;* ** . _____ iipjptiiiiii!! 1 EX-LIBRIS LOUISE ARNER BOYD THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GIFT OF Louise A. Boyd AMONG THE GREAT MASTERS OF PAINTING AMONG THE GREAT MASTERS By Walter Rowlands Among the Great Masters of Drama Among the Great Masters of "Warfare Among the Great Masters of Literature Among the Great Masters of Music Among the Great Masters of Painting Among the Great Masters of Oratory ismo, handsome cover design, boxed separately or in sets DANA ESTES & COMPANY Publishers Estes Press, 212 Summer Street, Boston Among the Great Masters of Painting Scenes in the Lives of Famous Painters Thirty- two Reproductions of Famous Paintings with Text by Walter Rowlands Boston Dana Estes & Company Publishers Copyright, BY DANA ESTES & COMPANY All rights reserved AMONG THE GREAT MASTERS OF PAINTING Colonial Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, Mass., U. S. A. GIFT A/D35" Mtfe 273 CONTENTS VAGB PHIDIAS i PAUSIAS 9 CIMABUE 15 FRA ANGELICO 24 HUGO VAN DER GOES . . . ... 31 LEONARDO DA VINCI 38 RAPHAEL 49 DURER 59 CORREGGIO 66 MICHAEL ANGELO . . . . .75 CELLINI 84 TITIAN 98 PALISSY no TINTORETTO 126 CALLOT 132 RUBENS 141 BRAUWER . . . * . 151 Contents VAN DYCK GUIDO 169 PAUL POTTER 173 VELAZQUEZ 181 POUSSIN ........ 193 CANO . . . . . . . . 201 REMBRANDT 208 SALVATOR ROSA . .'.- . . . 213 TENTERS . . . . . . . 219 WREN . ... ... .227 HOGARTH . . . . . . . 240 REYNOLDS 248 PAJOU . % 260 CARPEAUX . . . . . . . 263 Puvis DE CHAVANNES 271 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE MICHAEL ANGELO READING HIS SONNETS TO VITTORIA COLONNA . . Frontispiece PHIDIAS . 4 PAUSIAS AND GLYCERA . . . .12 CIMABUE'S MADONNA CARRIED IN PRO- CESSION THROUGH THE STREETS OF FLORENCE 18 THE SLEEP OF FRA ANGELICO ... 26 THE MADNESS OF HUGO VAN DER GOES . 34 THE DEATH OF LEONARDO DA VINCI . . 44 RAPHAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO IN THE VATICAN 52 ALBRECHT DURER IN VENICE ... 64 CORREGGIO DRAWING CHILDREN ... 70 BENVENUTO CELLINI 92 CHARLES V. PICKING UP TITIAN'S BRUSH . 104 BERNARD PALISSY . 116 List of Illustrations PAGE TINTORETTO PAINTING HIS DEAD DAUGHTER ^28 THE YOUTH OF CALLOT . . . .136 RUBENS AND HIS WIFE IN A GARDEN . 146 ADRIAN BRAUWER AND HIS MODELS . .158 VAN DYCK PAINTING THE CHILDREN OF CHARLES 1 164 GUIDO PAINTING BEATRICE CENCI IN PRISON 1 70 THE STUDIO OF PAUL POTTER . . .178 THE MAIDS OF HONOR . . . .186 POUSSIN ON THE BANKS OF THE TIBER . 196 AN ARTIST'S ALMSGIVING . ... . . 204 REMBRANDT ETCHING . . . ... 210 SALVATOR ROSA 216 THE PAINTERS AND THE CONNOISSEURS . 222 ST. PAUL'S: THE KING'S VISIT TO WREN . 234 HOGARTH AT CALAIS 242 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS PAINTING A POR- TRAIT ....... 254 PAJOU MODELLING A BUST OF MADAME DU BARRY \ . . . . . 262 CARPEAUX . . * .... 266 THE COMMITTEE ON THE EXHIBITION . . 272 PREFACE THE compiler's thanks are due to the publishers of Lippincotis Magazine for per- mission to use a portion of Olive Logan's article on Carpeaux which appeared in that periodical ; also to Messrs. H ought on, Mifflin & Co. for the use of a selection from Mrs. Mary C. Robbins's translation of Fromen- tin's paper on Paul Potter in his "Les Maitres d' Autrefois" published by them under the title of "The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland." The late Mrs. Mar- garet J. Preston's poem, "Tintoretto's Last Painting," is printed through the kindness of her son, Dr. George J. Preston, of Baltimore. WE'RE made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see ; And so they are better, painted better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that. BROWNING. ART is not the bread indeed, but it is the wine of life. JEAN PAUL. AMONG THE GREAT MASTERS OF PAINTING PHIDIAS " YES, rise, fair mount ! the bright blue heavens to kiss, Stoop not thy pride, august Acropolis! Thy brow still wears its crown of columns gray, Beauteous in ruin, stately in decay. Two thousand years o'er earth have spread their pall, Not yet, thy boast, Minerva's shrine shall fall : In spite of rapine, fire and war's red arm, Enough remains to awe us and to charm ; Glory and Phidias' shade the relic keep, Shield as they watch, and strengthen as they weep. The Doric columns, wrought from fairest stone, Severe but graceful, round the cella thrown, The lofty front, the frieze where sculptures shine, The long, long architrave's majestic line, Dazzle the eye with beauty's rich excess, O'erpower the mind by too much loveliness." NICHOLAS MICHELL. 2 The Great Masters of Painting Little is actually known of the life^of Phidias, but Alma Tadema's picture easily convinces us that thus the great sculptor displayed to his friends and patrons his completed handiwork. Phidias himself, stand- ing within the rope barrier, seems to await the favorable verdict of his illustrious pro- tector, Pericles, who confronts him and has at his side the beautiful Aspasia. The young man at the extreme left seems meant for Alcibiades, who has also accepted an invita- tion to this private view of the frieze of the Parthenon, seen not as we now behold it in the British Museum, but with its match- less figures glowing with the tints just laid upon it by Phidias and his fellow-workers. For by this work of Alma Tadema's we are forcibly reminded that the Greeks added color to much of their sculpture. Accustomed as we have been either to the dull whiteness of the antique marble or to the clearer white of the cast, it is with reluctance that we Phidias 3 accept this conclusion, but it appears to be inevitable. Professor Mahaffy says : " One cannot but feel that a richly colored temple pillars of blue and red, gilded friezes and other ornaments on a white marble ground and in white marble framing must have been a splendid and appropriate background under Grecian skies. . . . But if we imag- ine all the surfaces and reliefs in the temple colored for architectural richness' sake, we can feel even more strongly, how cold and out of place would be a perfectly colorless statue in a centre of this pattern. For say what we will, the Greeks were certainly, as a nation, the best judges of beauty the world has yet seen. And this is not all. The beauty of which they were evidently most fond was beauty of form, harmony of proportions, sym- metry of design. They always hated the tawdry and the extravagant. So with their dress, so with their dwellings. We may be sure that, had the effect of painted statues 4 The Great Masters of Painting and temples been tawdry, there is no on earth which would have felt it so keenly and disliked it so much." In connection with this, it may be pointed out that the light could only illuminate this frieze from below, and it would be all but impossible to see it properly from the ground. Hamerton says that the Greeks probably looked upon the Parthenon frieze as merely a band of decoration which did not need to be looked at closely. Phidias, to whose genius is universally credited the sculptures of the Parthenon, though it is impossible that they could all have been formed by his hand alone, has been made the subject of an interesting and suggestive comparison with Michael Angelo by Professor Waldstein. This authority says: " It is above all to Phidias and his works that Winckelmann's perfect summing up of the attributes of Greek works of art applies, Phidias 5 * noble naivett and placid grandeur/ Coupled with all the grandeur and width is that most striking feature of Greek art, the simplic- ity which adds to the silent greatness and gives a monumental rest to these gods of stone. It arises from that unreflective, un- analytical, unintrospective attitude of mind which drives it simply to do what it feels and thinks with serene spontaneity of action, with- out analyzing its own power, not 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' On this account Phidias is the type of the plastic mind among all artists and sculptors, and this simplicity and un reflectiveness can best be appreciated when we compare him with Michael Angelo, who, though possessed of the greatness, lacked the simplicity. The thoughts and conceptions of Michael Angelo preceded and ran beyond his active and executive power. This manifests itself not only in his life, not only in the confession of his thoughts in his sonnets, but also in his works. Every 6 The Great Masters of Painting one of them tells us the story of struggle; and though so much is expressed, we feel, what he felt so strongly, how much more remains unexpressed, in the labyrinthine re- cesses of his ever active brain. Frequently his heart failed him at the impotency of his sluggish hands, the work remained unfinished, the hand dropped with disgust and depression at the sight of the inane gulf that lies be- tween the thinking and feeling, and the doing and creating. His greatness then sought an outlet in numerous spheres of thought and action separately followed and intermingled. When sculpture failed to express all that he felt, he called to aid the pictorial element, with which he transfused his plastic works, and when painting was too weak, he strengthened his pictures with plastic forms, spreading over all his works a dim veil of deep thought and solemn poetry. Of this the works of Phidias have nothing. Grand or sublime or awful as they may be, they are ever serene, they have Phidias 7 coupled with all their greatness the truly Greek element of grace, in which the works of Michael Angelo are sometimes wanting." The many canvases produced by the illus- trious Tadema include several dealing, like the " Phidias," with episodes of artist life. " Antistius Labeon," a Roman amateur, show- ing some of his productions to friends, is one; "The Sculptor's Model" another; a third is "Architecture in Ancient Rome;" and there still remain the "Visit to the Studio" and "The Sculptor;" while not greatly differing in theme from these are the famous " Picture Gallery " and " Sculp- ture Gallery." Although some of the artist's earlier pictures are of scenes from Mero- vingian history, his talent has mostly occupied itself in reproducing the life of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The land of the Pharaohs suggested "The Death of the First Born" and "The Mummy;" from Hellas came "Sappho" and "The Pyrrhic 8 The Great Masters of Painting Dance ; " and the Imperial City contributed " A Roman Emperor " and " An Audience at Agrippa's." No less than six pictures by this artist are in the famous Walters collection in Balti- more, and they include the " Sappho " and the " Roman Emperor." Mr. Henry G. Mar- quand, of New York, owns Alma Tadema's " Reading from Homer." Leaving his native Holland in 1870, Alma Tadema, then about thirty-three, went to London, which city has since been his home, and where he lives with his English wife (herself a talented artist), in a superbly beautiful house built and decorated from his own designs. Elected a Royal Academi- cian years ago, and knighted by Queen Vic- toria in 1899, he enjoys many other honors, which the painter of " Phidias " has worthily won. Pausias PAUSIAS AN English poet, John Addington Symonds, has put into the mouth of Polygnotus, the Grecian artist, in a dialogue held with The- ron of Agrigentum, words which proclaim that Art is Love. Whereupon asks Theron : " * Love,' sayest thou ? Love who from the clash of things Created order, or that laughing boy Who sleeps on cheeks of maidens and of youths Drowned in day-dreaming? Pol. Yea, 'tis Love I mean: But of his lineage I would have you learn What poets have kept hidden. They pretend Love is a god, young, fair, desirable, Fulfilled of sweetness and self-satisfied, Treading the smooth paths of luxurious spirits. Not thus I know him ; for, methinks, he hungers Full oftentimes and thirsts, yearning to clasp The softness, tenderness and grace he hath not. He was begotten, as old prophets tell me, At the birth feast of Beauty by a slave, io The Great Masters of Painting Invention, on a beggar, Poverty ; Therefore he serves all fair things, and doth hold From his dame nothing, from his father wit Whate'er he lacks to win. Ther. You speak in riddles : Not thus have Hesiod and blind Homer sung him. Pol. Nathless 'tis true: and Art, whereby men mould Bronze into breathing limbs, or round these lines With hues delusive, or join verse to verse, Or wed close-married sounds in hymn and chorus, Is Love ; poor Love that lacks, strong Love that conquers ; Love like a tempest bending to his will The heart and brain and sinews of the maker, Who, having nought, seeks all, and hath by seeking. Look now : the artist is not soft or young, Supple or sleek as girls and athletes are, But blind like Homer, like Hephaistos lame. True child of Poverty, he feels how scant Is the world round him ; and he fain would fashion A fairer world for his free soul to breathe in. The strife between what is and what he covets, Stings him to yearning; till his father, Craft, Cries stretch thy hand forth, take thy fill, and furnish Thy craving soul with all for which she clamors. Pausias 1 1 Ther. Is it so easy then to win the prize You artists play for ? I, a king, find Love A hard taskmaster. Pol. Ay, and so is Art. Many a painter through the long night-watches Till frozen day-spring hath lain tired with waiting At his dream's doorstep, watering the porch With tears, suspending rose wreaths from the lintel, Thrice blest if but the form he woos be willing To kiss his cold lips in the blush of morning. And though that kiss be given, even then, 'Mid that supreme beatitude, there lingers An aching want a sense of something missed Secluded, cloud-involved, and unattained The melody that neither flute nor lyre, Through breath of maidens or sharp smitten strings, Hath rendered. See how Art is like to Love ! For lovers, though they mingle, though close lips To lips be wedded, hair with streaming hair And limb with straining limb be interwoven, Yet are their souls divided ; yet their flesh Aches separate and unassuaged, desiring What none shall win, that supreme touch whereby Of two be made one being. Even so In art we clasp the shape imperishable Of beauty, clasp and kiss and cling and quiver ; While, far withdrawn, the final full fruition, 1 2 The Great Masters of Painting The melting of our spirit in the shape She woos, still waits : a want no words can fathom. Thus Art is Love. And, prithee, when was lover Or artist owner of fat lands and rent ? Poor are they both and prodigal ; yet mighty ; And both must suffer. I have heard, O King, The pearls your mistress wears upon her sleeve, Are but the product of an oyster's pain. Between its two great shells the creature lies Storing up strength and careless, till a thorn Driven by deft fingers, probes the hinge that joins Well-fitting wall to wall ; the poor fish pines, Writhes, pours thin ichor forth, and well-nigh drains His substance : when at last the wound is healed, A pearl lurks glistening in the pierced shell. See now your artist : were there no quick pain, How should the life-blood of his heart be given To make those pearls called poems, pictures, statues ? Ther. Are lovers oysters then as well as artists ? Nay, prithee, brook the jest ! I take your meaning." Pausias, an eminent painter who flourished nearly coeval with Polygnotus, lived and worked in Sicyon, the capital of the most ancient kingdom of Greece, several hundred years before our era. He is said to have Pausias 1 3 become enamored of Glycera, a beautiful maiden of Sicyon, while painting a picture of her occupied in making garlands of flowers : "... herself a fairer flower." Human nature being always the same, it is not strange that, from the time of Pausias to our own day, instances of artists who fell in love with their fair sitters should be far from uncommon. We are told that Filippo Lippi, the Flor- entine painter, while at work in the convent of Sta. Margharita at Prato, conceived an ardent passion for a young novice, Lucrezia Buti, whose fair features were serving him as a model for the face of a Madonna he was limning, and carried her off with him. A still greater artist, one of the most illustrious, indeed, of all, Leonardo da Vinci, is credited by some historians of art with a deep and lasting love for Monna Lisa, the beautiful Florentine, whose marvellous 14 The Great Masters of Painting portrait (painted for the lady's husband, never delivered to him) enriches the Louvre. It is certain that Leonardo, like Michael Angelo, never married. Was it because the woman he adored was wedded to another ? Passing from the time of the Renaissance to our own day, we are reminded of the painter-poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1851 he became acquainted with a beautiful girl, Miss Elizabeth Siddall, who was after- ward the model for some of his most famous pictures, and whose type of face he never ceased to reproduce. The painter and his model became engaged, and, in 1860, were married, but their life together was destined to be brief, as Mrs. Rossetti died early in 1862, and her grief-stricken husband buried his unpublished poems in her grave. Cimabue 1 5 CIMABUE WHEN the late Lord Leighton was about eighteen years old, he painted a picture of Cimabue finding Giotto at the moment when the young shepherd was busy drawing one of his flock with a sharp stone on a smooth slab of rock. For both these two painters Leighton had a great admiration, and not long after the exhibition of the above-mentioned picture, he projected his " Cimabue' s Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Flor- ence." Leighton took the incident of the picture from Vasari, who says : " Cimabue afterward painted the picture of the Virgin for the church of Santa Maria Novella, where it is suspended on high, be- tween the chapel of the Rucellai family and that of Bardi, of Vernio. This picture is of larger size than any figure that had been 1 6 The Great Masters of Painting painted down to those times ; and the angels surrounding it made it evident that, although Cimabue still retained the Greek manner, he was, nevertheless, gradually approaching the mode of outline and general method of mod- ern times. Thus it happened that this work was an object of so much admiration to the people of that day they having then never seen anything better that it was carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trum- pets and other festal demonstrations, from the house of Cimabue to the church, he himself being highly rewarded and honored for it." This was painted in Rome, where young Leighton was a favorite in the distinguished circle of his countrymen, which included Thackeray and the Brownings. Thackeray, who watched the progress of the " Cimabue," was so impressed by it that he said to Mil- lais, " My boy, I have met in Rome a versa- tile young dog, called Leighton, who will one of these days run you hard for the president- Cimabue 1 7 ship." This picture, the first one exhibited at the Royal Academy by Leighton, was shown there in 1855, and won instant suc- cess, Queen Victoria purchasing it for .600. George Aitchison, Leighton 's old friend, and the architect of his beautiful house, says that the young painter, always generous, gave commissions to all of his poor artist friends in Rome with the money received for the " Cimabue." Ruskin's criticism of the picture is of in- terest. He wrote: "This is a very impor- tant and very beautiful picture. It has both sincerity and grace, and is painted on the purest principles of Venetian art, that is to say, on the calm acceptance of the whole of nature, small and great, as, in its place, de- serving of faithful rendering. The great secret of the Venetians was their simplicity. They were great colorists, not because they had peculiar secrets about oil and color, but because when they saw a thing red they 1 8 The Great Masters of Painting painted it red, and when they saw it dis- tinctly they painted it distinctly. In all Paul Veronese's pictures the lace borders of the table-cloths or fringes of the dresses are painted with just as much care as the faces of the principal figures ; and the reader may rest assured that in all great art it is so. Everything in it is done as well as it can be done. Thus, in the picture before us, in the background is the church of San Miniato, strictly accurate in detail ; on the top of the wall are oleanders and pinks, as carefully painted as the church ; the architecture of the shrine on the wall is well studied from thirteenth-century Gothic, and painted with as much care as the pinks ; the dresses of the figures, very beautifully designed, are painted with as much care as the faces ; that is to say, all things throughout with as much care as the painter could bestow. The paint- ing before us has been objected to because it seems broken to bits. Precisely the same Cimabue 19 objection would hold, and in very nearly the same degree, against the best work of the Venetians. All faithful colorists' work in figure-painting has a look of sharp separation between part and part. Although, however, in common with all other work of its class, it is marked by these sharp divisions, there is no confusion in its arrangement. The principal figure is nobly principal, not by extraordinary light, but by its own pure whiteness, and both the master and young Giotto attract full regard by distinction of form and face. The features of the boy are carefully studied, and are, indeed, what, from the existing portraits of him, we know those of Giotto must have been in his youth. " The background of Cimabue's ' Madonna ' represents the hills of Florence, and in front of them stretches a wall, which serves to throw into relief the procession passing be- fore it. In the left-hand corner (as we look at it) is a group of Florentines of all ages, 2O The Great Masters of Painting dressed in colors sufficiently subdued: not to distract the eye from the central and im- portant part of the picture. Behind them walks Cimabue himself, clad in white, with a wreath surmounting the curious kind of white peaked cap then worn, and leading by the hand his pupil Giotto, who, we cannot help thinking, must have looked very young for his years. The boy, with a tight-fitting gar- ment of dark purple, does not seem to appre- ciate the post of honor that he holds, for he is hanging back, as if he would fain join some kindred spirits in the crowd, and go to play. Behind comes what we may call the bier, covered in white, with a beautifully painted piece of color, of which red is the predominating hue, to the front. This is added to break the line between the white of the bier and the dress of Cimabue. Above is the picture of the Madonna, seen, of course, sideways, or in profile, by the spectator, but the perspective and treatment Cimabue 2 1 of which is absolutely perfect ; it hangs a little forward from a gold frame, and has a gold background of its own. On this is painted the Virgin in blue, holding in her lap the Child, who is in red. From the size of the picture, the angels, who made such an impression on the Florentines, are not visible. The picture is kept in its place by men, who hold the cords attached to it. The man in the front nearest Giotto is clad in cream tints, which blend, on the one hand, into the white of Cimabue, and on the other into the splendid saffron robes of the man next him, whose head is covered with drapery of a deeper shade of orange. The third man, im- mediately to the front of the bier, is in yellowy red. A little more in the foreground stand some boys, who always form the indispensable part of every procession, and near them a man in a gorgeous scarlet robe, with a loose drapery of purple over it. ... The Madonna is followed by a band of con- 22 The Great Masters of Painting temporary artists, anxious to do honor to the greatest among them. Among these are Simone Memmi, Gaddo Gaddi, Nicola Pisano, Buffalmacco, and Arnolfo di Lapo. Between them and the wall under the hills is the Gonfaloniere of Florence, mounted on a very finely painted gray horse, and clothed in blue and scarlet, with an ermine tippet over his shoulders ; red vines cluster the wall above over his head, and the glow of color about all this part of the picture contrasts strongly with the quiet gray figure of Dante leaning against a tree, and looking on with the sar- donic and wondering gaze of the man who had been in hell." Sir Frederic (afterward Lord) Leighton died in the first month of 1896, aged sixty- five years, having been president of the Royal Academy since 1878, and was succeeded in that office by Millais. One of the most indus- trious of painters, Leighton left behind him a long list of works, from among which may Cimabue 23 be selected for mention, " Dante Going Forth into Exile," "The Death of Brunelleschi," "Orpheus and Eurydice," "Wedded" (in the Art Gallery at Sydney, N. S. W.), " Summer Moon," " Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis," "The Daphnephoria," " Elijah in the Wilderness " (owned by the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) ; " Phryne at Eleusis," "Captive Andromache," "Cy- mon and Iphigenia," " Perseus and Androm- eda," "The Garden of the Hesperides," and "The Bath of Psyche." The last- named picture belongs to the British nation, as does also the artist's statue of "The Athlete Wrestling with a Python." Leigh- ton's frescoes include " The Arts of Peace " and " The Arts of War," at the South Ken- sington Museum ; " Phoenicians Bartering with Ancient Britons," in the Royal Ex- change ; and the decorations of the music- room in the house of Mr. Henry G. Mar- quand in New York. 24 The Great Masters of Painting FRA ANGELICO UNLIKE Cimabue, who lies in Florence, the city of his birth, the "Angelical Painter" rests in Rome, far from the mountain ham- let of Vicchio, where, less than a score of miles from the " City of the Lilies," he first saw the light. Beneath the high altar of the church of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, lies the greatest of the sisters of St. Dominic St. Catherine of Siena, who died only seven years before Fra Angelico was born, whom he has several times portrayed, and near her tomb he sleeps. The inscription over his remains, unlike many epitaphs, does not lie. It was composed by Pope Nicholas V., for whose chapel in the Vatican Angelico painted some of his latest and finest works. Professor Norton has thus translated it: Fra A ngelico 2 5 " Not mine be the praise that I was as a second Apelles, But that I gave all my gains to thine, O Christ ! One work is for the earth, another for heaven, The city, the Flower of Tuscany, bore me John." But though buried in the Eternal City, "he lives," as Mrs. Oliphant says, "in Flor- ence, within the walls he loved, in the cells he filled full of beauty and pensive celestial grace, and which now are dedicated to him, and hold his memory fresh as in a shrine." The blessed painter, whose life and art were worthy of each other, is set before us with a loving touch by Vasari, who says : "Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole . . . was no less preeminent as a painter and mini- aturist than as a religious. ... He might, in- deed, had he so chosen, have lived in the world in the greatest comfort, and, beyond what he himself already possessed, gained whatso- ever he wanted more, by the practice of those arts of which, whilst still a young man, he was already a master ; but he chose 26 The Great Masters of Painting instead, being well-disposed and pious by nature, for his greater contentment and peace of mind, and above all for the salva- tion of his soul, to enter the order of Preachers. . . . Rightly, indeed, was he called 'Angelico,' for he gave his whole life to God's service, and to the doing of good works for mankind and for his neighbor. . . . He was entirely free from guile, and holy in all his acts. . . . He kept himself unspotted from the world, and living in purity and holiness, he was so much the friend of the poor, that I think his soul is now in heaven. "He labored assiduously at painting, but he never cared to work at any but sacred subjects. Rich, indeed, he might have been, yet for riches he took no thought. He was wont to say that true riches consist in being content with little. He might have borne rule over many, but he did not choose to do so, believing that he who obeys has fewer cares, and is less likely to go astray. It was Fra Angelica 27 in his power, too, to have held high place, both within his order and without it ; but he cared nothing for such honors, affirming that he sought no other dignity than the avoidance of hell and the attainment of paradise. And, in truth, what dignity can compare with that which not only religious but all men ought to strive after, namely, that which is to be found in God alone and in a virtuous order of life. . . . " Fra Angelico was of a most humane and temperate disposition, and living in chastity, he did not become entangled in the world's snares. In fact, he used often to say that he who practised art had need of quiet, and of a life free from care, and that he who had to do with the things of Christ ought to live with Christ. He was never seen to show anger toward any of his brethren, . . . and when he did admonish a friend, he was accus- tomed to do so gently and with a smiling face. And to those who wished him to work 28 The Great Masters of Painting for them, he would reply with the utmost good-will, that if they could come to terms with the prior, he would not fail them. In a word, this friar, who can never be too much praised, was most humble and modest in every word and work, and in his pictures showed both genius and piety. The saints that he painted have more of the aspect and character of saintship than any others. " It was his custom never to retouch or repaint any of his works, but to leave them always just as they were when finished the first time ; for he believed, as he himself said, that such was the will of God. It is said, indeed, that Fra Giovanni never took a brush in his hand until he had first offered a prayer; nor did he paint a 'Crucifixion' without tears streaming down his cheeks. And both in the faces and attitudes of his figures it is easy to find proof of his sincere and deep devotion to the religion of Christ.'* Three centuries after this tender tribute Fra Angelica 29 was published, a French Dominican, Edmund Cartier, wrote a reverent and highly sym- pathetic life of Fra Angelico (since trans- lated into English), which is of great interest and value. In it Cartier quotes some of the praises showered upon the painter-monk, among which are mentioned the poetical trib- ute of the painter Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father; together with encomiums from the pens of the Jesuit Lanzi, of August Schlegel, of Seroux d'Agincourt, of Rio, and of Monta- lembert. Here is one of Cartier 's own eulo- gies of the " Angelical Painter." He says : "The talent of Beato Angelico was the ornament of his virtue. He knew not the ambition which lengthens the watchings of the artist, and makes him purchase success so painfully. To him labor was without sorrow. He cultivated painting as Adam did the earthly paradise ; his pictures were the flowers God produced in his soul, and he let them grow in all their freedom, fearing to 30 The Great Masters of Painting mar the Master's work by a knowing culture. Vasari tells us he never would alter his com- positions, because he looked on his inspirations as favors from heaven. The least desire of glory never disturbed his heart : he would make God praised. To what good shall we subscribe his works ? Should a mirror arro- gate to itself the rays it reflects ? He did not intend to make new compositions. When an image satisfied his piety, why should he not have repeated it, like the prayers we love to say again ? Why not imitate the old masters when we have no hope to surpass them ? Beato Angelico thought only of loving our Lord and ,the saints, and of making them loved. He sought the kingdom of heaven before all, and the rest was added unto him." Cartier would have found no difficulty in believing the legend, illustrated in Maignan's picture, which declares that the works of Fra Angelico often received miraculous touches from heavenly visitants during the painter's Hugo Van der Goes 31 absence, or when, weary from his labor, he fell asleep at his well-loved task. We may be pardoned for thinking M. Maignan's figure of the sleeping Angelico more impressive than that of the angel, the model for whom the artist would have done well to take from some work of the blessed painter of Fiesole. HUGO VAN DER GOES IN the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, founded by Folco Portinari, the father of Dante's Beatrice, is preserved a large altar-piece by Hugo Van der Goes. Tommaso Portinari, agent at Bruges for the house of the Medici and the most influential foreigner in that Flemish trading city, cher- ished a warm affection for his native Florence, and, among other generous acts, presented this votive picture to the hospital. It is in three sections, the central panel representing the adoration of the infant Christ by the Virgin 32 The Great Masters of Painting Mary, Joseph, and three shepherds, and a numerous company of angels. The left wing of the picture shows the donor, behind whom are his two boys, with St. Anthony and St. Thomas; and the right wing presents his wife and daughter with their patron saints, Margaret and Magdalen. Of all the works produced by this able but unfamiliar painter, the St. Maria Nuova altar- piece, which is mentioned by Vasari, is the only authenticated one remaining. Con way says of this triptych : " This picture of Master Hugo's would be of untold value for one thing alone, even if it possessed no other virtues : it is the first picture that really makes us acquainted with the mediaeval peasantry. Nothing is more obvious than that the three shepherds are drawn from life. They are no ideal shepherds ; their horny hands, rough features, and gaping mouths, are proofs of a perfect veracity. The three men in this Nativity, or at all events two Hugo Van der Goes 33 of them, are not creations issuing from the moral consciousness of any one. They are reflections of actual persons. Their bent figures tell of their laboring battle with the earth. Their hardened faces have been beaten into that rugged form by nights of exposure, frost, and storm. Whilst the world was going along in its noisy fashion with wars and revolutions, setting up of kings, political intrigues, and tremblings of hope and fear in the hearts of conspicuous but now for the most part forgotten men, peasants such as these were the real heat that kept the whole surface bubbling on the go. But for their careless and continuous labor, kings and feudal systems would have faded in a few days. Yet they are as un- recorded and unobserved (expect for some tyrannous statute of laborers or another) as if the fine gentry, the monks, and the mer- chants had really been the life at the heart of the whole body politic. Among the mul- 34 The Great Masters of Painting titude of Golden Fleeced heroes, Hansaatic merchants, lords, counts, dukes, and popes, whose likenesses we possess, whose sayings we can know if we care to hunt them up, whose manner of living is recorded in minute detail, these three old shepherds are the only representatives of the far larger and more important body of silent sufferers and silent workers who kept the world a-going. " Van der Goes, probably born at Ghent about 1405, and a pupil of the Van Eycks, ap- pears to have labored mostly in that city and at Bruges. At one time in his life he was afflicted with attacks of insanity, caused, according to one account, by an unrequited love, according to another, by religious melan- choly, and retired to a monastery in or near Brussels. One of his fellow monks has left the following account of this episode in the artist's life. He says : " I was a novice when Van der Goes entered the convent. He was so famous Hugo Van der Goes 35 as a painter that men said his like was not to be found this side of the Alps. In his worldly days he did not belong to the upper classes ; nevertheless, after his reception into the con- vent, and during his novitiate, the prior per- mitted him many relaxations more suggestive of worldly pleasure than of penance and humiliation, and thus awakened jealousy in many of our brothers. Frequently noble lords, and amongst others the Archduke Maximilian, came to visit him and admire his pictures. At their request he received per- mission to remain and dine with them in the guest-chamber. He was often cast down by attacks of melancholy, especially when he thought of the number of works he still had to finish ; his love of wine, however, was his greatest enemy, and for that at the stranger's table there was no restraint. In the fifth or sixth year after he had taken the habit, he undertook a journey to Cologne with his brother Nicolas and others. On his return 36 The Great Masters of Painting journey he had such an attack of melancjioly that he would have laid violent hands on him- self had he not been forcibly restrained by his friends. They brought him under restraint to Brussels, and so back to the convent. The prior was called in, and he sought by the sounds of music to lessen Hugo's passion. For a long time all was useless ; he suffered under the dread that he was a son of dam- nation. At length his condition improved. Thenceforward of his own will he gave up the habit of visiting the guest-chamber and took his meals with the lay brothers." Hugo died in 1482, his insanity having disappeared in the meantime. The picture of the mad painter which we reproduce was painted by Emile Wauters in 1872, and exhibited at the Brussels Salon, where it made an immediate sensation, and was purchased by the State for the Brussels museum. Wauters, who is a pupil of Portaels and Hugo Van der Goes 37 Gerome, was born at Brussels in 1846, and has devoted himself to the painting of por- traits and of history. The museum of Liege possesses his " Mary of Burgundy entreating the sheriffs of Ghent to pardon her council- lors ; " while on the staircase of the Brussels Hotel de Ville may be seen his "Mary of Burgundy swearing to respect the commer- cial rights of Brussels, 1477," and "The armed citizens of Brussels demanding the charter from Duke John IV. of Brabant." An enormous panorama of "Cairo and the Banks of the Nile," " Sobieski and his Staff at the Siege of Vienna," Serpent-charmers of Sokko," "The Battle of Hastings," and many other works, attest the talent and the industry of Wauters, whose extraordinary gifts have won him a multiplicity of medals and honors of various kinds. 38 The Great Masters of Painting LEONARDO DA VINCI Louis XII. of France, son of the poet Charles of Orleans, was a friend of art and letters, and his viceroy in Milan, Charles d'Amboise, a highly cultured nobleman who greatly admired the genius of Leonardo, exerted his powerful influence with the French king in favor of the painter of " The Last Supper." Early, therefore, in 1507, we find Louis sending this letter, addressed " To our very dear and close friends, allies, and confeder- ates, the priors, and perpetual Gonfalioniere of the Signory of Florence." "Louis, by the grace of God King of France, Duke of Milan, Lord of Genoa, etc. Very dear and close friends : As we have need of Master Leonardo da Vinci, painter Leonardo da Vinci 39 to your city of Florence, and intend to make him do something for us with his own hand, and as we shall soon, God helping us, be in Milan, we beg you, as affectionately as we can, to be good enough to allow the said Leonardo to work for us such a time as may enable him to carry out the work we intend him to do. And as soon as you receive these letters (we beg you) write to him, and direct that he shall not leave Milan until we arrive there. While he is awaiting us we shall let him know what it is that we desire him to do, but meanwhile write to him in such fashion that he shall by no means leave the said city before our arrival. I have already urged your ambassador to write to you in the same sense. You will do us a great pleasure in acting as we desire. Dear and close friends, may our Lord have you in his keeping. Written from Blois, the 1 4th day of January, 1507. "Louis." 40 The Great Masters of Painting A few months after the date of this mis- sive, Louis XII. made a triumphal entry into Milan, and there seems reason to believe that Leonardo had a share in devising some part of the decorations prepared for the occa- sion. When, two years later, Louis again entered the capital of Lombardy, it is said that Leonardo was appointed master of the ceremonies. There is no doubt that much pressure was brought to bear upon the artist to in- duce him to take up his abode in France, but, although some writers incline to assert that he did sojourn there sometime between 1507 and 1510, the balance of testimony is against this supposition. We know that he undertook certain tasks, both artistic and scientific, for Louis and for his representative, the magnificent Charles d'Amboise. The latter, however, died in 1511 at a comparatively early age, and at the end of the following year the French were Leonardo da Vinci 41 forced to abandon Milan. In 1513 Leonardo left that city for Rome in the suite of Giu- liano de' Medici, brother of Pope Leo X., and while sojourning in the Eternal City received several commissions from the Pontiff. Louis XII. died in 1515, and among those who greeted his successor, Francis I., on his entry into Milan as a conqueror after the victory of Marignano, Leonardo appears to have found a place. Nor did the painter ever leave his latest protector. "Francis I.," says Miintz, "showed his desire to honor the greatness of the master by bestowing a princely revenue upon him, 700 crowns, about .1,400. This fact is attested by Benvenuto Cellini, who boasted, at a later date, that he had been granted a like sum. But let us leave the great gold- smith and writer to speak for himself. After relating that he has acquired a copy of Leonardo's treatise on the three great arts, he adds that, "as that great man's genius 42 The Great Masters of Painting was as vast as it was varied, and as he hatiT a certain acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature, King Francis, who was violently enamored of his great talents, took so great a delight in hearing him argue, that he only parted from him for a few days in the year, thus preventing him from putting the splen- did studies, which he had carried on with so much discipline, to actual use. I must not fail to repeat the words concerning him which I heard from the king's own lips, when he spoke to me, in the presence of the Cardinal of Ferrara, the Cardinal of Lor- raine, and the King of Navarre. He af- firmed that never any man had come into the world who knew so much as Leonardo, and that not only in matters of sculpture, paint- ing, and architecture, for, in addition, he was a great philosopher." The residence assigned to Leonardo was in the town of Amboise, the cradle of the first colony of artists summoned to France Leonardo da Vinci 43 by Charles VIII., and the favorite dwelling- place of Francis I. A great part of the youth of Francis had been spent there; there, soon after his accession, he had celebrated the betrothal of Rene*e de Mont- pensier and the Duke of Lorraine ; and there three of his own children had been born. To the great Italian artist was given the little manor-house of Cloux, standing between the castle and the town of Amboise. This manor-house, now known under the name of Clos-Luce, has lately been restored. Anatole de Montaiglon says of it : " Leonardo has leaned on the window-sills of the two stories, his feet have trodden the staircase, his step has passed through all the eight large rooms of which the dwelling is composed; and in the quiet house, which has not altered, exter- nally at least, since those days, we can imag- ine we see him yet." The room in which Leonardo breathed his last is said to be still 44 The Great Masters of Painting *&-*' existing with its raftered ceiling and its huge hearth. He often received visits from the great per- sonages who frequented the court of Francis I. In the autumn of 1516 the Cardinal of Aragon visited the painter, attended by his retinue. The cardinal's secretary, Antonio di Beatis, tells us that Leonardo showed the prelate three paintings : a female portrait executed for Giuliano de' Medici, a young St. John the Baptist, and a Madonna with the Child on the lap of St. Anne. "Unfortu- nately," adds the secretary, "a sort of par- alysis, which has affected his right hand, for- bids our expecting more good work from him." Leonardo, however, brought his abilities as an engineer to the service of Francis, and we are told of the plan which he made for dig- ging a canal near Romorantin, to be used both for irrigation and navigation, in addition to other works. The failing condition of his health at this Leonardo da Vinci 45 time suggested to the master the advisability of making his last arrangements, and a week before his death a notary of Amboise was sent for, and to him Leonardo dictated his will. The original document is lost, but a copy is in existence. It provides that the body of the testator be interred in the church of St. Florentin at Amboise, also for the cele- bration of numerous masses, and for certain gifts to the poor of the neighborhood. Leo- nardo's friend and pupil, Francesco Melzi, a young Milanese of noble birth, who had accom- panied the painter to France, was made sole executor and given certain sums of money and all of the artist's books, drawings, manuscripts, and instruments. This priceless legacy, thus, luckily, came into the hands of one who rightly appreciated its value to the world, which owes to Melzi the preservation of these precious relics of Leonardo. Other bequests were made to the brothers of the artist and to some old servants. 46 The Great Masters of Painting Vasari says : " Leonardo, growing old^iell sick for many months, and seeing death draw near, he desired to be carefully instructed concerning the things of our good and holy Christian and Catholic religion, and having made his confession and repented with many tears, he insisted, though he could not stand upright, and had to be supported in the arms of his friends and servants, on leaving his bed to receive the most blessed sacrament. The king, who often went to see him in the most friendly fashion, arrived at this moment ; Leonardo, out of respect, raised himself up in his bed, explained the nature and changes of his illness to him, and told him, further, how much he had offended God and men by not using his talent as he should have done. Just at this moment he was seized with a spasm, the forerunner of death; the king rose from his seat and took hold of his head to help him, and prove his favor to him, so as to comfort him in his suffering ; but this Leonardo da Vinci 47 divine spirit, recognizing that he could never attain a greater honor, expired in the king's arms, at the age of sixty-seven years, on May 2, 1519." Much doubt has been cast in later days upon this anecdote, which has been made the subject of several pictures by French artists, but it cannot be said to be absolutely dis- proved. "Thus died, full of years and glory, but far from his own land, the mighty genius who had carried the art of painting to its highest perfection, and had penetrated farther into the mysteries of nature than any mortal since the days of Epicurus and Aristotle." Leonardo was buried in the cloister of the church of St. Florentin, since entirely demolished. The life of the distinguished painter of the "Death of Leonardo da Vinci" affords a remarkable instance of perseverance and of industry continued through extreme old age. 48 The Great Masters of Painting For Ingres was eighty-six when death ^over- took him, in Paris, on January 14, 1867. A pupil of David, during his long stay in Rome, both as a student and as director of the French school there, he was much influenced by the works of Raphael. He became the recognized leader of those who followed the classic school in painting as opposed to the romantic, and at the Universal Exhibi- tion in Paris, in 1855, ne was awarded a gold medal, though his chief rival, Delacroix, received a like honor. The Cathedral of Montauban, his native town, contains Ingres's "Vow of Louis XIII. ; " the Louvre holds his " Apotheosis of Homer," his "Joan of Arc at the Corona- tion of Charles VII.," his " Roger Delivering Angelica," his " CEdipus Explaining the Rid- dle of the Sphinx," and his "La Source" (painted at seventy-five), in addition to sev- eral portraits, including one of the composer, Cherubini. From a long list of other pic- Raphael 49 tures, we will select for mention these titles : "The Martyrdom of St. Symphorien," in Autun Cathedral ; " The Sleep of Ossian " and "The Triumph of Romulus," both in the Quirinal Palace at Rome ; " Stratonice," "Francesca da Rimini," "Raphael and the Fornarina," "Virgil Reading the ^Eneid to Augustus and Octavia," the "Virgin of the Host," the " Sistine Chapel," and the " Oda- lisque with her Slave/* RAPHAEL THE date of Raphael's arrival in Rome, and who it was that summoned him thither, are alike unknown. It was probably early in 1509 when he began his work in the Eternal City. Raphael was then about twenty-six years of age, and for so young an artist had pro- duced a large number of important works. Already his hand had called into existence 50 The Great Masters of Painting the " Sposalizio," now in the Brera, at Milan ; the Ansidei Madonna of the National Gal- lery, the " Entombment," which hangs in the Borghese Gallery, the " St. Catherine," also in the National Gallery, the " Knight's Dream," the " Three Graces," the " St. Michael," and two pictures of St. George. Many lovely Madonnas, also, his graceful brush had traced, among them, the Solly, the Conestabile, the Gran Duca, the Cowper, the Orleans, the Cardellino, and the Bridgewater, nor does this list give all. Whoever it might have been that influenced Raphael to take up his abode in Rome, it was the Pope, Julius II. who there became his great patron, as he was already the patron of Bramante and of Michael Angelo. Born in 1441 and elevated to the pontificate in 1503, Julius, at the time of Raphael's advent at Rome, was nearing his seventieth year, but his energy showed no symptoms of de- cay, and his grand projects for the building Raphael 5 1 of St. Peter's, and the enlargement of the Vatican, were pushed forward with never ceasing vigor. To Raphael, Julius assigned the decoration of those four rooms in the palace of the Vatican which are now known as the Stanze of Raphael, and where are enshrined those creations of the master's pencil which un- questionably rank foremost among his works, and are rivalled only by the mighty frescoes which the genius of Michael Angelo spread upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Raphael and Michael Angelo labored near each other at Rome for a number of years, yet never seem to have been on terms of much intimacy. Each admired the genius of the other, but such intercourse as took place between them hardly merited the name of friendship. Symonds says : " If they did not understand one another and make friends, this was due to the different conceptions they were framed to take of life, the one being 52 The Great Masters of Painting the exact antipodes to the other." ^Angelo, less amiable than the younger artist, appears to have been prejudiced against him because he was a pupil of Perugino. Miintz says in reference to this : " There was nothing the sculptor disliked more than the vapid style of Perugino, and he was also very much opposed to his mer- cenary ways. He accordingly refused him permission to see some of his pictures (per- haps his famous cartoon), which he did not like showing to any one. Perugino made some severe remark, whereupon Michael Angelo, losing his temper, called him an ' old woman/ So gross an insult was not worth notice, but Perugino would not sit down under it. Twenty years before, he would have waited for Michael Angelo at the corner of the street and have given him a sound thrashing, but he was too old for that, and he perhaps remembered the fine which had been inflicted upon him some time before. Raphael 53 He accordingly decided to appeal to the tribunals, but he took nothing by it, for he lost his case, and his reputation declined very much in consequence. Soon afterward he went back to Umbria, where no one thought of questioning his merit, and where he was amply compensated for slights in- flicted elsewhere. To my mind, the hostility between Michael Angelo and Raphael may well have originated in this quarrel, for the former, hot-tempered as he was, very prob- ably vented on the pupil the ill-will he felt for the master.'* Crowe and Cavalcaselle, on the other hand, do not admit the existence of such feeling as Miintz implies. They say : " In Tuscany, neither Raphael nor Buona- rotti could dispense with the patronage of the rich, to which they both appealed. At Rome they were servants of a pontiff, who employed them both under one roof. Varie- ties and dissonances, which might have passed 54 The Great Masters of Painting unnoticed in Tuscany, would naturally come out with exceptional force at the Vatican ; because, in the one case, the two men were necessarily thrown together, in the other, they seldom met in friendship or in enmity. Still, at Florence as at Rome, nothing pre- vented either of them from following his own bent. Raphael might charm those who knew him by a pleasing affability; Michael Angelo might repel rather than court friend- ship by rudeness and sarcasm. To such of the public as understood these things, both artists were gifted with extraordinary powers, which only differed from each other in some of their subtler elements. One was all grace ; the other all strength. Two forces* directly equal and contrary, met and neutral- ized each other. The picture of violent and ceaseless hostility, which tradition has handed down to us as a normal state in which Raphael and Michael Angelo lived, appears to be grossly exaggerated. In all Raphael 55 that we can gather from credible sources, as well from reasoning as from analogy, we find no more than that they were generous rivals. They had nothing to fear from each other. Neither of them could miss the goal for which they equally contended, neither fail to produce those masterpieces which surprised their contemporaries and afterward astonished the world." And again : "It may be true that during the prog- ress of the Sistine Chapel and Camere the rivalry of Raphael and Michael Angelo be- came acute. Yet there is hardly ground for thinking that it was in 1509 that Michael Angelo was threatened with the direct oppo- sition of which Condivi and Vasari speak the opposition which aimed at substituting Raphael for Michael Angelo in the comple- tion of the Sistine Chapel. One of the principal grounds for thinking that no such opposition was then made is that Buonarotti 56 The Great Masters of Painting ^-' continued his labors at the Vatican, whilst Raphael went on painting at the Camere. The Pope, who had easy access to both places, may have compared the pictures of the two painters, and contrasted the beauties of the ' Disputa ' with those of the * Crea- tion ' or the * Deluge ; ' but as each of the two masters had begun a series of works that required unity of thought as well as of handling to complete them, the anecdotes, of which artistic annals are full, can scarcely apply to the period at which we have now arrived in Raphael's life." Among the anecdotes which survive con- cerning the relations between Raphael and Michael Angelo is one which relates that the older artist, encountering Raphael in the courtyard of the Vatican, attended by numer- ous pupils, sneeringly remarked, " You walk with the retinue of a prince." To this Raphael is supposed to have replied, "And you alone, like an executioner." Raphael 57 It is this episode which furnished Vernet with a subject for the painting which we reproduce. At the top of the picture, to the left, is seen Pope Julius, whose attention, Bramante, plan in hand, seeks to attract to- ward the fabric of the palace. The Supreme Pontiff, however, motions him aside with a gesture of his hand and fixes his eyes upon Raphael, who, surrounded by several fellow artists, is engaged in sketching a peasant mother and her child, seated amidst other pilgrims to the Eternal City, and forming the centre of a group suggestive of the holy family. In the foreground appears the great Buonarotti, carrying in his arms a model for one of his sculptured figures, while above Raphael, to the right, may be discerned Leonardo da Vinci (with a long gray beard) speaking to a young artist standing at his side. The painter of " Raphael in the Vatican " came of an artist family, both his father, 58 The Great Masters of Painting \ Carle Vernet, and his grandfather, Vernet, being distinguished painters. Horace Vernet was born at Paris in 1789, and dis- played artistic talent in early childhood. During a life of ceaseless industry and ever increasing fame, this artist produced a great number of works, mostly of military sub- jects. Many of his battle-pictures are to be seen at Versailles, while his "Judith and Holof ernes " and " Defence of the Barrier of Clichy" are in the Louvre. Vernet painted many scenes from the campaigns of the French in Algeria, a notable one being the " Taking of the Smalah of Abd-el- Kader in 1843," an enormous canvas, now in the palace of Versailles. He died at Paris, on Jan. 17, 1863. Diirer 59 DURER THE old proverb of the Nurembergers proudly asserted that " Nuremberg's hand Goes through every land " and this was no idle boast, for the free and busy city, which has been well called "the Birmingham of the Middle Ages," divided with Augsburg the great transcontinental traffic between Venice and the Levant and Northern Europe. The commercial relations of Nuremberg and the City of the Lagoons were especially important, and numerous mer- chants from the Bavarian city were connected with the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, or German warehouse, in Venice, and travelled back and forth between the two great centres of com- merce. The main reason, among several, for Diirer's second visit to Venice, which took 60 The Great Masters of Painting place in 1505 (it appears now to be fairly proven that he had also been there in 1494), is to be found in the project for rebuilding the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, which was burnt down in the winter of the year 1504-05. A few months later the Venetian Senate de- cided to begin the work of rebuilding the edifice on an enlarged scale, and from the various plans submitted chose those by a countryman of Diirer, one Hieronymus, prob- ably of Augsburg. Professor Thausing, in his authoritative biography of Diirer, says that the two ruling parties in the German colony at Venice were the Augsburg and Nuremberg merchants, and suggests that, in order to avoid undue partiality (the architect selected being an Augsburger), they deter- mined to give Diirer the commission to paint an altar-piece for the church of San Barto- lommeo, which was attached to their Fon- daco. The picture resulting from this decision was the famous "Feast of the Durer 61 Rosary" (now in the monastery of Strahow, near Prague), in the background of which the painter has introduced portraits of himself and of his friend, Wilibald Pirkheimer, while behind them may be seen a distant group of buildings, representing the castle of their beloved Nuremberg. Writing to Pirkheimer from Venice, Durer refers to the picture thus : " I have also silenced the painters, who said that I was a good engraver, but did not know how to manage colors. Now everyone says they never saw more beautiful coloring." Again, he says, "All the artists praise it just as the great people praised you. They say they never saw a more sublime or more lovely picture." In another letter to Pirkheimer, Durer writes : " I wish you were in Venice. There are many fine fellows among the painters, who get more and more friendly with me ; it holds one's heart up. Well brought up folks, 62 The Great Masters of Painting good lute players, skilled pipers and many noble and excellent people, are in the com- pany, all wishing me very well, and being very friendly. On the other hand, here are the falsest, most lying, thievish villains in the whole world, appearing to the unwary the pleasantest possible fellows. I laugh to my- self when they try it with me : the fact is, they know their rascality is public, though one says nothing. I have many good friends among the Italians, who warn me not to eat or drink with their painters : for many of them are my enemies, and copy my picture in the church, and others of mine wherever they meet with them ; and yet, notwithstanding this, they abuse my works, and say that they are not according to ancient art, and, there- fore, not good. But Gian Bellini has praised me highly before several gentlemen, and he wishes to have something of my painting. He came himself, and asked me to do some- thing for him, saying that he would pay me Diirer 63 well for it ; and all the people here tell me what a good man he is, so that I also am greatly inclined to him." A pleasing story is told of Diirer's inter- course with the aged Bellini : Bellini, while paying a visit to Durer, asked, as a special mark of affection, for one of the brushes used by the latter in painting hair. Durer held out to him a number of ordinary brushes, and told him to choose one, or take them all if he liked. Bellini, thinking Durer had not understood him, again asked for one of the particular brushes with which, as he thought, Diirer was accustomed to do his fine hair painting. On this Diirer assured him that he used nothing but the ordinary brushes, and, to prove it, painted on the spot a long lock of woman's hair in his peculiar manner. Bellini is said to have acknowledged to several people afterward that he would never have believed it if he had not seen it with his own eyes. 64 The Great Masters of Painting It is somewhat curious that Diirer makes no mention in his letters of either Giorgione or Titian, though he must have met them, as both painters were employed, during Diirer's stay in Venice, in decorating the exterior walls of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi with fres- coes. The popular and industrious artist Carl Becker, in his painting of "Albrecht Diirer in Venice," places before us the handsome Bavarian seated beside old Bellini, who is ex- amining some of Diirer's drawings. Behind them appears Giorgione, who is about to pledge Durer in a bumper of wine, while Titian replenishes his glass. It is not a matter of wonder that Diirer's words at the thought of returning home and leaving these genial kindred spirits were, " Ah, how I shall shiver for want of the sun. Here I am a gentleman, at home a hanger-on." It seems that Becker has permitted himself some artis- tic license in representing Titian so mature in Durer 6$ aspect, in fact, he was only about twenty- eight years old at this period, and the junior of the German painter by several years. Lavinia, the beautiful daughter of Titian, so well known to art lovers by her father's portrait of her bearing a dish of fruit, in the Berlin gallery, stands behind her brother Orazio, who holds up a sketch he has just taken from Dlirer 's portfolio. Becker, who died in 1900 at the age of eighty years, was a pupil of Hess and Cor- nelius, and won many honors in the course of a long life. His " Charles V. Being Enter- tained by Fugger " is in the National Gallery at Berlin, and "The Emperor Maximilian Crowning Ulrich von Hutten at Augsburg" belongs to the Walraff-Richartz Museum at Cologne. At the Corcoran Gallery in Wash- ington may be seen his painting of "The newly found statue of the Apollo Belvedere viewed by Pope Julius II.," and other works of his are in American galleries, both public 66 The Great Masters of Painting and private. Probably his best-known pic- tures are "Othello Relating his Adventures to Desdemona and her Father," and " Romeo and Juliet at the Friar's." CORREGGIO THE meagre records of Correggio's life do not tell us much of the man who spent his years peacefully at work at Parma, far from the great centres of Italian art, and never, apparently, even visited Rome. The exag- gerated tales of his poverty and avarice have been proved unworthy of belief, and we may now feel sure that Correggio knew neither want nor wealth. But the cause of his seemingly sudden death at the early age of forty is still a mystery, nor have we any authentic portrait of the painter of the Holy Night." A continuous chorus of praise has been for over three centuries bestowed on Correggio Correggio 67 from Vasari, who awarded him " the great praise of having attained the highest point of perfection in coloring," to Ruskin, who said, speaking of the National Gallery, "The two pictures which I would last part with, out of it, would be Titian's 'Bacchus' and Correg- gio's 'Venus.' ' Sweetser says : " In the seventeenth cen- tury, Correggio's pictures fascinated all be- holders, and the tide of his fame rose higher and higher, especially after the Caracci had aroused an interest by their letters and re- searches. Said Annibale Caracci: 'Cor- reggio's thoughts are his own thoughts, emanating from his own imagination. One sees that they are the offspring of his brain, and that he took nature alone into his coun- cils. Others have ever leaned upon some foreign support, some on models, others on statues and engravings/ Scanelli calls Correggio, Raphael, and Titian the three greatest painters, saying : ' He has in reality 68 The Great Masters of Painting reached the zenith of faithful portraiture of nature/ Tassoni enters rhapsody thus : * Pliny praises the paintings of Apelles, with which those of our master may in some re- spects be compared, chiefly for their grace, beauty of finish, and charm of color ; but no one can quite equal Antonio, who has at- tained the highest point of perfection in artistic coloring, expression of beauty, and grace.' Still later the ecstatic Scaramuccia says : ' This is the very quintessence of good style. You need not seek further, for here are hidden the costly jewels and all the imaginable essentials of our highly difficult art. You do not need to seek further. Oh, thou spirit of my Antonio of Correggio, what master didst thou have from whom thou couldst have acquired such divine powers ? ' "The next century magnified his power still more, if possible, and his fame was spread more widely by travellers returning from Italy to their distant homes in the North and Correggio 69 West, bearing amazing stories of the great paintings at Parma and Modena. Most of these were Frenchmen, with all the vivacious enthusiasm of the Latin race ; and even Raphael himself fared hard when compared with the new-found Apelles. A deep inter- est arose in the course and events of his life, and investigations were made by the highly suspected Pater Resta of Milan ; by the Swiss painter, David ; by Gherardo Bru- norio ; by Raphael Mengs, who wrote ' On the Life and Works of Antonio Allegri ; ' by the Genoese painter, Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, author of a voluminous biography ; by Michele Antonioli, who made several fresh discoveries ; by Tiraboschi, the learned and accurate librarian of Modena ; by Pater Irenea Aff6, who found the frescoes in the convent of San Paolo, at Parma ; and by Pater Luigi Pungileoni, who published three volumes on Correggio, full of the evidences of careful study and analysis. 70 The Great Masters of Painting , "The complex criticism of the nineteenth century has been more discriminating and less adulatory. The connoisseurs of the North, of England and Germany, have, in some cases, applied moral rules to his works, and find in them the Beginning of the great decadence. With all his undeniable gifts and genius acknowledged, he is charged with having demoralized art by introducing new and less sanctified motives, and thus prepar- ing the way for the degradation which ensued in the next period. The three preceding centuries found fault with his drawing, some- times, or with his groupings, but had not dis- covered his loss of spiritual insight. " Of late years, and especially since Ruskin's influence has become such a power in art- criticism, there has been much reprehension of the so-called inherent sensuality of Cor- reggio's pictures. But there is a charming naTvete", an idyllic purity, in his works, which bear evidence that his glorification of the Correggio Jl flesh was only a reproduction, original, and not communicated from any study, of the old Greek naturalism, wherein the human body, perfectly developed throughout and full of all life, is still the crown of all beauty, the worthiest theme of art. This is not religion, but it is truth. The tranquillity and purity of Correggio' s life bear witness that his works were wrought out from no base mind, but were rather the best efforts of a frank and childlike soul. The tide of pietism, ris- ing in the catacombs and the caves of the Nitrian desert, and everywhere present in Umbrian and Tuscan art and life, had passed its flood, and throughout Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, men were looking at the old problems in a new light, the light of nature and of reason. Insulated as he was amid the dull peasantry of rural Lombardy, Allegri felt the thrill of the ris- ing Renaissance, and ignored asceticism as a dead issue, painting, in all naturalness and 72 The Great Masters of Painting grace, the joyousness of human life and hu- man instincts." A legend relates that Titian said of Cor- reggio's frescoes in the Duomo of Parma, " Turn it upside down and fill it with gold ; even so, you will not have paid its just price," and Raphael Mengs called it "the most beautiful of all cupolas painted either before or since." Brinton, the latest biog- rapher of Correggio, writes of "that won- derful cathedral cupola, which, with all its faults, is yet the expression of his sincerest utterance : no dream of beauty that poet has conceived can equal that radiant world of angel forms which there surrounds us, those genii who light their torches or scatter in- cense on the sacrifice, those children who float upward through the golden vaporous clouds: from the grave saints tended by the child angels, from the apostles above and their glad genii, to the uprushing wave of angel forms who soar into the golden haze Correggio 73 of the cupola, it is a cry of ' Sursum corda ! ' * Lift up your hearts ! ' that the old painter of heavenly joy has sent us." Annibale Caracci wrote, "The children of Correggio breathe and smile with such a grace and truth that one cannot refrain from smiling and enjoying one's self with them," and Guido Reni is asserted to have asked a citizen of Modena " if Correggio 's putti at S. Pietro Martire had grown up and left their places where he had seen them, for so vivid and life-like were they that it was impossible to believe they could remain." Corrado Ricci, director of the gallery at Parma, says, in his authoritative life of the artist, when speaking of Correggio's children : " The innumerable cherubs, genii, and chil- dren scattered throughput his works are the result of his delight in the pictorial expres- sion of grace and happiness. No other painter has succeeded in rendering these little creatures with" such truth of form 74 The Great Masters of Painting and expression, with such a knowledge^ of their naifve simplicity and pretty grotesque- ness of pose, although, after his time, the palaces and churches of half Europe were invaded by laughing infant hordes. John Addington Symonds writes as follows of the putti in the cupola of San Giovanni Evan- gelista : ' Correggio has sprinkled them lav- ishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by his temperament to overlay the melody with roulades. Gazing at these frescoes, the thought came to me that Correggio was like a man listening to sweetest flute playing, and translating phrase after phrase, as they passed through his fancy, 1 into laughing faces, breezy tresses, and polling mists. Sometimes a grander cadence reached his ear, and then St. Peter with the keys, or St. Augustine of the mighty brow, or the inspired eyes of St. John, took form beneath his pencil. But the Michael Angela 75 light airs returned, and rose and lily bloomed again for him among the clouds.' ' Henri Guillaume Schlesinger, whose pic- ture imagines Correggio making sketches of some lovely children, was an artist of Ger- man birth who became a naturalized citizen of France. A pupil of the Academy of Vienna, he made his bow at the Paris Salon in 1840, and exhibited many portraits and subject-pictures there during the course of a life which reached to eighty years. His " Five Senses," shown at the Paris Exposi- tion of 1867, was bought by Napoleon III. Schlesinger died in 1893. MICHAEL ANGELO IT is said that, being asked by a priest why he had never married, Michael Angelo re- plied : " I have only too much of a wife in this art of min. She has always kept me struggling on. My children will be the works 76 The Great Masters of Painting I leave behind me. Even though they^are worth naught, yet I shall live awhile in them. Woe to Lorenzo Ghiberti if he had not made the gates of S. Giovanni. His children and grandchildren have sold and squandered the substance that he left. The gates are still in their places." The only woman with whose name that of Michael Angelo has been connected is Vittoria Colonna, and their affection for each other seems to have been purely of a platonic nature. On her side was admiration for a great artist ; on his side, attraction to a noble nature, strengthened by a common love for poetry and a unity of religious sentiment. Vittoria was about fifteen years younger than the great Angelo, having been born in 1490. Her father was Fabrizio Colonna, Grand Constable of Naples ; her mother, Agnesina di Montefeltro, daughter to Fede- rigo, Duke of Urbino. Betrothed when a child, Vittoria Colonna was married at nine- Michael Angela 77 teen to the young Marquis of Pescara, who became a brilliant soldier, but whose career ended in disgrace in 1525. His widow, igno- rant of some of his faults, forgiving others, mourned him long and faithfully, and never remarried. " For death, that breaks the marriage band In others, only closer pressed The wedding-ring upon her hand, And closer locked and barred her breast." We do not know when the friendship between her and Michael Angelo began perhaps about 1538, when the artist was over sixty and the lady nearing fifty years. The only letters extant which he sent to her, and they are but two, belong to the year 1545, when Angelo had reached seventy years. The friends had sent each other poems of their own composition, and Michael Angelo had also executed certain drawings for the lady. 78 The Great Masters of Painting His first epistle to Vittoria is as follows : " I desired, lady, before I accepted the things which your ladyship has often expressed the will to give me I desired to produce some- thing for you with my own hand, in order to be as little as possible unworthy of this kind- ness. I have now come to recognize that the grace of God is not to be bought, and that to keep it waiting is a grievous sin. Therefore I acknowledge my error, and will- ingly accept your favors. When I possess them, not indeed because I shall have them in my house, but for that I myself shall dwell in them, the place will seem to encircle me with Paradise. For which felicity I shall remain ever more obliged to your ladyship than I am already, if that is possible. " The bearer of this letter will be Urbino, who lives in my service. Your ladyship may inform him when you would like me to come and see the head you promised to show me." Michael Angelo 79 The letter was accompanied by this son- net : " Seeking at least to be not all unfit For thy sublime and boundless courtesy, My lowly thoughts at first were fain to try What they could yield for grace so infinite. But now I know my unassisted wit Is all too weak to make me soar so high, For pardon, lady, for this fault I cry, And wiser still I grow, remembering it. Yea, well I see what folly 'twere to think That largess dropped from *thee like dews from heaven Could e're be paid by work so frail as mine ! To nothingness my art and talent sink ; He fails who from his mortal stores hath given A thousandfold to match one gift divine." Here is a translation, by Symonds, who also translated those sonnets by the master which are here quoted, of a letter which Vittoria Colonna sent to Michael Angelo from Viterbo : "MAGNIFICENT MESSER MlCHELANGELO. "I did not reply earlier to your letter, be 8o The Great Masters of Painting cause it was, as one might say, an answer to my last ; for I thought that if you and I were to go on writing without intermission accord- ing to my obligation and your courtesy, I should have to neglect the Chapel of S. Catherine here, and be absent at the ap- pointed hours for company with my sister- hood, while you would have to leave the Chapel of S. Paul, and be absent from morning through the day from your sweet usual colloquy with painted forms, the which with their natural accents do not speak to you less clearly than the living persons round me speak to me. Thus we should both of us fail in our duty, I to the brides, you to the vicar of Christ. For these rea- sons, inasmuch as I am well assured of our steadfast friendship and firm affection, bound by knots of Christian kindness, I do not think it necessary to obtain the proof of your good will in letters by writing on my side, but rather to await with well-prepared mind some Michael Angela 81 substantial occasion for serving you. Mean- while I address my prayers to that Lord of whom you spoke to me with so fervent and humble a heart, when I left Rome, that when I return thither I may find you with his image renewed and enlivened by true faith in your soul, in like measure as you have painted it with perfect art in my Samaritan. Believe me to remain always yours and your Urbino's." The friendship between these two noble souls came to an end, as far as death can end such things, in 1547, when Vittoria Colonna passed from earth. " All my friends are dead ; And she is dead, the noblest of them all. I saw her face, when the great Sculptor Death, Whom men should call Divine, had at a blow Stricken her into marble ; and I kissed Her cold white hand." x 1 Longfellow's " Michael Angelo." 82 The Great Masters of Painting si-' The two sonnets which here follow were doubtless composed by Angelo in his be- reavement : " When my rude hammer to the stubborn stone Gives human shape, now that, now this, at will, Following his hand who wields and guides it still, It moves upon another's feet alone ; But that which dwells in heaven, the world doth fill With beauty by pure motions of its own ; And since tools fashion tools which else were none, Its life makes all that lives with living skill. Now, for that every stroke excels the more The higher at the forge it doth ascend, Her soul that fashioned mine hath sought the skies ; Wherefore unfinished I must meet my end, If God, the great Artificer, denies That aid which was unique on earth before." " When she who was the source of all my sighs Fled from the world, herself, my straining sight, Nature, who gave us that unique delight, Was sunk in shame, and we had weeping eyes. Yet shall not vauntful Death enjoy the prize, This sun of suns which then he veiled in night ; For Love hath triumphed, lifting up her light Michael Angela 83 On earth and 'mid the saints of Paradise. What though remorseless and impiteous doom Deemed that the music of her deeds would die, And that her splendor would be sunk in gloom ? The poet's page exalts her to the sky With Life more living in the lifeless tomb, And Death translates her soul to reign on high." Vittoria Colonna had been at rest seven- teen years when the end of a long life and of many colossal labors came to Buonarroti. "Who shall doubt that these two have walked much together since, in that heaven where 'they neither marry nor are given in marriage ? ' ' In painting his attractive picture of " Michael Angelo Reading his Sonnets to Vit- toria Colonna," Herr Schneider has permitted himself the quite allowable license of portray- ing the two poets as somewhat younger than the facts warrant. Hermann Schneider was born at Munich in 1846, and received instruction in art from the celebrated Piloty. His paintings are 84 The Great Masters of Painting mostly historical in their nature, and inehide Charles V. at Valladolid," " Mozart and his Sister," " Van Dyck Painting the Children of Charles I.," " Venus and Cupids/' " Nymph and Triton," " Abundantia," and "A Roman Festival." He has decorated the castle of Drachenburg, on the Rhine, with mural paintings of "The Cycle of Bacchus " and other subjects. CELLINI ONE of the most remarkable autobiog- raphies ever given to the world is that written by Benvenuto Cellini. An artist of rare gifts and consummate master of the goldsmith's craft, Cellini was hardly a great sculptor ; a man of many faults, rash, full of conceit, arrogant, quarrelsome, he was " a mad- cap who firmly believed he was wise, cir^ cumspect, and prudent." His passionate and vindictive spirit thought it but right to re- Cellini 85 venge itself on an enemy either bravely in the open or by taking him at a disadvantage, yet when we remember the corrupt age in which Cellini lived and the evil examples set before him by personages of the highest rank, we are constrained to find some excuse for his conduct. At all events, however much we may and must condemn many of his acts, we cannot but admire his genius and energy, and the frankness with which he tells the story of his romantic career. In Robert-Fleury's picture of our artist- bravo, we see Cellini as he sits in his studio brooding darkly over some real or fancied wrong and thinking how he may best re- quite it. As an instance of Cellini's revengeful spirit, we will mention the account of his brother's death and the way it was revenged. It appears that our artist had a younger brother named Francesco, about twenty five 86 The Great Masters of Painting years old, who was a soldier in the service of Duke Alessandro de Medici in Rome. Seeing one day a former comrade being taken to prison by the guard of the Bargello, four brisk young blades of Francesco's company were induced by their captain to attempt a rescue. They attacked the constables, and during the fight which ensued, Bertino Aldo- brandi, an intimate friend of Francesco's, was seriously wounded. Francesco coming up and being told that his friend was killed, rushed after the guard and ran through the body the soldier who had wounded Bertino. Turning then upon the other constables, an arquebusier whom he was about to strike fired in self-defence (as Cellini himself says) and hit Francesco in the thigh. Of this wound he soon afterward died, and Cellini vowed to revenge him. He writes : " I took to watching the arquebusier who shot my brother, as though he had been a girl I was in love with. The man had for- Cellini 87 merly been in the light cavalry, but afterward had joined the arquebusiers as one of the Bargello's corporals ; and what increased my rage was that he had used these boastful words : 'If it had not been for me, who killed that brave young man, the least trifle of delay would have resulted in his putting us all to flight with great disaster.' When I saw that the fever caused by always seeing him about was depriving me of sleep and appetite, and was bringing me by degrees to sorry plight, I overcame my repugnance to so low and not quite praiseworthy an enterprise, and made up my mind one evening to rid myself of the torment. The fellow lived in a house near a place called Torre Sanguigua. It had just struck twenty-four, and he was standing at the house-door, with his sword in hand, having risen from supper. With great address I stole up to him, holding a large Pistojan dagger, and dealt him a back-handed stroke, with which I meant to cut his head 88 The Great Masters of Painting clean off, but as he turned round very" sud- denly, the blow fell upon the point of his left shoulder and broke the bone. He sprang up, dropped his sword, half-stunned with the great pain, and took to flight. I followed after, and in four steps caught him up, when I lifted my dagger above his head, which he was holding very low, and hit him in the back exactly at the junction of the nape- bone and the neck. The poniard entered this point so deep into the bone, that, though I used all my strength to pull it out, I was not able. For just at that moment four soldiers with drawn swords sprang out from the next house and obliged me to set hand to my own sword to defend my life. Leaving the pon- iard then, I made off, and fearing I might be recognized, took refuge in the palace of Duke Alessandro, which was between Piazza Navona and the Pantheon." At another time, having some cause for enmity against Pompeo, a Milanese jeweller Cellini 89 in the papal service, Cellini relates that he followed his rival, who was " attended by ten men very well armed," and came up with him as he was leaving an apothecary's shop, "and his bravi had opened their ranks and received him in their midst. I drew a little dagger with a sharpened edge, and breaking the line of his defenders, laid my hands upon his breast so quickly and coolly that none of them were able to prevent me. Then I aimed to strike him in the face ; but fright made him turn his head round, and I stabbed him just beneath the ear. I only gave two blows, for he fell stone dead at the second. I had not meant to kill him ; but, as the say- ing goes, knocks are not dealt by measure. With my left hand I plucked back the dagger and with my right hand drew my sword to de- fend my life. However, all those bravi ran up to the corpse and took no action against me, so I went back alone through Strada Giulia, considering how best to put myself in safety." go The Great Masters of Painting Cellini now accepted an invitation Trom Cardinal Cornaro to remain for a time under his protection, in view of possible unpleasant consequences from Pompeo's murder, "and a few days afterward the Cardinal Farnese was elected Pope. "After he had put affairs of greater con- sequence in order, the new Pope sent for me, saying that he did not wish any one else to strike his coins. To these words of his Holiness, a gentleman very privately ac- quainted with him, named Messer Latino Juvinale, made answer that I was in hiding for a murder committed on the person of one Pompeo of Milan, and set forth what could be argued for my justification in the most favorable terms. The Pope replied : * I knew nothing of Pompeo's death, but plenty of Benvenuto's provocation ; so let a safe-conduct be at once made out for him, in order that he may be placed in perfect security. 9 A great friend of Pompeo's, who Cellini 9 1 was also intimate with the Pope, happened to be there ; he was a Milanese, called Messer Ambrogio. This man said : ' In the first days of your papacy it were not well to grant pardons of this kind.' The Pope turned to him and answered : ' You know less about such matters than I do. Know, then, that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, stand above the law; and how far more he, then, who re- ceived the provocation I have heard of?' When my safe-conduct had been drawn out, I began at once to serve him, and was treated with the utmost favor." Having seen Benvenuto as a bravo, let us look at him as an artist, and one specially favored by that liberal patron of the arts, Francis I. Cellini writes that at one time Francis said, " Having now so fine a basin and jug of my workmanship, he wanted an equally handsome salt-cellar to match them ; and begged me to make a design, and to lose 92 The Great Masters of Painting no time about it. I replied : ' Your Majesty shall see a model of the sort even sooner than you have commanded ; for while I was making the basin, I thought there ought to be a salt-cellar to match it, therefore I have already designed one, and if it is your pleas- ure, I will at once exhibit my conception.' The king turned with a lively movement of surprise and pleasure to the lords in his com- pany, they were the King of Navarre, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the Cardinal of Ferrara, exclaiming, as he did so : ' Upon my word, this is a man to be loved and cherished by every one who knows him/ Then he told me he would very gladly see my model. " I set off, and returned in a few minutes ; for I had only to cross the river, that is, the Seine. I carried with me the wax model I had made in Rome, at the Cardinal of Fer- rara' s request. When I appeared again be- fore the king, and uncovered my piece, he Cellini 93 cried out in astonishment : ' This is a hun- dred times more divine a thing than I had ever dreamed of. What a miracle of a man ! He ought never to stop working.' Then he turned to me with a beaming countenance, and told me that he greatly liked the piece, and wished me to execute it in gold. The Cardinal of Ferrara looked me in the face, and let me understand that he recognized the model as the same I had made for him in Rome. I replied that I had already told him I should carry it out for one who was worthy of it. The cardinal, remember- ing my words, and nettled by the revenge he thought that I was taking on him, re- marked to the king : ' Sire, this is an enor- mous undertaking ; I am only afraid that we shall never see it finished. These able artists, who have great conceptions in their brain, are ready enough to put the same in execution without duly considering when they are to be accomplished. I therefore, 94 The Great Masters of Painting if I gave commission for things of such mag- nitude, should like to know when I was likely to get them/ The king replied that if a man was so scrupulous about the ter- mination of a work, he never would begin anything at all. These words he uttered with a certain look, which implied that such enterprises were not for folk of little spirit. I then began to say my say : ' Princes who put heart and courage in their servants, as your Majesty does, by deed and word, render undertakings of the greatest magnitude quite easy. Now that God has sent me so mag- nificent a patron, I hope to perform for him a multitude of great and splendid master- pieces.* 'I believe it,' said the king, and rose from the table. Then he called me into his chamber, and asked how much gold was wanted for the salt-cellar. ' A thousand crowns/ I answered. He called his treasurer at once, who was the Viscount of Orbec, and ordered him that very day to disburse to me Cellini 95 a thousand crowns of good weight and old gold." At a later date the artist says, speaking of the famous salt-cellar now at Vienna : " The king had now returned to Paris ; and when I paid him my respects, I took the piece with me. As I have already related, it was oval in form, standing about two-thirds of a cubit, wrought of solid gold, and worked entirely with the chisel. While speaking of the model, I said before how I had repre- sented Sea and Earth, seated, with their legs interlaced, as we observe in the case of firths and promontories ; their attitude was there- fore metaphorically appropriate. The Sea carried a trident in his right hand, and in his left I put a ship of delicate workmanship to hold the salt. Below him were his four sea- horses, fashioned like our horses from the head to the front hoofs ; all the rest of their body, from the middle backwards, resembled a fish, and the tails of these creatures were 96 The Great Masters of Painting agreeably interwoven. Above this groujTthe Sea sat throned in an attitude of pride and dignity; around him were many kinds of fishes and other creatures of the ocean. The water was represented with its waves, and enamelled in the appropriate color. I had portrayed Earth under the form of a very handsome woman, holding her horn of plenty, entirely nude like the male figure ; in her left hand I placed a little temple of Ionic archi- tecture, most delicately wrought, which was meant to contain the pepper. Beneath her were the handsomest living creatures which the earth produces; and the rocks were partly enamelled, partly left in gold. The whole piece reposed upon a base of ebony, properly proportioned, but with a projecting cornice, upon which I introduced four golden figures in rather more than half relief. They represented Night, Day, Twilight, and Dawn. I put, moreover, into the same frieze four other figures, similar in size, and intended for Cellini 97 the four chief winds ; these were executed, and in part enamelled, with the most exquisite refinement. "When I exhibited this piece to his Majesty, he uttered a loud outcry of astonish- ment, and could not satiate his eyes with gazing at it. Then he bade me take it back to my house, saying he would tell me at the proper time what I should have to do with it. So I carried it home, and sent at once to invite several of my best friends ; we dined gaily together, placing the salt-cellar in the middle of the table, and thus we were the first to use it." The painter of " Benvenuto Cellini in his Studio," Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury, in- structed in art by Girodet and Gros, and also by Horace Vernet, spent most of his life and produced most of his work in Paris, where he died in 1890, over ninety years old. More than one of his works may be seen in the Luxembourg and at Versailles. His sub- 98 The Great Masters of Painting jects, mostly historic in their character^in- clude "Charles V. at Yuste," "Galileo/ 1 "The Conference at Poissy, 1561," " Clovis Entering Tours," "The Death of Titian," "Columbus," and "The Last Moments of Montaigne." The Paris Tribunal of Com- merce contains several frescoes by Robert- Fleury. TITIAN " WE can no more bring Titian before us as a young man, than we can fancy the an- gelic Raphael old," says, with truth, Mrs. Jameson. Few artists have reached the age allotted to Titian, whom Death passed by until he lacked but about a year of being a century old. The great Venetian painter was a man of fifty and over when he first met Charles V., his constant patron for more than a score of years, but he outlived the emperor nearly two decades. Titian 99 It was probably in 1533, and at Bologna, ihat Titian made his first sketches of Charles, who was then on his way from Germany to embark at Genoa for Spain. From these sittings the artist painted a full-length por- trait of the emperor, in armor, which has perished, and another one, showing him in a rich dress, with a hound by his side, which is in the Museum of Madrid. "It was said of Charles V. that, from the day on which he first saw Titian, he never condescended to sit to any other mas- ter. The statement is based on the wording of a patent which the emperor issued ta the master on his arrival at Barcelona in 1533. Titian is described in this document, which bears the date of May I9th, as a man so exquisitely gifted, that he deserves the name of the Apelles of his time. The emperor declares that he only follows the example of his predecessors, Alexander the Great and Octavian, in selecting him to be his painter ; ioo The Great Masters of Painting Alexander having sat to none but Apglles, and Octavian having employed the best of all draughtsmen, lest his glory should be tarnished by the monstrous failures of inex- perienced designers : Titian's felicity in art, and the skill he displayed, warrant a grant of imperial honors. He is therefore created a Count of the Lateran Palace, of the Aulic Council, and of the Consistory, with the title of Count Palatine, and all the advantages attached to those dignities. He acquires the faculty of appointing notaries and ordinary judges, and the power to legitimize the ille- gitimate offspring of persons beneath the station of prince, count, or baron. His children are raised to the rank of nobles of the empire, with all the honors appertaining to families with four generations of ances- tors. Titian himself is made a Knight of the Golden Spur, with all the privileges of knighthood, to wit, the sword, the chain, and the golden spur; and with this right Titian 101 the entrance to court is conceded a privi- lege which we shall find Titian frequently exercised." Such liberality was the more noteworthy coming from one usually so parsimonious as Charles. Motley says of him : " The absolute master of realms on which the sun perpetually shone, he was not only greedy for additional dominion, but he was avaricious in small matters, and hated to part with a hundred dollars. To the soldier who brought him the sword and gauntlets of Francis I., he gave a hundred crowns, when ten thousand would have been less than the customary present, so that the man left his presence full of desperation. The three soldiers who swam the Elbe, with their swords in their mouths, to bring him the boats with which he passed to the victory of Miihlberg, received from his imperial bounty a doublet, a pair of stockings, and four crowns apiece. His courtiers and min- IO2 The Great Masters of Painting isters complained bitterly of his habituaT nig- gardliness, and were fain to eke out their slender salaries by accepting bribes from every hand rich enough to bestow them." At the end of the year 1547, Charles sum- moned Titian to his court at Augsburg, and the painter, then seventy years old, obeyed the emperor's behest and endured the hard- ships of a midwinter ride of two hundred miles across the Alps. Arriving at the imperial city, he was received with much favor by Charles, who increased his pension and sat to him for the equestrian portrait now at Madrid. This superb work shows Charles as he rode into the battle of Miihl- berg on the Elbe, where he defeated the Protestant league, and captured the Electors of Saxony and Hesse. The emperor is rep- resented in full armor, with lance in hand, " his vizor up over the eager, powerful face the eye and beak of an eagle, the jaw of a bull- dog, the face of a born ruler, a man of prey." Titian 103 An entire contrast to this work is offered by another portrait of Charles, painted by Ti- tian at Augsburg, which hangs in the gallery of Munich. Here the great emperor is seen in repose, seated on an armchair of red velvet, his black, fur-lined robe relieved against a yel- low screen. He wears the order of the Golden Fleece and holds a glove in his right hand. During his stay in Augsburg, Titian also painted portraits of many other high-born personages, among them Mary, Queen Dow- ager of Hungary, King Ferdinand, brother of the emperor, Philibert Emmanuel of Savoy, the brilliant Maurice of Saxony, and the cruel Duke of Alva. Titian was again called to Augsburg by the emperor in 1550, and on the nth of November in that year we find him writing as follows to Pietro Aretino, that despicable but remarkable man, who at least was a faith- ful friend to our artist, by whom his portrait was painted more than once. 104 The Great Masters of Painting ^^ Titian to Aretino at Venice. " SlGNOR PlETRO, HONORED GOSSIP ! I wrote by Messer Aeneas that I kept your letters near my heart, till occasion should offer to deliver them to his Majesty. The day after the Parmesan's (Aeneas) departure his Majesty sent for me. After the usual courtesies and examination of the pictures which I had brought, he asked for news of you and whether I had letters from you to deliver. To the last question I answered affirmatively, and then presented the letter you gave me. Having read it, the emperor repeated its contents so as to be heard by his Highness his son, the Duke of Alva, Don Luigi Davila, and the rest of the gentlemen of the chamber, and as there was mention of me he asked what it was that was required of him. I replied that at Venice, in Rome, and in all Italy the public assumed that his Holiness was well minded to make you . . . Titian 105 (cardinal), upon which Caesar showed signs of pleasure in his face, saying he would greatly rejoice at such an event, which could not fail to please you ; and so, dear brother, I have done for you such service as I owe to a friend of your standing, and if I should be able otherwise to assist you, I beg you will command me in every respect. Not a day passes but the Duke of 'Alva speaks to me of the * divine Aretino/ because he loves you much, and he says he will favor your interest with his Majesty. I told him that you would spend the world, that what you got you shared with everybody, and that you gave to the poor even to the clothes on your back, which is true, as every one knows. I gave your letter, too, to the Bishop of Arras, and you shall shortly have an answer. Sir Philip Hoby left yesterday for England by land; he salutes you, and says he will not be con- tent until he does you a pleasure himself in addition to the good offices which he promises io6 The Great Masters of Painting to do for your benefit with his sovereign. Rejoice therefore, as you well may by the grace of God, and keep me in good recollec- tion, saluting for me Signor Jacoho Sansovino and kissing the hand of Anichino. " Your friend and gossip, "TlZIANO." "From Augsburg, Nov. H, 1550" The main purpose for which Titian was summoned to Augsburg at this time was to paint the portrait of Charles's eldest son, afterward Philip II., then twenty-four years old. The first likeness done of the prince, now at Madrid, was sent to London when the marriage of Philip with Queen Mary of England was in course of arrangement, and, so skilfully had Titian veiled the repellent qualities of the prince, did much to incline Mary's fancy toward him. During this visit the courtiers saw with surprise the familiar intercourse between Titian 107 Charles and Titian, who held frequent con- ferences together as to the composition of a picture which should embody both the relig- ious struggle of the time and the emperor's desire for retirement from the cares of state. When, eight years later, Charles finally re- nounced, at Yuste, all the glory of this world, this picture of the Trinity was among those upon which his dying eyes last rested. Stirling Maxwell says : " His retreat was adorned with some pictures, few, but well chosen, and worthy of a discerning lover of art, and the patron and friend of Titian. A composition on the subject of the 'Trinity/ and three pictures of < Our Lady,' by that great master, filled the apartments with poetry and beauty ; and as specimens of his skill in another style, there were portraits of the recluse himself and of his empress .... Long tradition, which there seems little rea- son to doubt, adds that over the high altar of the convent, and in sight of his own bed, io8 The Great Masters of Painting he had placed that celebrated composition, called the ' Glory of Titian,' a picture of the Last Judgment, in which Charles, his wife, and their royal children were represented in the master's grandest style, as conducted by angels into life eternal. And another mas- terpiece of the great Venetian St. Jerome praying in his cavern, with a sweet land- scape in the distance is also reputed to have formed the opposite altar-piece in the private oratory of the emperor." A few days before his death, " he sent for a portrait of the empress, and hung for some time, lost in thought, over the gentle face, which, with its blue eyes, auburn hair, and pensive beauty, somewhat resembled the noble countenance of that other Isabella, the great Queen of Castile. He next called for a pic- ture of Our Lord praying in the garden, and then for a sketch of the ' Last Judgment/ by Titian. Having looked his last upon the image of the wife of his youth, it seemed as Titian 109 if he were now bidding farewell, in the con- templation of these other favorite pictures, to the noble art which he had loved with a love which cares, and years, and sickness could not quench, and that will ever be remem- bered with his better fame." We know not upon what historic data, if any, rests the anecdote illustrated by the painter, Carl Becker. It relates that once, when the great Venetian was at work upon a portrait of Charles, he dropped his brush and the emperor stooped to pick it up. This was in those days a supreme condescension from a prince to a painter, one which doubtless more than compensated in the judgment of their world for the harassing and intermi- nable delays in making payment for his work of which Titian was so often forced to complain. 1 10 The Great Masters of Painting ^-^ PALISSY O Palissy ! within thy breast Burned the hot fever of unrest ; Thine was the prophet's vision, thine The exaltation, the divine Insanity of noble minds, That never falters nor abates, But labors and endures and waits Till all that it foresees it finds, Or what it cannot find creates ! " Longfellow. IF the Bastile still existed, no spot within its massive walls would be more worthy of note than the cell wherein Bernard Palissy breathed his last, a victim of religious intoler- ance. It was in 1589 that the great potter passed away, having, after a life of ennobling toil, reached the age of eighty years. Henry III., the worthless king who left Palissy to die in prison, though his mother, the cruel Catherine de Medicis, had protected the Hu- guenot potter during the massacre of St. Palissy III Bartholomew, perished the same year by the dagger of Jacques Clement, a Dominican friar. Palissy, who was not only an artist, but a chemist, naturalist, botanist, and scientist, and also an author, has left us among his writings a most graphic account of the struggles he underwent in endeavoring to learn the art of making white enamel. He says : " It is more than five and twenty years since there was shown to me an earthen cup, turned and enamelled with so much beauty, that from that time I entered into controversy with my own thoughts, re- calling to mind several suggestions that some people had made to me in fun, when I was painting portraits. Then, seeing that these were falling out of request in the country where I dwelt, and that glass-painting was also little patronized, I began to think that if I should discover how to make enamels I could make earthen vessels and other things 112 The Great Masters of Painting very prettily, because God had gifted "me with some knowledge of drawing ; and there- after, regardless of the fact that I had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for the enamels, as a man gropes in the dark. Without having heard of what materials the said enamels were composed, I pounded, in those days, all the substances which I could suppose likely to make anything ; and having pounded and ground them, I bought a quan- tity of earthen pots, and after having broken them in pieces, I put some of the materials that I had ground upon them, and having marked them, I set apart in writing what drugs I had put upon each, as a memoran- dum ; then, having made a furnace to my fancy, I set the fragments down to bake, that I might see whether my drugs were able to produce some whitish color ; for I sought only after white enamel, because I had heard it said that white enamel was the basis of all others. Then, because I had never seen Palissy 113 earth baked, nor could I tell by what degree of heat the said enamel should be melted, it was impossible for me to get any result in this way, though my chemicals should have been right ; because at one time the mass might have been heated too much, at another time too little ; and when the said materials were baked too little or burnt, I could not at all tell the reason why I met with no success, but would throw blame on the materials, which sometimes, perhaps, were the right ones, or at least could have afforded me some hint for the accomplishment of my inten- tions, if I had been able to manage the fire in the way that my materials required. But again, in working thus, I committed a fault still grosser than that above named ; for in putting my trial - pieces in the furnace, I arranged them without consideration, so that if the materials had been the best in the world, and the fire also the fittest, it was im- possible for any good result to follow. Thus, 114 The Great Masters of Painting having blundered several times at a greaf^ex- pense, and through much labor, I was every day pounding and grinding new materials, and constructing new furnaces, which cost much money, and consumed my wood and my time. "When I had fooled away several years thus imprudently with sorrow and sighs be- cause I could not at all arrive at my inten- tion, and, remembering the money spent, I resolved, in order to avoid such large ex- penditure, to send the chemicals that I would test to the kiln of some potter ; and, having settled this within my mind, I pur- chased afresh several earthen vessels, and, having broken them in pieces, as was my custom, I covered three or four hundred of the fragments with enamel, and sent them to a pottery distant a league and a half from my dwelling, with a request to the potters that they would please to permit those trials to be baked within some of their vessels. Palissy 115 This they did willingly ; but when they had baked their batch, and came to take out my trial-pieces, I received nothing but shame and loss, because they turned out good for nothing ; for the fire used by those potters was not hot enough, and my trials were not put into the furnace in the required manner, and according to my science. And because I had at that time no knowledge of the rea- son why my experiments had not succeeded, I threw the blame (as I before said) on my materials; and, beginning afresh, I made a number of new compounds and sent them to the same potters, to do with as before ; so I continued to do several times, always with great loss of time, confusion, and sorrow. . . . " Seeing that I had been able to do nothing, whether in my own furnaces or in those of the before -mentioned potters, I broke about three dozen earthen pots, all of them new, and having ground a large quantity of different materials, I covered all 1 1 6 The Great Masters of Painting the bits of the said pots with my chemicals, laid on with a brush ; but you should under- stand that, in two or three hundred of those pieces, there were only three covered with each kind of compound. Having done this, I took all these pieces and carried them to a glass-house, in order to see whether my chemicals and compounds might not prove good when tried in a glass furnace. Then, since these furnaces are much hotter than those of potters, the next day, when I had them drawn out, I observed that some of my compounds had begun to melt ; and for this cause I was still more encouraged to search for the white enamel upon which I had spent so much labor. "Concerning other colors I did not give myself any trouble ; this little symptom, which I then perceived, caused me to work for the discovery of the said white enamel for two years beyond the time already men- tioned, during which two years I did nothing Palissy 117 but go and come between my house and adjacent glass-houses, aiming to succeed in my intentions. God willed that when I had begun to lose my courage, and was gone for the last time to a glass-furnace, having a man with me carrying more than three hundred kinds of trial-pieces, there was one among those pieces which was melted within four hours after it had been placed in the fur- nace, which trial turned out white and polished in a way that caused me such joy as made me think I was become a new creature; and I thought that from that time I had the full perfection of the white enamel ; but I was very far from having what I thought. This trial was a very happy one in one sense, but very unhappy in another happy, because it gave me entrance upon the ground which I have since gained ; but unhappy, because it was not made with substances in the right meas- ure or proportion. I was so great an ass 1 1 8 The Great Masters of Painting in those days, that directly I had mad the said enamel, which was singularly beautiful, I set myself to make vessels of earth, although I had never understood earths ; and having employed the space of seven or eight months in making the said vessels, I began to erect for myself a furnace like that of the glass- workers, which I built with more labor than I can tell ; for it was requisite that I should be the mason to myself, that I should temper my own mortar, that I should draw the water with which it was tempered; also it was requisite that I should go myself to seek the bricks and carry them upon my back, because I had no means to pay a single man for aid in this affair. I succeeded with my pots in the first baking, but when it came to the second baking, I endured suffering and labor such as no man would believe. For instead of reposing after my past toil, I was obliged to work for the space of more than a month, night and day, to grind the materials Palissy 119 of which I had made that beautiful enamel at the glass-furnace ; and when I had ground them, I covered therewith the vessels that I had made ; this done, I put the fire into my furnace by two mouths, as I had seen done at the glass-houses; I also put my vessels into the furnace, to bake and melt the enamel which I had spread over them ; but it was an unhappy thing for me, for though I spent six days and six nights before the said furnace, feeding it with wood inces- santly through its two mouths, it was not possible to make the said enamel melt, and I was like a man in desperation. And although quite stupefied with labor, I coun- selled to myself, that in my enamel there might be too little of the substance which should make the others melt ; and, seeing this, I began once more to pound and grind the before - named materials, all the time without letting my furnace cool. In this way I had double labor to pound, grind, and 1 20 The Great Masters of Painting maintain the fire. When I had thuiT com- pounded my enamel, I was forced to go again and purchase pots, in order to prove the said compound seeing that I had lost all the vessels which I had made myself. And having covered the new pieces with the said enamel, I put them into the furnace, keeping the fire still at its height ; but there- upon occurred to me a new misfortune, which caused great mortification namely, that the wood having failed me, I was forced to burn the palings which maintained the boundaries of my garden ; which being burnt also, I was forced to burn the tables and the flooring of my house, to cause the melting of the second composition. I suffered an anguish that I cannot speak, for I was quite exhausted and dried up by the heat of the furnace it was more than a month since my shirt had been dry upon me. Further to console me, I was the object of mockery; and even those from whom solace was due Palissy 121 ran crying through the town that I was burning my floors ! And in this way my credit was taken from me, and I was re- garded as a madman. " Others said that I was laboring to make false money, which was a scandal under which I pined away, and slipped with bowed head through the streets like a man put to shame ; I was in debt in several places, and had two children at nurse, unable to pay the nurses ; no one gave me consolation, but, on the con- trary, men jested at me, saying it was right for him to die of hunger, seeing that he had left off following his trade. All these things assailed my ears when I passed through the street ; but for all that there still remained some hope which encouraged and sustained me, inasmuch as the last trials had turned out tolerably well. . . . Other faults and ac- cidents occurred; as, when I had made a batch, it might prove to be too much baked, or another time too little, and all would be 122 The Great Masters of Painting lost in that way. I was so inexperienced, that I could not discern the too much, or too little. One time my work was baked in front, but not baked properly behind; an- other time I tried to obviate that, and burnt my work behind, but the front was not baked at all ; sometimes it was baked on the right hand and burnt on the left; sometimes my enamels were put on too thinly, sometimes they were too thick, which caused me great losses ; sometimes, when I had in the fur- nace enamels different in color, some were burnt before the others had been melted. In short, I blundered for the space of fifteen or sixteen years. When I had learnt to guard against one danger, there came another, about which I had not thought. During this time I made several furnaces which caused me great losses before I understood the way to heat them equally. At last I found means to make several vessels of different enamels intermixed in the manner of jasper. That Palis sy 123 fed me for several years ; but, while feeding upon these things, I sought always to work onward with expenses and disbursements as you know that I am doing still. When I had discovered how to make my rustic pieces, I was in greater trouble and vexation than before ; for having made a certain number of rustic vases and having put them to bake, my enamels turned out some beautiful and well melted, others ill melted ; others were burnt, because they were composed of different materials, because they were fusible in dif- ferent degrees the green of the lizards was burnt before the color of the serpents were melted, and the color of the serpents, lob- sters, tortoises, and crabs was melted before the white had attained any beauty. All these defects caused me such labor and heaviness of spirit, that before I could render my enamels fusible at the same degree of heat, I thought that I would be at the door of my sepulchre ; also, while laboring at such affairs, 124 The Great Masters of Painting I was, for the space of ten years, so wasted in my person, that there was no form nor prominence of muscle on my arras and legs ; also the said legs were throughout of one size, so that the garters with which I tied my stockings, were at once, when I walked, down upon my heels, the stockings too. I often walked about the fields of Xaintes, con- sidering my miseries and weariness, and above all things that in my own house I could have no peace or do anything that was considered good. I was despised and mocked by all; nevertheless, I made some vessels of different colors which kept house tolerably, but, in do- ing this, the diversities of earth, which I thought to forward myself, brought me more loss in a little time than all the accidents before. For having made several vessels of different earths, some were burnt before the others were baked ; some received the enamel, and proved afterward extremely suited to my purpose; others deceived me Palissy 125 in all my enterprises. Then, because my enamels did not work well together on the same thing, I was deceived many times ; whence I derived always vexation and sor- row. Nevertheless, the hope that I have caused me to proceed with my work so like a man, that often, to amuse people who came to see me, I did my best to laugh, although within me all was very sad." The picture of Palissy which we give was painted by Jean Hegesippe Vetter. Vetter, who is a Parisian, born in 1820, was in- structed in art by Steuben, and his first picture appeared at the Salon in 1842. He has been honored by having at least two of his paintings, " Moliere and Louis XIV.," and "Mazarin," purchased by the state. "Palissy" was painted in 1861, made a great success, and was sold for twenty-five thousand francs. 126 The Great Masters of Painting TINTORETTO THE home life of the painter of the " Miracle of St. Mark " was, without doubt, a happy one. Seven children moved within its circle : two sons, of whom Domenico is well known as an artist, and five daughters. Marietta, her father's favorite and his pupil, was not only gifted as a portrait painter, but skilled in music, being a fine performer on the lute and a talented singer. She seems to have been the soul of the artistic gatherings which took place in her father's house where might be seen such artists as Bassano, Paul Veronese, and Schiavoni, together with Alessandro Vittoria, the sculptor, and where music was represented by Giuseppe Zarlino, the chapelmaster of St. Mark's. Marietta became the wife of one Mario Augusta, a German jeweller, but did not live to reach the high rank in art which her Tintoretto 127 early successes indicated. She fell into ill health and died in 1590, when but thirty years of age, four years before her fa- ther's death. They rest together in the church of S. Madonna dell' Orto, in Venice. Cogniet's striking picture of Tintoretto painting a portrait of his daughter, as she lies dead before him, hangs in the Museum of Bordeaux. We know nothing of the where- abouts of the great artist's portrait of Mari- etta after death, if it still exists. The Museum of Madrid has a portrait of a fair young Venetian holding a rose in her hand, which is from the brush of Tintoretto, and is thought to be a likeness of his favorite daughter, but this was done from life. Mrs. Margaret J. Preston's fine poem, "Tintoretto's Last Painting," should be associated with Cogniet's picture, and we give it entire. 128 The Great Masters of Painting " Oh, bitter, bitter truth ! I see it now, Heightening the lofty calmness of her face, Until it seems transfigured. On her brow The gray mists settle. I begin to trace The whitening circle round her lips ; the fine Curve of the nostril pinches, ... ah, the sign Indubitable ! I dare thrust aside No longer what ye oft in vain have tried To force upon my sight, that day by day My Venice lily drops her leaves away, While I have seen no fading, I, who should Have known it earliest. II. " Only thirty years For this unfolding flush of womanhood To fruiten into ripeness : Oh, if tears Could bribe, how soon my harvested fourscore Should take the thirty's place ! For I have had Life's large ingathering, and I crave no more. But she, ... she just begins to taste how glad The mellower clusters are, when see ! the woe ! One blast of mortal ravage, and here lies, Before my startled eyes, The laden vine, uprooted at a blow. Tintoretto 129 in. My Paradiso does not hold a face That is not richer through my darling's gift : One angel has the hushed, adoring lift Of her arched lids ; another wears the grace That dimples round her flexile mouth ; and one The nearest to the Mother and her Son Borrows the tawny glory of her hair : And yet, how strange ! as full and perfect whole, Her form, her features, all the breathing soul Of her I have not pictured otherwhere. IV. Tommaso, bring my colors hither. Haste ! We have no time to waste. Draw back the curtain ; in the fairest light Set forth my easel ? - - 1 am blind to-night, Blind through my weeping, but I must not lose Even the shadow's shadow. Now they prop Her for the breeze : There ! just as I would choose, They smooth the pillows. Dear Ottavia, drop Your Persian scarf across her couch, that so Its wine-red flecks may interfuse the cold Blanch of the linen's deaded snow. 1 30 The Great Masters of Painting v. Nay, hold! Give her no hint ; forbear to let her know That the old doting father fain would snatch This phantom from death's grip. My child! My child ! My inmost soul rebels, unreconciled ! Heart sinks, hand palsies, while I strive to match Such beatific loveliness with blot Of earthly color. All my tints but seem Ashen and muddy to reflect the gleam Of those celestial eyes fast-fixt on what Spirits alone can see. Ah ! now, she smiles VI. " Look on my canvas : if the wish beguiles Not judgment, I have caught a glimmer here Of the old shine that used to flash so clear Across our evening circle, like the last Long sunset ray aslant our gray lagunes, When she would lean, with Veronese anear, Beside the sill, and listen to the tunes Of gondoliers who 'neath our windows passed. Now softly bid Ottavia loosen out Her golden-thridded hair ; and bring a rose From yonder vase, and let her fingers close Poor, fragile fingers ! the green stem about. Tintoretto 131 VII. " Yea, - so ! But all is blurred through rush of tears : Only the vanish'd, mocking long ago, Frescoed with memories of her happy years, Betwixt me and the canvas seems to glow. And now, and now ! Her hair rays off, an aureole round her brow : And see ! Tommaso, see ! I understand Not what I do ; for, in her slackening hand, I've put a palm-branch where I meant the rose Should drop its spark of warmth the whiteness o'er ; How wan she looks ! Surely the pallor grows, Nay, push the easel back, ... I can no more ! " Leon Cogniet was born at Paris in 1794, and studied under Guerin, winning tbe Great Prize of Rome in 1817. He spent the rest of his long life (he died in 1880) in painting portraits and historical subjects, and in teach- ing. His "Marius among the Ruins of Carthage," and his " Numa " were purchased by the government. The " National Guard Marching to Join the Army in 1792," is at 132 The Great Masters of Painting Versailles, together with the " Battle o-Ri- voli," and other military pictures. One of Cogniet's best known works was "The Mas- sacre of the Innocents," which he exhibited in 1824. CALLOT THE first appearance in France of the strange and mysterious people called "gip- sies," was in August, 1427, when a tribe of 132 souls, under a "duke," a "count," and ten "knights," startled the people of Paris. Hundreds of years before this time, the Per- sian poet Ferdusi wrote : " For that which is unclean by nature thou canst entertain no hope : no washing will turn the gipsy white," and ere long the presence of this singular race became distasteful to the French people. Numberless crimes and misdemeanors were imputed to them, and Francis I., following the example of other monarchs, decreed their ban- ishment. Under Charles IX., in 1561, exter- Callot 133 urination by fire and steel was ordered against them, yet in spite of the severity of their per- secutors, these " masterful beggars " managed somehow to retain a foothold in France. As an instance of this, we can cite the fact apparently well authenticated that more than forty years after the sentence of destruc- tion launched against them under the ninth Charles, young Jacques Callot of Nancy, great etcher-to-be, joined a band of roving gipsies bound for Italy, the fatherland of art. How this came about is thus related : " Of course, as Callot grew up, he began to manifest his love for art in the usual ortho- dox manner. Giotto neglected his sheep for his drawing, and Gainsborough put landscape sketches into his copy-book ; Rembrandt drew portraits on the sacks in his father's mill ; and so one need not be astonished to learn that little Jacques is using his pencil, in season and out of season, particularly out of season in the precise eyes of Messer Jean 134 The Great Masters of Painting Callot, his father. He, worthy man,%:on- siders the art of painting merely a useful adjunct to the noble science of heraldry. If the boy would only confine himself to the emblazoning of azure, and vert, and sang, in the proper quarters of the various shields where they should be, all would be well ; but, alas! the young rogue has found out an azure in the sky, and a vert beneath his feet, and a sang in the glowing west when the sun goes down, fonder of drawing picturesque little peasants than of investigating the pedi- gree of the proudest Lorraine, alive or dead. The poor king-at-arms has had a project in that wise head of his, ever since he first saw Jacques lying in his mother's arms, a helpless bundle of humanity. His other sons have taken themselves to various callings ; this one shall succeed him in his office, and live and die in the service of Lorraine, like he and his father before him. But even kings- at-arms are liable to be thwarted in their Callot 135 dearest wishes, and Jean, with anger and vex- ation, confessed to himself that this son of his, who is probably even now sketching some eccentric vagabond, or copying and enjoying the grotesque carving on some quaint gar- goyle, is not a very likely person to perform the high and important functions of herald-at- arms to his Highness of Lorraine, with sat- isfaction either to himself or his princely employer. " Meanwhile Jacques is getting as dissatis- fied as his father at the state of things. Ren6e Brunehault's family had produced painters, and probably her stories of their lives had inflamed the imagination of her son with those brilliant dreams of Italy, the fatherland of art, of which his mind was full, Italy, the home of painting, of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto ; Rome, where all the treasures of ancient art were stored, oh, that he could get to Italy, and become a 136 The Great Masters of Painting humble guest at this feast of- the immortals ! Heraldry, with its eccentric zoology and in- harmonious coloring, becomes more and more distasteful to the young genius, who hopes to astonish all the world with the glories of his art. "To Italy he resolves to go at all costs, and, with a heavy heart and a light purse, he leaves the paternal domicile, and sets forth upon his journey after fame and fortune, often as perilous and as unsuccessful an enterprise as the search of the San Grail. The world was all before him where to choose, but one object alone animated him: to see the fair land of Italy, and become a famous painter ; and ere he had proceeded far, his grief at parting from home and fatherland was absorbed in the anticipation of the career he had painted for himself in all the glowing colors of the springtime's fancy. It is written, ' Man shall not live by bread alone/ but it is equally certain man Callot 137 cannot subsist entirely without that article, and poor Jacques's light purse is getting lighter every day ; but what then ? when the youthful blood bounds quickly along our veins, we are not given to despair ; while there is life there is hope. Moreover, this golden land of hope is getting nearer every day. But the daily bread ! Hunger is the most powerful subjugator of all enthusiasm, political, religious, and, indeed, of every sort whatever, and is also a quick destroyer of all social pride and distinctions of caste. Therefore we need not be surprised to hear that Callot joined himself to one of those bands of merry vagrants who then wandered all over Europe, the Bohemians of France, the Gitanos of Spain, the Zingari of Italy, the Gipsies of our own land ; that mysteri- ous race whose origin has defied the most industrious investigation, " In later life, Callot appears to have had this portion of his career often in his mind, 138 The Great Masters of Painting and in one of his wonderful etchings he rials portrayed a scene, probably that of his first introduction to his vagabond friends. The band are halting at the outskirts of a village, and are taking possession of an empty hay- loft, on the roof of which a cat is pursuing a bird, totally unconscious of the proximity of a dog, who exhibits vicious intentions on pussy's tail, the dog itself being unaware of an avenging stick poised in mid-air. Some pigs, previous inhabitants of the loft, are caus- ing dire disasters among the crowd ; in the centre the high life of gipsydom is grouped, surveying the operators with a truly aristo- cratic air. In the front, some stragglers have just come up, and a handsome blade is assisting a demoiselle to descend from her horse, with a gallantry worthy of Louis Bien-Aimd ; and near these sits Jacques Cal- lot, with silken doublet and feathered hat, making pictorial notes of the queer folk sur- rounding him, and by his side, survying his Callot 139 work with admiring wonder, is a charming gipsy girl, whose flowing hair and arch looks might have tempted good St. Anthony him- self. " In another of his works, ' The Gipsies on the March/ we have a further reminiscence of this period of his life, gipsy men, fierce and swaggering; gipsy children, precociously imitating their sires ; gipsy women, with an air of tender gracefulness about them, re- deeming their squalid rags and gewgaw finery. Questionable company hast thou fallen into, Jacques ! What would father Jean say, could he behold thee a recognised mem- ber of this society of outcasts, without law or religion? people to whom the sixth com- mandment is an obsolete act, whose hand is against every one, and having every one's hand against them ? See what comes of diso- bedience, my son ! Such, perhaps, in his dreams, are the words which young Callot hears addressed to him by the king-at-arms. 140 The Great Masters of Painting But Rascaldom and Bohemianism are^not without redeeming traits in young eyes, par- ticularly eyes as fond of the grotesque and the eccentric as those of that respectable herald's own son. "At all events, we are travelling toward the wished-for haven," and so we see him merrily trudging away beside a sturdy "Bohemian," who bears both sword and crutch over his shoulder, his pretence of lameness for the time put away. Dauntless twelve-year-old Jacques is in light marching order, having, so far as we can see, no bag- gage but his sketch-book. Perchance, how- ever, the wagon behind carries his small be- longings. Perhaps, also, the boy repaid the gipsies for their aid and company by sharing with them the proceeds from any sketches he might sell on his way to Rome. Aime" de Lemud, the French artist whose pencil drew our picture of the boy Callot, was himself a native of Lorraine, of which Rubens 141 dukedom Nancy was formerly the capital. De Lemud, who is probably most familiar to us from his picture of the dreaming Bee- thoven, died an old man in 1887, after win- ning success and honors both as painter, engraver, and lithographer. In the Museum of Nancy is his " Fall of Adam," and that of Metz contains his " Prisoner." RUBENS Two happy marriages fell to the lot of Rubens. His first union was with Isabella Brant, and took place in 1609, when the painter was thirty-two and his bride eighteen years old. After living together in peace and mutual content for over sixteen years, the couple were separated by death, who claimed Isabella as his own in 1626. Her loss was deeply felt and sincerely mourned by Rubens, as can well be seen in the fol- lowing lines taken from a letter he wrote 142 The Great Masters of Painting to his friend Dupuy soon after Isabella's decease : " In truth I have lost an excellent com- panion, and one worthy of all affection, for she had none of the faults of her sex. Never displaying bitterness or weakness, her kind- ness and loyalty were perfect ; and her rare qualities, having made her beloved during her life, have caused her to be regretted by all after her death. Such a loss, it seems to me, ought to be deeply felt, and since the only remedy for all evil is the oblivion that time brings, I must undoubtedly look to time for consolation. But it will be very difficult for me to separate the grief caused by this bereavement, from the memory of one whom I must respect and honor as long as I live. A journey might perhaps serve to take me away from the sight of the many objects which necessarily renew my grief, for she alone still fills my henceforth empty house, she alone lies by my side on my desolate Rubens 143 couch ; whereas the new sights that a jour- ney affords occupy the imagination and fur- nish no material for the regrets that are for ever springing up in one's heart. But I should travel in vain, for I shall have myself for companion everywhere." Four years passed, and Rubens again sought matrimonial happiness. His first wife had been his niece by marriage, and so, curiously enough, was his second spouse, Helena Fourment, whom he married on December 6, 1630. She was a girl of six- teen, he a man of fifty-three, handsome, famous, ennobled, well-to-do, and gouty. Paul Mantz says: "From the day of his marriage with his second wife, Helena Four- ment, on the 6th of December, 1630, a sort of St. Martin's summer began in Ru- bens's life, and seemed to lend to his heart and to his genius the impulse of another springtime. Apparently, too, he was eager to share the delight he took in her with all 144 The Great Masters of Painting the world, and she was for many years^and, indeed, to the end of his life, continually in his mind and in his eyes. He never wearied of reproducing her young grace. The por- traits of her are numberless." Houbraken, speaking of her beauty, called her a new Helen, and said that she was a valuable possession for the artist, " since she spared him the expense of other models." It is certain that her portrait, more or less exact, may be seen in many of the ideal works produced by her husband after their marriage. In these Helena's fair face looks out at us from under many an alias now as St. Cecilia before her organ, now as Andromeda chained to the rock, or as the despairing Dido about to stab herself. Again, she masquerades as a Bathsheba or Susanna, as nymph or shepherdess, or as one of the charming dames in the " Garden of Love" of the Prado, that masterpiece which Philip IV. so treasured. Like Rem- Rubens 145 brandt's beloved Saskia, Rubens's Helena dominates her husband's brush, but, more fortunate than the great Dutchman, the great Fleming was permitted to cherish his adored model to the end of his days. "A fine picture in the Munich Gallery represents both husband and wife in the early period of their marriage, walking in the garden of their house. The artist wears a broad-brimmed felt hat, and a black doublet striped with gray. The refined, intelligent head, the proudly turned up moustaches, the attractive countenance, the distinguished bearing, incline us to regard him as a young man ; a few silver threads in the fair beard show us our mistake. His arm is in Helena's ; she is painted almost full face, and her pink complexion is protected from the sun by a large straw hat. She looks delightfully in- genuous in all the bloom of her sixteen years. Her hair, with its golden reflected lights, is cut in a fringe over the forehead like that of 146 The Great Masters of Painting a boy, and escapes round her face Tn fair curls. Her black bodice opens over a chem- isette ; her dull yellow skirt is turned up over a gray petticoat, and a white apron falls over both. She holds a feather fan in her hand, and a pearl necklace sets off the whiteness of her throat. She half turns toward a young page, entirely dressed in red, who follows her bareheaded. The couple ap- proach a portico, beneath which a table is spread beside the statues and busts which decorate it ; some bottles have been set to cool in a large basin on the ground. The building, so fantastic in its architecture, which is an eccentric mixture of Italian style and Flemish taste, is the pavilion the artist erected in his garden not far from the house, and often introduced in his pictures. Near at hand an old woman feeds two peacocks ; a turkey-cock struts about with his spouse, and a friendly dog runs after their young ones. The air is warm, the lilacs are in Rubens 147 bloom ; the young orange-trees have been released from their winter quarters, and the flower-beds are gay with many-colored tulips. At the side, the waters of a fountain, like- wise found in many of Rubens's pictures, fall into a basin. The pair are about to seat themselves under this portico, surrounded by these domestic animals, with the blue sky and the flowers before their eyes, wholly given up to a happiness which is echoed in the holiday mood of surrounding nature. "When we have thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful picture, our eyes involuntarily turn to the other canvas in the same room of the gallery, in which, on an equally fine spring day, Rubens painted himself in a honeysuckle arbor with his wife Isabella, whom he had so affectionately loved, who was so intimately associated with his life, and whose loss he deplored four years earlier in the touching letter to Dupuy quoted above. In the same involuntary fashion it occurs to us that the 148 The Great Masters of Painting former marriage was better assorted ; intellectual sympathy must have been greater than it could have been with a young girl who passed so suddenly from the seclusion of her father's house to so conspicuous a, posi- tion. It would be interesting to learn some- thing of Helena's character, of her culture and education, of her influence on the great man who loved her. But no information on these points is to be found either in the acts of her life, in Rubens's correspondence, or in the testimony of contemporaries. But the large number of portraits of her that Rubens painted bear eloquent witness to the strength and persistence of his love. There is scarcely a gallery of importance without a portrait of her, and at Munich there are four.' 1 One of these shows Madame Rubens, at full length, sitting clothed in green and violet, with her little son, nude save for a black cap and feather, on her lap. Another presents her seated facing us in an armchair Rubens 149 under a colonnade, with an Eastern rug beneath her feet a purple drapery hangs behind her, her dress of black satin opens over an underskirt of white silk brocade embroidered with gold. A high lace collar, feathered fan, pearl necklace, and jewelled stomacher complete the sumptuous picture. She appears again in a full-length portrait in the Louvre, seated, embracing her little son, her infant daughter standing by. The same child is seen once more in a picture belonging to Baron Alphonse de Roths- child, which is called " Rubens and his wife teaching one of their children to walk." In the Louvre example, Helena wears a white dress and a gray felt hat with plumes ; in Baron Rothschild's canvas, her gown is of black velvet. The baron also owns a full- length portrait of Rubens's second wife in a Spanish dress of black satin with lilac ribbons, attended by a page dressed in red. For these two pictures, which were formerly 150 The Great Masters of Painting at Blenheim, Baron Rothschild paid the 4Duke of Marlborough ,55,000. The royal collection at Windsor has a beautiful half-length portrait of Helena hold- ing her hands crossed in front of her. In this she wears a yellow satin dress with slashed sleeves, a black mantle, a rich lace ruff, and a pearl necklace. St. Petersburg preserves a fine full-length of her standing with a fan in her hand, and at Vienna is the celebrated picture called " The Pelisse " showing Helena on her way to the bath, clad only in a fur-trimmed cloak. This portrait Rubens always retained, and at his death in 1640 he specially bequeathed it to his widow, who, by the way, married again in 1645. She was only twenty-six at the time of the death of Rubens, by whom she became the mother of five children, and her second husband was one Jean Baptiste van Brock- hoven, an Antwerp alderman and man of rank and substance. Helena survived her Brauwer 151 first husband many years, not dying until 1673- Finally we are reminded that the master's picture of "The Virgin and Saints," which forms the altar-piece of the Rubens chapel in the church of St. Jacques at Antwerp, is said to contain portraits of both the wives of Rubens, who has there represented himself as St. George. In this chapel the illustrious painter was interred. BRAUWER THE face of the artist in Papperitz's pic- ture of Brauwer is so kindly and pleasant that one is glad to believe the latest accounts of him, which assert that he was not such a worthless toper as older writers have made him out to be. Doctor Johnson said, " Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat," and perchance this Dutch painter was (dis) credited with 152 The Great Masters of Painting much of the drinking, gambling, and quarrell- ing which, so far as his own life was concerned, went on only in his pictures. For these were the kind of subjects pot-house brawls and drinking bouts, dice-throwing and maudlin rev- els, which he always painted, and painted so superbly that genuine works from his hand are most highly prized. Brauwer died when but little over thirty, and his pictures are quite rare. Van dam has written a vivacious account of an adventurous episode in Brauwer's life which is well worth quoting. " It is a sunny afternoon in May, 1634, though very little of its cheerfulness pene- trates into the gloomy cell where we meet once more with poor Adriaan. It is part of the prison constructed in one of the angles of the citadel, which was built by the Duke of Alva to keep rebellious Antwerpers in check. How comes he there ? Simply enough. He has been arrested as a spy by Brauwer 153 the Spanish sbirri. They must have been very bad judges of physiognomy. A spy is a crafty being, whose apparent confidence and assumed tranquillity always more or less betray his circumspection and his fear. Our man is the very reverse ; he is indiscretion per- sonified. Those that have seen his portrait, painted by himself, in the gallery at Dresden, will be in a position to judge how much he had in common with a professional espion. " Nevertheless, there he is safe enough under lock and key. Not that he takes the matter au serieux. To beguile the tedious- ness of his imprisonment he intones now and then a snatch of a Dutch or Flemish patriotic song, or else empties enormous goblets of beer, that is, when he can get them, chaffs his gaolers, draws their caricatures on the walls ; in one word, plays the devil to such an extent that his next-door neighbor, a captive as well as he, and who is no less a personage than Albert de Ligne, Prince de 154 The Great Masters of Painting ^ Barbancon, Comte d'Aigremont and de la Roche, Knight of the Golden Fleece, etc., becomes interested in him, and obtains, by his influence, the permission of the governor that Brauwer shall come and keep him (the prince) company. "Next day finds the newly made friends seated at the same table, a large apoplectic jug of amber-tinted beer between them ; in the distance, through the small windows, appears at intervals the tan-colored face of some Castilian or Austrian, some caballero, as noble as the King of Spain himself, but obliged to occupy the humiliating position of warder to the Flemings these * Gueiixj as they contemptuously call them, never dream- ing that these beggars would almost become their masters in a few years. "The prince is recounting his adventures of love and war : " * Twice he fights his battles over, Thrice he slays the slain.' Brauwer 155 "The painter narrates the story of his young and checkered, though not altogether joyless, life. While still young, he designed flowers and birds on caps, which his mother sold to the peasant women to buy bread ; but. even as a child he was already fond of accompanying his father to the ale-house, and a humer le piot, as Rabelais has it. "He tells him how Hals, struck by his precocious talents, offered to teach him ; how he began to instruct him in the vari- ous technicalities, which the most happy genius, if left to itself, could never master, and which can be taught by experience alone; how, when his master saw that his lessons were bearing fruit, he changed his conduct toward him, at the suggestion of Mrs. Hals, a pitiless Megaera, who made him isolate the boy away from his comrades ; how he was shut up in a miserable garret, with hardly any clothes to cover him, and where, almost starved to death, he was forced, day after 156 The Great Masters of Painting <^ day, to throw off small pictures, which were sold by Hals at a great price, and of the merits of which he (Brauwer) was absolutely ignorant ; how, following the example of their elder, his fellow-pupils bought drawings of him, which they paid for at the rate of a penny a figure, and which they after- ward disposed of for hundreds of guilders; how, tired of such an existence, he made his way, at the instigation of Van Ostade, his only true friend, to Amsterdam, where he arrived, footsore and penniless, but full of confidence in his youth and the future ; how he sold his first great work, 'A Quarrel between Peasants and Soldiers/ to M. de Vernandois, who gave him a hundred duca- tons for it ; how that gentleman told him that his productions were already noted and valued ; how he was stupefied by the, to him, enormous sum, and, in the exuberance of his feelings, ran home, emptied the bag of gold on his pallet, and rolled himself round in it; Brauwer 157 how he spent it in ten days, exclaiming, when the last piece was gone, Thank God, I have got rid of that load, and feel all the lighter for it.' " Much more does he tell, which space for- bids me to reproduce in detail ; but through- out the whole tale he shows the same philosophical espteglerie> which never left him till his death. " He flavors his rtcit with sundry anec- dotes, some of which are so good that I cannot forbear to retail one or two. " Shortly after his first picture was sold, his parents, to whom he was very good, expos- tulated with him upon the meanness of his attire. Forthwith he goes to the tailor and orders a splendid justaucorps of velvet, a cloak embroidered with gold lace and satin, and everything to match. The change pro- duced its effect immediately. He received an invitation to a wedding party. In the midst of the dinner, while all the guests are at 158 The Great Masters of Painting Si-' table, he chooses a dish, the sauce of which appears to him the richest, and throws it over his garments, apostrophising them thus ; ' It's you that ought to fare the best, because you, not I, were invited.' Diogenes could not have surpassed the severity of the reproof. " One more, and I resume my sketch. "After being robbed of everything he possessed, he returns to Amsterdam in a most pitiable state. He provides himself, on credit, with a suit of plain linen, covers it, by the aid of his brush, with the most delicious flowers, and takes a walk in the public prome- nade. Every one's, but especially the ladies', attention is drawn upon him, and he is pestered with requests for the address of the manufacturer of the material. His answer is a sponge and some water. With a few strokes he restores rile de satin of the curd of Meudon. " Thus chat the prince and the artist. The Brauwer 159 former encourages him with cheering words, and stimulates him to work. Brauwer asks for brushes and colors, and reproduces, there and then, on the canvas a sketch of the soldiers who are guarding them, sitting at play in the next room. "The picture finished, Albert de Ligne, mistrustful of his own judgment, sends for Rubens, who no sooner caught sight of it than, like Praxiteles of old, when Apelles had been to visit him in his absence, and left, as the only sign of his call, a figure drawn on the wall, he exclaimed, ' This is Brauwer's ! No one could have treated a scene with so much dash and perfection.' And on the spot he offers six hundred guilders for it. " The reader may easily imagine that the Prince de Barbancon did not part with his little treasure. "The Lord of Stein did not stop there. He took steps to obtain Brauwer's freedom, lodged him in his own house, admitted him 160 The Great Masters of Painting "5^ to his table, and provided for all his wants. But the inveterate Bohemianism of Adriaan could not reconcile itself to the regularity of the great painter's household. The elegance of the latter 's manner, the high-bred tone of his usual companions and friends, were insup- portable to Brauwer, whose every movement, whose lightest words were at variance and in discord with his present surroundings. He already began to regret his garret at Haarlem, where, at least, no one censured his doings or criticised his bearing. Unable to hold out any longer, he sells his clothes, flees from his benefactor as from a tyrant, and replunges with ecstasy into disorder and debauch." Georg Papperitz, born at Dresden in 1846, has painted many popular pictures, among which may be mentioned "Richard Wagner at Bayreuth," "Romeo and Juliet," and " Queen of Heaven." Van Dyck 161 VAN DYCK " IN the month of April Van Dyck was in London ' for good.' He found a temporary home with his friend Geldorp in Blackfriars. All the precinct was astir at the coming to the peculiar home of artists in London of one of the foremost men of all his time. Shortly, Whitehall was astir also ; king and painter stood in the presence of each other. Van Dyck was a cavalier in bearing, with tact and taste. To such a, man Charles was, of course, gracious. The monarch lodged the artist at the expense of the Crown (other- wise, at the cost of the people). Inigo Jones was commissioned to fashion a dwelling for him in Blackfriars, and a country house at Eltham. Ere a few months had passed, the artist, thus housed by a sovereign, was named 'Painter in Ordinary to His Majesty/ That knighthood was added to his employment, 1 62 The Great Masters of Painting yet not wanted to dignify it, was a natural consequence. Charles not only touched Van Dyck gaily on the shoulder, but threw over it a gold chain, from which hung the king's portrait, surrounded by diamonds. "Van Dyck had earned the honor by glorious work. Within a few months of his arrival he had painted a large family picture, representing the king, queen, Prince of Wales, and Princess Mary, for one hundred pounds. He had, moreover, executed the portraits of the king, the French king's brother, the Archduchess Isabella, the Prince and Princess of Orange, at twenty pounds each. For the same reward he painted a 'Vitellius,' and for a fourth of the sum he ' mended ' a Galba. A warrant was issued for the payment of the total. This pay- ment, the knighthood, the chain, and the * diamond portrait,' were graceful acknowl- edgments of merit. Van Dyck, seeing that the king was resolved to treat him as a gen- Van Dyck 163 tleman, was equally resolved to act up to the standard, and live like a prince. " But he worked like a man to enable him to keep this state. . . . "Van Dyck and fashion ruled the hour. His studio in Blackfriars was graced with as noble company as Whitehall ; indeed, with the same company. The king himself was often there, and with him the artist's other illustrious, and perhaps more liberal, patrons, Strafford, Northumberland (no longer in the Tower), Pembroke, Somerset, and a dozen other of the splendid nobility of the time. Fancy may reproduce that studio, with its aristocratic inmates, silent in the presence of Charles, but loud enough in his absence, or with his license to speak, being present. Some paid homage of ultra-gallantry to Mar- garet Leman. Others gave words of conde> scending praise, now and then, to Van Dyck's accomplished assistants, who, at various times, were to be found schooling themselves in his 164 The Great Masters of Painting studio, and learning how to add value 4o their works by giving to them the name of their master. " Van Dyck was as much at his ease in the palaces and noble homes of England as princes and nobles were in the painter's studio." Though impartial history forbids us to accept Charles I. as having been all that his portraits by Van Dyck tempt us to believe, the cavalier king was a true and loving husband, and a fond father to his children. Of them Van Dyck painted several groups, some of which remain among the best pro- ductions of the great Flemish artist. Herr Schneider has given us a picture of Van Dyck at work upon the portraits of the three eldest children of Charles. The king's eldest son, afterward Charles II., stands near the easel, his sister Mary is playing with a dog, and James, Duke of York, the youngest Van Dyck 165 of the three, is being coaxed by some of the ladies-in-waiting to pose for the painter, with an apple in his hands. In the gallery at Turin may be seen a superb group by Van Dyck which depicts these three infants, and was painted in 1635. Charles in a scarlet dress lays his hand upon the head of a fine dog ; next him is the Princess Mary in white satin, and then comes Master James, unfortunate king-to-be, wearing a quaint cap and a blue silk frock, and holding an apple between his hands. It is this last little figure which, separated from the painted group or reproduced from the drawing, we see so often under the name of " Baby Stuart." Jules Guiffrey says of this picture that " Such a work would alone suffice for the glory of a museum." The royal collection at Windsor has a group by Van Dyck, done in 1637, which includes two more of the children of Charles and Henrietta Maria. These are Elizabeth 1 66 The Great Masters of Painting