In other points he appears to me to have observed the same method, in regard to his model, as Poussin, who aimed at Raffaello's manner, without reaching it, either from want of ability, or from a dread of falling into servility. His masterpiece is said to be the Supper of Cana, a piece that has been engraved by Patina, among the Select Paintings. It was formerly in Padua, and is now at Venice in the Chapter of La Carità; with few figures in proportion to the place; a rich display of costume and ornament; dogs that appear like those of Paul, full of life; grand attendance, women of the most exquisite forms warmed with more ideal beauty than those of Titian, and drawn in the most graceful attitudes. Still it is not every one who will approve of his introduction of them for the service of such a table, in preference to men, as is the more general custom. The above picture cannot, however, boast such fresh and lucid tints as his four histories of the Life of San Domenico, which are to be seen in a Refectory of Santi Giovanni and Paolo, containing as it were the flower of Padovanino's best style. This very elegant artist spent his time between the capital and his native province, where alone his pictures abound in public; in other cities they are more rarely met with, and are scarce even in private collections.
In forming a judgment of his productions, it is necessary to be upon our guard against a variety of copies, many of his disciples having so happily imitated him, that Venetian professors themselves with difficulty distinguish their hand from that of their master.
Bartolommeo Scaligero ranks among the most celebrated pupils and imitators of Padovanino, an artist enumerated by the people of Padua among their fellow citizens, although they can boast little from his pencil; while the Venetians are in possession of his pictures in various churches, the most beautiful, perhaps, at the Corpus Domini. Gio. Batista Rossi, from Rovigo, produced one of his pictures for San Clemente at Padua; subsequently he flourished at Venice, executing few things for public exhibition, but which are much extolled by Boschini. Giulio Carpioni was accounted also among the pupils of Varotari, and acquired a reputation rather for his small than his larger compositions; but we shall have occasion to allude to him again. Maestri and Leoni are names recorded in the Guida of Venice, distinguished for their works in fresco, exhibited at the Conventuali. The former was most probably a foreigner, as well as the latter, whom we shall find at Rimino. Were Boschini somewhat of a less profuse panegyrist, we might here add to this list the name of Dario, a son of Padovanino, uniting the character of the physician, the poet, the painter, and engraver. In the index to the Carta del Navegar, we find him placed in the rank of Dilettanti, from the circumstance of his producing little in the art, and this more with the object of presenting his pictures as gifts than of gain. Nevertheless we meet with an encomium upon them,[[81]] sufficient to satisfy the claims even of a good professor; besides which, several of his virtues and portraits, with an excellent body of colouring, are equally extolled for the spirit of their attitudes, and exquisite taste in the Giorgione manner.
We have next to treat of Pietro Liberi, an artist who succeeded Padovanino in sustaining the honour of his native place. He ranks among the great men of his art, and is esteemed by many the most learned in point of design, of all who adorned the Venetian School. From his early studies of the antique at Rome, of Michelangiolo, and of Raffaello, of Coreggio at Parma, and of all the most excellent masters in the city of Venice, he was led to form a style partaking of every school; a style that pleased in Italy, but far more in Germany, and which obtained for him the titles of Count and Cavalier, with wealth to support them handsomely in Venice. And, in fact, to estimate his merits rightly, we ought not to consider him as a painter in one style, but in many. For according to his own confession, he employed for the eye of true judges a free and rapid pencil, not very studious of finish; for the less intelligent he worked with a very careful one, which bestowed the last touch upon every part, distinguishing the very hairs in such a manner that one might number them; and these paintings he executed on panels of cypress wood. Most probably the fire of this man's genius became quenched whenever he attempted to paint slowly, and his pieces were certainly less perfect, which is known to have occurred to several painters in fresco. But with the exception of these enthusiasts, who are extremely rare, and always adduced by the indolent in defence of their haste, an observing diligence is the perfection of every artist; and even those two thunderbolts, let us call them, of art, Tintoretto and Giordano, where they most practised it, succeeded most in charming the eye of taste. The style of this artist may also be distinguished into the sublime and beautiful. He produced fewer specimens, however, in the former, of which Venice boasts a Slaughter of the Innocents, Vicenza a Noah just landed from the Ark, Bergamo the Great Deluge, in which the shore is said to have been the work of M. Montagne; the whole of them painted for churches, robust in their design, displaying fine variety of foreshortenings and of attitudes, with naked parts in grand character, and more in emulation of the Caracci than of Michelangiolo. He even abused the singular skill that he thus displayed; drawing the Supreme Deity by an unprecedented example, without the least drapery, in the church of Santa Caterina at Vicenza, an error of judgment which detracts from the worth of one of his most beautiful productions. In a lighter character he produced several pictures for private ornament, sometimes consisting of fables familiar to us, and sometimes of capricci and allegorical subjects, too obscure even for Œdipus himself to unravel. Most frequently he drew naked figures of Venus, in the taste of Titian; and these are esteemed his masterpieces, which have acquired for him, indeed, the name of Libertino. It is asserted, that being unequal to the formation of the folds of his draperies, for the most part ill disposed and vague, he the more willingly exercised himself in these schools. We meet with a great number in different collections, and after beholding one, we are at no loss to recognize the remainder, both from the heads which are often repetitions of each other, and from the rosy tinge of his fleshes, and of the general tone of his pictures. He was extravagantly fond indeed of this last colour; which he often misapplied in regard to the hands and the extremities of the fingers. For the rest the composition of his colours was sweet; his shades delicate, in the Correggio manner, and his profiles often borrowed from the antique, while his whole handling was free and elevated.
Marco Liberi, his son, was not in any way comparable to his father, either in point of dignity or beauty, when left to his own invention. His forms are either caricatures, in a manner, of those of his father, or are very inferior where they are original. This striking difference may be observed in numerous collections, where their paintings of Venus are placed together, as we see in that of Prince Ercolani at Bologna. Still he was an excellent copyist of his father's works, a talent possessed by many others of the same school, whose imitations are easily mistaken for originals, even by professors themselves.
An excellent foreign artist ought not to be omitted in this place, one who flourished during a long period, and taught and died in Padua. His name is Luca Ferrari, from Reggio, fully deserving of being enrolled in the Abbeccedario Pittorico. Although Guido's pupil, his style became rather lofty than delicate; so that judging by the pictures that he produced for Santa Maria della Ghiaja in Reggio, Scannelli pronounced him a disciple of Tiarini. In some of the airs of his heads, however, and in certain graceful motions, he shews himself not unworthy of the character of the former master. In Padua there is a Pietà of his at San Antonio, of a very masterly kind, a picture that displays the rarest beauty of colouring. In his pieces abounding with figures, like that of the Plague of 1630, painted for the Domenicani, he does not appear to so much advantage; nor had Guido, indeed, offered him any great examples in this line, being accustomed rather to weigh than to number his figures. Minorello and Cirello, two of his pupils and followers, continued to support in Padua some relish of the Bolognese School. Their names might be added to the dictionary above mentioned, as Rosetti seemed to wish, and the former, who might sometimes be confounded with Luca, ought to hold a higher place in it than the latter. Francesco Zanella deserves likewise to be recorded there, as an artist of spirit, though neither very diligent nor very learned in his art. He is esteemed almost the Giordano of this city, from the great number of his works conducted in a short time, and may be computed almost as the last of the school; for Pellegrini, who flourished during the same age, was not a native, though tracing his origin to Padua; nor did he reside there many years.
The city of Vicenza produced nothing original during this epoch; though it possessed a school, sprung from that of Paul Veronese and from Zelotti, of which I promised the reader a series in a more appropriate part of the work. In regard to its style, this school, in part, belongs to a better age; but its productions are chiefly so very indifferent, and so much the result of mechanic art, that it may rather be ascribed to the present. Vicenza indeed might have had reason to boast, had it possessed artists at all equal in point of genius to its architects. I shall first commence with the name of Lucio Bruni, whether a native of the state or a foreigner is uncertain, an artist who produced, for San Jacopo, a little altarpiece, representing the marriage of S. Catherine, executed in 1585, and partaking of the genius of a better age. I have met with no other notice of him; for as he was probably little known in times when Italy abounded with the choicest artists, he found no historian who might have rescued his reputation from oblivion. Yet this I would willingly do, if not by giving him a rank in this school, at least including him in the list of artists of the city, where I find mention of his name. Giannantonio Fasolo received the instructions of Paul, and for a longer period those of Zelotti; still adhering, however, to Paul as his first example. At San Rocco there is one of his pictures, a Probatica, so beautifully decorated with perspective, and so finely filled with sick figures, in various groups and distances, that Paul Veronese would not have disclaimed it for his own. There are likewise three Roman histories in the ceiling of the prefectory palace; Mutius Scævola before Porsenna, Horatius at the Bridge, and Curtius before the Gulf; the whole of them nobly executed. By some strange mistake Orlandi mentions Verona as the place of his birth, and where he exercised his talents.
Among his pupils was Alessandro Maganza, son of the same Giambatista whose name I recorded among Titian's followers. Fasolo inspired him with his own taste; and we may likewise consider him a fine imitator of Zelotti and of Paul Veronese; as he has shown in his Epiphany, at San Domenico; and in his Martyrdom of S. Giustina, at San Pietro. In his architecture he was excellent, judicious in his composition, very pleasing in his countenances; in his fleshes inclining towards white; in his folds somewhat hard and monotonous; and for the most part wanting in expression. Vicenza has an abundance of his paintings, both private and in public; besides the provinces and the adjacent cities, to such an amount, that we have no difficulty in believing that he flourished till his seventy-fourth year; that he painted for good prices, and with little trouble. A few of his pictures, such as we meet with at Vicenza, are amply sufficient to give us an idea of the rest; not unfrequently presenting us with the same features and the same attitudes and motions. We are to look for the cause of this, not so much in his genius, which he shows in many of his works to have been excellent, as in his domestic anxieties, occasioned by a numerous family for whom he had to provide. This artist was extremely unfortunate as a father. Giambatista, the eldest of his sons, emulated him in knowledge; and if we may venture to judge from one of his histories, of San Benedetto, at the church of S. Giustina, in Padua, he was superior to him in point of elegance. But the support he derived from this young man's talents was soon cut off by his early death, leaving a young family of his own to the care of their grandfather. His second son, Girolamo, who had also to make provision for his own children, and Marcantonio, quite a youth, afterwards assisted their father in his productions, and already began to acquire some degree of reputation from their own. When, in the year 1630, their native place was ravaged by the plague, Alessandro had the grief to witness the death of his two sons, and, one by one, of the whole of his grandchildren; until left "the last of his race," to lament over the destruction of his kindred, he shortly followed them to the tomb, closing with his death that noble school which the two illustrious Veronese had founded in Vicenza.
Yet it did not altogether perish; but was continued by Maffei, by Carpioni, and by Cittadella, three artists who, compared with the Maganza, sometimes appear to have sprung from the same academy, either from having studied in Vicenza the models they imitated, or because the style, which partakes both of that of Paul and Palma, was then in high repute, as that of Cortona at another period among us. They were all three, like Alessandro himself, rapid in their composition; and were their pictures, even belonging to the city, to be enumerated, they would most likely be found to equal those of all the other foreign or native artists employed there. Francesco Maffei, from Vicenza, had been the pupil of Peranda, some of whose unfinished pieces he completed. He next undertook to imitate Paul Veronese, with a tolerable degree of spirit and learning. His style is on a lofty scale; in so much that Boschini entitles him the great mannerist, extolling him as the painter of giants. Nor is he wanting in a certain grace peculiarly his; which distinguishes him from the mannerists. His picture of St. Anna, at San Michele di Vicenza, besides many works produced at the same place for the public palace, and elsewhere, extremely poetical, full of fine portraits, and coloured in the best Venetian taste, show that he was able to compete with more skilful artists than Carpioni and Cittadella, his contemporaries. And as he, perhaps, did not consider them very formidable rivals, he did not finish his pieces with much care, leaving many of his heads, besides other portions of his figures, incomplete; scanty in his colouring, employing dark grounds, and altogether painting rather for years than for ages. At San Francesco, in Padua, there is a grand picture of his "Paradise," which, owing to this method, has lost almost every trace of colour. This result extinguishes the praise which Boschini bestows upon him, that with four touches of his pencil he could make the observer raise his eyebrows with admiration, and is a very excellent warning, we think, for over expeditious artists. Their pictures may be said, indeed, to resemble certain children, the offspring of unhealthy parents, who sometimes exhibit a florid countenance in youth, accompanied with every other symptom of health, but, declining as they advance, their constitution becomes exhausted in a few years.
Giulio Carpioni, a pupil to Padovanino, and for the same reason familiar with the composition of Paul Veronese, has assuredly more vivacity, power of expression, and poetry than Maffei. He was not, however, equally inclined to grand proportions, and works upon an extensive scale. His figures do not usually exceed the size of those of Bassano; and they are more frequently met with in collections than in churches, throughout the whole Venetian state. In many noble houses we also find pictures consisting of bacchanals, dreams, fables, and capricci, or fancy pieces, as well as histories, all touched with a spirit and a taste in his tints, which his master himself might have thought worthy of his pencil. He appears to have produced others for the people, if indeed they are not the work of his pupils, or of his son Carlo, who is supposed to have followed, in all points, the example of his father; though I never met with any piece that was positively genuine. He was, likewise, a good portrait painter; and in the public Council Hall at Vicenza, as well as in the church of the Servi at Monte Berico, appear the portraits of several of the magistrates in that government, accompanied by their trains; in which, to singular correctness of feature, we meet with much ideal beauty in his representation of the Virtues, that he introduced with appropriate and noble inventions. Such an artist ought to be well known in Venice and Vicenza, where he flourished during many years. He passed his latter days in Verona, where his contemporary, Bartolommeo Cittadella, had likewise taken up his residence; last of the three whom I have just before mentioned. It is uncertain whether he was a pupil, or only a companion of Carpioni; but he is indisputably his inferior in point of genius and ability. To the same school we may add the name of Niccolo Miozzi, of Vicenza, recorded in the Gioielli Pittoreschi of Boschini; and, though more doubtful, that of Marcantonio Miozzi, known by his superscription attached to a sacred subject, in possession of the house of Muttoni, at Rovigo.