Great Pictures, As Seen and Described Part 13

(_VELASQUEZ_)

THeOPHILE GAUTIER

_The Surrender of Breda_, better known under the name of _Las Lanzas_, mingles in the most exact proportion realism and grandeur. Truth pushed to the point of portraiture does not diminish in the slightest degree the dignity of the historical style.

A vast and s.p.a.cious sky full of light and vapour, richly laid in with pure ultramarine, mingles its azure with the blue distances of an immense landscape where sheets of water gleam with silver. Here and there incendiary smoke ascends from the ground in fantastic wreaths and joins the clouds of the sky. In the foreground on each side, a numerous group is ma.s.sed: here the Flemish troops, there the Spanish troops, leaving for the interview between the vanquished and victorious generals an open s.p.a.ce which Velasquez has made a luminous opening with a glimpse of the distance where the glitter of the regiments and standards is indicated by a few masterly touches.

The Marquis of Spinola, bareheaded with hat and staff of command in hand, in his black armour damascened with gold, welcomes with a chivalrous courtesy that is affable and almost affectionate, as is customary between enemies who are generous and worthy of mutual esteem, the Governor of Breda, who is bowing and offering him the keys of the city in an att.i.tude of n.o.ble humiliation.

Flags quartered with white and blue, their folds agitated by the wind, break in the happiest manner the straight lines of the lances held upright by the Spaniards. The horse of the Marquis, represented almost foreshortened from the rear and with its head turned, is a skilful invention to tone down military symmetry, so unfavourable to painting.

It would not be easy to convey in words the chivalric pride and the Spanish grandeur which distinguish the heads of the officers forming the General's staff. They express the calm joy of triumph, tranquil pride of race, and familiarity with great events. These personages would have no need to bring proofs for their admittance into the orders of Santiago and Calatrava. Their bearing would admit them, so unmistakably are they hidalgos. Their long hair, their turned-up moustaches, their pointed beards, their steel gorgets, their corselets or their buff doublets render them in advance ancestral portraits to hang up, with their arms blazoned on the corner of the canvas, in the galleries of old castles.

No one has known so well as Velasquez how to paint the gentleman with such superb familiarity, and, so to speak, as equal to equal. He is by no means a poor, embarra.s.sed artist who only sees his models while they are posing and has never lived with them. He follows them in the privacy of the royal apartments, on great hunting-parties, and in ceremonies of pomp. He knows their bearing, their gestures, their att.i.tudes, and their physiognomy; he himself is one of the King's favourites (_privados del rey_). Like themselves, and even more than they, he has _les grandes et les pet.i.tes entrees_.[20] The n.o.bility of Spain having Velasquez for a portrait-painter could not say, like the lion of the fable: "Ah! if the lions only knew how to paint."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SURRENDER OF BREDA.

_Velasquez_.]

Velasquez takes his place naturally between t.i.tian and Van Dyck as a painter of portraits. His colour is solidly and profoundly harmonious, without any false luxury and with no need of glitter. His magnificence is that of ancient hereditary fortunes. It has tranquillity, equality, and intimacy. We find no violent reds, greens, nor blues, no upstart glitter, no brilliant gew-gaws. All is restrained and subdued, but with a warm tone like that of old gold, or with a grey tone like the dead sheen of family silver. Gaudy and loud things will do for upstarts, but Don Diego Velasquez de Silva is too true a gentleman to make himself an object of remark in that manner, and, let us say, too good a painter also. Although a realist, he brings to his art a lofty grandeur, a disdain of useless detail, and an intentional sacrifice that plainly reveal the sovereign master. These sacrifices were not always those that another painter would have made. Velasquez chose to put in evidence what, it sometimes seems, should have been left in shadow. He extinguishes and he illuminates with apparent caprice, but the effect always justifies him.

The correctness of his eye was such that while he only pretended to be copying, he brought the soul to the surface and painted the inner and the outer man at the same time. His portraits relate the secret _Memoires_ of the Spanish court better than all the chroniclers. Let him represent them in gala dress, riding their genets, in hunting-costume, an arquebuse in their hand, a greyhound at their feet, and we recognize in these wan figures of kings, queens, and infantas, with pale faces, red lips, and ma.s.sive chins the degeneracy of Charles V. and the falling away of exhausted dynasties. Although a court-painter, he has not flattered his royal models. However, despite the brainlessness of the type, the quality of these high personages would never be doubted. It is not that he did not know how to paint genius; the portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, so n.o.ble, so imperious, and so full of authority, unanswerably proves that, unable to lend any fire to these sad lords, he gives them a cold majesty, a wearied dignity, a gesture and pose of etiquette, and then envelops all with his magnificent colour; that was full payment for the protection of his crowned friend.

M. Paul de Saint-Victor has somewhere called Victor Hugo "The Spanish Grandee of poetry;" may we not be permitted to call Velasquez "The Spanish Grandee of painting"? No qualification would suit him better.

As we have said, Velasquez was Court Chamberlain, and it was he who was charged with the preparation of the lodgings of the King in the trip that Philip IV. made to Irun to deliver the Infanta Dona Maria-Teresa to the King of France. It was he who had decorated and ornamented the pavilion where the interview of the two kings took place in the ile des Faisans. Velasquez was distinguished among the crowd of courtiers by his personal dignity, the elegance, the richness, and the good taste of his costumes on which he arranged with art the diamonds and jewels,--gifts of the sovereigns; but on his return to Madrid, he fell ill with fatigue and died on the 7th of August, 1660. His widow, Dona Juana Pacheco, only survived him seven days and was interred near him in the parish of San Juan. The funeral of Velasquez was splendid; great personages, knights of the military orders, the King's household, and the artists were present sad and pensive, as if they felt that with Velasquez they were interring Spanish art.

_Guide de l'Amateur au Musee du Louvre_ (Paris, 1882).

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Private audiences of the King.

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

(_MURILLO_)

AIMe GIRON

After her 3,700 battles with the Moors and the conquest of Granada, Spain had a splendid outburst of literary and artistic glory. In painting, the four schools of Valencia, Toledo, Madrid, and Seville suddenly shone forth with that conception of the real and that care for sharp relief which they owed to the brilliancy of their sunshine, while amid the fogs of the North the outline is more wavering and the vision less clear. Under the influence of this original realism, their works instinctively reproduced that two-fold character which the land of Spain, smiling in her valleys and savage in her mountains, shows in sharp contrast. But the Spaniards are, in truth, much more realistic in their execution than in their inspiration.

The school of Seville, founded by Luis de Vargas, counted among its ill.u.s.trious masters the greatest painter of that sunlit and pa.s.sionate Andalusia, Murillo (Bartolome-Esteban), 1617-1682, Spain's most popular painter, "the painter of the Conceptions," as she called him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.

_Murillo_.]

His uncle, Juan del Castillo, a mediocre artist but a good teacher, initiated him into his dry, stiff, and hard manner,--that of the old Florentine school. In his studio young Esteban Murillo had young Pedro de Moya as a fellow-student. One day the former took a fancy to go to Cadiz, where, miserable enough, he painted on pieces of serge some Madonnas for traffic in the West Indies, while the latter went to London to work in Van Dyck's studio. On his return Pedro de Moya brought several studies of the Flemish master, and Murillo, suddenly revolutionized and suddenly illuminated, no longer dreamed of anything but of going to Flanders or Italy, pa.s.sing--happily--through Madrid. In Madrid, the Velasquez of the Court of Charles II. stopped him on the way, gave him admission to the royal collections, where he copied t.i.tian, Veronese, and Rubens, and then opened his purse to him, and, lastly, revealed the secrets of his mighty art.

Thus taught and thus inspired, Murillo returned to Seville, where he settled once for all, immuring himself in his studio, where--modest, timid, and gentle--he lived with that single love for his art which soon enriched him, two years later adding to it the adoration of his wife, a n.o.ble lady of Pilas. It was from this studio that almost all of his laborious, numerous, and superb works issued, sometimes scarcely signed.

From the very beginning, Murillo possessed all the qualities of a great master, and henceforth we have only to separate his own personality and originality.

Murillo had three periods, as he also had three styles according to the nature of the subjects he had to treat: the first period, under the influence of the Florentine formulas of Juan del Castillo, was somewhat that of happy and masterly imitations; the second, under the memories of Van Dyck, brought back by Pedro de Moya and of the copies painted at Madrid, belongs to the Flemish school. But, at thirty-five, in full possession of his genius, he reveals _himself_, with his superb colouring, his consummate ease, his great science, his rich and inexhaustible imagination, his exquisite and tender sentiment, and his harmony, often produced with feminine delicacy and childish grace, with his vigour, his trivialities, and his mysticism.

The genius of Murillo, in fact, obeyed a double current, which carried him forward, on the one hand towards the sky, and on the other towards the earth, towards the Catholic ideal or towards vulgar realities, gentle Madonnas alternately with knavish beggars. Very sincerely and observantly religious, with the contemplative soul of the land of great men and great mysteries, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa, this chaste artist, who never painted a nude woman, has the exalted sentiment of faith of the Spanish artists, a sentiment which is somewhat enn.o.bled by their realism of nature.

"Why don't you finish that Christ?" asked one of his friends.

"I am waiting until he comes to speak to me," replied Murillo.

With these works he enriched the chapter-house of the Seville Cathedral, the Hospital de la Caridad, that of the Hospital de los Venerables, the convents of the Capuchins, the Augustines, etc.

I have said that Murillo had three styles, almost three pencils, not like the pencils of gold, of silver, and of iron that the Venetians attributed to the unequal genius of Tintoret, but in sympathy with the subjects he had to treat. The Spaniards have distinguished and qualified these styles as follows: _Frio, calido y vaporoso_, cold, warm, and vaporous.

In the cold style he painted broadly, boldly, and frankly his beggars and his _muchachos_, so true to life and in strong relief, with a certain brutality almost approaching triviality. A very well-known work of this kind is the _Pouilleux_ in the Museum of the Louvre, and a masterpiece in the Pinacothek of Munich, the Grandmother and Infant. He sought these types in some old Moorish dwelling, on the deck of a ship from Tunis or Tripoli anch.o.r.ed in a Spanish harbour, or in among a band of wandering _Gitanos_ on the banks of the Guadalquivir.

In the vaporous manner, which he used in rendering the ecstasies of the saints, he painted (under indescribable transparencies of light and atmospheric shade which is really only extinguished light), _Saint Francis in Ecstasy_, _The Angel Kitchen_ (Miracle of San Diego) running through several scales of tones in a marvellous chord and softening all the outlines "dulcemente perdidos," as Cean Bermudez says.

In his warm style, come his _Annunciations_, _Conceptions_, and all those gentle and graceful Madonnas, sweet and poetic young mothers rather than divine Virgins "whom Jews might kiss and Infidels adore," as Pope says, and which remind us of Correggio's effeminacy, unknown to Murillo, and in which he plays with ease with harmonies, contrasts, and reflections of colour.

_The Immaculate Conception_, in the National Museum of the Louvre, is of this style. Certainly it is not more beautiful than the _Conception_ in Madrid, of such extraordinary brilliance, and of such a virginal expression of innocence, piety, and melancholy; and above all not more beautiful than that of Seville--_The Great Conception_, or the _Pearl of Conceptions_, making the Virgin Mother's face into a beautiful and intense face of an archangel. That had its day of resounding triumph.

Every one knows that Marshal Soult accepted this work in Spain for the pardon of two monks condemned to be hanged as spies. On the 29th of May, 1852, this canvas was sold at auction. Around it the greatest nations were represented with their rival gold, and loud applause accompanied each royal bid. When, for the sum of 615,300 francs, it was knocked down--"To France, gentlemen!" cried the Count de Nieuwerkerke--then broke forth the delirium of a battle won.

In a diaphanous atmosphere gilded with an invisible clearness as of Paradise, the winged heads and bodies of little angels are moving: the former gracefully grouped, the latter boldly and skilfully disposed. The celestial infants have followed all the way to the earth the rays of celestial light in its elusive gradations of colour under its imperceptible glazing. In the centre, in the act of ascent, the Virgin rises in ecstasy. One corner of a cloud, the crescent moon, and a masterly group of little angels, naked and enraptured, bear the Immaculate aloft. Gracefully and statuesquely posed, and broadly draped in a white robe with sober folds enriched by an ample scarf of light blue, she modestly hides her feet under the drapery and chastely crosses her hands over the breast in which she feels the conception of the Son of G.o.d operating. Her head under its dishevelled waves of black hair, a little turned back and bending slightly to one side, is raised to heaven with uplifted eyes and open mouth, as if to receive in every sense the flow of the spirit. The face, in the exquisite sweetness of a surrender to piety, reflects the bliss of Faith, of mystical voluptuousness, and divine ecstasy. The expression is religious, but the Virgin is human, and full of life in the firmness of her lines and the warmth of her flesh-tints. Beneath the suppleness of the drawing and the soft touches we recognize in Mary the Immaculate, the woman and even the Andalusian.

The whole work is a most harmonious and well-balanced composition, of the greatest opulence of colour, solidly laid in, and here and there lightly glazed over in the Venetian manner; a superb work this, in which Murillo has found the right point where his idealism and his materialism meet and mingle.

If I remember rightly, we know one hundred and thirty canvases of Murillo, to any one of which our admiration hesitates to award the pre-eminence,--and if the crown of laurels which a Pope laid upon the funeral couch of Raphael is the consecration of the sovereignty of the painter of Urbino for History, the universally popular name of Murillo has also sanctified the incontestable genius of the painter of Seville.

Jouin, _Chefs-d'oeuvre: Peinture, Sculpture Architecture_ (Paris, 1895-97).

ST. FRANCIS BEFORE THE SOLDAN

(_GIOTTO_)

JOHN RUSKIN

It is a characteristic--(as far as I know, quite a universal one)--of the great masters, that they never expect you to look at them;--seem always rather surprised if you want to; and not overpleased. Tell them you are going to hang their picture at the upper end of the table at the next great City dinner, and that Mr. So-and-So will make a speech about it;--you produce no impression upon them whatever, or an unfavourable one. The chances are ten to one they send you the most rubbishy thing they can find in their lumber-room. But send for one of them in a hurry, and tell him the rats have gnawed a nasty hole behind the parlour door, and you want it plastered and painted over;--and he does you a masterpiece which the world will peep behind your door to look at for ever.

I have no time to tell you why this is so; nor do I know why, altogether, but so it is.

Giotto, then, is sent for, to paint this high chapel: I am not sure if he chose his own subjects from the life of St. Francis: I think so,--but of course can't reason on the guess securely. At all events, he would have much of his own way in the matter.