Venetian school

“ The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And throughout the course of its later development, always subordinate to architectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped from the influence of its beginnings. ”

“ You will not find poets, scholars, scientists a-plenty at Venice. Her painters have no tendency to be also architects, sculptors, mathematicians, theorists in æsthetics; they stick placidly to the main business of painting. And perhaps just because the Venetian painter refused to be diverted from the problems proper to his craft, his progress was so rapid and assured, and the Venetian school, simply as painting, the most beautiful school of painting the world has ever seen.
It was written in the lagoon itself that Venetian painting should be a school of color. ”

“ The change which now comes over painting is not so much a technical one as a change of temper, a new tendency in human thought, and we link it with Giorgione because he was the channel through which the deep impulse first burst into the light. We have tried to trace the growth of the early Venetian School, but it does not develop logically like that of Florence; it is not the result of long endeavour, adding one acquisition and discovery to another. Venetian art was peculiarly the outcome of personalities, and it did not know its own mind till the sixteenth century. ”

“ A certain national character marks the brightest æra of the Venetian school: however deviating from each other, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassan, and Paolo, acknowledged but one element of imitation, Nature herself. This principle each bequeathed to his followers; and no attempt to adulterate its simplicity, by uniting different methods, distinguished their immediate successors. Hence they preserved features of originality longer than the surrounding schools, whom the vain wish to connect incompatible excellence soon degraded to mediocrity, and from that plunged to insignificance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As we follow Tintoretto’s career, it is borne in upon us how little positive colour it takes to make a great colourist. The whole Venetian School, indeed, does not deal with what we understand as bright colour. Vivid tints are much more characteristic of the Flemish and the Florentine, or, let us say, of the painters of to-day. Strong, crude colours are to be seen on all sides in the Salon or the Royal Academy, but they are absent from the scheme of sombre splendour which has given the Venetians their title to fame. ”

“ Several great artists formed such a marked era in their schools, that their names and those of their schools are often used synonymously by many writers; thus, when they speak of the Roman school, they mean that of Raffaelle; of the Florentine, that of Michael Angelo; of Parma or Lombardy, that of Correggio; of Bologna, that of the Caracci; but not so of the Venetian and Neapolitan schools, because the Venetian school produced several splendid colorists, and that of Naples as many, distinguished by other peculiarities. ”

“ The painter is not concerned with science and 96 learning, or should not be. Such a condition of mind would result in feeble, academical work—in struggling to tell a story with his medium, instead of producing a beautiful design. That is partly why the Venetian school has had such a strong influence on art, even until the present day. The conditions were perfect for the development of art, because the patrons were capable of appreciating beautiful form and beautiful colour. Because the public would have it, this new school of painters appeared. ”

“ The Venetian love of splendour was displaying itself by the encouragement and collection of objects of art, and both ancient and modern works were in increasing request. On Gentile Bellini’s and Carpaccio’s canvases we see the sort of people the Venetians were, shrewd, quiet, splendour-loving, but business-like, the young men fashionably dressed, fastidious connoisseurs, splendid patrons of art and of religion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What the book does aim at is to enable those who care for art, but may not have mastered its history, to rear a framework on which to found their own observations and appreciations; to supply that coherent knowledge which is beneficial even to a passing acquaintance with beautiful things, and to place the unscientific observer in a position to take greater advantage of opportunities, and to achieve a wide and interesting outlook on that cycle of artistic apprehension which the Venetian School comprises, and which marks it as the outcome and the symbol of a great historic age. ”

“ Nearly all the Venetian pictures were bought in 1654 by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici from Messer Paolo del Sera, a Florentine merchant in Venice. More truly representative of the Renaissance, its humanism and splendour, than any other school of painting in Italy, the earlier works of that great Venetian School are not seen to advantage in the Uffizi. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To study the art of the Venetian school is a work of months, and one that would richly repay the student. The churches and galleries of Venice give a truly unique opportunity. In the Church of San Sebastiano lies Paolo Veronese, the church in which he painted his celebrated frescoes, now transformed into a temple for himself. ”

“ We realise the look of the Venice of his day, in all its tide of human nature, but we also feel that he never forgot that he was chronicling the doings of a city of strong men, and that he must paint them, even in their hours of relaxation and emotion, so as to convey the real dignity and power which underlay all the events of the Republic. ”

“ Thus he adhered to the tempera medium. He adhered also to the Byzantine traditions of the old Venetian School with its fondness for the "ancona," or altar-piece consisting of many single figures each in its separate compartment, and for gilt and silvered ornaments in high relief. There is, too, a vein of affectation in his pictures which contrasts strongly with the naturalistic tendency in contemporary Venetian art. Owing to a little touch of vanity in the painter we are able to date many of his pictures. ”

“ Nowhere is there a truer instance of that balance, that modulated unison of landscape and persons—of the human image and its accessories—already noticed as characteristic of the Venetian school, so that, in it, neither personage nor scenery is ever a mere pretext for the other. ”

“ Painters paint what they see around them, and hence at the outset we find in the Venetian School the rendering of material magnificence and the brilliant colours that distinguish it throughout. Look, for instance, at the pictures by a comparatively early Venetian, like Crivelli (see 602) ; no other painter of a corresponding age showed such fondness for fruits and stuffs and canopies and jewels and brilliant architecture. And then, in the second place, there is the colour of Venice itself, caused by her position on the lagoons. The Venetians had no gardens ”

“ Ursula’s Guild, and gave this panel. The types are all vividly realised and differentiated: the courtier looking critically at the arrivals; the frankly curious bourgeoisie; the man of fashion passing with his nose in the air, disdaining to stare too closely; the fop with his dogs and their dwarf keeper. Far beyond stretch the lagoons; the sea and air of Venice clear and fresh. What is noticeable even now in an Italian crowd, the absence of women, was then most true to life, for except on special occasions they were not seen in the streets, but were kept in almost Oriental seclusion. ”

“ These men have reproduced something of the lucent transparency, the natural colour of Venice, but it is as if unconsciously; they are not fully aiming at any special effect. Year after year the Venetian masters assimilate more or less languidly the influences which reach them from the mainland. They welcome Guariento and Gentile da Fabriano, they set themselves to learn from Veronese or Florentine, the Paduans contribute their chiselled drawing, their learned perspective, their archeological curiosity. ”

“ The conditions of Florence stimulated mental energy and turned the face of the soul inwards. Those of Venice inclined the individual to accept life as he found it" (Symonds, iii. 259) . Hence the ideal of Venetian painting [Pg 29] was "stateliness and power; high intercourse with kingly and beautiful humanity, proud thoughts, or splendid pleasures; throned sensualities; and ennobled appetites."
A speciality of the Venetian School arising from the characteristics we have described is its portraiture. ”

“ The merchant-patrons of Venice are quite uninterested in the solving of problems. They pay a price, and they want a good show of colour and gilding for their money. Presently they buy from outside, and a half-hearted imitation of foreigners is the best ambition of Venetian artists. Art, it has been said, does not declare itself with true spontaneity till it feels behind it the weight and unanimity of the whole body of the people. ”

“ The Venetian school, the great masters of which did not become extinct before the end of the sixteenth century, had its period of decadence at a later epoch; this will not come under our consideration. The Lombard school, which, by the deaths of Correggio and Parmigianino, had been left without its chiefs before the middle of this century (1534 and 1540) , seemed for a moment as if it would disappear as it had risen. But in Michael Angelo Caravaggio (Fig. 255) it met with a powerful master, who was able for some time to arrest the progress of its decadence.{309}
Fig. ”

“ Venetian painting in its prime differs altogether in character from that of every other part of Italy. The Venetian is the most marked and recognisable of all the schools; its singularity is such that a novice in art can easily, in a miscellaneous collection, sort out the works belonging to it, and added to this unique character is the position it occupies in the domain of art. Venice alone of Italian States can boast an epoch of art comparable in originality and splendour to that of her great Florentine rival ”

“ Florence very early discarded the temptation to cling to material splendour, but as we pass into the Hall of the Primitives in the Venetian Academy, we see at once that Venetian art, in its earlier stages, has more to do with the gilder than the painter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our problems do not seem so easy to solve, our tasks are more difficult because our vision is wider, but the spirit which animates us was anticipated by the spirit of the Renaissance, and more than anticipated. That spirit seems like the small rough model after which ours is being fashioned.
Italian painting interests many of us more than the painting of any other school not because of its essential superiority, but because it expressed the Renaissance; and Venetian painting is interesting above all because it was at Venice alone that this expression attained perfection. ”

“ The middle-aged men of Venice grew up in times of comparative quiet, when she did not so much care who ruled over her, and negatively, at least, they honored the Church. They may now hate the foreign rule, but there are many considerations of timidity, and many effects of education, to temper their hate. They may dislike the priests, but they revere the Church. The young men of to-day are bred in a different school, and all their thoughts are of opposition to the government and of war upon the Church, which they detest and ridicule. ”