CHAPTER XXIII
PAINTERS OF THE VENETIAN PROVINCES
It has become usual to include in the Venetian School those artists from the subject provinces on the mainland, who came down to try their luck at the fountain-head and to receive its hallmark on their talent. The Friulan cities, Udine, Serravalle, and small neighbouring towns, had their own primitive schools and their scores of humble craftsmen. Their art wavered for some time in its expression between the German taste, which came so close to their gates, and the Italian, which was more truly their element.
Up to 1499 Friuli was invaded seven times in thirty years by the Turks. They poured in large numbers over the Bosnian borders, crossed the Isonzo and the Tagliamenta, and massacred and carried off the inhabitants. These terrible periods are marked by the cessation of work in the provinces, but hope always revived again. The break caused by such a visitation can be distinctly traced in the Church of S. Antonino, at the little town of San Daniele. Martino da Udine obtained the epithet of Pellegrino da San Daniele in 1494 when he returned from an early visit to Venice, where he had been apprenticed to Cima. He was appointed to decorate S. Antonino. His early work there is hard and coarse, ill-drawn, the figures unwieldy and shapeless, and the colour dusky and uniform; but owing to the Turkish raid, he had to take flight, and it was many a year before the monks gained sufficient courage and saved enough money to continue the embellishment of their church. In the meantime, Pellegrino’s years had been spent partly in Venice and partly, perhaps, in Ferrara, for the reason Raphael gave for refusing to paint a “Bacchus” for the Duke, was that the subject had already been painted by Pellegrino da San Daniele. When Pellegrino resumed his work, it demonstrated that he had studied the modern Venetians and had come under a finer, deeper influence. A St. George in armour suggests Giorgione’s S. Liberale at Castelfranco; he specially shows an affinity with Pordenone, who was his pupil and who was to become a better painter than his old master. As Pellegrino goes on he improves consistently, and adopts the method, so peculiarly Venetian, of sacrificing form to a scheme of chiaroscuro. He even, to some extent, succeeds in his difficult task of applying to wall painting the system which the Venetians used almost exclusively for easel pictures. He was an ambitious, daring painter, and some of his church standards were for long attributed to Giorgione. The church of San Antonino remains his chief monument; but for all his travels Pellegrino remains provincial in type, is unlucky in his selection, cares little for precision of form, and trusts to colour for effect.
The same transition in art was taking place in other provinces. Morto da Feltre, Pennacchi, and Girolamo da Treviso have all left work of a Giorgionesque type, and some painters who went far onward, began their career under such minor masters. Giovanni Antonio Licinio, who takes his name from his native town of Pordenone, in Friuli, was one of these. All the early part of his life was spent in painting frescoes in the small towns of the Friulan provinces. At first they bear signs of the tuition of Pellegrino, but it soon becomes evident that Pordenone has learned to imitate Giorgione and Palma. Quite early, however, one of his chief failings appears, and one which is all his own, the disparity in size between his various figures. The secondary personages, the Magi in a Nativity, the Saints standing round an altar, are larger and more athletic in build and often more animated in action than the principal actors in the scene. What pleased Pordenone’s contemporaries was his daring perspective and his instinctive feeling for movement. He carried out great schemes in the hill-towns, till at length his reputation, which had long been ripe in his native province, reached Venice. In 1519 he was invited to Treviso to fresco the façade of a house for one of the Raviguino family. The painter, as payment, asked fifty scudi, and Titian was called in to adjudicate, but he admired the work so much that he hinted to Raviguino that he would be wise not to press him for a valuation. As a direct consequence of this piece of business, Pordenone was employed on the chapel at Treviso, in conjunction with Titian. At this time the Assumption and the Madonna of Casa Pesaro were just finished, and it is probable that Pordenone paid his first visit to Venice, hard by, and saw his great contemporary’s work. With his characteristic distaste for fresco, Titian undertook the altarpiece and painted the beautiful Annunciation which still holds its place, and Pordenone covered the dome with a foreshortened figure of the Eternal Father, surrounded by angels. Among the remaining frescoes in the Chapel, an Adoration of the Magi and a S. Liberale are from his brush. Fired by his success at Treviso, Pordenone offered his services to Mantua and Cremona, but the Mantovans, accustomed to the stately and restrained grace of Mantegna, would have nothing to say to what Crowe and Cavalcaselle call his “large and colossal fable-painting.” He pursued his way to Cremona, and that he studied Mantegna as he passed through Mantua is evident from the first figures he painted in the cathedral. In Cremona every one admired him, and all the artists set to work to imitate his energetic foreshortening, vehement movement and huge proportions.
Pordenone, with his love for fresco, was all his life an itinerant painter. In 1521 he was back at Udine and wandered from place to place, painting a vast distemper for the organ doors at S. Maria at Spilimbergo, the façade of the Church of Valeriano, an imposing series at Travesio, and in 1525, the “Story of the True Cross” at Casara. At the last place he threw aside much of his exaggeration, and, ruined and restored as the frescoes are, they remain among his most dignified achievements. He may be studied best of all at Piacenza, in the Church of the Madonna di Campagna, where he divides his subjects between sacred and pagan, so that we turn from a “Flight into Egypt” or a “Marriage of S. Catherine,” to the “Rape of Europa” or “Venus and Adonis.” At Piacenza he shows himself the great painter he undoubtedly is, having achieved some mastery over form, while his colour has the true Venetian quality and almost equals oils in its luscious tones and vivid hues, which he lowers and enriches by such enveloping shadows as only one whose spirit was in touch with the art of Giorgione would have understood how to use. Very complete records remain of Pordenone’s life, full details of a quarrel with his brother over property left by his father in 1533, and accounts of the painter’s negotiations to obtain a knighthood, which he fancied would place him more on a par with Titian when he went to live in Venice. The coveted honour was secured, but from this time he seems to have been very jealous of Titian and to have aimed continually at rivalling him. Pordenone was a punctual and rapid decorator, and on being given the ceiling of the Sala di San Finio to decorate in the summer of 1536, he finished the whole by March 1538. We have seen how Titian annoyed the Signoria by his delays, how anxious they were to transfer his commission to Pordenone, and what a narrow escape the Venetian had of losing his Broker’s patent. Pordenone was engaged by the nuns of Murano to paint an Annunciation, after they had rejected one by Titian on account of its price, and though it seems hardly possible that any one could have compared the two men, yet no doubt the pleasure of getting an altarpiece quickly and punctually and for a moderate sum, often outweighed the honour of the possible painting by the great Titian.
No one has left so few easel-paintings as Pordenone; fresco was so much better suited to his particular style. The canvas of the “Madonna of Mercy” in the Venice Academy, was painted about 1525 for a member of the house of Ottobono, and introduces seven members of the family. It is very free from his colossal, exaggerated manner; the attendant saints are studied from nature, and in his journals the painter mentions that the St. Roch is a portrait of himself. The “S. Lorenzo enthroned,” in the same gallery, shows both his virtues and failings. The saints have his enormous proportions. The Baptist is twisting round, to display the foreshortening which Pordenone particularly affects. The gestures are empty and inexpressive, but the colour is broad and fluid; there is a large sense of decoration in the composition, and something simple and austere about the figure of S. Lorenzo. As is so often the case with Pordenone, the principal actor of the scene is smaller and more sincerely imagined than the attendant personages, who are crowded into the foreground, where they are used to display the master’s skill.
Pordenone died suddenly at Ferrara, where he had been summoned by its Duke to undertake one of his great schemes of decoration. He was said to have been poisoned, but though he had jealous rivals there seems no proof of the truth of the assertion, which was one very commonly made in those days. He is interesting as being the only distinguished member of the Venetian School whose frescoes have come down to us in any number, and as being the only one of the later masters with whom it was the chosen medium.