The Venetian School of Painting Part 8

When Giorgione, the son of a member of the house of Barbarelli and a peasant girl of Vedelago, came down to Venice, we gather that he had nothing of the provincial. Vasari, who must often have heard of him from t.i.tian, describes him as handsome, engaging, of distinguished appearance, beloved by his friends, a favourite with women, fond of dress and amus.e.m.e.nt, an admirable musician, and a welcome guest in the houses of the great. He was evidently no peasant-bred lad, but probably, though there is no record of the fact, was brought up, like many illegitimate children, in the paternal mansion. His home was not far from the lagoons, in one of the most beautiful places it is possible to imagine, on a lovely and fertile plain running up to the Asolean hills and with the Julian Alps lying behind. We guess that he received his education in the school of Bellini, for when that master sold his allegory of the "Souls in Paradise" to one of the Medici, to adorn the summer villa of Poggio Imperiale, there went with it the two small canvases now in the Uffizi, the "Ordeal of Moses" and the "Judgment of Solomon," delightful little paintings in Giorgione's rich and distinctive style, but less accomplished than Bellini's picture, and with imperfections in the drawing of drapery and figures which suggest that they are the work of a very young man. The love of the Venetians for decorating the exterior of their palaces with fresco led to Giorgione being largely employed on work which was unhappily a grievous waste of time and talent, as far as posterity is concerned. We have a record of facades covered with spirited compositions and heraldic devices, of friezes with Bacchus and Mars, Venus and Mercury. Zanetti, in his seventeenth-century prints, has preserved a n.o.ble figure of "Fort.i.tude" grasping an axe, but beyond a few fragments nothing has survived. Before he was thirty Giorgione was entrusted with the important commission of decorating the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. This building, which we hear of so often in connection with the artists of Venice, was the trading-house for German, Hungarian, and Polish merchants. The Venetian Government surrounded these merchants with the most jealous restrictions. Every a.s.sistant and servant connected with them was by law a Venetian, and, in fact, a spy of the Republic. All transactions of buying and selling were carried out by Venetian brokers, of whom some thirty were appointed. As time went on, some of these brokers.h.i.+ps must have resolved themselves into sinecure offices, for we find Bellini holding one, and certainly without discharging any of the original duties, and they seem to have become some sort of State retainers.h.i.+ps. In 1505 the old Fondaco had been burnt to the ground, and the present building was rising when Giorgione and t.i.tian were boys. A decree went forth that no marble, carving, or gilding were to be used, so that painting the outside was the only alternative. The roof was on in 1507, and from that date Giorgione, t.i.tian, and Morto da Feltre were employed in the adornment of the facade. Vasari is very much exercised over Giorgione's share in these decorations. "One does not find one subject carefully arranged," he complains, "or which follows correctly the history or actions of ancients or moderns. As for me, I have never been able to understand the meaning of these compositions, or have met any one able to explain them to me. Here one sees a man with a lion's head, beside a woman. Close by one comes upon an angel or a Love: it is all an inexplicable medley." Yet he is delighted with the brilliancy of the colour and the splendid execution, and adds, "Colour gives more pleasure in Venice than anywhere else."

Among other early work was the little "Adoration of the Magi," in the National Gallery, and the so-called "Philosophers" at Vienna. According to the latest reading, this last ill.u.s.trates Virgil's legend that when the Trojan aeneas arrived in Italy, Evander pointed out the future site of Rome to the ancient seer and his son. Giorgione, in painting the scene, is absorbed in the beauty of nature. It is his first great landscape, and all accessories have been sacrificed to intensity of effect. He revels in the glory of the setting sun, the broad tranquil ma.s.ses of foliage, the long evening shadows, and the effect of dark forms silhouetted against the radiant light.

CHAPTER XV

GIORGIONE (_continued_)

When Giorgione was twenty-six he went back to Castelfranco, and painted an altarpiece for the Church of San Liberale. In the sixteenth century Tuzio Costanza, a well-known captain of Free Companions, who had made his fortune in the wars, where he had been attached to Catherine Cornaro, followed the dethroned queen from Cyprus, and when she retired to Asolo, settled near her at Castelfranco. His son, Matteo, entered the service of the Venetian Republic, and became a leader of fifty lances; but Matteo was killed at the battle of Ravenna in 1504, and Costanza had his son's body embalmed and buried in the family chapel.

Nothing is known of the details of this commission, but we are not straining the bounds of probability by a.s.suming that in a little town like Castelfranco, hardly more than a village, the two youths must have been well known to each other, and that this acquaintance and the familiarity of the one with the appearance of the other may have been the determining cause which led the bereaved father to give the commission to the young painter, while the tragic circ.u.mstances were such as would appeal to an ardent, enthusiastic nature. A treasure of our National Gallery is a study made by Giorgione for the figure of San Liberale, who is represented as a young man with bare head and crisp, golden locks, dressed in silver armour, copied from the suit in which Matteo Costanza is dressed in the stone effigy which is still preserved in the cemetery at Castelfranco. At the side of the stone figure lies a helmet, resembling that on the head of the saint in the altarpiece.

In Giorgione's group the Mother and Child are enthroned on high, with St. Francis and St. Liberale on either hand. The Child's glance is turned upon the soldier-saint, a gallant figure with his lance at rest, his dagger on his hip, his gloves in his hand, young, high-bred, with features of almost feminine beauty. The picture is conceived in a new spirit of simplicity of design, and shows a new feeling for restraint in matters of detail. It is the work of a man who has observed that early morning, like late evening, has a marvellous power of eliminating all unessential accessories and of enveloping every object in a delicious scheme of light. Repainted, cleaned, restored as the canvas is, it is still full of an atmosphere of calm serenity. It is not the ecstatic, devotional reverie of Perugino's saints. The painter of Castelfranco has not steeped his whole soul in religious imagination, like the painter of Umbria; he is an exemplar of the lyric feeling; his work is a poem in praise of youth and beauty, and dreams in air and suns.h.i.+ne. He uses atmosphere to enhance the mood, but Giorgione carries his unison of landscape with human feeling much further than Perugino; he observes the delicate effects of light, and limpid air circulates in his distance.

The sun rising over the sea throws a glamour and purity of early morning over a scene meant to glorify the memory of a young life. The painter shows his connection with his master by using the figure of the St.

Francis in Bellini's San Giobbe altarpiece. What Bellini owed to Giorgione is still a matter for speculation. The San Zaccaria altarpiece was, as we have seen, painted in the year following that of Castelfranco. Something has incited the old painter to fresh efforts; out of his own evolution, or stimulated by his pupil's splendid experiments, he is drawn into the golden atmosphere of the Venetian cinque-cento.

The Venetian painters were distinguished by their love for the kindred art of music. Giorgione himself was an admirable musician, and linked with all that is akin to music in his work, is his love for painting groups of people knit together by this bond. He uses it as a pastime to bring them into company, and the rich chords of colour seem permeated with the chords of sound. Not always, however, does he need even this excuse; his "conversation-pieces" are often merely composed of persons placed with indescribable grace in exquisite surroundings, governed by a mood which communicates itself to the beholder.

With the Florentines, the cartoon was carefully drawn upon the wall and flat tints were superimposed. They knew beforehand what the effect was to be; but the Venetians from this time gradually worked up the picture, imbedding tints, intensifying effects, one touch suggesting another, till the whole rich harmony was gradually evoked. With the Florentines, too, the figures supply the main interest; the background is an arbitrary addition, placed behind them at the painter's leisure, but Giorgione's and t.i.tian's _fetes champetres_ and concerts could not _be_ at all in any other environment. The amber flesh-tints and the glowing garments are so blended with the deep tones of the landscape, that one would not instil the mood the artist desires without the other. Piero di Cosimo and Pintoricchio can place delightful nymphs and fairy princesses in idyllic scenes, and they stir no emotion in us beyond an observant pleasure, a detached amus.e.m.e.nt; but Giorgione's gloomy blues, his figures s.h.i.+ning through the warm dusk of a summer evening, waken we hardly know what of vague yearning and brooding memory.

In the "Fete Champetre" of the Louvre he acquires a frankly sensuous charm. He becomes riper, richer in feeling, and displays great exuberance of style. The woman filling her pitcher at the fountain is exquisite in line and curve and amber colour. She seems to listen lazily to the liquid fall of the water mingling with the half-heard music of the pipes. The beautiful idyll in the Giovanelli Palace is full of art of composition. It is built up with uprights; pillars are formed by the groups of trees and figures, cut boldly across by the horizontal line of the bridge, but the figures themselves are put in without any attention to subject, though an unconscious humorist has discovered in them the domestic circle of the painter. The man in Venetian dress is there to a.s.sist the left-hand columnar group, placed at the edge of the picture after the manner of Leonardo. The woman and child lighten the ma.s.s of foliage on the right and make a beautiful pattern. The white town of Castelfranco sings against the threatening sky, the winds bl.u.s.ter through the s.p.a.ce, the trees s.h.i.+ver with the coming storm. Here and there leafy boughs are struck in with a slight, crisp touch, in which we can follow readily the painter's quick impression.

The "Knight of Malta" is a grand magisterial figure, majestic, yet full of ardent warmth lying behind the grave, indifferent n.o.bility. The face is bisected with shadow, in the way which Michelangelo and Andrea del Sarto affected, and the cone-shaped head with parted hair is of the type which seems particularly to have pleased the painter. To Giorgione, too, belongs the honour of having created a Venus as pure as the Aphrodite of Cnidos and as beautiful as a courtesan of t.i.tian.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Giorgione._ FeTE CHAMPeTRE.

_Louvre._ (_Photo, Alinari._)]

The death of Giorgione from plague in 1511 is registered by all the oldest authorities. His body was conveyed to Castelfranco by members of the Barbarelli family and buried in the Church of San Liberale. In 1638 an epitaph was placed over his tomb by Matteo and Ercole Barbarelli.

Allowing that he was hardly more than twenty when his new manner began to gain a following, he had only some twelve years in which to establish his deep and lasting influence. We divine that he was a man of strong personality, such a one as warms and stimulates his companions. Even his nickname tells us something,--Great George, the Chief, the George of Georges,--it seems to express him as a leader. And we have no lack of proof that he was admired and looked up to. His style became the only one that found favour in Venice, and the painters of the day did their best to conform to it. Few authentic examples are left from his own hand, but out of his conscious and devoted and more or less successful imitators, there grew up a school, "out of all those fascinating works, rightly or wrongly attributed to him; out of many copies from, or variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen, whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons, prized as his; out of the immediate impression he made upon his contemporaries and with which he continued in men's minds; out of many traditions of subject and treatment which really descend from him to our own time, and by retracing which we fill out the original image."

Summing up all these influences, he has left us the Giorgionesque; the art of choosing a moment in which the subject and the elements of colour and design are so perfectly fused and blended that we have no need to ask for any more articulate story; a moment into which all the significance, the fulness of existence has condensed itself, so that we are conscious of the very essence of life. Those idylls of beings wrapped into an ideal dreamland by music and the sound of water and the beauty of wood and mountain and velvet sward, need all our conscious apprehension of life if we are to drink in their full fascination. The dream of the Lotos-eaters can only come with force to those who can contrast it adequately with the experience, the complication, and the thousand distractions of an over-civilised world. Rest and relaxation, the power of the deeply tinted eventide, or of the fresh morning light, and the calm that drinks in the sensations they are able to afford, are among the precious things of life. The instinct upon which Giorgione's work rests is the satisfying of the feeling as well as the thinking faculty, the life of the heart, as compared to the life of the intellect, the solution of life's problems by love instead of by thought. It was the Eastern ideal, and its positive expression is conveyed by means of colour, deep, restful, satisfying, fused and controlled by chiaroscuro rather than by form.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS

Berlin. Portrait of a Man.

Buda-Pesth. Portrait of a Man.

Castelfranco. Duomo: Madonna with SS. Francis and Liberale.

Dresden. Sleeping Venus.

Florence. Uffizi: Trial of Moses (E.); Judgment of Solomon (E.); Knight of Malta.

Hampton Court. A Shepherd.

Madrid. Madonna with SS. Roch and Anthony of Padua.

Paris. Fete Champetre.

Rome. Villa Borghese: Portrait of a Lady.

Venice. Seminario: Apollo and Daphne.

Palazzo Giovanelli: Gipsy and Soldier.

San Rocco: Christ bearing Cross.

Boston. Mrs. Gardner: Christ bearing Cross.

London. Sketch of a Knight; Adoration of Shepherds.

Viscount Allendale: Adoration of Shepherds.

Vienna. Evander showing aeneas the Future Site of Rome.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GIORGIONESQUE

Giorgione had given the impulse, and all the painters round him felt his power. The Venetian painters that is, for it is remarkable, at a time when the men of one city observed and studied and took hints from those of every other, how faint are the signs that this particular manner attracted any great attention in other art centres. Leonardo da Vinci was a master of chiaroscuro, but he used it only to express his forms, and never sacrifices to it the delicacy and fineness of his design. It is the one quality Raphael never a.s.similates, except for a brief instant at the period when Sebastian del Piombo had arrived in Rome from Venice. It takes hold most strongly upon Andrea del Sarto, who seems, significantly enough, to have had no very p.r.o.nounced intellectual capacity, but in Venice itself it now became the only way. The old Bellini finds in it his last and fullest ideal; Catena, Basaiti, Cariani do their best to acquire it, and so successfully was it acquired, so congenial was it to Venetian art, that even second- and third-rate Venetian painters have usually something attractive which triumphs over superficial and doubtful drawing and grouping. It is easy to see how much to their taste was this fused and golden manner, this disregard of defined form, and this new play of chiaroscuro. The Venetian room in the National Gallery is full of such examples: the Nymphs and _Amoretti_ of No. 1695, charming figures against melting vines and olives; "Venus and Adonis," in which a bewitching Cupid chases a b.u.t.terfly; Lovers in a landscape, roaming in the summer twilight; scenes in which neither person nor scenery is a pretext for the other, but each has its full share in arousing the desired emotion. Such pictures are ascribed to, or taken from Giorgione by succeeding critics, but have all laid hold of his charm, and have some share in his inspiration.

One of the ablest of his followers, a man whose work is still confounded with the master's, is Cariani, the Bergamasque, who at different times in his life also successfully imitated Palma and Lotto. In his Giorgionesque manner Cariani often creates charming figures and strong portraits, though he pushes his colour to a coa.r.s.e, excessive tone. His family group in the Roncalli Collection at Bergamo is very close to Giorgione. Seven persons, three women and four men, are grouped together upon a terrace, and behind them stretches a calm landscape, half concealed by a brocaded hanging. The effect of the whole is restful, though it lacks Giorgione's concentration of sensation. Then, again, Cariani flies off to the gayer, more animated style of Lotto. Later on, when he tries to reproduce Giorgione's pastoral reveries, his shepherds and nymphs become mere peasants, herdsmen, and country wenches, who have nothing of the idyllic distinction which Giorgione never failed to infuse. "The Adulteress before Christ" at Glasgow still bears the greater name, but its short, vulgar figures and faulty composition disclaim his authors.h.i.+p, while Cariani is fully capable of such failings, and the exaggerated, red-brown tone is quite characteristic of him.

These painters are more than merely imitative; they are also typical.

Giorgione's new manner had appealed to some quality inherent and hereditary in their nature, and the essential traits they single out and dwell upon are the traits which appeal equally to the instincts of both.

It is this which makes their efforts more sympathetic than those of other second-rate painters. Colour, or rather the peculiar way in which Giorgione used colour, made a natural appeal to them, and it is a medium which does make an immediate appeal and covers a mult.i.tude of shortcomings.

But Giorgione was not to leave his message to the mercy of mere disciples and imitators, however apt. Growing up around him were men to whom that message was an inspiration and a trumpet-call, men who were to develop and deepen it, endowing it with their own strength, recognising that the way which the young pioneer of Castelfranco had pointed out was the one into which they could unhesitatingly pour their whole inclination. The instinct for colour was in their very blood. They turned to it with the heart-whole delight with which a bird seeks the air or a fish the water, and foremost among them, to create and to consolidate, was the mighty t.i.tian.

PRINc.i.p.aL WORKS

_Cariani._

Bergamo. Carrara: Madonna and Saints.

Lochis: Woman and Shepherd; Portraits; Saints.

Morelli: Madonna (L.).

Roncalli Collection: Family Group.

Hampton Court. Adoration of Shepherds (L.); Venus (L.).

London. Death of S. Peter Martyr (L.); Madonna and Saints (L.).

Milan. Brera: Madonna and Saints (L.); Madonna (L.).

Ambrosiana: Way to Golgotha.

Paris. Madonna, Saints, and Donor (E.); Holy Family and Saints.

Rome. Villa Borghese: Sleeping Venus; Madonna and S. Peter.

Venice. Holy Family; Portraits.

Vienna. Christ bearing Cross; The "Bravo."

_School of Giorgione._

London. Unknown subject; Adoration of Shepherds; Venus and Adonis; Landscape, with Nymphs and Cupids; The Garden of Love.

Mr. Benson. Lovers and Pilgrim.