Evelyn March Phillipps

“ Our mood changes; instead of observing and criticising, we become soothed, contemplative, dreamy. It is the carrying of this profound feeling into a colour-scheme by means of chiaroscuro, so that it is no longer learned and explanatory, but deeply sensuous and emotional, that is the gift to art which found full voice with Giorgione, and which in one moment was recognised and welcomed to the exclusion of the older manner, because it touched the chord which vibrated through the whole Venetian temperament. ”

“ The brilliant array of figures is subordinated to the charm of the landscape. The evening dusk draws all objects into its embrace. [Pg 274] The long, low, deep-blue distance stands out against a gleam of sunset sky. The tree-trunks and light play of leafy branches, which break up the composition, are from da Ponte’s own country round Bassano. The pony upon which the boy scrambles, the cows, the dog among the quiet sheep, are given with all the loving truth of the born animal-painter. It is no wonder that Teniers borrowed ideas from him, and has more than once imitated his whole design. ”

“ The Virgin and the Child upon her knee are of his dull round-eyed type, the form and colours of her draperies are still unsatisfactory, but the knight in armour with his Eastern turban, the romantic young page, holding his horse, are pure Giorgionesque figures. Beautiful in themselves, set in a beautiful landscape glowing with light and air, the whole picture exemplifies what surprising excellence could be suddenly attained by even very inferior artists, who were constantly associating with greater men, at a moment when the whole air was, as it were, vibrating with genius. ”

“ We do not wonder that all the leading personages of Italy wished to be painted by [Pg 156] Titian. His are the portraits of a man of intellect. They show the subject at his best; grave, cultivated, stately, as he appeared and wished to appear; not taken off his guard in any way. What can be more sympathetic as a personality than the Ariosto of the National Gallery? We can enter into his mind and make a friend of him, and yet all the time he has himself in hand; he allows us to divine as much as he chooses, and draws a thin veil over all that he does not intend us to discover. ”

“ Every event of importance was seized on by the Venetian ladies as an opportunity for arraying themselves in the richest attire, cloth of gold and velvet, plumes and jewels. Gentile has massed the ladies of Queen Catherine Cornaro’s Court around their Queen upon the left side of the canal. The light from above streams upon the keeper of the School, who holds the sacred relic on high. All round are the old, irregular Venetian houses, and in the crowd he paints the variety of men he saw around him every day in Venice. Yet even in this animated scene he retains his old quattrocento calm. ”

“ We have already noted that to establish the significance of any period in art, it is necessary that the tendencies should unite and combine in some culminating spirits who rise triumphant over their contemporaries and soar above the age in which they live. Such a genius stands out above the eighteenth century crowd, and is not only of his century, but of every time. For two hundred years Tiepolo has been stigmatised as extravagant, mannered, as just equal to painting cupids, nymphs, and parroquets. ”

“ In the school of the Carmine in Venice Tiepolo has left one of his grandest displays. The haughty Queen of Heaven, who is his ideal of the Virgin, bears the Child lightly on her arm, and, standing enthroned upon the rolling clouds, hardly deigns to acknowledge the homage of the prostrate saint, on whom an attendant angel is bestowing her scapulary. The most charming amoretti are disporting in all directions, flinging themselves from on high in delicious abandon, alternating with lovely groups of the cardinal virtues. ”

“ As an exponent of lofty and elevated central ideas, which unify all parts of his composition, Tintoretto stands with the greatest imaginative minds. The intellectual side of life was exemplified in Florentine art, but the Renaissance would have been a one-sided development if there had not arisen a body of men to whom emotion and the gift of sensuous apprehension seemed of supreme value, and at the very last there arose with him one who, to their philosophy of feeling and the mastery of their chosen medium, added the crowning glory of the imaginative idea. ”

“ The gracious, self-absorbed lady, with her softly dressed hair, her loose glove, her silvery satin dress, is a contrast in look and spirit to the goddess whose free, simple attitude and outward gaze embody the nobler ideal. The sinuous and enchanting line of Venus’s figure against the crimson cloak has, I think, been the outcome of admiration for Giorgione’s “Sleeping Venus,” and has the same soft, unhurried curves. Titian’s two figures are perfectly spaced in a setting which breathes the very aroma of the early Renaissance. ”

“ The glowing light and exquisitely graded shadows upon ivory limbs have a sensuous perfection and a refined, unselfconscious joy such as is felt in hardly any other work, except the painter’s own “Milky Way” in the National Gallery. In all these four pictures the feeling for design, a branch of art in which Tintoretto was past master, is fully displayed. In the Bacchus and Ariadne all the principal lines, the eyes and gestures, converge upon the tiny ring which is the symbol of union between the goddess and her lover, between the queenly city and the Adriatic sea. ”

“ The dark heads stand out against the dying sunset, the pallor of the dead is half veiled by the falling night. It is a picture which has the emotional beauty of a scene in nature, and makes a profound impression by its depth and mystery. This same solemnity and gravity temper the brilliant colouring of the great altarpiece painted for the Pesaro family in the Frari. Columns rise like great tree-trunks, light and air play through the clouds seen between them. ”

“ Lovers in a landscape, roaming in the summer twilight; scenes in which neither person nor scenery is a pretext for the other, but each has its full share in arousing the desired emotion. Such pictures are ascribed to, or taken from Giorgione by succeeding critics, but have all laid hold of his charm, and have some share in his inspiration.
One of the ablest of his followers, a man whose work is still confounded with the master’s, is Cariani, the Bergamasque, who at different times in his life also successfully imitated Palma and Lotto. ”

“ The Holy Personages are merely accessories to the gorgeous framework, the embossed ornaments, the real jewels, which were in favour with the rich and magnificent patrons. There is no sign of any feeling for painting as painting, no craving after the study of form as the outcome of intellectual activity, no zest of discovery, such as made the painter’s life in Florence an excitement in which the public shared. ”

“ A bas-relief on the marble fountain represents nymphs whipping a sleeping Love to life, while a cupid teases the chaste unicorn. A delicious baby Love splashes in the water, fallen rose-leaves strew the mellow marble rim, around and away stretches a sunny country scene, in which people are placidly pursuing a life of ease and pleasure. What a revelation to Venice these pictures were which began with Giorgione’s conversaziones! [Pg 155] How little occupied the women are with the story. Venus does not argue, or check off reasons on her fingers, like S. Ursula. ”

“ Bartolommeo had never been very successful in his dealing with oil-painting, though he had dabbled in it for some years before Antonello da Messina came his way, but the perception with which the Bellini at once grasped the new technique gave them the victory. We have only to compare the formless contours of much of Bartolommeo Vivarini’s work, the bladder-like flesh-painting of the Holy Child, with the clear luminous colour and firm delicate touch of Gentile, to see that the one man is leagues ahead of the other. ”

“ He conceives in colour. The Florentines cared little if their finely drawn draperies were blue or red, but Giorgione images purple clouds, their dark velvet glowing towards a rose and orange horizon. He hardly knows what attitudes his characters take, but their chestnut hair, their deep-hued draperies, their amber flesh, make a moving harmony in which the importance of exact modelling is lost sight of. His scenes are not composed methodically and according to the old rules, but are the direct impress of the painter’s joy in life. ”

“ These desires may owe their origin to national life and temperament; it may have taken generations to bring them to fruition, but they become audible through the agency of an individual genius. A genius is inevitably moulded by his age. Rome, in the seventeenth century, drew to her in Bernini a man who could with real power illustrate her determination to be grandiose and ostentatious, and, at the height of the Renaissance, Venice draws into her service a man whose sensuous feeling was instilled, accentuated, and welcomed by every element around him. ”

“ The air circulates freely through the white architecture, we breathe more deeply as we look out into the wide blue sky, and such is the sensation of expansion, that it is hardly possible to believe we are gazing at a flat wall. Titian’s backgrounds are a blue horizon, a burning twilight. Veronese builds marble palaces, with rosy shadows, or columns blanched in the liquid light. His personages show little violent action. ”

“ The religious feeling is less profound; the artist has been more absorbed in the contrast between the beautiful, youthful body of St. Sebastian and that of St. Giobbe, older but not emaciated, and with the exquisite surface that his now complete mastery of oil-painting enabled him to produce. This technique has evidently been a great delight, and is here carried to perfection; the skin of St. Sebastian gleams with a gloss like the coat of a horse in high condition. Everything that architecture, sculpture, and rich material can supply is borrowed to enhance the grandeur of the group ”

“ He kept immense stores of gorgeous stuffs to paint from in his studio, and drew everything from life,—the negroes covered with jewels, the bright-eyed pages, the models who, robed in velvets, brocades and satins, became queens or courtesans or saints. The pearls which bedecked them were from his own caskets. Though we know little of his private life, his work is so alive that he seems personified in it. He is saved from what might have been a prosaic or a sordid style by the delicious, ever-changing colour in which he revels ”

“ With the Florentines, too, the figures supply the main interest; the background is an arbitrary addition, placed behind them at the painter’s leisure, but Giorgione’s and Titian’s fêtes champêtres and concerts could not be at all in any other environment. The amber flesh-tints and the glowing garments are so blended with the deep tones of the landscape, that one would not instil the mood the artist desires without the other. ”

“ Look at the power of touch in such a picture as the “Death of Abel”; we see this spontaneity of execution actually forming part of the emotion with which the picture is charged. The concentrated hate of the one figure, the desperate appeal of the other, the lurid note of the landscape, gain their emotion as much from the impetuous brush-work as from the more studied design. We come closest to the painter’s mind in the Scuola di San Rocco. ”

“ Venetian women lived in a retirement which recalled the life of the harem, only appearing on great occasions to display their brocades and jewels. Girls were closely veiled when they passed through the streets. The attachment of men to women had no intellectual bias, scarcely any sentiment, but “went straight to the mark: the enjoyment of physical beauty.” The position of women in Venice was a great contrast to that attained by the Florentine lady of the Renaissance, who was highly educated, deeply versed in men and in affairs, the fine flower of culture, and the queen of a brilliant society. ”

“ It conveys to us the matter-of-fact monotony of the long, hot days, and the women and the animals with which they are beguiling their idle hours are painted with the greatest intelligence. It carries us back to another phase of life in Carpaccio’s Venice, seen through his observant, humorous eyes, and if there is nothing in his colour distinctive of the impending Venetian richness, it is still arresting in its brilliant limpidity; it seems drawn straight from the transparent canals and radiant lagoons. ”

“ Titian, passing from the courts of Ferrara to those of Mantua and Urbino, attended by a band of assistants, was a magnificent personage, whose presence was looked upon as a favour, and who undertook a commission as one who conferred a coveted boon. Among those who clustered closest round the popular favourite, no one did more to enhance his position than Aretino, the brilliant unscrupulous debauchee, wit, bully, blackmailer, but a man who, with all his faults, had evidently his own power of fascination, and, the friend of princes, must have been himself the prince of good company. ”