Carlo Dolci Part 1

Carlo Dolci.

by George Hay.

I

INTRODUCTION

If, in dealing with the life and work of Carlo Dolci, a writer sets down an apology by way of preface, it is in recognition of the fact that the art form of this painter, for all that it is serious and beautiful, is one of the first that we outgrow. There are artists in plenty, and their names are written large in the roll of fame, whose work makes no immediate appeal to us. Rembrandt, Velazquez, Tintoretto, one and all must be approached with an eye that has received some measure of training, and then the beauty of their work brings perennial enjoyment, though at first it could not be easily seen. Other men who lived and thought and wrought on quite a different plane appeal to the eye right away. Their work conceals nothing, its beauties are patent and entirely free from reticence or subtlety; such painters bear the same relation to the really great masters of the art as the writers of the songs sung at Ballad Concerts bear to the composers of the Pastoral, Unfinished or Pathetic Symphonies. Yet in their way it must be admitted that both the writer of ballads, and the painter of pictures that please, do a certain service. They help the uninitiated along the path that leads to higher things; they are a support that the timid explorer may rely upon until he has learnt to walk alone. There comes a time when the painter of pretty pictures and the writer of pretty songs cease to please us; we have mastered what we are pleased to regard as the tricks of both, and feel a little contempt for them. Then, perhaps, some of us are even anxious to forget our former att.i.tude towards the men who charmed our youthful fancy. We think we have become as G.o.ds, knowing good from evil, and in this mood we ignore the fine points of work we criticise. Carlo Dolci was in many ways a man who never grew up, but he had a keen and almost childish sense of beauty and of righteousness, and he sought to express it on canvas, leaving the deeper truths of art, and the more important aspects of life, to be treated by those who cared to deal with them. Beauty obvious, palpable; sentimental virtue as broad and unblushing as that of Edmund Spenser's heroines, were the themes that the artist chose to dwell upon, and it would be in the last degree unwise to forget that such a message as his will make a strong appeal to the rising generation as long as the world endures, and that by the time those who have been pleased are pleased no longer, there will be others waiting to take their place. Moreover Carlo Dolci laboured with a certain measure of sincerity until the message he had chosen to deliver to his generation became as true to him as the visions that helped Fra Angelico while he laboured in the cells of St. Mark's Convent in Florence. To-day in Florence and in Rome the younger generation seek the pictures of Carlo Dolci and find in them a realisation of certain ideals. We may be a little shocked or even contemptuous, but to recognise the claims of those who are coming on as well as the claims of those who are pa.s.sing, is to keep a sane outlook on life. For the world was not made for the middle-aged and the experienced, any more than it was created for the immature enthusiasts. There is a place on this planet for us all.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--POETRY

This canvas was painted for the head of the Corsini Family in Rome, when Dolci was a young man. It is one of a series that included Hope, Patience, and Painting. It is now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.]

Carlo Dolci painted, or over-painted, the romance of life. It was his misfortune that he always saw it in the same way. He was like a musician who, having all the keys of the piano at his disposal, regards anything more than the simplest modulation from tonic to dominant and back again as an extravagance to which he must not surrender. Nowadays the horizon of art has widened very considerably; even in literature the obvious has pa.s.sed out of fashion, but in the rather degenerate days when Carlo Dolci lived physical beauty was in a sense the keynote of all art work.

No heroine could reach the last chapter of a romance in safety unless she chanced to be equipped with a measure of beauty that defied the a.s.saults of time. Beauty other than physical was entirely overlooked, or was a.s.sociated deliberately with good looks. Handsome sinners were as far removed from the public ken as ugly saints. In many senses the world was younger than it is to-day; indeed, it has aged more in the past two hundred years than in five hundred that went before. Consequently the living painter of prettiness stands now at a certain disadvantage.

Perhaps he is more handicapped in the struggle for recognition now than he will be a hundred years hence, because we have but recently taken possession of our heritage of culture and judgment and are a little anxious to forget that we have been young. It may be granted that while a large collection of the works of a painter who laboured for all time pleases our every mood, it would be hard to live in a room in which Dolci's pictures dominated the walls. Swinburne has expressed the position very simply in the first volume of his famous "Poems and Ballads": "A month or twain to live on honeycomb is pleasant; but one tires of scented time."

We suffer from the painter's excess of sweetness, from a sentiment that comes dangerously near to sentimentality, from a quality that is almost as cloying as saccharine; but taken in the proper proportions, relegated to their proper place, the pictures of Carlo Dolci are bound to please, and we feel perhaps a little envious of the man who throughout his life could see nothing that was not gracious and pleasing, and moral and sweet. As we have said, he has his counterpart in literature and in music, and had he not been forced by circ.u.mstances he could not control into the immediate neighbourhood of men who had so much more to say than he, Dolci would have received more attention from his contemporaries and from succeeding generations. But, perhaps unfortunately for himself, Dolci is to be found only in the best artistic company of the world. His work hangs in Florence and in Rome cheek by jowl with that of the world's great masters; before the flame of their genius his light pales and becomes insignificant. Yet he is by no means to be despised, for he saw through his own little window a view of the pageantry of life that must have made him happy, and was destined to stimulate generations that have pa.s.sed and generations still unborn. His pictures do not lack sincerity, and do not fail to express the best that was in him. He saw Holy Families and saints and living sitters with an eye that insisted upon beauty and righteousness. He painted with exquisite finish, with delicate colouring, and with a measure of enthusiasm that the years have not dimmed. In short, though many men have done better, he did his best, and the pictures that are reproduced in these pages indicate very fairly the measure of his achievement, even while they do nothing to conceal his limitations. Moreover, while greater artists have had their biographers by the score, it is hard to find in the literature of Great Britain, France, or Italy any work dealing even in the simplest fashion with this painter's life, though it does not deserve to be neglected.

Dolci would seem to have been ignored altogether, and this att.i.tude of contempt is quite unfair, because no man who has pleased so many simple minds is unworthy of our attention, and it is more reasonable to praise a man for the gifts that were his than to ignore him on account of what he lacked.

II

THE ARTIST'S LIFE

As was said on a previous page, few people seem to have been at pains to deal with the life and work of our painter, and while the curators of the Italian museums can tell you little about him, save the approximate dates of his life and death, and a few stories relating to events that would perhaps have occurred if they could, the catalogue of the British Museum has no more than one reference to his name. Tracing the reference to its source, we find a little paper-covered pamphlet, written in the closing years of the seventeenth century and published in Florence some quarter of a century ago. In the British Museum library it is bound with two or three other booklets relating to totally different matters. The pamphlet that concerns us was written by Carlo Dolci's friend and patron, Signor Baldinucci, and has never been translated into English. Baldinucci was one of Dolci's intimates, evidently a good friend and an ardent admirer, a man who praises generously, but is rather reticent about the painter's artistic shortcomings, just as though reticence would avail to keep them hidden from the understanding eye. However, it is no bad thing for us that Signor Baldinucci should have been an enthusiast, because without enthusiasm the bounteous harvest of facts to which we can turn would not have been gathered, and we should have been left in such a state of doubt with regard to the incidents of the painter's life as besets us in dealing with so many of the earlier and more notable men of his art and country.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--THE MAGDALEN

This is an early picture, painted for one of the Florentine religious houses, finished with the utmost care. It has preserved its colour remarkably, and is now to be seen in Florence.]

Signor Baldinucci's work describes the artist's pictures in terms of quaint enthusiasm, and happily, too, it does not despise biographical details. This is as well, for, while there is no call for very subtle criticism in the case of Dolci, it is of great interest for us to discover what manner of man he was and how he came to paint so many pretty pictures all in the same key, why he never sought to enlarge the boundaries of his art, or to see "with dilated eye." Our biographer is generous; he gives us facts in plenty, and writes just enough about art to enable us to understand that his knowledge and his enthusiasm stood in inverse ratio to one another. That the author had a following is proved by the fact that the little pamphlet is now out of print, and though the writer sought diligently throughout Florence to procure a copy, he was quite unsuccessful.

Carlo Dolci was born about the year 1616. His father was a highly respected tailor of Florence, Andrea Dolci by name, his mother a daughter of Pietro Marinari, a painter (says Baldinucci) of repute.

Carlo's parents seem to have been an exemplary couple, who earned the esteem of all who knew them and raised a family of five children to follow the straight and narrow paths of probity. Carlo is said to have been born on the 25th of May 1616, a day devoted to the honour of St.

Zen.o.bius and Santa Maria Maddalena de Pazzi. The elder Dolci died when Carlo was four years old, and his mother was left in straitened circ.u.mstances, with which she struggled bravely and not without success.

Carlo seems to have been in every respect a model boy; in fact, if his biographer is strictly reliable, he was almost too good for the wicked world he lived in. It would be a relief to hear that he had moments when he was not on his best behaviour, that he robbed orchards, or played truant, or got into one or other of the sc.r.a.pes that are a.s.sociated with boyhood; but, alas, he did nothing of the kind. He was not even content to be good, but wanted all his schoolfellows to follow his example, and used to persuade them to tell their beads and say their prayers even when they were out walking.

At the early age of nine Carlo Dolci gave unmistakable signs of possessing an artist's gifts, and was entrusted by his mother to the care of Jacopo Vignali and Matteo Rosselli. He worked very hard under these masters, and was so good that Mr. Barlow of "Sandford and Merton"

fame would have been moved to tears of joy had he belonged to the seventeenth century and flourished in the neighbourhood of Florence, while Master Harry Sandford would have hidden a diminished head and confessed that he had found a greater saint than himself. At the age of eleven Carlo Dolci painted his first heads of Christ, one as a child, and the other crowned with thorns; he also painted a full-length figure of St. John. Then he painted a portrait of his mother, who was so pleased with the work that she took it to his master's studio, where, as good luck would have it, Pietro de Medici was in the habit of pa.s.sing some of his idle hours. This patron of the arts was so pleased with the boy's work that he ordered a portrait of himself and another of a friend, the musician Antonio Landini. He also took the pictures that little Carlo had just painted and showed them to the leaders of society in Florence, presenting the young artist to the duke, who could hardly believe that the work before him had been accomplished by one so young.

In order to a.s.sure himself, he told the boy to sketch two heads in his presence, only to be so pleased with the work that he rewarded him handsomely for it.

Florence, of course, began to talk of the boy painter, for a prodigy is neither to be despised nor overlooked in any wealthy city. His reputation pa.s.sed from palace to studio, gathering commissions on its travels, and in a very little time young Dolci had all the work he could do. He painted the portrait of the head of the Bardi family, and that of his nephew John de Bardi. He painted a portrait of Raphael Ximenes.

When he was not painting portraits he turned his attention to still life, painting some fruit and flower pictures for his Confessor, Canon Carpanti. His next work was for Lorenzo de Medici, an "Adoration," for which he asked twenty scudi and received forty, and then he painted the subject again on a rather larger canvas for one of the Genitori family, who paid seventy scudi. This picture was sold at the owner's death and realised just four times the sum that had been paid for it, while some pictures of the Evangelists painted by Dolci for one of his Confessors realised nearly twenty times as much as he had received.

It may be suggested without much fear of contradiction, that the success of the painter's earliest work was not the best thing that could have happened to him. If he had been compelled to develop slowly and in the face of adverse circ.u.mstance, it is more likely that Carlo Dolci would have given the world work of more lasting merit, but circ.u.mstance forced him to paint for patrons at a time when he should have been studying for himself. The style and method of his labours were settled for him, his development was limited and circ.u.mscribed; with his native gifts he might have travelled far had he not been hampered by these early successes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--THE ETERNAL FATHER

This plate, so characteristic of the sentiment of Dolci, is only part of an altar-piece in fresco, painted for one of the religious houses in the middle of the artist's career.]

From his youth Carlo Dolci had been devout, the rules of the brotherhood of St. Benedict appealed to him very strongly. He pa.s.sed much of his scanty leisure within the walls of the brethren in Florence, and, probably under the influence of his advisers there, made a firm resolve to paint nothing but religious subjects, or those that ill.u.s.trated some one of the cardinal virtues. At the back of each canvas it was his custom to write the date upon which he had started the work and the name of the saint to whom the day was dedicated. In Holy Week his brush was devoted entirely to subjects relating to the Pa.s.sion.

One of his greatest early successes was a picture of the Madonna with the Infant Christ and St. John, painted for Signor Grazzini. This work added so much to his commissions that he could no longer stay in Vignali's studio, finding it more convenient to work at home, where there was more accommodation in his mother's house. Here he painted his beautiful picture of St. Paul for one of the family of Strozzi, and his picture of St. Girolamo writing, and the penitence of Mary Magdalen. He also painted the picture of Christ blessing the bread, a head of St.

Philip of Neri, and the picture of St. Francis and St. George. For one of his Corsican patrons he painted a woman with weights and scales in her hand as Justice, and for one of the Corsini he painted the Hope, Patience, Poetry, and Painting, of which series the Poetry is reproduced here.

In 1648 Carlo Dolci was elected a member of the Florentine Academy, and, in accordance with the custom that prevailed, was required to present one of his pictures to the Academy on election. Not unnaturally, perhaps, his thoughts turned to the man with whose art he sympathised most, Fra Angelico of Fiesole--the man whose exquisite work has made the Florentine Convent of St. Mark a place of pilgrimage to this day. Oddly enough there was no portrait of Fra Angelico in the Academy. It was necessary to send to Rome to procure a drawing from which the portrait could be painted.

The public demand for Carlo Dolci's work at this time was very greatly in excess of the supply, but the painter was hardly a man who sought or obtained the highest price for his labours. A very little would seem to have contented him; cases might be multiplied in which his work was re-sold at far higher prices than he received for it. For example, he painted a picture of Mary Magdalen washing the feet of Christ, and sold the work to his doctor for 160 scudi. The Marquis Niccolini offered the doctor 1200 scudi for it, but could not tempt him to give it up.

By this time the fame of Carlo Dolci had spread well beyond the boundaries of Florence; he was known and taken seriously in art circles of Italy, and his work had special attractions for the religious houses whose heads saw that its influence was bound to be beneficial. We find the monks of the Italian Monastery dedicated to Santa Lucia of Vienna commissioning him to copy one of their pictures of the Virgin. He made several drawings and started work on the picture, but did not finish it for a long time, and some eight years later he sold it to some distinguished visitors to Florence for 160 scudi. Dolci was never idle, and his brush was always busy on canvas or wood, always setting out some sacred story or seeking to glorify some virtue. Among the important pictures belonging to this period are one of the Martyrdom of St.

Andrew, which was taken to Venice, and one of the Flight into Egypt, painted for Andrea Rosselli, a rather graceful if not original composition, in which the Virgin is seen riding with the Infant Christ in her arms. The same subject was commissioned by Lord Exeter and sent to England.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE V.--ANGEL OF THE ANNUNCIATION

This was painted about 1656 for the house of the Benedictines in Florence. It is one of the most popular of the artist's work, and has been widely reproduced.]

The picture of an angel pointing out to Christian souls the road to Heaven attracted great comment and praise when it was painted; so too did two oval pictures, one of the Archbishop of Florence, and the other of St. Philip of Neri. A half-length figure of St. Catherine was another of the painter's notable works that may be referred to his middle life.

He had acquired the art of giving to his canvas the high finish of a miniature, and his colours were very fresh and glowing. Indeed, it may be said of Carlo Dolci's work that it has preserved its freshness to a very remarkable extent; some of the pictures painted more than 250 years ago are still glowing with colour, while the work of many men who came after Dolci has lost all its original brightness and has become muddy.

This suggests that Dolci had found time to study the composition of paint with great care, and that some of the secrets of glazing surfaces had been revealed to him. Belonging to the middle period is the picture of St. Andrew embracing the Cross and the picture in octagon shape called Charity, presenting a beautiful woman nursing a sleeping babe, and holding a flaming heart in her right hand. A small picture of Hagar and Ishmael belongs to these years.

In 1655 Carlo Dolci's teacher, Rosselli, pa.s.sed away, and in the following year the artist completed the painting of a standard that his master had begun. The subject is St. Benedict on a cloud in a blue sky, and Dolci is said to have made studies of it from a picture that was already in possession of another brotherhood. Composition was never his strong point. He painted another standard for the Benedictines, to their great delight, and in the following year a St. Dominic on wood, and the famous Angel of the Lily.

Carlo Dolci was now a married man, for in 1654, apparently on the advice of his friends, he married the Signora Teresa di Giovanni. The suggestion that Carlo Dolci married to order is supported to some extent by the incidents of the marriage day. Baldinucci tells us that the painter's friends and family, together with the friends and family of his wife, were all gathered together, but Carlo did not keep his appointment, and messengers were despatched all over the city to find him. He was not at home, he was not with the Benedicts, he was not in the churches he favoured most, and dinner-time had come round when some happy searcher found the painter in a church that the others had overlooked. Having scolded him for forgetting his appointment, the bride forgave her absent-minded partner, and the marriage took place. It was a very happy one.

Some time after this alliance, and when he had pa.s.sed his fortieth year, Carlo Dolci turned his attention to fresco, and painted a figure of G.o.d the Father, the Holy Ghost, and four archangels. We learn that one of his pupils painted in the other angels, and this little fact is worth noting, because it shows that Carlo Dolci had reached the period of his life in which the demands for his work could not be satisfied without a.s.sistance, and he had been forced to follow the example of great predecessors. We know that t.i.tian and Tintoretto and other masters of the Renaissance period in Italy never scrupled to avail themselves of the services of clever pupils, and many a picture that left the studio with the master's name upon it did not receive more than the slightest touch of the master's brush. This scandal, for so we must describe it, has been common to nearly every period in the development of art, and was perhaps justified to some small extent in days when artists were not rewarded on a generous scale. While their commissions came from patrons who would not brook delay, and were quite well able to make their anger effective, it was unwise to be too scrupulous about the means to an end.

For the preparation of a canvas and the painting in of draperies for portraits the use of pupils may escape adverse criticism, but when the pressure of commission became very serious, too many great artists have succ.u.mbed to the temptation of leaving the bulk of the work to be painted by a pupil, trusting to a few skilled touches to give the completed canvas the stamp of their own individuality. We have no means of saying how far Carlo Dolci indulged in a custom that was common to his time. We are quite sure that had he thought it an immoral one he would have abandoned it without hesitation.

After turning his attention to fresco work the painter sent a St. Agatha to Venice, together with a portrait of St. John the Evangelist, and a picture ent.i.tled Sincerity, a woman garlanded with lilies. For another picture sent to Venice, representing Christ crowned with flowers and sitting at the entrance of a garden, Dolci received 200 scudi, a rather considerable sum when it is compared with those that were generally paid for his pictures. This picture was so successful that he painted another version of it in 1675 for a daughter of the Archduke Ferdinand and Anna de Medici. For this he received no less than 300 scudi, and the Marquis Runecini paid the same price for a picture of St. John, in which the saint sees in a vision a lady trampling a dragon under foot. Among other works belonging to this period are a St. Girolamo, a St. Luke, and a St.

Benedict, all commissioned by his doctor, Signor Lorenzo.

For one of the Corsini family Dolci painted St. Anthony with a skull in his hand, and for Signor Corbinelli the full-length life-size canvas of the figure of St. Peter. For the Scalzi Brotherhood he painted the picture of the Eternal Father that was placed over the high altar, and a picture of Herodiade with the head of St. John the Baptist. A David with the head of Goliath was painted for the Marquis Runecini, and a copy was made for the English amba.s.sador in Florence. This picture created a sensation when it was sent to England, and brought the painter many commissions for the portraits of Englishmen. The head of the Corsini house had given Dolci certain commissions, and they were so well executed that requests followed for another St. John, and a picture of King Casimir of Poland. The St. Cecilia playing the organ, which was sent to Poland, was painted shortly afterwards.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI.--THE MAGDALEN

This picture, painted for a Roman patron, is at present to be in the Corsini Palace, Rome. It has, however, not been so well preserved as some of the best work from the same hand.]

About this time Sustermans, a painter some of whose work may be seen and admired in Florence to-day, was commissioned to paint a portrait of Claudia, daughter of the Grand-duke Ferdinand and Anna de Medici, on the occasion of her marriage with the Emperor Leopold. But Sustermans on account of his great age could not accept the commission, and it was then offered to Carlo Dolci, who, although he had lived so long, and had achieved so large a measure of renown, had never travelled beyond the walls of Florence. However, he did not hesitate, but started out for Innsbruck in the spring of the year. He arrived in Holy Week, when, according to his rule of life, he would not paint secular subjects, but as soon as Easter had come to an end he began the portrait commissioned, and was then asked by the Duke to paint a second one of the same subject in a different pose. At Innsbruck Dolci received another commission of the sort that throws a strong light upon the ethics of the art world of his time. He was asked to repaint or touch up several devotional pictures by great masters who had pa.s.sed away, and he does not seem to have hesitated. It was sufficient for him that the pictures were of a kind that met his approval; he asked nothing more, but set to work on the canvases of other men without a qualm. He was the guest at Innsbruck of the Abbe Viviani, and by way of expressing his grat.i.tude for his host's unvarying attention and kindness he painted a beautiful head of St. Philip of Neri and gave it to him. Dolci remained at Innsbruck from April until the end of August, and received in addition to a considerable sum of money a gift of valuable jewels from his grateful patrons.

It was characteristic of the man that on his return to his native city and before he took the picture he had painted to the Palace of the Medici, he went to the church in Florence at which he was accustomed to pray, and returned thanks for the happy termination of his travels. Then he was instructed by the Medici family to finish the portrait, so that it might stand for Santa Galla Placidia, the Empress whose famous tomb may be seen in Ravenna to this day, and, indeed, is one of the show-places of that quaint old city. Dolci then painted a very charming picture reproduced in these pages, the sleeping St. John with St.

Zacharias and St. Elizabeth, and following the painting of this picture is a.s.sociated the great misfortune of a life that had hitherto been pleasant and peaceful. The religious feelings that had been with him since the days when he was a little boy busily instructing his schoolfellows to turn from profane to sacred thoughts now degenerated into melancholy, and Dolci suffered from the true melancholia which baffles physicians to-day, and was then, of course, quite beyond the reach of palliative or cure. He could not speak without deep sighs; he was convinced that he had lost all his ability as a painter, and that the world had no more use for him. His wife, who gave up much of her time and attention to him, suffered in health from the premature birth of a child, and then Baldinucci, who wrote the little biography of the artist that was printed in Florence in the early 'eighties, and is the foundation of our knowledge of the artist's life, took the painter away from Florence to the country to the house of one Domenico Valdinotti.

This man, an artist, had one or two pictures in his studio commissioned for wealthy patrons. He took up a palette with colours mixed, and gave it to Dolci, commanding him in sternest tones to finish a veil on one of the pictures of the Virgin. The painter obeyed, and succeeded so well in his task that all the doubt and fear that had clouded his life for the greater part of a year vanished in an hour, and he returned to Florence with a perfectly healthy mind to finish the Santa Galla Placidia, and one or two altar-pieces, including one for the Church of San Francesco.

Dolci then received a commission from the Empress Claude to paint a canvas for the Imperial Palace, but as she died in the following April this work was not completed. But he painted a fine martyrdom of St.