A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools

Lodovico is famous in art history as the founder of the Eclectic school of Bologna. Disgusted with the weakness of the Mannerists (of whom Baroccio was the best; see next picture), he determined to start a rival school, and enlisted the services of his two cousins, Agostino and Annibale, for that purpose. Their object, as expressed in a sonnet by Agostino, was to be to "acquire the design of Rome, Venetian action, and Venetian management of shade, the dignified colour of Lombardy (Leonardo), the terrible manner of Michael Angelo, Titian's truth and nature, the sovereign purity of Correggio's style, and the just symmetry of Raphael." Lodovico, who was the son of a Bolognese butcher,[62 - In the little-known collection in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, there is a powerful but unpleasantly realistic picture of a group in a butcher's shop, by one of the Carracci, which is perhaps a family portrait.] was a man of very wide culture and of great industry. In natural talent he was deficient. When first sent to an art school at Bologna, he was called by his companions "the ox," and when he visited Venice the veteran Tintoretto warned him that he had no vocation. But resolving to win by industry what nature seemed to have denied him, he studied diligently at Florence, Parma, Mantua, and Venice. He superintended the school, at first conjointly with his cousins, afterwards alone, from 1589 to his death.

A less objectionable rendering than most, of the story of Susannah in the Apocrypha – a story for all time, setting forth as it does the way in which minions of the law too often prey upon the innocent, and the righteous condemnation that the people, when there are just judges in the land, mete out to the offenders. Two judges, "ancients of the people," approached Susannah and threatened to report her as guilty unless she consented to do their bidding. She refused, and was reported accordingly. Judgment had well-nigh gone against her, when Daniel arose to convict the elders of false-witness, and they were straightway put to death. It is the moment of Susannah's temptation that the artist here depicts. "It is," says Hazlitt (p. 5), "as if the young Jewish beauty had been just surprised in that unguarded spot – crouching down in one corner of the picture, the face turned back with a mingled expression of terror, shame, and unconquerable sweetness, and the whole figure, with the arms crossed, shrinking into itself with bewitching grace and modesty." But Hazlitt never took notes, and Susannah's arms are not crossed – nor is her expression quite so naïve as he describes.

29. "OUR LADY OF THE CAT."

    Baroccio (Umbrian: 1528-1612).

Federigo Barocci, or Baroccio, is the best of the "Mannerists." "He feebly continued the style of Correggio," says Symonds, "with a certain hectic originality, infusing sentimental pietism into that great master's pagan sensuousness" (Renaissance, viii. 211). His colouring is peculiar: he used too much vermilion and ultramarine, and too few yellows. He was a native of Urbino, and the son of a sculptor. In 1548 he went to Rome and remained there some years, devoting his time to the study of Raphael. He then returned to Urbino, again visiting Rome in 1560, when he was employed in the Vatican. While there he was nearly poisoned, by some rival it is supposed, and for the rest of his long life he suffered from disease of the stomach, which rendered him unable to do much work. He died at Urbino at the age of eighty-four.

An admirable example of the decline of Italian art. The old religious spirit has entirely vanished, and the Holy Family is represented as worrying a bird with a cat! John the Baptist holds the little goldfinch; while the Madonna expressly directs the attention of the infant Christ to the fun. "See, the cat is trying to get at it," she seems to say. Behind the bird, the painter, in unconscious irony, has placed the Cross. The visitor who wishes to see how far Italian art has travelled in a hundred years should compare this picture with such an one as Bellini's (280), or with one of Raphael's, of whom Baroccio was a fellow-countryman. The connecting link should then be seen in Correggio (23). With Bellini or Perugino, the motive is wholly religious. With Raphael it is intermingled with artistic display. Correggio brings heaven wholly down to earth, but yet paints his domestic scene with lovely grace. Baroccio brings, one may almost say, heaven down to hell,[63 - See Blake's Auguries of Innocence.] and uses all his skill to show the infant Saviour's pleasure in teasing a bird. But the artist only embodied the spirit of his time. Baroccio was one of the most celebrated painters of his day, and his biographer (Bellori) writes of him that "his pencil may be said to have been dedicated to religion: so devout, so tender, and so calculated to awaken feelings of piety, are the sentiments expressed in his pictures."

30. SEAPORT: ST. URSULA

    Claude (French: 1600-1682). See 2.

The best Claude in the Gallery, for it is a perfect example of his chief merit – the painting of quiet skies. Constable, in one of his lectures, refers to it as "probably the finest picture of middle-tint in the world. The sun is rising through a thin mist, which, like the effect of a gauze blind in a room, diffuses the light equally. There are no large dark masses, there is no evasion in any part of this admirable work, every object is fairly painted in a firm style of execution, yet in no other picture have I seen the evanescent character of light so well expressed" (Leslie's Life of Constable, p. 338). "The effect of the breeze upon the water and upon the trees," says Ottley, "and the freshness of the morning atmosphere, in this picture, are expressed with a closeness of imitation bordering on illusion" (Descriptive Catalogue of the National Gallery, 1826, p. 42).

As for the subject: St. Ursula, a beautiful and gifted Sicilian princess, was sought in marriage by a prince of Britain; but having already dedicated herself to Christ, she made a condition that before her marriage, she, with eleven thousand attendant virgins, should be permitted for the space of three years to visit the shrines of the Saints. This being permitted, the maidens started on a miraculous voyage. Guided by angels they proceeded as far as Rome, where pagans having plotted their death, on their further journey to Cologne they were martyred by the barbarians besieging that city. Here in the picture they are represented as embarking.

31. THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC

    Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675).

Among the artists who were most closely associated with Nicolas Poussin (see 39) were his wife's brothers, Giovanni and Gaspard Dughet. The former was loved by Poussin as a son; the latter was also his pupil and adopted his name, though in France he is familiarly known as "Le Guaspre." Gaspard was Poussin's junior by nineteen years, and the older man, recognising his abilities, encouraged him to landscape painting. By the time he was twenty, Gaspard had established himself as an independent painter in Rome, and his works were eagerly sought by lovers of art. The Palazzo Doria and the Palazzo Colonna are especially rich in his works; the picture now before us, by some considered Gaspard's masterpiece, was formerly in the latter palace. Gaspard resided chiefly at Rome, but he also rented houses at Frascati and at Tivoli. In the noble scenery of those places and elsewhere in the country around Rome, he found the subjects for many of his best pictures. He worked so rapidly, we are told, that he would often "finish a picture in a day." He had a genuine love for nature, and also a passion for the chase. "A little ass, that he cared for himself, his only servant, bore his entire apparatus, provisions, and a tent, under which, protected from the sun and wind, he made his landscapes." There is (says Ruskin) more serious feeling in his landscapes, more "perception of the moral truth of nature," and "grander reachings after sympathy" than in those either of Nicolas or of Claude. It is impossible to look at many of his pictures in this Gallery without sharing the sense of grandeur and infinity in nature which inspired them, and hence it is that from Gaspard's own time till now they have enjoyed "a permanent power of address to the human heart." But more than this has been claimed for Gaspard. Critics thought they found in his works faithful adherence to the truths of nature in sky and trees. Ottley, for instance, in his Catalogue of the National Gallery (1826), speaks of Gaspard's "unrivalled correctness of imitation." Against these claims Ruskin took up his fiery parable. Gaspard's pictures are "full," he says, "of the most degraded mannerism;" first and foremost, in his search of a false sublimity, he painted every object in his picture, vegetation and all, of one dull gray and brown; and too many of his landscapes are now one dry, volcanic darkness. And secondly, he had a total want of imagination in seizing the true forms of natural objects, so that some passages of his landscapes are, as we shall see, perfect epitomes of the falseness to nature in the painters of that age[64 - Gaspard was particularly unfaithful to the variety of nature in his representation of leaves (see 98). It is interesting therefore, as showing how long it passed for truth, to note that Lanzi (i. 481) singles out this point for special praise: "Everything that Gaspard expresses is founded in nature; in his leaves he is as various as the trees themselves."] (collected from Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3, 14; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. v. § 12, sec ii. ch. ii. § 18; vol. iv. pt. v. ch. xvi. § 24).

These remarks cannot be better illustrated than in the present picture. Abraham and Isaac – the former with a lighted torch, the latter with the wood – are ascending the hill on the right to the sacrifice; while Abraham's two servants await his return below. The whole spirit of the picture is "solemn and unbroken," in perfect harmony with the subject. But it is kept from being a really grand picture by the "hopeless want of imagination" in the forms of the clouds, the colour of the sky, and the treatment of the distant landscape. These painters, says Ruskin, looked at clouds, "with utter carelessness and bluntness of feeling; saw that there were a great many rounded passages in them; found it much easier to sweep circles than to design beauties, and sat down in their studies, contented with perpetual repetitions of the same spherical conceptions, having about the same relation to the clouds of nature, that a child's carving of a turnip has to the head of the Apollo… Take the ropy, tough-looking wreath in the 'Sacrifice of Isaac,' and find one part of it, if you can, which is not the repetition of every other part of it, all together being as round and vapid as the brush could draw them" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. iii. § 8). Equally deficient is the colour of the sky: —

"It is here high noon, as is shown by the shadow of the figures; and what sort of colour is the sky at the top of the picture? Is it pale and gray with heat, full of sunshine, and unfathomable in depth? On the contrary, it is of a pitch of darkness which, except on Mont Blanc or Chimborazo, is as purely impossible as colour can be. He might as well have painted it coal-black: and it is laid on with a dead coat of flat paint, having no one quality or resemblance of sky about it. It cannot have altered, because the land horizon is as delicate and tender in tone as possible, and is evidently unchanged; and to complete the absurdity of the whole thing, this colour holds its own, without gradation or alteration, to within three or four degrees of the horizon, where it suddenly becomes bold and unmixed yellow. Now the horizon at noon may be yellow when the whole sky is covered with dark clouds, and only one open streak of light left in the distance from which the whole light proceeds; but with a clear, open sky, and opposite the sun, at noon, such a yellow horizon as this is physically impossible… We have in this sky (and it is a fine picture, one of the best of Gaspar's that I know) a notable example of the truth of the old masters – two impossible colours impossibly united!.. Nor is this a solitary instance; it is Gaspar Poussin's favourite and characteristic effect" (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. i. § 10).

Lastly, the same want of truth is shown in the wide expanse stretching away to the distance: —

"It is luminous, retiring, delicate and perfect in tone, and is quite complete enough to deceive and delight the careless eye to which all distances are alike; nay, it is perfect and masterly, and absolutely right, if we consider it as a sketch, – as a first plan of a distance, afterwards to be carried out in detail. But we must remember that all these alternate spaces of gray and gold are not the landscape itself, but the treatment of it; not its substance, but its light and shade. They are just what nature would cast over it, and write upon it with every cloud, but which she would cast in play, and without carefulness, as matters of the very smallest possible importance. All her work and her attention would be given to bring out from underneath this, and through this, the forms and the material character which this can only be valuable to illustrate, not to conceal. Every one of those broad spaces she would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you fresh lessons in every hair's-breadth of it, until the mind lost itself in following her; now fringing the dark edge of the shadow with a tufted line of level forest; now losing it for an instant in a breath of mist; then breaking it with the white gleaming angle of a narrow brook; then dwelling upon it again in a gentle, mounded, melting undulation, over the other side of which she would carry you down into a dusty space of soft crowded light, with the hedges and the paths and the sprinkled cottages and scattered trees mixed up and mingled together in one beautiful, delicate, impenetrable mystery, sparkling and melting, and passing away into the sky, without one line of distinctness, or one instant of vacancy"[65 - Compare on this point Claude's "Isaac and Rebecca," No. 12.] (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 8).

32. THE RAPE OF GANYMEDE

    School of Titian. See under 4.

Ganymede – so the Greek story ran – was a beautiful Trojan boy beloved of Jupiter, and was carried off by an eagle to Olympus to be the cup-bearer of the gods. Which things, say some, are an allegory – for "those whom the gods love die young," and are snatched off, it may be, in sudden death, as by an eagle's swoop.

Flushed Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half-buried in the Eagle's down,
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky.

    Tennyson: Palace of Art.
This picture was painted, like Tintoret's "Milky Way" (1313) and the four Veroneses (1318, 1324-6), for a compartment of a ceiling. It corresponds with a picture described by Ridolfi as painted by a scholar of Titian, though some connect it rather with Tintoret (see J. B. S. Holborn's Tintoretto, 1903, pp. 34, 35). It was formerly in the Colonna Palace: the background is a restoration by Carlo Maratti (see 174).

33. THE VISION OF ST. JEROME

    Parmigiano (Parmese: 1503-1540).

A picture of great interest both for itself and for the circumstances under which it was painted. Parmigiano was painting it at Rome in 1527 when the city was sacked by the army of the Emperor Charles V. under Constable Bourbon. So intent, says Vasari, was our artist on his work that "when his own dwelling was filled with certain of these men, who were Germans, he remained undisturbed by their clamours, and did not move from his place; arriving in the room therefore, and finding him thus employed, they stood confounded at the beauty of the paintings they beheld, and, like good and sensible men as they must have been, they permitted him to continue his occupation."[66 - This anecdote is a modern counterpart of that of Protogenes, the rival of Apelles, who worked continuously, we are told, during the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorcetes, notwithstanding that the garden in which he painted was in the middle of the enemy's camp. Demetrius, unsolicited, took measures for the painter's safety, and when he was told that one of the masterpieces by Protogenes was in a part of the town exposed to assault, he changed his plan of operations.] Parmigiano had other narrow escapes in his career, which ultimately came to a bad end, owing, Vasari says, to his forsaking painting for alchemy, "since he believed that he should make himself rich much more rapidly by the congelation of mercury than by his art."

Francesco Maria Mazzola was called Parmigiano from Parma, his birthplace. After Correggio settled there, Parmigiano devoted himself to the study and imitation of that master. In 1523 he went to Rome, to study the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo. In 1531 he returned to Parma, and undertook an important commission to paint in one of its churches. He was paid in advance, and when after five years he had not begun the work he was imprisoned for breach of contract. He was released on a promise that he would proceed with the frescoes, but he fled the city, and shortly afterwards died, in his thirty-seventh year. The chequered life of the artist finds a parallel in the varying fortunes of his reputation as an artist. He was an imitator both of Correggio and of Michael Angelo – here, for instance, the head of the infant Christ recalls the former master, the figures of St. Jerome and St. John recall the latter; and in his own day was held to have imitated them successfully, whilst Vasari adds that "the spirit of Raphael was said to have passed into Parmigiano." Of one of his works Reynolds, two hundred years later, expressed himself "at a loss which to admire most, the correctness of drawing or grandeur of conception." But the fashion in art has changed since Reynolds's day, and modern critics have found Parmigiano's work "incongruous," "insipid," and "affected." This difference of opinion is well exemplified in the case of this picture. Vasari calls it "singularly beautiful," and its subsequent popularity is attested by the number of copies of it extant (visitors on Students' Days will still often see copyists at work on it). But other critics have attributed its fame "more to its defects than its beauties" (Passavant), and have found it "mannered and theatrical" (Mrs. Jameson), and "a pernicious adaptation of an incongruous style" (Dr. Richter).

Leaving the visitor to form his own judgment, we may remind him that the subject is a supposed dream of St. Jerome when doing penance in the desert. He is asleep on the ground – doing penance, it might seem from his distorted position, even in his sleep, with a skull before him and a crucifix beside him. He is in the same desert where John the Baptist once preached, and thinking, we may suppose, of him, St. Jerome sees him in vision – with his camel skin about him – pointing upwards to the sky. There is the Virgin Mary seated as queen of heaven on a crescent moon, with a palm branch in her hand – the symbol now, not of martyrdom, but of victory over sin and death. And on her knee is the Divine Child, who rests his right hand on a little book on the Madonna's lap. It is a volume, we may suppose, of the Scriptures which St. Jerome had translated, and the vision thus foreshadows the time when it should be said unto him, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant; … enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

34. VENUS AND ADONIS

    Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See 4.

Venus is endeavouring to detain Adonis from the chase; but the sun is up (see his chariot in the sky) and the young huntsman is eager to be off with his hounds and his spear. The enamoured goddess caresses him, but it will be in vain. For Cupid, the god of love, is not there: he is asleep and at a distance, with his bow and quiver hanging on a tree; and all the blandishments of beauty, unaided by love, are as naught.

Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him.

    Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis.
This picture (formerly in the Colonna Palace at Rome) is probably a studio-repetition of an original which is now at Madrid, and which was painted by Titian for Philip II. of Spain, then King-Consort of England. It was forwarded to him in London in 1554. The picture is thus forty years later than the "Bacchus and Ariadne," and critics find in it not unjustly a lack of the finer poetry which characterises the earlier classical works of the master. "That the aim of the artist was not a very high one, or this poesia very near to his heart, is demonstrated by the curiously material fashion in which he recommends it to his royal patron. He says that 'if in the Danaë (now at Naples) the forms were to be seen front-wise, here was occasion to look at them from a contrary direction – a pleasant variety for the ornament of a camerino.' Our worldly-wise painter evidently knew that material allurements as well as supreme art were necessary to captivate Philip" (Claude Philips: The Later Work of Titian, p. 80).

35. BACCHUS AND ARIADNE

    Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See 4.

A picture which is at once a school of poetry and a school of art – "in its combination of all the qualities which go to make a great work of art possibly the finest picture in the world" (Poynter). It is a translation on canvas of the scene described in Catullus, where Bacchus, the wine-god, returning with his revel rout from a sacrifice, finds Ariadne on the seashore, after she had been deserted by Theseus, her lover. Bacchus no sooner sees her than he is enamoured and determines to make her his bride —

Bounding along is blooming Bacchus seen,
With all his heart aflame with love for thee,
Fair Ariadne! and behind him, see,
Where Satyrs and Sileni whirl along,
With frenzy fired, a fierce tumultuous throng…
There some wave thyrsi wreathed with ivy, here
Some toss the limbs of a dismembered steer…
Others with open palms the timbrel smite,
Or with their brazen rods make tinklings light.

    Carmen lxiv.: Sir T. Martin's translation.
Nothing can be finer than the painter's representation of Bacchus and his rout: there is a "divine inebriety" in the god which is the very "incarnation of the spirit of revelry." "With this telling of the story," says Charles Lamb (Essay on Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art), "an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud… But Titian has recalled past time, and made it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, – as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant, her soul undistracted from Theseus, Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian." But though as yet half unconscious, Ariadne is already under her fated star: for above is the constellation of Ariadne's crown – the crown with which Bacchus presented his bride. And observe in connection with the astronomical side of the allegory the figure in Bacchus's train with the serpent round him: this is the serpent-bearer (Milton's "Orphiucus huge") translated to the skies with Bacchus and Ariadne. Notice too another piece of poetry: the marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne took place in the spring, Ariadne herself being the personification of its return, and Bacchus of its gladness; hence the flowers in the foreground which deck his path.

The picture is as full of the painter's art as of the poet's. Note first the exquisite painting of the vine leaves,[67 - "If you live in London you may test your progress accurately by the degree of admiration you feel for the leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne" (Elements of Drawing, p. 82). Another technical beauty referred to in the same book (p. 77 n.) is "the points of light on the white flower in the wreath of the dancing child-faun." Similarly, "the wing of the cupid in Correggio's picture (10) is focused to two little grains of white at the top of it." Elsewhere Ruskin calls attention to "the leaves which crown the Bacchus, and the little dancing faun: every turn of the most subtle perspective, and every gradation of colour, is given with the colossal ease and power of the consummate master" (Academy Notes, 1855, p. 22).] and of the flowers in the foreground, as an instance of the "constant habit of the great masters to render every detail of their foreground with the most laborious botanical fidelity": "The foreground is occupied with the common blue iris, the aquilegia, and the wild rose (more correctly the Capparis spinosa); every stamen of which latter is given, while the blossoms and leaves of the columbine (a difficult flower to draw) have been studied with the most exquisite accuracy." But this detail is sought not for its own sake, but only so far as is necessary to mark the typical qualities of beauty in the object. Thus "while every stamen of the rose is given because this was necessary to mark the flower, and while the curves and large characters of the leaves are rendered with exquisite fidelity, there is no vestige of particular texture, of moss, bloom, moisture, or any other accident, no dewdrops, nor flies, nor trickeries of any kind; nothing beyond the simple forms and hues of the flowers, even those hues themselves being simplified and broadly rendered. The varieties of aquilegia have in reality a grayish and uncertain tone of colour, and never attain the purity of blue with which Titian has gifted his flower. But the master does not aim at the particular colour of individual blossoms; he seizes the type of all, and gives it with the utmost purity and simplicity of which colour is capable." A second point to be noticed is the way in which one kind of truth has often to be sacrificed in order to gain another. Thus here Titian sacrifices truth of aerial effect to richness of tone – tone in the sense, that is, of that quality of colour which makes us feel that the whole picture is in one climate, under one kind of light, and in one kind of atmosphere. "It is difficult to imagine anything more magnificently impossible than the blue of the distant landscape; impossible, not from its vividness, but because it is not faint and aerial enough to account for its purity of colour; it is too dark and blue at the same time; and there is indeed so total a want of atmosphere in it, that, but for the difference of form, it would be impossible to tell the mountains intended to be ten miles off, from the robe of Ariadne close to the spectator. Yet make this blue faint, aerial, and distant; make it in the slightest degree to resemble the tint of nature's colour; and all the tone of the picture, all the intensity and splendour, will vanish on the instant" (Modern Painters, vols. i., xxvii., xxx. (Preface to the Second Edition), pt. i. sec. ii. ch. i. § 5, pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. i. § 15; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. ix. § 18; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 31; Arrows of the Chace, i. 58). We may notice lastly what Sir Joshua Reynolds points out (Discourse viii.), that the harmony of the picture – that wonderful bringing together of two times of which Lamb speaks above, is assisted by the distribution of colours. "To Ariadne is given (say the critics) a red scarf, to relieve the figure from the sea, which is behind her. It is not for that reason alone, but for another of much greater consequence; for the sake of the general harmony and effect of the picture. The figure of Ariadne is separated from the great group, and is dressed in blue, which, added to the colour of the sea, makes that quantity of cold colour which Titian thought necessary for the support and brilliancy of the great group; which group is composed, with very little exception, entirely of mellow colours. But as the picture in this case would be divided into two distinct parts, one half cold and the other warm, it was necessary to carry some of the mellow colours of the great group into the cold part of the picture, and a part of the cold into the great group; accordingly, Titian gave Ariadne a red scarf, and to one of the Bacchantes a little blue drapery."

This famous picture was a commission from the Duke Alfonso I. of Ferrara. There were great delays in its delivery, the Duke and his agents resorting alternately to threats and cajolery in order to extract the promised canvas from the painter. Among other excuses Titian said he had no canvas for it. The Duke supplied the canvas, and sent at the same time a frame. But the picture did not come. Ultimately Titian took it with him to Ferrara in 1522, and finished it there. He seems to have been engaged on it, off and on, for some three years. The picture subsequently passed into the Aldobrandini collection at Rome, from which it was purchased for an English collector in 1806. Twenty years later it was acquired by the National Gallery.

36. A LAND STORM

    Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See 31.