A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 207. Giovanni Bellini. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.—H. C. Frick Coll., New York.

Chapter VII
VENETIAN PAINTING BEFORE TITIAN

On the splendor of Venice—Italo-Byzantine painters of the 14th Century—Paduan, Veronese, and Umbrian Painters at Venice—Jacopo Bellini—Squarcione’s school at Padua, Carlo Crivelli—Andrea Mantegna, mentor for Northern Italy—Antonello da Messina’s Realism—The flowering of the old Narrative School in Gentile Bellino—Giovanni Bellini—The backward Vivarini—Carpaccio and the end of the old Narrative Style—Literary background of Giorgione’s Art—Giorgione of Castelfranco.

When, about the middle of the fifth century, a pitiful throng of refugees sought safety from Attila and his Huns in the fens at the head of the Adriatic, they took with them what was left of the constructive genius of the Roman Empire. They raised amid the lagoons a healthful and convenient city, which in the course of centuries became the most beautiful in Europe. They developed a strong and wise oligarchy, under forms sufficiently democratic to satisfy the people. They attained an extraordinary capacity for diplomacy and overseas trade—a brilliant commercialized civilization. Secure in their isolation and wealth, the Venetians mediated the long strife between the popes and the Teutonic emperors, making favorable terms with both. Venice enjoyed a wholly exceptional political stability. No other commune of Europe could have fittingly assumed the title, Serenissima. Her galleys and sailing craft plied to Candia, Rhodes, Smyrna, Alexandretta, Constantinople. Down the Adriatic to Malta, her trading stations shone white under the yellow cliffs. Her incoming ships brought back the splendid rugs and silks and embroideries from the Levant, the beautiful potteries of Asia Minor, Persia and distant China, the veined marbles and porphyries of Egypt and of Istria to build into her churches and palaces. She was astute and powerful enough to divert a crusade into a plundering expedition against her rival, Constantinople. And thus she got the four antique bronze horses still chafing above the portico of St. Mark’s and many a relic of the later Byzantine splendor. Her doors ever opened to the Orient. Her quays swarmed with turbaned traders. The Greeks had their churches and confraternities at Venice, and so had the Slavonians. For articles of luxury the northern caravans came to Venice over the Brenner to load from the German warehouses on the Grand Canal.

So stable, rich and proud a city was singularly slow in producing its own art. Venice was never primarily a manufacturing community, and from the first she expected to import most articles of luxury and display. Thus when the manydomed Basilica rose over the body of her patron, St. Mark, Venice called masters from Constantinople to enrich the surfaces with mosaics, and when, towards the end of the fourteenth century, she wished to picture the new Palace of the Doges, she called not her own artists to the task, but those of Padua, Verona and distant Fabriano. Her originality and greatness in painting do not clearly assert themselves until about 1475 in the work of the brothers Bellini, and by 1577, the year of Titian’s death, the period of her artistic supremacy has passed. The whole development is comprised within a century; its acceleration is even more remarkable than the tardiness of its appearance. In three generations Venetian painting made the progress that had required six in Tuscany, and the whole preparatory period, which in Florence stretched over a century and three-quarters, is included in the single life of such a master as Giovanni Bellini.

This means that Venetian painting followed simpler and more unperturbed ideals than that of Florence. The composure, complacency, and self-centered quality of the Venetians was a source of strength to their artists and as well a limitation. The city stuck closely to its chief business of gaining greatly in order to live magnificently. And unlike Florence, Venice interprets magnificence in the most material terms, in terms of velvet and veined marbles, fair skins and lustrous hair, in feasting and measured revelry, grave and gentle manners, colorful pageantry in honor of God, his saints and the Serenissima Republica. You will not find poets, scholars, scientists a-plenty at Venice. Her painters have no tendency to be also architects, sculptors, mathematicians, theorists in æsthetics; they stick placidly to the main business of painting. And perhaps just because the Venetian painter refused to be diverted from the problems proper to his craft, his progress was so rapid and assured, and the Venetian school, simply as painting, the most beautiful school of painting the world has ever seen.

It was written in the lagoon itself that Venetian painting should be a school of color. Long before the marble and porphyry palaces and the shining bridges of Renaissance Venice spanned the canals, the brown water gave its satiny reflections of rude hut, coppered galley, tawny sail, and, in days of complete calm, of the serrated ivory of the Julian Alps or the velvety azure of the Euganean Hills. As the city grew palatially, the marble and gold of the palace fronts, and spires and domes, with the buff and red of soaring bell towers, further enriched the shimmering of the lagoon. Its waters were ruffled not merely by winds blending and effacing the weaving of borrowed colors, but also by the passing of gilded processional barges with rhythmical oars celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin or the marriage of Venice to the Adriatic.

Ashore the splendor was hardly less. Along the balustrades of innumerable little bridges, the rose or yellow marble got an ineffable finish from the touch of countless hands. Dusky archways gave upon courts encrusted with variegated marbles, porphyry and mosaics. In the gloomy streets, gay pictorial frescoes enlivened the fronts of the less pretentious houses. In the great Piazza of St. Mark and other open spaces, often passed in solemn procession the religious confraternities called Schools, the members garbed with a splendor rare even in the Renaissance. There were clubs of young fops, not yet broken to the paternal commerce, who gave themselves to the invention and display of the finest tailoring and haberdashery. And the unorganized kindred activities of the women of all ages were as effective from the point of view of social display. Such was the spectacle that Venice offered the painter for record and even more for inspiration. And the greatness of the Venetian painters lay in their capacity to lend to this chiefly material splendor their own kind of ideality.