ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VIII
Titian’s Assumption the Beginning of the Venetian Grand Style
Titian’s contemporaries were fully aware that the Assumption (1518) marked the beginning of the Grand Style at Venice and that the change was revolutionary. The critic Lodovico Dolce writes in his Dialogo della Pittura, Florence, 1735, p. 286 f. putting the words into the mouth of Aretino:
“After not much time [after the Fondaco frescoes, 1508] he was given to paint a great panel for the high altar of the Friars Minor; where Titian, still young, painted in oils the Virgin, who rises to heaven among many angels who accompany her, and above her he figured a God Father flanked by two angels. It seems really as if she rises with a face full of humility, and her robes fly lightly. At the bottom are the disciples who with various attitudes manifest joy and amazement, and are mostly larger than life, and assuredly in that picture is contained the grandeur and terribleness of Michelangelo, the pleasingness and grace of Raphael, with the coloring proper to nature, and, moreover, this was the first public work which he made in oils; and he made it in very little time, and young.”
“Thereupon the stupid painters and the vulgar herd who up to then had seen nothing but the cold and dead things of Giovanni Bellini, of Gentile, and of [Alvise] Vivarini (since Giorgione, working in oils, had not yet had any public work; and for the most part made no other works than half figures and portraits) which were without movement and without relief, spake great ill of that picture. Afterwards, as envy cooled, and opening their eyes a little to the truth, the people began to be amazed at the new manner discovered in Venice by Titian: and all the painters from then on strove to imitate it; but being off their own path, became confused. And surely it must seem a miracle that Titian, without having at that time seen the antiquities of Rome, which were the light of all the good painters, solely with that little spark, which he had discovered in the works of Giorgione, saw and perceived the idea of perfect painting.”
The general critical justness of this statement must condone its abundant overstatements and errors of fact.
Aurelio Luini on Titian’s Impressionism
“Aurelio Luini has excellently understood this art [of landscape] to whom it once happened that visiting Titian, and asking him his opinion about the background of trees, besides many reasons which he heard from him about making the foliage sparkle against the background, he saw one of his [Titian’s] wonderful landscapes which he had at home, which, having seen quietly, Aurelio thought a daubed up thing, but afterwards, having withdrawn to a distance, it seemed to him that the sun shone resplendently in it, making the paths retreat on this side and that; so that Aurelio had to say that he had never seen a rarer thing in the world in the way of landscapes.”
Lomazzo, Trattato, Milan, 1584, p. 474, 5.
On Belle Nature and the Antique
The Renaissance idea that Nature must be ennobled and corrected by the Antique is plainly formulated by Dolce, again under the name of Aretino, Dialogo, p. 190.
“One should then choose the most perfect form, imitating nature in part.... And partly one should imitate the beautiful marble and bronze figures of the ancient masters. Whereof who so shall taste and possess fully the marvellous perfection, will be able with certainty to correct many defects of nature, and make his pictures noteworthy and grateful to all. Inasmuch as the ancient things contain the entire perfection of art, and can be the exemplars of all beauty.”
This is one of the earliest full statements of the notion of belle nature, and of the antique as normative. The dogma persists with unabated rigor down to Sir Joshua Reynolds (see Illustration to Chapter VI, p. 316) and Jacques Louis David.
George Frederick Watts on the Greek Affinities of Venetian Painting
“The revival of the Greek Language and Greek Literature raised the long ebb into a wave that swept over civilized Europe. On its glittering crest the Venetian painters especially were lifted into the society of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs. They might see sky, sea and earth peopled with radiant beings; perhaps with a sort of semi-belief such as we accord to the Lorelei and fairies, creations that somehow easily worked in with creeds and experience. Anyhow, they might see Pan come dallying down the sparkling brook-side, now shouting to the laughing brown nymphs rustling through the reeds, and pretending to be afraid, now scattering a shower of notes from his pipes that would fall upon the ears as the brightness of the iris over a fountain falls upon the eye.”...
“It may seem strange if I place the Venetian school and Titian, with his liberal line—which, however, is by no means wanting in reticence—in closer relationship with Greek art of the great period than the more classical schools of Tuscany and Rome. Supposing one were to endeavor to paint a restoration of the pediments of the Parthenon, it would be possible to interpolate with figures by Titian, never with any by Poussin, or, I think, even by Raphael or Michael Angelo.”...
“In spite of extravagant and even absurd defects (for the great artist’s eyes no longer served him faithfully), when Titian, towards the end of his life painted the ‘Europa’ ... the muse who inspired Pheidias laid her hand on the old man’s shoulder, and she inspired the wealth of volume, ease of line, and glowing sense of nature’s exuberance.”
George Frederick Watts, his Life and Writings, London and New York, Vol. III., pp. 251, 253, 254.
Fig. 309. Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin.—Louvre.
Chapter IX
THE REALISTS AND ECLECTICS
The Confusion following Raphael and Michelangelo—Giulio Romano—Caravaggio and realistic Revolt—Salvator Rosa, romantic Individualism and the Picturesque—The Carracci and the Eclectic Ideal—Later Eclectics; Guido Reni—Domenichino—The Waning of Italian Greatness—Influence of Italy on the Schools of France, Flanders, and Spain.
Italian painting suddenly declined for lack of taste. The followers of Raphael and Michelangelo possessed astonishing power and knowledge, but, save their own cleverness, no longer had anything to express. Thus painting became merely an art of self-exploitation and display, a matter of difficult foreshortenings, complicated groupings, and novel constructions in light and shade. Such at least was the case at Rome, and partly at Florence. At Venice, Milan, Cremona, Ferrara, and generally in the North the decline was gradual and benign. Sincere art of a minor character was still produced. But in the artistic centre the collapse was complete, and all the more disastrous that nobody realized that a collapse had come.
It is staggering to find that Vasari, in the face of merited ridicule, had no doubt that he was a great painter. How he boasts of his own powers! “But what matters most for this art, is that they have made it so perfect today, and so easy for him who possesses design, that where formerly a picture was made by one of our masters in six years, today our masters make six in one. And I am the credible witness of this both by my observation and by my work. And many more perfect and finished pictures are now seen, than formerly were made by the important masters.” (Vol. IV, p. 13.) Nothing is more appalling than to find Vasari at Florence and Lomazzo at Milan regularly naming Giulio Romano, Polidoro and Maturino along with Raphael and Michelangelo. Evidently the old sure taste of the Renaissance has yielded to confusion.
Fig. 310. Giulio Romano. Battle for Troy. Fresco.—Palazzo del Tè. Mantua.
Indeed patronage had changed. It is no longer spontaneous but organized. We now have academies, art schools, art criticism, exhibitions, archæologists, picture dealers. Art no longer rests on generally accepted ideas and broad approbations, but is a game between experts.
To enumerate the followers of Michelangelo and Raphael and allot to each his due dispraise would be in no way profitable. Giulio Romano may represent them all. With extraordinary powers as a draughtsman of the figure, and with paradoxical taste in minor decoration, we know him already as the vulgarizer of Raphael’s designs in the Stanza of Heliodorus and of the Burning City. Later (1524–46) removed from Raphael’s influence, at Mantua, he develops a coarse titanism. The old Castello of the Gonzagas and the Palazzo del Tè, Figure [310], are tediously full of sensational and occasionally obscene mythologies which are done with amazing energy and facility, but are as restless and undecorative in design as they are hot and foxy in color. And the immoderations and indecencies have not even the excuse of naturalness, they are coldly calculated and studied. Such talented Florentine imitators of Michelangelo as Pontormo and Bronzino we have already considered. At Rome, he left at least one disciple of talent, Daniele da Volterra, in the composition of whose masterpiece the Deposition in the Convent of the Trinità, at Rome, the master himself may have had a hand. Rather than delay over these complacent epigones we do well to pass to those few more intelligent artists who saw that something was amiss.
Michelangelo Amerighi, (1569–1608), called from his Lombard birthplace Caravaggio, and Annibale Carracci of Bologna are here the outstanding names. The former bitterly fought the grand style in the name of naturalism, the latter attempted to reintegrate it through a critical eclectism. Their influence is dominant from the last decade of the sixteenth century.
Caravaggio[[88]] had carefully studied the impressionistic manner of late Titian but finally adopts a harsh and resolute chiaroscuro with the light restricted and the canvas mostly black. Thus his modelling is both brutal and academic. His real fight was with the nobility of Raphael. His saints are taken from the streets and often from the gutters. He loves character above all, and wants it proletarian. Within his chosen limitations he is a powerful and sincere artist. His masterpieces are the Entombment in the Vatican, and the Death of the Virgin in the Louvre, Figure [309], which created so much disapproval that it had to be removed from its altar. Both pictures take the theme out of the realm of legend, making it drastic and contemporary. Both, while rejecting all grandeur in the figures, preserve the tradition thereof in the composition. One gets Caravaggio in epitome in The Peter denying his Lord of the Vatican. Figure [311]. It is a powerful character study from low life. Indeed character is his watchword. One finds it extravagantly over-emphasized in his famous pothouse and gambling scenes, a revolutionary innovation. The most famous and one of the best is The Card Players, at Dresden, Figure [312]. It is the symbol of the painter’s love of low life. He killed his man in a duel, and died himself when turned out of prison into the August sun.
Before that fitting end he had fled to Naples where amid the corruption of the Spanish overlordship his proletarian ideals became generally contagious. They were taken up eagerly by the Valencian, José Ribera, who with an equal sense for character and a more genuine religious feeling transmitted the manner to Seville and eventually to Velasquez. So Caravaggio became the founder of the modern realistic and impressionistic schools, a precursor of Courbet and Manet. Except for a surplusage of too emphatic character studies, smiling and weeping philosophers, Ribera was a true and most skilful artist. Having no quarrel with an earlier grand style, he had the grace of simplicity.
Fig. 311. Caravaggio. St. Peter denying his Lord.—Vatican.
Fig. 312. Caravaggio. The Card Players.—Dresden.
Both at Rome and Naples swaggering Caravaggio had enormous success. His heads, we read, brought more than other men’s compositions. He boasted himself the greatest painter of all time, and was often believed. From his swarthy tones his entire school took the name, the Tenebrists. His experiments in interior and artificial lighting were widely imitated, and again ultimately passed into recent Impressionism. His rejection of noble form in favor of what one sees, and of decorative color in favor of natural, was the sharpest possible challenge of the Renaissance style, and outside of Italy where the noble tradition was only incipient did much to arrest its diffusion. From the point of view of modern art there are few more important figures. From the point of view of art broadly he has his serious limitations. Most damaging is his waiver of civilization, he looks at low life not with the eyes of a detached artist but with those of a ruffian. He did not have the intelligence to live up to his own formula. Annibale Carracci was once looking at Caravaggio’s Judith, and, being pressed for an opinion, remarked that it was “too natural.” He spoke as an admirer of the grand style. A modern realist would make the far more radical criticism that Caravaggio is never natural enough. He really makes no close study of the subtleties of natural appearance or of the actual refinements of illumination, but rather substitutes for the old stately formulas a new, more ugly, and less studied formula of his own. Logically he should have gone forward with Ribera and Velasquez to a real investigation of appearances. But his logic was only that of scorn, and it would doubtless have somewhat compensated him for a sordid and premature end, could he have forseen that his biographers would credit him with the ruin of Italian painting.
Through Ribera, Caravaggio’s influence passes to the Neapolitan, Salvator[[89]] Rosa (1615–1673). With greater vivacity and better color Salvator repeats the character studies and tavern scenes, also bringing the proletarian mood into mythology. He painted battle pieces of real ferocity. He was an irascible, vain and capricious person, proud of being so; a scorner of his own patrons and of the bourgeois generally; a maker of epigrams, and a writer of satires. His specialty is the sinister and picturesque, and he practices it with gusto and ability, Figure [313]. Salvator is the real discoverer of the picturesque, the first enthusiast for the savage aspects of nature. Likewise he was one of the first artists to study effects—sunsets, storms, mists, and whirling clouds. He excursioned in the Abruzzo, equally savoring its crags, torrents, and forests, and its ferocious banditti. His letters on these wanderings are among the first and most important documents of the modern cult of nature. He writes: “You have saddened me by giving me the news of your having been in Garfagna, and having rejoiced in the savagery of that country so congenial to my nature.... To be merely reminded of it brings the tears to my eyes.” Again he writes from the Adriatic Apennines: “I have been two weeks in continual travel and the trip is much more strange and picturesque than that of Florence, beyond comparison so, since there is such an extravagant mixture of the rough and cultivated, of the level and precipitous that nothing more could be desired for the satisfaction of the eye.”... “At Terni, four miles off the road I saw the famous falls of the Velino, a thing to haunt and possess the most insatiable mind because of its horrid beauty. To see a river that plunges straight down a mountain for half a mile, and sends up its foam as high!” Much of the stormy and energetic character of such scenes is transcribed in the best landscapes of Salvator, Figure [314]. In their age they evoked little following. But these forests, cascades, evening seaports, and ruined sites were freely bought by the English, greatly admired and had their part in producing the literary enthusiasm for wild nature in the eighteenth century.
Fig. 313. Salvator Rosa. Landscape with figures.—Pitti.
Salvator avows his “extravagant genius,” is driven by the lust for novelty, is a modern and romantic spirit. Withal he was a man of capacity and taste with an open-minded understanding of quite alien merit. “Here, we esteem M. Poussin,” he writes in October, 1665, “more than any one else in the world.”
Poussin could never have returned the compliment. His approbation was for Raphael, the Carracci and Domenichino. Indeed a chief glory of the Bolognese Eclectics was that their critical method sufficed to nurture so classic a spirit as Poussin’s and so to establish the academic tradition for Northern Europe.
Fig. 314. Salvator Rosa. Landscape.—Pitti.
Though the Eclectic movement is properly associated with the cousins Lodovico and Annibale Carracci,[[90]] it somewhat antecedes them. The impetus comes from Flanders with the painter of Antwerp, Denis Calvert, who came to Bologna late in the sixteenth century and founded an art school. Like all the better educated Flemings, he represented a profound nostalgia for Renaissance grandeur, and also a certain detachment from the particular Italian artists who had embodied the ideal of grandezza. Such a man is, perforce, an eclectic, studying widely the methods of his great predecessors and seeking to assimilate in his own art their various perfections. Besides, methods of comparative study which had formerly been extremely difficult if not impossible were now easy. Casts were available of the antique marbles, fairly faithful engravings were at hand for all the great painters. It is significant that both the Carracci were reproductive engravers. Denis Calvert was no genius, but a prudent and sagacious artist who made the most of a slender endowment. His critical and assimilative spirit passed over to his best pupils. Their reform, unlike Caravaggio’s, was not revolutionary, but based on a careful restudy of the grand style, which they had never wavered in venerating.
Annibale Carracci was reared in devotion to Raphael, whose fine St. Cecilia was at Bologna. Venice lured him, but he was rebuffed by Tintoretto. Annibale made profound studies of Correggio at Parma, whence he writes that Raphael now seems wooden to him in comparison. He is now launched on the impossible quest of combining with the austere grandeur of the Roman School, the charm of Venetian coloring and the emotional instability of Correggio. Thus it was an attempt to restore the grand style largely in the name of one of its chief disintegrators, and as such it was from the first headed for failure. Yet it was an attempt dictated by the times, and the inevitable choice of any superior spirit who wished to reknit the Renaissance tradition.
It was the moment of the Catholic Reaction and of the endeavor of the new Jesuit Order to rebuild a shaken Church on the basis of persuasion. Largely shorn of authority, the Church must now be popular or perish. It wisely chose to be popular, adopting the thrilling novelties of Baroque architecture, borrowing from the opera its swelling choral cadences, everywhere stressing the note of charm, surprise and emotion. So the moderation and austerity which underlay the Renaissance style were forbidden to the Eclectics, and they chiefly differed from the rival Naturalists in choosing to make their sensationalism as decorous as the circumstances permitted. Such is the social background of the Carracci’s reform, and they deserve utmost credit for achieving so much under such limitations.
Fig. 315. Lodovico Carracci. Assumption.—Bologna.
Fig. 316. Annibale Carracci. Madonna in Glory.—Bologna.
Agostino (1568–1602) was the brains of the family, courtier, scholar, man of the world. Annibale (1560–1609) was the nerves,—moody, shy, solitary, with titan ambitions in a small and unprepossessing frame. His cousin, Lodovico (1555–1619), was possibly the best artist of the three if only because he attempted less and followed sentimentalism frankly without too much bothering about grandeur.
Lodovico, Figure [315], and Annibale, Figure [316], enriched the churches of Bologna with great animated altar-pieces which enthralled their contemporaries, and today seem more than a little affected. But that is merely because we no longer share what was an entirely sincere way of religious feeling. They started an Academy in which the antique, the nude, and competitive composition were the staple of instruction quite as in French and British State art schools today. In the Bolognese palaces the Carracci did in fresco great mythological series, consulting Homer, Virgil and Ovid and Apollonius of Rhodes. In the main they had friezes to do, and they drew heavily from Correggio, tempering his alacrity with something of the heavier energy of the Roman style.
In 1585 the Carracci set up their Academy. It was soon thronged. Agostino, a courtly, learned and accomplished person, was the leading influence, being lecturer as well as drawing master. Even, Annibale, habitually an offish and difficult man, is said to have been affable and helpful to his disciples.
In studying his pictures, one feels that he was thwarted of his true development. Not only was he much of a realist, painting tavern scenes, Figure [317], after Caravaggio’s lead, but also a studious and charming landscape painter, Figure [318]. His soberly colored and gracefully composed landscapes were an important influence on Poussin. Annibale’s adventures in the grand style, though audacious and loudly applauded, really did some violence to his modest and sensitive spirit. His was the least academic temperament imaginable, and the final disastrous quarrel with his eminently academic brother, Agostino, was inevitable.
Fig. 317. Annibale Carracci. The Bean Eater.—Prince Colonna, Rome.
Fig. 318. Annibale Carracci. Flight to Egypt.—Doria, Rome.
Fig. 319. Annibale Carracci. Ceiling Detail.—Farnese Palace, Rome.
Annibale and Agostino were called to Rome in 1595 to fresco Cardinal Odoardo Farnese’s palace. Annibale was thirty-five years old, Agostino a few years younger. Both had reaped all honors possible at Bologna, and they came to the Eternal City at a fortunate moment. The favorite decorators were men of routine talent, Taddeo Zuccaro and the Cavaliere d’Arpino. Caravaggio’s amazing and perturbing genius had already asserted itself, but he was not a mural painter. After a preliminary series of mythologies in the riverside casino of the Palazzo Farnese, Annibale turned, in 1597, to the decoration of the great hall. It was a lofty tunnel-like room of refractory proportions. The theme was to be the loves of the gods. But the great spaces in which are represented Bacchus and Ariadne, the Judgment of Paris, Polyphemus and Galatea, Cephalus and Aurora, Hero and Leander, amongst other subjects, yield in effect to the general plan and the incidental decoration. Annibale, who despite contemporary accounts to the contrary, controlled everything, has taken as his motive the architectural framework which Michelangelo designed for the Sistine, with its burden of decorative nudes. One looks past heavy painted cornices, Figure [319], to painted statuary in profusion, thickly set, and, behind, more nudes in natural hues, the whole echoed by nudes in stucco relief on the walls. We have instead of the relative flatness of Michelangelo and his predecessors a consistent lumpiness, which, while theoretically tasteless, is actually rich, satisfying, and even light. Only an extraordinary ability could have kept any kind of unity in this wilful and extravagant complexity, Figure [320]. But unity there is and coherent expression of a mood at once pompous and festal.
Fig. 320. Annibale Carracci and Helpers. Grand Hall, Farnese Palace.—Rome.
The pictures, as we have noted, seem to count for less than their borders. When we examine the love scenes, we find them at once coarse and mannered. They are superficially like Giulio Romano at Mantua but without his self-satisfied brutality. To this extent they are inferior, and indeed the strain to be at once grand, graceful, and passionate is only too apparent throughout the pictorial part. Yet as a whole the decoration seems hardly inferior in power, ingenuity, and rhythmical fulness to such ancient masterpieces of kindred inspiration as the Pergamon frieze. For the moment the decoration was enthusiastically acclaimed, after three-quarters of a century it taught Charles Le Brun the way to decorate the Louvre and the Palace at Versailles, and even today the admirer of the fountains of Rome and of her Baroque churches must admit that Annibale caught the very spirit of his day, in its superfluity of learned vaingloriousness and shortage of the simpler and more noble passions.
Fig. 321. Guido Reni. Madonna with two Saints.
For the artist the work brought only chagrin. The Cardinal treated him with stinginess and personal spite. His irritation with his brother reached the explosive point. Agostino left him staggering under the weight of an ungrateful task, he fell into a dangerous melancholy, and in 1609 died miserably, leaving his helpers Albani and Domenichino to finish the gallery.
Of the followers of the Carracci, Guido Reni[[91]] (1575–1642) and Domenichino (1581–1641), are the most important. At his worst Guido Reni is the most repellant of sentimentalists, at his best a realist of the calibre of Ribera himself. In his time there are no grander old men than his, better painted or more fully realized as characters. You find them at their best in the Madonna of St. Paul, at Berlin, or the Immaculate Conception at Petrograd, or the Madonna with St. Jerome, in the Vatican, Figure [321]. It is hard to reconcile them with his sleek and cheaply seductive Magdalens, Cleopatras and Venuses. What steadies him in his inconsistency is a fine and simple sense of composition. He is lucid where his masters, the Carracci, tend to be confused. His taste is more coherent than his character. Under other conditions than those of academic Bologna and Papal Rome he might easily have become a realist of Zurbaran’s type. As it was, he undertook the usual synthesis of the grand style with the new sentimentality. Generally speaking he is neither grand nor sentimental enough, but superficial in both regards. Yet his discretion saves him in such works as the ceiling of the Villa Rospigliosi (1615) and the supremely elegant St. Michael, Figure [323], of the Cappucini. I like the Aurora, Figure [322], nay love it well this side of idolatry, for the same reason that I like Kipling’s lines
“An’ the dawn comes up like thunder
Outer China ’crost the bay.”
Both the fresco and the verses have the same pounding and obvious, yet thrilling cadences, both bring lyricism to the brink of bombast without letting it go over.
Fig. 322. Guido Reni. Aurora. Ceiling Fresco.—Casino Rospigliosi, Rome.
Fig. 323. Guido Reni. Saint Michael.—Cappucini, Rome.
Fig. 324. Domenichino. Last Communion of St. Jerome.—Vatican.
Domenico Zampieri, called Domenichino,[[92]] (1581–1641) is a far more serious figure. We see him best not in the sentimental sibyls which he multiplied nor even in the studied emotionalism of his most famous altar-piece, the Last Communion of St. Jerome, in the Vatican, Figure [324], but, rather in such decorations as those in S. Andrea della Valle, and in the monastic church of Grotta Ferrata. Here we find a heavy and simple emphasis, a great clarity both of figure construction and of composition. For his personal awkwardness, patience and quietism his comrades mockingly called him the Ox. It took character to play the ox amid the febrile sprightliness of the Catholic Reaction. His gravity is marked also in his color. He forsakes the old decorative conventions of the Renaissance and works in olive and silvery tones which suggest in a generalizing way the coolness and freshness of nature. Above all he is not facile like most of his contemporaries, but studious, dilatory, and considerate. At times he yields to the prevailing sentimentality, but usually he is both spontaneous and reticent. He seldom insists, but candidly lets the picture be seen. All these qualities appear in the modestly hoydenish masterpiece, Diana and her Nymphs, in the Borghese Gallery, Figure [325]. It is completely captivating for its element of surprise, its manly wholesomeness, its winsome setting of lithe girlish bodies amid verdure under a gray sky. This unaffected mood in mythology has rarely been recaptured. We have it in Vermeer’s little Diana at the Hague and, only yesterday, in the Nausicaa of Lucien Simon. Such qualities of lucidity, reserve, and simple nobility made Domenichino the natural model for Nicholas Poussin. We can trace the influence through Poussin’s masterpieces, and had France been wise enough to understand her greatest painter, her academic tradition, which was promoted in Poussin’s name, might have taken a much more fruitful course than it actually did.
Fig. 325. Domenichino. Diana and her Nymphs.—Borghese, Rome.
An ill fate finally took Domenichino to Naples. There he found the ruffianly local painters banded against every foreigner, and in particular he met the systematic animosity of the truculent Spaniard, Ribera. Outright terrorism alternated with petty persecution. They defaced his work and tampered with his materials. Soon they broke his delicate and timid spirit, even turned him against the wife with whom he had lived on terms of ideal affection. Today it remains uncertain whether he died of shattered nerves or was actually poisoned. Presumably the barbarous Neapolitans would have done about the same to any visiting artist, but doubtless they turned the screw a shade harder upon a gentle idealist who brought into their realistic stews some afterglow of the quietistic dignity of a Montagna or a Cima.
When all reservations are made, the Eclectics had fairly done their work of correcting the disorder of the late Renaissance and of restoring something of the old decorum. They made possible the revival of the grand style at Rome, in the eighteenth century, by Carlo Maratta and Raphael Mengs. The Eclectics were the bridge by which the classical manner passed over into Western Europe, an indispensable link in the chain of the great hellenistic tradition. That should be enough to keep them in memory if not in unqualified honor.
Our review of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth, century in Italy will have served its purpose if it has convinced the reader that this was no time of stagnation. We have rather to do with activities of exploration and reconstruction which are much too restless and various. The intellectual power of the Italian painters had not greatly diminished in comparison with the Renaissance. Italy still was capable of giving the leads which have guided painting elsewhere ever since. What was lacking was not energy but patience, reflection and taste. The Italian artist tended to regard himself as a swift and resolute executant first of all, and no longer knew how to nourish his spirit as a man. Even as executants, the realists and eclectics had the humiliation of finding themselves outdone by foreigners. Successively in the seventeenth century Ribera, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez, Claude Lorrain and Poussin came to Italy and sojourned there. It was in every case apparent that the foreigner excelled all native artists in his field. The traditional authority of Italian painting still held, but its contemporary glory was evidently waning.
But even in decline Italy was strong enough to hand on her torch to newer hands. From Titian stems the florid classicism and aristocratic portraiture of Rubens and Van Dyck, which dominated the whole eighteenth century in France and England; through Caravaggio and Ribera, Italy made Velasquez the founder of those most characteristic nineteenth century movements, realism and impressionism; through Raphael, the Carracci and Domenichino, she fed the white flame of Poussin’s classicism, which in one way or another has determined the academic development of all Western Europe. Thus Italian painting, eternally alive in the timeless region where dwells the fame of Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Giorgione, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, is as well most practically and actually alive in the recent and present struggles, failures, and triumphs of our modern schools. Without understanding Italian painting we cannot understand our own painting. And while the modern world will hardly return to the coherence, solidity, and grace of the great Gothic and Renaissance masters, I am confident that there can be no exit from our present confusion and incoherence until our painters learn at least to consult those great Italian predecessors who dwelt on the heights above which is the abode of the human spirit’s creative rest.