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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
LORENZO LOTTO
AN ESSAY IN CONSTRUCTIVE ART
CRITICISM
Illustrated with thirty reproductions of the
most interesting pictures by Lotto and his master,
Alvise Vivarini, very few of which have ever
been reproduced before, a good part of them
being photographed for the first time, expressly
for this work. 8vo, $3.50.
G. P. Putnam's vSons
NEW YORK & LONDON
THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC UBRARY
THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
OF
THE RENAISSANCE
WITH AN INDEX TO THEIR WORKS
BY
BERNHARD BERENSON
SECOND EDITION
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK ,,-i;ON2)Oy, 1',
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD'aTRfiET, STRAND j
1895
~i?E NEW YOW
pmUC UBRAR'
Affm^ LENOX AND
COPYRIGHT, 1894
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Entered at Stationers^ Hall^ London
By G. p. Putnam's Sons
Klectrotyped, Printed and Bound by
rbe mnicl^erbocfccr press, 'fflcw l^orf;
G. P. Putnam's Sons
PREFACE TO THE SECOND
EDITION.
T^HE indices of this second edition have
been carefully revised, and a considerable
number of additions have been made to the
lists.
The author begs once more to call attention
to the fact that, with one or two exceptions,
Jie has mentioned no pictures that he has not seen.
The lists are the result, not of compilation,
but of first-hand acquaintance with the works
of art.
Ill
PREFACE.
HP HE following essay owes its origin to the
author's belief that Venetian painting is
the most complete expression in art of the
ItaHan Renaissance. The Renaissance is even
more important typically than historically.
Historically it may be looked upon as an age
of glory or of shame according to the different
views entertained of European events during
the past five centuries. But typically it stands
for youth, and youth alone — for intellectual
curiosity and energy grasping at the whole of
life as material which it hopes to mould to any
shape.
Every generation has an innate sympathy
with some epoch of the past wherein it seems
to find itself foreshadowed. Science has of late
revealed and given much, but its revelation and
vi PREFACE
gifts are as nothing to the promise it holds out
of constant acquisition and perpetual growth,
of everlasting youth. We ourselves, because of
our faith in science and the power of work,
are instinctively in sympathy with the Renais-
sance. Our problems do not seem so easy to
solve, our tasks are more difficult because our
vision is wider, but the spirit which animates
us was anticipated by the spirit of the Renais-
sance, and more than anticipated. That spirit
seems like the small rough model after which
ours is being fashioned.
Italian painting interests many of us more
than the painting of any other school not be-
cause of its essential superiority, but because
it expressed the Renaissance ; and Venetian
painting is interesting above all because it was
at Venice alone that this expression attained
perfection. Elsewhere, particularly in Florence,
it died away before it found complete utter-
ance.
In order to keep the main idea clearly be-
fore the mind of the reader, to show him how
the Renaissance reveals itself in Venetian
painting, the introduction of anything not
PREFACE vii
strictly relevant to the subject has been
avoided. The salient points once perceived
and connected with the more important
painters, the reader will find no difficulty in
seeing the proper place of any given work by
a great master, or the relative importance of
those second- and third-rate painters of whom
no special mention has been made because they
are comprised within what has been said about
the greater artists.
But happily art is too great and too vital a
subject to be crowded into any single formula ;
and a formula that would, without distorting
our entire view of Italian art in the fifteenth
century, do full justice to such a painter as
Carlo Crivelli, does not exist. He takes rank
with the most genuine artists of all times and
countries, and does not weary even when
" great masters " grow tedious. He expresses
with the freedom and spirit of Japanese design
a piety as wild and tender as Jacopo da Todi's,
a sweetness of emotion as sincere and dainty
as of a Virgin and Child carved in ivory by a
French craftsman of the fourteenth century.
The mystic beauty of Simone Martini, the
viii PREFACE
agonized compassion of the young Bellini, are
embodied by Crivelli in forms which have the
strength of line and the metallic lustre of old
Satsuma or lacquer, and which are no less
tempting to the touch. Crivelli must be
treated by himself and as the product of sta-
tionary, if not reactionary, conditions. Having
lived most of his life far away from the main
currents of culture, in a province where St.
Bernardino had been spending his last energies
in the endeavour to call the world back to the
ideals of an infantile civilisation, Crivelli does
not belong to a movement of constant progress,
and therefore is not within the scope of this
work.
To make the essay useful as a handbook to
Venetian painting, lists have been appended of
the works, in and out of Italy, by the principal
Venetian masters. These lists do not pretend
to absolute completeness. Only such private
collections have been mentioned as are well
known and accessible to students, although in
the case of very rare painters all of their known
works are given, and even such as are of doubt-
ful authenticity are alluded to. The author
PREFACE ix
has seen and carefully considered all the pic-
tures he mentions, except one or two at St.
Petersburg, which are, however, well known
from the photographs of MM. Braun & Cie.
The attributions are based on the results of the
most recent research. Even such painstaking
critics of some years ago as Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle laboured under terrible disadvan-
tages, because most of their work was done at
a time when travelling was much slower than
it has now become, and when photography
was not sufficiently perfected to be of great
service. Rapid transit and isochromatic pho-
tography are beginning to enable the student
to make of connoisseurship something like an
exact science. To a certain extent, therefore,
Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have been
superseded, and to a great degree supple-
mented by the various writings of Morelli,
Richter, Frizzoni, and others. The author takes
pleasure in acknowledging his indebtedness to
the first systematic writers on Italian painting
no less than to the perfectors of the new critical
method, now adopted by nearly all serious
students of Italian art. To the founder of
X PREFACE
the new criticism, the late Giovanni Morelli,
and to his able successor, Dr. Gustavo Frizzoni,
the author feels bound to ascribe many of his
attributions, although a number are based on
independent research, and for these he alone is
responsible. Special thanks are due to a dear
friend, Enrico Costa, for placing his notes of a
recent visit to Madrid at the author's disposal.
They have been used, with a confidence war-
ranted by Signor Costa's unrivalled connois-
seurship, to supplement the author's own notes,
taken some years ago.
Having noted the dependence of scientific
art study upon isochromatic photography, the
author is happy to take this opportunity of ex-
pressing his gratitude to such able photogra-
phers as Lowy of Vienna, Tamme of Dresden,
Marcozzi of Milan, Alinari Bros, of Florence,
and Dominic Anderson of Rome, all of whom
have devoted themselves with special zeal to the
paintings of the Venetian masters. The author
is peculiarly indebted to Signor Anderson for
having materially assisted his studies by photo-
graphing many pictures which at present have
a scientific rather than a popular interest.
PREFACE xi
The frontispiece is a reproduction of Gior-
gione's " Shepherd " at Hampton Court, a
picture which perhaps better than any other
expresses the Renaissance at the most fascina-
ting point of its course. The author is indebted
to Mr. Sidney Colvin for permission to make
use of a photograph taken at his order.
CONTENTS.
THE VENETIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAIS-
SANCE
I. Value of Venetian Art
II. The Church and Painting .
III, The Renaissance
IV. Painting and the Renaissance .
V. Pageant Pictures
VI. Painting and the Confraternities
VII. Easel Pictures and Giorgione .
VIII. The Giorgionesque Spirit .
IX. The Portrait . .• .
X. The Young Titian
XI. Apparent Failure of the Renaissance
XII. Lotto
XIII. The Late Renaissance and Titian
XIV. Humanity and the Renaissance
XV. Sebastiano del Piombo
XVI. Tintoretto .....
PAGE
I
I
2
5
12
17
22
26
31
32
38
41
43
44
48
49
5^
XIV CONTENTS.
PAGE
XVTT. Value of Minor Episodes in Art . . 56
XVIII. Tintoretto's Portraits . . . -59
XIX. V?:netian Art and the Provinces . .60
XX. Paul Veronese 62
XXI. Bassano, Genre, and Landscape . . 64
XXII. The Venetians and Velasquez . . . 70
XXIII. Decline of Venetian Art . . . .71
XXIV. LoNGHi 72
XXV. Canaletto and Guardi . . . .74
XXVI. Tiepolo 75
XXVII. Influence of Venetian Art . . .77
INDEX TO THE WORKS OF THE PRINCIPAL
VENETIAN PAINTERS 79
INDEX OF PLACES 131
THE VENETIAN PAINTERS OF
THE RENAISSANCE
I. Value of Venetian Art.-— Among the
Italian schools of painting the Venetian has,
for the majority of art-loving people, the
strongest and most enduring attraction. In the
course of the present brief account of the life
of that school we shall perhaps discover some
of the causes of our peculiar delight and inter-
est in the Venetian painters, as we come to
realise what tendencies of the human spirit their
art embodied, and of what great consequence
their example has been to the whole of Euro-
pean painting for the last three centuries.
The Venetians as a school were from the first
endowed with exquisite tact in their use of
colour. Seldom cold and rarely too warm,
their colouring never seems an afterthought,
I
2 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
as in many of the Florentine painters, nor is it
always suggesting paint, as in some of the
Veronese masters. When the eye has grown
accustomed to make allowance for the darken-
ing caused by time, for the dirt that lies in
layers on so many pictures, and for unsuccess-
ful attempts at restoration, the better Venetian
paintings present such harmony of intention
and execution as distinguishes the highest
achievements of genuine poets. Their mastery
over colour is the first thing that attracts most
people to the painters of Venice. Their colour-
ing not only gives direct pleasure to the eye,
but acts like music upon the moods, stimulat-
ing thought and memory in much the same
way as a work by a great composer.
II. The Church and Painting.~The Church
from the first took account of the influence
of colour as well as of music upon the
emotions. From the earliest times it em-
ployed mosaic and painting to enforce its
dogmas and relate its legends, not merely
because this was the only means of reaching
people who could neither read nor write, but
THE CHURCH AND PAINTING 3
also because it instructed them in a way which,
far from leading to critical enquiry, was pecu-
liarly capable of being used as an indirect
stimulus to moods of devotion and contrition.
Next to the finest mosaics of the first centuries,
the early works of Giovanni Bellini, the greatest
Venetian master of the fifteenth century, best
fulfil this religious intention. Painting had in
his life-time reached a point where the difficulties
of technique no longer stood in the way of the
expression of profound emotion. No one can
look at Bellini's pictures of the Dead Christ
upheld by the Virgin or angels without being
put into a mood of deep contrition, nor at his
earlier Madonnas without a thrill of awe and
reverence. And Giovanni Bellini does not
stand alone. His contemporaries, Gentile Bel-
lini, the Vivarini, Crivelli, and Cima da Cone-
gliano all began by painting in the same spirit,
and produced almost the same effect.
The Church, however, thus having educated
people to understand painting as a language
and to look to it for the expression of their
sincerest feelings, could not hope to keep it
always confined to the channel of reHgious
4 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
emotion. People began to feel the need of
painting as something that entered into their
every-day lives almost as much as we nowadays
feel the need of the newspaper ; nor was this
unnatural, considering that, until the invention
of printing, painting was the only way, apart
from direct speech, of conveying ideas to the
masses. At about the time when Bellini and
his contemporaries were attaining maturity, the
Renaissance had ceased to be a movement
carried on by scholars and poets alone. It had
become sufficiently widespread to seek popular
as well as literary utterance, and thus, toward
the end of the fifteenth century, it naturally
turned to painting, a vehicle of expression
which the Church, after a thousand years of
use, had made familiar and beloved.
To understand the Renaissance at the time
when its spirit began to find complete embodi-
ment in painting, a brief survey of the move-
ment of thought in Italy during its earlier
period is necessary, because only when that
movement had reached a certain point did
painting come to be its most natural medium
of expression.
THE RENAISSANCE 5
III. The Renaissance. — The thousand
years that elapsed between the triumph of
Christianity and the middle of the fourteenth
century have been not inaptly compared to
the first fifteen or sixteen years in the life
of the individual. Whether full of sorrows
or joys, of storms or peace, these early years
are chiefly characterised by tutelage and un-
consciousness of personality. But toward the
end of the fourteenth century something hap-
pened in Europe that happens in the lives of
all gifted individuals. There was an awaken-
ing to the sense of personality. Although it
was felt to a greater or less degree everywhere,
Italy felt the awakening earlier than the rest
of Europe, and felt it far more strongly. Its
first manifestation was a boundless and insatia-
ble curiosity, urging people to find out all they
could about the world and about man. They
turned eagerly to the study of classic literature
and ancient monuments, because these gave
the key to what seemed an immense store-
house of forgotten knowledge ; they were in
fact led to antiquity by the same impulse
which, a little later, brought about the in-
6 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
vention of the printing-press and the discovery
of America.
The first consequence of a return to classical
literature was the worship of human greatness.
Roman literature, which the Italians naturally
mastered much earlier than Greek, dealt chiefly
with politics and war, seeming to give an alto-
gether disproportionate place to the individual,
because it treated only of such individuals as
were concerned in great events. It is but a
step from realising the greatness of an event to
believing that the persons concerned in it were
equally great, and this belief, fostered by the
somewhat rhetorical literature of Rome, met
the new consciousness of personality more
than half way, and led to that unlimited admi-
ration for human genius and achievement
which was so prominent a feature of the early
Renaissance. The two tendencies reacted upon
each other. Roman literature stimulated the
admiration for genius, and this admiration in
turn reinforced the interest in that period of
the world's histor}^ when genius was supposed
to be the rule rather than the exception ; that
is to say, it reinforced the interest in antiquity.
THE RENAISSANCE 7
The spirit of discovery, the never satisfied
curiosity of this time, led to the study of
ancient art as well as of ancient literature, and
the love of antiquity led to the imitation of its
buildings and statues as well as of its books
and poems. Until comparatively recent times
scarcely any ancient paintings were found,
although buildings and statues were every,
where to be seen, the moment anyone seriously
thought of looking at them. The result was
that while the architecture and sculpture of
the Renaissance were directly and strongly
influenced by antiquity, painting felt its influ-
ence only in so far as the study of antiquity
in the other arts had conduced to better
draughtsmanship and purer taste. The spirit
of discovery could thus show itself only indi-
rectly in painting, — only in so far as it led
painters to the gradual perfection of the tech-
nical means of their craft
Unlimited admiration for genius and won-
der that the personalities of antiquity should
have survived with their great names in no
way diminished, soon had two consequences.
One was love of glory, and the other the
8 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
patronage of those arts which were supposed
to hand down a glorious name undiminished
to posterity. The glory of old Rome had
come down through poets and historians,
architects and sculptors, and the Italians, feel-
ing that the same means might be used to
hand down the achievements of their own time
to as distant a posterity, made a new religion
of glory, with poets and artists for the priests.
At first the new priesthood was confined almost
entirely to writers, but in little more than
a generation architects and sculptors began to
have their part. The passion for building is in
itself one of the most instinctive, and a man's
name and armorial bearings, tastefully but
prominently displayed upon a church or palace,
were as likely, it was felt, to hand him down
to posterity as the praise of poets or historians.
It was the passion for glory, in reality, rather
than any love of beauty, that gave the first
impulse to the patronage of the arts in the
Renaissance. Beauty was the concern of the
artists, although no doubt their patrons were
well aware that the more impressive a building
was, the more beautiful a monument, the more
THE RENAISSANCE 9
likely was it to be admired, and the more
likely were their names to reach posterity.
Their instincts did not mislead them, for where
their real achievements would have tempted
only the specialist or antiquarian into a study
of their career, the buildings and monuments
put up by them — by such princes as Sigis-
mondo Malatesta, Frederick of Urbino, or
Alfonzo of Naples, — have made the whole in-
telligent public believe that they were really
as great as they wished posterity to believe
them.
As painting had done nothing whatever to
transmit the glory of the great Romans, the
earlier generations of the Renaissance expected
nothing from it, and did not give it that
patronage which the Church, for its own pur-
poses, continued to hold out to it. The
Renaissance began to make especial use of
painting only when its own spirit had spread
very widely, and when the love of knowledge,
of power, and of glory had ceased to be the
only recognised passions, and when, following
the lead of the Church, people began to turn
to painting for the expression of deep emotion.
lO THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
The new religion, as I have called the love
of glory, is in its very essence a thing of this
world, founded as it is on human esteem.
The boundless curiosity of the Renaissance
led back inevitably to an interest in life and to
an acceptance of things for what they were, —
for their intrinsic quality. The moment people
stopped looking fixedly toward heaven their
eyes fell upon the earth, and they began to
see much on its surface that was pleasant.
Their own faces and figures must have struck
them as surprisingly interesting, and, consider-
ing how little St. Bernard and other mediaeval
saints and doctors had led them to expect,
singularly beautiful. A new feeling arose that
mere living was a big part of life, and with
it came a new passion, the passion for beauty,
for grace, and for comeliness.
It has already been suggested that the Re-
naissance was a period in the history of modern
Europe comparable to youth in the life of the
individual. It had all youth's love of finery
and of play. The more people were imbued
with the new spirit, the more they loved pa-
geants. The pageant was an outlet for many of
THE RENAISSANCE II
the dominant passions of the time, for there a
man could display all the finery he pleased,
satisfy his love of antiquity by masquerading as
Caesar or Hannibal, his love of knowledge by
finding out how the Romans dressed and rode
in triumph, his love of glory by the display of
wealth and skill in the management of the cere-
mony, and, above all, his love of feeling himself
alive. Solemn writers have not disdained to
describe to the minutest details many of the
pageants which they witnessed.
We have seen that the earlier elements of
the Renaissance, the passion for knowledge and
glory, were not of the kind to give a new im-
pulse to painting. Nor was the passion for
antiquity at all so direct an inspiration to that
art as it was to architecture and sculpture. The
love of glory had, it is true, led such as could
not afford to put up monumental buildings, to
decorate chapels with frescoes in which their
portraits were timidly introduced. But it was
only when the Renaissance had attained to a
full consciousness of its interest in life and en-
joyment of the world that it naturally turned,
and indeed was forced to turn, to painting; for
12 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
it is obvious that painting is peculiarly fitted
for rendering the appearances of things with a
cflow of liffht and richness of colour that cor-
respond to and express warm human emotions.
IV. Painting and the Renaissance. —
When it once reached the point where its
view of the world naturally sought expression
in painting, as religious ideas had done before,
the Renaissance found in Venice clearer utter-
ance than elsewhere, and it is perhaps this fact
which makes the most abiding interest of
Venetian painting. It is at this point that we
shall take it up.
The growing delight in life with the conse-
quent love of health, beauty, and joy were felt
more powerfully in Venice than anywhere else
in Italy. The explanation of this may be found
in the character of the Venetian government
which was such that it gave little room for the
satisfaction of the passion for personal glory,
and kept its citizens so busy in duties of state
that they had small leisure for learning. Some
of the chief passions of the Renaissance thus
finding no outlet in Venice, the other passions
PAINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE I 3
insisted all the more on being satisfied. Venice,
moreover, was the only state in Italy which
was enjoying, and for many generations had
been enjoying, internal peace. This gave the
Venetians a love of comfort, of ease, and of
splendour, a refinement of manner, and humane-
ness of feeling, which made them the first
really modern people in Europe. Since there
was little room for personal glory in Venice,
the perpetuators of glory, the Humanists, found
at first scant encouragement there, and the
Venetians were saved from that absorption in
archaeology and pure science which overwhelmed
Florence at an early date. This was not neces-
sarily an advantage in itself, but it happened
to suit Venice, where the conditions of life had
for some time been such as to build up a love
of beautiful things. As it was, the feeling for
beauty was not hindered in its natural devel-
opment. Archaeology would have tried to
submit it to the good taste of the past, a
proceeding w^hich rarely promotes good taste
in the present. Too much archaeology and too
much science might have ended in making
Venetian art academic, instead of letting it be-
14 THE VENETIAN PAINTERS
come what it did, the product of a natural
ripening of interest in Hfe and love of pleasure.
In Florence, it is true, painting had developed
almost simultaneously with the other arts, and
it may be due to this very cause that the Flor-
entine painters never quite realised what a
different task from the architect's and sculp-
tor's was theirs. At the time, therefore, when
the Renaissance was beginning to find its best
expression in painting, the Florentines were
already too much attached to classical ideals of
form and composition, in other words, too aca-
demic, to give embodiment to the throbbing
feeling for life and pleasure.
Thus it came to pass that in the Venetian pic-
tures of the end of the fifteenth century we
find neither the contrition nor the devotion of