Fig. 244. Carpaccio. Prince Hero Taking Leave of his Father (L) and Greeting Ursula (R).—Venice.
We have now to trace the old narrative style to its climax and end in Vittore Carpaccio.[[76]] He inherited all the panoramic and luministic accomplishments of Gentile Bellini, but applied them with far greater imagination. He deals with legend, giving it contemporary color, and in his sensitive hands it becomes the most veridical and charming of fairy lands. Carpaccio’s training is obscure to us. It may be that the very mediocre narrative painter, Lazzaro Bastiani, first taught him. In any case he drew more from Gentile Bellini’s resolute handling of light, textures and costume. We first meet Carpaccio as an artist in the decoration of the Great School of St. Ursula from 1492 to 1495. He was probably all of fifty years old. The childlike legend, with its numerous embassies, meetings and partings, settings out and arrivings, gave him spectacular opportunities of which he made the most winning use. In the nine canvases now in the Academy we find an epitome of the courtesy, circumstance and adventure that accompanied travel in those days, and the mere spectacle is underlaid with a pensive ideality; for these are no ordinary journeys, but the quest of martyrdom by a princely youth and maiden. Nothing is insisted on, however, but the gayety of the events, and the picturesqueness of their settings. As in all good story-telling, the persuasiveness depends on veracious minor episodes. There are the most attentive scribes and secretaries, as if to carry off the unlikely matter they are inditing. The heavy ease of men-at-arms and self-conscious elegance of young Venetian fops make them credible witnesses to else incredible legend. To adorn his tales Carpaccio borrowed from the woodcut illustrations to Breydenbach’s “Itinerary to Jerusalem.” It is remarkable how he invests these mere skeletons of cities with color, sunlight, the glamour of the orient. About all he draws a veil of air saturated with sunlight, concentrated into rising clouds whose shadows darken the lustrous blue of the tranquil lagoon. There never was a more ravishing raconteur in the art of making incidentals count for essentials. Such a picture as Prince Hero taking leave of his father and greeting St. Ursula, Figure [244], is the fulfilment of all that old Jacopo Bellini and his Veronese precursors had dreamed of. It is typical of a series which has its more intimate phases only by way of exception. The virginal beauty of the legend gets a real expression only in the Vision of St. Ursula. Figure [245]. The character of the earnest, slumbering face and the sweet slight body carries through the exquisitely indicated space, and we hardly need to be told that the wistful boyish angel is offering a martyr’s palm. Possibly it takes a mundane person like Carpaccio to realize the beauty of the more fantastic religious ardors. A completely devout person takes them as in the day’s work.
Fig. 245. Carpaccio. Dream of St. Ursula.—Venice.
Before the end of the century, Carpaccio painted for the School of S. Giovanni Evangelista the Miracle of the healing of a Demoniac. The picture is now in the Academy. It is a marvellous panorama of contemporary Venice, with the bustle of eager crowds, the slipping of gondolas over the canal, and light flickering over and caressing the manifold colors of the gay scene. It has the fidelity of Gentile Bellini without his dryness.
Fig. 246. Carpaccio. St. George and the Dragon.—School of St. George of the Slavonians.
The most delightful if not the most important monument of Renaissance Venice is unquestionably the School of St. George of the Slavonians. It is the only school that retains its primitive paintings still set in the original carved and golded wainscoting. There one sees in the ground floor the legends of St. Jerome, an odd mixture of gravity, richness, and humor. Nothing more sumptuous than the Saint in his exquisitely appointed study, or more archly comic than the scene of consternation when the Saint brings home his lion from the desert. The series was painted about 1502. Upstairs we have the chivalric legend of St. George of Cappadocia, painted some eight years later. Nothing could be more romantically entrancing than the boyish champion charging intrepidly over the sun-dried shreds and tatters of his predecessors into the very jaws of the most confidently virulent of dragons, Figure [246], unless it be the scene where he leads his tame dragon into the astounded court, or that in which he proudly baptizes his future bride and her parents while a Turkish band plays a fanfare. About the blowing of these horns of elfland there is no faintness whatever. We are in the realm of most palpable adventure and romance, and the emphasis depends on splendid color and on drawing of a magical alertness.
Carpaccio’s merit as the liveliest and most persuasive of raconteurs seems so definite that it is almost a shock to meet him in other capacities. Also a disappointment to find in the New Testament subjects from the School of the Albanians, 1504, that in such stereotyped subjects he can be almost mediocre. Certainly in the great altar-piece of the Presentation in the Temple, Figure [247], at the Academy, he shows that he fully understands the new monumentality of Giovanni Bellini. The date is 1510. The picture is of the most reverent composure, and as tender as it is grand. In the portrait of Two Courtesans on a Balcony, in the Correr, Carpaccio shows a force of character wholly modern. With a kind of irony he has taken the moral emptiness of his sitters out of doors, flooded it with sunlight and air, given it harshness and ugliness, lavishing upon the rich costumes and fair skins the most delicate pains. John Ruskin will tell you that these are honest women. Such faith is more worthy of reverence than of imitation. The greatness of Carpaccio lies in the impartiality with which he renders a certain kind of life on its own terms. The romancer is capable of appalling truthfulness.