Part 8

With regard to the characteristics of Claude's art, his general position in the history of landscape painting has been defined in the chapter on the French School, and some further points of detail are noticed under his several works. Here, however, it may be convenient to give Ruskin's summary of the matter. (1) Claude had a fine feeling for beauty of form, and is seldom ungraceful in his foliage. His tenderness of conception is especially shown in delicate aerial effects, such as no one had ever rendered before, and in some respects, no one has ever done in oil-colour since. But their character appears to rise rather from a delicacy of bodily constitution in Claude than from any mental sensibility; such as they are, they give a kind of feminine charm to his work, which partly accounts for its wide influence. To whatever their character may be traced, it renders him incapable of enjoying or painting anything energetic or terrible. Thus a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of Claude is beyond praise in all qualities of air. But he was incapable of rendering great effects of space and infinity. (2) As with his skies, so too with his seas. They are the finest pieces of water painting in ancient art. But they are selections of the particular moment when the sea is most insipid and characterless. (3) He had sincerity of purpose; but in common with the other landscape painters of his day, neither earnestness, humility, nor love, such as would ever cause him to forget himself. Hence there is in his work no simple or honest record of any single truth, and his pictures, when examined with reference to essential truth, are one mass of error from beginning to end. So far as he felt the truth, he tried to be true; but he never felt it enough to sacrifice supposed propriety, or habitual method, to it. Very few of his sketches and none of his pictures show evidence of interest in other natural phenomena than the quiet afternoon sunshine which would fall methodically into a composition.[40] One would suppose he had never seen scarlet in a morning cloud, nor a storm burst on the Apennines. (4) He shows a peculiar incapacity of understanding the main point of a matter, and of men of name is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of expression. (5) Yet in spite of all his deficiencies Claude effected a revolution in art. This revolution consisted in setting the sun in heaven. We will give him the credit of this with no drawbacks.[41] Till Claude's time no one had seriously thought of painting the sun but conventionally; that is so say, as a red or yellow star (often), with a face in it, under which type it was constantly represented in illumination; else it was kept out of the picture, or introduced in fragmentary distances, breaking through clouds with almost definite rays. Claude first set it in the pictorial heaven (collected from _Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3, 5, 14, sec. iii. ch. i. § 9, ch. iii. §§ 13-15, 17; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. §§ 22, 27, and Appendix i.; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. v. §§ 10, 11). This summary should show that it is a mistake to represent Ruskin as blind to the merits of Claude. He has done full justice to Claude's amenity and pensive grace; to the beauty of his skies and the skill and charm of his aerial effects. At the time when Ruskin began to write _Modern Painters_, Claude was still accounted the prince of all landscape painters. The estimate of Claude against which Ruskin protested may be found in Goethe. "Claude Lorraine," he said, "knew the real world thoroughly, even to its smallest detail, and he made use of it to express the world contained in his own beautiful soul. He stands to nature in a double relation,--he is both her slave and her master: her slave, by the material means which he is obliged to employ to make himself understood; her master, because he subordinates these material means to a well reasoned inspiration, to which he makes them serve as instruments." And elsewhere, Goethe expresses his admiration for the depth and grasp of Claude's powers. Ruskin, in vindicating the greater sweep and depth of Turner's genius, fastened with all the emphasis of an advocate upon the weak points in Claude's artistic and intellectual armoury. By so doing he cleared the ground for a truer appreciation of Claude. As a corrective or supplement to Ruskin's adverse criticisms, the reader may be referred to Constable's enthusiastic appreciations. "I do not wonder," wrote Constable to his wife, "at you being jealous of Claude. If anything could come between our love, it is him.... The Claudes, the Claudes are all, all, I can think of here" (Leslie's _Life of Constable_, 1845, p. 121). Constable was writing from Sir George Beaumont's house, where several of the Claudes, now in the National Gallery, were then hanging. Constable, however, was alive to some of Claude's defects. "Claude's exhilaration and light," he wrote to Leslie, "departed from him when he was between fifty and sixty, and he then became a professor of the 'higher walks of art,' and fell in a great degree into the manner of the painters around him; so difficult is it to be natural, so easy to be superior in our own opinion. When we have the pleasure of being together at the National Gallery I think I shall not find it difficult to illustrate these remarks, as Carr has sent a large picture of the latter description" (_ibid._, p. 221). The picture in question is No. 6, painted in 1658.

For the story of Cephalus, who is here receiving from Procris the presents of Diana, the hound Lelaps, and the fatal dart with which she was killed, see under 698. As for the landscape, Mr. Ruskin cites this picture as an instance of the "childishness and incompetence" of Claude's foregrounds.

"I will not," he writes, "say anything of the agreeable composition of the three banks, rising one behind another from the water, except only that it amounts to a demonstration that all three were painted in the artist's study, without any reference to nature whatever. In fact, there is quite enough intrinsic evidence in each of them to prove this, seeing that what appears to be meant for vegetation upon them amounts to nothing more than a green stain on their surfaces, the more evidently false because the leaves of the trees twenty yards farther off are all perfectly visible and distinct; and that the sharp lines with which each cuts against that beyond it are not only such as crumbling earth could never show or assume, but are maintained through their whole progress ungraduated, unchanging, and unaffected by any of the circumstances of varying shade to which every one of nature's lines is inevitably subjected. In fact the whole arrangement is the impotent struggle of a tyro to express by successive edges that approach of earth which he finds himself incapable of expressing by the drawing of the surface. Claude wished to make you understand that the edge of his pond came nearer and nearer; he had probably often tried to do this with an unbroken bank, or a bank only varied by the delicate and harmonious anatomy of nature: and he had found that owing to his total ignorance of the laws of perspective such efforts on his part invariably ended in his reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and making it look perpendicular. Much comfort and solace of mind in such unpleasant circumstances may be derived from instantly dividing the obnoxious bank into a number of successive promontories, and developing their edges with completeness and intensity" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. iv. §§ 17, 18).

3. A CONCERT.

_School of Titian_ (Venetian). _See under next picture._

The young man in the red velvet cap plays on the violoncello; the other on the oboe, of which only the reed is visible. The other three are vocalists. The master is keeping time, and is intent on the boy pupil. The young girl, with her hand on her husband's shoulder, is waiting to chime in, and looks far away the while to where the music takes her. "In Titian's portraits you always see the soul,--faces 'which pale passion loves.' Look at the Music-piece by Titian--it is 'all ear,'--the expression is evanescent as the sounds--the features are seen in a sort of dim _chiaroscuro_, as if the confused impressions of another sense intervened--and you might easily suppose some of the performers to have been engaged the night before in

Mask or midnight serenade Which the starved lover to his mistress sings Best quitted with disdain."

(HAZLITT: _Criticisms on Art_, edition 1843, p. 10).

Perhaps it is indeed a travelling party of musicians practising for a serenade. Certainly one thinks of this picture as one reads of a supper party at Titian's house. "Before the tables were set out, we spent the time in looking at the lifelike figures in the excellent paintings of which the house was full, and in discussing the real beauty and charm of the garden, which was a pleasure and a wonder to every one. It is situated in the extreme part of Venice upon the sea, and from it may be seen the pretty little island of Murano, and other beautiful places. This part of the sea, as soon as the sun went down, swarmed with gondolas adorned with beautiful women, and resounded with varied harmonies--the music of voices and instruments till midnight" (Priscianese, describing a visit to Titian in 1540: cited in Heath's _Titian_, "Great Artists" series, p. 53).

4. A HOLY FAMILY.

_Titian_ (Venetian: 1477-1576).

Tiziano Vecellio--"il divino Tiziano," as his countrymen called him--is one of the greatest names in the history of painting: "There is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they" (_Two Paths_, § 57). Titian's works "are not art," said one of his contemporaries, "but miracles; they make upon me the impression of something divine, and as heaven is the soul's paradise, so God has transfused into Titian's colours the paradise of our bodies." It is not easy, however, to point out the special characteristics of Titian, for it is his glory to offer nothing over-prominent and to keep "in all things the middle path of perfection." Titian's mind was "wholly realist, universal, and manly. He saw that sensual passion in man was not only a fact, but a Divine fact; the human creature, though the highest of the animals, was, nevertheless, a perfect animal, and his happiness, health, and nobleness depended on the due power of every animal passion, as well as the cultivation of every spiritual tendency" (_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 30). As a youth Titian worked under the influence of Giorgione, of whom (says Vasari), "they who were excellent confessed that he was born to put the breath of life into painted figures and to imitate the elasticity and colour of flesh." The so-called "Sacred and Profane Love" of Titian marks the culmination of his "Giorgionesque" style, in which sensuous delight and spiritual yearning are mixed in subtle harmony. The "Bacchus and Ariadne" of our own Gallery belongs to a somewhat later date, and is a combination of poetry and painting almost unique in the world of art. "One object," says Sir Frederick Burton,[42] "Titian kept steadily before him from the beginning--the rendering of the lustre of the skin in its warmth, its pearliness, and its light, such as it is found in the European races, and nowhere perhaps in such perfection as in the blended northern and southern blood of Venetia. He presents to us humanity in its noblest and most beautiful forms, and so profoundly had he studied it that the ideal personages introduced in his pictures have an intense individuality. Naturally, therefore, he stands supreme amongst the great portrait-painters. In the department of landscape he was, if not the first to perceive, at least the first to render, nature in her sublimer aspects. When dealing with classical themes he thoroughly translated the spirit, without idly imitating the forms, of antiquity." And as the range of his intellectual sympathy was wide, so was that of his executive skill. He is, indeed, especially supreme as a colourist; but for the rest, the very greatness of the master lies in there being no one quality predominant in him. Raphael's power is properly called "Raphaelesque," but "Titian's power is simply the power of doing right. Whatever came before Titian, he did wholly as it _ought_ to be done" (_Two Paths_, §§ 57, 58, 69).

This universality of Titian's art is reflected in his life--a life prolonged far beyond the ordinary human spell, and full to the end of "superhuman toil." He was sent from his country home at Cadore to Venice to begin his studies when quite a boy: he was only nine, it is said, when he entered Gentile Bellini's studio. He lived to be ninety-nine, and his life was one long education. He was nearly threescore years and ten when he visited Rome and saw Michael Angelo, but he "had greatly improved," he said in later years, "after he had been at Rome." He painted until his dying hour, and is said to have exclaimed at the last that he was "only then beginning to understand what painting was." This continual striving after perfection, this consciousness of falling short, is in striking contrast to the honour and glory paid to him by others. He was painter in ordinary to the Venetian State (a post in which he succeeded Giovanni Bellini). He was an honoured guest at the court of Alphonso I., Duke of Ferrara, for whom he painted the "Bacchus and Ariadne" (35). To the Emperor Charles V. he "stood as Apelles to Alexander the Great, the only man worthy to paint his royal master," and he was made Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur, with precedence for his children as nobles of the Empire. The emperor's son, Philip II. (of Spain), was an equally generous patron; the Pope Paul III. tried hard to induce Titian to settle in Rome; and Henry III. of France, who visited him at his own house, wished the picture on which the painter was then at work to be placed over his tomb. In his house at Venice Titian lived in great style, attracting kings and nobles and men of letters to him. There is all the keenness of a city of merchants in Titian's business relations, and many of the extant documents about him are petitions for further favours and for arrears of pensions. But if he gathered like a beggar, he spent like a prince. There is a story of two cardinals coming to dine at his house. He flung his purse to the steward, and bade him make ready, for "all the world was coming to dine with him." Certain too it is that if he knocked too much at the doors of princes, it was for the sake of his children rather than of himself. At the loss of his wife (when he was fifty-seven) he was "utterly disconsolate," says the letter of a friend. His sister Orsa afterwards kept house for him--"sister, daughter, mother, companion, and steward of his household," so Aretino described her; and it was his daughter Lavinia whom he oftenest loved to paint. She was "the person dearest to him in all the world," and many years after she had died (1560) in childbirth, he described her to Philip II. as "absolute mistress of his soul." A less pleasant light is thrown upon the great painter by his friendship and close association with the infamous Aretino. This curious product of the Renaissance came to Venice in 1527, and with Titian and Jacopo del Sansovino formed "the so-called Triumvirate, which was a kind of Council of Three, having as its _raison d'être_ the mutual furtherance of material interests, and the pursuit of art, love, and pleasure." To Titian's association with Aretino some critics have ascribed the stronger vein of sensuality which is discernible in some of his later works. To the extreme limit, however, of his long life his hand never lost its cunning, nor was the force of imagination abated. He was carried off by the plague, and received even in that time of panic the honour of solemn obsequies in the church of the Frari--"the man as highly favoured," says Vasari, "by fortune as any of his kind had ever been before him." His house at Venice is still shown. It looks across the lagoons to the distant mountains of his early home.

One of the pictures which mark the advance made by Titian in the art of landscape. Look at the background of some earlier Holy Family--at the "purist" landscape, for instance, of Perugino (288),--and the change will be seen at once--a change from the conventional or ideal to the real and the actual. Titian was one of the first to "relieve the foreground of his landscapes from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded formalism of the early painters, and give a close approximation to the forms of nature in all things; retaining, however, this much of the old system, that the distances were for the most part painted in deep ultramarine blue, the foregrounds in rich green and brown" (_Lectures on Architecture and Painting_, p. 158). In particular he was the first[43] to "apprehend the subduing pathos that comes with eventide" (see Gilbert's _Cadore_ or _Titian's Country_, p. 33). Titian, says Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ii. § 1, ch. vii. § 15), "hardly ever paints sunshine, but a certain opalescent twilight which has as much of human emotion as of imitative truth in it:

The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."

5. A SEAPORT AT SUNSET.

_Claude Lorraine_ (French: 1600-1682). _See_ 2.

An instance of false tone (_cf._ under Cuyp, No. 53). "Many even of the best pictures of Claude must be looked close into to be felt, and lose light every foot that we retire. The smallest of the three Seaports in the National Gallery is valuable and right in tone when we are close to it, but ten yards off it is all brick-dust, offensively and evidently false in its whole hue." Contrast "the perfect and unchanging influence of Turner's picture at any distance. We approach only to follow the sunshine into every cranny of the leafage, and retire only to feel it diffused over the scene, the whole picture glowing like a sun or star at whatever distance we stand, and lighting the air between us and it" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. i. § 20).

6. DAVID AT THE CAVE OF ADULLAM.[44]

_Claude Lorraine_ (French: 1600-1682). _See_ 2.

David, in front of the cave, "longed and said, 'Oh that one would give me to drink of the water of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!' And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines (seen in the valley), and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David" (2 Samuel xxiii. 15, 16). With regard to the landscape, the picture is a good instance at once of Claude's strength and weakness. Thus "the central group of trees is a very noble piece of painting" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. ii. § 8). On the other hand the rocks, both in the left corner and in the right, are highly absurd. "The Claudesque landscape is not, as so commonly supposed, an idealised abstract of the nature about Rome. It is an ultimate condition of the Florentine conventional landscape, more or less softened by reference to nature" (_ibid._, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 27). So, too, "the brown foreground and rocks are as false as colour can be: first, because there never was such a brown sunlight, for even the sand and cinders (volcanic tufa) about Naples, granting that he had studied from these ugliest of all formations, are, where they are fresh fractured, golden and lustrous in full light, compared to these ideals of crags, and become, like all other rocks, quiet and gray when weathered; and secondly, because no rock that ever nature stained is without its countless breaking tints of varied vegetation" (_ibid._, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 16).

7, 37. GROUPS OF HEADS.

_After Correggio. See under 10._

Copies by Annibale Carracci from Correggio's compositions in the church of S. Giovanni at Parma (Layard's edition of Kugler's _Italian School of Painting_, ii. 631). These pictures have had an eventful history, and been connected with the fortunes of many sovereigns. They came to the National Gallery from Mr. Angerstein, who bought them from the Orleans collection. They had formerly been in the possession of Queen Christina, having been carried off to Sweden as part of the plunder of Prague when that city was captured by the Swedes in 1648. The pictures collected there by the Emperor Rudolph II. were removed to Stockholm.

8. A DREAM OF HUMAN LIFE.

_From a design by Michael Angelo. See 790._

The naked figure, typical of the human race, and reclining against a slippery globe,--with the world, we may say, before him,--is awakening, at the sound of a trumpet from above from the dream of life to the lasting realities of eternity. It may be the sound of the "last trump" or the call to a "new life" that comes before. Behind his seat are several masks, illustrating the insincerity or duplicity of a world in which "all is vanity"; and around him are visions of the tempting and transitory hopes, fears, and vices of humanity. On the right sits a helmed warrior, moody and discomfited; his arms hang listlessly and his face is unseen--hidden perhaps from the cruelty of War. Above him are battling figures--emblematic of Strife and Contention. A little detached from this group is a son dragging down his parent by the beard--"bringing his grey hair with sorrow to the grave." On the other side sits Jealousy, gnawing a heart; and above are the sordid hands of Avarice clutching a bag of gold. On the left hand Lust and Sorrow are conspicuous; Intemperance raises a huge bottle to his lips; and Gluttony turns a spit (see Landseer's _Catalogue of the National Gallery_, 1834, p. 41). Thus all around the figure of Human Life there wait--

The ministers of human fate And black Misfortune's baleful train!... These shall the fury Passions tear, The vultures of the mind, Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear, And shame that sculks behind; Or pining Love shall waste their youth, Or Jealousy, with rankling tooth, That inly gnaws the secret heart; And Envy wan, and faded Care, Grim-visag'd comfortless Despair, And Sorrow's piercing dart.

GRAY: _Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College_.

9. "LORD, WHITHER GOEST THOU?"

_Annibale Carracci_ (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609).