It has been treated as a mistake to confine the chiaroscuro of a subject exclusively to one source; nor can it be doubted that often it is and has been proved to be both necessary and advantageous to admit more; this is however a licence to be granted with considerable caution, and it appears to be the privilege of superiour powers to raise a subject, by the admission of subordinate, sometimes diverging, sometimes opposite streams of light, to assist and invigourate the effect of the primary one, without impairing that unity which, alone can ensure a breadth of effect, without which each part, for mastery striving, soon would be lost in confusion, or crumble into fragments. The best instances of the advantages gained by the superinduction of artificial light, appear to be the Pietro Martire and the S. Lorenzo of Tiziano; if selection can be made from the works of a master, where to count is to choose. In the first, the stern light of evening far advanced in the back-ground, is commanded by the celestial emanation bursting from above, wrapping the summit in splendour, and diffusing itself in rays more or less devious over the scenery. The subject of S. Lorenzo, a nocturnal scene, admits light from two sources—the fire beneath the saint, and a raised torch: but receives its principal splendour from the aërial reflex of the vision on high, which sheds its mitigating ray on the martyr.
The nocturnal studies of Tintoretto from models and artificial groups have been celebrated: these, prepared in wax or clay, he arranged, raised, suspended, to produce masses, foreshortening, and variety of effect: it was thence he acquired that decision of chiaroscuro unknown to more expanded day-light, by which he divided his bodies, and those wings of obscurity and light by which he separated the groups of his composition, though the mellowness of his eye nearly always instructed him to connect the two extremes by something intermediate that partook of both, as the extremes themselves by reflexes with the back-ground or the scenery. The general rapidity of his process, by which he baffled his competitors and often overwhelmed himself, did not indeed always permit him to attend deliberately to this principle, and often hurried him into an abuse of practice, which in the lights turned breadth into mannered or insipid flatness, and in the shadows into total extinction of parts: of all this, he has in the schools of S. Rocco and Marco given the most unquestionable instances; the Resurrection of Christ and the Massacre of the Innocents, comprehend every charm by which chiaroscuro fascinates its votaries: in the vision, dewy dawn melts into deep but pellucid shade, itself rent or reflected by celestial splendor and angelic hues: whilst in the Infant-massacre at Bethlehem alternate sheets of stormy light, and agitated gloom, dash horrour on the astonished eye.
He pursued, however, another method to create, without more assistance from chiaroscuro than individual light and shade, an effect equivalent and perhaps superiour to what the utmost stretch of its powers could have produced, in the crucifixion of the Albergo, or guest-room of S. Rocco, the largest and most celebrated of his works. The multitudinous rabble dispersed over that picture, (for such, rather than composition, one group excepted, that assemblage of accidental figures deserves to be called), he connected by a sovereign tone, ingulphing the whole in one mass of ominous twilight, an eclipse, or what precedes a storm, or hurricane, or earthquake; nor suffering the captive eye to rest on any other object than the faint gleam hovering over the head of the Saviour in the centre, and in still fainter tones dying on the sainted group gathered beneath the cross. Yet this nearly superhuman contrivance which raises above admiration a work whose incongruous parts else must have sunk it beneath mediocrity, Agostino Carracci in his print, with chalcographic callus, has totally overlooked; for notwithstanding the iron sky that overhangs the whole, he has spread, if not sunshine, the most declared day-light from end to end, nor left the eye uninformed of one motley article, or one blade of grass.
With Iacopo Robusti may be named, though adopted by another school, Belisario Corenzio an Achæan Greek, his pupil, his imitator in the magic of chiaroscuro, and with still less compunction his rival in dispatch and rapidity of hand: the immense compositions in which he overflowed, he encompassed, and carried to irresistible central splendour by streams of shade, and hemmed his glories in with clouds, or showery, or pregnant with thunder. The monasteries and churches of Naples and its dependencies abound in his frescos.
The more adscititious effects of chiaroscuro produced by the opposition of dark to lucid, opaque to transparent bodies, and cold to warm tints, though fully understood by the whole Venetian school, were nearly carried to perfection by Paolo Cagliari. There is no variety of harmonious or powerful combination in the empire of colour, as a substitute of light and shade, which did not emanate from his eye, variegate his canvas, and invigourate his scenery. Many of his works, however, and principally the masses scattered over his suppers, prove that he was master of that legitimate chiaroscuro which, independent of colour, animates composition: but the gaiety of his mind which inspired him with subjects of magnificence and splendour, of numerous assemblies canopied by serene skies or roving lofty palaces, made him seek his effects oftener in opposed tints, than in powerful depths of light and shade.
But all preceding, contemporary, and subsequent schools, with their united powers of chiaroscuro, were far excelled both in compass and magnitude of its application by the genius of Antonio Allegri from the place of his nativity, surnamed Correggio. To them light and shade was only necessary as the more or less employed, or obedient attendant on design, composition and colour: but design, composition and colour, were no more than the submissive vehicles, or inchanted ministers of its charms to Correggio. If, strictly speaking, he was not the inventor of its element, he fully spanned its measure, and expanded the powers of its harmony through Heaven and earth; in his eye and hand it became the organ of sublimity; the process of his cupolas made it no longer a question whether an art circumscribed by lines and figure could convey ideas of reality and immensity at once. Entranced by his spell, and lap’d in his elysium, we are not aware of the wide difference between the conception of the medium, the place, space and mode in which certain beings ought, or may be supposed to move, and that of those beings themselves; and forget, though fully adequate to the first, that Correggio was unequal to the second; that though he could build Heaven he could not people it. If M. Agnolo found in the depth of his mind and in grandeur of line the means of rendering the immediate effect of will and power intuitive in the creation of Adam, by darting life from the finger of Omnipotence, the coalition of light and darkness opened to the entranced eye of Correggio the means of embodying the Mosaic. ‘Let there be light,’ and created light in that stream of glory which, issuing from the divine infant in his Notte, proclaims a god. If Thought be personified in the prophets and Sybils of the Sistine chapel, he has made silence audible in the slumbering twilight that surrounds the Zingara; and filled the gloom which enbosoms Jupiter and Io, with the whispers of Love.
And though perhaps we should be nearer truth by ascribing the cause of Correggio’s magic to the happy conformation of his organs, and his calm serenity of mind, than to Platonic ecstacies, a poet might at least be allowed to say ‘that his soul, absorbed by the contemplation of infinity, soared above the sphere of measurable powers, knowing that every object whose limits can be distinctly perceived by the mind, must be within its grasp; and however grand, magnificent, beautiful or terrific, fall short of the conception itself, and be less than sublime.’—In this, from whatever cause, consists the real spell of Correggio—which neither Parmegiano nor Annibale Carracci seem to have been able to penetrate: the Bolognese certainly not; for if we believe himself in his letters to Ludovico, expressive of his emotions at the first sight of Correggio’s cupolas, he confines his admiration to the foreshortening and grace of forms, the successful imitation of flesh, and rigorous perspective.
Of Correggio’s numerous pretending imitators Lodovico Carracci appears to be the only one who penetrated his principle: the axiom, that the less the traces appear of the means, by which a work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of nature, is not an axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation, which Lodovico Carracci spread over his works could arise only from the contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and its comparison with nature, and where could that be met with in a degree equal to what he found in the infinite unity and variety of Correggio’s effusions? They inspired his frescos in the cloisters of St. Michele in Bosco: the foreshortenings of the muscular labourers at the Hermitage, and of the ponderous dæmon that mocks their toil, the warlike splendour in the homage of Totila, the nocturnal conflagration of Monte Cassino, the wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insidious charms of the sister nymphs in the garden scene, equally proclaim the pupil of Correggio.
His triumph in oil is the altar piece of St. John preaching in a chapel of the Certosa at Bologna, whose lights seem embrowned by a golden veil, and the shadowy gleam of Vallombrosa; though he sometimes indulged in tones austere, pronounced and hardy: such is the Flagellation of Christ in the same church, whose tremendous depth of flesh-tints contrasts the open wide-expanded sky, and less conveys than dashes its terrours on the astonished sense.