William Michael Rossetti

“ It is said that in painting one of the executioners the artist actually wrought himself into a passion, using threatening words and actions, and that Annibale Caracci, surprising him at that moment, embraced him, exclaiming with joy, ‘To-day, my dear Domenichino, thou art teaching me.’ So novel, and at the same time so natural, it appeared to him that the artist, like the orator, should feel within himself all that he is representing to others. ”

“ Here are a few of his axioms:—“What makes the difference between man and man is real performance, and not genius or conception.” “I don’t think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smelt offensive than to say how rough the paint lies, for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture.” “The eye is the only perspective-master needed by a landscape-painter.” ”

“ Rosa was a man of facile and versatile genius, and had by this time several strings to his bow. It is said that, still keeping painting steadily in view as his real objective, he resolved to secure attention first as a musician, poet, improvisatory and actor—his mother-wit and broad Neapolitan dialect (which appears to have stuck to him through life) standing him powerfully in stead. In the carnival he masqued as Formica and Capitan Coviello, and bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and more particularly of the mind. ”

“ In the angels the absence of all true notions of composition may be considered striking; yet their movements are more natural and pleasing than hitherto. One indeed, to the spectator’s right of the Virgin, combines more tender reverence in its glance than any that had yet been produced. Cimabue gave to the flesh-tints a clear and carefully fused colour, and imparted to the forms some of the rotundity which they had lost. ”

“ As a painter, Fuseli had a daring invention, was original, fertile in resource, and ever aspiring after the highest forms of excellence. His mind was capable of grasping and realizing the loftiest conceptions, which, however, he often spoiled on the canvas by exaggerating the due proportions of the parts, and throwing his figures into attitudes of fantastic and over-strained contortion. ”

“ Before the age of nineteen, when he migrated to Rome, he had covered with frescoes seven chapels in the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista, Parma. Prior to starting for the city of the popes in 1523 he deemed it expedient to execute some specimen pictures. One of these was a portrait of himself as seen in a convex mirror, with all the details of divergent perspective, &c., wonderfully exact—a work which both from this curiosity of treatment and from the beauty of the sitter—for Parmigiano was then “more like an angel than a man”—could not fail to attract. ”

“ Gainsborough and Reynolds rank side by side as the greatest portrait-painters of the English school. They were at variance; but Gainsborough on his death-bed sought and obtained a reconciliation. It is difficult to say which stands the higher of the two, although Reynolds may claim to have worked with a nearer approach to even and demonstrable excellence. In grace, spirit, and lightness of insight and of touch, Gainsborough is peculiarly eminent. ”

“ No great master is more dangerous than Correggio to his enthusiasts; round him the misdeeds of conventionalists and the follies of connoisseurs cluster with peculiar virulence, and almost tend to blind to his real and astonishing excellences those practitioners or lovers of painting who, while they can acknowledge the value of technique, are still more devoted to greatness of soul, and grave or elevated invention, as expressed in the form of art.
Correggio was the head of the school of painting of Parma, which forms one main division of the Lombardic school. ”

“ The fine school of Zurbaran was too expensive for the poor lad; his parents were either dead or too poor to help him, and he was compelled to earn his bread by painting rough pictures for the “feria” or public fair of Seville. The religious daubs exposed at that mart were generally of as low an order as the prices paid for them. A “pintura de la feria” (a picture for the fair) was a proverbial expression for an execrably bad one; yet the street painters who thronged the market-place with their “clumsy, saints and unripe Madonnas” not infrequently rose to be able and even famous artists. ”

“ On the other hand, his paintings are never either languid or cold. His figures are full of life and earnestness, and seem to have an object in view which they follow with rigid intensity. Like Rubens he excelled in the art of setting his figures in motion. Though the lofty and terrible was his proper sphere, Fuseli had a fine perception of the ludicrous. The grotesque humour of his fairy scenes, especially those taken from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, is in its way not less remarkable than the poetic power of his more ambitious works. As a colourist Fuseli has but small claims to distinction. ”

“ Vasari, who was at one time a pupil of Andrea, describes her as faithless, jealous, overbearing and vixenish with the apprentices. She lived to a great age, surviving her husband forty years.
By 1514 Andrea had finished his last two frescoes in the court of the Servites, than which none of his works was more admired—the “Nativity of the Virgin,” which shows the influence of Leonardo, Domenico Ghirlandajo and Fra Bartolommeo, in effective fusion, and the “Procession of the Magi,” intended as an amplification of a work by Baldovinetti; in this fresco is a portrait of Andrea himself. ”

“ His best works have beauty, great amenity, artistic feeling and high accomplishment of manner, all alloyed by a certain core of commonplace; in the worst pictures the commonplace swamps everything, and Guido has flooded European galleries with trashy and empty pretentiousness, all the more noxious in that its apparent grace of sentiment and form misleads the unwary into approval, and the dilettante dabbler into cheap raptures. Both in Rome and wherever else he worked he introduced increased softness of style, which was then designated as the modern method. ”

“ The most distinguished funeral honours were paid to his remains, which were deposited in the temple at Passagno on the 25th of the same month.
Canova, in a certain sense, renovated the art of sculpture in Italy, and brought it back to that standard from which it had declined when the sense both of classical beauty and moderation, and of Titanic invention and human or superhuman energy as embodied by the unexampled genius of Michelangelo, had succumbed to the overloaded and flabby mannerisms of the 17th and 18th centuries. ”

“ The first person to discover that Rosa's work was not as trumpery as it was cheap was the painter Lanfranco, who bought some of the paintings, and advised the youth to go to Rome. Hither in 1635, at the age of twenty, Rosa betook himself; he studied with enthusiasm, but, catching fever, he returned to Naples and Falcone, and for a while painted nothing but battle pieces, and these without exciting any attention. This class of work was succeeded by the landscape art peculiarly characteristic of him—wild scenes wildly peopled with shepherds, seamen or especially soldiers. ”

“ Ghirlandajo was an insatiate worker, and expressed a wish that he had the entire circuit of the walls of Florence to paint upon. He told his shop-assistants not to refuse any commission that might offer, were it even for a lady’s petticoat-panniers: if they would not execute such work, he would. Not that he was in any way grasping or sordid in money-matters, as is proved by the anecdote of the readiness with which he gave up a bonus upon the stipulated price of the Ricci chapel frescoes, offered by the wealthy Tornabuoni in the first instance, but afterwards begrudged. ”

“ Murillo was needy, and offered his services; after balancing their own poverty against his obscurity the friars bade him begin. Murillo covered the walls with eleven large pictures of remarkable power and beauty-displaying by turns the strong colouring of Ribera, the lifelike truthfulness of Velazquez, and the sweetness of Vandyck. Among them were to be found representations of San Francesco, of San Diego, of Santa Clara and of San Gil. These pictures were executed in his earliest style, commonly called his frio or cold style. ”

“ Painting inveighs against the pictorial treatment of squalid subjects, such as beggars (though Rosa must surely himself have been partly responsible for this misdirection of the art) , against the ignorance and lewdness of painters, and their tricks of trade, and the gross indecorum of painting sprawling half-naked saints of both sexes. War (which contains the eulogy of Masaniello) derides the folly of hireling soldiers, who fight and perish while kings stay at home; the vile morals of kings and lords, heresy and unbelief also come in for a flagellation. ”

“ Spite of the great disaster of Rome, the life of Mazzola had hitherto been fairly prosperous—the admiration which he excited being proportionate to his charm of person and manner, and to the precocity and brilliancy (rather than depth) of his genius; but from this time forward he became an unfortunate, and it would appear a soured and self-neglected, man. In 1531 he returned to Parma, and was commissioned to execute an extensive series of frescoes in the choir of the church of S. Maria della Steccata. ”

“ A dark-coloured frame surrounds the gabled square of the picture, delicately traced with an ornament interrupted at intervals by thirty medallions on gold ground, each of which contains the half-figure of a saint. In the face of the Madonna is a soft and melancholy expression ”

“ With him he remained two years; then he returned to Rome, and was domesticated until April 1625 with another landscape-painter, Augustin Tassi, who hired him to grind his colours and to do all the household drudgery.
His master, hoping to make Claude serviceable in some of his greatest works, advanced him in the rules of perspective and the elements of design. Under his tuition the mind of Claude began to expand, and he devoted himself to artistic study with great eagerness. He exerted his utmost industry to explore the true principles of painting by an incessant examination of nature ”

“ Like his father, Filippino had a most marked original genius for painting, and he was hardly less a chief among the artists of his time than Fra Filippo had been in his; it may be said that in all the annals of the art a rival instance is not to be found of a father and son each of whom had such pre-eminent natural gifts and leadership. ”

“ Few pictures are so thoroughly enjoyable as those of Lippo Lippi; they show the naiveté of a strong, rich nature, redundant in lively and somewhat whimsical observation. He approaches religious art from its human side, and is not pietistic though true to a phase of Catholic devotion. ”

“ But Annibale Caracci, who observed his faculties with more attention, predicted that the apparent slowness of Domenichino’s genius would in time produce what would be an honour to the art of painting. When his early productions had brought him into notice, he studied with extreme application, and made such advance as to raise his works into a comparison with those of the most admired masters of the time. ”

“ The model filled Italy with admiration; the marble was procured, and the chisel of the sculptor ready to be applied to it, when the jealousy of churchmen as to the site, or some other cause, deprived the country of the projected work. The mind of Canova was inspired with the warmest sense of devotion, and though foiled in this instance he resolved to consecrate a shrine to the cause. In his native village he began to make preparations for erecting a temple which was to contain, not only the above statue, but other works of his own ”

“ Full of amenity, and deeply sensitive to the graces of nature, Claude was long deemed the prince of landscape painters, and he must always be accounted a prime leader in that form of art, and in his day a great enlarger and refiner of its province. ”

“ The prominent defect of Canova’s attractive and highly trained art is that which may be summed up in the word artificiality,—that quality, so characteristic of the modern mind, which seizes upon certain properties of conception and execution in the art of the past, and upon certain types of beauty or emotion in life, and makes a compound of the two—regulating both by the standard of taste prevalent in contemporary “high society,” a standard which, referring to cultivation and refinement as its higher term, declines towards fashion as the lower. ”

“ From the affability and kindness of the Caracci, and their zeal for the scientific education of the students, their academy rose rapidly in popular estimation, and soon every other school of art in Bologna was deserted and closed. They continued together till, at the invitation of Cardinal Farnese, Annibale and Agostino went to Rome in 1600 to paint the gallery of the cardinal’s palace. ”