The Venetian School of Painting Part 2

_Pisanello._

Padua. S. Anastasia: St. George and the Dragon.

Verona. S. Fermo: Annunciation.

London. S. George and S. Jerome; S. Eustace and the Stag.

CHAPTER IV

THE SCHOOL OF MURANO

The important little town of Murano, a satellite of Venice, lies upon an island, some ten minutes' row from the mother State, distinct from which it preserved separate interests and regulations. Its gla.s.s manufacture was safeguarded by the most stringent decrees, which forbade members of the Guild to leave the islet under pain of death. Its mosaics, stone work, and architecture speak of an early artistic existence, and we recognise the justice of the claim of Muranese painters to be the first to strike out into a more emanc.i.p.ated type than that of the primitives.

The painter Giovanni of Murano, called Giovanni Alema.n.u.s or d' Alemagna, names between which Venetian jealousy for a time drew an imaginary distinction, had certainly received his early education in Germany, and betrays it by his heavier ornamentation and more Gothic style; but he was a fellow-worker with Antonio of Murano, the founder of the great Vivarini family, and the Academy contains several large altarpieces in which they collaborated. "Christ and the Virgin in Glory" was painted for a church in Venice in 1440, and has an inscription with both names on a banderol across the foreground. The Eternal Father, with His hands on the shoulders of the Mother and Son, makes a group of which we find the origin in Gentile da Fabriano's altarpiece in the Brera, and it is probable that one if not both masters had been studying with the Umbrian and absorbing the principles he had brought to Venice. It is easy to trace the influence of Giovanni d' Alemagna, though not always easy to pick out which part of a picture belongs to him and which to Antonio working under his influence. In S. Pantaleone is a "Coronation of the Virgin," with Gothic ornaments such as are not found in purely Italian art at this period, but the example in which both masters can be most closely followed is the great picture in the Academy, the "Madonna enthroned," where she sits under a baldaquin surrounded by saints. Here the Gothic surroundings become very florid, and have a gingerbread-cake effect, which Italian taste would hardly have tolerated. Many features are characteristic of the German; the huge crown worn by the Mother, the floriated ornament of the quadrangle, the almost baroque appearance of the throne. Through it all, heavily repainted as it is, shines the dawn of the tender expression which came into Venetian art with Gentile.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Antonio da Murano._ ADORATION OF THE MAGI.

_Berlin._ (_Photo, Hanfstangl._)]

Giovanni d' Alemagna and Antonio da Murano were no doubt widely employed, and when the former died Antonio founded and carried on a real school in Venice. In 1446 he was living in the parish of S. Maria Formosa with his wife, who was the daughter of a fruit merchant, and the wills of both are still preserved in the parish archives. Gentile da Fabriano had set the example for gorgeous processions with gay dresses and strange animals; winding paths in the background and foreshortened limbs prove that attention had been drawn to Paolo Uccello's studies in perspective, while many figures and horses recall Pisanello. A striking proof of the sojourn of Gentile and Pisanello in Venice is found in an "Adoration of Magi," now ascribed to Antonio da Murano, in which the central group, the oldest king kissing the Child's foot, is very like that in Gentile's "Adoration," but the foreshortened horses and the attendants argue the painter's knowledge of Pisanello's work. A comparison of the architecture in the background with that in the "St. George" in S. Anastasia shows the same derivation, and the dainty cavalier, who holds a flag and is in attendance on the youngest king, is reminiscent of St. George and St. Eustace in Pisanello's paintings in the National Gallery, so that in this one picture the influences of the two artists are combined.

Antonio took his younger brother, Bartolommeo, into partnership, and the t.i.tle of da Murano was presently dropped for the more modern designation of Vivarini. Both brothers are fine and delicate in work, but from the outset of their collaboration the younger man is more advanced and more full of the spirit of the innovator. In his altarpiece in the first hall of the Academy the Nativity has already a new realism; Joseph leans his head upon his hand, crushing up his cheek. The saints are particularly vivid in expression, especially the old hermit holding the bell, whose face is br.i.m.m.i.n.g with ardent feeling.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS

_Giovanni d' Alema.n.u.s and Antonio da Murano._

Venice. Christ and the Virgin in Glory; Virgin enthroned, with Saints.

_Antonio da Murano._

Berlin. Adoration of Magi.

CHAPTER V

THE PADUAN INFLUENCE

And now into this dawning school, employed chiefly in the service of the Church, with its tentative and languid essays to understand Florentine composition, resulting in what is scarcely more than a mindless imitation, and with its rather more intelligent perception of the Humanist qualities of Pisanello's work, there enters a new factor; or rather a new agency makes a slightly more successful attempt than Gentile and Castagno had done to help the Venetians to realise the supreme importance of the human figure, its power in relation to other objects to determine s.p.a.ce, its modelling and the significance of its att.i.tude in conveying movement. Giotto had been able to present all these qualities in the human form, but he had done so by the light of genius, and had never formulated any sufficient rules for his followers'

guidance. In Ghiberti's school, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the fascination of the antique in art was making itself felt, but Donatello had escaped from the artificial trammels it threatened to exercise, and had carried the Florentine school with him in his profound researches into the human form itself. Donatello had been working in Padua for ten years before Pisanello's death, and in an indirect way the Venetians were experiencing some after-results of the systematising and formulating of the new pictorial elements. Though the intellectual life had met with little encouragement among the positive, practical inhabitants of Venice, in Padua, which had been subject to her since 1405, speculative thought and ideal studies were in full swing. There was no re-birth in Venice, whose tradition was unbroken and where "men were too genuinely pagan to care about the echo of a paganism in the remote past." St. Mark was the deity of Venice, and "the other twelve Apostles" were only obscurely connected with her religious life, which was strong and orthodox, but untroubled by metaphysical enthusiasms and inconvenient heresies. Padua, on the other hand, was absorbed in questions of learning and religion. A university had been established here for two centuries. The abstract study of the antique was carried on with fervour, and the memory of Livy threw a l.u.s.tre over the city which had never quite died out. It seemed perfectly right and respectable to the Venetians that the _savants_, lying safely removed from the busy stream of commercial life, should cultivate inquiries into theology and the cla.s.sics, which would only have been a hindrance to their own practical business; but such, as it was well known, were of absorbing interest in the circles which gathered round the Medici in Florence. The school of art, which was now arising in Padua, was fed from such sources as these. The love of the antique was becoming a fashion and a guiding principle, and influenced the art of painting more formally than it could succeed in doing among the independent and original Florentines.

Francesco Squarcione, though, as Vasari says, he may not have been the best of painters, has left work (now at Berlin) which is accepted as genuine and which shows that he was more than the mere organiser he is sometimes called. He had travelled in Greece, and was apparently a dealer, supplying the demand for cla.s.sic fragments, which was becoming widespread. When he founded his school in Padua he evidently was its leading spirit and a powerful artistic influence. His pupils, even the greatest, were long in breaking away from his convention, and few of them threw it off entirely, even in after life. That convention was carried with undeviating thoroughness into every detail. Draperies are arranged in statuesque folds, designed to display every turn of the form beneath; the figures are moulded with all the precision and limitations of statuary. The very landscape becomes sculpturesque, and rocks of a volcanic character are constructed with the regularity of masonry. The colour and technique are equally uncompromising, and the surface becomes a beautiful enamel, unyielding, definite in its lines, lacquer-like in its firmness of finish, while the Gothic forms, which had hitherto been so prevalent, were replaced by more or less pedantic adaptations from Roman bas-reliefs. This system of design was practised most determinedly in Padua itself, but it soon spread to Venice. Squarcione himself was employed there after 1440, and though Antonio da Murano clung to the old archaic style he saw the Paduan manner invading his kingdom, and his own brother became strongly Squarcionesque.

The two brothers of Murano come most closely together in an altarpiece in the gallery of Bologna, where the framework is more simple than Alema.n.u.s's German taste would have permitted, and the Madonna and Child have some natural ease, and the delicacy of feeling of primitive art.

Bartolommeo, when he breaks away and sets out to paint by himself, is crude and strong, but full of vital force. In his altarpiece of 1464, in the Academy, he gives his saints reality by taking them off their pedestals and making them stand upon the ground, and though they are still isolated from one another in the part.i.tions of an ancona, their sparkling eyes, individual features, and curly beards give them a look of life. The draperies, thin and clinging, with little rucked folds, which display the forms, and the drawing of the bony structure, exaggerated in the arms and legs, are Squarcionesque. The rocks and stones, too, show the Paduan convention. In several of his other altarpieces, Bartolommeo introduces rich ornaments and swags of fruit, such as Donatello had first brought to Padua, or which Paduan artists delighted to copy from cla.s.sic columns. Antonio's manner to the end is the local Venetian manner, infused as it was with the soft and charming influence of Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello, but Bartolommeo adopts the new and more ambitious style. Though not a very good painter, and inclined to be puffy and shapeless in his flesh forms, he was the head of a crowd of artists, and works of his school, signed _Opus factum_, went all over Italy, and are found as far south as Bari. Works of his pupils are numerous; the "St. Mark enthroned" in the Frari is as good if not better than the master's own work, and the triptych in the Correr Museum is a free imitation.

Round this early school gathered such painters as Antonio da Negroponte and Quirizio da Murano, who were both working in 1450. Negroponte has left an enthroned Madonna in S. Francesco della Vigna, which is one of the most beautiful examples of colour and of the fanciful charm of the Renaissance that the early art of Venice has to show. The Mother and Child are placed in a marble shrine, adorned with antique reliefs, rich wreaths of fruit swag above her head, a little Gothic loggia is full of flowers and fruit, and birds are perched on cornucopias. On either side, four badly drawn little angels, with ugly faces and awkwardly foreshortened forms, foreshadow the beautiful, music-making angels which became such a feature of North Italian art. The Divine Mother, adoring the Child lying across her knees, has an exquisite, pensive face, conceived with all the delicacy and simplicity of early art. It seems quite possible, as Professor Leonello Venturi suggests, that we have here the early master of Crivelli, in whom we find the love of fruit garlands, of chains of beads and rich brocades carried to its farthest limits, who takes keen pleasure in introducing the ugly but lively little angels, and who gives the same pensive and almost mincing expression to his Madonnas.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS

_Antonio da Murano and Bartolommeo Vivarini._

Bologna. Altarpiece.

_Bartolommeo Vivarini._

Venice. Academy: Altarpiece, 1464; Two Saints.

Frari: Madonna and four Saints.

S. Giovanni in Bragora: Madonna and two Saints.

S. Maria Formosa: Triptych.

London. Madonna and Saints.

Vienna. S. Ambrose and Saints.

_Antonio da Negroponte._

Venice. S. Francesco della Vigna: Altarpiece.

CHAPTER VI

JACOPO BELLINI

While Venice was a.s.similating the spirit of the school of Squarcione, which in the next few years was to be rendered famous by Mantegna, another influence was a.s.serting itself, which was sufficient to counteract the hard formalism of Paduan methods.

When Gentile da Fabriano left Venice, he carried with him, and presently established with him in Florence, a young man, Jacopo Bellini, who had already been working with him and Pisanello, and who was an ardent disciple of the new naturalistic and humanist movement. Both Gentile and his apprentice were subjected to annoyance from the time they arrived in Florence, where the strict regulations which governed the Guilds made it very difficult for any newcomer to practise his art. The records of a police case report that on the 11th of June 1423 some young men, among them, one, Bernabo di San Silvestri, the son of a notary, were observed throwing stones into the painter's room. His a.s.sistant, Jacopo Bellini, came out and drove the a.s.sailants away with blows, but Bernabo, accusing Jacopo of a.s.sault, the latter was committed to prison in default of payment. After six months' imprisonment, a compromise of the fine and a penitential declaration set him at liberty. The accounts declare that Gentile took no steps to be of service to his follower; but Jacopo soon after married a girl from Pesaro, and his first son was christened after his old master, which does not look as though they were on unfriendly terms. Jacopo travelled in the Romagna, and was much esteemed by the Estes of Ferrara, but he was back in Venice in 1430. He has left us only three signed works, and one or two more have lately been attributed to him, but they give very little idea of what an important master he was.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Jacopo Bellini._ AGONY IN GARDEN--DRAWING.

_British Museum._ (_Photo, Anderson._)]

His Madonna in the Academy has a round, simple type of face, and in the Louvre Madonna, which is attributed but not signed, it is easy to recognise the same arched eyebrows and half-shut, curved eyelids. In this picture, where the Madonna blesses the kneeling Leonello d' Este, we see how Pisanello acted on Jacopo and, through him, on Venetian art.

The connection between the two masters has been established in a very interesting way by Professor Antonio Venturi's discovery of a sonnet, written in 1441, which recounts how they painted rival portraits of Leonello, and how Bellini made so lively a likeness that he was adjudged the first place. The landscape in the Louvre picture is advanced in treatment, and with its gilded mountain-tops, its stag and its town upon the hill-side, is full of reminiscences of Pisanello, especially of the "St. George" in S. Anastasia. We come upon such traces, too, in Jacopo's drawings, and it is by his two sketch-books that we can best judge of his greatness. One of these is in the British Museum; the other, in the Louvre, was discovered not many years ago in the granary of a castle in Guyenne. These drawings reveal Jacopo as one of the greatest masters of his day. He is larger, simpler, and more natural than Pisanello, and he apparently cares less for the human figure than for elaborate backgrounds and surroundings. Many of his designs we shall refer to again when we come to speak of his two sons.

His "Supper of Herod" reminds us of Masolino's fresco at Castiglione d' Olona. He sketches designs for numbers of religious scenes, treated in an original and interesting manner. A "Crucifixion" has bands of soldiers ranged on either side, an "Adoration of the Magi" has a string of camels coming down the hill, the executioners in a "Scourging" wear Eastern head-dresses. In a sketch for a "Baptism of Christ" tall angels hold the garments in the early traditional way; on one side two play the lute and the violin, while the two on the other side have a trumpet and an organ. He has sketches for the Ascension, Resurrection, Circ.u.mcision, and Entombment, repeated over and over again with variations, and one of S. Bernardino preaching in Venice (where he was in 1427). Jacopo delights even more in fanciful and mythological than in sacred subjects. A tournament with spectators, a Faun riding a lion, a "Triumph of Bacchus" with panthers, are among such essays. The fauns pipe, the wine-G.o.d bears a vase of fruit. His love of animals is equal to that of Pisanello, and S. Hubert and the stag with the crucifix between its horns is directly reminiscent of the Veronese. His horses, of which there are immense numbers, sometimes look as if copied from ancient bas-reliefs. His treatment of single nude figures is often poor and weak enough, and his rocks have the flat-topped, geological formation of the Paduan School, but no one who so drank in every description of lively scene about him could have been in any danger of becoming a mere archeological type, and it was from this pitfall that he rescued Mantegna. To judge by his drawings, Jacopo did not overlook any source of art open to him; he delights in the rich research of the Paduans as much as in the varieties of wild nature and all the incidents of contemporary life first annexed by Pisanello. He is often very like Gentile da Fabriano, he makes raids into Uccello's domains of perspective, he is frankly mundane and draws a revel of satyrs and centaurs with a real interpretation of the lyrical and pagan spirit of the Greeks, and he has an idealism of the soul, which found its full expression in his son, Giovanni. We cannot call Jacopo Bellini the founder of the Venetian School, for its makings existed already, but it was his influence on his sons which, above all, was accountable for the development of early excellence. His long, flowing lines have a sweep and a fanciful grace which form an absolute antidote to the definite, geometrical Paduan convention. In Jacopo we see the thorough a.s.similation of those foreign elements which were in sympathy with the Venetian atmosphere, and while up to now Venice had only imbibed influences, she was soon to create for herself an artistic _milieu_ and to become the leader of the movement of painting in the north of Italy.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS

_Jacopo Bellini._