Winged persuasions and wild destinies,
Splendours, and glooms, and glimmering incarnations
Of hopes, and fears, and twilight fantasies,—"
took form and being—became palpable existences: and yet with all this inventive power, this love of allegorical fiction, it is life, the spirit of animal life, diffused through and over their works; it is the blending of the plain reasoning with splendid creative powers;—of wonderful fertility of conception with more wonderful facility of execution; it is the combination of truth, and grandeur, and masculine vigour, with a general coarseness of taste, which may be said to characterise both these great men. Neither are, or can be, favourites of the women, for the same reasons.
There must have been something analogous in the genius of Rubens and Titian. The distinction was of climate and country. They appear to have looked at nature under the same aspect, but it was a different nature,—the difference between Flanders and Venice. They were both painters of flesh and blood: by nature, poets; by conformation, colourists; by temperament and education, magnificent spirits, scholars, and gentlemen, lovers of pleasure and of fame. The superior sentiment and grace, the refinement and elevation of Titian he owed to the poetical and chivalrous spirit of his age and country. The delicacy of taste which reigned in the Italian literature of that period influenced the arts of design. As to the colouring—we see in the pictures of Rubens the broad daylight effects of a northern climate, and in those of Titian, the burning fervid sun of a southern clime, necessarily modified by shade, before the objects could be seen: hence the difference between the glow of Rubens, and the glow of Titian: the first "i' the colours of the rainbow lived," and the other bathed himself in the evening sky; the one dazzles, the other warms. I can bring before my fancy at this moment, the Helen Forman of Rubens, and Titian's "La Manto;" the "man with a hawk" of Rubens, and Titian's "Falconer;" can any thing in heaven or earth be more opposed? Yet in all alike, is it not the intense feeling of life and individual nature which charms, which fixes us? I know not which I admire most; but I adore Titian—his men are all made for power, and his women for love.
And Rembrandt—king of shadows!
——Earth-born
And sky-engendered—son of mysteries!
was not he a poet? He reminds me often of the Prince Sorcerer, nurtured "in the cave of Domdaniel, under the roots of the sea."[ 36] Such an enchanted "den of darkness" was his mill and its skylight to him; and there, magician-like, he brooded over half-seen forms, and his imagination framed strange spells out of elemental light and shade. Thence he brought his unearthly shadows; his dreamy splendours; his supernatural gleams; his gems flashing and sparkling with internal light; his lustrous glooms; his wreaths of flaming and embossed gold; his wicked wizard-like heads—turbaned, wrinkled, seared, dusky; pale with forbidden studies—solemn with thoughtful pain—keen with the hunger of avarice—and furrowed with an eternity of years! I have seen pictures of his in which the shadowy background is absolutely peopled with life. At first all seems palpable darkness, apparent vacancy; but figure after figure emerges—another and another; they glide into view, they take shape and colour, as if they grew out of the canvass even while we gaze; we rub our eyes, and wonder whether it be the painter's work or our own fancy!