The History Of Painting In Italy Volume I Part 19

Francesco di Cristofano Rustici, called Rustichino, is better known in Siena than those just mentioned. He obtained the name of Rustichino, either because he was the last of a family that had produced three painters before him, or because he died in the outset of life. This circ.u.mstance, perhaps, has contributed to his reputation. All his remaining works are beautiful, which seldom happens to artists who live to a great age, and who abate in diligence as they advance in reputation and in years. He is a graceful follower of Caravaggio; and particularly excels in confined or candle lights, much in the style of Gherardo della Notte; but he is perhaps more select. The Dying Magdalen, in possession of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the S. Sebastian, cured by S. Irene, which belongs to Prince Borghese, in Rome, are in this style. But it was not the only one in which Rustichino painted. He had visited Rome, and had studied the works of the Caracci and of Guido, of which traces may be discovered in several of his works; but, at the same time, all of them possess a certain originality, and something peculiarly his own.

The best of all his pictures at Siena is an Annunciation, in Provenzano, before which the Virgin, S. Catherine, prays, surrounded by a mult.i.tude of angels. If Rustichino pleases in other works, in this he enchants us.

He began a work on the history of the city in the public palace, in which his father, whose figures were not equal to his decorations, was also employed, and it was finished by other artists.

Rutilio Manetti, or, as Pecci writes it, Mannetti, followed Caravaggio with less discrimination, but with greater force in the shadows. His pictures at Siena are easily recognized by invariably partaking of a certain sombre hue, which deranges the due balance and partic.i.p.ation of light and shade. The same objection lies against many of his contemporaries of every school. The method of purifying colours, and of composing vehicles,[302] had degenerated; and the injury sustained from this defect was not observed in the pictures: the artist only looked to the grand effect, to which the age so much aspired. Manetti united an improved design to ideas above the common order, and beautiful architecture; and hence, at times, he approaches rather to Guercino than to Caravaggio. In the cathedral of Siena is his Elijah under the juniper tree, in which the historian of that church commends the force of the colouring, which is juicy and natural. Many of his works remain in the Carthusian monastery of Florence, and in several churches of Siena, the most admired of which is the Repose of the Holy Family, in S. Peter's of Castelvecchio. In private collections, where pictures are better preserved than in churches, we find very beautiful Madonnas by this artist; and there is a most exquisite Lucretia in the possession of the Bandinelli family. He sometimes departed from his usual manner, as in the Triumph of David, in the ducal gallery, in which the shadows are not so dark, and the tone of the whole is more lively. Mention is made in the _Lettere Pittoriche_,[303] of Bernardino Capitelli, a scholar of Manetti, and an etcher: and in the third volume there is casual mention of one Domenico Manetti, probably of the same family, but not to be mistaken for the great individual of the same name. He appears rather to have employed himself in ornamenting private collections, and painted a Baptism of Constantine for the casa Magnoni, that has been much commended.

Astolfo Petrazzi, as well as Vanni, was a pupil of the younger Salimbeni and of Sorri; and seems, more than any other, to have adhered to the manner of his master. He frequently aims at pleasing the eye, and not unfrequently chooses his models from the schools of Upper Italy. A Marriage-feast of Cana, by his hand, in a private house, brings Paolo strongly to our recollection. His Communion of S. Jerome, in the possession of the Augustine friars, partakes, perhaps, too strongly of the manner of the Caracci. This picture, which he painted at Rome, was much admired at Siena, and was the origin of his great employment in that city, where his pictures are always decorated with most pleasing choirs of angels. His cabinet pictures were also lively; witness the four Seasons at Volte, a seat of the n.o.ble family of Chigi. He kept an open academy for painting in his house, which was much frequented by natives of Siena, and honoured by the attendance of Borgognone, who stopt some months with Astolfo before he went to Rome. Hence, many of this artist's early battle-pieces and landscapes are to be met with at Siena: the house of Sig. Decano Giovanelli, a literary ornament of that city, abounded with them.

I find some other painters of this school who are known beyond the state of Siena. Antiveduto Grammatica, an eminent painter, of Sienese extraction, was known at Rome, where he was president of the academy of S. Luke. It is true that he was deprived of that office for attempting to subst.i.tute one of his own copies for a S. Luke, by Raffaello, which he had sold to a gentleman. He had a peculiar talent in the art of copying, especially heads, and, on this account, he was a good portrait painter. Although we are not certain that he had any master but one Domenico Perugino, a painter of little wooden scenes,[304] he obtained applause in large compositions. There is an Annunciation by Grammatica of a most brilliant colouring, in the hospital of the Incurables; and several of his other pictures, in different churches. He died at Rome in 1626.

Two other artists, unknown in their native place, are made known to me by their signatures. On a Last Supper, in the convent of the Angioli, below a.s.sisi, I discovered _Franciscus Antonius Senensis_, 1614, or thereabouts. The style has enough of Baroccio to lead me to suspect that he was the scholar of Vanni, or of Salimbeni: nor must he be reckoned the meanest of that school, for he was master of expression in a degree superior to mediocrity. The figure of the departing Judas is the image of desperate resolve, and would be much better had he not given it the feet of a bat; a grotesque conceit. In the same neighbourhood, at the church of Foligno, I read, beneath a Holy Family, the name of _Marcantonio Grecchi_, and the date 1634. The style is solid, expressive, and correct; more resembling Tiarini di Bologna than any master of Siena. Niccolo Tornioli, lately mentioned, painted in the church of S. Paul, at Bologna, in various cities of Italy: in Siena he left, perhaps, no picture in public but the Vocation of S. Matthew, still remaining in the custom-house. Towards the close of the century, painting was practised at Siena chiefly by foreigners. Annibale Mazzuoli, a fresco painter of rapid execution but of little merit, was most employed: he afterwards went to Rome, and is the last name inserted in the Eulogies of Pio.

Painting, however, came again into repute at Siena, about 1700, when its credit was restored by Cav. Giuseppe Nasini, a scholar of Ciro Ferri.

Nasini possessed the qualities for which I have commended many of his nation, a fervid genius, a fertile imagination, and a poetic vein; but his poetry was of the species that prevailed in Italy during his younger days, a composition unrestrained by fixed rules. To this spirit we not unfrequently discover some a.n.a.logy in his paintings, in which we could desire to find more order, a more choice design, and colouring less vulgar. He always shews, however, a taste for allegory, great command of pencil, and an imposing air on the whole; and the observation of Redi, that "he stuns the beholder," is not without some foundation.[305] This remark was made when Nasini had finished the cupola of the chapel of S.

Anthony, in the church of the Apostles at Rome; in which chapel there is a picture by Luti. He afterwards entered into a compet.i.tion with Luti, and the first artists then in Rome, in the large prophets of the lateran cathedral. His masterpiece is supposed to be the S. Leonard, in Madonna del Pianto, at Foligno, the ceiling of which he painted with good frescos. Siena contains some of his finest productions of every kind; above all, the pictures of the Novissimi, intended for the Pitti palace, but transferred from it to the church of the Conventuals of Siena. It contains a great number of figures neither so select nor so well arranged as to arrest the eye of the spectator; but he who would contemptuously overlook it, let him say how many painters then in Italy could have produced such a picture.

Giuseppe brought up two pupils in his house. He had a brother named Antonio, who was a priest, whose likeness is among the eminent portrait painters in the gallery at Florence. Cav. Apollonio Nasini, the son of Giuseppe, was inferior to his father in the profession; yet a.s.sisted him in his greatest works, and held an honourable rank among his contemporaries. Gioseffo Pinacci, of Siena, a disciple of Mehus in figures, and of Borgognone in battle-pieces, lived in the time of Nasini. He was a good painter of portraits, and made a considerable fortune, first at the court of Carpio, Viceroy of Naples, and afterwards in the service of the grand duke Ferdinand, at Florence, where several of his works remain. But his chief merit consisted in a knowledge of the pencilling of the old masters. Nicolo Franchini distinguished himself rather by restoring the work of other hands than by his own productions, and thus furnished Pecci with much convenient information for his City Guide; "by his skill," says the Cavaliere, "in restoring injured specimens to their original beauty, without applying to them a fresh pencil, and in supplying the faded colours with others taken from paintings of less value, he ent.i.tled himself, in fact, to the praise of a new discovery." We shall here conclude the school of Siena; and shall add in its praise, that if it did not produce painters of the very highest cla.s.s, it at least boasts many artists, eminent when we consider their era, and few inferior, or not above mediocrity.[306] It indeed appears, that either a genius for painting is natural to that people, or that none of them have embraced the art who were not capable of prosecuting it successfully.

[Footnote 299: See Malvasia, tom. i. p. 571; and tom. ii. p. 355.]

[Footnote 300: It has his name and the year 1579, which date must be false. The widow of Arcangiolo married again, and bore Francesco Vanni in 1565. Consequently the latter could not be the scholar of Arcangiolo, though such an idea is very prevalent; and he could give lessons only for a short time to his son, Ventura, or to Sorri, and Casolani, if the period of their birth is true.]

[Footnote 301: See letter 127 in vol. v. of _Lett. Pittor._, in which there is a catalogue of those painters.]

[Footnote 302: The idea that the brilliant colouring of the Venetian school was owing to the use of a peculiar vehicle for the colours, or a certain varnish, has been long entertained by artists and connoisseurs; and the opinion has been sanctioned by great names: yet it is highly probable that the great secret of the Venetian painters consisted not in vehicles nor in varnishes, but in employing mineral colours, and in laying them on the canvas as little mixed as possible. No colour derived from the vegetable kingdom will stand well when mixed with oil, and our best colours are composed of metallic oxides, or earthy bodies highly charged with those oxides. When colours are much mixed on the palette they become invariably muddy, and to him who aims at brilliancy of colouring no maxim is of greater consequence than _to keep his palette as clean as possible_. The use of transparent colours in the shadows is another great cause of brilliancy, and this cannot be obtained by the use of mixed colours. It is produced by what is called glazing, or laying transparent colours one over another. In nothing is the effect of glazing, in giving transparency, more obvious, than in the astonishing clearness of the skies and water in the works of the best Dutch artists.

That the magical effect of Kuyp's pictures is thus produced, I had an opportunity of knowing, from the blunder of a picture-cleaner, who thought he had made a great discovery when he found the _Rhine_ of a deep blue in a picture by this master; from which, along with the varnish, he had removed a thin coating of yellow, with which the blue was glazed over, to produce the beautiful greenish hue of the water.

(_Note by_ Dr. Traile.)]

[Footnote 303: Tom. i.]

[Footnote 304: His name alone survives in Perugia; though it is believed that one of his pictures remains in the church of S. Angelo Magno, at Ascoli, where the figure of S. Giovanni is ascribed by Lazzeri, in his _Ascoli in Prospettiva_, to one Giandomenico da Perugia, and the landscape to Gio. Francesco da Bologna, that is to say, to Grimaldi. The figure is in the Guercino taste, according to the opinion of Sig.

Orsini; but I cannot conceive how he or the Sig. Mariotti (p. 273) should not have remarked that it must be the production of Giandomenico Cerrini, of Perugia, contemporary with Grimaldi and Guercino, and not of that Domenico, the painter of wooden scenes, who lived about an age anterior to them.]

[Footnote 305: Lett. Pittoriche, tom. ii. p. 69.]

[Footnote 306: A few of the names that obtained least celebrity in Siena are pointed out by P. M. della Valle in the third volume of the Lettere Senesi, (p. 459,) among which are found Crescienzio Gamberelli Nasinesco, Deifobo Burbarini, a poor artist, Aurelio Martelli, called Il Mutolo, Gio. Batista Ramacciotti, a priest and connoisseur in painting; and the same may be said of Bernardino Fungai, and of the n.o.ble Marcello Loli, of Galgano Perpignano, with others of like merit, either omitted or slightly mentioned by Sig. Pecci. P. della Valle excuses himself from the task of treating of them in favor of happier writers, but as we do not pretend to aspire to that felicity, we shall leave others to avail themselves of the Father's liberality.]

END OF VOL. I.