Part 9

Annibale, younger brother of Agostino and cousin of Lodovico Carracci, was one of the three masters of the Eclectic School at Bologna, the characteristics of which have been discussed in the chapter on the Later Italian Schools. Annibale, the most distinguished of the family as a painter, was the son of a tailor and was intended for his father's business. He went off, however, to his cousin Lodovico, with whom he devoted himself to art. In 1580 he visited Parma, where he spent three years in studying the works of Correggio. The copies noticed above (7 and 37) were perhaps made at this time. Annibale afterwards studied in Venice. In 1589 the school of the Carracci was started at Bologna. They called it the _Incamminati_, or, as we might say, "The Right Road." In 1600 Annibale was invited to Rome by the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese to decorate his palace. Here, we are told, "he was received and treated as a gentleman, and was granted the usual table allowance of a courtier." He was assisted in the Farnese frescoes by Lanfranco, by Domenichino (then a young man), and by his brother Agostino, of whom, however, he was very jealous (_see under_ 147). He died in 1609, and was buried near Raphael in the Pantheon. The frescoes of the Carracci in the Farnese palace were preferred by Poussin to all the works in Rome after those of Raphael, and they undoubtedly possess many technical merits. The subject-pictures by Annibale in our Gallery will fail greatly to please; they are academical and unindividual, and are deficient in true enthusiasm. Annibale was one of the first to practise landscape-painting as a separate department of art. In this field the influence of the Netherlands and of Venice may be seen united in Carracci's pictures, which in their turn laid the foundation for Poussin and Claude. In our Gallery Annibale is seen at his best in the two poetic subjects painted for a harpsichord (93 and 94); these are both graceful and spirited.

The Apostle Peter, according to a Roman tradition, being terrified at the danger which threatened him in Rome, betook himself to flight. On the Via Appia our Saviour appeared to him bearing his cross. To Peter's question: Domine quo vadis? ("Lord, whither goest Thou?") Christ replied, "To Rome, to suffer again crucifixion." Upon which the apostle retraced his steps, and received the crown of martyrdom. So much for the subject. As for its treatment, the note of almost comic exaggeration in St. Peter's attitude will not fail to strike the spectator; and "there is this objection to be made to the landscape, that, though the day is breaking over the distant hills and pediment on the right hand, there must be another sun somewhere out of the picture on the left hand, since the cast shadows from St. Peter and the Saviour fall directly to the right" (Landseer's _Catalogue_, p. 193).

10. THE EDUCATION OF CUPID.

_Correggio_ (Parmese: 1494-1534).

Antonio Allegri--called Il Correggio from his birthplace, a small town near Modena--is one of the most distinctive of the old masters. What is it that constitutes what Carlyle (following Sterne) calls the "Correggiosity of Correggio"? It is at once a way peculiar to him amongst artists, of looking at the world, and an excellence, peculiar to him also, in his methods of painting. Correggio "looked at the world in a single mood of sensuous joy," as a place in which everything is full of happy life and soft pleasure. The characteristics of his style are "sidelong grace," and an all-pervading sweetness. The method, peculiar to him, by which he realised this way of looking at things on canvas, is the subtle gradation of colours,--a point, it is interesting to note, in which of all modern masters Leighton most nearly resembles him (_Art of England_, p. 98). "Correggio is," says Ruskin, "the captain of the painter's art as such. Other men have nobler or more numerous gifts, but as a painter, master of the art of laying colour so as to be lovely, Correggio is alone" (_Oxford Lectures on Art_, § 177). The circumstances of Correggio's life go far to explain the individuality of his style. He was the son of a modest, peaceful burgher, and Correggio and Parma, where he spent his life, were towns removed from the greater intellectual excitements and political revolutions of his time. Ignorant of society, unpatronised by Popes or great Princes, his mind was touched by no deep passion other than love for his art, and "like a poet hidden in the light of thought," he worked out for himself the ideals of grace and movement which live in his pictures (see Symonds, _Renaissance_, iii. 248). Of the details of his life little is known. His earliest works, as Morelli first demonstrated, reveal the influence of the Ferrarese masters, nor was he untouched by the creations of Mantegna at Mantua, where he studied for two or three years. In 1514, in his twentieth year, he was entrusted with an important commission by the Minorite Friars of Correggio. The Court of Correggio was then a centre of refinement and culture, under the rule of Giberto and his wife Veronica, who was one of the most accomplished women of the day, and greatly admired "our Antonio," as she called the painter. In 1518 Correggio left his native city for Parma, which was to become for ever associated with his name. "There is little reason," says his latest biographer, "to lament that he never visited Rome or any other great city. Parma, rising in smiling tranquillity upon her fertile plains, girdled by castles and villages, and looking out upon the vaporous line of hills from which the streams which give her water descend into the champaign, offered our painter not only the serenity that suited his temperament, but a vaster field of activity than had ever been allotted to any artist. There were altar-pieces to be painted, rooms to be decorated; and the joyous fancies of his genius were to be allowed ample scope in the decoration of two stately cupolas" (Ricci). He was first employed by the Abbess of the Convent of S. Paolo to paint her principal chamber. It is characteristic of the time that the subjects selected were from pagan mythology. Afterwards Correggio was commissioned to cover with frescoes the cupolas of the Church of S. Giovanni Evangelista, and of the cathedral. In these compositions, Correggio "carries the foreshortening of the figures to a point which, while it displays the daring of the artist, too often transcends the limits of grace." Seen from below, little of the figures is sometimes distinguishable except legs and arms in vehement commotion. When one of the frescoes in the cathedral was first uncovered, a canon is said to have remarked that it looked to him like a "fricassee of frogs." But many of the angels' heads in Correggio's frescoes are exquisitely beautiful. It is only in Parma that Correggio's power can be fully appreciated. His charm is to be found rather in his oil-paintings, and in these the National Gallery possesses some acknowledged masterpieces. In 1530 Correggio lost his wife, and returned to his native town. "Although by nature good and well-disposed, he nevertheless," says Vasari, "grieved more than was reasonable under the burden of those passions which are common to all men. He was very melancholic in the exercise of his art, and felt its fatigues greatly." His life was but little longer than that of Raphael, for he died in his forty-first year. The stories of his poverty given in many biographies appear to be ill-founded. He was in constant employment; he was treated as a person of consideration, and received good remuneration; and the Governor of Parma wrote to the Duke of Mantua on the painter's death, "I hear he has made comfortable provision for his heirs." His fame was great, and has been enduring; but his influence upon later art was not fortunate. "His successors, attracted by an intoxicating loveliness which they could not analyse, threw themselves blindly into the imitation of Correggio's faults.... Cupolas through the length and breadth of Italy began to be covered with clouds and simpering cherubs in the convulsions of artificial ecstasy. The attenuated elegance of Parmigiano, the attitudinising of Anselmi's saints and angels, and a general sacrifice of what is solid and enduring to sentimental gewgaws on the part of all painters who had submitted to the magic of Correggio, proved how easy it was to go astray with the great master. Meanwhile, no one could approach him in that which was truly his own--the delineation of a transient moment in the life of sensuous beauty, the painting of a smile on Nature's face, when light and colour tremble in harmony with the movement of joyous living creatures" (Symonds: _Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece_, ii. 158).

One of the most celebrated works in the Gallery--"the two pictures which I would last part with out of it," Ruskin once said, "would be Titian's Bacchus and Correggio's Venus." It is a great picture first because it is true to nature. "Look at the foot of Venus. Correggio made it as like a foot as he could, and you won't easily find anything liker.... Great civilised art is always the representation, to the utmost of its power, of whatever it has got to show--made to look as like the thing as possible" (_Queen of the Air_, § 163). Notice, too, the roundness of effect produced in the limbs by the gradation of full colours, the reflected lights, and the transparent shadows. The "chiaroscuro" is so clever that you can look through the shadows into the substance.

As for the subject of the picture, Mercury, the messenger of the gods (dressed therefore in his winged cap and sandals), is endeavouring to teach Cupid (Love) his letters, of which, according to the Greek story, Mercury was the inventor. Venus, the Goddess of Beauty and the Mother of Love, looks out to the spectator with a winning smile of self-complacent loveliness and points us to the child. She has taken charge meanwhile of Cupid's bow (from which he shoots his arrows into lovers' hearts), and is herself represented (as sometimes in classical gems) with wings, for Beauty has wings to fly away as well as Time and Love. The picture is sometimes called the Education of Cupid, but Love learns through the heart and not through the head, and "if you look at this most perfect picture wisely, you will see that it really ought to be called 'Mercury trying, _and failing_, to teach Cupid to read,' for indeed from the beginning and to the end of time, Love reads without letters, and counts without arithmetic" (_Fors Clavigera_, viii. 238).

This famous picture has had a strange, eventful history. It was painted in 1521 or 1522, and a century later it was still in the Ducal Gallery at Mantua. In 1625 Charles I. of England despatched his music master, Nicholas Laniere, to Italy to buy pictures for him. Laniere communicated with a picture-dealer named Nys, who purchased several works from the Mantuan gallery. When the transaction became known, the citizens took it so ill that the Duke would have paid double the money to be rid of the bargain. But Nys would not relent, and the picture was included in the artistic freight which the ship _Margaret_ took to London in 1628. On its arrival, our picture was hung in the king's private apartments in Whitehall. When he was beheaded, and his collection sold, the Correggio was bought for £40 by the Duke of Alva, and taken to Spain. It afterwards passed through several collections, and ultimately into that of Murat, King of Naples. Upon his fall from power his wife took it with her when she escaped to Vienna. During the congress of sovereigns in 1822 her chamberlain communicated with the ministers of all the Powers, with a view to the sale of this and another Correggio (15). Russia was negotiating for the purchase of them when Lord Londonderry, hearing by mere accident of the affair, went to the chamberlain, paid the larger price against which Russia was holding out, and despatched his courier post haste to Vienna to convey the treasures to England. An attempt was made to stop him, but they reached this country almost before the Russians had heard of the purchase.[45] The picture has not come unscathed out of these changes and chances. "Repairs," says Sir Edward Poynter, "are visible in many places. Injudicious cleaning has done even more injury; and it has undoubtedly been deprived of much of that final delicate surface-painting which, in the hands of a great master, does so much to unite a picture into one harmonious whole. It remains, nevertheless, one of the most distinguished works in the collection" (_The National Gallery_, i. 4).

11. ST. JEROME.

_Guido Reni_ (Eclectic-Bologna: 1575-1642).

Guido was a native of Bologna, the son of a musician, and first studied under Dionysius Calvaert, a Flemish artist established in that city. Guido afterwards removed to the school of the Carracci, and became one of their most celebrated pupils. For twenty years he worked in Rome, where he obtained great distinction. He left Rome abruptly, owing to a dispute with one of the Cardinals, and settled in Bologna, where he lived in splendour and established a school. "As a child he was very beautiful, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. He was specially characterised by devotion to the Madonna. On every Christmas-eve, for seven successive years, ghostly knockings were heard upon his chamber door; and every night, when he awoke from sleep, the darkness above his bed was illuminated by a mysterious globe of light. In after life, besides being piously addicted to Madonna-worship, he had a great dread of women in general and witches in particular. He was always careful, it is said, to leave his studio door open while drawing from a woman" (Symonds's _Renaissance_, vii. 215). To the temperament thus indicated we may trace the half-effeminate, half-spiritual character of some of his works--the "few pale rays of fading sanctity," which Ruskin sees in him (_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. § 4). In later life his effeminate eccentricity amounted to insanity, and he gave himself wholly up to the gaming table. To extricate himself from money troubles he sold his time, says his biographer, at a stipulated sum per hour, to certain dealers, one of whom tasked him so rigidly as to stand by him, watch in hand, while he worked. How different from the honourable terms on which the earlier masters worked! How easy to understand the number of bad Guidos in the world! His biographer, Malvasia, relates that Guido's works were sometimes begun and finished in three hours. His earlier works were in the robust and forcible style of Caravaggio (_see_ No. 172). Afterwards he aimed rather at ideal grace. Both styles are represented in the National Gallery; the "Magdalen" (177), the "Youthful Christ embracing St. John" (191), and the "Ecce Homo" (271), have all been much admired for their sentiment or sentimentality. The head of St. John is a work of undoubted grace. But Guido's best work is the Aurora of the Rospigliosi Palace at Rome.

For the story of St. Jerome, _see_ under 227.

12. ISAAC AND REBECCA, OR "THE MILL."[46]

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

This and the Claude on the other side of the door (14) are of peculiar interest as being the two which Turner selected for "the noble passage of arms to which he challenged his rival from the grave." He left two of his own pictures (479 and 498) to the nation on the express condition that they should always hang side by side--as they are hanging to-day--with these two by Claude.[47] To discuss fully the comparative merits of the pictures would be beyond the scope of this handbook; the whole of the first volume of _Modern Painters_ was written to establish the superiority of Turner. We can only select a few leading points.

"The greatest picture is that which conveys the greatest number of the greatest ideas." Take first what Ruskin calls "ideas of relation," by which he means "the perception of intellectual relations, including everything productive of expression, sentiment, character." Now from this point of view this picture is a particularly clear instance of Claude's "inability to see the main point in a matter" or to present any harmonious conception:--

"The foreground is a piece of very lovely and perfect forest scenery, with a dance of peasants by a brook side; quite enough subject to form, in the hands of a master, an impressive and complete picture. On the other side of the brook, however, we have a piece of pastoral life; a man with some bulls and goats tumbling headforemost into the water, owing to some sudden paralytic affection of all their legs. Even this group is one too many; the shepherd had no business to drive his flock so near the dancers, and the dancers will certainly frighten the cattle. But when we look farther into the picture, our feelings receive a sudden and violent shock, by the unexpected appearance, amidst things pastoral and musical, of the military; a number of Roman soldiers riding in on hobby-horses, with a leader on foot, apparently encouraging them to make an immediate and decisive charge on the musicians. Beyond the soldiers is a circular temple, in exceedingly bad repair; and close beside it, built against its very walls, a neat watermill in full work. By the mills flows a large river with a weir all across it. The weir has not been made for the mill (for that receives its water from the hills by a trough carried over the temple), but it is particularly ugly and monotonous in its line of fall, and the water below forms a dead-looking pond, on which some people are fishing in punts. The banks of this river resemble in contour the later geological formations around London, constituted chiefly of broken pots and oyster-shells. At an inconvenient distance from the waterside stands a city, composed of twenty-five round towers and a pyramid. Beyond the city is a handsome bridge; beyond the bridge, part of the Campagna, with fragments of aqueducts; beyond the Campagna the chain of the Alps; on the left, the cascades of Tivoli. This is, I believe, a fair example of what is commonly called an 'ideal' landscape; _i.e._ a group of the artist's studies from Nature, individually spoiled, selected with such opposition of character as may ensure their neutralising each other's effect, and united with sufficient unnaturalness and violence of association to ensure their producing a general sensation of the impossible. Let us analyse the separate subjects a little in this ideal work of Claude's. Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light.... A dull purple poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the red light rests, like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the Alban Mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the promontories of the Apennines. From the plain to the mountains the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners, passing from a nation's grave. Let us, with Claude, make a few 'ideal' alterations in this landscape. First, we will reduce the multitudinous precipices of the Apennines to four sugar loaves. Secondly, we will remove the Alban Mount, and put a large dust-heap in its stead. Next we will knock down the greater part of the aqueducts, and leave only an arch or two, that their infinity of length may no longer be painful from its monotony. For the purple mist and declining sun, we will substitute a bright blue sky, with round white clouds. Finally, we will get rid of the unpleasant ruins in the foreground; we will plant some handsome trees therein, we will send for some fiddlers, and get up a dance, and a picnic party. It will be found, throughout the picture, that the same species of improvement is made on the materials which Claude had ready to his hand. The descending slopes of the city of Rome, towards the pyramid of Caius Cestius, supply not only lines of the most exquisite variety and beauty, but matter for contemplation and reflection in every fragment of their buildings. This passage has been idealised by Claude into a set of similar round towers, respecting which no idea can be formed but that they are uninhabitable, and to which no interest can be attached beyond the difficulty of conjecturing what they could have been built for. The ruins of the temple are rendered unimpressive by the juxtaposition of the watermill, and inexplicable by the introduction of the Roman soldiers. The glide of the muddy streams of the melancholy Tiber and Anio through the Campagna is impressive in itself, but altogether ceases to be so when we disturb their stillness of motion by a weir, adorn their neglected flow with a handsome bridge, and cover their solitary surface with punts, nets, and fishermen" (_Modern Painters_, vol i., preface to second edition, pp. xxxvi.-xxxix.)

Take next the "ideas of truth" in the picture--the perception, that is to say, of faithfulness in a statement of facts by the thing produced. And first (1) for truth of _colour_. "Can it be seriously supposed that those murky browns and melancholy greens are representative of the tints of leaves under full noonday sun? I know that you cannot help looking upon all these pictures as pieces of dark relief against a light wholly proceeding from the distances; but they are nothing of the kind, they are noon and morning effects with full lateral light. Be so kind as to match the colour of a leaf in the sun (the darkest you like) as nearly as you can, and bring your matched colour and set it beside one of these groups of trees, and take a blade of common grass, and set it beside any part of the fullest light of their foregrounds, and then talk about the truth of colour of the old masters!" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 5). (2) Next for truth of _chiaroscuro_. Claude neglects that distinctness of shadow which is the chief means of expressing vividness of light. Thus "the trunks of the trees between the water-wheel and the white figure of the middle distance, are dark and visible; but their shadows are scarcely discernible on the ground, and are quite vague and lost in the building. In nature, every bit of the shadow, both on the ground and building, would have been defined and conspicuous; while the trunks themselves would have been faint, confused, and indistinguishable, in their illumined parts,[48] from the grass or distance" (_ibid._, ch. iii. § 4). (3) Thirdly, for truth of _space_. In nature everything is indistinct, but nothing vacant. But look at the city on the right bank of the river:--