Jan Looten (Dutch: about 1618-1681).
Looten is said to have visited England in the reign of Charles II., in order (as a countryman of his explains) "to initiate the English into the beauties of Dutch landscape." The process was successful, for many large pictures by Looten are (or were) in English country-seats. The figures in his landscapes were sometimes painted by Berchem.
902. "THE TRIUMPH OF SCIPIO."
Andrea Mantegna (Paduan: 1431-1506). See 274.
One of the grisailles, or pictures in gray and brown, of which Mantegna in his later years painted very many, and to multiply which he took to engraving. In its subject the picture is a piece of ancient Rome. No other works of the time, it has been said, are so full of antique feeling as Mantegna's. Botticelli played with the art of the ancients and modernised it; Mantegna actually lived and moved in it (Woltmann and Woermann: History of Painting, translated by Clara Bell, ii. 378). Mantegna's classical scholarship, too, is abundantly shown in the details of this picture, which is full of allusions to Latin authors and history. The Triumph of Scipio, it may be briefly explained, consisted in his being selected by the Senate as "the worthiest man in Rome," by whom alone—so the oracle decreed—must Cybele, the Phrygian mother of the gods, be received. It was "an honour," says Livy, with the fine patriotism of Rome, "more to be coveted than any other which the Senate or people could bestow." On the left, the image of the goddess is being borne on a litter, and with it the sacred stone alleged to have fallen from heaven. It was an unusual fall of meteoric stones that had caused the Romans to consult the oracle in B.C. 204, during Hannibal's occupation of Italy, and the oracle had answered that the Phrygian mother must be brought to Rome. This goddess, worshipped under different forms in many parts of the world, was a personification of the passive generative power in nature, and from this time forward she was included among the recognised divinities of the Roman State. In the centre of the picture Scipio and his retinue are receiving her; whilst Claudia, a Roman lady, has thrown herself before the image. Some slur had attached to her reputation, but she had proved her innocence by invoking the goddess and then drawing off from a shoal in the harbour of Ostia, with the aid of only a slight rope, the vessel which bore the sacred image.
"The picture," says Sir F. Burton, "has a history of its own. It was undertaken towards the close of Mantegna's long and laborious career; and when that career terminated in the sadness and gloom which have too often awaited those whose imaginative powers had placed them above their fellow-men, it remained in his studio, probably not fully finished. It may have been the last, it was certainly one of the last, pictures which his pencil touched." An advance payment of 25 ducats had been made to Mantegna in 1504. His son Francesco made an unsuccessful claim to it as an inheritance from his father, offering to repay the amount received in advance. The picture, representing an event glorious in the history of the Scipios, was commissioned by a Venetian nobleman, Francesco Cornaro, in order to throw lustre upon the genealogy of his family, which claimed to belong to the Roman gens Cornelia.
903. CARDINAL FLEURY.
Hyacinthe Rigaud (French: 1659-1743).
Rigaud was a native of Perpignan, and the son and grandson of a painter. In 1681 he went up to Paris, and following the advice of Le Brun devoted himself to portraiture. He studied diligently the works of Van Dyck, whose disciple he always professed to be. He rapidly obtained fame as a portrait-painter, but it was not till 1700—on the completion of his "St. Andrew" now in the Louvre—that he was admitted as an historical painter into the Academy. He held various offices in that body, and painted all the great men of his day. His own portrait by himself is in the Uffizi.
A portrait of the famous tutor, and afterwards prime minister, of Louis XV. It is eminently the "pacific Fleury," who strove to keep France out of war and starved her army and navy when she was forced into it, that we see in this amiable old gentleman—the scholar and member of the Academy, who completed what is now the National Library of France—rather than the statesman. A similar picture is in the Wallace Collection (No. 130).