Chapter Ten
ARTISTS OF THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE
IT can be no matter for wonder that colour was the elected medium of expression for Venice: endowed, by reason of her water, with a twofold gift of light, she was also perhaps more splendid than any other city in the details of her daily life. Colour was its substance. Everything was pictorial and rich and festive. Even on a dark day the rooms of the Accademia seem full of sunshine from the treasure they hold of ancient Venice. If Bellini’s Procession of the Cross on the Piazza of San Marco were missing from its place, we should feel that a light had been put out. The Venetians had always been decorators. The pictures of the first masters—Vivarini, d’Alemagna, Jacobello del Fiore and many others—seem literally spun out of the furnaces of Murano. They are no primitives in their mastery of colour. Consider for a moment the Madonna and Saints of Vivarini and d’Alemagna in the Sala della Presentazione. The natural life of the fields has been made to serve a design of amazing richness. The Virgin’s golden throne is carved With acorns and roses, and luxuriant oak foliage forms its decorative fringe; the fruits of the garden in which she sits are lavished round her; the grass is gemmed with countless tiny flowers, trefoil and strawberry, milkwort and potentilla, and the infant Christ has burst open a golden pomegranate, displaying its burden of rich crimson seeds. There is scarcely a harmony of colour unattempted, scarcely a jewel unset, from the rainbow of the angels’ wings, and the rim of fluctuating colours on the Virgin’s green robe folded back over peacock blue, to the mosaics in the burning gold of the angels’ haloes, in the Virgin’s crown, and in the mitres of the Fathers. There too is the very vermilion of Veronese, that wonderful salvia scarlet to which the Feast in Levi’s House owes so much of its decorative significance. We shall be better equipped for understanding the early colour-masters if we realise that their dowry came to them not only from the lagoon. The marvellous rainbow of Venice the “Ambiguous One” was not their only light nor the deep azure and emerald and gold, which she hung about her, the only jewels they knew. The garment of Venetian art is inwoven with threads of mountain glory, of rich harvests of grape and golden grain: we must go up into the mainland of Venice to understand the art of the first masters no less than that of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, whose conceptions were penetrated with the very sunshine of earth, a warmer-bodied, fuller sunshine than Venice of the waters could know, full of secret throbbings of the hidden springing life for light and ripening. Autumn is the loom on which was woven the robe of Venetian art, autumn with its indomitable splendours of gold and silver, green and cremoisin and the supreme scarlet of the salvia. These colours are steeped in an impermeable dye: they seem saturated with the light, burning out the more gloriously, the more intensely, as their allotted span grows less. The passion of the spring is of another kind; it needs the present magic of the sun to draw out its exquisite, incipient radiance; it cannot lavish glory except when his countenance is bent upon it. But in the radiance of autumn foliage there is a daring that darkness is impotent to quell: it is like a shout of triumph in the face of death, a procession of all the glory of earth into the kingdom of the dead, not reluctant, not made fearful by the rumours that have floated to it in the grey-mantled dawn, in the fierce trumpeting of rain and wind; boldly, gloriously it marches, scattering joyfully the gems it cannot hold, that nothing shall be saved. We sing no dirge, but a triumph song, as the golden trophies fall—a gold more refulgent than Bellini’s façade of San Marco, though this was gold of the purest even Venice, the golden city, could win from her furnaces. We may still see these mainland autumns where the colour-masters gathered their treasures; on the borders of the mountains we may sit in such a garden of the Madonna as Vivarini and his fellows record. In the late autumn the sun is slow to win his way; but when he comes there is no splendour to rival the fire of the salvia-beds, round cups of concentrated light springing up into spires and tongues of flame among the arrow-shaped green leaves. No words can describe the brilliance of this leaping flame, devouring the sunshine like fuel, and scattering it abroad in myriad gems of penetrating brightness. In the long luminous grass of the lawn will be scattered here and there a rose-bush of the Madonna’s crimson, and tall gold-edged lilies may be seen through the close-hung flaps of the medusa leaves. This splendid tapestry is spread upon a poplar background of flickering gold and green, the steadier gold of low mulberries, and grey-bodied autumn apple-trees on which the leaves glow blood-red, while behind all rise the grassy slopes of the mountain outposts crossed by the shadow of some jutting rock.
Often among the humbler Venetian painters, less versed in the deeper significance of human life and religious symbol, we find a singular mastery of perspective and many signs of familiarity with the interplay of light and shade among the mountains. We are reminded again and again of their apprenticeship to nature as we see one of the countless ruined towers on the outposts of the Alps rising against the golden sunset light within its threadbare rampart of dusky branches. The face of the mountains was a vital and intimate fact to them, not an accepted piety. We are, for instance, often tempted to consider the persons of Cima’s sacred themes less as the essential interest than as a finely designed harmony of colour in the foreground of a landscape. In his native city of Conegliano he stored his mind with mountain wonders, and in his wide and delicate horizons there are many touches inspired by a living memory of the scene. We have known the joy of that limpid atmosphere after days of mist and rain, those floating sunlit clouds upon the transparent blue, that jewel-like gleam of a deep pool, the delicacy of autumn trees passing into gold, the foretaste of an untrodden stronghold in the winding paths that lose themselves and come again to view as they coil up the castled heights. The landscape is conventionalised of course, but its spirit is there—its rare shades of colour, its marvellous varieties of depth; and ever behind, there is the vision of the mountains cutting into the sky in a sharp, clear, azure coldness, or with a luminous haze round their base in the mellowness of an autumn day. As backgrounds we see them only, for Venice had other needs than of mountains; but many of these painters knew them as near realities; they had stept home in the glory of an autumn sunset amid the revel of the vintage, their whole being intoxicated with the wine and the splendour of life; they had drunk that fresh-trodden, unfermented juice, the vino mosto, sufficient to stir those whose senses are alert and in whom the passion of the world runs high. It needed indeed a Titian to transform the vintage of Cadore into the bacchic rout of his Ariadne, but it is there, in the wooded mountain slopes, in the pageantry of evening, when the fancy soars to Ariadne’s crown faintly dawning in the warm blue, and sweeps round some mist-clad inland lake to float among the turreted heights.
Or if we take our stand on the keep of the ruined Roman citadel of Asolo, when the evening light streaming down into the shadowy undulations of the valley, which tosses in ceaseless waves round the mountain’s base, illuminates a land of rich and golden peace, we feel again the painters of Venice at our side; the vague, rich spirit of the winding valleys, allied with the solemn grandeur of the mountains, above whose dark barrier we have glimpses of remote and shining peaks, the tiny citadels half gathered into the folding mist, the alternate radiance and keen obscurity of the lower peaks now visited and now forsaken by the inconstant sunset light, the sudden illumination of a solitary peasant or a single tree in sharp relief against the twilight—all these have passed into the canvas of Giorgione: in him, above all, we seem to drink that wondrous potion compact of evening vapour and golden light which the sunset pours into the dim goblet of the mountain valleys. And we may record here, how, in the last period of the Venetian Renaissance, the great decorator Veronese found a field of activity under the shadow of Asolo. When Marcantonio Barbaro, Procurator of San Marco, and his brother the Patriarch of Aquileja, bade Palladio build their villa at the little village of Maser, they called on their friend Paolo to decorate it within. And this perfect villa is one of the happiest monuments to the two artists; the excellent skill of both is brought into congenial play, and to the courtly old patrician Barbaro we owe a debt which perhaps we partly cancel in the coin of our pleasure. The simple yet sumptuous villa lies so dexterously disposed below its cypress hill, that it seems almost to consist of the loggia alone as we climb up the garden slope from the road, through the judicious mingling of smooth lawn and scythe-cut grass full of scabious and delicate Alpine flowers. Delicious scents float down from the late roses along the terrace and the brilliant flower-beds in the grass; the medusa tree stands luminous against the evergreen shrubs and cypress, and against the yellow wall a huge cactus raises its mysterious purple sword-blade. The villa is spacious and full of air and light; the suite of rooms above the loggia, containing the great part of Paolo’s work, open one out of the other, and each has a glass door that leads directly to the lawn and grotto in the cleft of the hill behind, while the central hall lies open on each side to wide stretches of mountain country. There were no stern censors here to ask Paolo if his homely details were quite in keeping with the gravity of his theme; the artist was working for a friend in a house that was full of light and sunshine and the clear mountain air, and he has put his soul with most lucid fantasy into the allegories of autumn and springtime, of Cybele and Juno, Vulcan and Apollo, of dogs and boys and girls at play among the mimic balconies, of sprays of fig and vine leaf; into the figures of Michelangelesque strength reclining above the doors, and the tiny processions of men and beasts in chiaroscuro on the friezes; into the clear, radiant faces of women and sinewy forms of men; the eloquent dogs and lions; and not least into the lithe and gallant figure of himself, advancing from the mimic door at one end of the long vista to meet the lady who trips out from the opposite end, l’amica dell’ artista—or, as the guide-book discreetly says—his wife. The portrait of himself is done with much imagination and even pathos. He was a dreamer, too, this Veronese. These figures of the painter and his dog give us pause; they make us feel that he would have been good to walk the mountains with; that if he could step out now from the room where he keeps continual watch, on to the exquisite grass plot, with its happy tuft of white anemone and pale Michaelmas daisy, we might win from him some mountain confidence which he has not entrusted to canvas or fresco. It is a pleasure to picture Veronese at his work upon Marcantonio’s villa. Every midday he must have had good progress to show; for these blithe works that have kept their colour so fresh and strong are executed with a few brave master strokes: they are no less potent in their swift presentment than in their conception. We can see him dismounting from his scaffold at the summons of Barbaro, returned from his morning round among his stables or his orchards; we can see him still keen and stirred by the creative impulse, full of that excited pleasure which accompanies expression, standing a little aside while Barbaro bears his admiration to and fro—now confessing that time and office have rusted his mythology and asking the meaning of some emblem; now on the lookout for a freak of his friend, some beast or bird put in perhaps to give him joy; now in raptures over the old shoes and broom, which he swears he has just thrashed the maid for leaving on the cornice, while Paolo stands by brimming with mirth at the deception; now called upon to guess the significance of the fair lady bridled by her lord, which the guide-book ungallantly interprets as the victory of virtue over vice, but which to Marcantonio no doubt seemed capable of less abstract explanation. With all their nobility of design and execution, there is something about these frescoes so intimate and sympathetic as to impart to us the actual joy and health of spirit which conceived them. Given the skill and the robust and prodigal genius of Veronese, how should they not be joyous in these halls full of light and air and sunshine, the song of birds and of trickling water, the sounds of meadow and mountain. We may take leave of the mountains in the midst of one of those brave companies which must often have gathered in this earthly Paradise of Marcantonio Barbaro round the long table spread in the loggia—such a loggia as Paolo himself so often painted—looking out, through the arches to the vista of creepered wall and over the green meadows studded with golden fruit-trees, to the undulating country and tracts of woodland, now bathed in liquid sunshine, now gathered into a soft-enfolding haze—a wide ocean from which the campaniles rise like masts of ships, and over which the distant villas are scattered like shining fishing-boats.
“These workmen,” says d’Annunzio of the Venetian artists of the Renaissance, “create in a medium that is itself a joyous mystery—in colour, the ornament of the world, in colour, which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light. And the entirely new, musical understanding they have of colour acts in such a way that their creation transcends the narrow limits of the symbols it represents and assumes the lofty, revealing faculty of an infinite harmony.” Colour—which seems to be the striving of the spirit to become light. These words recur to us again and again face to face with the Venetian masters. By the primitives the colours are laid on as accessory to the scene, as it were fine enamel; in the Renaissance painters, they are not only woven into the fabric of the picture, it grows and moves through them. We may choose, in illustration, Giovanni Bellini’s small picture of the Madonna with St. Catherine and the Magdalen in the Accademia, because, though it is in one sense less completely representative of the distinguishing features of the Venetian school than, for instance, his masterpiece of the Frari, it realises perhaps more fully than any that “new and musical understanding of colour” which was the peculiar gift of the Venetians. It is literally informed with radiance; flesh itself has become spirit, no longer a covering, but an atmosphere—a directly perfect expression. There is no denial or emaciation of the flesh; the forms are strong, the habitations of a potent earth-spirit. The faces are pondering, penetrating, profound, and withal extremely individual; they might seem impassive, were it not that every feature is kindled by the pervading colour till we seem to feel it as a sensuous presence. It is a quality of colour that so subtly determines the poise of their hands, that makes their touch so sensitively penetrating that feeling seems to flow from it without pressure. The solemn harmony of red and green and blue, and of the diffused radiance of the flesh tints, is not only lit from without by the sunlight, it seems literally to burn from within, depth behind depth, with light.
The peculiarly luminous treatment of the flesh perfected by Bellini in repose, it remained for Tintoretto to realise in motion; this we may venture to illustrate from a work too immense for our discussion in any but a limited aspect—his last great work, The Paradise, in the Ducal Palace. The quality we are seeking in it becomes the more remarkable on account of its loss of superficial colour, so that at first it seems cold and faded as if a mist had fallen upon it; then, very slowly, like day breaking out of the veil, colour reveals itself as a fresh property in the forms. We cannot penetrate the depth of it; rank behind rank the luminous faces define themselves like mysterious shapes of the atmosphere, some mere ghosts in the depths which daylight cannot pierce, some radiant already with the light; and across and through them all, through the flame-winged throng of Cherubim, piercing all companies and ranks of being to the extremes of the vast canvas, shoot the rays from the central source of light in the seat of Christ. It is a symphony of colour become almost vocal; we perceive it not only with the eye but in all our senses, this music of the spheres which one man has dared to gather into a single canvas. Who but Tintoretto could have dreamed of achieving this perspective built solely of human forms and faces? Into all the mysteries of life—those echoes of experience which we touch but faintly, those substances with which we feel inexplicable correspondencies—into these Tintoretto has looked: the rays from behind the Son of God have poured into the heart of the universe, and from it has grown his Paradise. Joy is the heart of this great symphony; it works upon us rather as a creative force than as a thing created, sounding continually some new note or rarer harmony of colour. At times it overpowers us, and then amid the maze of divine musicians and Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones and Principalities and Powers, some single harmonious human form, strong in beauty, with wings of light, some tender, lovely face of youth or woman, the solemn gesture of saint or bishop, the rainbow of an angel’s wing, gives our intellect a resting-place. For it is not through obscuring of outlines that this wonder of music in colour is accomplished; the human form, on which all the notes are played, is become indeed a perfect instrument, but not by forfeiting its material strength or substance; the structure is massive, solid—if to our notion of solidity we may unite the gift of perfect ease within an element whose progress only is by flight, where each moment is poised but slightly in its passage to the next, where there is no time because no stable unit to serve as pedestal for time. In this great picture, that faculty of the Venetian painters which we are now illustrating, found perhaps its completest realisation—the power of winging flesh with colour so that it is endowed with the very properties of atmosphere.
By permission of Arnold Mitchell, Esq.
TOWARDS THE RIALTO, SAN ANGELO.
This luminous quality of the Venetian painters is realised by them in many more general ways than in the treatment of the human form. We may consider it in Carpaccio in relation to the significance of landscape in his compositions. It is his power of treating a scene atmospherically that supplies one chief charm of his work. It is never on a day of splendour that either he or Gentile Bellini depicts Venice; but constantly on a cold, colourless day of late autumn the waters of Carpaccio seem to live again for us as we have seen them through the perspective of his arches or in the background of a city picture. We may see the Grand Canal wind into the dark city under the pale familiar gold of his Rialto sunset, and scattered sails on the cold, clear lagoon in weird contrast of orange with the steely waters or with the pale rose or white of buildings. There is a peculiar fascination in this clear neutrality of light in sky and water and buildings; it is no less a property of Venice than her more refulgent harmonies. Whatever hour of day it comes, it has the strange revelation of the dawn about it, a curious remoteness in which the works of men arrest attention as if fraught with a new purport. The emotional significance of landscape was understood by Carpaccio in a wonderful degree. How much depends, for instance, in the scene where Ursula’s father dismisses the English ambassadors, on the vista of canal across which lights fall from dividing waterways! It is the narrowest strip; but the sunlight on the houses, the exquisite arch of pale blue sky fading into white above the distant buildings, give a new value to the interior; the outside world, on which the sun is shining, seems to look into the room with the streaming light. A still more beautiful illustration of Carpaccio’s understanding of light is to be found in the room where St. Ursula lies asleep. It seems, in fact, scarcely an indoor room; through its open doors and windows it is in close touch with the air and sky; and the effect of contact with wind and sky is heightened by the real plumage of the angel’s grey wings, while the back-sweep of his robe suggests a sudden alighting after flight with the current of air still about him. We know of no picture to surpass this of Carpaccio in conveying the atmosphere of a room into which the first light is breaking—the exhilaration of an illumined wall, the waking of colour on window-ledge, chair and bedcover, the blending of luminous and shadowy. It is the light of the first dawn, the infancy of day, with a suggestion of unillumined sky, just creeping out of shadow in the expanse of open, untrellised window behind the plants, a soft, wonderful stealing green, that has not yet come into its kingdom. Even buildings are made by Carpaccio to serve an atmospheric effect. We might illustrate from almost every picture in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, but confining ourselves to the St. Ursula series, we shall find a notable illustration in the buildings seen through the water-gate in the Return of the Embassy, and in the great Renaissance loggia which fills so conspicuous a place in the foreground, and to which airiness and light have been imparted by its great arches, by the water washing round its base, and by the spring of the bridge that connects it with the campo where the King sits under his canopy. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the subtle architectural treatment by which, in the great threefold scene of the Prince’s departure, his meeting with Ursula and their blessing by the King, Carpaccio has bestowed an atmosphere of remoteness, almost of fairy strangeness on the English harbour with its castles and walls and motley buildings soaring far up the rocky hillside into the sky, an atmosphere entirely distinct from the upper-world light and joyousness of the contrasting court of Ursula’s father.
There is an element of his native landscape that Carpaccio incorporated with singular felicity, and which is peculiarly prominent in his pictures—namely the shipping of Venice. In the great trilogy of the Prince’s departure the vessels are a masterpiece: there is nothing to surpass them in this kind. Carpaccio seems to have realised to the full their varied elements of beauty: their static properties, their weight and substance and the symmetry of their frame, combined with all the radiant light and spring of swelling sail and rigging and flag and countless trappings: all that goes to make a sailing ship a thing of music. And it is not only vessels rigged and ready to float in triumph on the high seas that Carpaccio depicts: there is a vessel also in squero, with all the song gone from it, one might think, lying uneasily on its side with its huge mast aslant across the harbour tower. It is noteworthy that all the vessels of the English King seem in course of repair; there is something in their semi-skeleton condition which singularly reinforces the dream effect that we have noticed in this portion of the picture, and the triumphant vessel that would seem to belong to the gay town on our right is united in feeling to the shadow city on the left by the exceeding mystery and beauty of its reflection. This picture supplies us with another instance of the way in which Venice operated as an inspiration in the work of Carpaccio, even when he was not directly portraying the city itself. The beautiful effect of a drawbridge over a great water, such as he knew familiarly in Venice, had impressed itself on his mind: adapting it to the requirements of his scene, he reproduces the bridge of Rialto in the city of the English King, not forgetting the significance of a crowning figure in white at the apex of the arch. We cannot indeed afford to miss a detail in Carpaccio: there is never any crowding nor taking refuge in vagueness. The varieties of shipping, the flags hung from the windows, the most distant figures, are all treated with the same clearness and precision: to each its value is assigned. This fulness of meaning is one of the sources of his fascination for us: the fact that he has done a little thing means sometimes more to us, if we can come at the prompting purpose, than a pageant of main figures. It is like the side-flash of light which a seemingly irrelevant act casts sometimes on a personality.
The fidelity of Bellini and Carpaccio to the facts of Venice fills us continually with fresh wonder: it is not the fidelity of copyists standing outside the scene they paint; their very heart is in its stones. As we watch Gentile’s gorgeous procession sweep like a stream from the gate of the Ducal Palace round the border of the Piazza, with the sound of trumpets, the rustle and swing of noble garments and the gleam of banners, we feel that the painter had heard and felt the triumph of the music, so marvellously has he conveyed its influence in these moving figures; we too hear the jubilation of it as the long tubes pass out and in. With the pictures of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini before us we may do more than conjecture what manner of men they were who filled the foreground of contemporary Venice. We have not masses or dispositions of colour merely: we seem to move through a crowd of living beings or a gallery of portraits. No one could paint loungers as Carpaccio paints them; there is no monotony in their inaction; the faces are as various as the men—wonderful faces, some coarse, some refined, but almost all with that indefinable quality of pathos in their strength which is one of the essentials of beauty. There are perhaps comparatively few among them that would satisfy a conventional canon of beauty: their fascination lies in the rich combination of whimsical humour and strength, melancholy and wit; so eloquent are they, so quick with intelligence that we are little disposed to question their material perfection or imperfection. These citizens of Gentile Bellini, Mansueti and above all Carpaccio—since in him are realised a far greater variety of types—impress us profoundly as men of calm and steady purpose, who have lived, felt and prevailed. They are men of action, yet they are dreamers. And this was not from incapacity in Carpaccio to express vivid motions in feature or form. When he is more freely composing, as in the Death of St. Ursula, it would be hard to rival the brilliance and vivacity with which he has treated the turmoil of the one-sided fray. But these citizens—whether of Venice or of Ursula’s court is immaterial—seem to be governed by some internal harmony; there is a rhythm in their motions and in their standing still, which reflects the spirit of their time. We have only to compare them with the characters in Longhi’s eighteenth-century interiors to understand that a great change has taken place. Imagine Carpaccio and Bellini set to paint as primary interests the choosing of a dress, the stopping of a tooth, the guessing of a riddle, a dancing lesson, a toilette. These things were part of life, and superbly they would have done it; they painted lesser acts than these in the corner of their pictures, for every detail of the city life so jealously guarded by its rulers was precious to them. But the difference lies in the centre of interest. In the eighteenth century, the detail, the side light, the accessory of life has swelled into the principal subject, and the faces of the actors are vacant as never in Carpaccio. It is not so much that they are less beautiful, that they are often witless; but they are lacking in purpose, in subordination to a common control. The pulse of a great civic life no longer beats in them.
We have considered hitherto the manner in which Venice used her elected medium of expression, how her painters had understood and interpreted the life of the city. We will turn now to ask what attitude towards the facts of life is reflected in their canvases. And here we will attempt again to illustrate, by certain examples, what aspects of life found most ready acceptance by the Venetian artists of the Renaissance. We may venture to seek an illustration of two of its broader aspects—one foreign, the other native to the mind of Venice as reflected in her life and in her art—in two sculptured figures by Antonio Rizzo in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace. These two figures, of Adam and Mars, are most original in conception. Adam holds the apple in his hand; it seems that he has just partaken of it and that, partaking, he has been initiated into a new vision. His beautiful clear-cut face is upturned; his lips are open; his hand seems to hold in the tumult of his heart. There is as yet no shame, no contrition, no sense of sin in Adam’s look, nor in his attitude, but the immense wonder of a new experience with its yet undetermined import; and through the ecstasy of his vision there breaks that strange pain of the mortal man whose body can scarcely support its spiritual burden. It seems almost as if Adam were receiving now that vision of the ages at whose threshold he stood; he has opened a door which can never again be shut; he has let in a flood which is beyond his control, and he is rapt in the contemplation. The other figure who fills with Adam a niche in the Arco Foscari is Mars, the god of war. His body is grandly moulded, stalwart and disciplined and ready for action; but there are no tempests in his look; there is no herculean development of muscle nor trampling vehemence as in the fresco of Veronese. Rizzo’s war-god is young, full of grace and beauty, with the dream also of a poet on his sensuous lips. He is majestic; his face is grave and thoughtful, with a strange sadness in its vigilant wisdom. He and Adam seem to strike together the accord of the Renaissance, the union of a great expectancy, an uncomprehended newness, with controlled and ordered purpose and the conviction of conquest. It is the latter aspect which seems to find reflection in the mind of Venice not the mystic promise, the troubled vision, which the Renaissance held for some of those on whom its influence fell. In the Venetians of the first Renaissance there is always the note of calm and assured knowledge; we may find it again and again in their artistic annals. In the Casa Civran—the so-called Casa dell’ Otello beside the Campo dei Carmini—we again recognise Rizzo’s hand in one of the most lovely and characteristic figures of the first Renaissance, which has fortunately survived the various restorations and spoliations of the house and stands still intact in its lonely niche on the plastered wall. It is impossible to convey in words the vivacity, the nobility and grace of this young warrior: the proud and magnificent control governing each motion of his spirited form, the
