Part 9

From the _Aurora_ of Guido, we must turn to the rival _Aurora_ of Guercino, in the Villa Ludovisi. In spite of Guido's bad head of Apollo, and in spite of Guercino's magic chiaroscuro, I confess myself disposed to give the preference to Guido. In the first place, there is not the same unity of composition in Guercino's. It is very fine in all its parts; but still it _is_ in parts. It is not so fine a _whole_, nor is it so perfect a composition, nor has it the same charm as Guido's. Neither is there the same ideal beauty in the Aurora. Guercino's is a mortal--Guido's a truly ethereal being. Guercino's Aurora is in her car, drawn by two heavenly steeds, and the shades of night seem to dissipate at her approach. Old Tithonus, whom she has left behind her seems half awake; and the morning star, under the figure of a winged genius bearing his kindled torch, follows her course. In a separate compartment, Night, in the form of a woman, is sitting musing, or slumbering, over a book. She has much of the character of a Sibyl. Her dark cave is broken open, and the blue sky and the coming light break beautifully in upon her and her companions, the sullen owl and flapping bat, which shrink from its unwelcome ray. The Hours are represented under the figure of children, fluttering about before the goddess, and extinguishing the stars of night--a beautiful idea; but one, perhaps, better adapted to poetry than painting. The Hours of Guercino are, however, infinitely less poetic and less beautiful than the bright female forms which encircle the car of day in Guido's _Aurora_. Yet it is a masterpiece of painting; and but for the _Aurora_ of Guido, we could have conceived nothing beyond the _Aurora_ of Guercino.

_Rome in the Nineteenth Century_ (5th edition, London, 1852).

AURORA

(_GUIDO RENI_)

JOHN CONSTABLE

Although no distinct landscape is known by the hand of Guido, yet in a history of this particular branch it may not be improper to notice its immense importance as an accessory in his picture of _Aurora_. It is the finest instance I know of the beauty of natural landscape brought to aid a mythological story, and to be sensible of its value we have only to imagine a plain background in its stead. But though Guido has placed us in the heavens, we are looking towards the earth, where seas and mountain-tops are receiving the first beams of the morning sun. The chariot of Apollo is borne on the clouds, attended by the Hours and preceded by Aurora, who scatters flowers, and the landscape, instead of diminishing the illusion, is the chief means of producing it, and is indeed most essential to the story.

Leslie, _Life and Letters of John Constable, R.A._ (London, new ed., 1896).

THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN

(_TITIAN_)

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

The pearl of the Museum at Madrid is a Raphael; that of Venice is a Titian, a marvellous canvas, forgotten and afterwards recovered, which has its legend also. For many long years Venice possessed this masterpiece without knowing it. Relegated to an old and seldom frequented church it had disappeared under a slow coating of dust and behind a network of spider-webs. The subject could scarcely be made out. One day, Count Cicognora, a great connoisseur, noticing that these rusty figures had a certain air, and scenting the master under this livery of neglect and misery, wetted his finger and rubbed the canvas, an action which is not one of exquisite propriety, but which an expert on pictures cannot help doing when he is face to face with a dirty canvas, be he twenty times a count and a thousand times a dandy. The noble picture, preserved intact under this layer of dust, like Pompeii under its mantle of ashes, appeared so young and fresh that the count never doubted but that he had discovered the canvas of a great master, an unknown _chef-d'oeuvre_. He had the strength of mind to control his excitement, and proposed to the _curé_ to exchange this great dilapidated painting for a beautiful picture, quite new, perfectly clean, very brilliant, and well framed, which would do honour to the church and give pleasure to the faithful. The _curé_ joyfully accepted it, smiling to himself at the eccentricity of the count, who gave new for old and demanded nothing in return.

When relieved of its dirt and stains, Titian's _Assunta_ appeared radiant as the sun when it bursts through the clouds. Parisian readers may form an idea of the importance of this discovery by going to see the beautiful copy, recently made by Serrur and placed in the Beaux Arts. The _Assunta_ is one of Titian's greatest works, the one in which he attains his highest flight: the composition is balanced and distributed with infinite art. The upper portion, which is arched, represents Paradise, Glory, as the Spanish say in their ascetic language: garlands of angels floating and submerged in a wave of light of uncalculable depth, stars scintillating in the flame, and brighter glints of the everlasting light form the aureole of the Father, who arrives from the depths of the infinite with the action of a hovering eagle, accompanied by an archangel and a seraph whose hands support the crown and the nimbus.

This Jehovah, like a divine bird appearing head-foremost and with body horizontally foreshortened beneath a wave of drapery flying open like wings, astonishes us by its sublime boldness; if it is possible for the brush of a human being to give a countenance to divinity, certainly Titian has succeeded. Unlimited power and imperishable youth radiate from that white-bearded face that need only nod for the snows of eternity to fall: not since the Olympian Jove of Phidias has the lord of heaven and earth been represented more worthily.

[Illustration: THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN. _Titian._]

The centre of the picture is occupied by the Virgin Mary, who is lifted up, or rather who is surrounded by a wreath of angels and souls of the blessed: for she has no need of any aid to mount to Heaven; she rises by the springing upward of her robust faith, by the purity of her soul, which is lighter than the most luminous ether. Truly there is in this figure an unheard-of force of ascension, and in order to obtain this effect Titian has not had recourse to slender forms, diaphanous draperies, and transparent colours. His Madonna is a very true, very living, and very real woman, with a beauty as solid as that of the Venus de Milo, or the sleeping woman in the Tribune of Florence. Large, full drapery flows about her in numerous folds; her flanks are wide enough to have contained a God, and, if she was not on a cloud, the Marquis du Guast might have put his hand on her beautiful bosom, as in the picture in our Museum. Yet nothing is of more celestial beauty than this great and strong figure in its rose-coloured tunic and azure mantle; notwithstanding the powerful voluptuousness of the body, the radiant glance is of the purest virginity.

At the base of the picture, the apostles are grouped in happily-contrasted attitudes of rapture and surprise. Two or three little angels, who link them to the intermediary zone of the composition, seem to be explaining to them the miracle that is taking place. The heads of the apostles, who are of various ages and characters, are painted with a surprising force of vitality and reality. The draperies are of that fullness and abundant flow that characterize Titian as the richest and at the same time the simplest of all painters.

In studying this Virgin and mentally comparing her with other Virgins of different masters, we reflected what a marvellous and ever new thing is art. What Catholic painting has embroidered with variations upon this theme of the Madonna, without ever exhausting it, astonishes and confuses the imagination; but, in reflecting, we comprehend that under the conventional type each painter conveyed secretly, at the same time, his dream of love and the personification of his talent.

The Madonna of Albrecht Dürer in her sad and somewhat constrained gracefulness, with her tired features, interesting rather than beautiful, her air of a matron rather than a Virgin, her German and _bourgeoise_ frankness, her tight garments and her symmetrically broken folds, almost always accompanied by a rabbit, an owl, or an ape, through some vague memory of Germanic pantheism, may she not be the woman whom he would have loved and preferred to all others, and does she not also exceedingly well represent the very genius of the artist? As she is his Madonna, she might easily be his Muse.

The same resemblance exists in Raphael. The type of his Madonna, in whom, mingled with old memories, the features of the Fornarina are always found, sometimes suggested, sometimes copied, most frequently idealized, is she not the most perfect symbol of his talent,--elegant, graceful, and penetrated throughout with a chaste voluptuousness? The Christian nourished on Plato and Greek Art, the friend of Leo X., the dilettante Pope, the artist who died of love while painting the _Transfiguration_, did he not live entirely in these modest Venuses holding on their knees a child who is Love? If we wished to symbolize the genius of every painter in an allegorical picture, would it be any other than the angel of Urbino?

The Virgin of the _Assunta_, big, strong, highly-coloured, with her robust and beautiful grace, her fine bearing, and her simple and natural beauty,--is she not Titian's painting with all its qualities? We might carry our researches still further; but we have said enough as a suggestion.

Thanks to the dusty shroud which covered it for so long, the _Assunta_ glows with a quite youthful brilliancy; the centuries have not elapsed for it, and we enjoy the supreme pleasure of seeing a picture of Titian's just it came fresh from the palette.

_Voyage en Italie_ (new ed., Paris, 1884).

THE NIGHT WATCH

(_REMBRANDT_)

EUGÈNE FROMENTIN

We know how the _Night Watch_ is hung. It faces the _Banquet of Arquebusiers_ by Van der Helst, and, no matter what has been said, the two pictures do not hurt each other. They oppose each other like day and night, like the transfiguration of things and their literal imitation, slightly vulgar and clever. Admit that they are as perfect as they are celebrated and you will have before your eyes a unique antithesis, what La Bruyère calls "opposition truths that illuminate one another."

I shall not astonish anyone in saying that the _Night Watch_ possesses no charm, and the fact is without example among the fine works of pictorial art. It is amazing, it is disconcerting, it is imposing, but it absolutely lacks that insinuating quality that convinces us, and it almost always fails to please us at first. In the first place, it shocks our logical sense and that habitual visual rectitude that loves clear forms, lucid ideas, and clearly formulated boldness; something warns us that our imagination as well as our reason will be only half satisfied and that even the mind that is most easily won over will not submit till the last and will not surrender without dispute. This is due to various causes that do not all arise from the picture,--the light is detestable; the frame of dark wood in which the painting is drowned spoils its middle values, and its bronze scale of colour, and its force, and makes it look much more smoked than it is; and, lastly and above all, the exigencies of the place prevent the picture from being hung at the proper height, and, against all the laws of the most elementary perspective, oblige you to look at it from the same level.

[Illustration: THE NIGHT WATCH. _Rembrandt._]

You are aware that the _Night Watch_, rightly or wrongly, passes for an almost incomprehensible work, and that constitutes its chief prestige. Perhaps it would have made far less noise in the world, if for two centuries people had not kept up the habit of trying to find out its meaning instead of examining its merits, and persisted in the mania of regarding it as a picture enigmatical above all.

Taking it literally, what we know of the subject seems to me sufficient. In the first place, we know the names and quality of the personages, thanks to the care with which the painter has inscribed them on a plate at the bottom of the picture; which proves that if the painter's fancy has transfigured many things, the chief idea at least deals with the customs of local life. It is true that we cannot tell for what purpose these men are going out armed, whether they are going to practise shooting, or on parade, or what; but, as there is no matter here for the deeper mysteries, I am persuaded that if Rembrandt has failed to be more explicit it is because either he did not wish or he did not know how to be, and there is a whole series of hypotheses that might be very simply explained by some such matter as inability or intentional reticence. As for the time of day (the most vexed question of all and the only one, moreover, that could have been settled when first it arose), for fixing that we have no need to discover that the Captain's outstretched arm casts a shadow upon the skirt of his coat. It suffices to remember that Rembrandt never treated light otherwise; that nocturnal obscurity is his habit; that shadow is the ordinary form of his poetic feeling and his usual means of dramatic expression; and that in his portraits, in his interiors, in his legends, in his anecdotes, in his landscapes, and in his etchings, as in his paintings, it is generally with night that he makes day.

It is agreed that the composition does not constitute the principal merit of the picture. The subject had not been selected by the painter, and the manner in which he intended to treat it did not allow of its first sketch being very spontaneous, nor very lucid. Therefore the scene is indecisive, the action almost null, and, consequently, the interest is greatly divided. From the very beginning is betrayed an inherent vice in the first idea, and a kind of irresolution in the manner of conceiving, distributing, and placing it. Some men marching, others standing still, one priming his musket, another loading his, another firing, a drummer who poses for the head while beating his instrument, a somewhat theatrical standard-bearer, and, finally, a crowd of figures fixed in the requisite immobility of portraits,--so far as action is concerned, these, if I am not mistaken, are the sole picturesque features of the painting.

Is this indeed sufficient to give it the facial, anecdotal, and local feeling that we expect from Rembrandt when he paints the places, things, and men of his time? If Van der Helst instead of seating his arquebusiers had made them move in any manner whatever, do not doubt that he would have given us the truest if not the finest indications of their ways. And as for Frans Hals, you may imagine with what clearness and order, and how naturally he would have disposed the scene; how piquant, lively, ingenious, abundant, and magnificent he would have been. The idea conceived by Rembrandt then is one of the most ordinary, and I would venture to say that the majority of his contemporaries considered it poor in resources; some because its abstract line is uncertain, scanty, symmetrical, meagre, and singularly incoherent; others, the colourists, because this composition, so full of gaps and ill-occupied spaces, did not lend itself to that broad and generous employment of colours which is usual with able palettes....

Thus there is no truth and very little pictorial invention in the general disposition. Is there more in the individual figures?

What immediately strikes us is that they are unreasonably disproportioned and that many of them have shortcomings and so to speak an embarrassment of characterization that nothing can justify. The captain is too big and the lieutenant too small, not only by the side of Captain Kock, whose stature crushes him, but also beside accessory figures whose height or breadth gives this somewhat plain young man the air of a youth who has grown a moustache too soon. Regarding the two as portraits, they are scarcely successful ones of doubtful likeness and thankless physiognomy, which is surprising in a portrait-painter who had made his mark in 1642, and which affords some excuse for Captain Kock's having a little later applied to the infallible Van der Helst. Is the guard loading his musket rendered any better? Moreover, what do you think of his right-hand neighbour, and of the drummer? One might say that all these portraits lack hands, so vaguely are they sketched and so insignificant is their action. It follows that what they hold is also ill rendered: muskets, halberds, drum-sticks, canes, lances, and flag-pole; and that the gesture of an arm is impotent when the hand that ought to act does not do so clearly, quickly, or with energy, precision, or intelligence. I will not speak of the feet, which, in most cases, are lost in shadow. Such in reality are the necessities of the system of envelopment adopted by Rembrandt, and such is the imperious foregone conclusion of his method, that one general dark cloud invades the base of the picture and that the forms float in it to the great detriment of their points of support.

Must we add that the clothes are very similar to the likenesses, sometimes uncouth and unnatural, sometimes rigid and rebellious to the lines of the body? One would say that they are not worn properly. The helmets are stupidly put on, the hats are outlandish and ungracefully worn. The scarfs are in their place and yet they are awkwardly tied. Here is none of that unique ease of carriage, that natural elegance, that _négligé_ dress, caught and rendered to the life in which Frans Hals knows how to attire every age, every stature, every stage of corpulence, and, certainly also, every rank. We are not reassured on this point more than on many others. We ask ourselves whether there is not here a laborious fantasy, like an attempt to be strange, which is not at all pleasing or striking.

Some of the heads are very handsome, I have mentioned those that are not. The best, the only ones in which the hand of the master and the feeling of a master are to be recognized, are those which, from the depths of the canvas, shoot their vague eyes and the fine spark of their mobile glances at you; do not severely examine their construction, nor their plan, nor their bony structure; accustom yourself to the greyish pallor of their complexion, question them from afar as they also look at you from a distance, and if you want to know how they live, look at them as Rembrandt wants us to look at his human effigies, attentively and long, at their lips and eyes.

There remains an episodical figure which has hitherto baffled all conjectures, because it seems by its traits, its carriage, its odd splendour, and its inappropriateness, to personify the magic, the romantic feeling, or, if you prefer, the misrepresentation of the picture; I mean that little witch-like personage, child-like and crone-like at the same time, with her hair streaming and adorned with pearls, gliding among the guards for no apparent reason, and who, a not less inexplicable detail, has a white cock, that at need might be taken for a purse, hanging from her girdle.

Whatever right she has to join the troop, this little figure seems to have nothing human about her. She is colourless and almost shapeless. Her figure is that of a doll and her gait is automatic. She has the air of a beggar, something like diamonds covers her whole body, and an accoutrement resembling rays. You would say that she came from some jewry, or old clothes market, or Bohemia, and that, awaking from a dream, she had attired herself in the most singular of all worlds. She has the light, the uncertainty, and the wavering of a pale fire. The more we examine her, the less we can grasp the subtle lineaments that serve as envelope for her uncorporeal existence. We end by seeing in her nothing but a kind of extraordinarily strange phosphorescence which is not the ordinary light of things, nor yet the ordinary brilliance of a well-regulated palette, and this adds more sorcery to the peculiarities of her countenance. Notice that in the place she occupies, one of the dark corners of the canvas, rather low in the middle distance, between a man in deep red and the captain dressed in black, this eccentric light has much greater force than the most sudden contrast with a neighbouring tint, and without extreme care this explosion of accidental light would have sufficed to disorganize the whole picture.

What is the meaning of this little imaginary or real being, who, however, is only a supernumerary while yet holding, so to speak, the chief rôle? I shall not attempt to tell you. Abler people than I have allowed themselves to inquire what it was and what it was doing there, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion.

But if to all these somewhat vain questions Rembrandt replied: "This child is a caprice no less strange than and quite as plausible as many others in my engraving or painting. I have placed it as a narrow ray amid great masses of shadow because its exiguity rendered it more vibrating and it suited me to awaken with a ray one of the dark corners of my picture. It also wears the usual costume of my female figures, great or small, young or old, and in it you will find the type frequently occurring in my works. I love what glitters, and that is why I have clothed her in brilliant materials. As for those phosphorescent gleams that astonish you here, whilst elsewhere they pass unnoticed, it is only the light in its colourless splendour and supernatural quality that I habitually give to my figures when I illuminate them at all strongly."--Do you not think that such a reply ought to satisfy the most difficult, and that finally, the rights of the stage-setter being reserved, he need only render account of one point: the manner in which he has treated the picture?

We know what to think of the effect produced by the _Night Watch_ when it appeared in 1642. This memorable attempt was neither understood nor relished. It added noise to Rembrandt's glory, increased it in the eyes of his faithful admirers, and compromised it in the eyes of those who had only followed him with some effort and attended him to this decisive point. It made him a painter more peculiar and a master less sure. It heated and divided men of taste according to the heat of their blood, or the stiffness of their reason. In short, it was regarded as an absolutely new but dangerous adventure which brought him applause and some blame, and which at heart did not convince anybody. If you know the judgment expressed on this subject by Rembrandt's contemporaries, his friends and his pupils, you know that opinion has not sensibly varied for two centuries, and that we repeat almost the same thing that this great daring man might have heard during his lifetime....