A striking example of the old symbolical conception, according to which the adoration of the Magi—the tribute of the wise men from the East to the dawning star of Christianity—was represented as taking place in the ruins of an antique temple, signifying that Christianity was founded upon the ruins of Paganism. This picture was painted in 1573 for the church of San Silvestro in Venice, where it remained until 1835. It is mentioned in most of the guidebooks and descriptions of Venice. One of these published in 1792 says, in describing the church of San Silvestro: "Many are the pictures by Tintoretto, by scholars of Titian, by Palma Vecchio, etc.; but among them all the famous Adoration of the Magi by Paolo Veronese deserves especial attention." The picture has recently been covered with glass, an operation which is noteworthy on account of the great size of the pane required, 11 ft. 7 in. by 10 ft. 7 in. The pane had to be obtained in France.
269. A KNIGHT IN ARMOUR.
Giorgione (Venetian: 1477-1510).
Giorgio[121] of Castelfranco, called Giorgione, George the Great,—a name given him, according to Vasari, "because of the gifts of his person and the greatness of his mind,"—is one of the most renowned of the old masters, and exercised a deeper influence upon the artists of his time than any other painter. He was the fellow-pupil with Titian of Bellini at Venice, and after executing works at his native place was employed in Venice. Here by way of exhibiting a specimen of his ability, he decorated the front of his house with frescoes. He was afterwards employed in conjunction with Titian there to decorate the façade of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. These paintings have been destroyed by the sea-winds.[122] But what was more original in Giorgione's work was his small subject pictures. He was, says Pater, "the inventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve for uses neither of devotion, nor of allegorical or historical teaching—little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape—morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar." Some of Bellini's late works are already of this kind; but they were a little too austere and sober in colour for the taste of the time. Carpaccio was full of brilliancy, fancy, and gaiety, but he painted few easel pictures. Giorgione brought to the new style all the resources of a poetical imagination, of a happy temper, and of supreme gifts as a colourist. He was, says Ruskin, one of "the seven supreme colourists."[123] The chief colour on his palette, it has been said, was sunlight. In the glowing colour with which he invested the human form "the sense of nudity is utterly lost, and there is no need nor desire of concealment any more, but his naked figures move among the trees like fiery pillars, and lie on the grass like flakes of sunshine" (Modern Painters, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. xiv. § 20). Giorgione, says Mr. Colvin, came to enrich Venetian painting further, with "a stronger sense of life and of the glory of the real world as distinguished from the solemn dreamland of the religious imagination. He had a power hitherto unknown of interpreting both the charm of merely human grace and distinction, and the natural joy of life in the golden sunlight among woods and meadows." Giorgione, by his originality and his exact correspondence with the spirit of the time, created a demand which other painters were forced to supply. His influence, says Morelli, is not only to be traced in the early work of Titian; it stands out broadly in the paintings of nearly all his Venetian contemporaries—Lotto, Palma, Pordenone, Bonifacio, Cariani, and many others, not to speak of his scholar, Sebastiano del Piombo. The surviving pictures which are undoubtedly by Giorgione's own hand are very few. This category hardly includes more than four,—the altar-piece at Castelfranco (see below), the so-called "Famiglia di Giorgione" (now identified as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle," in the Palazzo Giovanelli at Venice), the "Three Philosophers" (in the Belvedere at Vienna), and the lovely "Sleeping Venus," identified by Morelli, in the Dresden Gallery. Among pictures in a second and less certain category, may be mentioned the "Concert" in the Louvre (the "Venetian Pastoral" of Rossetti's sonnet), another "Concert" in the Pitti, the "Head of a Shepherd" at Hampton Court, and (more doubtfully) No. 1160 in this Gallery. The number of reputed Giorgiones is very large. His fame has been constant from his own day to ours, and as every gallery desired to have a Giorgione, the wish was freely gratified by dealers and cataloguers. Modern criticism has played havoc among most of these so-called Giorgiones;[124] but the Giorgionesque spirit remains—unmistakable and distinct—in many works. Such in this Gallery are Nos. 930, 1123, and 1173, ascribed by the director to "the School of Giorgione." It is a school, as we have seen, of genre. It "employs itself mainly with painted idylls, but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete expression by drawing and colour. For although its productions are painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself without an articulated story." Vasari remarked that it was difficult to give Giorgione's representations an explanatory name. As Morelli has well pointed out, the genius of Titian was wholly dramatic; Giorgione was a lyric poet, who gives us at most dramatic lyrics. A picture by Giorgione or in his style "presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instant, a mere gesture, a look, a smile perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment—into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens of Venice—exquisite pauses in Time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life." Pictures in the Giorgionesque spirit are, as it were, "musical intervals in human existence—filled with people with intent faces listening to music, to the sound of water, to time as it flies" (Pater: "The School of Giorgione," Fortnightly Review, October 1877, reprinted in the third edition of The Renaissance). The landscapes of Giorgione have the same quality of quickened life. "Most painted landscapes leave little power to call up the actual physical sensations of the scenes themselves, but Giorgione's never fail to produce this effect; they speak directly to the sensations, making the beholder feel refreshed and soothed, as if actually reclining on the grass in the shade of the trees, with his mind free to muse on what delights it most. In so far as poetry may be compared to painting, Giorgione's feeling for landscape suggests Keats" (Mary Logan: Guide to the Italian Pictures at Hampton Court, p. 13).
Giorgione's pictures may be described as showing us golden moments of a golden age. His life, as told by Vasari and Ridolfi, corresponds with this ideal, which also was in exact accordance with the spirit of the times. Many readers will remember that it is with a mention of Giorgione that Ruskin prefaces his noble description of Venice in the days of the early Renaissance: "Born half-way between the mountains and the sea—that young George of Castelfranco—of the Brave Castle; stout George they called him, George of Georges, so goodly a boy he was—Giorgione. Have you ever thought what a world his eyes opened on—fair, searching eyes of youth? What a world of mighty life, from those mountain roots to the shore; of loveliest life, when he went down, yet so young, to the marble city, and became himself as a fiery heart to it?" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. ix. § 1). He spent his childhood at Castelfranco, "where the last crags of the Venetian Alps break down romantically with something of a park-like grace to the plain." "Giorgione's ideal of luxuriant pastoral scenery, the country of pleasant copses, glades and brooks, amid which his personages love to wander or recline with lute and pipe, was derived, no doubt, from these natural surroundings of his childhood." Close by his birthplace is Asolo, whence the word asolare, "to disport in the open air; to amuse oneself at random" (see Browning's Asolando). Giorgione "found his way early into a circle of notable persons—people of courtesy, and became initiated into those differences of personal type, manner, and even of dress, which are best understood there. Not far from his home lived Catherine of Cornaro, formerly Queen of Cyprus, and up in the towers which still remain, Tuzio Costanzo, the famous condottiére—a picturesque remnant of mediæval manners, in a civilisation rapidly changing" (Pater). In Venice Giorgione's gracious bearing and varied accomplishments introduced him into congenial company. "He took no small delight," says Vasari, "in love-passages and in the sound of the lute, to which he was so cordially devoted, and which he practised so constantly, that he played and sang with the most exquisite perfection, insomuch that he was for this cause frequently invited to musical assemblies and festivals by the most distinguished personages." "It happened, about his thirty-fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he entertained his friends with music, he met a certain lady of whom he became greatly enamoured, and 'they rejoiced greatly,' says Vasari, 'the one and the other in their love.' And two quite different legends concerning it agree in this, that it was through this lady he came by his death; Ridolfi relating that, being robbed of her by one of his pupils, he died of grief at the double treason; Vasari, that she being secretly stricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as usual, he took the sickness from her mortally, along with her kisses, and so briefly departed" (Pater).[125]
This little panel is a study for the figure of San Liberale, the warrior-saint, in the altar-piece by Giorgione at Castelfranco—one of his acknowledged masterpieces, and according to Ruskin one of the two best pictures in the world.[126] Notice "the bronzed, burning flesh" of the knight—"the right Giorgione colour on his brow" characteristic of a race of seamen (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. v. ch. i. § 19). This "original little study in oil, with the delicately gleaming silver-grey armour is," says Mr. Pater, "one of the greatest treasures of the National Gallery, and in it, as in some other knightly personages attributed to Giorgione, people have supposed the likeness of his own presumably gracious presence." From a MS. memorandum on the back of the Castelfranco picture, it appears, however, that the warrior was said to represent Gaston de Foix. The only difference between this study and the picture is that in the altar-piece the warrior wears his helmet, while in the picture he is bareheaded. On this ground, and owing to the high finish of our picture, some have argued that it is not an original study for the picture, but a later copy from it (see e.g. Richter's Italian Art in the National Gallery, p. 86). The argument does not seem conclusive. Do artists never make elaborate studies? and is not an artist as likely to vary his design as a copyist his model? Our picture, which was formerly in the collection of Benjamin West, P.R.A., was bequeathed to the National Gallery by Samuel Rogers.
270. "NOLI ME TANGERE!"
Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See 4.
A picture of the evensong of nature and of the evening of a life's tragedy. "The hues and harmonies of evening" are upon the distant hills and plain; and whilst the shadows fall upon the middle slopes, there falls too "the awful shadow of some unseen Power" upon the repentant woman who has been keeping her vigil in the peaceful solitude; at the sound of her name she has turned from her weeping and fallen forward on her knees towards him whom she now knows to be her master. "The impetuosity with which she has thrown herself on her knees in shown by the fluttering drapery of her sleeve,[127] which is still buoyed up by the air; thus with a true painter's art telling the action of the previous moment" (Quarterly Review, October 1888). She stretches out her hand to touch him, but is checked by his words; as Christ, who is represented with a hoe in his hand because she had first supposed him to be the gardener, bids her forbear: "Touch me not," "noli me tangere," "for I am not yet ascended to my Father:" it is not on this side of the hills that the troubled soul can enter into the peace of forgiveness.
This beautiful picture was bequeathed to the National Gallery by Samuel Rogers. It is usually ascribed to Titian's earlier or "Giorgionesque" period. "The Magdalen is, appropriately enough, of the same type as the exquisite golden-blond courtesans—or, if you will, models—who constantly appear and re-appear in this period of Venetian art" (C. Phillips: The Earlier Work of Titian, p. 52).