Chapter Ten
ARTISTS OF THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE
It can be no matter for wonder that colour was the elected medium of expression for Venice: endowed, by reason of her water, with a twofold gift of light, she was also perhaps more splendid than any other city in the details of her daily life. Colour was its substance. Everything was pictorial and rich and festive. Even on a dark day the rooms of the Accademia seem full of sunshine from the treasure they hold of ancient Venice. If Bellini’s Procession of the Cross on the Piazza of San Marco were missing from its place, we should feel that a light had been put out. The Venetians had always been decorators. The pictures of the first masters—Vivarini, d’Alemagna, Jacobello del Fiore and many others—seem literally spun out of the furnaces of Murano. They are no primitives in their mastery of colour. Consider for a moment the Madonna and Saints of Vivarini and d’Alemagna in the Sala della Presentazione. The natural life of the fields has been made to serve a design of amazing richness. The Virgin’s golden throne is carved With acorns and roses, and luxuriant oak foliage forms its decorative fringe; the fruits of the garden in which she sits are lavished round her; the grass is gemmed with countless tiny flowers, trefoil and strawberry, milkwort and potentilla, and the infant Christ has burst open a golden pomegranate, displaying its burden of rich crimson seeds. There is scarcely a harmony of colour unattempted, scarcely a jewel unset, from the rainbow of the angels’ wings, and the rim of fluctuating colours on the Virgin’s green robe folded back over peacock blue, to the mosaics in the burning gold of the angels’ haloes, in the Virgin’s crown, and in the mitres of the Fathers. There too is the very vermilion of Veronese, that wonderful salvia scarlet to which the Feast in Levi’s House owes so much of its decorative significance. We shall be better equipped for understanding the early colour-masters if we realise that their dowry came to them not only from the lagoon. The marvellous rainbow of Venice the “Ambiguous One” was not their only light nor the deep azure and emerald and gold, which she hung about her, the only jewels they knew. The garment of Venetian art is inwoven with threads of mountain glory, of rich harvests of grape and golden grain: we must go up into the mainland of Venice to understand the art of the first masters no less than that of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, whose conceptions were penetrated with the very sunshine of earth, a warmer-bodied, fuller sunshine than Venice of the waters could know, full of secret throbbings of the hidden springing life for light and ripening. Autumn is the loom on which was woven the robe of Venetian art, autumn with its indomitable splendours of gold and silver, green and cremoisin and the supreme scarlet of the salvia. These colours are steeped in an impermeable dye: they seem saturated with the light, burning out the more gloriously, the more intensely, as their allotted span grows less. The passion of the spring is of another kind; it needs the present magic of the sun to draw out its exquisite, incipient radiance; it cannot lavish glory except when his countenance is bent upon it. But in the radiance of autumn foliage there is a daring that darkness is impotent to quell: it is like a shout of triumph in the face of death, a procession of all the glory of earth into the kingdom of the dead, not reluctant, not made fearful by the rumours that have floated to it in the grey-mantled dawn, in the fierce trumpeting of rain and wind; boldly, gloriously it marches, scattering joyfully the gems it cannot hold, that nothing shall be saved. We sing no dirge, but a triumph song, as the golden trophies fall—a gold more refulgent than Bellini’s façade of San Marco, though this was gold of the purest even Venice, the golden city, could win from her furnaces. We may still see these mainland autumns where the colour-masters gathered their treasures; on the borders of the mountains we may sit in such a garden of the Madonna as Vivarini and his fellows record. In the late autumn the sun is slow to win his way; but when he comes there is no splendour to rival the fire of the salvia-beds, round cups of concentrated light springing up into spires and tongues of flame among the arrow-shaped green leaves. No words can describe the brilliance of this leaping flame, devouring the sunshine like fuel, and scattering it abroad in myriad gems of penetrating brightness. In the long luminous grass of the lawn will be scattered here and there a rose-bush of the Madonna’s crimson, and tall gold-edged lilies may be seen through the close-hung flaps of the medusa leaves. This splendid tapestry is spread upon a poplar background of flickering gold and green, the steadier gold of low mulberries, and grey-bodied autumn apple-trees on which the leaves glow blood-red, while behind all rise the grassy slopes of the mountain outposts crossed by the shadow of some jutting rock.
Often among the humbler Venetian painters, less versed in the deeper significance of human life and religious symbol, we find a singular mastery of perspective and many signs of familiarity with the interplay of light and shade among the mountains. We are reminded again and again of their apprenticeship to nature as we see one of the countless ruined towers on the outposts of the Alps rising against the golden sunset light within its threadbare rampart of dusky branches. The face of the mountains was a vital and intimate fact to them, not an accepted piety. We are, for instance, often tempted to consider the persons of Cima’s sacred themes less as the essential interest than as a finely designed harmony of colour in the foreground of a landscape. In his native city of Conegliano he stored his mind with mountain wonders, and in his wide and delicate horizons there are many touches inspired by a living memory of the scene. We have known the joy of that limpid atmosphere after days of mist and rain, those floating sunlit clouds upon the transparent blue, that jewel-like gleam of a deep pool, the delicacy of autumn trees passing into gold, the foretaste of an untrodden stronghold in the winding paths that lose themselves and come again to view as they coil up the castled heights. The landscape is conventionalised of course, but its spirit is there—its rare shades of colour, its marvellous varieties of depth; and ever behind, there is the vision of the mountains cutting into the sky in a sharp, clear, azure coldness, or with a luminous haze round their base in the mellowness of an autumn day. As backgrounds we see them only, for Venice had other needs than of mountains; but many of these painters knew them as near realities; they had stept home in the glory of an autumn sunset amid the revel of the vintage, their whole being intoxicated with the wine and the splendour of life; they had drunk that fresh-trodden, unfermented juice, the vino mosto, sufficient to stir those whose senses are alert and in whom the passion of the world runs high. It needed indeed a Titian to transform the vintage of Cadore into the bacchic rout of his Ariadne, but it is there, in the wooded mountain slopes, in the pageantry of evening, when the fancy soars to Ariadne’s crown faintly dawning in the warm blue, and sweeps round some mist-clad inland lake to float among the turreted heights.
PALAZZO REZZONICO.
Or if we take our stand on the keep of the ruined Roman citadel of Asolo, when the evening light streaming down into the shadowy undulations of the valley, which tosses in ceaseless waves round the mountain’s base, illuminates a land of rich and golden peace, we feel again the painters of Venice at our side; the vague, rich spirit of the winding valleys, allied with the solemn grandeur of the mountains, above whose dark barrier we have glimpses of remote and shining peaks, the tiny citadels half gathered into the folding mist, the alternate radiance and keen obscurity of the lower peaks now visited and now forsaken by the inconstant sunset light, the sudden illumination of a solitary peasant or a single tree in sharp relief against the twilight—all these have passed into the canvas of Giorgione: in him, above all, we seem to drink that wondrous potion compact of evening vapour and golden light which the sunset pours into the dim goblet of the mountain valleys. And we may record here, how, in the last period of the Venetian Renaissance, the great decorator Veronese found a field of activity under the shadow of Asolo. When Marcantonio Barbaro, Procurator of San Marco, and his brother the Patriarch of Aquileja, bade Palladio build their villa at the little village of Maser, they called on their friend Paolo to decorate it within. And this perfect villa is one of the happiest monuments to the two artists; the excellent skill of both is brought into congenial play, and to the courtly old patrician Barbaro we owe a debt which perhaps we partly cancel in the coin of our pleasure. The simple yet sumptuous villa lies so dexterously disposed below its cypress hill, that it seems almost to consist of the loggia alone as we climb up the garden slope from the road, through the judicious mingling of smooth lawn and scythe-cut grass full of scabious and delicate Alpine flowers. Delicious scents float down from the late roses along the terrace and the brilliant flower-beds in the grass; the medusa tree stands luminous against the evergreen shrubs and cypress, and against the yellow wall a huge cactus raises its mysterious purple sword-blade. The villa is spacious and full of air and light; the suite of rooms above the loggia, containing the great part of Paolo’s work, open one out of the other, and each has a glass door that leads directly to the lawn and grotto in the cleft of the hill behind, while the central hall lies open on each side to wide stretches of mountain country. There were no stern censors here to ask Paolo if his homely details were quite in keeping with the gravity of his theme; the artist was working for a friend in a house that was full of light and sunshine and the clear mountain air, and he has put his soul with most lucid fantasy into the allegories of autumn and springtime, of Cybele and Juno, Vulcan and Apollo, of dogs and boys and girls at play among the mimic balconies, of sprays of fig and vine leaf; into the figures of Michelangelesque strength reclining above the doors, and the tiny processions of men and beasts in chiaroscuro on the friezes; into the clear, radiant faces of women and sinewy forms of men; the eloquent dogs and lions; and not least into the lithe and gallant figure of himself, advancing from the mimic door at one end of the long vista to meet the lady who trips out from the opposite end, l’amica dell’ artista—or, as the guide-book discreetly says—his wife. The portrait of himself is done with much imagination and even pathos. He was a dreamer, too, this Veronese. These figures of the painter and his dog give us pause; they make us feel that he would have been good to walk the mountains with; that if he could step out now from the room where he keeps continual watch, on to the exquisite grass plot, with its happy tuft of white anemone and pale Michaelmas daisy, we might win from him some mountain confidence which he has not entrusted to canvas or fresco. It is a pleasure to picture Veronese at his work upon Marcantonio’s villa. Every midday he must have had good progress to show; for these blithe works that have kept their colour so fresh and strong are executed with a few brave master strokes: they are no less potent in their swift presentment than in their conception. We can see him dismounting from his scaffold at the summons of Barbaro, returned from his morning round among his stables or his orchards; we can see him still keen and stirred by the creative impulse, full of that excited pleasure which accompanies expression, standing a little aside while Barbaro bears his admiration to and fro—now confessing that time and office have rusted his mythology and asking the meaning of some emblem; now on the lookout for a freak of his friend, some beast or bird put in perhaps to give him joy; now in raptures over the old shoes and broom, which he swears he has just thrashed the maid for leaving on the cornice, while Paolo stands by brimming with mirth at the deception; now called upon to guess the significance of the fair lady bridled by her lord, which the guide-book ungallantly interprets as the victory of virtue over vice, but which to Marcantonio no doubt seemed capable of less abstract explanation. With all their nobility of design and execution, there is something about these frescoes so intimate and sympathetic as to impart to us the actual joy and health of spirit which conceived them. Given the skill and the robust and prodigal genius of Veronese, how should they not be joyous in these halls full of light and air and sunshine, the song of birds and of trickling water, the sounds of meadow and mountain. We may take leave of the mountains in the midst of one of those brave companies which must often have gathered in this earthly Paradise of Marcantonio Barbaro round the long table spread in the loggia—such a loggia as Paolo himself so often painted—looking out, through the arches to the vista of creepered wall and over the green meadows studded with golden fruit-trees, to the undulating country and tracts of woodland, now bathed in liquid sunshine, now gathered into a soft-enfolding haze—a wide ocean from which the campaniles rise like masts of ships, and over which the distant villas are scattered like shining fishing-boats.
“These workmen,” says d’Annunzio of the Venetian artists of the Renaissance, “create in a medium that is itself a joyous mystery—in colour, the ornament of the world, in colour, which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light. And the entirely new, musical understanding they have of colour acts in such a way that their creation transcends the narrow limits of the symbols it represents and assumes the lofty, revealing faculty of an infinite harmony.” Colour—which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light. These words recur to us again and again face to face with the Venetian masters. By the primitives the colours are laid on as accessory to the scene, as it were fine enamel; in the Renaissance painters, they are not only woven into the fabric of the picture, it grows and moves through them. We may choose, in illustration, Giovanni Bellini’s small picture of the Madonna with St. Catherine and the Magdalen in the Accademia, because, though it is in one sense less completely representative of the distinguishing features of the Venetian school than, for instance, his masterpiece of the Frari, it realises perhaps more fully than any that “new and musical understanding of colour” which was the peculiar gift of the Venetians. It is literally informed with radiance; flesh itself has become spirit, no longer a covering, but an atmosphere—a directly perfect expression. There is no denial or emaciation of the flesh; the forms are strong, the habitations of a potent earth-spirit. The faces are pondering, penetrating, profound, and withal extremely individual; they might seem impassive, were it not that every feature is kindled by the pervading colour till we seem to feel it as a sensuous presence. It is a quality of colour that so subtly determines the poise of their hands, that makes their touch so sensitively penetrating that feeling seems to flow from it without pressure. The solemn harmony of red and green and blue, and of the diffused radiance of the flesh tints, is not only lit from without by the sunlight, it seems literally to burn from within, depth behind depth, with light.
The peculiarly luminous treatment of the flesh perfected by Bellini in repose, it remained for Tintoretto to realise in motion; this we may venture to illustrate from a work too immense for our discussion in any but a limited aspect—his last great work, The Paradise, in the Ducal Palace. The quality we are seeking in it becomes the more remarkable on account of its loss of superficial colour, so that at first it seems cold and faded as if a mist had fallen upon it; then, very slowly, like day breaking out of the veil, colour reveals itself as a fresh property in the forms. We cannot penetrate the depth of it; rank behind rank the luminous faces define themselves like mysterious shapes of the atmosphere, some mere ghosts in the depths which daylight cannot pierce, some radiant already with the light; and across and through them all, through the flame-winged throng of Cherubim, piercing all companies and ranks of being to the extremes of the vast canvas, shoot the rays from the central source of light in the seat of Christ. It is a symphony of colour become almost vocal; we perceive it not only with the eye but in all our senses, this music of the spheres which one man has dared to gather into a single canvas. Who but Tintoretto could have dreamed of achieving this perspective built solely of human forms and faces? Into all the mysteries of life—those echoes of experience which we touch but faintly, those substances with which we feel inexplicable correspondencies—into these Tintoretto has looked: the rays from behind the Son of God have poured into the heart of the universe, and from it has grown his Paradise. Joy is the heart of this great symphony; it works upon us rather as a creative force than as a thing created, sounding continually some new note or rarer harmony of colour. At times it overpowers us, and then amid the maze of divine musicians and Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones and Principalities and Powers, some single harmonious human form, strong in beauty, with wings of light, some tender, lovely face of youth or woman, the solemn gesture of saint or bishop, the rainbow of an angel’s wing, gives our intellect a resting-place. For it is not through obscuring of outlines that this wonder of music in colour is accomplished; the human form, on which all the notes are played, is become indeed a perfect instrument, but not by forfeiting its material strength or substance; the structure is massive, solid—if to our notion of solidity we may unite the gift of perfect ease within an element whose progress only is by flight, where each moment is poised but slightly in its passage to the next, where there is no time because no stable unit to serve as pedestal for time. In this great picture, that faculty of the Venetian painters which we are now illustrating, found perhaps its completest realisation—the power of winging flesh with colour so that it is endowed with the very properties of atmosphere.
By permission of Arnold Mitchell, Esq.