Part 14
I have refrained from comparing it with the Dresden Venus for the reason that this discovery of Morelli’s has been, though I believe on insufficient grounds, disputed, and some critics question whether the Venus is not a work of Titian. The evidence with which Morelli maintained the Giorgionesque origin of the work is very convincing, but there is a quality of the work upon which he did not lay sufficient stress. I refer to the lack of sensuousness in the figure. It is the lack of this mundane quality, the abstractness of the figure, that renders it ideal, which allies this work with the finest Greek sculpture, with figures of the Periclean epoch. The nude female figure is thought of not from a sexual standpoint, but from that of pure beauty of form. To represent such feeling was unlike Titian even in the most earnestly ideal of his youthful days. His work in almost every case has a glow of passion; Giorgione’s, on the contrary, suggests loveliness that deserves the deepest admiration, but does not suggest actual human life and action. The two ideals are the poles asunder. Titian’s is that of the man, Giorgione’s that of the woman. As Coleridge said, “Man loves the woman, but woman loves the love of the man,” and when one looks at Titian’s Venuses or his other female figures, one is inevitably more vigorously self-conscious and one’s attention is more indissolubly bound to the body than when one’s eyes rest on the statuesque beauties of the Castelfranco painter’s imaginings.
[Illustration: PLATE LXIV.]
The method by which these effects are depicted is unmistakable and clear. In Titian’s figures of nude women the glance of the eye is often distinctly and sharply focussed in the eye of the beholder, and the
## action of the figure is motived by the presence of the beholder. The
painted image is the corollary of the being that looks upon her. It is not so in Giorgione’s work. His Venus is self-contained, self-centred and thoughtless of the outer world. The eyes (cf. the Giovanelli picture) do not strongly draw yours to themselves, and the action does not imply a realisation of the presence of any interested gazer. For exactly these reasons, plain simple reasons, but of deepest import, the Venus of Praxiteles is of inestimably greater worth than that later impersonation of female vigour and physical delight, the Venus de’ Medici. And in similar manner Giorgione proves himself a man and an artist who attained to the adequate presentation of an ideal of beauty of the female figure far more elevated and uplifting than that held by his more famous contemporary Titian. The Venus may, as Morelli said, be safely considered as a true Giorgione.
The case is not so clear, though I believe it is not less unquestionable, when we consider the Epiphany[52] of the National Gallery (Plate LXIII). The criticism passed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle on this picture and the Shepherd’s Offering in the Beaumont Collection is, so far as it goes, sound. They say of these pictures “that the style coincides with that which historians attribute to Giorgione; that most of the characteristics which predominate recur in canvases registered by the oldest authorities as those of Barbarelli; and that the landscapes in every case resemble each other and recall the country of Castelfranco.” There is much more proof, however, that can be adduced to show that only Giorgione could have painted these works. But first the attribution of them both to Catena[53] must be shown to be groundless.
A word, however, in regard to logical reasoning about pictures, the lack of which constitutes a great weakness in Morelli and some of his followers, may perhaps be deemed not inappropriate here. Circumstantial evidence is at best only partially conclusive. Morelli did some brilliant work by its means in correcting the names under which many pictures had masqueraded. Such work must, it is self-evident, be founded on the signed works of the masters or on works whose authorship is proved by literary evidence of the strongest character. But he and his followers seem to forget that others may refuse adherence to the belief in one or more of these attributions and yet not be utterly foolish. Many minds are convinced by evidence which to other equally capable and well-trained intelligences does not carry the force of conviction, or may even seem to be based on a misapprehension of fundamental facts. Grant, however, that a given attribution of an unsigned work seems reasonable, still there are in most such cases parts of it that are to a certain extent dissimilar to the certified works of the master to whom it is attributed—otherwise it would never have been falsely named.
Were this not true, how had doubt ever arisen in men’s minds as to who wrote the Rhesus, or when the Apollo Belvedere was made? Suppose now that in studying a picture and attributing it to an artist one finds a second or a third or a fourth picture that seems to be by the same painter. One sees that each has certain points in common with the signed works and others common only to the unsigned work which was the first of our new attributions. To deduce from the similarity which any two of the unsigned works bear to each other in their _differences_ from the signed works of the author to whom it is desired to attribute them, that they must be by this author, is an absolutely illogical and unreasonable method of argument. One can ‘prove’ anything in this way, which could without difficulty enable one to show that the Two Loves of the Borghese Gallery was painted by Perugino. All that is needed is a sufficiently large list of works each differing slightly from Perugino’s true masterpieces. It is but another form of the old game of turning one word into another by adding and subtracting syllables. Thus one turns _drama_ into _odious_: drama, melodrama, melodious, odious.
Unfortunately Morelli did not realise the weakness of this system. Had he done so, he would never have attributed to Catena the Epiphany of the National Gallery, and his followers would not consider the same artist as the painter of the Benson Holy Family and the Beaumont Shepherd’s Offering.[54] I do not mean to imply that he would have considered Giorgione as their author, but, it is only by strained and extravagant reasoning that they can be claimed for Catena. They bear no resemblance in either composition, colour or idea to any of the unquestioned works by this second-rate pupil of Bellini, the imitator, _par excellence_, of the work of his greater contemporaries.
So far as a careful analysis enables one to make out from the context of the whole passage in which Morelli speaks of these works,[55] he seems to have convinced himself that Catena was the painter of the Epiphany because of the similarities that exist between it and the Knight adoring the Infant Christ and the St. Jerome in his Study in the same Gallery. The first thing to notice is that the likeness which the Epiphany bears to the St. Jerome is almost entirely imaginary. The chief difference between the two works is that the Epiphany is not only painted in a very different manner technically, but it is much less laboured. It shows vastly greater facility of draughtsmanship; the execution is very much more easy; the colour is fuller and purer; the chiaroscuro is more varied, and, finally, it is much more imaginatively conceived. It gives one, in fact, the impression of being by a master, whereas the St. Jerome seems nothing more either in imagination or in technique than the work of a careful, serious, arid-minded student.
The St. Jerome in fact may well be by Catena, for these are the qualities with which we know he was endowed. The similarity between the Epiphany and the Knight adoring the Infant Christ is greater, but still not very great.[56] But here too we must remember that the attribution of the Knight to Catena is based not so much even on good circumstantial evidence as on the fairly unanimous belief among those capable of judging what certain phases of Catena’s changing style probably resembled. But the points wherein the Epiphany surpassed the St. Jerome are just those in which it shows greater mastery than is exhibited in the Knight. The same stiffness and awkwardness of drawing mark the Knight as by an artist of much less capacity than him of the Epiphany.
So too does the clumsy, empty composition. The small-featured faces, the lack of appearance of real substance in the bodies, the dull and uninteresting chiaroscuro, the laboured technique are characteristic of Catena, but not one of them shows in the Epiphany. Catena may well have painted the beast like a hobby horse which the Knight’s page holds, but it was an abler hand than his which drew the horses from which the Magi have dismounted. The crinkly, crushed draperies in the Knight are similar to Catena’s work, but there is nothing like them in the Epiphany, where the glowing coloured garments are cast in simpler and grander and at the same time more natural lines. Can any one really imagine that the same man painted the dull, hard, conventional head of St. Joseph in the Knight and the much more thoughtful and original face of the same figure in the Epiphany? or how can any one believe that the same artist designed heads of such different shape, eyes and noses and mouths so unlike in the one and the other work; hands in the Knight so like turtles’ feet, and so vigorous and human in the Epiphany? It is surely improbable, and Crowe and Cavalcaselle were right when they recognised a great difference between the two works and saw in the smaller, richer one the hand of Giorgione. The reasoner who is calm and unpolemically minded must agree with them.
The next picture for us to consider is the Beaumont Shepherd’s Offering which Crowe and Cavalcaselle give to Giorgione, but which is by Berenson and others considered a Catena.[57] If the Epiphany were a Catena, then the Shepherd’s Offering would be also, for not only the treatment and colour as a whole, but the details, more particularly the group of the Holy Family, is distinctly alike in both. The same reasons that show that it is impossible that Catena ever painted the Epiphany apply with even greater force to the Shepherd’s Offering. Both pictures are utterly unlike Catena’s work in all essential points, all those, that is to say, which are the expression of character. Certain Giorgionesque qualities show more strongly in the Shepherd’s Offering than in the smaller work. I will not analyse the details of form, substantiality of masses and richness of colour, for every unprejudiced eye will see that they are the same in each of these two works as they are in the unquestioned works by Giorgione. But there is a quality more difficult to analyse and to express in fixed terms, that stamps the Shepherd’s Offering not only as a work by Giorgione, but as a very characteristic expression of his genius. I refer to the impression given by the quietness of the scene, by the slight vagueness of it all, and to the colour and chiaroscuro that remind one of an evening landscape (Plate LXIV). All these points taken together make the scene seem mysterious and dreamlike.
[Illustration: PLATE LXV.]
Now, clearly enough, this romantic quality occurs to a greater or less extent in all the unquestioned Giorgiones. It is the deep religious ardour of Bellini turned to a broader field. It is the sharp focussed passion of Titian transmuted into an abiding love for all things beautiful. In the Giovanelli Landscape (Plate LXV) you see it in the strange combination of soldier and nude woman under the lightning-riven skies and the trees heavy and white with the storm. In the Three Philosophers you see it in the contrast of the three men of different ages and the quiet forest where they sit with the city in the distance that seems to be asleep (Plate LXVI). In the Virgin of Castelfranco you see it in the throne placed in the open meadows peopled by visionlike figures, in the deeply impressive silence and contrast of the monk and warrior, and in the still blue sea lapping the templed shores beyond. You see it in the Venus,—not any one woman so much as the presentation of everlasting feminine beauty—sleeping under the open sky across which roll great summer clouds rising from the distant sea. It is present almost invariably in his work and forms the chief richness of the Beaumont picture, in which the strangely silent group under the trees, the empty shepherd’s hut beyond and the deep distance of rolling, castelled hills and meadows, golden in the light of the low sun, is like a vision that one sees in those rare moments when one’s eyes pierce the husk of this world and we seem for one treasured instant to have passed the borders and be wandering in El Dorado.
In none of Catena’s authentic works does he attain to such a height of imaginative presentation of daily phenomena. He could appreciate it, as is shown by his attempt in the Knight to paint in the manner of Giorgione, but that picture alone would be sufficient to show his incapacity to attain the goal at which he aimed. Nor is this feeling which we derive from Giorgione’s works imaginary and based on preconceived ideas. It is distinctly due to certain indubitable facts. No one questions the mystery and inexpressible beauty of the light of early dawn or evening, and it is this rather than the full, hard, mid-day glare that is the light of all Giorgione’s pictures. Nor is there doubt of the impressiveness of gloom, be it of forest or of storm, and such mystery as this was dear to the hill-born artist. Nor, further, can one hesitate to admit the visionary, mirage-like appearance of vigorous action that takes place in silence and of which the anatomical details are suppressed. Such is the action of Giorgione’s figures. They are plainly deeply interested in the scene of which they form part, but their faces (even in the Judgment of Solomon at Kingston Lacy) show their interest rather by the eyes than by the lips. They look, but do not speak. Like Greek Gods they act, but with terrible great silence.
And so, too, though the bodies of his figures are full of life and
## action, yet they rarely show the tense and emphasised muscles
appropriate to such action, but appear rather, having acted, to be now at rest. A similar peculiarity is to be observed in the draperies which, just as I have tried to show in regard to the figure of the Venus, are of the same nature as the best Greek work. They are completely motived, that is, by the bodies beneath them. They are a positive component part of the figure, not merely an accidental addition, and they rest and move with it. Thus, as the bodies seem to be resting after motion, so the draperies seem to be also. They show none of the little, trifling, momentary folds that express actual motion, but merely those larger, more essential lines and masses that are truly expressive of the vitality and movement of the figures, whose beauty they enhance, so far as such life and activity can be expressed by woven stuffs.
Let us turn now to Catena, his Sta. Caterina, or his Virgin Enthroned, in Venice, and we see draperies that are in large measure as merely studio studies of cloth as any to which Albert Dürer ever attached hands and feet and a head and called it a human being. The folds do not carry out the action of the figure, but crinkle and ripple and break in meaningless profusion from shoulder to ankle. Giorgione was a richly imaginative, deeply thoughtful genius, and such a personality as this is indelibly stamped in the Epiphany, the Shepherd’s Offering, and the Benson Holy Family. Catena was a fashionable plagiarist and moderately successful imitator of the manner of his master Bellini and of his great contemporaries; such a character as his is completely foreign to the spirit of these three pictures.
The Holy Family,[58] one of the many treasures of Mr. Benson’s collection, is also given by Berenson, and by others, to Catena. The Virgin and Joseph are, as one sees at first sight, the same figures as in the two preceding works. I will not unfold the argument again. The picture is to be attributed to Giorgione for the same reasons that show the two other pictures to be his. One proof may be added to those adduced before, and this is the pebbly surface of the ground. The same treatment is to be seen in the Judgment of Solomon, and the Trial of Moses, in the Uffizi, in the Three Philosophers, in the Giovanelli Landscape; and in this last picture the painting of the brick work below the column is the same as that of the building beside which the Holy Family are seated in Mr. Benson’s picture. Catena could as easily have painted Bellini’s Loredano as this head of St. Joseph, as fine a head in its grandeur of mould and simple earnestness of expression as was ever given to this too often maligned Saint. It is a Giorgione, and a fine one.
The picture of Christ carrying the Cross in the Church of San Rocco in Venice is by Morelli[59] said to be “gewiss ein ganz frühes Werk” of Titian. Considering that he does not give a single proof of this assertion, we may be forgiven if we fail to see the _Gewissheit_ of the attribution. It is true that Vasari was not sure whether Giorgione or Titian was the author, but tradition, as can be traced by guide books, certainly leads us to consider the former as the author. The condition of the picture is such that it gives one no help in solving the problem, but so far as the drawing of details goes we meet no contradiction of the traditional authorship. The shape of the head of the Christ and the drawing of the eyes and brow are met with in the certain works. In believing this ruined picture to be by our master, I am following the opinion held by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and in more recent days by Berenson.
The difficulties that are met in trying to discover a decisive proof of the origin of the Knight of Malta are similar to those which confuse the argument about the ‘Christ’ of San Rocco. The picture has been so maltreated that there is little left to study but the shadow of the original. A magnificent original it must have been, one of those rare works, commoner in Venice than elsewhere, that truly make the corporal substance conform to the nature of the hidden soul, so that one thinks not so much of the person shown to us as of his manner of thought and life. There is much about the portrait that makes its attribution to any one but Giorgione next to impossible, and nothing, I believe, that throws any doubt in the way of our considering him the author. He was capable of such a portrait, and in its earlier days it was unquestionably worthy of him. This is, of course, the usual opinion, though Crowe and Cavalcaselle felt that the repainting had so altered the work as to destroy its character.
The Head of Christ bearing the Cross, formerly in Vicenza, and now, fortunately for our country, in Boston, is another of the works the authorship of which cannot be absolutely proved, but of which the character is so marked that there is little or no diversity of opinion about it.[60] It is one of the pictures that Crowe and Cavalcaselle thought worthy of Giorgione, and which since their day Morelli and others have not hesitated to regard as his. Still strongly tinged with the influence of Bellini, it contains the promise of a freer, broader treatment of religious subjects than even Bellini had attained, and shows us unquestionably the young Giorgione. The hand and eye of Bellini guide him as he works, but his own genius cannot be utterly suppressed, and he adds to his master’s style something that marks the picture, when it leaves his easel, as the true expression of a great genius and not as that of a merely facile and unoriginal pupil (Plate LXVII).
Closely connected with the Madonna of Castelfranco is the study for the figure of San Liberale in the National Gallery. It is true that such studies by the fifteenth-century Italian masters are extremely uncommon, but the differences between this study and the large picture are such as we can hardly imagine being introduced by a copyist, and the painting, considered solely from the technical point of view, is so masterly that we are, I believe, justified in considering the figure as the product of Giorgione’s brush.
Of the six pictures (Pitti, Concert, and Nymph with Satyr; Louvre, Fête Champêtre, and Madonna and Saints; Hampton Court, Shepherd; Madrid, Madonna with Sta. Brigida) which, though traditionally ascribed to Giorgione, Crowe and Cavalcaselle refused to consider as his, the Madonna and Sta. Brigida and the Madonna and Saints in the Louvre are now less often thought of in connection with his name.[61]
[Illustration: PLATE LXVI.]
Of the Madonna and Saints in the Louvre it is interesting to note that even a century ago there were those who judged the work at its true value. It is of this work, I believe, that J. B. P. Lebrun[62] says: (p. 71) “Attribué au Giorgion. Un Concert de figures vues à mi-crops et de grandeur naturelle, très-mauvais ouvrage dans le genre de cette école, d’environ 4 pieds et demi de hauteur, sur 6 de largeur, sur toile. Je tairai ce qu’en dit Lalande. Vient de Milan, bibliothèque Ambrosienne.”
Concerning the four other pictures there is considerable diversity of opinion. The Head of a Boy at Hampton Court is thought by Morelli to be an original Giorgione, but as the light was bad when he saw the work, he is not sure. Berenson, however, does not doubt the genuineness of the picture. Considering the fact that the head is a copy of the Vienna David, we may very seriously question whether it is by Giorgione. One can scarcely suppose that he would have repeated his pictures and made the head of his David answer for a Shepherd. Morelli was right in recognising the Giorgionesque spirit of the work, but it is only a copy of the head of the original David, with certain details altered.
The Nymph and Satyr[63] in the Pitti, which used to be called a Giorgione and which Crowe and Cavalcaselle thought to be by some imitator of him and of Titian, bears now, I believe, the name of Dosso Dossi. Morelli considered it a youthful work of Giorgione, though it certainly shows few signs of youth, and the Giorgionesque details which he enumerates are exactly those which an imitator would easily acquire. The idea and the energetic freedom of composition are more like the work of men who came after Giorgione, and the colouring is unlike his. We have no reason to believe that he ever painted subjects embodying just such trivially sensual and commonplace ideas, and as there is no marked and characteristic likeness in the figures to any of his known works, it is safer to consider it the product of a would-be imitator, such as we know Dosso Dossi to have been.