“ When I last lingered in the Gallery before my old favourites, I thought them more wonderful than ever before; but as I draw towards the close of life, I feel that the real world is more wonderful yet: that Painting has not yet fulfilled half her mission,—she has told us only of the heroism of men and the happiness of angels: she may perhaps record in future the beauty of a world whose mortal inhabitants are happy, and which angels may be glad to visit. ”

“ And this is what people call 'painting nature'! It is, indeed, painting nature, as she appears to the most unfeeling and untaught of mankind. The bargeman and the bricklayer probably see no more in Venice than Canaletto gives—heaps of earth and mortar, with water between—and are just as capable of appreciating the facts of sunlight and shadow, by which he deceives us, as the most educated of us all. ”

“ What may they be? and whence did it come?—Out of embalmed sacristy, or antique coffin of some early Brescian martyr, or, through that bright space of blue Italian sky, from the hands of an angel, like his Annunciation lily, or the book received in the Apocalypse by John the Divine? It is one of those old saints, Gaudioso (at home in every church of Brescia) , who looks out with full face from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from a background which, though it might be the new heaven over a new earth, is in truth only the proper, breathable air of Italy. ”

“ What says he of himself? 'Despiser of wealth and of death.' Two grand scorns: but, oh, condemned Salvator! the question is not for man what he can scorn, but what he can love." At the "opposite poles of art are Fra Angelico and Salvator Rosa; of whom the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, and never harboured an impure thought. His pictures are simply so many pieces of jewellery, the colour of the draperies being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. ”

“ Thus at Florence, the Madonna is a tender, shrinking, delicate maiden. At Venice, she is a calm, serene, and pure-spirited mother. The Florentine "handmaiden of the Lord" often wears a mystic, and almost always an intellectual air. The Venetian type, seen at its central perfection in Bellini, has a neck firm as a column; the child is nude and plays with a flower or fruit; grandeur of mien and a noble type of motherhood are the ideals the Venetian painters set before themselves. The Lombard Madonna is less spiritual and severe than the Florentine. ”

“ What he held up to nature—and herein is Rembrandt's individuality [Pg 122] most marked—was the dark mirror. "He was," says Leighton, "the supreme painter who revealed to the world the poetry of twilight and all the magic mystery of gloom." "He was in the mystery," says Burton, "that underlies the surface of things." "He accosts with his dark lantern," says Fromentin, "the world of the marvellous, of conscience, and the ideal; he has no master in the art of painting, because he has no equal in the power of showing the invisible." ”

“ The history of these frescoes is typical of that of many a vicissitude, and recalls the idea suggested in one of Browning's Dramatic Lyrics, in which the soul of the painter watches the gradual decay and dispersal of his life's work:—
Wherever a fresco peals and drops,
Wherever an outline weakens and wanes
Till the latest life in the painting stops,
Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains:
One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick,
Each tinge, not wholly escape the plaster,
—A lion who dies of an ass's kick,
The wronged great soul of an ancient Master. ”

“ The entire purpose of the picture is a mystic symbolism by motion and chiaroscuro. By motion, first. There is a dome of burning clouds in the upper heaven. Twelve angels half float, half dance, in a circle, round the lower vault of it. All their drapery is drifted so as to make you feel the whirlwind of their motion. They are seen by gleams of silvery or fiery light, relieved against an equally lighted blue of inimitable depth and loveliness. It is impossible for you ever to see a more noble work of passionate Greek chiaroscuro—rejoicing in light" (Lectures on Landscape, § 58) . ”

“ In studying a picture by Ruysdael we become interested also in the personality of the painter. We find ourselves asking questions. Had he joys, as he certainly had bitterness? Did destiny give him occasion to love other things than clouds, and from what did he suffer most, if he did suffer, from the torment of painting well or of living? All these questions remain without answer, and yet posterity is interested in them. Would it occur to you to ask as much about Berchem, Karel Dujardin, Wouwerman, Goyen, Terburg, Metsu, Peter de Hoogh himself? ”

“ He gave the populace of his day something to look at—and something to love. "Is she not beautiful," asks a critic before this picture, "in simplicity and solemn majesty? Is she not a real mother with a half sad and foreboding wistful look that goes straight to the heart?" Cimabue's Madonna is still a Mater Dolorosa—"our Lady of Pain," but there is an attempt alike in her and in the child, and in the attendant angels, to substitute for the conventional image of an ideal personage the representation of real humanity. ”

“ It is so pronounced, so peculiar, so repulsive to one man, so attractive to another, that, like his own dread statue of Lorenzo de' Medici, 'it fascinates and is intolerable.' There are few, I take it, who can feel at home with him in all the length and breadth and dark depths of the regions that he traversed. The world of thought and forms in which he lived habitually is too arid, like an extinct planet, tenanted by mighty elemental beings with little human left to them, but visionary Titan-shapes, too vast and void for common minds to dwell in pleasurably. ”

“ In other districts of Italy, the dignity of the heads which occur in the most celebrated compositions is clearly owing to the feeling of the painter. He has visibly realised or idealised his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults or failings of the human nature around him, so that the best of his work is that which has most perfectly taken the colour of his own mind; and the least impressive, if not the least valuable, that which appears to have been unaffected and unmodified portraiture. But at Venice, all is exactly the reverse of this. ”

“ Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset ”

“ He was, says Pater, "the inventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve for uses neither of devotion, nor of allegorical or historical teaching—little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape—morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar." Some of Bellini's late works are already of this kind; but they were a little too austere and sober in colour for the taste of the time. Carpaccio was full of brilliancy, fancy, and gaiety, but he painted few easel pictures. ”

“ There is no more fascinating and illustrious name in the annals of art than Leonardo, of Vinci, a town in the Val d'Arno below Florence. He has been well called, from the many-sidedness of his efforts, the Faust of the Renaissance. The great public which knows him best by his few pictures and many drawings does not always remember that he was also musician, critic, poet, sculptor, architect, mechanist, mathematician, philosopher, and explorer. ”

“ Richter's interpretation, Giuliano in the picture before us lies sunk in deepest sleep. The little satyrs are whispering dreams into his ears, dreams from the realms of Venus. In his dreams, Giuliano is overcome with fear, because his lady is clad in the armour of Pallas: he cannot brook the gleam of her helmet and her lance. But Cupid whispers: "Lift thine eyes, Giuliano, to that flame which with its radiance blinds thee like a sun; for she it is who quickens noble minds, and from the breast all evil thoughts expels." ”

“ There are eight or nine and thirty of them, laid over each other like fish-scales; the shade being most carefully made darker and darker as it recedes from each until it comes to the edge of the next, against which it cuts in the same sharp circular line, and then begins to decline again, until the canvas is covered with about as much intelligence or feeling of art as a house-painter has in marbling a wainscot, or a weaver in repeating an ornamental pattern. What is there in this, which the most determined prejudice in favour of the old masters can for a moment suppose to resemble trees? ”

“ Rubens came to urge Charles to conclude peace, and here on canvas he sets forth its blessings. In the centre of the picture is the Goddess of Wisdom, with Minerva's helmet on her head, her right hand resting on her spear, now to be used no more. Before her flies War, reluctantly, as if he dared not resist Wisdom, yet employing his shield, in order still to shelter Discord, with her torch now extinguished. Last of all in the hateful train is Malice, whose very breath is fire, and who "endeth foul in many a snaky fold"—in the serpent's folds, which ever attend the hostilities of nations. ”

“ The brown tones of the soil, the landscape background and the water, the purple and gold of the draperies, make up a marvellous setting alike for the brilliantly illuminated contour and the more subdued carnations of the model. The truth of the impression, the breadth of the careful but masterly execution, the variety of the handling, proclaim the matured power of the artist, and combine to glorify the hardy grace and youthful radiance of his creation" (Rembrandt: his Life, his Work, and his Time, ii. 70) . ”

“ The simple, flowing cast of the drapery, the general scheme of colour, and the quality of individual tints, such as the mellow yellow shaded with red, and the greenish-blue of the Virgin's mantle, are not like what I know of Catena. The lively, well-drawn child, with its supple limbs; the faces of the women, with full faces, short noses, and square jaws; the straight-necked horses, and many other things in this charming picture,—seem to me to proclaim a distinct, if unknown, master. ”

“ George, who comes to rescue her, is thus the type of noble chivalry. "She turns away for flight; and if her hands are raised to heaven, and her knees fall to earth, it is more that she stumbles in a woman's weakness, than that she abides in faith or sweet surrender. Tintoret sees the scene as in the first place a matter of fact, and paints accordingly, following his judgment of girl nature." But in another sense the princess of the allegory represents the soul of man, which has to be freed from subjection to the dragon of the flesh. ”

“ Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens of Venice—exquisite pauses in Time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life. ”

“ There is endless profusion of decorative work; elaborate arabesques on the pilasters of the Madonna's lordly house, elaborate capitals, elaborate loggias, an elaborate cornice. The grain of the wood on her reading-desk is carefully painted; so are the planks in the wall of her bedchamber.... Besides the endless interest of its decorative work, this picture is useful as marking the difference between the spiritual and ideal motives which dominated Florence, and the worldly motives of richness and splendour which dominated Venice. ”

“ He clothed his demons in human forms; they hovered round him in the shape of beautiful women, who, with the softest blandishments, allured him to sin." The saint in his distress resolved to flee yet farther from the world; but it is not so that evil can be conquered, and still "spirits in hideous forms pressed round him in crowds, scourged him and tore him with their talons—all shapes of horror, 'worse than fancy ever feigned or fear conceived,' came roaring, howling, hissing, shrieking in his ears." ”

“ Hazlitt, perhaps too enthusiastically, describes (in a criticism upon the present picture) as obtainable in a background of Rembrandt's, 'you stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another,' I cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of his darkness, and the dulness of his light. Glorious or inglorious, the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by sunlight. ”

“ It is a constant law that the greatest men, whether poets or historians, live entirely in their own age.... Dante paints Italy in the thirteenth century; Chaucer, England in the fourteenth; Masaccio, Florence in the fifteenth; Tintoret, Venice in the sixteenth;—all of them utterly regardless of anachronism and minor error of every kind, but getting always vital truth out of the vital present.... Tintoret and Shakespeare paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature as they saw it in their time, down to the root; and it does for all time ”

“ Their speciality consists in seeing that "shadow is not an absence of colour, but is, on the contrary, necessary to the full presence of colour; every colour in painting must be a shadow to some brighter colour, and a light to some darker one—all the while being a positive colour itself. And the great splendour of the Venetian School arises from their having seen and held from the beginning this great fact—that shadow is as much colour as light, often much more. In Titian's fullest red the lights are pale rose-colour, passing into white—the shadows warm deep crimson. ”

“ One of the chief delights which any one who really enjoys painting finds in that art as distinct from sculpture, is in the exquisite inlaying or joiner's work of it, the fitting of edge to edge with a manual skill, precisely correspondent to the close application of crowded notes without the least slur, in fine harp or piano-playing. In many of the finest works of colour on a large scale, there is even some admission of the quality given to a painted window by the dark lead bars between the pieces of glass. ”

“ The artist has filled his picture with that solemn reverential pity, harmonised by love, which befits his subject. The body of Christ—utterly dead, yet not distorted nor defaced by death—is that of a tired man whose great soul would not let him rest while there was still His father's work to do on earth. In the face of the angel at His head there is a look of quiet joy, [Pg 186] as of one who knows that "death is but a covered way that leads into the light"; in the attitude and expression of the angel at the feet there is prayerful sympathy for the sorrowing mother. ”