Durtal's consternation had risen to the highest pitch. The work was thus arranged. Against a gold background, a Virgin, crowned, red-haired, bullet-headed, dressed in blue, held on her knees an Infant blessing the Kings, two kneeling on each side of the throne. One, an old fellow with a short beard like a retired officer, and hair curled like shavings over his ears, was sumptuously arrayed in crimson velvet brocaded with gold, his hands clasped; the other, a dandy with long hair and a large beard, dressed in green shot with gold and trimmed with fur, held up a golden cup. And behind each, other figures were standing, flourishing their swords and standards, in cavalier attitudes, and posing for the public, thinking much more of the visitors than of the Virgin.
This, then, was the type of Madonna, of the supersensual and sublimated Virgins of Cologne! This one was puffy, redundant, chubby; she had the neck of a heifer, and flesh like cream, or hasty pudding, that quivers when it is touched. Jesus, whose expression was the only interesting feature of the picture, a certain manly gravity that was shown without any disfigurement of the character of childhood, was also round and well-fed, and the scene took place on a lawn strewn with flowers—primroses, violets, and strawberries painted in fine stipple with the touch of a miniaturist.
You might call this picture what you pleased, the execu
tion, smooth and wavy, and cold in spite of the brilliant colours, was a finished piece of work, brilliant, dexterous—but not religious; it betrayed a decadence; the work was laboured, complicated, pretty, but it was in no sense that of an early master.
This common, squat Virgin, fat and pudgy, was simply a good German girl, well-dressed and squarely seated, but she could never have been the ecstatic Mother of God! Then these kneeling and standing men were not in prayer; there was no devotion in this picture; the personages were all thinking of something else, folding their hands and looking round at the painter who was depicting them. As to the wings, it were better to say nothing about them. What was to be thought of the Saint Ursula with a prominent forehead like a cupping-glass and a burly stomach, surrounded by other creatures as shapeless as herself, their squab noses poking out of the bladders of lard that did duty for their faces?
And Durtal found the same impression of insensibility to mysticism in the picture gallery. There he could study Stephan Lochner's precursor, Master Wilhelm—the first early German painter whose name is known—and in this again he found the look of elaborate chubbiness as in the Dombild. Wilhelm's Virgin was indeed less vulgar than the Virgin of the cathedral; but in feeling she was equally insipid, over-finished, and even more simperingly pretty. She was the triumph of delicate pertness, and had the look of a stage chamber-maid with her hair crimped over her forehead. And the child, twisted into an unnatural attitude, while he caressed his Mother's chin, turned his face round to be the better seen.
In short, this Virgin was neither human nor divine; she had not even the too realistic touch of Lochner, and could, no more than the other, have been the chosen Mother of God.
It is indeed strange that these very early painters should have begun where painting as an art ends, in mere finish and smoothness; men who from the first put sugar in their new wine and betray their lack of energy, of enthusiasm, of simplicity, while no faith projects itself from their work. They are the very converse of every other school;
for everywhere else, in Italy, Flanders, Holland, Burgundy, pictures began by being clumsy and unfinished, barbarous and hard, but at least ardent and pious!
As he studied the other pictures in this collection, the mass of anonymous work, the paintings ascribed to the Master of the Lyversberg Passion, and the Master of the Saint Bartholomew, Durtal came to the conclusion that the School of Cologne had known nothing of mysticism till it had felt the influence of the Flemish painters. It had needed a Van Eyck, and the yet more exquisite Roger van der Weyden, to breathe the air of Heaven into these craftsmen. They thus had changed their manner, had imitated the ascetic innocence of the Flemings, had assimilated their tender piety and simplicity, and, in their turn, had sung the glory of the Mother and mourned over the sufferings of the Son in ingenuous hymns.