And yet Dutch art and Italian are not wholly discrepant the link, as I have said, comes through the minor figures of religious scenes, or even occasionally through the major. A Dutch homeliness lurks shyly in the background of Italian art, and at times appears boldly in the foreground. From one point of view nothing could be more Dutch than the innumerable Madonnas who suckle their Bambini. Nor do their haloes destroy their homeliness. The peasant girl of Tintoretto’s Annunciation in S. Rocco wears a halo, but neither that nor the angel bursting through the crumbling brick of the door can prevent this scene from being a Dutch interior with a cane chair. Realism, smuggled in under the cloak of religion, is none the less realism, and when Moretto shows us the Bambino about to be bathed by mother and nurse, and paints us a basket of belly-bands, he has given us a genre picture none the less because rapt saints and monks look on in defiance of chronology, and, perched on a bank of cloud over a romantic landscape, angels sing on high. Even as early as Giotto the nurse who presides at The Birth of the Virgin is washing the baby’s eyes. Very curious and realistic is the pastoral study which Luca Cambiaso styled Adoration of the Shepherds. And in Veronese, for all his magnificence, and in Carpaccio, for all his fairy-tale atmosphere, and above all in Bassano, for all his golden glow, we get well-established half-way houses between High Art and Low. Under the pretext of The Supper in Emmaus Bassano anticipates all Dutch art. Here be cats, dogs, plucked geese, meat in the pan, shining copper utensils scattered around, the pot over the glow of the fire, the rows of plates in the kitchen behind. What loving study of the colour of the wine in the glasses of the guests, and of their robes and their furs! These things it is that, with the busy figures behind the bar or stooping on the floor, fill up the picture, while the Christ on a raised platform in the corner bulks less than the serving-maid, and the centre of the stage is occupied by a casual eater, his napkin across his knees. If this sixteenth-century picture is Venetian in its glowing colour and its comparative indifference to form, it is Dutch in its minuteness and homeliness.
The same love of pots and pans and animals glows in The Departure of Jacob, with his horse and his ass and his sheep and his goats and his basket of hens, and even beguiles Bassano into attempting a faint peering camel. But not even the presence of God in a full white beard can render this a sacred picture. It is, however, in his favourite theme of The Animals going into the Ark that Bassano brings the line between the sacred and secular almost to vanishing point. Although Savonarola preached on the Ark with such unction, as became the prophet of a new deluge, the just Noah himself seems the least religious figure in the Old Testament, perhaps because—after so much water—he took too much wine. There is even a tradition recorded by Ibn Yachya that after the Flood he emigrated to Italy and studied science. At any rate Bassano always treated him as a mere travelling showman, packing his animals and properties for the next stage. In a picture at Padua Noah’s sons and daughters are doing up their luggage—one almost sees the labels—and Noah, with his few thin white hairs, remonstrates agitatedly with Shem—or it may be Ham or Japhet—who is apparently muddling the boxes. A lion and lioness are treading the plank to the Ark, into which a Miss Noah is just pushing the leisurely rump of a pig, which even the lions at its tail fail to accelerate. Countless other pairs of every description, including poultry, jostle one another amid a confusion of pots, wash-tubs, sacks, and bundles, the birds alone finding comfortable perching-room on the trees. Mrs. Noah wears her hair done up in a knot with pearls just like the Venetian ladies, and a billy-cock hat lies on one of the bundles. In his Sheep-shearing (in the Pinacoteca Estense of Modena) Bassano throws over all pious pretences and becomes unblushingly Dutch—nay, double-Dutch, for he drags in agricultural operations and cooking as well as sheep-shearing.
But it is in Turin that Bassano’s Batavianism runs riot. For his market-place is a revel of fowls, onions, prezels, eggs, carcases, sheep, rams, mules, dogs gnawing bones, market-women, chafferers, with a delicious little boy whose shirt hangs out behind his vivid red trousers. And his Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan is an extravaganza in copper pots and pans; and yet another market masterpiece is an inventory of all he loved—butcher’s meat and rabbits and geese and doves, and lungs and livers, and gherkins and melons, and cocks and hens, and copper pans and pewter spoons, and a cow and a horse and an owl and lambs, all jostling amid booths and stalls on a pleasant rustic background as in a Tintoretto Paradise of luscious paintabilities.
Gaudenzio Ferrari has the same love of sheep, and these, with horses and dogs, force their way into his pictures. The Bible is an encyclopædia of themes, and even had any subject been wanting, apocrypha and sacred legend would have provided it. For his pet lambs Ferrari goes to the copious broidery on the Gospel, and his Angels predicting the Birth of Maria is really a study in sheep on the background of a domed and towered Italian city. Giotto too had attempted sheep, though they are more like pigs, and dogs, though they are elongated and skinny; his camel with grotesque ears and a sun-bonnet one can forgive.
The lives of the saints supplied other opportunities for “Dutch” pictures in the shape of miracles at home. Titian himself stooped to record the miracle of putting on again the foot which the man who had kicked his mother cut off in remorse. And in the same Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua you may see the neglectful nurse carrying safely to its parents at table the babe she had allowed to boil.
And yet despite all these manifold opportunities, no Italian seems quite to get the veracious atmosphere of the Dutch and to achieve the dignity of Art without departing from the homeliness of Nature. No Italian has brought Christ into the street so boldly as Erasmus Quellinus in that picture in the Museo Vicenza in which a girl with a basket of live hens on her head stops to watch the fat Dutch baby sleeping in its mother’s arms. Despite the unreal presence of adoring saints in the crowd, there is here a true immanence of divinity in everyday reality. The sixteenth-century Italian Baroccio did indeed depict a Dutch peasant-feast in his Last Supper in the cathedral of Urbino, with its bare-legged boy cook stooping for platters from a basket and its dog drinking at a bronze dish, but its homeliness is marred by the hovering of angels. Realism unadorned is essayed by Fogolino in his Holy Family in Vicenza, with the carpenter’s shop, the rope of yarn, the hammer; with a boy Christ in a black tunic saying grace before a meal of boiled eggs, pomegranate, and grapes, washed down by a beaker of red wine; with the Madonna bending solicitously over him, her wooden spoon poised over her bowl; but, alas! the whole effect is of a cheap oleograph.
But then Fogolino was not a great painter, and it would have been interesting to see a superb craftsman like Paul Veronese try his hand at homely nature, unadorned by great space-harmonies and decorative magnificences. As it was, he had the delight of a Dutchman in dogs and cats, copper pots and jugs, and earthen pans and groaning tables and glittering glasses, and these it is which fascinate him, far more than the spiritual aspect of the Supper in the House of the Pharisee, so that even when he wishes to paint the soul of the pink-gowned Venetian Magdalen, he paints it through a little bowl which she overturns in her emotion at kissing the feet of Christ. This is why meals are the prime concern of Veronese, obsess him more than even his noble pillared rhythms and arched perspectives. How eagerly he grasps at The Marriage of Cana and The Disciples at Emmaus and The Meal in the House of Levi, with which that hold-all of the Bible supplied him! Spaces and staircases, arches and balconies and lordly buildings, all the palatial poetry of Verona, with its fair women and rich-robed men—these are his true adoration, and he paints, not Jesus, but the loaves and fishes. Nay, it may almost be said that unless there be food in the picture Veronese grows feeble, and must have pillars at least to prop him up. See, for example, his Susannah and the Elders, with no trace of food and only a wall to sustain him. When the Biblical cornucopia was wholly depleted of its food-stuffs, he had to forage for manna, especially when the need of decorating a monastic refectory was added to his own passion for provender. One of his discoveries was The Banquet of Gregory the Great, which is in the Monastery of the Madonna del Monte outside Vicenza, and which is based on the legend that Gregory invited twelve poor men to eat with him and Christ turned up as one of them. But Christ, who is removing the cover from a fowl, is less striking than Paul Veronese himself—who stands on the inevitable balcony with his own little boy—and at best a mere item in the rhythm of pillars and staircases and sky-effects. Nothing brings out the defect of Veronese as a religious painter so clearly as a comparison of his Disciples at Emmaus with Titian’s. Titian too gives us fine shades of bread and fruit and wine, and even a little “Dutch” dog under the table; Titian too plays with pillars and a romantic background. But how his picture is suffused with the spirit! These things know their place, are absorbed in the luminous whole. A certain blurred softness in the modelling, a certain subdued glow in the colouring—as of St. Mark’s—give mystery and atmosphere. The food is, so to speak, transubstantiated.
Even Moretto’s Supper at Emmaus (in Brescia) is superior to Veronese’s, though his Christ in pilgrim’s cockle-hat and cloak has to the modern eye the look of an officer with a cocked hat and a gold epaulette.
But Veronese is not the only Italian who would have been happier as a lay painter. I am convinced that some of the romanticists of the Renaissance were born with the souls of Dutchmen, and these, as it happens, the very men who have not worn well; a proof that they were out of their element and gave up to romance and religion what was meant for realism. Take Guido Reni, the very synonym of a fallen star, the Aurora in Rome, perhaps his one enduring success—though even here Aurora’s skirt is of too crude a blue, and there is insufficient feeling of mountain and sea below her. His portrait by Simone Cantarini da Pesaro shows him with a short grey beard, a black doublet, a lawn collar, and a rather pained look—there is nothing of the Aurora in this sedate and serious figure. And better than either his violent Caravaggio martyrology or his later mythologic poesy I find his portraits of his mother and his foster-mother; the mother in black with a black turn-down collar, a muslin coif, and grey hair thinning at the temples, and the foster-mother a peasant woman with bare and brawny arms. The St. Peter Reading in the Brera is also a strong study of an old man’s head. Moroni had the good sense or the good fortune to shake himself almost free of religious subjects and to produce a Tailor who is worth tons of Madonnas, but even he did not utterly escape the church-market, and when one examines such a picture as his Madonna and Son, St. Catherine, St. Francis, and the Donor in the Brera, one rejoices even more that an overwhelming percentage of his product is pure portraiture. For the holy women in this picture are quite bad; St. Francis is rather better, but the real Moroni appears only in the smug donor who prays, his clasped hands showing his valuable ring. Here, of course, the painter had simply to reproduce his sitter. As much can be said of Garofalo and many another religious painter, whose “Donors” often constitute the sole success of their pious compositions.
Lorenzo Lotto, too, should perhaps have confined himself to portraiture, if of a fashionable clientèle. His pretty Adoration of the Infant might be any mother adoring any infant. Near it—in the Palazzo Martinengo in Brescia—Girolamo Romanino has a frightful fresco in the grand manner, and quite a good portrait of an old gentleman; which suggests that Romanino too should have avoided the classic. There is an altar-piece of his in Padua which, although by no means devoid of beauty, confirms this suggestion, for the Madonna and Child lack character and originality, and are infinitely inferior to the Dutch painting of the robes. The whole composition, indeed, glows and has depth only in its lower and more terrestrial part, including in that term the little girl angel who plays a tambourine below the throne.