Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) by S. Spooner (best ebook reader under 100 TXT) 📖
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fled but Poussin, who was surrounded, and received a cut from a sabre
between the first and second finger. Passeri, who relates the anecdote,
says that the sword turned, otherwise "a great misfortune must have
happened both to him and to painting." Not daunted, however, he fought
under the shelter of his portfolio, throwing stones as he retreated,
till being recognized by some Romans who took his part, he effected his
escape to his lodgings. From that day he put on the Roman dress,
adopted the Roman way of living, and became so much a Roman, that he
considered the city as his true home.
POUSSIN'S HABITS OF STUDY.
Poussin not only studied every vestige of antiquity at Rome and in its
environs, with the greatest assiduity while young, but he followed this
practice through life. It was his delight to spend every hour he could
spare at the different villas in the neighborhood of Rome, where,
besides the most beautiful remains of antiquity, he enjoyed the
unrivalled landscape which surrounds that city, so much dignified by the
noble works of ancient days, that every hill is classical, the very
trees have a poetic air, and everything combines to excite in the soul a
kind of dreaming rapture from which it would not be awakened, and which
those who have not felt it can scarcely understand.
He restored the antique temples, and made plans and accurate drawings of
the fragments of ancient Rome; and there are few of his pictures, where
the subject admits of it, in which we may not trace the buildings, both
of the ancient and the modern city. In the beautiful landscape of the
death of Eurydice, the bridge and castle of St. Angelo, and the tower,
commonly called that of Nero, form the middle ground of the picture. The
castle of St. Angelo appears again in one of his pictures of the
Exposing of Moses; and the pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Pantheon, the
ruins of the Forum, and the walls of Rome, may be recognised in the
Finding of Moses, and several others of his remarkable pictures.
"I have often admired," said Vigneul de Marville, who knew him at a late
period of his life, "the love he had for his art. Old as he was, I
frequently saw him among the ruins of ancient Rome, out in the Campagna,
or along the banks of the Tyber, sketching a scene which had pleased
him; and I often met him with his handkerchief full of stones, moss, or
flowers, which he carried home, that he might copy them exactly from
nature. One day I asked him, how he had attained to such a degree of
perfection as to have gained so high a rank among the great painters of
Italy? He answered, '_I have neglected nothing!_'"
POUSSIN'S OLD AGE.
The genius of Poussin seems to have gained vigor with age. Nearly his
last works, which were begun in 1660, and sent to Paris 1664, were the
four pictures, allegorical of the seasons, which he painted for the Duc
de Richelieu. He chose the terrestrial paradise, in all the freshness of
creation, to designate spring. The beautiful story of Boaz and Ruth
formed the subject of summer. Autumn was aptly pictured, in the two
Israelites bearing the bunch of grapes from the Promised Land. But the
masterpiece was Winter, represented in the Deluge. This picture has
been, perhaps, the most praised of all Poussin's works. A narrow space,
and a very few persons have sufficed him for this powerful
representation of that great catastrophe. The sun's disc is darkened
with clouds; the lightning shoots in forked flashes through the air:
nothing but the roofs of the highest houses are visible above the
distant water upon which the ark floats, on a level with the highest
mountains. Nearer, where the waters, pent in by rocks, form a cataract,
a boat is forced down the fall, and the wretches who had sought safety
in it are perishing: but the most pathetic incident is brought close to
the spectator. A mother in a boat is holding up her infant to its
father, who, though upon a high rock, is evidently not out of reach of
the water, and is only protracting life a very little.
POUSSIN'S LAST WORK AND DEATH.
The long and honorable race of Poussin was now nearly run. Early in the
following year, 1665, he was slightly affected by palsy, and the only
picture of figures that he painted afterwards was the Samaritan Woman at
the Well, which he sent to M. de Chantelou, with a note, in which he
says, "This is my last work; I have already one foot in the grave."
Shortly afterwards he wrote the following letter to M. Felibien: "I
could not answer the letter which your brother, M. le Prieur de St.
Clementin, forwarded to me, a few days after his arrival in this city,
sooner, my usual infirmities being increased by a very troublesome cold,
which continues and annoys me very much. I must now thank you not only
for your remembrance, but for the kindness you have done me, by not
reminding the prince of the wish he once expressed to possess some of my
works. It is too late for him to be well served; I am become too infirm,
and the palsy hinders me in working, so that I have given up the pencil
for some time, and think only of preparing for death, which I feel
bodily upon me. It is all over with me." He expired shortly afterwards,
aged 71 years.
POUSSIN'S IDEAS OF PAINTING.
"Painting is an imitation by means of lines and colors, on some
superfices, of everything that can be seen under the sun; its end is to
please.
_Principles that every man capable of reasoning may learn:_--There can
be nothing represented,
Without light,
Without form,
Without color,
Without distance,
Without an instrument, or medium.
_Things which are not to be learned, and which make an essential part of
painting._
First, the subject must be noble. It should have received no quality
from the mere workmen; and to allow scope to the painter to display his
powers, he should choose it capable of receiving the most excellent
form. He must begin by composition, then ornament, propriety, beauty,
grace, vivacity, probability, and judgment, in each and all. These last
belong solely to the painter, and cannot be taught. The nine are the
golden bough of Virgil, which no man can find or gather, if his fate do
not lead him to it."
POUSSIN AND THE NOBLEMAN.
A person of rank who dabbled in painting for his amusement, having one
day shown Poussin one of his performances, and asked his opinion of its
merits, the latter replied, "You only want a little poverty, sir, to
make a good painter."
POUSSIN AND MENGS.
The admirers of Mengs, jealous of Poussin's title of "the Painter of
Philosophers," conferred on him the antithetical one of "the Philosopher
of Painters." Though it cannot be denied that Mengs' writings and his
pictures are learned, yet few artists have encountered such a storm of
criticism.
POUSSIN AND DOMENICHINO.
Next to correctness of drawing and dignity of conception, Poussin valued
expression in painting. He ranked Domenichino next to Raffaelle for this
quality, and not long after his arrival at Rome, he set about copying
the Flagellation of St. Andrew, painted by that master in the church of
Gregorio, in competition with Guido, whose Martyrdom of that Saint ison the opposite side of the same church. Poussin found all the students
in Rome busily copying the Guido, which, though a most beautiful work,
lacks the energy and expression which distinguish the Flagellation; but
he was too sure of his object to be led away by the crowd. According to
Felibien, Domenichino, who then resided at Rome, in a very delicate
state of health, having heard that a young Frenchman was making a
careful study of his picture, caused himself to be conveyed in his chair
to the church, where he conversed some time with Poussin, without making
himself known; charmed with his talents and highly cultivated mind, he
invited him to his house, and from that time Poussin enjoyed his
friendship and profited by his advice, till that illustrious painter
went to Naples, to paint the chapel of St. Januarius.
POUSSIN AND SALVATOR ROSA.
Among the strolling parties of monks and friars, cardinals and prelates,
Roman princesses and English peers, Spanish grandees and French
cavaliers which crowded the _Pincio_, towards the latter end of the
seventeenth century, there appeared two groups, which may have recalled
those of the Portico or the Academy, and which never failed to interest
and fix the attention of the beholders. The leader of one of these
singular parties was the venerable Niccolo Poussin! The air of antiquity
which breathed over all his works seemed to have infected even his
person and his features; and his cold, sedate, and passionless
countenance, his measured pace and sober deportment, spoke that
phlegmatic temperament and regulated feeling, which had led him to study
monuments rather than men, and to declare that the result of all his
experience was "to teach him to live well with all persons." Soberly
clad, and sagely accompanied by some learned antiquary or pious
churchman, and by a few of his deferential disciples, he gave out his
trite axioms in measured phrase and emphatic accent, lectured rather
than conversed, and appeared like one of the peripatetic teachers of the
last days of Athenian pedantry and pretension.
In striking contrast to these academic figures, which looked like their
own "grandsires cut in alabaster," appeared, unremittingly, on the
Pincio, after sun-set, a group of a different stamp and character, led
on by one who, in his flashing eye, mobile brow, and rapid movement, all
fire, feeling, and perception--was the very personification of genius
itself. This group consisted of Salvator Rosa, gallantly if not
splendidly habited, and a motley gathering of the learned and witty, the
gay and the grave, who surrounded him. He was constantly accompanied in
these walks on the Pincio by the most eminent virtuosi, poets,
musicians, and cavaliers in Rome; all anxious to draw him out on a
variety of subjects, when air, exercise, the desire of pleasing, and the
consciousness of success, had wound him up to his highest pitch of
excitement; while many who could not appreciate, and some who did not
approve, were still anxious to be seen in his train, merely that they
might have to boast "_nos quoque_."
From the Pincio, Salvator Rosa was generally accompanied home by the
most distinguished persons, both for talent and rank; and while the
frugal Poussin was lighting out some reverend prelate or antiquarian
with one sorry taper, Salvator, the prodigal Salvator, was passing the
evening in his elegant gallery, in the midst of princes, nobles, and men
of wit and science, where he made new claims on their admiration, both
as an artist and as an _improvisatore_; for till within a few years of
his death he continued to recite his own poetry, and sing his own
compositions to the harpsichord or lute.
POUSSIN, ANGELO, AND RAFFAELLE COMPARED.
Poussin is, in the strict sense of the word, an historical painter.
Michael Angelo is too intent on the sublime, too much occupied with the
effect of the whole, to tell a common history. His conceptions are epic,
and his persons, and his colors, have as little to do with ordinary
life, as the violent action of his actors have resemblance to the
usually indolent state of ordinary men.
Raffaelle's figures interest so much in themselves, that they make us
forget that they are only part of a history. We follow them eagerly, as
we do the personages of a drama; we grieve, we hope, we despair, we
rejoice with them.
Poussin's figures, on the contrary, tell their story; we feel not the
intimate acquaintance with themselves, that we do with the creations of
Raffaelle. His Cicero would thunder in the forum and dissipate a
conspiracy, and we should take leave of him with respect at the end of
the scene; but with Raffaelle's we should feel in haste to quit the
tumult, and retire with him to his Tusculum, and learn to love the
virtues, and almost to cherish the weaknesses of such a man.
Poussin has shown that grace and expression may be independent of what
is commonly called beauty. His women have none of that soft, easy, and
attractive air, which many other painters have found the secret of
imparting, not only to their Venuses and Graces, but to their Madonnas
and Saints. His beauties are austere and dignified. Minerva and the
Muses appear to have been his models, rather than the inhabitants of
Mount Cithæron. Hence subjects of action are more suited to him than
those of repose.--_Graham's Life of Poussin_.
REMBRANDT.
Paul Rembrandt van Rhyn, one of the most eminent painters and engravers
of the Dutch school, was the son of a miller, and was born in 1606, at a
small village on the
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