Atlantic Monthly by - (the reading strategies book .txt) 📖

Nor is there at Manchester any picture by Duccio da Siena, the great, and, one may almost say, the worthy contemporary of Giotto, from which his power and feeling are to be well estimated. Like Giotto he struggled to free himself from the swathing-clothes in which the traditions of Byzantine Art had bound up the limbs and the imaginations of artists, and he succeeded in at last breaking loose. But the long restraint had impaired the power of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression, which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and imperfect knowledge of the materials and limits of painting. It is this groping effort after truth which results often in the naïve rendering of details, and the quaintness of composition, which are so common in the works of these early masters; but the deep feeling of the artists penetrates through all, and thus even their awkward and imperfect drawing frequently produces a stronger effect, and seems a better rendering of nature, than the cold, unfeeling, academic accuracy of Bologna, or all the finished science of the eclectic schools.

In passing down through the century one finds lamentable omissions at Manchester. Fifty pictures, of which half at least have been restored, (that is to say, in part or wholly spoiled,) and half originally the work of inferior masters, do not represent the art of a century which was full of the glow of reawakening life, and which, as the spring covers the earth with flowers, covered Italy with cathedrals, campaniles, churches, baptisteries, and camposantos, and decorated their walls with sculpture and painting. Art was gaining gradually a knowledge of her own powers. Orgagna, the Michel Angelo of his time, (one of his pictures is at Manchester,) was opening a wider field for her progress; and ten years after his death Fra Angelico was born. He was a boy of fifteen years old when in 1402 Masaccio was born at Florence, and the brightness of the fifteenth century had begun.

There is one, among the four pictures ascribed to Fra Angelico in this collection, from which something of the heavenly purity, the sweetness, and the tenderness of this great and gentle master may be learned. It is a picture of the Last Judgment. Unfortunately, it has been much injured by time and by neglect; its brilliant colors have sunk and become dim,—those pure, clear colors which give to Fra Angelico’s panel pictures the brilliancy of a missal illumination, and which reflect the purity and the clearness of his tranquil life and his reverential soul. It is no fanciful theory which connects the uses of color with moral qualities, and which from the coloring of a picture will deduce something of the moral character of its painter. Thus it is not only from the exquisite delicacy of form, the spirituality of expression, and the sweet, reverent fancy in attitude, of the angels from which Fra Angelico derived his name, but also from the brightness of their golden wings, from the deep glow of their crimson, or scarlet, or azure robes, and from the clear shining of the stars on their foreheads, that one learns that he deserved that name as characteristic of his temper and his life. Something of the influence of the cloister shows itself in most of his larger works; but if his vision was narrowed within convent walls, it did but pierce the more clearly into the regions of tranquillity and loveliness that lay above them.

With the end of the fifteenth century religion almost disappears from Art. John Bellini, dying ninety years old in 1516, was the last and one of the greatest of the long line of artists who had loved Art as the means granted them of serving God upon earth. The manly vigor of his conceptions, the tender and holy purity of his imagination, the delicate strength of his fancy, are not to be discovered in the few pictures that bear his name at Manchester. His pictures are to be fairly seen only at Venice, where, in out-of-the-way churches, over tawdry altars, his colors gleam undimmed by time, and the faces of his Virgins look down with a still celestial sweetness. But there is one picture here, by a Venetian contemporary of John Bellini, before which we shall do well to pause. It is a St. Catharine, by Cima da Conegliano. It is the picture of a noble woman, full of fortitude, serenity, and faith. The richness of the color of her dress, her calm dignity, the composure of her attitude, recall to mind and make her the worthy companion of the beautiful St. Barbara of the church of Santa Maria Formosa. It is well to look at her, for we are coming to those days when such saints as these were no longer painted; but in their places whole tribes of figures with faces twisted into every trick of sentimental devotion, imbecile piety, and pretended fervor.

But before this time, somewhere about the middle of the fifteenth century, the fashion of painting pictures upon panel for private purposes, though as yet religious subjects were principally chosen for treatment, had already begun; and we find the masters of the early part of the sixteenth century represented with tolerable fulness at Manchester. English collectors have long had a passion for Raphael, and England is almost as rich in his works in oils as Italy herself. Italy, however, keeps his frescos; and may she long keep them! There are more than thirty works ascribed to Raphael hanging on the walls of the Exhibition. Many of them are of doubtful genuineness; many of them have been restored.

It is impossible to trace in these pictures the progress of Raphael’s manner, and to mark the development of his style; but even in these one may see something of the change from the simplicity and feeling of his early works, produced under the influence of religious sentiment, and the still clinging stiffness of traditional restraints, to the freedom and coldness of his later works, painted under the influence of success at a dissolute court, of flattery, of jealousy, and of indifference to the motives of religion.

The Venetian masters of the sixteenth century fill a large portion of the sides of one of the great saloons of this aisle, covering it with a glow of deepest color. The opposite side is hung with many pictures by Rubens; and the contrast between the works of the mighty colorists of Venice and the famous colorist of Antwerp is not without curious interest and instruction. The Venice wall has the color of Venetian sunsets, the gold and crimson of its clouds, the solemn blue of the Cadore hills, the deep green of the lagoons, the brown and purple of the seaweeds, and the shadows of the city of decaying palaces. Here are such harmonies as Nature strikes in her great symphony of color. But on the other wall are the colors of the courts in which Rubens passed so many of his days,—the dyes of tapestry, the sheen of jewels and velvet, the glaring crimson and yellow of royal displays; while the harmonies that he strikes out with his rapid and powerful hand are like those of the music of some great military band.

There are noble pictures here by Giorgione, and Titian, and Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, and Bonifazio. Look at this Musical Party by Giorgione, this landscape by Titian, this portrait of the vile Duke of Alva by the same great master, the greatest master of all in portraiture. It is the Duke himself, not merely in his outward presence, but such as the insight of one as profoundly versed in human as in external nature beheld him. The portrait is a biography of the man, and one may read in the narrow, hard, and wily face the history of his cruel life. The same qualities of inward vision are displayed by Tintoret in his more hasty portraits, and one learns as much of Venetian men and of their lives from the pencil of Titian and of Tintoret as from the pens of contemporary chroniclers. The picture by Bonifazio of a Virgin and Child surrounded by saints is a splendid example of this almost unsurpassed colorist; while several of the pictures by Paul Veronese are among the most precious things in all the Exhibition, as clear and uninjured specimens of admirable Venetian work.

The Bolognese school is represented at Manchester out of all proportion to its worth, in comparison with the earlier and greater schools of Italy. It is essentially the school of decline, and, after the time of Francia, very few pictures proceeded from it dignified by noble thought, or exhibiting either purity or power of imagination. Its very method condemned it to inferiority. But debased as it is, it has been during the last two centuries the object of perhaps more real and affected admiration than any other of the schools of Italian art. Fortunately, we have entered upon a better period of criticism, and a change is fast coming over the public taste. But it is a curious fact, that the most popular picture in the whole gallery of ancient masters, the picture before which larger crowds assemble and linger than before any other, is one from this school,—the three Maries weeping over the body of the Saviour, by Annibale Caracci. A portion of the interest which it excites undoubtedly arises from the report that Louis Napoleon has offered the sum of £20,000 for it to its possessor, the Earl of Carlisle; but its intrinsic qualities are such as to explain much of its attraction for uneducated eyes. The attitudes of the figures are violent and theatrical, the colors are strong, the surface is smooth, the subject is easily recognized and of general interest. But whatever value be set upon these points, it is an example of many of the worst defects of the school. The expressions of the figures are exaggerated and unnatural, the color, though strong, is cold and inharmonious, the drawing feeble and incorrect, the sentiment inconceivably material. It is a true exponent of the low ebb of artistic power and of religious feeling at the period at which it was painted.

But we are delaying too long in these halls of the old painters. We have scarcely looked at a tithe of the eleven hundred pictures that hang around, and we must pass by with only a glance the long lines of German, Flemish, and Dutch works, and the rows of pictures by the great Spanish masters. We can but see how much there is for pleasure and for study, and wish in vain to pause before Rembrandt, and Cuyp, and Ruysdael, and Vandyck, before Murillo and Velasquez.

We come out into the nave, and, forgetting for a time pictures as works of art, let us look at them as representations of men, as we pass along before the portraits of British worthies, with which the two sides of this great hall are hung. It is a gallery of which every one of British blood may be proud; for no other country could show such a long line of the portraits of her famous men, and feel at the same time that so many of her greatest were not to be found in the collection. The gallery begins with a portrait of King Henry IV.; it ends with that of Mr. Prescott. After nearly four hundred English worthies, at last one American,—and only one; for in the whole collection there is but one other portrait of an American,—West, the painter,—and he was