The Exhibition building was admirably designed for its purpose. Its plan is simple, and not unpleasing, although the proportions, which its object required, were such as to prevent any attempt at grand architectural effect. The general arrangement of the interior is easily understood, even without the aid of a ground-plan. The chief entrance leads into a nave, which has on each side an aisle of less height, separated from it by a wall. The wall is broken by two openings, through which is the passage from nave to aisle, or aisle to nave. The nave and aisles end in a transept, and behind the transept are two small saloons, and a large hall or aisle crossing the building transversely and forming its western end. A gallery runs round the transept, and another crosses the nave at its eastern end. This is the general arrangement. The walls of the nave or central hall are occupied by the gallery of British portraits, and between the iron columns that support the roof are set pieces of sculpture, and the cases containing the precious collection of Ornamental Art, (works of the minor arts, as they might be called,) which has been brought together from private and public sources, and is quite unrivalled in its completeness. The southern aisle contains the main collection of pictures by ancient, foreign masters; while the opposite aisle is filled with the works of the British school. The transept, being chiefly given up to arrangements for an orchestra, contains below little but a collection of busts, but its galleries are occupied with the collection of miniatures, a most admirable and extensive historical series of engravings, a large number of photographs, and a very precious collection of original drawings by the old masters. The saloon at the north end of the transept is filled with East Indian and Chinese tapestries, furniture, and works of ornamental design; while the opposite saloon continues the collection of paintings of ancient masters, being chiefly occupied with works from the gallery of the Marquis of Hertford, which he sent to the Exhibition on condition that they should be kept together. The hall that crosses the building at the western end is filled with a collection of water-color drawings.—Such, in brief, is an outline of the distribution of the treasures contained in this great palace of Art.
The first impression, on entering the nave, is that of the vast space filled with light and rich with color. The attention is not attracted to particular details. Separate objects are dwarfed in the long vista. The eye rests on nothing that is not precious, and is at first contented to wander rapidly from one object to another, without attempting to delay on any thing. Passing down the middle between the ordered files of statues, (all modern works, and few of them worthy of remark,) we enter from the transept the south nave, where the works of the foreign schools of painting are arranged for the most part in chronological order. This nave, like the opposite, is divided into three saloons and two vestibules. We are now in the first saloon. On the one side are the works of the earlier Italian masters, and on the other those of the masters of the earlier German and Flemish schools. And it is here that one observes the chief deficiency of the collection. The pictures which are here have been brought from the private galleries in which England is so rich. Many a famous country-house, full of historic and poetic associations, gains additional interest from its gallery of pictures or of marbles. Blenheim, Wilton House, Warwick Castle, have their old walls hung with pictures by Titian, Vandyck, and Holbein. Who does not remember, as one of his most delightful recollections of England,—delightful as all his recollections of that dear old Mother-land are, if he has really seen her,—who does not thus remember the drive from the little country town to the old family place, up the long avenue under its ancestral trees, the ferny brook crossed by the stone bridge with its carved balustrade, the deer feeding on the green slope of the open park or lying under some secular oak, the heavy white clouds casting their slow shadows on the broad lawn, the dark spreading cedars of Lebanon standing on the edge of the bright flower-garden,—the old house itself, with its quaint gables and oriels, the broad flight of steps leading to the wide door,—the cheerful reception from the prim, but good-natured housekeeper,—her pride in the great hall, and in the pleasant, home-like rooms, in Vandyck's portrait of the beautiful countess, and in Holbein's of the fifth earl,—the satisfaction with which she would point to the pictures and the marbles brought two centuries ago from Italy, now stopping before this to tell you that "it is considered a very improportionable Virgin by Parmigianino," and calling you to observe this old statue "of a couching Silenius wrapped in the skin of a Pantheon,"—and then, when the Rubens, and the Claude, and all the other pictures have been seen, her letting you pass, as a great favor, through the library with its well-filled oaken shelves, the gilding worn off the backs of many of its books by the love of successive generations;—who does not remember such scenes as these, and recall the glorious pictures from Florence, or from Venice, or from Antwerp, that enrich many an English country home?
It was, indeed, from such homes that the Manchester collection was, in great measure, brought together; and this being the case, it is not to be wondered at that it was difficult to form an historic sequence of pictures by which the course and progress of Art should be properly illustrated, or that many of the old pictures that hang on the walls of the Exhibition bear the names of greater masters than they deserve to be honored with. Nor is it strange that the earlier schools of Art should be but very scantily represented. The earlier painters did not do much work that would answer for the decoration of homes; their work was of a public, and, for the most part, a consecrated nature. The pictures of later centuries are more easily appreciated by those who have not made a thoughtful study of Art, and they have consequently been more loudly praised and more generally sought for. The later works have attractive qualities in which the earlier are often deficient, and it is not until very recently that the real beauty and value of these first pictures of the revival have been felt with any due appreciation. The masters of the fourteenth, and of the greater part of the fifteenth century, did not, as we have said, paint pictures simply as objects of beauty or for mere purposes of adornment, nor were those methods of painting then in use which have brought pictures into private homes and within private means. And so it happens that the schools of this period are not represented at Manchester in any fair proportion to the schools of the sixteenth century.
The two most important centuries of Art are not to be studied here. Of the six pictures, for instance, that profess to be by Giotto, the great head and master of Italian Art, there are but two from which even a faint impression of his style can be gained. There is nothing here which would enable one who had not seen his works in Italy to conceive a true idea of their character and merits. Giotto stands at the threshold of the fourteenth century, breaking open the door, so long barred up, that was to let men into the glories of the unseen world. The friend of Dante, he, as painter, stands side by side with the poet. In the midst of the tumults, the confusion, and violence of those bloody times, his soul rose above the discord of the world, his hand snapped the fetters of authority and tradition, and revealed by line and color the exalted visions of his imagination. Painting, with him, took its inspiration from religious faith, and spent itself in religious service. Whether at Padua, in the little withdrawn Arena chapel, or on the bare mountains at Assisi, in the great church of St. Francis, or at Naples, in the king's chapel, his frescos, though dimmed by the dust of five hundred years, blackened by the smoke of incense, abused by restorers, still show a power of imagination, a spirituality and tenderness of feeling, a simplicity and directness of treatment, which give them place among the most sacred and precious works that Art has yet produced. That quiet, solitary chapel of the Arena at Padua is one of the places most worthy of reverence in Italy; for in the pictures from the lives of the Virgin and the Saviour, that are painted upon its walls, there is the expression of such religious fervor, such faith and love, as Art has rarely or never reached in later times.
Nor is there at Manchester any picture by Duccio da Siena, the great, and, one may almost say, the worthy contemporary of Giotto, from which his power and feeling are to be well estimated. Like Giotto he struggled to free himself from the swathing-clothes in which the traditions of Byzantine Art had bound up the limbs and the imaginations of artists, and he succeeded in at last breaking loose. But the long restraint had impaired the power of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression, which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and imperfect knowledge of the materials and limits of painting. It is this groping effort after truth which results often in the naïve rendering of details, and the quaintness of composition, which are so common in the works of these early masters; but the deep feeling of the artists penetrates through all, and thus even their awkward and imperfect drawing frequently produces a stronger effect, and seems a better rendering of nature, than the cold, unfeeling, academic accuracy of Bologna, or all the finished science of the eclectic schools.
In passing down through the century one finds lamentable omissions at Manchester. Fifty pictures, of which half at least have been restored, (that is to say, in part or wholly spoiled,) and half originally the work of inferior masters, do not represent the art of a century which was full of the glow of reawakening life, and which, as the spring covers the earth with flowers, covered Italy with cathedrals, campaniles, churches, baptisteries, and camposantos, and decorated their walls with sculpture and painting. Art was gaining gradually a knowledge of her own powers. Orgagna, the Michel Angelo of his time, (one of his pictures is at Manchester,) was opening a wider field for her progress; and ten years after his death Fra Angelico was born. He was a boy of fifteen years old when in 1402 Masaccio was born at Florence, and the brightness of the fifteenth century had begun.
There is one, among the four pictures ascribed to Fra Angelico in this collection, from which something of the heavenly purity, the sweetness, and the tenderness of this great and gentle master may be learned. It is a picture of the Last Judgment. Unfortunately, it has been much injured by time and by neglect; its brilliant colors have sunk and become dim,—those pure, clear colors which give to Fra Angelico's panel pictures the brilliancy of a missal illumination, and which reflect the purity and the clearness of his tranquil life and his reverential soul. It is no fanciful theory which connects the uses of color with moral qualities, and which from the coloring of a picture will deduce something of the moral character of its painter. Thus it is not only from the exquisite delicacy of form, the spirituality of expression, and the sweet, reverent fancy in attitude, of the angels from which Fra Angelico derived his name, but also from the brightness of their golden wings, from the deep glow of their crimson, or scarlet, or azure robes, and from the clear shining of the stars on their foreheads, that one learns that he deserved that name as characteristic of his temper and his life. Something of the influence of the cloister shows itself in most of his larger works; but if his vision was narrowed within convent walls, it did but pierce the more clearly into the regions of tranquillity and loveliness that lay above them.
With the end of the fifteenth century religion almost disappears from Art. John Bellini, dying ninety years old in 1516, was the last and one of the greatest of the long line of artists who had loved Art as the means granted them of serving God upon earth. The manly vigor of his conceptions, the tender and holy purity of his imagination, the delicate strength of his fancy, are not to be discovered in the few pictures that bear his name at Manchester. His pictures are to be fairly seen only at Venice, where, in out-of-the-way churches, over tawdry altars, his colors gleam undimmed by time, and the faces of his Virgins look down with a still celestial sweetness. But there is one picture here, by a Venetian contemporary of John Bellini, before which we shall do well to pause. It is a St. Catharine, by Cima da Conegliano. It is the picture of a noble woman, full of fortitude, serenity, and faith. The richness of the color of her dress, her calm dignity, the composure of her attitude, recall to mind and make her the worthy companion of the beautiful St. Barbara of the church of Santa Maria Formosa. It is well to look at her, for we are coming to those days when such saints as these were no longer painted; but in their places whole tribes of figures with faces twisted into every trick of sentimental devotion, imbecile piety, and pretended fervor.
But before this time, somewhere about the middle of the fifteenth century, the fashion of painting pictures upon panel for private purposes, though as yet religious subjects were principally chosen for treatment, had already begun; and we find the masters of the early part of the sixteenth century represented with tolerable fulness at Manchester. English collectors have long had a passion for Raphael, and England is almost as rich in his works in oils as Italy herself. Italy, however, keeps his frescos; and may she long keep them! There are more than thirty works ascribed to Raphael hanging on the walls of the Exhibition. Many of them are of doubtful genuineness; many of them have been restored.
It is impossible to trace in these pictures the progress of Raphael's manner, and to mark the development of his style; but even in these one may see something of the change from the simplicity and feeling of his early works, produced under the influence of religious sentiment, and the still clinging stiffness of traditional restraints, to the freedom and coldness of his later works, painted under the influence of success at a dissolute court, of flattery, of jealousy, and of indifference to the motives of religion.