Chapter VIII: Venetian Painting of the Renaissance (2)

In 1561 Tintoretto finished the great Marriage at Cana for the Salute. The picture is tremendously developed in depth, and the Christ is set in the distance. The foreground figures alone are concerned with the miracle. Very effective is the contrast of the quiet feasters with those who are stirred by the marvel. The lighting is consummately fine. There are passages of extreme loveliness, such as the swaying row of women’s faces on the right of the table, but the whole thing is far from clear; illustrative and decorative features are imperfectly harmonized. In this great scale Tintoretto’s richness and insatiate inventiveness tend to work against him.

Before considering his colossal labor in the School of St. Roch, we should note his avowed ideal. It might be read on the walls of his studio: “The Drawing of Michelangelo and the Coloring of Titian.” In the studio were casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures brought up at great expense from Florence and Rome. And to Michelangelo we owe the slender and alert proportions of Tintoretto’s figures, quite different as they are from the gravity, almost ponderosity of Titian, Palma, and Paolo Veronese. The color is based on late Titian, but is more sonorous, simple, and uncomplicated by minor tones. The brush stroke is unlike anything earlier—sketchy, impetuous, definitive, working by first intention. Accordingly the surfaces are much broken, and, to a near view, lack preciousness. We have neither the fluent enamel of Giorgione and early Titian, nor yet the muffled richness of Titian’s later manner. But in the best Tintorettos the touch is infallibly crisp, right and expressive. To exaggerate these generously avowed influences of the master who repudiated him and the master he never saw would be easy. As a matter of fact, Tintoretto is always more the illustrator than either of his models. If he adopts the grand poses of Michelangelo, he does so not for abstract beauty, but ever seeks a motive for them. If he chooses Michelangelo’s slender, athletic proportions, he invests them with tenderness and enthusiasm. Unlike Titian, he avoids both classical draperies and rich contemporary costumes, choosing compromise forms of dress which, without ceasing to be classical, should seem familiar, and fit for a real world. If he adopts Titian’s coruscating light, he gives it a special poetry. It does not glow evenly through the picture, but flashes intermittently, as an accent or accompaniment to emotion.

In 1560 the famous charitable confraternity of St. Roch determined to decorate their beautiful School. They called Federico Zuccaro, and Francesco Salviati, who had Roman honors, Tintoretto, and his friends, Schiavone and Paolo Veronese. The subject in competition was to be a cartoon of St. Roch in glory for the ceiling of the refectory. When the day came, Tintoretto unveiled not a cartoon but the finished oval. That was his drawing, he said; he hoped they would not be offended, but he knew no other way. The misunderstandings due to this summary procedure were soon cleared up. Tintoretto became titular painter to the School, later a member, and worked at the two great halls and ante-rooms for twenty-eight years.

St. Roch was the Physician Saint who cared for the plague stricken. Thus the upper hall was pictured with examples of miraculous mercy and deliverance chosen from the Old Testament. The lower hall was devoted to the more familiar stories of the life of Christ and of His Mother. Sadly darkened and neglected, often in impossible light, these pictures baffle all but the enthusiast. One needs all the vicarious enthusiasm that may be drawn from a Ruskin to do San Rocco with any thoroughness. Whoever persists will be rewarded, for while Tintoretto is by no means at his greatest as a painter in this work, it reveals his inexhaustible inventiveness, his warmth and tenderness, and power, as no other series does, whereas it has in the little moonlit landscapes with St. Mary Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt faery refinements elsewhere lacking in the master.

Everybody knows at least the great Calvary, with its sense of cosmic disaster. Marvellous is the storm which sweeps towards the cross from behind, superb alike the cluster of faithful friends at the foot of the cross and the proud riders at the flanks. Hate, love and indifference mingle in the scene. It gets its profound tragedy on terms of fact, is free from all mystical sentimentality. What was it like on that awful evening? is the only question the artist asks himself, and his answer, a sheer gift of the imagination, transcends all the lyrical sweetness and measured solemnity of the ritual crucifixions. Humanism and religion unite for once in this masterpiece.

FIG. 297. Tintoretto. Christ Tempted by Satan.—_Scuola di S. Rocco._
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Among the scores of narratives in the two halls the eye will rest upon Moses Smiting the Rock, for its majesty; upon the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth which has the intensity of Giotto’s fresco at neighboring Padua, with an abandon all its own; upon the Flight into Egypt, with its idyllic landscape; upon the awful tumult and despair of the Massacre of the Innocents; upon the pathos of the white-robed Christ, awaiting his doom from an indifferent proconsul. These occur among many that are equally memorable. Perhaps the subtle humanism of Tintoretto is best shown in the Temptation of Christ, Figure 297. Instead of the ignoble bat-like Satan of the mediæval painters, we have a magnificent starry-eyed youth, a veritable genius of the pride of life. With outstretched, generous arms he offers unstinted power and pleasure. The Christ regards him with tranquil kindness, as one might a splendid animal fawning too eagerly. For so Christian a man as Tintoretto, it implies extraordinary sympathy to imagine a Satan in his own way gloriously sure of his case. In these compositions the method is most various. But where there are many figures Tintoretto generally avoids the convention of placing the chief personages on the picture plane. You look over heads or between bodies to glimpse the Saints or the Blessed Virgin or Christ. And curiously this procedure does not confuse the eye. On the contrary these apparently casual but really most thoughtful arrangements heighten the sense of reality; one feels like a witness, like one himself on the edges of the throng.

Along with the decoration of San Rocco, Tintoretto undertook frequent commissions for the Ducal Palace. But the fire of 1577 consumed his picture of the naval victory at Lepanto, with much else. In the mythologies of the Anticollegio painted in 1578 we have the loveliest poesies of the Venetian school. These are the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Mercury and the Graces, Minerva expelling Mars and the Forge of Vulcan. From the point of view both of decoration and sentiment these are perhaps the finest nudes in painting. They glow with outdoor health, the firm wholesome bodies sway from sheer joy in motion, or hover lightly in the limpid air. The noble forms are fixed for us in transparent shadows, and broad dapplings of light. There is little of the sheer dreaminess of Giorgione, who yet counts for something in the work, nor yet of the explicit sensuousness of Titian. These noble creatures go about our business,—marrying, seeking grace in life, composing strife, providing munitions should strife arise. Miss Phillipps is probably right in divining here an allegory of the greatness of Venice, bride of the Adriatic, protected by her diplomacy, admired for her arts, yet ever ready in her arsenals. What is better worth noting is the combination of breadth and delicacy in the finest of these poesies, The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Figure 298. The interlocking of the superb forms in a flowing rhythm or pattern, the technical miracle of Venus’s easy turn in the air as she offers the ring and the starry crown, the exquisite alternations of light and half light others might conceivably have invented. What is proper to Tintoretto and to him alone is the hesitating hand of Ariadne and her almost resigned and reluctant acceptance of a new love, being mindful of love once betrayed. Also the delicacy of Bacchus’s ardent gesture, as knowing himself to be not only wooer but consoler, is purest Tintoretto. The picture with its companion pieces is the effulgent afterglow of the Arcadianism that began with Giorgione. It breathes a charm that has never since been fully recoverable.

FIG. 298. Tintoretto. Bacchus and Ariadne.—_Ducal Palace._
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While these poesies were in progress, about 1575, Tintoretto painted for the Church of San Cassiano the most original of his Crucifixions, Figure 299. One looks over the narrow top of Golgotha to a peaceful expanse of marbled evening sky. The heads and serried pikes of the Roman legionaries suggest a throng behind the hill. The sharpest note of color is a banner, and the purple robe just stripped from the Christ. Between John and Mary and the executioners on the ladder and against the sky the strangest episode passes. It is the moment when a Pharisee hands up to the executioner the mocking placard “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.” With a sudden impulse John points out the act to Mary, to console her. Christ’s enemies affirm the truth of him. Even in the hour of defeat and death he is eternally his people’s king. The level light which ripples softly over the nude forms of Christ and the thieves takes away all harshness. At San Rocco Tintoretto presented an epic and cosmic terror. Here he suggests all the intimate and lyrical hopes that have grown out of the sacrifice on Calvary.

FIG. 299. Tintoretto. Calvary.—_S. Cassiano._
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Like all the Venetians Tintoretto was an admirable portraitist. His sober and powerful vein is well shown in the Madonna with Three Magistrates, Figure 300.

FIG. 300. Tintoretto. Madonna with Three Magistrates.—_Venice._
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Among the later altar-pieces none is finer than the Miracle of St. Agnes in the Orto. It has all of Tintoretto’s sweetness, power and suddenness, and is nearly in its original condition of color. In 1587, being nearly seventy years old, he got the commission for his greatest and perhaps his last picture, the Paradise, in the Hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace. Darkened and dried, it is still to the perceptive observer a billowing sea of rapturous faces of the blest, obeying in its widening circles of cloud-borne angels an oceanic rhythm. During the three years that Tintoretto was painting it, his young daughter and comrade, Marietta, dressed like a Shakespearean page for greater convenience, worked and chattered beside him on the scaffolding. She hardly lived to see the great canvas set on its wall. Tintoretto lived on till 1594, and then his aged and withered body was carried across the canal from his palace to his vault in the Orto. Such friends as Schiavone and Paolo Veronese had gone before him, the old merrymakings and impromptu concerts in his home had ceased. It was a very tired old man who bid his sons continue the honorable trade of painting. He had shared nobly the greatest range of human emotions, and his last artistic vision was of an ecstatic peace in Paradise.

After Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese[85] seems an anti-climax. His imagination is very limited. His greatest pictures treat the sole theme of stately feasts. His soul is that of a very high class society editor. But no well-advised person looks to Paolo Veronese for soul. One rather seeks in him judgment and fine painting. Both are at their maximum.

Paolo Caliari was born at Verona in 1528, trained by a half primitive master, Antonio Badile, and influenced by the energetic compositions of Brusasorci. Paolo inherited the long Veronese tradition for spectacular narrative painting with splendid architectural accessories, and he carries the local tradition to its close and height. He came to Venice at twenty-seven, a finished and famous artist, bringing with him a novel sort of color. He avoids the contrasts and keen resonances of the true Venetians, painting rather in luminous half tones based on gray and blue. His forms are rich and solid without heavy shadow, and his canvases have the generally blond and uniform color quality of the modern out-of-door school.

His preference is for feasts and pageants. We have the spectacle of a rich and gentle society, dignified in its pleasures and resplendent in its costume. Gold brocade sets off the pearly skins of the portly and gracious ladies in his pictures, and their cavaliers are as magnificently clad in satins, velvets and furs. The feasts are generally half out of doors in great colonnades, with the light glinting impartially upon fair throats and faces and upon channeled columns and sculptured balustrades. Behind, pale cornices and spires swim against a blue sky.

It was the habit of the wealthy chapters of monks who maintained the great Venetian churches to paint in their refectories some Scriptural feast, as a warrant perhaps for their own daily convivialities. Earlier, the most solemn of all meals, The Last Supper, would have been chosen. Not so with Veronese and his contemporaries. They chose instead the Marriage at Cana or the Feast in the House of Simon or of Levi, Figure 301,—splendid events of small or only incidental religious significance, and treated merely as contemporary banquets.

FIG. 301. Paolo Veronese. Feast in Levi’s House.—_Venice._
]

Of the four great feasts painted by Paolo Veronese the Marriage at Cana, in the Louvre, painted in 1563, is earliest, and most imposing. It builds up indefinitely from the marble pavement, with tier upon tier of people, clinging to columns and peering from balconies. One may count no less than two hundred and fifty heads. It has all the stir of a public banquet and everywhere the greatest richness of table accessories and costumes. The theme called for little religious emotion. The miracle itself is a convivial one. Yet Veronese has made this different from other feasts by a most complicated system of guiding lines which always lead the eye to the gentle face of the Christ in the centre. He fairly dominates all this animation and splendor. In the trio of musicians in the foreground Veronese has given us a precious hint of the part music played in the life of all Venetian artists. Paolo himself plays the viola, Tintoretto the ’cello, and Titian the bass. What is remarkable about the great canvas is its unity. Bathed in equable cool light, the eye takes it in at a glance; there is no confusing or distracting emphasis; the whole thing is nobly tranquillizing.

In 1569 Veronese was in Rome. We may possibly see some slight influence of Michelangelo in the frescoes of the Villa Barbaro, at Maser. These contain the only nudes of Veronese that have a real athleticism, and the whole decoration has a more positive and sprightly spirit than is usual in Veronese’s placid style. Working in a country house for liberal and congenial patrons, Daniele Barbaro was himself an architect of merit, Veronese sheds something of that professional dignity which is sometimes excessive in his official work.

FIG. 302. Paolo Veronese. Marriage of St. Catherine.—_Santa Caterina._
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Among his numerous altar-pieces, the Marriage of St. Catherine, Figure 302, in the Venetian Church of that name is perhaps the most gracious. The women are adorable—hothouse flowers, incredible for poise, hue and delicate surface bloom. They are not very personal, their charm is a social one. But they are very gentle, reasonably unconscious of their own beauty, and quite unforgettably lovely. It took a wonderful eye to see them at once so simple and so regal.

In the last twelve years of his life, Veronese was constantly employed in the Ducal Palace and the adjoining public buildings. He employed assistants freely, and the work affords difficult critical problems. The work is uneven. In mythology he belies the hopes based on the frescoes at Maser, where it seemed as if he too might attain the Olympian mood. It is sadly lacking in the hoydenish group that enacts Europa and the Bull, Figure 303, in the Ducal Palace. Why are these heavy Venetian lasses risking their skins and skirts and shins near the seaside and a bull? The flat prose of the feeling, or rather the absence of any real feeling, makes one forget the splendor of the painting. Such also is the effect of the superbly painted Venus and Mars, at New York, and of most of the mythologies. We have to do with sheer prose and not very sincere prose at that.

FIG. 303. Paolo Veronese. Rape of Europa.—_Ducal Palace._
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When, however, the theme can be drawn from everyday Venice, Veronese is overpoweringly fine. Again and again in looking at the ceilings of the Ducal Palace one catches his breath before such visions of magnificence as Venice as Justice, Figure 304, Venice as Queen of the World. For all its contemporary quality, it attains a strange other-worldliness. It is as if some one had looked at superb Venice through a magnifying glass that ennobled the forms and greatly enhanced the colors. You feel how Veronese loved it all and how little he cared for anything beyond the splendor, dignity and prosperity of his adoptive city. He gives us the look of Venice at her climax of Renaissance glory, as Carpaccio had given the dying radiance of her mediæval estate. From the point of view of judgment, style and fine craftsmanship, it is impossible to overpraise Veronese. He should be regarded rather as a great painter in the narrower sense than a supreme artist. When he died in 1588, only fifty years old, he left a very enduring inheritance.

FIG. 304. Paolo Veronese. Venice attended by Force and Justice.
Ceiling Panel.—_Ducal Palace._
]

It was on the whole his moderate and judicious sumptuousness that inspired the painters of the next century. It was well that they sought his imitable merits and not the passion of Titian and Tintoretto. It was largely thanks to Veronese that Venetian art suffered no such sharp decline as befell that of Florence and Rome. The decorative tradition of Veronese sufficed to nourish a Piazetta and a Tiepolo a century and a half after his death.

FIG. 305. G-B. Tiepolo. Time revealing Truth.—_Villa Biron, Vicenza._
]

For Giovanni Battista Tiepolo[86] (1695–1770) in sheer force and fertility yields to none of his Renaissance predecessors. There never was a more valiant draughtsman or a more splendid colorist. Such decorations as those of the Scuola del Carmine, and the Labia Palace fall little behind Veronese’s pageantry in grandeur while representing an audacity of stroke and coloration which Veronese lacked. So the tragic scenes of Christ’s Passion at San Luigi have the intensity of Tintoretto if lacking something of his nobility. In the ceiling decorations of Tiepolo, Figure 305, we see the freest fancies of the Baroque, its customary tumult of shimmering clouds and hovering pearly figures, repeated with a lightness and audacity and withal measure which the Baroque itself never attained save in its great initiator Correggio. Such powers as Tiepolo’s soon won him international patronage. He painted in Austria and died at Madrid. With him perishes the grandeur of the Venetian school. Only a tinge of masquerade and exhibitionism puts him lower than his constant exemplar, Paolo Veronese.

FIG. 306. Antonio Canale. Island of San Michele.—_Royal Collections,
Windsor._
]

Indeed the simplicity which is the most enduring charm of any art is more felt in the minor Venetians of Tiepolo’s time, as in Antonio Canale, called Canaletto, Figure 306, who painted the irradiated panorama of the Venetian lagoon and canals with the ardent precision of a reborn Gentile Bellini. Francesco Guardi[87] (1712–1765), Canaletto’s pupil, with a freer brush and fancy paints the spectacle of Venice, Figure 307, its balls and promenades and water pageants, with the sensitiveness of a Carpaccio. But Carpaccio’s youthful world is no longer there to paint. Romance has given way to casual amorous intrigue, sentiment to show. But out of the welter of sophisticated gayety still rise clean against the heavens the pale domes and bell towers of an older and finer Venice. Guardi is perhaps at his best in the numerous tiny oil sketches which deal with the remote and solitary groves and ruins of the lagoon. Here we have felicities of broken color and niceties of observation, accurate notations of evanescent effects of light, which can still give lessons to the most modern landscapists.

FIG. 307. Francesco Guardi. Scuola di San Marco. Pen and Wash
Drawing.—_Lamperti Coll., Milan._
]

In Pietro Longhi (1702–1762) Venice developed a sympathetic chronicler of her social pleasures, Figure 308. The world of his delicate and witty little canvases is that of the card party, the formal call, the vanity and ceremony of philandering, the shop, the musicale, the masked ball. Only Holland has given so true and sympathetic a record of her smaller affairs, and at the moment, only Hogarth in England and Chardin in France were doing the thing with equal ability.

FIG. 308. Pietro Longhi. Maskers at the Zoo.—_London._
]

Nothing better shows the slightly anachronistic quality of Tiepolo’s grandeur than a fine Longhi. The Venetian imagination had moved indoors, so to speak, had foregone in favor of individual gratifications the old vision of the collective splendor. Venice no longer dines grandly in the open with Veronese, she coquettishly sips coffee with Longhi. If she had declined in nobility, she had at least kept her sincerity and taste. Her affair had ever been rather with appearances than with ideals or interpretations. But since the Greeks no other nation had considered appearances with such noble candor. She kept to the end the good pictorial habit of letting appearances explain themselves. Thus if a Titian will stand beside a Pheidian marble, so will a Tiepolo beside an Alexandrian masterpiece, while a trim belle of Pietro Longhi need feel no confusion before a Tanagra figurine. Time passes gently over a city whose artistic aims are as limited as her taste is sure. Venice had ever been gracious in her grandeur, and gracious she remained even after she had ceased to be grand.

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER VIII

TITIAN’S ASSUMPTION THE BEGINNING OF THE VENETIAN GRAND STYLE

Titian’s contemporaries were fully aware that the Assumption (1518) marked the beginning of the Grand Style at Venice and that the change was revolutionary. The critic Lodovico Dolce writes in his _Dialogo della Pittura_, Florence, 1735, p. 286 f. putting the words into the mouth of Aretino:

“After not much time [after the Fondaco frescoes, 1508] he was given
to paint a great panel for the high altar of the Friars Minor; where
Titian, still young, painted in oils the Virgin, who rises to heaven
among many angels who accompany her, and above her he figured a God
Father flanked by two angels. It seems really as if she rises with a
face full of humility, and her robes fly lightly. At the bottom are
the disciples who with various attitudes manifest joy and amazement,
and are mostly larger than life, and assuredly in that picture is
contained the grandeur and terribleness of Michelangelo, the
pleasingness and grace of Raphael, with the coloring proper to nature,
and, moreover, this was the first public work which he made in oils;
and he made it in very little time, and young.”

“Thereupon the stupid painters and the vulgar herd who up to then had
seen nothing but the cold and dead things of Giovanni Bellini, of
Gentile, and of [Alvise] Vivarini (since Giorgione, working in oils,
had not yet had any public work; and for the most part made no other
works than half figures and portraits) which were without movement and
without relief, spake great ill of that picture. Afterwards, as envy
cooled, and opening their eyes a little to the truth, the people began
to be amazed at the new manner discovered in Venice by Titian: and all
the painters from then on strove to imitate it; but being off their
own path, became confused. And surely it must seem a miracle that
Titian, without having at that time seen the antiquities of Rome,
which were the light of all the good painters, solely with that little
spark, which he had discovered in the works of Giorgione, saw and
perceived the idea of perfect painting.”

The general critical justness of this statement must condone its abundant overstatements and errors of fact.

AURELIO LUINI ON TITIAN’S IMPRESSIONISM

“Aurelio Luini has excellently understood this art [of landscape] to whom it once happened that visiting Titian, and asking him his opinion about the background of trees, besides many reasons which he heard from him about making the foliage sparkle against the background, he saw one of his [Titian’s] wonderful landscapes which he had at home, which, having seen quietly, Aurelio thought a daubed up thing, but afterwards, having withdrawn to a distance, it seemed to him that the sun shone resplendently in it, making the paths retreat on this side and that; so that Aurelio had to say that he had never seen a rarer thing in the world in the way of landscapes.”

Lomazzo, _Trattato_, Milan, 1584, p. 474, 5.

ON BELLE NATURE AND THE ANTIQUE

The Renaissance idea that Nature must be ennobled and corrected by the Antique is plainly formulated by Dolce, again under the name of Aretino, _Dialogo_, p. 190.

“One should then choose the most perfect form, imitating nature in
part.... And partly one should imitate the beautiful marble and bronze
figures of the ancient masters. Whereof who so shall taste and possess
fully the marvellous perfection, will be able with certainty to
correct many defects of nature, and make his pictures noteworthy and
grateful to all. Inasmuch as the ancient things contain the entire
perfection of art, and can be the exemplars of all beauty.”

This is one of the earliest full statements of the notion of _belle nature_, and of the antique as normative. The dogma persists with unabated rigor down to Sir Joshua Reynolds (see Illustration to Chapter VI, p. 316) and Jacques Louis David.

GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS ON THE GREEK AFFINITIES OF VENETIAN PAINTING

“The revival of the Greek Language and Greek Literature raised the long ebb into a wave that swept over civilized Europe. On its glittering crest the Venetian painters especially were lifted into the society of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs. They might see sky, sea and earth peopled with radiant beings; perhaps with a sort of semi-belief such as we accord to the Lorelei and fairies, creations that somehow easily worked in with creeds and experience. Anyhow, they might see Pan come dallying down the sparkling brook-side, now shouting to the laughing brown nymphs rustling through the reeds, and pretending to be afraid, now scattering a shower of notes from his pipes that would fall upon the ears as the brightness of the iris over a fountain falls upon the eye.”...

“It may seem strange if I place the Venetian school and Titian, with his liberal line—which, however, is by no means wanting in reticence—in closer relationship with Greek art of the great period than the more classical schools of Tuscany and Rome. Supposing one were to endeavor to paint a restoration of the pediments of the Parthenon, it would be possible to interpolate with figures by Titian, never with any by Poussin, or, I think, even by Raphael or Michael Angelo.”...

“In spite of extravagant and even absurd defects (for the great artist’s eyes no longer served him faithfully), when Titian, towards the end of his life painted the ‘Europa’ ... the muse who inspired Pheidias laid her hand on the old man’s shoulder, and she inspired the wealth of volume, ease of line, and glowing sense of nature’s exuberance.”

_George Frederick Watts, his Life and Writings_, London and New York, Vol. III., pp. 251, 253, 254.

FIG. 309. Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin.—_Louvre._
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