Palma Vecchio[[81]] is a more considerable figure. Born at Serinalta amid the Bergamesque hills, in 1480, we find him at Venice, by 1505 among the pupils of Giovanni Bellini. Like the rest, he is touched by Giogione’s poetry, but on the whole he merely intensifies and refines upon simpler methods. He follows Titian in the conversation piece, and does many Arcadian Holy Families which are beautifully lighted, radiantly colored and felt with a warmth and simplicity that just misses sentimentality. Among the best is the Adoration of the Shepherds, Figure [278], in the Louvre.
With Titian, he loves women of generous build and he sets off their impressive charms by careful posing, employing all the new devices of counterpoise. One may see him at his grandest in the altar-piece of St. Barbara, Figure [279], painted after 1561. The saint is worthy to be the patroness of artillerymen. She holds her martyr’s palm like a field marshal’s baton, she is imperiously confident and yet gentle—a lovely Amazon of the Christian pantheon.
Fig. 279. Palma Vecchio.—S.M. Formosa.
In the Arcadian nude Palma has delicacy and refinement of workmanship, but the mood is obvious. For him beauty is literally skin deep, and he gives himself to the impossible competition of paint with nature’s nacreous shades and ineffable carnations. But he so nearly succeeds that just as a painter of lovely surfaces no Venetian painter quite equalled him, not even Titian, and with this single talent Palma almost made himself a great portraitist. Indeed if painting surfaces were all of portraiture, he would be the greatest portraitist of the Renaissance. But his big, blond models lose condition in his hands. Charming as is such a group as the Three Graces at Dresden, or the dozen or more single portraits of men and women, they lack the last quality of distinction. He tries to gain it by adopting rather overtly the pathos and wistfulness of Giorgione, but it doesn’t suit his exquisitely groomed cavaliers nor yet their even more exquisitely groomed and most ample light o’loves. Indeed, despite a handful of superb portraits, Palma has ever the air rather of a consummate beauty doctor than that of a great artist. However that be, his influence was widespread throughout Northern Italy, and especially around his native Bergamo. He died in 1528, leaving a Veronese pupil, Bonifazio, to complete his unfinished canvases and to carry on to the middle of the century his brilliant and gentle style. Within his narrow range Palma is admirable, never uneasy, never below himself. In his unperturbed Arcadianism and even in his harmless sentimentalism, in his delicacy and robustness, he seems more Venetian than the Venetians themselves.
Composure is the very soul of the grand style whether in fifth century Athens or in sixteenth century Florence, Rome, or Venice. It accepts the human spectacle as worthy and thrilling, admires without misgivings the best things that come before its eye. That is why radicals hate the grand style—and rightly, for it is always aristocratic, caring rather little for the average man and much for that privileged remnant which lives in highest bodily efficiency and mental ease. The grand style is on the side of what Matthew Arnold called the barbaric virtues of wealth, health, and generous living. The moment the artist begins to question the social order, to be curious about the foibles and fates of individuals as such, the grand style is in peril. This delicate and inquisitive sensibility makes its appearance in Italy not long after the death of Raphael. You will find it in Pontormo, at Florence, in Lorenzo Lotto, in the Venetic region, in Moretto of Brescia, above all in Correggio, more assertively in Tintoretto, and latent in Titian’s last phase. It is a tremor on the sea of history that heralds a new dawn.
Fig. 280. Lorenzo Lotto. Adoration of the Shepherds.—Brescia.
Lorenzo Lotto,[[82]] born at Treviso in 1480, first and most characteristically embodies the new intimacy. He worked widely through Lombardy and the Marches, enjoying a transitory vogue at Venice. Trained in the austere methods of Alvise Vivarini, he soon gave himself to his own native melancholy. One may see his qualities and defects in the great Enthroned Madonna, in San Bartolommeo at Bergamo. Mr. Berenson has well remarked that the saints are no longer demi-gods and objects of worship, but “pious souls in whose faces and gestures we discern the zeal, the fervor, the yearning, the reverie, or even the sentimental ecstacy peculiar to the several temperaments most frequently occurring among the children of Holy Mother Church.” Note too how the stately architecture derived from Giovanni Bellini and the crowded figure group mutually dwarf one another. Intimacy and monumentality do not live well together. This picture was finished in 1516, the year that Titian began the Assumption. Does not the contrast show Lotto an alien in his time and a harbinger of ours? In later pictures of less monumental pretensions,—as in a Nativity, Figure [280], at Brescia, which may profitably be contrasted with Palma’s more assured version,—he attains a penetrating beauty of a morbid kind, and his sensitiveness makes him a most appealing portraitist. He has left an extraordinary gallery of shy, inadequate, sometimes morose and invalid men, and women, Figure [281]. They have not the confidence of the Renaissance, but hesitations like our own. Which shows perhaps that the Renaissance mood was ever urban and the affair of a minority of statesmen, merchants and humanists. In the little cities where there was no enlightened court the human spirit retained and betrayed its immemorial frailties and misgivings. Lotto died in 1556, having widely diffused his sensitive art through the Marca and Lombardy.
