§ 20. The Venetian school of landscape expired with Tintoret, in the year 1594; and the sixteenth century closed, like a grave, over the great art of the world. There is no entirely sincere or great art in the seventeenth century. Rubens and Rembrandt are its two greatest men, both deeply stained by the errors and affectations of their age. The influence of the Venetians hardly extended to them; the tower of the Titianesque art fell southwards; and on the dust of its ruins grew various art-weeds, such as Domenichino and the Carraccis. Their landscape, which may in few words be accurately defined as "Scum of Titian," possesses no single merit, nor any ground for the forgiveness of demerit; they are to be named only as a link through which the Venetian influence came dimly down to Claude and Salvator.
§ 21. Salvator possessed real genius, but was crushed by misery in his youth, and by fashionable society in his age. He had vigorous animal life, and considerable invention, but no depth either of thought or perception. He took some hints directly from nature, and expressed some conditions of the grotesque of terror with original power; but his baseness of thought, and bluntness of sight, were unconquerable; and his works possess no value whatsoever for any person versed in the walks of noble art. They had little, if any, influence on Turner; if any, it was in blinding him for some time to the grace of tree trunks, and making him tear them too much into splinters.
§ 22. Not so Claude, who may be considered as Turner's principal master. Claude's capacities were of the most limited kind; but he had tenderness of perception, and sincerity of purpose, and he effected a revolution in art. This revolution consisted mainly in setting the sun in heaven.[100] Till Claude's time no one had seriously thought of painting the sun but conventionally; that is to say, as a red or yellow star, (often) with a face in it, under which type it was constantly represented in illumination; else it was kept out of the picture, or introduced in fragmentary distances, breaking through clouds with almost definite rays. Perhaps the honor of having first tried to represent the real effect of the sun in landscape belongs to Bonifazio, in his pictures of the camps of Israel.[101] Rubens followed in a kind of bravado, sometimes making the rays issue from anything but the orb of the sun;—here, for instance, Fig. 6., is an outline of the position of the sun (at s) with respect to his own rays, in a sunset behind a tournament in the Louvre: and various interesting effects of sunlight issuing from the conventional face-filled orb occur in contemporary missal-painting; for instance, very richly in the Harleian MS. Brit. Mus. 3469. But all this was merely indicative of the tendency to transition which may always be traced in any age before the man comes who is to accomplish the transition. Claude took up the new idea seriously, made the sun his subject, and painted the effects of misty shadows cast by his rays over the landscape, and other delicate aerial transitions, as no one had ever done before, and, in some respects, as no one has done in oil color since.
§ 23. "But, how, if this were so, could his capacities be of the meanest order?" Because doing one thing well, or better than others have done it, does not necessarily imply large capacity. Capacity means breadth of glance, understanding of the relations of things, and invention, and these are rare and precious; but there are very few men who have not done something, in the course of their lives, better than other people. I could point out many engravers, draughtsmen, and artists, who have each a particular merit in their manner, or particular field of perception, that nobody else has, or ever had. But this does not make them great men, it only indicates a small special capacity of some kind: and all the smaller if the gift be very peculiar and single; for a great man never so limits himself to one thing, as that we shall be able to say, "That's all he can do." If Claude had been a great man he would not have been so steadfastly set on painting effects of sun; he would have looked at all nature, and at all art, and would have painted sun effects somewhat worse, and nature universally much better.
§ 24. Such as he was, however, his discovery of the way to make pictures look warm was very delightful to the shallow connoisseurs of the age. Not that they cared for sunshine; but they liked seeing jugglery. They could not feel Titian's noble color, nor Veronese's noble composition; but they thought it highly amusing to see the sun brought into a picture: and Claude's works were bought and delighted in by vulgar people then, for their real-looking suns, as pictures are now by vulgar people for having real timepieces in their church towers.
§ 25. But when Turner arose, with an earnest desire to paint the whole of nature, he found that the existence of the sun was an important fact, and by no means an easily manageable one. He loved sunshine for its own sake; but he could not at first paint it. Most things else, he would more or less manage without much technical difficulty; but the burning orb and the golden haze could not, somehow, be got out of the oil paint. Naturally he went to Claude, who really had got them out of oil paint; approached him with great reverence, as having done that which seemed to Turner most difficult of all technical matters, and he became his faithful disciple. How much he learned from him of manipulation, I cannot tell; but one thing is certain, that he never quite equalled him in that particular forte of his. I imagine that Claude's way of laying on oil color was so methodical that it could not possibly be imitated by a man whose mechanism was interfered with by hundreds of thoughts and aims totally different from Claude's; and, besides, I suppose that certain useful principles in the management of paint, of which our schools are now wholly ignorant, had come down as far as Claude, from the Venetians. Turner at last gave up the attempt, and adopted a manipulation of his own, which indeed effected certain objects attainable in no other way, but which still was in many respects unsatisfactory, dangerous, and deeply to be regretted.
