On examining the dates which I have given, it will be noticed that the Bolognese Eclectics, intervening between the age of Michelangelo and the age of Nicholas Poussin, worked during the first fervor of the Catholic Revival. Their art may therefore be taken as fairly representative of the religious temper and the profane culture of the Italians in the period influenced by the Council of Trent. It represents that temper and that culture before the decline of the same influence, when the Counter Reformation was in active progress and the Papal pretensions to absolute dominion had received no check.
We should be wrong, however, to treat the Eclectics as though they succeeded without interruption to that 'giant race, before the flood.' Their movement was emphatically one of revival; and revival implies decadence. After 1541, when Michelangelo finished the Last Judgment, and before 1584, when the Caracci were working on their frescoes in the Palazzo Fava at Bologna—that is to say, between the last of the genuine Renaissance paintings and the first of the Revival—nearly half a century elapsed, during which art sank into a slough of slovenly and soulless putrescence.[215] Every city of Italy swarmed with artists, adequately educated in technical methods, and apt at aping the grand style of their masters. But in all their work there is nothing felt, nothing thought out, nothing expressed, nothing imagined. It is a vast vacuity of meaningless and worthless brush-play, a wilderness of hollow trickery and futile fumbling with conventional forms. The Mannerists, as they were called, covered acres of palace and church walls with allegories, histories, and legends, carelessly designed, rapidly executed, but pleasing the eye with crowds of figures and with gaudy colors. Their colors are now faded. Their figures are now seen to be reminiscences of Raphael's, Correggio's, Buonarroti's draughtsmanship. Yet they satisfied the patrons of that time, who required hasty work, and had not much money wherewith to reward the mature labors of a conscientious student. In relation, moreover, to the spiritless and insincere architecture then coming into vogue, this art of the Mannerists can scarcely be judged out of place. When I divulge the names of Giorgio Vasari, Giuseppe Cesari (Cav. d'Arpino), Tempesta, Fontana, Tibaldi, the Zuccari, the Procaccini, the Campi of Cremona, the scholars of Perino del Vaga, I shall probably call up before the reluctant eyes of many of my readers visions of dreary wanderings through weariful saloons and of disconsolate starings up at stuccoed cupolas in Rome and Genoa, in Florence and Naples, and in all the towns of Lombardy.[216]
In an earlier volume I briefly sketched the development of this pernicious mannerism, which now deluged the arts of Italy. Only one painter, outside Venice, seems to have carried on a fairly good tradition. This was Federigo Baroccio (1528-1612), who feebly continued the style of Correggio, with a certain hectic originality, infusing sentimental pietism into that great master's pagan sensuousness. The mixture is disagreeable; and when one is obliged to mention Baroccio as the best in a bad period, this accentuates the badness of his contemporaries. He has however, historical value from another point of view, inasmuch as nothing more strongly characterizes the eclecticism of the Caracci than their partiality for Correggio.[217] Though I have no reason to suppose that Baroccio, living chiefly as he did at Urbino, directly influenced their style, the similarity between his ideal and theirs is certainly striking. It seems to point at something inevitable in the direction taken by the Eclectics.
Such was the state of art in Italy when Lodovico Caracci, the son of a Bolognese butcher, conceived his plan of replacing it upon a sounder system.[218] Instinct led him to Venice, where painting was still alive. The veteran Tintoretto warned him that he had no vocation. But Lodovico obstinately resolved to win by industry what nature seemed to have denied him. He studied diligently at Florence, Parma, Mantua, and Venice, founding his style upon those of Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, Titian, Parmigiano, Giulio Romano, and Primaticcio. When he again settled at Bologna, he induced his two cousins, Agostino and Annibale, the sons of a tailor, to join him in the serious pursuit of art. Agostino was a goldsmith by trade, already expert in the use of the burin, which he afterwards employed more frequently than the brush.[219] Of the three Caracci he was the most versatile, and perhaps the most gifted. There is a note of distinction and attainment in his work. Annibale, the youngest, was a rough, wild, hasty, and hot-tempered lad, of robust build and vigorous intellect, but boorish in his manners, fond of low society, and eaten up with jealousy. They called him the ragazzaccio, or 'lout of a boy,' when he began to make his mark at Bologna. Agostino presented a strong contrast to his brother, being an accomplished musician, an excellent dancer, a fair poet, fit to converse with noblemen, and possessed of very considerable culture. Lodovico, the eldest of the cousins, acted as mentor and instructor to the others. He pacified their quarrels, when Annibale's jealousy burst out; set them upon the right methods of study, and passed judgment on their paintings.
Like Lodovico, the brothers served their first apprenticeship in art at Parma and Venice. Annibale's letters from the former place show how Correggio subdued him, and the large copies he there made still preserve for us some shadows of Correggio's time-ruined frescoes. At Venice he executed a copy of Titian's Peter Martyr. This picture, the most dramatic of Titian's works, and the most elaborate in its landscape, was destined to exercise a decisive influence over the Eclectic school. From the Caracci to Domenichino we are able to trace the dominant tone and composition of that masterpiece. No less decisive, as I have already observed, was the influence of Correggio's peculiar style in the choice of type, the light and shade, and the foreshortenings of the Bolognese painters. In some degree, the manner of Paolo Veronese may also be discerned. The Caracci avoided Tintoretto, and at the beginning of their career they derived but little from Raphael or Michelangelo. Theirs was at first a mainly Veneto-Lombardic eclecticism, dashed with something absorbed from Giulio Romano and something from the later Florentines. It must not however, be supposed that they confined their attention to Italian painters. They contrived to collect casts from antique marbles, coins, engravings of the best German and Italian workmanship, books on architecture and perspective, original drawings, and similar academical appliances. Nor were they neglectful of drawing from the nude, or of anatomy. Indeed, their days and nights were spent in one continuous round of study, which had for its main object the comparison of dead and living nature with the best specimens of art in all ages. It may seem strange that this assiduity and thoroughness of method did not produce work of higher quality. Yet we must remember that even enthusiastic devotion to art will not give inspiration, and that the most thorough science cannot communicate charm. Though the Caracci invented fresh attitudes and showed complete mastery of the human form, their types remained commonplace. Though their chiaroscuro was accurately based on that of Correggio, it lacked his aërial play of semitones. Though they went straight to Titian for color, they never approached Venetian lucidity and glow. There was something vulgar in their imagination, prosaic in their feeling, leaden in their frigid touch on legend. Who wants those countless gods and goddesses of the Farnese Gallery, those beblubbered saints and colossal Sibyls of the Bolognese Pinacoteca, those chubby cherubs and buxom nymphs, those Satyrs and S. Sebastians, to come down from the walls and live with us? The grace of Raphael's Galatea, the inspiration of Michelangelo's Genii of the Sistine, the mystery of Lionardo's Faun-S. John, the wilding grace of Correggio's Diana, the voluptuous fascination of Titian's Venus, the mundane seductiveness of Veronese's Europa, the golden glory of Tintoretto's Bacchus,—all have evanesced, and in their place are hard mechanic figures, excellently drawn, correctly posed, but with no touch of poetry. Where, indeed, shall we find 'the light that never was on sea or land' throughout Bologna?[220]
Part of this failure must be ascribed to a radically false conception of the way to combine studies of nature with studies of art. The Eclectics in general started with the theory that a painter ought to form mental ideals of beauty, strength, dignity, ferocity, and so forth, from the observation of characteristic individuals and acknowledged master pieces. These ideal types he has to preserve in his memory, and to use living persons only as external means for bringing them into play. Thus, it was indifferent who sat to him as model. He believed that he could invest the ugliest lump of living flesh with the loveliest fancy. Lodovico supplied Annibale Caracci with the fleshy back of a naked Venus. Guido Reni painted his Madonna's heads from any beardless pupil who came handy, and turned his deformed color-grinder—a man 'with a muzzle like a renegado'—into the penitent Magdalen.[221] It was inevitable that forms and faces thus evolved should bear the stamp of mediocrity, monotony, and dullness on them. Few, very few, painters—perhaps only Michelangelo—have been able to give to purely imagined forms the value and the individuality of persons; and he succeeded best in this perilous attempt when he designed the passionate Genii of the Sistine frescoes. Such flights were far beyond the grasp of the Eclectics. Seeking after the 'grand style,' they fell, as I shall show in the sequel of this chapter, into commonplace vacuity, which makes them now insipid.[222]
There was at this time a native of Antwerp named Dionysius Calvaert, a coarse fellow of violent manners, who kept open school in Bologna. The best of the Caracci's pupils—Guido Reni, Domenichino and Albani—emigrated to their academy from this man's workshop. Something, as it seems to me, peculiar in the method of handling oil paint, which all three have in common, may perhaps be ascribed to early training under their Flemish master. His brutality drove them out of doors; and, having sought the protection of Lodovico Caracci, they successively made such progress in the methods of painting as rendered them the most distinguished representatives of the Bolognese Revival. All three were men of immaculate manners. Guido Reni, beautiful as a Sibyl in youth, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion, was, to the end of his illustrious career, reputed a virgin. Albani, who translated into delicate oil-painting the sensuousness of the Adone, studied the forms of Nymphs and Venuses from his lovely wife, and the limbs of Amorini from the children whom she bore him regularly every year. Domenichino, a man of shy, retiring habits, preoccupied with the psychological problems which he strove to translate into dramatic pictures, doted on one woman, whom he married, and who lived to deplore his death (as she believed) by poison. Guido was specially characterized by devotion to Madonna. He was a singular child. On every Christmas eve, for seven successive years, ghostly knockings were heard upon his chamber door; and, every night, when he awoke from sleep, the darkness above his bed was illuminated by a mysterious egg-shaped globe of light.[223] His eccentricity in later life amounted to insanity, and at last he gave himself up wholly to the demon of the gaming-table. Domenichino obeyed only one passion, if we except his passion for the wife he loved so dearly, and this was music. He displayed some strangeness of temperament in a morbid dislike of noise and interruptions. Otherwise, nothing disturbed the even current of an existence dedicated to solving questions of art. Albani mixed more freely in the world than Domenichino, enjoyed the pleasures of the table and of sumptuous living, but with Italian sobriety, and expatiated in those spheres of literature which supplied him with motives for his coldly sensual pictures. Yet he maintained the credit of a thoroughly domestic, soundly natured, and vigorously wholesome man.
I have thought it well thus to preface what I have to say about these masters, partly because critics of the modern stamp, trusting more to their subjective impressions than to authoritative records, have painted the moral characters of Guido and Domenichino in lurid colors, and also because there is cer tainly something in their work which leaves a painful memory of unhealthy sentiment, impassiveness to pain, and polished carnalism on the mind. It may incidentally be recorded that Lodovico Caracci, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani are all of them, on very good authority, reported to have been even prudishly modest in their use of female models. They never permitted a woman to strip entirely, and Guido carried his reserve to such a pitch that he preferred to leave his studio door open while drawing from a woman.[224] Malevolence might suggest that this was only part and parcel of post-Tridentine hypocrisy; and probably there is truth in the suggestion. I certainly do not reckon such solicitous respect for garments entirely to their credit. But it helps us to understand the eccentric compound of sentiment, sensuality, piety, and uneasy morality which distinguished the age, and which is continually perplexing the student of its art.
Of these three men, Guido was the most genially endowed. He alone derived a true spark from the previous age of inspiration. He wearies us indeed with his effeminacy, and with the reiteration of a physical type sentimentalized from the head and bust of Niobe. But thoughts of real originality and grace not seldom visited his meditations; and he alone deserved the name of colorist among the painters I have as yet ascribed to the Bolognese School.[225] Guido affected a cool harmony of blue, white, and deadened gold, which in the best pictures of his second manner—the Fortune, the Bacchus and Ariadne of S. Luke's in Rome, the Crucifixion at Modena—has a charm akin to that of Metastasio's silvery lyrics. The samson at Bologna rises above these works both in force of conception and glow of color. The Aurora of the Rospigliosi Casino attempts a wider scheme of hues, and is certainly, except for some lack of refinement in the attendant Hours, a very noble composition. The S. Michael of the Cappuccini is seductive by its rich bravura style; and the large Pietà in the Bolognese Gallery impresses our mind by a monumental sadness and sobriety of tone. The Massacre of the Innocents, though one of Guido's most ambitious efforts, and though it displays an ingenious adaptation of the Niobe to Raphael's mannerism, fails by falling between two aims—the aim to secure dramatic effect, and the aim to treat a terrible subject with harmonious repose.
Of Albani nothing need be said in detail. Most people knew his pictures of the Four Elements, so neatly executed in a style adapting Flemish smoothness of surface to Italian suavity of line. This sort of art delighted the cardinals and Monsignori of the seventeenth century. But it has nothing whatsoever to say to and human soul.