The life and writings of Henry Fuseli Volume III Part 18

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 Ba.s.sano, Lanzi surmises that Nasocchio di Ba.s.sano 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 surpa.s.sed 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 princ.i.p.al 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 succeeded[140] 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 att.i.tudes 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.[141]

From the crowd[142] 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,[143] 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 pa.s.sed 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, ba.s.so-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. .h.i.therto described; slowly emerging from barbarity, and still too much busied with the elements to think of elegance and ornament. Even then, indeed, canva.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al of Cadore on the Alpine verge of Friuli, 1477.[144] His education is said to have been learned, and Giov. Battista Egn.a.z.io is named as his master in Latin and Greek;[145] 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.[146]

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 Ferrara[147] 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 a.s.sists 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."[148] 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.[149] 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 rivals.h.i.+p 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 surpa.s.s 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 ma.s.ses opposed to each other.

The first essays of this complicated system, in single figures, are probably the frescoes of the palace Gussoni;[150] 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 ma.s.ses, the living motion of the agents, notwithstanding their frequent aberrations from their centre of gravity,[151] and the harmony that rules the whirlwind of that tremendous moment, must for ever place it among the most astonis.h.i.+ng 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 mult.i.tudinous a.s.semblage of figures of each s.e.x 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 a.s.sert, 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 ma.s.ses; 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 Ma.s.sacre 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 surpa.s.ses the most legitimate offsprings of art, the Crucifixion.[152]

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 princ.i.p.al 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 sanct.i.ty 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 cas.e.m.e.nt on a timid female with a whirlwind's blast, the waving grace and calm dignity of his gesture and att.i.tude, ought to have been above the a.s.sistance of theatrical ornament; nor should Palladio have been consulted to construct cla.s.sic avenues for the humble abode of pious meditation. It must however be owned that we become reconciled to this ma.s.s of fact.i.tious embellishments by a tone which seems to have been inspired by Piety itself; the message whispers in a celestial atmosphere,

Te?? ?fe??t' ?f?----

and so forcibly appears its magic effect to have influenced Tintoretto himself, ever ready to rush from one extreme to another, that he imitated it in the Annunciata of the Arimani Palace:[153] not without success, but far below the mannerless unambitious purity of tone that pervades the effusion of his master, and of which he himself gave a blazing proof in the Resurrection of the Saviour,--a work in which sublimity of conception, beauty and dignity of form, velocity and propriety of motion, irresistible flash, mellowness and freshness of colour, tones inspired by the subject, and magic chiaroscuro, less for "mastery strive," than relieve each other and entrance the absorbed eye.

FOOTNOTES:

[134] Thus in an order of the Justiziarii we read: "MCCCXXII. Indicion s.e.xta die primo de Octub. Ordenado e fermado fo per Misier Piero Veniero & per Miser Marco da Mugla Justixieri Vieri, lo terzo compagno vacante.

Ordenado fo che da mo in avanti alguna persona si venedega come forestiera non osa vender in Venexia alcuna _Anchona_ impenta, salvo li empentori, sotto pena, &c. Salvo da la sensa, che alora sia licito a zaschun de vinder _anchone_ infin chel durera la festa," &c. And a picture in the church of S. Donato at Murano, has the following inscription: "Corendo MCCCX. indicion viii. in tempo de lo n.o.bele h.o.m.o Miser Donato Memo honorando Podesta facta fo questa _Anchona_ de Miser S. Donato."

[135] In the church at Ca.s.sello di Sesto, which has an abbey founded in 762, there are pictures of the ninth century.

[136] Gelasio di Nicolo della Masuada di S. Giorgio, was of Ferrara, and flourished about 1242. Vid. Historia almi Ferrariensis Gymnasii, Ferraria, 1735.

[137] At that time he painted in the palace of Cari della Scala at Verona, and at Padoua a chapel in the church 'del Sarto;' he repeated his visit in the latter years of his life to both places. Of what he did at Verona no traces remain, but at Padoua the compartments of Gospel histories round the Oratorio of the Nunziata all' Arena, by the freshness of the fresco and that blended grace and grandeur peculiar to Giotto, still surprise.

[138] Fiorillo has confounded this questionable name with the real one of Luigi, who painted about 1490.--See Fiorillo Geschichte, ii. p. 11.

[139] In S. Giorgio Maggiore is a St. Stephen and Sebastian, with the inscription:

1445.

Johannes de Alemania et Antonius de Muriano.

P.

from which, another picture at Padova, inscribed "Antonio de Muran e Zohan Alama.n.u.s 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.

[140] In no instance seems Vasari to have given a more decisive proof of his attachment to the Florentine school, than by building the fame of Pisano on having been the pupil of Andrea del Castagno, and having been allowed to terminate the works which he had left unfinished behind him about 1480; an anachronism the more absurd as the Commendator del Pozzo was possessed of a picture by Pisano, inscribed 'Opera di Vittor Pisanello de San V. Veronese, MCCCCVI.' a period at which probably Castagno was not born. The truth is, that Vasari, whose rage for dispatch and credulity kept pace with each other, composed the first part of Pisano's life nearly without materials, and the second from hearsay.

[141] What Vasari says of the dog of S. Eustachio and the horse of St.

Giorgio, though on the authority of Fra Marco de' Medici, warrants the a.s.sertion; and still more the foreshortened horse on the reverse of a medal struck in 1419, in honour and with the head of John Palaeologus.

The horse, like that of M. Antoninus, has an att.i.tude of parallel motion. The medal has been published by Ducange in the appendix to his Latin Glossary, by Padre Banduri, Gori and Maffei.

[142] See their lists in _Descrizione delle Architetture, Pitture e Sculture di Vicenza con alcune osservazioni, &c._ Vicenza, 1779, 8vo. p.

I. II.

[143] Ridolfi, i. 68. Vasari, who treats his art with contempt, calls him Jacopo; and Orlandi, afraid of choosing between them, used both, and made two different artists.

[144] Vasari dates his birth 1480.

[145] Liruti, Notizie de' Letterati del Friuli, t. ii. p. 285.

[146] Sebastiano Zuccati of Trevigo, flourished about 1490. He had two sons, Valerio and Francesco, celebrated for mosaic about and beyond the middle of the sixteenth century. Flaminio Zuccati, the son of Valerio, who inherited his father's talent and fame, flourished about 1585. See Zanetti.

[147] See Ridolfi. The original went to Dresden; but Italy abounds in copies of it. Lanzi mentions one which he saw at S. Saverio in Rimini, with Tiziano's name written on the fillet of the Pharisee, a performance of great beauty, and by many considered less a copy than a duplicate.

The most celebrated copy, that of Flaminio Torre, is preserved at Dresden with the original.

[148] "Si pu quasi dire, che il vizio sia la virtu della Scuola Veneziana, poiche fa pompa della sollecitudine nel dipingere; e perci fa stima di Tintoretto, che non avea altro merito." Mengs, Opere, t. i.

p. 175. ed. Parm.

[149] It has supplanted, was probably perpetuated in allusion to his rapidity of execution, and remains familiar to ears that never heard of Robusti.

[150] See Varie Pitture a fresco de' princ.i.p.ali Maestri Veneziani, &c.

Venez. fol. 1760. Tab. 8, 9, p. viii. No one who has seen the original figures of the Aurora and Creposcolo in S. Lorenzo, can mistake their imitation, or rather transcripts, in these.