A great number of the Italians do the same even now. In numerous costume pictures, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flashing with silk and velvet, the Southerner’s bright pleasure in colour still loves to celebrate its orgies. Gay trains rustle, rosy Loves laugh down from the walls, Venetian chandeliers shed their radiance; no other epoch in history enables the painter with so much ease to produce such an efflorescence of full-toned chords of colour. With his shining glow of hue the delectable and spirited Favretto (who, like Fortuny, entered the world of art as a victor, and, like him again, was snatched from it when barely thirty-seven, after a brief and brilliant career) stands at the head of this group. The child of poor parents, indeed the son of a joiner, he was born in Venice in 1849, and, like the Spaniard, passed a youth which was full of privations. But all the cares of existence, even the loss of an eye, did not hinder him from seeing objects under a laughing brightness of colour. Through his studies and the bent of his fancy he had come to be no less at home in the Venice of the eighteenth century than in that of his own time. This Venice of Francesco Guardi, this city of enchantment surrounded with the gleam of olden splendour, the scene of rich and brilliantly coloured banquets and a graceful and modish society, rose once more under Favretto’s hands in fabulous beauty. What brio of technique, what harmony of colours, were to be found in the picture “Un Incontro,” the charming scene upon the Rialto Bridge, with the bowing cavalier and the lady coquettishly making her acknowledgments! This was the first picture which gave him a name in the world. What fanfares of colour were in the two next pictures, “Banco Lotto” and “Erbajuolo Veneziano”! At the Exhibition in Turin in 1883 he was represented by “The Bath” and “Susanna and the Elders”; at that in Venice in 1887 he celebrated his last and greatest triumph. The three pictures “The Friday Market upon the Rialto Bridge,” “The Canal Ferry near Santa Margherita,” and “On the Piazzetta” were the subject of enthusiastic admiration. All the Venetian society of the age of Goldoni, Gozzi, and Casanova had become vivid in this last picture, and moved over the smooth brick pavement of the Piazzetta at the hour of the promenade, from the Doge’s palace to the library, and from the Square of St. Mark to the pillar of the lions and Theodore, to and fro in surging life. Men put up their glasses and chivalrously greeted the queens of beauty. The enchanting magic building of Sansovino, the loggetta with their bright marble pillars, bronze statues of blackish-grey, and magnificent lattice doors, formed the background of the standing and sauntering groups, whose variegated costumes united with the tones of marble and bronze to make a most beautiful combination of colours. Favretto had a manner of his own, and, although a member of the school of Fortuny, he was stronger and healthier than the latter. He drew like a genuine painter, without having too much of the Fortuny fireworks. His soft, rich painting was that of a colourist of distinction, always tasteful, exquisite in tone, and light and pleasing in technique.

By the other Italian costume painters the scale run through by Fortuny was not enriched by new notes. Most of their pictures are nugatory, coquettishly sportive toys, masterly in technique no doubt, but so empty of substance that they vanish from memory like novels read upon a railway journey. Many have no greater import than dresses, cloaks, and hats worn by ladies during a few weeks of the season. Sometimes their significance is not even so great, since there are modistes and dressmakers who have more skill in making ruches and giving the right nuance to colours. Some small part of Favretto’s refined taste seems to have been communicated to the Venetian Antonio Lonza, who delights in mingling the gleaming splendour of Oriental carpets, fans, and screens amid the motley, picturesque costumes of the rococo period—Japanese who perform as jugglers and knife-throwers in quaint rococo gardens before the old Venetian nobility. But the centre of this costume painting is Florence, and the great mart for it the Società artistica, where there are yearly exhibitions.

Hanfstaengl.
FAVRETTO.SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS.

Francesco Vinea, Tito Conti, Federigo Andreotti, and Edoardo Gelli are in Italy the special manufacturers who have devoted themselves, with the assistance of Meissonier, Gérôme, and Fortuny, to scenes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to plumed hats, Wallenstein boots, and horsemen’s capes, to Renaissance lords and laughing Renaissance ladies, and they have thereby won great recognition in Germany. Pretty, languishing women in richly coloured costumes, tippling soldiers and gallant cavaliers, laughing peasant women and trim serving-girls drawing wine in the cellar vaults and setting it before a trooper, who in gratitude affectionately puts his arm round their waist, beautiful and still more languishing noble ladies, who laugh with a parrot or a dog, instead of a trooper, in apartments richly furnished with Gobelins—such for the most part are the subjects treated by Francesco Vinea with great virtuosity bordering on the routine of a typewriter. His technique is neither refined nor fascinating; the colours are so crude that they affect the eye as a false note the ear. But the mechanical power of his painting is great. He has much ability, far more, indeed, than Sichel, and possesses the secret of painting, in an astonishing manner, the famous lace kerchiefs wound round the heads of his fair ones. Andreotti and Tito Conti work in the same fashion, except that the ballad-singers and rustic idylls of Andreotti are the smoother and more mawkish, whereas the pictures of Conti make a somewhat more refined and artistic effect. His colour is superior and more transparent, and his tapestry backgrounds are warmer.

And, so far as one can judge from their pictures, life runs as merrily for the Italians of the present as it did for those rococo cavaliers. Hanging here and there beside the serious art of other nations, these little picture-people enjoy their careless tinsel pomp; art is a gay thing for them, as gay as a Sunday afternoon with a procession and fireworks, walks and sips of sherbet, to an Italian woman. By the side of the blue-plush and red-velvet costume-picture comic genre still holds its sway: barbaric in colour and with materials which are merrier than is appropriate in tasteful pictures, Gaetano Chierici represents children, both good and naughty, making their appearance upon a tiny theatre. Antonio Rotta renders comic episodes from the life of Venetian cobblers and the menders of nets. Scipione Vannuttelli paints young girls in white dresses arrayed as nuns or being confirmed in church. Francesco Monteverde rejoices in comical intermezzi in the style of Grützner—for instance, an ecclesiastical gentleman observing, to his horror, that his pretty young servant-girl is being kissed by a smart lad in the yard. This is more or less his style of subject. Ettore Tito paints the pretty Venetian laundresses whom Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Charles Ulrich, Eugène Blaas, and others introduced into art. Only a very few struck deeper notes. Luigi Nono, in Venice, painted his beautiful picture “Refugium Peccatorum”; Ferragutti, the Milanese, his “Workers in the Turnip Field,” a vivid study of sunlight of serious veracity; and after these Giovanni Segantini came forward with his forcible creations, in which he has demonstrated that it is possible for a man to be an Italian and yet a serious artist.

Hanfstaengl.
TITO.THE SLIPPER SELLER.

Segantini’s biography is like a novel. Born the child of poor parents, in Arco, in 1858, he was left, after the death of his parents, to the care of a relative in Milan with whom he passed a most unhappy time. He then wanted to make his fortune in France, and set out upon foot; but he did not get very far, in fact he managed to hire himself out as a swine-herd. After this he lived for a whole year alone in the wild mountains, worked in the field, the stable, the barn. Then came the well-known discovery, which one could not believe were it not to be read in Gubernati. One day he drew the finest of his pigs with a piece of charcoal upon a mass of rock. The peasants ran in a crowd and took the block of stone, together with the young Giotto, in triumph to the village. He was given assistance, visited the School of Art in Milan, and now paints the things he did in his youth. In a secluded village of the Alps, Val d’Albola in Switzerland, a thousand metres above the sea, amid the grand and lofty mountains, he settled down, surrounded only by the peasants who make a precarious living from the soil. Out of touch with the world of artists the whole year round, observing great nature at every season and every hour of the day, fresh and straightforward in character, he is one of those natures of the type of Millet, in whom heart and hand, man and artist, are one and the same thing. His shepherd and peasant scenes from the valleys of the high Alps are free from all flavour of genre. The life of these poor and humble beings passes without contrasts and passions, being spent altogether in work, which fills the long course of the day in monotonous regularity. The sky sparkles with a sharp brilliancy. The spiky yellow and tender green of the fields forces its way modestly from the rocky ground. In front is something like a hedge where a cow is grazing, or there is a shepherdess pasturing her sheep. Something majestic there is in this cold nature, where the sunshine is so sharp, the air so thin. And the primitive, it might almost be said antique, execution of these pictures is in accord with the primitive simplicity of the subjects. In fact, Segantini’s pictures, with their cold silvery colours, and their contours so sharp in outline, standing out hard against the rarefied air, make an impression like encaustic paintings or mosaics. They have nothing alluring or pleasing, and there is, perhaps, even a touch of mannerism in this mosaic painting; but they are nevertheless exceedingly true, rugged, austere, and yet sunny. Segantini opened up to painting an entirely new world of beauty, the poetry of the highlands. His appearance dates from the Impressionistic period when preference was given to damp, misty atmospheres which toned down all colour and melted away all lines, and artists made a specialty of flat, monotonous plains. At that time the mountains were in bad repute, thanks to the old-fashioned painters of views, the masters of the “picture-postcard style.” Segantini led the way again up to the heights; but he did not paint the mountain-tops that, like the Titans of old, strive to reach the sky; he painted the plateaus, not the plains of the lowlands, but of the highlands, lonely, weird, sublime, where man draws near to the heart of Nature, far from the noise and struggle of everyday life. The air of the heights is there, the colours and lines speak with no uncertain voice. Thus Segantini learnt from the locale of his pictures to become the first master of line among the Impressionists. How he mirrors in his pictures the stillness, the might and grandeur of these lofty heights! With what astounding truth his cold, clear colours make us feel the coldness and clearness of these regions. Like a dome of steel, the sky stretches over the steel-blue lakes, clear as crystal, over the pale-green meadows in the grip of the frost; the tender foliage rustles and freezes in the quivering ice-cold air: there glaciers gleam, there glitters the snow, there the sun pours down his beams upon the earth like plumes of fire. A thunder cloud draws near, calm and majestic as destiny in its relentless course. There is something Northern and virginal, something earnest and grandiose, which stands in strange contrast with the joyful, conventional smile which is otherwise spread over the countenance of Italian painting. Though he died so young, Giovanni Segantini will live for all time in the history of art.