The Venetian School of Painting Part 12

BONIFAZIO AND PARIS BORDONE

Some uncertainty has existed as to the ident.i.ty of the different members of the family of Bonifazio. All the early historians agree in giving the name to one master only. Boschini, however, in 1777 discovered the register of the death of a second, and a third bearing the name was working twenty years later. Upon this Dr. Morelli came to the conclusion that we must recognise three, if not four, masters bearing the name of Bonifazio, but doc.u.ments recently discovered by Professor Ludwig have in great measure destroyed Morelli's conjectures. There may have been obscure painters bearing the name, but they were mere imitators, and it is doubtful if any were related to the family of de Pitatis.

Bonifazio Veronese is really the only one who counts. As Ridolfi says, he was born in Verona in the most beautiful moment of painting. He came to Venice at the age of eighteen, and became a pupil of Palma Vecchio, with whom his work has sometimes been confused. After Palma's death Bonifazio continued in friendly relations with his old master's family, and his niece married Palma's nephew. Bonifazio himself married the daughter of a basket-maker, and appears to have had no children, for he and his wife by their wills bestowed their whole fortune on their nephews. Antonio Palma, who married Bonifazio's niece, was a painter whose pictures have sometimes been attributed to the legendary third Bonifazio. Bonifazio's life was pa.s.sed peacefully in Venice. He received many important commissions from the Republic, and decorated the Palace of the Treasurers. His character and standing were high, and he was appointed, in company with t.i.tian and Lotto, to administer a legacy which Vincenzo Catena had left to provide a yearly dower for five maidens. After a long life spent in steady work, Bonifazio withdrew to a little farm amidst orchards--fifteen acres of land in all--at San Zenone, near Asolo; but he still kept his house in San Marcuola, where he died. He was buried in S. Alvise in Venice.

A son of the plains and of Venetian stock, his work is always graceful and attractive, though inclined to be hot in colour. It has a very p.r.o.nounced aristocratic character, and bears no trace of the rough, provincial strain of such men as Cariani or Pordenone. It is very fine and glowing in colour, but lacks vigour and energy in design. Nowhere do we get more worldly magnificence or such frank worship of wealth as on Bonifazio's joyous canvases. He represents Christian saints and Eastern kings alike, as gentlemen of princely rank. There is a note of purely secular art about his Adorations and Holy Families. In the "Adoration of the Magi," in the Academy, the Madonna is a handsome, prosperous lady of Bonifazio's acquaintance. The Child, so far from raising His hand in benediction, holds it out for the proffered cup. He does not, as usual, distinguish the eldest king, but singles out the cup held by the second, who, in a puffed velvet dress, is an evident portrait, probably that of the donor of the picture, who is in this way paid a courtier-like compliment. The third king is such a Moor as Bonifazio must often have seen embarking from his Eastern galley on the Riva dei Schiavoni. A servant in a peaked hood peers round the column to catch sight of what is going on. The groups of animals in the background are well rendered.

In the "Rich Man's Feast," where Lazarus lies upon the step, we have another scene of wealthy and sumptuous Venetian society, an orgy of colour. And, again, in the "Finding of Moses" (Brera) he paints n.o.bles playing the lute, making love and feasting, and lovely fair-haired women listening complacently. We are reminded of the way in which they lived: their one preoccupation the toilet, the delight of appearing in public in the latest and most magnificent fashions. And in these paintings Bonifazio depicts the elaborate striped and brocaded gowns in which the beautiful Venetians arrayed themselves, made in the very fashions of the year, and their thick, fair hair is twisted and coiled in the precise mode of the moment. The deep-red velvet he introduces into nearly all his pictures is of a hue peculiar to himself. As Catena often brings in a little white lap-dog, so Bonifazio constantly has as an accessory a liver-and-white spaniel.

Vasari speaks of Paris Bordone as the artist who most successfully imitated t.i.tian. He was the son of well-to-do tradespeople in Treviso, and received a good education in music and letters, before being sent off to Venice and placed in t.i.tian's studio. Bordone does not seem to have been on very friendly terms with t.i.tian. He was dissatisfied with his teaching, and t.i.tian played him an ill turn in wresting from him a commission to paint an altarpiece which had been entrusted to him when he was only eighteen. He was, above all, in love with the manner of the dead Giorgione, and it was upon this master that he aspired to form his style. His masterpiece, in the Academy, was painted for the Confraternity of St. Mark, and made his reputation. The legend it represents may be given in a few words:

In the days of Doge Gradenigo, one February, there arose a fearful storm in Venice. During the height of the tempest, three men accosted a poor old fisherman, who was lying in his decayed old boat by the Piazza, and begged that he would row them to S. Niccolo del Lido, where they had urgent business. After some demur they persuaded him to take the oars, and in spite of the hurricane, the voyage was accomplished. On reaching the sh.o.r.e they pointed out to him a great ship, the crew of which he perceived to consist of a band of demons, who were stirring up the waves and making a great hubbub. The three pa.s.sengers laid their commands on them to desist, when immediately they sailed away and there was a calm.

The pa.s.sengers then made the oarsman row them, one to S. Niccolo, one to S. Giorgio, and the third was rowed back to the Piazza. The fisherman timidly asked for his fare, and the third pa.s.senger desired him to go to the Doge and ask for payment, telling him that by that night's work a great disaster had been averted from the city. The fisherman replied that he should not be believed, but would be imprisoned as a liar. Then the pa.s.senger drew a ring from his finger. "Show him this for a sign,"

he said, "and know that one of those you have this night rowed is S.

Niccolas, the other is S. George, and I am S. Mark the Evangelist, Protector of the Venetian Republic." He then disappeared. The next day the fisherman presented the ring, and was a.s.signed a provision for life from the Senate.

There has, perhaps, never been a richer and more beautiful subject-picture painted than this glowing canvas, or one which brings more vividly before us the magnificence of the pageants which made such a part of Venetian life in the golden age of painting. It is all strength and splendour, and escapes the hectic colour and weaker type which appear in Bordone's "Last Supper" and some of his other works. In 1538 he went to France and entered the service of Francis II., painting for him many portraits of ladies, besides works for the Cardinals of Guise and of Lorraine. The King of Poland sent to him for a "Jupiter and Antiope." At Augsburg he was paid 3000 crowns for work done for the great Fugger family.

No one gives us so closely as Bordone the type of woman who at this time was most admired in Venice. The Venetian ideal was golden haired, with full lips, fair, rosy cheeks, large limbed and ample, with "abundant flanks and snow-white breast." A type glowing with health and instinct with life, but, to say the truth, rather dull, without deep pa.s.sions, and with no look that reveals profound emotions or the struggle of a soul. From what we see of Bordone's female portraits and from some of the mythological compositions he has left, he might have been among the most sensually minded of men. His beautiful courtesan, in the National Gallery, is an almost over-realistic presentment of a woman who has just parted from her lover. His women, with their carnation cheeks and expressionless faces, are like beautiful animals; but, as a matter of fact, their painter was sober and temperate in his life, very industrious, and devoted to his widowed mother. About 1536 he married the daughter of a Venetian citizen, and had a son, who became one of the many insignificant painters of the end of the sixteenth century. Most of his days were divided between his little Villa of Lovadina in the district of Belluno, and his modest home in the Corte dell' Cavallo near the Misericordia. "He lives comfortably in his quiet house," writes Vasari, who certainly knew Bordone in Venice, "working only at the request of princes, or his friends, avoiding all rivalry and those vain ambitions which do but disturb the repose of man, and seeking to avert any ruffling of the serene tranquillity of his life, which he is accustomed to preserve simple and upright."

Many of his pictures show an intense love of country solitudes. His poetic backgrounds, lonely mountains, leafy woods, and sparkling water are in curious contrast to the sumptuous groups in the foreground.

His "Three Heads," in the Brera, is a superb piece of painting and an interesting characterisation. The woman is ripe, sensual, and calculating, feeling with her fingers for the gold chain, a mere golden-fleshed, rose-flushed hireling, solid and prosaic. The go-between is dimly seen in the background, but the face of the suitor is a strange, ironic study: past youth, worn, joyless, and bitter, taking his pleasure mechanically and with cynical detachment. The "Storm calmed by S. Mark" (Academy) was, in Mr. Berenson's opinion, begun by Giorgione.

Rich, brilliant, and essentially Venetian as is the work of these two painters, it does not reach the highest level. It falls short of grandeur, and has that worldly tone that borders on vulgarity. As we study it we feel that it marks the point to which Venetian art might have attained, the flood-mark it might have touched, if it had lacked the advent of the three or four great spirits, who, appearing about the same time, bore it up to sublimer heights and developed a more distinguished range of qualities. Bonifazio and Bordone lack the grandeur and sweetness of t.i.tian, the brilliant touch and imaginative genius of Tintoretto, the matchless feeling for colour, design, and decoration of Veronese, but they continue Venetian painting on logical lines, and they form a superb foundation for the highest.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS

_Bonifazio Veronese._

Dresden. Finding of Moses.

Florence. Pitti: Madonna; S. Elizabeth and Donor (E.); Rest in Flight into Egypt; Finding of Moses.

Hampton Court. Santa Conversazione.

London. Santa Conversazione (E.).

Milan. Brera: Finding of Moses.

Paris. Santa Conversazione.

Rome. Villa Borghese: Mother of Zebedee's Children; Return of the Prodigal Son.

Colonna: Holy Family with Saints.

Venice. Academy: Rich Man's Feast; Ma.s.sacre of Innocents; Judgment of Solomon, 1533; Adoration of Kings.

Giovanelli: Santa Conversazione.

Vienna. Santa Conversazione; Triumph of Love; Triumph of Chast.i.ty; Salome.

_Paris Bordone._

Bergamo. Lochis: Vintage Scenes.

Berlin. Portrait of Man in Black; Chess Players; Madonna and four Saints.

Dresden. Apollo and Marsyas; Diana; Holy Family.

Florence. Pitti: Portrait of Woman.

Genoa. Brignole Sale: Portraits of Men; Santa Conversazione.

Hampton Court. Madonna and Donors.

London. Daphnis and Chloe; Portrait of Lady.

Bridgewater House: Holy Family.

Milan. Brera: Descent of Holy Spirit; Baptism; S. Dominio presented to the Saviour by Virgin; Madonna and Saints; Venal Love.

S. Maria pr. Celso: Madonna and S. Jerome.

Munich. Portrait; Man counting Jewels.

Paris. Portraits.

Rome. Colonna: Holy Family and Saints.

Treviso. Madonna and Saints.

Duomo: Adoration of Shepherds; Madonna and Saints.

Venice. Academy: Fisherman and Doge; Paradise; Storm calmed by S. Mark.

Palazzo Ducale Chapel: Dead Christ.

Giovanelli: Madonna and Saints.

S. Giovanni in Bragora; Last Supper.

Vienna. Allegorical Pictures; Lady at Toilet; Young Woman.

CHAPTER XXIII

PAINTERS OF THE VENETIAN PROVINCES

It has become usual to include in the Venetian School those artists from the subject provinces on the mainland, who came down to try their luck at the fountain-head and to receive its hallmark on their talent. The Friulan cities, Udine, Serravalle, and small neighbouring towns, had their own primitive schools and their scores of humble craftsmen. Their art wavered for some time in its expression between the German taste, which came so close to their gates, and the Italian, which was more truly their element.

Up to 1499 Friuli was invaded seven times in thirty years by the Turks. They poured in large numbers over the Bosnian borders, crossed the Isonzo and the Tagliamenta, and ma.s.sacred and carried off the inhabitants. These terrible periods are marked by the cessation of work in the provinces, but hope always revived again. The break caused by such a visitation can be distinctly traced in the Church of S. Antonino, at the little town of San Daniele. Martino da Udine obtained the epithet of Pellegrino da San Daniele in 1494 when he returned from an early visit to Venice, where he had been apprenticed to Cima. He was appointed to decorate S. Antonino. His early work there is hard and coa.r.s.e, ill-drawn, the figures unwieldy and shapeless, and the colour dusky and uniform; but owing to the Turkish raid, he had to take flight, and it was many a year before the monks gained sufficient courage and saved enough money to continue the embellishment of their church. In the meantime, Pellegrino's years had been spent partly in Venice and partly, perhaps, in Ferrara, for the reason Raphael gave for refusing to paint a "Bacchus" for the Duke, was that the subject had already been painted by Pellegrino da San Daniele. When Pellegrino resumed his work, it demonstrated that he had studied the modern Venetians and had come under a finer, deeper influence. A St. George in armour suggests Giorgione's S. Liberale at Castelfranco; he specially shows an affinity with Pordenone, who was his pupil and who was to become a better painter than his old master. As Pellegrino goes on he improves consistently, and adopts the method, so peculiarly Venetian, of sacrificing form to a scheme of chiaroscuro. He even, to some extent, succeeds in his difficult task of applying to wall painting the system which the Venetians used almost exclusively for easel pictures. He was an ambitious, daring painter, and some of his church standards were for long attributed to Giorgione. The church of San Antonino remains his chief monument; but for all his travels Pellegrino remains provincial in type, is unlucky in his selection, cares little for precision of form, and trusts to colour for effect.

The same transition in art was taking place in other provinces. Morto da Feltre, Pennacchi, and Girolamo da Treviso have all left work of a Giorgionesque type, and some painters who went far onward, began their career under such minor masters. Giovanni Antonio Licinio, who takes his name from his native town of Pordenone, in Friuli, was one of these. All the early part of his life was spent in painting frescoes in the small towns of the Friulan provinces. At first they bear signs of the tuition of Pellegrino, but it soon becomes evident that Pordenone has learned to imitate Giorgione and Palma. Quite early, however, one of his chief failings appears, and one which is all his own, the disparity in size between his various figures. The secondary personages, the Magi in a Nativity, the Saints standing round an altar, are larger and more athletic in build and often more animated in action than the princ.i.p.al actors in the scene. What pleased Pordenone's contemporaries was his daring perspective and his instinctive feeling for movement. He carried out great schemes in the hill-towns, till at length his reputation, which had long been ripe in his native province, reached Venice. In 1519 he was invited to Treviso to fresco the facade of a house for one of the Raviguino family. The painter, as payment, asked fifty scudi, and t.i.tian was called in to adjudicate, but he admired the work so much that he hinted to Raviguino that he would be wise not to press him for a valuation. As a direct consequence of this piece of business, Pordenone was employed on the chapel at Treviso, in conjunction with t.i.tian. At this time the a.s.sumption and the Madonna of Casa Pesaro were just finished, and it is probable that Pordenone paid his first visit to Venice, hard by, and saw his great contemporary's work. With his characteristic distaste for fresco, t.i.tian undertook the altarpiece and painted the beautiful Annunciation which still holds its place, and Pordenone covered the dome with a foreshortened figure of the Eternal Father, surrounded by angels. Among the remaining frescoes in the Chapel, an Adoration of the Magi and a S. Liberale are from his brush.

Fired by his success at Treviso, Pordenone offered his services to Mantua and Cremona, but the Mantovans, accustomed to the stately and restrained grace of Mantegna, would have nothing to say to what Crowe and Cavalcaselle call his "large and colossal fable-painting." He pursued his way to Cremona, and that he studied Mantegna as he pa.s.sed through Mantua is evident from the first figures he painted in the cathedral. In Cremona every one admired him, and all the artists set to work to imitate his energetic foreshortening, vehement movement and huge proportions.

Pordenone, with his love for fresco, was all his life an itinerant painter. In 1521 he was back at Udine and wandered from place to place, painting a vast distemper for the organ doors at S. Maria at Spilimbergo, the facade of the Church of Valeriano, an imposing series at Travesio, and in 1525, the "Story of the True Cross" at Casara. At the last place he threw aside much of his exaggeration, and, ruined and restored as the frescoes are, they remain among his most dignified achievements. He may be studied best of all at Piacenza, in the Church of the Madonna di Campagna, where he divides his subjects between sacred and pagan, so that we turn from a "Flight into Egypt" or a "Marriage of S. Catherine," to the "Rape of Europa" or "Venus and Adonis." At Piacenza he shows himself the great painter he undoubtedly is, having achieved some mastery over form, while his colour has the true Venetian quality and almost equals oils in its luscious tones and vivid hues, which he lowers and enriches by such enveloping shadows as only one whose spirit was in touch with the art of Giorgione would have understood how to use. Very complete records remain of Pordenone's life, full details of a quarrel with his brother over property left by his father in 1533, and accounts of the painter's negotiations to obtain a knighthood, which he fancied would place him more on a par with t.i.tian when he went to live in Venice. The coveted honour was secured, but from this time he seems to have been very jealous of t.i.tian and to have aimed continually at rivalling him. Pordenone was a punctual and rapid decorator, and on being given the ceiling of the Sala di San Finio to decorate in the summer of 1536, he finished the whole by March 1538. We have seen how t.i.tian annoyed the Signoria by his delays, how anxious they were to transfer his commission to Pordenone, and what a narrow escape the Venetian had of losing his Broker's patent. Pordenone was engaged by the nuns of Murano to paint an Annunciation, after they had rejected one by t.i.tian on account of its price, and though it seems hardly possible that any one could have compared the two men, yet no doubt the pleasure of getting an altarpiece quickly and punctually and for a moderate sum, often outweighed the honour of the possible painting by the great t.i.tian.

No one has left so few easel-paintings as Pordenone; fresco was so much better suited to his particular style. The canvas of the "Madonna of Mercy" in the Venice Academy, was painted about 1525 for a member of the house of Ottobono, and introduces seven members of the family. It is very free from his colossal, exaggerated manner; the attendant saints are studied from nature, and in his journals the painter mentions that the St. Roch is a portrait of himself. The "S. Lorenzo enthroned," in the same gallery, shows both his virtues and failings. The saints have his enormous proportions. The Baptist is twisting round, to display the foreshortening which Pordenone particularly affects. The gestures are empty and inexpressive, but the colour is broad and fluid; there is a large sense of decoration in the composition, and something simple and austere about the figure of S. Lorenzo. As is so often the case with Pordenone, the princ.i.p.al actor of the scene is smaller and more sincerely imagined than the attendant personages, who are crowded into the foreground, where they are used to display the master's skill.

Pordenone died suddenly at Ferrara, where he had been summoned by its Duke to undertake one of his great schemes of decoration. He was said to have been poisoned, but though he had jealous rivals there seems no proof of the truth of the a.s.sertion, which was one very commonly made in those days. He is interesting as being the only distinguished member of the Venetian School whose frescoes have come down to us in any number, and as being the only one of the later masters with whom it was the chosen medium.

His kinsman, Bernardino Licinio, is represented in the National Gallery by a half-length of a young man in black, and at Hampton Court by a large family group and by another of three persons gathered round a spinet. His masterpiece is a Madonna and Saints in the Frari, which shows the influence of Palma. His flesh tints, striving to be rich, have a hot, red look, but his works have been constantly confounded with those of Giorgione and Paris Bordone.

A long list might be given of minor artists who were industriously turning out work on similar lines to one or other of these masters: Calderari, who imitates Paris Bordone as well as Pordenone; Pomponio Amalteo, Pordenone's son-in-law, a spirited painter in fresco; Florigerio, who practised at Udine and Padua, and of whom an altarpiece remains in the Academy; Giovanni Battista Gra.s.si, who helped Vasari to compile his notices of Friulan art, and many others only known by name.

At the close of the fifteenth century the revulsion against Paduan art extended as far as Brescia, and Girolamo Romanino was one of the first to acquire the trick of Venetian painting. He probably studied for a time under Friulan painters. Pellegrino is thought to have been at Brescia or Bergamo during the Friulan disturbances of 1506-12, and about 1510 Romanino emerges, a skilled artist in Pellegrino's Palmesque manner. His works at this time are dark and glowing, full of warm light and deep shadow; the scene is often laid under arches, after the manner of the Vivarini and Cima; a gorgeous scheme of accessory is framed in n.o.ble architecture.

Brescia was an opulent city, second only to Milan among the towns of northern Italy, and Romanino obtained plenty of patronage; but in 1511 the city fell a prey to the horrors of war, was taken and lost by Venice, and in 1512 was sacked by the French. Romanino fled to Padua, where he found a home among the Benedictines of S. Giustina. Here he was soon well employed on an altarpiece with life-size figures for the high altar, and a "Last Supper" for the refectory. It is also surmised that he helped in the series for the Scuola del Santo, for several of which t.i.tian in 1511 had signed a receipt, and the "Death of St. Anthony" is pointed out as showing the Brescian characteristics of fine colour, but poor drawing.

Romanino returned to Brescia when the Venetians recovered it in 1516, but before doing so he went to Cremona and painted four subjects, which are among his most effective, in the choir of the Duomo.

He is not so daring a painter as Pordenone, from whom he sometimes borrows ideas, but he is quite a convert to the modern style of the day, setting his groups in large s.p.a.ces and using the slashed doublets, the long hose, and plumed headgear which Giorgione had found so picturesque.