Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 50

These profound sentences are the epitaph, not only of imitative poetry, but also of such eclectic art as the Caracci inst.i.tuted. Very little of it bears examination now. We regard it with listlessness or loathing. We turn from it without regret. We cannot, or do not, wish to keep it in our memory.

Yet no student of Italian painting will refuse the Caracci that tribute of respect which is due to virile effort. They were in vital sympathy with the critical and a.n.a.lytical spirit of their age--an age mournfully conscious that its scepter had departed--that

'Nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the gra.s.s, of glory in the flower;'

an age incapable as yet of acquiescing in this gloom, strenuously eager by study and by labor to regain the kingdom which belongs alone to inspiration. Science and industry enabled them to galvanize the corpse of art; into this they breathed the breath of the religion _a la mode_, of fashionable sensuousness and prevalent sentimentality.

Michelangelo died in 1564, Paolo Veronese in 1588, Tintoretto in 1594.

These were the three latest survivors of the great generation, and each of them had enjoyed a life of activity prolonged into extreme old age.

Their intellectual peers had long ago departed; Lionardo in 1520, Raphael in 1522, Correggio in 1534.

'Theirs was the giant race, before the flood.'

These dates have to be kept in mind; for the painters of the Bolognese School were all born after 1550, born for the most part at that decisive epoch of the Tridentine Council which might be compared to a watershed of time between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation--Lodovico Caracci in 1555, Agostino in 1558, Annibale in 1560, Guido Reni in 1574, Lionello Spada in 1576, Francesco Albani in 1578, Domenichino in 1581, Guercino in 1590.[213] With the last of these men the eclectic impulse was exhausted; and a second generation, derived in part from them, linked the painters of the Renaissance to those of modern times. It is sufficient to mention Nicholas and Gaspar Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Salvator Rosa, Luca Giordano, and Ca.n.a.letto as chief representatives of this secondary group.[214]

On examining the dates which I have given, it will be noticed that the Bolognese Eclectics, intervening between the age of Michelangelo and the age of Nicholas Poussin, worked during the first fervor of the Catholic Revival. Their art may therefore be taken as fairly representative of the religious temper and the profane culture of the Italians in the period influenced by the Council of Trent. It represents that temper and that culture before the decline of the same influence, when the Counter Reformation was in active progress and the Papal pretensions to absolute dominion had received no check.

[Footnote 213: The three founders of the school were thus born precisely during the most critical years of the Council. They felt the Catholic reaction least. That expressed itself most markedly in Domenichino, born seventeen years after its close.]

[Footnote 214: Nich. Poussin, b. 1594; Claude, 1600; Gaspar Poussin, 1613; Salvator Rosa, 1615; Luca Giordano, 1632; Ca.n.a.letto, 1697.]

We should be wrong, however, to treat the Eclectics as though they succeeded without interruption to that 'giant race, before the flood.'

Their movement was emphatically one of revival; and revival implies decadence. After 1541, when Michelangelo finished the Last Judgment, and before 1584, when the Caracci were working on their frescoes in the Palazzo Fava at Bologna--that is to say, between the last of the genuine Renaissance paintings and the first of the Revival--nearly half a century elapsed, during which art sank into a slough of slovenly and soulless putrescence.[215] Every city of Italy swarmed with artists, adequately educated in technical methods, and apt at aping the grand style of their masters. But in all their work there is nothing felt, nothing thought out, nothing expressed, nothing imagined. It is a vast vacuity of meaningless and worthless brush-play, a wilderness of hollow trickery and futile fumbling with conventional forms. The Mannerists, as they were called, covered acres of palace and church walls with allegories, histories, and legends, carelessly designed, rapidly executed, but pleasing the eye with crowds of figures and with gaudy colors. Their colors are now faded. Their figures are now seen to be reminiscences of Raphael's, Correggio's, Buonarroti's draughtsmanship.

Yet they satisfied the patrons of that time, who required hasty work, and had not much money wherewith to reward the mature labors of a conscientious student. In relation, moreover, to the spiritless and insincere architecture then coming into vogue, this art of the Mannerists can scarcely be judged out of place. When I divulge the names of Giorgio Vasari, Giuseppe Cesari (Cav. d'Arpino), Tempesta, Fontana, Tibaldi, the Zuccari, the Procaccini, the Campi of Cremona, the scholars of Perino del Vaga, I shall probably call up before the reluctant eyes of many of my readers visions of dreary wanderings through weariful saloons and of disconsolate starings up at stuccoed cupolas in Rome and Genoa, in Florence and Naples, and in all the towns of Lombardy.[216]

In an earlier volume I briefly sketched the development of this pernicious mannerism, which now deluged the arts of Italy. Only one painter, outside Venice, seems to have carried on a fairly good tradition. This was Federigo Baroccio (1528-1612), who feebly continued the style of Correggio, with a certain hectic originality, infusing sentimental pietism into that great master's pagan sensuousness. The mixture is disagreeable; and when one is obliged to mention Baroccio as the best in a bad period, this accentuates the badness of his contemporaries. He has however, historical value from another point of view, inasmuch as nothing more strongly characterizes the eclecticism of the Caracci than their partiality for Correggio.[217] Though I have no reason to suppose that Baroccio, living chiefly as he did at Urbino, directly influenced their style, the similarity between his ideal and theirs is certainly striking. It seems to point at something inevitable in the direction taken by the Eclectics.

[Footnote 215: I of course except Venice, for reasons which I have sufficiently set forth in _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. iii. p. 347. Long after other schools of Italy the Venetian was still only adolescent.]

[Footnote 216: I have not thought it worth while to write down more than a very few names of the Mannerists. Notice how often they worked in whole families and indistinguishable coteries.]

[Footnote 217: Everyone familiar with European picture-galleries will remember cabinet pieces by the Caracci, especially Ecce h.o.m.os, Pietas, Agonies in the Garden, which look like copies from Correggio with a dash of added sentimentalism.]

Such was the state of art in Italy when Lodovico Caracci, the son of a Bolognese butcher, conceived his plan of replacing it upon a sounder system.[218] Instinct led him to Venice, where painting was still alive.

The veteran Tintoretto warned him that he had no vocation. But Lodovico obstinately resolved to win by industry what nature seemed to have denied him. He studied diligently at Florence, Parma, Mantua, and Venice, founding his style upon those of Andrea del Sarto, Correggio, t.i.tian, Parmigiano, Giulio Romano, and Primaticcio. When he again settled at Bologna, he induced his two cousins, Agostino and Annibale, the sons of a tailor, to join him in the serious pursuit of art.

Agostino was a goldsmith by trade, already expert in the use of the burin, which he afterwards employed more frequently than the brush.[219]

Of the three Caracci he was the most versatile, and perhaps the most gifted. There is a note of distinction and attainment in his work.

Annibale, the youngest, was a rough, wild, hasty, and hot-tempered lad, of robust build and vigorous intellect, but boorish in his manners, fond of low society, and eaten up with jealousy. They called him the _ragazzaccio_, or 'lout of a boy,' when he began to make his mark at Bologna. Agostino presented a strong contrast to his brother, being an accomplished musician, an excellent dancer, a fair poet, fit to converse with n.o.blemen, and possessed of very considerable culture. Lodovico, the eldest of the cousins, acted as mentor and instructor to the others. He pacified their quarrels, when Annibale's jealousy burst out; set them upon the right methods of study, and pa.s.sed judgment on their paintings.

[Footnote 218: I have mainly used the encyclopedic work ent.i.tled _Felsina Pittrice_ (Bologna, 1841, 2 vols.) for my study of the Eclectics. This is based upon the voluminous writings of the Count C.C.

Malvasia, who, having been born in 1616, and having enjoyed personal intercourse with the later survivors of the Bolognese Academy, was able to bequeath a vast ma.s.s of anecdotical and other material to posterity.

The collection contains critical annotations and additions by the hand of Zanotti and later art students, together with many ill.u.s.trative doc.u.ments of the highest value. Reading this miscellaneous repertory, we are forced to regret that the same amount of characteristic and authentic information has not been preserved about one of the greater schools of Italy--the Venetian, for example.]

[Footnote 219: He acquired a somewhat infamous celebrity by his obscene engravings in the style of Giulio Romano.]

Like Lodovico, the brothers served their first apprenticeship in art at Parma and Venice. Annibale's letters from the former place show how Correggio subdued him, and the large copies he there made still preserve for us some shadows of Correggio's time-ruined frescoes. At Venice he executed a copy of t.i.tian's Peter Martyr. This picture, the most dramatic of t.i.tian's works, and the most elaborate in its landscape, was destined to exercise a decisive influence over the Eclectic school. From the Caracci to Domenichino we are able to trace the dominant tone and composition of that masterpiece. No less decisive, as I have already observed, was the influence of Correggio's peculiar style in the choice of type, the light and shade, and the foreshortenings of the Bolognese painters. In some degree, the manner of Paolo Veronese may also be discerned. The Caracci avoided Tintoretto, and at the beginning of their career they derived but little from Raphael or Michelangelo.

Theirs was at first a mainly Veneto-Lombardic eclecticism, dashed with something absorbed from Giulio Romano and something from the later Florentines. It must not however, be supposed that they confined their attention to Italian painters. They contrived to collect casts from antique marbles, coins, engravings of the best German and Italian workmanship, books on architecture and perspective, original drawings, and similar academical appliances. Nor were they neglectful of drawing from the nude, or of anatomy. Indeed, their days and nights were spent in one continuous round of study, which had for its main object the comparison of dead and living nature with the best specimens of art in all ages. It may seem strange that this a.s.siduity and thoroughness of method did not produce work of higher quality. Yet we must remember that even enthusiastic devotion to art will not give inspiration, and that the most thorough science cannot communicate charm. Though the Caracci invented fresh att.i.tudes and showed complete mastery of the human form, their types remained commonplace. Though their chiaroscuro was accurately based on that of Correggio, it lacked his aerial play of semitones. Though they went straight to t.i.tian for color, they never approached Venetian lucidity and glow. There was something vulgar in their imagination, prosaic in their feeling, leaden in their frigid touch on legend. Who wants those countless G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of the Farnese Gallery, those beblubbered saints and colossal Sibyls of the Bolognese Pinacoteca, those chubby cherubs and buxom nymphs, those Satyrs and S. Sebastians, to come down from the walls and live with us?

The grace of Raphael's Galatea, the inspiration of Michelangelo's Genii of the Sistine, the mystery of Lionardo's Faun-S. John, the wilding grace of Correggio's Diana, the voluptuous fascination of t.i.tian's Venus, the mundane seductiveness of Veronese's Europa, the golden glory of Tintoretto's Bacchus,--all have evanesced, and in their place are hard mechanic figures, excellently drawn, correctly posed, but with no touch of poetry. Where, indeed, shall we find 'the light that never was on sea or land' throughout Bologna?[220]

[Footnote 220: Malvasia has preserved, in his _Life of Primaticcio_, a sonnet written by Agostino Caracci, in which the aims of the Eclectics are clearly indicated. The good painter must have at his command Roman or cla.s.sic design, Venetian movement and shadow, Lombard coloring, the sublimity of Michelangelo, the truth to nature of t.i.tian, the pure and sovereign style of Correggio, Raphael's symmetry, Tibaldi's fitness and solidity, Primaticcio's erudite invention, with something of Parmigianino's grace (_Fels. Pittr._ vol. i. p. 129). Zanotti adds: 'This sonnet is a.s.suredly one which every painter ought to learn by heart and observe in practice.']

Part of this failure must be ascribed to a radically false conception of the way to combine studies of nature with studies of art. The Eclectics in general started with the theory that a painter ought to form mental ideals of beauty, strength, dignity, ferocity, and so forth, from the observation of characteristic individuals and acknowledged masterpieces. These ideal types he has to preserve in his memory, and to use living persons only as external means for bringing them into play. Thus, it was indifferent who sat to him as model. He believed that he could invest the ugliest lump of living flesh with the loveliest fancy. Lodovico supplied Annibale Caracci with the fleshy back of a naked Venus. Guido Reni painted his Madonna's heads from any beardless pupil who came handy, and turned his deformed color-grinder--a man 'with a muzzle like a renegado'--into the penitent Magdalen.[221] It was inevitable that forms and faces thus evolved should bear the stamp of mediocrity, monotony, and dullness on them. Few, very few, painters--perhaps only Michelangelo--have been able to give to purely imagined forms the value and the individuality of persons; and he succeeded best in this perilous attempt when he designed the pa.s.sionate Genii of the Sistine frescoes. Such flights were far beyond the grasp of the Eclectics. Seeking after the 'grand style,' they fell, as I shall show in the sequel of this chapter, into commonplace vacuity, which makes them now insipid.[222]

[Footnote 221: See Malvasia, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 277; vol. ii. p. 57.

The odd thing is that Malvasia tells these stories of the Lodovico-Aphrodite and the color-grinder-Magdalen with applause, as though they proved the mastery of Annibale Caracci and Guido.]

[Footnote 222: The later Eclectics--Spada, Domenichino, Guercino--were to some extent saved by the influences they derived from Caravaggio and the Naturalisti. But they had not the tact to see where the finer point of naturalistic art lies for a delicately minded painter. They added its brutality, as employed by Caravaggio, to the insipidities of the Caracci, and produced such horrors as Domenichino's Martyrdom of S.

Agnes.]

There was at this time a native of Antwerp named Dionysius Calvaert, a coa.r.s.e fellow of violent manners, who kept open school in Bologna. The best of the Caracci's pupils--Guido Reni, Domenichino and Albani--emigrated to their academy from this man's workshop. Something, as it seems to me, peculiar in the method of handling oil paint, which all three have in common, may perhaps be ascribed to early training under their Flemish master. His brutality drove them out of doors; and, having sought the protection of Lodovico Caracci, they successively made such progress in the methods of painting as rendered them the most distinguished representatives of the Bolognese Revival. All three were men of immaculate manners. Guido Reni, beautiful as a Sibyl in youth, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion, was, to the end of his ill.u.s.trious career, reputed a virgin. Albani, who translated into delicate oil-painting the sensuousness of the _Adone_, studied the forms of Nymphs and Venuses from his lovely wife, and the limbs of Amorini from the children whom she bore him regularly every year. Domenichino, a man of shy, retiring habits, preoccupied with the psychological problems which he strove to translate into dramatic pictures, doted on one woman, whom he married, and who lived to deplore his death (as she believed) by poison. Guido was specially characterized by devotion to Madonna. He was a singular child. On every Christmas eve, for seven successive years, ghostly knockings were heard upon his chamber door; and, every night, when he awoke from sleep, the darkness above his bed was illuminated by a mysterious egg-shaped globe of light.[223] His eccentricity in later life amounted to insanity, and at last he gave himself up wholly to the demon of the gaming-table. Domenichino obeyed only one pa.s.sion, if we except his pa.s.sion for the wife he loved so dearly, and this was music.

He displayed some strangeness of temperament in a morbid dislike of noise and interruptions. Otherwise, nothing disturbed the even current of an existence dedicated to solving questions of art. Albani mixed more freely in the world than Domenichino, enjoyed the pleasures of the table and of sumptuous living, but with Italian sobriety, and expatiated in those spheres of literature which supplied him with motives for his coldly sensual pictures. Yet he maintained the credit of a thoroughly domestic, soundly natured, and vigorously wholesome man.

[Footnote 223: This tradition of Guido's childhood I give for what it is worth, from Malvasia, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 53. In after life, beside being piously addicted to Madonna-worship, he had a great dread of women in general and witches in particular. What some will call spiritual, others effeminate, in his mature work, may be due to the temperament thus indicated.]

I have thought it well thus to preface what I have to say about these masters, partly because critics of the modern stamp, trusting more to their subjective impressions than to authoritative records, have painted the moral characters of Guido and Domenichino in lurid colors, and also because there is certainly something in their work which leaves a painful memory of unhealthy sentiment, impa.s.siveness to pain, and polished carnalism on the mind. It may incidentally be recorded that Lodovico Caracci, Guido Reni, and Francesco Albani are all of them, on very good authority, reported to have been even prudishly modest in their use of female models. They never permitted a woman to strip entirely, and Guido carried his reserve to such a pitch that he preferred to leave his studio door open while drawing from a woman.[224]

Malevolence might suggest that this was only part and parcel of post-Tridentine hypocrisy; and probably there is truth in the suggestion. I certainly do not reckon such solicitous respect for garments entirely to their credit. But it helps us to understand the eccentric compound of sentiment, sensuality, piety, and uneasy morality which distinguished the age, and which is continually perplexing the student of its art.

[Footnote 224: Malvasia, _op. cit._ p. 53, p. 178. The latter pa.s.sage is preceded by a discussion of the nude in art which shows how Malvasia had imbibed Tridentine morality in the middle of Italy glowing with Renaissance masterpieces.]

Of these three men, Guido was the most genially endowed. He alone derived a true spark from the previous age of inspiration. He wearies us indeed with his effeminacy, and with the reiteration of a physical type sentimentalized from the head and bust of Niobe. But thoughts of real originality and grace not seldom visited his meditations; and he alone deserved the name of colorist among the painters I have as yet ascribed to the Bolognese School.[225] Guido affected a cool harmony of blue, white, and deadened gold, which in the best pictures of his second manner--the Fortune, the Bacchus and Ariadne of S. Luke's in Rome, the Crucifixion at Modena--has a charm akin to that of Metastasio's silvery lyrics. The samson at Bologna rises above these works both in force of conception and glow of color. The Aurora of the Rospigliosi Casino attempts a wider scheme of hues, and is certainly, except for some lack of refinement in the attendant Hours, a very n.o.ble composition. The S.

Michael of the Cappuccini is seductive by its rich bravura style; and the large Pieta in the Bolognese Gallery impresses our mind by a monumental sadness and sobriety of tone. The Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents, though one of Guido's most ambitious efforts, and though it displays an ingenious adaptation of the Niobe to Raphael's mannerism, fails by falling between two aims--the aim to secure dramatic effect, and the aim to treat a terrible subject with harmonious repose.

[Footnote 225: Lo Spada and Guercino, afterwards to be mentioned, were certainly colorists.]

Of Albani nothing need be said in detail. Most people knew his pictures of the Four Elements, so neatly executed in a style adapting Flemish smoothness of surface to Italian suavity of line. This sort of art delighted the cardinals and Monsignori of the seventeenth century. But it has nothing whatsoever to say to and human soul.

On Domenichino's two most famous pictures at Bologna Mr. Ruskin has written one of his over-poweringly virulent invectives.[226] It is worth inserting here at length. More pa.s.sionate words could hardly be chosen to express the disgust inspired in minds attuned to earlier Italian art by these once worshiped paintings. Mr. Ruskin's obvious injustice, intemperance, and ostentatious emphasis will serve to point the change of opinion which has pa.s.sed over England since Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote. His denunciation of the badness of Domenichino's art, though expressed with such a clangor of exaggeration, fairly represents the feeling of modern students. 'The man,' he says, 'who painted the Madonna del Rosario and Martyrdom of S. Agnes in the gallery of Bologna, is palpably incapable of doing anything good, great, or right in any field, way, or kind whatsoever.... This is no rash method of judgment, sweeping and hasty as it may appear. From the weaknesses of an artist, or failures, however numerous, we have no right to conjecture his total inability; a time may come when he shall rise into sudden strength, or an instance occur when his efforts shall be successful. But there are some pictures which rank not under the head of failures, but of perpetrations or commissions; some things which a man cannot do or say without sealing forever his character and capacity. The angel holding the cross with his finger in his eye, the roaring, red-faced children about the crown of thorns, the blasphemous (I speak deliberately and determinedly) head of Christ upon the handkerchief, and the mode in which the martyrdom of the saint is exhibited (I do not choose to use the expressions which alone could characterize it), are perfect, sufficient, incontrovertible proofs that whatever appears good in any of the doings of such a painter must be deceptive, and that we may be a.s.sured that our taste is corrupted and false whenever we feel disposed to admire him. I am prepared to support this position, however uncharitable it may seem; a man may be tempted into a gross sin by pa.s.sion, and forgiven; and yet there are some kinds of sins into which only men of a certain kind can be tempted, and which cannot be forgiven.

It should be added, however, that the artistical qualities of these pictures are in every way worthy of the conceptions they realize. I do not recollect any instance of color or execution so coa.r.s.e and feelingless.'

[Footnote 226: _Modern Painters_, vol. i. p. 87.]

We have only to think of the S. Agnes by Tintoretto, or of Luini's St.

Catherine, in order to be well aware how far Domenichino, as a painter, deviated from the right path of art.[227]

[Footnote 227: I allude to the Tintoretto in S. Maria dell'Orto at Venice, and to the Luini in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan. Yet the model of Luini's S. Catherine was the infamous Contessa di Cellant, who murdered her husband and some lovers, and was beheaded for her crimes in Milan. This fact demonstrates the value of the model in the hands of an artist capable of using it.]

Yet we are bound to acquit him, as a man, of that moral obliquity which Mr. Ruskin seems to impute. Indeed, we know Domenichino to have been an unaffectedly good fellow. He was misled by his dramatic bias, and also by the prevalent religious temper of his age. Jesuitry had saturated the Italian mind; and in a former chapter I have dwelt upon the concrete materialism which formed the basis of the Jesuitical imagination. In portraying the martyrdom of S. Agnes as he has done, Domenichino was only obeying the rules of Loyola's _Exercitia_. That he belonged to a school which was essentially vulgar in its choice of type, to a city never distinguished for delicacy of taste, and to a generation which was rapidly losing the sense of artistic reserve, suffices to explain the crude brutality of the conceptions which he formed of tragic episodes.[228] The same may be said about all those horrible pictures of tortures, martyrdoms, and acts of violence which were produced by the dozen in Italy at this epoch. We turn from them with loathing. They inspire neither terror nor pity, only the sickness of the shambles. And yet it would be unjust to ascribe their unimaginative ghastliness to any special love of cruelty. This evil element may be rationally deduced from false dramatic instinct and perverted habits of brooding sensuously on our Lord's Pa.s.sion, in minds deprived of the right feeling for artistic beauty.

[Footnote 228: When I a.s.sert that the age was losing the sense of artistic reserve, I wish to refer back to what I have written about Marino, the dictator of the age in matters of taste. See above, pp. 273, 274.]

Probably Domenichino thought that he was surpa.s.sing t.i.tian's Peter Martyr when he painted his hard and hideous parody of that great picture. Yet t.i.tian had already touched the extreme verge of allowable realization, and his work belonged to the sphere of higher pictorial art mainly by right of n.o.ble treatment. Of this n.o.ble treatment, and of the harmonious coloring which shed a sanctifying splendor over the painful scene, Domenichino stripped his master's design. What he added was grimace, spasm, and the expression of degrading physical terror.

That Domenichino could be, in his own way, stately, is proved by the Communion of S. Jerome, in which he rehandled Agostino Caracci's fine conception. Though devoid of charm, this justly celebrated painting remains a monument of the success which may be achieved by the vigorous application of robust intellectual powers to the working out of a well-conceived and fully developed composition. Domenichino's gigantic saints and Sibyls, with their fleshy limbs, red cheeks, and upturned eyes, though famous enough in the last century, do not demand a word of comment now.[229] So strangely has taste altered, that to our eyes they seem scarcely decorative.

[Footnote 229: Go to S. Andrea nella Valle in Rome, to study the best of them.]

While the Caracci were reviving art at Bologna in the way that I have described, Caravaggio in Rome opposed the Mannerists after his own and a very different fashion.[230] The insipidities of men like Cesari drove him into a crude realism. He resolved to describe sacred and historical events just as though they were being enacted in the Ghetto by butchers and fishwives. This reaction against flimsy emptiness was wholesome; and many interesting studies from the taverns of Italy, portraits of gamesters, sharpers, _bravi_ and the like, remain to prove Caravaggio's mastery over scenes of common life.[231] But when he applied his principles to higher subjects, their vulgarity became apparent. Only in one picture, the Entombment in the Vatican, did he succeed in affecting imagination forcibly by the evident realization of a tragic scene. His martyrdoms are inexpressibly revolting, without appeal to any sense but savage blood-l.u.s.t. It seems difficult for realism, either in literature or art, not to fasten upon ugliness, vice, pain, and disease, as though these imperfections of our nature were more real than beauty, goodness, pleasure, and health. Therefore Caravaggio, the leader of a school which the Italians christened Naturalists, may be compared to Zola.