Is this indeed sufficient to give it the facial, anecdotal, and local feeling that we expect from Rembrandt when he paints the places, things, and men of his time? If Van der Helst instead of seating his arquebusiers had made them move in any manner whatever, do not doubt that he would have given us the truest if not the finest indications of their ways. And as for Frans Hals, you may imagine with what clearness and order, and how naturally he would have disposed the scene; how piquant, lively, ingenious, abundant, and magnificent he would have been. The idea conceived by Rembrandt then is one of the most ordinary, and I would venture to say that the majority of his contemporaries considered it poor in resources; some because its abstract line is uncertain, scanty, symmetrical, meagre, and singularly incoherent; others, the colourists, because this composition, so full of gaps and ill-occupied spaces, did not lend itself to that broad and generous employment of colours which is usual with able palettes....

Thus there is no truth and very little pictorial invention in the general disposition. Is there more in the individual figures?

What immediately strikes us is that they are unreasonably disproportioned and that many of them have shortcomings and so to speak an embarrassment of characterization that nothing can justify. The captain is too big and the lieutenant too small, not only by the side of Captain Kock, whose stature crushes him, but also beside accessory figures whose height or breadth gives this somewhat plain young man the air of a youth who has grown a moustache too soon. Regarding the two as portraits, they are scarcely successful ones of doubtful likeness and thankless physiognomy, which is surprising in a portrait-painter who had made his mark in 1642, and which affords some excuse for Captain Kock's having a little later applied to the infallible Van der Helst. Is the guard loading his musket rendered any better? Moreover, what do you think of his right-hand neighbour, and of the drummer? One might say that all these portraits lack hands, so vaguely are they sketched and so insignificant is their action. It follows that what they hold is also ill rendered: muskets, halberds, drum-sticks, canes, lances, and flag-pole; and that the gesture of an arm is impotent when the hand that ought to act does not do so clearly, quickly, or with energy, precision, or intelligence. I will not speak of the feet, which, in most cases, are lost in shadow. Such in reality are the necessities of the system of envelopment adopted by Rembrandt, and such is the imperious foregone conclusion of his method, that one general dark cloud invades the base of the picture and that the forms float in it to the great detriment of their points of support.

Must we add that the clothes are very similar to the likenesses, sometimes uncouth and unnatural, sometimes rigid and rebellious to the lines of the body? One would say that they are not worn properly. The helmets are stupidly put on, the hats are outlandish and ungracefully worn. The scarfs are in their place and yet they are awkwardly tied. Here is none of that unique ease of carriage, that natural elegance, that neglige dress, caught and rendered to the life in which Frans Hals knows how to attire every age, every stature, every stage of corpulence, and, certainly also, every rank. We are not reassured on this point more than on many others. We ask ourselves whether there is not here a laborious fantasy, like an attempt to be strange, which is not at all pleasing or striking.

Some of the heads are very handsome, I have mentioned those that are not. The best, the only ones in which the hand of the master and the feeling of a master are to be recognized, are those which, from the depths of the canvas, shoot their vague eyes and the fine spark of their mobile glances at you; do not severely examine their construction, nor their plan, nor their bony structure; accustom yourself to the greyish pallor of their complexion, question them from afar as they also look at you from a distance, and if you want to know how they live, look at them as Rembrandt wants us to look at his human effigies, attentively and long, at their lips and eyes.

There remains an episodical figure which has hitherto baffled all conjectures, because it seems by its traits, its carriage, its odd splendour, and its inappropriateness, to personify the magic, the romantic feeling, or, if you prefer, the misrepresentation of the picture; I mean that little witch-like personage, child-like and crone-like at the same time, with her hair streaming and adorned with pearls, gliding among the guards for no apparent reason, and who, a not less inexplicable detail, has a white cock, that at need might be taken for a purse, hanging from her girdle.

Whatever right she has to join the troop, this little figure seems to have nothing human about her. She is colourless and almost shapeless. Her figure is that of a doll and her gait is automatic. She has the air of a beggar, something like diamonds covers her whole body, and an accoutrement resembling rays. You would say that she came from some jewry, or old clothes market, or Bohemia, and that, awaking from a dream, she had attired herself in the most singular of all worlds. She has the light, the uncertainty, and the wavering of a pale fire. The more we examine her, the less we can grasp the subtle lineaments that serve as envelope for her uncorporeal existence. We end by seeing in her nothing but a kind of extraordinarily strange phosphorescence which is not the ordinary light of things, nor yet the ordinary brilliance of a well-regulated palette, and this adds more sorcery to the peculiarities of her countenance. Notice that in the place she occupies, one of the dark corners of the canvas, rather low in the middle distance, between a man in deep red and the captain dressed in black, this eccentric light has much greater force than the most sudden contrast with a neighbouring tint, and without extreme care this explosion of accidental light would have sufficed to disorganize the whole picture.

What is the meaning of this little imaginary or real being, who, however, is only a supernumerary while yet holding, so to speak, the chief role? I shall not attempt to tell you. Abler people than I have allowed themselves to inquire what it was and what it was doing there, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion.

But if to all these somewhat vain questions Rembrandt replied: "This child is a caprice no less strange than and quite as plausible as many others in my engraving or painting. I have placed it as a narrow ray amid great masses of shadow because its exiguity rendered it more vibrating and it suited me to awaken with a ray one of the dark corners of my picture. It also wears the usual costume of my female figures, great or small, young or old, and in it you will find the type frequently occurring in my works. I love what glitters, and that is why I have clothed her in brilliant materials. As for those phosphorescent gleams that astonish you here, whilst elsewhere they pass unnoticed, it is only the light in its colourless splendour and supernatural quality that I habitually give to my figures when I illuminate them at all strongly."—Do you not think that such a reply ought to satisfy the most difficult, and that finally, the rights of the stage-setter being reserved, he need only render account of one point: the manner in which he has treated the picture?

We know what to think of the effect produced by the Night Watch when it appeared in 1642. This memorable attempt was neither understood nor relished. It added noise to Rembrandt's glory, increased it in the eyes of his faithful admirers, and compromised it in the eyes of those who had only followed him with some effort and attended him to this decisive point. It made him a painter more peculiar and a master less sure. It heated and divided men of taste according to the heat of their blood, or the stiffness of their reason. In short, it was regarded as an absolutely new but dangerous adventure which brought him applause and some blame, and which at heart did not convince anybody. If you know the judgment expressed on this subject by Rembrandt's contemporaries, his friends and his pupils, you know that opinion has not sensibly varied for two centuries, and that we repeat almost the same thing that this great daring man might have heard during his lifetime....

Save one or two frank colours, two reds and a deep violet, except one or two flashes of blue, you cannot perceive anything in this colourless and violent canvas to recall the palette and ordinary method of any of the known colourists. The heads have the appearance rather than the colouring proper to life. They are red, purple, or pale, without for all that having the true paleness Velasquez gives to his faces, or those sanguine, yellowish, greyish, or purplish shades that Frans Hals renders with such skill when he desires to specify the temperaments of his personages. In the clothes and hair and various parts of the accoutrements, the colour is no more exact nor expressive than is, as I have said, the form itself. When a red appears, it is not of a delicate nature and it indistinctly expresses silk, cloth, or satin. The guard loading his musket is clothed in red from head to foot, from his hat to his boots. Do you perceive that Rembrandt has occupied himself for a moment with the varied physiognomy of this red, its nature or substance, as a true colourist would not have failed to do?...

I defy any one to tell me how the lieutenant is dressed and in what colour. Is it white tinged with yellow? Is it yellow faded to white? The truth is that this personage having to express the central light of the picture, Rembrandt has clothed him with light, very ably with regard to brilliance and very negligently with regard to colour.

Now, and it is here that Rembrandt begins to show himself, for a colourist there is no light in the abstract. Light of itself is nothing: it is the result of colours diversely illumined and diversely radiating in accordance with the nature of the ray that they transmit or absorb. One very deep tint may be extraordinarily luminous; another very light one on the contrary may not be at all luminous. There is not a student in the schools who does not know that. With the colourists, then, the light depends exclusively upon the choice of the colours employed to render it and is so intimately connected with the tone that we may truthfully say that with them light and colour are one. In the Night Watch there is nothing of the kind. Tone disappears in light as it does in shade. The shade is blackish, the light whitish. Everything is brilliant or dull, radiant or obscure, by an alternative effacement of the colouring principle. Here we have different values rather than contrasted tones. And this is so true that a fine engraving, a good drawing, a Mouilleron lithograph, or a photograph will give an exact idea of the picture in its important effects, and a copy simply in gradations from light to dark would destroy none of its arabesque.

What is his execution in the picture before us? Does he treat a stuff well? No. Does he express it ingeniously, or with liveliness, with its seams, folds, breaks, and tissue. Assuredly not. When he places a feather at the brim of a hat, does he give it the lightness and floating grace that we see in Van Dyck, or Hals, or Velasquez? Does he indicate by a little gloss on a dead ground, in their form, or feeling of the body, the human physiognomy of a well adjusted coat, rubbed by a movement or worn with use? Can he, with a few masterly touches and taking no more trouble than things are worth, indicate lace-work, or suggest jewellery, or rich embroidery?

In the Night Watch we have swords, muskets, partisans, polished casques, damascened cuirasses, high boots, tied shoes, a halberd with its fluttering blue silk, a drum, and lances. Imagine with what ease, with what carelessness, and with what a nimble way of making us believe in things without insisting upon them, Rubens, Veronese, Van Dyck, Titian himself, and lastly Frans Hals, that matchless workman, would have summarily indicated and superbly carried off all these accessories. Do you maintain in good faith that Rembrandt in the Night Watch excels in treating them thus? I pray you, look at the halberd that the little lieutenant Ruijtenberg holds at the end of his stiff arm; look at the foreshortened steel, look especially at the floating silk, and tell me if an artist of that value has ever allowed himself more pitifully to express an object that ought to spring forth beneath his brush without his being aware of it. Look at the slashed sleeves that have been so highly praised, the ruffles, the gloves; examine the hands! Consider well how in their affected or unaffected negligence their form is accentuated and their foreshortening is expressed. The touch is thick, embarrassed, awkward, and blundering. We might truly say that it goes astray, and that applied crosswise when it should be applied lengthwise, made flat when any other than he would have rounded it, it confuses instead of determining the form....

At length I come to the incontestable interest of the picture, to Rembrandt's great effort in a new field: I am going to speak of the application on a large scale of that way of looking at things which is proper to him and which is called chiaroscuro.

No mistake is possible here. What people attribute to Rembrandt is really his. Without any doubt chiaroscuro is the native and necessary form of his impressions and ideas. Others have made use of it; but nobody has employed it so constantly and ingeniously as he. It is the supremely mysterious form, the most enveloped, the most elliptic, and the richest in hidden meanings and surprises that exists in the pictorial language of the painter. In this sense it is more than any other the form of intimate feelings or ideas. It is light, vaporous, veiled, discreet; it lends its charm to hidden things, invites curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to the speculations of conscience. In short, it partakes of sentiment, emotion, uncertainty, indefiniteness, and infinity; of dreams and of the ideal. And this is why it is, as it ought to be, the poetic and natural atmosphere in which Rembrandt's genius never ceased to dwell.

In very ordinary language and in its action common to all schools, chiaroscuro is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible, and painting an object enveloped with air. Its aim is to render all the picturesque accidents of shadow, of half-tints, of light, of relief, and of distance; and to give in consequence more variety, more unity of effect, more caprice and more relative truth either to forms or to colours. The contrary is a more ingenuous and more abstract acceptation, by virtue of which objects are shown as they are, viewed close at hand, the atmosphere being suppressed, and consequently without any other than linear perspective, which results from the diminishing of objects and from their relation to the horizon. When we speak of aerial perspective, we already presuppose a little chiaroscuro.

Any other than Rembrandt, in the Dutch school, might sometimes make us forget that he was obeying the fixed laws of chiaroscuro; with him this forgetfulness is impossible: he has so to speak framed, co-ordinated and promulgated its code, and if we might believe him a doctrinaire at this moment of his career, when instinct swayed him much more than reflection, the Night Watch would have a redoubled interest, for it would assume the character and the authority of a manifesto.

To envelop and immerse everything in a bath of shadow; to plunge light itself into it only to withdraw it afterwards to make it appear more distant and radiant; to make dark waves revolve around illuminated centres, grading them, sounding them, thickening them; to make the obscurity nevertheless transparent, the half gloom easy to pierce, and finally to give a kind of permeability to the strongest colours that prevents their becoming blackness,—this is the prime condition, and these also are the difficulties of this very special art. It goes without saying, that if anyone ever excelled in this, it was Rembrandt. He did not invent, he perfected everything; and the method that he used oftener and better than anyone else bears his name.

When explained according to this tendency of the painter to express a subject only by the brilliance and obscurity of objects, the Night Watch has, so to speak, no more secrets for us. Everything that might have made us hesitate is made clear. Its qualities have their raison d'etre; and we even come to comprehend its errors. The embarrassment of the practitioner as he executes, of the designer as he constructs, of the painter as he colours, of the costumer as he attires, the inconsistency of the tone, the amphibology of the effect, the uncertainty of the time of day, the strangeness of the figures, their flashing apparition in deep shadow,—all this results here by chance from an effect conceived contrary to probability, and pursued in spite of all logic, not at all necessary, and with the following purpose: to illuminate a real scene with unreal light, that is to say, to clothe a fact with the ideal character of a vision. Do not seek for anything beyond this audacious project that mocked the painter's aims, clashed with received ideas, set up a system in opposition to customs, and boldness of spirit in opposition to manual dexterity; and the temerity of which certainly did not cease to spur him on until the day when I believe insurmountable difficulties revealed themselves, for, if Rembrandt resolved some of them, there are many that he could not resolve.

Maitres d'Autrefois (Paris, 1876).



THE RAPE OF HELEN

(BENOZZO GOZZOLI)

COSMO MONKHOUSE

Though the patronage of art had shifted partly from the Church to the great magnates, especially the great commercial princes like the Medici at Florence, her influence was still paramount, and though secular subjects were not uncommon, the vast majority of paintings executed for patrons, whether clerical or lay, were still religious in subject. It is not therefore, surprising that among the artists of the Fifteenth Century, many of whom were monks and all Church painters, we find a distinct cleavage dividing artists whose aim was to break away from all traditions—realists—classicists—in a word, reformers, from artists who clung tenaciously to the old ideals, and whose main aim was still the perfection of devotional expression.



It was to the former class that Benozzo Gozzoli belonged, pupil though he was of Fra Angelico. Although his special quality may be partly discerned in the altar-piece that hangs above his master's predella, in the strongly marked character of the saints, and perhaps more in the carefully studied goldfinches, there was little scope in such a subject for the exercise of his imagination or the display of his individuality. It is different with the little panel opposite, The Rape of Helen (No. 591), in which he has depicted with great liveliness and gusto a scene from a classical legend. Possibly, to Fra Angelico, who regarded painting only as a means of edification, its employment on such a subject may have seemed little less than sacrilege, not unlike the use of a chancel for the stabling of horses. Such views can scarcely be said to be extinct now, and this is the more remarkable as no one has the same feeling with regard to the other arts, such as sculpture or poetry. To a young man like Benozzo, and many others of his day, not monks, nor specially devout in disposition, it must, nevertheless, have been a change which was welcome. To paint the Virgin enthroned with Saints over and over again, must have been a little wearisome to men conscious of a fancy to which they could give no scope except by putting S. Jerome's hat in a new place, or introducing a couple of goldfinches. One likes to think of the pleasure with which Gozzoli received his commission one morning, perhaps from Cosimo de' Medici himself, for whom his master was adorning a cell in the Convent of San Marco, recently rebuilt at the great man's expense. Did he know the legend of Helen of Troy, or had he to seek the advice of some scholar like Nicolli or Poggio for the right tradition? He seems, indeed, to have been rather mixed in his ideas on the subject. Did he consult Brunellesco in the construction of his Greek Temple, or Donatello or Ghiberti for the statue inside? Whence came that wonderful landscape with its mountains and cypress trees and strange-shaped ships? From his imagination, or from some old missal or choir-book illumination? At all events, pleasure evidently went to the making of it, for his fancy had full scope. His costumes he adopted frankly from those of his day, adding some features in the way of strange headgear, much like those in Fra Angelico's Adoration (in which he possibly had a hand), to give an Eastern colour to the group of boyish heroes on the left; not knowing or considering that the robes in which he was accustomed to drape his angels were much nearer to, were indeed derived from, the costume of the Greeks. For his ideal of female beauty he seems to have been satisfied with his own taste. One can scarcely imagine a face or figure much less classical than that of the blonde with the retrousse nose (presumably Helen herself), who is riding so complacently on the neck of the long-legged Italian in the centre. The figures in the Temple are of a finer type, and the lady in the sweeping robe, with the long sleeves, who turns her back to us, has a simple dignity which reminds one less of Gozzoli's master than of Lippo Lippi or Masaccio, whose frescoes in the Carmine he, in common with all other artists, had doubtless studied. There is nothing so classical or so natural in the picture as the beautiful little bare-legged boy that is running away in the foreground. This little bright panel—so gay, so naive, so ignorant, and withal so charming—is of importance in the history of art as illustrated in the National Gallery. It is the first in which the artist has given full play to his imagination, and entered the romantic world of classic legend, and, with one exception, the first which is purely secular in subject, and was designed for a "secular" purpose. It probably once formed part of a marriage-chest. The important share which the landscape has in the composition, and its serious attempt at perspective, are also worthy of note. As an example of the master himself, of the painter of the great panoramic procession of the notables of his day, which under the title of the Adoration of the Kings, covers the walls of the chapel in the Medici Palace at Florence, of the designs of the history of S. Agostino at San Gemignano, and of the frescoes in Campo Santo at Pisa, it is of course extremely inadequate, but it suffices to indicate many paths which the young artist was to strike out from the old track which sufficed for his saint-like master.

In the National Gallery (London, 1895).



MONNA LISA[9]

(LEONARDO DA VINCI)

WALTER PATER

In Vasari's life of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured form in which the world stamps its appreciation of one who has thoughts for himself alone, his high indifferentism, his intolerance of the common forms of things; and in the second edition the image was changed into something fainter and more conventional. But it is still by a certain mystery in his work, and something enigmatical beyond the usual measure of great men, that he fascinates, or perhaps half repels. His life is one of sudden revolts, with intervals in which he works not at all, or apart from the main scope of his work. By a strange fortune the works on which his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, as the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the work of meaner hands, as the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsanctified and secret wisdom; as to Michelet and others to have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some secret errand....



His art, if it was to be something in the world, must be weighted with more of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity. Nature was "the true mistress of higher intelligences." So he plunged into the study of nature. And in doing this he followed the manner of the older students; he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines traced by stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between the different orders of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each other; and for years he seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice silent for other men.

He learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of an intimate presence in the things he handled. He did not at once or entirely desert his art; only he was no longer the cheerful objective painter, through whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright figures of Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He wasted many days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of lines and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossible—the perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the church of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats for the performance of which natural magic professes to have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the over-wrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions—the smiling of women and the motion of great waters....

The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to concentrate a thousand experiences. Later writers, thinking only of the well-ordered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered manuscripts, written strangely as his manner was, from right to left, have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that impression which those about him received from him. Poring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying by a strange variation of the alchemist's dream to discover the secret, not of an elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather giving immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things, in the reed at the brook-side or the star which draws near to us but once in a century. How in this way the clear purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser's head perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest here. But it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.

The year 1483—the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first of Leonardo's life—is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell him for a price strange secrets in the art of war. It was that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so susceptible to religious impressions that he turned his worst passions into a kind of religious cultus, and who took for his device the mulberry tree—symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economizes all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had gone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the first duke. As for Leonardo himself he came not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible to the charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up to this time some charm of voice and aspect, strong enough to balance the disadvantage of his birth, had played about him. His physical strength was great; it was said that he could bend a horseshoe like a coil of lead.

The Duomo, the work of artists from beyond the Alps, so fantastic to a Florentine used to the mellow unbroken surfaces of Giotto and Arnolfo, was then in all its freshness; and below, in the streets of Milan, moved a people as fantastic, changeful, and dreamlike. To Leonardo least of all men could there be anything poisonous in the exotic flowers of sentiment which grew there. It was a life of exquisite amusements, (Leonardo became a celebrated designer of pageants,) and brilliant sins; and it suited the quality of his genius, composed in almost equal parts of curiosity and the desire of beauty, to take things as they came.

Curiosity and the desire of beauty—these are the two elementary forces in Leonardo's genius; curiosity often in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace.

The movement of the Fifteenth Century was two-fold: partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming of what is called the "modern spirit," with its realism, its appeal to experience; it comprehended a return to antiquity, and a return to nature. Raffaelle represents the return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature. In this return to nature he was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So we find him often in intimate relations with men of science, with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes of manuscript; and those who can judge describe him as anticipating long before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. He explained the obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that the sea had once covered the mountains which contain shells, and the gatherings of the equatorial waters above the polar.

He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a peculiar atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such curious fidelity that different writers have attributed to him a fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the jasmine; while at Venice there is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first, appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape: hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light—their exact antitype is in our own western seas; all solemn effects of moving water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing as a little fall into the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a goodly river below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks, washing the white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of divided streams in La Gioconda, to the sea-shore of the Saint Anne—that delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells lie thick upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through his strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.

And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality, and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion on dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention. So he painted the portraits of Ludovico's mistresses, Lucretia Crivelli and Cecilia Galerani the poetess, of Ludovico himself, and the Duchess Beatrice. The portrait of Cecilia Galerani is lost, but that of Lucretia Crivelli has been identified with La Belle Ferronniere of the Louvre, and Ludovico's pale, anxious face still remains in the Ambrosian. Opposite is the portrait of Beatrice d'Este, in whom Leonardo seems to have caught some presentiment of early death, painting her precise and grave, full of the refinement of the dead, in sad earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones....

The Last Supper was finished in 1497; in 1498 the French entered Milan, and whether or not the Gascon bowmen used it as a mark for their arrows, the model of Francesco Sforza certainly did not survive. Ludovico became a prisoner, and the remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or less years of wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne—not the Saint Anne of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon now in London—revived for a moment a sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung, and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived still in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses of Florence, left perhaps a little subject to light thoughts by the death of Savonarola (the latest gossip is of an undraped Monna Lisa, found in some out-of-the-way corner of the late Orleans collection), he saw Ginevra di Benci, and Lisa, the young third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. As we have seen him using incidents of the sacred legend, not for their own sake, or as mere subjects for pictorial realisation, but as a symbolical language for fancies all his own, so now he found a vent for his thoughts in taking one of those languid women, and raising her, as Leda or Pomona, Modesty or Vanity, to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression.

La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in the marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.[10] As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limit, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By what strange affinities had she and the dream grown thus apart, yet so closely together? Present from the first, incorporeal in Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?

The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

During these years at Florence Leonardo's history is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the sea-shore at Piombino, each place appearing as fitfully as in a fevered dream.... We catch a glimpse of him again at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made like one under a spell, was upon him now with double force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his philosophy to "fly before the storm;" he is for the Sforzas or against them, as the tide of their fortune turns. Yet now he was suspected by the anti-Gallian society at Rome of French tendencies. It paralyzed him to find himself among enemies; and he turned wholly to France, which had long courted him.

France was about to become an Italy more Italian than Italy itself. Francis the First, like Lewis the Twelfth before him, was attracted by the finesse of Leonardo's work; La Gioconda was already in his cabinet, and he offered Leonardo the little Chateau de Clou, with its vineyards and meadows, in the soft valley of the Masse, and not too far from the great outer sea. M. Arsene Houssaye has succeeded in giving a pensive local colour to this part of his subject, with which, as a Frenchman, he could best deal. "A Monsieur Lyonard, peinteur du Roy pour Amboyse,"—so the letter of Francis the First is headed. It opens a prospect, one of the most attractive in the history of art, where, under a strange mixture of lights, Italian art dies away as a French exotic.

Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1873).

FOOTNOTES:

[9] The spelling commonly used is "Mona Lisa." The editor has thought best, however, to keep the form of spelling used by Walter Pater.

[10] Yet for Vasari there was some further magic of crimson in the lips and cheeks, lost for us.



THE ADORATION OF THE LAMB

(VAN EYCK)

KUGLER

Hubert van Eyck was born, according to the common acceptation, in 1366. John van Eyck was his junior by some unknown number of years. Chroniclers of the Sixteenth Century vaguely suggest that the two brothers settled at Ghent in 1410. There is every reason to believe that all these dates are incorrect; that Hubert was born after 1366, and that the date of his migration to Ghent must be placed later in the century. It is credible that both the brothers were court painters to Philip of Charolois, heir apparent to the throne of Burgundy, who lived with his wife Michelle de France at Ghent between 1418 and 1421. In the service of the prince, painters were free from the constraint of their guild, but on the withdrawal of the court the privilege would cease; and this explains how the names of the Van Eycks were not recorded in the register of the corporation of St. Luke till 1421, when, on the death of the Countess Michelle, and as a tribute to her memory, they were registered as masters without a fee. John van Eyck soon found employment in the court atmosphere, which seemed congenial to him, whilst Hubert remained at Ghent, received commissions from the municipality (1424), and became acquainted with Jodocus Vydts, for whom he composed the vast altar-piece known as the Adoration of the Lamb. It was not fated that he should finish the great work which he was then induced to begin. He probably sketched the subjects that were to adorn the panels, and completed some of the more important of them. At his death in 1426 he was buried in the chapel, the decoration of which had been the last occupation of his life. We may sum up the qualities which distinguished him, and the services which he rendered to the art of his country, in the following sentences:—



He carried the realistic tendency, already existing in the Flemish masters, to an extraordinary pitch of excellence, whilst in many essential respects he adhered to the more ideal feeling of the previous period, imparting to this, by the means of his far richer powers of representation, greater distinctness, truth of nature, and variety of expression. Throughout his works he displayed an elevated and highly energetic conception of the stern import of his labours in the service of the Church. The prevailing arrangement of his subject is symmetrical, holding fast the early architectonic rules which had hitherto presided over ecclesiastic art. The later mode of arrangement, in which a freer and more dramatic and picturesque feeling was introduced, is only seen in Hubert van Eyck's works in subjection to these rules. Thus his heads exhibit the aim at beauty and dignity belonging to the earlier period, only combined with more truth of nature. His draperies unite its pure taste and softness of folds with greater breadth; the realistic principle being apparent in that greater attention to detail which a delicate indication of the material necessitates. Nude figures are studied from nature with the utmost fidelity; undraped portions are also given with much truth, especially the hands; only the feet remain feeble. That, however, which is almost the principal quality of his art, is the hitherto unprecedented power, depth, transparency, and harmony of his colouring. To attain this he availed himself of a mode of painting in oil which he and his brother had perfected. Oil painting, it is true, had long been in use, but only in a very undeveloped form, and for inferior purposes. According to the most recent and thorough investigations, the improvement introduced by the Van Eycks, and which they doubtless only very gradually worked out, were the following. First, they removed the chief impediment which had hitherto obstructed the application of oil-paint to pictures properly so called. For, in order to accelerate the slow drying of the oil colours, it had been necessary to add a varnish to them, which consisted of oil boiled with a resin. Owing to the dark colour of this varnish, in which amber, or more frequently sandarac, was used, this plan, from its darkening effect on most colours, had hitherto proved unsuccessful. The Van Eycks, however, succeeded in preparing so colourless a varnish that they could apply it without disadvantage, to all colours. In painting a picture they proceeded on the following system. The outline was drawn on a gesso ground, so strongly sized that no oil could penetrate the surface. The under painting was then executed in a generally warm brownish glazing colour, and so thinly that the light ground was clearly seen through it. They then laid on the local colours, thinner in the lights, and, from the quantity of vehicle used, more thickly in the shadows; in the latter availing themselves often of the under painting as a foil. In all other parts they so nicely preserved the balance between the solid and the glazing colours as to attain that union of body and transparency which is their great excellence. Finally, in the use of the brush they obtained that perfect freedom which the new vehicle permitted; either leaving the touch of the brush distinct, or fusing the touches tenderly together, as the object before them required. Of all the works which are now attributed to Hubert, but one is genuine and historically authenticated. This noble work is certified by an inscription. It is a large altar picture, consisting of two rows of separate panels, once in the Cathedral of St. Bavon at Ghent. It was painted, as before remarked, for Jodocus Vydts, Seigneur of Pamele, and Burgomaster of Ghent, and his wife Elizabeth, of the then distinguished family of Burlunt, for their mortuary chapel in that cathedral.[11] When the wings were opened, which occurred only on festivals, the subject of the upper centre picture was seen, consisting of three panels, on which were the Triune God—the King of heaven and earth—and at his side the Holy Virgin and the Baptist; on the inside of the wings were angels, who with songs and sacred music celebrate the praises of the Most High: at the two extremities, each inside the half-shutters which covered the figure of God the Father, were Adam and Eve, the representatives of fallen man. The lower central picture shows the Lamb of the Revelation, whose blood flows into a cup; over it is the dove of the Holy Spirit; angels, who hold the instruments of the Passion, worship the Lamb, and four groups, each consisting of many persons, advance from the sides: they comprise the holy martyrs, male and female, with priests and lay-men; in the foreground is the fountain of life; in the distance the towers of the heavenly Jerusalem. On the wing pictures, other groups are coming up to adore the Lamb; on the left, those who have laboured for the kingdom of the Lord by worldly deeds—the soldiers of Christ, and the righteous judges; on the right, those who, through self-denial and renunciation of earthly good, have served Him in the spirit—holy hermits and pilgrims; a picture underneath, which represented hell, finished the whole.

This work is now dispersed: the centre pictures and the panels of Adam and Eve only being in Ghent.[12] The lower picture of hell was early injured and lost, and the others form some of the greatest ornaments of the gallery of the Berlin Museum.[13]

The three figures of the upper centre picture are designed with all the dignity of statue-like repose belonging to the early style; they are painted, too, on a ground of gold and tapestry, as was constantly the practice in earlier times: but united with the traditional type we already find a successful representation of life and nature in all their truth. They stand on the frontier of two different styles, and, from the excellence of both, form a wonderful and most impressive whole. In all the solemnity of antique dignity the Heavenly Father sits directly fronting the spectator—his right hand raised to give the benediction to the Lamb, and to all the figures below; in his left is a crystal sceptre; on his head the triple crown, the emblem of the Trinity. The features are such as are ascribed to Christ by the traditions of the Church, but noble and well-proportioned; the expression is forcible, though passionless. The tunic of this figure, ungirt, is of a deep red, as well as the mantle, which last is fastened over the breast by a rich clasp, and, falling down equally from both shoulders, is thrown in beautiful folds over the feet. Behind the figure, and as high as the head, is a hanging of green tapestry adorned with a golden pelican (a well-known symbol of the Redeemer); behind the head the ground is gold, and on it, in a semicircle, are three inscriptions, which again describe the Trinity, as all-mighty, all-good, and all-bountiful. The two other figures of this picture display equal majesty; both are reading holy books and are turned towards the centre figure. The countenance of John expresses ascetic seriousness, but in the Virgin's we find a serene grace, and a purity of form, which approach very nearly to the happier efforts of Italian art.

On the wing next to the Virgin stand eight angels singing before a music-desk. They are represented as choristers in splendid vestments and crowns. The brilliancy of the stuffs and precious stones is given with the hand of a master, the music-desk is richly ornamented with Gothic carved work and figures, and the countenances are full of expression and life; but in the effort to imitate nature with the utmost truth, so as even to enable us to distinguish with certainty the different voices of the double quartet, the spirit of a holier influence has already passed away. On the opposite wing, St. Cecilia sits at an organ, the keys of which she touches with an expression of deep meditation: other angels stand behind the organ with different stringed instruments. The expression of these heads shows far more feeling, and is more gentle; the execution of the stuffs and accessories is equally masterly. The two extreme wings of the upper series, the subjects of which are Adam and Eve, are now in the Museum at Brussels. The attempt to paint the nude figure of the size of life, with the most careful attention to minute detail, is eminently successful, with the exception of a certain degree of hardness in the drawing. Eve holds in her right hand the forbidden fruit. In the filling up, which the shape of the altar-piece made necessary over these panels, there are small subjects in chiaroscuro: over Adam, the sacrifice of Cain and Abel; over Eve, the death of Abel—death, therefore, as the immediate consequence of original sin.

The arrangement of the lower middle picture, the worship of the Lamb, is strictly symmetrical, as the mystic nature of the allegorical subject demanded, but there is such beauty in the landscape, in the pure atmosphere, in the bright green of the grass, in the masses of trees and flowers, even in the single figures which stand out from the four great groups, that we no longer perceive either hardness or severity in this symmetry. The wing picture on the right, representing the holy pilgrims, is, in the figures, less striking than the others. Here St. Christopher, who wandered through the world seeking the most mighty Lord, strides before all, a giant in stature, whilst a host of smaller pilgrims, of various ages, follow him. A fruitful valley, with many details, showing a surprising observation of nature, is seen through the slender trees. The cast of the folds in the ample red drapery of St. Christopher, as in the upper picture, reminds us still of the earlier style. The whimsical and singular expression in the countenances of the pilgrims is also very remarkable. The picture next to the last described is more pleasing; it represents the troop of holy anchorites passing out of a rocky defile. In front are St. Paul the Hermit and St. Anthony, the two who set the first example of retirement from the world; and the procession closes with the two holy women who also passed the greater part of their lives in the wilderness, Mary Magdalen and St. Mary of Egypt. The heads are full of character, with great variety of expression: on every countenance may be traced the history of its life. Grave old men stand before us, each one differing from the other; one is firm and strong, another more feeble; one cheerful and single-minded, another less open. Some inspired fanatics wildly raise their heads, whilst others with a simple and almost humorous expression walk by their side, and others again are still struggling with their earthly nature. It is a remarkable picture, and leads us deep into the secrets of the human heart—a picture which in all times must be ranked amongst the master-works of art, and which to be intelligible needs no previous inquiry into the relative period and circumstances of the artists who created it. The landscape background, the rocky defile, the wooded declivity, and the trees laden with fruit, are all eminently beautiful. The eye would almost lose itself in this rich sense of still life if it were not constantly led back to the interest of the foreground.

The opposite wing pictures differ essentially in conception from those just described. Their subject did not in itself admit such varied interest, and it is rather the common expression of a tranquil harmony of mind, and of the consciousness of a resolute will, which attracts the spectator, combined at the same time with a skilful representation of earthly splendour and magnificence. Inside the wing to the right we see the soldiers of the Lord on fine chargers, simple and noble figures in bright armour, with surcoats of varied form and colour. The three foremost with the waving banners appear to be St. Sebastian, St. George, and St. Michael, the patron saints of the old Flemish guilds, which accompanied their earls to the Crusades. In the head of St. George, the painter has strikingly succeeded in rendering the spirit of the chivalry of the Middle Ages—that true heroic feeling and sense of power which humbles itself before the higher sense of the Divinity. Emperors and kings follow after him. The landscape is extremely beautiful and highly finished, with rich and finely-formed mountain ridges, and the fleecy clouds of spring floating lightly across. The second picture (the last to the left) represents the righteous judges; they also are on horseback, and are fine and dignified figures. In front, on a splendidly caparisoned grey horse, rides a mild benevolent old man, in blue velvet trimmed with fur. This is the likeness of Hubert, to whom his brother has thus dedicated a beautiful memorial. Rather deeper in the group is John himself, clothed in black, with his shrewd, sharp countenance turned to the spectator. We are indebted to tradition for the knowledge of these portraits.

Both these wing pictures have the special interest of showing us, by means of armour, rich costumes, and caparisons, a true and particular representation of the Court of Burgundy in the time of Philip the Good—when it was confessedly the most superb court in Europe.

The upper wings, when closed, represented the Annunciation, and this was so arranged that on the outer and wider ones (the backs of the two pictures of angels singing and playing) were the figures of the Virgin and the Angel Gabriel,—on the inner narrower ones (that is, on the back of the Adam and Eve), a continuation of the Virgin's chamber. Here, as was often the case in the outside pictures of large altar-pieces, the colouring was kept down to a more uniform tone, in order that the full splendour might be reserved to adorn with greater effect the principal subject within. The angel and the Holy Virgin are clothed in flowing white drapery, but the wings of the angel glitter with a play of soft and brilliant colour, imitating those of the green parrot. The heads are noble and well painted; the furniture of the room is executed with great truth, as well as the view through the arcade which forms the background of the Virgin's chamber, into the streets of a town, one of which we recognize as a street in Ghent.

In the semicircles which close these panels above, on the right and left, are the prophets Micah and Zechariah, whose heads have great dignity, but are somewhat stiff and unsatisfactory in their attitudes. In the centre (corresponding with the figures in chiaroscuro over Adam and Eve) are two kneeling female figures represented as sibyls.

The exterior portion of the lower wings contains the statues of the two St. Johns. These display a heavy style of drapery, and there is something peculiarly angular in the breaks of the folds, imitated perhaps from the sculpture of the day, which had also already abandoned the older Northern mould. This peculiarity by degrees impressed itself more and more on the style of painting of the Fifteenth Century, and the drapery of the figures in the Annunciation already betrays a tendency towards it. The heads exhibit a feeling for beauty of form which is rare in this school. John the Baptist, who is pointing with his right hand to the Lamb on his left, is appropriately represented, as the last of the Prophets, as a man of earnest mien and dignified features, with much hair and beard. John the Evangelist, on the other hand, appears as a tender youth with delicate features, looking very composedly at the monster with four snakes which, at his benediction, rises from the chalice in his hand.

The likenesses of the donors are given with inimitable life and fidelity. They show the careful hand of Jan van Eyck, but already approach that limit within which the imitation of the accidental and insignificant in the human countenance should be confined. The whole, however, is in admirable keeping, and the care of the artist can hardly be considered too anxiously minute, since feeling and character are as fully expressed as the mere bodily form. The aged Jodocus Vydts, to whose liberality posterity is indebted for this great work of art, is dressed in a simple red garment trimmed with fur; he kneels with his hands folded, and his eyes directed upwards. His countenance, however, is not attractive; the forehead is low and narrow, and the eye without power. The mouth alone shows a certain benevolence, and the whole expression of the features denotes a character capable of managing worldly affairs. The idea of originating so great a work as this picture is to be found in the noble, intellectual, and expressive features of his wife, who kneels opposite to him in the same attitude, and in still plainer attire.

At Hubert van Eyck's death, on the 16th of September, 1426, Jodocus Vydts engaged Jan van Eyck, the younger brother and scholar of Hubert, to finish the picture in the incomplete parts.[14] A close comparison of all the panels of this altar-piece with the authentic works of Jan van Eyck shows that the following portions differ in drawing, colouring, cast of drapery, and treatment, from his style, and may therefore with certainty be attributed to the hand of Hubert:—of the inner side of the upper series, the Almighty, the Virgin, St. John the Baptist, St. Cecilia with the angels playing on musical instruments, and Adam and Eve; of the inner side of the lower series, the side of the centre picture with the apostles and saints, and the wings with the hermits and pilgrims, though with the exception of the landscapes. On the other hand, of the inner side of the upper series, the wing picture with the singing angels is by Jan van Eyck; of the inner side of the lower series, the side of the centre picture of the Adoration of the Lamb, containing the patriarchs and prophets, etc., and the entire landscape; the wing with the soldiers of Christ and the Righteous Judges, and the landscapes to the wing with the hermits and pilgrims; finally, the entire outer sides of the wings, comprising the portraits of the founders, and the Annunciation. The Prophet Zechariah and the two sibyls alone show a feebler hand.[15]

About one hundred years after the completion of this altar-piece an excellent copy of it was made by Michael Coxis for Philip II. of Spain. The panels of this work, like those of the original, are dispersed; some are in the Berlin Museum, some in the possession of the King of Bavaria, and others in the remains of the King of Holland's collection at the Hague. A second copy, which comprises the inside pictures of this great work, from the chapel of the Town-house at Ghent, is in the Antwerp Museum.

Handbook of Painting: the German, Flemish, and Dutch Schools, based on the handbook of Kugler remodelled by Dr. Waagen and revised by J.A. Crowe (London, 1874).

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Carton, Les Trois Freres van Eyck, p. 36.

[12] Marc van Vaernewijck in a MS. of 1566-8, describing the Ghent troubles, states that on the 19th of August, two days before the iconoclasts plundered St. Bavon, the picture of the Mystic Lamb was removed from the Vijdts chapel and concealed in one of the towers. See the MS., Van die Beroerlicke Tijden in die Nederlanden{b}, recently printed at Ghent (1872), p. 146. On the same page in which Vaernewijck relates this story he says that he refers his readers, for the lives of the Van Eycks to his book, Mijn leecken Philosophie int xx^e bouck. This book, which probably still exists on the shelves of some library, has not as yet been discovered.

[13] "The pictures here exhibited as the works of Hemmelinck, Messis, Lucas of Holland, A. Duerer, and even Holbein, are inferior to those ascribed to Eyck in colour, execution, and taste. The draperies of the three on a gold ground, especially that of the middle figure, could not be improved in simplicity, or elegance, by the taste of Raphael himself. The three heads of God the Father, the Virgin, and St. John the Baptist, are not inferior in roundness, force, or sweetness to the heads of L. da Vinci, and possess a more positive principle of colour."—Life of Fuseli, i. p. 267. This is a very remarkable opinion for the period when it was written.

[14] This appears from the following inscription of the time, on the frame of the outer wing:—

"Pictor Hubertus ab Eyck, major quo nemo repertus Incepit; pondusque Johannes arte secundus Frater perfecit, Judoci Vyd prece fretus [VersV seXta MaI Vos CoLLoCat aCta tVerI]."

[The last verse gives the date of May 6, 1432.] The discovery of this inscription, under a coating of green paint, was made in Berlin in 1824, when the first word and a half of the third line, which were missing, were [imperfectly] supplied [with "frater perfectus"] by an old copy of this inscription, found by M. de Bast, the Belgian connoisseur.

[15] [Dr. Waagen did not always hold decided opinions as to what portions of the altar-piece of Ghent are by Hubert and John van Eyck, respectively. There is no doubt that some of "the sublime earnestness" which Schlegel notes in the Eternal, the Virgin, and John the Baptist, and much of the stern realism which characterizes those figures, is to be found in the patriarchs and prophets, and in the hermits and pilgrims, and in the Adam and Eve; but it is too much to say that these wing pictures can "with certainty be assigned to Hubert," and it is not to be forgotten that John van Eyck worked in this picture on the lines laid down by his elder brother, and must have caught some of the spirit of his great master.]



THE DEATH OF PROCRIS

(PIERO DI COSIMO)

EDWARD T. COOK

A very characteristic work by Piero, called di Cosimo, after his godfather and master, Cosimo Rosselli. Piero's peculiarities are well known to all readers of George Eliot's Romola, where everything told us about him by Vasari is carefully worked up. The first impression left by this picture—its quaintness—is precisely typical of the man. He shut himself off from the world, and stopped his ears; lived in the untidiest of rooms, and would not have his garden tended, "preferring to see all things wild and savage about him." He took his meals at times and in ways that no other man did, and Romola used to coax him with sweets and hard-boiled eggs. His fondness for quaint landscape ("he would sometimes stand beside a wall," says Vasari, "and image forth the most extraordinary landscapes that ever were") may be seen in this picture: so also may his love of animals, in which, says Vasari, he took "indescribable pleasure."



The subjects of his pictures were generally allegorical. In Romola he paints Tito and Romola as Bacchus and Ariadne; here he shows the death of Procris, the story in which the ancients embodied the folly of jealousy. For Procris being told that Cephalus was unfaithful, straight-way believed the report and secretly followed him to the woods, for he was a great hunter. And Cephalus called upon "aura," the Latin for breeze, for Cephalus was hot after the chase: "Sweet air, O come," and echo answered, "Come, sweet air." But Procris, thinking that he was calling after his mistress, turned to see, and as she moved she made a rustling in the leaves, which Cephalus mistook for the motion of some beast of the forest, and let fly his unerring dart, which Procris once had given him.

But Procris lay among the white wind-flowers, Shot in the throat. From out the little wound The slow blood drained, as drops in autumn showers Drip from the leaves upon the sodden ground. None saw her die but Lelaps, the swift hound, That watched her dumbly with a wistful fear, Till at the dawn, the horned wood-men found And bore her gently on a sylvan bier, To lie beside the sea,—with many an uncouth tear.

AUSTIN DOBSON: Old World Lyrics.

A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery (London and New York, 1888).



THE DEATH OF PROCRIS

(PIERO DI COSIMO)

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

The point that connects him with Botticelli is the romantic treatment of his classical mythology, best exemplified in his pictures of the tale of Perseus and Andromeda.[16] Piero was by nature and employment a decorative painter; the construction of cars for pageants, and the adornment of dwelling rooms and marriage chests, affected his whole style, rendering it less independent and more quaint than that of Botticelli. Landscape occupies the main part of his compositions, made up by a strange amalgam of the most eccentric details—rocks toppling over blue bays, sea-caverns and fantastic mountain ranges. Groups of little figures upon these spaces tell the story, and the best invention of the artist is lavished on the form of monstrous creatures like the dragon slain by Perseus. There is no attempt to treat the classic subject in a classic spirit: to do that and to fail in doing it, remained for Cellini....[17] The same criticism applies to Piero's picture of the murdered Procris watched by a Satyr of the woodland.[18] In creating his Satyr the painter has not had recourse to any antique bas-relief, but has imagined for himself a being half human, half bestial, and yet wholly real; nor has he portrayed in Procris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence. The strange animals and gaudy flowers introduced into the landscape background further remove the subject from the sphere of classic treatment. Florentine realism and quaint fancy being thus curiously blended, the artistic result may be profitably studied for the light it throws upon the so-called Paganism of the earlier Renaissance. Fancy at that moment was more free than when superior knowledge of antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art, and when the painters thought less of the meaning of the fable for themselves than of its capability of being used as a machine for the display of erudition.

The Renaissance in Italy (London, 1877).

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Uffizi Gallery.

[17] See the bas-relief upon the pedestal of his 'Perseus' in the Loggia de' Lanzi.

[18] In the National Gallery.



THE MARRIAGE IN CANA

(TINTORET)

JOHN RUSKIN

The Church of the Salute is farther assisted by the beautiful flight of steps in front of it down to the canal; and its facade is rich and beautiful of its kind, and was chosen by Turner for the principal object in his well known view of the Grand Canal. The principal faults of the building are the meagre windows in the sides of the cupola, and the ridiculous disguise of the buttresses under the form of colossal scrolls; the buttresses themselves being originally a hypocrisy, for the cupola is stated by Lazari to be of timber, and therefore needs none. The sacristy contains several precious pictures: the three on its roof by Titian, much vaunted, are indeed as feeble as they are monstrous; but the small Titian, St. Mark with Sts. Cosmo and Damian, was, when I first saw it, to my judgment, by far the first work of Titian's in Venice. It has since been restored by the Academy, and it seemed to me entirely destroyed, but I had not time to examine it carefully.



At the end of the larger sacristy is the lunette which once decorated the tomb of the Doge Francesco Dandolo, and, at the side of it, one of the most highly finished Tintoret's in Venice, namely: The Marriage in Cana. An immense picture, some twenty-five feet long by fifteen high, and said by Lazari to be one of the few which Tintoret signed with his name. I am not surprised at his having done so in this case. Evidently the work has been a favourite with him, and he has taken as much pains as it was ever necessary for his colossal strength to take with anything. The subject is not one which admits of much singularity or energy in composition. It was always a favourite one with Veronese, because it gave dramatic interest to figures in gay costumes and of cheerful countenances; but one is surprised to find Tintoret, whose tone of mind was always grave, and who did not like to make a picture out of brocades and diadems, throwing his whole strength into the conception of a marriage feast; but so it is, and there are assuredly no female heads in any of his pictures in Venice elaborated so far as those which here form the central light. Neither is it often that the works of this mighty master conform themselves to any of the rules acted upon by ordinary painters; but in this instance the popular laws have been observed, and an academy student would be delighted to see with what severity the principal light is arranged in a central mass, which is divided and made more brilliant by a vigorous piece of shadow thrust into the midst of it, and which dies away in lesser fragments and sparkling towards the extremities of the picture. This mass of light is as interesting by its composition as by its intensity. The cicerone who escorts the stranger round the sacristy in the course of five minutes and allows him some forty seconds for the contemplation of a picture which the study of six months would not entirely fathom, directs his attention very carefully to the "bell' effetto di prospettivo," the whole merit of the picture being, in the eyes of the intelligent public, that there is a long table in it, one end of which looks further off than the other; but there is more in the "bell' effetto di prospettivo" than the observance of the common law of optics. The table is set in a spacious chamber, of which the windows at the end let in the light from the horizon, and those in the side wall the intense blue of an Eastern sky. The spectator looks all along the table, at the farther end of which are seated Christ and the Madonna, the marriage guests on each side of it,—on one side men, on the other women; the men are set with their backs to the light, which passing over their heads and glancing slightly on the table-cloth, falls in full length along the line of young Venetian women, who thus fill the whole centre of the picture with one broad sunbeam, made up of fair faces and golden hair. Close to the spectator a woman has risen in amazement, and stretches across the table to show the wine in her cup to those opposite; her dark red dress intercepts and enhances the mass of gathered light. It is rather curious, considering the subject of the picture, that one cannot distinguish either the bride or the bride-groom; but the fourth figure from the Madonna in the line of women, who wears a white head-dress of lace and rich chains of pearls in her hair, may well be accepted for the former, and I think that between her and the woman on the Madonna's left hand the unity of the line of women is intercepted by a male figure: be this as it may, this fourth female face is the most beautiful, as far as I recollect, that occurs in the works of the painter, with the exception only of the Madonna in the Flight into Egypt. It is an ideal which occurs indeed elsewhere in many of his works, a face at once dark and delicate, the Italian cast of feature moulded with the softness and childishness of English beauty some half a century ago; but I have never seen the ideal so completely worked out by the master. The face may best be described as one of the purest and softest of Stothard's conceptions, executed with all the strength of Tintoret. The other women are all made inferior to this one, but there are beautiful profiles and bendings of breasts and necks along the whole line. The men are all subordinate, though there are interesting portraits among them; perhaps the only fault of the picture being that the faces are a little too conspicuous, seen like balls of light among the crowd of minor figures which fill the background of the picture. The tone of the whole is sober and majestic in the highest degree; the dresses are all broad masses of colour, and the only parts of the picture which lay claim to the expression of wealth or splendour are the head-dresses of the women. In this respect the conception of the scene differs widely from that of Veronese, and approaches more nearly to the probable truth. Still the marriage is not an important one; an immense crowd, filling the background, forming superbly rich mosaic of colour against the distant sky. Taken as a whole the picture is perhaps the most perfect example which human art has produced of the utmost possible force and sharpness of shadow united with richness of local colour. In all the other works of Tintoret, and much more of other colourists, either the light and shade or the local colour is predominant; in the one case the picture has a tendency to look as if painted by candle-light, in the other it becomes daringly conventional, and approaches the conditions of glass-painting. This picture unites colour as rich as Titian's with light and shade as forcible as Rembrandt's, and far more decisive.

There are one or two other interesting pictures of the early Venetian school in this sacristy, and several important tombs in the adjoining cloister; among which that of Francesco Dandolo, transported here from the Church of the Frari, deserves especial attention.

Stones of Venice (London, 1853).



MADAME DE POMPADOUR

(DE LA TOUR)

CHARLES-AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE

Madame de Pompadour was not exactly a grisette, as her enemies affected to say and as Voltaire has said in a malicious moment: she was a bourgeoise, a blossom of finance, the most lovely woman in Paris, witty, elegant, adorned with a thousand gifts and a thousand talents, but with a way of feeling that did not have the grandeur and coldness of an aristocratic ambition. She loved the King for his own sake, as the handsomest man in his realm, as the one who had seemed the most amiable to her; she loved him sincerely, sentimentally, if not with a profound passion. On her arrival at court, her ideal would have been to amuse him with a thousand entertainments borrowed from the arts, or even from matters of the intellect, to make him happy and constant in a circle of varied enchantments and pleasures. A Watteau landscape, sports, comedies, pastorals in the shade, a continual Embarkation for Cythera, that would have been the round she would have preferred. But once transported into the slippery enclosure of the court, she could realize her ideal very imperfectly. Kind and obliging by nature, she had to take up arms to defend herself against enmity and perfidy and to take the offensive to avoid being overthrown; necessity led her into politics and induced her to make herself Minister of State.

She loved the arts and intellectual things far above the comprehension of any of the ladies of quality. On her arrival at her eminent and dishonourable post—much more dishonourable than she thought—she at first only thought of herself as destined to aid, to call to her side, and to encourage struggling merit and men of talent of all kinds. This is her sole glory, her best title, and her best excuse. She did her best to advance Voltaire and to make him agreeable to Louis XV., whom the petulant poet so strongly repelled by the vivacity and even the familiarity of his praises. She thought she had found a genius in Crebillon and honoured him accordingly. She showed favour to Gresset; she protected Marmontel; she welcomed Duclos; she admired Montesquieu and plainly showed it. She would have liked to serve Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When the King of Prussia ostentatiously gave d'Alembert a modest pension and Louis XV. was scoffing in her presence at the amount (1200 livres), in comparison with the term sublime genius, for which it was given, she advised him to forbid the philosopher to accept it and to double it himself; which Louis XV. did not dare to do; his religious principles would not permit it on account of the Encyclopedie. It was not her fault that we cannot say the century of Louis XV., as we say the century of Louis XIV.



There are then in the career and power of Madame de Pompadour two distinct periods: the first, the most brilliant and most greatly favoured, was that following the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): in this, she completely played her role of a youthful favourite, fond of peace, the arts, the pleasures of the mind, and advising and protecting all things happily. There was a second period, greatly checkered, but more frequently disastrous and fatal; this was the whole period of the Seven Years' War, the attempted assassination by Damiens, the defeat of Rosbach, and the insults of the victorious Frederick. These were harsh years which prematurely aged this weak and graceful woman, who was drawn into a struggle beyond her strength.... However, my impression is that things might have been worse, and that, with the aid of M. de Choiseul, by means of the Family Compact she again covered her own mistakes and the humiliation of the French monarchy with a certain amount of prestige.

It seems that the nation itself felt this and felt more especially that after this brilliant favourite there would be a greater fall; for when she died at Versailles, April 15, 1764, the regret of the Parisian populace, which some years before would have stoned her, was universal....

The one who seemed to regret her the least was Louis XV.; it is related that seeing from a window the hearse on its way from Versailles to Paris, the weather being dreadful, he only said:

"The Marquise will not have very fine weather for her journey."

All the masters of the French school of her time painted a portrait of Madame de Pompadour: we have one by Boucher, and another by Drouais which Grimm preferred to all others; but the most admirable of all is certainly La Tour's pastel owned by the Louvre. To this we go in order to see la marquise before we allow ourselves to judge of her, or to form the least idea of her personality.

She is represented as seated in an arm-chair, holding in one hand a book of music, and with her left arm resting on a marble table on which are placed a globe and several volumes. The largest one of these books, which is next to the globe, is Volume IV. of the Encyclopedie; next to it in a row are the volumes of L'Esprit des Lois, La Henriade, and Pastor Fido, indicative of the tastes at once serious and sentimental of the queen of this spot. Upon the table also and at the base of the globe is seen a blue book upside down, its cover is inscribed: Pierres gravees; this is her work. Underneath it and hanging down over the table is a print representing an engraver of precious stones at work with these words: Pompadour sculpsit. On the floor, by the foot of the table, is a portfolio marked with her arms and containing engravings and drawings; we have here a complete trophy. In the background, between the feet of the consol-table, is seen a vase of Japanese porcelain: why not of Sevres? Behind her arm-chair and on the side of the room opposite the table is another arm-chair, or an ottoman, on which lies a guitar. But it is the person herself who is in every respect marvellous in her extreme delicacy, gracious dignity, and exquisite beauty. Holding her music-book in her hand lightly and carelessly, her attention is suddenly called away from it; she seems to have heard a noise and turns her head. Is it indeed the King who has arrived and is about to enter? She seems to be expecting him with certainty and to be listening with a smile. Her head, thus turned aside, reveals the outline of the neck in all its grace, and her very short but deliciously-waved hair is arranged in rows of little curls, the blonde tint of which may be divined beneath the slight covering of powder. The head stands out against a light-blue background, which in general dominates the whole picture. Everything satisfies and delights the eye; it is a melody, perhaps, rather than a harmony. A bluish light, sifting downwards, falls across every object. There is nothing in this enchanted boudoir which does not seem to pay court to the goddess,—nothing, not even L'Esprit des Lois and L'Encyclopedie. The flowered satin robe makes way along the undulations of the breast for several rows of those bows, which were called, I believe, parfaits contentements, and which are of a very pale lilac. Her own flesh-tints and complexion are of a white lilac, delicately azured. That breast, those ribbons, and that robe—all blend together harmoniously, or rather lovingly. Beauty shines in all its brilliance and in full bloom. The face is still young; the temples have preserved their youth and freshness; the lips are also still fresh and have not yet withered as they are said to have become from having been too frequently puckered or bitten in repressing anger and insults. Everything in the countenance and in the attitude expresses grace, supreme taste, and affability and amenity rather than sweetness, a queenly air which she had to assume but which sits naturally upon her and is sustained without too much effort. I might continue and describe many lovely details, but I prefer to stop and send the curious to the model itself: there they will find a thousand things that I scarcely dare to touch upon.

Such in her best days was this ravishing, ambitious, frail, but sincere woman, who in her elevation remained good, faithful (I love to believe) in her sin, obliging, so far as she could be, but vindictive when driven to it; who was quite one of her own sex after all, and, finally, whose intimate life her lady-in-waiting has been able to show us without being too heavy or crushing a witness against her.

In spite of everything, she was exactly the mistress to suit this reign, the only one who could have succeeded in turning it to account in the sense of opinion, the only one who could lessen the crying discord between the least literary of kings and the most literary of epochs. If the Abbe Galiani, in a curious page, loudly preferring the age of Louis XV. to that of Louis XIV., has been able to say of this age of the human mind so fertile in results: "Such another reign will not be met with anywhere for a long time," Mme. de Pompadour certainly contributed to this to some extent. This graceful woman rejuvenated the court by bringing into it the vivacity of her thoroughly French tastes, tastes that were Parisian. As mistress and friend of the Prince, as protectress of the arts, her mind found itself entirely on a level with her role and her rank: as a politician, she bent, she did ill, but perhaps not worse than any other favourite in her place would have done at that period when a real statesman was wanting among us.

When she found herself dying after a reign of nineteen years; when at the age of forty-two years she had to leave these palaces, these riches, these marvels of art she had amassed, this power so envied and disputed, but which she kept entirely in her own hands to her last day, she did not say with a sigh, like Mazarin, "So I must leave all this!" She faced death with a firm glance, and as the cure of the Madeleine, who had come to visit her at Versailles, was about to depart, she said: "Wait a moment, Monsieur le Cure, we will go together."

Madame de Pompadour may be considered the last in date of the Kings' mistresses who were worthy of the name: after her it would be impossible to descend and enter with any decency into the history of the Du Barry. The kings and emperors who have succeeded in France, from that day to this, have been either too virtuous, or too despotic, or too gouty, or too repentant, or too much the paterfamilias, to allow themselves such useless luxuries: at the utmost, only a few vestiges have been observable. The race of Kings' mistresses, therefore, may be said to be greatly interrupted, even if not ended, and Mme. de Pompadour stands before our eyes in history as the last as well as the most brilliant of all.[19]

Causeries de Lundi (Paris, 1851-57), Vol. II.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Here is an exact statement of the civil register of the State relating to Mme. de Pompadour: Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour, born in Paris, Dec. 29, 1721 (Saint-Eustache);—married March 9, 1741, to Charles-Guillaume Lenormant, seigneur d'Etioles (Saint-Eustache); died April 15, 1764; interred on the 17th at the Capucines de la place Vendome. Her parish in Paris was la Madeleine; her hotel, in the Faubourg Saint-Honore, now l'Elysee.

M. Le Roi, librarian of Versailles, has published, after an authentic manuscript the Releve des depenses de Mme. de Pompadour depuis la premiere annee de sa faveur jusqu'a sa mort. This statement, which mentions the sums and their uses, presents a complete picture of the marquise's varied tastes, and does not try too much to dishonour her memory.



THE HAY WAIN

(CONSTABLE)

C.L. BURNS

A little strip of country on the borders of Essex and Suffolk, not ten miles in length, and but two or three in breadth, presenting to the casual observer few features more striking than are to be seen in many other parts of England, but hailed with delight by painters for its simple charm, has exercised a wider influence upon modern landscape painting than all the noble scenery of Switzerland or the glories of Italy; for here was nurtured that last and greatest master of that school of English landscape painting, which made the Eastern Counties famous in the annals of art. He was so essentially English, it might be said local, in his feeling, that he never left his country, and produced his greatest works within the narrow limits of his native valley; in whom love of locality was indeed the very basis of his art.



Constable, for it was he, like Rembrandt, was the son of a miller, and was born at a time when the winds and flowing waters were powers in the land, bearing a golden harvest on their health-giving and invisible currents, turning sails upon countless hill-tops, and wheels in every river—before the supplanter, steam, was even dreamed of. His earliest recollections were mingled with the busy clatter of wheels, and the whirr of sails, as they sped round before the wind, was the music of his boyhood. His father, good man of the world as he was, holding a high opinion of the solid comforts gained by following his own profitable calling, placed his son, at the age of seventeen, in charge of a windmill, hoping thereby to curb his rising enthusiasm for the more glorious but less substantial pursuit of art. Alas! how little can we predict the effect of our actions. This one, framed to divert his purpose in life, was the very means of leading him to study more closely the ever-varying beauties of the sky, with its matchless combinations of form and colour, and all the subtle differences of atmosphere, which in after-life formed a distinctive feature in his work; and, for a landscape-painter, perhaps no early training could have been better. His daily occupation by bringing him continually face to face with Nature, and necessitating a constant observance of all her changing phenomena, trained his heart and eye to discover her secrets, hidden from the careless, but revealed to all true lovers of her wisdom.

The effect upon a temperament so artistic as Constable's was as permanent as it was quickly apparent. In less than a year we find his father reluctantly converted to his son's views in the choice of a career, and consenting to his sojourn in London, to learn the principles and technicalities of his profession, which he soon strove to forget and subsequently set at defiance. Two years of studio work was sufficient to convince him that his school was the open air; and in his own country, amid the scenes of his boyhood, he could shake off the chains of fashion, which bound the landscape-painter of that day, and go straight to nature for his inspiration. Concerning this he writes: "For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeing truth at second-hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performances look like the work of other men; I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes which may employ me—there is room for a natural painter;" a prediction which was hardly fulfilled in his lifetime, for, with the majority of even intelligent lovers of art, his works were rarely understood and never popular, though the appreciative sympathy of an enlightened few kept him from despair. But, appreciated or not, he had found his life's work, and henceforth his mission was to depict the scenes around his old home, and to express the love he felt so keenly for "every stile and stump, and every lane in dear Bergholt."

"Painting," he writes, "is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour—those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful."

How lovingly he repaid this debt of gratitude to his native valley will be seen by the tender care he bestowed in depicting its beauties; indeed, the strongest impression produced after visiting Constable's country and again turning to a study of his works, is the marvellous sense of locality he has embodied in them. You seem to breathe the very air of Suffolk and hear again the "sound of water escaping from mill-dams," and see once more "the willows, the old rotten planks, the slimy posts, and brickwork," he delighted in. In spite of the fifty years which have elapsed since he laid aside his brush for ever, with all the accidents of time and season, the subjects he painted are still to be easily found, and clearly distinguished by anyone at all acquainted with his works. The only exception is in the original of the famous Cornfield, now in the National Gallery. Here the enemy has been busy, and by the aid of his children Growth and Decay, has succeeded in transforming the subject out of all recognition, tearing down the trees on the left, enlarging the group on the right, shutting out the view of Stratford Church, and choking up the brook from which the boy is drinking. Nor has Time been idle with this same boy, who six years ago, was carried to his last resting-place in Bergholt Churchyard, aged sixty-five....