A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VI

A Contemporary List of Great Artists, before 1510

In an offhand mention in The Courtier Baldasarre Castiglione tells us who seemed to be great artists to a cultured and well-informed gentleman about the year 1508. Titian had not yet emerged and of the older men only Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna are remembered. As seniors, they are the first mentioned.

“Again various things give equal pleasure to the eyes, so that we can with difficulty decide what are more pleasing to them. You know that in painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgio da Castelfranco are very excellent, yet they are all unlike in their work; so that no one of them seems to lack anything in his own manner, since each is known as the most perfect in his style.”

The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldesar Castiglione, translated by Leonard Ekstein Opdycke, New York, 1903, p. 50.

Michelangelo on Renaissance Counterpoise

It is said then that Michelangelo once gave his advice to Marcoda Siena, his pupil, that “one should make the figure pyramidal, spiral, (serpentinata) and multiplied by one, two, and three.” Lomazzo Trattato, Milan, 1484, p. 23. The pose, that is, should be contained geometrically, should display opposing thrusts, and should be mathematically proportioned within the inclosing geometrical form.

Vasari on the “Modern Style”

Vasari’s account of the Grand Style or “Third Manner,” in the Preface to Part III (De Vere’s translation, Vol. IV, pp. 79–85) is still authoritative. He praises the artists before Leonardo, but finds in them a certain hardness, lack of finish and uncertainty of proportions. The change to the perfect manner was caused by the discovery of ancient marbles.

“After them [the predecessors of Leonardo], their successors were able to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but only a movement of certain parts, which are revealed with a most perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness, hardness, and sharpness of manner....

[He mentions the contemporary admiration of such precursors as Francia and Perugino.]

“But their error was afterwards clearly proved by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which we propose to call the modern—besides the force and boldness of his drawing, and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the minutenesses of nature exactly as they are—with good rule, better order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding in resources and having a most profound knowledge of art, may be truly said to have endowed his figures with motion and breath.

“There followed after him, although at some distance, Giorgione da Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his pictures ...; and not inferior to him in giving force, relief, sweetness, and grace to his pictures, with his colouring, was Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco. But more than all did the most gracious Rafaello da Urbino, who, studying the labours of the old masters and those of the Moderns, took the best from them, and, having gathered it together, enriched the art of painting with that complete perfection which was shown in ancient times by the figures of Apelles and Zeuxis, nay, even more, if we may make bold to say it, as might be proved if we could compare their works with his. Wherefore nature was left vanquished by his colours....

“In the same manner, but sweeter in colouring and not so bold, there followed Andrea del Sarto, who may be called a rare painter, for his works are free from errors.

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“But he who bears the palm from both the living and the dead, transcending and eclipsing all others, is the divine Michelangelo Buonarotti, who holds the sovereignty not merely of one of these arts, but of all three together. This master surpasses and excels not only all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass her; and in his own self he triumphs over moderns, ancients, and nature, who could scarcely conceive anything so strange and so difficult that he would not be able, by the force of his most divine intellect and by means of his industry, draughtsmanship, art, judgment and grace, to excel it by a great measure; and that not only in painting and in the use of colours under which title are comprised all forms, and all bodies upright or not upright, palpable or impalpable, visible or invisible, but also in the highest perfection of bodies in the round, with the point of his chisel.”

Unity of Design in the Renaissance

The humanist Benedetto Varchi, renewing the debate which Leonardo da Vinci had started concerning the relative rank of sculpture and painting, sent the text of his lecture to Michelangelo and asked for his opinion. The sculptor writes in 1549:

“In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad as it approaches the effect of painting. I used to consider that sculpture was the lantern of painting and that between the two things there was the same difference as that between the sun and the moon. But now that I have read your book, in which, speaking as a philosopher, you say that things which have the same end are themselves the same, I have changed my opinion; and I now consider that painting and sculpture are one and the same thing, unless greater nobility be imparted by the necessity for a keener judgment, greater difficulties of execution, stricter limitations and harder work. And if this be the case, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than of painting and no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By sculpture I mean the sort that is executed by cutting away from the block: the sort that is executed by building up resembles painting. That is enough, for as one and the other, that is to say, both painting and sculpture proceed from the same faculty, it would be an easy matter to establish harmony between them and to let such disputes alone, for they occupy more time than the execution of the figures themselves. As to that man [Leonardo da Vinci] who wrote saying that painting was more noble than sculpture, as though he knew as much about it as he did of the other subjects on which he has written, why my serving-maid would have written better!”

From Robert W. Carden, Michelangelo, a Record of his Life, Boston and New York, 1913, a book which from Michelangelo’s letters gives a very intimate view of the sculptor’s character.

Sir Joshua Reynolds on the Grand Style

No critic of art has better expressed the ideal of the Grand Style than Sir Joshua Reynolds. I quote from the third of his Discourses, in the admirable edition of Roger E. Fry, New York, 1906. pp. 51 ff.

“Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The gusto grande of the Italians, the beau idéal of the French and the great style, genius and taste among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual dignity, they say, that ennobles the Painter’s Art; that lays the line between him and the mere mechanic: and produces those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are scarcely able to retain....” [The grand style is seen to rest upon a sort of generalizing tendency.] “The whole beauty and grandeur of the Art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every kind.” [The artist] “being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and, what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object.” [Sir Joshua advocates the study of the antique, not to imitate any single work, but to master the principle that underlies them all.] “Beauty and simplicity have so great a share in the composition of the great style, that he who has acquired them has little else to learn. It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of conception, which goes beyond any thing in the mere exhibition of perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of ancient and modern poetry.”

Kenyon Cox on the Classic Spirit

The ideals of the High Renaissance are eloquently, if incidentally, defined by the late Kenyon Cox in The Classic Point of View, New York, 1911. pp. 3–5.

“The Classic spirit is the disinterested search for perfection; it is the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is, above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work of art, not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be fine and noble. It seeks not merely to express individuality or emotion, but to express disciplined emotion and individuality restrained by law. It strives for the essential rather than the accidental, the eternal rather than the momentary—loves impersonality more than personality, and feels more power in the orderly succession of the hours and the seasons than in the violence of earthquake or of storm. And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It would have each new work connect itself in the mind of him who sees it with all the noble and lively works of the past, bringing them to his memory and making their beauty and charm a part of the beauty and charm of the work before him. It does not deny originality and individuality—they are as welcome as inevitable. It does not consider tradition as immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth and the old beauty, seen only from a different angle and colored by a different medium. It wishes to add link by link to the chain of tradition, but it does not wish to break the chain.”

The End of the Renaissance and the Coming of Fear

An artistic collapse whether in an artist or a nation is usually due to a prior collapse in morale. Florence suffered such loss of face when the Imperialists stormed the city and crushed the Republic. We may study the disaster in Michelangelo’s personal case and in its effect on the citizenry at large. Michelangelo was military engineer. Writing from Venice, Sept. 25, 1529, he describes his desertion with singular objectivity:

“I had intended to remain in Florence to the end of the war, having no fears for my own safety. But on Tuesday morning, the 21st of September, a certain person came out by the Porta a San Nicolò while I was engaged in inspecting the bastions, and whispered in my ear that I must remain there no longer if I valued my life. He accompanied me to my house, dined there, brought me horses, and never left my side until he had carried me out of Florence, declaring that it was for my good that he so acted. Whether it were God or the devil I cannot say.”

From Robert W. Carden, Michelangelo, a Record of his Life, Boston and New York, 1913, p. 168.

Florence suffered not from hallucinations, as this seems to have been, but from the humiliation and confusion incident upon defeat and foreign occupation. I translate from Benedetto Varchi’s Storia, the extract in Ancona and Bacci’s Manuele della Letteratura Italiana, Vol. II, p. 506.

“The city of Florence when her liberty was lost was full of such sorrow, of such terror, of such confusion, that it can hardly be described or even imagined.... The nobles were indignant among themselves and inwardly resented being scorned and vilified by the lowest classes; the plebeians in extreme need, would not refrain at least from relieving their minds about the nobility; the rich, how they could manage not to lose their property; the poor, day and night, what they should do not to die utterly and of famine; the citizens were dismayed and desperate, because they had spent and lost a lot: the peasants, much more, because there remained for them nothing at all; the priests were ashamed of having deceived the laity; the laity grieved at having believed the priests; men had become extraordinarily suspicious and covetous; women immeasurably incredulous and distrustful: finally, every one with lowered face and staring eyes, seemed beside himself, and all without exception pallid and bewildered feared at all times every sort of ill.”

From such a shell-shocked community as this, no serene or noble art was to be expected. It was much that Florence in bondage still could nurture the exquisitely morbid art of a Pontormo and the aristocratic detachment and finesse of a Bronzino.

Fig. 207. Giovanni Bellini. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.—H. C. Frick Coll., New York.

Chapter VII
VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN

On the splendor of Venice—Italo-Byzantine painters of the 14th Century—Paduan, Veronese, and Umbrian Painters at Venice—Jacopo Bellini—Squarcione’s school at Padua, Carlo Crivelli—Andrea Mantegna, mentor for Northern Italy—Antonello da Messina’s Realism—The flowering of the old Narrative School in Gentile Bellino—Giovanni Bellini—The backward Vivarini—Carpaccio and the end of the old Narrative Style—Literary background of Giorgione’s Art—Giorgione of Castelfranco.

When, about the middle of the fifth century, a pitiful throng of refugees sought safety from Attila and his Huns in the fens at the head of the Adriatic, they took with them what was left of the constructive genius of the Roman Empire. They raised amid the lagoons a healthful and convenient city, which in the course of centuries became the most beautiful in Europe. They developed a strong and wise oligarchy, under forms sufficiently democratic to satisfy the people. They attained an extraordinary capacity for diplomacy and overseas trade—a brilliant commercialized civilization. Secure in their isolation and wealth, the Venetians mediated the long strife between the popes and the Teutonic emperors, making favorable terms with both. Venice enjoyed a wholly exceptional political stability. No other commune of Europe could have fittingly assumed the title, Serenissima. Her galleys and sailing craft plied to Candia, Rhodes, Smyrna, Alexandretta, Constantinople. Down the Adriatic to Malta, her trading stations shone white under the yellow cliffs. Her incoming ships brought back the splendid rugs and silks and embroideries from the Levant, the beautiful potteries of Asia Minor, Persia and distant China, the veined marbles and porphyries of Egypt and of Istria to build into her churches and palaces. She was astute and powerful enough to divert a crusade into a plundering expedition against her rival, Constantinople. And thus she got the four antique bronze horses still chafing above the portico of St. Mark’s and many a relic of the later Byzantine splendor. Her doors ever opened to the Orient. Her quays swarmed with turbaned traders. The Greeks had their churches and confraternities at Venice, and so had the Slavonians. For articles of luxury the northern caravans came to Venice over the Brenner to load from the German warehouses on the Grand Canal.

So stable, rich and proud a city was singularly slow in producing its own art. Venice was never primarily a manufacturing community, and from the first she expected to import most articles of luxury and display. Thus when the manydomed Basilica rose over the body of her patron, St. Mark, Venice called masters from Constantinople to enrich the surfaces with mosaics, and when, towards the end of the fourteenth century, she wished to picture the new Palace of the Doges, she called not her own artists to the task, but those of Padua, Verona and distant Fabriano. Her originality and greatness in painting do not clearly assert themselves until about 1475 in the work of the brothers Bellini, and by 1577, the year of Titian’s death, the period of her artistic supremacy has passed. The whole development is comprised within a century; its acceleration is even more remarkable than the tardiness of its appearance. In three generations Venetian painting made the progress that had required six in Tuscany, and the whole preparatory period, which in Florence stretched over a century and three-quarters, is included in the single life of such a master as Giovanni Bellini.

This means that Venetian painting followed simpler and more unperturbed ideals than that of Florence. The composure, complacency, and self-centered quality of the Venetians was a source of strength to their artists and as well a limitation. The city stuck closely to its chief business of gaining greatly in order to live magnificently. And unlike Florence, Venice interprets magnificence in the most material terms, in terms of velvet and veined marbles, fair skins and lustrous hair, in feasting and measured revelry, grave and gentle manners, colorful pageantry in honor of God, his saints and the Serenissima Republica. You will not find poets, scholars, scientists a-plenty at Venice. Her painters have no tendency to be also architects, sculptors, mathematicians, theorists in æsthetics; they stick placidly to the main business of painting. And perhaps just because the Venetian painter refused to be diverted from the problems proper to his craft, his progress was so rapid and assured, and the Venetian school, simply as painting, the most beautiful school of painting the world has ever seen.

It was written in the lagoon itself that Venetian painting should be a school of color. Long before the marble and porphyry palaces and the shining bridges of Renaissance Venice spanned the canals, the brown water gave its satiny reflections of rude hut, coppered galley, tawny sail, and, in days of complete calm, of the serrated ivory of the Julian Alps or the velvety azure of the Euganean Hills. As the city grew palatially, the marble and gold of the palace fronts, and spires and domes, with the buff and red of soaring bell towers, further enriched the shimmering of the lagoon. Its waters were ruffled not merely by winds blending and effacing the weaving of borrowed colors, but also by the passing of gilded processional barges with rhythmical oars celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin or the marriage of Venice to the Adriatic.

Ashore the splendor was hardly less. Along the balustrades of innumerable little bridges, the rose or yellow marble got an ineffable finish from the touch of countless hands. Dusky archways gave upon courts encrusted with variegated marbles, porphyry and mosaics. In the gloomy streets, gay pictorial frescoes enlivened the fronts of the less pretentious houses. In the great Piazza of St. Mark and other open spaces, often passed in solemn procession the religious confraternities called Schools, the members garbed with a splendor rare even in the Renaissance. There were clubs of young fops, not yet broken to the paternal commerce, who gave themselves to the invention and display of the finest tailoring and haberdashery. And the unorganized kindred activities of the women of all ages were as effective from the point of view of social display. Such was the spectacle that Venice offered the painter for record and even more for inspiration. And the greatness of the Venetian painters lay in their capacity to lend to this chiefly material splendor their own kind of ideality.

Fig. 208. Presentation; Flight to Egypt; Miracle at Cana; Temptation. From an Italo-Byzantine Altar-front of about 1350.—Trieste.

When Venetian painting about the year 1350 made its first timid assertions of originality, the leading influence was that of the late Byzantine artists of the Slavonian coast and the Ionian Islands. We see their narrative painting assuming a very slightly Italian guise in the composite altar-front preserved in the museum of Trieste. Figure [208]. Its date cannot be very late in the fourteenth century, and the stereotyped religious compositions represent models vividly before the Venetian painter up to the Renaissance. Such Venetian masters as Paolo, active from 1332 to 1358, and Lorenzo, whose work falls a generation later, make slight and external improvements on the Byzantine manner.[^[70]] They reject its more rigid formulas—the gold web over drapery, the multiplied small folds, the painfully schematized muscles. They add on their own account radiant blond coloring, splendid brocades, more gorgeous fashions of gilding, and a new type of architectural arrangement. The elaborate altar-backs with perforated pilasters, and flamboyant arches and cresting; with full-length figures below and half-length of like scale above, become the standard form of Venetic ancona about 1350 and remains so for nearly a century and a half. We may see the form, with the upper central panel modernized, in Lorenzo’s Annunciation of 1357, in the Venetian Academy. The effect depends largely on the frame-maker. Such altar-pieces are made more thoughtfully by Caterino and Donato and indeed persist in all Northern Italy until after 1450. Figure [211]. We may study a similar type of ancona with narratives instead of single figures in the very accomplished and colorful work doubtfully ascribed to Nicolo Semitecolo, towards the beginning of the new century. Though the narratives follow pretty closely the old Byzantine requirements, the whole surface shows the flower-bed variety and harmony of color which is proper to Venice. Such work, as a blend of Byzantine and Gothic features, repeats what Siena had effected with far greater originality and finesse about seventy years earlier under Duccio and Simone Martini. Modena and Bologna and Padua through the latter half of the fourteenth century share this development, but again on a basis of rather marked inferiority to Siena.

The Venetian authorities were fully conscious of the backwardness of their own artists. When the Ducal Palace was finished in 1365, they called to fresco its great hall not any of the various local followers of Paolo and Lorenzo, but Guariento from neighboring Padua. He executed the great Coronation of the Virgin which was later damaged by fire and covered by Tintoretto’s Paradise. The temporary removal of Tintoretto’s canvas showed for a time the crumbling remains of Guariento’s fresco. It is in an elaborate Gothic-Byzantine style and abounds in incidental architectural ornament. Below the ceremony of the Coronation there is a screen of pierced marble niches occupied by graceful angels. It is a motive that will often recur in the new century. On the whole Guariento brings little new to Venice, but he does demonstrate the decorative possibilities of the local style. His influence was restricted because the Venetians soon ceased to work in fresco.

The impetus necessary to lift Venetian painting out of its routine condition was supplied in the fifteenth century by Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello. Gentile, who worked in the Ducal Palace about 1410, commanded both the exquisiteness of the Sienese style and its narrative breadth. Unhappily his Venetian frescoes which are lauded in contemporary accounts have perished. His sweetness and ideality are attested by various Madonnas. We may infer his raciness and vivacity as a narrative painter from the predella of his master work, the Adoration of the Kings (1423). The little panel of the Presentation in the Temple is admirable for its architectural inscenation and for the actuality of its incidental figures. We have a man whose eye takes in the look of things. This is even more the case with Pisanello (1397–1455), who worked a little later in the same hall. He has severe notions of draughtsmanship, as befitted the greatest of all medallists. He brought from Verona, where his artistic ideas were formed, the ideal of elaborate and credible setting, especially as regards the relations of figures to architecture. In his ruined fresco of St. George of Verona, Figure [209], we may catch his quality. But the Veronese style is really better represented by such immediate predecessors as Avanzo and Altichiero. Jointly about 1385 they frescoed the great Oratorio of St. George at Padua. Especially remarkable are the legends of the titular saint, Figure [210]. Through repainting one may still discern the dignity and discretion of the arrangement, and in particular the just and tasteful elaboration of contemporary architectural features. Florentine and Sienese frescoes of the time are hardly as accomplished. The festal value of the architecture persists as a leading ideal of the school of Verona down to her greatest master, Paolo Veronese, and the ideal was taken up with conviction at Venice—became indeed the distinctive feature of her narrative school.

Fig. 210. Altichiero of Verona. St. George baptizes the Family of the Princess. Fresco.—Oratory of St. George, Padua.

Fig. 209. Pisanello. St. George meets the Princess. Fresco.—Sant’ Anastasia. Verona.

Jacopo Bellini,[^[71]] the first great painter whom Venice herself developed, was the pupil of Gentile da Fabriano and also profoundly influenced by the Veronese. Thus he combines in himself the two main strains of early Venetian painting—its desire for sweetness and its desire for vivacity and elaborate truthfulness in narrative. Alongside of Jacopo Bellini worked the faithful imitators of Paolo, Lorenzo, and Guariento. Such artists as Jacobello del Fiore and Michele Giambono, while often inherently attractive, are of small importance. Their contemporary, Antonio Vivarini, though in most ways less sensitively the artist, prepared the way for the conservative school of Murano. Antonio’s quality is somewhat obscured by his habit of working with a German partner, Giovanni. Yet the part of Antonio, as represented by his altar-piece in the Vatican, dated 1464, Figure [211], seems to have been merely to build cautiously on the work of Guariento and Lorenzo. His nephew, Alvise, and his younger brother, Bartolommeo, become influential figures towards the end of the century.

The hope of the future rested with that far more searching spirit, Jacopo Bellini. He gave to art not merely his own indefatigable curiosity but two sons of genius, Gentile and Giovanni. All the leading tendencies of the Early Renaissance in Venice originate with this remarkable family. We first meet Jacopo Bellini in 1424 as an assistant of Gentile da Fabriano and he worked on till 1470. The great decorative canvases which he made for the Ducal Palace, and for the Schools of St. Mark and St. John the Evangelist have perished, while the few pictures remaining from his brush are mostly of late date and inadequately express his ambitions. His Madonnas at the Uffizi, Venice, Paris, and Milan retain the exquisite sweetness of his master’s vein. Their modest grace may be felt in the little Madonna, Figure [212], at Venice. Of admirable gentleness and spirit is the ornate Annunciation painted in 1444, in Sant’ Alessandro at Brescia. Its predella panels, although probably of student execution, show how definitely his narrative compositions derive from Altichiero and the Veronese.

Fig. 211. Antonio Vivarini. St. Antony (polychromed wood statue) and Saints. 1464.—Vatican Gallery, Rome.

Fig. 212. Jacopo Bellini. Madonna.—Venice.

But we get the full stature of the man, not from the minor paintings which chance has spared, but from the two extraordinary sketch books respectively in the Louvre and the National Gallery. Here we trace his day by day exercises. Perspective is his constant concern. He piles up elaborate architecture with an extravagance which even his Veronese exemplars never ventured. The subject matter gets lost in the setting. The Annunciation becomes a mere episode in an architectural extravaganza. So does the Feast of Herod, Figure [213]. The buildings generally are of ornate Early Renaissance type. He loves to adorn them with swags and statues and low reliefs. Sometimes he sketches actual Roman sculptures and coins, medallions, and inscriptions. He makes strange, stern backgrounds for his outdoor scenes, with twisted stratified mountains and stately distant cities. He loves wild beasts; draws capital horses for St. George or for Perseus. He is a bit of a humanist, doing bacchanals, with mischievous satyrs. There are a few fine portraits and designs for Madonnas. Thus these sketches with the silver point and quill pen anticipate every mode of the next generation—the narrative style, the altar-piece, the pastoral mythology. One feels in the sketch books a nature rather alert and curious than thorough—a certain lack of concentration and real seriousness. But the sketches evince an inexhaustible fancy, and if they are ever published cheaply, they should rival in popularity the most loved picture-books of fairyland. Jacopo was not only a versatile but a travelled artist. Active for a time at the brilliant court of Lionello d’Este at Ferrara, he had also visited Florence and probably Rome. But his most important move as regards the history of art, was to Padua, about 1453. There the whole course of Venetian painting was shaped by the apparently casual fact that an austere young painter named Andrea Mantegna fell in love with Jacopo’s daughter, Niccolosia, and married her. Through that alliance, the most formidable of brothers-in-law became the artistic mentor of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

Fig. 213. Jacopo Bellini. The Feast of Herod (in upper right loggia).—From the Paris Sketch Book.

For a moment, indeed, Padua and Mantegna quite efface Venice in interest. For ten years before this lucky marriage, Padua had been the scene of intense artistic activity. Donatello, the most powerful realist sculptor of Florence, was at work on the bronze reliefs for the altar of Sant’ Antonio, and on the Gattamelata statue. He gave young Mantegna a strong impulse in the direction of constructive realism. Such Florentine realists as Paolo Uccello and Fra Filippo Lippi were also transient visitors at this time. And Padua, ever an academic city, saw the first systematic art school started by a shrewd and able master, Francesco Squarcione. Squarcione collected Roman marbles and bronzes, concerned himself with the new mysteries of perspective, foreshortening and precise anatomy. He made his students acquire a line with the resiliency of bronze. He made them copy minutely veined marbles and sculptured reliefs. He insisted that every picture should have garlands of laurel mixed with vegetables and fruits. The whole surface had to be brought to the lustrous surface of an enamel. Severe teaching usually attracts good pupils. So it was in Squarcione’s case; he had scores of pupils from all of the Venetic region and even from Dalmatia beyond the Adriatic. He was too sensible to paint much himself; it didn’t pay so successful a teacher. So the few pictures ascribed to him are either of small importance or of dubious authenticity. But his stamp is on all his pupils. What his teaching meant may be grasped in early Mantegna and even better in a painter who never emancipated himself—Carlo Crivelli, of Venice, “Eques Aureatus.”

Fig. 214. Carlo Crivelli. Madonna. Angels bearing Symbols of the Passion.—Verona.

Fig. 215. Carlo Crivelli. Pietà.—Boston.

Crivelli’s[^[72]] fame was great but provincial. Originally most of his altar-pieces adorned churches of the Adriatic Marches. Dozens have passed thence to the museums of Europe and America. One and all they seem less painted things than the most splendid of mineral productions. It is incredible that mere brush and paint can achieve so tense a line and such jewel-like surfaces. Entirely typical is an early Madonna, at Verona, Figure [214]. The great ancona of 1476 in the National Gallery shows him faithful to the arrangements of the early Venetians. The Annunciation, in the same gallery, painted ten years later, reveals him affected by the narrative tradition of Jacopo Bellini. In America fine Pietàs at Boston, Figure [215], New York, and in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, exemplify his rectitude and energy. While Mrs. Gardner’s St. George and the Dragon, as the most fastidious of fairy tales, consoles us for the absence of this subject among the few pictures of Jacopo Bellini. From his beginnings about 1460 to his death in 1493, Carlo Crivelli remained true to his early teaching. Whoever understands his works has little need to consult further the entirely similar achievement of such great Ferrarese painters as Marco Zoppo (1440 ca.–1498) and Cosimo Tura (1430 ca.–1495). The influence of Squarcione passed to the conservative painters at Venice, and influenced the entire Murano school. We have a resplendent masterpiece of this sort in the single known work of Antonio da Negroponte, Figure [216], in San Francesco della Vigna, at Venice. It combines with its evident Squarcionesque features, the magnificence of the old Gothic-Byzantine style, and much of the sweetness of Jacopo Bellini. Its date is about 1450, and the picture is an excellent point of departure for our understanding of the radical reform that came into Venice and all Lombardy with the activity of Andrea Mantegna.

Fig. 216. Fra Antonio da Negroponte. Madonna.—S. Francesco della Vigna.

Born in 1431 at Vicenza, we find Mantegna[^[73]] enrolled at the tender age of thirteen in the painters’ guild at Padua. He is described as an adoptive son of Squarcione. Mantegna was scarcely twenty-four when he engaged with other fellow pupils to decorate a chapel in the Church of the Eremitani, the subject being the legends of St. James and St. Christopher. In the six panels assigned to Mantegna, his quality and superiority are already manifest. His style is severely archæological and Roman. He endeavors honestly to reconstruct the times of the apostles. But his method is more severe than that of the Romans themselves. The line moves with the slow authority of an engraved contour. The relief is dry and harsh. There is little sense of difference between living forms and sculptured figures. The landscape is built in spiral strata as if worked out of metal. Here transpires clearly the influence of Jacopo Bellini, which is as evident also in the ornate architectural settings. The colors are at once dull and garish, the textures scrupulously studied after Squarcione’s precepts. A most strenuous art this, and with all its pedantry full of power and dignity.

Fig. 217. Mantegna. St. James led to Execution. Fresco.—Eremitani, Padua.

Certain innovations in perspective should be noted. In the fresco, St. James led to Execution, Figure [217], Mantegna avoids the usual conventional perspective, which tilts the picture towards the spectator; and treats the group as if it were on an actual stage set at the height of the fresco. Thus no ground is seen; the projecting floor cuts off the feet of the figures; and all vanishing points are precisely set at the level of the spectator’s eye below. The aim is to create illusion.

Fig. 218. Andrea Mantegna. Madonna with Saints.—San Zeno, Verona.

Before the completion of the Eremitani frescoes, Mantegna had married Niccolosia Bellini, had profited largely by her father’s advice, and had influenced strongly her two brothers, Gentile and Giovanni. They seem to have been the first eager pupils of the man who was soon to be the artistic schoolmaster for all Northern Italy. Two years after his marriage, in 1455, Mantegna liberated himself from legal bondage to Squarcione, and soon after began the masterpiece of his developed Renaissance style, the altar-back for San Zeno Maggiore at Verona, Figure [218]. It was finished in 1459, the artist being twenty-eight years old. It is a little over-rich, finished throughout like a miniature, and very stately. In arrangement it obeys the artist’s new law of illusion. The base of the picture is precisely at the level of the eye, so no floor is seen. The carved classical frame is regarded as the front of an actual pavillion which is continued in paint. Without the frame, the architectural perspective of the picture would not explain itself, and if the picture were set higher or lower all the perspective relations would be wrong. At Siena, a century and more earlier, the Lorenzetti had devised this motive of an open box of which the frame is the plastic front. Mantegna made this sort of illusionism standard for Venice and all Northern Italy. Its value is open to question, but I believe that the monumental altar-pieces of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini gain something in gravity and stability from this careful adjustment of the perspective to the actual position of the spectator. At any rate it was the rigid logic and probity of Mantegna that gave to Venetian art precisely the tonic stimulus it needed.

By thirty he was famous, and yielding to repeated persuasion, he left Padua for Mantua and the court of the most generous art patrons of the moment, the Gonzagas. His most notable work for them was the decoration of the Camera degli Sposi, 1474, in their great palace, and the canvases of the triumphs of Cæsar, 1481 to 1494, which, sadly damaged and repainted, are now seen at Hampton Court. The two series represent strikingly the dual and never completely harmonized strains in Mantegna’s genius—realism and archaism. He was never more the realist than in the room decorated in honor of the marriage of Lodovico Gonzaga and Barbara of Brandenburg, the Camera degli Sposi. The motives are wholly novel—no religious subjects, nothing mythological, just the Gonzaga family and their courtiers, sitting in conversation, meeting ceremoniously, or preparing for the hunt. Nowhere before had such a consistent use of the principle of illusionism been made, not even in Roman mural painting of the Antonine age. Mantegna has completely painted away the real walls of the room, and has replaced the real architecture by a simulated classical pavillion, with arcades looking out to the country side and a round opening above. All the figures are out of doors. To see the scheme properly you must stand precisely in the centre of the room and turn on your heel. The arrangement in short is periscopic. As you look up you will see a balcony with cupids, Figure [219], standing on the outside ledge and maids of honor and peacocks looking down over the balustrade. You see everything feet foremost as if it were actually there. Then you look out through the arcades where the view of outside doings is sometimes interrupted by a curtain. Generally it is drawn aside that you may see these great folk at ease outside their pleasure house, Figure [220]. The portraits are of utmost dignity and authority. In dealing with real people Mantegna’s style is less pinched than in his classical decorations. If I have insisted on the point of illusionism, it is only because the audacious logic of Correggio and a host of baroque followers for a century and more really grows out of this scheme at Mantua. You will see the open well with figures outside the parapet in Correggio’s dome at Parma, and the figures outside the painted roof in the Convent of St. Paolo. Indeed, you have only to let the clouds come down through such open roofs and seat decorative figures on the clouds to arrive at the fully developed baroque style. And it is odd enough that its most romantic extravagances are clearly deducible from this rather sober and pedantic illusionism of Andrea Mantegna.

Fig. 219. Mantegna. Detail of Ceiling.—Camera degli Sposi, Mantua.

Fig. 220. Mantegna. Portraits of the Gonzaga Family. Fresco.—Camera degli Sposi, Mantua.

Of the painted cloths representing the Triumphs of Cæsar, Figure [221], (1484–1492), nine remain in debased condition at Hampton Court, England. Here the classicism of Mantegna finds its most legitimate expression. The designs are better seen in the engravings of his school and in the later woodcut copies by Andreini.

Fig. 221. Mantegna. Triumph of Cæsar.—Hampton Court, England.

Despite such great commissions, Mantegna lived in something near poverty. He could never resist a beautiful antique, and he was proud and difficult in his relations to exacting patrons. His style after his Roman visit of 1488 to 1490 loses something of its tension and develops breadth. Perhaps the most impressive picture of this time is the Madonna of Victory, Figure [222], in the Louvre, which was painted in 1495 to celebrate Gianfrancesco Gonzaga’s drawn battle with the French at Fornovo. Its severity is mollified by the graciousness of the evergreen bower in which the group is set and by the contrasting seriousness of St. Elizabeth and the kneeling donor. These figures forecast a mystical and tender quality in certain of the later Madonnas.

In his last years Mantegna undertook an attractive but difficult task in decorating the study of the famous bluestocking, Isabella d’Este, wife of Gianfrancesco. With the pertinacity of a suffragette born out of due time, this great lady framed the most elaborate written programmes, upon the literal accomplishment of which she insisted. Her correspondence with such unfortunate protegés as Perugino and Lorenzo Costa is among the delightful eccentricities of Renaissance annals. The resultant decorations reflect the sophisticated and somewhat brittle grace of Isabella’s own personality. None are better than those of Mantegna which were done about the year 1500. His Parnassus, Figure [223], with its romantically picturesque gods and godesses, and its admirable round of dancing muses, is the best that Northern Italy can show in comparison with Botticelli’s mythologies, unless it be the companion piece, Minerva expelling the Vices, Figure [224], which is wonderful alike in energy, inventiveness and grotesque humor, anticipating in its mood similar refinements in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and Milton’s “Comus.” Mantegna in these works becomes the true precursor of that poetic pastoralism which in Giorgione soon dominates the Venetian scene.

Fig. 222. Mantegna. Madonna of Victory.—Louvre.

Fig. 223. Mantegna. Parnassus.—Louvre.

Fig. 224. Mantegna. Minerva Expelling the Vices.—Louvre.

Mantegna lived on, none too well treated by the younger Gonzagas, until 1506. To relieve his poverty he offered for sale his most treasured marble, an Agrippina. He left in his studio his most rigid and painful piece,—the Foreshortened Christ he called it. All his probity is in the picture. For Giovanni Bellini and others it served as the highest model of the tragic style, and it refutes the shallow views of such as find Mantegna merely academic and cold. He left many engravings and marvellous drawings in which perhaps better than in the paintings we may feel the exquisiteness of his austerely fastidious taste. Such a drawing as the Judith in the Uffizi, Figure [225], is an epitome of all that Mantegna had to bequeath to the Renaissance.

Well his contemporaries knew the value of his example. It rebuked the slackness of their own practice. Alongside the exquisitely modelled foot of his St. Sebastian in the Louvre, stands the severed marble foot from a Greek statue. As he ever measured his work against the antique, so the painters of Milan, Vicenza, Ferrara, Verona and Venice had to measure their work against his. And that simple act of honest comparison in a single generation furthered the art of Northern Italy to a degree that in Tuscany it had taken a century to attain.

Fig. 225. Andrea Mantegna. Judith. Wash Drawing.—Uffizi.

Fig. 226.—Antonello da Messina. The Condottiere.—Louvre.

Fig. 227. Antonello da Messina. St. Jerome in his Study.—London.

At the moment when Mantegna’s influence was at its height, it was happily modified in a realistic direction by the advent of Antonello da Messina.[^[74]] Despite recent discoveries, the career of this great Sicilian realist remains obscure. Vasari imagined him a traveler in Flanders and a direct pupil of Jan van Eyck, whose invention of oil painting he was believed to have adopted. The legend is thoroughly discredited by newly discovered documents. Antonello came up in Sicily under the influence of visiting Spanish masters. From them he caught at second hand the point of view of Northern realism, from them he learned the advantages of the more fluid and lustrous oil vehicle. But he must also have seen and carefully studied fine paintings of the Flemish school. There were such in Sicily and at Naples. Antonello emerges about 1470 as the most energetic and truthful draughtsman of his time, and a portraitist of powerful character equipped with a new and better technique. In 1475 he was in Venice and Lombardy. Such portraits as the captain of mercenaries, Il Condottiere, Figure [226], at the Louvre, immediately set the standard for the entire region. We no longer find flat profiles, but heads perfectly drawn in three-quarters aspect, modelled minutely, but with no loss of character and effect. No such eye as Antonello’s, unless it were that of Piero della Francesca, had as yet applied itself to the problems of painting. Whether in the nude, in his St. Sebastians and Crucifixions, or in his rare interiors, such as the St. Jerome in his Study, Figure [227], in the National Gallery, he announced new perfections in lighting, modelling and perspective. He painted for the Church of San Cassiano at Venice a stately and massive Madonna which led the local painters in the direction of mass and monumentality. Recent criticism has recognised the mutilated central panel in the Vienna gallery. Antonello’s work imposes itself primarily by its mere intensity of existence. It has no charm, and no especial emotion. Precisely this impersonality makes it an admirable and safe model. Before his coming the Venetians had experimented with oil mediums, but they gladly adopted his lustrous enamels, and strong shadows. He returned soon to his native Sicily, where he died in 1479, but his brief sojourn in the North had left its stamp. Montagna of Vicenza, Cima of Conegliano, Buonsignori of Verona, Alvise Vivarini of Venice are among his conscious emulators, and all the figure painting of Venice assumes new gravity and authority. And we may mark his influence even in the leading masters of the new school, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.

The tardy emergence of these two brothers of genius is one of the puzzles of the Venetian school. Neither makes any impression till he is in his forties, and their work has no directive influence till after 1480. The simplest explanation is that of Mr. Berenson. He suggests that the brothers loyally contented themselves with the position of partners in their father’s bottega until his death in 1470. From that moment their progress is swift. Giovanni enlarges the style of the altar-piece in a Renaissance and monumental sense, and later moves gradually in a pastoral direction. Gentile brings to its perfection the complicated narrative style of his father. Both paint admirable portraits. Since Gentile is less an innovator than a perfector of an established mode, we may well begin with him.

Fig. 228. Gentile Bellini. Sultan Mahomet II.—London.

Fig. 229. Gentile Bellini. A Turkish Youth. Miniature.—Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston.

Such early works as the organ shutters of St. Mark’s and the processional banner with the portrait of the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani, 1465, show that he based himself on Mantegna. His career, however, is associated with narrative mural paintings for the schools, in which work he developes a real originality. Whatever he painted in 1466 for the Great School of St. Mark was soon destroyed in a fire. It was presumably the fame of these canvases that got him in 1469 the titles of knight and count palatine. In 1479, being fifty years old, he was called to Constantinople to serve that cruel voluptuary, Sultan Mahomet II. Gentile’s portrait of him, now in the National Gallery, Figure [228], is an appalling piece of exact characterization. One feels the malignity of a character softened by vices, but retaining all mental lucidity and capacities for both cruelty and calculated self-indulgence. A more amiable souvenir of this trip is the exquisite miniature portrait of a young Moslem prince, Figure [229], which is at Fenway Court. Gentile brought back to Venice the new title of Pasha. We do not find him about his proper work until 1492, when he agrees to do “not for money but by superhuman inspiration” the new canvases necessitated by the fire in the Great School of St. Mark.

The greatest of these is the view of the Piazza of St. Mark’s with the procession made by the School itself on Corpus Christi day, Figure [230]. In the centre is their venerated relic of the True Cross. About it attention is fixed and almost military, relaxing gradually at the sides. There are hundreds of figures and scores of portraits in the picture, yet there is no smallness of presentation. Such eighteenth century town painters as Canale and his followers could hardly improve upon the truthfulness of the scene as regards light and air even. Its value as record is immense. And, barring a certain stiffness, its value as art is hardly less.

Fig. 230. Gentile Bellini. Corpus Christi Procession in Piazza of S. Marco.—Venice.

Another panel from this series shows Gentile’s really great capacity as an out-of-doors painter. It represents the miraculous recovery of the reliquary of the cross which had fallen into the canal. How perfectly the play of light over the encrusted and plastered palaces is felt, its shimmer upon the smooth water and through the moving crowds! In the essentials of plein-airisme we moderns have not so much surpassed this work. And if Gentile seems after all not quite a great artist, it is due to that impassivity which is proper to a luminist. With equal realism, Gentile’s imitator, Carpaccio, added sentiment, hence he is beloved and Gentile ignored. Yet early Venetian narrative painting is complete with Gentile, and from every consideration of naturalism it is immensely superior to anything produced at Florence in this period. It gains all the smaller points of representation with the most amazing ease, perhaps because it waives the greater issue of monumentality. It is well put together, but shows little selection, is even at its best rather casually full of persons and things. This produces, as compared with Florence, an odd reversal of conditions. The altar-piece, which in Florence is rather intimate, is in Venice far the most monumental type of painting. We study the development of monumental design better in Giovanni Bellini’s altar-backs than in his brother’s narratives. To Gentile, at once a searching spirit in details and a conservative on the whole, it must have been a great satisfaction to have perfected the narrative mode that his father had so brilliantly inaugurated.

Fig. 231. Giovanni Bellini. Pietà.—Milan.

After 1500, being in the seventies and ailing, old Gentile acquired the ominous habit of frequently making and unmaking wills. His last one, which became effective in 1507, left to his vigorous brother, Giovanni, the precious paternal sketch books and the heavy duty of finishing for St. Mark’s School the vast Canvas of St. Mark Preaching at Alexandria, which is now at Milan. Giovanni was nearly eighty himself, but he put the great work through handsomely.

Fig. 232. Giovanni Bellini. Christ at Gethsemane.—London.

Giovanni Bellini[^[75]] was a natural son, but as was the humane Italian custom, taken into his father’s family. He was born about 1430, and his early efforts were completely dominated by Mantegna. Indeed he hardly finds himself artistically until he is fifty, and then he develops a most gracious capacity for growth which ceases only with his death at eighty-five. Of the score of pictures which are Mantegnesque in quality the earliest and most remarkable is the Pietà at Milan, Figure [231]. In the tragic power it outdoes Mantegna himself, and with all its hardness, it is more painter-like. The distribution of light and dark is broader, the expression more homely and genuine. Only a little later, perhaps towards 1470, is the Christ on the Mount of Olives, at London, Figure [232]. With a very similar picture by Mantegna in the same gallery, it is based on a sketch of Jacopo Bellini’s. Although Giovanni frankly imitates the rigid folds of drapery and landscape from Mantegna, it is with a distinct difference. The mood is gentler, details are less obtrusive, there is an exquisite sense of evening sky, and of hills in gloom, and of the coming of twilight over a river plain. It is the first greatly felt landscape in Venetian painting, and though Giovanni was far to surpass it in fineness and accuracy, even he never excelled it in depth and truthfulness of feeling. The serenity of the eventide is the fitting foil to Our Lord’s single moment of human weakness and despair.

Fig. 233. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna.—Estate Theodore Davis.

Giovanni’s early Madonnas are singularly various. We have one very stately and tender in the estate of Theodore M. Davis, Figure [233]. The Madonna in the John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia, is wistful and emaciated. One belonging to Mr. Philip Lehman, New York, is of sensuous, peasant type, while the painting, unlike the soberness of the two earlier ones, shows the utmost resplendence of Mantegnesque enamels. Its date may be about 1470. So we see Giovanni wholly flexible and experimental at forty, and developing chiefly under Mantegna’s influence.

Giovanni’s emancipation from Mantegna takes place very gradually. It is virtually complete in the Transfiguration, Figure [234], at Naples which may be dated towards 1480. Bellini asserts himself fully in the gracious monumentality of the chief group, while his Arcadian mood is forecast in the ample landscape softly invested with a colorful light and shade. There is a more specific emotion and a more romantic richness of setting in St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Figure [207], Frick Collection, which may be a year or two later. These are both Wordsworthian pictures, imbued with a mystical tenderness for natural appearances. Such are the sources from which Giorgione will soon draw his pagan pastoralism.

Fig. 234. Giovanni Bellini. The Transfiguration.—Naples.

Towards 1480 Giovanni Bellini’s work assumes monumental breadth, and withal a new sweetness. His Madonnas settle into what was to be the Venetian type—superb, mature forms at once queenly and maternal. Earlier there had been no Madonna type in his work but a singular variety of forms and faces. In generalizing the stately charm of Venetian motherhood, Giovanni moves towards the grand style, and does so nearly twenty years sooner than the Florentines. His characteristic works are now great altar-pieces, with monumental distribution of the figures within fine architectural spaces. Generally the frame is a part of the pictorial organism, the plastic front of a pavillion. It is about the only survival of Mantegna’s practice in these solemn and gracious pictures. Unluckily the first of the series perished in 1867 in the disastrous fire which robbed us also of Titian’s Death of St. Peter Martyr. But surviving copies of this altar-back for the Church of S. Giovanni e Paolo confirm the tradition that it was painted well before 1480. In its arrangement and details, especially in the tendency to crowd the many figures forward, it reveals to me the influence of Antonello da Messina’s great altar-piece for San Cassiano. It had apparently a somewhat rigid formality like that of the slightly earlier piece at Pesaro. Bellini is not yet quite at ease in his new and broader style, but he has at least glimpsed the ideal of monumentality and acquired a new technique, that of oil painting, in which to express it.

Fig. 235. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—Frari, Venice.

Fig. 235a.> Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of St. Job.—Venice.

We find him full-grown in the noble Madonna of St. Job, Figure [235a], made for the church of that name about 1484 and now in the Venice Academy. In this picture the new Venetian ideals of ardor and gravity unite harmoniously with the old ideal of material splendor. What playings of light and half-lights there are over mosaics, polished marbles and carvings! How admirably the strict symmetry of the group is relieved by varying the postures of the six saints and by contrasting the sober garb of the monkish saints with the superb nudity of Saints Job and Sebastian and the shimmering silks of the playing angels below. And the great picture, with all its monumentality, retains much of that old lyrical fire, which is gradually yielding to more sedate and reflective aims.

We shall find the two great Madonnas of 1488, for the Frari, Figure [235], and for St. Peter’s at Murano, conceived more impassively. For the city church, Bellini insisted on hieratic effect and incidental splendors, reverting to the form of the triptych and arranging it after Mantegna’s fashion with the frame and picture in one perspective. It is perhaps the grandest as it is the most formal of his altar-backs, consciously regal in the attitude of the Virgin, with saints as magisterial as so many Venetian senators. For the suburban church at Murano he set the Madonna low amid her paladins and opened up delicious landscape vistas at the sides. The thing, with all its dignity, is lyrical, and almost intimate. It anticipates the mood of the later open-air Sacred Conversations.

Fig. 236.—Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with St. Paul and St. George.—Venice.

In the nineties and the early years of the new century, masterpiece follows masterpiece, and we must proceed by selection. Giovanni invents a charming form of altar-piece for private chapels. These Madonnas and saints at half-length have already the mood of the later conversation pieces, and need only the less symmetrical scheme which Bellini’s pupil, Titian, will soon give them. For harmony one might prefer the Madonna with two female saints, or for robust contrast and vitality the Madonna with two burly military champions, Figure [236]. Both are in the Venetian Academy.

Fig. 237. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna of the Trees.—Venice.

The single, half-length Madonnas, Figure [237], of this period are counted by scores, and are in many public and private collections in Europe and America. They are singularly uniform in inspiration, and yet the mood is so rich and noble that an apparent monotony is never cloying. Bellini’s gift in these pictures is to combine a kind of serene obviousness with great delicacy. There are hints of wistfulness and sadness through the series, but such sentiments are never much insisted on. The real mysticism of these pictures is nothing but the notation of the most natural and mysterious thing in the world—the bond between mother and babe, the pride of it, the exclusiveness of it, the joyous burden of it. Art could hardly be less theological or more genuinely religious than in these Madonnas. I think no human being could miss either their naturalness or their sacredness.

As Giovanni Bellini approached the scriptural term of years, and the century drew to its close, he cultivates by way of recreation certain old leads which become new and powerful influences on his successors. The element of tact in the man is miraculous. He does nothing till the time has come when the doing will be most useful. Thus such pastoral recreations as the Religious Allegory in the Uffizi, Figure [238], and the little symbolical panels in the Venice Academy lead directly to the fantastic Arcadianism of Giorgione. The Religious Allegory is vaguely an illustration for the old French poem “Man’s Pilgrimage.” We have a Paradise, with the new souls in infant form. The apostles Peter and Paul stand guard outside the celestial barrier, while the Madonna presides within. Beyond a dark stream is the hazardous world, a place of caverns and crags, and hermits and centaurs; of mystery and uncertainty. Perhaps Giovanni Bellini cared rather more for the darkling shadows over water and river bank, for the broken light under a veiled sky than for the formal allegory. Certainly the element of strangeness and glamour is evident enough in the five little panels depicting virtues and vices. Again the faery quality, our earth grown strange to us, is the basis of the charm. We have noted similar fantastic inventions at Florence, notably in the work of Piero di Cosimo. Bellini evokes a more normal poetry which is based on a more intimate study of nature. Such landscapes as his, even when unpeopled, suggest nymphs and shepherds.

Fig. 238. Giovanni Bellini. Religious Allegory, Souls in Paradise.—Uffizi.

Fig. 240. Giovanni Bellini. Doge Loredano.—London.

Fig. 239. Giovanni Bellini. Madonna with Saints.—S. Zaccaria.

At seventy, at the opening of the new century, Giovanni Bellini’s mind was still flexible, so much so that we hardly know whether he leads or follows such pupils of genius as Titian and Giorgione. His color acquires a deeper glow, his warm shadows are heavier and more carefully graduated; he drops his few remaining Mantegnesque habits. In the Madonna for San Zaccaria, Figure [239], dated 1505, we have no longer the illusionistic perspective of the altar-pieces of the ’80s. The group is set well back, the suffusion of the niche with air is more dense, the saintly figures have exchanged the old resolute, hieratic attitudes for a gentle dreaminess; the mood is that of Giorgione’s contemporary altar-piece at Castelfranco. In the portrait of Doge Loredano, Figure [240], of the same year resolution and wistfulness blend fascinatingly. The delineation has the force and certainty of Antonello da Messina with a refinement Antonello never even glimpsed.

In these later years Giovanni Bellini multiplied, largely through student aid, conversation pieces with gracious gatherings of saints in the open air. The mood is that of courtly revery. Titian and Palma will later repeat the theme indefinitely. One of the best is at S. Francesco della Vigna, and bears the date 1507. It is an idyl borrowing religious forms. In the altar-piece painted in 1513, Figure [241], for the church of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, Giambellino anticipates the new and compositional forms of the rising generation. The rich architecture opens upon a contemplative old man reading on a crag, with majestic mountain lines behind him athwart a serene sky. Everything above is off centre and diagonal, stability being preserved by the great vertical figures of the saints in the foreground, and by the formality of the parapet behind them. We have almost a picture within a picture, the maximum of formality and informality, of nature and artifice—all those elaborate and calculated beauties which we associate with Titian’s maturity. There is withal a mystical earnestness of which Titian himself lacked the secret.

Fig. 241. Giovanni Bellini. St. John Crisostom.—S. Giov. Crisostomo.

In his remaining two years Bellini designed the lovely and modest nude Lady at her Toilet, at Vienna, and the Feast of the Gods, Figure [242], now in Mr. Joseph Widener’s collection at Philadelphia. His career ends in a rather skeptical acceptance of the sensuous graces of the new humanism, for the gods are merely Venetian picnickers on an excursion. The penetrating poetry of the picture is of a homely sort without pretensions to grandeur. The landscape is partly by Titian.

Giovanni died in 1515, being more than eighty-five years old. As late as 1506, Albrecht Dürer found him the greatest artist at Venice. He had begun with the faint dawn of the Renaissance and ended in its midday glow. He had raised Venetian painting to monumental estate, had mastered the secrets of landscape and its illumination, had initiated a delightful pastoralism, had conveyed religious emotion in forms humanly sweet and grave, had made the best of every world. Scores of his pupils extended his manner to Brescia, Bergamo, Vicenza, and Treviso. His genius knew neither haste nor hesitation, he was almost never below his best. The Renaissance produced a few painters of greater scope and powers, but none more consistently great as an artist or more venerable as a personality.

Fig. 242. Giovanni Bellini. Feast of the Gods.—Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa.

Fig. 243. Bartolommeo Vivarini. Madonna with Saints.—Naples.

To appreciate his value a glance at less progressive contemporaries will suffice. We find Bartolommeo Vivarini normally continuing the routine of the Murano School. In the polyptych at Bologna, done with his elder brother Antonio in 1450, we have with slight Squarcionesque improvements the old attenuated Venetian forms. In the highly decorated Madonna at Naples, dated 1465, we have an intelligent use of both the Squarcionesque realisms, and the refinements of Jacopo Bellini. Figure [243]. Later pieces such as the triptych of 1487 at the Frari reveal a heavy-handed imitation of Mantegna, and any little originality of the master soon gets lost in the voluminous output of the shop. Bartolommeo died in the last year of his century, whose fair average he had well represented. His nephew Alvise Vivarini deserves notice as the transmitter of the realism of Antonello da Messina to such artists as Montagna, Cima, and Lorenzo Lotto. As a portraitist he has real power. His great altar-pieces have their bleak and unattractive nobility. Venice greatly honored him in confiding several of the new panels for the Ducal Palace to his care. But since these works of the eighties were soon burned, our view of Alvise remains imperfect. I suspect modern criticism has somewhat exaggerated his importance. He was active from about 1460 to 1503, and his altar-pieces afford the best foils for Giovanni Bellini, as revealing a lesser capacity for growth.

Fig. 244. Carpaccio. Prince Hero Taking Leave of his Father (L) and Greeting Ursula (R).—Venice.

We have now to trace the old narrative style to its climax and end in Vittore Carpaccio.[^[76]] He inherited all the panoramic and luministic accomplishments of Gentile Bellini, but applied them with far greater imagination. He deals with legend, giving it contemporary color, and in his sensitive hands it becomes the most veridical and charming of fairy lands. Carpaccio’s training is obscure to us. It may be that the very mediocre narrative painter, Lazzaro Bastiani, first taught him. In any case he drew more from Gentile Bellini’s resolute handling of light, textures and costume. We first meet Carpaccio as an artist in the decoration of the Great School of St. Ursula from 1492 to 1495. He was probably all of fifty years old. The childlike legend, with its numerous embassies, meetings and partings, settings out and arrivings, gave him spectacular opportunities of which he made the most winning use. In the nine canvases now in the Academy we find an epitome of the courtesy, circumstance and adventure that accompanied travel in those days, and the mere spectacle is underlaid with a pensive ideality; for these are no ordinary journeys, but the quest of martyrdom by a princely youth and maiden. Nothing is insisted on, however, but the gayety of the events, and the picturesqueness of their settings. As in all good story-telling, the persuasiveness depends on veracious minor episodes. There are the most attentive scribes and secretaries, as if to carry off the unlikely matter they are inditing. The heavy ease of men-at-arms and self-conscious elegance of young Venetian fops make them credible witnesses to else incredible legend. To adorn his tales Carpaccio borrowed from the woodcut illustrations to Breydenbach’s “Itinerary to Jerusalem.” It is remarkable how he invests these mere skeletons of cities with color, sunlight, the glamour of the orient. About all he draws a veil of air saturated with sunlight, concentrated into rising clouds whose shadows darken the lustrous blue of the tranquil lagoon. There never was a more ravishing raconteur in the art of making incidentals count for essentials. Such a picture as Prince Hero taking leave of his father and greeting St. Ursula, Figure [244], is the fulfilment of all that old Jacopo Bellini and his Veronese precursors had dreamed of. It is typical of a series which has its more intimate phases only by way of exception. The virginal beauty of the legend gets a real expression only in the Vision of St. Ursula. Figure [245]. The character of the earnest, slumbering face and the sweet slight body carries through the exquisitely indicated space, and we hardly need to be told that the wistful boyish angel is offering a martyr’s palm. Possibly it takes a mundane person like Carpaccio to realize the beauty of the more fantastic religious ardors. A completely devout person takes them as in the day’s work.

Fig. 245. Carpaccio. Dream of St. Ursula.—Venice.

Before the end of the century, Carpaccio painted for the School of S. Giovanni Evangelista the Miracle of the healing of a Demoniac. The picture is now in the Academy. It is a marvellous panorama of contemporary Venice, with the bustle of eager crowds, the slipping of gondolas over the canal, and light flickering over and caressing the manifold colors of the gay scene. It has the fidelity of Gentile Bellini without his dryness.

Fig. 246. Carpaccio. St. George and the Dragon.—School of St. George of the Slavonians.

The most delightful if not the most important monument of Renaissance Venice is unquestionably the School of St. George of the Slavonians. It is the only school that retains its primitive paintings still set in the original carved and golded wainscoting. There one sees in the ground floor the legends of St. Jerome, an odd mixture of gravity, richness, and humor. Nothing more sumptuous than the Saint in his exquisitely appointed study, or more archly comic than the scene of consternation when the Saint brings home his lion from the desert. The series was painted about 1502. Upstairs we have the chivalric legend of St. George of Cappadocia, painted some eight years later. Nothing could be more romantically entrancing than the boyish champion charging intrepidly over the sun-dried shreds and tatters of his predecessors into the very jaws of the most confidently virulent of dragons, Figure [246], unless it be the scene where he leads his tame dragon into the astounded court, or that in which he proudly baptizes his future bride and her parents while a Turkish band plays a fanfare. About the blowing of these horns of elfland there is no faintness whatever. We are in the realm of most palpable adventure and romance, and the emphasis depends on splendid color and on drawing of a magical alertness.

Carpaccio’s merit as the liveliest and most persuasive of raconteurs seems so definite that it is almost a shock to meet him in other capacities. Also a disappointment to find in the New Testament subjects from the School of the Albanians, 1504, that in such stereotyped subjects he can be almost mediocre. Certainly in the great altar-piece of the Presentation in the Temple, Figure [247], at the Academy, he shows that he fully understands the new monumentality of Giovanni Bellini. The date is 1510. The picture is of the most reverent composure, and as tender as it is grand. In the portrait of Two Courtesans on a Balcony, in the Correr, Carpaccio shows a force of character wholly modern. With a kind of irony he has taken the moral emptiness of his sitters out of doors, flooded it with sunlight and air, given it harshness and ugliness, lavishing upon the rich costumes and fair skins the most delicate pains. John Ruskin will tell you that these are honest women. Such faith is more worthy of reverence than of imitation. The greatness of Carpaccio lies in the impartiality with which he renders a certain kind of life on its own terms. The romancer is capable of appalling truthfulness.

Fig. 247. Carpaccio. The Presentation.—Venice.

That he was also a mystic of the most intense sort is hard to believe. Yet if the marvellous Meditation on the Passion, Figure [248], in the Metropolitan Museum, be really by him, such is the case. In a desert the Dead Christ sits in a crumbling throne, while two grim sages, St. Job and St. Onophrius, sit in rapt contemplation. Their mood has evoked the bodily vision of their Lord. Art has produced few such symbols for the hallucinative intensity of the life contemplative. These weather-beaten forms seem an emanation from the sands and blistering sunlight. They have few relations to our world. Their souls move in vast uninhabited spaces. That Carpaccio can have produced this masterpiece as late as 1520, and cast it deliberately in a style learned forty years earlier seems to me a fantastic hypothesis, even if it has enlisted grave authority. The abundant similarities of the landscape with that of the St. Francis of the Frick Collection make me feel that the invention of this picture is Giovanni Bellini’s, at his moment of highest emotional power, about 1480. Since the actual painting is evidently in large part Carpaccio’s, I am driven to the by no means satisfactory hypothesis that Carpaccio may have executed this masterpiece, and the group to which it belongs, while serving as studio assistant to Giovanni Bellini. Such a view at least expresses my conviction that the picture transcends Carpaccio’s powers.

Fig. 248.—Ascribed to Carpaccio, perhaps Giovanni Bellini’s Design. Desert Hermits Meditating the Passion.—New York.

As for his later years, his work goes off, he loses most of his Venetian patronage, and paints for the obscure Istrian and Dalmatian seaports, the critics mock him, he dies some time after 1523, leaving no deep impression. Vasari dispatches him with a few condescending lines, and nobody cares for him till young Burne-Jones came to Venice some sixty years ago. He plainly stands out of the main line of progress. He was too romantically traditional in his themes, and too minutely naturalistic in his vision to fit into the monumental development of the Renaissance. In a sense he merely brings the old narrative tradition to a splendid close. But in so doing he preserves the look of an exquisite moment—of Venice still in her mediæval gayety and splendor, not yet reduced to her ultimate magnificent decorum. In him we glimpse the eager comeliness of patrician youth, self-sufficient in love of living. And this we see between the glistening waters of the lagoon and the lambent blue heavens, with pearly domes and bell towers rising as lightly as the drifting summer clouds above. All this may or may not be apart from what the wise esteem artistic greatness. In any case it is charm of the most persuasive and durable kind.

Whether Giorgione of Castelfranco is to be regarded as the last of the Venetian primitives or as the first of the men of the Renaissance is no simple problem. It is further complicated by the fact that we do not surely know what pictures he painted. According to the austerity or geniality of the critics, the lists vary from eight, Lionello Venturi’s, to over seventy, Herbert Cook’s. Naturally I also have my own list, which, with old copies, runs to twenty-four, but I am unwilling to claim demonstrative weight for what are merely strong subjective convictions. Walter Pater daintily evaded the issue by writing the most subtle of essays not on the person, but on the School of Giorgione. I shall in part imitate him in defining first the Giorgionesque mood before considering the canon of his works.

Fig. 249. Giorgione. Portrait of a Youth.—Berlin.

On the side of minor technique Giorgione marks a great advance. He early abandons the old frank coloring of Giovanni Bellini for a mysterious method which abolishes line, builds in mass, invests the picture with deep shadows that are marvellously warm and colorful. What contemporaries loved to call the Venetian fire originates with him about 1505. Vasari may well be right in saying that he learned the method directly from Leonardo da Vinci, who was a fugitive in Venice in the year 1500. Only Leonardo never taught him that shadow is color. That was Giorgione’s own beautiful discovery, one immensely important for all decorative painting ever since.

In his early phase, if I am right in thinking that Sir Martin Conway’s two stories of Paris, Figure [250], and the Ordeal of the Infant Moses and Judgment of Solomon in the Uffizi, are his, Giorgione was merely a graceful continuer of the slighter narrative mood of Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio,—that is, distinctly a primitive artist. In his fully developed Arcadian vein he is neither a primitive nor fully of the Renaissance, but midway between, and his work constitutes not so much a pioneer effort as a delectable episode quite complete in itself. Unhappily we are almost without biographical details. Giorgione was born in 1478, in Castelfranco, a long day’s ride towards the Friulian Alps. The country abounds in streams, meadows, and immemorial trees—is a subalpine Arcadia. He came pretty young to Venice and worked with Giovanni Bellini. Legend tells us that he was big and handsome, amorous, and a musician. We know that he died of the plague of 1510, in his thirty-third year. The rest is conjecture from pictures some of which are his, and all of which are inspired by him.

Fig. 250. Giorgione. The Infant Paris found by Shepherds.—Sir Martin Conway. Maidstone, England.

These breathe a single mood, that of Arcadian revery. It is a world of desire indulged for its own sweetness, of day dreaming apart from will, action, and results. More blithely it had pre-existed in the Idyls of Theocritus; more pensively, in the Eclogues of Virgil. This world revives a far-away pastoral golden age, of lovers and their lasses, of nymphs and fauns, of vague ardors at once tempered and reinforced by a sympathetic nature. We are dealing with one of the oldest resources of poetry, and we can only understand this most beautiful visualization of the old theme by associating it with the tradition of literary pastoralism.

Of course the Eclogues of Virgil were read generation by generation, if not very understandingly, through the Middle Ages. Still the more sensitive felt the appeal of mountain shadows lengthening over the evening meadows and the pathos of love-lorn shepherds sighing musically for hard-hearted shepherdesses. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the pastoral mode becomes once more contemporary, incidentally in the interludes of Bocaccio’s Decameron, explicitly in his idyl of alternate prose and verse, the Ameto. These are pale lights before the dawn. Pastoralism becomes widely current in the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro, the bulk of which was ready by 1489. It is the parent of those slow-moving, sentimental, and ever lengthy romances in verse and prose of which Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is the most familiar to the modern reader. Dante had once longed for a magic boat in which congenial souls should drift forever and do nothing but discourse of love. Transfer these discourses to a leafy nook beside a running stream, with the herds in view below the branches, and nymphs and satyrs overhearing the debate—and you have Sannazaro’s Arcadia. We have the eternal poetry and perhaps eternal fallacy of a bygone golden age where duty and effort are absent, where love and poesy reign.

In his most famous song, Alma beata, Sannazaro, celebrating a dead beauty, makes heaven itself merely an Arcadia—

“Other mountains, other plains,

Other groves and streamlets

In heaven I see, and withal new blossoms.

Other fauns and sylvans, through sweet summer places,

Pursue their nymphs in happier loves than ours.”

You find the mood clear cut in the Venetian nobleman and prelate, Pietro Bembo, both in his Asolani and in the separate poems. These were being handed about in Giorgione’s time, from 1500 on. Thus Bembo sings of the shepherd’s life:

“Tryphon, who in place of ministrants and lackeys,

Loggias and marbles, woven gold and purple,

Lovest about thee willows leafy, cloister

Of joyous hillocks, plants and rivulets—

Well may the world admire thee.”

Naturally the denizens of such paradises live and dress in a state of nature. The nymphs are lightly clothed and readily discard their slight draperies for the joys of the bath, which they considerately take within the range of their shepherd swains. Bembo warmly praises those “courteous garments” which do not too much hide the fair throat and bosom, and roundly curses more churlish concealing fashions.

Sannazaro describes with a confusing mixture of metaphors what may be called a fortunate bath fall.

“Leading one day my herds beside a stream,

I saw a light amid those waters fair,

Which bound me fast straightway with two blond tresses,

And stamped a face all milk and roses

Forever on my heart.”

Earlier painters than Giorgione[^[77]] had essayed these pastoral themes. Botticelli, Signorelli; in a sardonic way, Piero di Cosimo; Giovanni Bellini and even Andrea Mantegna had variously attempted this sort of painted poesy. But the flavor of the Giorgionesque poesy is fuller and richer. His beauty is that of languor, revery, dream. Whatever the ostensible theme may be, his painting is Arcadian. His people have not merely no relation to our world, but slight and ambiguous relations to each other within the picture. They are isolated in their own musings, rarely look at each other, never suggest an action, but only a mood. Even the portraits suggest rather temperament than character or will. The proud youth, at Berlin, Figure [249], withdraws himself from purpose and deed. It is an early Giorgione. The Shepherd with a Flute, at Hampton Court, is bemused with his own fancy. It is of the later years. The fastidious patrician, at New York, reveals an almost worried and sickly detachment. If indeed a Giorgione, which I cannot doubt, it is of his latest manner.

Fig. 251. Giorgione. Fire Ordeal of Infant Moses.—Uffizi.

Fig. 252. Giorgione. “Soldier and Gipsy.”—Giovanelli Palace.

Take the little Carpaccian idyls at Florence which cannot be much later than 1500. How far we are from real narrative! In the Ordeal of Moses, Figure [251], a child is thrusting his tender fingers among live coals. Ladies and gentlemen stand languidly about and bask in the pleasantness of their own thoughts. There is a similar nonchalance in the Judgment of Solomon where a newborn babe is threatened with the sword. The horror is treated as a negligible incident of an al fresco party.

Fig. 253. Giorgione. The Three Philosophers.—Vienna.

Again what is the meaning of the mysterious idyl in Prince Giovanelli’s gallery? Figure [252]. In view of the picturesque walls and moat of Castelfranco, a half nude mother, oblivious of a coming thunder shower, nurses her child. Equally oblivious of her and the weather, a fashionably dressed youth turns away. Ruins reflect the ominous lightning flashes. Old records call this (one of the few certain Giorgiones) The Soldier and the Gipsy—evidently a bad guess. A learned Viennese professor chooses to think that this is Prince Adrastus finding the forsaken Princess Hypsiphile. Nobody can prevent such conjectures or disprove them. It is safer to imagine that coming rain and thunder at Venice recalls some old memory of similar weather and state of mind at Castelfranco, evokes some old desire of which this richly fanciful masterpiece is the enigmatic symbol. Some story of loving and parting surely underlies the poesy, it would be foolish to be more specific than Giorgione himself has chosen to be. The Three Philosophers, at Vienna, Figure [253], again has been explained as Aeneas surveying the future site of Rome. What we actually have is a glowing nook at eventide in which three grave men of different ages go separately about some task requiring thought and mathematical calculation. And even this duty is yielding to the spell and mystery of the evening hour. These pictures are probably a little earlier than the altar-piece of 1504 at Castelfranco.

Fig. 254. Giorgione. Madonna with St. George and St. Francis.—Castelfranco.

Fig. 255. Giorgione. Landscape by Titian. Sleeping Venus.—Dresden.

That lovely work, Figure [254], has much of the intimacy of Bellini’s altar-piece at S. Zaccaria, in formal arrangement it is rather monumental. The mood, however, is one of revery. St. Francis of Assisi makes his gesture only for himself, and St. George, exponent of the active life, broods moodily beneath his slackly held pennon. The Arcadian landscape quietly reinforces the idyllic feeling. Externally the thing is splendid in color, and as saturated with atmosphere as it is with mood.

From now on the question of chronology becomes at once difficult, and, since we are dealing only with five years or so, relatively unimportant. The sleeping Venus at Dresden, Figure [255], may have been designed about 1505. A Cupid slumbering at the Goddess’s feet has been painted out, and the landscape was finished by Titian. The noble sleeping body, to use a word of Lucretius which Montaigne commends, seems “poured out” on the receptive earth—so grandly and easily it lies. The gestures are unconscious caresses. The Goddess dreams of old joys. What faun or sylvan even would not respect that dream? Not with passion, then, though himself knowing all its sting, does Giorgione deal, but with ardors sublimated in memory. The marvellous lines of this Venus, as sweeping as the curves of hills or river currents, were imitated again and again, but neither Titian, Palma Vecchio, nor the rest ever recaptured the evasive poetry of their model.

Fig. 256. Giorgione. Judith.—Petrograd.

In 1508, working with Titian, Giorgione finished certain frescoes for the outside of the German Warehouse. The remaining red blurs, and Zanetti’s fragmentary copies, tell us that the postures begin to have the breadth and conscious counterpoise of the advancing Renaissance, but that the mood is still that of languor. Very like one of these figures is the fascinating Judith, at Petrograd, Figure [256]. After the horrors of the night, she stands dreamily. Her lovely left leg escapes from the courteous draperies, and the foot touches lightly the brow of the peaceful, severed head of Holophernes. The touch of the foot is almost careless, as if merely to assure herself that the portent is really true. Her head bends gently, her nerveless beautiful fingers barely feel her girdle or support her great sword. Behind her, morning forests and fields stretch towards a tranquil sea and sky. The gestures are those of one between sleeping and waking, irresolutely feeling for some basis in reality. We are in a realm where the most awful deeds and experiences count only as raw material for delicate imaginings.

Fig. 257. Giorgione. Pastoral Symphony.—Louvre.

In the later works problems multiply, and a critic is pretty well reduced to personal intuitions. No doubt, however, should attach to the pathetic and nearly effaced Christ of St. Roch. The Christ is nobler than the earlier example at Fenway Court, the feeling more expansive. Still nobody, not even the executioner, seems to will the atrocity of the deed. The thing is not an act but a vision, pervaded by a dreamy tenderness.

The completely repainted Pastoral Concert, Figure [257], at the Louvre is never the less fraught with Giorgione’s peculiar poetry. A courtly lover has struck a chord on the lute, and gazes intently, perhaps sadly, at a shepherd sitting close to him. A rustic, nude nymph whose back only is seen takes the pipe from her lips to listen. A proud beauty turns toward a fountain, light draperies slip away from her superb form, and with a graceful gesture of idleness she pours back into the fountain a tinkling jet from a crystal pitcher, while she bends to note the ripple and catch the pleasant, idle sound. This strange scene takes place on the edge of a vale that winds down to a glittering sea, affording a path to a shepherd and his flocks. The meaning? Modern criticism is loath to look beyond contrasts of nude and clothed forms, swing of tree-tops and of sky, subtle interplay of light and shade. My own reading is merely based on the contrast between the rustic and urban lovers, and an intuition that the courtier in peering so wistfully at the shepherd is merely seeing himself in a former guise. In lassitude, perhaps in satiety, beside a courtly mistress who is absent from him in spirit, there rises the vision of earlier simpler love and of a devoted shepherdess who once piped for him in the shade. The vision rises as his listless hand sweeps the lute strings in a chord unmarked by the far lovelier mistress at the fountain. The golden age of love, like Arcady itself, is ever in the past. Such may be the reading of this poesy. Indeed all Giorgione’s pictures are less facts than apparitions born of roving thought in idleness,—such stuff as dreams are made of.

The famous Concert, Figure [258], of the Pitti since Morelli’s time has been generally classed as an early Titian, I think erroneously. The precise and powerful execution of the Monk’s head is certainly his, but I question if the motive itself lay within the scope of his lucid and uncomplicated imagination. An Augustinian monk holds the initial harmony on the clavichord and turns towards the ’cellist while the singer waits impassively. And this simple theme becomes a universal symbol for thwarted desire. The player asks a kind of sympathy which this world rarely affords, which certainly these companions cannot give. As in the Pastoral Symphony, the music awakens impossible longings, is the accompaniment of inadequacy. Titian was too robust ever to have imagined such a thing, and I feel we need only modify the old tradition to the extent of giving Titian a hand in an unfinished Giorgione to account for this poignant and most characteristic masterpiece.

Fig. 258. Giorgione cum Titian. The Concert.—Pitti.

There remains old and good tradition for crediting Giorgione with the design of the altar-piece in San Giovanni Crisostomo. The execution is unquestionably by Sebastiano del Piombo. If this view be correct, Giorgione attained the external features of the coming Renaissance style, missing its athleticism. Certainly the abstraction of the saint and the unmotivated appearance of the three virtues, and their unrelated gracefulness, is entirely in Giorgione’s manner, while the whole invention is alien to Sebastiano’s heavy and forthright talent.

For the view I have tried to give of this poet picture-maker I may claim at least the merit of consistency. There is only one theme—languor of love and of remembered happiness; and there is only one setting—the Arcadia of the pastoral poets. Giorgione is the first painter who realized Leonardo’s definition of painting as “mute poetry,” yet not quite mute for there is generally a suggestion of music. And the music is less heard than contemplated, as is the case in one of his latest pictures, the Shepherd Boy, Figure [259], who hesitates to set the flute to his lips lest the melody fall short of that which the imagination has already heard.

Fig. 259. Giorgione. Shepherd with a Flute.—Hampton Court.

For ten years after Giorgione’s death his mood dominated Titian with most of the rising artists. It seemed likely to replace the sturdy and objective art of Venice with a quite alien subjectivism. Meanwhile the normal effort of old Giovanni, Bellini and of young Titian continued. The Renaissance offered to the outer eye new dignities and splendors. The inner eye went bankrupt in the numerous imitators of Giorgione, in trivial symbolism and merely playful mythology. After her brief pause in Arcadia, Venice once more took account of her own proud charms. The nymphs paled before the comparison, Arcadia vanished. But it never was wholly forgotten, and, ever since, those who have craved actually to see the golden age of poesy have had to consult Giorgione of Castelfranco.