Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/520

Rh in the first half of the 15th century, a German, Justus of Allemagna, worked in partnership with a Muranese family. A little later a stranger from another quarter executes important commissions in the city of the lagoons. This was an Umbrian, Gentile da Fabriano, who possessed the suavity and tenderness of his school.

The natural tendency of Venetian taste, nourished for centuries on opulent Oriental stuffs, on gold and gems, ran in the direction of what was soft and pleasing to the sense. The northern Gothic and the Umbrian influences corresponded with this and flattered the natural tendency of the people. For the proper development of Venetian painting some element of Florentine strength and science was absolutely necessary, and this was imparted to the Venetian school by Mantegna through the medium of the Bellini.

The Bellini were a Venetian family of painters, of whom the father was originally an assistant to Gentile da Fabriano, but lived for a while at Padua, where his daughter Nicolosia became the wife of Mantegna. With the two Bellini sons. Gentile and Giovanni, Mantegna became very intimate, and a mutual influence was exercised that was greatly to the benefit of all. Mantegna softened a little what has been termed his “iron style,” through the assimilation of some of the suavity and feeling for beauty and colour that were engrained in the Venetians, while on the other hand Mantegna imparted some of his own sternness and his Florentine science to his brothers-in-law, of whom the younger, Giovanni, was the formative master of the later Venetian school.

§ 17. The Painting of the Sixteenth Century: the Mastery of Form.—If we examine a drawing of the human figure by Raphael, Michelangelo, or Correggio, and compare it with the finest examples of Greek figure design on the vases, we note at once that to the ancient artist the form presented itself as a silhouette, and he had to put constraint on himself to realize its depth; whereas the moderns, so to say, think in the third dimension of space and every touch of their pencil presupposes it. The lovely “Aphrodite riding on a Swan,” on the large Greek kylix in the British Museum, is posed in an impossible position between the wing of the creature and its body, where there would be no space for her to sit. The lines of her figure are exquisite, but she is pure contour, not form. In a Raphael nude the strokes of the chalk come forward from the back, bringing with them into relief the rounded limb which grows into plastic fullness before our eyes. Whether the parts recede or approach, or sway from side to side, the impression on the eye is equally clear and convincing. The lines do not merely limit a surface but caress the shape and model it by their very direction and comparative force into relief. In other words, these 16th-century masters for the first time perfectly realize the aim which was before the eyes of the Greeks; and Raphael, who in grace and truth and composition may have been only the peer of Apelles, probably surpassed his great predecessor in this easy and instinctive rendering of objects in their solidity.

In so far as the work of these masters of the culminating period, in its relation to nature, is of this character it needs no further analysis, and attention should rather be directed to those elements in Italian design of the 16th-century which have a special interest for the after development of the art.

Not only was form mastered as a matter of drawing, but relief was indicated by a subtle treatment of light and shade. Foreshortening as a matter of drawing requires to be accompanied by correct modulation of tone and colour, for as the form in question recedes from the eye, changes of the most delicate kind in the illumination and hue of the parts present themselves for record and reproduction. The artist who first achieved mastery in these refinements of chiaroscuro was Leonardo da Vinci, while Correggio as a colourist added to Leonardesque modelling an equally delicate rendering of the modulation of local colour in relation to the incidence of light, and the greater or less distance of each part from the eye. This represented a great advance in the rendering of natural truth, and prepared the way for the masters of the 17th century. It is not only by

linear perspective, or the progressive diminution in size of objects as they recede, that the effect of space and distance can be compassed. This depends more on what artists know as “tone” or “values,” that is, on the gradual degradation of the intensity of light and shadow, and the diminishing saturation of colours, or, as we may express it in a word that is not however quite adequate, aerial perspective. That which Leonardo and Correggio had accomplished in the modelling, lighting and tinting of the single form in space had to be applied by succeeding artists to space as a whole, and this was the work not of the 16th but of the 17th century, and not of Italians but of the masters of the Netherlands and of Spain.

§ 18. The Contribution of Venice.—Before we enter upon this fourth period of the development of the art, something must be said of an all-important contribution that painting owes to the masters of Venice.

The reference is not only to Venetian colouring. This was partly, as we have seen, the result of the temperament and circumstances of the people, and we may ascribe also to the peculiar position of the city another Venetian characteristic. There is at Venice a sense of openness and space, and the artists seem anxious on their canvases to convey the same impression of a large entourage. The landscape background, which we have already found on early Flemish panels, becomes a feature of the pictures of the Venetians, but these avoid the meticulous detail of the Flemings and treat their spaces in a broader and simpler fashion. An indispensable condition however for the rich and varied effects of colour shown on Venetian canvases was the possession by the painters of an adequate technique. In the third part of this article an account is given of the change in technical methods due, not so much to the introduction of the oil medium by the Van Eycks, as to the exploitation at Venice of the unsuspected resources which that medium could be made to afford. Giovanni Bellini, not Hubert van Eyck, is really the primal painter in oils, because he was the first to manipulate it with freedom, and to play off against each other, the various effects of opaque and transparent pigment. His noble picture at Murano, representing the Doge Barbarigo adoring the Madonna, represents his art at its best (see fig. 21, Plate VI.).

Bellini rendered possible the painters of the culminating period of Venetian art, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, with others hardly less great. Giorgione was the first who made the art, as an art of paint not merely of design, speak to the soul. His melting outlines and the crisp clean touches that wake the piece to life; his glowing hues and the pearly neutrals that give them repose and quality; the intimate appeal of his dreamy faces, his refined but voluptuous forms, and the large freedom of his spaces of sky and distance, all combine to impress us with a sense of the poetry and mystery of creation that we derive from the works of no other extant painter. The “Concert” of the Louvre, fig. 22, Plate VII. is typically Giorgionesque.

Tintoretto, more intellectually profound, more passionate, writes for us his message in his stormy brush-strokes, now shaking us with terror, now lifting our souls on the wings of his imagination; but with him as with the younger master it is always the painter who speaks, and always in the terms of colour and texture and handling. Lastly, between the two, unapproachable in his majestic calm, stands Titian. Combining the poetry of Giorgione with much of Tintoretto's depth and passion, he is the first, and still perhaps the greatest, of the supreme masters of the painter's art. His masterpiece is the great “Presentation” of the Venice Academy, fig. 23, Plate VII. Painting, it is true, has to advance in its development beyond the ideals of Titian’s century, but it loses on the ethical side more than on the technical side it wins, and without the Venetians the world would have never known the full possibilities of the art that began so simply and at so early a stage of human civilization.

§ 19. The Fourth Period: the Realization of the Truth of Space. Changed Relation of Painting to Nature.—By the 17th century the development of painting had passed through all its stages, and the picture was no longer a mere silhouette or a transcript