Titian continued to paint to the last year of his long life, and many writers, fond of the marvellous, assert that his faculties and his powers continued to the last. Vasari, who saw him in 1566 for the last time, said he "could no longer recognize Titian in Titian." Lanzi says, "There remains in the church of S. Salvatore, one of these pictures (executed towards the close of his life), of the Annunciation, which attracts the attention only from the name of the master. Yet when he was told by some one that it was not, or at least did not appear to have been executed by his hand, he was so much irritated that, in a fit of senile indignation, he seized his pencil and inscribed upon it, 'Tizianus fecit, fecit.' Still the most experienced judges are agreed that much may be learned, even from his latest works, in the same manner as the poets pronounce judgment upon the Odyssey, the product of old age, but still by Homer."
MONUMENT TO TITIAN.
A monument to Titian, from the studio of the brothers Zandomenghi, was erected in Venice in 1852; and the civil, ecclesiastical, and military authorities were present at the ceremony of inauguration. It represents Titian, surrounded by figures impersonating the Fine Arts; below are impersonations of the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The basement is adorned with five bas-reliefs, representing as many celebrated paintings by the great artist.
HORACE VERNET.
Among all the artists of our day, is one standing almost alone, and singularly characterized in many respects. He is entirely wanting in that lofty religious character which fills with pureness and beauty the works of the early masters; he has not the great and impressive historical qualities of the school of Raffaelle, nor the daring sublimity of Michael Angelo; he has not the rich luxury of color that renders the works of the great Venetians so gorgeous, nor even that sort of striking reality which makes the subjects rendered by the Flemish masters incomparably life-like. Yet he is rich in qualities deeply attractive and interesting to the people, especially the French people, of our own day. He displays an astonishing capacity and rapidity of execution, an almost unparalleled accuracy of memory, a rare life and motion on the canvass, a vigorous comprehension of the military tactics of the time, a wonderful aptitude at rendering the camp and field potent subjects for the pencil, notwithstanding the regularity of movement, and the unpicturesque uniformity of costume demanded by the military science of our day. Before a battle-piece, of Horace Vernet (and only his battle-pieces are his masterpieces), the crowd stands breathless and horrified at the terrible and bloody aspect of war; while the military connoisseur admires the ability and skill of the feats of arms, so faithfully rendered that he forgets he is not looking at real soldiers in action. In the landscapes and objects of the foreground or background, there are not that charm of color and aërial depth and transparency in which the eye revels, yet there is a hard vigorous actuality which adds to the force and energy of the actors, and strengthens the idea of presence at the battle, without attracting or charming away the mind from the terrible inhumanities principally represented. No poetry, no romance, no graceful and gentle beauty; but the stern dark reality as it might be written in an official bulletin, or related in a vigorous, but cold and accurate, page of history. Such is the distinguishing talent of Horace Vernet—talent sufficient, however, to make his pictures the attractive centres of crowds at the Louvre Exhibitions, and to make himself the favorite of courts and one of the illustrissimi of Europe.
The Vernets have been a family of painters during four generations. The great-grandfather of Horace was a well-known artist at Avignon, a hundred and fifty years ago. His son and pupil, Claude Joseph Vernet, was the first marine painter of his time; and occupies, with his works alone, an entire apartment of the French Gallery at the Louvre, besides great numbers of sea-pieces and landscapes belonging to private galleries. He died in 1789, but his son and pupil, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, who had already during two years sat by his side in the Royal Academy, continued the reputation of the family during the Consulate and Empire. He was particularly distinguished for cavalry-battles, hunting scenes, and other incidents in which the horse figured largely as actor. In some of these pictures the hand of the son already joined itself to that of the father, the figures being from the pencil of Horace; and before the death of the father, which took place in 1836, he had already seen the artistic reputation of the family increased and heightened by the fame of his son.
Horace Vernet was born at the Louvre on the 30th June, 1789, the year of the death of his grandfather, who, as painter to the king, had occupied rooms at the Louvre, where his father also resided; so that Horace not only inherited his art from a race of artist-ancestors, but was born amid the chef d' œuvres of the entire race of painters. Of course, his whole childhood and youth were surrounded with objects of Art; and it was scarcely possible for him not to be impressed in the most lively manner by the unbroken artist-life in which he was necessarily brought up. It would appear that from his childhood he employed himself in daubing on walls, and drawing on scraps of paper all sorts of little soldiers.
Like his father and grandfather, his principal lessons as a student were drawn from the paternal experience, and certainly no professor could more willingly and faithfully save him all the loss of time and patience occasioned by the long and often fruitless groping of the almost solitary Art-student. He was also thus saved from falling into the errors of the school of David. Certainly no great penchant towards the antique is discoverable in his father's works; nor in his own do we find painted casts of Greek statues dressed in the uniforms of the nineteenth century. At twenty, it is true, he tried, but without success, the classic subject offered to competition at the Academy for the prize of visiting Rome. The study of the antique did not much delight him. On the contrary, he rather joined with the innovators, whose example was then undermining the over-classic influence of David's school, the most formidable and influential of whom, a youth about his own age, and a fellow-student in his father's atelier, was then painting a great picture, sadly decried at the time, but now considered one of the masterpieces of the French school in the Louvre—the "Raft of the Medusa." Gericault was his companion in the studio and in the field, at the easel and on horseback; and we might trace here one of the many instances of the influence which this powerful and original genius exercised on the young artists of his time, and which, had it not been arrested by his premature death in January, 1824, would have made Gericault more strikingly distinguished as one of the master-spirits in French Art, and the head of a school entirely the opposite to that of David.