Great Pictures, As Seen and Described Part 2

Michael Angelo replied with his usual brusqueness:

"Tell the Pope that he must employ himself a little less in correcting my pictures, which is very easy, and employ himself a little more in reforming men, which is very difficult."

It is said that Maestro Biaggio, master of ceremonies to Paul III., having accompanied the Pope on a visit that His Holiness made to see Michael Angelo's fresco when it was about half finished, allowed himself to express his own opinion upon _The Last Judgment_.

"Holy Father," said the good Messer Biaggio, "if I dare p.r.o.nounce my judgment, this picture seems more appropriate to figure in a tavern than in the chapel of a Pope."

Unfortunately for the master of ceremonies, Michael Angelo was behind him and did not lose a word of Messer Biaggio's compliment. The Pope had scarcely gone before the irritated artist, wishing to make an example as a warning for all future critics, placed this Messer Biaggio in his h.e.l.l, well and duly, under the scarcely flattering guise of Minos. That was always Dante's way when he wanted to avenge himself upon an enemy.

I leave you to imagine the lamentations and complaints of the poor master of ceremonies when he saw himself d.a.m.ned in this manner. He threw himself at the Pope's feet, declaring that he would never arise unless His Holiness would have him taken out of h.e.l.l: that was the most important thing. As for the punishment, that the painter deserved for this dreadful sacrilege, Messer Biaggio would leave that entirely to the high impartiality of the Holy Father.

"Messer Biaggio," replied Paul III. with as much seriousness as he could maintain, "you know that I have received from G.o.d an absolute power in heaven and upon the earth, but I can do nothing in h.e.l.l; therefore you must remain there."

While Michael Angelo was working at his picture of _The Last Judgment_, he fell from the scaffold and seriously injured his leg. Soured by pain and seized with an attack of misanthropy, the painter shut himself up in his house and would not see any one.

But he reckoned without his physician; and the physician this time was as stubborn as the invalid.

This excellent disciple of aesculapius was named Baccio Rontini. Having learned by chance of the accident that had befallen the great artist, he presented himself before his house and knocked in vain at the door.

No response.

He shouted, he flew into a pa.s.sion, and he called the neighbours and the servants in a loud voice.

Complete silence.

He goes to find a ladder, places it against the front of the house, and tries to enter by the cas.e.m.e.nts. The windows are hermetically sealed and the shutters are fast.

What is to be done? Any one else in the physician's place would have given up; but Rontini was not the man to be discouraged for so little.

With much difficulty he enters the cellar and with no less trouble he goes up into Buonarroti's room, and, partly by acquiescence and partly by force, he triumphantly tends his friend's leg.

It was quite time: exasperated by his sufferings, the artist had resolved to let himself die.

_Trois Maitres_ (Paris, 1861).

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dante, _Inferno_ III.

MAGDALEN IN THE DESERT

(_CORREGGIO_)

AIMe GIRON

Correggio was a painter and a poet at the same time, interpreting Nature, flattering her, idealizing her, and realizing her creations in their double aesthetic expression, with undulating outlines and tender tones. His drawing was modelled and supple, with a certain vigour of line and a certain solidity of relief. He had a charming imagination of conception and a voluptuous grace in its accomplishment, which are requisites in the painting of women and children. He therefore excelled in rendering _bambini_. With a note-book in his hand, he studied them everywhere. This explains why his Loves and his Cherubs have such rare truth of mien, of flesh, and of life. His knowledge of anatomy is great and he foreshortens on canvas and ceiling astonishingly before the advent of Michael Angelo. His enchanting colouring, impasted like that of Giorgione, vivid as that of t.i.tian, ran through the most delicate gradations and melted into the most elusive harmonies. Beneath his facile brush, soft and thick, the transparencies of the skin and the morbidezza of the flesh become ideal.

He was the first to apply himself to the choice of fabrics, and one of the first in Italy to attend to the scientific distribution of light.

But, in the famous _chiaroscuro_ he does not get his effects by contrasts, but by a.n.a.logies, superimposing shadow upon shadow and light upon light, both being disposed in large ma.s.ses and graduated in progression. This process occurs at its fullest in the _Christmas Night_, where the moon shines, and the child glows with radiance, in a kind of symbolic struggle between the natural light of this world and the supernatural light of the other. The effect is such that the spectator is forced instinctively to blink his eyes, as does the Shepherdess herself entering the stable.

"When Correggio excels he is a painter worthy of Athens," wrote Diderot, whose art criticism had in it more of sentiment than knowledge.

"With Correggio everything is large and graceful," said Louis Carrache, who gave Correggio a large place in his eclecticism. But after studying and weighing everything, from his somewhat excessive qualities it follows that Correggio was more of an idealist than a mystic and obeyed Art more than Faith, with a leaning towards the apotheosis of form. He painted _Io and Jupiter_ for Frederick Gonzaga of Mantua. This picture having pa.s.sed to the son of the Regent, the two pa.s.sionate heads so strongly troubled his prudery that he cut them out and burned them.

Coypel then begged the Prince to spare the rest and to give it to him.

He obtained it on condition that "he would make good use of it," and on the death of Coypel, M. Pasquier, _depute du Commerce de Rouen_, paid 16,500 _livres_ for the mutilated remains, as I find in a very old account.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAGDALEN.

_Correggio_]

All the great museums of the world possess Correggios, and I will only mention the exquisite _Saint Catherine_ and the resplendent _Antiope_ of the Louvre; the _Danae_ of the Borghese Gallery, a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of grace and delicacy; and, finally, in the Dresden Gallery, our _Magdalen in the Desert_, that jewel so well-known and so often reproduced.

This Magdalen as a matter of fact holds the first place among the small Correggios. There are two kinds of Magdalens in art: I. the Repentant, emaciated, growing ugly, disfigured by tears and penitence at the end of her life, with a skull in her hand or before her eyes, not having had even--like the one sculptured in the Cathedral of Rouen--"for three times ten winters any other vesture than her long hair," according to Petrarch's verse; II. the Sinner, always young, always beautiful, always seductive, who has not lost any of her charms nor even of her coquetry, and with whom the Book of Life takes the place of the Death's Head.

Our Magdalen belongs to the latter cla.s.s. In a solitary spot, but attractive with its verdure and rocks, on a gra.s.sy knoll the saint is stretched out at full length, with her shoulder, her bosom, her arms, and her feet adorably bare. A blue fabric drapes the rest of her body and forms a coquettish hood for her head and neck. Her flesh has a robust elegance of line. Leaning on her right elbow, her hand, half hidden in her hair, supports a charming and meditative head, while her other arm is slipped under an open ma.n.u.script. Her hair, long and blonde, according to legend--which she loves and still cares for because it once wiped the feet of her Saviour--falls in thick curls, or strays at will with a premeditated abandon. On the ground, to her right, stands the vase of perfumes of her first adoration; to the left are the stones of her supreme expiation.

What grace in her att.i.tude! What beauty of form! She is thrown in with a rare happiness and painted with an exquisite delicacy of touch and tint.

The blue drapery upon the green landscape defines her sufficiently without making her stand out too much, leaving the figure and the landscape to mingle without disturbing each other in skilful harmony.

All of this is in most finished execution, a little elaborate, perhaps, and the expression of the face reflects the sweet, sad memory of the Beloved, whose Gospels she is reading, just as one reads again tender letters of the past.

This work was executed for the Dukes of Este, who kept it in a silver frame studded with precious stones and used it as an ornament for their bedrooms, and when they travelled, they took it with them in a casket.

When the King of Poland became its possessor, he gave it a second boxing of gla.s.s with lock and key. In 1788, this masterpiece having been stolen, 1,000 ducats were promised for its discovery, and, in consideration of that sum, the thief denounced himself. Cristofano Allori, the greatest Florentine painter of the Decadence, made a superb copy for the Offices, I believe.

This Magdalen of Correggio's, "the least converted of sinners and the most adorable of penitents," is she really, historically and liturgically the Magdalen of the House of Bethany, of the grotto de la Sainte-Baume in Provence? No. She recalls rather "_cette dame de marque_" who was evoked in the Seventeenth Century by the Carmelite Father Pierre de Saint-Louis in his sublime poem of accomplished burlesque; and does not the following verse hum in your ear:

_"Levres dont l'incarnat faisant voir a la fois Un rosier sans epine, un chapelet sans croix,"_

while the sinner

_" ... s'occupe a punir le forfait De son temps preterit qui ne fut qu'imparfait"?_

This evidently is not at all the art of the Middle Ages, nor its saints, whose vestment was sackcloth and whose body was a mere lay figure for a soul devoted entirely to purity, to simplicity, to mysticism, and to the other world. In the Sixteenth Century, however, people took the sackcloth from the saints and dressed them in flesh. Then was produced a kind of revival of paganism, of naturalism, of life; and religious art, in its flesh and colouring, no longer created anything but an Olympus of beautiful maidens, or, at least, n.o.ble G.o.ddesses. Correggio's Magdalen belongs to this artistic cycle and the painter executed it in the noonday splendour of those qualities, the dawn of which glows in Parma at St. Paul's. Correggio is not a mystic, he is a voluptuous naturalist, and from him to the realist Caravaggio, "the grinder of flesh," and the exuberant Rubens, who gave much study to Correggio, the distance is not very great and the decline is fatal. But, in the meantime, where shall we find more grace, or seductiveness--under this conversion complicated with memories--than in Correggio's Magdalen?

In hagiographal literature we find a work of similar tone and charm: _Marie Madeleine_, by P. Lacordaire, an exquisite little book written with tenderness and piety, which deliciously calls up before us the Magdalen of repentance and love, "the loving woman accustomed to the delights of contemplation and needing only to see in her heart him whom in other days she saw under the transparent veil of mortal flesh."

It must be confessed that Correggio was constantly preoccupied with _charm_ and with that skilful coquetry that sports with every grace.

This is a subtlety of purely personal qualities; but let others beware of a systematic affectation! In this way Correggio did not found a school, but he had imitators, among whom was Parmigiano, who by dint of study and in search for grace--the most natural thing in the world--most often fell into affected and conventional ways.

Jouin, _Chefs-d'oeuvre: Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture_ (Paris, 1895-7).

BANQUET OF THE ARQUEBUSIERS

_(VAN DER HELST)_