Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum—
the trumpet pours its loud notes along the vaulted roof of some lofty cathedral, which reverberates them on the crowd below, in imitation of the “last trump,” whose awful sounds shall penetrate every grave on this globe—burst the marble cerements of the tomb—and summon their shivering tenants to the foot-stool of their God—the effect is almost magical! And well it may be so. The very idea of such a stupendous and miraculous event, involving the hopes and fears, the rewards and punishments, the eternal peace or endless misery of the whole human race, is sufficiently astounding and overwhelming in itself; but when heightened by the most artful and gorgeous imitation that human ingenuity could invent or effect, the impression is beyond description or even conception!
The picture-galleries are the master-lion of Dresden, and as a mere catalogue of the paintings—not a “catalogue raisonnée”—fills a goodly octavo volume, the reader may be assured that I will not, even if I could, inflict on him a critical notice of this celebrated collection, reiterated ad nauseam, by so many connoisseurs in the art and mystery of the craft. Would that the pictorial critics would keep their unintelligible jargon and puzzling lingo to themselves! How many hundreds and thousands of the visitors of galleries have the cup of enjoyment dashed from their lips, while admiring paintings, by hearing some pert hypercritic condemn them as deficient in “depth of shade,” “breadth of colour,” “truth of tint”—or some arbitrary quality which his brain has engendered to bewilder the uninitiated, and display his own refinement of taste and judgment! Then the host of pseudo-critics, who prick up their ears and catch the fiats of the connoisseur, become actual pests in the galleries, retailing the dicta of their superiors, and scattering doubts and dissentions among the confiding crowd—
——Spargere voces
In vulgum ambiguas.——
In such a prodigious collection the great majority of pictures must be of inferior note, and unworthy of attention. There are, however, a vast number of gems and chef-d’œuvres, and on these, the traveller will, almost always, find artists (male and female) constantly employed in copying—many of them for their daily bread—not a few, as amateurs, even of the highest rank in life. Here, then, are a series of guides, more practical than all the critics which commit their lucubrations to the press.
Although Saxony is a Protestant state, it is a Catholic kingdom, and therefore there is a good sprinkling of sacred subjects in the Dresden galleries. The intentions of delineating the mysteries of our holy religion on canvas, may be pious, but the attempt to do so is little less than impious. What required the miraculous power of a Deity to effect, is not likely to be imitated in oil and colours by the hands of man. The great truths of religion are addressed to the heart rather than to the eye—to the internal feelings rather than to the external senses—to faith rather than to demonstration. Let the painter beware how he tries to reduce these to sensible and visible representations!
Be this as it may, the stranger will always find artists and artistes busy in copying Bellini’s “Christ”—Titian’s “Tribute Money”—the same painter’s “Mistress”—Veccio’s “Virgin and Infant”—P. Veronese’s “Adoration of the Virgin and Child”—“The Finding of Moses”—Giorgione’s “Meeting of Jacob and Rachael”—“The Marriage of the Doges of Venice with the Sea”—the “Four Doctors of the Church,” by Dosso Dossi—Raphael’s “Madonna de san Sisto,” the jewel of the gallery, which was bought for £8000—Corregio’s “Virgin and Child”—the “Virgin and Infant in the Manger,” the second gem of Dresden paintings,—the “Recumbent Magdalene”—“the Sacrifice of Isaac,”—“Venus and Bacchus”—Rubens’ “Descent of the Fallen Angels”—Van Dyk’s “Charles I. and Family”—Rembrandt’s “Own Self and Wife”—Poussin’s “Discovery of Moses in the Bullrushes”—Claud’s “Acis and Galatea,” &c. These and scores of others are in perpetual transition from the walls of the galleries to the easels of the copyists—hence a common complaint that such collections as these give the highest encouragement to imitators, and almost annihilate originality.