I, Sandro, painted this picture at the end of the year 1500, during the troubles of Italy, in the half year after the first year of the loosing of the Devil for 3-1/2 years, in accordance with the fulfilment of the 11th chapter of the Revelations of St. John. Then shall the Devil be chained, according to the 12th chapter, and we shall see him trodden down as in the picture.

The Devil which was loosed for three and a half years stood for the stage of wickedness through which Botticelli believed that Florence was passing in 1500. In the bottom corners of the picture you can see minute little devils running away discomfited; otherwise all is pure joy and peace, symbolic of the gladness to come upon Italy when the Church had been purified:

When Life is difficult, I dream Of how the angels dance in Heaven. Of how the angels dance and sing In gardens of eternal spring, Because their sins have been forgiven.... And never more for them shall be The terrors of mortality. When life is difficult, I dream Of how the angels dance in Heaven....[2]

[Footnote 2: By Lady Alfred Douglas.]

That is what Botticelli dreamed. He saw the beautiful angels in green, white, and red dancing with joy, because of the birth of their Saviour, and into their hands he put scrolls, upon which were written:—'Glory to God in the Highest.' The rest of the verse, 'Peace and goodwill towards men' is on the scrolls of the shepherds, brought by the angel to behold the Babe lying in the manger. The three men, embraced with such eagerness and joy by the three angels in the foreground, are Savonarola and his two chief companions, burnt with him, who, after their long suffering upon earth, have found reward and happiness in heaven.



Such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture, as spiritual in idea as any of the paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli's skill matched his thought. His drawing of the angels in their Greek dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group surpassing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger, nor will you soon see a lovelier Virgin's face than hers. Botticelli had great power of showing the expression in a face, and the movement in a figure. Here the movements may seem overstrained, a fault which grew upon him in his old age; the angel, with the two shepherds on the right, has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically at the Babe, and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence. The artists of the early Renaissance had learnt with so much trouble to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired skill sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors by stiffness.

The way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the Nativity of Christ, is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert van Eyck painted the Three Maries at the Sepulchre. We saw how the latter pictured the event as actually taking place outside Jerusalem. To Botticelli the Nativity of Christ was emblematic of a new and happier life for people in Florence, with the Church regenerated and purified, as Christ would have wished it to be. To him the Nativity was a symbol of purity, so he painted the picture as a commentary on the event, not as an illustration of the Biblical text.

The angels rejoice in heaven as the shepherds upon earth, the devils flee away discomfited, and Savonarola and his companions obtain peace after the tribulations of life. Such was the message of Botticelli in the picture here reproduced.



CHAPTER VI

RAPHAEL

The original of our next picture is very small, only seven inches square, yet I hope it will instantly appeal to you. The name of the artist, Raphael, is perhaps the most familiar of all the names of the Old Masters, mainly, it may be, because he was the painter of the Sistine Madonna, the best known and best loved of Madonnas.

When Raphael drew and painted this picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' about the year 1500, he was himself like a young knight, at the outset of his short and brilliant career. As a boy he was handsome, gifted, charming. His nature is said to have been as lovely as his gifts were great, and he passed his short life in a triumphant progress from city to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists, princes, and popes. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter living in the town of Urbino, in Central Italy, but Raphael when quite young went to Perugia to study with the painter Perugino, a native of that town.

Perugia stands upon a high hill, like the hill in the background of the picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' only higher, for from it you can overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as Assisi—the home of St. Francis—which lies on the slope of the next mountain. That beautiful Umbrian landscape, in which all the towns look like castles perched upon the top of steep hills, with wide undulating ground between, occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino, and often in those of his pupil Raphael. If you have once seen the view from Perugia for yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination of the young painter. Raphael had a most impressionable mind. It was part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it. The artists of his day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular problem in connection with their art. Michelangelo, a giant in intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece. His sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of figure-painting. He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing. As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are for the most part unfinished.

Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one masterpiece after another. For him the great interest in the aspect of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression of the face. What was fantastic and weird fascinated him. At Windsor are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with gigantic claws. He once owned a lizard, and made wings for it with quicksilver inside them, so that they quivered when the lizard crawled. He put a dragon's mask over its head, and the result was ghastly. The tale gives us a side light on this extraordinary personage. When you are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his strong, yet perplexing personality. The faces in his pictures are wonderful faces, with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden of strange thought. By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light, his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting, till Raphael and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo. Heretofore, Italian painters had been contented to bathe their pictures in a flood of diffused light, but he experimented also with effects of strong light and shade on the face. His landscape backgrounds are an almost unearthly cold grey, and include the strangest forms of rock and mountain. His investigations into several of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which affected in an important degree the work of many later artists.

If Raphael had less originality than Michelangelo or Leonardo, if Leonardo was the first artist to obtain complete mastery over the expression of the face and Michelangelo over the drawing of the figure, Raphael was able to profit at once by whatever they accomplished. Yet never was he a mere imitator, for all that he absorbed became tinged with a magical charm in his fertile brain, a charm so personal that his work can hardly be mistaken for that of any other artist.

Our picture of a 'Knight's Dream' was probably painted while Raphael was under the influence of a master named Timoteo Viti, whose works you are not likely to know, or much care about when you see them. It was just after he had painted it that he came into Perugino's hands.

Although the 'Knight's Dream' is so small, and Raphael was but a boy when he painted it, the picture has the true romantic air, characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance. He does not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it. Yet he chose the competition of these two ideals as the subject of this picture. The Knight, clothed in bright armour and gay raiment, bearing no relation at all to the clothes worn in 1500, rests upon his shield beneath the slight shade of a very slender tree. In his dream there appear to him two figures, both of whom claim his knightly allegiance for life: one, a young and lovely girl in a bright coloured dress with flowers in her hair, tempts him to embrace a life of mirth, of

Jest and youthful Jollity, Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles, Nods and Becks and wreathed Smiles.

The other resembles the same poet's

Pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast, and demure.

She holds sword and book, symbols of stern action and wise accomplishment. Which the knight will choose we are not told, perhaps because Raphael himself never had to make the choice. He was too gifted and too fond of work to be tempted from it by anything whatever. Always joyous and always successful, he was able to paint any subject, sacred, profane, ancient, or modern, so long as it was a happy one. He was too busy and too gay to feel pain and sorrow, as Botticelli felt them, and to paint sad subjects. To him the visible world was good and beautiful, and the invisible world lovely and happy likewise. His Madonnas are placid or smiling mothers. The fat and darling babies they hold are indeed divine but not awesome. Yet the extraordinary sweetness of expression, nobility of form, and beauty of colouring in the Madonnas make you almost hold your breath when you look at them.

In the 'Knight's Dream' there is a simple beauty in the pose and grouping of the figures. You can hardly fancy three figures better arranged for the purpose of the subject. There is something inevitable about them, which is the highest praise due to a mastery of design in the art of composition. Raphael's surpassing gift was in fitting beautiful figures into any given space, so that it seems as though the space had been made to fit the figures, instead of the figures to fit the space. You could never put his round Madonnas into a square frame. The figures would look as wrong as in a round frame they look right. If you were to cut off a bit of the foreground in any of his pictures and add the extra piece to the sky, you would make the whole look wrong, whereas perhaps you might add on a piece of sky to Hubert van Eyck's 'Three Maries' without spoiling the effect.



The colouring of the picture, too, is jewel-like and lovely, but the uncoloured drawing is itself full of charm. The grace of line, which was to distinguish all the works of his mature years, is already manifest in this effort of his boyhood. It seems to foretell the sweep of the Virgin's drapery in the Sistine Madonna, and the delightful maze of curves flowing together and away again and returning upon themselves which outline the face, the arms, hands, and draperies of St. Catherine in the National Gallery. You will find it well worth a little trouble to look long and closely at one of Raphael's well-known Madonnas till you clearly see how the composition of all the parts of it is formed by the play of long and graceful curves.

You can see from the drawing of the 'Knight's Dream,' which is hung quite near the painting in the National Gallery, how carefully Raphael thought out the detail of the picture before he began to paint. He seems even to have been afraid that he might not be able to draw it again so perfectly; therefore he placed the drawing over the panel and pricked it through. The marks of the pin are quite clear, and it brings one nearer this great artist to follow closely the process of his work. It makes the young boy genius of 1500 almost seem akin to the struggling boy and girl artists of the present time.

From Perugia Raphael went to Florence, where he painted a number of his most beautiful Madonnas. Then, in 1508, he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. to decorate some rooms in the Vatican Palace. The Renaissance popes were possessed of so great wealth, and spent it to such purpose, that its spending influenced the art of their age. Many of the rooms in the Vatican had been decorated by Botticelli and other good artists of the previous half-century, but already the new pope considered their work out of date and ordered it to be replaced by Michelangelo and Raphael. For nine years Raphael worked at the decoration of the palace, always being pressed, hurried, and even worried by two successive popes who employed him. The wall spaces which he had to fill were often awkwardly broken up with windows and doors, but he easily overcame whatever difficulties were encountered. To succeed apparently without struggle was a peculiar gift granted to Raphael above any other artist of his day. The frescoes painted by him in the Vatican illustrated subjects from Greek philosophy and medieval Church history, as well as from the Old and New Testament. As an illustrator of sacred writ he never attempted that verisimilitude in Eastern surroundings to which Hubert van Eyck leaned, neither was he satisfied with the dress of his own day in which other painters were wont to clothe their sacred characters. The historical sense, which has driven some modern artists to much antiquarian research to discover exactly what Peter and Paul must have worn, did not exist before the nineteenth century. Raphael felt, nevertheless, that the clothes of the Renaissance were hardly suitable for Noah and Abraham, so he invented a costume of his own, founded upon Roman dress, but different from oriental or contemporary clothes. The Scripture illustrations of Raphael most familiar to you may probably be his cartoon designs for tapestry in the South Kensington Museum, which were bought by Charles I. In these you can see what is meant about the clothes, but you will not be surprised at them, because the same have been adopted by the majority of Bible illustrators ever since the days of Raphael. His pictures became so popular that it was thought whatever he did must be right. The dress was a mere detail in his work, but it was easy to copy and has been copied persistently from that day to this. It is curious to think that the long white robes, which Christ wears in the illustrations of our present-day Sunday School books and other religious publications, are all due to imitation of Raphael's designs.

The first room he finished for Julius II. was so rich in effect and beautiful in colour that the Pope could scarcely wait for more rooms as fine. Raphael had to call in a large number of assistants to enable him to cover the walls fast enough to please the Pope, and the quality of the work began to deteriorate. The uneven merit of his frescoes foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility and power. But in his panel pictures, when he was not hurried, his work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death.

Raphael was thirty-seven when he died in 1520, and very far from coming to the end of his powers of learning. Each picture that he painted revealed to him new difficulties to conquer, and new experiments to try, in his art. We seem compelled to think that had he lived and laboured for another score of years, the history of painting in Italy might have been different. In Rome and Florence no successor attempted to improve upon his work. His pupils and assistants were more numerous than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of his facility of drawing and painting they were contented. None of them had Raphael's genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any personal note. It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write beautifully and then had had little to say.

Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael. Several of his pupils were artists of ability, and lived to carry on his traditions of painting in the north of Italy. Leonardo himself had been so erratic, produced so little, and so few of his pictures survive, that many know him best in his pupils' work, or through copies and engravings of his great 'Last Supper'—a picture that became an almost total wreck upon the walls of the Refectory in Milan, for which it was painted. His influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great, so that during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not show a likeness to the work of Leonardo. He had created a type of female beauty all his own. The face will impress itself upon your memory the first time you see it, whether in a picture by Leonardo or in one by a pupil. You can see it in the National Gallery in the great 'Madonna of the Rocks,' and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House. It is not a very beautiful face, but it haunts the memory, and the Milanese artists of Leonardo's day never threw off their recollection of it.

With far less power than Leonardo, one of his imitators, Bernardino Luini, painted pictures of such charm and simplicity that almost everyone finds them delightful. If you could see his picture of the angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red, through the air to her last resting-place upon the hill, you would feel the beauty and peace of his gentle nature revealed in his art. But the spell of Leonardo vanished with the death of those who had known him in life. The last of his pupils died in 1550, and with him the Leonardo school of painting came to an end.

There is one more painter belonging to the full Renaissance too famous to remain entirely unmentioned. This is Correggio, a painter affected also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo, but individual in his vision and his work. He passed his life in Parma, in the north of Italy, inheriting a North Italian tradition, and hearing only echoes of the world beyond. His canvases are thronged with fair shapes, pretty women and dancing children, ethereally soft and lovely. But it is in his native town that the angels soar aloft with the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral, and the children frolic on the walls of the convent. These are his masterpieces you would like best.

In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the Renaissance was drawing to an end. The great central epoch may be said to have terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and Raphael in 1520. But we have said nothing yet of Venice, where, in 1520, artists whose visions and whose record of them were to be as wonderful as those of Botticelli and Raphael, were as yet sleeping in their cradles.



CHAPTER VII

THE RENAISSANCE IN VENICE

A visit to Venice is one of the joys which perhaps few of us have yet experienced. But whether we have been there or not, we all know that the very sound of her name is enchanting for those who are fresh from her magic—her sunrises and sunsets unmatched for colour, and her streets for silence.

The Venetians were a proud and successful people, wealthier by virtue of their great sea-trade than the citizens of Florence or of any other town in Italy; their foremost men lived in great high-roomed palaces, richly furnished, and decorated with pictures of a sumptuous pageantry. But the Venetians were not merely a luxurious people. The poetry of the lagoons, and the glory of the sunset skies, imparted to their lives the wealth of a rare romance. Even in Venice to-day, now that the steamers have spoilt the peace of the canals and the old orange-winged sailing-boats no longer crowd against the quays, the dreamy atmosphere of the city retains its spell.

Few artists ever felt and expressed this atmosphere better than Giorgione, the painter of the first of our Venetian pictures. He was one of the great artists of the Renaissance who died young, ten years before Raphael, but their greatness is scarcely comparable. Like Raphael, Giorgione was precocious, but unlike him he painted in a style of his own that from the very beginning owed little to any one else. He saw beauty in his own way, and was not impelled to see it differently by coming into contact with other artists, however great. Unlike Raphael, he was not a great master of the art of composition. In the little picture before us the grouping of the figures is not what may be called inevitable, like that in the 'Knight's Dream.' It seems as though one day when Giorgione was musing on the beauties of the world, and the blemishes of life, even life in Venice, he thought of some far-off time beyond the dawn of history when all men lived in peace. The ancient Greeks called this perfect time the 'Golden Age' of the world. In many ways their idea of it tallies with the description of the Garden of Eden, and they were always contrasting with it the 'Iron Age' in which they thought they lived, as the Hebrews contrasted the life of Adam and Eve in the garden with their own. As the fancy flashed across Giorgione's mind, perchance he saw some just king of whom his subjects felt no fear seated upon a throne like this. A dreamy youth plays soft music to him, and another hands him flowers and fruit. Books lie strewn upon the steps, and a child stands in a reverent attitude before him. Wild and domestic animals live together in harmony; the ground is carpeted with flowers; all is peaceful. Such a subject suited the temperament of Giorgione, and he painted it in the romantic mood in which it was conceived. Nothing could be further from everyday life than this little scene. It has the unlaboured look that suits such an improvised subject. Of course no one knows for certain that this is a picture of the Golden Age, and you may make up any story you like about it for yourselves. That is one of the charms of the picture. It has been said that the throned one is celebrating his birthday, and that his little heir is reciting him a birthday ode accompanied by music. You may believe this if you like, but how do you then account for the leopard and the peacock living in such harmony together?



Giorgione painted a few sacred pictures and many mythological scenes, besides several very beautiful portraits of dreamy-looking poets and noblemen. But even when he illustrated some well-known tale, he did not care to seize upon the dramatic moment that gives the crisis of the story, as Giotto would have done, and as the painter of our next picture does. Violent action did not attract him. Whatever the subject, if it were possible to group the figures together at a moment when they were beautifully doing nothing, he did so. But he liked still more to paint ideal scenes from his own fancy, where young people sit in easy attitudes upon the grass, conversing for an instant in the intervals of the music they make upon pipes and guitar. He was the first artist, so far as I know, to paint these half real, half imaginary scenes, of which our picture may be one. In all of them landscape bears an important part, and in some the background has become the picture and completely subordinated the figures. In this little 'Golden Age' the landscape is quiet in tone, tinged with melancholy, romantic, to suit the mood of the figures. Its colouring, though rich, is subdued, more like the tints of autumn than the fresh hues of spring. The Venetians excelled in their treatment of colour. They lived in an uncommon world of it. Giorgione saw his picture in his mind's eye as a blaze of rich colour; he did not see the figures sharply outlined against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael's 'Knight's Dream.' That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard II. diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione's eye outline was nothing without colour and light and shade. The body of the King upon the throne in our picture is massed against the background, but there is no definite outline to divide it from the tree behind. In this respect Giorgione was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures of a still later time.

Giorgione was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague in 1510, the same year as Botticelli. His master, Giovanni Bellini, who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great Titian, his fellow-pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century or more.

Titian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art. His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgione, except during the short space of time when he painted under the spell of his brother artist. It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between Titian's early and Giorgione's late work. Titian perhaps had the greater intellect. Giorgione's pictures vary according to his mood, while Titian's express a less changeable personality. In spite of his youth, Giorgione made a profound impression upon all the artists of his time. They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy mood. It was almost as though Giorgione had absorbed the romance of Venice into his pictures, so that for a time no Venetian painter could express Venetian romance except in Giorgione's way.

But in 1518, eight years after Giorgione's death, another great innovating master was born at Venice, Tintoret by name, who in his turn opened new visions of the world to the artists of his day. While painting in the rest of Italy was becoming mannered and sentimental, lacking in power and originality, Tintoret in Venice was creating masterpieces with a very fury of invention and a corresponding swiftness of hand. He was his own chief teacher. Outside his studio he wrote upon a sign to inform or attract pupils—'The design of Michelangelo and the colouring of Titian.' Profound study of the works of these two masters is manifest in his own. Like Michelangelo he worked passionately rather than with the sober competence of Titian. His thronging visions, his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures. His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale. He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance had deviated but little from it. In Tintoret the freedom of the Renaissance reached its height. For him tradition had no fetters. When he painted a picture of Paradise for the Doge's Palace it measured 84 by 34 feet, and contained literally hundreds of figures. His imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a figure. New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush in exhaustless multitude.

It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret's most famous works, still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which they were painted, or in which they have been brought together. But the National Gallery is fortunate in possessing one relatively small canvas of his which shows some of his finest qualities. The subject of St. George slaying the dragon was not a new one. It had been painted by Raphael and by several of the earlier Venetian painters, but Tintoret's treatment of it was all his own. In the earlier pictures, the princess, for whose sake St. George fights the dragon, was a little figure in the background fleeing in terror. St. George occupied the chief place, as he does upon the back of our gold sovereigns, where the princess has been left out altogether. Tintoret makes her flee, but she is running towards the spectator, and so, in her flight, stands out the most conspicuous figure. One of the victims that the dragon has slain lies behind her. In the distance St. George fights with all his might against the powers of evil, whilst 'the splendour of God' blazes in the sky. There is a vividness and power about the picture that proclaims the hand of Tintoret. In contrast to Giorgione he liked to paint figures in motion, yet he was as typical an outcome of Venetian romance as the earlier painter. Nothing could be more like a fairy-tale than this picture. It was no listless dreamer that painted it, but one with a gorgeous imagination and yet a full knowledge of the world, enabling him to give substance to his visions. Tintoret's stormy landscapes are as beautiful in their way as Giorgione's dreamy ones, and each carries out the mood of the rest of the picture. This one is full of power, mystery, and romance. Tintoret had modelled his colouring upon Titian and was by nature a great colourist, but too often he used bad materials that have turned black with the lapse of years. In this picture you see his colour as it was meant to be, rich, and boldly harmonious. The vivid red and blue of the princess's clothes are a daring combination with the brilliant green of the landscape, but Tintoret knew what he was doing, and the result is superb. With his death in 1594 the best of Venetian painting came to an end.



There were as many excellent painters in the fairy city as there had been in Florence; contemporaries of Giovanni Bellini (who, in his early years, worked in close companionship with Mantegna, his brother-in-law), as well as contemporaries of Titian and Tintoret. The painter Veronese, for instance, died a few years before Tintoret. For pomp and pageantry his great canvases are eminent. Standing in some room of the Doge's Palace, decorated entirely by his hand, we are carried back to the time when Venice was Queen of the Seas, unrivalled for magnificence and wealth. He was the Master of Ceremonies, before whom other painters of pomps and vanities pale. Gorgeous colouring is what all these Venetian painters had in common. We see it in the early days when Venetian art was struggling into existence. In her art, as in her skies and waters, we are overwhelmed by a vision of colour unsurpassed.

We have now touched on a few prominent points in the history of painting in Italy from its early rise in Florence with Giotto; through its period of widespread excellence in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, when Raphael, Giorgione, Michelangelo, and Leonardo were all painting masterpieces in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan at the same moment; to its final blaze of sunset grandeur in Venice. It is time to return to the north of Europe. In the next chapter we will try to gain a few glimpses of the progress of painting in Germany, Holland, Flanders, and our own country.



CHAPTER VIII

THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH

The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world which could not long remain confined to Italy. There were then, as now, roads over the passes of the Alps by which merchants and scholars were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes of thought stirred in the south.

In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the art of the north. Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent; so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events in wonderful detail. They were a strictly practical people whose painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously minute and veracious. But they were not a handsome race, and their models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came handiest and by no means the best looking. Thus the figures in their pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of vigour, truth, and skill.

When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of Raphael, in whom grace was native, they fell in love with his work and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did. But to them grace was not God-given, and in their attempt to achieve it, their pictures became sentimental and postured, and the naive simplicity and everyday truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished. The influence of the Van Eycks had not been confined to Flanders. Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected. They learnt the new technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eycks in the fifteenth century. Like them, too, they discarded gold backgrounds and tried to paint men and women as they really looked, instead of in the old conventional fashion of the Middle Ages. Schools of painting grew up in several of the more important German towns, till towards the end of the fifteenth century two German artists were born, Albert Durer at Nuremberg in 1471, and Hans Holbein the younger at Augsburg in 1497, who deserve to rank with the greatest painters of the time in any country.

Durer is commonly regarded as the most typically German of artists, though his father was Hungarian, and as a matter of fact he stands very much alone. His pictures and engravings are 'long, long thoughts.' Every inch of the surface is weighted with meaning. His cast of mind, indeed, was more that of a philosopher than that of an artist. In a drawing which Durer made of himself in the looking-glass at the age of thirteen, we see a thoughtful little face gazing out upon the world with questioning eyes. Already the delicacy of the lines is striking, and the hair so beautifully finished that we can anticipate the later artist whose pictures are remarkable for so surprising a wealth of detail. The characteristics of the Flemish School, carefulness of workmanship and indifference to the physical beauty of the model, to which the Italians were so sensitive, continued in his work. For thoroughness his portraits can be compared with those of John van Eyck. In the National Gallery his father lives again for us in a picture of wonderful power and insight.

Durer was akin to Leonardo in the desire for more and yet more knowledge. Like him he wrote treatises on fortifications, human proportions, geometry, and perspective, and filled his sketchbooks with studies of plants, animals, and natural scenery. His eager mind employed itself with the whys and wherefores of things, not satisfied with the simple pleasure that sight bestows. In his engravings, even more than in his pictures, we ponder the hidden meanings; we are not content to look and rejoice in beauty, though there is much to charm the eye. His problems were the problems of life as well as the problems of art.

The other great artist of Germany, Hans Holbein the younger, was the son of Hans Holbein the elder, a much esteemed painter in Augsburg. This town was on the principal trade route between Northern Italy and the North Sea, so that Venetians and Milanese were constantly passing through and bringing to it much wealth and news of the luxury of their own southern life. As a result the citizens of Augsburg dressed more expensively and decorated their houses more lavishly than did the citizens of any other town in Germany. After a boyhood and youth spent at Augsburg, Holbein removed to Basle. He was a designer of wood-engravings and goldsmiths work and of architectural decoration, besides being a painter. In those days of change in South Germany, artists had to be willing to turn their hands to any kind of work they could get to do. North of the Alps, where the Reformation was upsetting old habits, an artist's life was far from being easy. Reformers made bonfires of sacred pictures and sculptured wooden altar-pieces. Indeed the Reformation was a cruel blow to artists, for it took away Church patronage and made them dependent for employment upon merchants and princes. Except at courts or in great mercantile towns they fared extremely ill. Altar-pieces were rarely wanted, and there were no more legends of saints to be painted upon the walls of churches.

The demand for portraiture, on the other hand, was increasing, whilst the growth of printing created a new field for design in the preparation of woodcuts for the illustration of books. Thus it came to pass that the printer Froben, at Basle, was one of the young Holbein's chief patrons. We find him designing a wonderful series of illustrations of The Dance of Death, as well as drawing another set to illustrate The Praise of Folly, written by Erasmus, who was then living in Basle and frequenting the house of Froben. Erasmus was a typical scholar of the sixteenth century, belonging rather to civilized society as a whole than to any one country. He moved about Europe from one centre of learning to another, alike at home in educated circles in England, Flanders, and Germany. He had lived for some time in England and knew that there were men there with wealth who would employ a good painter to paint their portraits if they could find one. Erasmus himself sat to Holbein, and sent the finished portrait as a present to his friend Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England.

In England, owing to the effects of the Wars of the Roses, good painters no longer existed. A century of neglect had destroyed English painting. Henry VIII., therefore, had to look to foreign lands for his court painter, and where was he to come from? France was the nearest country, but the French King was in the same predicament as Henry. He obtained his painters from Italy, and at one time secured the services of Leonardo da Vinci; but Italy was a long way off and it would suit Henry better to get a painter from Flanders or Germany if it were possible. So Erasmus advised Holbein to go to England, and gave him a letter to Sir Thomas More. On this first visit in 1526, he painted the portraits of More and his whole family, and of many other distinguished men; but it was not till his second visit in 1532 that he became Henry VIII.'s court painter. In this capacity he had to decorate the walls of the King's palaces, design the pageantry of the Royal processions, and paint the portraits of the King's family. Although Holbein could do and did do anything that was demanded of him, what he liked best was to paint portraits. Romantic subjects such as the fight of St. George and the dragon, or an idyll of the Golden Age, little suited the artistic leanings of a German. To a German or a Fleming the world of facts meant more than the world of imagination; the painting of men and women as they looked in everyday life was more congenial to them than the painting of saints and imaginary princesses.

But how unimportant seems all talk of contrasting imagination and reality when we see them fused together in this charming portrait of Edward, the child Prince of Wales. It belongs to the end of the year 1538, when he was just fifteen months old, and the imagination of Holbein equipped him with the orb of sovereignty in the guise of a baby's rattle. It is in the coupling of distant kingship and present babyhood that the painter works his magic and reveals his charm.



If you recall for a moment what you know of Henry VIII., his masterful pride, his magnificence, his determination to do and have exactly what he wanted, you will understand that his demands upon his court painter for a portrait of his only son and heir must have been high. No one could say enough about this wonderful child to please Henry, for all that was said in praise of him redounded to the glory of his father.

The following is a translation of the Latin poem beneath the picture:

Child, of thy Father's virtues be thou heir, Since none on earth with him may well compare; Hardly to him might Heaven yield a son By whom his father's fame should be out-done. So, if thou equal such a mighty sire, No higher can the hopes of man aspire; If thou surpass him, thou shalt honoured be O'er all that ruled before, or shall rule after thee.[3]

[Footnote 3: Translated by Miss K. K. Radford.]

In justice be it said that the little Edward VI. was of an extraordinary precocity. When he was eight years old he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer in Latin. When he was nine he knew four books of Cato by heart as well as much of the Bible. To show you the way in which royal infants were treated in those days,—we read that at the time this picture was painted, the little prince had a household of his own, consisting of a lady-mistress, a nurse, rockers for his cradle, a chamberlain, vice-chamberlain, steward, comptroller, almoner, and dean. It is hard to believe that the child is only fifteen months old, so erect is the attitude, so intelligent the face. The clothes are sumptuous. A piece of stuff similar in material and design to the sleeve exists to-day in a museum in Brussels.

In the best sense Holbein was the most Italian of the Germans. For in him, as in the gifted Italian, grace was innate. He may have paid a brief visit to Italy, but he never lived there for any length of time, nor did he try to paint like an Italian as some northern artists unhappily tried to do. The German merits, solidity, boldness, detailed finish, and grasp of character, he possessed in a high degree, but he combined with them a beauty of line, delicacy of modelling, and richness of colour almost southern. His pictures appeal more to the eye and less to the mind than do those of Durer. Where Durer sought to instruct, Holbein was content to please. But like a German he spared no pains. He painted the stuff and the necklace, the globe and the feather, with the finish of an artist who was before all things a good workman. Observe how delicately the chubby little fingers are drawn. Holbein's detailed treatment of the accessories of a portrait is only less than the care expended in depicting the face. He studied faces, and his portraits, one may almost say, are at once images of and commentaries on the people they depict. Thus his gallery of pictures of Henry and his contemporaries show us at once the reflexion of them as in a mirror, and the vision of them as beheld by a singularly discerning and experienced eye that not only saw but comprehended.

This is the more remarkable because Holbein was not always able to paint and finish his portraits in the presence of the living model, as painters insist on doing nowadays. His sitters were generally busy men who granted him but one sitting, so that his method was to make a drawing of the head in red chalk and to write upon the margin notes of anything he particularly wanted to remember. Afterwards he painted the head from the drawing, but had the actual clothes and jewels sent him to work from.

In the Royal Collection at Windsor there are a number of these portrait drawings of great interest to us, since many of the portraits painted from them have been lost. As a record of remarkable people of that day they are invaluable, for in a few powerful strokes Holbein could set down the likeness of any face. But when he came to paint the portrait he was not satisfied with a mere likeness. He painted too 'his habit as he lived.' Erasmus is shown reading in his study, the merchant in his office surrounded by the tokens of his business, and Henry VIII. standing firmly with his legs wide apart as if bestriding a hemisphere. But I think that you will like this fine portrait of the infant prince best of all, and that is why I have chosen it in preference to a likeness of any of the statesmen, scholars, queens, and courtiers who played a great part in their world, but are not half so charming to look upon as little Prince Edward.



CHAPTER IX

REMBRANDT

After the death of Holbein, artists in the north of Europe passed through troublous times till the end of the sixteenth century. France and the Netherlands were devastated by wars. You may remember that the Netherlands had belonged in the fifteenth century to the Dukes of Burgundy? Through the marriage of the only daughter of the last Duke, these territories passed into the possession of the King of Spain, who remained a Catholic, whilst the northern portion of the Netherlands became sturdily Protestant. Their struggle, under the leadership of William the Silent, against the yoke of Spain, is one of the stirring pages of history. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, seven of the northern states of the Netherlands, of which Holland was the chief, had emerged as practically independent. The southern portion of the Netherlands, including the old province of Flanders, remained Catholic and was governed by a Spanish Prince who held his court at Brussels.

When peace came at last, there was a remarkable outburst of painting in each of the two countries. Rubens was the master painter in Flanders. Of him and of his pupil Van Dyck we shall hear more in the next chapter. In Holland there was a yet more wide-spread activity. Indomitable perseverance had been needed for so small a country to throw off the rule of a great power like Spain. The long struggle seems to have called into being a kindred spirit manifesting itself in every branch of the national life. Dutch merchants, Dutch fishermen, and Dutch colonizers made themselves felt as a force throughout the world. The spirit by which Dutchmen achieved political success was pre-eminent in the qualities which brought them to the front rank in art. There were literally hundreds of painters in Holland, few of them bad. That does not mean that all Dutchmen had the magical power of vision belonging to the greatest artists, the power that transforms the objects of daily view into things of rare beauty, or the imagination of a Tintoret that creates and depicts scenes undreamt of before by man. Many painted the things around them as they looked to a commonplace mind, with no glamour and no transforming touch. When we see their pictures, our eyes are not opened to new effects. We continue to see and to feel as we did before, but we admire the honest work, the pleasant colour, and the efficiency of the painters. In default of Raphaels, Giorgiones, and Titians, we should be pleased to hang upon our walls works such as those. But towering above the other artists of Holland, great and small, was one Dutchman, Rembrandt, who holds his own with the greatest of the world.

He was born in 1606, the son of a miller at Leyden, who gave him the best teaching there to be had. Soon he became a good painter of likenesses, and orders for portraits began to stream in upon him from the citizens of his native town. These he executed well, but his heart was not wrapped up in the portrayal of character as John Van Eyck's had been. Neither was it in the drawing of delicate and beautiful lines that he wished to excel, as did Holbein and Raphael. He was the dramatist of painting, a man who would rather paint some one person ten times over in the character of somebody else, high priest, king, warrior, or buffoon, than once thoroughly in his own. But when people ordered portraits of themselves they wanted good likenesses, and Rembrandt was happy to supply them. At first it was only when he was working at home to please himself that he indulged his picturesque gift. He painted his father, his mother, and himself over and over again, but in each picture he tried some experiment with expression, or a new pose, or a strange effect of lighting, transforming the general aspect of the original. His own face did as well as any other to experiment with; none could be offended with the result, and it was always to be had without paying a model's price for the sitting. Thus all through his life, from twenty-two to sixty-three, we can follow the growth of his art with the transformation of his body, in the long series of pictures of his single self.

More than any artist that had gone before him, Rembrandt was fascinated by the problem of light. The brightest patch of white on a canvas will look black if you hold it up against the sky. How, then, can the fire of sunshine be depicted at all? Experience shows that it can only be suggested by contrast with shadows almost black. But absolutely black shadows would not be beautiful. Fancy a picture in which the shadows were as black as well-polished boots! Rembrandt had to find out how to make his dark shadows rich, and how to make a picture, in which shadow predominated, a beautiful thing in itself, a thing that would decorate a wall as well as depict the chosen subject. That was no easy problem, and he had to solve it for himself. It was his life's work. He applied his new idea in the painting of portraits and in subject pictures, chiefly illustrative of dramatic incidents in Bible history, for the same quality in him that made him love the flare of light, made him also love the dramatic in life.

Rembrandt's mother was a Protestant, who brought up her son with a thorough knowledge of the Scripture stories, and it was the Bible that remained to the end of his life one of the few books he had in his house. The dramatic situations that he loved were there in plenty. Over and over again he painted the Nativity of Christ. Sometimes the Baby is in a tiny Dutch cradle with its face just peeping out, and the shepherds adoring it by candle-light. Often he painted scenes from the Old Testament; such as Isaac blessing Esau and Jacob, who are shown as two little Dutch children. Simeon receiving the Infant Christ in the Temple is a favourite subject, because of the varied effects that could be produced by the gloom of the church and the light on the figure of the High Priest. These, and many other beautiful pictures, were studies painted for the increase of the artist's own knowledge, not orders from citizens of Leyden, or of Amsterdam, to which capital he moved in 1630. At the same time he was coming more and more into demand as a portrait-painter. These were days in which he made money fast, and spent it faster. He had a craving to surround himself with beautiful works of art and beautiful objects of all kinds that should take him away from the dunes and canals into a world of romance within his own house. He disliked the stiff Dutch clothes and the great starched white ruffs worn by the women of the day. He had to paint them in his portraits; but when he painted his beautiful wife, Saskia, she is decked in embroideries and soft shimmering stuffs. Wonderful clasps and brooches fasten her clothes. Her hair is dressed with gold chains, and great strings of pearls hang from her neck and arms. Rembrandt makes the light sparkle on the diamonds and glimmer on the pearls. Sometimes he adorns her with flowers and paints her as Flora. Again, she is fastening a jewel in her hair, and Rembrandt himself stands by with a rope of pearls for her to don. All these jewels and rich materials belonged to him. He also bought antique marbles, pictures by Giorgione and Titian, engravings by Durer, and four volumes of Raphael's drawings, besides many other beautiful works of art.

These were splendid years, years in which he was valued by his contemporaries for the work he did for them, and years in which every picture he painted for himself gave him fresh experience. A picture of the anatomy class of a famous physician had been among the first with which Rembrandt made a great public success. Every face in it—and there were eight living faces—was a masterpiece of portraiture, and all were fitly grouped and united in the rapt attention with which they followed the demonstration of their teacher.

In 1642 he received an order to paint a large picture of one of the companies of the City Guard of Amsterdam. According to the custom of the day, each person portrayed in the picture contributed his equal share towards the cost of the whole, and in return expected his place in it to be as conspicuous as that of anybody else. Such groups were common in Holland in the seventeenth century. The towns were proud of their newly won liberties, and the town dignitaries liked to see themselves painted in a group to perpetuate remembrance of their tenure of office. But Rembrandt knew that it was inartistic to give each and every person in a large group an equal or nearly equal prominence, although such was the custom to which even Franz Hals' brush had yielded full compliance. For his magnificent picture of the City Guard, Rembrandt chose the moment when the drums had just been sounded as an order for the men to form into line behind their chief officers' march-forth. They are coming out from a dark building into the full sunshine of the street. All in a bustle, some look at their fire-arms, some lift their lances, and some cock their guns. The sunshine falls full upon the captain and the lieutenant beside him, but the background is so dark that several of the seventeen figures are almost lost to view. A few of the heads are turned in such a way that only half the face is seen, and no doubt as likenesses some of them were deficient. Rembrandt was not thinking of the seventeen men individually. He conceived the picture as a whole, with its strong light and shade, the picturesque crossing lines of the lances, and the natural array of the figures. By wiseacres, the picture was said to represent a scene at night, lit by torch-light, and was actually called the 'Night Watch,' though the shadow of the captain's hand is of the size of the hand itself, and not greater, being cast by the sun. Later generations have valued it as one of the unsurpassed pictures in the world; but it is said that contemporary Dutch feeling waxed high against Rembrandt for having dealt in this supremely artistic manner with an order for seventeen portraits, and that he suffered severely in consequence. Certainly he had fewer orders. The prosperous class abandoned him. His pictures remained unsold, and his revenue dwindled.

Rembrandt was thirty-six years of age and at the very height of his powers, at the time of the failure of this his greatest picture. His mature style of painting continued to displease his contemporaries, who preferred the work of less innovating artists who painted good likenesses smoothly. Every year his treatment became rougher and bolder. He transformed portraits of stolid Dutch burgomasters into pictures of fantastic beauty; but the likeness suffered, and the burgomasters were dissatisfied. Their conservative taste preferred the smooth surface and minute treatment of detail which had been traditional in the Low Countries since the days of the Van Eycks. Year after year more of their patronage was transferred to other painters, who pandered to their preferences and had less of the genius that forced Rembrandt to work out his own ideal, whether it brought him prosperity or ruin. These painters flourished, while Rembrandt sank into ever greater disrepute.

It is certain, too, that he had been almost childishly reckless in expenditure on artistic and beautiful things which were unnecessary to his art and beyond his means, although those for a while had been abundant. At the time of the failure of the 'Night Watch,' his wife Saskia died, leaving him their little son, Titus, a beautiful child. Through ever-darkening days, for the next fifteen years, he continued to paint with increasing power. It is to this later period that our picture of the 'Man in Armour' belongs.



The picture is not a portrait, but rather a study of light upon armour. No man came to Rembrandt and asked to be painted like that; but Rembrandt saw in his mind's eye a great effect—a fine knightly face beneath a shadowing helmet and set off against a sombre background. A picture such as this is a work of the imagination in the same sense as the 'Saint George and the Dragon' of Tintoret. It was an effect that only Rembrandt could see, painted as only he could paint it. The strongest light falls upon the breastplate, the next strongest upon the helmet, and the ear-ring is there to catch another gleam. When you look at the picture closely, you can see that the lights are laid on (we might almost say 'buttered on') with thick white paint. More than once Rembrandt painted armour for the sake of the effects of light. In one of the portraits of himself he wears a helmet, and he painted his brother similarly adorned. A picture of a person wearing the same armour as in the Glasgow picture is in St. Petersburg, but the figure is turned in a slightly different direction and reflects the light differently. It is called 'Pallas Athene,' and was no doubt painted at the same time as ours; but the person, whether named Pallas Athene or knight, was but a peg upon which to hang the armour for the sake of the light shining on it.

Rembrandt was a typical Dutch worker all his life. Besides the great number of pictures that have come down to us, we have about three thousand of his drawings, and his etchings are very numerous and fine.

I wonder if you know how prints are made? There are, broadly speaking, two different processes. You can take a block of wood and cut away the substance around the lines of the design. Then when you cover with ink the raised surface of wood that is left and press the paper upon it, the design prints off in black where the ink is but the paper remains white where the hollows are. This is the method called wood-cutting, which is still in use for book illustrations.

In the other process, the design is ploughed into a metal plate, the lines being made deep enough to hold ink, and varying in width according to the strength desired in the print. You then fill the grooves with ink, wiping the flat surface clean, so that when the paper is pressed against the plate and into the furrows, the lines print black, out of the furrows, and the rest remains white.

There are several ways of making these furrows in a metal plate, but the chief are two. The first is to plough into the metal with a sharp steel instrument called a burin. The second is to bite them out with an acid. This is the process of etching with which Rembrandt did his matchless work. He varnished a copper plate with black varnish. With a needle he scratched upon it his design, which looked light where the needle had revealed the copper. Then the whole plate was put into a bath of acid, which ate away the metal, and so bit into the lines, but had no effect upon the varnish. When he wanted the lines to be blacker in certain places, he had to varnish the whole rest of the plate again, and put it back into the bath of acid. The lines that had been subjected to the second biting were deeper than those that had been bitten only once.

The number of plates etched by Rembrandt was great, at least two hundred; some say four hundred. Their subjects are very various—momentary impressions of picturesque figures, Scriptural scenes, portraits, groups of common people, landscapes, and whatever happened to engage the artist's fancy, for an etching can be very quickly done, and is well suited to record a fleeting impression. Thousands of the prints still exist, and even some of the original plates in a very worn-down condition.

In spite of the quantity and quality of Rembrandt's work, he was unable to recover his prosperity. He had moved into a fine house when he married Saskia, and was never able to pay off the debts contracted at that time. Things went from bad to worse, until at last, in 1656, when Rembrandt was fifty, he was declared bankrupt, and everything he possessed in the world was sold. We have an inventory of the gorgeous pictures, the armour, the sculptures, and the jewels and dresses that had belonged to Saskia. His son Titus retained a little of his mother's money, and set up as an art dealer in order to help his father.

It is a truly dreary scene, yet Rembrandt still continued to paint, because painting was to him the very breath of life. He painted Titus over and over again looking like a young prince. In these later years the portraits of himself increase in number, as if because of the lack of other models. When we see him old, haggard, and poor in his worn brown painting-clothes, it hardly seems possible that he can be the same Rembrandt as the gay, frolicking man in a plumed hat, holding out the pearls for Saskia.

In his old age he received one more large order from a group of six drapers of Amsterdam for their portraits. It has been said that the lesson of the miscalled 'Night Watch' had been branded into his soul by misfortune. What is certain is that, while in this picture he purposely returned to the triumphs of portraiture of his youth, he did not give up the artistic ideals of his middle life. He gave his sitters an equal importance in position and lighting, and at the same time painted a picture artistically satisfying. Not one of the six men could have had any fault to find with the way in which he was portrayed. Each looks equally prominent in vivid life. Yet they are not a row of six individual men, but an organic group held together you hardly know how. At last you realize that all but one are looking at you. You are the unifying centre that brings the whole picture together, the bond without which, metaphorically speaking, it would fall to pieces.

This picture of six men in plain black clothes and black hats, sitting around a table, is by some considered the culmination of Rembrandt's art. It shows that, in spite of misfortune and failure, his ardour for new artistic achievement remained with him to the end.

In 1662 Rembrandt seems to have paid a brief and unnoticed visit to England. If Charles II. had heard of him and made him his court painter, we might have had an unrivalled series of portraits of court beauties by his hand instead of by that of Sir Peter Lely. As it was, a hasty sketch of old St. Paul's Cathedral, four years before it was burnt down, is the sole trace left of his visit.

The story of his old age is dreary. Even Titus died a few months before his father, leaving him alone in the world. In the autumn of 1669 he himself passed away, leaving behind him his painting-clothes, his paint-brushes, and nothing else, save a name destined to an immortality which his contemporaries little foresaw. All else had gone: his wife, his child, his treasures, and his early vogue among the Dutchmen of his time.

The last picture of all was a portrait of himself, in the same attitude as his first, but disillusioned and tragic, with furrowed lines and white hair. No one cared whether he died or not, and it is recorded that after his death pictures by him could be bought for sixpence. Thus ended the life of one of the world's supremely great painters.



CHAPTER X

PETER DE HOOGH AND CUYP

Let us now turn from the splendid gloom of Rembrandt's 'Knight in Armour,' to delight in this beautiful little interior of a Dutch house by Peter de Hoogh. Still you see the prepossession for light, but for more tempered rays and softer shadows. The sunshine is diffused by the yellow curtains throughout the room. The old lady need not fear its revelations, to be sure, for it is Holland—she knows that the whole house has been duly scrubbed with soap and water. Dust and dirt are banished. It is a cloudless day and dry under foot, otherwise the little boy would have worn clogs over his shoes, and you might see them outside. Mud on the polished stones of the passage would have ruffled the housewife's calm. As it is, we can see she has had no worries this morning. She has donned her fresh red dress and clean white apron, and will soon be seated to prepare the vegetables and fruit that are being brought her. Perhaps they are a present from the old lady in the house over the way, who from her front door watches the child delivering the gift.



It is a domestic scene that you might witness in any of the old towns of Holland to this day. The insides and outsides of the houses are still scrubbed with soap and water; rows of clogs stand outside the front doors on muddy days; the women wear the same bright coloured gowns fully gathered round the waist, with the cleanest of white aprons; their faces are placid and unruffled as they pursue the even tenour of their way.

This atmosphere of Dutch life, peaceful, home-loving, and competent, is rendered by Peter de Hoogh in most of his pictures. It is not the atmosphere of Rembrandt's art, yet he never could have painted thus except for Rembrandt. The same love of sunlight and shadows prevailed with Peter de Hoogh, and it was no less the aim of his art to attain mastery over the painting of light, but light diffused and reflected. He loved to show the sunlight shining through some coloured substance, such as this yellow curtain, which scatters its brightness and lets it fall more evenly throughout the room. He never painted such extreme contrasts as make manifest Rembrandt's power. Rembrandt's light had been so vivid that it seemed to overwhelm colours in a dazzling brilliancy. Peter de Hoogh's lights are just strong enough to reveal the colours in a milder illumination. In our picture the sunshine diffused by the yellow curtains mingles with the red of the woman's dress and creates a rich orange. Little does she know how well her dress looks. But it was only after incessant study of the way in which Rembrandt had mastered the whole range from light to dark, that Peter de Hoogh became able to paint as he did within his narrower scale, abridged at both extremes.

Begin with the room, then the passage, then the farther hall, then the highway open to the unseen sky above, then the house-front beyond it, and the hall beyond the lady in the neighbouring doorway; there are at least four distinct distances in this picture each differently lighted, and the several effects worked out with scrupulous painstaking fidelity. It is worth your while, with your own eyes rather than with many words of mine, to search out on the original all these beautifully varied gradations. In many of his pictures one part is lighted from the sunlit street, and another from a closed court. Sometimes his figures stand in an open courtyard, whilst behind is a paved passage leading into the house. All his subjects are of the domestic Dutch life of the seventeenth century, but the arrangement in rooms, passages, courtyards, and enclosed gardens admitted of much variation. We never feel that the range of subjects is limited, for the light transforms each into a scene of that poetic beauty which it was Peter de Hoogh's great gift to discern, enjoy, and record.

The painting is delicate and finished, meant to be seen from near at hand. It is always the room that interests him, as much as the people in it. The painting of the window with its little coats of arms, transparent yet diffusing the light, is exquisitely done. A chair with the cushion upon it, just like that, occurs again and again in his pictures, the cushion being used as a welcome bit of colour in the scheme. Most of all, the floors, whether paved with stone as in this picture, or with brick as in the courtyards, are painted with the delightful precise care that the Van Eycks gave to their accessories. In Peter de Hoogh's vision of the world there is the same appreciation of the objects of daily use as was displayed by the fifteenth-century Flemish painters whenever their sacred subjects gave them opportunity. In the seventeenth century it was more congenial to the Flemish and Dutch temperament to paint their own country, and domestic scenes from their own lives, than pictures of devotion.

Other artists besides Peter de Hoogh painted people in their own houses. In the pictures of Terborch ladies in satin dresses play the spinet and the guitar. Jan Steen depicted peasants revelling on their holidays or in taverns. Peter de Hoogh was the painter of middle-class life, and discovered in its circumstances, likewise, abounding romance.

The Dutchman of the seventeenth century loved his house and his garden, and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had been from invasions by armies and the sea. Many painters never left Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in painting its flatness beneath over-arching clear or clouded skies. Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but only for a background. In the sixteenth century the figures gradually get smaller and less important, and towards the end of the century disappear. As the song says, 'a very different thing by far' is painting a landscape background and painting a whole landscape picture. Before the end of the century Rubens painted some wonderful landscapes, and he was soon followed by a great number of very fine landscape painters in Holland. Cuyp was one of many.

In a Dutch landscape we cannot expect the rich colouring of Italy. The colouring of Holland is low toned, and tender gradations lead away to the low and level horizon. The canals are sluggish and grey, and the clouds often heavy and dark. We saw how the brilliant skies and pearly buildings of Venice made Venetian painters the gayest colourists of the world. So the Dutch painters took their sober scale of landscape colouring as it was dictated to them by the infinitely varied yet sombre loveliness of their own land. In the great flat expanses of field, intersected by canals and dotted with windmills, the red brick roof of a water-mill may look 'loud,' like an aggressive hat. But the shadows cast by the clouds change every moment, and in flat country where there is less to arrest the eye the changes of tone are more marked.

In an etching, Rembrandt could leave a piece of white paper for the spot of highest sunlight, and carry out all the gradations of tone in black and white, until he reached the spot of darkest shadow. A painted landscape he indicated in the same way by varying shades of dull brown. In all of them you seem to feel the interposition of the air between you and the distant horizon at which you are looking. What else is there? At each point in the picture the air modifies the distinctness with which you can see the objects. This consciousness of air in a picture of low horizon is a very difficult thing to describe and explain. We know when it is there and when it is not. It has to be seen, to be enjoyed, and recorded. Holbein painted Edward VI. standing, so to speak, in a vacuum. Every line of his face is sharply defined. In real life air softens all lines, so that even the edge of a nose in profile is not actually seen as a sharp outline. The figures in Richard II.'s picture stand in the most exhausted vacuum, but Hubert van Eyck had already begun to render the vision or illusion of air in his 'Three Maries.' In this respect he had learnt more than the early painters of the Italian Renaissance; but Raphael and the Venetians, especially Giorgione and Titian, sometimes bathed their figures in a luminous golden atmosphere with the sun shining through it.

The Dutch painters carried this still further, particularly in their pictures of interiors and landscapes. It is the atmosphere in the rooms that makes Peter de Hoogh's portrayal of interiors so wonderful. In our little picture the light coming through the window makes the air almost golden. When this painting of air and tone is set forth by the exquisite colour of Peter de Hoogh, you see this kind of Dutch achievement at its best. Cuyp's love of sunshine is rare among Dutch landscape painters. He suffuses his skies with a golden haze that bathes his kin and kine alike in evening light. In our picture you can feel the great height of the sky and the depth of the air between the foreground and the horizon. The rendering of space is excellent. But Cuyp has not been content with the features of his native Holland. He has put an imaginary mountain in the distance and a great hill in the foreground. It is certainly not a view that Cuyp ever saw in Holland with his own eyes. He thought that the mountain's upright lines were good to break the flatness; and the finished composition, if beautiful, is its own excuse for being.



Rembrandt is an exception to all rules, but most of the Dutch painters did not allow themselves these excursions within their studios to foreign scenes. They faithfully depicted their own flat country as they saw it, and added neither hills nor mountains. But they varied the lighting to express their own moods. Ruysdael's sombre tone befits the man who struggled with poverty all his life, and died in a hospital penniless. Cuyp is always sunny. In his pictures, cattle browse at their ease, and shepherds lounge contented on the grass. He was a painter of portraits and of figure subjects as well as of landscapes, and his little groups of men and cattle are always beautifully drawn. Ruysdael, Hobbema, and many others were landscape painters only, and some had their figures put in by other artists. Often they did without them, but in the landscapes of Cuyp, cows generally occupy the prominent position. The black and white cow in our picture is a fine creature, and nothing could be more harmonious in colour than the brown cow and the brown jacket of the herdsman.

There were some painters in Holland in the seventeenth century who made animals their chief study. Theretofore it had been rare to introduce them into pictures, except as symbols, like the lion of St. Jerome, or where the story implied them; or in allegorical pictures, such as the 'Golden Age.' But at this later time animals had their share in the increased interest that was taken in the things of daily life, and they were painted for their handsome sakes, as Landseer painted them in England fifty years ago.

Thus the seventeenth century in Holland shows an enlargement in the scope of subjects for painting. Devotional pictures were becoming rare, but illustrations, sacred and secular, portraits, groups, interiors, and landscapes, were produced in great numbers. Dutch painters outnumbered those of Flanders, but among the latter were at least two of the highest eminence, Rubens and Van Dyck, and to these we will next direct our attention.



CHAPTER XI

VAN DYCK

The great painter Rubens lived at Antwerp, a town about as near to Amsterdam as Dover is to London. Yet despite the proximity of Flanders and Holland, their religion, politics, social life, and art were very different in the seventeenth century, as we have already seen.

Rubens was a painter of the prosperous and ruling classes. He was employed by his own sovereign, by the King of Spain, by Marie de Medicis, Queen of France, and by Charles I. of England. His remarkable social and intellectual gifts caused him to be employed also as an ambassador, and he was sent on a diplomatic errand to Spain; but even then his leisure hours were occupied in copying the fine Titians in the King's palace.

One day he was noticed by a Spanish noble, who said to him, 'Does my Lord occupy his spare time in painting?' 'No,' said Rubens; 'the painter sometimes amuses himself with diplomacy.'

In his life as in his art he was exuberant. An absurd anecdote of the time is good enough to show that. Some people, who went to visit him in his studio at Antwerp, wrote afterwards that they found him hard at work at a picture, whilst at the same time he was dictating a letter, and some one else was reading aloud a Latin work. When the visitors arrived he answered all their questions without leaving off any of those three occupations! We must not all hope to match Rubens.

Rubens's great ceremonial paintings, containing numerous figures and commemorating historical scenes in honour of his Royal patrons, were executed by his own hands, or by the hands he taught and guided, with great skill and speed. He painted also beautiful portraits of his wife and family, and pictures of his own medieval castle, which he restored and inhabited during the last years of his life, with views of the country stretching out in all directions. He liked a comfortable life and comfortable-looking people. He painted his own wives as often as Rembrandt painted Saskia; both were plump enough to make our memories recur with pleasure to the slenderer figures preferred by Botticelli and the painters of his school.

To accomplish the great mass of historic, symbolic, and ceremonial painting that still crowds the walls of the galleries of Europe, Rubens needed many assistants and pupils, but only one of them, Van Dyck, rose to the highest rank as a painter.

He was a Fleming by birth, and worked in the studio at Antwerp for several years as an assistant of Rubens; then he went to Italy to learn from the great pictures of the Italian Renaissance, as so many Northern artists wished to do. It has been said that the works of Titian influenced his youthful mind the most. Van Dyck spent three years in Genoa, where he was employed by those foremost in its life to paint their portraits. Many of these superb canvases have been dispersed to enrich the galleries of both hemispheres, public and private; but the proud, handsome semblances of some of his sitters, dressed in rich velvet, pearls, and lace, look down upon us still from the bare walls of their once magnificent palaces, with that 'grand air' for which the eye and the brush of Van Dyck have long remained unrivalled.

When he returned to Flanders from Italy, he had attained a style of painting entirely his own and very different from that of his great master, Rubens. The William II of Orange picture is an excellent example of Van Dyck's work. The child is a prince: we know it as plainly as if Van Dyck had spoken the word before unveiling his canvas. His erect attitude, his dignified bearing, his perfect self-possession and ease, show that he has been trained in a high school of manners. But there is also something in the delicate oval of the face, the well-cut nose and mouth, and the graceful growth of the hair, that speak of refined breeding. Distinction is the key-note of the picture.



This little Prince had in his veins the blood of William the Silent, and became the father of our William III. Poor human nature is too easily envious, and some deny the reality, in fact, of the distinction, the grace, of Van Dyck's portrayed men and women. Nevertheless, Van Dyck's vision, guiding his brush, was as rare an endowment as envy is a common one, and has higher authority to show us what to look for, to see, and to enjoy.

Van Dyck was the first painter who taught people how they ought to look, to befit an admirer's view of their aristocratic rank. His portraits thus express the social position of the sitter as well as the individual character. Although this has been an aim of portrait-painters in modern times, when they have been painting people of rank, it was less usual in the seventeenth century.

There was hardly scope enough in Antwerp for two great painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck, so in 1632 Van Dyck left Flanders and settled permanently in England, as Court painter to Charles I. All his life Charles had been an enthusiastic collector of works of art. Born with a fine natural taste, he had improved it by study, until Rubens could say of him: 'The Prince of Wales is the best amateur of painting of all the princes in the world. He has demanded my portrait with such insistence that he has overcome my modesty, although it does not seem to me fitting to send it to a Prince of his importance.'

Two of our pictures, the Richard II. diptych and the Edward VI. of Holbein, were in his collection, besides many we have mentioned, such as Holbein's 'Erasmus,' Raphael's cartoons, and Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar.' Before Charles came to the throne he had gone to Spain to woo the daughter of Philip III. The magnificent Titians in the palace at Madrid extorted such admiration from the Prince that Philip felt it incumbent upon him as a host and a Spaniard to offer some of them to Charles. Charles sent his own painter to copy the rest. He kept agents all over Europe to buy for him, and spent thousands of pounds in salaries and presents to the artists at his Court. As in the time of Henry VIII., there were still no first-rate English painters. James I. had employed a Fleming, and an inferior Dutchman, whom Charles retained in his service for a time. Then he experimented with a second-rate Italian artist, who painted some ceilings which still exist at Hampton Court. Rubens was too much in demand at other Courts for Charles to have his exclusive service, but the courtly Van Dyck was a painter after his own heart. For the first time he had found an artist who satisfied his taste, and Van Dyck a Court in which he could paint distinction to his heart's content. Charles would have squandered money on him if he had then had it to squander. As it was, he paid him far less than he had paid his inferior predecessors, but Van Dyck continued to paint for him to the end, and by Heaven's mercy died himself before the crash came, which overthrew Charles and scattered his collection.

Between the years 1632 and 1642, Van Dyck painted a great number of portraits of the King. It is from these that we obtain our vivid idea of the first Charles's gentleness and refinement. He has a sad look, as though the world were too much for him and he had fallen upon evil days. We can see him year by year looking sadder, but Van Dyck makes the sadness only emphasize the distinction.

Queen Henrietta Maria was painted even more often than the King. She is always dressed in some bright shimmering satin; sometimes in yellow, like the sleeve of William II.'s dress, sometimes in the purest white. She looks very lovely in the pictures, but lovelier still are the groups of her children. Even James II. was once a bewitching little creature in frocks with a skull-cap on his head. His sister Mary, aged six, in a lace dress, with her hands folded in front of her, looks very good and grown-up. When she became older, though not even then really grown-up, she married the William of Orange of our picture. He came from Holland and stayed at the English Court, as a boy of twelve, and it was then that Van Dyck painted this portrait of him.

Later on, when they were married, Van Dyck painted them together, but William was older and looked a little less beautiful, and Mary had lost the charm of her babyhood. With all her royal dignity and solemnity, she is a perfect child in these pictures. Refined people, loving art, have grown so fond of the Van Dyck children, that often when they wish their own to look particularly bewitching at some festivity, they dress them in the costumes of the little Mary and Elizabeth Stuart, and revive the skull-caps and the lace dresses for a fresh enjoyment.

Van Dyck's patrons in England, other than the King, were mostly noblemen and courtiers. They lived in the great houses, which had been built in many parts of the country during the reigns of Elizabeth and her successors. The rooms were spacious, with high walls that could well hold the large canvases of Van Dyck. Sometimes a special gallery was built to contain the family portraits, and Van Dyck received a commission to paint them all. Often, several copies of the same picture were ordered at one time to be sent as presents to friends and relations. Usually the artist painted but one himself; the rest were copies by his assistants.

Van Dyck's portraits were designed to suit great houses. In a small room, which a portrait by Holbein would have decorated nobly, a canvas by Van Dyck would have been overpowering. In spite of the fact that the expressions on the faces are often intimate and appealing, domesticity is not the mark of his art. In Van Dyck's picture of our 'heir of fame,' the white linen, the yellow satin, and the armour please us as befitting the lovely face. There is a glimmer of light on the armour, but you see how different is Van Dyck's treatment of it from Rembrandt's. Van Dyck painted it as an article of dress in due subordination to the face, not as an opportunity for reflecting light and becoming the most important thing in the picture.