The Venetian masters of the sixteenth century fill a large portion of the sides of one of the great saloons of this aisle, covering it with a glow of deepest color. The opposite side is hung with many pictures by Rubens; and the contrast between the works of the mighty colorists of Venice and the famous colorist of Antwerp is not without curious interest and instruction. The Venice wall has the color of Venetian sunsets, the gold and crimson of its clouds, the solemn blue of the Cadore hills, the deep green of the lagoons, the brown and purple of the seaweeds, and the shadows of the city of decaying palaces. Here are such harmonies as Nature strikes in her great symphony of color. But on the other wall are the colors of the courts in which Rubens passed so many of his days,—the dyes of tapestry, the sheen of jewels and velvet, the glaring crimson and yellow of royal displays; while the harmonies that he strikes out with his rapid and powerful hand are like those of the music of some great military band.
There are noble pictures here by Giorgione, and Titian, and Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, and Bonifazio. Look at this Musical Party by Giorgione, this landscape by Titian, this portrait of the vile Duke of Alva by the same great master, the greatest master of all in portraiture. It is the Duke himself, not merely in his outward presence, but such as the insight of one as profoundly versed in human as in external nature beheld him. The portrait is a biography of the man, and one may read in the narrow, hard, and wily face the history of his cruel life. The same qualities of inward vision are displayed by Tintoret in his more hasty portraits, and one learns as much of Venetian men and of their lives from the pencil of Titian and of Tintoret as from the pens of contemporary chroniclers. The picture by Bonifazio of a Virgin and Child surrounded by saints is a splendid example of this almost unsurpassed colorist; while several of the pictures by Paul Veronese are among the most precious things in all the Exhibition, as clear and uninjured specimens of admirable Venetian work.
The Bolognese school is represented at Manchester out of all proportion to its worth, in comparison with the earlier and greater schools of Italy. It is essentially the school of decline, and, after the time of Francia, very few pictures proceeded from it dignified by noble thought, or exhibiting either purity or power of imagination. Its very method condemned it to inferiority. But debased as it is, it has been during the last two centuries the object of perhaps more real and affected admiration than any other of the schools of Italian art. Fortunately, we have entered upon a better period of criticism, and a change is fast coming over the public taste. But it is a curious fact, that the most popular picture in the whole gallery of ancient masters, the picture before which larger crowds assemble and linger than before any other, is one from this school,—the three Maries weeping over the body of the Saviour, by Annibale Caracci. A portion of the interest which it excites undoubtedly arises from the report that Louis Napoleon has offered the sum of £20,000 for it to its possessor, the Earl of Carlisle; but its intrinsic qualities are such as to explain much of its attraction for uneducated eyes. The attitudes of the figures are violent and theatrical, the colors are strong, the surface is smooth, the subject is easily recognized and of general interest. But whatever value be set upon these points, it is an example of many of the worst defects of the school. The expressions of the figures are exaggerated and unnatural, the color, though strong, is cold and inharmonious, the drawing feeble and incorrect, the sentiment inconceivably material. It is a true exponent of the low ebb of artistic power and of religious feeling at the period at which it was painted.
But we are delaying too long in these halls of the old painters. We have scarcely looked at a tithe of the eleven hundred pictures that hang around, and we must pass by with only a glance the long lines of German, Flemish, and Dutch works, and the rows of pictures by the great Spanish masters. We can but see how much there is for pleasure and for study, and wish in vain to pause before Rembrandt, and Cuyp, and Ruysdael, and Vandyck, before Murillo and Velasquez.
We come out into the nave, and, forgetting for a time pictures as works of art, let us look at them as representations of men, as we pass along before the portraits of British worthies, with which the two sides of this great hall are hung. It is a gallery of which every one of British blood may be proud; for no other country could show such a long line of the portraits of her famous men, and feel at the same time that so many of her greatest were not to be found in the collection. The gallery begins with a portrait of King Henry IV.; it ends with that of Mr. Prescott. After nearly four hundred English worthies, at last one American,—and only one; for in the whole collection there is but one other portrait of an American,—West, the painter,—and he was English by adoption, though not by birth. We could spare his fame without great loss, but it would not do for us to give up that of our popular historian. In the next great assemblage of the portraits of the worthies of the English race and speech, perhaps those born on this side of the Atlantic may appear in larger numbers and in even rank of honor.
The first portrait on the catalogue is that of King Henry IV.; but he has displaced here, as in life, his predecessor on the throne. Henry VI. and Richard III. follow in near succession; but it is not till Henry VIII.'s time that we really enter upon the field of English portraiture. We begin with the king himself. Here is Holbein's famous picture of him; a picture that represents a man so gross, so sensual, so disgusting in appearance, that one recognizes its truth, and wonders that the court-painter did not lose his head for such a libellous sincerity.
Wolsey is near his master; his face is that of a man "exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading"; he has a large, full brow, narrow and shrewd eyes, a delicate nose, and somewhat heavy and sensual cheeks. A little later the portraits become more numerous. Of Queen Elizabeth there are seven here, and in them may be traced the great changes of her face,—from that of the plain, awkward, not altogether unpleasing, red-haired girl, to that of the hard, bitter, disappointed old woman. Some of her courtiers surround her;—Leicester, with a treacherous uncertainty of expression; and Burleigh, riding on a mule, and holding flowers in his hand,—an odd representation of the great Lord Treasurer. And here, too, is Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, finding a deserved place among the chief men of his time,—for he was Shakspeare's friend, and to him the "Rape of Lucrece" was dedicated, with the words, "What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours." Here is Holbein's portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, with the face of a true knight. Sidney is not here, but "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," has an honored place,—and though her portrait is not of so "fair" a woman as one might desire to have seen her, it has the look of a woman "wise and good." And here are Shakspeare and Ben Jonson themselves;—the Chandos portrait of Shakspeare, with which all the world is familiar, more interesting from its own fame than from its being either an authentic or a satisfactory likeness of the poet; and Ben Jonson close by, with his strong features and manly face. And Fletcher, and Shirley, and Dick Burbadge, who first acted Hamlet, and whose picture explains why the queen should say, "He's fat and scant of breath,"—and others of the same great band of contemporaries. Their heads belong for the most part to one broad type; their common characteristics are strongly marked. There were never finer heads than these;—the broad, uplifted, solidly based skulls; the strong and vigorous marking of the features, giving evidence, both in shape and in expression, of the union of pure intellect and pure imagination. Compare with them the heads of the wits and statesmen of Charles II.'s time. See the difference;—the high, wide arch of the skull is lowered or narrowed; the broad brow cramped; the features finer cut, but losing in force what they gain in fineness. Look, for instance, at this Vandyck of Sir John Suckling,—only the next generation after the great men; but his portrait is that of an idler, his head that of a man without great thoughts or great interests. The age of imagination had passed; the age of fancy was setting in. Here and there in the later days one finds a man who might belong to the earlier time;—for instance, this likeness of Sir Henry Wotton, also by Vandyck, gives us a broad and noble head; but one sees the time to which he belonged in his somewhat affected meditative attitude, and in the word Philosophemur, which is inscribed upon the canvas. The finest type of head which England has had since the time of Elizabeth was that developed among the Roundheads. Round heads they were, and noble heads too. They are well represented here. Look at this portrait of Cromwell;—it has the same character and expression with that still nobler likeness of him which he sent to the Duke of Tuscany, and which hangs now in one of the back halls of the Pitti Gallery, a stern, silent monitor to the dull Florentines. Frederick Tennyson said of it, that it was the best battle-piece he ever saw;—"In its red ruggedness it looks as if it had been sketched in by the gleam of Dunbar's cannon flashes." Hampden, Eliot, and Pym, with wide individual differences, all belong to the same class;—the lines of their faces, which in Hampden and in Eliot have settled into a cast of resolute melancholy, and in Pym betray the sternness of his nature, tell in all of the hard discipline of their lives, and the upright patriotism of their hearts. Compare the faces of these patriots with those of the leaders of the French Revolutions. The Cavaliers, with a type of head less fine, were for the most part handsomer men than the Roundheads. Here is Lovelace, the poet, for instance; Aubrey says of him, "He was an extraordinary handsome man," and this likeness bears out the assertion. His face has a look of enthusiasm and of gallantry, appropriate to the man who could write, "Stone walls do not a prison make." With the portraits of Brooke, and Fairfax, and Falkland, and Astley, and others of the time, the comparison between Roundhead and Cavalier might be carried still farther,—but we must pass on.
The portrait of Hobbes of Malmesbury, as an old man, hangs near that of Sir Thomas Browne. It is a curious contrast between the imaginative and the unimaginative philosopher,—between the student of innumerable books, and the cynic who declared that "he should know as little as other men, if he had read as many books."
There is a whole bevy here of the famous beauties of Charles II.'s court,—full of the affected airs and languishing graces which Sir Peter Lely knew well how to paint, and rarely showing any thing in their portraits of the sprightliness which some of them at least possessed in life. The only one of Sir Peter's full-length beauties, who calls up any associations but such as belong to Grammont's Memoirs, is Margaret Lucas, the Duchess of Newcastle. Who does not know her through Charles Lamb, and love her for Charles Lamb's sake? She looks out of place here, between Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland; and it was not in a fancy dress of most fantastic style that she wrote her memoir of her husband,—in which she tells of what My Lord would eat at dinner, as well as collects the wise things which dropped from My Lord's lips.
The worthy Secretary Pepys appears here, in "an excellent conceited picture," of which he himself has told the story in his Diary:—