to be a glorious colourist, made his earliest trials in painting
+with the juice of flowers. Titian studied in Venice under the Bellini,
+and had Giorgione, who was born in the same year, for his
+fellow-scholar, at first his friend, later his rival. When a young man
+Titian spent some time in Ferrara; there he painted his 'Bacchus and
+Ariadne,' and a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1512, when Titian was
+thirty-five years of age, he was commissioned by the Venetians to
+continue the works in the great council-hall, which the advanced age of
+Gian Bellini kept him from finishing. Along with this commission Titian
+was appointed in 1516 to the office of la Sanseria, which gave him the
+duty and privilege of painting the portraits of the Doges as long as he
+held the office; coupled with the office was a salary of one hundred
+and twenty crowns a year. Titian lived to paint five Doges; two others,
+his age, equal to that of Gian Bellini, prevented him from painting.
+
+In 1516, Titian painted his greatest sacred picture, the 'Assumption of
+the Virgin.' In the same year he painted the poet Ariosto, who mentions
+the painter with high honour in his verse.
+
+In 1530, Titian, a man of fifty-three years, was at Bologna, where there
+was a meeting between Charles V, and Pope Clement VII., when he was
+presented to both princes.
+
+Charles V, and Philip II, became afterwards great patrons and admirers
+of Titian, and it is of Charles V. and Titian that a legend, to which I
+have already referred, is told. The Emperor, visiting the painter while
+he was at work, stooped down and picked up a pencil, which Titian had
+let fall, to the confusion and distress of the painter, when Charles
+paid the princely compliment, 'Titian is worthy of being served by
+Caesar.' Titian painted many portraits of Charles V., and of the members
+of his house. As Maximilian had created Albrecht Duerer a noble of the
+Empire, Charles V, created Titian a Count Palatine, and a Knight of the
+Order of St Iago, with a pension, which was continued by Philip II., of
+four hundred crowns a year. It is doubtful whether Titian ever visited
+the Spain of his patrons, but Madrid possesses forty-three of his
+pictures, among them some of his finest works.
+
+Titian went to Rome in his later years, but declined to abandon for Rome
+the painter's native Venice, which had lavished her favours on her son.
+He lived in great splendour, paying annual summer visits to his
+birth-place of Cadore, and occasionally dwelling again for a time at
+Ferrara, Urbino, Bologna. In two instances he joined the Emperor at
+Augsburgh. When Henry III, of France landed at Venice, he was
+entertained _en grand seigneur_ by Titian, then a very old man; and when
+the king asked the price of some pictures which pleased him, Titian at
+once presented them as a gift to his royal guest.
+
+Titian married, as has been recently ascertained, and had three
+children,--two sons, the elder a worthless and scandalous priest; the
+second a good son and accomplished painter; and a daughter, the
+beautiful Lavinia, so often painted by her father, and whose name will
+live with his. Titian survived his wife thirty-six years; and his
+daughter, who had married, and was the mother of several children, six
+years. His second son and fellow-painter died of the same plague which
+struck down Titian, in 1566, at the ripe age of eighty-nine years.
+
+Titian is said to have been a man of irritable and passionate temper.
+The hatred between him and the painter, Pordenone, was so bitter, that
+the latter thought his life in danger, and painted with his shield and
+poniard lying ready to his hand. Titian grasped with imperious tenacity
+his supremacy as a painter, sedulously kept the secrets of his skill,
+and was most unmagnanimously jealous of the attainments of his scholars.
+No defect of temper, however, kept Titian from having two inseparable
+convivial companions--one of them the architect, Sansovino, and the
+other the profligate wit, Aretino, who was pleased to style himself the
+'friend of Titian and the scourge of princes.' Though Titian is said, in
+the panic of the great plague, to have died not only neglected, but
+plundered before his eyes, still Venice prized him so highly, that she
+made in his favour the single exception of a public funeral, during the
+appalling devastation wrought by the pestilence.
+
+From an engraving of a portrait of Titian by himself, which is before
+me, I can give the best idea of his person. He looks like one of the
+merchant princes, whom he painted so often and so well, in richly furred
+gown, massive chain, and small cap, far off his broad forehead: a
+stately figure, with a face--in its aquiline nose and keen eyes, full of
+sagacity and fire, which no years could tame.
+
+Towards the close of Titian's life, there was none who even approached
+the old Venetian painter in the art which he practised freely to the
+last. Painting in Italy was everywhere losing its pre-eminence. It had
+become, even when it was not so nominally, thoroughly secularized;--and
+with reason, for the painters by their art-creed and by their lives were
+fitter to represent gods and goddesses, in whom no man believed, than to
+give earnest expression to a living faith. Even Titian, great as he was,
+proved a better painter of heathen mythology than of sacred subjects.
+
+But within certain limits and in certain directions, Titian stands
+unequalled. He has a high place for composition and for drawing, and his
+colouring was, beyond comparison, grand and true. He was great as a
+landscape painter, and he was the best portrait painter whom the world
+ever saw. In his painting is seen, not, indeed, the life of the spirit,
+but the life of the senses 'in its fullest power,' and in Titian there
+was such large mastery of this life, that in his freedom there was no
+violence, but the calmness of supreme strength, the serenity of perfect
+satisfaction. His painting was a reflection of the old Greek idea of the
+life of humanity as a joyous existence, so long as the sun of youth,
+maturity, health, and good fortune shone, without even that strain of
+foreboding pain, and desperate closing with fate, which troubled the
+bliss of ancient poet or sculptor. A large proportion of Titian's
+principal pictures are at Venice and Madrid.
+
+Among Titian's finest sacred pictures, are his 'Assumption of the
+Virgin,' now in the Academy, Venice, where 'the Madonna, a powerful
+figure, is borne rapidly upwards, as if divinely impelled; ..,
+fascinating groups of infant angels surround her, beneath stand the
+apostles, looking up with solemn gestures;' and his 'Entombment of
+Christ,' a picture which is also in Venice. Titian's Madonnas were not
+so numerous as his Venuses, many of which are judged excellent examples
+of the master. His 'Bacchus and Ariadne,' in the National Gallery, is
+described by Mrs Jameson, 'as presenting, on a small scale, an epitome
+of all the beauties which characterize Titian, in the rich, picturesque,
+animated composition, in the ardour of Bacchus, who flings himself from
+his car to pursue Ariadne; the dancing bacchanals, the frantic grace of
+the bacchante, and the little joyous satyr in front, trailing the head of
+the sacrifice.'
+
+Titian's landscapes are the noble backgrounds to many of his pictures.
+These landscapes were not only free, but full. 'The great masters of
+Italy, almost without exception, and Titian, perhaps, more than any
+other (for he had the highest knowledge of landscape), are in the
+constant habit of rendering every detail of their foregrounds with the
+most laborious botanical fidelity; witness the Bacchus and Ariadne, in
+which the foreground is occupied by the common blue iris, the aquilegia,
+and the wild rose; _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.'--_Ruskin_.
+
+In portraits, Titian conveyed to the sitters and transferred to his
+canvas, not only a life-likeness, but a positively noble dignity in that
+likeness. What in Van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds was the bestowing of
+high breeding and dainty refinement, became under Titian's brush
+dignity, pure and simple, very quiet, and wonderfully real. There is
+this peculiarity in connection with the number of portraits which Titian
+executed, that many of them have descended to us without further titles
+than those of 'A Venetian Senator,' 'A Lady,' etc., etc., yet of the
+individual life of the originals no one can doubt. With regard to
+Titian's portraits of women, I have already referred to those of his
+beautiful daughter, Lavinia. In one portrait, in the Berlin Museum, she
+is holding a plate of fruit; in another, in England, the plate of fruit
+is changed into a casket of jewels; in a third, at Madrid, Lavinia is
+Herodias, and bears a charger with the head of John the Baptist. A
+'Violante'--as some say, the daughter of Titian's scholar, Palma, though
+dates disprove this--sat frequently to Titian, and is said to have been
+loved by him.
+
+I have written, in connection with Lionardo's 'Jaconde' and Raphael's
+'Fornarina,' of Titian's 'Bella Donna.' He has various 'Bellas,' but, as
+far as I know, this is _the_ 'Bella Donna,'--'a splendid, serious
+beauty, in a red and blue silk dress,' in the Sciarra Gallery, Rome.
+
+I have read that critics were at one time puzzled by the singular
+yellow, almost straw colour, appearing profusely in the hair of the
+women of the Venetian painters of this time, and that it was only by
+consulting contemporary records that it was learnt that the Venetian
+women indulged in the weak and false vanity of dyeing their black hair a
+pale yellow--a process, in the course of which the women drew the hair
+through the crown of a broad-brimmed hat, and spreading it over the
+brim, submitted patiently to bleaching the hair in a southern sun.
+
+Among Titian's portraits of men, those of the 'Emperor Charles V.' and
+the 'Duke of Alva' are among the most famous.
+
+Titian painted, and painted wonderfully, to the very last. He was
+eighty-one when he painted the 'Martyrdom of St Lawrence,' one of his
+largest and grandest compositions, and in the last year of his life he
+painted--leaving it not quite completed,--a 'Pieta;' showing that his
+hand owned the weight of years,[16] but the conception of the subject is
+still animated and striking, the colours still glowing; while,
+Titian-like, the light still flows around the mighty group in every
+gradation of tone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DUeRER, 1471-1528.
+
+
+Albrecht Duerer 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 Duerer 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 Duerer'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 Duerer'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 Duerer was a shrew and a miser, was
+Albrecht Duerer 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 Duerer 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 Duerer.
+
+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 Duerer 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 Duerer's designs to the German's serious loss and
+inconvenience.
+
+A little later Albrecht Duerer, accompanied by his wife, visited the
+Netherlands. The Emperor Maximilian treated the painter with great
+favour, and a legend survives of their relations:--Duerer 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 Duerer 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 Duerer 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
+Duerer, 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
+Duerer's case the change was never openly professed--the doctrines of the
+Reformation.
+
+There is a portrait of Albrecht Duerer, 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 Duerer, but I imagine it proceeds simply
+from the noble scars of work and time; and that when Albrecht Duerer 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 Duerer 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,'
+
+    'For the great painter never dies.'
+
+Albrecht Duerer'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 Duerer 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 Duerer'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 Duerer 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 Duerer'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 Duerer'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 Duerer 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 naive 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 Duerer'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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+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
+facade 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 facades, 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 naivete 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 L1500. 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 Duerer, 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 fricassee 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 masterpieces, 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. 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 Ion 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. In the 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 Cagliari 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, etc., etc. Another of Veronese's pictures in the
+National Gallery is 'The Consecration of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+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 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:
+
+    'Let him, who a good painter would be,
+    Acquire the drawing of Rome,
+    Venetian action, and Venetian shadow,
+    And the dignified colouring of Lombardy,
+    The terrible manner of Michael Angelo,
+    Titian's truth and nature,
+    The sovereign purity of Correggio's style,
+    And the true symmetry of Raphael;
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    And a little of Parmegiano'a grace,
+    But without so much study and toil,
+    Let him only apply himself to imitate the works
+    Which our Niccolino has left us here.'
+
+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,' etc. In this intent regard to style,
+and this perfecting of means to an end, thought and 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 'Pietas,'
+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 'Phoebus 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 a 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 personae_,
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+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, etc. etc., 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 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 debonnairete 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:
+
+    'A man long trained to love the monk's vision 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 the stout horses and 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 that 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' 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
+    peasants cottage.'
+
+Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches
+being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp,
+many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and
+cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at
+Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of
+Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a
+very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his
+own.
+
+First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group,
+distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard
+to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in
+relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An
+enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the
+daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for
+composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the
+bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely
+physical agony--too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime--- an
+earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'
+
+    'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
+     Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow
+     Stream not with blood.'
+
+There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while
+Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by
+re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the
+Magdalene.
+
+With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of
+the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for sixteen
+hundred florins, his usual terms being a hundred florins a-day.
+
+'The Virgin and Serpent' (from the 12th chapter of Revelation) in the
+Munich gallery is very splendid. The Virgin with the new-born Saviour in
+her arms is mounting on the wings of an eagle, surrounded by a flood of
+light. The serpent, encircling the moon on which she stands, is writhing
+beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre
+over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful
+combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the
+child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his
+tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin
+with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with
+impotent rage, and falling with the dragon into the abyss.'
+
+'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects
+from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and
+in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry.' Among
+his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,'
+now at Munich. 'The women are driven back by the Greeks over the river
+Thermodon; two horses are in savage combat on the bridge; one Amazon is
+torn from her horse; a second is dragged along by a sable steed, and
+falling headlong into the river, where others are swimming and
+struggling. No other battle-piece, save that of the Amazons, can compare
+with Raphael's "Battle of Constantine."'
+
+Another great picture is The 'Carrying off of Proserpine.' 'Pluto in his
+car is driven by fiery brown steeds, and is bearing away the goddess,
+resisting and struggling. The picture absolutely glows with genial fire.
+The forms in it are more slender than is general with Rubens. Among the
+companions of Proserpine the figure of Diana is conspicuous for grace
+and beauty. The victorious god of love hovers before the chariot, and
+the blue ocean, warmly tinted with the sunbeams, forms a splendid
+back-ground.'[23]
+
+Rubens was famous for the loveliness and grace of his paintings of
+children. Perhaps the most beautiful is that of 'The Infant Jesus and
+John playing with a Lamb.'
+
+Rubens was a great animal painter. One of his celebrated animal pictures
+is 'Daniel in the Lions' Den,' now at Hamilton Palace, in which each
+lion is a king of beasts checked in his fiercest have been painted by
+Rubens in a fit of pique at a false report which had been circulated
+that he could not paint animals, and that those in his pictures were
+supplied by the animal-painter, his friend and scholar, Schneyders.
+
+Rubens' landscapes are not the least renowned of his pictures. He gave
+to his own rich but prosaic Flanders, all the breadth and breeziness and
+matchless aerial effects of a master of painting, and a true lover of
+nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most
+ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a lover and a man
+of genius would pass by. His 'Prairie of Laacken,' 'with the sun of
+Flanders piercing the dense yellow clouds with the force of fire,' is of
+great repute.
+
+Among his famous portraits I shall mention that called 'The Four
+Philosophers' (Justus Lepsius, Hugo Grotius, Rubens, and his brother),
+with peaked beards and moustaches, in turned-over collars, ruffs and
+fur-trimmed robes, having books and pens, a dog, and a classic bust as
+accessories. The open pillared door is wreathed with a spray from
+without, and there is a landscape in the background. This portrait is
+full of power, freedom, and splendid painting.
+
+Another portrait contains that sweetest of Rubens' not often sweet
+faces, called 'the Lady in the Straw Hat.' Rubens himself did not name
+the picture otherwise in his catalogue. Tradition says the original was
+Mdlle Lundens, the beauty of the seventeen provinces, and that she died
+young and unmarried. Connoisseurs value the picture because of the
+triumph of skill by which Rubens has painted brilliantly a face so much
+in the shade; to those who are not connoisseurs I imagine the picture
+must speak for itself, in its graceful, tender beauty. Forming part of
+the collection of the late Sir Robert Peel (I think he gave three
+thousand pounds for 'the Lady in the Straw Hat'), which has been bought
+for the country, this beautiful portrait is now in the National Gallery.
+
+And now I must speak of the picture of the Arundel Family. But first, a
+word about Thomas, Earl of Arundel. It is impossible to write an English
+work on art and omit a brief account of one of England's greatest art
+benefactors. Thomas, Earl of Arundel, representing in his day the great
+house of Howard, had a love of art which approached to a mania; and
+without being so outrageously vain as Sir Kenelm Digby, there is no
+doubt that the Earl counted on his art collection as a source of
+personal distinction. James I., himself an art collector, so far
+humoured the Earl in his taste as to present him with Lord Somerset's
+forfeited collection, valued at a thousand pounds. But Charles I, and
+the Earl became rival collectors, and little love was lost between them.
+The Earl of Arundel impairing even his great revenues in the pursuit,
+employed agents and ambassadors--notably Petty and Evelyn--all over
+Europe, to obtain for him drawings, pictures, ancient marbles, gems,
+etc., etc. When the civil wars broke out, Lord Arundel conveyed his
+priceless collection for safety to Antwerp and Padua. Eventually it was
+divided among his sons and scattered far and wide. The only portion of
+it which fell to the nation, in the course of another generation, was
+the Greek Marbles, known as the Arundel Marbles, which were finally
+presented to the University of Oxford. But in Rubens' day all this grand
+collection was intact, and displayed in galleries at Arundel House,
+which the mob thought fit to nickname 'Tart Hall;' and through these
+galleries Rubens was conducted by the Earl.
+
+Lord Arundel desired to have an Arundel family portrait painted for him
+by Rubens. The Earl was rather given to having Arundel family portraits,
+for there are no less than three in which he figures. One by Van Somer,
+in which the hero is pointing somewhat comically with his truncheon to
+the statues of his collection in the background, and the last one
+projected by Van Dyck, but executed by an inferior artist, in which
+various family pieces of armour, swords, and shields, worn at Flodden,
+or belonging to the poet Earl of Surrey, are introduced in the hands of
+the sons of the family.
+
+But it is with Rubens' 'Arundel Family,' which, we must remember, ranks
+second in English family pictures, that we have to do. Thomas, Earl of
+Arundel, and the Lady Alathea,[24] are under a portico with twisted
+columns, like those in Raphael's cartoons; a rich curtain, and a
+landscape with a large mansion are seen beyond. The Countess is seated
+in a chair of state, with one hand on the head of a white greyhound; she
+wears a black satin gown, laced ruff, gold bracelets, and pearl
+necklace. Her hair is light, and decked with pearls and plumes. The Earl
+stands behind with a hand on her chair. His head is uncovered, the short
+hair inclining to grey; the whiskers and beard pointed. His vest is
+olive-coloured, and he has a brown mantle lined with crimson over the
+shoulders beneath his ruff. There is a little boy--Earl Thomas's
+grandson, Philip Howard, afterwards Cardinal Howard, in crimson velvet,
+trimmed with gold lace, and a dwarf on the other side of the dog, with
+one hand on its back.
+
+Among other masterpieces of Rubens, including the 'Straw Hat,' which
+are in the National Gallery, there are the 'Rape of the Sabines,' and
+the landscape 'Autumn,' which has a view of his country chateau, de
+Stein, near Mechlin. In Dulwich Gallery there is an interesting portrait
+by Rubens of an elderly lady in a great Spanish ruff, which is believed
+to be the portrait of his mother.
+
+Rembrandt Van Rhyn is said to have been born near Leyden about 1606 or
+1608, for there is a doubt as to the exact date. His father was a miller
+or maltster, and there is a theory that Rembrandt acquired some of his
+effects of light and shade from the impressions made upon him during his
+life in the mill. He was a pupil at the Latin school of Leyden, and a
+scholar in studios both at Leyden and Amsterdam.
+
+In 1630, when Rembrandt was a mere lad, he seems to have settled in
+Amsterdam, and married there in 1634, when he was six or eight and
+twenty years of age, a young Dutchwoman possessed of a considerable
+fortune, which, in case of her death and of Rembrandt's re-marriage, was
+to pass to her children, a provision that in the end wrought Rembrandt's
+ruin. The troubles of his country in the painter's time rendered his
+prices comparatively small and precarious, and Rembrandt, like Rubens,
+without Rubens' wealth, was eager in making an art collection and
+surrounding himself with those very forms of beauty in the great Italian
+masters' works, in the appreciation of which the Dutch master--judged by
+his own works--might have been reckoned deficient.
+
+Rembrandt's wife died after eight years of marriage, and left him with
+one surviving son, Titus, and Rembrandt, having re-married, was called
+upon to give up the lad's inheritance. This call, together with the
+expenditure of the sums which Rembrandt had lavished on his collection,
+was too heavy upon funds never very ample, and the painter, after
+struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son
+took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the
+painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his
+mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery,
+degradation, and poverty of this period. He lived thirteen years longer,
+but it was in obscurity--out of which the only records which reach us,
+are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose,
+a desperate resort to low company dating from his first wife's death,
+and his gradual downfall.
+
+Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of
+light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.
+
+It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I
+add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt
+painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and
+stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows
+are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded
+by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double
+chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a
+chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging
+across his breast.
+
+Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost
+equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems
+as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht Duerer had in
+Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective
+Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark
+days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight
+in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at
+Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by
+fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat
+grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of
+the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is
+this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good
+painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather
+under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness
+of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in
+that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and
+alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise
+prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have
+coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and
+incidents being _Rembrandtesque_, as we speak of their being
+picturesque.
+
+Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or
+even horror, which he sought to produce, to imagination working in the
+mysterious depths of his shadows. A very famous picture of his is 'Dr
+Deeman (an anatomist) demonstrating from a dead subject.' In another
+picture a man stealing from the gloom is in the act of stabbing in the
+back the unconscious man in the foreground.[25] Rembrandt's originality
+is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in
+painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any
+evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty;
+this can be said of him who spent means not his own on gathering
+together images of beauty and grace produced by the pencils and brushes
+of others. Many of Rembrandt's pictures are in the galleries of
+Amsterdam and the Hague, and we have many in London. The National
+Gallery has several examples, including two of Rembrandt's portraits.
+
+Passing over Van Dyck, whom I reserve, as I have reserved Holbein, to
+class among the foreign painters resident in or closely connected with
+England, I come to the Teniers--father and son. David the elder was born
+at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610.
+David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the
+works of the father are often mistaken for those of the son. The two
+Teniers' class of subjects was the same, being ordinarily 'fairs,
+markets, peasants' merry-makings, beer-houses, guard rooms.'
+
+David the younger had great popularity, was court painter to the
+Archduke of Austria, and earned such an independence, that he bought for
+himself a chateau at the village of Perck, not very far from the Chateau
+de Stein of Rubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly
+intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost
+state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers
+married twice, his first wife being the daughter of one of a family of
+Flemish painters, who were known, according to their respective
+proclivities in art, by the names of Peasant Breughel, Velvet Breughel,
+and Hell Breughel. Teniers had many children.
+
+The elder Teniers died at Antwerp in 1649; the younger died at Brussels,
+and was buried at Perck, in 1694.
+
+The distinction of the Teniers was the extreme fidelity and cleverness
+with which they copied (but did not explain) the life they knew--the
+homeliest, humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous
+accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of
+poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even
+coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who
+ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the
+Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to
+those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking
+that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the
+Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos;
+while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the
+life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from
+missing what should be present in every life. Men and women are only
+conscious of the defect when the painters wander, now and then, into
+higher spheres and into sacred subjects, and there is the unavoidable
+recoil from gross blindness. I have taken the Teniers as the
+representatives of a numerous school of Flemish and Dutch artists, whose
+works abound in this country. David Teniers the younger appears at his
+best, several times, in Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery.
+
+Philip Wouverman was born at Haarlem in 1620. He was the son of a
+painter, able, but unrecognized in his own day. Philip Wouverman found
+few patrons, disposed of his pictures by hard bargains to dealers, was
+tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far,
+according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to
+prevent his son pursuing the career which had been to him a career of
+bitter disappointment. He died at Haarlem, 1668, when he was no more
+than forty-eight years of age. Yet some nine hundred paintings bear
+(many of them falsely) Wouverman's name.
+
+With all the truth and excellent execution of his contemporaries and
+countrymen', Philip Wouverman, who had, as he thought, missed his mark,
+had something which those successful men lacked--he had not only a
+feeling for grace, but a touch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly
+'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt
+a higher class of actors--knights and ladies, instead of peasants--there
+is a more refined treatment and a dash of tenderness and melancholy--the
+last possibly born of his own disastrous fortunes. In his love of horses
+and dogs, as adjuncts to his groups, he had as great a fondness for a
+special white horse, as Paul Potter had for black and white cattle.
+
+Albert Cuyp was born at Dort in 1605. He was a brewer by trade, and only
+painted as an amateur. In spite of this, he was a great landscape
+painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing
+his own love of nature. Little is known of Cuyp's life, and the date of
+his death is uncertain, farther than it was later than 1638.
+
+In affected enthusiasm, Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude, but in
+reality, Cuyp surpassed, Claude in some respects. The distinction, which
+Mr Ruskin draws between them, is that, while Claude, in the sense of
+beauty, is the superior to Cuyp, in the sense of truth Claude is the
+inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is
+called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, etc.), but Cuyp's
+triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and
+in 'expressions of yellow sunlight.' Mr Ruskin admits, while he is
+proceeding to censure Cuyp, parts might be chosen out of the good
+pictures of Cuyp which have never been equalled in art.' On another
+occasion, Mr Ruskin has this passage full of dry humour in reference to
+Cuyp:
+
+'Again, look at the large Cuyp in Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt
+considers "finest in the world," and of which he very complimentarily
+says, "the tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple
+light of the hills" have an effect ought to have apologized before now
+for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with
+terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to
+observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet
+more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily
+discovered that Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this
+first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say
+about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. We may see for
+ourselves Cuyp's lovely landscapes both in the National Gallery and at
+Dulwich.
+
+Paul Potter was born at Enkhuysen, in North Holland, in 1625, and was
+the son of a painter. Paul Potter settled, while still very young, at
+the Hague as an animal painter, and died in his thirtieth year, in 1654.
+His career, which was thus brief, had promised to be very successful,
+and he had established his fame, while no more than twenty-two years of
+age, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his
+most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,'
+for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native
+country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is
+considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse,
+representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's
+later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle
+feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now
+regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider
+scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of
+Paul Potter in the National Gallery.
+
+Jan David de Heem[26] and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603,
+the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were
+eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom
+and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish
+and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description.
+I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well
+represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how,
+as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they
+are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted
+and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch
+full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern
+flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to
+introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every
+cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.
+
+From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and
+Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am
+sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to
+other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into
+one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde,
+etc., etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682.
+
+
+Spanish art, from its dawn to the time of Velasquez, had been of a
+'severely devotional character,' austere and formal; and although one
+man did not work a revolution by his independent example, he did
+something to humanize and widen art. In the rich city of Seville in
+1599, Diego Rodriguez, de Silva y Velasquez,--and not, as he is
+incorrectly called, Diego Velasquez de Silva, was born, and, according
+to an Andalusian fashion, took his mother's name of Velasquez, while his
+father was of the Portuguese house de Silva. Velasquez was gently born,
+though his father was in no higher position than that of a lawyer in
+Seville.
+
+The painter was well educated, though, according to his English
+biographer (Sir W. Stirling Maxwell), 'he was still more diligent in
+drawing on his grammars and copybooks than in turning them to their
+legitimate use.' The lad's evident bent induced his father to painter.
+He studied in two different Spanish studios, and married the daughter of
+his second master, whom the talents, assiduity, and good qualities of
+Velasquez had already strongly attached to the young painter.
+
+From the first, Velasquez struck out what was then a new line in Spanish
+art. He gave himself up to the materialistic studies, to which the
+Flemish and Dutch painters were prone, painting diligently 'still life'
+in every form, taking his living subjects from the streets and
+way-sides, and keeping a peasant lad as an apprentice, 'who served him
+for a study in different actions and postures (sometimes crying,
+sometimes laughing), till Velasquez had grappled with every variety of
+expression.' The result of those studies was Velasquez's famous picture
+of the 'Aguador,' or water-carrier of Seville, which was carried off by
+Joseph Buonaparte in his flight from Spain, taken in his carriage at
+Vittoria, and finally presented by Ferdinand VII, of Spain, as a
+grateful offering to the Duke of Wellington, in whose gallery at Apsley
+House the picture remains. 'It is a composition of three figures,' Sir
+W. Stirling Maxwell writes; 'a sunburnt way-worn seller of water,
+dressed in a tattered brown jerkin, with his huge earthen jars, and two
+lads, one of whom receives a sparkling glass of the pure element, whilst
+his companion quenches his thirst from a pipkin. The execution of the
+heads and all the details is perfect; and the ragged trader dispensing a
+few maravidi's worth of his simple stock, maintains, during the
+transaction, a grave dignity of deportment, highly Spanish and
+characteristic, and worthy of an emperor pledging a great vassal in
+Tokay.'
+
+Just such a group may still be seen, or was to be seen till very lately,
+in the quaint streets of Seville. I have read an anecdote of Velasquez
+and this picture, which is quite probable, though I cannot vouch for
+its accuracy. It is said that, while painting the water-carrier day
+after day, when he had been engaged with his work for several hours,
+Velasquez found himself vexed by perceiving, as it were, the effect of a
+shadow cast by some of the drapery. Small flaw as it might have been, it
+appeared to him to interfere with and spoil the picture. Again and
+again, in endeavouring to do away with this 'shadow,' Velasquez undid
+portions of his work, and had to repeat them next day, but always,
+towards the end of his task, the invidious shadow stole upon his vision.
+At last a friend, who was present and full of admiration for the
+picture, heard Velasquez exclaim, 'That shadow again!' and saw him seize
+a brush and prepare to dash it across the canvas. The friend
+remonstrated, besought, and by main force held back the painter, and at
+last induced him to leave the picture untouched till next day, when
+Velasquez discovered, to his great relief, that the shadow had been in
+his own wearied young eyes, and not in his admirable representation of
+the 'Water-carrier.'
+
+Velasquez was in Madrid in 1623, when he was in his twenty-fifth year,
+and having been introduced by the Prime Minister, Olivares, to the King
+of Spain, Philip IV., a king who was only known to smile once or twice
+in his lifetime, whose government was careless and blundering, but who
+had the reputation of being a man of some intelligence and very
+considerable taste,--Velasquez was received into the king's service with
+a monthly salary of twenty ducats, and employed to paint the royal
+portrait.
+
+From the time that he became court painter, Velasquez was largely
+occupied in painting portraits of members of the royal family, with
+special repetitions of the likeness of his most Catholic Majesty. With
+Velasquez's first portrait of Philip in armour, mounted on an Andalusian
+charger, the king was so pleased, that he permitted the picture to be
+publicly exhibited, amidst the plaudits of the spectators, in front of
+the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. Nor was the exhibition a
+barren honour to the painter, for the king not only 'talked of
+collecting and in future Velasquez should have the monopoly of the royal
+countenance,' he paid three hundred ducats for the picture.
+
+About this time our own Charles I., then Prince of Wales, went in his
+incognito of Charles Smith to Madrid on his romantic adventure of
+seeking to woo and win, personally, the Infanta of Spain, and Velasquez
+is said to have gained Charles's notice, and to have at least begun a
+portrait of him. If it were ever completed it has been lost, a
+misfortune which has caused spurious pictures, purporting to be the real
+work, to be offered to the public. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell holds, with
+great show of truth, that this visit of Charles to Madrid, when its
+altars were 'glowing' with the pictures of Titian, confirmed the unhappy
+king's taste for art.
+
+In 1628 Rubens came to Madrid as an envoy from the governess of the
+Netherlands, and the two painters, who had many points in common, and
+who had already corresponded, became fast friends. By the advice of
+Rubens, Velasquez was induced to put into execution his cherished
+desire of visiting Italy, the king granting his favourite painter leave
+of absence, the continuance of his salary, and a special sum for his
+expenses.
+
+Velasquez went to Venice first, and afterwards to Rome, where he was
+offered, and declined, a suite of apartments in the Vatican, asking only
+free access to the papal galleries. There he copied many portions of
+Michael Angelo's 'Last Judgment'--not a hundred years old, and 'yet
+undimmed by the morning and evening incense of centuries,' and portions
+of the frescoes of Raphael. At Rome Velasquez found there before him,
+Domenichino, Guido Reni, alternating 'between the excitements of the
+gaming table and the sweet creations of his smooth flowing pencil;'
+'Nicolas Poussin, an adventurer fresh from his Norman village; and
+Claude Gelee, a pastry-cook's runaway apprentice from Lorraine.'[27]
+Velasquez remained a year in Rome. Besides his studies he painted three
+original pictures, one of them, 'Joseph's Coat,' well known among the
+painter's comparatively rare religious works, and now in the Escurial.
+In this picture his biographer acknowledges, that 'choosing rather to
+display his unrivalled skill in delineating vulgar forms than to risk
+his reputation in the pursuit of a more refined and idealized style,'
+Velasquez's 'Hebrew patriarchs are swineherds of Estramadura or
+shepherds of the Sierra Morena.'
+
+From Rome Velasquez proceeded to Naples, where he was enabled by his
+prudence and forbearance to face without injury the disgraceful 'reign
+of terror' which the Neapolitan artists had established in the south of
+Italy. The Neapolitan artists more than any other Italian artists are
+believed to have influenced Velasquez's style.
+
+In 1639 Velasquez painted his principal religious work, 'The
+Crucifixion,' for the nunnery of San Placido in Madrid, a painting in
+which his power has triumphed successfully over his halting imagination.
+
+With regard to the many court groups which Velasquez was constantly
+taking, I may quote Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's amusing paragraph about a
+curious variety of human beings in the Court Gallery. 'The Alcazar of
+Madrid abounded with dwarfs in the days of Philip IV., who was very fond
+of having them about him, and collected curious specimens of the race,
+like other rarities. The Queen of Spain's gallery is, in consequence,
+rich in portraits of these little monsters, executed by Velasquez. They
+are, for the most part, very ugly, displaying, sometimes in an extreme
+degree, the deformities peculiar to their stunted growth. Maria Barbola,
+immortalized by a place in one of Velasquez's most celebrated pictures,
+was a little dame about three feet and a half in height, with the head
+and shoulders of a large woman, and a countenance much underjawed, and
+almost ferocious in expression. Her companion, Nicolasito Pertusano,
+although better proportioned than the lady, and of a more amicable
+aspect, was very inferior in elegance as a royal plaything to his
+contemporary, the valiant Sir Geoffrey Hudson; or his successor in the
+next reign, the pretty Luisillo of Queen Louisa of Orleans. Velasquez
+painted many portraits of these little creatures, generally seated on
+the ground; and there is a large picture in the Louvre representing two
+of them leading by a cord a great spotted hound, to which they bear the
+same proportion that men of the usual size bear to a horse.'
+
+In 1648 Velasquez again visited Italy, sent by the king this time to
+collect works of art for the royal galleries and the academy about to be
+founded. Velasquez went by Genoa, Milan, Venice (buying there chiefly
+the works of Tintoret), and Parma, to Rome and Naples, returning to
+Rome. At Rome Velasquez painted his splendidly characteristic portrait
+of the Pope Innocent X., 'a man of coarse features and surly expression,
+and perhaps the ugliest of all the successors of St Peter.'
+
+Back at Madrid, Philip continued to load Velasquez and his family with
+favours, appointing the painter Quarter-Master-General of the king's
+household with a salary of three thousand ducats a year, and the right
+of carrying at his girdle a key which opened every lock in the palace.
+
+Philip is said to have raised Velasquez to knighthood in a manner as
+gracious as the manner of Charles V, when he lifted up Titian's pencil.
+In painting one of his most renowned pictures, to which I shall refer
+again, 'The Maids of Honour,' Velasquez included himself at work on a
+large picture of the royal family. The painter represented himself with
+the key of his office at his girdle, and on his breast the red cross of
+the Order of Santiago. Philip, who came every day to see the progress of
+this picture, remarked in reference to the figure of the artist, that
+'one thing was yet wanting, and taking up the brush painted the knightly
+insignia with his own royal fingers, thus conferring the accolade with a
+weapon not recognized in chivalry.'
+
+As it is believed, Velasquez's court office, with all its prestige and
+influence, helped in causing his death. King Philip went in June, 1660,
+to the Isle of Pheasants in the river Bidassa, where, on ground which
+was neither Spanish nor French, the Spanish and French courts were to
+meet and celebrate with the greatest magnificence the marriage of the
+Grand Monarque and the Infanta Maria Teresa. One of Velasquez's
+official duties was to prepare lodgings for the king on his journeys,
+and in this instance the lodging included not only the decoration of the
+castle of Fuenterrabia, but the erection of a sumptuous pavilion in
+which the interviews of the assembled kings and queens and their
+revelries were to be held. Velasquez did his part of the preparations,
+and doubtless shared in the royal festivities, but returned to Madrid so
+worn out by his undertaking, and by constant attendance on his master,
+that he was seized with tertian fever, of which he died a few days
+later, while but in his sixty-first year, to the great grief of his
+countrymen, and above all of his king. Velasquez's wife, Dona Juana,
+died eight days after her husband, and was buried in his grave. The
+couple left one surviving child, a daughter, married to a painter.
+
+In one picture, now at Vienna, Velasquez gives a glimpse of his family
+life at a time when it would seem that he had four sons and two
+daughters, so that the fortunate painter's home had not been free from
+one shadow--that of death, which must have robbed him of five of his
+children. In this pleasant picture, 'his wife dressed in a brown tunic
+over a red petticoat, sits in the foreground of a large room, with a
+pretty little girl leaning on her knees, and the rest of her children
+grouped around her; behind are the men in deep shadow, one of them,
+perhaps, being Mazo, the lover or the husband of the eldest daughter,
+and a nurse with a child; and in an alcove Velasquez himself appears,
+standing before his easel, at work on a portrait of Philip IV. This is
+one of the most important works of the master out of the Peninsula; the
+faces of the family sparkle on the sober background like gems. As a
+piece of easy actual life, the composition has never been surpassed, and
+perhaps it excels even "The Meninas," inasmuch as the hoops and dwarfs
+of the palace have not intruded upon the domestic privacy of the
+painter's home, in the northern gallery.'[28]
+
+Velasquez seems to have been a man of honour and amiability. He filled
+a difficult office at the most jealous court in Europe with credit. He
+was true to his friends, and helpful to his brother artists. His
+biographer writes of Velasquez as handsome in person, and describes his
+costume when he appeared for the last time with his king in the galas at
+Pheasants' Isle:--'over a dress richly laced with silver he wore the
+usual Castilian ruff, and a short cloak embroidered with the red cross
+of Santiago; the badge of the order, sparkling with brilliants, was
+suspended from his neck by a gold chain; and the scabbard and hilt of
+his sword were of silver, exquisitely chased, and of Italian
+workmanship.' In the likeness of Velasquez, which is the frontispiece of
+Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's 'Life,' the painter appears as a man of
+swarthy complexion, with a long compressed upper lip, unconcealed by his
+long, elaborately trimmed moustache; his hair, or wig, is arranged in
+two large frizzed bunches on each side of a face which is inclined to be
+lantern-jawed. He wears a dark doublet with a 'standing white collar.'
+
+Velasquez's excellence as a painter was to be found, like that of
+Rembrandt, in his truth to nature; but the field of truth presented to
+the stately Spaniard, while it had its own ample share of humour, was a
+widely different field from that which offered itself to the Dutch
+burgher. Together with absolute truth, Velasquez had the ease and
+facility in expressing truth which are only acquired by a great master.
+Like Rubens, Velasquez made essays in many branches of painting. In
+sacred art, if we except his 'Crucifixion,' he did not attain a high
+place. With regard to his landscapes, Sir David Wilkie bore
+witness:--'Titian seems his model, but he has also the breadth and
+picturesque effect for which Claude and Salvator Rosa are remarkable;'
+and Sir David added of those landscapes, 'they have the very same sun we
+see, and the air we breathe, the very soul and spirit of nature.'
+
+Velasquez's _genre_ pictures, to which I shall refer by and by, are
+excellent, but the fate was kind which confined him largely to portrait
+painting. It was brought as a reproach against Velasquez in his
+lifetime, that he could paint a head and nothing else, to which he
+replied with mingled spirit, sense, and good nature, that his detractors
+flattered him, 'for he knew nobody of whom it could be said that he
+painted a head thoroughly well.'
+
+Sir W. Stirling Maxwell asserts of Velasquez's portrait painting, that
+no artist 'ever followed nature with more catholic fidelity; his
+cavaliers are as natural as his boors; he neither refined the vulgar,
+nor vulgarized the refined,' and goes on to quote this among other
+criticism:--'his portraits baffle description and praise; he drew the
+minds of men; they live, breathe, and are ready to walk out of the
+frames.' Sir William winds up with the enthusiastic declaration, 'Such
+pictures as these are real history; we know the persons of Philip IV,
+and Olivares, as familiarly as if we had paced the avenues of the Pardo
+with Digby and Howell, and perhaps we think more favourably of their
+characters.'
+
+I shall borrow still further from Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's graphic and
+entertaining book, descriptions of two of Velasquez's _genre_ pictures,
+'The Maids of Honour,' and the more celebrated 'Spinners,' both at
+Madrid. 'The scene (of the first) is a long room in a quarter of the old
+palace which was called the prince's quarter, and the subject, Velasquez
+at work on a large picture of the royal family. To the extreme right of
+the composition is seen the back of the easel and the canvas on which he
+is engaged; and beyond it spalette, pausing to converse, and to observe
+the effect of his performance. In the centre stands the little Infanta
+Maria Margarita, taking a cup of water from a salver which Dona Maria
+Augustina Sarmiento, maid of honour to the queen, presents kneeling. To
+the left, Dona Isabel de Velasco, another menina, seems to be dropping a
+courtesy; and the dwarfs, Maria Barbolo and Nicolas Pertusano, stand in
+the foreground, the little man putting his foot on the quarters of a
+great tawny hound, which despises the aggression, and continues in a
+state of solemn repose. Some paces behind these figures, Dona Marcela de
+Ulloa, a lady of honour in nun-like weeds, and a _guardadimas,_ are seen
+in conversation; at the far end of the room an open door gives a view of
+a staircase, up which Don Josef Nieto, queen's apasentador, is retiring;
+and near this door there hangs on the wall a mirror, which, reflecting
+the countenance of the king and queen, shows that they form part of the
+principal group, although placed beyond the bounds of the picture. The
+room is hung with paintings which Palomino assures us are works of
+Rubens; and it is lighted by three windows in the left wall, and by the
+open door at the end, an arrangement of which an artist will at once
+comprehend the difficulties. The perfection of art which conceals art,
+was never better attained than in this picture. Velasquez seems to have
+anticipated the discovery of Daguerre, and taking a real room, and real
+chance grouped people, to have fixed them, as it were by magic, for all
+time on his canvas. The little fair-haired Infanta is a pleasing study
+of childhood; with the hanging-lip and full cheek of the Austrian
+family, she has a fresh complexion and lovely blue eyes, and gives a
+promise of beauty which as empress she never fulfilled. Her young
+attendants, girls of thirteen or fourteen, contrast agreeably with the
+ill-favoured dwarf beside them; they are very pretty, especially Dona
+Isabel de Velasco, who died a reigning beauty, and their hands are
+painted with peculiar delicacy. Their dresses are highly absurd, their
+figures being concealed by long stiff corsets and prodigious hoops; for
+these were the days when the mode was--
+
+    "Supporters, pooters, fardingales, above the loynes to weare;"
+
+and the _guardainfante_, the oval hoop peculiar to Spain, was in full
+blow; and the robes of a dowager might have curtained the tun of
+Heidelberg, and the powers of Velasquez were baffled by the perverse
+fancy of "Fribble, the woman's tailor." The gentle and majestic hound,
+stretching himself and winking drowsily, is admirably painted, and seems
+a descendant of the royal breed immortalized by Titian in portraits of
+the Emperor Charles and his son.'
+
+'The Spinners:' 'The scene is a large weaving-room, in which an old
+woman and young one sit, the first at her spinning-wheel, and the
+second winding yarn, with three girls beside them, one of whom plays
+with a cat. In the background, standing within an alcove filled with the
+light from an unseen window, are two other women displaying a large
+piece of tapestry to a lady customer, whose graceful figure recalls that
+which has given its name to Terburg's picture of "The Satin Gown." Of
+the composition, the painter Mengs observed, "it seemed as if the hand
+had no part in it, and it had been the work of pure thought."'
+Velasquez, who must have seen many a bull fight, has left the world a
+fine example of field sports in 'The Boar Hunt,' in our National
+Gallery, a picture which was bought for two thousand two hundred pounds
+from Lord Cowley. When ambassador at the Court of Spain, it was given to
+him by Ferdinand VII. In a circular pen in the Pardo, 'Philip IV. and a
+party of cavaliers display their skill in slaying boars, to a few
+ladies, who sit secure in heavy old-fashioned blue coaches,' while
+motley groups of courtiers and peasants, huntsmen and hounds, postilions
+and their mules fill the foreground. Sir Edwin Landseer remarked of
+this picture that he had never before seen 'so much large art on so
+small a scale.'
+
+Bartolome Estevan Murillo was born at Seville in 1618, and was therefore
+nearly twenty years younger than his great countryman Velasquez. Murillo
+seems to have been of obscure origin, and to have begun his life in
+humble circumstances. There are traditions of his being self-taught, of
+his studying ragged boys, himself little more than a boy, in the gypsy
+quarter of Triana in Seville; of his painting in the marketplace, where
+he probably found the originals of the heads of saints and Madonnas (by
+which he made a little money in selling them for South America) in the
+peasants who came to Seville with their fruit and vegetables. In 1642,
+Murillo, then twenty-four years of age, visited Madrid, and was kindly
+received, and aided in his art by his senior and fellow artist, the
+court painter, Velasquez. It had been Murillo's intention to proceed to
+England to study under Van Dyck, but the death of the latter put a stop
+to the project. Murillo was prevented from making the painter's
+pilgrimage to Italy by want of means, but the loss of culture was so far
+supplied by the instructions given to him by Velasquez.
+
+In 1645, when Murillo was twenty-seven years of age, he returned to
+Seville, and settled there, becoming as successful as he deserved; and
+being acknowledged as the head of the school of Seville, where he
+established the Academy of Art, and was its first president. Murillo
+married, in 1648, a lady of some fortune, and was accustomed to
+entertain at his house the most exclusive society of Seville.
+
+In 1682, Murillo was at Cadiz painting a picture of the marriage of St
+Catherine in the church of the Capuchins there, when, in consequence of
+the accidental fall of the scaffolding, he received so severe an injury,
+that he was forced to leave his work incomplete, and to return to
+Seville, where he died within a few weeks, aged sixty-four years. He had
+two sons, and an only daughter, who was a nun, having taken the veil
+eight years before her father's death.
+
+Murillo appears to have been in character a gentle, enthusiastic man,
+not without a touch of fun and frolic. He would remain for hours in the
+sacristy of the cathedral of Seville before 'the solemn awful picture of
+the 'Deposition from the Cross,' by Pedro de Campana. When Murillo was
+asked by the sacristan why he stood thus gazing there, the painter
+answered, 'I am waiting till these holy men have finished their work.'
+By his own desire, Murillo was buried before this picture. Before
+another 'too truthful picture of Las dos Cadaveres' in the small church
+of the hospital of the Caridad, Murillo used to hold his nose. One of
+Murillo's pictures has the odd name of 'La Virgen Sarvilleta,' or the
+Virgin of the Napkin. Murillo was working at the Convento de la Merced,
+which is almost filled with his works, when the cook of the convent
+begged a memorial of him, offering as the canvas a napkin, on which
+Murillo at once painted a 'brilliant glowing Madonna,' with a child,
+'which seems quite to bound forward out of the picture.'[29]
+
+Murillo's portrait by himself represents him in a dark doublet having
+wide sleeves and a square collar closed in front. His thumb is in his
+pallet, and the other hand, with fingers taper and delicate as those of
+a hand by Van Dyck, holds one of his brushes. The smooth face, with
+regular features, is pale and thoughtful, and with the womanliness of
+the aspect increased from the dark hair, which is divided slightly to
+one side, being allowed to fall down in long wavy curls on the
+shoulders.
+
+In spite of the naturalistic studies of his early youth, and even of the
+naturalistic treatment which he gave to his first religious work,
+Murillo was possessed of greater and higher imagination than Velasquez
+could claim, and the longer Murillo lived and worked the more refined
+and exalted his ideas became. Unlike Velasquez, Murillo was a great
+religious painter, and during the last years of his life he painted
+sacred subjects almost exclusively. But, like Velasquez, Murillo was
+eminently a Spanish painter--his virgins are dark-eyed,
+olive-complexioned maidens, and even his Holy Child is a Spanish babe.
+
+Without the elevation and the training of the best Italian painters,
+Murillo has left abundant proofs of great original genius. The painter's
+works are widely circulated, but the chief are still in Seville. Six are
+in the church of the Caridad, and these six include his famous 'Moses
+striking the Rock,' and his 'Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes;' seven
+'Murillos' are in the Convento de la Merced, among them Murillo's own
+favourite picture, which he called 'Mi Cicadro' of 'St Thomas of
+Villaneuva.' 'St Thomas was the favourite preacher of Charles V., and
+was created Archbishop of Valencia, where he seemed to spend the whole
+of his revenues in charity, yet never contracted any debt, so that his
+people used to believe that angels must minister to his temporal wants.
+He is represented at his cathedral door, distributing alms, robed in
+black, with a white mitre. A poor cripple kneels at his feet, and other
+mendicants are grouped around.'
+
+In the cathedral, Seville, is Murillo's 'Angel de la Guarda,' 'in which
+a glorious seraph, with spreading wings, leads a little trustful child
+by the hand, and directs him to look beyond earth into the heavenly
+light;' and his 'St Antonio.' 'The saint is represented kneeling in a
+cell, of which all the poor details are faithfully given, while the long
+arcade of the cloister can be seen through the half-open door. Above, in
+a transparent light, which grows from himself, the Child Jesus appears,
+and descends, floating through wreaths of angels, drawn down by the
+power of prayer.'[30]
+
+Another of Murillo's renowned pictures is that of the patron saints of
+Seville, 'Santa Rufina and Santa Justina,' who were stoned to death for
+refusing to bow down to the image of Venus.
+
+With regard to Murillo's pictures of flower-girls and beggar-boys, I
+think my readers are sure to have seen an engraving of one of the
+former, '_The_ Flower-Girl,' as it is called, with a face as fresh and
+radiant as her flowers. In the National Gallery there is a large Holy
+Family of Murillo's, and in Dulwich Gallery there is a laughing boy, an
+irresistible specimen of brown-cheeked, white-teethed drollery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE[31] LORRAINE, 1600-1682--CHARLES
+LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE, 1726-1805.
+
+
+Nicolas Poussin was born at Andely in Normandy in 1594. Of his parentage
+little seems to have been ascertained, but it is believed that he was
+well educated, and his classical learning in after life was reckoned
+great. He was regularly trained to be a painter under a master in his
+native town, and afterwards in Paris.
+
+Dissatisfied with the patronage which he received in Paris, Poussin went
+to Rome when he was about thirty years of age. In Rome he is said to
+have lived on familiar terms with a sculptor whose devotion to antique
+art influenced his taste, and lent it the strong classical bent which it
+retained. Poussin studied regularly in the school of Domenichino. After
+some delay in attracting public notice, 'The Death of Germanicus,' and
+'The Capture of Jerusalem,' which Poussin painted for Cardinal
+Barberini, won general approval. In 1629, when Nicolas Poussin was in
+his thirty-fifth year, he married the sister of his pupil, Gaspar
+Dughet, who took Poussin's name, and is known as a painter, inferior to
+his master, by the name of Gaspar Poussin.
+
+Nicolas Poussin returned to Paris when he was a middle-aged man, was
+presented to the king, Louis XIII., by Cardinal Richelieu, and offered
+apartments in the Tuileries, with the title of painter in ordinary, and
+a salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year. Poussin agreed to settle
+in Paris, but on his going back to Rome to fetch his wife, and on the
+King of France's dying, the attractions of the Eternal City proved too
+great for the painter, and in place of removing his home to his native
+country, he lived for the rest of his years in Rome, and died there in
+1665, when he was seventy-one years of age. Except what can be judged of
+him from his work, I do not know that much has been gathered of the
+private character and life of Nicolas Poussin, notwithstanding that
+there was a biography written of him fifty years ago by Lady Calcott,
+and that his letters have been published in Paris. In the absence of
+conclusive testimony one may conclude with some probability that he was
+'quiet,' like his best paintings; a man who minded his own business, and
+did not trouble the world by astonishing actions, good or bad.[32]
+
+In painting his own picture, from which an engraving has been taken,
+Poussin's classical preferences seem to have passed into the likeness,
+for in the dress of the seventeenth century, the cloak (not unlike a
+toga), the massive hand with the heavy signet-ring resting on what looks
+like a closed portfolio, the painter has something of the severe air and
+haughty expression of an old Roman; still more, perhaps, of the
+French-Romans, if I may call them so, of whom revolutionary times
+nearly two centuries later, afforded so many examples. This is a
+handsome, dignified face, with austerity in its pride. The slightly
+curled hair is thrown back with a certain consciousness from the knit
+brow, and from the shoulders. There is only the faintest shadow of a
+moustache over the cleanly cut, firmly closed mouth.
+
+Poussin painted largely, and his pictures have been often engraved. With
+harmonious composition, good drawing and colouring, his pictures alike
+profited and suffered from the classical atmosphere in which they had
+their being. They gained in that correctness which in its highest form
+becomes noble truthfulness, but they lost in freedom. The figures in the
+pictures had frequently the statuesqueness which in sculpture suits the
+material, but in painting is stiffness.
+
+Nicolas Poussin had an exceptional reputation for a historical painter
+in his day. As a landscape painter, Mr Ruskin, while waging war with
+Nicolas Poussin's brother-in-law and assumed namesake, Gaspar, notably
+excepts Nicolas from his severest strictures, and treats his efforts in
+landscape painting with marked respect. At the same time, however, the
+critic censures the painter for a want of thorough acquaintance with
+nature, and the laws of nature, ignorance not uncommon in any day, and
+nearly universal in Nicolas Poussin's day. 'The great master of elevated
+ideal landscape,' Mr Ruskin calls Nicolas Poussin, and illustrates his
+excellence in one respect, after contrasting it with the slovenliness of
+Sir Joshua Reynolds, by describing the vine in Poussin's 'Nursing of
+Jupiter,' in the Dulwich Gallery, thus:--
+
+'Every vine-leaf, drawn with consummate skill and untiring diligence,
+produces not only a true group of the most perfect grace and beauty, but
+one which in its pure and simple truth belongs to every age of nature,
+and adapts itself to the history of all time.' 'One of the finest
+landscapes that ancient art has produced, the work of a really great
+mind,' Mr Ruskin distinguishes the 'Phocian' of Nicolas Poussin in the
+National Gallery, before proceeding to point out its faults.
+
+Again, Mr Ruskin, writing of the street in the centre of another
+landscape by Nicolas Poussin, indicates it with emphasis:--'the street
+in the centre of the really great landscape of Poussin (great in
+feeling, at least) marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery,' The criticism
+with which Mr Ruskin follows up this praise is so perfect a bit of
+word-painting, that I cannot refrain from writing it down here. 'The
+houses are dead square masses, with a light side and a dark side, and
+black touches for windows. There is no suggestion of anything in any of
+the spaces, the light wall is dead grey, the dark wall dead grey, and
+the windows dead black. How differently would nature have treated us.
+She would have let us see the Indian corn hanging on the walls, and the
+image of the Virgin of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with
+the doves upon them, and the carved Roman capital built into the wall,
+and the white and blue stripes of the mattresses stuffed out of the
+windows, and the flapping corners of the neat blinds. All would have
+been there; not as such, not like the corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not
+to be comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black
+spots and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow;
+microscopic in its minuteness, and filling every atom and space with
+mystery, out of which would have arranged itself the general impression
+of truth and life.' Once more, Mr Ruskin freely admits that 'all the
+landscape of Nicolas Poussin is imagination.'
+
+Mr Ruskin's first definition of ideal landscape is in this manner. Every
+different tree and leaf, every bud, has a perfect form, which, were it
+not for disease or accident, it would have attained; just as every
+individual human face has an ideal form, which but for sin and suffering
+it would present: and the ideal landscape-painter has realized the
+perfect form, and offers it to the world, and that in a sense quite
+distinct from the fallacy of improving nature.
+
+But I wish to take my readers further into imaginative landscape, and to
+show it to them, if possible, under additional lights. I despair of
+succeeding if I cannot do it by one or two simple examples. In passing
+through a gallery we may stop before a picture to be struck, almost
+startled, by the exact copy which it presents of some scene in nature;
+how like the clouds in the sky, the leaves on the trees, the very
+plumage of the birds! But pass on to another picture which may or may
+not have the same exact likeness, and we are possessed with quite
+another feeling; instead of being merely surprised by the cleverness of
+the imitation, we feel a thrill of delight at a reproduction of nature.
+In this picture there are not only the clouds we remember, but we can
+almost feel the shadows which they cast, and the air which stirs them.
+These tree-leaves are not only green, or yellow, or russet, they are
+tender, or crisp living leaves. One half expects to see the birds'
+throats swell, and hear the sweetness or the shrillness of their songs.
+
+The first picture, with all its correctness, brightness, richness, or
+delicacy it may be, remains bare, hard, and barren, compared to the
+second. I cannot explain to my readers the cause of the difference, I
+can Only show it to them as they may see it for themselves, and say
+that I suppose it proceeds from this--that the second painter has seen
+farther into the heart of nature than the first, and has been able by
+subtler touches to make us see with his eyes.
+
+But imaginative landscape is much more than this vivid feeling and
+expression of nature; there is not a cloud, or leaf, or bird too many or
+out of keeping with the place and the hour. The clouds are the very
+clouds of sunset, or sunrise, or high noon--clouds differing widely from
+each other, as you have no doubt observed. The trees are the beeches, or
+chestnuts, or pines, which would grow on the conformation of rocks, in
+the sheltered nook, or on the breezy upland; the birds are the linnets
+or the larks, the thrushes or the lapwings, which frequent these special
+trees, and may be seen and heard at this particular hour.
+
+Again, landscape often tells a story, and tells it inimitably. My
+readers have heard of the ballad of the 'Two Corbies,' which the writer
+of the ballad has made to meet and tell gruesomely where and on what
+carrion their feast has been. Suppose the writer of the ballad had been
+a painter, he might have painted the story as intelligibly by the lone
+hill-side, the bleaching bones of the faithful hound and gallant grey,
+the two loathly blue-black birds satiated with their prey. There is a
+significant old Scotch song with a ballad ring, by Lady Nairne, two
+verses of which form each a complete picture not only of different
+seasons, but of different phases of feeling--happiness and misery.
+
+    'Bonnie ran the burnie down,
+    Wandering and winding;
+    Sweetly sang the birds aboon,
+    Care never minding.
+
+    'But now the burn comes down apace,
+    Roaring and reaming,
+    And for the wee birdies' sang
+    Wild howlets screaming.'
+
+Imagine these two verses painted, and the painter, from a lack of
+comprehension, introducing the 'wild howlets screaming' _beside the
+burnie_, 'wandering and winding,' and the 'wee birdies' foolishly and
+inconsequently singing with their feeble song drowned in the rush of the
+burn (no longer a burnie), 'roaring and reaming,' when the 'spate' is
+spreading desolation on every side. Don't you see how the picture would
+be spoilt, and the story of complete contrast left untold? I have taken
+advisedly an extreme and, therefore an unlikely case of halting
+imagination. But in imaginative landscape every 'white flower with its
+purple stain,' every crushed butterfly, is made to play its part in the
+whole, and at the same time due proportion is never lost sight of, and
+the less is always kept subordinate to the greater.
+
+I have already had occasion to mention examples of Nicolas Poussin in
+the National Gallery and in Dulwich Gallery.
+
+Claude Gelee, better known as Claude Lorraine, was a native of Lorraine,
+and was born at Chateau de Chamagne in the Vosges, in 1600. His parents
+were in humble life, and apprenticed Claude to a baker and pastry-cook.
+According to some biographers the cooks of Lorraine were in such request
+that they occasionally repaired to Rome with their apprentices in their
+train to serve the successor of St Peter, and Claude was thus carried,
+in the way of trade, to the city which might well have been the goal of
+his ambition. According to other writers of art histories, Claude
+abandoned the kneading-trough and the oven; and it was as a runaway
+apprentice that by some occult means he reached Rome. And when he had
+arrived he entered into the service of a landscape painter of good
+repute, to whom he was colour-boy as well as cook. The last is the
+account, so far, which Claude gave of himself to a friend, and it is
+hardly likely either that he misrepresented his history, or that his
+friend invented such details, though lately French authorities have
+questioned the authenticity of the narrative. Claude remained for nearly
+the entire remainder of a long life in Rome. He only once re-visited
+France, while he was yet a young man, under thirty years of age, in 1625
+or 1627. He is supposed to have painted his earliest pictures and
+executed his etchings about this time, 1630 and to have painted his best
+pictures fifteen years later, when he was in the maturity of his life
+and powers. He was counted successful during his life time, as a
+landscape painter, but did not amass a larger fortune than about two
+thousand pounds.[33] He was a slow and careful painter (working a
+fortnight at a picture with little apparent progress); his painstaking
+work, and his custom of keeping a book, in which he verified his
+pictures, are about the most that I can tell you of the habits of one of
+the foreign painters, who has been most fully represented in England,
+and was long in the highest favour with English lovers of art. Claude
+Lorraine died at Rome in the eighty-third year of his age, in 1682.
+
+Claude Lorraine's name has become a very vexed name with art critics.
+There was a time when he had an unsurpassed reputation as a landscape
+painter. The possession of a Claude was enough to confer art glory on a
+country-house, and possibly for this reason England, in public and
+private collections, has more 'Claudes' than are held by any other
+country. But Claude's admirers, among whom Sir George Beaumont, the
+great art critic of his generation, took the lead, have had their day,
+and, if they have not by any means passed away, are on the wane.
+
+The wrathful indignation of the English landscape painter, Turner, at
+the praise which was so glibly lavished on Claude--an indignation that
+caused Turner to bequeath two of his own landscape paintings to the
+trustees of the National Gallery, on the caustic condition that they
+should always be placed between the two celebrated 'Claudes,' known as
+'The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' and 'The Embarkation of the Queen of
+Sheba'--helped to shake the English art world's faith in its former
+idol. Mr Ruskin's adoption and proclamation of Turner's opinion shook
+the old faith still further. This reversal of a verdict with regard to
+Claude is peculiar; it is by no means uncommon for the decision of
+contemporaries to be set aside, and we shall hear of an instance
+presently, in the case of the painter Le Brun. In fact, it is often
+ominous with regard to a man's future fame, when he is 'cried up to the
+skies' in his own day. The probability may be that his easy success has
+been won by something superficial and fleeting. But Claude's great
+popularity has been in another generation, and with another nation.
+English taste may have been in fault; or another explanation seems
+preferable--that Claude's sense of beauty was great, with all its faults
+of expression, and he gave such glimpses of a beautiful world as the
+gazers on his pictures were capable of receiving, which to them proved
+irresistible.
+
+While Claude adopted an original style as a landscape painter, so far as
+his contemporaries were concerned, he was to such a degree self taught,
+and only partially taught, that it is said he never learnt to paint
+figures--those in his pictures were painted by other painters, and that
+Claude even painted animals badly.
+
+Mr Ruskin has been hard on Claude, whether justly or unjustly, I cannot
+pretend to say.
+
+The critic denies the painter not only a sense of truth in art, but all
+imagination as a landscape painter 'Of men of name,' Mr Ruskin writes,
+'Perhaps Claude is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly
+total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much
+feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of
+expression.' Mr Ruskin condemns in the strongest terms 'the mourning and
+murky olive browns and verdigris greens, in which Claude, with the
+industry and intelligence of a Sevres china painter, drags the laborious
+bramble leaves over his childish foreground.' But Mr Ruskin himself
+acknowledges, with a reservation, Claude's charm in foliage, and
+pronounces more conditionally his power, when it was at its best, in
+skies--a region in which the greater, as well as the less, Poussin was
+declared to fail signally; 'a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of
+Claude,' Mr Ruskin writes, 'is indeed most perfect, and beyond praise,
+in all qualities of air; though even with him I often feel rather that
+there is a great deal of pleasant air between me and the firmament, than
+that the firmament itself is only air.'
+
+When all has been said that can be said, let us look at a mellow or a
+sunny Claude on any wall where it may hang, and judge for ourselves of
+the satisfaction it is calculated to give.
+
+Claude was fond of painting scenes on the Tiber and in the Roman
+Campagna, but while he tried to reproduce the hills and woodlands of
+Italy, he did not seek to paint the mountain landscapes of the
+Apennines.
+
+Besides Claude's numerous works in England and scattered through other
+countries, some of his finest paintings are in the Doria and Sciarra
+palaces in Rome. He rarely put his name to his works; when he did so he
+signed it frequently 'Claudio,' sometimes 'Claudius.' I have spoken of
+his book of sketches, in which he had been wont to note on the back of
+the sketch the date of the completed picture, and to whom sold. This
+book he called the 'Libro di Verita,' or, Book of Truth, and its
+apparent use was to check the sale of spurious paintings in Claude's
+name, even during his lifetime. The 'Book of Truth' is in possession of
+the Duke of Devonshire, and has been employed in recent years with
+reference to the end for which it seemed designed, so woe to that
+country-house which has long pride that 'Claude' does not happen to have
+a place in the 'Book of Truth,' though I do not know that it is at all
+certain that Claude took the precaution of inscribing _every_ painting
+which he painted after a certain date in the 'Book of Truth.'
+
+Claude Lorraine is well represented in the National Gallery. Engravings
+of his pictures are common.
+
+Charles le Brun was born in Paris, in 1619. He was trained to be a
+painter, and went young to Rome, studying there for six years under the
+guidance of Nicolas Poussin. Le Brun returned to Paris, and, through the
+patronage of the Chancellor Segnier, was introduced to the court, and
+got the most favourable opportunities of practising his profession with
+worldly success. He speedily acquired a great name, and was appointed
+painter to the King, Louis XIV. Le Brun had enough influence with his
+royal master, and with the great minister Colbert, to succeed in
+establishing, while the painter was yet a young man, the Royal Academy
+of Art, of which he was the first member, and virtually the head,
+holding, in his own person, the directorship of the Gobelin tapestry
+works, which was to be the privilege of a member of the Academy. Le Brun
+continued in the utmost favour with the King, who, not content with
+employing the painter largely at Fontainebleau and in Versailles,
+invested him with the order of St Michael, bestowed on him letters of
+nobility, and visited him frequently at his work, occasions when there
+were not wanting adroit courtiers to liken the Grand Monarque to the
+Emperor Charles V., and Le Brun to Titian.
+
+Le Brun seems to have been a man of energy, confidence, and industry,
+neither mentally before nor after his time, and by no means too
+retiring, meditative, or original, to fail to profit by his outward good
+fortune. He wrote, as well as painted, artistic treatises, which were
+received as oracular utterances, and entirely deferred to in the schools
+of his day. He died at Paris in 1690, when he was in his seventieth
+year.
+
+Le Brun's real merits as a painter were limited to respectable abilities
+and acquirements, together with florid quickness and ease, and such an
+eye to what was splendid and scenic as suited admirably a decorator of
+palaces in an age which prized sumptuousness, and an exaggeration of
+dramatic effect, over every other quality. Nicolas Poussin's quiet
+refinement of style became in Le Brun what is called academic
+(conventionally learned), pompous, and grandiose, and men decidedly
+preferred the degeneration. But later critics, who have not the natural
+partiality of the French to the old master, return to their first loves,
+and condemn Le Brun's swelling violence, both in the tints and poses of
+his figures. Among his most famous works, which have been magnificently
+engraved, are his 'Battles of Alexander.'
+
+Antoine Watteau was born at Valenciennes in 1684. A very different
+painter from Le Brun, he was yet as characteristic of French art in the
+reign of Louis XIV. I think my readers must be familiar with his name,
+and I dare say they associate it, as I do, not only with the fans which
+were painted largely after his designs, but with mock pastorals and
+Sevres china. I don't know if his birth-place at Valenciennes, with its
+chief product of dainty lace, had anything to do with it, but the other
+items of poor Watteau's history are considerably removed from the very
+artificial grace which one connects with his name. He was the son of a
+carpenter, and struggled up, by the hard instrumentality of third-rate
+masters and of picture-dealers, to the rank which he attained among
+artists, taking his stand from the first, however, as the painter of
+well-bred, well-apparelled people--the frequenters of _bals masques,_
+and _fetes champetres,_ who were only playing at shepherds and
+shepherdesses.
+
+Watteau was elected an Academician in 1717, when he was thirty-three
+years of age, and he afterwards came to England, but did not remain
+there. He died of consumption at Nogent-sur-Marne in 1721, when he was
+thirty-six years of age.[34] Watteau's gifts were his grace and
+brilliance on a small scale. He did not draw well; as to design, his
+composition may be said to be suited to such a work as the collection of
+'fashionable figures,' which he engraved and left behind him. Yet, if we
+were to see at this moment some of his exquisite groups of ladies in
+sacques and Watteau hats, and cavaliers in flowing wigs and lace,
+cravats, I have no doubt that the most of us would admire them much, for
+they are exceedingly pretty, and exceeding prettiness is attractive,
+particularly to women. But I would have my readers to remember that this
+art is a finical and soulless art, after all. I would fain have them
+take this as their maxim, 'That the art is greatest which conveys to the
+mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of
+the greatest ideas.'
+
+Jean Baptiste Greuze was born at Tournus in Burgundy in 1726. He studied
+painting from his youth in the studios of artists at Lyons, Paris, and
+Rome, and his studies resulted in his being a celebrated genre painter.
+He only painted one historical picture, but, with the touchy vanity
+which seemed natural to the man, he ranked his genre pictures as high
+art; and when he was placed in the ordinary list of genre painters on
+his election as a member of the French Academy of Painting, Greuze
+resented the imputation, and withdrew from the Academy. He died in 1805,
+aged seventy-nine years. Greuze was a showy, clever, but neither earnest
+nor truthful painter of domestic subjects and family pictures. His
+pictures of women and heads of girls, the expression in some of which
+has been severely condemned, are among his best known works, and by
+these he is represented in the National Gallery.[35]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK, 1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO,
+1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723.
+
+
+Hans Holbein, sometimes entitled Hans the Younger, was born at Augsburg
+about 1494 or 1495. He was the son of a painter, and belonged to a
+family of painters, one or more of whom had preceded Hans Holbein in
+leaving Augsburg, and taking up his residence at Basle. There Holbein
+was under the patronage of, and on terms of friendly intercourse with,
+the great scholar Erasmus. One bad result proceeded from this friendly
+familiarity, that of establishing or originating the charge that
+Holbein, as a young man, at least, was coarse and dissipated in his
+habits. The evidence is sufficiently curious. There is still in
+existence the copy of a Latin book, called the 'Praise of Folly,'
+written by Erasmus, which Holbein, not being a scholar, could not have
+read for himself, but which, according to tradition, Erasmus himself,
+or some other friend, read to him, while Holbein was so delighted with
+the satire that he covered the margin of the book with illustrative
+sketches. (The sketches remain, and are unmistakably Holbein's.)
+Opposite a passage, recording the want of common sense and energy in
+many learned men, Holbein had drawn the figure of a student, and written
+below, '_Erasmus_.' The book coming again into the hands of Erasmus, he
+was offended with the liberty taken by the painter., and sought to
+retaliate in kind by writing below the sketch of a rude boor drinking,
+'_Holbein_.' In spite of the rough jesting, the friendship between
+scholar and painter was not interrupted.
+
+In these early days Holbein sometimes practised painting on glass, after
+the example of some of his kinsmen. At Basle, Holbein painted what is
+considered his finest work, the 'Meier Madonna,' now at Darmstadt, with
+a copy in the Dresden Gallery, and there he executed the designs for his
+series of woodcuts of the 'Dance of Death.'
+
+At Basle Holbein married, while still a young man. The presumption that
+the painter's marriage, like that of his countryman, Albert Duerer, was
+unhappy, has rested on the foundation that he left his wife and her
+children behind when he repaired to England, and that although he
+re-visited Basle, and saw his wife and family, they did not return with
+him to England. A fancied confirmation to the unhappiness of the
+marriage is found in the expression of the wife in a portrait which
+Holbein painted of her and his children when he was at Basle.
+'Cross-looking and red-eyed,' one critic calls the unlucky woman;
+another describes her as 'a plain, coarse-looking, middle-aged woman,'
+with an expression 'certainly mysterious and unpleasant.' Holbein's
+latest biographer[36] has proved that the forsaken wife, Elssbeth
+Schmid, was a widow with one son when Holbein married her, and has
+conjectured that she was probably not only older than Holbein, but in
+circumstances which rendered her independent of her husband. So far the
+critic has done something to clear Hans Holbein from the miserable
+accusation often brought against him, that he abandoned his wife and
+children to starve at Basle, while he sunned himself in such court
+favour as could be found in England. But, indeed, while Hans Holbein may
+have been honest and humane enough to have been above such base
+suspicions, there is no trace of him which survives that goes to
+disprove the probability that he was a self-willed, not over-scrupulous
+man, if he was also a vigorous and thorough worker.
+
+Holbein came to England about 1526 or 1527, when he must have been
+thirty-one or thirty-two years of age, and repaired to Chelsea to the
+house of Sir Thomas More, to whom the painter brought a letter of
+introduction, and still better credentials in the present, from Erasmus
+to More, of the portrait of Erasmus, painted by Hans Holbein. There are
+so many portraits and copies of portraits of Erasmus, not only by
+Holbein, but by other painters--for Erasmus was painted by Albert Duerer
+and Quintin Matsys,--that this special portrait, like the true Holbein
+family portrait of the More family, remains very much a subject of
+speculation. Most of us must be well acquainted with the delightful
+account which Erasmus gave of Sir Thomas More's country-house at
+Chelsea, and the life of its occupants. It has been cited hundreds of
+times as an example of what an English family has been, and what it may
+be in dutiful discipline, simple industry, and high cultivation, when
+Sir Thomas's young daughters repeated psalms in Latin to beguile the
+time in the drudging process of churning the butter. During Holbein's
+residence in or visits to the Mores' house at Chelsea, he sketched or
+painted the original of the More family picture.
+
+Holbein was introduced to Henry VIII, by Sir Thomas More, and was
+immediately taken into favour by the king, and received into his
+service, with a lodging in the palace, a general salary of thirty pounds
+a year, and separate payment for his paintings. According to Horace
+Walpole, Holbein's palace lodging was probably 'the little study called
+the new library' of square glazed bricks of different colours, designed
+by the painter at Whitehall. (This gateway, with the porch at Wilton,
+were the painter's chief architectural achievements.) By another
+statement, Holbein's house was on London Bridge, where it was destroyed
+in the great fire.
+
+I have already alluded to the anecdote of the value which Henry VIII,
+put on Holbein. It was to this effect: that when an aggrieved courtier
+complained to the king that the painter had taken precedence of him--a
+nobleman, the king replied, 'I have many noblemen, but I have only one
+Hans Holbein.' In fact, Holbein received nothing save kindness from
+Henry VIII.; and for that matter, there seemed to be something in common
+between bluff King Hal and the equally bluff German Hans. But on one
+occasion Hans Holbein was said to have run the risk of forfeiting his
+imperious master's favour by the too favourable miniature which the
+painter was accused of painting of Anne of Cleves.
+
+At Henry's court Holbein painted many a member of the royal family,
+noble and knight, and English gentleman and lady. His fortune had made
+him a portrait painter, but he was fully equal to other branches of art,
+as shown by his 'Meier Madonna,' and still more by the designs which
+have been preserved of his famous allegory of 'the Triumphs of Riches
+and Poverty,' painted for the hall of the Easterling Steelyard, the
+quarters of the merchants of Allemagne, then traders in London. In
+addition to painting portraits Holbein designed dagger hilts, clasps,
+cups, as some say after a study of the goldsmith's work of Cellini.
+
+For a long time it was believed that Hans Holbein died after Mary Tudor
+succeeded to the English throne; indeed, some said that his death had
+been occasioned or hastened by that change in the affairs of men, which
+compelled him to quit his lodgings in the palace to make room for 'the
+new painter,' Sir Antony More, who came in the suite of Mary's
+well-beloved husband, Philip of Spain. There was even a theory,
+creditable to Hans Holbein, drawn from this conclusion, that he might
+have adopted the Protestant views of his late gracious master, and have
+stood by them stoutly, and so far forfeited all recognition from the
+bitter Catholic Mary. But, unfortunately for the tradition and theory,
+and for the later pictures attributed to Hans Holbein, his will has been
+discovered, and that quite recently, proving, from the date of its
+administration, his death of the plague (so far only the tradition had
+been right), when yet only in his forty-eighth year, as early as 1543,
+four years before the death of Henry VIII. In spite of court patronage
+Holbein did not die a rich man, and there is an impression that he was
+recklessly improvident in his habits.
+
+Holbein had re-visited Basle several times, and the council had settled
+on him a pension of fifty florins a year, provided he would return and
+reside in Basle within two years, while his wife was to receive a
+pension of forty florins a year during Holbein's two years' absence.
+Holbein did not comply with the terms of the settlement. About the time
+of his death his son Philip, then a lad of eighteen, was a goldsmith in
+Paris. Of Hans Holbein's portraits I have two to draw from; one,
+painted in his youth at Basle, shows the painter in an open doublet, and
+curious stomacher-like shirt, and having on his head a great flapping
+hat. His face is broad and smooth-skinned, with little hair seen, and
+the features, the eyes especially, rather small for such an expanse of
+cheek and chin. The other picture of Holbein to which I have referred
+belongs certainly to a considerably later period of his life, and
+represents him with short but bushy hair, and short bushy beard and
+moustache, a man having a broad stout person with a mixture of
+dauntlessness and _bonhommie_ in his massive face.
+
+Mr Ruskin says of Holbein, as a painter, that he was complete in
+intellect; what he saw he saw with his whole soul, and what he painted
+he painted with his whole might.
+
+In deep and reverential feeling Holbein was far behind his countryman
+Albert Duerer, but Holbein was far more fully furnished than Duerer
+(unless indeed as Albrecht Duerer showed himself in that last picture of
+'the Apostles') in the means of his art; he was a better draughtsman in
+the maturity of his powers, and a far better colourist. For Hans Holbein
+was not more famous for the living truthfulness of his likenesses ('a
+man very excellent in making physiognomies'), than for the 'inimitable
+bloom' that he imparted to his pictures, which 'he touched, till not a
+touch became discernible.' Yet beneath this bloom, along with his
+truthfulness, there was a dryness and hardness in Holbein's treatment of
+his subjects, and he is far below Titian, Rubens, and even Rembrandt as
+a portrait painter.
+
+Holbein was in the habit of painting his larger portraits on a peculiar
+green, and his miniatures on a blue background. He drew his portrait
+sketches with black and red chalk on a paper tinted flesh-colour. It is
+said, that with the exception, of Philip Wouwermann, no painter has been
+so unfortunate in having the works of other painters attributed to him
+as Hans Holbein has been, and 'that three out of every four pictures
+ascribed to him are misnamed.'[37]
+
+The 'Meier, or Meyer Madonna,' is otherwise called 'the Meier Family
+adoring the infant Christ in the arms of the Virgin.' The subject is
+understood to prove that it must have been painted in Holbein's youth,
+before Protestantism was triumphant at Basle. The figures are the
+Burgomaster Meier and his wife, whom Holbein painted twice; their son,
+with a little boy _nude_ beside him; another woman, elderly, conjectured
+to be a grandmother of the family, and beside her the young daughter of
+the house. In the centre on a turkey carpet stands the Madonna, holding
+in her arms an infant stretching out its left hand to the group of
+worshippers. In course of time, and in its transfer from hand to hand, a
+doubt has arisen with regard to the subject of this picture. Some
+critics have regarded it as a votive picture dedicated in a private
+chapel to commemorate the recovery from sickness or the death of a
+child. This conjecture seems to rest mainly on the fact, that the child
+in the Dresden copy (it is said to be otherwise in the Darmstadt
+picture) is of an aspect so sickly, as to have given rise to the
+impression that it represented an ailing, or even a dead child, and no
+glorious child Christ. Critics have gone still farther, and imagined
+that the child is a figure of the soul of a dead child (souls were
+sometimes painted by the old painters as new-born children), or of the
+soul of the elder and somewhat muffled-up woman who might have been
+recently dead. Mr Ruskin regards the picture as an offering for the
+recovery of a sick child, and thus illustrates it:
+
+     'The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is
+     beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father
+     and a mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child.
+     She appears to them, her own child Christ in her arms; she puts
+     down her child beside them, takes their child into her arms
+     instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hand to
+     its father and mother, saying farewell.'
+
+Yet another much more prosaic and less attractive interpretation of the
+picture has been suggested by Holbein's biographer, that the two
+children may represent the same child. The child standing by his brother
+may be the boy restored to health, the feeble child in the arms of the
+Virgin may indicate the same child in its sickness, while the extended
+arm may point to the seat of the disease in an arm broken or injured.
+After all, the child may simply be a child Christ, marred in execution.
+I have given this dispute at length, because I think it is interesting,
+and, so far as I know, unique in reference to such a picture. By an odd
+enough mistake this very picture was once said to be the famous More
+Family picture.
+
+The idea of the 'Dance of Death' did not originate with Holbein, neither
+is he supposed to have done more than touch, if he did touch, the
+paintings called the 'Dance of Death,' on the wall of the Dominican
+burial-ground, Basle, painted long before Holbein's day, by the order of
+the council after the plague visited Basle, and considered to have for
+its meaning simply a warning of the universality of death. But Holbein
+certainly availed himself of the older painting, to draw from it the
+grim satire of his woodcuts. Of these there are thirty-seven designs,
+the first, 'The Creation;' the second, 'Adam and Eve in Paradise;' the
+third, 'The Expulsion from Paradise;' the fourth, 'Adam Tilling the
+Earth;' the fifth, 'The Bones of all People;' till the dance really
+begins in the sixth. Death, a skeleton, as seen through the rest of the
+designs, sometimes playing on a guitar or lute, sometimes carrying a
+drum, bagpipes, a dulcimer, or a fiddle, now appearing with mitre on
+head and crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the
+parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he
+seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going
+down impartially through Emperor of Francis I., nobleman, advocate,
+physician, ploughman, countess, old woman, little child, etc., etc., and
+leading each unwilling or willing victim in turn to the terrible dance.
+One woman meets her doom by Death in the character of a robber in a
+wood. Another, the Duchess, sits up in bed fully dressed, roused from
+her sleep by two skeletons, one of them playing a fiddle.
+
+Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of
+these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of
+Albrecht Duerer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil,' or Orcagna's
+'Triumph of Death.' In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling
+faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable
+fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the
+time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and
+told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer
+resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners
+during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the
+guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as
+represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the arrival of
+the cholera.
+
+Of the 'More Family' there are so many duplicates or versions, that, as
+in the case of Erasmus's picture, it is hard to say which is the
+original picture, or whether Holbein did more than sketch the original,
+or merely sketch the various heads to be afterwards put together by an
+inferior artist. A singular distribution of the light in the best
+authenticated picture has been supposed to favour this conjecture. But
+under any supposition, this, the second of the three noted English
+family pictures, is of the greatest interest. I shall record a minute
+and curious description given of this 'More Family,' which is still in
+the possession of a descendant of the Mores and Ropers.
+
+'The room which is here represented seemed to be a large dining-room. At
+the upper end of it stands a chamber-organ on a cupboard, with a curtain
+drawn before it. On each end of the cupboard, which is covered with a
+carpet of tapestry, stands a flower-pot of flowers, and on the cupboard
+are laid a lute, a base-viol, a pint pot or ewer covered in part with a
+cloth folded several times, and _Boetius de Consolatione Philosophiae_,
+with two other books upon it. By this cupboard stands a daughter of Sir
+Thomas More's, putting on her right-hand glove, and having under her arm
+a book bound in red Turkey leather and gilt, with this inscription round
+the outside of the cover--_Epistolica Senecae_. Over her head is written
+in Latin, _Elizabeth Dancy_, daughter of Sir Thomas More, aged 21.
+
+'Behind her stands a woman holding a book open with both her hands, over
+whose head is written _Spouse of John Clements_.[38]
+
+'Next to Mrs Dancy is Sir John More in his robes as one of the justices
+of the King's Bench, and by him Sir Thomas in his chancellor's robes,
+and collar of SS, with a rose pendant before. They are both sitting on a
+sort of tressel or armed bench, one of the arms and legs and one of the
+tassels of the cushion appear on the left side of Sir Thomas. At the
+feet of Sir John lies a cur-dog, and at Sir Thomas's a Bologna shock.
+Over Sir John's head is written, _John More, father, aged_ 76. Over Sir
+Thomas's, _Thomas More, aged_ 50. Between them, behind, stands the wife
+of John More, Sir Thomas's son, over whose head is written _Anne
+Cresacre, wife of John More, aged_ 15. Behind Sir Thomas, on his left
+hand stands his only son, John More, pictured with a very foolish
+aspect, and looking earnestly in a book which he holds open with both
+his hands. Over his head is written, _John, son of Thomas More, aged_
+19.' (The only and witless son of the family, on whom Sir Thomas made
+the comment to his wife:--'You long wished for a boy, and you have got
+one--for all his life.')
+
+'A little to the left of Sir Thomas are sitting on low stools his two
+daughters, Cecilia and Margaret. Next him is Cecilia, who has a boot in
+her lap, clasped. By her side sits her sister Margaret, who has likewise
+a book on her lap, but wide open, in which is written, _L. An.
+Senecae--Oedipus--Fata si liceat mihi fingere arbitrio meo, temperem
+zephyro levi_. On Cecilia's petticoat is written, _Cecilia Heron,
+daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 20, and on Margaret's, _Margaret Roper_,
+_daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 22.' (The best beloved, most
+amiable, and most learned of Sir Thomas's daughters, who visited
+him in the Tower and encouraged him to remain true to his
+convictions, while her step-mother urged him to abjure his faith.
+Margaret Roper intercepted her father on his return to the Tower
+after his trial, and penetrating the circle of the Guards, hung on
+his neck and bade him farewell. There is a tradition that she
+caused her father's head to be stolen from the spike of the bridge
+on which it was exposed, and, getting it preserved, kept it in a
+casket. She and her husband, William Roper, wrote together the
+biography of her father, Sir Thomas More.)
+
+'Just by Mrs Roper sits Sir Thomas's lady in an elbow-chair (?), holding
+a book open in her hands. About her neck she has a gold chain, with a
+cross hanging to it before. On her left hand is a monkey chained, and
+holding part of it with one paw and part of it with the other. Over her
+head is written '_spouse of Thomas More, aged_ 57.'
+
+(Dame Alice More, the second wife of Sir Thomas More, a foolish and
+mean-spirited woman.)
+
+'Behind her is a large arched window, in which is placed a flower-pot (a
+vase) of flowers, and a couple of oranges. Behind the two ladies stands
+Sir Thomas's fool, who, it seems, was bereft of his judgment by
+distraction. He has his cap on, and in it are stuck a red and white
+rose, and on the brim of it is a shield with a red cross on it, and a
+sort of seal pendant. About his neck he wears a black string with a
+cross hanging before him, and his left thumb is stuck in a broad
+leathern girdle clasp'd about him. Over his head is written _Henry
+Pattison, servant_ of Thomas More. At the entrance of the room where Sir
+Thomas and his family are, stands a man in the portal who has in his
+left hand a roll of papers or parchments with two seals appendant, as if
+he was some way belonging to Sir Thomas as Lord Chancellor. Over his
+head is written _Joannes Heresius, Thomae Mori famulus_. In another room
+at some distance is seen through the door-case a man standing at a large
+sleeved gown of a sea-green colour, and under it a garment of a
+blossom-colour, holding a book open in his hands written or printed
+in the black letter, and reading very earnestly in it. About the
+middle of the room, over against Sir Thomas, hangs a clock with
+strings and leaden weights without any case.'[39]
+
+It is notable that not one of Sir Thomas's sons-in-law is in this
+picture, neither is there a grandchild, though one or more is known to
+have been born at the date.
+
+The miniature of Anne of Cleves, if it ever existed, is lost; it is
+probable that what was really referred to was the portrait of Anne by
+Holbein in the Louvre, where she appears 'as a kindly and comely woman
+in spite of her broad nose and swarthy complexion, but by no means such
+a painted Venus as might have deceived King Hal.'[40]
+
+A well-known portrait by Holbein is that of a 'Cornish Gentleman,' with
+reddish hair and beard. I saw this portrait not long ago, as it was
+exhibited among the works of the Old Masters, and so much did it look
+as though the figure would step from the frame, that it was hard to
+believe that more than three hundred years had passed since the original
+walked the earth.[41]
+
+Doubtless the last of Holbein's portrait pieces, which it is reported he
+left uncompleted when he died, is that of the 'Barber Surgeons,' painted
+on the occasion of the united company receiving their charter from the
+king, and including the king's portrait. This picture still hangs in the
+old company's hall.
+
+I have only to say a few more words of those sketches which survive the
+destruction of the picture--Holbein's allegory of the 'Triumph of
+Riches,' and the 'Triumph of Poverty,' and of his portrait sketches. In
+the 'Triumph of Riches,' Plutus, an old man bent double, drives in a
+car, drawn by four white horses; before him, Fortune, blind, scatters
+money. The car is followed by Croesus, Midas, and other noted misers and
+spendthrifts--for Cleopatra, the only woman present, is included in the
+group. In the 'Triumph of Poverty,' Poverty is an old woman in squalor
+and rags, who is seated in a shattered vehicle, drawn by asses and oxen,
+and guided by Hope and Diligence. The designs are large and bold. In the
+first, a resemblance to Henry VIII, is found in Croesus. If the
+resemblance were intentional on Holbein's part, it showed the same want
+of tact and feeling which the painter early betrayed in his caricature
+of Erasmus.
+
+But the best of Holbein's drawings are his portrait sketches with
+chalks, on flesh-tinted paper. These sketches have a history of their
+own, subsequent to their execution by Holbein. After being in the
+possession of the art-loving Earl of Arundel, and carried to France,
+they were lost sight of altogether for the space of a century, until
+they were discovered by Queen Caroline, wife of George II., in a bureau
+at Kensington. You will hear a little later that the finest collection
+of miniatures in England went through the same process of disappearance
+and recovery.[42] These original sketches, in addition to their great
+artistic merit, form a wonderful collection of speaking likenesses,
+belonging to the court of Henry VIII.,--likenesses which had been
+happily identified in time by Sir John Cheke (in the reign of
+Elizabeth), since the names of the originals have been inscribed on the
+back of each drawing, as it is believed, by Sir John Cheke's hand. The
+collection is now in the Queen's library, Windsor, with photographs at
+Kensington Museum. There are one or two of Holbein's reputed portraits
+at Hampton Court.
+
+I must pass over some painters as not being sufficiently represented for
+my purpose. Among these is Sir Antony More, Philip II, of Spain's
+friend. It is recorded that Philip having rested his hand on the
+shoulder of More while at work, the bold painter turned round, and
+daubed the royal hand with vermilion. This gave rise to the
+courtier-saying that Philip 'made slaves of his friends, and friends of
+his painters.' Another is Zucchero, one of the painters who was
+requested by Queen Elizabeth to paint her picture without shade, the
+result being 'a woman with a Roman nose, a huge ruff and farthingale,
+and a bushel of pearls.' There are also Van Somer,--Janssens, who
+painted Lady Bowyer, named for her exquisite beauty, 'The star of the
+East,' and Susanna Lister, the most beautiful woman at court, when
+presented in marriage to Sir Geoffrey Thornhurst by James I, in
+person,[43]--and Daniel Myttens, all foreigners, Flemish or Dutch, whom
+we must thus briefly dismiss. And now we come to Van Dyck.
+
+Antony Van Dyck was born at Antwerp, in 1599. His father was a merchant;
+his mother was famous for painting flowers in small, and for needlework
+in silk. The fashion of painting 'in small' had prevailed for some time.
+Horace Walpole mentions that the mother of Lucas de Heere, a Flemish
+painter, born in 1534, could paint with such 'diminutive neatness' that
+she had executed 'a landscape with a windmill, miller, a cart and horse,
+and passengers,' which half a grain of corn could cover. At ten years of
+age, Van Dyck began to study as a painter, and he soon became a pupil,
+and afterwards a favourite pupil, of Rubens. In 1618, when Van Dyck was
+but a lad of seventeen years, he was admitted as a master into the
+painters' guild of St Luke. Two years later, he was still working with
+Rubens, who, seeing his lameness of invention, counselled him to abide
+by portrait painting, and to visit Italy. A year later, in 1621, when
+Van Dyck was twenty years of age, he came to London, already becoming a
+resort of Flemish painters, and lodging with a countryman of his own,
+worked for a short time in the service of James I.
+
+On Van Dyck's return to Flanders, and on the death of his father, he was
+able to take Rubens' advice, and in 1623, when Van Dyck was still only
+twenty-two years of age, he set out for Venice, the Rome of the Flemish
+painters. Before quitting Antwerp, Van Dyck, in proof of the friendship
+which existed between the painters, presented Rubens with several of the
+former's pictures, among them his famous portrait of 'Rubens' wife.' As
+a pendant to this generosity, when Van Dyck came back to Antwerp, and
+complained to Rubens that he--Van Dyck--could not live on the profits of
+his painting, Rubens went next day and bought every picture of Van
+Dyck's which was for sale.
+
+Van Dyck spent five years in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, and
+Palermo, but residing principally at Genoa. In Italy, he began to
+indulge in his love of splendid extravagance, and in the fastidious
+fickleness which belonged to the evil side of his character. At Rome he
+was called 'the cavalier painter,' yet his first complaint on his return
+to Antwerp was, that he could not live on the profits of his painting!
+He avoided the society of his homelier countrymen.
+
+At Palermo, Van Dyck knew, and according to some accounts, painted the
+portrait of Sophonisba Anguisciola, who claimed to be the most eminent
+portrait painter among women. She was then about ninety years of age,
+and blind, but she still delighted in having in her house a kind of
+academy of painting, to which all the painters visiting Palermo
+resorted. Van Dyck asserted that he owed more to her conversation than
+to the teaching of all the schools. A book of his sketches, which was
+recovered, showed many drawings 'after Sophonisba Anguisciola.' She is
+said to have been born at Cremona, was invited at the age of twenty-six
+by Philip II, to Spain, and was presented by him with a Spanish don for
+a husband, and a pension of a thousand crowns a-year from the customs of
+Palermo.
+
+The plague drove Van Dyck from Italy back to Flanders, where he painted
+for a time, and presented his picture of the 'Crucifixion' to the
+Dominicans as a memorial gift in honour of his father, but in Flanders
+Rubens' fame overshadowed that of every other painter, and Van Dyck,
+recalling an invitation which he had received from the Countess of
+Arundel while still in Italy, came a second time to England, in 1630,
+when he was about thirty years of age, and lodged again with a
+fellow-countryman and painter named Gildorp. But his sensitive vanity
+was wounded by his not at once receiving an introduction to the king, or
+the countenance which the painter considered his due, and the
+restlessness, which was a prominent feature in his character, being
+re-awakened, he withdrew once more from England, and returned to the Low
+Countries in 1631. At last, a year later, in 1632, Van Dyck's pride was
+propitiated by receiving a formal invitation from Charles I., through
+Sir Kenelm Digby, to visit England, and this time the painter had no
+cause to complain of an unworthy reception. He was lodged by the king
+among his artists at Blackfriars, having no intercourse with the city,
+save by water. He had the king, with his wife and children, to sit to
+him, and was granted a pension of two hundred a-year, with the
+distinction of being named painter to his Majesty.
+
+A year later Van Dyck was knighted. Royal and noble commissions flowed
+upon him, and the king, who had a hereditary love of art, visited the
+painter continually, and spent some of the happiest and most innocent
+hours of his brief and clouded life in Van Dyck's company. Thus began
+Van Dyck's success in England.
+
+To give you an example of how often, and in how many different manners,
+Van Dyck painted the king and royal family, I shall quote from a list of
+his pictures--
+
+     'King Charles in coronation robes.'
+
+     'King Charles in armour' (twice).
+
+     'King Charles in white satin, with his hat on, just
+     descended from his horse; in the distance, view of the
+     Isle of Wight.'
+
+     'King Charles in armour, on a white horse; Monsieur
+     de St Antoine, his equerry, holding the king's
+     helmet.'
+
+     'The King and Queen sitting; Prince Charles,
+     very young, standing at the King's side; the Duke of
+     York, an infant, on the Queen's knee.'
+
+     'The King and Queen holding a crown of laurel
+     between them.'
+
+     'The Queen in white.'
+
+     'Prince Charles in armour' (two or three times).
+
+     'King, Queen, Prince Charles, and Princess Mary.'
+
+     'Queen with her five children.'
+
+     'Queen with dwarfs,[44] Sir Geoffrey Hudson having
+     a monkey on his shoulder.'
+
+Van Dyck had several great patrons, after the king. For the Earl of
+Arundel, in addition to portraits of the Earl and Countess, the painter
+designed a second Arundel family picture, which was painted by
+Fruitiers. For George, Duke of Buckingham, Van Dyck painted one of his
+finest double portraits of the Duke's two sons, when children. For the
+Northumberland family Van Dyck painted, besides portraits of Henry and
+Algernon, Earls of Northumberland, another famous picture, that of the
+two beautiful sisters, Lady Dorothy Percy, afterwards Countess of
+Leicester, and her sister, Lady Lucy Percy, afterwards Countess of
+Carlisle, whose charms figure frequently in the memoirs of her time.
+William and Philip, Earls of Pembroke, were also among his patrons, and
+for the second he painted his great family picture, 'The Wilton
+Family.' Sir Kenelm Digby, too, whose wife Venitia was more frequently
+painted than any woman of her day, and was not more distinguished for
+her beauty than for her lack of nobler qualities. Van Dyck alone painted
+her several times, the last after her sudden death, for her vain and
+eccentric, if gallant, husband, who in the end was no friend to Van
+Dyck.
+
+But these high names by no means exhaust the list of patrons of a
+painter who, among various contradictory qualities, was indefatigably
+industrious. His work is widely distributed among the Scotch as well as
+the English descendants of the nobility whom he painted, so that the
+possession of at least one ancestral 'Van Dyck' accompanies very many
+patents of nobility, and is equivalent to a warrant of gentle birth.
+
+The Earl of Clarendon, in the next reign, had a great partiality for Van
+Dyck's pictures, and was said to be courted by gifts of them until his
+apartments at Cornbury were furnished with full-length 'Van Dycks.' A
+third of his collection went to Kitty Hyde, Duchess of Queensberry, one
+of the Earl's three co-heiresses. Through the Rich family many of these
+'Van Dycks' passed to Taymouth Castle, where by a coincidence they were
+lodged in the company of numerous works of George Jamieson of Aberdeen,
+who is said to have been for a short time a fellow-pupil of Van Dyck's
+under Rubens, who has been called 'the Scotch Van Dyck,' and who is
+certainly the first native painter who deserves honourable mention.
+Since the death of the last Marquis of Breadalbane these travelled 'Van
+Dycks' have gone back to the English representative of the Rich family.
+
+Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a
+whole-length picture;--for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their
+children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had
+five hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Van Dyck soon impaired his
+fortune. He was not content with having a country-house at Eltham in
+Kent, where he spent a portion of each summer; he would emulate in his
+expenditure the most spendthrift noble of that reign. 'He always went
+magnific so good a table in his apartment that few princes were more
+visited and better served.' His marriage was not calculated to teach him
+moderation. In his thirty-ninth year the King gave him the hand of Marie
+Ruthven, who was nearly related to the unhappy Earl of Gowrie. She was
+his niece, her father having been the scarcely less unhappy younger
+brother Patrick, a physician, who, apprehended when a young man on the
+charge of being concerned in the treason of his elder brothers, spent
+his manhood in the Tower. He was kept a prisoner there from 1584 to
+1619, nearly forty years, and was only released in his age and infirmity
+when his mind was giving way. Patrick Ruthven's infant daughter had been
+adopted, either through charity or perversity, by Anne of Denmark, and
+brought up first at the court of Anne, and afterwards at that of
+Henrietta Maria. The assertion that Marie Ruthven was a very beautiful
+woman has been contradicted. It was said that 'she was bestowed in
+marriage on Sir Antony Van Dyck as much to humble further the already
+humbled and still detested family of Ruthven, as to honour the painter;
+but this does not seem consistent with King Charles's known favour for
+Van Dyck. Yet such a view might have been entertained by Marie Ruthven
+herself, who, according to tradition, held herself degraded by the
+marriage, and never forgave the degradation. She was not a loving wife
+to a man who could hardly have been a very loving or loyal husband. And
+certainly the marriage did not unite the painter closer to the king.
+
+With his professional industry, Van Dyck combined an equally
+unquenchable love of pleasure, which, with his luxurious and sedentary
+habits, induced paroxysms of gout, from which Rubens also suffered
+severely. This must have ultimately disqualified him for good work, and
+when his debts accumulated in greater proportion even than his receipts,
+in place of having recourse, like Rubens, to his painting-room, Van Dyck
+tried a shorter road to get rich, by following the idle example of Sir
+Kenelm Digby in his pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher's stone.
+
+In the year of his marriage, Van Dyck re-visited Flanders, in company
+with his wife, and then repaired to France, it is understood with the
+intention of settling there. He was instigated to the step by his wife,
+and his own ambition of rivalling Rubens' triumphs at the Luxembourg;
+but the preference which the French gave to the works of their
+countryman, Nicolas Poussin, roused his latent jealousy, and so
+mortified him as to induce him to renounce his intention. He determined
+to return to England, and was, to his credit, confirmed in his
+resolution by the threatening civil war which was to shake his royal
+master's throne to the foundation, rather than deterred from it.
+
+Again in England, Van Dyck employed Sir Kenelm Digby to make an offer on
+the painter's part that for eight hundred pounds he would paint the
+history, and a procession of the Knights of the Garter on the walls of
+the Knights' banqueting-room at Whitehall--that palace which was to
+have surpassed the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Escurial, and from one
+of the windows of which Charles stepped out on his scaffold. But the
+proposal was rejected, and immediately afterwards the civil war broke
+out, and was speedily followed by the death of Van Dyck, about a year
+after his marriage, when he was a little over forty years old, at
+Blackfriars, in 1641. He was buried in old St Paul's, near the tomb of
+John of Gaunt. His daughter, Justiniana, was born a short time--some say
+only eight days--before her father died, and was baptized on the day of
+his death. Van Dyck left effects and sums due to him to the amount of
+twenty thousand pounds; but the greater part of the debts were found
+beyond recovery at the close of the civil war. His daughter grew up, and
+married a Mr Stepney, 'who rode in King Charles's life guards.' His
+widow re-married; her second husband was a Welsh knight.
+
+Van Dyck's contradictory elements. He was actuated by opposite motives
+which are hard to analyze, and which in their instability have within
+themselves, whatever their outward advantages, the doom of failure in
+the highest excellence. He was a proud man, dissatisfied both with
+himself and his calling, resenting, with less reason than Hans Holbein
+showed, that he should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no
+means undervaluing or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the
+persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their
+countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter,
+sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not
+once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck
+appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater
+things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his
+weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as
+spoiled his greatest successes.
+
+I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to
+get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that
+of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose,
+a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse
+and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is
+an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare.
+The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the
+best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his
+complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and
+whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.
+
+In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a
+delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master,
+both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement
+which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of
+conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness
+and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true,
+and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the
+refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I.,
+whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus
+lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a
+noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who
+have maintained that Charles,--the son of a plain uncouth father, and of
+a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in
+his childhood a sickly rickety child,--was by no means so well endowed
+in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of old
+gossip and close investigation, have alleged that Charles was long and
+lanky, after he had ceased to be Baby Charles; that his nose was too
+large, and, alas! apt to redden; that his eyes were vacillating; and his
+mouth, the loosely hung mouth of a man who begins by being irresolute,
+and ends by being obstinate.[45] Again, in the hands of a sitter, which
+Van Dyck was supposed to paint with special care and elegance, it has
+been argued that he copied always the same hand, probably his own, in
+ignorance, or in defiance of the fact that hands have nearly as much and
+as varying character as a painter can discover in faces. Though Van Dyck
+painted many beautiful women, he did not excel in rendering them
+beautiful on canvas, so that succeeding generations, in gazing on Van
+Dyck's versions of Venitia, Lady Digby, and Dorothy Sydney--Waller's
+Sacharissa,--have wondered how Sir Kenelm, Waller, and their
+contemporaries, could find these ladies so beautiful.
+
+Van Dyck certainly owed something of the charm of his pictures to the
+dress of the period, with regard to which he received this credit that
+'Van Dyck was the first painter who e'er put ladies' dress into a
+careless romance.' But in reality never was costume better suited for a
+painter like Van Dyck.
+
+The hair in the men was allowed to flow to the shoulders or gathered in
+a love knot, while the whiskers and beard formed a point. In the women
+the hair was crisped in curls round the face. The ruff in men and women
+had yielded to the broad, rich, falling collar, with deep scallops of
+point lace. Vest and cloak were of the richest velvet or satin, or else,
+on the breaking out of the civil war, men appeared in armour. The man's
+hat was broad and flapping, usually turned up at one side, and having an
+ostrich feather in the band; his long wide boots were of Spanish
+leather, and he wore gauntlet gloves, and rich ruffles at his wrists.
+The women wore hoods and mantles, short bodices, ample trains, and wide
+sleeves terminating in loose ruffles at the elbow, which left half of
+the arm bare. Pearl necklaces and bracelets, round feather fans, and
+'knots of flowers,' were the almost universal ornaments of women.
+Another ornament of both men and women, which belonged to the day, and
+was very common in the quarters I have been referring to, was a
+miniature enclosed in a small case of ivory or ebony, carved like a
+rose, and worn on the left side in token of betrothal.[46] Van Dyck,
+along with the appreciation of black draperies which he held in common
+with Rubens, was specially fond of painting white or blue satin. He is
+said to have used a brown preparation of pounded peach-stones for
+glazing the hair in his pictures.
+
+In the end, with all the aids that critics may have given him, and all
+the faults they may find in him, Van Dyck was a great, and in the main
+an earnest portrait painter. Perhaps 'Charles in white satin, just
+descended from his horse,' is the best of the single portraits which
+were held to be Van Dyck's forte.
+
+I must try to give my readers some idea of Van Dyck's 'Wilton Family.'
+It has been so praised, that some have said 'it might have been covered
+with gold as a price to obtain it;' on the other hand, it has not
+escaped censure. One critic asserts that there is no common action
+uniting the figures, and that the faces are so different in
+complexion--one yellow-faced boy appearing either jaundiced or burnt by
+a tropical sun, that the family might have lived in different climates.
+
+This is the story of the picture. 'Earl Philip of Pembroke having
+caused his family to meet, informs them with great emotion of the
+necessity of his eldest son Charles, Lord Herbert, going into the army
+of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, there to acquire military honour and
+experience, notwithstanding his having just married Mary, daughter of
+George, Duke of Buckingham. Lord Herbert is receiving the news with
+ardour, the young bride is turning aside her fair face to hide her
+tears. (Charles Lord Herbert was married Christmas, 1634, went to
+Florence, and died there of small pox, January, 1636.)
+
+'In the Pembroke picture (or "Wilton Family") there are ten figures. The
+Earl and Countess are seated on a dais, under a coat of arms. He wears a
+great lace collar, an order on his breast, a key at his girdle, and has
+great shoes with roses. She has flowing curls, hanging sleeves, arms
+crossed, necklace on the bare neck. (The Countess of Pembroke was the
+Earl's second wife, Anne Clifford, daughter of George, Earl of
+Cumberland, the brave lady who defied Cromwell, and was fond of signing
+her name with the long string of titles derived from her two husbands,
+"Anne Dorset, Pembroke, Montgomery.") Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon,
+is introduced with his wife, Lady Anne Sophia Herbert, daughter of Earl
+Philip; they are on the Countess's left hand. The daughter-in-law, about
+to be parted from her husband, stands on the lowest step of the dais;
+she is elegantly dressed, with hanging sleeves knotted with bows from
+shoulder to elbow. Two young men, the bridegroom and his brother, are at
+their father's right hand; they wear great falling collars and cloaks.
+There are three half-grown boys in tunics without collars, and great
+roses in their shoes, with a dare three daughters of the family who died
+in infancy.'
+
+Van Dyck's finest sacred pictures were his early 'Crucifixion,' and a
+Pieta, at Antwerp. In these he gave a promise of nobler and deeper
+pathos than he afterwards fulfilled. His pictures are to be found
+freely, as I have written, in old English mansions, such as Arundel and
+Alnwick Castles, Knowsley, Knole, Petworth, etc. A head said to be by
+Van Dyck is in the National Gallery.
+
+Van Dyck had few pupils: one, an Englishman named Dobson, earned an
+honourable reputation as a painter.
+
+From Sir Antony More's time down to that of Leily and Kneller, the rage
+for portraits was continually increasing, and took largely the form of
+miniatures, which were painted chiefly by foreigners; notably by
+Hilliard and two Olivers or Oliviers, a father and son of French
+extraction, and by a Swiss named Petitot. A collection of miniatures by
+the Oliviers, including no less than six of Venitia, Lady Digby, had a
+similar fate to that of Holbein's drawings. The miniatures had been
+packed in a wainscot box and conveyed to the country-house in Wales of
+Mr Watkin Williams, who was a descendant of the Digby family. In course
+of time the box with its contents, doubtless forgotten, had been
+transferred to a garret, where it had lain undiscovered for, it has been
+supposed, fully a hundred years. It was two hundred years after the
+date of the painting of the miniatures, that on some turning over of the
+lumber in the garret, the exquisite miniatures, fresh as on the day when
+they were painted, were accidentally brought to light.[47]
+
+Sir Peter Lely was born in Westphalia in 1618. His real name was Vander
+Facs, and his father was a 'Captain of Foot,' who, having chanced to be
+born in rooms over a perfumer's shop which bore the sign of a lily, took
+fantastically enough the name of Du Lys, or Lely, which he transmitted
+to his son. Sir Peter Lely, after studying in a studio at Haarlem, came
+to England when he was twenty-three years of age, in 1641, and set
+himself to copy the pictures of Van Dyck, who died in the year of Lely's
+arrival in England, and whom he succeeded as court painter. Lely was
+knighted by Charles II., married an English woman, and had a son and a
+daughter, who died young. He made a large fortune, dying at last of
+apoplexy, with which he was seized as he was painting the Duchess of
+Somerset, when he was sixty-two years of age, in 1680.
+
+With regard to Lely's character, we may safely judge from his works that
+he was such a man as Samuel Pepys, 'of easy virtue,' a man holding a low
+enough standard by which to measure himself and others. Mr Palgrave
+quotes from Mr Leslie the following characteristic anecdote of Lely,
+which seems to prove that he was aware of, and coolly accepted, the
+decline of art in his generation and person. A nobleman said to Lely,
+'How is it that you have so great a reputation, when you know, as well
+as I do, that you are no painter?' 'True, but I am the best you have,'
+was the answer. Lely's punishment followed him into his art, for
+beginning by copying Van Dyck, it is said of Lely that he degenerated in
+his work till it bore the very 'stamp of the depravity of the age.'
+
+Lely's sitters were mostly women. Among them was one who deserved a
+fitter painter, Mistress Anne Killigrew, Dryden's--
+
+    'Youngest virgin daughter of the skies.'
+
+In Lely's portrait of her, she is a neat, slightly prim, delicate
+beauty, with very fine features, and such sleepy eyes, as were probably
+the gift of Lely, since he has bestowed them generally on the women whom
+he painted. Mistress Anne Killigrew's hair is in curls, piled up in
+front, but hanging down loosely behind. Her bodice is gathered together
+by a brooch, and she has another brooch on one shoulder. She wears a
+light pearl necklace, and 'drops' shaped like shamrocks in her ears.
+
+Lely painted both Charles I, and Cromwell, who desired his painters to
+omit 'no pimple or wart,' but to paint his face as they saw it.
+
+Among less notable personages Lely painted Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and
+his rough Duchess, once a camp follower, according to popular rumour,
+and named familiarly by the contemptuous wits of the day 'Nan Clarges.'
+It is with not more honourable originals than poor 'Nan Clarges' that
+Lely's name as a painter is chiefly associated. We know what an evil
+time the years after the Restoration proved in England, and it was to
+immortalize, as far as he could, the vain, light women of the
+generation that Lely lent what skill he possessed. There their pictures
+hang in what has been called 'the Beauty Room' at Hampton Court, and no
+good man or woman can look at them without holding such beauty
+detestable.
+
+At Hampton Court also there are several of the eleven portraits of
+Admirals whom Lely painted for James II, when Duke of York.
+
+Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, incorrectly Canaletti, was born at
+Venice in 1697. He was the son of a scene painter at the theatre. In his
+youth he worked under his father; a little later he went to Rome, and
+studied for some time there. Then he came to England, where he remained
+only for two years. I have hesitated about placing his name among those
+of the foreign painters resident in England, but so many of his works
+are in this country that he seems to belong to it in an additional
+sense. He is said to have 'made many pictures and much money.' He died
+at Venice when he was seventy years of age, in 1768. As a painter he
+was famous for his correctness of perspective and precision of outline
+(in which it is alleged he aided himself by the use of the camera),
+qualities specially valuable in the architectural subjects of which he
+was fond, drawing them principally from his native Venice. But his very
+excellence was mechanical, and he showed so little originality or, for
+that matter, fidelity of genius, that he painted his landscapes in
+invariable sunshine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The great wood-carver Grinling Gibbons deserves mention among the
+artists of this date. He was a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in
+1648. He came to London with other carvers the year after the great fire
+of London, and was introduced by Evelyn to Charles II., who took him
+into his employment. 'Gibbons was appointed master carver in wood to
+George I., with a salary of eighteen-pence a day.' He died at his house
+in Bow Street in the sixty-third year of his age, in 1721. It is said
+that no man before Gibbons 'gave to wood the lightness of flowers.' For
+the great houses of Burghley, Petworth, and Chatsworth, Gibbons carved
+exquisite work, in festoons for screens, and chimney-pieces, and panels
+for pictures, of fruit, flowers, shells, and birds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sir Godfrey Kneller was born at Luebeck in 1646, and was the son of an
+architect. He is said to have studied under Rembrandt; but if this be
+true, it must have been in Kneller's early youth. It is more certain
+that he travelled in Italy and returned to settle in Hamburg, but
+changing his plans, he came to England, when he was about thirty years
+of age, in 1675. London became his home. There he painted portraits with
+great success; his prices being fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if
+with one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole-length portrait.
+Charles II, sat at the same time to Kneller and to Lely. Not Titian
+himself painted more crowned heads than it fell to the lot of Kneller to
+paint--not less than six reigning kings and queens of England, and, in
+addition, Louis XIV. of France, Charles VI, of Spain, and the Czar Peter
+of Russia.
+
+William III, created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the
+painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his
+conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled
+more in his conversation than in any originality of observation
+displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite
+qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or
+slovenliness, whether in the man or the artist, did not interfere with
+an immense capacity for work, such as it was, but if Horace Walpole be
+right, that Kneller employed many Flemish painters under him to
+undertake the wigs, draperies, etc. etc., the amount of work in portrait
+painting which Sir Godfrey Kneller accomplished is so far explained. He
+attained the end of being a very rich man, and married an English woman,
+but left no family to succeed to his wealth and his country-seat of
+Whitton, when he died at his house in London in his seventy-eighth year,
+in 1723.
+
+As a painter Sir Godfrey Kneller showed considerable talent in drawing,
+and a certain cumbrous dignity of design, but he had much more industry
+of a certain kind than artistic feeling or taste. When he and Lely
+painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of
+execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the
+better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when
+Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden,
+Addison, Prior, and Steele. Apropos of these writers, among the most
+famous works of Kneller are the forty-three portraits, painted
+originally for Tonson, the bookseller, of the members of the Kit Cat
+club, the social and literary club of the day, which got its name from
+the chance of its holding its meetings in a house the owner of which
+bore the unique name of Christopher Cat. Another series of portraits by
+Kneller are what ought to be, in their designation, the Hampton Court
+Beauties. These are still, like the other 'Beauties,' at Hampton. The
+second series was proposed by William's Queen Mary, and included
+herself, Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, and Mary Bentinck. To
+Sarah Jennings men did award the palm of beauty, but poor Queen Mary,
+who had a modest, simple, comely, English face as a princess, had lost
+her fresh youthful charm by the time she became Queen of England, and
+was still further disfigured by the swelling of the face to which she
+was liable. Her proposal to substitute the worthier women of her court
+for the unworthy beauties of her uncle King Charles' court was not
+relished, and helped to render Mary unpopular--among the women, at
+least, of her nobility. Neither was Sir Godfrey Kneller qualified to
+enhance the attractions of Mary's maids of honour and ladies in waiting,
+who, to complete their disadvantages, lived at a period when it had
+become the fashion for women to crown their persons by an erection on
+their natural heads of artificial 'edifices of three heads.'
+
+To Kneller, as I have already written, we owe the preservation of
+Raphael's cartoons.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.[48]
+
+ITALIAN MASTERS FROM THE FOURTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES--TADDEO
+GADDI, 1300, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED 1366--FRA FILIPPO, 1412-1469--BENOZZO
+GOZZOLI, 1424-1496--LUCA SIGNORELLI, 1441, SUPPOSED TO HAVE DIED ABOUT
+1524--BOTTICELLI, 1447-1515--PERUGINO, 1446-1522--CARPACCIO, DATE AND
+PLACE OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--CRIVELLI--FILIPPINO LIPI, EARLIER THAN
+1460--ANTONELLA DA MESSINA, BELIEVED TO HAVE DIED AT VENICE,
+1496--GAROPALO, 1481-1559--LUINI, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, SUPPOSED TO
+HAVE DIED ABOUT 1530--PALMA, ABOUT 1480-1528--PARDENONE, 1483-1538--LO
+SPAGNA, DATE OF BIRTH UNKNOWN, 1533--GIULIO ROMANO, 1492-1546--PARIS
+BORDONE, 1500-1570--IL PARMIGIANINO, 1503-1540--BAROCCIO,
+1528-1612--CARAVAGGIO, 1569-1609--LO SPAGNOLETTO, 1593-1656--GUERCINO,
+1592-1666--ALBANO, 1578-1660--SASSOFERRATO, 1605-1685--VASARI,
+1513-1574--SOFONISBA ANGUISCIOLA, 1535, ABOUT 1620--LAVINIA FONTANA,
+1552-1614.
+
+
+Taddeo Gaddi, the most important of Giotto's scholars, was born in 1300,
+and was held at the baptismal font by Giotto himself. Gaddi rather went
+back on earlier traditions and faults. His excellence lay in his purity
+and simplicity of feeling. His finest pictures are from the life of the
+Virgin, in S. Croce, Florence. He was, like his master, a great
+architect as well as painter. He furnished the plans for the Ponte
+Vecchio and Campanile, Florence, after Giotto's death. He was possessed
+of great activity and industry. He is supposed to have died in 1366, and
+rests in the scene of his labours, since he was buried in the cloisters
+of S. Croce.
+
+Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, a Carmelite friar. The romantic, scandalous
+life, including his slavery in Barbary, attributed to him by Vasari, the
+great biographer of the early Italian painters, has received no
+corroboration from modern researches. It is rather refuted. He always
+signed his pictures 'Frater Filippus,' and his death is entered in the
+register of the Carmine convent as that of 'Frater Filippus.' In all
+probability he was from first to last a monk, and not a disreputable
+one. He describes himself as the poorest friar in Florence, with six
+marriageable nieces dependent on him, and he is said to have been
+involved in debt.
+
+His colouring was 'golden and broad,' in anticipation of that of Titian;
+his draperies were fine. He was wanting in the ideal, but full of human
+feeling, which was apt to get rude and boisterous; his angels were 'like
+great high-spirited boys.' Withal, his style of composition was stately.
+Among the best examples of his work are scenes from the life of St John
+the Baptist in frescoes in the choir of the Duomo at Prato. His panel
+pictures are rather numerous. There are two lunette[49] pictures by Fra
+Filippo in the National Gallery.
+
+Benozzo Gozzoli, 1424-1496, a scholar of Fra Angelico, but resembling
+him only in light and cheerful colouring. He is said to have been the
+first Italian painter smitten with the beauty of the natural world. He
+was the first to create rich landscape backgrounds, and he enlivened
+his landscapes with animals. He displayed a fine fancy for architectural
+effects, introducing into his pictures open porticoes, arcades,
+balconies, and galleries. He liked to have subsidiary groups and circles
+of spectators about his principal figures. In these groups he introduced
+portraits of his contemporaries, true to nature and full of expression
+and delicate feeling. His best work is in the Campo Santo, Pisa, scenes
+from the history of the Old Testament, ranging from Noah to the Queen of
+Sheba. The Pisans were so pleased with his work as to present him, in
+1478, with a sarcophagus intended to contain his remains when they
+should be deposited in the Campo Santo. He survived the gift eighteen
+years, dying in 1496. His easel pictures are rare, and do not offer good
+representations of the master. There is one in the National Gallery--a
+Virgin and Child, with saints and angels.
+
+Luca d'Egidio di Ventura, called also Luca 'da Cortona,' from his
+birth-place, and Luca Signorelli, 1441, supposed to have died about
+1524. His is a great name in the Tuscan School. He played an important
+part in the painting of the Sistine Chapel, though he is only
+represented by one wall picture, the History of Moses. At his best he
+anticipated Michael Angelo in power and grandeur, but he was given to
+exaggeration. His fame rests principally on his frescoes at Orvieto,
+where, by a strange chance, he was appointed, after an interval of time,
+to continue and complete the work begun by Fra Angelico, the master most
+opposed to Signorelli in style. Luca added the great dramatic scenes
+which include the history of Antichrist, executed with a grandeur which
+'only Lionardo among the painters sharing a realistic tendency could
+have surpassed.' These scenes, which contain The Resurrection, Hell, and
+Paradise, bear a strong resemblance to the work of Michael Angelo. In
+his fine drawing of the human figure Signorelli may be known by 'the
+squareness of his forms in joints and extremities.' A conspicuous detail
+in his pictures is frequently a bright-coloured Roman scarf. His work is
+rarely seen north of the Alps.
+
+Sandro Filipepi, called Botticelli, 1447-1515. He was an apprentice to
+a goldsmith, and then became a scholar of Filippo Lipi's. Botticelli was
+vehement and impetuous, full of passion and poetry, seeking to express
+movement. He was the most dramatic painter of his school. Occasionally
+he rises to a grandeur that allies him to Signorelli and Michael Angelo.
+His circular pictures of the Madonna and Child, with angels, are
+numerous. Like Fra Filippo, Botticelli's angels are noble youths, some
+of them belonging to the great families of the time. They are prone to
+be ecstatic with joy or frantic with grief. There is a grand Coronation
+of the Virgin, by Botticelli at Hamilton Palace, and a beautiful
+Nativity by the old master belongs to Mr Fuller Maitland. His Madonna
+and Child are grand and tragic figures always. Botticelli's noble
+frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are apt to be overlooked because of
+Michael Angelo's 'sublime work' on the ceiling. There has been a revival
+of Botticelli's renown within late years, partly due to the new
+interest in the earlier Italian painters which Mr Browning has done
+something to stimulate.
+
+I quote some thoughtful remarks on Botticelli by W.C. Lefroy in
+_Macmillan's Magazine_: 'Mr Ruskin, we know, divides Italian art into
+the art of faith, beginning with Giotto, and lasting rather more than
+200 years, and the art of unbelief, or at least of cold and inoperative
+faith, beginning in the middle of Raphael's life. But whatever division
+we adopt, we must remember that the revival of Paganism, as a matter of
+fact, affected men in different ways. Right across the schools this new
+spirit draws its line, but the line is not a hard and sharp one. Some
+men lie wholly on one side of it, with Giotto, Angelico, and Orcagna;
+some wholly upon the other, with Titian and Correggio, but there are
+some on whom it seems to fall as a rainbow falls upon a hill-side. Such,
+for instance, is Botticelli. Now he tries to paint as men painted in the
+old days of unpolluted faith, and then again he breaks away and paints
+like a very heathen.
+
+'The interest which this artist has excited in the present generation
+has been exaggerated into something like a fashion, and recent criticism
+has delighted to find or imagine in him the idiosyncrasies of recent
+thought. To us it may be he does in truth say more than he or his
+contemporaries dreamed of, but while true criticism will sternly refuse
+to help us to see in his pictures that which is purely subjective, it
+will, I think, recognise the fact that a day like ours is capable of
+reading in the subtle suggestions of ancient art thoughts which have
+only now come to be frankly defined or exquisitely analysed. To us,
+moreover, Botticelli presents not only the poem of the apparition of the
+young and beautiful manhood of humanism before the brooding and
+entranced, yet half expectant, maidenhood of mediaevalism, but also the
+poem of the painter's own peculiar relation to that crisis. For us there
+is the poetry of the thing itself, and also the poetry of Botticelli's
+attempt to express it. The work of Botticelli does not supply a
+universal utterance for mankind like Shakespeare's plays, but when we
+stand before the screen on which his "Nativity" is hung, or contemplate
+in the adjoining room his two perplexed conceptions of "Aphrodite," we
+are face to face with a genuine outcome of that memorable meeting,
+mediaevalism, humanism, and Savonarola, which no generation can afford to
+ignore, and our own especially delights to contemplate. There has been
+much dispute about the date of Botticelli's "Nativity," and some
+defenders of Savonarola have hoped to read 1511 in the strange character
+of its inscription, so that this beautiful picture, standing forth as
+the work of one for many years under the influence of "the Frate," may
+refute the common calumny that that influence was unfriendly to art. Our
+catalogue, indeed, unhesitatingly asserts of Botticelli, that "he became
+a follower of Savonarola and no doubt suffered from it;" but though
+there seems to be really little doubt that the "Nativity" was painted in
+1500, the inscription, with its mystic allusion to the Apocalypse, and
+the whole character of the picture, afford unmistakable evidence of the
+influence of Savonarola.'
+
+Pietro Perugino, 1446, died of the plague at Frontignano in 1522.
+Perugino is another painter who has been indebted to the last
+Renaissance. His fame, in this country rested chiefly on the
+circumstance that he was Raphael's master, whom the generous prince of
+painters delighted to honour, till the tide of fashion in art rose
+suddenly and floated old Pietro once more to the front. At his best he
+had luminous colour, grace, softness, and enthusiastic earnestness,
+especially in his young heads. His defects were monotony, and formality,
+together with comparative ignorance of the principles of his art. His
+conception of his calling in its true dignity was not high. His attempts
+at expressing ardour degenerated into mannerism, and he acquired habits
+and tricks of arrangement and style, among which figured his favourite
+upturned heads, that in the end were ill drawn, and, like every other
+affectation, became wearisome. In the process of falling off as an
+artist, when mere manual dexterity took the place of earnest devotion
+and honest pains, Perugino had a large studio where many pupils executed
+his commissions, and where, working for gain instead of excellence in
+art, he had the satisfaction, doubtless, of amassing a large fortune.
+Among his finest works is the picture of an enthroned Madonna and Child
+in the gallery of the Uffizi. Another fine Madonna with Saints is at
+Cremona. His frescoes in the Sala del Campio at Perugia are among his
+best works. The subjects of these frescoes are partly scriptural; partly
+mythological. In the execution there is excellence alike in drawing,
+colouring, and the disposal of drapery. A _chef d'oeuvre_ by the master
+is the Madonna of the Certosa at Pavia, now in, the National Gallery.
+Yet it is said to have been painted at the very period when Michael
+Angelo ridiculed Perugino's work as 'absurd and antiquated.' Vittore
+Carpaccio, date and place of birth unknown, though he is said to have
+been a native of Istria. He was a historical painter of the early
+Venetian School and a follower of the Bellini. His romantic _genre_
+pictures show the daily life of the Venice of his time, and are
+furnished with landscape and architectural backgrounds. His masterly and
+rich work is mostly in Venice. He introduces animals freely and well in
+his designs.
+
+Carlo Crivelli was another master of the fifteenth century who deserves
+notice. He had strong individuality, yet was influenced by the Paduan
+and Venetian Schools. He displayed an old-fashioned preference for
+painting in tempera. Sometimes his drawing approaches that of Mantegna,
+while he has a gorgeousness of colouring all his own. His pictures
+occasionally show dignity of composition in combination with grace and
+daintiness; but he could be guilty of exaggerated vehemence of
+expression. He frequently introduced fruit, flowers, and birds in his
+work. He is fully represented in the National Gallery, his works there
+ranging from 'small tender pictures of the dead Christ with angels, to a
+sumptuous altar-piece in numerous compartments.'
+
+Filippino Lipi was an adopted son and probably a relation of Fra
+Filippo's, though a scholar's use of his master's name was not uncommon.
+The date of his birth is earlier than 1460. Filippino was also a pupil
+of Botticelli's, while there was a higher sense of beauty and grace in
+the pupil than in the teacher. Among his last works is the Vision of St
+Bernard, an easel picture in the Badia at Florence. The apparition of
+the Madonna in this picture is said to be 'full of charm.' In his larger
+works he is one of the greatest historical painters of his country.
+Roman antiquities had the same keen interest for him which they held for
+the greatest of his contemporaries, and he made free use of them in the
+architecture of his pictures. He has fine work in the Carmelite Church,
+Florence, and in S. Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome. Much of some of his
+pictures is painted over. The National Gallery has a picture of
+Filippino's 'of grand execution,' though almost colourless--the Madonna
+and Child, with St Jerome and St Francis.
+
+Antonella da Messina was the Neapolitan painter who brought the practice
+of painting in oils from the Netherlands into Italy, though it is now
+believed, from stubborn discrepancies in dates, that the story of his
+great friendship with Jan Van Eyck, as given by Vasari, is apochryphal.
+Very likely Hans Memling, called also 'John of Bruges,' was the real
+friend and leader of Antonella. His best work consisted of portraits. He
+is believed to have died at Venice in 1496.
+
+Benvenuto Tisio, surnamed from the place of his birth Garofalo, was born
+in 1481, and died in 1559. He passed from the early school of Ferrara to
+that of Raphael. His conception was apt to be fantastic, while his
+colouring was vivid to abruptness, and he was deficient in charm of
+expression. He fell into the fault of monotonous ideality. At the same
+time his heads are beautiful, and his drapery is classic. His finest
+work is an 'Entombment' in the Borghese Palace, Rome. There is an
+altar-piece by Garofalo, a Madonna and Child with angels, in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Bernardo Luini, who stands foremost among the scholars of Lionardo da
+Vinci, was born by the Lago Maggiore, the date unknown, came to Milan in
+1500, was elderly in 1525, and is supposed to have died not long after
+1530. His work is chiefly found in Milan. His great merit has been only
+lately acknowledged. He is not 'very powerful or original,' but for
+'purity, grace, and spiritual expression,' he ranks very high. He unites
+the earnestness of the older masters with the prevailing feeling for
+beauty of the great masters of Italian Art. His pictures were long
+mistaken for those of his master, Lionardo, though it is said that when
+the difference between them is once pointed out, it is easily
+recognised; indeed, the resemblance is confined to a smiling beatific
+expression in the countenances, which abounds more in Luini's pictures.
+His heads of women, children, and angels present every degree of
+serenity, sweet cheerfulness and happiness, up to ecstatic rapture.
+'Christ Disputing with the Doctors,' in the National Gallery, formerly
+called a Lionardo, is now known to be a Luini. He painted much, whether
+in tempera, fresco, or oil. His favourite subjects in oil were the
+Madonna and Child, with St John and the Lamb, and the Marriage of St
+Catherine. Probable he appears to greatest advantage in frescoes. He is
+said to have reached his highest perfection in the figure of St John in
+a Crucifixion in the Monasterio Maggiore, Milan.
+
+Jacopo Palma, called Il Palma Vecchio, was born about 1480 near Bergamo,
+and died in 1528. He is believed to have studied under Giovanni Bellini,
+while he is also the chief follower of Giorgione. His characteristics
+are ample forms and gorgeous breadth of drapery. His female saints, with
+their large rounded figures, have a soft yet commanding expression. He
+had an enchanting feeling for landscape, which seems to have been the
+birthright of the Venetian painters. To Palma is owing what are called
+'Santa Conversazione,' where there are numerous groups round the Virgin
+and Child, as if they are holding a court in a retired and beautiful
+country nook. Palma rivalled Giorgione and Titian as a painter of
+women's portraits. Among these is that of his daughter Violante,
+believed to have been loved by Titian. 'Palma's three Daughters,' in the
+Dresden Gallery, is a masterpiece of 'fair, full-blown beauty.' The hair
+of the women is of the curiously bleached yellow tint affected then by
+the Venetian ladies. Palma painted many pictures, leaving at his death
+forty-our unfinished.
+
+Giovanni Antonio da Pardenone, born 1483, died 1538. He had many names,
+'Pardenone' from his birth-place, 'Corticellis' from that of his father,
+and he is believed to have assumed the name 'Regillo' after he received
+knighthood from the King of Hungary. He was Venetian in his artistic
+qualities. Many of his works are in his native Pardetowns near. All have
+suffered and some are now hidden by whitewash. His chief strength lay in
+fresco. His scenes from the Passion in the cathedral, Cremona, are
+greatly damaged and wretchedly restored, but they still reveal the
+painter as a great master. They have 'fine drawing, action, excellent
+colouring, grand management of light and shade, with freedom of hand and
+dignity of conception.' In the prophets and sibyls around the cupola of
+the Madonna di Campagna, Piacenza, Pardenone's power is fully proven.
+His immense works in fresco account for the rarity of his oil pictures
+and their comparative inferiority. There is only one picture, and that a
+portrait, indisputably assigned to Pardenone in England, in the Baring
+Collection.
+
+Giovanni di Pietro, known as Lo Spagna (the Spaniard), was a
+contemporary of Raphael's, a fellow-pupil of his under Perugino. There
+is no record of the time and place of Lo Spagna's birth. He died in
+1533. He was a careful, conscientious follower of Perugino and Raphael,
+doing finished and delicate work; an 'Assumption' in a church at Trevi
+is a fine example of his qualities. His best picture was painted in
+1516, and is at Assisi. It represents the Madonna enthroned with three
+saints on each side. In his later works he betrayed feebleness. Pictures
+by Lo Spagna are often attributed to Raphael.
+
+Giulio Pippi, surnamed Romano, born in 1492, died in 1546, was a very
+different painter, while he was the most celebrated of Raphael's
+scholars. He had a vigorous, daring spirit, with a free hand and a bold
+fancy. So long as he painted under Raphael, Giulio followed his master
+closely, especially in his study of the antique, but he lacked the
+purity and grace of his teacher, on whose death, the pupil leaving Rome,
+pursued his own coarser, more vehement impulses. The frescoes in the
+Villa Modama, Rome, are good examples of his style, so is the
+altar-piece of the Martyrdom of St Stephen in S. Stefano, Genoa. Giulio
+Romano was the architect who designed the rebuilding of half Mantua.
+His best easel picture in England is the 'Education of Jupiter by Nymphs
+and Corybantes,' in the National Gallery. In Raphael's lifetime his
+principal scholar was accustomed to work on the master's pictures, and
+on his death Giulio, together with another pupil, Gianfrancesco Penni,
+were left executors of Raphael's will and heirs of his designs.
+
+Paris Bordone was born at Treviso in 1500 and died in 1570. He was
+educated in the Venetian School, and remained remarkable for delicate
+rosy colour in his flesh tints and for purple, crimson, and shot hues in
+his draperies, which were usually small and in crumpled folds. His _chef
+d'oeuvre_ is in the Venetian Academy. It is a fisherman presenting a ring
+to the Doge, and is a large and fine picture with many figures. He dealt
+frequently in mythological or poetic subjects. There is an example of
+the first in the National Gallery. He was great in single female
+subjects and women's portraits. There is a portrait by Bordone of a
+lovely woman of nineteen belonging to the Brignole family, in the
+National Gallery. He had often fine landscape and grand architecture in
+his pictures.
+
+Il Parmigianino, born 1503, died 1540, was a follower of Correggio's. In
+Parmigianino's case the danger of the master's peculiarities became
+apparent by the lapse into affectation and frivolity. 'His Madonnas are
+empty and condescending, his female saints like ladies in waiting.'
+Still there were certain indestructible beauties of the master which yet
+clung to the scholar. He had clear warm colouring, decision, and good
+conception of human life. He was highly successful in portraits. There
+is a splendid portrait by Parmigianino, said to be Columbus, in Naples.
+Among his celebrated pictures is 'The Madonna with the Long Neck,' in
+the Pitti Palace. An altar-piece in the National Gallery, which
+represents a Madonna in the clouds with St John the Baptist appearing
+to St Jerome, is a good example of Parmigianino. It is said that he was
+engrossed with this picture during the siege of Rome in 1527. The
+soldiers entered the studio intent on pillage, but surprising the
+master at his work, respected his enthusiasm and protected him.
+
+Federigo Baroccio, of Urbino, born in 1528, died in 1612, was also a
+follower of Correggio's, and made a stand against the decline of art in
+his day. He was tender and idyllic, though apt in his turn to be
+affected and sentimental. When painting in the Vatican, Rome, his rivals
+sought to take his life by poison. The attempt caused Baroccio to return
+to Urbino, where he established himself and executed his commissions.
+
+Amirighi da Caravaggio was born at Caravaggio in 1569, and died at Porto
+Ercole in 1609. He was chief of the naturalistic school, the members of
+which painted common nature and violent passions in bitter opposition to
+the eclectics, especially the Caracci. The feud was sometimes carried on
+appositely enough on the side of the naturalistic painters by poison and
+dagger. Caravaggio was distinguished by his wild temper and stormy life,
+in keeping with his pictures. He resided principally in Rome, but dwelt
+also in Naples. He is vulgar but striking, even pathetic in some of his
+pictures. The 'Beheading of John the Baptist,' in the Cathedral, Malta,
+is one of his masterpieces. His Holy Families now and then resemble
+gipsy _menages_.
+
+Guiseppe Ribiera, a Spaniard, and so called Lo Spagnoletto, was born
+1593 and died 1656. He followed Caravaggio, while he retained
+reminiscences of the Spanish School and of the Venetian masters. Some of
+his best pictures, such as 'the Pieta with the Marys and the Disciples,'
+and his 'Last Supper,' are in Naples. He had a wild fancy with a
+preference for horrible subjects--executions, tortures--in this respect
+resembling Domenichino. Lo Spagnoletto is said to be particularly
+unpleasant in his mythological scenes. Many of his pictures have
+blackened with time. His 'Mary of Egypt standing by her open Grave' is a
+remarkable picture in the Dresden Gallery.
+
+Giovanni Francesco Barbiera, surnamed Guercino da Cinto, approached the
+school of the Caracci. In his art he resembled Guido Reni, with the same
+sweetness, greater liveliness, and fine chiaroscuro. 'Dido's Last
+Moments' and 'St Peter raising Tabitha' in Rome and in the Pitti Palace
+are fine examples of Guercino's work. His later pictures, like Guido's,
+are fascinating in softness, delicate colouring and tender sentiment,
+degenerating, however, into mannerism and insipidity, while his
+colouring becomes at last pale and washy.
+
+Albano, born 1578, died 1660. He had elegance and cheerfulness which
+hardly rose to grace. He painted mostly scenes from ancient mythology,
+such as 'Venus and her Companions.' Religious subjects were
+comparatively rare with him; one, however, often repeated was the
+'Infant Christ sleeping on the Cross.'
+
+Giovanni Battista Salvi, surnamed from his birth-place Sassoferrato, was
+born in 1605 and died in 1685. He followed the scholars of the Caracci,
+but with some independence, returning to older and greater masters. His
+art was distinguished by a peculiar but slightly affected gentleness of
+conception, pleasing and sweet--with the sweetness verging on weakness.
+He finished with minute care. He gave constant representations of the
+Madonna and Child and Holy Families in a domestic character. In one of
+his pictures in Naples the Madonna is engaged in sewing. His most
+celebrated, 'Madonna del Rosario,' is in S. Sabina, Rome. The Madonna
+bending in ecstatic worship over an infant Christ lying on a cushion is
+in the Dresden Gallery.
+
+Giorgio Vasari was born at Arezzo in 1512 and died at Florence in 1574.
+He was an architect, or jeweller, and a historical painter of heavy
+crowded pictures. His lives of the early Italian painters and sculptors
+up to his own time, the sixteenth century, though full of traditional
+gossip, are invaluable as graphic chronicles of much interesting
+information which would otherwise have been lost.
+
+Sofonisba Anguisciola, born 1535, died about 1620, was a pupil of
+Bernardino Campi about the close of the sixteenth century at Cremona.
+She is justly praised by Vasari. Though her works are rare there are a
+few in England and Scotland. Three of her pictures which are mentioned
+with high commendation by Dr. Waagen are, 'a nun in the white robes of
+her order, nobly conceived and delicately coloured,' in Lord
+Yarborough's collection; in Mr Harcourt's collection, 'her own
+portrait, still very youthful, delicate, charming, and clear;' and in
+the collection of the late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, 'another portrait of
+herself at an easel painting the Virgin and Child on wood, delicately
+conceived, clear in colour, and very careful.'
+
+Lavinia Fontana, born in 1552, died 1614, was a daughter of Prospero
+Fontana, who belonged to the fast degenerating Bolognese artists at the
+close of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. She was
+a better artist than her fellow painters, worked cleverly and boldly,
+and showed truth to nature. She has left excellent portraits. In the
+late Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's collection there is a picture by her,
+'Two girls in a boat with a youth rowing,' on wood, 'of very graceful
+motive and careful treatment.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.[50]
+
+GERMAN, FLEMISH, AND DUTCH ARTISTS FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE EIGHTEENTH
+CENTURY--VAN DER WEYDEN, A CONTEMPORARY OF THE VAN EYCKS, 1366-1442--VAN
+LEYDEN, 1494-1533--VAN SOMER, 1570-1624--SNYDERS, 1579-1657--G.
+HONTHORST, 1592-1662--JAN STEEN, 1626-1679--GERARD DOW, 1613-1680--DE
+HOOCH, DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH UNKNOWN--VAN OSTADE, 1610-1685--MAAS,
+1632-1693--METZU, 1615, STILL ALIVE IN 1667--TERBURG,
+1608-1681--NETCHER, 1639-1684--BOL, 1611-1680--VAN DER HELST,
+1613-1670--RUYSDAEL, 1625 (?)-1682--HOBBEMA, 1638-1709--BERCHEM,
+1620-1683--BOTH, 1610 (?)-1650 (?)--DU JARDIN, 1625-1678--ADRIAN VAN DE
+VELDE, 1639-1672--VAN DER HEYDEN, 1637-1712--DE WITTE, 1607-1692--VAN
+DER NEER, 1619(?)-1683--WILLIAM VAN DE VELDE THE YOUNGER,
+1633-1707--BACKHUYSEN, 1631-1708--VAN DE CAPELLA, ABOUT
+1653--HONDECOETER, 1636-1695--JAN WEENIX, 1644-1719--PATER SEGERS,
+1590-1661--VAN HUYSUM, 1682-1749--VAN DER WERFF, 1659-1722--MENGS,
+1728-1774.
+
+
+Roger van der Weyden was a contemporary of the Van Eycks, born at
+Tournai. His early pictures in Brussels are lost. He visited Italy in
+1439, and was treated with distinction at Ferrara. His Flemish realistic
+cast of mind and artistic power remained utterly unaffected by the grand
+Italian pictures with which he came in contact; so did his profound
+earnestness, which must have been great indeed, since its effects are
+felt through all impediments down to the present day. His expressive
+realism chose subjects in which the sentiments of grief and pity could
+be most fitly shown. He sternly rejected any suggestion to idealise the
+human form, and paint heads, hands, or feet different from those in
+ordinary life. 'It is the simplicity with which he gives expression by
+large and melancholy eyes, thought by projections of the forehead, grief
+by contracted muscles, and suffering by attenuation of the flesh which
+touches us.' The deadly earnestness of the man impresses the spectator
+at this distant date. 'There is no smile in any of his faces, but there
+is many a face wrung with agony, and there is many a tear.' He objected
+to shadow in every form, and filled his pictures with an invariable
+atmosphere and light--those which belong to dawn before sunrise. Among
+his finer works are a triptych[51] belonging to the Duke of Westminster,
+a 'Last Judgment' in the Hospital at Bearne, and a large 'Descent from
+the Cross' in Madrid. In the triptych in the centre is Christ with black
+hair, which is unusual, in his left hand the globe. On his right is the
+Virgin Mary, on his left St John the Evangelist; on the right wing is
+St John the Baptist, on his left the Magdalene.
+
+Lucas Van Leyden was born in 1494 and died in 1533. He painted both
+scriptural subjects and everyday scenes, being a man of varied powers.
+He worked admirably for his time, and added to his art that of an
+engraver. He followed the Van Eycks, but lowered their treatment of
+sacred subjects. In incidents taken from common life he showed himself
+full of observation, and possessed of some humour. His pictures are
+rare. A 'Last Judgment,' in the Town House, Leyden, is a striking but
+unpleasant example of Lucas Van Leyden's work.
+
+Paul Van Somer was born at Antwerp in 1570, and died in 1624. He worked
+for many years in England, where his best works--portraits--remain. He
+was truthful, a good colourist, and finished carefully. His portraits of
+Lord Bacon at Panshanger and of the Earl and Countess of Arundel at
+Arundel Castle are well known.
+
+Frans Snyders was born in 1579, and died, at Antwerp in 1657. After
+Rubens, Snyders was the greatest Flemish animal painter. He painted
+along with Rubens often, Snyders supplying the animals and Rubens the
+figures. Frans Snyders paid a visit to Italy and Rome, from which he
+seems to have profited, judging by his skill in arrangement. This skill
+he displayed also in his kitchen-pieces (magnificent shows of fruit,
+vegetables, game, fish, etc.), which, like his animal pictures, are
+numerous. In one of these kitchen-pieces in the Dresden Gallery, Rubens
+and his second wife are said to figure as the cooks. Princes and nobles
+bade for Snyders' pictures. There is a famous 'Boar Hunt' in the Louvre,
+in Munich 'Lionesses Pursuing a Roebuck,' in Vienna 'Boar attacked by
+Nine Dogs.' Snyders' animal pictures are full of energetic action and
+fierce passion. To these qualities is frequently added hideous realism
+in detail. There are many Snyders in English galleries.
+
+Gerard Honthorst was born at Utrecht in 1592, and died in 1662. He was a
+follower of Caravaggio. He visited Italy and found favour in Rome, where
+he got from his night-pieces Correggio's name, 'Della Notte.' Honthorst
+was summoned to England by Charles I., for whom he painted several
+pictures. He entered the service of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange,
+and painted also for the King of Denmark. He left an extraordinary
+number of works, sacred, mythological, historical, and latterly many
+portraits. He drew well and painted powerfully, but was coarsely
+realistic in his treatment. At Hampton Court there are two of his best
+portraits, those of the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia and the Duke of
+Buckingham and his family. Gerard Honthorst's younger brother, William,
+was a portrait painter not unlike the elder brother in style.
+
+Jan Steen was born at Leyden in 1626, and died in 1679. He was great as
+a _genre_ painter. He is said to have been, after Rembrandt, the most
+humorous of Dutch painters, full of animal spirits and fun. At his best,
+composition, colouring, and execution were all in excellent keeping. At
+his worst, he was vulgar and repulsive in his heads, and careless and
+faulty in his work. He was very rarely either kindly or reverent in his
+subjects, though, in spite of what is known to have been his riotous
+life, he is comparatively free from the grossness which is often the
+shame of Flemish and Dutch art. Jan Steen succeeded his father as a
+brewer and tavern-keeper at Delft. He renounced the brewery, in which he
+did not succeed, and joined the Painters' Guild, Haarlem; but his
+position as a tavern-keeper is reflected in his pictures, of which
+eating and drinking, card-playing, etc., are frequently the _motifs_.
+His family relations were not conducive to higher principles and tastes.
+He is said to have been so lost to common feeling as to have painted his
+first wife when she was in a state of intoxication.[52] His second wife
+may have been a worthier woman, but she was drawn from the lowest class,
+and had been accustomed to sell sheeps' heads and trotters in the
+butchers' market. Without doubt Jan Steen had extraordinary genius
+coexisting with his coarse, careless nature and jovial habits, and he
+must have worked with great facility, since, in spite of his idleness
+and comparatively early death, he left as many as two hundred pictures,
+rendered him extremely popular. Besides his favourite subjects, such as
+'The Family Jollification,' 'The Feast of the Bean King,' 'Game of
+Skittles,' he has pictures in a slightly higher atmosphere, such as 'A
+Pastor Visiting a Young Girl,' 'The Parrot,' 'Schoolmaster with
+Unmanageable Boys,' 'The Pursuit of Alchemy.' Among the latter a good
+example is 'The Music Master' in the National Gallery.
+
+Gerard Dow was born in 1613 and died in 1680. He was a _genre_ painter
+of great merit. He belonged to Leyden, and was a pupil of Rembrandt. He
+began with portraiture, often painting his own face, and went on to
+scenes from low and middle-class life, but rarely attempted to represent
+high society. Compared to Jan Steen, however, he is refined. He had a
+curious fondness for painting hermits. The lighting of his pictures is
+frequently by lantern or candle. They are mostly small, and without
+animated action, but are full of picturesqueness. He was a good
+colourist, 'with a rare truth to nature and a marvellous distinctness of
+eye and precision of hand.' Minute as his execution was, his touch was
+'free and soft.' His best pictures are 'like nature's self seen through
+the camera obscura.' An instance often given of his exquisite finish is
+that of a broom in the corner of one of his pictures. Some contemporary
+had remarked how careful and elaborate was the labour bestowed on it,
+when the painter answered that he was still to give it several hours'
+work. He must have been exceedingly industrious as well as painstaking,
+since he left two hundred pictures as his contribution to Dutch art.
+Among his finer pictures are 'An Old Woman reading the Bible to her
+Husband,' in the Louvre; 'The Poulterer's Shop,' in the National
+Gallery. His _chef d'oeuvre_, 'The Woman Sick of the Dropsy,' is in the
+Louvre. His candlelight is the finest rendered by any master. There is a
+good example of it in 'The Evening School,' in the Amsterdam Gallery.
+
+Peter de Hooch--spelt often, De Hooge--was the _genre_ painter of full,
+clear sunlight. The dates of his birth and death can only be guessed by
+those of his pictures, which extend from 1656 to 1670. His groups are
+generally playing cards, smoking, drinking, or engaged in domestic
+occupations--almost always in the open air. No other _genre_ painter can
+compare with him in reproducing the effects of sunlight. His prevailing
+colour is red, varied and repeated with great delicacy. English lovers
+of art brought De Hooch into favour, and many of his pictures are in
+England. There are fine examples--'The Court of a Dutch House' and 'A
+Courtyard'--in the National Gallery.
+
+Adrian van Ostade was born at Haarlem in 1610 and died in his native
+town in 1685. He has been called 'the Rembrandt of _genre_ painters,'
+and, like Rembrandt, he was without the sense of human beauty and grace,
+for even his children are ugly; yet it is the purer, happier side of
+national life which he constantly represents, and he had great feeling
+for nature, with picturesqueness and harmony of design and colouring, as
+well as mastery of the technique of his art. He suffered many hardships
+in his youth, and grew up a quiet, industrious, family man. He left a
+very large number of pictures, nearly four hundred, many of them good,
+and not a few in England. 'The Alchemist'[53] is in the National
+Gallery.
+
+Maas, born in 1632, died in 1693, is a much-prized _genre_ painter,
+whose pictures are rare. He was a pupil of Rembrandt. He is said to have
+treated 'very simple subjects with naive homeliness and kindly humour.'
+His pictures are 'well lit, with deep warm harmony, and a vigorous
+touch.' 'The Idle Servant-maid,' in the National Gallery, is a
+masterpiece.
+
+Metzu, like Terburg, is _par excellence_ one of the two painters of
+Dutch high life. Metzu was born in 1615, and is known to have been alive
+in 1667. He painted both on a large and a small scale, and occasionally
+departed from his peculiar province to represent market-scenes, etc. He
+is the most refined and picturesque of _genre_ painters on a small
+scale. Among his _chefs d'oeuvre_ are a 'Lady holding a Glass of Wine and
+receiving an Officer,' in the Louvre; and a 'Girl writing, a Gentleman
+leaning on her chair and another girl opposite playing the Lute,' in the
+Hague Gallery. The fine 'Duet,' and the 'Music Lesson' are both in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Gerard Terburg was born at Zwol, in 1608, and died in 1681. He visited
+Germany and Italy in his youth. His small groups and single figures,
+taken from the wealthier classes, with their luxurious surroundings, are
+'given with exquisite delicacy and refinement.' Included in his
+masterpieces are a 'Girl in white satin (a texture which he rendered
+marvellously) washing her hands in a basin held before her by a
+maid-servant,' in the Dresden Gallery; an 'Officer in confidential talk
+with a Young Girl, and a Trumpeter who has brought him a Letter,' in the
+Hague Gallery; a 'Young Lady in white satin sitting playing the Lute,'
+in the Chateau of Wilhelmshoee, at Cassell. There are twenty-three
+Terburgs in England and Scotland.
+
+Caspar Netcher, born in 1639, died in 1684. He formed himself upon Metzu
+and Terburg. He is the great Dutch painter of childhood. His finest
+works are in the Dresden Gallery. In the National Gallery is his
+'Children blowing Bubbles.'
+
+Ferdinand Bol was born at Dordrecht in 1611, and died at Amsterdam in
+1680. He was a student of Rembrandt's, and distinguished himself in
+sacred and historical pictures, and especially in portraits. He followed
+his master in his youth, fell off in his art in middle life, but became
+again excellent in his later years. Among his fine pictures are 'David's
+Charge to Solomon,' in the Dublin National Gallery; and 'Joseph
+presenting his father Jacob to Pharaoh,' in the Dresden Gallery. His
+last portraits are considered very fine. They are taken in the fullest
+light, and have a surprising amount of animation. Such a portrait,
+called 'The Astronomer,' is in the National Gallery.[54]
+
+Jacob Ruysdael was born in 1625(?) at Haarlem. In 1668 he was in
+Amsterdam, and acted as witness to the marriage of Hobbema, whose lack
+of worldly prosperity Ruysdael shared. He himself was unmarried, and
+maintained his father in his old age. In the prime of life Jacob
+Ruysdael in turn fell into extreme poverty, and died an inmate of the
+Haarlem Almshouse in 1682--a sad record of Holland's greatest landscape
+painter, for 'beyond dispute' Ruysdael is the first of the famous Dutch
+landscape painters.
+
+'In no other is there the feeling for the poetry of Northern nature
+united with perfect execution, admirable drawing, great knowledge of
+chiaroscuro, powerful colouring, and a mastery of the brush which ranged
+from the minutest touch to broad, free execution.' His prevailing tone
+of colour is a full, decided green, though age has given many of his
+pictures a brown tone. A considerable number of his pictures are in a
+greyish, clear, cool tone (good examples of the last are to be seen in
+the Dresden Gallery). He generally painted the flat Dutch country in
+tranquil repose. He dealt usually in heavy clouded skies which told of
+showers past and coming, and dark sheets of water overshadowed by
+trees, lending a melancholy sentiment to the picture. He was fond of
+wide expanses of land and water, fond also of introducing the spires of
+his native Haarlem, touching the horizon line. He has left a few
+sea-pieces, always with cloudy heavens and heaving or raging seas;[55]
+where he has given sketches of sea, and shore, the aerial perspective is
+rendered in tender gradations 'full of pathos.' He has other pictures
+representing hilly, even mountainous, landscapes. In these foaming
+waterfalls form a prominent feature. Ruysdael was weak in his drawing of
+men and animals, in which he was occasionally assisted by
+fellow-artists, such as Berchem and Van de Velde. Among his finest
+pictures are 'A View of the Country round Haarlem,' in the Museum of the
+Hague; 'A flat country, with a road leading to a village and fields with
+wheat sheaves,' in the Dresden Gallery; 'A hilly bare country through
+which a river runs; the horseman and beggar on a bridge, by
+Wouvermans,' in the Louvre. His most remarkable waterfall is in the
+Hague Museum. In the Dresden Gallery there is 'A Jewish Cemetery,' 'full
+of melancholy.' Three of Ruysdael's fine waterfalls are in the National
+Gallery. Of two very grand storms which he painted one is in the Louvre,
+the other in the collection of the Marquis of Lansdowne at Bowood. There
+are many of Ruysdael's pictures in England. In the great landscape
+painter, as in the other renowned Dutch artists of the seventeenth
+century, the influence of Rembrandt is marked.
+
+Meindert Hobbema was born in 1638, married in 1638, and died in poverty
+at Amsterdam in 1709. His works, which were neglected in his lifetime,
+now fetch much more than their weight in gold. Sums as large as four
+thousand pounds have been paid more than once for a Hobbema, yet his
+name was not found in any dictionary of art or artists for more than a
+century after his death. The English were the first to acknowledge
+Hobbema's merit, and nine-tenths of his works are in England, where he
+is the most popular Dutch landscape painter. But he is said by judges to
+have less invention and less poetic sensibility than his contemporary
+and friend Ruysdael. Hobbema's subjects are usually villages surrounded
+by trees like those in Guelderland, water-mills, a slightly broken
+country, with groups of trees, wheatfields, meadows, and small pools,
+more rarely portions of towns, and still more seldom old castles and
+stately mansions.[56] He has all the lifelike truthfulness of the Dutch
+artists. In tone he is as warm and golden as Ruysdael is cool in his
+greens. In the National Gallery there are excellent specimens of
+Hobbema, such as 'The Avenue Middelharnis' and 'A Landscape in Showery
+Weather.'
+
+Nicolas Berchem, often spelt Berghem, was born at Haarlem in 1620, and
+died at Amsterdam in 1683. He was an excellent Dutch landscape painter.
+He had evidently visited Italy, and displayed great fondness for
+Italian subjects. His pictures show 'varied composition, good drawing,
+fine aerial effects, freedom, playfulness, and spirit.' As a colourist he
+was unequal, being often warm and harmonious, but at other times heavy
+and cold. It is clear that he was no student of life, from the monotony
+of his shepherds and shepherdesses and the sameness of his animals. He
+was naturally industrious, and was spurred on, as a still greater artist
+is said to have been, by the greed of his wife. He painted upwards of
+four hundred pictures, besides doing figures and animals for other
+painters. The great northern European galleries are rich in his works.
+One of his best pictures, 'A Shepherdess driving her cattle through a
+ford in a rocky landscape,' where the cool tone of the landscape is
+contrasted with the golden tone of the cattle, is in the Louvre. Another
+fine picture, 'Crossing the Ford,' is in the National Gallery.
+
+Jan Both, born in 1610 (?), died in 1650 (?), was another Dutch
+landscape painter still more spellbound by Italy,[57] which he visited,
+and where he fell under the influence of Claude Lorraine. Both devoted
+himself thenceforth to Italian landscape to a greater degree than was
+practised by any other Dutch painter. He was excellent in drawing and
+skilful in rendering the golden glories of Italian sunsets. He painted
+freely and with solidity. The figures of men and animals in his pictures
+were often introduced by his brother Andreas. Jan Both excelled both in
+large and small pictures, but he was most uninterestingly uniform in
+design. He had generally a foreground of lofty trees, and for a
+background a range of mountains rising step by step, with a wide plain
+at their feet. Sometimes he introduced a waterfall or a lake. He rarely
+painted particular points in a landscape. His life was not a long one,
+so that his pictures do not number more than a hundred and fifty.
+Occasionally his warm tone of colouring degenerates to a foxy red. One
+of Both's best pictures--a landscape in which the fresh light of
+morning is apparent--is in the National Gallery.
+
+Karil du Jardin, born in 1625, died in 1678, is a third great Dutch
+landscape painter, whose fancy Italy laid hold of, so that he settled in
+the country, dying at Venice. He was, it is said, a pupil of Berchem's,
+from whom he may have first drawn his Italian proclivities. He has more
+truth and feeling for animated nature than Berchem. Indeed, in this
+respect Du Jardin followed Paul Potter. According to contemporary
+accounts, Du Jardin, who had his share of the national humour, wasted
+his time in the pursuit of pleasure, and did not leave more pictures
+behind him than Both left. Du Jardin's best works are in the Louvre, but
+there are also many of his pictures in England. Among his masterpieces,
+'Cattle of all kinds in a meadow surrounded by rocks, and watered by a
+cascade; a horseman giving alms to a peasant boy;' and his celebrated
+'Charlatan,' full of observation and humour, are in the Louvre. A fine
+picture, 'Figures of Animals under the shade of a Tree,' is in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Adrian Van de Velde, born in 1639, died in 1672, the younger brother of
+a great marine painter, ranks almost as high as Paul Potter in cattle
+painting. If 'inferior in modelling and solidity' to his rival, Adrian
+Van de Velde is superior in variety, taste, and feeling. Like the great
+English animal painter, Landseer, Van de Velde was a distinguished
+artist when a mere boy of fourteen. Like his compatriot, Paul Potter,
+Van de Velde died young, at the age of thirty-two. He generally disposed
+of his cattle among broken ground with trees and pools of water.
+Sometimes he has a herdsman or a shepherdess, sometimes there is a
+hunting party passing. His scenery is reckoned masterly. It is mostly
+taken from the coast of Scheveningen. He often painted in men, horses,
+and dogs for other painters. He must have been very industrious, with
+great facility in his work, since, in spite of his premature death, he
+had painted nearly two hundred pictures. 'A brown cow grazing and a
+grey cow resting,' which is in the Berlin Museum, was done at the age of
+sixteen, yet it is full of observation, delicacy, and execution. 'Cattle
+grazing before a peasant's cottage,' which is in the Dresden Gallery, is
+considered very fine. A fine 'Winter Landscape,' and a 'Farm Cottage,'
+are in the National Gallery. Some of Adrian Van de Velde's best work, as
+well as his brother's, is in England.
+
+Jan Van der Heyden, 'the Gerard Dow of architectural painters,' was born
+in 1637 and died in 1712. He combined an unspeakable minuteness of
+detail with the closest observation of nature. His subjects, which he
+selected with great taste, were chiefly well-known buildings, palaces,
+churches, and canal banks in Holland and Belgium. He painted in a warm
+transparent tone, with close application of the laws of perspective. The
+figures in his pictures, in excellent keeping, were often introduced by
+Adrian Van de Velde. Van der Heyden's productiveness as a painter was
+lessened by the circumstance that his mechanical talent led him to make
+an invention by which the construction of the fire-engines of his day
+was greatly improved. In consequence he was placed by the magistrates of
+Amsterdam at the head of their fire-engine establishment, which had thus
+many claims on his time. A beautiful 'Street in Cologne' is in the
+National Gallery.
+
+Emanuel De Witte, born in 1607, died in 1692, was great in architectural
+interiors, especially in churches of Italian architecture. He stood to
+this branch of Dutch art in the same relation that Ruysdael did to
+landscape and William Van de Velde to seascape.
+
+Aart Van der Neer was born in 1619(?), died in 1683. He is famous for
+his canal banks by moonlight, and fine disposal of broad masses of
+shadow. After his moonlights come his sunsets, conflagrations, and
+winter scenes. He rarely painted full daylight. He sometimes painted on
+the same Van der Neer in the National Gallery. Many of his works are in
+England.
+
+William Van de Velde the younger, the elder brother of Adrian Van de
+Velde, the cattle painter, was born at Amsterdam in 1633, and died at
+Greenwich in 1707. His early life was spent in Holland. He followed his
+father, William Van de Velde, a painter also, to England, where, under
+the patronage of Charles II, and James II., William the younger painted
+the naval victories of the English over the Dutch, just as in Holland he
+had already painted the naval victories of the Dutch over the English.
+He was a greater and more consistent artist than he was a patriot.
+Without question he is the first marine painter of the Dutch School. He
+was untiring in his study of nature, so that his perfect knowledge of
+perspective and the incomparable mastery of technical qualities which he
+inherited from his school, enabled him to render sea and sky under every
+aspect. His vessels 'were drawn with a knowledge which extended to every
+rope.' He has been an exceedingly popular painter both with the Dutch
+and the English. Of upwards of three hundred pictures left by him many
+are in Holland and still more in England, where in his lifetime he was
+largely employed by the English nobility and gentry. William Van de
+Velde has a great picture in the Amsterdam Museum, where the English
+flag-ship, the _Princess Royal_, is represented as striking her colours
+to the Dutch fleet in 1666. In the companion picture, also by Van de
+Velde, 'Four English men-of-war brought in as prizes,' the painter
+introduces himself in the small boat from which he witnessed the fight.
+William Van de Velde's triumphs in calm seas are seen especially in his
+pictures at the Hague and in Munich. Some of Van de Velde's best works
+are in the National Gallery.
+
+Backhuysen born in 1631, died at Amsterdam in 1708, was another
+admirable marine painter. He did not study painting till he had followed
+a trade up to the age of eighteen years; he then gave himself with
+ardour to art, making many studies of skies, coasts, and vessels. He was
+inferior to William Van de Velde in his colouring, which was heavy, with
+a cold effect. But he had in full a Dutch painter's truthfulness, while
+his 'stormy waves and rent clouds' are given with poetic feeling. He was
+an industrious and successful man, painting nearly two hundred pictures,
+and receiving many commissions from the King of Prussia, Grand Duke of
+Tuscany, etc. One of his finest works, 'A View of the River from the
+Landing-place called the Mosselsteiger,' is in Amsterdam Museum. In the
+Louvre is 'A view of the Mouth of the Texel, with ten Men-of-war Sailing
+before a Fresh Wind.' 'Dutch Shipping' is in the National Gallery.
+
+Van de Capella is another capital marine painter, though little is known
+of him. He was a native of Amsterdam about 1653. His favourite subject
+is a quiet sea in sunny weather. His work bears some resemblance to that
+of Cuyp. His best pictures are in England. 'A Calm at Low Water' is in
+the National Gallery.
+
+Melchior de Hondecoeter, born in 1636, died in 1695, chose the feathered
+tribe for his subjects. He has been called 'the Raphael of bird
+painters.' He painted especially poultry, peacocks, turkeys, and
+pigeons, which he usually represented alive, and treated with great
+truthfulness and picturesque feeling. Among his best pictures are 'The
+Floating Feather,' a feather given with singular lightness drifting in a
+pool, with different birds on the water and the shore--a pelican
+prominent--in Amsterdam Museum, and 'A Hen defending her Chickens
+against the attacks of a Pea-hen, with a Peacock, a Pigeon, a Cassowary,
+and a Crane,' also in Amsterdam.
+
+Jan Weenix, born in 1644, died in 1719. He was a painter of 'still
+life,' and was especially famous for his dead hares, 'which in form and
+colour, down to the rendering of every hair, are marvels of execution.'
+He painted sometimes, though rarely, a living dog in his pieces. A fine
+Weenix sometimes painted flower pieces.[58]
+
+Pater Segers, so called because he was a Father in a Jesuit convent,
+which he entered at twenty-four years of age. He was born in 1590, and
+died in the Jesuit convent, Antwerp, 1661. He was a famous flower
+painter, but did not paint flowers by themselves; he painted them in
+conjunction with the historical and sacred subjects of other painters.
+He added many a wreath to the Virgin and Child. He worked in this
+fashion with Rubens, but painted more frequently along with painters of
+a lower rank in art. Pater Segers' flowers are finely drawn and
+tastefully arranged. The red of his roses has remained unchanged by
+years, while the roses of other painters have become violet or faded
+altogether. He had endless royal commissions. There are six of his
+pictures of much merit in the Dresden Gallery.
+
+Besides the elder and younger De Heem and Maria Von Oesterwyck mentioned
+at page 258, Jan Van Huysum, 1682-1749, was great in flower painting,
+choosing flowers rather than fruit for his brush. If De Heem has been
+called the Titian, Van Huysum has been defined as the Correggio, of
+flowers and fruit. He reversed the ordinary course of artists by
+beginning in a broad style, and progressing into an execution of the
+finest details. In masterly drawing and truthfulness he was not inferior
+to De Heem, though hardly reckoned his equal in other respects. Even in
+Van Huysum's lifetime there was an eager demand for his pictures, of
+which he left more than a hundred. There is an excellent fruit and
+flower piece by him in Dulwich Gallery, and a masterpiece, 'A Vase with
+Flowers,' is in the National Gallery.
+
+Andrian Van der Werff was born in 1659, and died in 1722. He is
+honourably distinguished for his pursuit of the ideal, in which he stood
+alone among the Dutch artists of his day. He showed much sense of beauty
+and elegance of form with great finish, but he had more than
+counterbalancing faults. His grouping was artificial, his heads
+monotonous, his colouring 'cold and heavy,' with 'a frosty feeling' in
+his pictures. His flesh tints resembled ivory, yet his elegance was so
+highly prized that he had many royal and noble patrons, for whom he
+executed sculptural and mythological pieces. Many of his pictures are in
+the Munich Gallery.
+
+Anton Raphael Mengs was born in Bohemia 1728, and died in Rome 1774. His
+father was a distinguished miniature painter, and gave his son a careful
+education, training him to copy the masterpieces of Michael Angelo and
+Raphael from his twelfth year. Unfortunately he remained a copyist and
+an eclectic. He drew well, learnt chiaroscuro from studying Correggio,
+and colouring from analysing Titian. He was acquainted with the best
+technical processes in oil and fresco. All that teaching could do for a
+man was done, and to a great extent in vain. For though he worked with
+great conscientiousness, fancy and feeling were either originally
+lacking, or they were overlaid and stifled by his excess of culture and
+severe education. The most successful of his works are portraits, in
+which masterly treatment makes up to some extent for the absence of
+originality and subtle sympathy. But in his day, and with some reason,
+Raphael Mengs was greatly prized, since he figured among a host of
+ignorant, careless, and conceited painters. At the age of seventeen he
+was appointed court painter to King Augustus of Saxony. He was summoned
+to Spain by Charles III., who gave him a high salary. Among his good
+works is an 'Assumption' on the high altar of the Catholic Church,
+Dresden. An allegorical subject in fresco on the ceiling of the Camera
+de Papini in the Vatican has 'beauty of form, delicate observation, and
+masterly modelling.' Mengs wrote well on art, though in his writing also
+his eclecticism comes out.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO PAGE 96.
+
+
+     'I have been told that I have not done justice to Lionardo in
+     this short sketch. I give in an abridged form the accurate
+     appreciative analysis of the man and his work in Sir C, and Lady
+     Eastlake.'--KUGLER. It is stated that the versatility of
+     Lionardo was against him. He attempted too much for one man and
+     one life. An additional impediment was produced by his
+     temperament, 'dreamy, perfidious, procrastinating,' withal
+     desirous of shining in society. His ideal of the Lord's head is
+     the highest that art has realised. The apostles' heads are among
+     the truest and noblest. The countenances of his Madonnas are full
+     of ineffable sweetness and pathos. 'At the same time he analysed
+     the monstrous and misshapen, and has left us caricatures in which
+     he seems to have gloated over hideousness half human, half
+     brute. He altered and retouched without ceasing, always deferring
+     the conclusion of the task which he executed with untiring labour
+     and ceaseless dissatisfaction.' The wonder is not that he should
+     have left so little, but that he left enough to prove the
+     transcendent nature of his art. 'There is nothing stranger in
+     history than the fact that his great fame rests on one single
+     picture--long reduced to a shadow--on half-a-dozen pictures for
+     which his hand is alternately claimed and denied, and on
+     unfinished fragments which he himself condemned.' Lionardo was
+     too universal to be of any school.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+                               PAGE
+
+     Albino                     387
+     Angelico, Fra               36
+     Anguisciola                388
+     Backhuysen                 415
+     Baroccio                   385
+     Bartolommeo, Fra            77
+     Bellini, The                54
+     Berchem                    407
+     Bol                        402
+     Bordone                    393
+     Both                       418
+     Botticelli                 369
+     Canaletto                  358
+     Capella, Van de            416
+     Caravaggio                 385
+     Carpaccio                  375
+     Carracci, The              212
+     Cellini                     69
+     Claude Loraine             296
+     Correggio                  185
+     Crivelli                   375
+     Cuyp                       255
+     Domenichino                220
+     Dow                        398
+     Du Jardin                  410
+     Duerer                      169
+     Eycks, The Van              41
+     Filippo, Fra               365
+     Fontana                    389
+     Francia, Il                 73
+     Gaddi                      374
+     Garofalo                   377
+     Ghiberti                    31
+     Ghirlandajo                 69
+     Gibbons, Grinling          359
+     Giorgione                  181
+     Giotto                       8
+     Gozzoli                    366
+     Greuze                     307
+     Guercino                   386
+     Guido                      218
+     Heem, De                   258
+     Helst, Van der             403
+     Heyden, Van der            412
+     Hobbema                    406
+     Holbein                    309
+     Hondecoeter                416
+     Honthorst                  395
+     Hooch                      399
+     Huysum, Van                418
+     Kneller                    359
+     Le Brun                    303
+     Lely                       355
+     Leyden, Van                393
+     Lionardo da Vinci           83
+     Lipi                       376
+     Luini                      378
+     Maas                       401
+     Mabuse                      48
+     Mantegna                    64
+     Masaccio                    34
+     Matsys                      50
+     Memling                     48
+     Mengs                      420
+     Messina, Da                377
+     Metzu                 259, 401
+     Michael Angelo              96
+     Murillo                    280
+     Netcher                    402
+     Orcagna                     24
+     Ostade, Van                400
+     Palma                      379
+     Pardenone                  380
+     Parmigianino               384
+     Perugino                   373
+     Pisano                      23
+     Potter                     257
+     Poussin                    286
+     Raphael                    125
+     Rembrandt                  245
+     Romano                     382
+     Rubens                     225
+     Ruysdael                   403
+     Salvator Rosa              222
+     Sarto, Del                  81
+     Sassa errato               387
+     Segers                     418
+     Signorelli                 367
+     Snyders                    394
+     Somer, Van                 394
+     Spagna                     381
+     Spagnoletto                386
+     Steen                      396
+     Teniers, Father and Son    251
+     Terburg               259, 402
+     Tintoretto                 194
+     Titian                     157
+     Van Dyck                   333
+     Vasari                     388
+     Velasquez                  360
+     Velde, Van de              411
+     Velde, Van de, The Younger 414
+     Veronese                   205
+     Watteau                    305
+     Wouvermans                 253
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] It is in their unconsciousness and earnestness that a parallel is
+drawn between the first Italian painters and the Elizabethean poets. In
+other respects the comparison may be reversed, for the early Italian
+painters, from their restriction to religious painting, with even that
+treated according to tradition, were as destitute of the breadth of
+scope and fancy attained by their successors, as the Elizabethean poets
+were distinguished by the exuberant freedom which failed in the more
+formal scholars of Anne's reign.
+
+[2] Kugler's Handbook of Art.
+
+[3] While writing of goldsmiths that became painters, I may say a word
+of a goldsmith who, without quitting his trade, was an unrivalled artist
+in his line. I mean Benvenuto Cellini, 1500--1571, a man of violent
+passions and little principle, who led a wild troubled life, of which he
+has left an account as shameless as his character, in an autobiography.
+Cellini was the most distinguished worker in gold and silver of his day,
+and his richly chased dishes, goblets, and salt cellars, are still in
+great repute.
+
+[4] Kugler's _Handbook of Painting_.
+
+[5] Kugler's _Handbook of Painting_.
+
+[6] See note, page 422.
+
+[7] Mrs Roscoe's _Life of Vittoria Colonna_
+
+[8] Michael Angelo's will was very simple. 'I bequeath my soul to God,
+my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest relations.'
+
+[9] Lady Eastlake, _History of Our Lord_.
+
+[10] Hare, _Walks in Rome_.
+
+[11] Lanzi, in Hare's _Walks in Rome_.
+
+[12] Rio. _Poetry of Christian Art_, in Hare's _Walks in Rome._
+
+[13] Mrs Jameson.
+
+[14] Dean Alford.
+
+[15] _Imperial Biographical Dictionary_.
+
+[16] Titian's age is variously given; some authorities make it
+ninety-nine years, placing the date of his death in 1570 or 7.
+
+[17] Kugler.
+
+[18] The term originated in the French expression, '_du genre bas_.'
+
+[19] He had a peculiar fondness for blue and bronze hues.
+
+[20] It is due to Tintoret to say, that there are modern critics, who
+look below the surface, and are at this date deeply enamoured of his
+pictures. Tintoret's name now stands very high in art.
+
+[21] Mrs Jameson.
+
+[22] Guido said of Rubens: 'Does this painter mix blood with his
+colours?'
+
+[23] _Life of Rubens_.
+
+[24] If I mistake not, this is the same Countess of Arundel who, in her
+widowhood, resided in Italy in order to be near her young sons then at
+Padua. Having provoked the suspicion of the Doge and Council of Venice,
+she was arrested by them on a charge of treason, and brought before the
+tribunal, where she successfully pled her own cause, and obtained her
+release, the only woman who ever braved triumphantly the terrible 'ten.'
+
+[25] Here is the description of a very different Rembrandt which appears
+in this year's Exhibition of the Works by Old Masters: 'There is no
+portrait here which equals Rembrandt's picture, from Windsor, "A Lady
+Opening a Casement;" a not particularly appropriate name, because the
+picture represents no such action. The lady is simply looking from an
+open window, her left hand raised and resting at the side of the
+opening. We believe there is nothing left to tell who this lady was,
+with the grave, sad eyes, and lips that seem to quiver with a trouble
+hardly yet assuaged collar, almost a tippet, for it falls below her
+shoulders, together with lace cuffs. A triple band of large pearls goes
+about her neck, and she has similar ornaments round each wrist. She
+wears a mourning robe and black jewellery.... This picture, which
+resembles in most of its qualities a pair, of somewhat larger size,
+which were here last year, and also came from the Royal collection, is
+signed and dated "Rembrandt, F. 1671." It is, therefore, a late work of
+his. What wonderful harmony is here, of light, of colour, of tone. How
+nearly perfect is the keeping of the whole picture; as a whole, and also
+in respect of part to part. Could anything be truer than the breadth of
+the chiaroscuro? Notice how beautifully, and with what subtle
+gradations, the light reflected from her white collar strikes on her
+slightly faded cheek; how tenderly it seems to play among the soft
+tangles of the hair that time has thinned.'--_Athenaeum_.
+
+[26] He had been called the Titian of flower and fruit painters. He
+preferred fruit for his subject. His works are not common in England.
+His masterpiece, 'The Chalice of the Sacrament,' crowned with a stately
+wreath, and sheaves of corn and bunches of grapes among the flowers, is
+at Vienna.
+
+[27] Sir W. Stirling Maxwell.
+
+[28] Sir W. Stirling Maxwell.
+
+[29] Hare, _Wanderings in Spain_.
+
+[30] Hare's _Wanderings in Spain_.
+
+[31] The spelling is an English corruption of the French Claude.
+
+[32] Poussin had a villa near Ponte Molle, and the road by which he used
+to go to it is still called in Rome 'Poussin's walk.'
+
+[33] Claude's summer villa is still pointed out near Rome.
+
+[34] _Imperial Biographical Dictionary_.
+
+[35] Madame Le Brun, whose maiden name was Vigee, born 1755, died 1842,
+was an excellent portrait painter.
+
+[36] Wornum.
+
+[37] Wornum.
+
+[38] Supposed to be a niece of Sir Thomas More's.
+
+[39] Rev. J. Lewis, 1731.
+
+[40] Wornum.
+
+[41] A still more famous picture by Holbein is that called 'The Two
+Ambassadors,' and believed to represent Sir Thomas Wyatt and his
+secretary.
+
+[42] Walpole.
+
+[43] Walpole.
+
+[44] Dwarfs figured at Charles's court, as at the court of Philip IV. of
+Spain.
+
+[45] The notion that Van Dyck sacrificed truth to grace is absolutely
+contradicted by certain critics, who bring forward as a proof of their
+contradiction what they consider the 'over-true' picture of the Queen
+Henrietta Maria, shown at the last exhibition of the works of Old
+Masters. The picture seems hardly to warrant the strong opinion of the
+critics.
+
+[46] Walpole.
+
+[47] Walpole.
+
+[48] Lady Eastlake and Dr. Waagen's works on Italian, Flemish, and Dutch
+Art, modelled on Kugler.
+
+[49] A lunette is a small picture, generally semicircular, surmounting
+the main picture in an altar-piece.
+
+[50] The Dutch still more than the Italian artists belonged largely to
+families of artists bearing the same surnames.
+
+[51] A picture with one door of two panels is called a diptych, with two
+doors of three panels a triptych, with many doors and panels a
+polyptych.
+
+[52] Fairholt's 'Homes and Haunts of Foreign Artists.'
+
+[53] Alchemists, like hermits, still existed in the seventeenth century.
+
+[54] Bartholomew Van der Helst, 1613-1670, was another great Dutch
+portrait painter. His portrait pieces with many figures are famous. An
+'Archery Festival,' commemorating the Peace of Westphalia, includes
+twenty-four figures full of individuality and finely drawn and coloured.
+One of his best works is 'In the Workhouse,' at Amsterdam. Two women and
+two men are conversing together in the foreground. There is a man with a
+book, and a preacher delivering a sermon in the background.
+
+[55] It may be that Ruysdael's straggling life was reflected in his
+lowering skies and stormy seas.
+
+[56] Other eminent painters, such as Van de Velde, Wouvermans, and
+Berchem often supplied cattle and figures to Hobbema's landscapes.
+
+[57] Was the apparently greater success of these partly denaturalised
+Dutch landscape painters, as contrasted with the adversity of Ruysdael
+and Hobbema, due to the classic mania?
+
+[58] Peter Gysels was another painter of 'still life.' His butterflies
+are said to have been rendered with 'exquisite finish.'
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ISBISTERS' PRIZE AND GIFT BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Charming prize books. If anything can make the children of the present
+day take kindly to useful information, it will be such books as these,
+full of excellent illustrations, and in easy as well as interesting
+language."_--GUARDIAN.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_ONE SHILLING VOLUMES._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ANIMAL STORIES FOR THE YOUNG.
+
+In Three handsome little Volumes full of Illustrations.'
+
+     1. HEADS WITHOUT HANDS;
+           Or, Stories of Animal Wisdom.
+
+     2. HEARTS WITHOUT HANDS;
+           Or, Fine Feeling among Brutes;
+
+     3. SENSE WITHOUT SPEECH;
+           Or, Animal Notions of Right and Wrong.
+
+MOU-SETSE.
+
+     A Negro Hero. By L.T. MEADE.
+            With Illustrations. Small 8vo.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_HALF-CROWN VOLUMES._
+
+Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+AMONG THE BUTTERFLIES.
+
+         A Book for Young Collectors.
+           By B.G. JOHNS, M.A.
+             With Twelve Full-page Plates, etc. Crown 8vo.
+
+     "This is such a book as should be abundantly given as a prize in
+      schools."
+                                              _Glasgow Herald._
+
+MOTHER HERRING'S CHICKEN.
+
+         An East-end Story. By L.T. MEADE.
+            Illustrated by BARNES. Crown 8vo.
+     "One of the most pleasing little tales which was ever written for
+      young people; and even for old people."--_Newcastle Chronicle._
+
+A DWELLER IN TENTS.
+
+     By L.T. MEADE. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo.
+     "It surprises us with a study of human character of no ordinary
+     merit and intensity."
+                                     _Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+ANDREW HARVEY'S WIFE.
+
+          By L.T. MEADE. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo.
+     "The characters are well drawn, and the story well
+      developed."--_Literary World._
+     "Decidedly strong and well wrought out."--_Scotsman_.
+
+IN PRISON AND OUT.
+
+       By HESBA STRETTON.
+         10th Thousand. Illustrated by R. BARNES. Crown 8vo.
+     "Told with all the pathos and captivating interest of the authoress
+     of 'Jessica's First Prayer.'"--_Guardian_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE BY POST._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_TWO SHILLING VOLUMES._
+
+Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt edges.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THREE LITTLE HEROES.
+
+        WILLIE HARDY.--LITTLE RAINBOW.--JEAN BAPTISTE.
+          By Mrs. CHARLES GARNETT. With Thirty Illustrations.
+     "Touching and graceful sketches."--_Literary World_.
+     "Drawn from life we should say.... So vivid and natural in
+     colouring."
+                                                       _Church Bells_.
+
+NOBODY'S NEIGHBOURS.
+
+         A Story of Golden Lane. By L.T. MEADE.
+             With Thirty Illustrations.
+     "In every respect entitled to a place among the best reward books
+     of the season."--_Schoolmaster_.
+
+KING FROST.
+
+         The Wonders of Snow and Ice. By Mrs. THORPE.
+             With Seventy Illustrations.
+     "Exceedingly able, and without an unattractive
+     page."--_School Board Chronicle_.
+     "Full of charming little pictures and instructive descriptions of
+     the phenomena      which attend the presence of the Ice
+     King."--_Christian World_.
+
+UP THE NILE.
+
+        A Boy's Voyage to Khartoum. By H. MAJOR, B. Sc.
+            With Forty Illustrations.
+     "Must be placed amongst the best of the books for boys and girls
+     which have been issued this season. A very excellent
+     book."--_Nottingham Guardian._
+
+THE STRENGTH OF HER YOUTH.
+
+         A Story for Girls. By S. DOUDNEY. With Twenty Illustrations.
+     "The story is simple enough, but Miss Doudney handles it
+     well."--_Spectator_.
+     "Sound and healthy in tone, yet not without movement and variety.
+     Carefully      illustrated and tastefully bound."--_Daily News_.
+
+WE THREE;
+
+     A Bit of Our Lives.
+        By the Author of "Worth a Threepenny Bit," etc.
+           With Thirty Illustrations.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+_TWO SHILLING VOLUMES._
+
+Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, gilt edges.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A BAND OF THREE.
+
+        By L.T. MEADE, Author of "Scamp and I," etc.
+           Illustrated by Barnes.
+     "An exquisite little tale. Since the days of 'Little Meg's
+     Children' there has been no sketch approaching the pathos of
+     child-life in      'A Band of Three.'"--_Christian Leader_.
+     "Full of pathos and interest."--_Guardian_.
+
+MY BACK-YARD ZOO.
+
+        A Course of Natural History. By Rev. J.G. WOOD, M.A., Author
+           of "Homes without Hands," etc.
+              With Seventy Illustrations.
+     "A book that will delight young people. It is well illustrated and
+     thoroughly reliable."--_Morning Post_.
+
+     "Really a complete course of natural history."--_Times_.
+
+FROM THE EQUATOR TO THE POLE.
+
+     IN THE HEART OF AFRICA. By JOSEPH THOMSON.
+     CLIMBING THE HIMALAYAS. By W.W. GRAHAM.
+     ON THE ROAD TO THE POLE. By Captain A.H. MARKHAM.
+         With Forty-five Illustrations.
+     "A more delightful prize or present for boys than this it would be
+     hard to find."
+                                                       _Record_.
+
+FAITHFUL FRIENDS.
+
+         Stories of Struggle and Victory.
+           By L.T. MEADE and others.
+             With Twenty Illustrations by French, Barnes, etc.
+     "A carefully illustrated little book.... With truth and
+     pathos."--_Daily News_.
+     "Capital reading for young folks.... All brisk and
+     wholesome."--_Scotsman_.
+
+HEROES AND MARTYRS OF SCIENCE.
+
+         By HENRY C. EWART. With Thirty Illustrations.
+     "It is an admirable book of its order, full of the inspiration of
+     great lives."
+                                _School Board Chronicle_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+15 & 16, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Old Masters and Their Pictures, by Sarah Tytler
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MASTERS AND THEIR PICTURES ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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