The Mind of the Artist Part 18

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Raphael_ THE Ma.s.s OF BOLSENA (Detail) _Anderson_]

We shall end by adoring J. Dupre. I don't always like him, but he has individuality.

Too many painters, my dear fellow, and too many exhibitions! But you see, at my age, I'm not afraid of showing my pictures among the young men's sometimes.

Yet I hate exhibitions; one can hardly ever judge of a picture there.

_Alfred Stevens._

ITALIAN MASTERS

CCV

There is something ... in those deities of intellect in the Sistine Chapel that converts the n.o.blest personages of Raphael's drama into the audience of Michael Angelo, before whom you know that, equally with yourself, they would stand silent and awe-struck.

_Lawrence._

CCVI

My only disagreement with you would be in the estimate of his comparative excellence in sculpture and painting. He called himself sculptor, but we seldom gauge rightly our own strength and weakness. The paintings in the Sistine Chapel are to my mind entirely beyond criticism or praise, not merely with reference to design and execution, but also for colour, right n.o.ble and perfect in their place. I was never more surprised than by this quality, to which I do not think justice has ever been done; nothing in his sculpture comes near to the perfection of his Adam or the majesty of the Dividing the Light from Darkness; his sculpture lacks the serene strength that is found in the Adam and many other figures in the great frescoes. Dominated by the fierce spirit of Dante, he was less influenced by the grave dignity of the Greek philosophy and art than might have been expected from the contemporary and possible pupil of Poliziano. In my estimate of him as a Sculptor in comparison with him as Painter, I am likely to be in a minority of one!

but _I_ think that when he is thought of as a painter his earlier pictures are thought of, and these certainly are unworthy of him, but the Prophets and Sibyls are the greatest things ever painted. As a rule he certainly insists too much upon the anatomy; some one said admirably, "Learn anatomy, and forget it"; Michael Angelo did the first and not the second, and the fault of almost all his work is, that it is too much an anatomical essay. The David is an example of this, besides being very faulty in proportion, with hands and feet that are monstrous. It is, I think, altogether bad. The hesitating pose is good, and goes with the sullen expression of the face, but is not that of the ardent heroic boy!

This seems presumptuous criticism; and you might, considering my aspirations and efforts, say to me: "Do better!" but I am not Michael Angelo, but I am a pupil of the greatest sculptor of all, Pheidias (a master the great Florentine knew nothing of), and, so far, feel a right to set up judgment on the technique only.

_Watts._

CCVII

ITALIAN ART IN FLANDERS

As to Italian art, here at Brussels there is nothing but a reminiscence of it. It is an art which has been falsified by those who have tried to acclimatise it, and even the specimens of it which have pa.s.sed into Flanders lose by their new surroundings. When in a part of the gallery which is least Flemish, one sees two portraits by Tintoret, not of the first rank, sadly retouched, but typical--one finds it difficult to understand them side by side with Memling, Martin de Vos, Van Orley, Rubens, Van Dyck, and even Antonio More. It is the same with Veronese.

He is out of his element; his colour is lifeless, it smacks of the tempera painter; his style seems frigid, his magnificence unspontaneous and almost bombastic. Yet the picture is a superb piece, in his finest manner; a fragment of an allegorical triumph taken from a ceiling in the Ducal Palace, and one of his best; but Rubens is close by, and that is enough to give the Rubens of Venice an accent which is not of this country. Which of the two is right? And listening merely to the language so admirably spoken by the two men, who shall decide between the correct and learned rhetoric of Venetian speech, and the emphatic, warmly coloured, grandiose incorrectness of the Antwerp idiom? At Venice one leans to Veronese; in Flanders one has a better ear for Rubens.

Italian art has this in common with all powerful traditions, that it is at the same time very cosmopolitan because it has penetrated everywhere, and very lofty because it has been self-sufficient. It is at home, in all Europe, except in two countries; Belgium, the genius of which it has appreciably affected without ever dominating it; and Holland, which once made a show of consulting it but which has ended by pa.s.sing it by; so that, while it is on neighbourly terms with Spain, while it is enthroned in France, where, at least in historical painting, our best painters have been Romans, it encounters in Flanders two or three men, great men of a great race, sprung from the soil, who hold sway there and have no mind to share their empire with any other.

_Fromentin._

CCVIII

I am never tired of looking at t.i.tian's pictures; they possess such extreme breadth, which to me is so delightful a quality. In my opinion there never will, to the end of time, arise a portrait-painter superior to t.i.tian. Next to him in this kind of excellence is Raphael. There is this difference between Raphael and t.i.tian: Raphael, with all his excellence, possessed the utmost gentleness; it was as if he had said, "If another person can do better, _I_ have no objections." But t.i.tian was a man who would keep down every one else to the uttermost; he was determined that the art should come in and go out with himself; the expression in all the portraits of him told as much. When any stupendous work of antiquity remains with us--say, a building or a bridge--the common people cannot account for it, and they say it was erected _by the devil_. Now I feel this same thing in regard to the works of t.i.tian;--they seem to me as if painted by a devil, or at any rate from inspiration; I cannot account for them.

_Northcote._

NORTHERN MASTERS

CCIX

Raphael, to be plain with you--for I like to be candid and outspoken--does not please me at all. In Venice are found the good and the beautiful; to their brush I give the first place; it is t.i.tian that bears the banner.

_Velasquez._

CCX

Perhaps some day the world will discover that Rembrandt is a much greater painter than Raphael. I write this blasphemy--one to make the hair of the Cla.s.sicists stand on end--without definitely taking a side; only I seem to find as I grow older that the most beautiful and most rare thing in the world is truth.

Let us say, if you will, that Rembrandt has not Raphael's n.o.bility. Yet perhaps this n.o.bility which Raphael manifests in his line is shown by Rembrandt in the mysterious conception of his subjects, in the profound navete of his expressions and gestures. However much one may prefer the majestic emphasis of Raphael, which answers perhaps to the grandeur inherent in certain subjects, one might a.s.sert, without being stoned by men of taste--I mean men whose taste is real and sincere--that the great Dutchman was more a born painter than the studious pupil of Perugino.

_Delacroix._

CCXI

Rembrandt's principle was to extract from things one element among the rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to a.n.a.lyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects.

One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their "envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate them; but then, if he ignored grace and beauty, purity of line and the delicacy of the skin, he expressed the nude body by suggestions of suppleness, roundness, elasticity, with a love of material substance, a sense of the live being, which enchant the practical painter. He resolved everything into its component parts, colour as well as light, so that, by eliminating the complicated and condensing the scattered elements from a given scene, he succeeded in drawing without outline, in painting a portrait almost without strokes that show, in colouring without colour, in concentrating the light of the solar system into a sunbeam. It would be impossible in a plastic art to carry the curiosity for the essential to an intenser pitch. For physical beauty he subst.i.tutes expression of character; for the imitation of things, their almost complete transformation; for studious scrutiny, the speculation of the psychologist; for precise observation, whether trained or natural, the visions of a seer and apparitions of such vividness that he himself is deceived by them. By virtue of this faculty of second sight, of intuitions like those of a somnambulist, he sees farther into the supernatural world than any one else whatever. The life that he perceives in dream has a certain accent of the other world, which makes real life seem pale and almost cold. Look at his "Portrait of a Woman in the Louvre," two paces from "t.i.tian's Mistress." Compare the two women, study closely the two pictures, and you will understand the difference between the two brains. Rembrandt's ideal, sought as in a dream with closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosph.o.r.escence that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial painting, real beyond any other master's work, and able to hold its own with a Rubens, a t.i.tian, a Veronese, a Giorgione, a Van Dyck--this is Rembrandt's aim.

Has he succeeded? The testimony of the world answers for him.

_Fromentin._

CCXII

The painting of Flanders will generally satisfy any devout person more than the painting of Italy, which will never cause him to shed many tears; this is not owing to the vigour and goodness of that painting, but to the goodness of such devout person; women will like it, especially very old ones or very young ones. It will please likewise friars and nuns, and also some n.o.ble persons who have no ear for true harmony. They paint in Flanders, only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill, and saints and prophets. Their painting is of stuffs--bricks and mortar, the gra.s.s of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reasonableness or art, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting, and finally, without any substance or verve; and in spite of all this, painting in some other parts is worse than it is in Flanders. Neither do I speak so badly of Flemish painting because it is all bad, but because it tries to do so many things at once (each of which alone would suffice for a great work), so that it does not do anything really well.

Only works which are done in Italy can be called true painting, and therefore we call good painting Italian; for if it were done so well in another country, we should give it the name of that country or province. As for the good painting of this country, there is nothing more n.o.ble or devout; for with wise persons nothing causes devotion to be remembered, or to arise, more than the difficulty of the perfection which unites itself with and joins G.o.d; because good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of G.o.d and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty. This painting is so rare that few are capable of doing or attaining to it.

_Michael Angelo._

CCXIII

All Dutch painting is concave: what I mean is that it is composed of curves described about a point determined by the pictorial interest; circular shadows round a dominant light. Design, colouring, and lighting fall into a concave scheme, with a strongly defined base, a retreating ceiling, and corners rounded and converging on the centre; whence it follows that the painting is all depth, and that it is far from the eye to the objects represented. No type of painting leads with more certain directness from the foreground to the background, from the frame to the horizon. One can live in it, walk in it, see to the uttermost ends of it; one is tempted to raise one's head to measure the distance of the sky. Everything conspires to this illusion: the exactness of the aerial perspective, the perfect harmony of colour and tones with the plane on which the object is placed. The rendering of the heights of s.p.a.ce, of the envelope of atmosphere, of the distant effect, which absorbs this school makes the painting of all other schools seem flat, something laid upon the surface of the canvas.

_Fromentin._

CCXIV