[Sidenote: Titian]
Titian (c. 1477-1576) was the typical representative of the Venetian school of painting which acquired great distinction in bright coloring. Official painter for the city of Venice and patronized both by the Emperor Charles V and by Philip II of Spain, he secured considerable wealth and fame. He was not a man of universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo; his one great and supreme endowment was that of oil painting. In harmony, light, and color, his work has never been equaled. Titian's portrait of Philip II was sent to England and proved a potent auxiliary in the suit of the Spanish king for the hand of Mary Tudor. His celebrated picture of the Council of Trent was executed after the aged artist's visit to the council about 1555.
From Italy as a center, great painting became the heritage of all
Europe. Italian painters were brought to France by Louis XII and
Francis I, and French painters were subsidized to imitate them. Philip
II proved himself a liberal patron of painting throughout his
dominions.
[Sidenote: Dürer]
In Germany, painting was developed by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), a native of Nuremberg, who received a stimulus from Italian work and was royally patronized by the Emperor Maximilian. The career of Dürer was honored and fortunate: he was on terms of friendship with all the first masters of his age; he even visited and painted Erasmus. But it is as an etcher or engraver, rather than as a painter, that Dürer's reputation was earned. His greatest engravings—such as the Knight and Death, and St. Jerome in his Study—set a standard in a new art which has never been reached by his successors. The first considerable employment of engraving, one of the most useful of the arts, synchronized with the invention of printing. Just as books were a means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating pictures which gave vividness to the ideas, or served in place of books for those who could not read.
The impetus afforded by this extraordinary development of painting continued to affect the sixteenth century and a greater part of the seventeenth. The scene shifted, however, from Italy to the Spanish possessions. And Spanish kings, the successors of Philip II, patronized such men as Rubens (1577-1640) and Van Dyck (1599-1641) in the Belgian Netherlands, or Velasquez (1590-1660) and Murillo (1617-1682) in Spain itself.
[Sidenote: Rubens and Van Dyck]
If the work of Rubens displayed little of the earlier Italian grace and refinement, it at any rate attained to distinction in the purely fanciful pictures which he painted in bewildering numbers, many of which, commissioned by Marie de' Medici and King Louis XIII of France, are now to be seen in the Louvre galleries in Paris. And Van Dyck raised portrait painting to unthought-of excellence: his portraits of the English royal children and of King Charles I are world-famous.
[Sidenote: Velasquez]
[Sidenote: Murillo]
Within the last century, many connoisseurs of art have been led to believe that Velasquez formerly has been much underrated and that he deserves to rank with the foremost Italian masters. Certainly in all his work there is a dignity, power, and charm, especially in that well- known Maids of Honor, where a little Spanish princess is depicted holding her court, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, her dwarfs and her mastiff, while the artist himself stands at his easel. The last feat of Velasquez was to superintend the elaborate decorations in honor of the marriage of the Spanish Infanta with King Louis XIV of France. Murillo, the youngest of all these great painters, did most of his work for the Catholic Church and naturally dealt with ecclesiastical subjects.