Frank Jewett Mather

“ As Crocker took in vaguely bits of Hispano-Moresque and mellow ivories, a broad medal or so and a well-poised Renaissance bronze, a Japanese painting on the lighted wall, and one or two drawings by great contemporaries, Emma's friends, he was amazed at the quality of everything. A sense of extreme fastidiousness rebuked, in a way, his more indiscriminate zeal as a collector. Uncomfortably near him on the dark wall he began to be aware of something marvellous on old gold when tea interrupted his observations. Tea with Emma was always engrossing. ”

“ Although Giovanni frankly imitates the rigid folds of drapery and landscape from Mantegna, it is with a distinct difference. The mood is gentler, details are less obtrusive, there is an exquisite sense of evening sky, and of hills in gloom, and of the coming of twilight over a river plain. It is the first greatly felt landscape in Venetian painting, and though Giovanni was far to surpass it in fineness and accuracy, even he never excelled it in depth and truthfulness of feeling. The serenity of the eventide is the fitting foil to Our Lord’s single moment of human weakness and despair. ”

“ THE MISSING ST. MICHAEL Dennis, our Epicurean sage, addressed us all as we lolled on his terrace, drank his tea, and divided our attention between his fluent wisdom and his spacious view of the Valdarno.
"The question is," he repeated, "what will Emma do? Will she be brave, or, rather ordinary enough, to act for herself and him, or will she refuse him because of what she thinks we shall think of them both? As we calmly sit here she may be deciding. That is if you are sure, Harwood, that Crocker was really bound for Emma's when you saw him." ”

“ You feel how Veronese loved it all and how little he cared for anything beyond the splendor, dignity and prosperity of his adoptive city. He gives us the look of Venice at her climax of Renaissance glory, as Carpaccio had given the dying radiance of her mediæval estate. From the point of view of judgment, style and fine craftsmanship, it is impossible to overpraise Veronese. He should be regarded rather as a great painter in the narrower sense than a supreme artist. ”

“ The workmanship is of extraordinary carefulness and beauty. Every detail of the fur, of the flowing hair, of the powerful, slender hand, is there; but the effect remains large. There is in the face a sense of dignity, reserve, decision, and sympathy. Other portraits are probably much more like Dürer as Nuremberg saw him. This presents his own ideal of himself as creative artist, exemplifying a spiritual beauty that he ever strove to attain. Despite an old inscription reading 1500, we must date this portrait after that Venetian visit which brought to Dürer new power and self-confidence. ”

“ Differing in form and colour, the entire lot agreed in possessing that dull early Italian lustre, which perhaps accidental and less distinguished than that of Spain, is even dearer in a collector's eyes. They hinted of all enamelled things that come out of the East—of the peacock reflections of the tiles of Damascus and Cordova, of the franker polychromy of Rhodian kilns, of the subtler bloom of the dishes of Moorish Spain, of the brassier glazes of Minorca and Sicily—all these things lay enticingly in epitome in these lustred Italian pots, as they glimmered with a furtive splendour. ”

“ Stolid men like Fra Bartolommeo immediately accepted his principles of composition and so did miraculously alert intelligences like Raphael’s. His mere passing contact and tradition inspired that admirable language of light and dark that became poetry in Giorgione and Correggio. The good and the harm he did is active today in thousands of academies and art schools. His is assuredly the finest intelligence that ever applied itself to the painter’s art, and if he failed in will and in fecundity, he has impressed himself upon posterity as no other Italian painter save Titian. ”

“ If the serene intelligence of a Raphael had not found emotions to fill such forms, if Michelangelo himself in his later years falls back on a monotonous formula of terribleness, what hope was there for such uninspired imitators as the Venustis, Volterras, and Vasaris? One and all, they entertained monstrous delusions of effortless attainment—cleverly contorted their nudes, shrewdly calculated their terrors. And the Roman art of the Golden Age, forgetting both the wise humility of Umbria and the reasonable pride of Florence, suddenly collapsed in the ugliest and most irrational ostentation. ”

“ All the hot way up the valley he had had a sense of a crisis. It was odd to be summoned whither he had been drifting for four years, and now the sight of Emma disarmed, perplexed him. It seemed ominous. One finds such transparent kindness in clever people generally at parting, when one would be remembered for one's self and not for a phrase. Then Crocker for an instant glimpsed the wilder hope that the softening was for him and not for an occasion. Emma had never seemed more desirable than to-day. ”

“ For greater beauty, Athens represented them nude or lightly draped; for greater dignity, Florence chose the solemn garb of the Roman forum. Whether pagan or Christian, the guardians of a people’s morality were to be above haste, excitement, or any transient emotion. They were to express intensities of feeling, but a feeling more composed, permanent, and disciplined, than that of every day. Judgment and criticism count for as much in both arts as emotional inspiration. ”

“ In the Arcadian nude Palma has delicacy and refinement of workmanship, but the mood is obvious. For him beauty is literally skin deep, and he gives himself to the impossible competition of paint with nature’s nacreous shades and ineffable carnations. But he so nearly succeeds that just as a painter of lovely surfaces no Venetian painter quite equalled him, not even Titian, and with this single talent Palma almost made himself a great portraitist. Indeed if painting surfaces were all of portraiture, he would be the greatest portraitist of the Renaissance. ”

“ However that be, Raphael in the glorious years from 1500 to 1512 resumes and perfects every gentle, orderly, and reasonable strain in Italian painting. Whether in portraiture or narrative, in mythology or symbolism, in pictures of the Madonna or in pure decoration, he gave to Italian painting its final stamp. He achieved a grandeur of space composition akin to the movement of a symphony, a hidden structure more appealing than any separate hue or form. His best work rests on a great humility, and his later pride went far towards undoing him as an artist. ”

“ In every phase Correggio’s work is distinguishable by the most beautiful handling of color and light and dark. Like Moretto and Lotto he prefers a blonder scale than the Venetian, and makes his surfaces so many miracles of ivory, silvery grays and straw yellows, invested with shadow tenuously modulated, yet of strongest modelling power. He cares nothing about textures or individually rich passages; it is the whole picture that counts. The brush sweeps lightly and swiftly, there is no loading of color, everywhere an exquisite economy and a subtlety that conceals itself. ”

“ Within his narrow range Palma is admirable, never uneasy, never below himself. In his unperturbed Arcadianism and even in his harmless sentimentalism, in his delicacy and robustness, he seems more Venetian than the Venetians themselves.
Composure is the very soul of the grand style whether in fifth century Athens or in sixteenth century Florence, Rome, or Venice. It accepts the human spectacle as worthy and thrilling, admires without misgivings the best things that come before its eye. ”

“ Charming as is such a group as the Three Graces at Dresden, or the dozen or more single portraits of men and women, they lack the last quality of distinction. He tries to gain it by adopting rather overtly the pathos and wistfulness of Giorgione, but it doesn’t suit his exquisitely groomed cavaliers nor yet their even more exquisitely groomed and most ample light o’loves. Indeed, despite a handful of superb portraits, Palma has ever the air rather of a consummate beauty doctor than that of a great artist. ”

“ We have neither the fluent enamel of Giorgione and early Titian, nor yet the muffled richness of Titian’s later manner. But in the best Tintorettos the touch is infallibly crisp, right and expressive. To exaggerate these generously avowed influences of the master who repudiated him and the master he never saw would be easy. As a matter of fact, Tintoretto is always more the illustrator than either of his models. If he adopts the grand poses of Michelangelo, he does so not for abstract beauty, but ever seeks a motive for them. ”

“ All objects, human and inanimate, bear firmly on the ground and are wrapped in an enveloping atmosphere. In the quality and arrangement of the figures, it all derives from Giotto; in the vastness of the scale, the introduction of mystery and distance, it is wholly Masaccio’s own. Vasari rightly praised the harmony and discretion with which these powerful assertions of form are made, and sees here the beginnings of the modern style of painting. ”

“ Modern criticism is loath to look beyond contrasts of nude and clothed forms, swing of tree-tops and of sky, subtle interplay of light and shade. My own reading is merely based on the contrast between the rustic and urban lovers, and an intuition that the courtier in peering so wistfully at the shepherd is merely seeing himself in a former guise. In lassitude, perhaps in satiety, beside a courtly mistress who is absent from him in spirit, there rises the vision of earlier simpler love and of a devoted shepherdess who once piped for him in the shade. ”

“ Such is Jacopo Tintoretto amid the reflective tranquility, and confident splendors of Venetian painting—a wind of the spirit, a shattering, yet consoling, apparition. Tenderness, tragedy, 425romance, are his realm. Where his contemporaries dealt in superb averages, he deals in transcendent exceptions. Thus he has ever been a baffling figure to the critics. For the febrile Ruskin, he is among the greatest of painters; for the coolly analytical Kenyon Cox, he is little better than a reckless sensationalist. Every one, friend or foe of his art, must admit its Shakespearean richness and variety. ”

“ Certain ardent young faces recall Leonardo da Vinci, and the construction of the group is his. We have linking motives, like that of sprawling Diogenes on the steps, curves that repeat or counter the vault above, turns and thrusts of bodies in active balance, an energetic variety within a serene harmony. The mood is less agitated than that of the Disputa, while the composition is freer. Human science and philosophy are at once less bound than is theology, and move more equably because they strive for more readily attainable ends. ”

“ The gestures are unconscious caresses. The Goddess dreams of old joys. What faun or sylvan even would not respect that dream? Not with passion, then, though himself knowing all its sting, does Giorgione deal, but with ardors sublimated in memory. The marvellous lines of this Venus, as sweeping as the curves of hills or river currents, were imitated again and again, but neither Titian, Palma Vecchio, nor the rest ever recaptured the evasive poetry of their model. ”

“ Botticelli, Signorelli; in a sardonic way, Piero di Cosimo; Giovanni Bellini and even Andrea Mantegna had variously attempted this sort of painted poesy. But the flavor of the Giorgionesque poesy is fuller and richer. His beauty is that of languor, revery, dream. Whatever the ostensible theme may be, his painting is Arcadian. His people have not merely no relation to our world, but slight and ambiguous relations to each other within the picture. They are isolated in their own musings, rarely look at each other, never suggest an action, but only a mood. ”

“ The great Florentine artist is a thinker; he is often poet and scientist, sculptor and architect, besides being a painter. Behind his painting lies always a problem of mind, and as sheer personalities the greatest painters of Siena, Venice, and Lombardy often seem mere nobodies when compared even with the minor Florentines. We should know something about a city that produced personality so generously, and before considering Giotto, the first great painter Florence bred, we shall do well to look at Florence as he saw it about the year 1300, being a man in the thirties. ”