The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance Part 2

Bonifazio's pupil, Jacopo Ba.s.sano, no less fond of painting country scenes, did not however confine himself to representing city people in their parks. His pictures were for the inhabitants of the small market-town from which he takes his name, where inside the gates you still see men and women in rustic garb crouching over their many-coloured wares; and where, just outside the walls, you may see all the ordinary occupations connected with farming and grazing. Inspired, although unawares, by the new idea of giving perfectly modern versions of biblical stories, Ba.s.sano introduced into nearly every picture he painted episodes from the life in the streets of Ba.s.sano, and in the county just outside the gates. Even Orpheus in his hands becomes a farmer's lad fiddling to the barnyard fowls.

Ba.s.sano's pictures and those of his two sons, who followed him very closely, found great favour in Venice and elsewhere, because they were such unconscious renderings of simple country life, a kind of life whose charm seemed greater and greater the more fashionable and ceremonious private life in the city became. But this was far from being their only charm. Just as the Church had educated people to understand painting as a language, so the love of all the pleasant things that painting suggested led in time to the love of this art as its own end, serving no obvious purpose either of decoration or suggestion, but giving pleasure by the skilful management of light and shadow, and by the intrinsic beauty of the colours. The third quarter of the sixteenth century thus saw the rise of the picture-fancier, and the success of the Ba.s.sani was so great because they appealed to this cla.s.s in a special way. In Venice there had long been a love of objects for their sensuous beauty.

At an early date the Venetians had perfected an art in which there is scarcely any intellectual content whatever, and in which colour, jewel-like or opaline, is almost everything. Venetian gla.s.s was at the same time an outcome of the Venetians' love of sensuous beauty and a continual stimulant to it. Pope Paul II., for example, who was a Venetian, took such a delight in the colour and glow of jewels, that he was always looking at them and always handling them. When painting, accordingly, had reached the point where it was no longer dependent upon the Church, nor even expected to be decorative, but when it was used purely for pleasure, the day could not be far distant when people would expect painting to give them the same enjoyment they received from jewels and gla.s.s. In Ba.s.sano's works this taste found full satisfaction.

Most of his pictures seem at first as dazzling, then as cooling and soothing, as the best kind of stained gla.s.s; while the colouring of details, particularly of those under high lights, is jewel-like, as clear and deep and satisfying as rubies and emeralds.

It need scarcely be added after all that has been said about light and atmosphere in connection with t.i.tian and Tintoretto, and their handling of real life, that Ba.s.sano's treatment of both was even more masterly.

If this were not so, neither picture-fanciers of his own time, nor we nowadays, should care for his works as we do. They represent life in far more humble phases than even the pictures of Tintoretto, and, without recompensing effects of light and atmosphere, they would not be more enjoyable than the cheap work of the smaller Dutch masters. It must be added, too, that without his jewel-like colouring, Ba.s.sano would often be no more delightful than Teniers.

Another thing Ba.s.sano could not fail to do, working as he did in the country, and for country people, was to paint landscape. He had to paint the real country, and his skill in the treatment of light and atmosphere was great enough to enable him to do it well. Ba.s.sano was in fact the first modern landscape painter. t.i.tian and Tintoretto and Giorgione, and even Bellini and Cima before them, had painted beautiful landscapes, but they were seldom direct studies from nature. They were decorative backgrounds, or fine harmonising accompaniments to the religious or human elements of the picture. They never failed to get grand and effective lines--a setting worthy of the subject. Ba.s.sano did not need such setting for his country versions of Bible stories, and he needed them even less in his studies of rural life. For pictures of this kind the country itself naturally seemed the best background and the best accompaniment possible,--indeed, the only kind desirable. Without knowing it, therefore, and without intending it, Ba.s.sano was the first Italian who tried to paint the country as it really is, and not arranged to look like scenery.

=XXII. The Venetians and Velasquez.=--Had Ba.s.sano's qualities, however, been of the kind that appealed only to the collectors of his time, he would scarcely rouse the strong interest we take in him. We care for him chiefly because he has so many of the more essential qualities of great art--truth to life, and spontaneity. He has another interest still, in that he began to beat out the path which ended at last in Velasquez.

Indeed, one of the attractions of the Venetian school of painting is that, more than all others, it went to form that great Spanish master.

He began as a sort of follower of Ba.s.sano, but his style was not fixed before he had given years of study to Veronese, to Tintoretto, and to t.i.tian.

=XXIII. Decline of Venetian Art.=--Ba.s.sano appealed to collectors by mere accident. He certainly did not work for them. The painters who came after him and after Tintoretto no longer worked unconsciously, as Veronese did, nor for the whole intelligent cla.s.s, as t.i.tian and Tintoretto had done, but for people who prided themselves on their connoisseurship.

Palma the Younger and Domenico Tintoretto began well enough as natural followers of Tintoretto, but before long they became aware of their inferiority to the masters who had preceded them, and, feeling no longer the strength to go beyond them, fell back upon painting variations of those pictures of Tintoretto and t.i.tian which had proved most popular.

So their works recall the great masters, but only to bring out their own weakness. Padovanino, Liberi, and Pietro della Vecchia went even lower down and shamelessly manufactured pictures which, in the distant markets for which they were intended, pa.s.sed for works of t.i.tian, Veronese, and Giorgione. Nor are these pictures altogether unenjoyable. There are airs by the great composers we so love that we enjoy them even when woven into the compositions of some third-rate master.

=XXIV. Longhi.=--But Venetian painting was not destined to die unnoticed.

In the eighteenth century, before the Republic entirely disappeared, Venice produced three or four painters who deserve at the least a place with the best painters of that century. The const.i.tution of the Venetian State had remained unchanged. Magnificent ceremonies still took place, Venice was still the most splendid and the most luxurious city in the world. If the splendour and luxury were hollow, they were not more so than elsewhere in Europe. The eighteenth century had the strength which comes from great self-confidence and profound satisfaction with one's surroundings. It was so self-satisfied that it could not dream of striving to be much better than it was. Everything was just right; there seemed to be no great issues, no problems arising that human intelligence untrammelled by superst.i.tion could not instantly solve.

Everybody was therefore in holiday mood, and the gaiety and frivolity of the century were of almost as much account as its politics and culture.

There was no room for great distinctions. Hair-dressers and tailors found as much consideration as philosophers and statesmen at a lady's levee. People were delighted with their own occupations, their whole lives; and whatever people delight in, that they will have represented in art. The love for pictures was by no means dead in Venice, and Longhi painted for the picture-loving Venetians their own lives in all their ordinary domestic and fashionable phases. In the hair-dressing scenes we hear the gossip of the periwigged barber; in the dressmaking scenes, the chatter of the maid; in the dancing-school, the pleasant music of the violin. There is no tragic note anywhere. Everybody dresses, dances, makes bows, takes coffee, as if there were nothing else in the world that wanted doing. A tone of high courtesy, of great refinement, coupled with an all-pervading cheerfulness, distinguishes Longhi's pictures from the works of Hogarth, at once so brutal and so full of presage of change.

=XXV. Ca.n.a.letto and Guardi.=--Venice herself had not grown less beautiful in her decline. Indeed, the building which occupies the very centre of the picture Venice leaves in the mind, the Salute, was not built until the seventeenth century. This was the picture that the Venetian himself loved to have painted for him, and that the stranger wanted to carry away. Ca.n.a.le painted Venice with a feeling for s.p.a.ce and atmosphere, with a mastery over the delicate effects of mist peculiar to the city, that make his views of the Salute, the Grand Ca.n.a.l, and the Piazzetta still seem more like Venice than all the pictures of them that have been painted since. Later in the century Ca.n.a.le was followed by Guardi, who executed smaller views with more of an eye for the picturesque, and for what may be called instantaneous effects, thus antic.i.p.ating both the Romantic and the Impressionist painters of our own century.

=XXVI. Tiepolo.=--But delightful as Longhi, Ca.n.a.le, and Guardi are, and imbued as they are with the spirit of their own century, they lack the quality of force, without which there can be no really impressive style.

This quality their contemporary Tiepolo possessed to the utmost. His energy, his feeling for splendour, his mastery over his craft, place him almost on a level with the great Venetians of the sixteenth century, although he never allows one to forget what he owes to them, particularly to Veronese. The grand scenes he paints differ from those of his predecessor not so much in mere inferiority of workmanship, as in a lack of that simplicity and candour which never failed Paolo, no matter how proud the event he might be portraying. Tiepolo's people are haughty, as if they felt that to keep a firm hold on their dignity they could not for a moment relax their faces and figures from a monumental look and bearing. They evidently feel themselves so superior that they are not pleasant to live with, although they carry themselves so well, and are dressed with such splendour, that once in a while it is a great pleasure to look at them. It was Tiepolo's vision of the world that was at fault, and his vision of the world was at fault only because the world itself was at fault. Paolo saw a world touched only by the fashions of the Spanish Court, while Tiepolo lived among people whose very hearts had been vitiated by its measureless haughtiness.

But Tiepolo's feeling for strength, for movement, and for colour was great enough to give a new impulse to art. At times he seems not so much the last of the old masters as the first of the new. The works he left in Spain do more than a little to explain the revival of painting in that country under Goya; and Goya, in his turn, had a great influence upon many of the best French artists of our own times.

=XXVII. Influence of Venetian Art.=--Thus, Venetian painting before it wholly died, flickered up again strong enough to light the torch that is burning so steadily now. Indeed, not the least attraction of the Venetian masters is their note of modernity, by which I mean the feeling they give us that they were on the high road to the art of to-day. We have seen how on two separate occasions Venetian painters gave an impulse to Spaniards, who in turn have had an extraordinary influence on modern painting. It would be easy, too, although it is not my purpose, to show how much other schools of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the Flemish, led by Rubens, and the English led by Reynolds, owed to the Venetians. My endeavour has been to explain some of the attractions of the school, and particularly to show its close dependence upon the thought and feeling of the Renaissance. This is perhaps its greatest interest, for being such a complete expression of the riper spirit of the Renaissance, it helps us to a larger understanding of a period which has in itself the fascination of youth, and which is particularly attractive to us, because the spirit that animates us is singularly like the better spirit of that epoch. We, too, are possessed of boundless curiosity. We, too, have an almost intoxicating sense of human capacity. We, too, believe in a great future for humanity, and nothing has yet happened to check our delight in discovery or our faith in life.

INDEX TO THE WORKS OF THE PRINc.i.p.aL VENETIAN PAINTERS.

NOTE.

Public galleries are mentioned first, then private collections, and churches last. The princ.i.p.al public gallery is always understood after the simple mention of a city or town. Thus, Paris means Paris, Louvre, London means London, National Gallery, etc.

An interrogation point after the number or t.i.tle of a picture indicates that its attribution to the given painter is doubtful.

Distinctly early or late works are marked E. or L.

It need scarcely be said that the attributions here given are not based on official catalogues, and are often at variance with them.

ANTONELLO DA MESSINA.

=B.= Circa 1444: d. circa 1493. Began under unknown Flemish painter; influenced by the Vivarini and Bellini.

=Antwerp.= 4. Crucifixion, 1475.

=Bergamo.= LOCHIS, 222. St. Sebastian.

=Berlin.= 18. Portrait of Young Man, 1478.

18A. Portrait of Young Man, 1474.

25. Portrait of Young Man in Red Coat.

=Dresden.= 52. St. Sebastian.

=London.= 673. The Saviour, 1465.

1141. Portrait of Man.

1166. Crucifixion, 1477.

1418. St. Jerome in his Study.

=Messina.= Madonna with SS. Gregory and Benedict, 1473.

=Milan.= MUSEO CIVICO, 95. Portrait of Man wearing Wreath.

PRINCE TRIVULZIO, Portrait of Man, 1476.

=Naples.= SALA GRANDE, 16. Portrait of Man.

=Paris.= 1134. Condottiere, 1474.

=Rome.= VILLA BORGHESE, 396. Portrait of Man.

=Venice.= ACADEMY, 589. Ecce h.o.m.o.

GIOVANELLI, Portrait of Man.

=Vicenza.= SALA IV, 17. Christ at Column.

JACOPO DI BARBARI.

1450 circa-1516 circa. Pupil of Alvise Vivarini; influenced by Antonello da Messina.

=Augsburg.= Still Life Piece, 1504.

=Bergamo.= GALLERY LOCHIS, 147, 148. Heads of Young Men.