This principle Lionardo seems seldom if ever to have extended to relieve or recommend his larger compositions and male figures, if we except the group of contending horsemen which made or was intended for some part of his rival cartoon in the Sala del Consiglio: a knot of supreme powers in Composition and Chiaroscuro; though, as we know it chiefly from a copy of P. P. Rubens engraved by Edelinck, the gross evidence of Flemish liberties taken with the style, makes it probable that the original simplicity of light and shade has been invigourated by the artificial contrasts of the copyist. Lionardo’s open scenery, tinged with the glareless evenness of plain day-light, seldom warrants effects so concentrated. Unostentatious gravity marks the characters of his Last Supper, and in sober evening tones marked probably the Chiaroscuro of the groups and scenery, if we may be allowed to form our judgment from the little that remains unimpaired by the ravages of time and the more barbarous ones of renovators.
To the discovery of central radiance the genius of Lionardo with equal penetration added its counterpart, purity of shade and the coalescence of both through imperceptible demi-tints. Whatever tone of light he chose, he never forgot that the shade intended to set it off, was only its absence and not a positive colour, and that both were to be harmonised by demi-tints composed of both; a principle of which no school anterior to him has left a trace.
That the discovery of a principle big with advantages as obvious as important to art should have been reserved for the penetration of Lionardo, however singular, is less strange than that, when discovered and its powers demonstrated, it should, with the exception of one name, have not only met with no imitators, but with an ambiguous and even discouraging reception from the pupils of his own school, and some next allied to it. Vasari, his panegyrist rather than biographer, talks of it more as a singular phænomenon than as an evident principle, and avowing that he introduced a certain depth of shade into oil-painting, which enabled succeeding artists to relieve their figures more forcibly[88], persevered to discolour walls and pannels with washy flat insipidity. Bartolomeo della Porta alone appears to have had sufficient compass of mind to grasp its energy and connect it with colour: from him, through Andrea del Sarto down to Pietro Berettini, who owed his effects rather to opposition of tints than to legitimate Chiaroscuro, the Tuscan school gradually suffered it to dwindle into evanescence. Unless we were to consider its astonishing effects in some of Michael Angelo’s works in the light of imitations rather than as emanations of his own genius; which perhaps we are the less warranted to presume as he seems to have paid no attention to Lionardo’s discovery in its brightest period; for the groups of his celebrated cartoon exhibit little more than individual light and shade.
What the Tuscan school treated with neglect the Roman appears not to have been eager to adopt: if Raffaello did not remain a stranger to the theories of Lionardo and Frà. Bartolomeo, he suffered the principle to lie dormant; for no production of his during his intercourse with them is marked by concentration of light or purity of shade or subordinate masses: nor is the interval between his last departure from Florence and his entrance of the Vatican discriminated by any visible progress in massing and illuminating a whole: the upper and lower parts of the dispute on the Sacrament, cut sheer asunder, as a whole, are little relieved in either; and if the Parnassus and the school of Athens have the beginning, middle, and end of legitimate Composition, they owe it to expression and feeling; nor can the more vigorous display of Chiaroscuro in the works of the second stanza, the Deliverance of Peter, the Fall of Heliodorus, the Attila, the Mass of Bolsena be referred to a principle of imitation, when we see it neglected in a subject where it might have ruled with absolute sway, in the Incendio del Borgo, and on the whole in every Composition of the third and fourth stanza; a series of evidence that Raffaello considered Chiaroscuro as a subordinate vehicle, and never suffered its blandishments or energies to absorb meaning or to supplant expression and form[89]: but the harmony which immediately after him Giulio Pipi, and Polydoro only excepted, the rest of his pupils had sacrificed or consecrated to higher beauties, their successors, the subsequent Roman school from the Zuccari through Giuseppo Cesari down to C. Maratta, if they did not entirely lose in a heavy display of academic pedantry, or destroy by the remorseless ‘bravura’ of mannered practice, they uniformly polluted by bastard theories and adulterated methods of shade.
When I say that the Roman school uniformly erred in their principle of shade, I have not forgot M. Angelo da Caravaggio, whose darks are in such perfect unison with the lights of his chiaroscuro, that A. Carracci declared he did not grind colour but flesh itself for his tints (‘che macinava carne’), and whom for that reason and on such authority I choose rather to consider as the head of his own school than as the member of another: in some of his surviving works, but far more frequently in those which without sufficient authenticity are ascribed to him, an abrupt transition from light to darkness, without an intervening demi-tint, has offended the eye and provoked the sarcasm of an eminent critic: but as long as the picture of the entombing of Christ in the Chiesa Nuova at Rome may be appealed to; as long as the Pilgrim’s kneeling before the Madonna with the child in her arms, of St. Agostino at Rome, shall retain their tone; or the Infant Jesus, once in the Spada palace, crushing the Serpent’s head, shall resist the ravages of time—it will be difficult to produce in similar works of any other master or any other school, from Lionardo down to Rembrandt, a system of chiaroscuro which shall equal the severe yet mellow energy of the first; the departing evening ray and veiled glow of the second; or, with unimpaired harmony, the bold decision of masses and stern light and shade of the third.
The homage sparingly granted or callously refused to chiaroscuro by the two schools of design was with implicit devotion paid to it by the nurse of colour, the school of Venice. Whether as tradition on the authority of Vasari maintains, they received it as a principle of imitation from the perspicacity, or as a native discovery from the genius of Giorgione Barbarelli, though from what has been advanced on both sides of the question, it would be presumptuous positively to decide on either, it must be allowed, that if the Venetian received a hint from the Florentine, he extended it through a system, the harmony of which was all his own, and excelled in breadth and amenity the light which it could not surpass in splendour, added transparence to purity of shade, rounded by reflexes and discovered by the contrast of deep with aërial colour, that energy of effect which mere chiaroscuro could not have reached, and which was carried near perfection by Paolo Cagliari.
Among the varied mischief poured into this country by the rapacious sophistry of traders and the ambitious cullibility of wealthy collectors, no hand perhaps has been more destructive to the genuine appreciation of original styles than the baptism of pictures with names not their own: by this prolific method worse ones than those of Luini, Aretusi, Timoteo della Vite, Bonifacio, are daily graced with the honours due to Lionardo, Correggio, Raffaello, Tiziàn; though none have suffered more by the multiplication than Giorgione, whom shortness of life, a peculiar fatality of circumstances, and the ravages of time, have conspired to render one of the scarcest as well as least authenticated artists even in Italy: to whom his earliest and latest biographers have been as critically unjust as chronologically inattentive; Vasari by transferring to another his principal work; Fiorillo by making him paint the portrait of Calvin the Reformer.[90]
To form our opinion therefore of Giorgione’s chiaroscuro from a few portraits or single figures, if legitimate, often restored, or from the crumbling remnants of his decayed frescoes, would be to form an estimate of a magnificent fabric from some loose fragment or stone: to do full justice to his powers we must have recourse to his surprising work in the school of St. Marco at Venice; a composition whose terrific graces Vasari descants on with a fervour inferior only to the artist’s own inspiration, though he unaccountably ascribes it to the elder Palma.[91]
‘In the school of S. Marco he painted the story of the ship which conducts the body of S. Mark through a horrible tempest, with other barges assailed by furious winds; and besides, groups of aërial apparitions, and various forms of fiends who vent their blasts against the vessels, that by dint of oars and energy of arms strive to force their way through the mountainous and hostile waves which threaten to submerge them. You hear the howling blast, you see the grasp and fiery exertion of the men, the fluctuation of the waves, the lightning that bursts the clouds, the oars bent by the flood, the flood broke by the oars, and dashed to spray by the sinews of the rowers. What more? In vain I labour to recollect a picture that equals the terrours of this, whose design, invention, and colour make the canvass tremble! Often when he finishes, an artist, absorbed in the contemplation of parts, forgets the main point of a design, and as the spirits cool, loses the vein of his enthusiasm; but this man never losing sight of the subject, guided his conceit to perfection.’
The effect of this work, when it drew such a stream of eulogy from lips else so frugal in Venetian praise, may be guessed at from the impression it makes in its present decay—for even now, it might defy the competition of the most terrific specimens in chiaroscuro, the boat of Charon in M. Angelo’s Last Judgment, perhaps only excepted. Yet its master was defrauded of its glory by his panegyrist, whilst it was exciting the wonder and curiosity of every beholder: Lanzi is the only historian who notices its remains, and the real author[92]; we look in vain for it in Ridolfi, who in his Life of Giorgione treats us instead of it with a delectable account of a night-piece which he painted, exhibiting the tragi-comedy of castrating a cat.