Rubens, hearing of the prolonged sojourn of his pupil at Saveltheim, arrived one day upon the scene, and finally induced Van Dyck to tear himself from his mistress and continue his journey to Italy.
The great object of his visit was to study the Venetian masters, and accordingly he repaired forthwith to the City of the Lagoons. We can picture him standing for the first time before those wonderful portraits of Titian and Tintoretto, Palma-Vecchio and Moroni, about which he had heard so much in his student days in Antwerp. That he was not disappointed is evidenced by the fact that almost immediately a change is observable in his method. He cast aside as speedily as possible the silveriness and coolness which had characterised his palette when working in Antwerp, and endeavoured to assimilate in as great a degree as possible the golden luminosity and subtle handling of the mighty Venetians. It is probable that Titian held the first place in his estimation, for it is rather upon his method that all his subsequent developments in technique are based. But perhaps full justice has not been done to the influence Moroni had in moulding his youthful genius. One has only to compare, for example, the full-length portrait of an Italian nobleman, No. 1316 in the National Gallery, with that marvellous representation of Philip le Roy in the Wallace Collection, reproduced in this volume, to see the connection between the two painters. There is the same air of distinction in each portrait, and in silveriness of colouring and elegance of pose there is much in common. These are not isolated examples in the life-work of the two masters, but are rather representative of a whole series of portraits in which their genius runs on nearly parallel lines.
We cannot wonder that Van Dyck was not much impressed by such of the Umbrian painters as he came in contact with. There was still left in these men the remains of that mysticism which was born of the intimate contact with religion in relation to life that had originally brought it into being. The religious art of the Netherlands—I am speaking now of that which arose after the middle of the sixteenth century—was built upon a purely human and materialistic basis. If a scriptural scene was represented it was brought before us as a subject from everyday life; a martyrdom with all its brutality, a crucifixion with all its physical horror, and a madonna and child simply as a peasant girl with a child, set in homely surroundings. Our artist, endowed with the same temperament as the men who had created such works, and who moreover was perhaps the best exponent of this school of painting, with the possible exception of Rubens himself, could not be expected to be touched with the subtleties of Botticelli or Filippino Lippi. Further, it is not unlikely that he found he could learn little from the technique of Raphael or Andrea del Sarto. But with the Venetians it was quite otherwise. From the early days of Giovanni Bellini they seem to have treated religious subjects in just as materialistic a manner, if less grossly and repugnantly, than the Flemings themselves. One has but to contemplate the life-work of Titian to see how little religious feeling, in the Florentine or mystical sense of the term, there was in his art. Even the two most impressive religious pictures he ever painted, the "Entombment," in the Louvre, and the "Christ crowned with Thorns," at Munich, would certainly not have pleased the patrons of Ghirlandajo or Pollaiuolo. But Titian and his contemporaries constitute the zenith attained by Italian materialistic art, at any rate in point of technique.
PLATE V.—PHILIPPE LE ROY, SEIGNEUR DE RAVEL
(In the Wallace Collection)
The masterpiece of Van Dyck's second Flemish manner. In it we see the culmination of the influences he had brought away with him from Italy sobered by a renewed contact with the productions of his illustrious master. The dignity of pose, probably derived from Moroni and Titian, united with the fact that his immense technical powers are brought into play in an unsurpassed degree, certainly proclaim it as one of the greatest portraits in the world. Van Dyck executed an etching of Philippe le Roy, probably based upon this portrait which ranks very high amongst his productions in this way.