It was characteristic of the man that on his return to his native city and before he took the picture he had painted to the Palace of the Medici, he went to the church in Florence at which he was accustomed to pray, and returned thanks for the happy termination of his travels. Then he was instructed by the Medici family to finish the portrait, so that it might stand for Santa Galla Placidia, the Empress whose famous tomb may be seen in Ravenna to this day, and, indeed, is one of the show-places of that quaint old city. Dolci then painted a very charming picture reproduced in these pages, the sleeping St. John with St. Zacharias and St. Elizabeth, and following the painting of this picture is associated the great misfortune of a life that had hitherto been pleasant and peaceful. The religious feelings that had been with him since the days when he was a little boy busily instructing his schoolfellows to turn from profane to sacred thoughts now degenerated into melancholy, and Dolci suffered from the true melancholia which baffles physicians to-day, and was then, of course, quite beyond the reach of palliative or cure. He could not speak without deep sighs; he was convinced that he had lost all his ability as a painter, and that the world had no more use for him. His wife, who gave up much of her time and attention to him, suffered in health from the premature birth of a child, and then Baldinucci, who wrote the little biography of the artist that was printed in Florence in the early 'eighties, and is the foundation of our knowledge of the artist's life, took the painter away from Florence to the country to the house of one Domenico Valdinotti. This man, an artist, had one or two pictures in his studio commissioned for wealthy patrons. He took up a palette with colours mixed, and gave it to Dolci, commanding him in sternest tones to finish a veil on one of the pictures of the Virgin. The painter obeyed, and succeeded so well in his task that all the doubt and fear that had clouded his life for the greater part of a year vanished in an hour, and he returned to Florence with a perfectly healthy mind to finish the Santa Galla Placidia, and one or two altar-pieces, including one for the Church of San Francesco.
Dolci then received a commission from the Empress Claude to paint a canvas for the Imperial Palace, but as she died in the following April this work was not completed. But he painted a fine martyrdom of St. Lorenzo and a striking picture of St. Francis of Assisi for the Duke. Then came more commissions from Venice, and the painter worked at half-a-dozen well-known pictures for that city. These pictures showed, perhaps, even more finish than those that had gone before, because concentration seems to have been the keynote of the painter's life, and while other men in all ages have used art as a means to an end, and have been unable to avoid the social temptations that have beset them in the day of their success, Carlo Dolci, like Tintoretto before him, had no care for anything save his work. So long as health was good he desired nothing better than to devote the whole day to labour, and his closest and most complete attention to what he had in hand. Of course, one only compares Dolci with Tintoretto in point of industry; all the developments that the great Venetian had made, all the truths he had discovered, were either unknown to Dolci or ignored by him. He was painting for a public that knew very little about art, and regarded exquisite finish as the surest sign of artistic accomplishment. Consequently the painter did not seek to develop along lines of independent thought; he had no pressing need to do so while everything he could reasonably require in the way of patronage and commission was at his command.
In 1682 Luca Giordano came to Florence to paint frescoes in the Chapel of the Corsini Palace. He admired Carlo Dolci's work very much, but used to rally him about the time he spent on it. "You do beautiful work, my Carlo," he said; "but how can you make it pay when you give hours and hours to that close finish? When I think of the 150,000 scudi I have earned since I took up the brush, I begin to fear that you will die hungry."
PLATE VII.—PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
This is one of the collection of portraits of artists painted, each by his own hand. As may be seen from the canvas, Dolci executed it in 1674 when he was approaching his sixtieth year. The canvas hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
It was perhaps a little unwise to talk in this fashion to a man who had been suffering from some form of brain disease, but it is certain that the words, though they were only spoken in jest, made a very deep impression upon the painter. Dolci had just finished an Adoration of the Magi, and had sent it to the Palace of the Duchess Vittoria. Receiving a summons from the Palace, he went there and heard the Duchess express herself to him in terms of high praise. Then she sent his Adoration back to its wall and ordered one of Giordano's pictures to be brought to her. "What do you think of this," she said to Dolci; "is it not a wonderful piece of work? Can you believe that it was really painted in such a short time?" and she named the dates of its commission and completion. This unlucky remark brought back all the painter's forebodings. His friend and biographer tells us that the Duchess did not mean to hurt his feelings, she had admired his work for the qualities it possessed, and in praising Giordano's she had commented upon what had struck her most about it—that is, the rapidity with which it had been executed. From that hour the painter went about silent and miserable, he was seldom heard to speak, and then to add to his troubles, his wife, to whom he had been devoted so passionately, died. His melancholy returned, and his Confessor, remembering how successfully he had been treated in the country beyond Florence, ordered him to turn to a picture of St. Ludovic and paint the vestments of one of the figures on the canvas. Dolci did as he was told, but this time the effort was in vain. Doubtless his brain had been weakened by the first attack of melancholia, and fears for the future, coupled with the shock of a beloved wife's death, were altogether too much for the enfeebled constitution of a man of seventy. He took to his bed, and died on the 17th of January 1686, leaving a family of seven daughters and one son. Dolci was buried in the family vault in the Church of the Santissima Nunziata, where he had worshipped so long, and where one of his friends had found him on his marriage day when he should have been with his bride. He did not leave much money behind him, but quite a large number of pictures that doubtless served his family in lieu of legacies at a time when the painter's work would be in greater demand than ever, because the limit of his output had been reached.
[III]
THE ARTIST'S WORK
When we turn from a résumé of the chief events of the painter's comparatively uneventful life to an endeavour to estimate the place he takes in the history of his country's art we have, in the first place, to consider the season in which he was born. Looking at the art history of Florence we see that Dolci came very late into the world. From the close of the fourteenth century, when Fra Angelico was born, down to the late years of the sixteenth century, when the last of the great masters seemed to pass away, Florence had enjoyed the services of a long series of distinguished artists. Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Lorenzo di Credi, Andrea del Sarto, Bronzino, Cigoli, all these and many others whose names can hardly be recalled without delight flourished in Florence, and while they lived there the city's reputation filled all the rest of Italy with envy. But neither a man nor his influence is everlasting; the great ones passed and left no successors; when Carlo Dolci appeared upon the scene the last trace of their influence had disappeared. Consequently he brought his gifts to a city from which inspiration had departed. The great achievements of the art world were no more than echoes. Florence had excelled herself in all directions. Painting had served her greatest men as no more than one form of expression. The greatest of them had sought to give their message to the world through the medium of more arts than one, and consequently, he who was a simpler painter was of comparatively small account. When Carlo Dolci was born, the time of great men having passed, no great forces were at work in his native city. He did not have the advantage of travel, he was never called upon to struggle hard and anxiously for the necessities of life. In some ways he was regarded as an infant prodigy and treated as such, and it would be hard to say that the premature development of gifts however great has ever served their possessor in the long run. No man's work can be judged properly save in relation to his circumstances and his time, and, in order that we may avoid the danger of underrating Carlo Dolci's achievement and dismissing for obvious faults what we should praise for merit, we are forced to consider the case carefully lest we treat a deserving man with injustice. Bearing time, place, and limitations in mind, it is possible then to consider the painter without the prejudice that the most glaring defects of his art are calculated to arouse.