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

170. THE HOLY FAMILY

Garofalo (Ferrarese; 1481-1559). See 81.

Notice the rich cap in which the little St. John is dressed; it is not unlike those which French and Flemish children are still made to wear as a protection from tumbles. There is a grace in the figures of the Virgin and St. Elizabeth which recalls Raphael. A less happy effect of his influence may be seen in the vision of the heavenly host above, full of that exaggerated action which marks the decadence of Italian art. God the Father is represented gesticulating wildly, almost like an actor in melodrama. And so with the playing angels. In pictures of the great time they are shown "with uninterrupted and effortless gesture … singing as calmly as the Fates weave" (Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret, p. 15), but here they are all scrambling through their songs, their hair floating in the breeze and their faces full of excited gesture.

172. THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS

Caravaggio (Naturalist: 1569-1609).

Michael Angelo Amerighi, the son of a mason, is usually called Caravaggio from his birthplace, a town of that name near Milan.99 He was the leader of the so-called "Naturalist" School (see introduction to "The Later Italian Schools"), which numbered among its disciples Spagnoletto (235) and the Dutch Gerard von Honthorst (1444). The characteristics of his art, as described below, were not out of keeping with the sombre character of the man.100 He had established himself as a painter at Rome, when he had to fly for homicide. He was playing at tennis and became so violent in a dispute that he killed his companion. After a short stay at Naples he went to Malta, where he gained the favour of the grand-master, and was made a Knight of the Cross of Malta. His ungovernable temper, however, again led him into trouble, and quarrelling with one of the knights, he was cast into prison. He escaped to Sicily and thence returned to Naples. Having procured the Pope's pardon for his original offence, he hired a felucca and set sail for Rome. The coast-guard arrested him in mistake for another person; the crew of the felucca plundered him of all his belongings; and after wandering disconsolately along the coast, he was seized with fever, and died at the early age of forty.

One notices first in this picture the least important things – the supper before the company, the roast chicken before Christ. Next one sees how coarse and almost ruffianly are the disciples, represented as supping with their risen Lord at Emmaus (Luke xxiv. 30, 31). Both points are characteristic of the painter, who was driven by the insipidities of the preceding mannerists into a crude "realism," which made him resolve to describe sacred and historical events just as though they were being enacted in a slum by butchers and fishwives. "He was led away," says Lanzi (i. 452), "by his sombre genius, and represented objects with very little light. He ridiculed all artists who attempted a noble expression of countenance or graceful folding of drapery." His first altar-piece was removed by the priests for whom it was painted, as being too vulgar for such a subject. "Many interesting studies from the taverns of Italy remain to prove Caravaggio's mastery over scenes of common life. For the historian of manners in seventeenth-century Italy, those pictures have a truly precious value, as they are executed with such passion as to raise them above the more careful but more lymphatic transcripts from beer-cellars in Dutch painting. But when he applied his principles to higher subjects, then vulgarity became apparent. It seems difficult for realism, either in literature or art, not to fasten upon ugliness, vice, pain, and disease, as though these imperfections of our nature were more real than beauty, goodness, pleasure, and health. Therefore Caravaggio, the leader of a school which the Italians christened Naturalists, may be compared to Zola" (Symonds, vii. 221).

173. PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

Bassano (Venetian: 1510-1592).

Jacopo da Ponte is commonly called Il Bassano or Jacopo da Bassano from his native town, near Venice. His father, Francesco, who was a painter in the school of the Bellini, was his first master; he afterwards studied under Bonifazio at Venice. After a short stay in that city, Jacopo returned to his native town, where he remained for the rest of a long life. "His best works are almost worthy," says Sir F. Burton, "of Titian. They are conspicuous among other qualities for Venetian excellence of colouring – especially in his green, where he exhibits a peculiar brilliancy. Most of his pictures seem at first sight as dazzling, then as cooling and soothing, as the best kind of stained glass; while the colouring of details, particularly of those under high lights, is jewel-like, as clear and deep and satisfying as rubies and emeralds." No. 228 in this Collection has passages which illustrate this point. Jacopo was nearly contemporary with the great Tintoretto, but while the latter was the last of the Venetian painters in the grand style, Bassano after a time devoted himself to simple scenes of country life. His distinguishing place in the history of art is that he was the first Italian painter of genre– a painter, that is, du genre bas, painter of a low class of subjects, of familiar objects such as do not belong to any other recognised class of paintings (as history, portrait, etc.): see, for instance, No. 228, in which the religious subject merely gives the painter an opportunity for a scene of market life. "His pictures were for the inhabitants of the small market-town from which he takes his name, where, besides the gates, you still see men and women in rustic garb crouching over their many-coloured wares; and where, just outside the walls, you may see all the ordinary occupations connected with farming and grazing. Inspired, although unawares, by the new idea of giving perfectly modern versions of Biblical stories, Bassano introduced into nearly every picture he painted episodes from the life in the streets of Bassano and in the country just outside the gates. Another thing Bassano could not fail to do, working as he did in the country and for country people, was to paint landscape. He loved to paint the real country. He was, in fact, the first modern landscape painter" (Berenson: Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, § xxi). "Giovanni Bellini places his figure in the crystal air of an Italian morning; Titian and Tintoretto give us daylight, mighty while subdued; but Bassano throws a lurid grey over his landscape and carries the eye to the solemn twilight spread along the distant horizon. This peculiarity of feature is partly accounted for by the position of the town of Bassano, which is wrapped in an early twilight by the high mountains above it on the west" (Layard's edition of Kugler, ii. 624).

A fine portrait – somewhat recalling Rembrandt in style – of a very refined face. In the vase beside him is a sprig of myrtle. This painter is fond of introducing such vases: see one in 277. In the principal street of Bassano, where the artist was born and, after studying at Venice, continued to live, such vessels may still be seen placed out for sale.

174. PORTRAIT OF CARDINAL CERRI

Carlo Maratti (Roman: 1625-1713).

Carlo Maratti (called also Carlo delle Madonne, from the large number of Madonna pictures that he painted) was an imitator of Raphael, and for nearly half a century the most eminent painter in Rome. The portrait of a cardinal should have come kindly to him, for he was in the service of several popes, and was appointed superintendent of the Vatican Chambers by Innocent XI.

176. ST. JOHN AND THE LAMB

Murillo (Spanish: 1618-1682). See 13.

An interesting illustration of the substitution of the palpable image for the figurative phrase. The mission of St. John the Baptist was to prepare the way for Christ, to proclaim to the people "Behold the Lamb of God!" Murillo makes the standard of the Lamb, with those words upon it, lie upon the ground below; but he further represents the young St. John as embracing an actual lamb.

177. THE MAGDALEN

Guido (Eclectic-Bologna: 1575-1642). See 11.

Just such a picture as might have suggested the lines in Pope's epistle on "The Characters of Women" —

Let then the fair one beautifully cry,In Magdalen's loose hair and lifted eye;Or dress'd in smiles of sweet Cecilia shine,With simpering angels, palms, and harps divine;Whether the charmer sinner it, or saint it,If folly grow romantic, I must paint it.

Just such a picture, too, as Guido turned out in numbers. "He was specially fond," says one of his biographers, "of depicting faces with upraised looks, and he used to say that he had a hundred different modes" of thus supplying sentimentality to order.

179. VIRGIN AND CHILD ENTHRONED.

180. A PIETÀ

Francia (Ferrarese-Bolognese: 1450-1517).

Of Francesco Raibolini's life the two most interesting things are these: first, that great artist though he came to be, he never painted a picture, so far as we know, till he was forty; and secondly, the intimate connection, exemplified in him, between the artist and the craftsman. He was the son of a carpenter, and, like so many of the greatest old masters, was brought up to the goldsmith's trade. The name of Francia was that of his master in goldsmith's work, and was adopted by him in gratitude.101 He attained great skill in his trade, especially as a die-engraver and a worker in "niello" (inlaying a black composition into steel or silver). He was appointed steward of the Goldsmiths' Guild in 1483, and afterwards became master of the Mint – a post which he held till his death. In some of his earlier pictures the hand of a goldsmith is seen – in the clear outline, the metallic and polished surface, and the minuteness of detail; and even on some of his later and more important works, such as 179, he signed himself "Francia aurifex (goldsmith) Bononiensis." It was with Costa, the Ferrarese artist (see 629), who migrated to Bologna, and with whom he entered into partnership, that Francia learnt the art of painting, and thus, though a Bolognese, he is properly included in the Ferrarese School. His work marks the culminating point of that school, just as Raphael's102 marks that of the Umbrian, and in these pictures (originally one altar-piece, painted for the Buonvisi chapel in S. Frediano at Lucca, where, says Vasari, it was held to be of great value) we have some of his best work. Many of his pictures are still at Bologna, including the one which some consider his chef d'œuvre, the Bentivoglio altar-piece in S. Giacomo Maggiore. Francia is the most pathetic of painters. Raphael is said to have remarked that Francia's Madonnas were the most devoutly beautiful he knew,103 and there is considerable affinity between Francia and Perugino. But the Umbrian master was more ideal; in Francia there are touches of realism. "It will be observed in No. 180 that the Virgin is represented as a middle-aged woman, and that the lids of the angels' eyes are red with weeping. In spirit also they are different. Francia makes his angels appeal to the spectator as if to enlist his sympathy in the pathos of the tragedy, holding up the beautiful tresses of Christ's hair to aid in the appeal. This Perugino would never have done; his angels, and his saints also, are always wrapt in a spiritual ecstasy to which Francia could not attain" (Monkhouse: In the National Gallery, p. 173).

(179) On the throne are the Virgin and her mother, St. Anne, who offers the infant Christ a peach, symbolical, as the fruit thus offered in these pictures originally was, of "the fruits of the spirit – joy, peace, and love." At the foot of the throne stands the little St. John (the Baptist), "one of the purest creations of Christian art," holding in his arms the cross of reeds and the scroll inscribed "Ecce Agnus Dei" ("Behold the Lamb of God"). The discovery of Benedetto Buonvisi's will has shown why the various saints were selected – St. Anne, because the Buonvisi chapel was dedicated to her; St. Lawrence as the patron of the founder's father; St. Paul as the patron of the founder's brother and heir; St. Sebastian as the saint invoked in plagues (from which calamity Lucca suffered in 1510); and St. Benedict as the patron of the founder (G. C. Williamson's Francia, p. 111).

(180) This picture, which was the "lunette," or arch, forming the top of the altar-piece, is a "pietà," i. e. the Virgin and two angels weeping over the dead body of Christ. The artist has filled his picture with that solemn reverential pity, harmonised by love, which befits his subject. The body of Christ – utterly dead, yet not distorted nor defaced by death – is that of a tired man whose great soul would not let him rest while there was still His father's work to do on earth. In the face of the angel at His head there is a look of quiet joy, as of one who knows that "death is but a covered way that leads into the light"; in the attitude and expression of the angel at the feet there is prayerful sympathy for the sorrowing mother. The face of the mother herself, which before was pure and calm, is now tear-stained and sad, because her son has met so cruel a death —

What else in life seems piteous any moreAfter such pity?

Yet it bears a look of content because the world has known him. She rests His body tenderly on her knee as she did when he was a little child – thus are "the hues of the morning and the solemnity of eve, the gladness in accomplished promise, and sorrow of the sword-pierced heart, gathered into one human Lamp of ineffable love" (Modern Painters, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 21).

181. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ST. JOHN

Perugino (Umbrian: 1446-1523). See 288.

If really by Perugino,104 this must be one of his early works. It is painted in tempera. The Flemish process of oil-painting found its way to Venice, where Perugino is known to have been in 1494, and where he probably learnt it. The superiority of the new method may be seen in a moment by comparing the cracked surface and faded colours of this picture with 288, which was painted when Perugino had obtained complete mastery over the new medium, and which is still as bright and fresh as when it was painted. The style of this picture is, however, thoroughly Peruginesque. It is interesting to compare the Umbrian type of the Madonna – innocent and girl-like, with an air of far-off reverie – with the types of other schools. The Umbrian Madonna is less mature, more etherealised than the Venetian. She is a girl, rather than a mother. Therein she resembles the Florentine type; but an air of dreamy reverie in the Umbrian takes the place of the intellectual mysticism of the Florentine. In Perugino "the Umbrian type finds its fullest and highest representative. Dainty small features, all too babyish for the figures that bear them; a mouth like a cupid's bow; a tiny and delicate chin; eyes set well apart, with curiously heavy and drooping lids; faint pencilled eyebrows; a broad smooth forehead, – these are the main elements in Perugino's Madonnas" (Grant Allen in the Pall Mall Magazine, 1895, p. 620).

184. PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG LADY

Nicolas Lucidel (German: 1527-1590).

Lucidel (a name which is supposed to be a corruption of Neufchatel) studied painting at Antwerp, and afterwards settled at Nuremberg. This picture, dated 1561, was formally ascribed to Sir Antonio More and supposed to represent Jeanne d'Archel; but it reveals (says the latest edition of the Official Catalogue) "in its style and its Upper German costume, the handiwork of Lucidel."

"The picture is much obscured," says Sir Edward Poynter, "by a coarse brown varnish. A beautiful example of this master, in the collection of Lord Spencer, is remarkable for the purity of its colour, and doubtless this portrait had originally the same qualities" (The National Gallery, i. 294).

186. PORTRAITS OF JAN ARNOLFINI AND HIS WIFE

Jan van Eyck (Early Flemish: about 1390-1440).

The Van Eycks – Hubert, the elder brother, and Jan – were natives of Maesyck (Eyck-sur-Meuse), and are famous as being the artists to whose ingenuity the first invention of the art of painting in oils was for a long time ascribed. The probability is that although the practice of mixing oil with colours was employed for decorative purposes in Germany and elsewhere long before their time, they were the first to so improve it as to make it fully serviceable for figure-painting.105 The art of oil painting reached higher perfection in many ways after their time; but there is no picture in the Gallery which shows better than this, one great capacity of oil painting – its combination, namely, of "imperishable firmness with exquisite delicacy" (On the Old Road, i. 141). The place of the Van Eycks in the development of early Flemish art has been described in the introduction to that School, but the suddenness and completeness of their mastery remains among the wonders of painting. "The first Italian Renaissance," says Fromentin, "has nothing comparable to this. And in the particular order of sentiments they expressed and of the subjects they chose, one must admit that neither any Lombard School, nor Tuscan, nor Venetian, produced anything that resembles the first outburst of the School of Bruges." The two brothers were granted the freedom of the profession by the Corporation of Painters of Ghent in 1421. In that year Jan left Hubert and took an appointment as painter to Count John of Bavaria at the Hague. In 1424 he returned to Bruges as painter to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, in whose service he remained to the end of his life. Like Rubens, the painter Jan van Eyck "amused himself with being ambassador." "He was frequently employed on missions of trust; and following the fortunes of a chief who was always in the saddle, he appears for a time to have been in ceaseless motion, receiving extra pay for secret services at Leyden, drawing his salary at Bruges, yet settled in a fixed abode at Lille. In 1428 he joined the embassy sent by Philip the Good to Lisbon to beg the hand of Isabella of Portugal. His portrait of the bride fixed the Duke's choice. After his return he settled finally at Bruges, where he married, and his wife bore him a daughter, known in after years as a nun in the convent of Maesyck. At the christening of this child the Duke was sponsor; and this was but one of the many distinctions by which Philip the Good rewarded his painter's merits" (Crowe). But never was there an artist less puffed up. "Jan van Eyck was here." "As I can, not as I would." Such signatures are the sign-marks of modesty. In 1426 his brother Hubert died, leaving the great altar-piece – the Adoration of the Lamb – for Jan to finish. This masterpiece of the Van Eycks was in 1432 set up in the Chapel of St. Bavon at Ghent, where the central portions still remain – the other original panels being now at Brussels and Berlin. The portraits by Jan in our Gallery belong to the next three years. There are no finer specimens of his marvellous precision and delicacy in this branch of the art.

This wonderful picture of a Flemish interior – dated 1434 – is as spruce and clean now (for the small twig broom did its work so well that the goodman and his wife were not afraid to walk on the polished floor without their shoes), as it was when first painted five hundred years ago. This is the more interesting from the eventful history the picture has had. At one time we hear of a barber-surgeon at Bruges presenting it to the Queen-regent of the Netherlands, who valued it so highly that she pensioned him in return for the gift. At another it must have passed again into humbler hands, for General Hay found it in the room to which he was taken in 1815 at Brussels to recover from wounds at the battle of Waterloo. He purchased the picture after his recovery, and sold it to the British Government in 1842. "It is," says Sir Edward Poynter, "one of the most precious possessions in the national collection, and, in respect of its marvellous finish, combined with the most astounding truth of imitation and effect, perhaps the most remarkable picture in the world."

For the delicacy of workmanship note especially the mirror, in which are reflected not only the objects in the room, but others beyond what appears in the picture, for a door and two additional figures may be distinguished. In the frame of the mirror, too, are ten diminutive pictures of the ten "moments" in the Passion of Christ "as material for the lady's meditation while doing her hair." Notice also the brass-work of the chandelier. "There are many little objects about, such as an orange on the window-sill, placed there to catch the light. Through the window you can see a cherry-tree, with sunshine on the ripe fruit. In the treatment of these and similar details Jan van Eyck shows a liking for dots and spots of light" (Conway). Above the chandelier, elaborately wrought, is the painter's signature. This signature (in Latin), "Jan van Eyck was here," exactly expresses the modesty and veracity which were the keynote of his art. The artist only professed to come, to see, and to record what he saw. Arnolfini was the representative at Bruges of a Lucca firm of merchants, and Van Eyck gives us a picture of the quiet, dry, business folk exactly as he found them.

187. THE APOTHEOSIS OF WILLIAM THE TACITURN OF HOLLAND

Rubens (Flemish: 1577-1640). See 38.

A sketch of a picture in the possession of the Earl of Jersey. This sketch was formerly in the possession of Sir David Wilkie, R.A.

189. THE DOGE LEONARDO LOREDANO

Giovanni Bellini (Venetian: 1426-1516).

Giovanni Bellini (often shortened into Giambellini) – the greatest of the fifteenth-century artists – "the mighty Venetian master who alone of all the painters of Italy united purity of religious aim with perfection of artistical power"106– belonged, it is interesting to note, to a thoroughly artistic family. His father, Jacopo, drawings by whom may be seen in the British Museum, was an artist of repute; his elder brother Gentile (see 1213) was another. The two brothers studied together in their father's school at Padua, and there they formed a friendship with Mantegna, who afterwards married their sister. Two pictures in our Gallery (Bellini's, 726; and Mantegna's, 1417) recall the days of their early association. By blood every inch an artist, so was Giovanni also in character. His life was one long devotion to his art. He lived to be ninety, and showed to the end increasing knowledge and power. Albert Dürer wrote in 1506, when the grand old man was eighty, that "though very old he was still the best painter in Venice."107

This famous portrait must have been painted about the same time, for Leonardo Loredano only became Doge in 1501. About 1460, Bellini had settled in Venice, where he soon rivalled and eclipsed the established school of the Vivarini. In 1479, when his elder brother Gentile departed to Constantinople, Giovanni was appointed in his place to carry on the series of pictures for the Hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace. These works were destroyed by fire in 1577. The documents referring to them show the terms on which he worked. He was engaged at a fixed rate of salary to work "constantly and daily, so that said pictures may be completed as expeditiously as possible, with three assistants, also paid by the State, to render speedy and diligent assistance." One of these assistants was Carpaccio (see 750). Three years later he was appointed State painter to the Republic. His fame is sounded by Ariosto, who in "Orlando Furioso" ranks him with Leonardo. It may be gathered also from the number of great painters who attended his studio, including Giorgione and Titian. He was overwhelmed with work, and doubtless employed assistants to complete commissions from his design. Hence the confusion that exists in the matter of attribution among pictures of this school (see under 599). With Titian he was on terms of warm friendship, and his last work (a companion piece to Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne," now in the Duke of Northumberland's Gallery at Alnwick) was left for Titian to finish. Bellini was buried in the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, in the same tomb where Gentile had lain since 1507.