Carlo Dolci

by George Hay

We have seen in the course of our necessarily short survey that Carlo Dolci lived to the established age of man, and started his work before he was in his teens, that no long journeys or extended sojourns in foreign countries withdrew him from the area of his normal activities; we have seen that he never left Florence save on one occasion. And, as he was working throughout his life, his output would have been uncomfortably large but for the fact that he never allowed a canvas to leave his studio until every stroke that his brain could suggest, and his hand execute, had been added to it. His conscientiousness alone availed to check his output, and so intent was he upon expressing himself as well as he could within the obvious limitations of his gift that he never attempted to grapple with the problems that beset bigger men.

In composition, for example, Carlo Dolci was distinctly deficient; there is no more serious charge against him as an artist than that he could not compose a large figure picture. If he had to devote himself to one, under the terms of some commission from a wealthy patron, he would not hesitate to go to other masters in search of a composition that would suit his purpose. It may be put to his credit that he did these things openly, he does not seem to have claimed for himself the work that he borrowed from his contemporaries. In fact, it is quite probable that he knew his gifts did not lie in the direction of composition; he regarded it as something that did not matter very much, and was quite content with the praises that his single figure subjects received. One cannot help thinking that he would have been very successful as a painter of miniatures.

Dolci impresses us to-day with the feeling that he was a man who struggled valiantly and conscientiously with a very considerable gift, which he had neither the time nor the will to develop along the lines that lead from mediocrity to remarkable achievement. Then again we must remember that the fates were not auspicious, he was not taken in the early days to the studio of a first-class master, he did not have the inspiration of great work. By the time the seventeenth century had travelled over a third of its appointed course Florentine art, as we have seen, was hardly in a very flourishing condition. The days of great experiments and earnest striving had passed, and, although Venice is comparatively close to Florence, and was full even in Carlo Dolci's days of some of the world's most inspiring work, although the Venetians were delighted by Carlo Dolci's rich vivid colouring, and commissioned many pictures from his brush, there is no evidence to show that he ever visited the great city of the Adriatic, or that he found the time or the inclination to learn any of the lessons she has to teach.

PLATE VIII.—THE SLEEP OF ST. JOHN

This is one of the last efforts of Dolci. It was painted after his return from Innsbrück, just before he was taken ill. It hangs in the Pitti Palace, Florence.

We cannot, then, look upon Carlo Dolci's life or work as being complete. He seems to afford an example of what talent will do when it lacks adequate direction, and we see too the danger into which the art of the painter falls when his inclinations are too literary. For it was no part of Carlo Dolci's aim in life to express harmonies in colour and line, although such expression may be taken to be the beginning and end of all that is greatest in painting. Dolci was always keen on telling a story, always intent upon preaching a sermon in paint, always forgetful that the provinces of art and literature have a very wide boundary line. It is rather interesting to compare the lives of Carlo Dolci and Fra Angelico of Fiesole, because each was a man who sought to express moral principles, sentiments, and belief on canvas, and, while the one succeeded beyond all possibility of doubt, the other has met with only a modified success. Beato Angelico was influenced by the Dominicans as Dolci was by the Benedictines; each gave his life work to the service of the Church and the pursuit of virtues that the Church teaches man to practise. One laboured in the cloister and the other outside it, but oddly enough, he who came first and decorated the walls of St. Mark's Convent knew the more about life and more about art, more about perspective and more about composition, than his successor, who followed so many years later. The truth is, perhaps, that when Fra Angelico came to the convent of the Dominicans the Renaissance was just blossoming in Italy. It was a season of great inspiration. Man and Learning were being discovered, and although some aspects of the discovery were hidden from the good brother of St. Dominic, all the attendant enthusiasms came to him. Moreover, Angelico travelled and mingled freely with scholars and great artists, so that we can divide his life work into three stages, of which the second is better than the first, and the last is best of all.

On the other hand, when Dolci came on the scene the Renaissance had blossomed and budded and filled the face of the earth with fruit, but the fruit was already overripe. The great stimulus had passed; degeneration had set in, not only in the world of art. The mere fact that Carlo Dolci's gifts found an immediate acceptance shows that the times were not distinguished, and we do not find in Baldinucci's life of his friend one solitary suggestion that any of the great rulers who employed his brush ever turned to him with the request that he should enter into competition with those who had gone before, that he should take a course of study and learning to strengthen the weak points of his work, sacrificing a little of its sweetness to gain some small measure of strength. At the same time we must not underrate Carlo Dolci's work because we have outgrown it, since, as was suggested on an early page of this little essay, his charm in certain aspects is perennial, and although its powers to hold us must pass when we have turned to higher things, those who are following us will find pleasure and inspiration in the painter's art when they visit for the first time the galleries of Italy. They will travel by easy degrees from pictures that please to those that call in the first place for study, and then for admiration and the recognition of masterpieces.

Carlo Dolci's place in art is not altogether unlike that of some of his living countrymen in the world of music. There are Italian musicians known to all of us who have such a gift of sweetness that we cannot endure their melodies for long. A song now and again, or some sparkling little work for piano or violin, gives us a passing thrill of pleasure, and then we turn with complete content to the clearer atmosphere and more serene moods of the great masters whose works endure for all time. So it is with Carlo Dolci; we go to him now and again, if only for a little while, conscious that sweetness as well as strength has its place in the world of art as in the world of music and letters. And we know, too, that criticism can say nothing worse about Carlo Dolci's gifts than that he was never able to turn them to the best account, that the rough diamond of his talent was never in the hands of a competent lapidary. His life is not one we are called upon to overlook, for his achievement, though it has little variety, is marked by certain definite qualities that call for recognition, even though these qualities are often moral rather than artistic.