Before parting with the Pietà theme I would remark that in the Italian galleries the name Pietà is often—with apparent inaccuracy—given to pictures of the dead Christ alone in his tomb. One of the most curious pictures of this sort I came upon in the gallery of Faenza, where Christ stands in his tomb, yet still nailed on the Cross, from either end of which depends a scourge. I found the same design in the centre of a little stone shield over a building marked as the “Mons Pietatis” of Faenza. And this set me speculating whether such an image as a symbol of the Monte di Pietà was due to the mere suggestiveness of the word Pietà, or whether there was a more mystical connection implied between the Crucifixion and the loan-offices instituted in Italy by Bernardino da Feltre to frustrate the usury of the Jews. It is the Monte di Pietà of Treviso that shelters the Entombment ascribed to Giorgione. It seems a long way from Golgotha to the pawn-shop, yet we still talk of pledges being redeemed.
HIGH ART AND LOW
“Pictures
Of this Italian master and that Dutchman.”
James Shirley: The Lady of Pleasure.
To come in the Uffizi upon a Dutch collection, to see the boors of Jan Steen, the tavern peasants of Heemskerck, the pancake-seller of Gerard Dou, the mushrooms and butterflies of Marcellis Ottone, is to have, first a shock of discord and then a breath of fresh air and to grow suddenly conscious of the artificial atmosphere of all this Renaissance art. Where it does not reek of the mould of crypts or the incense of cathedrals or the pot-pourri of the cloister, it is redolent of marmoreal salons, it is the art of the Magnificent Ones. Moroni’s Tailor marks almost the social nadir of its lay subjects, and our sartor was no doubt a prosperous member of his guild. There are two courtesans in Carpaccio but indistinguishable from countesses, in a rich setting of pilasters and domestic pets. Guido Reni painted his foster-mother, but it is the exception which proves the rule. And the rule is that Demos shall appear in Art only as the accessory in a sacred picture, like the old woman with the basket of eggs in Titian’s Presentation in the Temple, or the servants in the many sacred suppers and banquetings beloved of Veronese. That the Holy Family itself was of lowly status is, of course, ignored except here or there by Tintoretto or Signorelli or Giovanni Bellini, and the wonderful gowns and jewels worn by the carpenter’s wife, according to Fra Angelico or Crivelli, would be remarkable even on a Beatrice d’Este or a Marie de’ Medici. Who would ever think that Raphael’s Sposalizio of the Virgin was the marriage of a Bethlehem artisan to a peasant girl? Even the carpenter’s barefootedness—the one touch of naked truth—seems a mere piece of hymeneal ritual, in face of that royal company of princesses and their suites, that functioning High Priest. No; insistence on the humbleness of the Holy Family hardly tallied with the Christianity of the Renaissance, or even with the psychology of the poor believer, who loves to dress up his gods as Magnificent Ones and for whom to adore is to adorn. Aristocracy is the note of Italian painting—the Holy Family takes formal precedence, but the Colonnas and the Medicis rank their families no less select. The outflowering of Dutch art was like the change from the airless Latin of the scholars to the blowy idioms with which real European literature began. Italian art expressed dignity, beauty, religion; Dutch art went back to life, to find all these in life itself. It was the efflorescence of triumphant democracy, of the Dutch Republic surgent from the waves of Spain and Catholicism as indomitably as she had risen from the North Sea. Hence this sturdy satisfaction with reality. Rembrandt painted with equal hand ribs of beef and ribs of men. The Low Countries invented the fruit and flower piece and the fish and game piece. That Low Art hails from the nether lands is not a mere coincidence. Holland was less a country than a piece of the bed of the sea to which men stuck instead of limpets. Cowper says, “God made the country and man made the town,” but the Dutch proverb says, “God made the sea and we made the shore.” ’Twas no braggart boast. The Dutchman had made for himself a sort of anchored ship, and the damps and vapours drove him oft from the deck to the warm cabin, where, asquat on plump cushions with buxom vrow and solid food and stout liquor, he met the mists with an answering cloud from his placid pipe. And the art he engendered reflected this love for cosy realities, and found a poetry in the very peeling of potatoes. No voice of croaking save from the frogs of his marshes. Let your Leopardis croak ’mid their sunny vineyards, let your Obermanns sulk on their stable mountains Mynheer is grateful to be here at all, to have outwitted the waters and dished the Dons. And so never has earthiness found more joyous expression than in his pictures. What gay content with the colours of clothes and the shafts of sunshine, and the ripe forms of women, and the hues of meats and fishes! O the joy of skating on the frozen canals! O the jolly revels in village taverns! Hail the ecstasy of the Kermesse! “How good is man’s life, the mere living.” “It is a pleasant thing to have beheld the sun.” These are the notes of Dutch art, which is like a perpetual grace to God for the beauty of common things. And if the painters are concerned so much with the problems of light, if Rembrandt was the poet of light, was it not because the Dutchman had always in his eye varying effects of light, shifting reflections and scintillations in the ubiquitous canals, kaleidoscopic struggles of sunlight with mist and fog? The Venetians too, those Hollanders of Italy, are notable for their colour, in contrast with the Florentines.
Even in the Dutch and Flemish images of doom I have thought to detect a note of earth-laughter, almost an irresponsible gaiety. Pierre Breughel paints the Fall of the Angels as a descent to lower forms—the loyal angels beat the rebels down, and they change as they fall into birds, beasts, and fishes, into frogs and lizards, and even into vegetables. There are bipedal carrots, and winged artichokes and bird-tailed pomegranates. ’Tis as if the worthy painter was anxious to return to the kitchen, to his genre subjects. Or may we sniff a belated Buddhism or a premature Darwinism? Instead of a sacred picture we get a pantomimic transformation scene: metamorphosis caught grotesquely in the act. This Fall of the Angels seems a favourite Flemish subject—one reads almost an allegory of Art hurled down from heaven to earth.
The same sportive fantasy frolics it over the Flemish hell. De Vos gives us a devil playing on the fluted nose of a metamorphosed sinner. In a triptych of Jerome Bosch, the Last Judgment is the judgment of a Merry Andrew who turns the damned into bell-clappers, strings them across harp-strings, or claps their mouth to the faucets of barrels till they retch. So far goes the painter’s free fancy that he invents air-ships and submarines for the lost souls to cower in, unwitting of the day when these would hold no terrors for the manes of erring aeronauts and torpedoists.
Italian art even in the childish grotesqueries of its Inferno never falls so low as this freakish farrago. One cannot help feeling that the Italians believed in hell and the Netherlanders made fun of it.
One of these extravaganzas of Bosch has drifted to Venice, though this Temptation of St. Antony (of which there is a replica in Brussels) is also attributed to Van Bles. The nude ladies coming to the saint with gifts are most unprepossessing, and what temptation there is in the whirl of carnival grotesques I cannot understand. No doubt some allegory of sin lurks in these goblin faces, with their greedy mouths full of strange creatures, and in this great head with black-tailed things creeping in through eye and mouth, with frogs suspended from its earrings and a little town growing out of its head. Such uncouth ugliness has no parallel in Venice, unless it be a German Inferno with a belled devil. From such puerilities one turns with relief to the coldest and stateliest conventions of High Art.