THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
GIFT OF
Gladys Wickson
Ida Wickson Thomas
Ednah Wickson Kelly
A
RENAISSANCE MASTERS
THE ART OF RAPHAEL, MICHELANGELO
LEONARDO DA VINCI, TITIAN
CORREGGIO, BOTTICELLI AND
RUBENS
BY
GEORGE B. ROSE
THIRD EDITION
To WHICH is ADDED A STUDY OF THE ART OP
CLAUDE LORRAINE
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK & LONDON
Gbe Knickerbocker {press
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1898
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London
COPYRIGHT, 1908
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
(For new material)
Ubc Knickerbocker f>ree0, View fiorb
GIFT
A/6370
Tfr
/fef
DEDICATED
TO
MY WIFE
WHOSE INTELLIGENT SYMPATHY WITH MY STUDY
OF RENAISSANCE ART HAS BEEN A
GREAT ENCOURAGEMENT
921
PREFACE
IT is not the purpose of this book to endeavor
to assist the successors of Morelli in deter-
mining the authenticity of pictures. It accepts
the results of the latest criticism, and is based
on a loving study of works whose genuineness
is established by the weight of authority.
Its design is to give in a brief compass an
insight into the essential characteristics of each
of the masters treated, so that the traveller
may be able to enjoy them for what they are,
without looking for merits in one which can
be found only in another. Even the greatest
have their limitations, and these as well as
their qualities must be understood to derive
the fullest pleasure and profit from the con-
templation of their achievements.
General students should form their concep-
tion of an artist from his acknowledged master-
VI PREFACE
pieces, which give the measure of his powers.
I have therefore rarely considered doubtful or
inferior productions, and have added no lists of
the master's works. Many such lists exist
already, and no two of them agree. I should,
however, particularly recommend those ap-
pended to Mr. Bernhard Berenson's invalu-
able little books on the Painters of the Italian
Renaissance. The extraordinary penetration
displayed in the body of the text qualifies the
author in an unusual degree to pass on ques-
tions of authenticity.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION i
RAPHAEL 18
MICHELANGELO 42
LEONARDO DA VINCI \ . . .71
TITIAN 104
CORREGGIO 131
BOTTICELLI 159
RUBENS 180
CLAUDE LORRAINE . . . .211
INDEX 239
vii
RENAISSANCE MASTERS
INTRODUCTION
THERE are two periods in the history of
the world's art that are of supreme in-
terest, the age of Pericles and the Italian
Renaissance. But they are widely different in
their character. The age of Pericles was the
culmination of a long and harmonious develop-
ment, the glorious blossoming of a perfect
flower, which had grown in symmetrical grace
to bloom in ideal beauty.
Not so with the Renaissance. No period of
humanity has been torn with more conflicting
ideas, with more diverse aspirations, with more
opposing passions. Greek literature and Greek
art had come again to light, and the hearts of
many, carried away by the loveliness of this
I
2 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
world, longed to return to the bright days of
old when beauty was all in all, and men gath-
ered to watch the naked runners at Olympia
straining their forms of matchless grace and
power, or stood upon the shore of the Athen-
ian gulf to look at Phryne as she rose as
Aphrodite from the purple sea. But in other
breasts the religious fervor of the Middle
Ages, the hatred of the pomp and glory of
the earth, glowed as warmly as in the bosom
of Peter the Hermit when he aroused Europe
to throw itself upon Asia in the hope of re-
covering the Holy Sepulchre. What made
the conflict so intense and so peculiar was that
the new spirit did not come as a distinct faith
against which the forces of conservatism could
be clearly drawn. The lovers of antique art
did not cease to be Christians, they were not
even heretics, so that they could not be burned
at the stake and an end made of the matter, as
Simon de Montfort had wiped out in blood the
brilliant civilization of Provence when a holy
war had been proclaimed against the trouba-
dours because they sang too sweetly of woman's
love and of earthly beauty. The spirit of the
INTRODUCTION 3
Renaissance penetrated into every heart, and
the conflict went on in the bosom of every
man. For long centuries men had bowed be-
neath the yoke of an ascetic discipline imposed
by a religious fervor that had blinded them to
the loveliness of nature, and had regarded the
fair earth as a hideous dungeon haunted by
evil spirits, the body as an unclean tenement
of clay that imprisoned the soul and dragged
it down to sin. Slowly their eyes wereX
opened. They looked upon the world, and
they saw that though defaced by the ravages
of man and stained by his crimes, it was still
fair and good, and in thier breasts there grew
up, although they struggled against it, the old
pagan love for the beauty of external things,
for the purple sea breaking forever on the
silver sands, for the sunlight's brilliance as it
fell upon fields of golden grain and hills clothed
in verdure; above all, for the beauty of the*^
human countenance, for the grace of the human
form. But these feelings were not simple and
unmixed as in the bosom of a Greek. In
every breast there were also the spiritual aspira-
tions, the hatred of the world, the flesh, and
4 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
the devil that characterized the Middle Age.
These inconsistent elements waged an incessant
war. Sometimes, as in the case of Fra Angel-
ico, the spiritual side had almost the entire
victory ; sometimes, as in the case of Titian,
the new paganism almost uprooted the Chris-
tian spirit; and sometimes, as in the case of
Raphael, they were blended together in har-
monious union.
AVhen the Renaissance began we cannot tell.
Far back in the Dark Ages we can see the
spirit stirring, now manifesting itself here, now
there, but always sternly repressed by the
bigotry of the time. But when at length the
human intellect broke its fetters, its advance
was extremely rapid. Petrarch was already
seventeen years of age when Dante died, yet,
while the spirit of Dante is almost entirely
mediaeval, the spirit of Petrarch is almost en-
tirely classic. Still, as showing how the two
spirits were intermingled, the very groundwork
of Petrarch's poetry is of the Middle Age.
One of the peculiarities of the Middle Age
was its constant yearning for the unattainable.
That which was within reach was without
INTRODUCTION 5
value: that which was beyond the grasp was
longed for with infinite desire. Men cared
little for their own wives or for any whom they
could win. Every knight chose some lady in
whose honor he might achieve his feats of
arms, every minnesinger or troubadour chose
one to whom to address his songs of love and
war ; but it was always some one beyond their
reach, either because she was the wife of
another or because of her exalted rank. It
was this purely spiritual love alone that found
poetic expression ; and there was so little
reality in it, it was so entirely a matter of the
imagination, that the real objects of human
love cared little about it. His visionary pas-
sion for Beatrice did not prevent Dante from
marrying and having ten children, and his
good wife, Gemma, no doubt valued the poet's
devotion to his shadow at its true worth.
Had Beatrice come to Dante or Laura to Pe-
trarch the poets would have wept over their
shattered dream, and have chosen some other
woman as the object of their adoration. This
visionary love, which it is so hard for us now to
realize, was the natural result of the absorption
6 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
of the Middle Age in the things of the spirit
and its abhorrence of the things of the flesh.*
/Though the Renaissance owed its awakening
to the re-discovery of antiquity, there is a vast
gulf between the art of Greece and that of
Italy. In ancient art it was the type that was
sought, each artist striving to produce the ideal
of perfect beauty, free from the imperfections
of any individual man or woman. With the
soul, Greek art has little to do. The expression
upon the faces is usually one of Olympian
serenity alone, and if human passions are por-
trayed, as in the " Laocoon," it is only in
their simplest form.
Far different was the Renaissance. Chris-
tianity and the Middle Ages had swept across
men's lives, and they had learned to turn their
glance inward, probing the soul's most hidden
mysteries. Instead of faces which merely ex-
press the joy of living in a joyous world, in a
world still bright with the freshness of its
glorious youth, we have countenances in which
* Perhaps the best illustration of this peculiar kind of love
is the Florentine poet Sacchetti, who married three successive
wives, and in the meantime addressed all his poems to a fourth
woman.
IN TROD UC TION *J
are depicted all the passions of humanity, its
most secret instincts, its vaguest aspirations.
It is no longer the type that is sought, it is theN
individual. Instead of trying to eliminate from
the work of art all that is personal to the
model, leaving only the abstraction of ideal
beauty, the effort is to represent the individual
person, the individual soul. Instead of en-
deavoring to produce from many imperfections
a single perfect type, they strive to show how
body differs from body, spirit from spirit.
Leonardo da Vinci would follow all day long
one whose countenance struck him as they
passed upon the street, striving to penetrate
the secret of personality, and to fix upon his
sketch-book the charm of feature or expression
with which he had been impressed trying to
seize those very elements of being that Apelles
would have been most anxious to exclude.
Therefore, while the purpose of Greek art
was the attainment of abstract perfection, the\
purpose of Renaissance art was the expression
of the individual countenance and form. In
this respect nearly all modern art has followed
the guidance of the Renaissance, not of an-
8 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
tiquity. We admire ancient art, but its calm
grandeur is no longer possible to our souls,
torn as they are with conflicting feelings un-
dreamed of by a Greek ; and when we try to
imitate it we are usually merely stiff and
academic. But the people of the Italian Re
naissance are our true ancestors. Their feel-
ings were the same as ours, only more intense;
they were confronted by the same problems;
their art deals with the same sentiments, the
same aspirations; and in the study of their
works the modern artist will find infinite profit
and inspiration.
The result of this seeking after individuality*
is that Renaissance art is far more varied than
that of classic times. In Greece every artist
was striving for the same thing, for the highest
type of beauty or of strength, so that there is
a certain sameness in their works. Scopas is
more vehement, Praxiteles more voluptuous,
but they are in search of the same ideals, and
even among the ancients their works were
hopelessly confused a thing that could never
happen in the case of Michelangelo, Raphael,
Leonardo, Correggio, and Titian.
INTRODUCTION 9
And it was in consequence of this love of
individuality that painting became the favorite
art of the Renaissance, as sculpture was the
favorite art of Greece. Sculpture is best suited
to the creation of ideal types, painting to the
depicting of individual expression. And in
the hands of the artists of the Renaissance the
function of sculpture is completely changed.
Instead of plastic forms with brows on which
sits the serenity of Olympus, the body is useol
as a vehicle for the utterance of the most com-
plex feelings; and often the artist thinks not
of its beauty, but only of the expressiveness of
the tortured limbs.
And this striving after individuality in art is
but an expression of the spirit of the age.^/
There are times in the world's history when
the individual is completely absorbed in the
mass of his fellows ; when all men are seeking
a single ideal, each rejoicing to subordinate
himself to the spirit that animates the whole.
Such in art were the Middle Ages, when
myriads of men co-operated in the erection of
those marvellous Gothic cathedrals which are
the wonder of all succeeding generations, and
IO RENAISSANCE MASTERS
yet all were so absorbed in their work that we
know not even the names of the architects from
whose astounding brains could spring the con-
ception of these vast structures with their in-
finite complications of ornament and slender
shafts reaching heavenward their stony arms
in rapturous prayer to the throne of grace
men who cared only for their work, and who
did not even carve their names upon those
pillars, the least of which would have made
them immortal.
There are other times that are periods of
disintegration, when the bonds that bound
men together are loosened, and when each
strikes out for himself, or combines with others
only for purposes of temporary advantage,
moved by no common impulse, but each seek-
ing for himself pleasure, power, riches, or fame.
Such a period was the Peloponnesian War,
the fall of the Roman Republic, the dissolu-
tion of the Roman Empire, the Italian Renais-
sance, the Thirty Years' War, the French
Revolution, times of intense personal activ-
ity, of strong individual development, when the
human soul breaks its fetters and revels in a
IN TR OD UC TION 1 1
freedom that too often leads to dissolution and
ruin. These are not the most wholesome
periods in the world's records, but they are the
periods of greatest interest. In them we pass
from history to biography. We are no longer
concerned with the movement of vast inert
masses we are fascinated by intense person-^
alities, each of which differs from the other,
having different ideas, different aspirations,
different characteristics. And of all these
periods of transition, when the old idols are
crumbling and thousands of new ones are
clamoring to take their places, when the old
ties of association have been broken and new
ones have not yet been established, when men
are free to pursue the bent of their own spirit
without constraint, when each stands distinct
from the mass of humanity, the Italian Re-
naissance is the most attractive. It was a time
of vehement activity, when brain and nerves
and sinews were strained to the utmost, when
each strove most passionately for himself,
freeing himself most completely from his fel-
low-men, a time of intense light and Cimme-
rian darkness, of great virtues and astounding /
12 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
crimes, of princes like the Visconti, of whom
it was said that their hate was fratricide and
their love was incest ; of popes like Sixtus IV.
and Alexander Borgia, who defiled the chair of
St. Peter with orgies that would have shocked
the companions of Nero, and at whose poisoned
banquets Death presided as master of the
revels ; of saints like Fra Angelico and Carlo
Borromeo ; of murderous Bacchantes like Lu-
cretia Borgia, and of holy matrons like Vittoria
Colonna, a time of upheaval, of tumult, of
confusion, when a mere condottiere like Sforza,
selling his sword and his mercenaries to the
highest bidder, could become a sovereign,
when principalities were daily changed into
republics and republics into principalities,
when the ruler of to-day was the exile of to-
morrow, only to return again in triumph to
exact a bloody vengeance, a time almost of J
anarchy, when men yet loved art and learning
with an intensity of devotion that has never
since been equalled, when the artist quietly
painted his altar-piece or his Venus rising from
the sea, or the scholar drank rapturously at
the newly discovered fount of the Grecian
INTRODUCTION 13
Muses while men were cutting each other's
throats outside his door, a time, in short,
when a man could be anything if he only had
the boldness, the cunning, or the strength.^/
No age is so varied in its interest^ Each city
has its different architecture, its different art,
and its individual history full of the storm and
stress of conflicting passions. The very air\
seemed surcharged with electricity, here shin- '
ing as a splendid beacon giving light to an
admiring world, there crashing downward as a
thunderbolt, bearing destruction in its wake.
In this atmosphere, where all things were pos-
sible for good or evil, life was intense, passion-
ate, voluptuous, cruel, as it has rarely been,
and yet pervaded everywhere by a spirit of
humanistic culture strangely at variance with
the brutal ferocity that was continually break-
ing forth. The art of such an age must neces-^
sarily possess a peculiar and enduring interestX
/"There is nothing more striking than the
sodden ending of Renaissance art) Greek art
reached the zenith in the age of'Tericles, but
its long afternoon was almost as brilliant as
its noonday splendor. But when the sun of
14 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
Utalian art had reached its meridian it was
suddenly eclipsed. This was partly due to
exhaustion, but was principally the result of
political causes. \
\ While all this brilliant life was going on in
Italy, while the peninsula was divided among
a number of petty principalities maintaining
the balance of power as carefully as the Europe
of to-day, each the centre of a rich artistic
activity, beyond the Alps, in those countries
of the North and West of which the Italians
rarely thought, and then only with contempt
as a region of barbarism and darkness, forces
were at work of which they scarcely reckoned.
Slowly out of the anarchy and turmoil of the
Middle Ages two great kingdoms were emerg-
ing, France and Spain kingdoms that cared
not for the arts, but rejoiced in war and rapine,
before whose vast mail-clad armies the Italian
mercenaries must be scattered as chaff before
the wind. They rose above Italy like black
and angry waves ready to break and overwhelm
the land; but she saw not the danger, and
went on with her masques and her revels, her
painting and her sculpture, heedless of the
INTRODUCTION 15
wrath to come.y In an evil hour Ludovico il
Moro, Duke of Milan, invoked the assistance
of the French. This brought the Spaniard
also into the peninsula, and from that time
forth havoc and desolation reigned supreme.
Italy, where serious war had been for centuriesN
unknown, became the battle-ground of Europe.^
The steel-clad knights of France, the iron in-
fantry of Spain, the ruthless reiters of Ger-
many, who dreamed only of blood and gold,
and to whose rude natures art could make no
appeal, marched back and forth, devastating
the land and trampling upon the people until
in the wretchedness of slavery they lost their
genius and their manhood, and became as in-
capable of artistic production as Greece when
she was reduced to the condition of a Roman
province.
Moreover, Italy had returned toward classic
times until it had become almost pagan, while
the rest of Europe was still imbued with the
spirit of the Middle Age. The pilgrims from
the North, seeing the wealth, the luxury, the
immorality of Italian life, in which the church
took the lead, were shocked beyond measure;
16 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
and doubtless to the rude visitors from beyond
the Alps many pictures which are now the
glory of the world gave greater offense than
the murders of the Borgias. Germany rose in
revolt, and Switzerland, Holland, Denmark,
Norway, Sweden, and England threw in their
lot with her. Even in France the authority of
the Pope was assailed. In this hour of the
church's extreme peril, the fierce and bigoted
Spaniards seized the helm, and fought out with
measurable success the long battle against the
forces of the Protestant revolt; and they
trampled the bright Italian race under foot as
cruelly as they had done the people of Mexico
and Peru.
Crushed and bleeding, Italy thought no more
of art, and under the tyranny of the Spanish
Inquisition, she sank into such a state of deg-
radation that not only was she unable to pro-
duce works worthy of her past, but she could
not even appreciate those which she possessed,
and covered many of them with hideous
whitewash.
So perished the Italian Renaissance, but as
long as man loves the beautiful and the grand
INTRODUCTION \*J
it will be studied with a loving care devoted to
no other epoch of modern times. It has been
to the modern world what Greece was to the
ancient, the glorious beacon at which the
torches of civilization have been lit.
RAPHAEL
(1483-1520)
ENIUS has so often been synonymous
* J with misfortune, its path has so often
led in despair and darkness over stones and
brambles to a neglected tomb, Life has so
often pressed down upon its aching brows the
crown of thorns, leaving Death to circle them
with the wreath of laurel, that it is with peculiar
pleasure that one contemplates Raphael's un-
varying felicity. ^From his cradle to his grave
Fortune smiled upon him, and the approbation
with which his first artistic efforts were greeted
increased with the progress of his years until
it became a chorus of universal praise^
Most men who have enjoyed in fullest meas-
ure the admiration of their contemporaries are
forgotten by posterity. Their popularity is
due to the fact that they voice the peculiar
18
RAPHAEL 19
feelings of their own time, and when those
feelings are forgotten, they, too, pass into ob-
livion, leaving the throne to some rival who
speaks to the eternal and unchanging heart of
man. But such was not Raphael's fate. /In
his own day he was hailed by common acclaim
the Prince of Painters, and if a faint voice has
since been raised here and there to contest his
pre-eminence, it has been drowned in the general
applause. His fame has grown with the pas-
sage of the centuries until it is co-extensive
with civilization, and his name is pronounced
with reverence in every land and on every sea.
Nor is his renown confined to any class/S There
are painters, like Botticelli, who appeal chiefly
to the learned. There are others, like Dore",
whose hold is only upon the populace. But
Raphael charms both alike. (The connoisseur
understands better the mystery of his power,
but the peasant is enthralled with the beauty of
his work.^ It may not be amiss to examine the
foundations of this universal and enduring fame.
Our modern civilization is composed of two
elements : the humanism, the love of beauty,
of harmony, of rhythm, of proportion, of the
2O RENAISSANCE MASTERS
sweetness and the light of this world that we
have borrowed from the Greeks; and the
spiritual aspirations that we have inherited
from the Hebrews. These forces are in large
measure antagonistic. We all remember the
Euphorion of Goethe, the beautiful boy born
of Faust and Helena, the perfect being sprung
from the marriage of the Middle Age and An-
tiquity, harmoniously blending in a single per-
son the excellences of each. Goethe fancied
that he saw Euphorion in Lord Byron, but he
was surely mistaken, for Byron is totally defi-
cient in that unclouded serenity which is the
crowning perfection of Greek culture.
(There has been but one Euphorion, and he
was Raphael} In him alone are combined the
noblest characteristics of the classic and the
mediaeval spirits.} In him alone do we discover
the spiritual fervor of the Hebrew so chastened
and refined that it mingles in harmonious union
with the rhythmic beauty of Grecian art. (Tie
is the crowning glory of the Renaissance.)
Since the great awakening the two forces had
moved on side by side, often in hostility,
sometimes blending imperfectly. To Raphael
RAPHAEL 21
was reserved the supreme honor of uniting
them, of giving to Greek beauty the religious
fervor and the sweetness of the Christian spirit
in its pristine purity, of clothing the Hebraic
abstractions in the radiant forms of Greece.
/He has done more than any other man to
purify and elevate the conception of physical
beauty and to make us comprehend the beauty
of "holiness. The world has never been the
same since his inspired brush effected the
magic combination. The two spirits which
had been at conflict for ages he has reconciled
with one another, and we know now, as those
who preceded him could never know, that they
can be blended without injury to either, and
that from their union there can spring the
dazzling Euphorion, as serenely beautiful as
an Olympian divinity, as pure in spirit and as
full of heavenward aspirations as the Marys
who gazed in wonder into the vacant sepulchre.
According to our individual temperament or
culture, we may prefer the Hebraic or the
classic spirit ; but since Raphael has made the
great reconciliation we can never again look
upon them as incompatible.
22 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
One great element in Raphael's fame is his
perfect purity. The soul of man was born to
rise. It may flounder in the mire, but it will
still strive with its soiled and broken pinions to
beat upward into the pure ether, and though
it may fall back into the slime from which it
rose, the gaze of the dying eagle will still be
fixed on the clear heavens where it might have
soared on extended wing. Therefore the art
that can combine a beauty that will allure with
a purity that will lift the soul to a higher plane
is the art that will last; and no painter com-
bines these qualities in the same measure as
does Raphael. There are some who have
more spiritual fervor, but they are so indiffer-
ent to external beauty that they repel as much
as they attract. There are others who have
an equal, possibly a finer, conception of physi-
cal beauty, but they have not the same power
to exalt the soul. It is impossible to look
upon a masterpiece of Raphael's without a
sense of spiritual elevation. He does not, like
Michelangelo, carry us to dizzy heights around
which rage the storms of Titanic passions ; he
leads us into an enchanted land bathed in a
RAPHAEL 23
mellow radiance, where all is as wholesome as
it is charming, and where the Christian Graces
move about upon their errands of love and
mercy as fair as Olympian deities and with the
sweet serenity of the world's youth. It mat-
ters not whether we are Christians or pagans,
his works appeal to all ; and we can never look
upon them without carrying away with us
some atom of their serene beauty which will
make us aspire to a purer and a higher life.
Another cause of Raphael's success is his
never failing humanity. In his works there is
always to be found that touch of nature that
makes all men kin. Michelangelo is super-
human, and it is only the elect who can be in
full sympathy with his mighty and solitary
soul. Raphael deals indeed with a humanity
that is perfected and lifted into a serener
atmosphere than is possible for this troubled
world, but even in his grandest flights he re-
mains human. His men and women live on a
higher plane than ours, but they are never
beyond our comprehension or our sympathy.
They are so elevated that they must be looked
up to by the noblest, but they are never so far
24 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
away that the humblest cannot grasp their es-
sential qualities. v They are select spirits who
have shaken off the dross of earth, but the
beauty, the dignity, the sweetness of true man-
hood and womanhood remain. They are not
supernatural beings, but men and women like
ourselves, purified, elevated, and refined. The
sight of the superhuman is dispiriting, for we
know that we can never reach it. But the
sight of the humanly perfect is encouraging,
for it shows us an ideal that we can under-
stand, and which does not seem beyond the
possibility of achievement. Before Michel-
angelo's prodigious figures we feel a sense
of our littleness and incapacity; but before
Raphael's noble creations we feel exalted, and
we say to ourselves, Why should not we be
thus ? In his power to combine the highest
art with an unfailing spirit of humanity Raphael
is supereminent.
One of the qualities which endear him most
to the hearts of men is his cheerful serenity.
Sometimes we enjoy the frenzied orgy of ex-
cessive mirth ; sometimes we like to sup full of
horrors; but both, in the healthy mind, are
RAPHAEL 25
transient tastes, while we gladly pass our lives
in the contemplation of serene cheerfulness.
Therefore Raphael's are pictures that we love
to live with, that become dear companions of
our solitude, lifting the troubled soul into a
clearer and brighter atmosphere, purging it of
baleful and unwholesome thoughts, bringing it
to repose and peace; and as such they must
always be inexpressibly dear to the human
heart.
And it is to Raphael more than to anyone
'else that the modern world owes its conception
of beauty that beauty in which the physical
and the spiritual shall mingle in ever varying
proportions, but in which neither shall ever be
entirely lacking; the beauty of the " Sistine
Madonna," whose great eyes are full of the
light of heaven as she is revealed upon her
cloudy throne; the beauty of the " Madonna
of the Chair," the ideal of wholesome and
happy motherhood ; the beauty of the young
athlete worthy to have entered the Olympic
games, who hangs from the wall in the " Burn-
ing of the Borgo "; the beauty of the Arch-
angel Michael transfixing Satan with his lance,
26 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
unmoved by passion, as serene in the per-
formance of his glorious duty as an Olympian
divinity; the beauty of Apollo and the Muses
thrilled with the rapture of divine harmony
upon the wooded summit of Parnassus, beauty
in countless forms, never sensual and gross,
never unsubstantial and inane, always truly
physical and truly spiritual, always attractive
and always ennobling. We do not know what
our ideal of beauty would have been without
Raphael, but it would have been different,
either erring like Leonardo on the side of the
spiritual, or like Titian on the side of the phys-
ical. It was Raphael who struck the golden
mean and established our standard.
In no other painter have the real and the
ideal so happily blended. He is upon principle
an idealist, seeking to elevate human nature
and to give it a surpassing beauty, dignity,
and grace. But it is not the washed-out, intan-
gible, unrealized idealism of which we see so
much to-day. His figures, beautiful as they
are, remain as real as the ugliest transcripts of
low life given us by Van Ostade or Teniers.
Even his fabulous monsters, his dragons and
RAPHAEL 27
chimeras, are not mere creatures of the im-
agination, but are rilled with an intense, ve-
hement, palpitating life, and we feel that if
Nature had made such things she would have
made them thus. And idealist as he is, he is
perhaps the most absolute realist of all artists
in the one branch where absolute realism is the
highest merit, the making of portraits. He
anticipated Cromwell's injunction to paint him
as he was, warts and all, and it is doubtful
whether there are any portraits in the world
more remorselessly realistic, more intensely in-
dividual, than those of Raphael. He neither
flatters the physical aspect of the faces nor
lends to them any of the charm of his own
gracious personality; but with a pitiless pre-
cision almost without example he gives them
to us exactly as they were, with all their im-
perfections on their heads.
Outside of the physical beauty and the
spiritual elevation of his types, Raphael's
highest qualities as an artist those in which he
remains unapproached and unapproachable
are in illustration and composition.
Art may be roughly divided into two great
28 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
elements, decoration and illustration : decora-
tion, which seeks beauty alone, regardless of
meaning; illustration, which seeks meaning
alone, regardless of beauty. Ordinarily they
are combined, so that the thing has both
beauty and meaning, but they may be utterly
divorced, as in the case of a crazy quilt, which
has no meaning at all, yet which pleases by
reason of the sensuous charm of color, and in
the case of a newspaper woodcut showing
some important event, which has no beauty,
but which interests by reason of the occur-
rences portrayed. In art the decorative ele-
ment is the universal, appealing to all times
and to all nations ; while the illustrative element
is transitory, and when we lose interest in the
events depicted we lose interest in the work as
an illustration ; and then if it still attracts, it
must be solely on account of the decorative
elements which it contains. But a vivid illus-
tration of anything about which people are
deeply concerned, as a terrible conflagration or
a great battle that has just taken place, will
interest the general public far more than any
decorative picture, however beautiful, and will
RAPHAEL 29
bring to the artist a more immediate fame and
a greater meed of popular applause. Qnjthe
other- hand, a mere illustration of something
far away or almost forgotten will fall flat, how-
ever skilful may be its execution.
Raphael was the greatest illustrator that ever
lived, and he has devoted his incomparable
talents to the illustration of the book that in-
terests us most, to depicting the events of the
story in which we are all instructed at our
mother's knee, whose every episode is familiar
to every beholder, and which to most of us is
full of absorbing interest ; hence his vast popu-
larity with all mankind.
If the time shall ever come when the Babe
of Bethlehem shall be forgotten, when the
meaning of the pictures is lost and men marvel
vainly why angels should be attending an in-
fant sleeping in a manger, then the decorative
elements of Raphael's work will alone remain,
and men may wonder why he was more es-
teemed than Titian ; but as long as Christianity
maintains its hold, the story which he illus-
trates with a sweetness, a dignity, a beauty that
remain unrivalled will preserve its perennial at-
30 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
traction, and the popularity of his works will
continue unimpaired.
It is the fashion now to depreciate the illus-
trative or literary element in painting even to
the extent of denying it any place in true art.
But this is an extreme view. The illustrations
of the life of Christ can have no meaning for a
Turk or a Japanese, who might still enjoy the
splendor of Titian's coloring. But for a long
time the civilized world has been brought up
in the teachings of the Christian faith, and it
is not likely that the Christian legends will be
forgotten before the pictures themselves have
crumbled into dust ; and art can perform no
greater service to humanity than to clothe the
popular beliefs in noble and dignified forms
calculated to exalt and purify the people's
faith. Besides, it is doubtful whether illustra-
tion itself is inferior in artistic merit to decora-
tion. [The imaginative illustrator who enables
us to realize vividly and intensely the events
of the past or of the present, giving form and
substance to our faint and fleeting impressions,
so that we can feel the elevation and purity of
X soul of which humanity is capable, and can
RAPHAEL 3 1
raise our feeble imaginations to a comprehen-
sion of the grandeur and solemnity of great
events, displays a talent that may well be
paralleled with that of the most splendid mas-
ters of decorative art.
From what I have said of Raphael's suprem-
acy as an illustrator it must not be inferred
that his works lack decorative qualities. As
a colorist he is inferior to the great Venetians,
but his color is always agreeable and appropri-
ate, and the harmony of his lines is decorative
in the highest degree. If their meaning were
entirely lost, his pictures would still be ex-
tremely attractive for their mere sensuous
beauty.
In the art of composition Raphael's pre- ^Hu-Q^
eminence has never been contested. In the
grouping of the figures so as to form an agree-
able and impressive whole he has no rival. It
is not merely the balancing of group against
group on a flat surface, which had been done so
often and so admirably before him; it is the
composition in space, the composition in three
dimensions, in which he excels. No man, un-
less it be Claude Lorraine, gives so vivid an
32 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
idea of space. And most of his pictures give
not merely the feeling of space, but of its limit-
less extent. He may not show a far-reaching
background, but there is a sense of space
stretching beyond and away into infinite dis-
tance. And this sense of space has much to
do with the impressiveness of his work. We
have all climbed to some eminence from which
we have overlooked a wide expanse of country,
and remember the thrill which we have experi-
enced, the exaltation, the sense of enlarged
vitality, the charm of the infinite t'hat has
stirred our souls. Something of this there is
in Raphael's pictures. And his skill in group-
ing his figures is such that they remind us of
the rhythmic harmony of music ; not, like
architecture, of music that is frozen, but of
music that is throbbing and palpitating with
life.
Nor is it necessary to go out of doors to
experience the feeling of space. The same
exhilarating sense comes upon us as we stand
beneath the arches of a vast cathedral, in a
lofty hall, or a lengthy corridor, and none of
Raphael's pictures gives it more strongly than
RAPHAEL 33
the " School of Athens." To produce it is
perhaps the highest achievement of architec-
ture; to give the illusion of it is one of the
greatest feats of painting.
Man's puny body can be accommodated in
very restricted quarters, but his intellect pines
for extended reaches, for limitless distances.
A ceiling seven feet high will serve his every
physical want, but unless it towers far above
his head he experiences a sense of confine-
ment, of suffocation. It is all a matter of the
imagination, and therefore the same effect of
exhilarating freedom can be produced by a
picture so disposed as to give a feeling of the
measureless extent of space.
As I have said, Claude Lorraine approached
and perhaps equalled Raphael in his power of
creating this illusion, but they work in widely
different ways and to widely different ends.
With Claude man is swallowed up in nature.
He is but an atom in the illimitable expanse,
and his puny figure might be stricken from the
landscape without material loss. But with
Raphael it is nature dominated by man. The
sense of space is the same, but man is not a
3
34 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
, mere incident, he is the master spirit. He is
not there to adorn the landscape: the land-
scape exists for him, and, limitless as it is, it is
subordinated to man's dignity. And it is this
faculty, which Raphael possesses in so supreme
a degree, of giving at the same time a realizing
sense of nature's boundless extent and of man's
inherent superiority, that imparts to Raphael's
pictures a large portion of their unrivalled
charm.
Raphael did not develop this faculty un-
aided. His master, Perugino, possessed it in
a high degree, and taught it to his pupil, who
surpassed him in this as in all else. And if, as
many critics now contend, the " Apollo and
Marsyas " of the Louvre, attributed to Ra-
phael, and the " Baptism of Christ " in the
National Gallery, attributed to Perugino, are
by neither of those masters, there must have
been at least one other who had almost equal
skill in the difficult art of composing so as to
reveal the depths of space while asserting man's
pre-eminence.
Raphael was the most receptive artist that
ever lived, learning something from everyone
RAPHAEL 35
with whom he came in contact; but he was
never an eclectic. We are familiar with eclec-
ticism in the next age, when the Carracci sought
to produce pictures combining the merits of all
schools. Their works exhibit great skill, and
are sometimes very beautiful, but they lack
vitality. With Raphael it was different.
Everything he learned was. so thoroughly as-
similated that it became his own, and in pass-
ing through the alembic of his marvellous brain
it was transmuted into purest gold.
This power of assimilation possessed by some
geniuses is startling. Shakespeare's knowledge
of antiquity was of the slightest, extending
little beyond Plutarch's Lives; and yet he
has given us in Julius Casar the most living
transcript of ancient life and feeling to be
found in the whole range of literature. The
flashlight of his genius penetrated deeper into
the spirit of antiquity than all the learned
have reached, groping painfully with their
farthing candles. So it was with Raphael.
His life was so short and so busy that he could
not have become a very profound scholar ; yet
the whole spirit of Greek poetry is in his
36 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
" Galatea/' the whole spirit of Greek philos-
ophy is in his "School of Athens"; and
while he became so thoroughly a Greek that
his work would have been hailed by Pericles
with delight, he still remained the highest and
purest type of the Christian artist.
When he arrived at the zenith of his fame
Raphael was so overwhelmed with commis-
sions that Briareus himself would not have
been able to meet the demands upon him, and
the master had recourse to the assistance of
his pupils, often furnishing only a sketch, and
leaving to them the entire work of painting.
For this he has been greatly blamed, but it
was a priceless gain to art. His inexhaustible
fertility enabled him to dash off these designs
with extreme rapidity, and in the meantime he
was himself working industriously with his
brush. The patron who thought that he was
getting a picture by Raphael's own hand might
have had cause to complain, but we should
only be grateful. Without this collaboration
we should have had few, if any, additional
productions by Raphael himself, and we
should have lost numerous treasures of ines-
RAPHAEL 37
timable value. Who would not have the
" Holy Family of Francis the First," with
that Madonna and that Magdalen which are
among the most beautiful faces that even Ra-
phael drew, and the magnificent " St. Michael "
of the Louvre, perhaps the most glorious type
of youthful manhood to be found in all the
range of modern art, painted as they are by
the hand of Giulio Romano, rather than not
have them at all ? Who would not have the
" Battle of Constantine," perhaps the most
splendid battle-piece ever produced, worked
out after Raphael's death by his scholars ac-
cording to his designs, rather than the unin-
spired compositions that they would have
turned off if left to their own devices ?
To realize the difference between Raphael
and his pupils we need only to go to the Far-
nesina at Rome, and look at his " Galatea,"
the most beautiful of all the lovely pictures
that have been inspired by the art of antiquity,
so full of the sea's splendor and of the exultant
spirit of pagan joy, and then pass into the ad-
joining enclosed loggia decorated by his pupils
with the story of Cupid and Psyche after his
38 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
designs. Nothing could be more deliciously
perfect than his own painting, while the work
of his disciples offends the eye by its coarseness
and haste. Still, through the imperfection of
the workmanship there shines forth the divine
beauty of Raphael's conception. The pictures
would have been incomparably more precious
had they been wrought by the master's own
hand; but in that event we must have done
without many a priceless masterpiece which we
could afford to sacrifice even less than we could
afford to dispense with this delightful specimen
of mural decoration. Owing to the brevity of
Raphael's life his works, without the assistance
of his pupils, must have been comparatively
few^ Each would have been perfect, but we
should have been deprived of many a marvel
of composition, whose merits may be impaired,
but not destroyed, by the inferiority of the
workmanship.
Apart from the assistance received from his
- f disciples Raphael was the most productive
artist that ever lived. His early death limited
his artistic activity to a period of twenty years,
and yet he has filled the galleries of the world
RAPHAEL 39
with the most varied masterpieces. He was
unceasingly industrious, but he must have had
the most intensely creative imagination in
history. Just as Michelangelo could see the
statue in the marble, begging to be liberated,
so he must have seen upon the naked canvas,
as though projected by a magic lantern, the
fair faces, the graceful forms, the appropriate
attitudes that were to make up the picture,
and beyond them those wide reaches of hill
and meadow, always different and always
lovely, that carry the glance away into illimit-
able space. He saw it all with the mind's eye
as clearly as we see it now that he has given it
tangible shape, and in the realization of it
there was none of that doubt and hesitation
which sometimes paralyzes even a supreme
genius like Leonardo. He saw exactly what
he wanted to paint, and the slender white
fingers knew exactly how to paint it. The re-
sponse of the hand to the mind was instan-
taneous and unfailing. He worked as a bird
sings, from the fulness of an overflowing heart,
spontaneously, without an effort, knowing pre-
cisely the note that he would strike. When he
4O RENAISSANCE MASTERS
thought of an occurrence it did not present
itself to him in the vague and intangible way
in which it appears to most of us. The whole
scene rose up before him, not as it was irTfact,
but as it might have happened in a world
purer, serener, more beautiful than this, and
his magic pencil hastened to turn the vision
into an everlasting reality. Where other artists
fumble about, seeking the correct note, he
caught it at once ; where they hesitate, doubt-
ing the right path, he advanced blithely, seeing
the end from the beginning and the flowery
road leading to the goal. It was this wonder-
ful capacity for mental images, this concord of
all his faculties, that enabled him to produce
so much and to do it all so well. The facul-
ties of most of us are like the pieces of an
orchestra playing each a different air; while
his were all attuned together, each aiding the
other in the production of the divine harmony
that thrills our souls across the ages.
If you do not realize Raphael's greatness
when you first see one of his masterpieces, do
not despair. Few are they who do. JThe Ti-
tanic force of Michelangelo is more impressive,
RAPHAEL 41
Titian's voluptuous charms are more alluring,
the haunting smile of Leonardo has a subtler
fascination. But none of them grows upon
one like Raphael. To appreciate him wholly
we must slowly realize the vast variety of com-
positions in which he excelled. There are
perhaps others who could have produced the
delicious pagan beauty of the " Galatea," the
noble dignity of the " School of Athens,"
the dramatic intensity of the " Expulsion of
Heliodorus," the hurrying tumult of the
Battle of Constantine," the sweet, soul-
stirring loveliness of any of his numerous Ma-
donnas, or the agony of his " Entombment " ;
but who is there who could have produced
them all, or other works so various in their
character, so surpassing in their merit ?
MICHELANGELO
(1477-1564)
IT is difficult to think of Raphael without
also thinking of Michelangelo. j^Beside
the beautiful countenance of the divine Um-
brian there always rises the grim visage of the
mighty Florentine. This is partly due to their
rivalry in life, still more to the law of contrasts^
Each stood upon a summit to which succeeding
generations of artists have vainly sought to
climb; but while Raphael's mountain rises in
the clear ether bathed in sunshine and clothed
in verdure, Michelangelo's is wrapped in clouds
and beaten upon by the storms of Titanic pas-
sions. Which mountain is the higher we can-
not say. Sometimes the verdurous summit
seems to lift itself farther into the serene air ;
sometimes it appears dwarfed in the presence
of the rugged sublimity of the other.
MICHELANGELO 43
Time usually settles such questions of pre-
eminence. We all remember Victor Hugo's
fine poem telling of his search among the
Pyrenees for the Pic du Midi. All the moun-
tains seemed of the same height, but when he
had given up the quest in despair, and was far
advanced on his return journey to the North,
he looked back, and behold, the Pic du Midi
standing alone upon the horizon's verge. But
time has not settled the contest between
Michelangelo and Raphael. The men who
saw them daily at their work were divided in
their judgment as to which was the greater
artist, and their descendants remain equally
unable to agree.
JBoth devoted their best talents to the illus-
tration of the Bible] but it was the Old Testa-
ment with its sternness and its God of Wrath
that appealed to Michelangelo, while it was
the New, with its sweetness and its God of
Love, that attracted RaphaelJ Sometimes
they invaded one another's province, but with
moderate success. If Raphael had painted
only the Bible pictures of the Loggie, or if
Michelangelo had produced only his " Christ,"
44 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
his " Pieta," and his " Holy Family of the
Tribune," they would have been esteemed
capable artists and nothing more ; but in their
proper spheres each has remained without a
rival.
[ There was never a more fervent Christian
than Michelangelo, but there have been few
who so utterly failed to grasp the Christian
spirit of sweetness and light, patience and
humility. Darkness and gloom, wrath and
defiance, an exultation in physical and mental
strength, a pride like that of Prometheus that
would never bow though the eagle should rend
his vitals through eternity these are the senti-
ments that we read in his works. He tries to
be a Christian, but his soul is with the Hebrew
prophetsj He was fit to stand beside Elijah
as he stretched out his hands on Mount Car-
mel, cursing the followers of Baal ; beside
Isaiah as he hurled his maledictions upon
Babylon the Great. He endeavors to repre-
sent Christian subjects, but all in vainj His
Christ of Santa Maria sopra Minerva is an
athlete rejoicing in his strength, who would
have borne the cross to Golgotha with a smile;
MICHELANGELO 45
not the Man of Sorrows whose fragile body
sank beneath its weight. Change the head
but a little, and it might stand beside the
statues of the Olympic victors wrought by
Myron and Polycletus. The Christ of the
" Last Judgment " is not the gentle Saviour
of Mankind welcoming the elect into the
mansions that he has made ready to receive
them ; he is the God of Wrath of the Hebrew
prophets embodied in a form of unexampled
muscular development even exceeding that
Torso of the Belvedere that Michelangelo ad-
mired so much. The master had been asked
to restore the missing limbs to this headless
trunk of unequalled power. This he was un-
willing to attempt in the marble, but has sought
to surpass it in his Christ, who resembles
Apollo hurling the thunderbolts of Jove
against the ascending Titans, but with an im-
measurable strength and a vengeful implacabil-
ity of which the Greeks had no conception.
The "Pieta" of St. Peter's has been much
and justly admired; but it is the physical
beauty of the corpse of Christ, and the fidelity
with which the limpness of death is depicted
46 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
that attract the attention, not the spiritual
significance; nor can any trace of Christian
spirit be found in the " Holy Family of the
Tribune," while the naked youths in the back-
ground, which are perhaps the best part of the
composition, are strangely out of keeping with
the subject. These and his Madonnas in stone
and his " Descent from the Cross " are precious
masterpieces, but they do nothing to body
forth in living shapes the Christian Gospel, and
a pagan who should infer from them the genius
of Christianity would fall into a singular mis-
conception.
The spirit of antiquity, whether Assyrian or
Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, or Roman, was
always masculine. jThe feminine element, al-
though ever present, was strictly subordinate^
[The virtues of antiquity were the manly virtues
courage, pride, independence, integrity, pa-
triotism. It was these embodied in noble
forms of perfect manhood that ancient art re-
joiced to portray. But they easily degenerated
into arrogance, revengefulness, and cruelty,
and when they had done so, and beneath the
tyranny of Tiberius the burden of the world's
MICHELANGELO 47
anguish had become greater than it could bear,
Christ arose to proclaim the superiority of
the feminine virtues of love, gentleness, and
humility, and to preach the brotherhood of
man. Of the new gospel Raphael became the
supreme exponent in art, but Michelangelo
remained with the mighty men of old, the last
and the greatest to assert the supremacy of
the
And he carried his preference for the mas-
culine to the point of being abnormal, almost
unnatural. He loved no woman unless the
Platonic sentiment that he experienced for
Vittoria Colonna in his old age could be called
by such a name. His affection went out to his
own sex, and when he emerged from his soli-
tude peopled by stupendous phantoms, it was
the society of men that he sought, particularly
of young men distinguished for the beauty of
their persons.
It is the fashion to admire indiscriminately
all the works of a great man, and many laud
the beauty of the women of Michelangelo. It
is trne thai- many nf them arf> beautiful, but n it
is not the. hpRiitv of woman r The Eve of the
48 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
" Creation " has been much commended; but
in point of fact she is heavy and somewhat
gross, a great Titaness sprung immediately
from the bosom of Mother Earth. And how
inferior she is to the glorious Adam in the ad-
joining fresco, receiving the spark of life from
the outstretched finger of God. He likewise
is a Titan, but he is one who, like Ixion, might
aspire to the embraces of Juno. The ' ' Night* '
and the " Dawn " of the Medici tombs are also
of the Titan race, the one plunged in the
dreamless sleep that follows the exhaustion
of intolerable woe, the other waking from
troubled slumbers to look in agony upon the
hateful light of another day. They are very
beautiful, but in their beauty there is no trace
of feminine charm. It is the beauty of elemen-
tal creatures that Earth might have formed in
her teeming womb when she was producing
the great cave tiger and the mammoth. The
lower limbs of the " Night " and of the Eve of
the " Temptation " are surpassingly fine, but
they have none of woman's softness. Beneath
the tightly drawn skin we see the iron muscles
of a victor in the race-course at Olympia.
MICHELANGELO 49
/No man could love one of Michangelo's
women. They are not human. We can no
more love them than we can love an elemental
force J If the " Night " should shake off her
slumber and sit upright upon her couch, if
" Dawn " should rear herself erect, we should
fly in terror from their superhuman strength
and their unspeakable despair. Frankenstein's
monster might claim them for his mates, but
they could only inspire terror in our puny
hearts. HLven his Madonnas are not lovable,./
They are strong, vigorous women whom we
admire, but who could stir no tender passion
in our bosoms.
j3ut on the other hand no artist among the
moderns, perhaps none even among the arf^
cients, has ever felt so keenly and expressed so
well the beauty of manhood of manhood in
its highest perfection, strong in body, with
every muscle developed to the utmost and
capable of the intensest strain, powerful and
undaunted in mind, ready for every conflict,,?
for every dangerTJ Look at the youths who
adorn the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They
are beautiful, proud, and manly as the Apollo
5O RENAISSANCE MASTERS
Belvedere. fThey are not unhuman like his
women. They are men as men should bej as
we can imagine them to have been in the
heroic days when Jason sought the Golden
Fleece, when Theseus struggled with the Min-
otaur, and Hercules hunted the monsters in
their lairs. If called to life they would win the
love of woman and the admiration of man, and
their beauty would be as conspicuous as their
strength. And where will we find the beauty
of youth combined with the pathos of despair
as in the finer of the two " Captives " of the
Louvre ? The " Hermes of Olympia " is not
more beautiful, the " Dying Alexander" is
less pathetic; and the hopeless dejection of
the bright young spirit now bound in fetters
is revealed not merely in the lovely face but
in every muscle of the perfect form.
M3ut beautiful as are these adolescent figures,
the essential of Michelangelo's art is over-
whelming power, that terribilitct which amazed
all his contemporaries and continues to awe
the world. There is no other artist who lifts
[the soul so high. In the presence of his super-
\human shapes weighed down by thoughts too
MICHELANGELO 5!
/great for mortal comprehension, bowed with
/ a grief which tongue can never utter, or else
/ defiantly erect like Ajax upon the storm-beaten
rock, we feel that we are transported into
V another world peopled by mighty and terrible
^-shadows, forms of supernatural sorrow, despair,
and wrath, before whose vast elemental pas-
sions we quail as before some convulsion of
nature J Look at his " Moses," and think
what would happen if the giant, so instinct
with life even in the marble, should arise and
speak! How the multitudes would cower be-
fore him ! What thunders, like those of Sinai,
would roll from his mighty lips! We should
think no more of resisting him than we should
struggle with an earthquake. Before his over-
mastering will we could only bow in terror and
submit. Imagine the 4< David " alive again,
with that face that would defy a world in
arms! Before his wrath a host of Goliaths
would fly in consternation. Glorious in their
strength as are the deities of Greece, we feel
that if the war had been with Titans of this
mould the battlements of Olympus would have
been scaled and the Gotterdammerung would
52 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
have come ; and upon the ruins of Jove's
palaces there would have sat the terrible Christ
of the " Last Judgment " condemning the
vanquished with an inexorable resolve. But
such creations could not exist in Hellas.
Happy Greeks! The iron had not entered
their soul, they had not bent beneath the
burden of an unutterable despair, they had not
striven to float among the stars on pinions that
would not lift them even from the earth ; and
they could have formed no conception of the
ideas which Michelangelo sought to body forth
in his stupendous shapes. The simple serenity
and directness of their imagination is impos-
sible to us. They belong to a different and a
happier world. What they desire is clear and
tangible. They are not haunted by impossible
dreams, by vague and unutterable longings.
Their art is the reflection of their own tranquil
souls. It is immensely beautiful, but it makes
to us no personal appeal. We admire it as we
admire Homer, but it cannot thrill us like a line
of Shakespeare, voicing our inmost thoughts, or
a statue of Michelangelo. We feel no kinship
with the Venus of Melos or the Apollo Belve-
MI CHELA NGEL 53
dere. They are too far away, too alien to the
ideas and feelings that stir us now. We can-
not fathom the full meaning of Michelangelo's
prodigious figures ; but we feel that, Titanic as
they are, they are still modern, and that they
utter in superhuman tones the aspirations and
the sorrows of living humanity ; and they have
a fascination for us that is never found even in
the noblest works of Greece.
Artists who endeavor to express violent pas-
sions usually express nothing else. Their
picture or their statue is only a symbol of the
passion sought to be portrayed, of wrath or
fear, of love or hate. We see at a glance the
full message which they seek to utter. The
figures are there to say a certain thing and they
say it, well or ill. Understanding all that
they would communicate, we lose interest, and
return to them again only to admire the beauty
of line or color. But Michelangelo's creations,
like Shakespeare's, are real beings. We can
no more read their inmost hearts than we can
read the inmost hearts of living men ; and their
souls are vaster, more complex, than poor
humanity can be. Their depths remain eter-
54 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
nally unsounded. We see the storms beating
upon the surface, but we also understand that
there are abysses which the eye can never
reach. They are infinitely suggestive like the
music of some mighty symphony. The more
we see them the more their power grows upon
us, the more unfathomable do we discover
them to be.
No man so dominates the soul as Michel-
angelo. As Rogers says of the fearfuFBfood-
ing figure that sits upon the tomb of Lorenzo,
meditating some frightful purpose of revenge
and death, he " fascinates and is intolerable."
In the presence of these awful shapes we feel
as we have felt in some lofty mountain region
with nothing around save stony desolation.
Michelangelo is more terrible than Milton or
than Wagner, for they comprehend the sweet-
ness of love, the charm of womanhood, the
rapture of exchanged caresses. They stroll at
times through the vales of Paradise, butjae
wanders forever upon the mountains amid
storms and darkness, or if he descends, it is
with a poor grace "as if he scorned his spirit
that could be moved to smile at anything."
MICH EL A NGEL 55
But his mountain solitudes are peopled by
glorious dreams such as he alone has dreamt.
Yet it is a mistake to speak of them as
dreams. In the presence of his prodigious
figures we feel that they are the reality, and
that we are only shadows that flit before their
face. As Venetian art was devoted to color
and Umbrian to grace, Florentine art had been
devoted to the realization of the human form.f
From Giotto down the Florentine masters had
depicted figures that seemed more real than
life. This power over the reality of things was\
inherited by Michelangelo, and applied to
types of such stupendous energy, so instinct
with passionate vitality, so colossal in their
dimensions and so overwhelming in their
power, that in their presence all else seems
trivial and unsubstantial. Beneath the Sis-
tine's vault there are noble pictures by illus-
trious masters, Perugino, Botticelli, and the
like. But who deigns to look at them ? In
another place they would enthrall our attention,
but beneath these overwhelming shapes, how
unreal, how insipid they appear! Others have
tried his terrible style, but have only succeeded
56 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
in producing spiritless giants, while his are im-
bued with an intense vehement life, and are
worthy associates of those sons of God who
forsook heaven to woo the daughters of men,
only to brood despairingly over the loss of their
celestial home.
How is it that he produces this effect ? It
is not merely his mighty soul, it is also his per-
fect knowledge. He alone knew all the capac-
ities of the body as a vehicle of expression.
Most artists are content to exhibit passions
only in the face. He comprehended that
'every passion quivers in every muscle, and
knew how to utter the full burden of the flesh.
He was the first in modern times entirely to
^understand the importance of the nude to see
rhat in the successful depicting of the naked
body so as to make every limb cry out the
emotions of the soul, art attains its completest
utterance. No man has ever comprehended
the use of the unclothed form as he. With
others we look to the countenance to see what
the subject feels; with him we look to the
torso and the limbs. Each sinew speaks and
proclaims its tale of agony or joy. In ancient
MICHELANGELO 57
art the body rarely expressed anything save
the tranquillity of strength or beauty, or the
harmony of rhythmical exertion. Michel-
angelo's contemporaries unveiled it only for
purposes of study or to reveal its sensuous
beauty. He alone used it as the vehicle for\ '"**&* *
v ~ ~ ~~~~ ~ _-..._-- ^C-jr> ^"^
the utterance of all the passions of humanity,
its love and hate, its rapture and despair. +
He^was born a sculptor, and a sculptor he
remained, even when he wielded the brusl^
He was never a painter like Raphael. He had
none of the power of composition of the Prince
of Painters. When you see a picture by the
latter the first thing that strikes you is the
harmony of the design. It is only after you
have looked at it in its entirety for a long time
that it occurs to you to examine the details,
and probably you will look at it for years
charmed with the exquisite rhythm of the
balancing lines without going further. But
Michelangelo never pleases you in this way.
His composition is rarely satisfactory, some- '"'
times confused. You do not think of looking
at his pictures as a whole. It is the individual
figures that seize the eye and rivet the atten-
RENAISSANCE MASTERS
tion. How differently Raphael would have
painted the " Last Judgment." Christ would
have been a benignant and merciful judge, not
an avenging god. Stress would have been laid
rather upon the happiness of the blest than on
the agony of the damned. The Virgin would
not have crouched timid and unnoticed beside
her Son. Above all, instead of a confused
group of writhing shapes whose general pur-
pose is scarcely intelligible after the most
patient study, we should have had a composi-
tion comprehensible at a glance, and of such
rhythmic harmony that we should probably
never have thought to examine the details.
But if we did, how weak the individual figures
would have seemed compared with this crowd
of writhing Titans trying to scale heaven and
hurled back by the wrath divine ! In Michel-
angelo's great fresco we rarely try to make out
the general plan. Each figure attracts on its
own account. Each is an amazing study in
<^**
anatomical expression. Strong, passionate,
wrathful, despairing, they struggle up or fall
\backward with superhuman force. And, par-
adoxical as the statement seems, perhaps the
MICHELANGELO 59
finest of all his statues are those created by his
brush ; for these prodigious forms of the Sis-
tine's vault and of the " Last Judgment " be-
long to statuary and not to painting. They
could be transferred to the marble with no loss
of effect. They are self-sufficing, they exist
for themselves, and could be freed from the
wall to which they are attached. They are
not mere parts of a scene like the figures in a
true picture. The sculptor has made them
with his brush because he was so commanded,
and because he did not have time to chisel
them out in stone; but they are the works of a
sculptor, and to statues they must be compared.
^No artist was ever so wrapped up in man.
For the beauties of nature Michelangelo seems
Vto have cared nothing. The backgrounds of
Raphael's pictures are frequently marvels of
charming landscapes, and many of the most
delightful scenes ever delineated are to be
found in the pre-Raphaelite masters. But for
all this Michelangelo had no eyes. His only
/interest was in the human form and in the feel-
ings of humanity heightened to a supernatural
^degree and expressed with Titanic power. He
6O RENAISSANCE MASTERS
does not rejoice in peaceful prospects like Ra-
phael ; he does not dream of fantastic rocks like
Leonardo ; he does not even think of the deso-
late sublimity of mountain summits. Man is
sufficient for him, and man's nude form suffices
to utter all his message. Man is even the only
ornament that he employs, and no one else has
so fully understood the decorative qualities of
the body. The grandest piece of decoration
in the world is the Sistine's vault, and the
only element that enters into it is the human
figure, sometimes draped, generally unclothed.
No one, not even Michelangelo, can entirely
escape the spirit of his time, and one reason
why he exults so much in physical strength is
that it was so highly esteemed by his contem-
poraries. The revival of Greek learning with
the pride of the Greeks in the triumphs of
physical vigor at the national games, added to
the warlike instincts inherited from the Middle
Ages, gave a great interest to all that con-
[cerned muscular development; and the ineffi-
Iciency of the laws, the insecurity of life and
(property, the constant necessity of repelling
assaults and the temptation to make them in
MICHELANGELO 6 1
that troubled era gave to bodily force an im-
fportance far beyond anything that we can now
Vconceive. Rarely has so much civilization
been combined with so little protection of the
law ; rarely have men of such cultivation so
often taken into their own hands the righting
/ of their wrongs. It is but natural that the
/ foremost sculptor of the age should portray
/ the type which the age admired; but it is
I fortunate that he was a man of so lofty a soul
\ that he could redeem from all grossness the
] enormous brute strength which he delighted
1 to depict and make it the vehicle for the ex-
\ pression of the highest thoughts. By giving
\to his Titans a spirit even vaster than their
bodies he has created a type of art that has
remained unique, immeasurable, and over-
Iwhelming.
is exultation of Michelangelo in mere
physical force, this joy in iron muscles ready
for any strain, is most fully exhibited in that
cartoon of the soldiers bathing in the Arno and
surprised by the trumpet's blast, usually called
the " Battle of Pisa." No such study in an-
atomy, no such picture of the male body in
62 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
fullest development, no such group of intensely
hurrying athletes, with every nerve throbbing
and palpitating with life, has been created in
modern times, perhaps not even by the Greeks.
Of its kind it is perfect. Exertion is carried
exactly to the point that it should not over-
pass. There is none of that excess so peril-
ously close to attitudinizing and contortion
that disfigures the " Last Judgment." All is
instinct with intense vitality, yet rhythmical
and harmonious. Cellini and many of his con-
temporaries in an age so enamored of physical
vigor regarded it as his masterpiece. It has
perished now, and we can judge it only by the
copies ; but we know that their estimate must
have been erroneous. Masterly as it was as an
anatomical study, it could not have had that
lofty spiritual meaning that gives to the gigan-
tic shapes that adorn the Sistine's vault or
brood above the Medicean tombs their everlast-
ing interest. Yet it is not surprising that
artists should have esteemed the cartoon so
highly. They were no more capable than the
rest of us of grasping the sense of those Titanic
forms, or of reading the secrets of their troubled
MICHELANGELO 63
souls ; but the cartoon was a matchless school
of design where all the secrets of the human
frame stood openly revealed.
Michelangelo will always be more interesting-
than Raphael. The latter, like Tennyson, was
only an artist. He lived in and for his art
alone, and expressed himself completely in it.
But with Michelangelo, great as was his work,
we feel that the man was greater still. Lofty
as is the dome of St. Peter's, terrible as is
the " Moses," mournful as are the Medicean
tombs, we feel that the soul of Michelangelo was
loftier, more terrible, more mournful than them
all. It is a rugged greatness, stern and unap-
proachable ; but at heart he is kind and tender,
filled with unspeakable pity for the miseries of
man, with burning protest against his wrongs.
Though beneath his touch the marble quivers
with an elemental life, and on the barren wall
there spring into being forms of supernatural
power, we feel that much is still unuttered,
that within that prodigious soul there are
oceans of woe and whirlwinds of passion too
great for brush or chisel to articulate. ^Ra-
phael lived in an ideal world that was all his
64 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
own, serenely indifferent to the tempests that
were raging round. With Michelangelo the
Florentine patriotism and devotion to liberty
4F
lose even above his love for art. He was first
S man and then an artist, and he was a part of
the storm and stress of contemporary life.
If Raphael availed himself too freely of the
labors of others, Michelangelo went to the
opposite extreme of excluding reasonable
co-operation. He wore himself out in rough-
hewing the marble when a common stone-
cutter could have done it as well ; and therefore,
considering the duration of a life prolonged to
the ninetieth year and the robust health which
he enjoyed, the amount of work that he has
left, particularly in stone, seems limited, and
very little of that has been finished in every
part. Had he done like the modern sculptor,
merely making a figure of clay and leaving to
his workmen the task of turning it into a
statue, his amazing energy and inexhaustible
fertility would have enabled him to fill the
world with masterpieces; but it is doubtful
whether any of them would have had upon
their brows the seal of supreme greatness,
MICHELANGELO 6$
whether all of them together would have been
worth one of these astounding creations sprung
entirely from that mighty hand and that tre-
mendous brain. Still we can easily conceive
how he could have availed himself to a greater
degree of the services of others in doing the
rough work of shaping his statues, and in that
way have doubled his artistic production with-
out a loss of power. But we must accept
genius with its limitations. His solitariness
was inseparable from his greatness. Like the
lion, he stalked alone. His quarry would have
been larger had he availed himself of the assist-
ance of the jackals ; but they were hateful in
his sight, and he hunted by himself.
In our own days we have seen the art of
music culminate in a genius worthy to stand
beside Michelangelo, and have beheld his death
followed by a decline like that which ensued
when the mighty Florentine had passed away.
A few years ago, when Wagner was pouring
out his prodigious music-dramas, it was felt
that at last the true dramatic music had been
discovered, and that we should have a series
of great operas of ever increasing power. He
5
66 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
died, and there fell a silence so profound that
the slender flute of Mascagni resounded
throughout the world.
So it was after the death of Michelangelo.
Some artists went to the other extreme, like a
relaxed bow, and painted pictures of sugared
sweetness, which found a ready popularity;
but the majority of the public, having become
accustomed to the grandeur of Michelangelo's
style, demanded that it should be continued ;
and many of the artists themselves, fascinated
by its power and forgetting their own limi-
tations, strove to imitate it. The pigmies,
encumbered by the giant's armor, rattled pain-
fully along, stumbling at every step. Where
he was dramatic, they were theatrical ; where he
was vigorous, they were hysterical ; where
he was awful, they were grotesque, and the
almost superhuman power of the master be-
came one of the most potent influences in the
decline of art.
In one respect Michelangelo was less fortu-
nate than Wagner. He survived his genera-
tion, to sit alone like Marius upon the ruins of
Carthage, brooding over the desolation and
MICHELANGELO 6/
shrouded in the gloom of the descending night.
If Wagner has had no successors, he at least
passed away surrounded by contemporaries
worthy of his genius and with every reason to
hope that music would take yet bolder flights ;
but the illustrious artists with whom Michel-
angelo had been associated preceded him to
the tomb, and he lived to see art decline from
Raphael to Giovanni Penni, from himself to
Baccio Bandinelli, and to stand like some
glorious mountain whose snowy summit still
remains bathed in sunlight when the world
all around lies wrapped in shadow.
Unhappily the progress of the decline is
nowhere more plainly visible than in the works
of Michelangelo himself.
At the outset of his career his efforts were
directed to the attainment of an absolute mas-
tery over the human body. By diligent study
of the living model and continual dissection of
the dead he acquired a proficiency in artistic
anatomy that has never been paralleled, and
which finds its supreme expression in the car-
toon of the " Battle of Pisa." Nothing has
ever surpassed the power and grace of these
68 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
hurrying athletes, whose movements are so
varied, so rhythmic, and so natural.
But when he had reached this point he was
not content, as almost any other artist would
have been, to repeat himself. He sought still
/higher flights. No longer satisfied with the
( mere beauty and strength of the body, he de-
J termined to make it the vehicle for the expres-
A sion of the deepest passions and the loftiest
v^aspirations of humanity. A technical skill, a
perfect knowledge, which others would have
considered an end in themselves, were with
him only the beginning, only a stepping-stone
from which he might mount to higher things.
It was in this period of his perfect development
that he produced the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel, the " Moses," and the Medicean
tombs, figures that are still almost, if not
quite, as realistically true as the " Pisan Bat-
tle," but in which the soul utters the burden
of its grandest thoughts.
/"But with the " Last Judgment " the decline
[. /begins. These prodigious figures, with their
muscles like knotted ropes, their surprising
lattitudes, their amazing foreshortenings, are
MICHELANGELO 69
still immensely powerful, but they pass the
modesty of nature. The era of mannerism
has set in it is no longer nature that the
master imitates, but himself, and his strength
has become exaggeration. In the paintings of
the Pauline Chapel the end has come the
divine fire has burnt out nature has been for-
gotten, and mannerism alone remains.
Yet even now, when he has lost his empire
over his own peculiar domain and the powers
of the Titan seem exhausted, he invades
another field, and, designing the dome of St.
Peter's, so prodigious in its size, so harmonious
in its proportions, so strong and yet so beauti-
ful, he achieves the grandest triumph of modern
architecture.
Ages have passed, but he still remains the
greatest name in art. The Greeks have none
to compare with him. Phidias was only a
sculptor, Ictinus only an architect, Apelles
only a painter. Michelangelo was a sculptor
by profession, and with extreme reluctance
did he take up the brush, but only to project
upon the Sistine's vault the sublimest forms
that painting has produced. With still greater
7<D RENAISSANCE MASTERS
reluctance he took up the compass, but only to
give the world the crowning glory of St. Peter's
_dome. As painter, architect, or sculptor he
has had no superior, and in his supreme mas-
; tery of the three he stands unapproached and
unapproachable.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
(1452-1519)
IN Venice a painter was usually only a painter,
a sculptor only a sculptor ; but in Florence
it was customary for the same man to practice
all the arts. Giotto was the foremost painter
and architect of his day, and in sculpture he
attained no mean distinction. And such was
the case with many of his successors, until the
school culminated in Michelangelo, who stood
pre-eminent in all.
But of Florentine versatility Leonardo is Jthe
supreme expression. He embraced not only
all the arts, but all the sciences. He was dis-
tinguished as a military and civil engineer, as a
geologist, geographer, and astronomer; he re-
discovered the principles of the lever and
hydraulics ; he was a great mathematician and
machinist, an anatomist, a physiologist, and a
71
?2 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
chemist. He invented more mechanical de-
vices than any man that ever lived unless it be
Edison, some of them merely wonderful toys
that delighted or terrified his contemporaries,
others serviceable implements that are still in
use, like the saws employed to-day at the quar-
ries of Carrara, or the hoisting apparatus with
which the obelisks of London and New York
were lifted into position. He designed breech-
loading cannon, and demonstrated the advan-
tages of conical bullets. He invented the
camera-obscura and boats that ran with wheels,
and foresaw that the latter could be propelled
by steam. He planned the great works of en-
gineering that have controlled the courses of
the Arno and the Po, and put a stop to their
destructive floods. Not content to walk upon
the earth, he devoted much time to the con-
trivance of a flying-machine, studying the
flight of birds, and trying to devise an instru-
ment that could soar on extended wings above
the mountains.
But it was in penetrating the secrets of
Nature that he is most amazing. She who
I guards her secrets so carefully from us all, so
I
LEONARDO DA VINCI 73
that we have to wrest them from her bit by
bit, considering ourselves fortunate if after a
lifetime of toil we have lifted but a little corner
of the veil, welcomed him to her bosom with
outstretched arms, and whispered into his ears
her most hidden mysteries. He walked be-
side the sea, and he understood that the waters
were composed of countless molecules. He
watched the billows in their rhythmical advance,
and he comprehended that light and sound
moved onward in succeeding waves. He trod
the mountain summits, and he knew that they
had been the bottom of the ocean when the
fossil shells had been deposited there, and that
they had since been raised aloft. He looked
into the heavens, and perceived that the world
was not the centre of created things, forestall-
ing the discovery of Copernicus; and he saw
that the universe was held together by the at-
traction of gravitation. He gazed at the
faintly illumined body of the new moon, and
divined that it was the earth's reflection that
lit it up. He loved all plants and animals, and
comprehended their structure and their growth.
He knew that the tides obeyed the moon, and
74 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
that the waters of the sea must rise highest at
the equator. And long before Bacon was born
he perceived the barrenness of the scholastic
philosophy, and laid down the principles of
inductive reasoning. And yet, though he saw
deeper into Nature than any one man ever
saw, it is doubtful whether he ever took the
trouble to mention his discoveries to a human
being, contenting himself to set them down in
those note-books written in strange characters
running from right to left, and which we are
now only beginning to decipher, continually
surprised by some unexpected flash of preter-
natural insight, and saddened to find that many
a secret that we have since wrested from Na-
ture with infinite toil was known to him and
noted in his memoranda; while other notes
which now seem obscure and incomprehensible
are perhaps only revelations of a penetration
transcending ours, and will one day be seen to
foreshadow discoveries the most profound.
And yet science was only the diversion of
his leisure hours. He was by profession an
artist, inscribing himself as a Florentine painter,
and practicing also architecture and sculpture,
LEONARDO DA VINCI 75
poetry and music. The beauty of his person
fascinated every beholder, while the charms of
his eloquence enchanted every ear; and in ad-
dition to his multifold occupations he was an
accomplished courtier, the best swordsman of
his time, and the leader of the brilliant revels
and pageants in which the age rejoiced.
It is not surprising that as a youth in Flor-
ence he was courted and admired as youth has
never been since the days of Alcibiades, or that
when he went to Milan he took the court by
storm. As he appeared before the duke in the
strength and beauty of his early manhood with
his hair falling in luxurious ringlets below his
waist, holding in his hand his wonderful lute
that he had fashioned of silver in the likeness
of a horse's head and from which he drew
notes sweeter than living man had heard, im-
provising songs accompanied by music of his
own composing, sung in tones of richest mel-
ody, it must have seemed to the assembled
courtiers that the heavens had opened and that
Apollo Citharaedus was standing in their midst.
That a man of such varied occupations
should have produced little in art is not sur-
76 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
prising ; but that that little should be so per-
fect is astonishing, so rare is the combination
of scientific and artistic genius, so difficult is it
to look into the essence of things and yet be
charmed with the beauty of their external
forms. Yet there can be no doubt that among
the countless works produced by that desire
of beauty that dwells in every heart, none
rank higher than the few that we owe to Leo-
nardo's hand.
Modern criticism has done a great deal for
the reputation of the masters. It has freed
them from responsibility for many unworthy
productions ascribed to them by the vanity
and self-interest of successive owners. But in
Leonardo's case the result is in the highest
degree confusing. A few years ago the Euro-
pean galleries numbered many pictures con-
ceded to his brush. The critics began their
work of demolition, and there are no two whose
lists agree ; while of the numerous paintings
once attributed to him only the cartoon of the
Royal Academy, the " Mona Lisa" and the
decaying fresco of the " Last Supper" are
admitted by all to be authentic. His works
LEONARDO DA VINCI 77
are the field where the modern criticism that
has done so much for art is most vulnerable to
the ridicule of its enemies. Still the doubt as
to the genuineness of the paintings accredited
to him does not greatly detract from their
value as an insight into the character of his
style. If not from his hand they are from
craftsmen of his school, and in his genius their
inspiration must be sought.
Fecundity is almost an essential element of
greatness. It is scarcely possible for a single
work, however perfect, to entitle its author to
a seat among the mighty witness Gray's Elegy
and Poe's Raven ; and it is doubtful whether
any other man so deficient in fecundity as
Leonardo was ever numbered with the greatest.
Yet no voice has been lifted to dispute his rank
among the master spirits of all time.
J$y what qualities has Leonardo been raised
to this pre-eminence ? Tojp_egin with, he was
the first perfect painter among the moderns.
Compared with him, his predecessors are all
primitives. Between their art and his there
yawns an immense chasm. They are striving
with doubtful success to give tangible form to
?8 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
simple ideas; he bodies forth with consummate
power thoughts too subtle and profound for
vocal utterance. Childlike and sincere, their
vision ranges over a narrow field, and depicts
imperfectly the things that it beholds; while
his powerful mind grasps the most hidden
secrets of Nature and of the human heart, and
his wizard fingers transfer them to the canvas
with unerring skill. They are still mediaeval,
while he is modern, belonging not to the past
but to our own and all succeeding generations,
one of those marvellous geniuses who outrun
their time, like Omar Khayyam questioning
the Deity among the blind followers of Ma-
homet, or like Shakespeare writing the solilo-
quies of Hamlet. In passing to his works from
those of the most illustrious of his predecessors
we perceive none of that gradual transition that
we usually meet. Their art is an attempt his
the perfection of achievement. They are
^JLtui^C^
fascinating by their immaturity, he by the
plenitude of his power. They are suggestive
because we seek to realize what they were try-
^***f$^*-%+*-*4.
ing to express; he is infinitely more so because
he represents more than our minds can seize.
LEONARDO DA VINCI 79
Of all artists Giotto alone has so far outleaped
the men who went before. In the singular
letter which Leonardo wrote to the Duke
of Milan in his youth he said, " In painting I
can do what can be done as well as any man,
be he who he may," and his boast stands as
good now as on the day when it was made.
The first of the great triumvirate of art in point
ofjime, he remains the most modern in the
spirit of his work. We feel that he was familiar
with all the thoughts that haunt us now, per-
haps with some that will only come to our re-
mote descendants. He was the first modern
artist in whom absolute technical skill and a
great creative mind went hand in hand, and in
neither respect has he ever been surpassed.
To Leonardo also must be accorded the
supreme glory of being the first modern to in-
vent grandeur of style. Before his day there /
were strong and beautiful pictures, but the
" Last Supper " was the first that was truly
grand. And it is the genuine grandeur which
depends not on largeness of dimensions, but
which arises from the harmonious combination
of nobility and simplicity, and shines forth in
80 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
the smallest woodcut of the immortal work.
Every line of the majestic composition, how-
ever reduced in size, is marked by a grandeur
which was a revelation to his contemporaries,
and for the like of which they had to return to
the shattered marbles of Greece. .1 The picture
reminds one of Handel's music, which can be
properly rendered only by a mighty organ or a
full orchestra, and yet whose simple grandeur
is apparent when it is played upon a flute. Its
painting was like the discovery of some majes-
tic harmony in nature of which men had never
dreamed. In these thirteen figures seated at a
table in a bare room with windows outlooking
upon an extended prospect there is a dignity,
an elevation, a majesty that came as an aston-
ishment to the world ; while in the varied yet
harmonious arrangement of the several groups,
the full capacities of composition were first
disclosed. When the picture was completed it
was hailed as the masterpiece of painting, and
succeeding ages have but joined in the acclaim.
From Uggione's great copy in the Royal
Academy to the cheapest print that adorns the
humblest cottage every reproduction of it con-
LEONARDO DA VINCI 8 1
veys some impression of the grandeur of the
original which, faded, repainted, and defaced,
still charms us by the majesty of its shadowy
outlines. If Leonardo had produced nothing
else, his title to rank with the greatest could
never be gainsaid. Grandeur of style is the
highest merit that a work of art can possess,
and of that supreme distinction he is the in-
ventor. Had he never lived it might have
been discovered by Michelangelo or Raphael;
but who can say that without the " Last Sup-
per " we should ever have had the " Creation
of Man " or the " School of Athens " ? Had
Columbus never sailed upon the Western seas
another might have planted his foot upon
America's shores; but the glory of the dis-
covery is justly his; and we cannot determine
with certainty what Raphael and Michelangelo
would have done had not Leonardo taught
them how such miracles are wrought.
No man ever had such a mastery of facial
expression. In portraying the human counte-
nance he has the same undisputed supremacy
that Michelangelo possesses in dealing with
the human form. He looked quite through
6
82 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
the souls of men, and fixed them on his sketch-
book or the canvas with unequalled skill. No
expression is too violent or too grotesque to be
depicted there, none too delicate or too evanes-
cent. He understood the whole gamut of
human feelings, the fiercest passions, the most
fleeting sensations. His whole life was a study
of the faces that he met, and the exquisite re-
finement and accuracy of his drawing enabled
him to fasten forever the surging frenzy of the
storm or the shade that passed over the face for
a moment like the shadow of a summer cloud.
When occasion required, the meaning could
be plain and comprehensible at a glance, as in
the " Last Supper," where were to be seen all
the manifestations of horror and amazement
exhibited by strong men as Christ uttered the
words, " One of you shall betray me." In
the " Battle of Anghiari," or the " Battle of
the Standard," as it is commonly called, the
first great battle piece of modern times, we
have every aspect of rage and fury of which
the countenance of man or beast was ever
capable.
Nowhere can we better contrast Leonardo,
LEONARDO DA VINCI 83
Michelangelo, and Raphael than in their three
great battle pieces. In Raphael's " Battle of
Constantine " we are attracted by the harmony
and rhythm of the contending masses, the
beauty of the composition, the pomp, pride,
and circumstance of glorious war. In Michel-
angelo's " Battle of Pisa "it is the muscular
development of the hurrying athletes. But
with Leonardo it is the psychological interest
the unspeakable rage of the struggling
soldiers. His ancestors had known nothing
of real war. The contests of the Italian mer-
cenaries were little more than jousts and tour-
neys, where fatalities were rare. But in his
day the French, Germans, and Spaniards had
made Italy the battle-ground of Europe, and
had shown its inhabitants how war was carried A/
on by the barbarians across the Alps. Leo-
nardo beheld it, and it seemed to him, in his
own words, a most bestial frenzy. As such he
has depicted it, and beside his masterpiece all
other representations of the rage of battle are
weak and tame. The insane fury, the fiendish
hunger for blood that has changed the combat-
ants into wild beasts having only the outward
84 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
semblance of humanity extends even to the
horses, which fight savagely, tearing each other
with their teeth with all the ferocity of tigers.
There is nothing glorious here all is fierce,
realistic, horrible, the truest, strongest, most
merciless picture of the human brute ravening
for slaughter that has ever been drawn. In
Raphael's painting we see war as it looks to
the leaders from afar; in Michelangelo's, war
as it appears to the soldiers preparing for the
conflict; while Leonardo gives us war as it is
in fact, in all its nameless horror.
Leonardo's cartoon, like Michelangelo's, has
disappeared, and we know it only by the
copies ; but in his Treatise on Painting he gives
us the best description of the appearance of a
battle that has ever been penned, and as we
know that he had the power to body forth
every vision of his teeming brain, we have no
reason to doubt that all the smoke and dust,
the confusion, the frenzy and despair of which
he speaks were to be seen in this cartoon.
Even as it has come down to us it stands un-
rivalled as a representation of war in its psy-
chological significance.
LEONARDO DA VINCI 85
But while Leonardo thus excelled all others
in depicting the violent passions of men, he
delighted most in delineating faces of a charm
so delicate and subtle that they remain as
fathomless as those Alpine lakes whose smiling
surface conceals abysmal depths. Upon most
of them there is that strange smile extend-
ing no further than the lips which he inherited
from his master Verrocchio, but which beneath
his magic touch changed from a pleasing smirk
to a thing of profound and fascinating mystery.
It is seen in its perfection on the lips of the
" Mona Lisa," that marvellous portrait which
Francis I. purchased at a price then almost un-
heard of, and whose riddle succeeding genera-
tions have striven in vain to read. In the
Louvre she is still sitting, and every passer is
constrained to stop, lured by that smile as by
a siren's song, vainly demanding why she
smiles and with what intent. Has she ex-
hausted all the possibilities of pain and joy ;
has she wandered through the streets of Sodom
and by the waters of Damascus ; has she hung
her harp upon the willows of Babylon ; has she
danced with Messalina and supped with Nero;
86 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
and does she smile to behold our innocence ?
Has she sat with Apollo beside the Castalian
stream, and is she still listening to the Muses'
song ? Is she thinking of her liege lord Gio-
condo, or dreaming of some guilty love ? Is
it good or evil that is in those haunting eyes
and on those smiling lips ? Perhaps Walter
Pater, whose peculiar and super-refined genius
brings him very close to Leonardo, has best
divined her meaning:
" The presence that thus rose so strangely
beside the waters, is expressive of what in the
ways of a thousand years man had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all ' the
ends of the world are come/ and the eyelids
are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little
cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic
reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek god-
desses or beautiful women of antiquity, and
how would they be troubled by this beauty
into which the soul with all its maladies has
passed ? All the thoughts and experience of
the world have etched and moulded there, in
LEONARDO DA VINCI 8?
that which they have of power to refine and
make expressive the outward form, the animal-
ism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of
the middle age with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan
world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older
than the rocks among which she sits ; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and
learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been
a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day
about her ; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants ; and, as Leda, was the
mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne,
the mother of Mary ; and all this has been to
her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and
lives only in the delicacy with which it has
moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged
the eyelids and the hands." *
Many others have sought to read her riddle,
but she remains the most insoluble of mysteries,
and pursues us with a haunting power pos-
sessed by no other work save perhaps the " Mel-
ancholia " of Albert Pjir^r.
And this same charm is in the faces of all
* The Renaissance, p. 134.
88 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
his women, in those Madonnas which are so
fascinating as revelations of subtlest woman-
hood, and in his countless sketches of female
heads. No man has ever penetrated so deeply
into woman's heart, none has ever felt so
strongly the enchantment of the eternal
womanly, or transferred it to canvas with such
consummate skill.
He is not a lover of physical beauty. His
types, if robbed of the charm of expression
that transfigures them, would rarely be beauti-
ful at all. His is a beauty that works from
within outward, which existed in the soul be-
fore it manifested itself in the face. Take it
away, and the features attract no more some-
times they would be merely commonplace,
more frequently they would be simply strange.
It is not all beauty that is suited to artistic
treatment. Many exquisitely beautiful women
are fit only for the adornment of a fashion plate
they lack that nameless distinction which a
picture must possess to be classed as art. This
fashion-plate beauty made no appeal to Leo-
nardo. He did not even value it at its worth.
The only beauty that he cared for was the
LEONARDO DA VINCI 89
purely artistic beauty, beauty so thoroughly
artistic that only the elect can realize the full
extent of its subtle fascination.
It is everywhere in Leonardo's genuine
work, in the " Mona Lisa," in the Academy
cartoon, in the " Madonna of the Rocks " of
the National Gallery, in " La Vierge aux
Rochers " and the " St. Anne " of the Louvre.
Deprived of the refined, sensitive soul that
shines through their eyes and quivers on their
lips they would be plain enough ; but he who
is insensible to their enthralling magic may
well despair of ever comprehending art in its
most exquisite manifestations.
Leonardo's figures are the most spiritual '
that have ever been drawn. Beside them
Michelangelo's are only athletes, Raphael's
only innocents upon whose unstained brows
sorrow and sin and love and hate have set no
mark. Leonardo's have lived this life and
drunk its cup of joy and anguish to the lees
lived it with minds intensely active and nerves
vibrating to passion's every thrill, and it is
with their souls that they have lived souls
that have trembled with rapture and quivered
9O RENAISSANCE MASTERS
with pain, and which have learned the lesson
that their lives could teach. But they are not
spiritual in the sense of religious. He was not
a saintly man, and Vasari says in his firsc edi-
tion, probably not without reason, that he was
an unbeliever. But in humanity it was the
spiritual essence that concerned him and not
the fleshly envelope.
Of all artists he was the greatest anatomist,
unless it be Michelangelo. But how differently
they studied and for what different ends!
Michelangelo studied anatomy only to see what
he could do with the human frame as a means
of artistic expression. Leonardo investigated
it as a scientific fact, and competent judges
declare that his anatomical drawings are the
most accurate that have ever been made.
Michelangelo loved the body, and rejoiced to
portray its strength and beauty. Leonardo
painted no nude figure save the " Leda,"
which has disappeared, and even there it was
the expression of the face that struck the be-
holder, not the beauty of the form; and his
sketches and drawings of the nude are hasty
and defective. It was in the face that his art
LEONARDO DA VINCI 91
was centred, in the representation of the soul
shining through mortal lineaments. Perhaps
no one was ever so exclusively a painter of the
soul.
And as usual, exclusive devotion met with
its reward. He caught the soul in the mo-
ments when it seems most hidden to mortal
sight, when it was listening to the music of the
spheres, when it was wandering among dreams
of unspeakable raptures and impossible sins,
when it strayed with the women of Gomorrah
or sat by the waters of Lethe.
No man ever painted faces of such subtle
charm or of so unsearchable a meaning; and
as we stand before them we are impelled to in-
quire whether they were mysteries also to him,
or whether those penetrating eyes of his which
saw so deeply into Nature's secrets could also
read their strange enigmas. To us they remain
as inscrutable as they are fascinating, and be-
cause their riddle remains unread they haunt
us yet with their inscrutable smile.
There are no women whom men could love
like Leonardo's, and none perchance whose
love would be so dangerous. Age could not
Q2 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
wither them, nor custom stale their infinite
variety. Their empire would not be based
upon the passing attractions of the flesh, but
upon all that is subtle and alluring in the soul
of woman. With the witchery of their smile
they could change their lovers into brutes or
lift them into heroes. They would be forever
new because the shadowy depths of their being
could never be sounded, and leaden-eyed
Satiety would not wait upon their multiform
caresses. They might be the sirens, the lamias,
the vampires of old; they might be Lais or
Cleopatra; to their subtle genius all things
would be possible, and the man who fell be-
neath the magic of their spell would find re-
lease in death alone. When his soul was once
caught in the witchery of that mysterious
smile or in the shining meshes of those locks
waving in uncontrolled luxuriance or bound in
intricate braids above the arching brows, it
might struggle as a butterfly in the web, but
never could it burst its bonds.
But it was not alone in the grandeur of his
style or in his unequalled capacity to delineate
the varying expressions of the human counte-
LEONARDO DA VINCI 93
nance that Leonardo advanced beyond his pred-
ecessors ; no man has ever made greater
changes in the technic of painting. Before
his day men were content with line and color
as the means of artistic utterance. He was
the first to perceive that light and shade were
equally important, and were capable of pro-
ducing the most poetical and illusive effects.
He did not invent chiaroscuro, but he was the /
first to handle it as a master. In his pictures
lights and shadows are treated with all the
truth of nature, and they are full of bewitching
loveliness, of mystery and charm. His chiar-
oscuro is not brilliant like Correggio's, it is not
full of luminous splendor like that of Rem-
brandt; but it is deep and true. He experi-
mented much with pigments, and as the effect
of time upon them could only be determined
with the lapse of years, he fell into errors never
sufficiently to be deplored, which have lost for
us the " Last Supper " and the portion of the
" Battle of the Standard " that was executed
upon the wall, and whose effects are only too
visible in all his works. To deepen his shadows
he painted upon a sombre groundwork, and ,/
94 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
the pigment of this having come through, it
has darked all his pictures. The wonderful
flesh tints of the " Mona Lisa" which filled
Vasari with admiration have disappeared, and
it is only with difficulty that we can distin-
guish the fantastic rocks and meandering
streams that fill the background. To convince
ourselves that this darkening is not essential to
the most perfect light and shade we need only
turn to the other wall of the Salon Carr6 on
which hangs Correggio's " Jupiter and An-
tiope," still as bright as on the day when it
left the painter's hand. But as Raphael and
Michelangelo learned from Leonardo the
grandeur of their style, so Correggio owes to
him the bewitching charm of his chiaroscuro.
Some complain of Leonardo that he enticed
men from the pleasant paths of primitive art
so that after him it was impossible to paint
with the old simple directness. The observa-
tion is just, but the reproach unfounded. No
work can combine every merit, and every gain
implies a corresponding loss. There can be
no increase of power without some loss of deli-
cacy, and what we gain in depth we lose in
LEONARDO DA VINCI 95
simplicity. A man who innovated so much as
Leonardo, who converted the works of his pred-
ecessors into relics of the past, and lifted art
to a higher and a broader plane, necessarily
bore it away from many a sweet dell where at
times we still delight to linger; but his services
were none the less conspicuous. He did
nothing to degrade art ; he only exalted it to
a perfection where certain charming qualities
of the delicious primitives became impossible ;
and if their pictures grow brighter and mellower
with time while his have steadily darkened,
that is due to the accidental use of unsatisfac-
tory pigments and to the absence in their
works of those delicate gradations of light and
shade so essential to artistic truth.
Nature never loved a son as she loved
Leonardo, and to none other has she opened
her bosom with such unreserve. And he re-
turned her love with an equal devotion. She
was his sole monitor, his only example. To
her he went in all his perplexities ; from her he
gathered every truth. While his contempo-
raries were all powerfully affected by the re-
mains of antique art, for him it did not exist.
96 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
Only once in his Treatise on Painting does he
mention the Greeks and Romans, and then
not as objects of artistic imitation. The plas-
tic beauty of form and feature that they ad-
mired meant nothing for him ; the mysterious
beauty of the soul for which he sought would
have been incomprehensible to them. Amidst
the countless faces that his sketch-books have
preserved there is perhaps not one of classic
purity of outline. Neither are they mediaeval,
like Botticelli's. They are modern or, rather,
they belong to all ages where the soul of man
suffers and pants and yearns and is rejoiced.
But though Leonardo turns so persistently
to Nature, he was not a realist. He was never
content with commonplace ugliness. He
sought to penetrate Nature's remotest con-
fines and pluck the rarest and most delicate
flowers that blossom there unseen by common
eyes. He was a seeker after things that are
beautiful and exotic, the exquisite orchids, fed
by the air and the dew, that bloom in life's
tangled garden. It is Nature that attracts
him, but it is Nature in her most refined and
subtlest revelations.
LEONARDO DA VINCI 97
His devotion to Nature is apparent not only
in his studies of the human countenance,
but in his treatment of every leaf and flower.
He paints them with a skill, a tenderness, an
accuracy, which reveal not merely his botanical
knowledge, but his affection. He loved all
living things, and he would spend large sums
in buying birds that he might open their cages
and watch them fly away. In his long study
for Sforza's statue he acquired the most
thorough comprehension of the anatomy and
movements of the horse that any man has ever
possessed, and he was so attached to his horses
that in the moments of his greatest adversity
nothing could induce him to part with them.
His fondness extended even to inanimate
nature, particularly when it manifested itself
in unusual forms; and he paints his fantastic
rocks with the same care as his Madonna's
smile.
One of the things that he loved most was
human hair. His own was the admiration of
his contemporaries, and he loved hair in all its
multifold shapes and varying colors, and
painted it with an unequalled patience of de-
7
98 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
tail,. so that each gleaming thread is distinctly
seen. It appears to fascinate him, and he
represents it in every conceivable way, now
freely flowing, now arranged in intricate de-
signs of marvellous conception.
And to the same love of Nature we owe that
interest in all things strange and curious that
seems to have been the strongest passion of
his life. Rare plants and flowers, singular ani-
mals, above all, fantastic rocks such as haunt
the dreams of poets, and unusual faces, having
in them something extraordinary, whether of
ugliness or beauty, had for him a resistless
charm. Insects and reptiles of the most hid-
eous aspect, countenances the most grotesque
and repulsive, allured him as much as forms of
benignity and grace. He would gather rude
peasants about him and excite them to laugh-
ter by unseemly jests that he might fix upon
his note-book their bestial mirth. He would
stand beside the dying criminal, and watch
him writhing in the agony of the execution ;
or he would follow a crippled beggar that he
might preserve the record of his deformity.
All that was abnormal, all that was strange and
LEONARDO DA VINCI 99
curious, had for him an attraction in no way
dependent on its inherent worth.
His fondness for strange things is also mani-
fested in that fashion of writing from right to
left, which makes his manuscripts so difficult
to decipher that a great part of them still re-
tain their secrets. Some writers have accounted
for it by those wanderings through the East
which his papers seem to put beyond question,
though Vasari knew nothing of them; but
many have travelled there without that result.
Others, again, explain it by the fact that he
was left-handed ; but the world is full of left-
handed men who still write in the normal man-
ner. It could only have been a part of that
seeking after strange things that was an es-
sential element of his genius.
Was it this same love of Nature that caused
him to paint St. John as a smiling faun such
as thronged the forests when Greece was
young ? A face closer to Nature in her smiling
moods it would be difficult to find. He is one
of the joyous children of universal Pan, such a
face as we should look to see peering out of
the thicket in spring when a bird is singing on
IOO RENAISSANCE MASTERS
every bough and every bramble is a mass of
flowers. He is not the pale anchorite of the
desert, the voice crying in the wilderness. He
is not even Christian. By a kinship of soul,
by the same love for the beauty of woodland
nature, Leonardo has returned unconsciously
to the early pagan spirit, and has created a
type which is perhaps the most profoundly
pagan of any that we possess; and the pupil
who has taken the same conception, crowned
it with vine-leaves and converted it into the
beautiful " Bacchus " that sits in the Louvre
beside the " St. John ' ' had a truer sense of the
character of the work.
Leonardo is the most thoughtful of all
painters unless it be Albert Durer. The mind
and its infinite suggestions are his realm.
.! With Raphael it is beauty and harmony, with
Michelangelo it is passion and strength, with
him it is thought and feeling thought so deep
that voice can never utter it, feelings so sensi-
tively delicate, so preternaturally refined that
they elude our grasp; and he is full of all
sorts of curious questionings, of intricate ca-
prices mingled with sublime conceptions. No
LEONARDO DA VINCI IOI
mind of power so versatile and penetrating
was ever devoted to artistic effort. The time
that he spent in scientific investigation has
been regretted, but it was not lost, even to
art. Had he been less intent to know the
hidden mystery of things he might have pro-
duced more; but would it have been worth
the smile of the " Mona Lisa" or the faces
of the Academy cartoon ? The world is full of
commonplace painters whose production is un-
limited ; is it not better to have the few master-
pieces of Leonardo, full of subtle witchery
drawn from the inmost heart of nature and of
man, than all their shallow works ? We must
accept him as he is. His mind was too vast,
too subtle, for him to be a largely creative
artist. He saw too deeply into the essence of
things to be content with facile hand to depict
their surfaces. His visions were so beautiful
that he despaired of giving them tangible
shapes, and preferred to leave them in the
realm of dreams. Perhaps he cared not to
bring them forth to public view, just as he was
content with merely jotting down in his note-
book discoveries which we have since remade
IO2 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
with infinite toil. Perhaps he wished to do
more than art could, and so accomplished less
than it might. But the little that we possess
gives us a deeper insight into nature and the
human heart than we should otherwise have
had, and is as precious as it is rare. Had he
not been so curious of other things he would
have painted more, but he could not have
painted as he did.
Of Leonardo we have only one authentic
portrait, a powerful drawing in red chalk by
his own hand, representing himself in his old
age, and it is the saddest portrait that was
ever made. It is a strong face with beetling
brows and piercing eyes, but its expression is
one of bitterest disenchantment. He is the
man to whom Nature had opened her bosom
as to no other that ever lived, who read as in
an open book the most hidden secrets of the
human heart, and the only result is an inex-
pressible bitterness, an unutterable scorn for
man and perhaps for Nature. With all his
Herculean strength, he died of exhaustion at
sixty-seven, an age at which Michelangelo
and Titian were in their prime, and we can
LEONARDO DA VINCI 103
imagine him upon his death-bed muttering
to himself, " Vanity of Vanities, all is Van-
ity. He who increaseth Knowledge increaseth
Sorrow."
TITIAN
IN Titian the Renaissance culminates. The
revolt against the Middle Ages, which be-
gan timidly with Niccolo Pisano, achieved in
him its completest triumph. Raphael com-
promised with the past, and fused the mediaeval
and classic conceptions into a new ideal of ever-
lasting beauty. Rejecting the mediaeval spirit,
Titian, although he painted some of the noblest
of religious pictures, was essentially a pagan,
with all a Greek's joy in the dignity of man,
the beauty of woman, and the charm of nature ;
loving them for what they are, and with no
vain aspirations toward a higher spiritual life.
Most of the Renaissance masters are still strug-
gling with the Middle Age, endeavoring with
only partial success to escape from the prison
in which it has confined their souls. Titian
104.
TITIAN IO5
has conquered his freedom, or rather was
born free, and if the Middle Age exists for
him at all, it is only as a hideous nightmare
which he has almost forgotten in the golden
sunshine of a perfect day. Life, which to
the mediaeval conception was only a gloomy
portal leading to death and judgment, is to
him a thing of infinite beauty, dignity, and
health.
We are only now recovering the position to
which Titian had attained. The Protestant
Reformation, followed by the Catholic Reac-
tion, the Spanish Inquisition, and the religious
wars, swept away the bright spirit of youthful
joy and freedom which thrilled the men of the
Italian Renaissance, and plunged the world
into a darkness almost as black and even
bloodier and more hideous than the night of
the Middle Ages. This terrible tempest of
bigotry and wrath has thundered past us, and
for two hundred years the clouds that it left
behind have been drifting slowly by, so that
at length we can again look at the world with
Titian's eyes, rejoicing in its life and beauty,
though rather with the saddened gaze of his
106 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
later years than with the idyllic freshness of
his early prime.
In his broad sanity, his masterful serenity,
his perfect control of the resources of his art,
he reminds us of Goethe in his Olympian days
at Weimar; but unlike Goethe he had no
Gothic period, no season of storm and stress.
From the time when he came to Venice, look-
ing with the wonder of a mountain lad on the
dazzling splendor of the Ocean's Queen, until
in his hundredth year he laid down his brush
at the summons of the plague, he is ever the
same, with an unchanging sense of the dignity
of life and of nature's beauty, with the same
broad comprehension of humanity, and the
same exclusive devotion to his art. We see
the tree grow until its branches reach far and
wide, but its symmetrical form remains un-
altered. To the end of his unexampled career
he follows the same path, ever upward and on-
ward, patiently, firmly, without haste and
without rest. The joy of existence and the
love of beauty for its own sake never desert
him, and the Venuses which he painted when
oppressed by the burden of a century have all
TITIAN ID/
the voluptuous charm of those that he depicted
in his lusty manhood. Who that looks upon
the " Sleeping Antiope " of the Louvre or the
" Venus and her Nymphs Equipping Cupid "
of the Borghese Gallery, would imagine that
they are the work of one who had already at-
tained an age that few indeed have reached ?
In the handling of the brush he was the
greatest painter of all time. Others may be
more inspired, but in brush-work he surpasses
everyone. He can paint with the detail of
Albert Diirer or the breadth of Velasquez, and
seems to exhaust every possibility of his craft,
tone, color, texture, perspective, chiaroscuro,
drawing, composition. In particular qualities
there are others who can surpass him ; but no
other brings to the technic of painting a pro-
ficiency so perfect and so varied. He is the
most rounded and complete of painters, and
therefore the hardest to describe. If a man
has a phenomenally long nose or a monstrous
head, we can strike off his portrait in a few
words ; but when he is faultless in his propor-
tions, his accurate characterization becomes a
matter of extreme difficulty.
108 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
The Venetians were always the most skilful
painters of the Renaissance. Painting is color ;
and of color the Venetians were the supreme
masters. Their merchants traded with the
Levant, bringing back the gorgeous fabrics of
the East. They beheld the splendor of the
Orient, and transferred it to their city, adorn-
ing their buildings like the mosques and palaces
of Cairo and Damascus. Beneath their feet
was the emerald sea and above their heads the
azure dome of heaven. The ocean mists were
tinged with a thousand hues, while far away
were the purple summits of the Alps. And
who can tell what effect was produced upon
their art by those gorgeous sunsets across the
Lagunes that Aretino has described so well ?
What painter could look upon that pageant of
gold and crimson without wishing to preserve
it on his canvas ? Hemmed in by his moun-
tains clothed in the pale green of their olives,
a Florentine rarely saw the perfect glory of a
sunset; but the Venetian lived in an ever-
changing pageant of color. It became to him
the most essential part of life, the very sub-
stance of existing things. Every Venetian
TITIAN
painter was therefore a colorist, and of them
all v Titian is the most complete. Giorgione is
sometimes more luminous, Bonifazio brighter,
Tintoretto more startling, Veronese more
stately, and if they could all be combined in
one, Titian would be surpassed; but no one
of them has such perfect mastery of color's
varied resources. They are all limited in their
range, while he is universal. And no one ever
knew how to use color so appropriately. He
understands what exact tints will enhance the
effect of every picture. From the brilliant
hues of his bacchanals, which recall the emer-
ald islands of the sparkling ^Egean, and the
glorious splendor of his "Assumption," where
heaven's own light seems streaming through
its gates, to the darkness of his " Entomb-
ment " that so heightens the agony of the
scene, he adapts his color to his subject with a
skill that is all his own. And when we consider
that these colors which we now admire so
much have been dimmed and faded by the
lapse of more than three centuries, we may well
be amazed at the thought of what they must
have been in their pristine glory.
1 10 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
Yet this result is produced by comparatively
simple means. He was not a searcher after
strange and recondite pigments. His palette
was not peculiar, embracing only the hues
within the reach of every painter, and he dif-
fered from others only in his patient industry
and consummate skill, an industry so tireless
that he worked upon his pictures for years,
going over them again and again and altering
them repeatedly, a skill so great that many
have doubted whether it was oil that he em-
ployed, surmising that he possessed some
vehicle known to himself alone an idea that
seems to be without foundation.
Color is perhaps the most enchanting element
of beauty. The most perfect features cannot
redeem a face if the complexion be bad, while
a dazzling complexion will lend an alluring
charm to lineaments the most irregular. So,
too, color is the essence of life, as pallor is
death's most striking ensign. It is therefore
only to be expected that Titian should excel
all other painters in depicting beauty, as he
excels all save only Rubens, the mighty color-
ist of the North, in imparting a sense of vital-
TITIAN 1 1 1
ity. And while Rubens surpasses him in the
intensity of vital energy, he falls far below in
appreciation of life's dignity and grace.
It is the fashion in recent years to belittle
Titian as a religious painter ; but his are among
the most splendid religious pictures that we
possess. It is true that he treats them from a
human standpoint, but was not Christ also a
man, and were not his disciples men ? The rock
on which devotional painters split is the face of
Christ. In trying to make it divine while pre-
serving its meekness and humility they gener-
ally make it weak and unmanly. In the effort
to do more than is in the power of art, they
fall below what they might accomplish. Into
this trap Titian never falls ; and since the de-
struction of Leonardo's " Last Supper," which
was also treated from a purely human stand-
point, probably the finest head of Christ that
we possess is in Titian's " Tribute Money."
It is impossible to conceive a nobler face, or to
imagine a loftier or gentler expression of re-
proach, or a finer contrast than is presented by
the cunning Pharisee beside the exalted Christ.
And of all the glorious altar-pieces that Chris-
112 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
tian art has furnished, the most magnificent is
the " Assumption^ " It provokes comparison
with Raphael's "Transfiguration," and in this
instance the palm must be awarded to Titian.
It is a perfect composition, all centering in the
stately figure of the Madonna, to whose face
the eye is irresistibly drawn from every part of
the canvas; while Raphael's is in reality two
pictures in one, and the drama going on at the
foot of the mountain is so much fuller of
human interest than that upon the summit
that the eye lingers there instead of soaring
upward. It has been said that the figure of
the Madonna is too matronly; but Titian is
right, both in point of fact and in point of art.
The Virgin was no longer young she was the
mother of a son who had died at the age of
thirty-three, and she must have been fully as
mature as she is represented. And if you
doubt the correctness of his artistic judgment,
imagine a slender, girlish figure in the centre
of this vast composition and bearing all its
weight. The balance and majesty of the
picture would be destroyed. Then it is said
that the Apostles below are too agitated.
TITIAN 113
Even in those days it was not an every-day
affair for a person to be carried to heaven
by exultant angels. The amazement of the
Apostles was therefore natural ; and when we
consider that she who was thus snatched from
their midst by the angelic host in a burst of
light and song was one whom they loved and
reverenced with an absolute devotion, their
agitation is no greater than we should expect.
When we consider the splendor of the color,
the unity of the composition, the majesty of
the Madonna, the strength of the Apostles, the
beauty of the angels, particularly of the three
exquisite young girls upon the right, it is dif-
ficult to name another altar-piece that can stand
beside this. In particular features it may be
excelled, but as a whole it is unsurpassable.
To value aright the greater part of Titian's
religious pictures, such as the " Pesaro Ma-
donna " and the " Presentation of the Virgin
in the Temple," we must understand the re-
ligious feeling of Venice. The Venetian was
as completely absorbed in his city as a Roman
of the Republic. He lived for Venice alone,
and scarcely had a separate existence. He
8
114 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
conceived religion not so much as a matter of
personal worship as of state ceremonial. He
was first a Venetian and then a Christian. Of
the Italian cities Venice alone is personified by
her citizens like Rome, seated upon her throne
as mistress of the sea while the nations lay
their tribute at her feet. The Venetian who
looked upon her beauty saw in her the god-
dess of his idolatry, and her faith was his.
From her grandeur he derived the idea of his
stately and ceremonial religion, which in the
hands of Titian is so noble and dignified, but
which with Veronese is to degenerate into a
splendid but worldly pageant.
And it was with this conception of religion
as a state function that Titian painted. If we
consider his pictures as something to take into
our closet as a stimulus to personal devotion,
we shall be much disappointed ; but if we place
ourselves in his point of view, we shall perceive
that nothing could be worthier or more appro-
priate that the grand solemnities of a state
religion could not be more nobly rendered.
The sense of humanity which gives so much
life and interest to his religious pictures makes
TITIAN 115
of him the greatest of portrait painters. In
this line even Raphael, Rubens, Van Dyck,
and Velasquez must yield the palm to him.
The vital realism of his portraits is unsur-
passed, and is combined with a sense of human
dignity that gives them an unique distinction.
How much of this dignity was in the subject
and how much in the painter it is now impos-
sible to determine. We should deem him a
flatterer were it not that the three portraits
where he had most interest to please, those of
Paul III., Charles V., and Philip II., are so
cruelly realistic. Paul appears as a gaunt,
treacherous wolf, while it is difficult to believe
that the protruding under-jaw and sickly phy-
sique of Charles and Philip were less attractive
than they are represented. Of all his portraits
these possess perhaps the least of his peculiar
dignity, and we are forced to conclude that he
only rendered nobly the qualities which his
sitters in fact possessed.
The Venetian nobility were a superior race.
Venice gave to her nobles wealth and power,
but, as we have said, she exacted in return the
exclusive consecration of their lives. To find
Il6 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
an equal absorption of the citizen in his city
we must go back to Sparta or to Rome. The
Venetian loved Venice with an intense devo-
tion that made exile the worst of punishments,
so that, like the young Foscari, he preferred
to die at home beneath the torture rather than
to be a wanderer in foreign lands. The life of
the Venetian nobility was one of labor and
danger, and they stood at all times ready to
toil and bleed and die for Venice. Yet their
intense patriotism involved no narrowness of
view. Their commerce brought them into
contact with all the nations of the earth, and
they were continually sent on missions of war
and peace to foreign capitals. In this busy
life, with their minds full of lofty purposes and
unalterable resolve, they acquired something
of that calm, masterful dignity that made the
ambassadors of Pyrrhus see in the Roman
senate a council of the gods. Such men were
Titian's friends and associates, and their proud,
thoughtful faces he transferred to the canvas.
His own genius enabled him to understand
them, and their society helped him to attain
their level. His portraits are therefore not
TITIAN 117
merely marvels of execution they give us an
enhanced appreciation of man's dignity and
worth.
He is the painter of humanity. In the
breadth and sanity of his conception of man
and his environment he has no superior save
Shakespeare, whom he resembles in many
ways. He does not, like Raphael, idealize
human nature and lift it to a higher plane.
Like Shakespeare he accepts it as it is, but
from the herd he chooses the noblest and fair-
est types. And he is the painter of the flesh.
The mediaeval notion that the flesh is hateful
and unclean found no lodgment in his mind.
He appreciated its beauty with the simplicity
of a Greek, and had as much delight in its
representation. The forms of his women are
as rounded and voluptuous as art can make
them, but as sane and wholesome as Grecian
goddesses. He has all a Greek's joy in sensu-
ous beauty, but he is always healthy and virile,
never corrupt or coarse. Except in some cases
where he is constrained by the necessities of
portraiture, he gives to his nude Venuses
something of the dignity of Venetian senators.
Il8 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
Venetian painting was allowed to develop
along the lines of pure decoration, almost en-
tirely unaffected by those classical influences
that moulded the art of Florence. And this
was a great good fortune. The Florentine
school could not have been surpassed in its
special qualities, and as it is we have two
manifestations of artistic genius as different as
if they had grown up in remote regions of alien
race, the one the product of thought and study,
the other as spontaneously beautiful as a
flower. By their contrast each enhances the
other's interest, and both are essential to the
glorious harmony of the Renaissance.
Of all the arts painting was the one which
on its revival was least affected by the art of
antiquity. It was not until long afterward,
when Pompeii and Herculaneum were un-
covered, that men acquired any adequate con-
ception of the style of painting practised
among the ancients; and the influence of an-
tique art on painting was indirect, working
through the medium of sculpture. This is one
reason why the painting of the Renaissance is
so superior. It is spontaneous and original;
TITIAN IIQ
and particularly was this true in Venice.
There were no remains of ancient statuary to
be found in her lagunes, and she was too much
occupied with war and commerce to import
them. Her attention was directed not to the
dead past, but to the living East and her per-
ennial contest with the Turk. Yet in its spirit
Venetian painting is far nearer to Greece than
that of Florence. There was no conscious
imitation, but the Venetians were imbued with
the same sentiments a respect for the dignity
of man and a love for the beauty of nature.
And of this revived spirit of antiquity, this
new flowering of humanity, this unconscious
neo-paganism, Titian is the supreme exponent.
The first to realize it fully was Giorgione,
who revolutionized the art of Venice, so that
all men had to follow in his footsteps or be
forgotten. He was a fellow-pupil of Titian in
Bellini's workshop, and they appear to have
been born in the same year; but it seems to be
universally conceded that it was Giorgione who
invented the new style. He, however, did not
advance beyond the idyl. He felt as no artist
has ever felt the sweet poetry of nature, so
120 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
joyous and yet so near to melancholy, that we
find in Daphnis and Chloe and in Theocritus;
but he found that domain so charming that he
sought no further. Titian adopted Giorgione's
spirit and method, and in the " Sacred and
Profane Love" and the "Three Ages of
Man " presented them to perfection. But he
was not content to remain there. He de-
veloped the new art in every direction, and
applied it to the most varied and important
themes. In his hands it gradually lost some-
thing of its poetry, but it gained immensely in
dignity and breadth.
Her absorption in practical affairs also pre-
cluded Venice from becoming a literary centre,
and preserved her art from the literary bias
that is visible upon the mainland. The de-
mands which she made upon the time and
energies of her nobles were too great to allow
them much leisure for literary pursuits. The
love of fame which led the Italian princes to
gather around them scholars and poets to per-
petuate the memory of their exploits was for-
bidden by the jealous oligarchy which ruled in
Venice, and which insisted sternly upon the
TITIAN 121
principle of equality among the governing
class. Though on account of her freedom and
her commercial advantages she had long been
the centre of the book-trade, it was only when
the Spanish Inquisition had rendered intellec-
tual life throughout the Peninsula a thing of
extremest danger that the humanists sought an
asylum in Venice, where they found the same
protection that England has afforded to the
political refugees of later days. But they
came only after Venice had formed her style
of painting, and too late to produce a marked
effect either upon its spirit or its practice. The
Venetian princes had encouraged art only be-
cause it had served to decorate the city they
loved so well. Hence the decorative element,
not the illustrative, remained paramount in
Venetian painting. Some, like Giorgione,
never grasped at all the idea of illustration.
Several of his pictures, which Herr Franz
Wickhoff has demonstrated to have been in-
tended as illustrations of classic authors, are so
ineffectual as such that they have been always
mistaken for charming but incomprehensible
allegories.
122 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
p
So it was with Titian in his early days. The
wonderfully beautiful picture in the Borghese
collection of two women, one nude and the
other richly draped, seated beside a fountain
in which a Cupid is playing, has always been
known by the absurd title of " Sacred and
Profane Love," and has been considered a
profound allegory, though none could say
.which was the sacred and which the profane.
Now, however, the same eminent scholar has
shown that it was painted to illustrate the
Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, and repre-
sents Venus persuading Medea to fly with
Jason that it is one of those subjects sug-
gested to the painter by the scholars who had
sought refuge in Venice, as was also perhaps
the picture entitled the " Three Ages of
Man."
This incapacity to conceive of art otherwise
than as decoration, which remained with Gior-
gione till his death, was overcome by Titian,
and the passages chosen from the Erotes of
Philostratus and the Epithalamium of Peleus
and Thetis of Catullus could not have been
better rendered than they are in the " Worship
TITIAN 123
of Venus " and the " Bacchus and Ariadne,"
whose meaning is apparent at a glance.
Titian's progress in composition is conspicu-
ous. At first he seems to have painted pictures
mostly for the beauty of the individual figures;
but later he displayed great skill in composing
a skill only surpassed by that of Raphael,
and which he perhaps owed in some measure
to his visit to Rome and his study of the lat-
ter's masterpieces. Still, even to the end he
was uncertain in composition, often splendid,
generally good, but sometimes strangely de-
fective.
It has been said that he was no draughts-
man, but the charge shows a misconception of
his art. Drawing implies an insistence upon
the outline, and the greatest draughtsmen are
those who render the outline with the greatest
power. Titian was not of these. His system
implied the subordination of the outline. He
rendered form by color, light and shade and
atmosphere, as Nature does, and in his proc-
esses he was truer to Nature's methods than
Michelangelo. The outline of his figures is
rarely prominent, but the figures themselves
124 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
are admirably modelled, and in his " St. Peter
Martyr" he displayed a power of drawing
that Michelangelo himself might envy, together
with a feeling for landscape of which the great
Florentine was wholly destitute. -That picture
shows that if he had wished to be a draughts-
man he could have ranked with th*e Jrig$es$Q
but he preferred the domain of color, light,
and air. Michelangelo was in Venice while it
was being painted, and perhaps influenced its
style. This, however, is doubtful, for the
" Danae " that Titian painted in Rome is thor-
oughly Venetian.
In his work he generally preferred repose or
quiet movement, but when he desired he could
be agitated and dramatic. He understood that
it is pleasantest to live with pictures of serene
and tranquil beauty, but when the occasion
demanded he was a master of vehement action
and intense emotion.
He was not a great anatomist like Michel-
angelo. He did not love the body for its
framework of bones and muscle, but for the
beauty of its fleshly covering. And no one
has rendered this so well. The female types
TITIAN 125
that he prefers are voluptuous and full, so that
the muscles are rarely seen, and as they are
fitted rather for repose than for action, he
shows them seated or reclining, sometimes in
princely palaces, sometimes upon the sward
beneath overarching trees or beside the sea.
He is the painter of woman's form, as Leo-
nardo is the painter of her soul ; and his women,
so beautiful and so healthy, often with that
hair of reddish gold that has acquired his name,
stand among modern works where the Venus
of Cnidus did among the ancient.
He is sensuous but never gross. He remains
always an aristocrat to his finger-tips. Amongst
the commonplace and vulgar types that cover
the walls of our modern salons his women
would reign as queens. He painted them for
the great of the earth, for the princes and
nobles with whom he associated, not for the
vulgar populace.
And, indeed, no modern populace has suffi-
ciently shaken off the Middle Ages properly to
enjoy the nude. When certain men appeared
naked before the Empress Livia, and her ser-
vants would have chastised them, she forbade
126 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
it, saying, " Let them alone; to a pure woman
they are only statues." But to the modern
populace statues are only naked men and
women. In Titian's time, however, as with
us to-day, many of the intelligent classes had
passed beyond that stage, and for them he
painted, producing works which, however dif-
ferent in their mode of treatment, would have
delighted the companions of Pericles, and
would have been hailed with universal ac-
clamation by that beauty-loving people who
assembled in multitudes to gaze upon the
charms of Phryne or of Lais.
'
He was a master of many manners. He
began with the idyllic style of Giorgione, in
which is to be found the sweetest essence of
bucolic poetry. But he passed on to the
splendid realism of his portraits, the grand
style of his "Assumption," the agony of his
' Entombment," and the unspeakable torture
of his " Mocking of Christ." No painter save
only Raphael has covered so wide a field, or
covered it so well.
But in one respect he was the very antithesis
of Raphael. As if conscious that his life and
TITIAN 127
vigor were to be prolonged to an unexampled
degree, he was in no haste, though he rested
not, and his development was slow; while
Raphael, as if aware that, like Achilles, his
career was to be as brief as glorious, developed
at the earliest moment, and crowded into his
narrow span every possible activity.
Though his masterful repose was removed
as far as possible from Byron's storm and
stress, in two respects they were strikingly
alike they had a more intense and personal
comprehension of woman's beauty than any-
one else has had, and an unequalled feeling
for nature, a sort of pantheistic sense of being
a part j)f the inanimate world.
Titian was the first in modern times to paint
a landscape. There were many fine landscapes
before his day, and landscape-painting has
achieved few greater triumphs than in his
master Bellini's " Agony in the Garden," with
that awful light in the east proclaiming the
lurid dawning of the fatal day. But they were
only backgrounds. Titian was the first to
paint a landscape for itself alone. The land-
scape, too, is an important part of nearly all his
128 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
pictures, and it is as appropriate as his colors.
It smiles with the joyous, it weeps with the
sorrowing, it thunders with the wrathful., It
is not, as with Raphael, nature dominated by
man ; it is man and nature as inseparable parts
of a pantheistic whole, laughing, wailing, curs-
ing together, and each answering to the other's
mood. He, too, painted a great battle-piece,
which has perished, and which we know only
by engravings and his sketch. It is not so
passionate as Leonardo's, nor so harmonious as
Raphael's; but it differs from both in the in-
sistence upon the landscape, and in the violent
tempest by which Nature contributes to the
tumult of the strife.
He was the first to understand the grandeur
and the mystery of the mountains. To the
ancients and to his contemporaries they were
simply horrid and forbidding. He was born
among them, and he loved them with a moun-
taineer's devotion to his home. But he knew
how to use them for artistic purposes. He
knew that the barren desolation of mountain
regions soon wearies the eye, and that the true
function of mountains in landscape-painting is
TITIAN 129
as a background to verdant and alluring scenes.
As such they are supremely effective, lending
grandeur and sublimity to a view which would
otherwise be only pretty. Of all painters he
uses mountains with the greatest felicity. In
most of his pictures his native Dolomites, far
away, as he saw them from Venice or the ad-
jacent mainland, stand out blue in the distance,
enveloping the landscape with a sense of
mystery and awe. He was the greatest of
landscape-painters until Claude Lorraine, and
in breadth exceeded him, passing from the
idyllic suavity of Giorgione's scenes to the
desolate horror which forms the appropriate
setting to St. Peter's death.
Like Raphael he is a painter to live with.
He is not a striver after the unattainable, a
wearier of the flesh, like Michelangelo. With
him there is no strife between mind and body.
Each is suited to the other, and repose and
harmony result. He is the painter of man as
a citizen of the world, of woman as a thing of
beauty, all placed in a suitable environment.
He is mundane and human, while Raphael
soars above the earth, but he is equally serene,
I
I3O RENAISSANCE MASTERS
and he lends to our mortal life a dignity and a
beauty that we can never contemplate too
often. He may not lift us up, but he gives us
a keener and a fuller sense of the worthiness
of terrestrial things.
CORREGGIO
(1494-1534)
CORREGGIO is a Greek of the Ionian
Isles, the fit companion of Sappho, of
Alcaeus, of Anacreon, full of the joy of life,
of the adoration of physical beauty, blithe as a
skylark, lovely as the morning. The return to
the pagan spirit is not with him the result
of study and conscious effort, as with most of
his contemporaries ; he was born a pagan of the
gladsome days when the forests were full of
fauns and dryads, when a nymph lay hidden in
every fountain, when the wilderness trembled
with the sighs of the amorous Pan. How such
a spirit survived the darkness and sorrow of
the Middle Ages, its joy undimmed, its bright-
ness untarnished, fresh as in the days when
Apollo watched the flocks of Admetus on the
Thessalian plains, is one of those problems of
which there is no solution.
131
I3 2 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
He is the painter of joy, of a dithyrambic
ecstasy which, if it ever existed in this work-
a-day world, has long since passed away. His
family name, Allegri, means joyful, and he ac-
cepted it as descriptive, for he often signs him-
self Lieto, or Laetus, its Italian and Latin
synonyms. In Italy there has never been the
break of continuity between classic and modern
times that exists in other lands, and perhaps
Correggio was descended from some glad pagan
of the ancient days whose jocund spirit won
for him the title that was borne by his descend-
ants. And Correggio almost makes us believe
in the doctrine of metempsychosis. In an ob-
scure little town scarcely to be found upon an
ordinary map, and in the humble dwelling of a
small merchant, he was born, the glorious rein-
carnation of the spirit of Grecian joy, which
had been crushed beneath the iron heel of im-
perial Rome and entombed in mediaeval dark-
ness. And he comes forth from his long sleep
with no stain of the past upon him, fresher,
brighter, more buoyant than when he wandered
with Sappho and Anacreon through Lesbos
and Ionia. Everything with him is gladsome,
CORREGGIO 133
and even the Fates, whom other artists have
conceived as gloomy, stern and old, he repre-
sents as youthful maidens spinning the shining
webs of golden destinies.
It has been the fashion of late years to de-
preciate Correggio, but it is difficult to see why
he should not be numbered with the greatest.
It is true that his art bears the same relation
to that of Raphael and Michelangelo that lyric
poetry bears to the drama and the epic. But
is the lyric essentially inferior ? Is not the
quivering, impassioned song, free in its move-
ment as the air and beautiful as the sunset, one
of the highest expressions of poetic genius ?
The Greeks, who were no mean judges, ranked
Sappho's Odes with the Iliad of Homer, and
he who loves beauty for its own sake must be
drawn to Correggio with an irresistible attrac-
tion.
Beauty and joy are the essence of his art,
beauty of a sweetly sensuous type, exultant,
rapturous joy such as the modern world has
never seen. His beings are not of the earth
that we know, neither are they of heaven.
Sometimes they are the fauns that basked in
134 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
the sunlight and frolicked in the shadows of
Grecian woodlands, sometimes the Ariels who
palpitate with ecstasy as they disport them-
selves in the blue empyrean.
His children and his boys are the loveliest
that were ever painted, far exceeding poor sad
humanity in their beauty as in their joy. His
infants that frolic among the clouds or play at
Madonnas' feet are thrilled with a rapture such
as childhood never knew, and the happiness of
his youths reaches the highest pitch of lyric
transport. Even the jubilant gladness of
_. Shelley's Ode to the Skylark gives no idea of
their feelings.
It would be wrong to call his beings super-
human. They are fairer and happier than
man can ever be, but they lack that tinge of
sadness which purifies and elevates humanity
at its best. They are spirits of the air that
hover near to earth, playing in the sunbeams
and wantoning with the roses, and they have
never scaled those heights wrapped in storms
and clouds which the soul of man can reach.
Our own Shakespeare, whose immeasurable gen-
ius enabled him to comprehend not merely the
CORREGGIO 135
infinite complexities of humanity, but the un-
seen beings that people the air about us, alone
has understood them, and in the Midsummer
Night 's Dream and The Tempest he brings them
into view Oberon, Ariel, and their rout,
creatures of inexpressible grace and gladness,
wanton yet innocent, knowing nothing of sor-
row and incapable of guilt.
These are the types which give to Correg-
gio's works their essential character. He can
represent grief with infinite truth, and the sad,
sweet face of the Madonna in his " Ecce
Homo " of the National Gallery has been
the model for all subsequent pictures of the
Mater Dolorosa. But with him joy is con-
tagious while sorrow is individual. His glad-
some pictures are glad throughout, all his
figures joining in the glorious paeon of raptur-
ous delight ; while his mournful works are so
only in part. The pious wish that health
might be contagious instead of disease finds
its realization in his ideal world.
No other artist ever took so lofty a flight
from so low an eminence. He was brought up
in the insignificant Emilian town whose name
136 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
he bears, and it is not known that he ever had
a competent teacher. He never visited Flor-
ence, Rome, or Venice. Morelli sees in his
works traces of Francia's influence, but there
is no proof that he was ever at Bologna, or
that he ever beheld one of Francia's pictures.
Traces of Mantegna's influence are apparent,
and it is strongly believed that he must have
studied at Mantua; but the genius of Man-
tegna, the severest of Renaissance masters, has
so little in common with Correggio's that the
influence could not have been great. It is
suspected that he must have seen something
by Leonardo and Raphael, but there is no cer-
tainty, perhaps no likelihood, of that. He is
generally looked upon as an outgrowth from
the school of Ferrara, but his gracious style
has little in common with that of Tura, Costa,
Grandi, or even Dosso. Of course he learned
the rudiments of painting from someone. The
mastery of technic results only from the labor
of successive generations, and no one who
begins at the beginning can accomplish much.
But the vital elements of his style are all his own,
and its originality is as striking as its beauty.
CORK EGG 10 137
Perhaps his isolation was an advantage.
With none about him of commensurate talents,
his genius was left in unfettered freedom to
develop along its own lines. Contact with
men of equal force might have robbed him of
a portion of his originality, taken away some-
thing of the lyric ecstasy of his works and left
them more formal and academic. It is sad to
think that one of the few supreme masters of
art should have passed his life in obscurity,
without the fellowship of the great men who
could have understood his worth ; but perhaps
it is better as it is. Who can tell what effect
the life of courts would have had on the ex-
quisite poetry of his delicate nature ?
Nor was the place of his birth so unpropi-
tious as it would seem at first. The spirit of
the Renaissance had permeated the whole of
Northern Italy, and in every town and hamlet
men talked of Plato and Apelles, often with
insufficient knowledge, but always with un-
limited enthusiasm. The little city of Correg-
gio, now so drowsy, was then the centre of
considerable intellectual activity. At no time
have women been more cultivated or more
138 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
influential than during the Italian Renaissance,
and in Correggio's day the petty court of his
native town was presided over by Veronica
Gambara, one of the most charming of her sex,
a lover of art and literature and a poetess of
decided merit. Existing documents show that
Correggio must have been a welcome visitor at
this court, and there, if he met no artists of the
first distinction, he at least found painters who
could teach him the rudiments of his craft, and
he sucked in with every breath that love of
classic beauty that was the very soul of the
Renaissance. Even in that provincial town
the opportunities for grasping the true spirit
of artistic creation excelled those now offered
by many a pretentious city. That spirit of
youth which characterizes the Renaissance
movement was stirring in the breast of every-
one. Each felt that he had a message for his
fellow men, and strove to utter it. Some
sought to do so in words, others by the brush ;
and art, which owes its origin in some measure
to the longing of the soul to escape its solitude
and commune with its fellows, naturally re-
ceived a tremendous impulse.
CORREGGIO 139
Living as they did at the centre of the
world's thought and culture, where the most
complex problems were agitating the minds of
men, it was inevitable that the art of Leonardo,
Raphael, and Michelangelo should be weighted
with a deep significance. But probably the
profoundest thought with which Correggio
came in contact was the sweet, feminine poetry
of Veronica Gambara, which cast no burden
upon his mind. In art's great symphony the
high, clear notes that thrill us in the paeon are
as essential to the harmony as the echoing
basses of the dirge or the mellow beauty of the
middle chords, and it is well that Correggio
was left to play them to the end.
From the time when Vasari and the Caracci
proclaimed his merits to the world, he was the
object of unqualified admiration until recent
years, when there arose a school of critics, with
Mr. Ruskin at their head, who loudly condemn
him as immoral. They might as well inveigh
against the morality of a skylark or a turtle-
dove. The feelings which he expresses are joy
and love, and if they are immoral, heaven must
be a place of exceeding wickedness.
14 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
It is readily conceivable that persons who
think that the function of art is to inculcate
moral precepts should find nothing to attract
them in his works; but it is amazing that in-
tolerance in this age should be carried so far as
Mr. Ruskin carries it when he brands as " las-
civious " the Magdalen of the Holy Family
called the " Day," who, fully draped, nestles
against the shoulder of the Virgin, one of the
sweetest incarnations of womanhood in all the
range of art.
It is said that if his beings were alive they
would be of no use. It is true that they would
not be serviceable as plow-hands or as soldiers.
But is beauty of no utility ? Is not the flower
that adorns the fields, which toils not, neither
does it spin, as essential in the world's economy
as the cabbage or the potato ? Is the great
singer who thrills the hearts of thousands to be
condemned because she cannot toil upon the
highway or fight in the ranks of battle ? The
love of beauty is one of the greatest influences
in the refinement and elevation of humanity,
and its contemplation is one of the few enjoy-
ments that leave no sting behind.
CORK EGG 10 141
It is true that his beings, were they alive,
would be wrapped up in the joy of living and
the ecstasy of light and air; but they would be
as harmless as birds. And can as much be said
of the prodigious figures of Michelangelo which
are supposed to breathe so lofty a morality ?
Would the " David " care greatly who fell be-
fore his wrath ? Would not the " Moses " in
his immeasurable pride tread the innocent and
the guilty indiscriminately under foot ? And
who can assure us that the mighty figures on
the Medicean tombs, if they should rouse
themselves, would not wish to plunge the
world into a gloom as overwhelming as their
own ?
There is nothing immoral in joy, neither is
love a sin. The early Christians believed that
God was love, and as such He is portrayed in
the catacombs, where the pictures are all cheer-
ful, even joyous. But in the frightful night
of the Middle Ages man's conception of God
underwent a change. Judging Him by their
own misery and suffering, they conceived Him
as a being of implacable wrath and hate, de-
lighting in His creatures' woes. Gladness and
142 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
beauty were accounted sinful, sighs and tears
and the maceration of the flesh were alone sup-
posed to find favor in the sight of God. That
mediaeval conception of Christianity, so differ-
ent from the benign spirit of Him whose first
miracle was wrought that nothing might mar
the joy of a wedding festival, still persists in
the hearts and minds of many ; and to such,
and to such alone, Correggio is immoral. Love
is holy, and joy that is not purchased with
another's pain is sweet and good. These are
the worst sentiments that Correggio expresses,
and he is no more open to the charge of im-
morality than the wanton flower that is kissed
by the breeze. He may be called unmoral, but
he is not immoral. His works simply have
nothing to do with morality. He belongs to
the class of those who are neither for heaven
nor against it. He is content with depicting
beauty in its most exquisite forms, with no
suggestion of evil, and if others are seduced
by it he is no more concerned than the youth-
ful angels whose charms so tempted Mephis-
topheles at the burial of Faust. He is as inno-
cent of offence as the children of Adam and Eve
CORREGGIO 143
playing unclothed among the thornless roses
of Eden. He belongs to the age when men
were naked and were not ashamed, and if we
have eaten of the forbidden fruit, the fault is not
with him. Raphael's beauty is of a kind that
cannot be divorced from active goodness ; Cor-
reggio's is neither good nor evil, but simply
innocent and glad.
In his early works there is a marked religious
/ feeling, though conceived in a sweet human
way that would have startled and perhaps
shocked the primitives. How much of this
was heartfelt and how much the result of imi-
tation we cannot say. Doubtless he received
a religious training in his youth ; but he was a
faun from the Grecian woodland on whose soul
the teachings of the church could make little
impression, and year by year we see its influ-
ence weakening and the pagan joy of life and
love of carnal beauty reasserting themselves
more strongly. The greater number of his
mythological pictures were painted in his last
days, when he had abandoned the work in the
Parma Cathedral in disgust, and had returned
to his native town. And as his genius was
144 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
essentially pagan, the further he wanders from
the ascetic spirit of mediaeval Christianity the
more striking and beautiful his works become.
There was in him no revolt against mediaeval
devotion as in some of his contemporaries. It
never had a firm hold upon him, and he merely
slips away from it. He was like some lovely
bird of paradise which we capture in the nest
and seek to tame, but which when its wings
are grown flies back to its glad life of free-
dom among the golden flowers of its native
forest.
When at his maturity, his religious and his
mythological subjects are treated in very much
the same spirit. He humanizes religious feel-
ing and spiritualizes sensual passion until there
is no great difference between them. The St.
John the Baptist of the " St. George " picture
is a faun straight from the Grecian forests, and
there was never a more charming representa-
tion of Cupid in his youthful prime than the
St. Sebastian who looks on at the mystic
marriage of St. Catherine in the Louvre. On
the other hand there is nothing gross in the
ecstasy of his " Danae " or " lo." The joy of
CORREGGIO 145
love was never depicted with more realistic
truth or more exquisite refinement. And the
child angels that are strewn over the "Assump-
tion " and " Ascension " like flowers upon a
meadow, tumbling upon the clouds, or peeping
out from between the legs of the Apostles, are
conceived in exactly the same mood as the
boys who attend " Diana " in the chase.
Like Michelangelo he is a painter purely of
the imagination, though his visions are simple
and joyous while Michelangelo's are complex
and mournful; and like him he made no por-
traits, not even his own, so that we know not
how he looked. His figures spring like Mi-
nerva from his creative brain, and have no pro-
totypes on earth. They are superhuman in
blitheness as in beauty, and yet so vivid is his
imagination and so great his artistic power that
they are projected upon the canvas or the wall
with an intensity of realism that would do
honor to the Dutch. Our reason tells us that
such beings never existed in this sad world,
but we sympathize with Guido, who always
asked those who had seen the " Madonna with
St. George " since he had seen it, if the chil-
146 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
dren were still in the picture, and if they had
not grown up.
His name has become a synonym for light
and shade. No Italian artist ever equalled
him in that respect, and it is doubtful whether
Rembrandt himself surpassed him, though
their methods are so different that an intelli-
gent comparison is hard to make. Like Rem-
brandt's, his shadows are not opaque, but
luminous, suffused through and through with
light, just as in nature a thing so difficult of
achievement that it has been accomplished in
a satisfactory manner by few. None of his
predecessors save Leonardo and Dosso had
any considerable skill in chiaroscuro, yet Cor-
reggio in his earliest works reveals himself a
master of the art, though a master who con-
tinually improves. It is incredible that so
young a man should have conquered its com-
plexities unaided, and we are driven to the
conclusion that he must have seen some of
Leonardo's works and perhaps studied under
Dosso.
And as a result of his mastery of light and
shade, his figures are bathed in atmosphere.
CORREGGIO 147
They are not standing in a vacuum like those
of the primitives; the air circles round them,
full of light, and they stand out in a luminous
medium as in nature.
The Florentine masters usually practised
both painting and sculpture, with the result
that their sculpture is frequently pictorial, as
in the case of Ghiberti, their painting always
somewhat sculptural, standing out in bold re-
lief, with strongly marked outlines. But Cor-
reggio and the Venetians are painters and
nothing else, and the luminous, palpitating
vitality of color finds its most perfect expres-
sion in their works.
As a colorist he must be numbered with the
greatest. His color has not the glowing splen-
dor of Venice, but in transparent lustre it is
unexcelled. It has been well described as a
clarification of Leonardo's.
It is very difficult to be a great colorist in
fresco. The system is suited to works of mon-
umental or primitive simplicity, and is not
conducive to brilliancy, depth, or delicate
gradations. It was rarely employed by the
great masters of color, the Venetians. Titian
148 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
tried it at Padua, but without adding anything
to his fame. Leonardo was so dissatisfied with
it that he mixed his fresco paints with oil, and
so destroyed them ; while the colors of Michel-
angelo are so inconspicuous that they are
scarcely thought of. Raphael himself seldom
reached great eminence in frescoed color,
though in some of his compositions, particu-
larly the " Miracle of Bolsena," his success is
undeniable. But it was reserved to Correggio
to give to fresco the splendor and transparency
of oil, and to produce with it those subtle
effects of light and shade in pursuit of which
Leonardo had sacrificed the durability of his
most precious works.
In the painting of the delicate flesh of women
and children even Titian and Veronese must
own Correggio's pre-eminence. The finest
piece of flesh painting in the world is probably
his " Antiope " of the Louvre. The satiny
sheen, the dainty tenderness, the rich, soft
flesh-tints of a youthful nymph could not be
better rendered. It seems living flesh, with the
warm blood coursing through the veins as she
lies there dreaming of love upon her mossy bank.
CORREGGIO 149
This picture of Correggio's and Titian's in
the same gallery dealing with the same sub-
ject afford a rare opportunity of contrasting
their styles, which have so much in common
and yet are so diverse. Titian's gives an ex-
tended landscape, while Correggio's reveals
only enough of the background to show that
the scene takes place in the forest depths.
Titian's Antiope is stronger, healthier, and
lies in an attitude of graceful repose, full of
dignity even as she sleeps. The posture of
Correggio's is violently foreshortened, with the
knees projecting straight toward the spectator,
and her light slumbers are haunted by amorous
dreams. But the greatest contrast is in the
satyrs. Titian's is the perfect blending of the
goat and man, exactly such a creature as would
be produced by such a union. The goat's
legs, the hairy body, and the low, sensual, cun-
ning physiognomy are just what we should ex-
pect in a real satyr. Such a creature would be
content with himself and assured of his own
perfection. But the satyr of Correggio is a
beautiful monster. There are the hairy legs
of a genuine goat, but the head is one of the
ISO RENAISSANCE MASTERS
most beautiful ever painted, as lovely as the
" Eros " of Praxiteles, as the vision that ap-
peared to Psyche when she lit the fatal lamp
to gaze upon the sleeping Cupid. Such a
creature would have died of mortification had
he looked down at his hideous shanks. The ex-
pression of their faces, too, is widely different.
Titian's satyr shows only the animal satis-
faction of a bestial nature, while Correggio's is
quivering with jubilant love. Yet it is not
certain that Titian's is the juster rendering of
the subject. If it were only a common satyr
surprising a nymph, there could be no doubt
of Titian's superiority ; but when we remember
that it was great Jove himself in this disguise,
it is quite probable that Correggio's picture
interprets more faithfully the true significance
of the scene. Then we see divine beauty re-
vealed in spite of its disguise, and the god,
knowing that the travesty can be cast off at
pleasure, is not ashamed of the ugly shanks
and cloven hoofs. But the two pictures show
well the difference between the realistic and
human beauty of Titian and the ideal, super-
mundane beauty of Correggio.
CORREGGIO 151
From someone, doubtless Mantegna, Cor-
reggio early acquired a taste for the problems
of foreshortening, and attained such a profi-
ciency in it that he remained unrivalled until
Michelangelo painted the " Last Judgment."
And as with Michelangelo, his extraordinary
skill led to its abuse, so that he sometimes
painted figures merely to test his powers, plac-
ing them in violent postures where they seem
attitudinizing and in points of view from which
they appear contorted. Extreme power is
always apt to be pushed to exaggeration, but
in Correggio's behalf it must be said that
Michelangelo in his later days departed further
from the modesty of Nature than he has ever
done.
In the handling of great masses Correggio
has no superior. It would be vain to seek
elsewhere for a composition so vast and so
united as the " Assumption of the Madonna "
that fills the dome of the Cathedral at Parma.
It is not a complicated harmony ; it is a thou-
sand voices singing together a jubilant paeon of
ecstatic joy. The Virgin rises into heaven in
a quivering transport of triumphant exultation,
152 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
and all the apostles and the heavenly host join
in a chorus of rapture that borders upon frenzy.
For the first time save in his majestic frescoes
in San Giovanni the architectural framework of
the dome is disregarded, and we look straight
upward into heaven. At the first glance the
countless legs of the ascending angels seen
through the billowy clouds of light produce a
singular effect; but as we continue to gaze
upon the prodigious sweep and whirl of the
mighty throng the wonderful realism of the
scene grows upon us, the world around is
forgotten, and we seem to behold heaven in
all its glory opened before our eyes. It is a
bold experiment, one of those daring attempts
which must find their justification in success.
It fascinated his followers, who continually
imitated it, but it remains alone as the one
perfect achievement of its kind.
He loved most the beauty of women, youths,
and children, but "The Apostles" of San
Giovanni's dome are among the grandest types
of manhood that art can offer. Perhaps the
thing in which he was most deficient was in
capacity to represent the withering effects of
CORREGGIO 153
age. Youth was his domain. He may give
to his old men silver locks and flowing beards,
but their eyes remain bright and their cheeks
rounded, so that they do not really look old.
Correggio inspired in the breast of Toschi a
devotion that has no parallel in the history of
art, and the great engraver devoted his long
life to reproducing the master's works. In this
way we are able to enjoy portions of the fres-
coes which have been so injured by damp and
dirt as to be invisible or incomprehensible from
below. In the translation from the poetry of
color to the engraving's prose there has been
necessarily a change no work can pass through
another's hand and brain and remain unaltered.
Something of the dithyrambic ecstasy of the
originals has been lost, something of academic
neatness has been added. Still the result is a
triumph of the engraver's art and a boon for
which the world must remain forever indebted.
One of the first duties of modern criticism
was to relieve Correggio from responsibility for
a multitude of unworthy pictures attributed to
him by an uncritical age. Many of them were
by feeble imitators like Parmigianino and An-
154 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
selmi, and had something of his manner, while
others bore no resemblance to his work. They
were simply clouds that obscured his fame, and
now that they have been dispersed his star
shines with a clearer lustre. Among them,
however, was one whose loss we must all de-
plore, the famous ' Reading Magdalen."
Since Morelli called attention to the absence
in it of the qualities of Correggio's style it has
been abandoned by all authoritative critics save
M. Muntz, and even he dares not be positive.
It is apparently the work of a later age ; but it
is with reluctance that we give it up and con-
fess that we do not know by whose hand the
dainty marvel was wrought. It is a lovely
little jewel taken from Correggio's crown a
jewel that never belonged there, but which he
had worn so long that we regret to see it go.
He is perhaps the equal of Titian in depict-
ing the beauty of woman ; and in his style there
is more of tenderness and refinement. He
never degenerates into the insipid elegance of
his imitators, but his female types are so ex-
quisite that even the lovely patricians whom
Titian delights to paint seem too voluptuous
CORREGGIO 155
and strong when placed beside them. Like
Titian's, his Madonnas are only women, but
women of such charming grace that they are
almost worthy of adoration. And he has
Leonardo's fondness for hair, and a nearly
equal skill in representing its waving, fluffy
lustre.
Like Michelangelo, he was one of the great
factors in the decline of art. After his death
countless imitators thought that they must
paint laughing children and wriggling legs,
with which they filled half the domes of Italy ;
but that was no fault of his. They carried his
qualities to the same exaggeration to which
Bernini carried the mannerisms of Michel-
angelo, but the irresistible impulse of weaklings
to imitate the play of giants is as inevitable as
it is unfortunate. Many a modest painter who
might have been a worthy disciple of Francia
or Perugino was ruined in his vain effort to
follow Michelangelo and Correggio in their
audacious flight.
He is the most emotional of painters. All
his figures feel intensely. The sentiment
which he usually prefers is joy, but sorrow,
156 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
when it is expressed at all, is expressed with
the same vehemence. But his emotions are
never complicated or difficult of apprehension.
They are as simple as those of childhood, ut-
tered with as little reserve, and weighted with
as little thought.
He and Leonardo are the painters of smiles,
but in what a different way ! Leonardo sur-
prises the soul upon the lips souls of wonder-
ful depth and unspeakable complexity, and
fixes them there forever as a riddle that no man
can read. Sorrow and hope and joy, unutter-
able passions and unavowed desires are in that
smile, while Correggio's have all the wanton
happiness of childhood, only raised to a super-
human pitch.
It is this want of depth that debars Correggio
from the highest place. All other qualities of
his art beauty and color and light and shade,
strength and movement and composition are
united in him as perhaps in no other; but he
lacks Raphael's serene wisdom and the depth
of those who have passed through the Valley
of the Shadow of Death and drained the bitter
cup. Joy is good, but he who has tasted only
CORREGGIO 157
its honeyed draught knows not the fulness of
our mortal life; and Correggio's works lack
that poignant fascination which an acquaint-
ance with Our Ladies of Sorrow alone can
give.
During the eighteenth century he was the
most esteemed of painters. It was an age of
super-refinement and elegance, when the nobil-
ity had become courtiers and passed their but-
terfly lives in exquisite enjoyments, scarcely
conscious of the vast, hungry, suffering multi-
tudes whose existence was to be revealed by
the lurid flames of the French Revolution.
To that polished and effeminate society the
works of Correggio seemed the highest ideal
of perfection. And even now as we stand be-
fore them, their fascination is so great that we
can hardly restrain ourselves from concurring
in this judgment.
We see in him a boldness of drawing and
foreshortening worthy of Michelangelo, a
genius for composition that Raphael alone can
surpass, color not so glowing as Titian's, but
of a marvellous lustre and transparency, a
mastery of light and shade that only Rem-
158 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
brandt can rival, and a sweet joyousness that
has never been seen on earth since the mighty
voice was heard off Paxos proclaiming the death
of Pan. While we look at him we cannot con-
fess that another is his superior, and it is only
when we have left him and our enthusiasm has
had time to cool that a still, small voice whis-
pers in our ears that, great as he is, Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian are greater
still.
BOTTICELLI
(1446-1510)
IT is very difficult to write impartially of
Botticelli. Those whom he pleases at all
are apt to love him to excess, and see in his
works all possible and impossible perfections ;
while those who are not touched by his peculiar
charm are disposed to look upon him as merely
quaint and curious. The truth lies between
these two extremes. He is not a great master
like Raphael and Leonardo, but he has a
singular and personal fascination that marks
him as one apart, and gives him a niche in the
temple of fame that is all his own. His works
are like certain music that strikes a responsive
chord only in particular hearts, but a chord
that vibrates with an intense and special har-
mony. He who has caught its singular charm
has a joy of his own forever, but he must not
159
l6o RENAISSANCE MASTERS
blame his neighbor upon whose ear it jars.
Every man who is not abnormal appreciates
Raphael ; but one has to be somewhat out of
the ordinary to experience the full attraction
of Botticelli's work. He speaks to an elect
circle, whose members are prone to worship
him with idolatrous devotion, and to regard as
boors the profane who reject their idol.
No artist has had greater vicissitudes of
fame. In his prime he was the favorite painter
of the brilliant court of Lorenzo the Magnifi-
cent, but with the death of his illustrious patron
he sank under the influence of Savonarola, so
inimical to his genius, and in his old age he
was eclipsed by the glories of Leonardo,
Michelangelo, and Raphael. He was almost
forgotten when at length he passed away in
poverty and neglect, and he seemed consigned
to hopeless oblivion when Mr. Ruskin and the
English pre-Raphaelites proclaimed his great-
ness and made him the object of a cult that is
extending every day. His pictures, little
prized forty years ago, are now sought for with
infinite eagerness, and are numbered among
the most precious gems of the richest galleries.
BOTTICELLI l6l
Those who do not feel their charm regard this
sudden fame as sentimental and factitious, born
without reason and destined to a speedy de-
cay ; while his votaries wonder that his position
among the highest should ever have been denied.
Both are wrong. He cannot be numbered
with the supreme masters, but he gives a
peculiar form of aesthetic pleasure that no one
else can give, and now that we are awakened
to its enjoyment, it is not likely that his works
will ever again sink into oblivion.
In fact, he is especially the painter of our
age, of an age that lives upon its nerves and is
deficient in the placid strength of earlier days.
He is the painter of the nerves, as Michel-
angelo is the painter of the muscles and Titian
of the flesh. In all his pictures, pagan or re-
ligious, the type is nervous, quivering, restless,
palpitating with feeling, incapable of repose.
They are all neurotic ; not to the point of dis-
ease, but beyond the limits of normal health.
The women that he loves to paint are delicate
hothouse flowers, rare orchids and sensitive
plants that know not the sunlight and the rain.
They are very lovely, and they have the tender
1 62 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
charm of those fragile beings whose heads are
bowed with the weight of impending doom.
They are enchanting, but they are not beau-
tiful. Their faces are irregular, often with high
cheek-bones and hollow cheeks, and frequently
their expression is one of poignant sadness.
Yet perhaps it is wrong to deny them beauty.
They do not conform to our standard, to the
standard that has been bequeathed to us by
Raphael's harmonious genius. But according
to other standards they may be perfect. They
are purely mediaeval. If they had been pro-
duced in the depths of the Middle Ages men
would have hailed them as a divine revelation,
and would have considered them immeasurably
finer than the master works of Greece. Every
age has its own standards which it deems in-
fallible, and the type created by Botticelli does
not conform to our ideals. It belongs to
another world more delicate, more exquisite,
less healthy and practical than ours.
One reason of the high regard in which he is
now held is the prevailing practice of studying
art historically. No artist represents so per-
fectly a particular moment in history. He
BOTTICELLI 163
stands at the exact point where the mediaeval
is aspiring toward the classical with infinite but
ineffectual desire. In him the Middle Age
stretches out its arms with unutterable yearn-
ing toward the goddess of Grecian beauty
rising again resplendent from the sea, but she
still eludes its grasp. He belongs to the time
when men kept lamps burning before the bust
of Plato as before the Virgin's shrine, yet
failed to grasp the essence of Hellenic culture.
In a little while the full day is to burst upon
them, revealing shapes of classic purity that
are to be preserved by Raphael's and by
Titian's brush. But Botticelli's contempo-
raries are still in the early dawn, lit up by a
dim and misty light through which the radiant
forms of the Grecian goddesses look thin and
pale. They scarcely see their shapes at all,
but they know that they are there, and in try-
ing to give them a corporeal form Botticelli
recurs for models to the delicate, unhealthy
types of mediaeval beauty which he already
knows ; and it is as if some slender nun brought
up in the shadow of the cloister should attempt
to rise with Phryne from the sea.
1 64 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
In his work we are most powerfully attracted
by this yearning of the Middle Age for the fair
Grecian land this love of the pine tree for the
palm which it cannot see, but of whose beauty
it has heard, and of which it has formed grace-
ful misconceptions based upon a study of the
ferns that grow about its feet. The most
popular of his pictures are the " Birth of
Venus" in the Uffizi and the " Spring" in
the Florentine Academy. And they are justly
so, for in them we see the very essence of
Botticelli's genius. They are among the most
fascinating pictures ever painted. Their spirit
is purely mediaeval, but with what ineffable
desire does it yearn toward the beautiful shores
of Greece! And how unavailingly ! In the
" Parnassus " Raphael transports us to the
Hellenic mountains; in the "Galatea" we
float with him upon the sparkling waves of the
blue -/Egean. But Botticelli knows them not.
In his search for Hellas he wanders far astray,
and leads us to an enchanted land where the
fairies dance upon flowers that their footsteps
do not crush. He shows us Venus again, not
as she landed in all the pride of her beauty
BOTTICELLI 165
upon the shores of Cyprus, but as she emerged
from the Venusberg, grown slender and pale
in her long seclusion, with softly rounded limbs
whose muscles have disappeared for want of
use, and in whose eyes is the sad, wistful gaze
that speaks of the infinite longing for the
moonlit valleys and sun-kissed mountains of
her native land that has grown up during the
centuries of her northern exile. It is a world
that has never existed save in the imagination
of mediaeval dreamers, a sweet fairyland of
delicate and delicious fancies. In his works we
see what the men of the early Renaissance im-
agined Greece to be, just as in his illustrations
of Dante so different from the pictures that
we owe to Flaxman's classic genius or to the
unbridled imagination of Dor we probably
have a much nearer approach to the visions
that arose before the poet and his contempo-
raries than any that we can attain elsewhere.
His works are precious documents that enable
us to understand the workings of the human
mind as words can never do, which reveal to
us the Middle Age standing upon tiptoe and
peering with unspeakable longing through the
1 66 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
morning's gilded mists toward the fair shapes
that are dimly seen beyond the veil.
Historically Botticelli is of the first impor-
tance, and as an artist he has merits of a high
order.
Though one of the worst anatomists, he is
one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renais-
sance. This may seem a contradiction in terms
when applied to a painter who dealt so largely
with the nude, yet it is true. The anatomy
of his figures is usually wretched. There is
every reason to believe that the poor diet, the
imperfect sanitation, the want of cleanliness
and the general misery of the Middle Ages had
a most deleterious effect upon the human
frame, and that the average man and woman
of mediaeval days was far from beautiful. In
Botticelli's time but few of the masterpieces of
antique art had been rescued from the clay.
The Middle Age had looked upon the body as
unclean, and had rarely represented it save in
ghastly crucifixions; but with the revival of
Greek learning came a new interest in the
human figure, and men turned again to its
representation. But they sought for models
BOTTICELLI l6?
among those about them, and sometimes with
as little discrimination as Botticelli displayed
in the selection of the " Mars " of the National
Gallery or the youth dragged by the hair in the
" Calumny " of the Uffizi, with their emaciated
limbs; and doubtless a part of Botticelli's de-
fective anatomy is due to the imperfections of
his models. But Nature never made such
shapes as some of those that he has drawn,
and it is difficult to see how they could have
held together if they had been created. Either
he was ignorant of anatomy, or utterly in-
different to its requirements.
Yet he is one of the greatest masters of the
single line that ever lived. He treats the
human body simply as a pattern for a living
arabesque. As a lineal decorator he stands
supreme. In point of color he is perhaps the
best of the Florentine school, sometimes bright,
usually harmonious, nearly always charming.
Yet he subordinates coloring so thoroughly to
the line that his pictures have been described
as tinted drawings. The tendency of color is
usually toward the obliteration of the outline.
With him it serves only to accentuate it. In
1 68 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
these days when it is the fashion to confound
the distinction between the arts, his pictures
may be described as symphonies of lines. And
all of them are lines of grace. Such harmoni-
ous curves it would be difficult to find else-
where. Frequently they are false to nature,
an outrage upon the human anatomy, and to
appreciate them we must forget how men are
made, and look upon them merely as parts of
an arabesque design. We shall then perceive
that as lineal decorations they are endowed
with a wonderful beauty.
Another merit which he possesses in an
extraordinary degree is the presentation of
movement. His figures are all in motion or
ready to move. It is not a strong movement
dependent upon muscular power, it is the
light, quick, graceful movement whose seat is
in the nerves. His walking figures nearly all
rest lightly on the ball of the foot in a position
that they could not retain for a moment. They
are like instantaneous photographs taken when
motion is at the highest point of its curve. And
this motion is always graceful. However bad
the figures may be in point of anatomy, they
BOTTICELLI 169
always move with an exquisite rhythm. In-
deed, the grace of their movements is enhanced
by their very imperfection. When we see mo-
tion in a body of perfect outline, its grace is
only what we expect, and our attention is
attracted most by the plastic beauty of the
form itself. But when we see these thin, ill-
drawn bodies moving so gracefully, it strikes
us with all the force of a surprise, and there
being no plastic loveliness to charm the eye,
we surrender ourselves entirely to the sense of
grace. By making the forms attenuated and
unattractive he gives us the very essence of
movement. We feel that he would be de-
lighted if he could express it entirely disem-
bodied.
And this he almost does through the agency
of the wind. He is the painter of the breeze.
In his pictures it blows continually, sometimes
quaintly represented as issuing from the wind-
god's mouth, sometimes as only revealed in
the flutter of garments not the horrible ba-
roque flutter with which Bernini has made us
all familiar, but a flutter in which is expressed
all the buoyant joy and vitality of the zephyr.
1 70 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
No one has ever depicted so faithfully or so
daintily the effects of the breeze playing with
a woman's vestments.
And what vestments they are! Sometimes
heavy, sometimes light, sometimes mere gauzy
draperies that only serve to enhance the rhyth-
mic grace of the moving limbs, they fall or
flutter in delightful folds, and are usually
adorned with those delicious embroideries
which were only produced in their perfection
during the Middle Ages, when time was a
matter of no importance, and when a handmaid
would spend years in the beautifying of a gar-
ment as a monk would pass his life in the illu-
mination of a missal. Embroideries so fanciful
or so charming have never been depicted by
the brush. And however classical the subject,
if it is clothed at all, it is in these quaintly
beautiful draperies of the Middle Ages un-
dreamed of by the Greeks.
He was the painter of small groups and of
single figures. In a large field he lost himself.
His great frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are
charming in many of their details, but the
composition is confusing a confusion height-
BOTTICELLI I/I
ened by the insertion into one picture of suc-
cessive episodes of the same story, so that it is
only with great labor that we can make out
the meaning; and they can scarcely be said to
have a general plan. He is like many writers
who can tell a short story well, but who can-
not handle the complicated threads of a long
romance. Within his narrow limitations his
composition is pleasing, but when he attempts
it on too large a scale we see that he has over-
passed his powers.
And he has surprising limitations. Though
he spent his life in seeking after dainty types,
his hands and feet are usually coarse, and the
way in which he sometimes sought to indicate
the fruitfulness of Nature is so gross and in-
artistic that it is inconceivable that so exquisite
a painter should have committed such a blun-
der. It must be noted, too, that he was almost
indifferent to light and shade at a time when
Leonardo was displaying all its resources.
He was a great lover of flowers, and painted
them, particularly roses, with exceeding skill.
Usually they are true to nature, but there are
some of them that have no prototypes now on
172 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
earth, and which were probably creations of
his own delicious fancy. It has been suggested
that his fondness for round pictures was due to
his love of flowers, and that he borrowed the
design of the " Crowned Madonna" from a
full-blown rose.
From the Middle Ages he derived a fond-
ness for allegory, and like a good many
other allegories his own are not always clear.
The one single exception is the recently dis-
covered picture of " Pallas and the Centaur,"
and this was probably painted under the im-
mediate direction of Lorenzo the Magnificent,
and owes its comprehensibility to his shrewd
and practical genius. No more delightful alle-
gory than the " Spring " was ever painted, but
its entire meaning can never be deciphered,
and, indeed, it owes a part of its charm to that
very fact. If we understood it fully it might
lose in interest.*
He is the most feminine of all painters, and
that is one reason why he so appeals to an age
dominated by the female element. He paints
* It seems to have been intended to illustrate some lines of
Lucretius, which, however, do not fully explain it.
BOTTICELLI 173
men sometimes, but rarely with entire success,
and as soon as possible he turns away to the
presentation of woman's charm and grace.
Vasari informs us that he loved to paint beau-
tiful undraped women, but the iconoclastic
frenzy of Savonarola, which has obliterated so
many traces of the pagan spirit in the early
Renaissance, has doubtless robbed us of most
of these. Still the best remain those which
he executed for the Medici, who took no part
in the mad orgy of destruction when so many
priceless treasures were cast upon the bonfires
in the Piazza della Signoria and from them
we can judge the type. We see that it was
not woman's plastic beauty that he loved, but
the alluring grace of her airy motion. Only
once does he produce a form of exceeding love-
liness the new-born Venus that floats toward
the shore in the pearly shell. And she is not
classically beautiful. She has never known
the free life of the mountains and the fields,
her bosom has never throbbed with pagan joy,
her limbs have never been strengthened by
wholesome exercise. She has been brought
up in the shadow of some dim cloister, wearied
174 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
by the droning of unceasing prayers, and now
that she has escaped she feels no exultant rap-
ture, and in her nakedness she is ashamed.
The maiden upon the shore rushes with a richly
embroidered mantle to clothe her nudity, and
when she gets the robe she will fold it around
her with all the modesty of a nun. As an at-
tempt to represent the radiant goddess of pagan
love, failure could scarcely be more complete ;
but it is full of the most delicate charm of
womanhood. And so, too, are the maidens of
the " Spring." Ill-drawn as they are, they
are the very essence of dainty grace.
One reason that Botticelli is so attractive is
that he falls so far short of what he attempts
that much remains for the play of the imagina-
tion. He loves to tell a story, but he tells it
imperfectly, leaving a great deal for fancy to
supply. It is as if one should try to play the
Moonlight Sonata on a flute. He would fail in
the attempt, but he might draw forth sweet
and haunting melodies that would never have
been heard had he confined himself to music
appropriate to his instrument.
His faces are as irregular in their outline as
BOTTICELLI 175
his forms ; but as in the figures it is the grace
and not the shape that allures us, in the faces
it is the expression. He is a painter of the
soul of woman, not in its unsounded depths
like Leonardo, but in its delicate refinement,
its melancholy reveries, its sweet sadness, its
wistful longings. If Leonardo's types may be
compared to an Alpine lake whose smiling sur-
face conceals unfathomed depths, his may be
compared to a lovely brook that winds in
sinuous curves, never very deep, but full of
charming grace. Botticelli's women are not
profound ; but they are wholly womanly, with
a tender, gentle melancholy that is the same in
a Venus or a Madonna. He is not a very re-
ligious painter, nor of a powerful imagination.
His realm is one of delicious fancy perhaps
the most refined and exquisite in all the range
of art. In his yearning for Grecian days he
wanders far from his purpose, and finds him-
self not in the classic land of Hellas, but in
that region of mediaeval paganism against
which the church waged a war so unrelenting
and so unavailing. It might crush mind and
body, but at times the human soul would slip
RENAISSANCE MASTERS
its fetters and escape into the woodland peopled
by elves and fairies and water-sprites, sweet,
tender spirits whose joy was close akin to sor-
row. In his search for the isles of Greece it
was into this enchanted land of fancy that
Botticelli strayed, while he thought that he
was wandering through Grecian vales and by
Castalian springs.
But though the thing that charms us most
is the sight of this mediaeval soul rambling
through a pagan world of its own creation, he
has produced two religious works that are
among the most attractive of all time, the
" Crowned Madonna" of the Uffizi and the
' ' Nativity ' ' in the National Gallery. The first,
with its irregular mediaeval faces that are yet so
beautiful, so full of wistful melancholy, is one
of the hardest to forget of all the pictures of
the Virgin; while the latter, with its angels
circling in the air as graceful as butterflies, is
perhaps the daintiest in all of art's domain.
Neither of them is great, but there are those who
would rather surrender many a grand master-
piece than give up these delicious creations of a
rare fancy ; and their choice is not to be despised.
BOTTICELLI 1/7
He is one of the most poetical of all painters,
with a quaint, sweet poetry that we love some-
times beyond its merits, like some of the old
lyrics of Elizabethan and Stuart days, so naive,
so touching, so full of delicate fancies and pleas-
ing affectations, and possessed of a haunting
rhythm and a delightful freshness that can
never be forgotten. They, too, sing of Grecian
gods with the same spirit of mediaeval phan-
tasy, striving with the same unsuccess to grasp
the spirit of Ovid or Theocritus. The painters
of his day were mostly realists, but Botticelli
was a poet and a dreamer, living apart in a
fairyland of his own creation.
There is no denying that there is something
affected in many of his attitudes. It was an
age of affectation, when poets delighted in
fanciful conceits and far-fetched images, and
Botticelli was not strong enough to escape its
influence. The most poetical painter of his
time, he had the faults as well as the qualities
of the men who sang around him, and his poses
sometimes overpass the limits of nature, and
assume the affected airs of the pastoral verse
that charmed his soul.
178 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
There are individuals whom we love beyond
their deserts, whom we love with a full knowl-
edge of their deficiencies, because of some
peculiar attraction that emanates from their
personality. Indeed, it is not usually the best
and greatest whom we love the most. There
is in all of us something of the spirit of the
Athenian who was tired of hearing Aristides
called the Just. And so it is that many turn
willingly from Raphael's perfect sanity and
beauty to the super-refined and morbid deli-
cacy of Botticelli. Nor are they to be greatly
blamed, for he can give them a peculiar pleas-
ure like the love of some exquisite creature
upon whose hectic cheek consumption has set
its mark, and whose caresses derive a poignant
sweetness from the sense of impending death.
Until our own day his influence has been
slight. But since Mr. Ruskin rediscovered
him he has been growing steadily in impor-
tance. It is difficult to understand how Burne-
Jones could have existed had he never seen the
"Madonna Incoronata," the "Spring" and
the " Birth of Venus," or how Strudwick could
have painted those wonderfully dainty and
BOTTICELLI
gracious pictures of his had he never beheld
the " Nativity." As the progenitor of these
two masters Botticelli must be numbered with
the blest ; but he shines by no borrowed light,
and few painters below the greatest are pos-
sessed of a charm so haunting when it has once
been felt.
RUBENS
(1577-1640)
BORN one year after Titian's death, Rubens
was the last and in some respects the
most dazzling product of the Italian Renais-
sance. There are flowers which, when trans-
planted to a foreign soil, assume strange forms
never seen before and take on a new and start-
ling brilliancy. So it was with the flower of
Renaissance culture when transplanted to the
Belgian Netherlands. It lost its delicacy, its
grace of form, its refinement of color, its subtle
perfume ; but it bloomed forth into something
brighter, more gorgeous, and of a more start-
ling splendor. At first glance it appears to
have no affinity with the beautiful lily that
grew tall and stately beside the Arno, gracious
and lovely among the Umbrian mountains,
luxuriant yet still refined beside the lagoons
180
RUBENS l8l
of Venice; but on a careful scrutiny we dis-
cover that it is still the same.
If we imagine a number of wild Thracians
coming to Athens to view the Pan-Athenaic
procession and on their return attempting to
enact it at one of the orgies of their bearded
Bacchus, we shall have some idea of the trans-
formation of Renaissance art when it passed
from Raphael and Titian to its northern exile.
The grace, the delicacy, the refinement are
lost, but we have instead a wild, lusty strength,
a primitive joy in animal existence, unprece-
dented since man replaced the fauns and satyrs
that haunted the primeval woods.
The perfection of classic art is in its serenity
and self-restraint, the subordination of the
individual and characteristic to the ideal and
universal. And yet, unrestrained and some-
times even grotesque as Rubens is, he is es-
sentially a classicist. He was one of the most
accomplished men of his time, speaking all the
languages of Western Europe, familiar with
Latin and Greek, and steeped to the lips in
ancient literature, art, and archaeology. That
love for " the glory that was Greece and the
1 82 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
grandeur that was Rome," that spirit of
humanism which so permeated the elect spirits
of the Italian Renaissance, was Rubens' in
fullest measure. At the banquets of Lorenzo
de' Medici, with Politian, Ficino, Filelfo, and
the rest, he would have been the guest of
honor. In his conversation, so learned, so
brilliant, so full of tact and refined courtesy,
they would have recognized a kindred soul ;
and would have hailed him as one of the glories
of the Renaissance.
But art is nature seen through a tempera-
ment, and no artist ever had a temperament
so overmastering as that of Rubens. When
he picked up the brush and sought to put
upon the canvas (or rather the boards, for
he usually painted on wood) those antique
legends that he knew so well and loved so
much, when he sought to translate to the eye
those stories of the Greek and Latin poets with
which he was so familiar, they suffered beneath
his magic touch a wonderful sea-change. They
remained things of rarest beauty, but instead
of the chastened and refined beauty that had
adorned them in their southern home, they
RUBENS 183
took on a florid and luxuriant beauty, a bar-
baric pomp and splendor, a lusty vitality that
is wholly new.
Usually when he deals with classic subjects
it is in his own manner. A great student of
classic art, he yet understood that it must not
be imitated, but used only as an inspiration.
With his wonderful facility of execution he
could no doubt have reproduced the master-
pieces that he studied with absolute accuracy;
but when he copies them he changes them to
suit his own genius. With him classic scenes
lose their calm majesty and are filled with
tumult and fire. The tall, straight forms of
ancient deities become overfull in their con-
tours and their curves exaggerated. But that
he can, if he sees fit, be perfectly classic in his
outlines is attested by his wonderful " Tiberius
and Agrippina " in the Liechtenstein Gallery,
where a purity of drawing that is worthy of
Greece is combined with a glory of color and
an intense vitality peculiar to himself.
While so entirely individual in his method
of presentation, he embodied, though with
superhuman power, the thoughts and ideals of
1 84 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
his own day. No one, however powerful, can
escape the spirit of the times in which he lives.
Already art was invaded by the affectations,
the baroque style, the fluttering draperies, the
excessive curves, which a little later Bernini
was to carry to so disastrous an excess.
Rubens was permeated by all of these. Every
fault of his contemporaries is found in his
works: their stilted manner, their tedious alle-
gories, their countless incongruities ; but these,
in passing through the wonderful alembic of
Rubens' genius, undergo a transformation,
and, ceasing to be lifeless affectations, become
endowed with an unspeakable vitality. He
utters with his brush all the thoughts of his
own age, but he utters them with the voice of
a giant, so that their petty babblings sound
like the blast of a trumpet. The ideals which
he embodies are the ideals of his own time;
but he clothes them for eternity.
Even in his unbridled sensuousness he is a
man of his age and country. The long, deso-
lating religious wars were over in Belgium ; the
stern, unbending Protestants had fled to Hol-
land, Germany, or England, and the population
RUBENS 185
that remained, weary of suffering, thought
only of festivals and enjoyment. In this dis-
position they were encouraged by their rulers,
who knew that happy people are never dan-
gerous, and who sought by splendid pageants
and worldly pleasures to divert the attention
of their subjects from the strife-breeding ques-
tions of the day.
It was to this harmony with contemporary
ideals that he owed his wonderful prosperity,
a prosperity which Raphael alone has rivalled.
They both stood as the perfect exponents of
their respective ages, thinking the thoughts of
their fellow-men, but giving to those thoughts
forms of imperishable glory. Because they
uttered the thoughts of their own time they
were appreciated in their own day, and knew
nothing of the penury and neglect that dog
the footsteps of him who is either before or
behind his age ; and because they bodied forth
those thoughts in everlasting types their fame
can never die.
Rubens lived when allegory was the fashion.
He was an elder contemporary of John Bun-
yan. He turns out one allegory after another,
1 86 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
sometimes fairly comprehensible, sometimes
demanding a volume of explanations, and
mingling real and mythological personages in
a most bewildering manner. But while as
allegories they are usually obscure enough, save
those splendid works in which he so often tried
to impress upon the strife-laden nations the
contrast between the horrors of war and the
blessings of peace, as pictures they are im-
mensely successful, and we are content to gaze
upon them for their own refulgent beauty, and
never trouble ourselves to inquire what it is all
about.
The coarseness and sensuality of the art of
Rubens offends all sensitive souls; and yet it
would be impossible to make any list of the
world's half-dozen supreme masters that should
not include his name. There is none who is
absolutely greater, and few indeed can stand
beside him. He does not, like Michelangelo,
carry us to dizzy heights where the soul com-
munes with the Deity face to face; he does
not, like Raphael, lead us by Castalian springs
where the Greek Muses and the Christian
Graces move in loving converse ; he does not,
RUBENS 187
like Titian, transport us to the Isle of Paphos,
and show us Venus rising from the sea amid
the glories of a summer sunset; he does not,
like Leonardo, whisper to us the soul's un-
spoken secrets. He is of the earth earthy,
intensely human, and with a humanity that
aspires to no higher sphere.
In what, then, does his greatness consist ?
In the first place, he exceeds all artists who , /,
have ever lived in the power of life. He is the
Prometheus of art, causing the inanimate clay
to thrill and pulsate with unexampled vitality.
Of all figures that ever glowed upon the canvas
or sprang from the chiselled rock, his are the
most alive; so much alive that the men and
women who pass before them seem dead or
sleeping in their presence. Beneath his brush
the flesh gleams and quivers, the blood surges
like liquid fire, or rolls in turgid rivers. It is
a purely animal life, but a life of an intensity
unparalleled since Leviathan sported in the
flood and Behemoth reared his shaggy mane.
From nothing in art or literature did Rubens
borrow this vitality. The wildest orgies de-
picted on Grecian marbles, the scenes por-
1 88 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
trayed in the Fourth Book of Lucretius' De
Rerum Natura^ are tame in comparison with
those " banquets of the flesh " of the marvel-
lous Fleming. Even that wonderful Battle of
the Gods and Giants that adorned the high
altar at Pergamon is not so full of seething,
passionate life.
This is Rubens' highest claim to immortal-
ity, the indestructible rock on which is reared
the imperishable temple of his fame. The
power to infuse life into inanimate objects is
the power which brings man closest to the
Deity. It is art's supremest triumph. And
this Rubens possessed in an unexampled de-
gree. He used it not with the serene wisdom
of the gods, but abused it in the wantonness
of human pride. From the shadowy void of
formless things he brought forth not shapes of
celestial grace, but strange beings, half satyr
and half man, palpitating with a vehement,
sensuous life at which Pan himself would have
gazed in open-mouthed astonishment.
Such was Rubens when himself, Rubens
painting for his own pleasure, uncontrolled
by religious conventions or the necessities of
RUBENS 189
portraiture. But when the occasion demanded
he could restrain this wild pagan spirit, and
be most nobly human ; and while such scenes
have not the fierce, lusty life of his prodigious
orgies, they are immensely vital, more alive
than when treated by any other hand.
In the second place, he is the most brilliant
colorist that ever lived. He seems to dip his
brush in glowing, palpitating light; not the
luminous gloom that encircles Rembrandt's
ugly figures with an undying halo, but the
dazzling brightness of a summer's noon.
It will not do to say that he is the greatest
of all colorists. The Venetians surpassed him
in depth and harmony. But in brilliancy he
remains forever unapproached. In every gal-
lery his pictures shine out like a lambent flame.
As far as the eye can reach, before the figures
can be detected, his works can be distinguished
at a glance. The same colors that others use
acquire on his palette a more penetrating
brightness. They seem lit up by a radiance
that somehow fails to fall upon the works that
hang beside them. It is neither the pale gray
light of the north through which objects loom
RENAISSANCE MASTERS
pallid and indistinct, nor the clear white light
of southern climes; it is a splendid super-
mundane effulgence seen only in the painter's
visions as he dreamed of that Italy which he
loved so well, basking beneath Apollo's golden
beams.
.
It is this supernatural brilliancy of color that
makes Rubens' pictures the most incompre-
hensible of all to him who has studied them
only in photographs and engravings. To
such, Rubens seems simply coarse and inele-
gant, and the beholder wonders why this un-
couth Fleming should be throned beside the
mighty ones of Italy and Greece. But no one
who has looked upon the original masterpieces
long enough to recover from the first shock of
their unbridled sensuality can doubt his right
to be numbered with the greatest; and the
more we look the more we love his splendor,
and the paler and darker seem the works that
hang beside him. Take, for example, the
" Judgment of Paris " in the National Gallery
or the " Perseus and Andromeda " at Berlin.
Anyone studying these in black and white,
and seeing only the coarse outlines and heavy
RUBENS IQI
forms, would pronounce them ugly; while in
fact the rich splendor of their coloring converts
them into visions of eternal beauty.
The work of every artist is very apt to be
affected by the prevailing atmospheric condi-
tions of his country. Different men may de-
vote their attention to differing objects, but
they all see them through the same all-pervad-
ing medium. In a dry climate like Florence,
where there is little atmospheric coloring, and
every outline stands forth clear and distinct,
the painter is apt to be primarily a draughts-
man. In a moist climate like Venice, where
in the shimmering mists outlines are frequently
blurred, and where the sun rises and sets in a
blaze of glory, the painter is apt to sacrifice
outline to color. It is therefore not surprising
that in the far mistier climate of the Nether-
lands Rubens was essentially a colorist. So
much environment did for him ; but it was his
own supreme genius that made of him in that
gray, dark land the most brilliant colorist that
the world has ever seen, dipping his brush in
tints so splendid that they seem to have been
made for him alone.
192 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
In the third place, he is the greatest of all
painters of the flesh. Even Titian is not his
equ&L With a few strokes of the brush, with
an amazing economy of labor, he brings before
us the living, palpitating flesh, with all its
quivering vitality, its satiny sheen. The
human flesh is the most difficult of all things
to paint, and yet the most important, for
nothing is more profoundly true than that
saying of Pope's that " the proper study of
mankind is man." Hence, he who can excel
in that is entitled to be called the most skilful
of the wielders of the brush.
Great discrimination is required in the study
of Rubens' works. He was not merely an
earnest and laborious painter, but, like Ra-
phael, he was the presiding genius of an im-
mense picture manufactory, where all manner
of decorative commissions were undertaken.
In practically all of his works, save those of his
early days and a few painted in his latter years
to glorify the voluptuous beauty of his second
wife, the handiwork of his pupils is seen. For
many pictures he furnished only a sketch,
leaving to the assistants the entire work of
RUBENS 193
gainting. In some he only touched up the
flesh tints ; in others he reserved to himself the
principal figures, leaving the background and
the accessories to meaner hands. But so char-
acteristic is his touch, that we can rarely doubt
where his work ends and where commences the
labor even of the most skilful of his pupils;
and he has fortunately left many documents
stating accurately the extent of their participa-
tion, to confirm us in our deductions.
Nothing is more difficult to carry on than a
picture factory like this. Artists are notorious
for their delicately strung nerves, their sensi-
tiveness to criticism, their vanity and their
irritability; and it is almost impossible to in-
duce them to work together in harmony and
under the guidance of a common master.
Only two men have had the tact and suavity
to succeed entirely in such an enterprise, Ra-
phael and Rubens, the two most charming
personalities in all the history of art, combining
the perfection of technical skill with the grace
and polish of the most accomplished men of
the world and the native urbanity of a heart
of gold, so that all who knew them loved them.
194 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
Both have been severely criticized for the
employment of their assistants, and most un-
justly blamed. In this way they were enabled
to multiply their production many times while
keeping it essentially their own ; and upon the
great economic principle of the division of
labor it would seem folly for the man who
could paint the face of the Virgin or the flesh
of the Magdalen as no one else could do, to
waste his precious moments on draperies and
furniture.
Moreover, in this way great schemes of
decoration could be carried out with a unity
of design and style that is now impossible.
Look at any of our public buildings that have
been adorned since the practice of collabora-
tion has been abandoned. Each picture is the
work of a single artist, and a unity in itself;
but all the separate unities generally make a
most discordant whole ; and it is only on those
rare occasions where an entire building is
turned over to a single artist, as was some-
times the case with Baudry and Puvis de
Chavannes, that a satisfactory result proceeds
from so much labor.
RUBENS 195
Rubens' amazing and unexampled fecundity
was not due altogether nor chiefly to the as-
sistance of his pupils. He himself had an un-
equalled facility of production. His mastery
of the brush was perfect ; his ability to produce
the desired effect with the greatest economy of
labor has never been excelled. He had the
true artist's eye, which seizes at once on the
essential characteristics of things, and his wide
reading and continual converse with learned
men filled his mind with unlimited ideas to be
transmuted into pictures. When you look at
the orgies and revels which he delights to
paint, you would expect to find a boon com-
panion and a wassailer; but of all artists he
was the most methodical and industrious. Be-
tween the man and his art there was a mighty
gulf. His works are the most unrestrained in
all art's wide domain, but in his life he was
the model of manly virtue, living laborious
days and passing his nights in the bosom of
his family. Even in the painting of those
impetuous canvases where it seems as if the
artist, hurried onward by the fire of his imagi-
nation, had lost all self-control, he was never
196 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
for a moment carried away, but moved on with
calm self-mastery, advancing the picture each
day as much as time and circumstances would
permit.
Like most men destined to a long life,
Rubens was slow to develop, and he was well
advanced in manhood before his style was
formed. The pictures painted during his
youth are numerous and they are entirely by
his hand, but in the estimate of his genius
they are scarcely to be considered the real
Rubens has not yet been born. During a
long sojourn in Italy, on emerging from his
master's studio he acquired the vicious method
of Caravaggio, which was then the rage, with
its high lights and black shadows, and it was
many years before he shook it off. His life
was one long progress toward the light. Each
year the shadows grow less opaque, each year
the passage from light to shadow is less abrupt,
until gradually the shadows almost pass away,
and the light shines forth with an effulgence
without example.
Perhaps the period of his painting that ap-
peals to the greater number is the middle one,
RUBENS 197
when he produced the " Descent from the
Cross " at Antwerp and so many other noble
masterpieces; but the works which are most
attractive to the real lover of Rubens are those
which he painted in his later years after his
marriage to Helen Fourment.
At the age of fifty-three Rubens wedded
this girl of sixteen. A wonderfully fair
blonde, she was accounted the most beauti-
ful woman in Flanders. She was the perfec-
tion of the type toward which the art of
Rubens had been constantly tending. His
love for her was unbounded, and henceforth
his painting is but a song in praise of her
voluptuous charms. Marvellous as had been
his brush-work before, astonishing his skill as
a painter of flesh, henceforth he surpasses
himself. In everything he produced afterwards
the satiny sheen of her plump, blond flesh is
seen, painted with a caressing touch that only
love could dictate, and with a perfect mastery
that remains forever unapproachable.
And his indiscretions in the disclosure of her
beauty are amazing even among painters. He
has portrayed her in every stage of nudity,
198 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
from the absolutely undraped " Andromeda "
of Berlin and " Venus of the Prado " to the
far more suggestive half nudity of the " Shep-
herd and Shepherdess" at Munich and " La
Pelisse" at Vienna. Of all these countless
portrayals of her beauty the last is probably
the best probably the most perfect piece of
flesh painting in all the world; and his own
appreciation of it is shown in his keeping it by
him while he lived, and leaving it to his wife
as a legacy at his death.
Singularly pure in his life for his profession
and his age, the imagination of Rubens had
always been of a sensuous type ; and as men
of that description advance in years a warmer
voluptuousness usually displays itself in their
works; as, for example, in those of Titian.
This was the case with Rubens, and after his
marriage to Helen Fourment his art became
a hymn in glorification of the beauty of the
flesh. Rich and with an established fame,
no longer annoyed with those embassies and
political commissions into which he had been
drawn because of his rare tact in dealing with
princes, he was able to paint more for his own
RUBENS 199
pleasure; and it was apparently for the joy of
the work itself that he produced that wonder-
ful series of pictures of voluptuous beauty
which have so aptly been called his " banquets
of the flesh."
This had always been the most characteristic^!
side,pf his art, the side on which he will remain
forever unapproachable; but his marriage with
Helen gave him the model that seemed per-
fect to his eyes and one which he could never
weary of depicting ; and so from that time this
style remained uppermost. It was owing to
his love for her that he brought to perfec-
tion that luminous type of the perfect blonde
that has been the despair of all succeeding
artists.
The morality of the art of Rubens has been
much discussed. Some persons are shocked
beyond measure at the grossness of his pic-
tures; others equally pure find in them no
offense. But it is rather a question of temper-
ament than of morals. Those of a cold
temperament find him shocking in the ex-
treme, while they see nothing objectionable in
many works which, though more refined, are
r:
2OO RENAISSANCE MASTERS
more immoral; while those of warmer blood
discover in Rubens nothing to offend. Some,
like Ruskin, go so far as to allow their preju-
dice against the morality of his works to blind
them to his greatness as an artist ; but these
are few, and are not increasing.
These " banquets of the flesh/' which to
some are so objectionable, must remain Ru-
bens' greatest masterpieces. In them he has
the opportunity to display to perfection the
three qualities in which he stands supreme:
l__his superabundant vitality, his brilliant color,
and his living flesh. But they are not all.
'It. He is one of the noblest of religious painters.
So far as we know, he was sincerely religious.
He began each day by hearing mass, and con-
formed to all the requirements of the Church.
In this there may have been something of
worldly policy in an age and country where
safety could be found only in conformity to
ecclesiastical demands; but Rubens was no
hypocrite, and was doubtless a Christian,
though one of liberal mind. That spirit of
humanism that penetrated the Renaissance
permitted a man to have a Christian soul and
RUBENS 201
a pagan art. Had he not been a Christian he
could scarcely have brought his wanton im-
agination to render with so much nobility of
feeling the scriptural story. In the gentler
scenes from the Gospels the face of his Christs
is usually rather commonplace; but in the
great tragic moments he rises to the level of
his subject, and the face, though wrung with
pain, is noble and manly in the highest degree.
It is human and not divine, but it is grandly
human.
Of all these religious pictures the best
known, and on the whole the finest, is the
" Descent from the Cross " at Antwerp. It is
a work worthy to stand beside Titian's " As-
sumption." The unity of the composition is
perfect, every feeling and every emotion cen-
tering around the descending body of our
Lord. Each movement is rhythmical yet
grand, and while pity and sorrow are intense,
they are not carried to the point of disfigura-
tion. It is one of the great masterpieces in
grandeur of style. The color is not yet so
rich as the master afterwards attained nor the
lights so skilfully handled ; but as a noble,
2O2 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
dignified work of religious painting it has few
rivals, and perhaps no superior.
There are many others by Rubens' brush
that are fit for its illustrious companionship;
such, for example, as the noble " Theodosius
Refused Admittance to the Church," that
adorns the gallery at Vienna; but there are
also many others which he painted for relig-
ious pictures and which were gravely hung in
sacred places that are really as much " ban-
quets of the flesh " as those which he painted
in praise of Helen Fourment's beauty. Yet
who would wish them otherwise ? Who
would blot out those numerous Saint Sebas-
tians, Magdalens, and Susannahs that are
among art's greatest triumphs ? The Mag-
dalen in the picture of " Christ and the Four
Penitents" at Munich, with her perfect blond
beauty and her shoulders so white and smooth
that beside them the richest satin would seem
coarse, is alone worth a king's ransom.
Rubens was himself most abstemious for his
time, but he took a strange delight in the
representation of drunkenness. Silenus and
his drunken rout repeatedly pass before us,
RUBENS 2O3
and even Hercules reels by, supported by
fauns and satyrs whose intoxication is scarcely
less complete. And it is with evident love
that he paints all this. Sober himself, he de-
lights to note in those around him the exhilara-
tion and the imbecility of the winecup. And
this was not so unreasonable in his day as it
now appears. Drunkenness then brought no
dishonor. It was the accompaniment and the
crown of every banquet. The ancestors of his
fellow-citizens had been the worshippers of the
god Thor, whose proudest exploit had been
that he had threatened to drink the ocean dry.
Rubens in this, as in other things, accepted the
ideas of his time, but clothed them in forms
that have made them colossal and eternal.
Rubens was principally a painter of the
human figure, but he excelled all contempo-
raries in every other branch. Usually the
animals in his pictures were painted by Sny-
ders or some other assistant; but when he
turned his hand to them, even Snyders had to
own himself surpassed. In his early days he
paid little regard to landscape, usually having
his backgrounds painted in by others; but in
204 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
his declining years, when he had retired to the
country, he devoted some attention to the
study of nature, and the landscapes that he
painted go far beyond anything that had
hitherto been produced in penetrating obser-
vation of natural phenomena, particularly of
clouds, light, and atmosphere ; while his vege-
tation has the same superabundant life and sap
that characterize his men and animals.
He was too intensely original to devote
himself greatly to portraiture. He abhorred
the literal fact. Even when he set himself to
copy a picture by a master whom he loved, as,
for example, Mantegna's " Triumph of Julius
Caesar," it was never an accurate transcription,
but a free version in his own exuberant lan-
guage. Therefore his portraits are not numer-
ous, and perhaps they are not absolutely true
to fact; but they are full of palpitating life,
and sometimes they are perfect in their style.
What could be lovelier or more living than the
charming portrait of the elder sister of Helen
Fourment that hangs in the National Gallery,
and is called " Le Chapeau de Foil," or that
Jacqueline de Cordes that is one of the brightest
RUBENS 205
jewels in the gallery at Brussels ? His por-
traits have not the aristocratic bearing that
Van Dyck gave to all his sitters nor the in-
tense realism of Velasquez ; but they are won-
derfully alive.
Yet it is easy to see that in painting them
Rubens felt himself hampered, and that he
worked unwillingly save when love guided the
brush. He turns with evident delight to
themes that leave to his imagination unfettered
scope, and particularly to vast canvases which
he could fill with exuberant forms of super-
human power.
He was not a painter of miniatures. He
loved broad surfaces over which his brush
could sweep in unfettered boldness of design
and execution. He preferred figures of natural
size; and in the handling of large groups in
strenuous action he has had few compeers.
Sometimes, like Michelangelo in his " Last
Judgment," he overreached himself, as in his
" Fall of the Damned" and " Fall of the
Rebel Angels," and in his two versions of the
" Last Judgment " at Munich, crowding
the scene to such an extent that pictorial
2O6 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
effect is lost ; but usually he succeeds wonder-
fully, as in the marvellous " Boar Hunt " at
Dresden and " Lion Hunt " at Munich;
which, in the intensity of the passions, the
vehemence of the action, and the impression
of strenuous vitality, are worthy a place beside
Leonardo's " Battle of the Standard," a part
of which Rubens had copied, and which no
doubt he had in mind when these masterpieces
were produced.
Yet the man who painted these wonderful
displays of rage and power has had no rival save
Correggio in depicting the sweet innocence of
babyhood. He loved children with all his
soul, and delighted in their dimpled charms,
their guileless mirth, and their bird-like prat-
tle. His children are not superhumanly bright
and soulful, youthful seraphs, like those of
Correggio. But they are so plump, so healthy,
so full of bubbling life, so thoroughly childlike
that they are irresistible. Where will you find
such a picture of babyhood as the " Christ and
St. John with Two Infant Angels " in the gal-
lery at Berlin ? And he painted many others
that are little, if at all, inferior.
RUBENS 207
As we have said, in the handling of large
masses in movement or at rest, he has had
few, if any, equals. However great the crowd,
he possesses a wonderful faculty of binding it
together so as to produce an effect of unity.
The wealth of details rarely detracts from the
unity of the effect. To crowd a picture with
figures is nearly always a mistake. The asser-
tion made by a distinguished artist that there
was never a great picture with more than one
figure is of course an exaggeration ; but when
they surpass a certain number they are rarely
handled with success. As some generals can
marshal a larger army than others, so Rubens
could marshal a greater array of figures in more
varied action than is usually possible. Again
and again he presents us vast compositions,
such as the " Rape of the Sabines," the
" Massacre of the Innocents," the " Garden
of Love," the " Kermesse," and the like,
filled with many figures, each entirely indi-
vidual and deserving of special study, yet all
contributing to produce a single impression.
Though so different, Rubens reminds one of
Michelangelo. In the mighty Florentine he
208 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
finds his only rival in vital force. In that re-
spect those two giants stand upon an eminence
which none other dares approach. The life
that quivers in every muscle of Michelangelo's
titans is gloomy and stern, full of inward striv-
ings and of aspirations too lofty for this world.
The life that surges in reddest blood through
the overfed bodies of Rubens and glistens in
their shining flesh is joyous, earthly, and
sensual, and thrills with no supermundane de-
sires; but it is equally intense. The one is the
life of titans that would pile Pelion on Ossa to
reach the heaven from which they are ex-
cluded ; the other is what the life of the fauns,
satyrs, and wood nymphs would have been had
they grown up in a richer, fatter land, flowing
with milk and honey, and where the gift of
Bacchus hung from every bough.
He also resembles Michelangelo in his im-
mense originality. No other artists are so
original, none others owe so little to external
suggestion. Michelangelo deals with strenu-
ous muscles, Rubens with palpitating flesh.
Michelangelo is above the weaknesses of
earth ; the art of Rubens is the apotheosis
RUBENS 2O9
of carnal appetites. Both are equally re-
moved from the serene perfection of Raphael,
both are abnormal, pressing their characteristic
qualities far beyond the narrow bounds of na-
ture. Their men and women are not human-
ity perfected ; but humanity with special quali-
ties developed to a superhuman degree. But
in their way of looking at the world, in the
character of the types which they evoke and
the method of their presentation, Michelangelo
and Rubens are both removed to an immeasur-
able distance from those who approach them
closest.
They are alike also in that neither founded
a school, and both were stumbling blocks in
the way of those who followed. This is the
inevitable consequence of supreme strength.
Skill may be imitated, but strength is Nature's
gift. And the sight of strength is demoraliz-
ing to the weak. They strive to imitate its
play, but theatrical straining after effect is the
only result. Both had many admirers, and
Rubens had many pupils ; but the true art of
both was so intensely personal that it perished
when they died.
210 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
Rubens is one of the broadest of all painters.
In landscape, in the painting of animals, in
humanity's boundless realm he was almost in-
exhaustible. There was only one limitation
to his talent he could not scale the loftiest
heights. Man's highest spiritual nature was
to him a sealed book. Ordinary emotions he
could feel intensely; but he could not climb
Sinai's riven summit with Michelangelo nor
stand with Phidias in serene majesty upon
Parnassus' brow. His place was in the valley
where dwell the men of earth, or in the forest
glades where Bacchus and his rout held their
prodigious revels.
The spirit of the Renaissance will never die,
but Rubens was its last great exemplar. Al-
ready the two great painters who were his
younger contemporaries, Rembrandt and Vel-
asquez, have wholly escaped its influence,
looking upon the world with different eyes and
from a different point of view. But as the
dying day often flares up in a sunset glory
that makes us almost forget its noontide splen-
dor, so Rubens came to give to the dying
Renaissance the one triumph that it lacked.
CLAUDE LORRAINE
(1600-1682)
LANDSCAPE artists, like all others, are
divided into two great schools, the real-
ists, who are content to reproduce with photo-
graphic accuracy the things they see, and the
idealists, who strive to body forth their own
conceptions. Of these, the latter are the
higher type. For the realist only a clear eye, a
cunning hand, and technical training are essen-
tial. The idealist worthy of the name must
possess all these, and must have in addition
that capacity to evoke forms of power and
beauty from the shadowy void, that creative
faculty, which brings man closest to the Deity.
The idealistic school has been discredited in
the opinion of many by the incompetency so
often manifested by its practitioners. Their
minds teeming with images, they have sought
211
212 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
to give to their visions a local habitation and a
name without first attaining the technical mas-
tery essential for self-expression. They have
sought to dance before they have learned to
walk ; and the result has been feeble, sometimes
even grotesque. If we attempt to produce the
ideal without an effectual hold of the real, we
have vague, lifeless abstractions that may excite
the wonder of the ignorant, but which cannot
long command attention. But when both are
combined, when a dream is clothed with a real-
ism so intense that it seems as true as fact, as in
the case of Dante's vision of Heaven and Hell,
or when the hard actualities of life are bathed in
an ideal atmosphere, as in Hawthorne's Scarlet
Letter, we have a work that will survive the
wearing of the ages.
The real is the first thing to be aimed at.
We cannot write a poem until we have mastered
the grammar; we cannot dance until we have
learned to walk. But if we are content with
grammatical exercises, we shall never produce
literature ; if we are content to walk, we shall
know nothing of the poetry of motion. As the
scholar learns a language not for the sake of
CLAUDE LORRAINE 213
knowing it, but as a key to the treasures which
it unlocks, so the idealist learns to reproduce
the real by brush or chisel only as a means of
giving tangible forms to the visions of beauty
that float before his mind's eye.
It is the function of art to perfect nature.
She is a wonderful enchantress, infinite in her
variety, but never perfect in her workmanship.
Of the thousands of leaves upon a tree, no two
are alike, yet no one of them is the perfect type
to which the others should conform. Of the
millions of beautiful women that have adorned
the earth, no two could be mistaken for one an-
other on a careful comparison, yet not one is
faultless. And so it is in landscape. There
was never a scene so lovely that it could not be
improved by the removal of some unsightly or
discordant object, or the addition of something
to enhance its beauty or sublimity. The painter
who reproduces any view, however enchanting,
with literal accuracy, has merely learned the
technic of his craft. He is not a creative genius.
To be such he must not only know the secrets
of mixing and applying paint to board and can-
vas ; he must have studied Nature with such
214 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
loving insight that he can enter into her work-
shop and comprehend her processes. He must
not only be able to copy what she has done,
but to create scenes that she might have created
and as she would have made them. He should
be able to use the prospect before him as the
inspired sculptor uses the living model merely
as a source of suggestions and as a guide to
truth. He should be able to look beyond
the actual to the ideal, taking the real only
as a firm foundation on which to plant the
ladder of his dreams.
Thus it was with Claude Lorraine, who, in
spite of all the attacks made upon him by smart
critics, still remains the prince of landscape
painters. Never did artist study nature with
more loving care. His two biographers, Sand-
rart and Baldinucci, tell us how he would
wander forth into the Campagna before the
dawn and remain until after nightfall, striving
to fix upon his palette every gradation of light,
every tint of the earth and sky, every atmos-
pheric effect ; how laboriously he would copy
every tree and leaf and flower, every rock and
mountain, the flowing brook and the rippling,
CLAUDE LORRAINE 21$
sun-kissed sea. Innumerable sketches remain
to attest his industry and the keenness of his
observation. These are no doubt but a small
fragment of the whole ; yet they demonstrate
that he was no idle dreamer, but one of the
most conscientious seekers after truth in all the
range of art. They show, too, that he perceived
many things that he did not put upon his canvas
because they did not suit his purpose ; things
which critics have accused him of being too
artificial to appreciate. They prove that had
he desired it he could have been one of the most
effective realists that ever lived. His Liber
Veritatis, with its two hundred drawings of his
finished pictures, is unhappily locked up at
Chatsworth, the home of the Duke of Devon-
shire; but every important gallery in Europe
possesses some of his sketches and drawings,
the National Gallery an immense number ; and
these show a delicacy and precision that rank
Claude among the great draughtsmen ; nor is
their beauty more remarkable than the variety
of the observations that they record. But all
this enormous mastery of detail he used only
as steps to the ideal. He did not sit down be-
2l6 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
fore a landscape and copy it with literal fidelity.
From the view before him he eliminated every
discordant element and added what was needed
to make it perfect ; and he bathed it all in an
atmosphere of celestial peace that Nature has
never known and man has found only in his
dreams of heaven. There results a scene like the
" Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca " in the Doria
Gallery, such as Nature has never made, but
which is true in every detail, and which she
would have rejoiced to make had her mood
been happier. To a dweller in a northern clime
these pictures may seem unreal in the ideality
of their beauty; but he who has wandered
through the hills and valleys of Umbria with
their sense of limitless space and their mountains
blue in the distance, who has gazed from the
battlements of her high-perched cities over the
broad vales where all lies in unbroken repose
touched with sweetest melancholy, to the far-
off summits whose sun-kissed clouds seem
heaven's own outworks, who has stood at a
Mediterranean seaport and watched the setting
sun fill the air with gold-dust and suffuse the
sapphire sea with amethystine tints, he can
CLAUDE LORRAINE 21?
understand that while the scene which Claude
spreads out before us is nature perfected, it is
still as true as it is enchanting.
In four aspects of landscape art Claude has
never been surpassed, and rarely equalled : in
beauty, in serene peacefulness, in the sense of
space, in atmosphere and light.
The beauty of his landscapes none can deny.
Everything that nature offers most alluring to
the eye is to be found there ; trees that are the
perfection of symmetry and grace ; crystalline
brooks that murmur between their verdurous
banks, now breaking into miniature waterfalls,
now spreading out into lovely pools that reflect
the glories of the earth and sky ; distant moun-
tains whose curves possess a truly feminine grace
which yet detracts not from their sublimity ;
ancient ruins and classic buildings of pleasing
architecture ; the sunlit sea in all the charm of
its hours of peace. And while he gives us all
these in their most exquisite forms, he excludes
all that is ugly, all that is out of keeping with
the spirit of the scene. His pictures are true
harmonies, such harmonies as have rarely been
produced.
2l8 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
The realist says : " This is all very beautiful,
but it is artificial. Nature makes nothing so
perfect." To which Claude might reply : "Every
tree, every mountain, every aspect of earth and
sky, has been studied from Nature. Every part
is true, and if I have brought together forms
of grace and beauty that Nature scattered far
apart, I have but discharged the function of
the artist." And the traveller who will follow
Claude over the rolling Campagna and the
Alban and Sabine hills into Umbria's land of
enchantment will see that Nature in her happiest
moments can give us effects almost as sym-
metrical, almost as serenely beautiful, as any
offered by Claude's magic brush. Pictures which
to the dwellers in less favored countries seem
too exquisite for reality are little more than the
bare truth in that region of delight.
Besides, no one reproaches Phidias or the
unknown sculptor of the Venus of Melos with
having surpassed Nature in dealing with the
human form. Their figures, though super-
human, are true to life. And so it is with
Claude's landscapes. They are perfectly true
to Nature, such scenes as she has made in
CLAUDE LORRAINE 219
Italy, such as she might have made in other
lands had her mood been happier. The fact
that they are not transcripts of any particular
view does not impair their truth, any more
than the Venus of Melos suffers because she is
not a literal reproduction of any model.
I have never understood the reproach so
often directed against Claude of introducing
into his pictures Roman ruins and classic archi-
tecture. Such things exist, and they are beau-
tiful. They were constantly under his eye.
Men travel thousands of miles to see them.
Why, then, should not Claude use them to
embellish his landscapes ? They are as real as
a peasant's hut. But somehow in these later
days the idea has gotten abroad that only the
ugly and the commonplace are real ; that things
of elegance and beauty lend an aspect of arti-
ficiality to a scene. Yet in fact the togaed
Romans, the mailed knights of chivalry, and
the silken courtiers of Watteau were just as
real as the drunken boors of Teniers or the
peasants of Millet, and the artist who repre-
sented them as they were was as true a realist.
Nor was Claude's introduction of these ruins
22O RENAISSANCE MASTERS
and this beautiful architecture the result of
pedantry. He was an unlearned, almost an il-
literate man, who painted as a bird sings, from
the fulness of an overflowing heart. He painted
the things that were lovely in his eyes, and
happily there are few to whom they are not a
source of perennial delight. If Claude had had
no successors, the charge of artificiality would
probably never have been advanced ; but un-
happily he was followed by a horde of imita-
tors, who, with no study of Nature, sought to
paint scenes like his; and their lifeless pro-
ductions have brought the whole school into
disrepute.
In conveying a sense of peace Claude has
never been equalled, and this makes him one
of the greatest ethical forces in the domain of
art. The old Greek virtue of serenity one of
the greatest of all virtues has been sadly lack-
ing in modern days. Instead, we have con-
tinual unrest, strivings for the unattainable,
dissatisfaction with ourselves and with all about
us. Claude takes us out of this nervous, irri-
table, work-a-day world, and transports us into
a land of enchantment, where all is peace and
CLAUDE LORRAINE 221
rest and serenest joy ; where strife and sin
have been forgotten ; where the gladness of
the morning, the delicious languor of a day in
June, or the exquisite reveries of the sunset
hour abide forever. When we are oppressed
with toil and care ; when love and hope seem
mockeries and hate and pain and weariness the
only realities, then let the troubled spirit turn
to Claude and bathe in his immortal sunshine.
There are few pictures that we so love to live
with, that have so healing an effect upon the
soul. The calm beauty of his landscapes de-
scends upon us like a benediction. They take
us out of ourselves, out of our sordid surround-
ings, away from the trivialities of our petty
existence, and bear us off into a world of serene
beauty, where struggle and sorrow are unknown
or but a fading memory that enhances our
sense of tranquil happiness. Of all man's
dreams of heaven on earth, Claude's come
nearest to perfection.
Nature is infinite in her manifestations, and
some of her aspects appeal to one, some to
another ; but there are many of us for whom
the finest quality in a landscape is the sense of
222 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
space, the uplifting of the soul into the infinite
that it gives. In this respect Claude has never
been equalled save by Turner in a few in-
stances ; and he produces his effects with the
sureness of a consummate master, whose hand
rarely fails.
If any man of clear vision will ask himself
what was the supreme moment of his soul's
expansion, what was the moment when he felt
most like a god, when the trammels of the flesh
seemed to fall away and the disembodied spirit
to soar highest in the heavens, he will recall
the instant when some far-reaching prospect
was first opened to his gaze. He will think of
the time when he first stood on Mount Royal
above Montreal, upon Richmond Hill, on Peru-
gia's battlements, or on some other eminence
overlooking a limitless expanse. In the pres-
ence of such a view we forget that we are
poor creatures crawling upon the earth. The
soul takes unto itself the wings of the morning,
and flies away over sea and land into the realm
of the infinite.
The weakness of man's mind and of his
vision is such that for him to feel the sense of
CLAUDE LORRAINE
space the scene must have a distant boundary
and there must be objects between on which
the eye can rest. The most limitless of all
views is up into the cloudless heavens, where
the closest star is millions of miles away ; but
we wholly fail to grasp its import. So it is
beside the sea. Its vastness so far exceeds our
comprehension, the eye is so completely lost
over the boundless expanse, that we have no
realization of distance. But in the region
around Rome, where Claude spent nearly the
whole of his long life, everything combines to
fill us with a sense of space. The gently roll-
ing Campagna, dotted with ruins and studded
with an occasional tree or dwelling, lures the
eye on and on from point to point till at last it
rests upon the far-off mountains. There are
countless objects to arrest the gaze, and as our
glance ranges from one to another ever farther
away, the vista seems to stretch into infinity.
Claude had this view ever before his eyes,
and its lesson sank into his soul as it has never
sunk into the soul of any other artist. Nearly
all of his pictures give us an unparalleled sense
of space. The eye is led on from tree to river,
224 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
from river to hill, and from hill to distant
mountain that suggests yet something beyond.
The vanishing point seems removed to an un-
limited distance ; and in their presence we feel
the same thrill, the same sense of the immedi-
ate presence of the infinite as when we have
climbed some eminence that gives us a far-
reaching view.
There are few artists who are so sure of their
effects as Claude. Of course, being human, he
failed at times ; but the failures are so few that
they can be ignored in the estimate of his
achievement. He was not a rapid worker. He
painted with so much care, he was so deter-
mined that every detail should be accurate,
that with all his unflagging industry he turned
out only from three to five pictures a year ; but
he was fortunately spared for so great a length
of days that his total production amounted to
some four hundred finished paintings, so that
every considerable gallery in Europe can boast
of something from his brush, while the homes
of the English nobility and gentry are teeming
with his works. And in all this vast output
how few are the unworthy canvases ! Nearly
CLAUDE LORRAINE 22$
every one of them gives us a glorious vision of
peace and beauty, and arouses in us a percep-
tion of the infinity of space.
Landscape art has explored so many fields
since Claude's day that it is hard now to realize
that in his own time he was something of a
revolutionist, making many advances upon the
work of his predecessors. The chief of these
was that he was the first to place the sun
in the sky. In the predella of his "Adora-
tion of the Kings," in the Florentine Academy,
Gentile da Fabrino paints the sun ; but he
gives it the face of a man, and makes no effort
to depict its real aspect. The same is true of
all Claude's predecessors. Claude not only
painted the rising and the setting sun, but he
painted it so well that no one has since sur-
passed or even equalled him. Some of Turner's
sunsets are said to have been originally more
brilliant ; but the pigments used were so defec-
tive that they have long since faded; and
for the present generation Claude is still the
painter who gives us the most perfect presenta-
tion of the sun's glory.
In light and atmosphere and the rendering of
226 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
the sky he also made an immense advance on
anything that had been done before. Many
atmospheric phenomena, many effects of light
have been since presented by the brush that
Claude either failed to observe or eliminated as
unsuited to his purpose. But in the rendition
of those effects which he chose to portray he is
still the master. His landscapes are bathed in
atmosphere ; not the heavy moist atmosphere
of the north of Europe, which envelops every-
thing in mist and blurs all outlines, but the
clear, luminous atmosphere of sunlit Italy,
which leaves all clear and distinct and only
serves to accentuate the distance.
And there are no pictures more thoroughly
suffused with light. It permeates everywhere.
It shimmers through the foliage, it laughs upon
the surface of the rippling brook, it caresses
the ruin in the foreground, it bathes the dis-
tant hill in splendor. But it is never obtrusive.
As in nature, it is the all-pervading revealer of
opaque objects, not a thing existing for itself.
And Claude comprehended what so many real-
ists have forgotten, that the light can fall as well
upon the beautiful as upon the ugly, that it can
CLAUDE LORRAINE 22^
light up a temple or a palace as delightfully as a
cottage. Claude realized, too, the limitations
of pigment in dealing with light a thing which
the impressionists have yet to learn. Knowing
that no paint could reproduce the clear bril-
liancy of sunlight, he did as a composer who
transposes a harmony to a lower key he did
the best he could to represent the sun's bright-
ness, and then brought down all the other
lights in proportion, so as to preserve the har-
mony of effect. The impressionist, on the other
hand, tries to paint the light precisely as it is.
He can give us the exact tone of light in the
shadows ; but he cannot produce the brilliance
of the sunlight, and so discord results. To any
normal eye the light in Claude's pictures is
more natural than in the productions of the
plein air school. He reproduces Nature's har-
mony, though in a lower key ; while they, with
all their scientific accuracy of observation, give
us a discord unknown to her.
Claude has been reproached for his inability
to depict the violent aspects of nature. It is
true that he was not able to render satisfactorily
storms and darkness. For that matter, neither
228 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
was Raphael, whose efforts to portray the tragic
are essentially failures. But this limitation of
Raphael's genius does not prevent his being ac-
knowledged as the Prince of Painters, and it is
hard to perceive why a different rule should be
applied to Claude. He does supremely well
what he undertakes to do ; and that is all that
can be demanded of any artist. You might as
well condemn Raphael because he could not
paint like Michelangelo, or Michelangelo be-
cause he could not paint like Titian. Every
one has his limitations, and the question is
whether he achieves a high degree of perfection
within those limits.
In devoting himself to the smiling aspects of
Nature Claude was true to the traditions of his
Italian home. The Italian loves light and ab-
hors darkness. The dim, shadowy aisles of a
Gothic cathedral have no charm for him. He
enjoys buildings in which the noon's whitest
radiance falls upon the splendor of fresco and
gilding. He delights in days when the air is of
crystalline brilliancy and when every object
appears most clearly defined. He may be sor-
rowful, but the brooding melancholy ,of the
CLAUDE LORRAINE
North has no hold upon him. His bright na-
ture turns from the mournful haze that some-
times envelops his land to the sun's effulgence.
He sees many aspects of nature, but only one
charms his soul, only one does he seek to per-
petuate on the canvas. At least, so it was in the
days of the Renaissance, when his own charac-
ter was suffered to develop naturally, unaffected
by those influences that now invade him from
beyond the Alps. Living much in the open air,
his eyesight was generally good, so that on the
clear days that he loved he saw distant objects
with great distinctness.
Not only is the Italian's sunny nature averse
to mists and dampness, but they bring to him
serious physical discomfort. The Hollander in
his cosy little room beside a cheerful fire likes to
look out on fogs and clouds. The sight of them
only adds to his satisfaction, making his home
seem sweeter and more attractive by contrast.
From his immaculate windows with their well
polished panes he gazes on the shifting vapors,
and loves to study the play of light through
and upon them and the ever varied atmospheric
effects which they produce. But with the Ital-
230 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
ian all is different. His great bare rooms with
their lofty vaulted ceilings are rarely heated
save by the sun. When the day is bright they
are beautiful and stately beyond all other dwell-
ings ; but in damp weather they are cheerless
to the last degree. Pictures of mist and rain
are therefore associated in the Italian's mind
with all that is cold and chill and wretched.
In such weather there may be beauty, but he is
too uncomfortable to observe it ; and the ac-
companying sensations are so unpleasant that
he does not wish them recalled to his memory.
Therefore, in the painting of the Italian
Renaissance you must not look for storms and
darkness. The dampness that makes such
phenomena possible was hateful to the painter's
sight. Sunlight alone he loves, and sun-bathed
landscapes are all that he cares to depict. In
the Italian mind there is little of that haziness,
of that dreamy vagueness so common with the
Teuton. What he sees at all he sees clearly,
and so it pleases him to portray it. Accordingly
he delights to paint his landscapes only as they
appear in sunny weather, and especially as they
appear when a storm has cleared the atmosphere
CLAUDE LORRAINE
and when its crystalline purity interposes no
veil between him and the object of his regard.
In his taste for landscape, as in so many
other things, the Renaissance Italian was the
heir of imperial Rome. To what extent this
was unconscious, a manifestation of an inherited
disposition, and to what extent it was due to
cultivation at a time when almost all works of
literary merit were in the Latin tongue, we can-
not say. But certain it is that he loved pre-
cisely those views that would have pleased the
subjects of Trajan or Augustus. The ancients
delighted only in nature's smiling aspects.
They saw nothing to attract in rugged moun-
tains or barren rocks. Such things filled them
with horror. They loved broad meadows slop-
ing to an azure sea, gentle eminences clothed
in verdure and bathed in sunlight, seaports
guarded by graceful promontories and dotted
with islands like jewels on ocean's bosom. It
was such prospects that they celebrated in their
poems and romances ; with such did they
decorate their walls. The sublimity of desolate
mountain fastnesses, of fathomless gorges, of
storms and darkness brooding over waters that
232 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
moan and shriek in fury and despair, were to
them unsympathetic and forbidding. Lord
Byron's exultation in the grandeur of the
storm-swept Alps they would have found in-
comprehensible. They loved mountains, but
only when their desolation was concealed by
distance, and when, blue on the horizon's verge,
they seemed the fitting home of the immortal
gods. They knew nothing of that desire to
scale them, to climb their riven and blasted
sides with infinite toil and no little danger, of
the intoxication of standing upon their dizzy
summits, that thrills our breasts to-day. They
knew nothing of our restless aspirations toward
the infinite. They thought that this world was
all in all, and that the gods dwelt just above
their heads on Ida and Olympus, and were
content.
The man of the Renaissance knew no more of
the universe than the ancient Roman, and he
looked at Nature with much the same eyes. He
loved her smiles and dreaded her frowns in the
same way, and was equally inclined to repre-
sent only her pleasing features. It was they
alone on which he could look with satisfaction ;
CLAUDE LORRAINE 233
it was they alone that he desired to remember.
Therefore it was they alone that he willingly
fixed upon the canvas.
Claude is reproached with the poor drawing
of his figures. The reproach is just. In dealing
with the human form he was hopelessly in-
competent. It is almost inconceivable that one
who could represent inanimate nature with such
perfect accuracy should have failed so com-
pletely in his figure painting. Nor was it due
to a want of application. He was continually
drawing from the antique and from life, striving
with all his might to learn the secrets of the
human body, yet all in vain. He realized his
own deficiencies, and used to say that he sold
his landscapes and threw in the figures. When
he had attained such eminence as to admit the
hiring of assistants, he usually employed some
one to put the figures in according to his scheme.
It is generally said that Claude derives the
basis of his art from Titian and the great Vene-
tians and from the Bolognese. That may be
so, but I fail to perceive it. Titian and his
followers are in some aspects more modern
than Claude. They possess in only moderate
234 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
degree his sense of space and his serenity.
They are deeper and richer in color. The
Bolognese, on the other hand, are so inferior to
Claude in artistic worth that they are not to be
mentioned in the same breath.
To find Claude's real predecessors we must
go back to the old Umbrian school, especially
to Perugino, to Pinturicchio, to the youthful
Raphael before he fell under the spell of Michel-
angelo. It is only of late that we have begun
to realize how great were these men as land-
scape painters. They relegated their landscapes
to the background, so that the casual observer
neglected them for the figures. As they were
not presentations of any known view, it was
the fashion to speak of them slightingly as
" conventional." Now, however, we perceive
that these old Umbrian backgrounds are among
the glories of art, often far more precious than
the saints and Madonnas that are the centre of
the pictures. These scenes, like Claude's, are
ideal. The artist has not copied any one frag-
ment of nature. He has composed a work of
the imagination, true to nature's spirit, but his
own beautiful creation. And there is the same
CLAUDE LORRAINE 235
sense of peace, of infinite distance, the same
exclusive predilection for scenes of tranquil
beauty, the same unobtrusive color, the same
preference for form and line as means of
expression.
We do not know that Claude ever saw these
pictures, far less that he consciously studied
them. It is likely that the resemblance is due
entirely to the fact that they lived in similar
environments, in constant contemplation of the
same charming scenes, beneath the same lumin-
ous sky. Certain it is that Claude takes up the
work where Perugino and Raphael leave it off,
and carries it along their lines to an ultimate
perfection.
It must be noted that not only was Claude a
great painter, but he was a great etcher. Only
at two short and distant periods of his life did
he take up the needle ; and for want of practice
his work in that line is very unequal. But at
his best it is very beautiful, remarkable for the
clearness and delicacy that characterize his
drawings. Some of his skies are the best ever
made with the burin.
Of late years Claude's fame has suffered an
236 RENAISSANCE MASTERS
eclipse. On the Continent the methods of the
Impressionists are the precise antithesis of his,
and they and all their followers have been con-
strained to ridicule him and to cry him down.
In England, Turner, who owed him so great a
debt and who sometimes imitated him so
closely, would suffer no rival near his throne,
and insisted upon abuse of Claude as a passport
to his favor. Claude's pictures have all the
qualities called for by the artistic principles
that Ruskin laid down, the accuracy of detail,
the idealism, the ethical quality ; and one would
have expected him to be enthusiastic in their
praise. But such was his devotion to Turner
that he voiced all the jealousy and prejudice of
the master, and his amazing eloquence is con-
tinually used in abuse of Claude. Rarely does
he bestow a word of praise on Turner without
flinging a stone at his great predecessor.
If, as many critics believe, composition is the
highest faculty of the artist, Claude must be
ranked supremely high. His pictures hang
together in a faultless way. Everything har-
monizes, and the wealth of detail, instead of
distracting attention, unites to produce the
CLAUDE LORRAINE 237
effect intended. Raphael is called the Prince
of Painters, largely because his composition is
so rarely at fault. The same rule should be
applied to Claude. He is one of the great
composers. And now, as the influence of Rus-
kin wanes and the world is growing weary of
the aberrations of the Impressionists, it is turn-
ing back to Claude, where he still sits enthroned
in an enchanted land of his own creation, a land
where all is harmony, where peace and joy
reign undisturbed, and sin and sorrow dare not
enter.
INDEX.
ART:
Renaissance and Greek compared, 6
Individuality of Renaissance, 7
Its variety, 8
Its preference for painting, 9
Its sudden end, 13
Art as decoration and illustration, 28
Venetian color, 108
Color as an element of beauty, no
Venetian art little affected by classic, 118, I2O
Venetian art decorative, 120
The nude, 125
Florentine and Venetian, 147
Color in fresco, 147
BOTTICELLI :
Diversity of opinion, 159
Vicissitudes of fame, 160
Painter of the nerves, 161
His ideal of beauty, 162, 163
His historical importance, 162
His ineffectual striving after classic ideals, 163, 175
" Birth of Venus," 164, 173, 178
"Spring," 164, 172, 173, 178
Compared with Raphael, 164, 160
His illustrations of Dante, 165
239
240 INDEX
BOTTICELLI : Continued.
His defective anatomy, 166
" Mars and Venus," 167
"Calumny," 167
His mastery of lineal decoration, 167
His color, 167
His sense of motion, 168
The painter of the breeze, 169
His draperies, 170
His weakness in large compositions, 170
Sistine frescoes, 170
His limitations, 171
His flowers, 171
"Crowned Madonna," 172, 176, 178
His fondness for allegory, 172
44 Pallas and the Centaur,'* 172
Most feminine of painters, 172
His suggestiveness, 174
Painter of woman's soul, 175
Compared with Leonardo, 175
His fancy, 175
" Nativity," 176, 179
His poetry, 177
His affectations, 177
His charm, 178
His influence on our time, 178
CORREGGIO :
His debt to Leonardo, 94, 146, 147
" Jupiter and Antiope," 148, 94
His paganism, 131
His joyousness, 132
44 The Fates," 133
Compared with Raphael, 133, 139, 148, 156, 157
Compared with Michelangelo, 133, 139, 141, 145, 148,
151. I55> 157
INDEX 24T
CORREGGIO : Continued.
A lyric poet, 133
His children and boys, 134
His types, 134
His expression of sadness, 135
"Ecce Homo," 135
His slight opportunities, 135
His isolation, 137
Compared with Leonardo, 139, 146, 147, 148, 156, 158
Is he immoral? 139
"The Day," 140
His religious feeling, 143
" Madonna with St. George," 144, 145
" Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine," 144
" Danae," 144
" Jupiter and lo," 144
"Assumption," 151, 145
"Ascension," 145, 146
A painter purely of the imagination, 145
Painted no portraits, 145
His chiaroscuro, 146
His atmosphere, 146
His color, 147
Compared with Titian, 148, 154, 157
"Sleeping Antiope," 148
His love for foreshortening, 151
His handling of masses, 151
Toschi's engravings, 153
"Reading Magdalen," 154
His sense of female beauty, 154
His effect on the decline of art, 155
Most emotional, 155
His smiles, 156
His want of depth, 156
His qualities, 157
242 INDEX
LEONARDO DA VINCI :
His study of countenance, 7
His versatility, 71
His scientific discoveries and inventions, 71
His personal appearance and accomplishments, 75
Questions of authenticity, 76
Academy cartoon, 76, 89, 101
" Mona Lisa," 85, 76, 94, 101
" Last Supper," 79, 76, 82, 93, in
Want of fecundity, 77, 101, 38
First modern painter, 77
Invented grandeur of style, 79
Mastery of facial expression, 81
" Battle of the Standard," 82, 93
Compared with Raphael, 83, 89, 100
Compared with Michelangelo, 83, 89, 90, IOO
Preference for subtle types, 85
His appreciation of the womanly, 88
Not a lover of physical beauty, 88
His smile, 85, 150
" Madonna of the Rocks," 89
" Virge aux Rochers," 89
"St. Anne," 89
His spirituality, 89
Anatomical skill, 90
Indifference to the nude, 90
" Leda," 90
The painter of the soul, 91
Lovableness of his women, 91
His chiaroscuro, 93
Revolutionized art, 77, 94
Devotion to nature, 95
Indifference to classic art, 95
Not a realist, 96
His fondness for plants and animals, 97
His fondness for hair, 97
INDEX 243
LEONARDO DA VINCI : Continued.
Interest in all things curious, 98
His writing from right to left, 99
" St. John," 99
"Bacchus," 100
Most thoughtful of painters, 100
His portrait, 102
Compared with Corregio, 139, 146, 147, 148, 156, 158
His frescoes, 150
Compared with Botticelli, 175
MICHELANGELO :
Compared with Raphael, 42, 58, 22, 23, 24, 39, 40, 47, 57,
63,64
His preference for the Old Testament, 43
" Christ " of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, 43, 44
" Pieta," 44, 45
41 Holy Family of the Tribune," 44, 46
Not Christian in spirit of his art, 44
" Last Judgment," 45, 52, 62, 68, 151
" Descent from the Cross," 46
His preference for the masculine, 46
" Eve," 47, 48
"Adam," 48, 81
" Night," 48, 49
" Dawn," 48, 49
Medicean Tombs, 48, 62, 63, 68, 141
His women not womanly, 47
Nor lovable, 49
His feeling for male beauty, 49
" Captives," 50
His terribilitb, 50
" Moses," 51, 63, 68, 141
"David," 51, 141
Compared with Greeks, 52
The vitality of his creations, 53
244 INDEX
MICHELANGELO : Continued.
His power, 54
Sistine ceiling, 47, 55, 62, 68
His mastery of the nude, 56
Essentially a sculptor, 57
His absorption in man, 59
His fondness for physical vigor, 60
' Battle of Pisa," 61, 67, 83
His personality, 63
His aversion to assistants, 64
Decline following his death, 65
His own decline, 67
Pauline Chapel, 69
St. Peter's Dome, 69
Painter, sculptor, architect, 69
His color, 149
Compared with Correggio, 133, 139, 141, 145, 148, 151,
155, 157
MIDDLE AGES :
Their longing for the unattainable, 4
Their conception of love, 5
Their absorption of the individual, 9
Their conception of religion, 141
Mediaeval paganism, 175
RAPHAEL :
His unvarying good fortune, 18
Reconciled the mediaeval and the classic, 19
His purity, 22
Compared with Michelangelo, 42, 58, 22, 23, 24, 39, 40,
47, 57
His humanity, 23
Fixed our standard of beauty, 25
"Sistine Madonna," 25
'* Madonna of the Chair," 25
INDEX 245
RAPHAEL : Continued.
" Burning of the Borgo," 25
" St. Michael," 25, 37
4 'Parnassus," 26, 164
Compared with Leonardo, 26, 39, 41
Compared with Titian, 26, 41, 112, 123
His realism and idealism, 26
His portraits, 27
As illustrator, 29
His feeling for space, 32
His color, 31, 148
His composition, 31, 58
41 School of Athens," 33, 36, 41, 8l
Compared with Claude Lorraine, 31, 33
44 Apollo and Marsyas," 34
His receptiveness, 34
4< Galatea," 36, 37, 164
Assistance received from his pupils, 36
44 Holy Family of Francis I.," 37
44 Battle of Constantine," 37, 41, 83
44 Cupid, and Psyche," 37
His fecundity, 38
His imaginative power, 39
4 ' Expulsion of Heliodorus," 41
4 "Entombment," 41
Variety of his compositions, 41
His preference for the New Testament, 43
Loggie pictures, 43
"Transfiguration," 112
44 Miracle of Bolsena," 148
Compared with Correggio, 133, 139, 148, 156, i$7
Compared with Botticelli, 164, 160
RENAISSANCE :
Conflict between classic and mediaeval, I
A period of disintegration and contrasts, IO
246 INDEX
RENAISSANCE : Continued.
Its lawlessness, 60
Its general culture, 137
TITIAN :
His paganism, 104
His breadth and sanity, 105
" Sleeping Antiope," 149, 107
" Venus and Nymphs Equipping Cupid," 107
His mastery of his craft, 107
His color, 108
" Assumption," 112, 109, 126
" Entombment," 109, 126
His religious pictures, 113
" Tribute Money," in.
His conception of Christ, in
" Pesaro Madonna," 113
" Presentation of the Virgin," 113
His portraits, 115
His humanity, 117
Painter of the flesh, 117, 124
His debt to Giorgione, 119
" Sacred and Profane Love," 122, I2O
" Three Ages of Man," 120, 122.
As an illustrator, 122
" Bacchus and Ariadne," 123
" Worship of Venus," 123
His composition, 123
Compared with Raphael, 112, 123, 126
His draughtsmanship, 123
Compared with Michelangelo, 123
" St. Peter Martyr," 124
"Danae," 124
His preference for repose, 124.
His anatomy, 124
His variety, 126
INDEX 247
TITIAN : Continued.
" Mocking of Christ," 126
His slow development, 127
His feeling for nature, 127
His serenity, 129
His frescoes, 147
Compared with Correggio, 148, 154, 157
RUBENS :
A classicist, 181
"Tiberius and Agrippina," 183
Represents ideas of his own time, 183
Allegories, 185
His rank as an artist, 186
His sense of vitality, 187, 208
His color, 189
"Judgment of Paris," 190
" Perseus and Andromeda," 190
His flesh painting, 192
His picture factory, 192
His fecundity, 195
His youthful style, 196
" Descent from the Cross," 197, 201
Helen Fourment, 197
"Andromeda," 198
"Venus of the Prado," 198
" Shepherd and Shepherdess," 198
"La Pelisse," 198
His sensuousness, 198
Morality of his works, 199
His religious paintings, 200
" Theodosius Refused Admittance to the Church," 202
" Christ and the Four Penitents," 202
Fondness for painting drunkenness, 202
His landscapes, 203
His portraits, 204
248 INDEX
" Le Chapeau de Foil," 204
His fondness for large compositions, 205, 207
" Last Judgment," 205
" Fall of the Damned," 205
" Fall of the Rebel Angels," 205
" Boar Hunt," 206
"Lion Hunt," 206
His children, 206
" Christ and St. John," 206
*' Rape of the Sabines," 207
" Massacre of the Innocents," 207
" Garden of Love," 207
"Kermesse," 207
Compared with Michelangelo, 207
His originality, 208
His successors, 209
His breadth, 210
SUPPLEMENTARY INDEX.
CLAUDE LORRAINE:
Real and ideal, 211
His drawings, 214
His sense of beauty, 217
His use of architecture, 219
His serenity, 220.
His sense of distance, 221
His high average, 224
Painting the sun, 225
Light and atmosphere, 225
Inability to represent storms, 227
Influence of Italian climate, 228
His predecessors, 233
His etchings, 235
Turner and Ruskin, 235
His composition, 236
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