After the middle of the sixteenth century, the flame-like rapidity of Tintoretto's style at Venice, and soon after, the powerful contrast of Caravaggio's method at Rome, and the eclectic system of the Carracci, at Bologna, spread general emulation over Italy, and divided Naples into three parties, of nearly equal strength, led by Corenzio, Ribera, and Caracciolo, differing from each other, but ready to unite against all foreign competition. During their flourish, Guido, Domenichino, Lanfranco, Artemisia Gentileschi were at Naples, and formed some pupils;—a period as enviable in the number of excellent artists and the progressive powers of execution, as disgraceful for the dark manœuvres and the vile intrigues that fill it—intrigues and manœuvres too closely interwoven with the history of Neapolitan art, and, unfortunately, too well attested, merely to be dismissed with silence and contempt.
Belisario Corenzio,[117] an Achæan Greek, after passing five years in the school of Tintoretto, fixed his abode at Naples about 1590. A native stream of ideas and unparalleled celerity of hand placed him, perhaps, on a level with his master in the dispatch of a prodigious number, even of most extensive works; but his rage was too ungovernable often to admit of more distinguished comparisons with Robusti; though few excelled him in design, and his works abound in conceptions, attitudes, and airs of heads confessedly inimitable to the Venetians themselves. The work in which he has best succeeded as an imitator of Tintoretto, is the Miraculous Feeding of the Crowd by the Saviour, in the Refectory of the Benedictines, a huge performance, but, under his hands, a task of forty days. Though generally too much of a mannerist to sacrifice the readiest to the best, he still preserves a character of his own, an air of originality, in glories especially, which he embosomed in darkness and clouds pregnant with showers. With a decided turn for works of large dimension in fresco, which seldom allowed him to submit to the finish of oil colour, he contrived to please by various compositions of sacred history, in small proportions, and is even said to have enlivened the perspectives of the Frenchman Desiderio with diminutive figures admirably toned and adapted to the scenery.
The native country of Giuseppe Ribera[118] was a subject of dispute between the Spaniards and Neapolitans, till the production of an extract from the baptismal register of Xativa (Antologia di Roma, 1795) decided the claim in favour of Spain, and proved him a native of that place, now "San Felipe," in the district of Valencia. If the date of his birth, January 12, 1588, be correct, he must have come to Italy and entered the school of Caravaggio at a very early period. From him Ribera went to Rome, Modena, Parma, saw Raffaello, Annibale, Correggio, and in imitation of their works attempted to form a more luminous and gayer style, in which he had little success, dismissed it soon after his return to Naples, and once more embraced the method of Caravaggio, as more eminently calculated by its force, truth, and effect to fix the eye of the multitude, the object of his ambition; he soon became painter to the court, and by degrees the arbiter of its taste.
The studies he had pursued enabled him to go beyond Caravaggio in invention, mellowness, and design: the grand Deposition from the Cross at the Certosa proves the success of his emulation, a work, by the verdict of Giordano, alone sufficient to form a painter: the Martyrdom of S. Gennaro in the royal chapel, and the S. Jerome of the Trinità, excel his usual style, and possess Titianesque beauties. S. Jerome was among his darling subjects; S. Jerome he painted, he etched in numerous repetition, in whole-length and in half figures. He delighted in the representation of hermits, anchorets, apostles, prophets, perhaps less to impress the mind with gravity of character and the venerable looks of age, than to strike the eye with the imitation of incidental deformities attendant on decrepitude, and the picturesque display of bone, veins, and tendons athwart emaciated muscle. A shrivelled arm, a dropsied leg, were to Ribera what a breast-plate and a gaberdine were to Rembrandt. As in objects of imitation he courted meagreness or excrescence, so in the choice of historic subjects he preferred to the terrors of ebullient passions, features of horror or loathsomeness, the spasms of Ixion, St. Bartholomew under the butcher's knife. Nor are the few ideas of gaiety by which he endeavoured to soothe his exasperated fancy, less disgusting: Bacchus and his attendants are grinning Lazaroni or bloated wine-sacks; brutality under his hand distorts the feature of mirth.
Giambatista Caracciolo,[119] first attached to Franc. Imparato, then to Caravaggio, grew to manhood before he had produced any work of consequence: roused afterward by the fame and the impression made on his mind by some picture of Annibale, he went to Rome, and by a pertinacious study of the Farnese Gallery became one of the best imitators of that style. This was the basis of his fame on his return to Naples, and by this, whenever provoked to competition, he maintained it: such are the Madonna of S. Anna de' Lombardi; S. Carlo, in the church of S. Agnello; and the Christ under the Cross, at the Incurabili. The rest of his performances, by their strength of chiaroscuro, betray the school of Caravaggio. From so considerate and finished an artist, haste and flimsiness were not to be feared, and yet there exist productions of his so feeble that his biographer[120] is reduced to account for them from the artist's wish of retaliating by paltry work for paltrier prices; or from suffering them to be finished by Mercurio d'Aversa, no very estimable pupil.
Such were the three leaders of that cabal which for some years persecuted every stranger of eminence in the art who freely came, or was invited to come, to Naples. Reputation, fiction, violence, had raised Belisario to the tyranny of fresco; the most lucrative commissions he considered as due to himself, the rest he distributed among his dependants, the greater number of whom possessed little merit. Massimo Santafede, though independent of him, remained neuter, afraid to interfere with a man who, to obtain his purpose, would stop at neither fraud nor crime; a proof of which he is said to have given, in administering poison to the gentlest and best of his pupils, Luigi Roderigo, whose growing powers he envied.
To maintain his primacy in fresco, the exclusion of every stranger who excelled in that branch became, of course, his principal object. Annibale Caracci arrived at Naples in 1609, to paint the churches "dello Spirito Santo" and "di Gesu Nuovo," and produced a small picture as a specimen of his style. The Greek and his associates, called upon to give their opinion of it, unanimously condemned it as cold, and its master far too tame to manage an extensive work. Thus baffled, Annibale returned to Rome during the most oppressive heats of summer, and soon after died. But the work most contested with strangers was the royal chapel of S. Gennaro, which the deputies had reserved for Giuseppe d'Arpino, then painting the choir of the Certosa. Belisario, leaguing himself with Spagnoletto, not less fierce and arrogant, and with Caracciolo, who both aspired to that commission, attacked Cesari with a fury which forced him, before he could terminate his choir, to fly for safety, first to Monte Cassino, and then back to Rome. The commission was now given to Guido; but not long after, two men unknown cudgelled his servant and dismissed him with a message to his master immediately to depart or to prepare for death. Guido fled; but Gessi his pupil, not intimidated, having demanded and obtained the grand commission, repaired to Naples with two assistants, G. Batista Ruggieri and Lorenzo Menini; both were decoyed on board a galley, that immediately slipped its cable and transported them to some place which no researches could discover, and Gessi was obliged to return with his disappointment to Rome.
Dispirited by the violence of these manœuvres, the deputies began to give way to the cabal of the monopolists, allotting the frescoes to Correnzio and Caracciolo, and flattering Spagnoletto with the hope of being intrusted with the altar-pieces; when all at once, repenting of their agreement, they ordered the two fresco painters to throw up their work, and transferred the whole of the chapel to Domenichino, at the splendid price of a hundred ducats for every entire, fifty for each half figure, and twenty-five for every head.[121] They likewise took measures for his personal safety, by obtaining the Viceroy's protection, but in vain. The faction, not content with crying him down as a cold insipid painter and discrediting him with those who see with their ears and fill every place, alarmed him with anonymous letters, threw down what he had painted, mixed ashes with his materials to crack the ground he had prepared, and, by a stroke of the most refined malice, persuaded the Viceroy to give him a commission of some pictures for the Court of Spain. These, when little more than dead-coloured, they carried from his study to court, where Ribera superciliously ordered what alterations he thought proper, and then, without allowing him leisure to terminate the whole, dispatched them to Spain. The insolence of the rival, the complaints of the deputies on the successive interruptions of their work, and hence the suspicion of mischief, induced Domenichino at last secretly to depart for Rome, in hopes of being able from thence to bring his affairs into a better train,—and not without success; the rumours of his flight subsided, new measures for his safety were taken, he returned to Naples, and, without more interruption, completed the greater part of the frescoes, and considerably advanced the altar-pieces.
Here death surprised him, accelerated, as some have suspected, by poison, certainly by repeated causes of disgust from his relations, competitors, and, above all, the arrival of his old adversary Lanfranco. He succeeded to Domenichino in the remaining fresco, Spagnoletto in one of the oil pictures, and Stanzioni in another. Caracciolo was dead; Belisario, excluded by age from sharing in the spoil, soon after was destroyed by a ruinous fall from a scaffold. Nor had Ribera, if the prevailing fame be true,[122] a desirable end; dishonoured in his daughter, gnawed by remorse for the vile persecutions in which he had shared, odious to himself, and sick of light, he escaped to sea, and none tells where he perished.