The works of Murillo are numerous, and widely scattered over the world. Most of his greatest works are in the churches of Spain; some are in the Royal collections at Madrid, some in France and Flanders, many in England, and a few in the United States. They now command enormous prices. The National Gallery of London paid four thousand guineas for a picture of the Holy Family, and two thousand for one of St. John with the Lamb. The late Marshal Soult’s collection was very rich in Murillos—the fruits of his campaigns in Spain. The famous Assumption of the Virgin, considered the chef d’œuvre of the master, brought the enormous sum of five hundred and eighty-six thousand francs, and was bought by the French government to adorn the Louvre; but it should be recollected that the heads of three governments—those of France, Russia, and Spain—and an English Marquis, competed for it. Such works, too, are esteemed above all price, as models of art, in a national collection of pictures. Of the other Murillos in the Soult collection, the principal brought the following prices: “The Ravages of the Plague,” twenty thousand francs; “The Miracle of St. Diego,” eighty-five thousand francs; “The Flight into Egypt,” fifty-one thousand francs; “The Nativity of the Virgin,” ninety thousand francs; “The Repentance of St. Peter,” fifty-five thousand francs; “Christ on the Cross,” thirty-one thousand francs; “St. Peter in Prison,” one hundred and fifty-one thousand francs; “Jesus and St. John—children,” fifty-one thousand seven hundred and fifty francs. The two last were purchased for the Emperor of Russia. The collection was sold in May, 1852.
The works of Murillo have been largely copied and imitated, and so successfully as to deceive even connoisseurs.
MURILLO’S ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN.
The Assumption of the Virgin is considered by all the Spanish writers as the masterpiece of Murillo, and never, perhaps, did that great master attain such sublimity of expression and such magnificent coloring, as in this almost divine picture. It represents the Virgin in the act of being carried up into Heaven. Her golden hair floats on her shoulders, and her white robe gently swells in the breeze, while a mantle of blue gracefully falls from her left shoulder. Groups of angels and cherubim of extraordinary beauty, sport around her in the most evident admiration, those below thronging closely together, while those above open their ranks, as if not in any way to conceal the glory shed around the ascending Virgin. The size of the picture is eight feet six inches in height, by six feet broad, French measure. This picture was the gem of the famous collection made by Marshal Soult, during his campaigns in Spain, who used humorously to relate that it cost him two monks, which he thus explained. One morning two of his soldiers were found with their throats cut, and the deed being traced to the instigation of the monks, near whose convent they had encamped, he immediately arraigned them before a court-martial, sentenced two of the fraternity to expiate the deed, and compelled them to designate the victims by lot. One of the chances fell to the Prior, who offered Soult this peerless picture as the price of their redemption.
CASTILLO’S TRIBUTE TO MURILLO.
Castillo was educated in the school of Zurbaran. After returning to his native city, he flattered himself that he was the first Spanish painter of the day; but subsequently, on a visit to Seville, he was painfully undeceived. The works of Murillo struck him with astonishment, and when he saw the St. Leander and St. Isidore, as well as the St. Anthony of Padua by that master, he exclaimed, “It is all over with Castillo! Is it possible that Murillo can be the author of all this grace and beauty of coloring?” He returned to Cordova, and attempted to imitate and equal Murillo, but felt satisfied that he had failed; and it is said that he died in the following year, from the effects of envy and annoyance.
CORREGGIO.
The name of this great artist was Antonio Allegri, and he was born at Correggio, a small town in the Duchy of Modena, in 1494; hence his acquired name. It was for a long time the fashion to regard the divine creations of Correggio as the mere product of genius and accident; himself as a man born in the lowest grade of society; uneducated in the elements of his art, owing all to the wondrous resources of his own unassisted genius; living and dying in obscurity and poverty; ill paid for his pictures; and at length perishing tragically. It has been proved that there is no foundation for these popular fallacies. Correggio’s own pictures are a sufficient refutation of a part of them; they exhibit not only a classical and cultivated taste, but a profound knowledge of anatomy, and of the sciences of optics, perspective, and chemistry, as far as they were then carried. His exquisite chiaro-scuro and harmonious blending of colors were certainly not the result of mere chance: all his sensibility to these effects of nature would not have enabled him to render them, without the profoundest study of the mechanical means he employed. The great works on which he was employed—his lavish use of the rarest and most expensive colors, and the time and labor he bestowed in analyzing and refining them—the report that he worked on a ground overlaid with gold—all refute the idea of his being either an ignorant or a distressed man. Of the rank he held in the estimation of the princes of his country we have evidence in a curious document discovered in the archives of the city of Correggio—the marriage contract between Ippolito (the son of Giberto, Lord of Correggio, by his wife, the celebrated poetess Vittoria Gambara), and Chiara da Correggio, in which we find the signature of the great painter as one of the witnesses. Correggio was one of that splendid triumvirate of painters who, living at the same time, were working on different principles, and achieving, each in his own department, excellence hitherto unequalled; and if Correggio must be allowed to be inferior to Raffaelle in invention and expression, and to Titian in life-like color, he has united design and color with the illusion of light and shadow in a degree of perfection not then nor since approached by any painter. Hence Annibale Caracci, on seeing one of his great pictures, exclaimed in a transport that he was “the only painter!”
CORREGGIO’S GRAND CUPOLA OF THE CHURCH OF ST. JOHN AT PARMA.
The admiration which the works of Correggio excited, induced the monks of St. John to engage him in ornamenting the grand cupola, and other parts of their church. The original agreement has not been discovered, but various entries have been found in the books of the convent, between 1519 and 1536, which prove, that for adorning the cupola he received, as Tiraboschi asserts, two hundred and seventy-two gold ducats, and two hundred more for other parts of the fabric. The last payment of twenty seven gold ducats was made on the 23d of January, 1524, and the acknowledgment of the painter, under his own signature, is still extant.