A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER VII

Praise of Mantegna in the Renaissance

The immense authority of Mantegna kept his name on all honor lists of painters long after his death.

Lorenzo of Pavia, writing in 1504 to Isabella d’Este, says of a Madonna by Giovanni Bellini:

“The Painter has made a great effort to do himself honour, chiefly out of respect to M. Andrea Mantegna, and although it is true that in point of invention it cannot compare with the work of Messer Andrea, that most excellent master, I pray Your Excellency to take the picture, both for your own honour and also because of the merit of the work.”

Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, New York, 1903, Vol. I, p. 351.

A little later Lorenzo writes:

“And, as I have said before, in point of invention no one can rival Andrea Mantegna, who is indeed a most excellent painter, the foremost of our age. But Zuan Bellini excels in colouring.” l. c. 352.

On Oct. 16, 1506, Lorenzo writes, on learning of Mantegna’s death:

“I am much grieved to hear of the death of our Messer Andrea Mantegna. For indeed we have lost a most excellent man and a second Apelles, but I believe that the Lord God will employ him to make some beautiful work. As for me, I can never hope to see again a finer draughtsman and more original artist.”

Isabella replied:

“Lorenzo,—We were sure that you would grieve over the death of M. Andrea Mantegna, for, as you say, a great light has gone out.”

l. c. I. 369.

Titian’s View of Mantegna

As late as 1519, Titian admired the Mantegnas at Mantua. Girolamo da Sestola, Isabella’s music master, writes to her:

“M. Dosso and M. Tiziano, another good master who is making a fine picture here [The Bacchanal, at Madrid] for the Lord Duke, went to Mantua. He saw all Mantegna’s works, and praised them greatly to our signor, and he also praised your studies. But above all, he admired your Tondo [the frescoed ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi, Fig. [219]] exceedingly, and calls it the finest thing he has ever seen. Our Signor has one here, but Titian says yours is incomparably the finest.”

l. c. II. 171, 2.

Ariosto’s Honor List of Painters

Ariosto as late as 1515 still includes Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini among the best artists. The list is instructive as to the fallibility of contemporary judgments. The two Dossi and Sebastiano del Piombo today have lost their place in the roll.

“And those who were and still are in our days—

Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Giambellino,

The Dossis, he who chiselled and colored equally

Michel, more than mortal, Angel divine,

Sebastian, Raphael, Titian who honors

No more Cadore, than they Venice and Urbino.”

Orlando Furioso, Canto XXXIII, 2.

Lomazzo’s List of Great Painters and Their Kindred Poets

“Each painter has naturally had a genus more conformable to one poet rather than another, and has followed that poet in his work, as it is easy to see in the modern painters. For one sees that Leonardo has expressed the movement and decorum of Homer, Polidoro the grandeur and sweep of Virgil, Michelangelo the profound obscurity of Dante, Raphael the pure majesty of Petrarch, Andrea Mantegna the keen judgment of Sannazaro, Titian the variety of Ariosto, and Gaudenzio Ferrari the devotion which one finds expressed in the books of the saints.”

Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’ Arte delle Pittura, Milan, 1584, p. 283.

See also Castiglione’s list in Illustrations to Chapter VI, p. 313.

Giorgione—Leonardo on Rural and Pastoral Delights

“What moves thee, O man, to quit thy city habitations and leave thy friends and kin, and go in places wild by reason of mountains and valleys, if not the natural beauty of the world, the which, if thou well considerest, thou enjoyest only through the sense of sight? And if the poet wishes to call himself also a painter in such matters, why do you not take such sites as described by the poet and stay at home without feeling the excessive heat of the sun? And would not this be more useful and less wearisome since it is done in coolness and without moving about and risk of illness?

“But the mind cannot enjoy the benefit of the eyes, windows of its habitation, and cannot receive the varieties of delightful spots, cannot see the shady valleys furrowed by the play of winding streams, cannot see the various flowers which with their colors make a harmony for the eye—and so with all the things which can be represented to that eye.”

“But if the painter in the cold and harsh winter time sets before thee those same places painted, and others, in which thou mayest have experienced thy pleasures beside some fountain, thou canst see again thyself as a lover, with thy loved one in blossoming meadows, under the sweet shadow of verdurous trees—wilt thou not receive quite an other pleasure than from hearing such an effect described by the poet?”

Leonardo, Trattato, Wien, 1882, p. 44.

This is so fully in the mood of Giorgione’s idyllism that one likes to think that he may have talked over such themes with Leonardo when they met in Venice in 1500.

Fig. 260. Titian. Bacchus and Ariadne.—London.

Chapter VIII
VENETIAN PAINTING OF THE RENAISSANCE

Titian before 1545—Some contemporaries, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma Vecchio—The advent of Modern Sensitiveness in Lorenzo Lotto—Moretto of Brescia—Correggio—Titian’s last Manner, its subjectivism and impressionism—The Portraitist Moroni—Tintoretto and the new dramatic emotionalism—Paolo Veronese, his spectacular mastery and impressionism, his characteristic works—Eighteenth Century Venetians: Tiepolo, Canaletto and Guardi—Longhi.

The glory of Venetian painting is to an unusual degree that of a single individual, Titian[^[78]] of Cadore. He lived nearly a hundred years, from 1477 to 1576, and we can trace his painting for more than seventy years of serene and unbroken progress. He had great contemporaries—Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma Vecchio, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Lorenzo Lotto, Moroni, Moretto of Brescia—but so various and comprehensive is his achievement that their work seems merely so many extensions of the paths first explored by him. In his noble and measured sensuousness, he seems nearer the Greeks than any other Italian painter.

If he is something less than admirable as a character, it is because of an unpleasantly calculating side. He schemed ruthlessly for preferment and lucrative sinecures, had the repute of envying young artists of talent, flattered to the limit his Hapsburg patrons, bargained and begged concerning prices, let himself be puffed egregiously by his blackguard friend, Pietro Aretino, first and most formidable of yellow journalists. Yet this element of craft in the man was eminently Venetian. They schemed for splendor and pleasure, and measured even their indulgences. Thus we should not expect lyrical raptures or extremes of any sort in Titian. His art is one of judgment and moderation. Indeed that calculating spirit which makes him unamiable as a man was a source of strength to him as an artist. One of his pupils, Palma Giovine, has described his manner of working. First he laid in his pictures heavily in neutral tones. Then he turned them to the wall for months to dry. Then he would pass from one to the other, scrutinizing each “as if it were his worst enemy.” He would add color, amend drawing and composition, thus systematically carrying many pictures forward at a time, and subjecting each to repeated criticism and correction. He never painted a figure at one go, saying that “he who improvises his song never achieves learned verses or well turned.” Precisely the greatness of Titian lay in his capacity to put ardor into these prolonged critical processes. Thus if certain raptures are denied him, he is never below himself, but always as noble in sentiment as he is resplendent in color.

Tiziano Vecellio was born at Cadore, in the Dolomites, in 1477.[^[79]] Its shadowy oaks and blue alps live in his backgrounds. At eleven he was put with a mosaic worker, Zuccati, at Venice. He may have worked for a time with Gentile Bellini, but attained his real development in the studio of Giovanni Bellini, under the stimulus of his fellow pupil, Giorgione. This intimate and poetical phase of Titian’s genius lasts from before 1505 to 1516 and the Assumption.

His second period is that of fullest color and vitality. It runs from 1517 to say 1536, Titian’s fortieth to fifty-ninth year, and the characteristic works are the monumental altar-pieces at Venice and the Mythologies painted for the Este family at Ferrara.

The third period extends from about 1537 to 1548. It is marked by deeper resonances of color that is tending towards tone, and by a more objective and static ideal. Energy is no longer squandered, and intimate poetry is not sought. Typical works are those mythologies and portraits done for the Duke of Urbino, and the early Hapsburg portraits.

Fig. 261. Titian. Portrait so-called “Ariosto.”—London.

Fig. 262. Titian. Portrait of a Youth.—Temple Newsham, England.

The fourth period begins with 1548 or a little earlier, Titian’s seventieth year, and lasts nearly thirty years till his death. A looser and more synthetic construction, the substitution of broken shades and tone for frank color, a more tragic and ardent mood, a more energetic grandeur of composition, with lesser formality, are the marks of this amazing last phase, in which Titian becomes a precursor of Rembrandt and Velasquez. Since he now works chiefly for the Hapsburgs, the great examples are at Madrid and Vienna.

Fig. 263. Titian. The Tribute Money.—Dresden.

The earliest Titians show the sultry shadows of Giorgione, and are distinguishable from his work only by a more linear quality, and by a greater explicitness of mood. Titian’s poetry is direct and rarely ambiguous. What ardors of flesh and spirit are suggested in his early portraits of men! The portrait of a bearded man in London, Figure [261], is conceived entirely in Giorgione’s fashion, as a short bust showing the hands, and the mysterious envelopment in warm shadow is Giorgione’s as is the sensitiveness of touch and characterization. But with all his gentle beauty, the man is formidable. His aloofness is no revery, but some preparation of will for action. Again Giorgione would hardly have labored to suggest the material splendor of the silvery satin sleeve. Even more perfect is the half-length of a young patrician at Temple Newsham, Figure [262], England. It is full of a reserved poetry, yet the effect is as well almost shrewd and diplomatic. This youth has the Venetian capacity for both passion and affairs. Both these portraits should be a little earlier than 1510. Such masterpieces of smouldering ardor as the Knight of Malta, erroneously ascribed to Giorgione and the Man with a Glove, at Paris, must be a little later. In concentration these are as fine as Giorgione’s portraits, but quite a different spirit transpires from the investing shadows. These men of Titian are no day-dreamers, but resolute and purposeful. They live little in memory and much in prospect. Their imagination implies action and possession. Even the drawing is more resolute. Study the eye sockets, temples, and cheek bones of these early Titians. Nowhere in Giorgione do you get such a sense of inner bony structure, of thicker and thinner cushions of flesh, of tenser or slacker skin. The method finds its most admirable expression in the two marvellous heads of the Tribute Money (1514–5), at Dresden, Figure [263]. Yet how little mystery or pathos is invoked. With a gesture and an expression of exquisite consideration and breeding, the Saviour baffles the most eager and fanatical of inquisitors. Nothing could be more unlike the abstracted and almost morose Christs of Giorgione. As usual, Titian stands on the ground of the finest worldliness, as the Greeks had done. With the supernal, whether in heaven or Arcadia, he has little concern.

Fig. 264. Titian. The Three Ages.—Bridgewater House, London.

In the early poesies Titian at once manifests his adoration of Giorgione and his own independence. In the Three Ages, Figure [264], at Bridgewater House we may grasp at its highest beauty his robust Arcadianism. In a meadow landscape an ardent nymph woos her bronzed swain. Complacently he accepts her unreserved advances. Nothing could be more explicit than the relation between the lovers, and with equal plainness an old man and sleeping child serve to teach us that youth and its sweetest ardors are but a brief pause between childhood and old age. Let us then seize the moments when nature and love are kind to us. Such is the forthright poetry of Titian. It is the poetry of every boy and every girl—simple, classic, unchangeable. Think of the overtones and personal interpretations with which Giorgione would have overlaid such a theme. Such twilight mysteries are alien to Titian’s fervent and lucid spirit. He loves the morning hour with work and love ahead, as Giorgione loves the veiling glamour and brooding memories of eventide.

Fig. 265. Titian. “Sacred and Profane Love.”—Borghese, Rome.

The Three Ages was probably painted about 1512, the far more famous poesy, misnamed Sacred and Profane Love, Figure [265], is two or three years later. The sumptuous variety and richness of Titian are here at their height. Luminous marbles, pearly nude forms, lustrous stuffs, dark shimmer of foliage and sun-swept slopes of grass seem created merely to set off their respective beauties of hue and texture. Purples, azure, rose, saturated greens form a sonorous chord of colors which is so satisfying that one scarcely asks why a Cupid stirs the waters of a magic fountain, and why a splendidly clothed figure sits tranquilly at the side while a superb nude figure turns impulsively and holds aloft a burning lamp.

Explanations of the fable abound. It is Venus persuading Helen to harken to Paris, or Medea to aid Jason. So the Germans. I am sure only that if we knew the meaning it would be quite as simple as these explanations. My friend, the late William P. Andrews, suggested that we have a lovely symbolism for the inquietude of maidenhood and the composure of matronhood—love in prospect and retrospect. The universality of the interpretation is in its favor. Titian’s mind worked socially and concretely. Plainly the nude figure is reminiscent of Giorgione’s listless beauty by the fountain in the Pastoral Concert, Figure [257]. Titian’s maiden lacks something of the momentary grace and spontaneity of her model, but has in compensation a fuller grandeur.

Fig. 266. Titian. Flora.—Pitti.

Perhaps the ideal portrait of Flora (1515–16), in the Pitti, Figure [266], should be reckoned with the poesies rather than with portraits. In material beauty few Titians excel it. The curded whites of the drapery vie with the flushed ivory of face and bosom. The sweetness of the impression is almost awe-inspiring. What a world it is that thrusts forth carelessly such beauty as this! Think of Giorgione’s quite similar Shepherd with the Pipe, Figure [259], and imagine again the twilight mystery with which he would have invested this apparition. Titian on the contrary thinks and feels like every man, but with an intensity and clearness quite his own. The lyrical and subjective note is incidental and superficial in him even when he most seems to resemble his lost comrade.

Titian’s progress in composition is best noted in the religious pieces. From the first he seeks to break up the old inert symmetries. He invents active balances, brings the main thrusts to the sides of the pictures rather than to the centre. Thus even his Conversation Pieces gain implications of action and energy. In the altar-piece of St. Peter with Donors, at Antwerp, perhaps as early as 1502, and still somewhat in Bellini’s style, we find the enthroned figure moved to the side and the accessory figures arranged in a processional approach. The somewhat later altar-piece of St. Mark at the Salute, painted probably in 1504, Figure [267], again evades the old central symmetries. The Saint is enthroned off centre and his position gains great energy and novelty from its elevation and consequent foreshortening. The four plague saints keep the old symmetry, their types are partly from Bellini (the St. Sebastian), partly from nature. The structure in glowing shadow is that of Giorgione. We trace the same evasion of old symmetries and the same Giorgionesque fire in the Baptism of Christ, in the Capitoline at Rome, and Christ and Mary Magdalen, at London. Such pictures with their slightly conscious emphasis prepare the way for the more assured and sonorous harmonies of the great altar-backs of the ’20s.

Fig. 267. Titian. St. Mark with Plague Saints.—Salute.

The Madonnas and Conversation pieces again show us most vividly how his taste is working. The Gipsy Madonna, Figure [268], at Vienna, painted about 1505, is highly Giorgionesque, but Giorgione never painted such sculptural forms, nor ever conceived so resolute a Christchild. Even the throwing of the outlet to one side reveals Titian. At Madrid and Vienna are superb half-length Madonnas arranged symmetrically after Bellini’s fashion, but with greater freedom of pose. Titian soon saw that the old compositional forms could not express the new energy. He makes repeated experiments, shifts the Madonna to one side, as in the unfinished Madonna with St. Anthony at Florence. He adds figures and rearranges them until the Conversation piece becomes an audience, with the saints and donors approaching the Madonna, as in an Adoration of the Magi. We find the completed form in the admirable Conversation piece, of about 1510 with its two versions in the Louvre and at Vienna, Figure [269]; and considerably later, a further development in those numerous full-length Holy Families in landscapes of which the Madonna of the Hare (1530), Figure [270], and The Marriage of St. Catherine, at London, are consummate types. And with all the conscious experimentalism of this work, the sense of character and of beauty is unperturbed. As compared with the contemporary Holy Families of Raphael, the accent is more individual and local. These superb Madonnas and gracious female saints with attendant martyrs and church doctors, are merely the lads and lasses of Carpaccio’s legends, grown up to manhood and womanhood, increased in dignity and sweetness.

Fig. 268. Titian. Gipsy Madonna.—Vienna.

Fig. 269. Titian. Madonna with Saints.—Vienna.

Until the death of Giovanni Bellini, in 1515, Titian seems a little hampered by his example as by that of Giorgione. Then, as if relieved of a restraint, Titian pursues his own aims. His design, in such great altar-backs as the Assumption and the Madonna of the Pesaro family, doubles its breadth and energy. His mythologies, in the bacchanals for the Alabaster Chamber of Alphonso d’Este, at Ferrara, are no longer pensive lyrics, but dithyrambs; primordial lyrics, for animation and power. The religious pictures, such as the noble Entombment in the Louvre, are no longer insistently pathetic. Subjective poetry is everywhere giving way to masculine assertion of the splendor of love, motherhood, comradeship. And these great objective commonplaces, which were the very staple in their day of Greek Epic and Sculpture, receive in Titian their finest modern embodiment. His new energy requires a changed color. All the hues are brighter and more resonant. Their harmonies no longer require the bond of deep shadow, but are positive and established at the middle of the color scale, where color is most itself. If the music of Giorgione was that of vibrating lute strings, that of Titian has the clarity and clangor of exquisitely harmonized woodwind and brass.

Fig. 270. Titian. Holy Family with Rabbit.—London.

Before sounding this new music, Titian prudently secured the sinecure, a Commissionership of the Salt Taxes, which old Giovanni Bellini had enjoyed. While scheming for it, he was designing also the most famous of his great altar-pieces, the Assumption, Figure [271]. It was finished in 1518, set on the high altar of the Friar’s Church, whither it has lately returned. Titian adopts a form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael had employed. The upper celestial tier is symmetrically arranged, almost in a domical way, the lower tier abounds in swinging turns and gestures, one carefully balancing the others. The forms are large and athletic, such as the Renaissance preferred, for greater gravity. Their weight is compensated by the ease with which they hold themselves and by the numerous floating and falling cherubs, playfully at home in their clouds, like so many celestial rose leaves for the crispness and lightness with which Titian’s brush has touched them in.

Fig. 271. Titian. The Assumption.—S. M. dei Frari.

Fig. 272. Titian. Pesaro Madonna.—Frari.

An over-spiritual observer might ask, Why are the Apostles so jubilant at losing their beloved Mistress? Only a little earlier, Giovanni Bellini, who painted the theme for San Pietro Martire at Murano, invested his witnesses with pathos, silence, wonder and awe. In comparison Titian is obvious, and barely reverent. He thinks of nothing but that this is Mary’s moment of highest glory, so of course her friends cheer boisterously as they wave her off heavenwards. Titian’s mind does not work in half tones of sensibility, yet he is honestly religious in his own way. The Lord’s people are good enough for him, and he likes them not in the hush of devotion but in the expansive moments of action. The attitude is operatic. Choruses have no business with overtones, all voices shall be robusto. What infallible taste he shows along these simple lines! There is no smallness, no mere floridness of utterance, no hint of over-emphasis. Such art is the despair of the modern artist. He cannot feel so simply. The great enduring commonplaces are denied to his more complicated genius.

Perhaps Titian is even more himself in the Madonna of the Pesaro Family, Figure [272], which was in hand from 1519 to 1526. For animation he sets the throne of Mary to the right, and carries splendid columns back in depth. He gives to every gesture of saint or donor a balancing relation to the gracious curve of the body of the Queen of Heaven. He renews the Giorgionesque mystery in the portraits of children, adds picturesque accessories of armor, velvet, and silken banner. The picture is as rich as it is logical and monumental, as varied in character as it is unified in mood. It is only by chance that it stands almost over Titian’s tomb, and yet it would have been hard to find a picture that better represents both his more intimate and his more objective perfections. Even such masterpieces as the Madonna with six Saints in the Vatican (1523), and the lost Slaying of Saint Peter Martyr (before 1530), which enjoyed three centuries of praise, seem a little set and over-reasonable in comparison.

Alphonso d’Este’s Alabaster Chamber at Ferrara represented the high point of mythological poesy for the Full Renaissance, as Castello with its Signorelli and Botticellis marked a similar culmination for the Early Renaissance. It is lamentable that we see these essential expressions of two great moments torn from their context and relegated to the promiscuity of museums. Yet the scattered poesies from the Alabaster Chamber remain a delight, at London, Madrid, and Philadelphia, and give us the truest impression of the pagan greatness of Titian in his maturity. For this series old Giovanni Bellini, in 1514, painted a sylvan Feast of the Gods, Figure [242]. Titian, succeeding to the work, freely repainted the landscape, to harmonize it with his own poesies. Two years later Titian set up The Worship of Venus, now in the Prado. Before the white image of the goddess the shadowy lawn swarms with winged loves. They frolic, dally, pluck apples shaken down by their mates from the trees above. The strong little bodies glow delicately like the inside of a great shell. A rhythm of joyous life runs through the picture. In due course Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard will fill earth and air with tumbling Cupids like these, but will hardly recapture the spontaneous ecstasy of this scene. It is baffling to learn that its origins are academic—from the imaginary gallery of the Alexandrian philosopher, Philostratus. Again a two year interval, for Titian ever declined to be hurried, and, in 1520, the Bacchanal, or Bacchus among the Andrians, was ready. About the lolling figures of two clothed nymphs, the sleek brown bodies of nude sylvans bend in grand gestures as they pour the wine. At the left Bacchus in professional aloofness goes about the serious business of emptying a flagon. At the right is flung the relaxed body of a nymph overcome by sleep and wine. Her splendid nudity shines forth in competition with a soaring afternoon cloud, while behind her a lightly draped shepherd dances with his lass. The orgy is swept by the clean breeze and dappled with sunlight—purifying elements. We have not intoxication in the gross sense, but the Greek notion of an elemental Bacchic inspiration.

The decoration was triumphantly completed in 1523 with the Bacchus and Ariadne, Figure [260], now in the National Gallery. The noisy train of the god of wine sweeps into the picture oblivious of the heroine. As the leopards swing the car along the strand, the God flings himself rapturously towards the form of startled Ariadne, who with a grand, hesitating gesture turns her head and body away while her legs and feet still bear her towards her wooer. The thing sparkles with wine-red and azure, tingles electrically with passion, gives forth a clamor which is also a harmony. Its exuberance is well contained in noble compositional forms. The passionate yet disciplined soul of Titian approaching fifty is fully expressed in this marvellous work.

Fig. 273. Titian. The Entombment.—Louvre.

Passing to the religious pictures once more, the Entombment, Figure [273], now in the Louvre, which was painted for the Gonzagas about 1525, is again a masterpiece of unaffected feeling and of finest disposition of masses. The central group looms against the sky with the grandeur of a great dome. Whoever has seen strong men caring for the dead or stricken will realize the reserve and nobility of acts which are expressions of sympathies too deep for words. I saw things like that at the Messina earthquake. Equally fine and restrained is the protective attitude of the Magdalen towards a Mary stark and mute with grief. Magnificent is the contrast of the grand nude forms of the dead Christ, with the rich stuffs in which the attendants are clothed. I imagine when Titian conceived this simple elegy with such power and pathos he may have had scornful reference to Raphael’s distorted and sensational version of the same theme, Figure [186]. And perhaps the æsthetic lesson of the picture is that choice feeling is far more difficult of attainment than fine painting.

In 1533, Titian, by command, met the Emperor Charles V at Augsburg, was promptly made a knight and later a count palatine. From now on he was much employed by the Emperor and his son Philip. With that relationship a change begins to come over his art. He becomes less exuberant, more official and objective. Titian at sixty has said almost every possible thing on his own account, and is content for a space to be observer and recorder of the stately world about him. We have descriptions of him at this time, maintaining a princely hospitality in his palace, and declining to share the dissipations which he willingly provided for such loose-living friends as Francesco Sansovino and Pietro Aretino.

He strangely depoetizes himself. The change comes somewhere about 1536, and a notable evidence of it is in the portrait of a lady in peacock blue velvet, in the Pitti. Posterity has agreed to call her simply La Bella, and so impersonal a style well befits her impassive beauty. Materially Titian has never painted more exquisitely, but it has become a painting of surfaces. The appeal is vague, general, social, there are no personal intimations, merely a magnificent statement of entirely obvious perfections.

Again Titian is content to be the mere painter in the so-called Venus of Urbino, Figure [274]. It was painted about 1538, and is in the Uffizi. Evidently the sleeping Venus of Giorgione is in Titian’s mind, but what a loss in awaking her! Titian sees the gracious forms for what they are of nacreous light and rosy shadow, he sees the room for what it is in distribution of curtained interior and alcove space irradiated by morning light. He studies curiously the delicate nuances of bluer sheet and creamier skin, he models out the slender body with faintest investment of almost imperceptible shadow. In short, he is just a painter, but what a painter he is!

Fig. 274. Titian. Venus of Urbino.—Pitti.

About the same time he did the official portraits of Eleonora and Federigo Gonzaga. He treats them as grandees. They are imposing, almost pompous, every inch the prince and princess. He sees with a courtier’s eye, and gives to official portraiture that impersonal cast which it has since only too faithfully retained. He revives the great traditions of Venetian narrative painting. The great wall painting, in the Ducal Palace, of the Imperial Victory at Cadore has perished. Old copies and engravings tell us of its energy, picturesqueness and panoramic breadth. Fortunately the great mural canvas, finished in 1538 and representing Mary entering the Temple, is still in its place; for the old School of the Carità has become the Academy. In this picture Titian realizes all that the Veronese and Venetian painters from Altichiero down had sought for. Like his predecessors, he is chiefly spectacular, subordinating character, but he attains a monumental breadth which they never remotely glimpsed. The scheme is worked out in magnificent oblongs varied by triangular forms which repeat the motive of the steps. The chief narrative motives, the childish determination of the Virgin, the gracious expectancy of the high priest, the admiration of the women below, hold their own amazingly in the vast space. The surface sings with color. The painting was affixed to the wall in 1538, fully ten years before Paolo Veronese had made this sort of pageantry his special domain.

Almost as dispassionate is the great canvas, depicting Christ before the People (1543), at Vienna. It becomes less an expression of the submission of Christ than an exaltation of the Imperial power that has him in charge and of the mob spirit that cries for his blood. The architectural surroundings are magnificent. There are wonderful details, as in the howling boy at the left and the white form of a girl caught in the throng. Her sudden apparition as an element of relief and mystery anticipates by nearly a century a similar device in Rembrandt’s Night Watch.

Very characteristic in its patrician decorum is The Disciples at Emmaus, in the Louvre, Figure [275], which was painted about 1545. Here there is no intensity in the moment of surprise and revelation. Benignly the Christ breaks bread; reverently and without excitement the disciples give him his due worship. All the homeliness and surprise that are in St. Luke’s narrative, and that Rembrandt later emphasized, have been leveled out in the interest of discretion and nobility. The disciples show no more enthusiasm than a Venetian dignitary and prelate should.

Fig. 275. The Supper at Emmaus.—Louvre.

Two portraits which were both painted within the year 1545 show Titian at the parting of the ways. The Aretino, in the Pitti Palace, the even finer sketch being in the Frick Collection, New York, Figure [276], reveals the truculent and sensual man of letters in all his formidable massiveness. The satin and velvets in which he is clad are painted lightly but with fullest regard for their textures and material beauty. Titian liked Aretino and had profited by his bitter and venal pen. So without emphasizing Aretino’s effrontery and brutality Titian brings out his resolute intelligence.

In the portraits of Paul III, Figure [277], especially in that scene where the decrepit Pope muses craftily between two smooth flatterers and traitors, his own kinsmen, the sinister air seems filled with contesting wills. A veil of atmosphere interposes itself before the figures. The touch is light, contrasts are evaded, materials count for very little, there is no copying of rich surfaces. Even the color is reduced to tones of gray merely warmed with reds or cooled with blues.

Fig. 276. Titian. Pietro Aretino.—Frick Coll., N. Y.

Fig. 277. Titian. Paul III and his Nephews.—Naples.

In its tremulous psychology, in its reticence, in its substitute of richly broken monochrome for a gamut of real color, this picture is a kind of negation of everything Titian had attained. His remaining thirty years were given to ideals which are no longer bounded by the Venetian lagoon, but are as broad perhaps and indeterminate as the modern imagination itself. Before exploring this mystery of Titian’s renovation of his art at seventy, and since his Venetian style has closed, we may do well to consider some of his contemporaries at Venice and in Lombardy.

Sebastiano del Piombo[^[80]] was born at Venice in 1487, and like most of his generation emulated the smouldering harmonies of Giorgione. He paints such admirable portraits as the so-called Fornarina, at Florence, which long passed for a Raphael. He soon passes from the lyrism of Giorgione to a dramatic mode quite his own. He was called to Rome, made keeper of the Papal Seal, became an executant of Michelangelo’s designs, and thus indulged a losing rivalry with Raphael. He commands a heavy dignity in his male portraits, and in his various pictures of the Dead Christ and Mary, attains a robust and telling pathos. Down to his death, in 1547, he maintained a tradition of Giorgionesque color in the alien air of Rome, and represented something of the gravity of the Venetian Renaissance in a city rapidly giving itself to sensationalism.

Fig. 278. Palma Vecchio. Adoration of the Shepherds.—Louvre.

Palma Vecchio[^[81]] is a more considerable figure. Born at Serinalta amid the Bergamesque hills, in 1480, we find him at Venice, by 1505 among the pupils of Giovanni Bellini. Like the rest, he is touched by Giogione’s poetry, but on the whole he merely intensifies and refines upon simpler methods. He follows Titian in the conversation piece, and does many Arcadian Holy Families which are beautifully lighted, radiantly colored and felt with a warmth and simplicity that just misses sentimentality. Among the best is the Adoration of the Shepherds, Figure [278], in the Louvre.

With Titian, he loves women of generous build and he sets off their impressive charms by careful posing, employing all the new devices of counterpoise. One may see him at his grandest in the altar-piece of St. Barbara, Figure [279], painted after 1561. The saint is worthy to be the patroness of artillerymen. She holds her martyr’s palm like a field marshal’s baton, she is imperiously confident and yet gentle—a lovely Amazon of the Christian pantheon.

Fig. 279. Palma Vecchio.—S.M. Formosa.

In the Arcadian nude Palma has delicacy and refinement of workmanship, but the mood is obvious. For him beauty is literally skin deep, and he gives himself to the impossible competition of paint with nature’s nacreous shades and ineffable carnations. But he so nearly succeeds that just as a painter of lovely surfaces no Venetian painter quite equalled him, not even Titian, and with this single talent Palma almost made himself a great portraitist. Indeed if painting surfaces were all of portraiture, he would be the greatest portraitist of the Renaissance. But his big, blond models lose condition in his hands. Charming as is such a group as the Three Graces at Dresden, or the dozen or more single portraits of men and women, they lack the last quality of distinction. He tries to gain it by adopting rather overtly the pathos and wistfulness of Giorgione, but it doesn’t suit his exquisitely groomed cavaliers nor yet their even more exquisitely groomed and most ample light o’loves. Indeed, despite a handful of superb portraits, Palma has ever the air rather of a consummate beauty doctor than that of a great artist. However that be, his influence was widespread throughout Northern Italy, and especially around his native Bergamo. He died in 1528, leaving a Veronese pupil, Bonifazio, to complete his unfinished canvases and to carry on to the middle of the century his brilliant and gentle style. Within his narrow range Palma is admirable, never uneasy, never below himself. In his unperturbed Arcadianism and even in his harmless sentimentalism, in his delicacy and robustness, he seems more Venetian than the Venetians themselves.

Composure is the very soul of the grand style whether in fifth century Athens or in sixteenth century Florence, Rome, or Venice. It accepts the human spectacle as worthy and thrilling, admires without misgivings the best things that come before its eye. That is why radicals hate the grand style—and rightly, for it is always aristocratic, caring rather little for the average man and much for that privileged remnant which lives in highest bodily efficiency and mental ease. The grand style is on the side of what Matthew Arnold called the barbaric virtues of wealth, health, and generous living. The moment the artist begins to question the social order, to be curious about the foibles and fates of individuals as such, the grand style is in peril. This delicate and inquisitive sensibility makes its appearance in Italy not long after the death of Raphael. You will find it in Pontormo, at Florence, in Lorenzo Lotto, in the Venetic region, in Moretto of Brescia, above all in Correggio, more assertively in Tintoretto, and latent in Titian’s last phase. It is a tremor on the sea of history that heralds a new dawn.

Fig. 280. Lorenzo Lotto. Adoration of the Shepherds.—Brescia.

Lorenzo Lotto,[^[82]] born at Treviso in 1480, first and most characteristically embodies the new intimacy. He worked widely through Lombardy and the Marches, enjoying a transitory vogue at Venice. Trained in the austere methods of Alvise Vivarini, he soon gave himself to his own native melancholy. One may see his qualities and defects in the great Enthroned Madonna, in San Bartolommeo at Bergamo. Mr. Berenson has well remarked that the saints are no longer demi-gods and objects of worship, but “pious souls in whose faces and gestures we discern the zeal, the fervor, the yearning, the reverie, or even the sentimental ecstacy peculiar to the several temperaments most frequently occurring among the children of Holy Mother Church.” Note too how the stately architecture derived from Giovanni Bellini and the crowded figure group mutually dwarf one another. Intimacy and monumentality do not live well together. This picture was finished in 1516, the year that Titian began the Assumption. Does not the contrast show Lotto an alien in his time and a harbinger of ours? In later pictures of less monumental pretensions,—as in a Nativity, Figure [280], at Brescia, which may profitably be contrasted with Palma’s more assured version,—he attains a penetrating beauty of a morbid kind, and his sensitiveness makes him a most appealing portraitist. He has left an extraordinary gallery of shy, inadequate, sometimes morose and invalid men, and women, Figure [281]. They have not the confidence of the Renaissance, but hesitations like our own. Which shows perhaps that the Renaissance mood was ever urban and the affair of a minority of statesmen, merchants and humanists. In the little cities where there was no enlightened court the human spirit retained and betrayed its immemorial frailties and misgivings. Lotto died in 1556, having widely diffused his sensitive art through the Marca and Lombardy.

Fig. 281. Lorenzo Lotto. The Marriage Yoke.—Madrid.

Fig. 282. Moretto of Brescia. Madonna with St. Nicholas.—Brescia.

Fig. 283. Correggio. Detail of Ceiling.—Convent of S. Paolo, Parma.

It is significantly the provincial painters and not the born Venetians who indulge these quite feminine refinements of sensibility. Such a one is Moretto of Brescia, born in 1498 and active until 1555. Although closely in touch with Palma and Titian, he avoids their positive color and dreams his pictures in delicate harmonies of silver and blue. There is a morning coolness about them which anticipates certain perfections of early Velasquez and even of the figure painting of Corot. He is a distinguished spirit but an anomaly in the age of Aretino. Milton would have understood him. In portraiture, as in the richly clad nobleman of the National Gallery, he forces the note of picturesqueness to restlessness. In such religious pictures as the Madonna in Glory, (1540), in San Giorgio Maggiore, at Verona, or in the Madonna with St. Nicholas, at Brescia, (1539), Figure [282], he shows an ecstatic lyrical feeling, and finds the free and florid compositional forms to express it. It has an informality which Titian would never have permitted himself at this moment.

Fig. 284. Correggio. St. Augustine. Fresco. Toschi’s Copy.—Cathedral, Parma.

Of course the greatest of those who in the name of sentiment undermined the grand style was Antonio Correggio,[^[83]] a provincial painter, a disappointed and unsuccessful man, who lived out his less than fifty short years (1489?–1534) in or near Parma. His ideas he took from Mantegna, master of all Northern Italy, whose illusionism he carried a point further. He made in 1518 for the ceiling of the reception room of the Convent of San Paolo, Figure [283], a trellis through the verdurous ovals of which one sees pairs of nude boy geniuses at play. He paints away the domes of the Church of San Giovanni (1524) and of the Cathedral (1530), shows us Christ or His Mother soaring into the clouds with hosts of accompanying angels. He brings the clouds down through the painted wall and sets them before the pendentives. Church Doctors, Figure [284], or Evangelists ride their cloud-thrones easily in the company of the fairest nude angels of either sex. The painting fairly annuls the architecture. These decorative frescoes are so vital and so richly various that they demand admiration and disarm criticism. To walk among the demi-gods and goddesses that loll on the parapet painted about the Cathedral dome, Figure [285], is to have known the company of Homer’s immortals. The impression is over-powering and unforgettable. Cautious people have always resented such profusion and such unrestrained assertion of life and joy. At the time they called the dome, with its confusion of wriggling rosy legs of ascending angels, the “frog pond.” They cavilled at Correggio’s price and appealed to Titian, who knowing a miracle of fine workmanship, told them that if they turned the dome over and filled it with ducats, it would not be too much.

Fig. 285. Correggio. Detail of fresco decoration of Dome of the Cathedral. After Toschi’s Copy.—Parma.

It was Correggio’s distinction to fill an immense decoration with lyrical ecstacy. Michelangelo in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel had done as much in elegiac vein. Both set a destructive example to smaller men who followed. For two centuries after Correggio’s death in 1534 the clouds blew into churches, and rosy angelic apparitions cooled their nude charms in these clouds and dangled their delicate legs therefrom, and painters worked their will upon mere architecture, and the baroque style took possession of all Catholic Europe. At its best it is captivating even to an unwilling Protestant imagination, but it never regained the height of its beginnings in Correggio.

Fig. 286. Correggio. “The Day.”—Parma.

Fig. 287. Correggio. Marriage of St. Catherine.—Louvre.

In his religious pieces and mythologies, Correggio is respectful to the grand style. He had in one way or another taken account of his Titian, Raphael, and Michelangelo, and he builds his groups in their active symmetries. But such an allegiance to the decorous style is merely superficial, his affinities are with the following centuries and the devotees of sensibility. Even in a grandly composed picture like the Holy Family called The Day, Figure [286], the women are disquieting in their personal loveliness. There is no relation to the Parthenon marbles, as there always seems to be in Titian, no suggestion of a larger air. These Maries know love, and raptures and tears. In the somewhat earlier Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure [287], at Paris, the mood is simply one of great tenderness. In later pictures like the Madonna with St. George and the Holy Night, at Dresden, the excitement of all the figures becomes almost unpleasant. So, in the mythologies, Leda, or Danae, or Antiope, Figure [288], is not goddesslike but perturbingly feminine and desirable. A most delicate erotic appeal is in all this work. It is like Alexandrian sculpture. It is still noble, but less so than Titian or Raphael, less abstract and stylistic. The exquisite ambiguity of the mood is not quite compatible with the compositional formulas. One feels it is but a step and a legitimate one from Correggio to the rare, sentimental nudes of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua and Romney.

Fig. 288. Correggio. Jupiter and Antiope.—Louvre.

In every phase Correggio’s work is distinguishable by the most beautiful handling of color and light and dark. Like Moretto and Lotto he prefers a blonder scale than the Venetian, and makes his surfaces so many miracles of ivory, silvery grays and straw yellows, invested with shadow tenuously modulated, yet of strongest modelling power. He cares nothing about textures or individually rich passages; it is the whole picture that counts. The brush sweeps lightly and swiftly, there is no loading of color, everywhere an exquisite economy and a subtlety that conceals itself. At all points, technically as well as psychologically, Correggio deals in overtones. And by that token he is not of the Renaissance, but is greater or smaller than it, as you may choose to decide. He is more our contemporary than he is Titian’s.

Meanwhile Titian himself is passing into a subjective phase. In 1545 he was at Rome. Michelangelo, who offered him unusual courtesies, doubtless showed him the Sistine ceiling and the recently finished Last Judgment. Titian, as he writes himself, studied with humble amazement the “marvellous old stones” that the Roman soil was yielding up to the newly founded museums.

Fig. 289. Charles V. at Mühlberg.—Madrid.

Even before the Roman trip, his style begins to show an old man’s restless vehemence. The titanic ceiling decorations for the Salute, of 1543 and 1544, Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, display at once an almost sensational energy and a lesser regard for the superficial attractions of color. The rugged designs are hacked out in bold splotches of light and dark. The method begins to be luministic. The partial foreshortening of the figures to adjust them to being seen from below is the decorative compromise which prevails at Venice from Tintoretto to Tiepolo. The new point of view is easiest studied in Christ crowned with Thorns, in the Louvre. Titian passes swiftly through this overtly dramatic stage. The same year, 1548, that saw the Crowning with Thorns, saw also the equestrian portrait of Charles V, Conqueror, Figure [289], after the battle of Mühlberg. What is odd about the picture is the elimination of all military conventions—no battle reek, no stricken foes, no busy staff. Instead just the pale, inflexible, thoughtful face of a slight old man, physically frail but firmly seated on a cantering horse. There is no frank color except the purple scarf and the gold of armor and horse trappings. Everything is expressed in marvellous grays and browns which contain hints of all the colors. There is no linear drawing; edge melts into edge without abrupt contrasts. A twilight mystery, a veiled quality, adds immensely to the expression of melancholy and might. The mere spectacle of life has become relatively uninteresting to Titian. He rather meditates on those creative throes of the mind which underlie action. His conqueror is a thinker.

Fig. 290. Titian. The Rape of Europa.—Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston.

In Titian’s own portrait, of 1550, at Berlin, the new method is more strongly announced. The form grows out of a silvery gloom by reason of hesitating flickers of light which yet have extraordinary modelling power. In character the work is remarkable. One senses smouldering under the weathered surfaces of this man of seventy-three the most formidable capacities for wrath and for passion.

The nudes and mythologies of these final years, the various Danae’s and the Nymph and Faun at Vienna, the Calisto and Actæon at Bridgewater House, the Venus and Adonis at Madrid, all show a very different temper from the early poesies. There is no suggestion of meditative dalliance, no shy Arcadianism. These are mortals stung and lashed by desire. Love is not sweet on their lips but bitter and fateful. Even Europa, Figure [290], at Fenway Court, the finest of these later poesies, seems to fill the sunlight sky and sea with a spasm of erotic expectancy. Passion becomes cosmic. Strange capacities for tenderness also appear. Compare the Deposition in the Prado, Figure [291], of 1559, with the masterpiece of forty years earlier, Figure [273], at the Louvre. The noble domelike arrangement persists, but within the compositional dome what a change! The body of the Christ is no longer grandly disposed. It crumples as it is turned into the tomb. The thing has the unexpectedness of fact. The canvas is soberly incandescent with half-lit faces which gleam through the deep grays and browns. Each light is a focus of compassion. Titian himself, impersonating St. Joseph of Arimathea, supports the Christ.

Fig. 291. Titian. The Entombment.—Madrid.

Fig. 292. Titian. Education of Cupid.—Borghese, Rome.

In one of the latest poesies, the Education of Cupid, Figure [292], at the Borghese, Rome, the new method may be studied. The forms are built up of little and apparently indeterminate touches of russets and grays that glow from within. The form builds itself out vibratingly. It is no longer as palpable to the hand as that of the early Titians, but it is more palpable to the eye and to the mind. Tone has driven out color; atmospheric envelopment has replaced minute description; the artist merely creates gradations of light which afford the illusion of bulk. It is what we call today, rather loosely, impressionism, or, more accurately, luminism. In the character of these goddesses we have no longer wistfulness, that ineffable adolescent quality of Titian’s early poesies, but women fully conscious of their power to give or take away.

His later pictures, The Crowning with Thorns at Munich (1570) and the Pietà (1576) in the Venice Academy, are nobly tragic in mood. Titian faces the last great event not as a humanist, but as a humble believer sorrowing in the suffering of his Lord. Carried off by the plague in 1576, Titian had lived nearly a century, for over seventy years had been a famous painter. In that long course there is no sign of failure of power. His dominant mood changes according to his age from the ardent pastoralism of his early maturity, through the dramatic energy of his middle age, and the impersonal splendor of his first old age. And when he had passed the scriptural term, he developed new depths of feeling, and created to contain them a pulsating realm of light and dark in twilight. He had begun with the cool preciseness of Giovanni Bellini and closed with a passionate mystery of expression which foretells Rembrandt. So far as Venice was concerned, he not merely led its Renaissance, but was its Renaissance, both in rise and decay. And it is noteworthy that while Raphael and Michelangelo end in ostentation of power and decline of feeling, Titian ends in deeper capacities whether for passion or sympathy, works away from the daylight realities of humanism towards new depths in natural appearance and new depths in his own soul.

Around such a man a throng of able painters naturally grew up. The poorest imitated him, the better took hints from his marvellous practice and went their own way. Among these was Giambattista Moroni of Bergamo, born in 1520 and trained under Moretto of Brescia. Mediocre as a religious painter, he was a portraitist of acutest vision for character. A provincial, he cared little for the idealizations of the time. In such a portrait as the Tailor, at London, or the amazing old Abbess in the Metropolitan Museum, or the Husband and Wife, at Cleveland, or The Widower, at Dublin, Figure [293], he gives us the very look of people, even to their uneasiness as they submit to the ordeal of being portrayed, and withal their intelligence, diligence, and patience. Titian, when overdriven with portrait commissions, habitually referred his clients to Moroni, as an abler artist in the specialty. And indeed Moroni, while lacking Titian’s style, looked harder at his sitters than Titian ever did. He died in 1572, four years before his generous friend.

Fig. 293. G-B. Moroni. The Widower.—Dublin.

The Bassanos, the father Jacopo and his sons Leandro and Francesco, were too popular to be omitted. Their style is pretty eclectic with something of late Titian and Tintoretto in it. They treat the old religious themes, are good portraitists, and carry out on their own initiative a bucolic sort of painting, with abundant horses, cattle and dogs. So homely a tradition has its place in breaking down the decorum of the grand style. The excellent average of the family in their craft may be judged from Leandro’s Pietà, at Cleveland.

Sometimes over the velvety calm of Venice and the lagoon will roll up a thunder storm. The radiant color becomes more sombrely rich under the tossing clouds. Their steely edges break into the lightning flash; domes and towers for a moment stagger under the lashing of the rain squall. The storm passes, the leaden clouds show saffron backs against the blue, the evening is here with double serenity and purity. Such is Jacopo Tintoretto amid the reflective tranquility, and confident splendors of Venetian painting—a wind of the spirit, a shattering, yet consoling, apparition. Tenderness, tragedy, romance, are his realm. Where his contemporaries dealt in superb averages, he deals in transcendent exceptions. Thus he has ever been a baffling figure to the critics. For the febrile Ruskin, he is among the greatest of painters; for the coolly analytical Kenyon Cox, he is little better than a reckless sensationalist. Every one, friend or foe of his art, must admit its Shakespearean richness and variety. He lacks Titian’s Olympian poise, but is more universal.

Fig. 294. Tintoretto. Tithonus and Aurora. Tempera color sketch.—British Museum.

Jacopo Robusti,[^[84]] the dyer’s son, was born in Venice in 1518. At seventeen he was put with Titian. Once passing through the studio Titian saw on the floor a number of Tintoretto’s sketches. Not trusting himself to speak, he sent word that the newcomer should never again enter his studio. An act which contemporary gossip ascribed to jealousy, is rather to be referred to disgust at Tintoretto’s unbridled vehemence. Whoever has studied Tintoretto’s tempera sketches, Figure [294], in the British Museum may realize how Titian felt. The sketches are superb, but Titian in 1535 was in no way to realize their value. Twenty years later he may have appreciated them.

Fig. 295. Tintoretto. Presentation of Virgin in the Temple.—S. M. dell’ Orto.

Driven out by the best master in Venice, Tintoretto was reduced to the process of self-education, in which he was aided by that brilliant decorative colorist and ever luckless artist, Andrea Schiavone. Tintoretto’s earliest work of note is the decoration of his own parish church of the Orto, which he undertook about the year 1546 for the costs. The gigantic canvases of the Deluge and Worship of the Golden Calf in the Choir made his fame, but we see his peculiar quality better in the Presentation in the Temple, Figure [295]. It was finished only a few years after Titian’s masterpiece in the Scuola della Carità, hence the contrast between the two works on the same theme is enlightening. Titian’s picture is fundamentally a spectacle and a ceremony. Everything goes as arranged and expected. Tintoretto’s picture is a sudden and thrilling event full of unexpected graces. The little Virgin is well within the picture, but keeps her prominence through her position against the sky and even more by reason of the focusing of intense interest on her by all the persons in the composition. It is a charming invention that three mothers and their infant daughters on the steps should share in the glory of her consecration. At the left a prophetic figure suddenly grasps the import of the moment and sways with wide stretched arms towards the hope. From him to the head of the steps rises a pathetic line of cripples and beggars mercifully veiled in half light. These are witnesses to the human misery that the Virgin through her Son is to assuage. The unifying principle, apart from the fine linear design, is the light which floods out of the picture over the beautifully carved steps. Everything is conceived in depth, while Titian’s Presentation is relatively on one plane. Golden browns and yellows of great luminosity are prevailing colors, the crimsons and blues serving merely as relief and accent. With all its richness of illustrative content, the thing is a noble decoration.

A little later, perhaps in 1548, Tintoretto did the first of three canvases for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. It represents the moment when a Christian slave is about to be brained. The liberating figure of St. Mark, Figure [296], swoops down, the maul snaps in the executioner’s hand. With a singular delicacy the entire interest of the bystanders is concentrated on the helpless white body of the martyr. The suspense is breathless. Only the old magistrate high at the right has seen the miraculous breaking of the executioner’s sledge. His gesture carries the eye to the figure of the downward swooping saint, thus the most sensational feature is last seen and comes as a climax. Such dramatic modulations are of the very essence of Tintoretto’s genius. Again, though the sweeping curves of the linear design are splendidly balanced, the light is the ultimate harmonizer. It ripples out in an increasing wave towards the spectator, kindling as it goes the colors of rich stuffs and the bronzed or pearly roundings of brows, shoulders, throats and limbs. The carrying of a uniform rhythm of motion through earth and sky is again Tintoretto’s invention. He uses it here as elsewhere not as a sprightly device—which was later the baroque attitude—but as a necessary factor in emotional expression.

Fig. 296. Tintoretto. Miracle of the Slave.—Venice.

In 1561 Tintoretto finished the great Marriage at Cana for the Salute. The picture is tremendously developed in depth, and the Christ is set in the distance. The foreground figures alone are concerned with the miracle. Very effective is the contrast of the quiet feasters with those who are stirred by the marvel. The lighting is consummately fine. There are passages of extreme loveliness, such as the swaying row of women’s faces on the right of the table, but the whole thing is far from clear; illustrative and decorative features are imperfectly harmonized. In this great scale Tintoretto’s richness and insatiate inventiveness tend to work against him.

Before considering his colossal labor in the School of St. Roch, we should note his avowed ideal. It might be read on the walls of his studio: “The Drawing of Michelangelo and the Coloring of Titian.” In the studio were casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures brought up at great expense from Florence and Rome. And to Michelangelo we owe the slender and alert proportions of Tintoretto’s figures, quite different as they are from the gravity, almost ponderosity of Titian, Palma, and Paolo Veronese. The color is based on late Titian, but is more sonorous, simple, and uncomplicated by minor tones. The brush stroke is unlike anything earlier—sketchy, impetuous, definitive, working by first intention. Accordingly the surfaces are much broken, and, to a near view, lack preciousness. We have neither the fluent enamel of Giorgione and early Titian, nor yet the muffled richness of Titian’s later manner. But in the best Tintorettos the touch is infallibly crisp, right and expressive. To exaggerate these generously avowed influences of the master who repudiated him and the master he never saw would be easy. As a matter of fact, Tintoretto is always more the illustrator than either of his models. If he adopts the grand poses of Michelangelo, he does so not for abstract beauty, but ever seeks a motive for them. If he chooses Michelangelo’s slender, athletic proportions, he invests them with tenderness and enthusiasm. Unlike Titian, he avoids both classical draperies and rich contemporary costumes, choosing compromise forms of dress which, without ceasing to be classical, should seem familiar, and fit for a real world. If he adopts Titian’s coruscating light, he gives it a special poetry. It does not glow evenly through the picture, but flashes intermittently, as an accent or accompaniment to emotion.

In 1560 the famous charitable confraternity of St. Roch determined to decorate their beautiful School. They called Federico Zuccaro, and Francesco Salviati, who had Roman honors, Tintoretto, and his friends, Schiavone and Paolo Veronese. The subject in competition was to be a cartoon of St. Roch in glory for the ceiling of the refectory. When the day came, Tintoretto unveiled not a cartoon but the finished oval. That was his drawing, he said; he hoped they would not be offended, but he knew no other way. The misunderstandings due to this summary procedure were soon cleared up. Tintoretto became titular painter to the School, later a member, and worked at the two great halls and ante-rooms for twenty-eight years.

St. Roch was the Physician Saint who cared for the plague stricken. Thus the upper hall was pictured with examples of miraculous mercy and deliverance chosen from the Old Testament. The lower hall was devoted to the more familiar stories of the life of Christ and of His Mother. Sadly darkened and neglected, often in impossible light, these pictures baffle all but the enthusiast. One needs all the vicarious enthusiasm that may be drawn from a Ruskin to do San Rocco with any thoroughness. Whoever persists will be rewarded, for while Tintoretto is by no means at his greatest as a painter in this work, it reveals his inexhaustible inventiveness, his warmth and tenderness, and power, as no other series does, whereas it has in the little moonlit landscapes with St. Mary Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt faery refinements elsewhere lacking in the master.

Everybody knows at least the great Calvary, with its sense of cosmic disaster. Marvellous is the storm which sweeps towards the cross from behind, superb alike the cluster of faithful friends at the foot of the cross and the proud riders at the flanks. Hate, love and indifference mingle in the scene. It gets its profound tragedy on terms of fact, is free from all mystical sentimentality. What was it like on that awful evening? is the only question the artist asks himself, and his answer, a sheer gift of the imagination, transcends all the lyrical sweetness and measured solemnity of the ritual crucifixions. Humanism and religion unite for once in this masterpiece.

Fig. 297. Tintoretto. Christ Tempted by Satan.—Scuola di S. Rocco.

Among the scores of narratives in the two halls the eye will rest upon Moses Smiting the Rock, for its majesty; upon the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth which has the intensity of Giotto’s fresco at neighboring Padua, with an abandon all its own; upon the Flight into Egypt, with its idyllic landscape; upon the awful tumult and despair of the Massacre of the Innocents; upon the pathos of the white-robed Christ, awaiting his doom from an indifferent proconsul. These occur among many that are equally memorable. Perhaps the subtle humanism of Tintoretto is best shown in the Temptation of Christ, Figure [297]. Instead of the ignoble bat-like Satan of the mediæval painters, we have a magnificent starry-eyed youth, a veritable genius of the pride of life. With outstretched, generous arms he offers unstinted power and pleasure. The Christ regards him with tranquil kindness, as one might a splendid animal fawning too eagerly. For so Christian a man as Tintoretto, it implies extraordinary sympathy to imagine a Satan in his own way gloriously sure of his case. In these compositions the method is most various. But where there are many figures Tintoretto generally avoids the convention of placing the chief personages on the picture plane. You look over heads or between bodies to glimpse the Saints or the Blessed Virgin or Christ. And curiously this procedure does not confuse the eye. On the contrary these apparently casual but really most thoughtful arrangements heighten the sense of reality; one feels like a witness, like one himself on the edges of the throng.

Along with the decoration of San Rocco, Tintoretto undertook frequent commissions for the Ducal Palace. But the fire of 1577 consumed his picture of the naval victory at Lepanto, with much else. In the mythologies of the Anticollegio painted in 1578 we have the loveliest poesies of the Venetian school. These are the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Mercury and the Graces, Minerva expelling Mars and the Forge of Vulcan. From the point of view both of decoration and sentiment these are perhaps the finest nudes in painting. They glow with outdoor health, the firm wholesome bodies sway from sheer joy in motion, or hover lightly in the limpid air. The noble forms are fixed for us in transparent shadows, and broad dapplings of light. There is little of the sheer dreaminess of Giorgione, who yet counts for something in the work, nor yet of the explicit sensuousness of Titian. These noble creatures go about our business,—marrying, seeking grace in life, composing strife, providing munitions should strife arise. Miss Phillipps is probably right in divining here an allegory of the greatness of Venice, bride of the Adriatic, protected by her diplomacy, admired for her arts, yet ever ready in her arsenals. What is better worth noting is the combination of breadth and delicacy in the finest of these poesies, The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Figure [298]. The interlocking of the superb forms in a flowing rhythm or pattern, the technical miracle of Venus’s easy turn in the air as she offers the ring and the starry crown, the exquisite alternations of light and half light others might conceivably have invented. What is proper to Tintoretto and to him alone is the hesitating hand of Ariadne and her almost resigned and reluctant acceptance of a new love, being mindful of love once betrayed. Also the delicacy of Bacchus’s ardent gesture, as knowing himself to be not only wooer but consoler, is purest Tintoretto. The picture with its companion pieces is the effulgent afterglow of the Arcadianism that began with Giorgione. It breathes a charm that has never since been fully recoverable.

Fig. 298. Tintoretto. Bacchus and Ariadne.—Ducal Palace.

While these poesies were in progress, about 1575, Tintoretto painted for the Church of San Cassiano the most original of his Crucifixions, Figure [299]. One looks over the narrow top of Golgotha to a peaceful expanse of marbled evening sky. The heads and serried pikes of the Roman legionaries suggest a throng behind the hill. The sharpest note of color is a banner, and the purple robe just stripped from the Christ. Between John and Mary and the executioners on the ladder and against the sky the strangest episode passes. It is the moment when a Pharisee hands up to the executioner the mocking placard “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.” With a sudden impulse John points out the act to Mary, to console her. Christ’s enemies affirm the truth of him. Even in the hour of defeat and death he is eternally his people’s king. The level light which ripples softly over the nude forms of Christ and the thieves takes away all harshness. At San Rocco Tintoretto presented an epic and cosmic terror. Here he suggests all the intimate and lyrical hopes that have grown out of the sacrifice on Calvary.

Fig. 299. Tintoretto. Calvary.—S. Cassiano.

Like all the Venetians Tintoretto was an admirable portraitist. His sober and powerful vein is well shown in the Madonna with Three Magistrates, Figure [300].

Fig. 300. Tintoretto. Madonna with Three Magistrates.—Venice.

Among the later altar-pieces none is finer than the Miracle of St. Agnes in the Orto. It has all of Tintoretto’s sweetness, power and suddenness, and is nearly in its original condition of color. In 1587, being nearly seventy years old, he got the commission for his greatest and perhaps his last picture, the Paradise, in the Hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace. Darkened and dried, it is still to the perceptive observer a billowing sea of rapturous faces of the blest, obeying in its widening circles of cloud-borne angels an oceanic rhythm. During the three years that Tintoretto was painting it, his young daughter and comrade, Marietta, dressed like a Shakespearean page for greater convenience, worked and chattered beside him on the scaffolding. She hardly lived to see the great canvas set on its wall. Tintoretto lived on till 1594, and then his aged and withered body was carried across the canal from his palace to his vault in the Orto. Such friends as Schiavone and Paolo Veronese had gone before him, the old merrymakings and impromptu concerts in his home had ceased. It was a very tired old man who bid his sons continue the honorable trade of painting. He had shared nobly the greatest range of human emotions, and his last artistic vision was of an ecstatic peace in Paradise.

After Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese[^[85]] seems an anti-climax. His imagination is very limited. His greatest pictures treat the sole theme of stately feasts. His soul is that of a very high class society editor. But no well-advised person looks to Paolo Veronese for soul. One rather seeks in him judgment and fine painting. Both are at their maximum.

Paolo Caliari was born at Verona in 1528, trained by a half primitive master, Antonio Badile, and influenced by the energetic compositions of Brusasorci. Paolo inherited the long Veronese tradition for spectacular narrative painting with splendid architectural accessories, and he carries the local tradition to its close and height. He came to Venice at twenty-seven, a finished and famous artist, bringing with him a novel sort of color. He avoids the contrasts and keen resonances of the true Venetians, painting rather in luminous half tones based on gray and blue. His forms are rich and solid without heavy shadow, and his canvases have the generally blond and uniform color quality of the modern out-of-door school.

His preference is for feasts and pageants. We have the spectacle of a rich and gentle society, dignified in its pleasures and resplendent in its costume. Gold brocade sets off the pearly skins of the portly and gracious ladies in his pictures, and their cavaliers are as magnificently clad in satins, velvets and furs. The feasts are generally half out of doors in great colonnades, with the light glinting impartially upon fair throats and faces and upon channeled columns and sculptured balustrades. Behind, pale cornices and spires swim against a blue sky.

It was the habit of the wealthy chapters of monks who maintained the great Venetian churches to paint in their refectories some Scriptural feast, as a warrant perhaps for their own daily convivialities. Earlier, the most solemn of all meals, The Last Supper, would have been chosen. Not so with Veronese and his contemporaries. They chose instead the Marriage at Cana or the Feast in the House of Simon or of Levi, Figure [301],—splendid events of small or only incidental religious significance, and treated merely as contemporary banquets.

Fig. 301. Paolo Veronese. Feast in Levi’s House.—Venice.

Of the four great feasts painted by Paolo Veronese the Marriage at Cana, in the Louvre, painted in 1563, is earliest, and most imposing. It builds up indefinitely from the marble pavement, with tier upon tier of people, clinging to columns and peering from balconies. One may count no less than two hundred and fifty heads. It has all the stir of a public banquet and everywhere the greatest richness of table accessories and costumes. The theme called for little religious emotion. The miracle itself is a convivial one. Yet Veronese has made this different from other feasts by a most complicated system of guiding lines which always lead the eye to the gentle face of the Christ in the centre. He fairly dominates all this animation and splendor. In the trio of musicians in the foreground Veronese has given us a precious hint of the part music played in the life of all Venetian artists. Paolo himself plays the viola, Tintoretto the ’cello, and Titian the bass. What is remarkable about the great canvas is its unity. Bathed in equable cool light, the eye takes it in at a glance; there is no confusing or distracting emphasis; the whole thing is nobly tranquillizing.

In 1569 Veronese was in Rome. We may possibly see some slight influence of Michelangelo in the frescoes of the Villa Barbaro, at Maser. These contain the only nudes of Veronese that have a real athleticism, and the whole decoration has a more positive and sprightly spirit than is usual in Veronese’s placid style. Working in a country house for liberal and congenial patrons, Daniele Barbaro was himself an architect of merit, Veronese sheds something of that professional dignity which is sometimes excessive in his official work.

Fig. 302. Paolo Veronese. Marriage of St. Catherine.—Santa Caterina.

Among his numerous altar-pieces, the Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure [302], in the Venetian Church of that name is perhaps the most gracious. The women are adorable—hothouse flowers, incredible for poise, hue and delicate surface bloom. They are not very personal, their charm is a social one. But they are very gentle, reasonably unconscious of their own beauty, and quite unforgettably lovely. It took a wonderful eye to see them at once so simple and so regal.

In the last twelve years of his life, Veronese was constantly employed in the Ducal Palace and the adjoining public buildings. He employed assistants freely, and the work affords difficult critical problems. The work is uneven. In mythology he belies the hopes based on the frescoes at Maser, where it seemed as if he too might attain the Olympian mood. It is sadly lacking in the hoydenish group that enacts Europa and the Bull, Figure [303], in the Ducal Palace. Why are these heavy Venetian lasses risking their skins and skirts and shins near the seaside and a bull? The flat prose of the feeling, or rather the absence of any real feeling, makes one forget the splendor of the painting. Such also is the effect of the superbly painted Venus and Mars, at New York, and of most of the mythologies. We have to do with sheer prose and not very sincere prose at that.

Fig. 303. Paolo Veronese. Rape of Europa.—Ducal Palace.

When, however, the theme can be drawn from everyday Venice, Veronese is overpoweringly fine. Again and again in looking at the ceilings of the Ducal Palace one catches his breath before such visions of magnificence as Venice as Justice, Figure [304], Venice as Queen of the World. For all its contemporary quality, it attains a strange other-worldliness. It is as if some one had looked at superb Venice through a magnifying glass that ennobled the forms and greatly enhanced the colors. You feel how Veronese loved it all and how little he cared for anything beyond the splendor, dignity and prosperity of his adoptive city. He gives us the look of Venice at her climax of Renaissance glory, as Carpaccio had given the dying radiance of her mediæval estate. From the point of view of judgment, style and fine craftsmanship, it is impossible to overpraise Veronese. He should be regarded rather as a great painter in the narrower sense than a supreme artist. When he died in 1588, only fifty years old, he left a very enduring inheritance.

Fig. 304. Paolo Veronese. Venice attended by Force and Justice. Ceiling Panel.—Ducal Palace.

It was on the whole his moderate and judicious sumptuousness that inspired the painters of the next century. It was well that they sought his imitable merits and not the passion of Titian and Tintoretto. It was largely thanks to Veronese that Venetian art suffered no such sharp decline as befell that of Florence and Rome. The decorative tradition of Veronese sufficed to nourish a Piazetta and a Tiepolo a century and a half after his death.

Fig. 305. G-B. Tiepolo. Time revealing Truth.—Villa Biron, Vicenza.

For Giovanni Battista Tiepolo[^[86]] (1695–1770) in sheer force and fertility yields to none of his Renaissance predecessors. There never was a more valiant draughtsman or a more splendid colorist. Such decorations as those of the Scuola del Carmine, and the Labia Palace fall little behind Veronese’s pageantry in grandeur while representing an audacity of stroke and coloration which Veronese lacked. So the tragic scenes of Christ’s Passion at San Luigi have the intensity of Tintoretto if lacking something of his nobility. In the ceiling decorations of Tiepolo, Figure [305], we see the freest fancies of the Baroque, its customary tumult of shimmering clouds and hovering pearly figures, repeated with a lightness and audacity and withal measure which the Baroque itself never attained save in its great initiator Correggio. Such powers as Tiepolo’s soon won him international patronage. He painted in Austria and died at Madrid. With him perishes the grandeur of the Venetian school. Only a tinge of masquerade and exhibitionism puts him lower than his constant exemplar, Paolo Veronese.

Fig. 306. Antonio Canale. Island of San Michele.—Royal Collections, Windsor.

Indeed the simplicity which is the most enduring charm of any art is more felt in the minor Venetians of Tiepolo’s time, as in Antonio Canale, called Canaletto, Figure [306], who painted the irradiated panorama of the Venetian lagoon and canals with the ardent precision of a reborn Gentile Bellini. Francesco Guardi[^[87]] (1712–1765), Canaletto’s pupil, with a freer brush and fancy paints the spectacle of Venice, Figure [307], its balls and promenades and water pageants, with the sensitiveness of a Carpaccio. But Carpaccio’s youthful world is no longer there to paint. Romance has given way to casual amorous intrigue, sentiment to show. But out of the welter of sophisticated gayety still rise clean against the heavens the pale domes and bell towers of an older and finer Venice. Guardi is perhaps at his best in the numerous tiny oil sketches which deal with the remote and solitary groves and ruins of the lagoon. Here we have felicities of broken color and niceties of observation, accurate notations of evanescent effects of light, which can still give lessons to the most modern landscapists.

Fig. 307. Francesco Guardi. Scuola di San Marco. Pen and Wash Drawing.—Lamperti Coll., Milan.

In Pietro Longhi (1702–1762) Venice developed a sympathetic chronicler of her social pleasures, Figure [308]. The world of his delicate and witty little canvases is that of the card party, the formal call, the vanity and ceremony of philandering, the shop, the musicale, the masked ball. Only Holland has given so true and sympathetic a record of her smaller affairs, and at the moment, only Hogarth in England and Chardin in France were doing the thing with equal ability.

Fig. 308. Pietro Longhi. Maskers at the Zoo.—London.

Nothing better shows the slightly anachronistic quality of Tiepolo’s grandeur than a fine Longhi. The Venetian imagination had moved indoors, so to speak, had foregone in favor of individual gratifications the old vision of the collective splendor. Venice no longer dines grandly in the open with Veronese, she coquettishly sips coffee with Longhi. If she had declined in nobility, she had at least kept her sincerity and taste. Her affair had ever been rather with appearances than with ideals or interpretations. But since the Greeks no other nation had considered appearances with such noble candor. She kept to the end the good pictorial habit of letting appearances explain themselves. Thus if a Titian will stand beside a Pheidian marble, so will a Tiepolo beside an Alexandrian masterpiece, while a trim belle of Pietro Longhi need feel no confusion before a Tanagra figurine. Time passes gently over a city whose artistic aims are as limited as her taste is sure. Venice had ever been gracious in her grandeur, and gracious she remained even after she had ceased to be grand.