Part 12

Paolo Caliari (called Veronese from his birthplace) stands, says Ruskin, in the forefront of the great colourists. "Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret were the only painters who ever sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of light and shade as associated with colour, in the noblest of all physical created things, the human form." With Veronese, "the whole picture is like the rose--glowing with colour in the shadows, and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or masses of whiteness, in the lights." Contrasting the aims of Veronese with those of the great chiaroscurists, Ruskin says: "Veronese chooses to represent the great relations of visible things to each other, to the heaven above, and to the earth beneath them. He holds it more important to show how a figure stands relieved from delicate air, or marble wall; how as a red, or purple, or white figure, it separates itself, in clear discernibility, from things not red, nor purple, nor white; how infinite daylight shines round it; how innumerable veils of faint shadow invest it; how its blackness and darkness are, in the excess of their nature, just as limited and local as its intensity of light; all this, I say, he feels to be more important than showing merely the exact _measure_ of the spark of sunshine that gleams on a dagger-hilt, or glows on a jewel. All this, moreover, he feels to be harmonious,--capable of being joined in one great system of spacious truth. And with inevitable watchfulness, inestimable subtlety, he unites all this in tenderest balance, noting in each hair's-breadth of colour, not merely what its rightness or wrongness is in itself, but what its relation is to every other on his canvas." In the tone of his colouring Paolo retained, as Sir F. Burton points out, much of the tradition of the Veronese school. "The silvery tone which differentiates his best works from the golden lustre of Titian was not gained in Venice, and under the lightsome skies of the lagoons he was not tempted to alter it." In the tone of his mind Veronese was thoroughly Venetian. It is a certain "gay grasp of the outside aspects of the world" that distinguishes him. "By habitual preference, exquisitely graceful and playful; religious, without severity, and winningly noble; delighting in slight, sweet everyday incident, but hiding deep meanings underneath it; rarely painting a gloomy subject, and never a base one" (_Modern Painters_, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. iii. § 16; vol. iv. pt. v. ch. iii. § 18, ch. xx. § 16; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 27; _Cambridge Inaugural Lecture in O.O.R._, vol. i. § 314). Thus Venetian in character, it is the Venice of his time--with all its material magnificence and pride of life of a nation of merchant princes--that Veronese everywhere paints. "Veronese," says Symonds, "elevated pageantry to the height of serious art. His domain is noonday sunlight ablaze on sumptuous dresses and Palladian architecture. Armour, shot silks and satins, brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres, crowns--all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun--form the habitual furniture of his pictures." It is characteristic of the spirit of his time that the pictures by Veronese of banquets and other scenes of gaiety were mostly painted for monasteries. The frank introduction of the costumes of the painter's own time, clothing the fine race to which he belonged, gives to his pictures of this kind an historical interest. Often he introduces portraits into his groups. In expression his figures are often deficient. "He will make the Magdalene wash the feet of Christ with a countenance as absolutely unmoved as that of any ordinary servant bringing an ewer to her master." Animal force in men, superb voluptuousness in women, were his favourite types. "His noblest creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full of nerve and blood. In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he does not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly; he remains proud and powerful, and frigidly urbane. The same love of display led him to delight in allegory--not allegory of the deep and mystic kind, but of the pompous and processional, in which Venice appears enthroned among the deities, or the genii of the arts are personified as handsome women and blooming boys." He painted with marvellous facility and revelled, as we have seen, in exuberance. In this he resembled Rubens, but he combined, as Rubens did not, moderation with profusion. Amid so much that is distracting, Veronese never loses command over his subject or his brush, "restraining, for truth's sake, his exhaustless energy; reining back, for truth's sake, his fiery strength; veiling, before truth, the vanity of brightness; penetrating, for truth, the discouragement of gloom; ruling his restless invention with a rod of iron; pardoning no error, no thoughtlessness, no forgetfulness; and subduing all his powers, impulses, and imaginations, to the arbitrament of a merciless justice, and the obedience of an incorruptible verity."

Of the life of Paolo Veronese few incidents are related. He was the son of a stone carver, and having shown a propensity to painting was apprenticed to his uncle, a mediocre artist. In his native city the works of Cavazzola and other Veronese masters were before his eyes. After executing some commissions in Mantua and Verona, he went in 1555 to Venice, which was henceforward to be his home and the scene of his triumphs. He soon began to rank with Tintoretto, who was nearly twenty years his senior, and with Titian, then in his eightieth year. He entered into a competition for painting the ceiling of the library of St. Mark, and executed the commission with so much power that his very rivals voted him the golden chain which had been tendered as an honorary distinction. He visited Verona in 1565, where he then married the daughter of his old master; and in 1560-61 he went to Rome in the suite of Grimani, the Venetian ambassador. With these exceptions he remained in Venice, full of work and honour. Upon his death his two sons and his younger brother, Benedetto, continued the work of his studio, signing the works which they produced in common as "heirs of Paolo Caliari Veronese."

This picture, which was formerly in the church of San Niccolo de' Frari at Venice, represents the consecration of Nicholas (for whom see 1171) as Bishop of Myra, in Syria (hence the turbans of the attendants). Two dignitaries of the Church are presenting him to the patriarch, who holds aloft the symbolical cross of the Redeemer, and with his right hand gives his blessing. The bishop-elect abases himself meanwhile that he may be exalted, while the angel descending with the mitre and crozier signifies that his "call" is from above. Clearly it is the pageantry of a Church function that fascinates the painter. "His art is seen at its best," says Sir Edward Poynter, "in the grouping and light and shade in this picture. The boy kneeling on the right is a masterpiece of silvery colour, and, with his red stockings, gives vivacity to the whole composition." We may also observe in this picture the employment of a "glaze." "The kneeling figure of the Saint is robed in green, with sleeves of golden orange. This latter colour is carried through as under-painting over the whole draped portions of the figure, the green being then floated over and so manipulated that the golden tint shows through in parts and gives the high lights on the folds" (Baldwin Brown's _Fine Arts_, 1891, p. 310).

27. THE POPE JULIUS II.

_Raphael_ (Urbino: 1483-1520). _See_ 1171.

This is one of nine replicas, or contemporary copies, of the portrait in the Uffizi at Florence. Julius died in 1513; the portrait belongs, therefore, to the earlier part of Raphael's Roman period.

The portrait of a Pope of the church militant. "Raphael has caught the momentary repose of a restless and passionate spirit, and has shown all the grace and beauty which are to be found in the sense of power repressed and power at rest. Seated in an arm-chair, with head bent downward, the Pope is in deep thought. His furrowed brow and his deep-sunk eyes tell of energy and decision. The down-drawn corners of his mouth betoken constant dealings with the world" (Creighton's _History of the Papacy_). For it was in the temporal, not in the spiritual world that Julius lived and moved and had his being, and became, by his combination of military and diplomatic abilities, the most prominent political figure of his day. But, like other great princes of the time, Julius was a liberal and enlightened patron of the arts: it was he who laid the foundation-stone of St. Peter's, and who called Michael Angelo and Raphael to his court. On the green hanging which forms the background, the cross-keys of the pontifical office are indicated, and from the two corners of the back of the chair rise two shafts, surmounted by gilt ornaments in the form of acorns--in reference to the armorial bearings of the Pope's family (_della Rovere_). "No amount of elaboration in the background could disturb the attention of any one looking at the portrait of Julius the Second, by Raphael, also in the Tribune, which I cannot help thinking is _the_ finished portrait in the world. A portrait is _the most truly historical picture_, and this is the most monumental and historical of portraits. The longer one looks at it the more it demands attention. A superficial picture is like a superficial character--it may do for an acquaintance, but not for a friend. One never gets to the end of things to interest and admire in many old portrait-pictures" (G. F. Watts, R.A., in the _Magazine of Art_, January 1889).

28. SUSANNAH AND THE ELDERS.

_Lodovico Carracci_ (Eclectic-Bologna: 1555-1619).

Lodovico is famous in art history as the founder of the Eclectic school of Bologna. Disgusted with the weakness of the Mannerists (of whom Baroccio was the best; _see_ next picture), he determined to start a rival school, and enlisted the services of his two cousins, Agostino and Annibale, for that purpose. Their object, as expressed in a sonnet by Agostino, was to be to "acquire the design of Rome, Venetian action, and Venetian management of shade, the dignified colour of Lombardy (Leonardo), the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, Titian's truth and nature, the sovereign purity of Correggio's style, and the just symmetry of Raphael." Lodovico, who was the son of a Bolognese butcher,[62] was a man of very wide culture and of great industry. In natural talent he was deficient. When first sent to an art school at Bologna, he was called by his companions "the ox," and when he visited Venice the veteran Tintoretto warned him that he had no vocation. But resolving to win by industry what nature seemed to have denied him, he studied diligently at Florence, Parma, Mantua, and Venice. He superintended the school, at first conjointly with his cousins, afterwards alone, from 1589 to his death.

A less objectionable rendering than most, of the story of Susannah in the Apocrypha--a story for all time, setting forth as it does the way in which minions of the law too often prey upon the innocent, and the righteous condemnation that the people, when there are just judges in the land, mete out to the offenders. Two judges, "ancients of the people," approached Susannah and threatened to report her as guilty unless she consented to do their bidding. She refused, and was reported accordingly. Judgment had well-nigh gone against her, when Daniel arose to convict the elders of false-witness, and they were straightway put to death. It is the moment of Susannah's temptation that the artist here depicts. "It is," says Hazlitt (p. 5), "as if the young Jewish beauty had been just surprised in that unguarded spot--crouching down in one corner of the picture, the face turned back with a mingled expression of terror, shame, and unconquerable sweetness, and the whole figure, with the arms crossed, shrinking into itself with bewitching grace and modesty." But Hazlitt never took notes, and Susannah's arms are not crossed--nor is her expression quite so naïve as he describes.

29. "OUR LADY OF THE CAT."

_Baroccio_ (Umbrian: 1528-1612).

Federigo Barocci, or Baroccio, is the best of the "Mannerists." "He feebly continued the style of Correggio," says Symonds, "with a certain hectic originality, infusing sentimental pietism into that great master's pagan sensuousness" (_Renaissance_, viii. 211). His colouring is peculiar: he used too much vermilion and ultramarine, and too few yellows. He was a native of Urbino, and the son of a sculptor. In 1548 he went to Rome and remained there some years, devoting his time to the study of Raphael. He then returned to Urbino, again visiting Rome in 1560, when he was employed in the Vatican. While there he was nearly poisoned, by some rival it is supposed, and for the rest of his long life he suffered from disease of the stomach, which rendered him unable to do much work. He died at Urbino at the age of eighty-four.

An admirable example of the decline of Italian art. The old religious spirit has entirely vanished, and the Holy Family is represented as worrying a bird with a cat! John the Baptist holds the little goldfinch; while the Madonna expressly directs the attention of the infant Christ to the fun. "See, the cat is trying to get at it," she seems to say. Behind the bird, the painter, in unconscious irony, has placed the Cross. The visitor who wishes to see how far Italian art has travelled in a hundred years should compare this picture with such an one as Bellini's (280), or with one of Raphael's, of whom Baroccio was a fellow-countryman. The connecting link should then be seen in Correggio (23). With Bellini or Perugino, the motive is wholly religious. With Raphael it is intermingled with artistic display. Correggio brings heaven wholly down to earth, but yet paints his domestic scene with lovely grace. Baroccio brings, one may almost say, heaven down to hell,[63] and uses all his skill to show the infant Saviour's pleasure in teasing a bird. But the artist only embodied the spirit of his time. Baroccio was one of the most celebrated painters of his day, and his biographer (Bellori) writes of him that "his pencil may be said to have been dedicated to religion: so devout, so tender, and so calculated to awaken feelings of piety, are the sentiments expressed in his pictures."

30. SEAPORT: ST. URSULA.

_Claude_ (French: 1600-1682). _See_ 2.

The best Claude in the Gallery, for it is a perfect example of his chief merit--the painting of quiet skies. Constable, in one of his lectures, refers to it as "probably the finest picture of _middle-tint_ in the world. The sun is rising through a thin mist, which, like the effect of a gauze blind in a room, diffuses the light equally. There are no large dark masses, there is no evasion in any part of this admirable work, every object is fairly painted in a firm style of execution, yet in no other picture have I seen the evanescent character of light so well expressed" (Leslie's _Life of Constable_, p. 338). "The effect of the breeze upon the water and upon the trees," says Ottley, "and the freshness of the morning atmosphere, in this picture, are expressed with a closeness of imitation bordering on illusion" (_Descriptive Catalogue of the National Gallery_, 1826, p. 42).

As for the subject: St. Ursula, a beautiful and gifted Sicilian princess, was sought in marriage by a prince of Britain; but having already dedicated herself to Christ, she made a condition that before her marriage, she, with eleven thousand attendant virgins, should be permitted for the space of three years to visit the shrines of the Saints. This being permitted, the maidens started on a miraculous voyage. Guided by angels they proceeded as far as Rome, where pagans having plotted their death, on their further journey to Cologne they were martyred by the barbarians besieging that city. Here in the picture they are represented as embarking.

31. THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC.

_Gaspard Poussin_ (French: 1613-1675).

Among the artists who were most closely associated with Nicolas Poussin (_see_ 39) were his wife's brothers, Giovanni and Gaspard Dughet. The former was loved by Poussin as a son; the latter was also his pupil and adopted his name, though in France he is familiarly known as "Le Guaspre." Gaspard was Poussin's junior by nineteen years, and the older man, recognising his abilities, encouraged him to landscape painting. By the time he was twenty, Gaspard had established himself as an independent painter in Rome, and his works were eagerly sought by lovers of art. The Palazzo Doria and the Palazzo Colonna are especially rich in his works; the picture now before us, by some considered Gaspard's masterpiece, was formerly in the latter palace. Gaspard resided chiefly at Rome, but he also rented houses at Frascati and at Tivoli. In the noble scenery of those places and elsewhere in the country around Rome, he found the subjects for many of his best pictures. He worked so rapidly, we are told, that he would often "finish a picture in a day." He had a genuine love for nature, and also a passion for the chase. "A little ass, that he cared for himself, his only servant, bore his entire apparatus, provisions, and a tent, under which, protected from the sun and wind, he made his landscapes." There is (says Ruskin) more serious feeling in his landscapes, more "perception of the moral truth of nature," and "grander reachings after sympathy" than in those either of Nicolas or of Claude. It is impossible to look at many of his pictures in this Gallery without sharing the sense of grandeur and infinity in nature which inspired them, and hence it is that from Gaspard's own time till now they have enjoyed "a permanent power of address to the human heart." But more than this has been claimed for Gaspard. Critics thought they found in his works faithful adherence to the truths of nature in sky and trees. Ottley, for instance, in his _Catalogue of the National Gallery_ (1826), speaks of Gaspard's "unrivalled correctness of imitation." Against these claims Ruskin took up his fiery parable. Gaspard's pictures are "full," he says, "of the most degraded mannerism;" first and foremost, in his search of a false sublimity, he painted every object in his picture, vegetation and all, of one dull gray and brown; and too many of his landscapes are now one dry, volcanic darkness. And secondly, he had a total want of imagination in seizing the true forms of natural objects, so that some passages of his landscapes are, as we shall see, perfect epitomes of the falseness to nature in the painters of that age[64] (collected from _Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3, 14; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. v. § 12, sec ii. ch. ii. § 18; vol. iv. pt. v. ch. xvi. § 24).

These remarks cannot be better illustrated than in the present picture. Abraham and Isaac--the former with a lighted torch, the latter with the wood--are ascending the hill on the right to the sacrifice; while Abraham's two servants await his return below. The whole spirit of the picture is "solemn and unbroken," in perfect harmony with the subject. But it is kept from being a really grand picture by the "hopeless want of imagination" in the forms of the clouds, the colour of the sky, and the treatment of the distant landscape. These painters, says Ruskin, looked at clouds, "with utter carelessness and bluntness of feeling; saw that there were a great many rounded passages in them; found it much easier to sweep circles than to design beauties, and sat down in their studies, contented with perpetual repetitions of the same spherical conceptions, having about the same relation to the clouds of nature, that a child's carving of a turnip has to the head of the Apollo.... Take the ropy, tough-looking wreath in the 'Sacrifice of Isaac,' and find one part of it, if you can, which is not the repetition of every other part of it, all together being as round and vapid as the brush could draw them" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. iii. § 8). Equally deficient is the colour of the sky:--

"It is here high noon, as is shown by the shadow of the figures; and what sort of colour is the sky at the top of the picture? Is it pale and gray with heat, full of sunshine, and unfathomable in depth? On the contrary, it is of a pitch of darkness which, except on Mont Blanc or Chimborazo, is as purely impossible as colour can be. He might as well have painted it coal-black: and it is laid on with a dead coat of flat paint, having no one quality or resemblance of sky about it. It cannot have altered, because the land horizon is as delicate and tender in tone as possible, and is evidently unchanged; and to complete the absurdity of the whole thing, this colour holds its own, without gradation or alteration, to within three or four degrees of the horizon, where it suddenly becomes bold and unmixed yellow. Now the horizon at noon may be yellow when the whole sky is covered with dark clouds, and only _one_ open streak of light left in the distance from which the whole light proceeds; but with a clear, open sky, and opposite the sun, at noon, such a yellow horizon as this is physically impossible.... We have in this sky (and it is a fine picture, one of the best of Gaspar's that I know) a notable example of the truth of the old masters--two impossible colours impossibly united!... Nor is this a solitary instance; it is Gaspar Poussin's favourite and characteristic effect" (_ibid._, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. i. § 10).

Lastly, the same want of truth is shown in the wide expanse stretching away to the distance:--