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Francesco Solimene,130 called "L'Abate Ciccio," born at Nocera de' Pagani, took the elements of art from his father Angelo, formerly a pupil of Massimo, and went to Naples. He successively frequented the schools of Francesco di Maria and of Giac. del Po, and left both to follow his own inclination, which at first exclusively led him to imitate the style of Pietro da Cortona, and even to adopt his figures. He next formed a manner which, of all others, approached next to Preti; the design, indeed, is less exact, the colour less true, but the faces handsomer, now in imitation of Guido, then nearer to Maratta, and often picked from life: hence the byname of "the Gentler Calabrese."131 To Preti he joined Lanfranco, whom he surnamed the "Master," and from him borrowed and exaggerated that serpentine sweep of composition: his chiaroscuro, balanced between both, lost some of its vigour and became softer with the advance of life. He drew and revised his forms from Nature with much accuracy before he painted, but often sacrificed his outline to the fire of execution in the process. The facility and elegance which distinguish him in poetry, mark his invention in painting, to no branch of which he could be called a stranger, and might have excelled singly in each. His works are scattered over Europe, for he lived to the age of ninety, and yielded in velocity of hand to Giordano only, his competitor and friend, at whose demise he succeeded to the Primacy of taste.
Of the public works that most distinguish Solimene, are the stories of the sacristy in S. Paolo Maggiore de' P.P. Teatini, nor less the pictures substituted for those of Giacomo del Po on the arches of the Chapels in the Church de' S.S. Apostoli. Specimens of his high finish may be seen in the Chapel of S. Filippo in the Church dell' Oratorio; he painted the principal altar-piece of the Nuns di "S. Gaudioso," and the four large histories in the choir of the church at Monte Cassino. Of private works, the gallery of Sanfelice is the most conspicuous at Naples; at Rome, some stories in the Albani and Colonna palaces; and at Macerata, in the Buonacorsi collection, among several mythologic subjects, the Death of Dido, a picture of large dimensions and striking effect. In the refectory of the Conventuals of Assisi, the Last Supper of our Lord, a polished performance, is by his hand.
Of that most numerous band of pupils whom he let loose upon the public, the most celebrated was, no doubt, Sebastiano Conca, a native of Gaeta, generally classed with the Roman school, for Rome became his residence and the theatre of his talent. After having served a pupilage of sixteen years under Solimene, and persevered in the practice of that style for several years at Rome, he ominously proved the futility of attempting at an advanced period to escape from the tyranny of early habits. At forty he dared to leave his brushes, became once more a student, and spent five years in drawing after the antique and the masters of design: but his hand and eye, debauched by manner, refused to obey his mind, till, wearied by hopeless fatigue, he followed the advice of the sculptor Le Gros, and returned to his former practice, though not without considerable improvements, and nearer to Pietro da Cortona than to his master. Conca had fertile brains, a rapid pencil, and a colour which at first sight fascinated every eye by its splendour, contrast, and the delicacy of its flesh-tints. His dispatch in fresco and in oil was equal to his employment, and there is scarcely a collection of any consequence without its Conca. He was courted by sovereigns and princes, and Pope Clement XI. ennobled him at a full assembly of the academicians of St. Luke. He was assisted in his labours by his brother Giovanni, a man of similar taste, but less power, and an excellent copyist. The maxims of Conca are considered132 as having completed the ruin of art; but every school had its own canker, and his influence did not extend to all. Without deviating into a catalogue of mediocrity, it may be sufficient to name three of his principal scholars, Gaetano Lapis of Cagli, Salvator Monosilio, a Messinese, and Gaspero Serenari, a Palermitan. Lapis had too much originality of conception and too much solidity of taste to adopt the flowery style of his master. The public works he left at home, and the Birth of Venus in a ceiling of the Borghese Palace, as correct as graceful, deserved and would have attained more celebrity, had not self-contempt and diffidence intercepted the fortune which his talent might have commanded. The two Sicilians, complete machinists, shared with the imitation the success of their master.
Next to Conca, the most successful pupil of Solimene was Francesco de Mura, surnamed Franceschiello, born at Naples and greatly employed in its churches and private galleries: the works, however, to which he owes most of his celebrity, were the frescoes painted in various apartments of the royal palace at Torino, in competition with Claudio Beaumont, who was then at the height of his vigour. Mura ornamented the ceiling of some rooms, chiefly filled with Flemish pictures, with subjects widely different, Olympic games, and actions of Achilles.
Corrado Giaquinto of Molfetta, may conclude what yet deserves to be recorded of this school. He too left Naples, came to Rome, and attached himself to Conca, whose maxims he made nearly all his own; as resolute, as easy, but less correct. Rome, Macerata, and other parts of the Roman state, are acquainted with his works. He painted in Piemont, was employed by Charles III. in Spain, appointed Director of the Academy of S. Fernando, pleased and continued to please the greater part of the public, even after the arrival of A.R. Mengs.
THE SCHOOL OF VENICE
The conquests, commerce and possessions of Venice in the Levant, and thence its uninterrupted intercourse with the Greeks, give probability to the conjecture, that Venetian art drew its origin from the same source, and that the first institution of a company, or, as it is there called, a School (Schola) of Painters, may be dated up to the Greek artists who took refuge at Venice from the fury of the Iconoclasts at Constantinople. The choice of its Patron, which was not St. Luke, but Sta. Sophia, the patroness of the first temple at that time, and prototype of St. Mark's, distinguishes it from the rest of the Italian Schools. Anchona, the vulgar name of a picture in the technic language, the statutes,133 and documents of those times, is evidently a depravation of the Greek Eikon. The school itself is of considerable antiquity; its archives contain regulations and laws made in 1290, which refer to anterior ones; and though not yet separated from the mass of artisans, its members began to enjoy privileges of their own.
In various cities of the Venetian State we meet with vestiges of art anterior in date134 to the relics of painting and mosaic in the metropolis, which prove that it survived the general wreck of society here, as in other parts of Italy. Of the oldest Venetian monuments, Zanetti has given a detailed account, with shrewd critical conjectures on their chronology; though all attempts to discriminate the nearly imperceptible progress of art in a mass of works equally marked by dull servility, must prove little better than nugatory; for it does not appear that Theophilus of Byzantium, who publicly taught the art at Venice about 1200, or his Scholar Gelasio135, had availed themselves of the improvements made in form, twenty years before, by Joachim the Abbot, in a picture of Christ. Nor can the notice of Vasari, who informs us that Andrea Tafi repaired to Venice to profit by the instructions of Apollonios in mosaic, prove more than that, from the rivalship of Greek mechanics, that branch of art was handled with greater dexterity there than at Florence, to which place he was, on his return, accompanied by Apollonios. The same torpor of mind continued to characterise the succeeding artists till the first years of the fourteenth century, and the appearance of Giotto, who, on his return from Avignon 1316, by his labours at Padua, Verona, and elsewhere in the state, threw the first effectual seeds of art, and gave the first impulse to Venetian energy and emulation136 by superior example.
He was succeeded by Giusto, surnamed of Padova, from residence and city rights, but else a Florentine and of the Menabuoi. To Padovano, Vasari ascribes the vast work of the church of St. John the Baptist; incidents of whose life were expressed on the altar-piece. The walls Giusto spread with gospel history and mysteries of the Apocalypse, and on the Cupola a glory filled with a consistory of saints in various attire: simple ideas, but executed with incredible felicity and diligence. The names 'Joannes & Antonius de Padova,' formerly placed over one of the doors, as an ancient MS. pretends, related probably to some companions of Giusto, fellow pupils of Giotto, and show the unmixed prevalence of his style, to which Florence itself had not adhered with more scrupulous submission, beyond the middle of the century, and the less bigoted imitation of Guarsiento, a Padovan of great name at that period, and the leader of Ridolfi's history. He received commissions of importance from the Venetian senate, and the remains of his labours in fresco and on panel at Bassano and at the Eremitani of Padova, confirm the judgment of Zanetti, that he had invention, spirit, and taste, and without those remnants of Greek barbarity which that critic pretends to discover in his style.
Of a style still less dependant on the principles of Giotto, are the relicks of those artists whom Lanzi is willing to consider as the precursors of the legitimate Venetian schools, and whose origin he dates in the professors of miniature and missal-painting, many contemporary, many anterior to Giotto. The most conspicuous is Niccolo Semitecolo, undoubtedly a Venetian, if the inscription on a picture on panel in the Capitular Library at Padova be genuine, viz., Nicoleto Semitecolo da Venezia, 1367. It represents a Pietà, with some stories of S. Sebastian, in no contemptible style: the nudities are well painted, the proportions, though somewhat too long, are not inelegant, and what adds most to its value as a monument of national style, it bears no resemblance to that of Giotto, which, though it be inferior in design, it equals in colour. Indeed the silence of Baldinucci, who annexes no Venetian branch to his Tuscan pedigree of Art, gives probability to the presumption, that a native school existed in the Adriatic long before Cimabue.
A fuller display of this native style, and its gradual approaches to the epoch of Giorgione and Tizian, were reserved for the fifteenth century: an island prepared what was to receive its finish at Venice. Andrea da Murano, who flourished about 1400, though still dry, formal, and vulgar, designs with considerable correctness, even the extremities, and what is more, makes his figures stand and act. There is still of him at Murano in S. Pier Martire, a picture, on the usual gold ground of the times, representing, among others, a Saint Sebastian, with a Torso, whose beauty made Zanetti suspect that it had been copied from some antique statue. It was he who formed to art the family of the Vivarini, his fellow-citizens, who in uninterrupted succession maintained the school of Murano for nearly a century, and filled Venice with their performances.
Of Luigi, the reputed founder of the family, no authentic notices remain. The only picture ascribed to him, in S. Giovanni and Paolo, has, with the inscription of his name and the date 1414, been retouched.137 Nor does much more evidence attend the names of Giovanni and Antonio de' Vivarini, the first of which belonged probably to a German, the partner of Antonio,138 who is not heard of after 1447, whilst Antonio, singly or in society with his brother Bartolommeo Vivarini, left works inscribed with his name as far as 1451.
Bartolommeo, probably considerably younger than Antonio, was trained to art in the principles before mentioned, till he made himself master of the new-discovered method of oil-painting, and towards the time of the two Bellini became an artist of considerable note. His first picture in oil bears the date of 1473; his last, at S. Giovanni in Bragora, on the authority of Boschini, that of 1498; it represents Christ risen from the grave, and is a picture comparable to the best productions of its time. He sometimes added A Linnel Vivarino to his name and date, allusive to his surname.
With him flourished Luigi, the last of the Vivarini, but the first in art. His relics still exist at Venice, Belluno, Trevigi, with their dates; the principal of these is in the school of St. Girolamo at Venice, where, in competition with Giovanni Bellini, whom he equals, and with Vittore Carpaccia, whom he surpasses, he represented the Saint caressing a Lion, and some monks who fly in terror at the sight. Composition, expression, colour, for felicity, energy, and mellowness, if not above every work of the times, surpass all else produced by the family of the Vivarini.
At the beginning of the century, Gentile da Fabriano, styled Magister Magistrorum, and mentioned in the Roman School, painted, in the public palace at Venice, a naval battle, now vanished, but then so highly valued that it procured him an annual provision, and the privilege of the Patrician dress. He raised disciples in the state: Jacopo Nerito, of Padova, subscribes himself a disciple of Gentile, in a picture at S. Michele of that place, and from the style of another in S. Bernardino, at Bassano, Lanzi surmises that Nasocchio di Bassano was his pupil or imitator. But what gives him most importance, is the origin of the great Venetian School under his auspices, and that Jacopo Bellini, the father of Gentile and Giovanni, owned him for his master. Jacopo is indeed more known by the dignity of his son's than his own works, at present either destroyed, in ruins, or unknown. What he painted in the church of St. Giovanni at Venice, and, about 1456, at the Santo of Padova, the chapel of the family Gattamelata, are works that exist in history only. One single picture, subscribed by his name, Lanzi mentions to have seen in a private collection, resembling the style of Squarcione, whom he seems to have followed in his maturer years.
A name then still more conspicuous, though now nearly obliterated, is that of Jacopo, or as he is styled Jacobello, or as he wrote himself, Jacometto del Fiore, whose father Francesco del Fiore, a leader of art in his day, was honoured with a monument and an epitaph in Latin verse at S. Giovanni and Paolo: of him it is doubtful whether any traces remain, but of the son, who greatly surpassed him, several performances still exist, from 1401 to 1436. Vasari has wantonly taxed him with having suspended all his figures, in the Greek manner, on the points of their feet: the truth is, that he was equalled by few of his contemporaries, for few like him dared to represent figures as large as life, and fewer understood to give them beauty, dignity, and that air of agility and ease, which his forms possess; nor would the lions in his picture of Justice at the Magistrato del Proprio, have shared the first praise, had not the principal figures, in subservience to the time, been loaded with tinsel ornament and golden glitter.
Two scholars of his are mentioned: Donato, superior to him in style, and Carlo Crivelli, of obscure fame, but deserving attention for the colour, union, grace, and expression, of the small histories in which he delighted.
The ardour of the capital for the art was emulated by every town of the state; all had their painters, but all did not submit to the principles of Venice and Murano. At Verona the obscure names of Aldighieri and Stefano Dazevio, were succeeded139 by the vaunted one of Vittore Pisanello, of S. Vito: though accounts grossly vary on the date in which he flourished, and the school from which he sprang, that his education was Florentine is not improbable, but whoever his master, fame has ranked him with Masaccio as an improver of style. His works at Rome and Venice, in decay at the time of Vasari, are now no more; and fragments only remain of what he did at Verona. S. Eustachio caressing a Dog, and S. Giorgio sheathing his Sword and mounting his horse, figures extolled to the skies by Vasari, are, with the places which they occupied, destroyed: works which seem to have contained elements of truth and dignity in expression with novelty of invention, and of contrast, style, and foreshortening in design: a loss so much the more to be lamented, as the remains of his less considerable works at S. Firmo and Perugia, far from sanctioning the opinion which tradition has taught us to entertain of Pisano, are finished indeed with the minuteness of miniature, but are crude in colour, and drawn in lank and emaciated proportions. It appears from his works, that he understood the formation, had studied the expression, and attempted the most picturesque attitudes of animals. His name is well known to antiquaries, and to the curious in coins, as a medallist, and he has been celebrated as such by many eminent pens of his own and the subsequent century.140
From the crowd141 of obscure contemporary artists, which the neighbouring Vicenza produced, the name of Marcello, or as Ridolfi calls him Gio. Battista Figolino, deserves to be distinguished: a man of original manner, whose companion, in variety of character, intelligence of keeping, landscape, perspective, ornament, and exquisite finish, will not easily be discovered at Venice, or elsewhere in the State, at that period; and were it certain that he was anterior to the two Bellini, sufficiently eminent to claim the honours of an epoch in the history of Art: in proof of which Vicenza may still produce his Epiphany in the church of St. Bartolommeo.
But the man who had the most extensive influence on Art, if not as the first artist, as the first and most frequented teacher, was Francesco Squarcione,142 of Padova; in whose numerous school perhaps originated that eclectic principle which characterised part of the Adriatic and all the Lombard schools. Opulent and curious, he not only designed what ancient art offered in Italy, but passed over to Greece, visited many an isle of the Archipelago in quest of monuments, and on his return to Padova formed, from what he had collected, by copy or by purchase, of statues, basso-relievos, torsos, fragments, and cinerary urns, the most ample museum of the time, and a school in which he counted upwards of 150 students, and among them Andrea Mantegna, Marco Zoppo, Girolamo Schiavone, Jacopo Bellini.
Of Squarcione, more useful by precept than by example, little remains, and of that little, perhaps, not all his own. From the variety of manner observable in what is attributed to him, it may be suspected that he too often divided his commissions among his scholars; such as some stories of St. Francis, in a cloister of his church, and the miniatures of the Antifonario in the temple della Misericordia, attributed by the vulgar to Mantegna. Only one indisputably genuine, though retouched work of his, is mentioned by Lanzi; which, in various compartments, represents different saints, subscribed 'Francesco Squarcione,' and conspicuous for felicity of colour, expression, and perspective.
These outlines of the infancy of Venetian art show it little different from that of the other schools hitherto described; slowly emerging from barbarity, and still too much busied with the elements to think of elegance and ornament. Even then, indeed, canvass instead of panels was used by the Venetian painters; but their general vehicle was, a tempera, prepared water-colour: a method approaching the breadth of fresco, and friendly to the preservation of tints, which even now retain their virgin purity; but unfriendly to union and mellowness. It was reserved for the real epoch of oil-painting to develope the Venetian character, display its varieties, and to establish its peculiar prerogative.
Tiziano, the son of Gregorio Vecelli, was born at Piave, the principal of Cadore on the Alpine verge of Friuli, 1477.143 His education is said to have been learned, and Giov. Battista Egnazio is named as his master in Latin and Greek;144 but his proficiency may be doubted, for if it be true that his irresistible bent to the art obliged the father to send him in his tenth year to the school of Giov. Bellini at Venice, he could be little more than an infant when he learnt the rudiments under Sebastiano Zuccati.145
At such an age, and under these masters, he acquired a power of copying the visible detail of the objects before him with that correctness of eye and fidelity of touch which distinguishes his imitation at every period of his art. Thus when, more adult, in emulation of Albert Durer, he painted at Ferrara146 Christ to whom a Pharisee shows the tribute money, he out-stript in subtlety of touch even that hero of minuteness: the hair of the heads and hands may be counted, the pores of the skin discriminated, and the surrounding objects seen reflected in the pupils of the eyes; yet the effect of the whole is not impaired by this extreme finish: it increases it at a distance, which effaces the fac-similisms of Albert, and assists the beauties of imitation with which that work abounds to a degree seldom attained, and never excelled by the master himself, who has left it indeed as a single monument, for it has no companion, to attest his power of combining the extremes of finish and effect.
GIACOMO ROBUSTI, SURNAMED IL TINTORETTO
1512-1594
"It might almost be said that vice is the virtue of the Venetian school, because it rests its prerogative on despatch in execution, and therefore is proud of Tintoretto, who had no other merit."147 Such, in speaking of the great genius before us, is the equally rash, ignorant, unphilosophic verdict of a man exclusively dubbed "The Philosophic Painter."
G. Robusti of Venice was the son of a dyer, who left him that byname as an heir-loom.148 He entered the school of Tiziano when yet a boy; but he, soon discovering in the daring spirit of his nursling the symptoms of a genius which threatened future rivalship to his own powers, with that suspicious meanness which marks his character as an artist, after a short interval, ordered his head pupil, Girolamo Dante, to dismiss the boy; but as envy generally defeats its own designs, the uncourteous dismissal, instead of dispiriting, roused the energies of the heroic stripling, who, after some meditation on his future course, and comparing his master's superiority in colour with his defects in form, resolved to surpass him by an union of both: the method best suited to accomplish this he fancied to find in an intense study of Michael Angelo's style, and boldly announced his plan by writing on the door of his study, THE DESIGN OF M. ANGELO, AND THE COLOUR OF TIZIAN.
But neither form nor colour alone could satisfy his eye; the uninterrupted habit of nocturnal study discovered to him what Venice had not yet seen, not even in Giorgione, if we may form an opinion from what remains of him – the powers of that ideal chiaroscuro which gave motion to action, raised the charms of light, and balanced or invigorated effect by dark and lucid masses opposed to each other.
The first essays of this complicated system, in single figures, are probably the frescoes of the palace Gussoni;149 and in numerous composition, the Last Judgement, and its counterpart, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, in the church of Sta. Maria dell' Orfo.
It is evident that the spirit of Michael Angelo domineered over the fancy of Tintoretto in the arrangement of the Last Judgement, though not over its design; but grant some indulgence to that, and the storm in which the whole fluctuates, the awful division of light and darkness into enormous masses, the living motion of the agents, notwithstanding their frequent aberrations from their centre of gravity,150 and the harmony that rules the whirlwind of that tremendous moment, must for ever place it among the most astonishing productions of art. Its sublimity as a whole triumphs even over the hypercriticisms of Vasari, who thus describes it: – "Tintoretto has painted the Last Judgement with an extravagant invention, which, indeed, has something awful and terrible, inasmuch as he has united in groups a multitudinous assemblage of figures of each sex and every age, interspersed with distant views of the blessed and condemned souls. You see likewise the boat of Charon, but in a manner as novel and uncommon as highly interesting. Had this fantastic conception been executed with a correct and regular design, had the painter estimated its individual parts with the attention which he bestowed on the whole, so expressive of the confusion and the tumult of that day, it would be the most admirable of pictures. Hence he who casts his eye only on the whole, remains astonished, whilst to him who examines the parts it appears to have been painted in jest."
In the Adoration of the Golden Calf, the counterpart in size of the Last Judgement, Tintoretto has given full reins to his invention; and here, as in the former, though their scanty width does not very amicably correspond with their height, which is fifty feet, he has filled the whole so dexterously that the dimension appears to be the result of the composition. Here too, as in the Transfiguration of Raffaelle, some short-sighted sophist may pretend to discover two separate subjects and a double action; for Moses receives the tables of the decalogue in the upper part, whilst the idolatrous ceremony occupies the lower; but the unity of the subject may be proved by the same argument which defended and justified the choice of Sanzio. Both actions are not only the offspring of the same moment, but so essentially relate to each other that, by omitting either, neither could with sufficient evidence have told the story. Who can pretend to assert, that the artist who has found the secret of representing together two inseparable moments of an event divided only by place, has impaired the unity of the subject?
Nowhere, however, does the genius of Tintoretto flash more irresistibly than in the Schools of S. Marco and S. Rocco, where the greater part of the former and almost the whole of the latter are his work, and exhibit in numerous specimens, and on the largest scale, every excellence and every fault that exalts or debases his pencil: equal sublimity and extravagance of conception; purity of style and ruthless manner; bravura of hand with mental dereliction; celestial or palpitating hues tacked to clayey, raw, or frigid masses; a despotism of chiaroscuro which sometimes exalts, sometimes eclipses, often absorbs subject and actors. Such is the catalogue of beauties and defects which characterize the Slave delivered by St. Marc; the Body of the Saint landed; the Visitation of the Virgin; the Massacre of the Innocents; Christ tempted in the Desert; the Miraculous Feeding of the Crowd; the Resurrection of the Saviour; and though last, first, that prodigy which in itself sums up the whole of Tintoretto, and by its anomaly equals or surpasses the most legitimate offsprings of art, the Crucifixion.151
It is singular that the most finished and best preserved work of Tintoretto should be one which he had least time allowed him to terminate – the Apotheosis of S. Rocco in the principal ceiling-piece of the Schola, conceived, executed, and presented, instead of the sketch which he had been commissioned with the rest of the concurrent artists to produce for the examination of the fraternity: a work which equally strikes by loftiness of conception, a style of design as correct as bold, and a suavity of colour which entrances the eye. Though constructed on the principles of that sotto in su, then ruling the platfonds and cupolas of upper Italy, unknown to or rejected by M. Angelo, its figures recede more gradually, yet with more evidence, than the groups of Correggio, whose ostentatious foreshortenings generally sacrifice the actor to his posture.
That Tintoretto acquired, during his stay with or after his dismissal from the study of Tiziano's principles, the power of representing the surface and the texture of bodily substance with a truth bordering on illusion, is proved with more irresistible because more copious evidence, in the picture of the Angelic Salutation; though it cannot be denied that the admiration due to the magic touch of the paraphernalia is extorted at the expense of the essential parts: Gabriel and Maria are little more than foils of her husband's tools; for their display, the artist's caprice has turned the solemn approach of the awful messenger into boisterous irruption, the silent recess of the mysterious mother into a public dismantled shed, and herself into a vulgar female. Nowhere would the superiority of refined over vulgar art, of taste and judgment over unbridled fancy, have appeared more irresistibly than in the sopraporta by Tiziano on the same subject and in the same place, had that exquisite master been inspired more by the sanctity of the subject than the lures of courtly or the ostentatious bigotry of monastic devotion. If Maria was to be rescued from the brutal hand that had travestied her to the mate of a common labourer, it was not to be transformed to a young abbess, elegantly devout, submitting to canonization, amongst her delicate lambs; if the angel was not to rush through a shattered casement on a timid female with a whirlwind's blast, the waving grace and calm dignity of his gesture and attitude, ought to have been above the assistance of theatrical ornament; nor should Palladio have been consulted to construct classic avenues for the humble abode of pious meditation. It must however be owned that we become reconciled to this mass of factitious embellishments by a tone which seems to have been inspired by Piety itself; the message whispers in a celestial atmosphere,
1445Johannes de Alemaniaet Antonius de MurianoP from which, another picture at Padova, inscribed "Antonio de Muran e Zohan Alamanus pinxit," and some traces of foreign style where his name occurs, Lanzi suspects that the inscription in S. Pantaleone, "Zuane, e Antonio da Muran, pense 1444," on which the existence of Giovanni is founded, means no other than the German partner of Antonio.
