woman who is cutting the throat of Holofernes as
a batcher slaughters a sheep ? This is a common de-
fect with Caravaggio, and one that is shared by many
otiier painters, even of our own time, this contradic-
tion between the title of a picture and the manner in
which it is rendered. It would be better to take
away the name and leave only the action represent-
ed ; Judith would then be a courtesan assassinating her
lover in order to rob him. Reduced to that ignoble
subject, the picture would, be irreproachable.

Caravaggio, indeed, when he is on his own ground
is an eminent artist. He appears thus at the Louvre,
in his Fortune-teller, and in the excellent portrait of
a Grand-master of Malta in his armor; he is also
seen to be a great artist at Rome in the picture of
the Gamesters, in which a young gentleman is seen
robbed by two swindlers ; and at Vienna (in the
Lichtenstein Gallery), in the portrait of a young girl
playing on the lute. This is an extraordinary work,
for, laying aside his habitual exaggeration, his in-
clination to the ugly and strange, the master here
shines in truth, grace, nobility, and beauty. Ca-
ravaggio was a mason, who became a painter by
seeing frescoes painted on the moist plaster he had
laid on the walls ; he was a painter who remained a
mason, rough, unlettered, professing to despise anti-
quity, and scoffing at Raphael and Correggio ; wishing
for no other model thnn natnrc, he studied common*
16



242 WONDERS OF ITALIAN AST.

place and low nature ; yet in his fiery execution he
attained a degree of energy, power, and truth, the
only defect of which is probably their own excess.



"Venetian School.

If we were here speaking of every branch of art,
it would be necessary to notice that the wonderful
and unique city of Venice is a perfect museum of
architecture. The Spaniards call Cadiz " the Stone
Ship," because — built on a little island of sand, in the
midst of the sea, and resting on the waters like the
nest of the halcyon — the waves of the ocean are
always beating against its strong Avails. Venice,
" the town which though flooded utters no cry for
help" — Venice, composed of a multitude of small
islands crowded together, and whose streets are
narrow arms of the sea which wind through the midst
of dwellings, deserves the appellation of a Fleet of
Stone. And these streets, without noise, without
dirt or dust — these canals, in fact, are like the gal-
leries of an architectural museum ; whilst the fronts
of the palaces are like so many pictures, on which the
spectator can gaze on either side, whilst passing at
his ease in his gondola. But it is with only one of
the three arts of design that we have to do here.

After the general glance that we have taken in the
preceding chapters, at the origin of painting in Italy
till the time of the Renaissance, and the formation of
the different schools, we shall not have to go back



VENETIAN SCiIOOL. 2-^



i »




very far in the history of the one of which wo arc
now speaking. We have already spoken of the ok)
Mosaics of the eleventh and twelfth centuries which
succeeded in turning Venice into an oriental and
Byzantine town. It will he sufficient now to men-
tion, among the greatest curiosities of the school, the
attempts of old Bartolommeo Vivarini, and the more
advanced works of his son and grandson, Luigi Viva-
rini the elder and the younger ; also some of the im-
mense pictures called anconn, (which combine several
subjects in their different compartments), the best-
known painters of which are Lorenzo Veneziano and
Nicolo Semitecolo ; and lastly, some important works
of the brothers Giovanni and Antonio de Murano,
who always worked together.

There are two other brothers, the Bellini, who
head the period of the rich and fertile Venetian
School. Yet the elder of the two, Gentile Bellini
(1421-1507), was a solitary painter, a traveller, who,
strictly speaking, had no pupils, and who did not
make art his profession. He even limited himself to
anecdotal painting, a kind for which his travels
afforded him ample material. It is known that ho
passed several years of his life at Constantinople,
whither, in spite of the curse of the Prophet against,
every image of a living person, he had been called
after the conquest by Mahomet II., who employed
him in numerous works. They say that it was to
him the alarming adventure occurred of seeing a
slave decapitated nt the order of the sultan, who wish



244 WONDERS OF ITALIAN ART.

ed to show the painter, from nature, the movement
of the muscles of the neck upon the head being cut
off. There is, at the Louvre, a most curious work b}
Gentile Bellini, the JRecejjtion of a Venetian Am-
bassador at Constantinople, which represents, with
scrupulous fidelity and remarkable talent, the scenes,
costumes, and manners, in the new capital of the
Ottomans. Two compositions of the same kind have
also been secured by the museum at Venice. These
are of two miracles, in which, by means ot the relics
of the Holy Cross, he had been preserved during the
course of his life ; the one on the square of St. Mark,
the other on the Great Canal. Gentile, who was
born in 1421, was very old when he painted them,
yet they are as interesting for the manner in which
they are executed as for their subject. They are still
true pages of history, and serve as records of his time.
After Gentile Bellini may be placed Vittore Car-
paccio, (from about 1455 to about 1525), who appears
to have been his disciple, and who reminds us, by his
simple grace, his delicate touch, and his poetic feel-
ing, both of Fra Angelico of the Italians, and of
Hemling of the Flemings. He is not well known,
except in his own country, to which he seems to have
bequeathed all his works. Amongst these are nine
great pictures which depict the legend of /St. Ursula
and her Companions, from the arrival of the King
of England's ambassadors to demand for his son the
hand of the young and noble maiden of Cologne, to
ll ie apotheosis of the eleven thousand virgins. There



VENETIAN SCHOOL. 245

is plenty of imagination in this painting, and also
clearness and order. Another is on the legend of
The Execution of ten thousand Martyrs crucified on
Mount Ararat, for Carpaccio we may see was not
afraid to handle vast subjects or to introduce his per-
sonages by thousands. Lastly, there is a Presentation
of Jems in the Temple, in which the old Simeon is
singing his canticle between two cardinals. This is
a work full at once of grace and vigor ; and, but for
some stiffness of outline, would deserve to be com-
pared with the most beautiful works of the school.

Not to interrupt the series of true Venetians, I
shall mention, after Carpaccio, another painter of the
same period, who, though he ought, by his birth and
his studies, to have belonged to Venice, remained a
Lombard both in style and execution. This was
Giambattista Cima da Conegliano (from about 1400
to about 1518). Referring to the name of his native
town, he used to put a rabbit (coniglio) in some
corner of his paintings. It was his signature, as
Garofalo's was a pink. A sense of youthful freshness
in bis compositions, an almost childish symmetry, a
studied correctness of drawing, a natural nobility in
his heads (too small, however, generally for the length
of the body), have given him the name of the Masac-
cio of Venetian art. A glorified Virgin called the Ma-
donna with Six Saints, a representation of the legend
of St. Thomas Touching the Sick, are still at Venice,
to testify to bis merits. But they may be recognized
even at the Louvre in another picture of the Virgin,



246 WONDERS OF ITALIAN AKT.

to whom Mary Magdalen is offering a vase of per
fume. The rocky landscape which forms the back-
ground is a view of the country of Conegliano.

The true Venetian school begins with Giovanni
Bellini (1426-1516). He had received his first lessons
from his father, Jacopo Bellini, a disciple of old Gen-
tile da Fabriano, surnamed Mayister magistrorum /
but, according to Borghini and Ridolfi, he discovered
the secret of oil-painting by obtaining admittance,
under the disguise of a patrician, to the studio of An-
tonello of Messina, who had then returned from
Flanders, and thus seeing him prepare his colors.
Giovanni Bellini was in his youth the master of Car-
paccio and Cima, who both retained his earliest
style ; afterwards in his maturity, the great Vene-
tians, Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto were his
pupils. His painting is correct and highly finished.
His marvellous patience in the representation of the
smallest objects strikes one as much as the purity of
his taste and his appreciation of the beautiful. A
great colorist also, though somewhat timid, Bellini is
in this point the leader of the school which followed
him ; and when in his old age he saw the beautiful
effects of chiaroscuro produced by Giorgione, he
learnt himself to give more warmth to his style and
greater breadth to his pencil. He became the pupil
of his pupil in the same way that at the same period
Perugino was of Raphael. At first natural and simple
like his predecessors, Bellini's style afterwards became
more skilful and bold like that of his successors.



VENETIAN SCHOOL. 247

We cannot become acquainted with the eminent
chief of this school at Paris. There is nothing be>
longing to him at the Louvre, not even his portrait,
because the two young men placed opposite each
other in the same frame, which are assumed to be the
portraits of the Bellini, taken by the younger, are
evidently wrongly named. The youthfulness of the
portraits is in manifest contradiction to the style and
touch which would belong to the old age of the
painter. Venice, happily, has collected several of
the most beautiful works of Bellini. Besides a good
many pictures which have remained in the churches,
and are for the greater part much defaced, the Acad-
emy of Fine Arts possesses five. All are uniformly
glorified Madonnas. One is called the Madonna
with Four Saints, another, the Madonna with Six
Saints, like that of Cima da Conegliano. There,
amidst five Christian saints, we see the old patriarch
Job, the painting having been originally executed for
the now suppressed church of San Giobbe. It is a
magnificent composition, worthy, from its noble style
ind beautiful execution, to be placed in the first rank
of Bellini's works. " It is remarkable," M. Charles
Blanc says, " that in spite of the rich, intense, and
varied coloring of this picture, it yet appeals to our
heart rather than to our eye. Its soft murmur
soothes us in the midst of the uproar of the Venetian
school."

Bellini has painted none but religious pictures ;
indeed, almost exclusively Madonnas, — from the one



248 WONDERS OF ITALIAN ART.

who holds the Child to her bosom, to that in which
she bears on her knee the body of her dead Son, and
at last shares in heaven the glory of the three persons
of the Holy Trinity. One of these Madonnas is pos-
sessed by the infant museum of Leipsic. The Studi
of Naples, however, can boast of a Transfiguration,
which is an excellent as well as curious painting.
This Transfiguration, in imitation of Giotto, only
represents the principal episode, Jesus between Moses
and Elias, rising above the group of apostles. But
it gave to Raphael the idea of treating the same sub-
ject in vaster proportions, adding the people at the
foot of the mountain, the child possessed with a
devil, and all the details given in the gospel of Saint
Matthew. The two portraits by Bellini, belonging
to the National Gallery in London and the Belvedere
in Vienna, are doubly valuable for their rarity. The
former is of the old doge, Leonardo Loredano, and in
it, the physical decrepitude, the strong mental intel-
ligence, and inexorable obstinacy, of the founder of
the State- Inquisition are admirably depicted ; the lat-
ter is the portrait of a young girl combing her hair
before a mirror. As Loredano was only elected doge
in 1501, and the portrait of the young girl bears the
signature, Johannes Bellinus, facicbat MDXY., the
one must have been painted when Bellini was sev-
enty-five, the other when he was eighty-nine. His
was a laborious old age, almost as astonishing as that
of Titian.

If his master and his fellow-students lived to be



VENETIAN SCHOOL. 249

venerable, it was not so with Giorgione (Giorgio Bar-
barelli di Castel franco, 1477-1511), who died at the
age of thirty-four, of grief, it is said, for the loss of a
loved mistress. By showing the secret of thick lay-
ers of coloring, by throwing out bright lights by
means of deep shadows, bright, in short, by all the
most skilful and wonderful effects of chiaroscuro,
Giorgione led the whole Venetian school into the
worship of coloring. He became, as we have before
said, the master of his master, he was also that of his
fellow-students. Titian, among others, only surpassed
him because he outlived him by more than sixty
years. It was of Giorgione that the president de
Brosses said with justice and truth, u I should place
him as a colorist in the same rank with Michael An-
gel o as a designer." As he died so young, and had
employed himself principally in painting frescoes,
either for the palace of the doges or for the facades
of edifices since destroyed (amongst others the Cham
ber of Commerce, called Fondaco de Tedeschi), Gior-
gione has left but few works of the easel that can be
strictly termed pictures. Let us search carefully for
these all over Europe.

The churches and convents of Yenice, so numer-
ous, and so rich in works of art, do not possess a sin-
gle one, neither docs the ducal palace. The Acad-
emy of Fine Arts has only succeeded in obtaining
one composition, St. Mark appeasing the Tempest,
and only one portrait, that of an unknown nobleman.
In his own city we can best become acquainted with



250 WONDERS OF ITALIAN ART.

Giorgione at the Manfrini palace, which possesses the
picture called The Three Portraits, so justly cele-
brated by Lord Byron. Florence has fared better.
The Uffizi has inherited a Moses, a Judgment of
Solomon, and a Mystical Allegory, as well as the por-
traits of a knight of Malta, and of General Gattame-
lata, both of marvellous beauty and vigor. The Pitti
palace also proudly displays a Moses saved from the
Water, a Nymph pursued by a Satyr, and a Musical
Concert, a favorite subject of this master, who was
an excellent musician, and sought after by the Vene-
tian nobility both as a singer and lute-player.

But, in truth, I do not know whether Giorgione
is not seen to greater advantage out of Italy than
even at Venice or Florence itself. In Spain, for in-
stance, he can be much better understood and ad-
mired. His picture of David hilling Goliath, which
has been conveyed to the Museo del Bey, exhibits
that boldness and ease so entirely Venetian, of which
he had given the first example. But all the qualities
of this great master are still more brilliantly shown
in a picture brought from the Escurial, to which we
can give no other name than a Family Portrait. In
front of a gentleman in complete armor, who seems,
like Hector, to be setting out for the war, a lady, a
second Andromache, tears herself from the caresses
of a young Astyanax, to replace him in the arms of
her attendant. This is the whole subject of the pic-
ture, and the half-length figures are of unknown per-
sons. But, in its way, it is a perfect and astonishing



VENETIAN SCUOOL. 251

work, which delights and at the same time saddens
ns ; fur in this magnificent work, the last expression
of the artist's genius, we read what Giorgione might
have become, and to what height his glory might
have reached, if he had had the time to be as fertile
us he was bold and powerful.

There are only two specimens of his best stylo at
the Louvre : one is of a subject in which he took in-
terest, because he was not less celebrated fur his
musical talents and amiable disposition than for his
great genius as a painter ; it is called A Rural Con-
cert • the other is a superb Holy Family, called, I
believe, a Saint Sebastian, because the centre group
is placed between this young martyr and a Saint
Catherine. These two pictures came, after passing
through the galleries of the dukes of Mantua and of
Charles I., by Jabach and Mazarin, to the cabinet of
Louis XIV. Although they cannot be placed in the
first rank of Giorgione's works, they yet present fine
examples of those skilful contrasts, that happy blend-
ing of detail in the general effect, that delicacy of
tint, and that powerful coloring, of which Giorgiono
had the honor of first exhibiting a perfect model. In
Germanv are to be found a few of those rare works
in which Giorgione has carried to its extreme limits
the knowledge and power of chiaroscuro. One of
the best is in the rich gallery at Dresden, the Meet-
ing of Jacob and Rachel, in the midst of their ser-
vants and flocks. The Belvedere at Vienna, with the
excellent portrait of a Knight in Ar?nor, the Young



252



WONDERS OF ITALIAN ART.



Mem crowned with vine-leaves, who is accosted by a
bandit, and the David carrying the sword of Goliath,
also possesses the picture known by the name of the
Three Surveyors, who are, rather, three astrologers.
This is a noble and spirited composition, possessing




The Looking-Glass.
By Titian.



the additional merit of an excellent landscape, cpiite
a rarity then, and, indeed, almost a novelty in Italy.
Lastly, Munich possesses the splendid portrait of the
painter by himself. Giorgione has a large head, full
of strength and energy ; an open, noble, and intelli-



VENETIAN SCHOOL. 253

gent face, and looking at this excellent likeness of a

man so richly gifted, one can almost curse the fickle
beauty whose desertion killed the great artist in the
prime of life, before the time for his greatest works.

Giorgione brings ns to Titian, whom he had a
little preceded, not in his life (they were of the same
age), but in the adoption, I may say the invention,
of their common style. Tiziano Vecellio, of Cadore
(1477-1576) was, it is said, the great-great-nephew of
the bishop of Odezzo, Saint Titian. He came while
quite young to the studio of Bellini in Venice, and
passed in that city the whole of his long patriarchal
life, dying there at last of the plague, at the age of
ninety-nine. As, from his tenderest infancy to his
extreme old age, he possessed a delight in work, and
a facility in execution, and also, like all other mas
ters, was helped in his larger compositions by chosen
pupils, it is not surprising that Titian should have
left an immense number of works, or that every col-
lection in Europe should have gathered some frag-
ments of them. This ubiquity in a painter, if one
may so speak, is necessary to his fame. The work
of a musician is copied, printed, spread. Mozart had
only written the Don Giovanni, and Rossini, 11
Barbiere di Siviglia, when they became everywhere
known and celebrated. But a picture can only be in
one place, and can only be seen there. Consequent-
ly, for his celebrity to eqnal his merit, a painter ought
to add to all his natural or acquired qualities that of
fertility.



254 W0NDER8 OF ITALIAN ART.

Venice is more fortunate with regard to Titian
than to Giorgione, for many of his works are pre-
served in its museum, churches, and in the palaces
of its doges and patricians. I have counted thirty-
three of them, amongst which are several of the most
important and most justly famous. At the Accade-
mia delle Belle Arti, his whole history is written.
There are the first trials of a yet uncertain youth, the
last occupations of an old age, voluntarily laborious,
and the perfection of his middle age.

A Visitation of Saint Elizabeth, in small propor-
tions, is considered the earliest existing work of this
great man. He painted this somewhat weak picture
when scarcely more than a child, hesitating between
the imitation of his master, Giovanni Bellini, that of
some Flemish painters lately arrived at Venice, and
the new style of his fellow-student Giorgione. The
forms are stiff and the colors tame, but one can
already clearly see the direction in which his natural
inclinations were leading him.

His last work, on the other hand, is a Descent
from the Cross, which death prevented his finishing.
On examining this picture closely, we can see all the
confused and heavy work of a trembling hand and
dim eye ; and yet at a little distance it is full of
effect, force, and grandeur. Some parts of this ven-
erable Deposition which had been left incomplete
were finished bv the elder Palma, according to the
pious inscription traced at the bottom : Quod Titia-
nus inchoatum reliquit, Palm a reverenter alsolvit,
Deoquc rficavit optis.



VENETIAN SCHOOL. 255

The two large compositions at the Academy of
the Fine Arts in Venice, representing the commence-
ment and the close of the History of the Virgin ; her
Presentation in the Temple, and her Assumption to
Heaven, indicate the maturity and the culminating
point of the genius of Titian. The first is a singular
imagination, suggested doubtless by tradition. In it
are seen the external flight of stairs leading to the
vestibule of the temple, the neighboring houses, the
streets in perspective, mountains in the background,
and a crowd of people. Mary, the young girl who
ascends the steps alone, is the least part of the pic-
ture, which is none the less an admirable specimen
of the Venetian style, already inclining more to the
real than to the ideal. The two kinds of merit in
painting, the real and the ideal, which ought to be
inseparable, arc seen together in the Assumption, so
widely celebrated, and now so well known from hav-
ing been reproduced in every possible method. The
remembrance of this famous composition had been in
some way lost, till happily Cicognara discovered it,
much smoked, on a high wall in the church of the
Frari, and exchanged it for a new picture. Since
this discovery, the Assumption has been considered
Titian's chef-d'oeuvre. It sealed his growing reputa-
tion, whether he painted it, according to some, in
1507, at the very time that Raphael was revealing
himself at Rome in the Dispute of the Holy Sacra-
ment, or according to others, and which seems to me
more probable, in 151 ft, when he was thirty-nine



^56 WONDERS OF ITALIAN ART.

years old. It' is indeed useless to extol its various
beauties, to attempt to describe the mysterious majes-
ty of the Eternal Father, the dazzling radiancy of
the group of the Virgin, borne by thirty little angels,
or the vigorous reality of the witnesses of the mira-
cle ; it is sufficient to say, that in this picture Titian
fully merits the name given him by his biographers
and admirers, of the greatest colorist of Italy ; and I
may add, that if he cannot quite be called the great-
est colorist in the world, at least there are none to
share this title with him but Rubens, Velasquez, and
Rembrandt. Titian was, in the Venetian school,
what Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael,
and Correggio were at Milan, Florence, Rome, and
Parma. " He absorbed his predecessors, and hope-
lessly forestalled his successors," say the annotators
of Vasari. To the school of Bellini, till this time
kept back by scruples of tradition and by dread of
difficulties, ho imparted boldness and readiness, in
fact, full liberty both of conception and of execution.
Another of the great chefs-d'oeuvre of Titian, and
we might almost say of painting, is still* at Venice,
in the church of Saint John and Saint Paul (usually
called San Zanipolo). It is the murder of Saint Peter
Martyr. The subject of this vast composition is the
death of a Dominican monk named Pietro di Verona,
who was assassinated in a wood, while returning with

* This great work of Titian was destroyed by fire in 1867. A
magnificent Madonna by Bellini, and several pictures of less import
anci, perished at the same time.



VKNFTIAN SCHOOL. 257

another monk from some council. Tie was canonized,
and his tragic death recorded amongst the hest au-
thenticated legends. No hind of honor that could
have heen paid to tliis picture lias been wanting-
first, the senate of Venice having learnt that a cer-
tain Daniel Nil had offered to pay eighteen thousand
crowns for it to the Dominican possessors of the
church of San Zanipolo, forbade the monks by a spe-
cial decree, and under pain of death, to allow it to
go out of the territory of the republic ; then Do-
menichino made a copy of it. which in spite of its
eminent beauties has not attained to the grandeur of