The life and writings of Henry Fuseli

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THE L I F E

AND

WRITINGS

OF

HENRY FUSELI, ESQ. M.A. R.A.

KEEPER, AND PROFESSOR OF PAINTING TO THE

ROYAL ACADEMY IN LONDON; MEMBER OF THE FIRST CLASS

OF THE ACADEMY OF ST. LUKE AT ROME.

THE FORMER WRITTEN, AND THE LATTER EDITED BY

JOHN KNOWLES, F.R.S.

CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY AT ROTTERDAM,

HIS EXECUTOR.

Ai.inio vidit, ingenio complexus cst, eloquentia illnminavit."

Ptlleiiis Pateratliis in Cicervnei

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.

LONDON:

HENRY COLBURN AND RICHARD BENTLEY,

NEW BURLINGTON STREET.

MDCCCXXXI.

LONDON :

PlilNTEl) BV SAMUEL BENTLEV,
Dorset Street, Fleet Street.

CONTENTS

THE THIRD VOLUME.

LECTURES.

XT. ON THE PREVAILING METHOD OF TREATING

THE HISTORY OF PAINTING, WITH OBSERVA-
TIONS ON THE PICTURE OF LIONARDO DA
VINCI OF " THE LAST SUPPER" . Page 1

XII. ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART, AND THE

CAUSES WHICH CHECK ITS PROGRESS . 39

APHORISMS,
CHIEFLY RELATIVE TO THE FINE ARTS . 61

A HISTORY OF ART
IN THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL .... 153

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE . . . 193

THE SCHOOL OF SIENA . . . 231

THE ROMAN SCHOOL . . . 242

THE SCHOOL OF NAPLES . . , . 279

THE SCHOOL OF VENICE 334

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA . 301

THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA . . , . 399

ELEVENTH LECTURE.

ON THE PREVAILING METHOD OF TREATING
THE HISTORY OF PAINTING,

WITH OBSERVATIONS ON

THE PICTURE OF LIONARDO DA VINCI
OF "THE LAST SUPPER/'

VOL. III. B

ELEVENTH LECTURE.

IN this Lecture I shall submit to your con-
sideration some criticisms on the prevailing
method of treating the History of our Art;
attended by a series of observations on the
magnificent picture of the Last Supper, by
Lionardo da Vinci, now before you.

History, mindless of its real object, sinking
to Biography, has been swelled into a diffuse
catalogue of individuals, who, tutored by dif-
ferent schools, or picking something from the
real establishers of Art, have done little more
than repeat, or imitate through the medium
of either, what those had found in Nature, dis-
criminated, selected, and applied to Art, ac-
cording to her dictates. Without wishing to
depreciate the merit of that multitude who
felt, proved themselves strong enough, and

4 LECTURE XL

strenuously employed life to follow, it must be
pronounced below the historian's dignity to
allow them more than a transitory glance.
Neither originality, nor selection and combi-
nation of materials scattered over the various
classes of Art by others, have much right to
attention from him who only investigates the
real progress of Art, if the first proves to have
added nothing essential to the system by novel-
ty, and the second to have only diluted energy,
and by a popular amalgam* to have pleased the
vulgar. Novelty, without enlarging the circle
of knowledge, may delight or strike, but is
nearer allied to whim than to invention ; and
an eclectic system, without equality of parts, as
it originated in want of comprehension, totters
on the brink of mediocrity.

The first ideas of Expression, Character,
Form, Chiaroscuro, and Colour, originated in
Tuscany: Masaccio, Lionardo da Vinci, M.
Agnolo, Bartolomeo della Porta. The first was
carried off before he could give more than hints
of dramatic composition ; the second appears to
have established character on physiognomy, and
to have seen the first vision of chiaroscuro,
though he did not penetrate the full extent of

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 5

its charm; the third had power, knowledge,
and life sufficiently great, extensive, and long,
to have fixed style on its basis, had not an
irresistible bias drawn off his attention from
the modesty and variety of Nature ; Baccio
gave amplitude to drapery, and colour to form.
Of the Tuscan School that succeeded these,
the main body not only added nothing to their
discoveries, but, if their blind attachment to
the singularities rather than the beauties of
the third be excepted, equally inattentive to
expression, character, propriety of form, the
charms of chiaroscuro, and energies of colour,
contented themselves to give to tame or puerile
ideas, obvious and common-place conceptions,
a kind of importance by mastery of execution
and a bold but monotonous and always man-
nered outline ; and though Andrea del Sarto,
with Francia Bigio, Giacopo da Pontormo, and
Rosso, may be allowed to have thought some-
times for themselves and struck out paths of
their own, will it be asserted that they enlarged
or even filled the circle traced out before ?
The most characteristic work of Andrea's ori-
ginal powers, is, no doubt, the historic series in
S. Giovanni dei Scalzi ; yet, when compared

6 LECTURE XI.

with the patriarchal simplicity of the groups
in the Lunette of the Sistine Chapel, the
naivete of his characters and imagery will be
found too much tainted with contemporary,
local, and domestic features, for Divine, Apos-
tolic, and Oriental agents. His drapery, when-
ever he escapes from the costume of the day,
combines with singular felicity the breadth of
the Frati, and the acute angles of Albert
Durer; but neither its amplitude, nor the
solemn repose and tranquillity of his scenery,
can supply the want of personal dignity, or
consecrate vulgar forms and trivial features.

The Roman school like an Oriental sun rose,
not announced by dawn, and, setting, left no
twilight. Raffaello established his school on
the Drama; its scenery, its expression, its
forms ; History, Lyrics, Portrait, became under
his hand the organs of passion and character.
With his demise the purity of this principle
vanished. Julio Romano, too original to adopt,
formed a school of his own at Mantoua, which,
as it was founded on no characteristic principle,
added nothing to Art, and did not long survive
its founder. Polydoro Caldara was more ambi-
tious to emulate the forms of the antique than

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 7

to propagate the style of his master, which was
not comprehended by Penny, called 11 Fattore,
mangled by Perrino del Vaga, became com-
mon-place in the hands of the Zuccari, bar-
barous manner during the usurpation of Giu-
seppe Cesari, sunk to tameness in the timid
imitation of Sacchi and Maratta, and expired
under the frigid method of Mengs.

A certain national, though original character,
marks the brightest epoch of the Venetian
School. However deviating from each other,
Tiziano, Tintoretto, Jacopo da Ponte, and
Paolo Veronese, acknowledge but one element
of imitation, Nature herself: this principle
each bequeathed to his school, and no attempt
to adulterate its simplicity by uniting different
methods, distinguishes their immediate succes-
sors : hence they preserved features of origi-
nality longer than the surrounding schools,
whom the vain wish to connect incompatible
excellence, soon degraded to mediocrity, and
from that plunged to insignificance.

If what is finite could grasp infinity, the
variety of Nature might be united by indivi-
dual energy ; till then the attempt to amalga-
mate her scattered beauties by the imbecility

8 LECTURE XI

of Art, will prove abortive. Genius is the
pupil of Nature ; perceives, is dazzled, and
imperfectly transmits one of her features : thus
saw M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano, Correggio ;
and such were their technic legacies, as insepa-
rable from their attendant flaws, as in equal
degrees irreconcilable. That Nature is not
subject to decrepitude, is proved by the su-
periority of modern over ancient science ; what
hinders modern Art to equal that of classic
eras, is the effect of irremovable causes.

But I hasten to the principal object of this
Lecture, the consideration of the technic cha-
racter of Lionardo da Vinci, one, and in my
opinion the first of the great restorers of mo-
dern Art, as deduced from his most important
work, the Last Supper, surviving as a whole in
the magnificent copy of Marco Uggione, res-
cued from a random pilgrimage by the courage
and vigilance of our President, and by the
Academy made our own. The original of this
work, the ultimate test of his most vigorous
powers, the proof of his theory, and what may
be called with propriety the first characteristic
composition since the revival of the Art, was
the principal ornament of the Refectory in

LIONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER." 9

the Dominican Convent of S. Maria delle
Gratie, at Milan.

Let us begin with the centre, the seat of the
principal figure, from which all the rest ema-
nate like rays. Sublimely calm, the face of the
Saviour broods over the immense, whilst every
face and every limb around him, roused by his
mysterious word, fluctuate in restless curiosity
and sympathetic pangs.

The face of the Saviour is an abyss of
thought, and broods over the immense revolu-
tion in the economy of mankind, which throngs
inwardly on his absorbed eye — as the spirit
creative in the beginning over the water's dark-
some wave — undisturbed and quiet. It could
not be lost in the copy before us : how could
its sublime conception escape those who saw
the original ? It has survived the hand of
Time in the study which Lionardo made in
crayons, exhibited with most of the attendant
heads in the British Gallery ; and even in the
feebler transcript of Del Testa.

I am not afraid of being under the necessity
of retracting what I am going to advance, that
neither during the splendid period immediately
subsequent to Lionardo, nor in those which

10 LECTURE XI.

succeeded to our own time, has a face of the
Redeemer been produced which, I will not say
equalled, but approached the sublimity of Lio-
nardo's conception, and in quiet and simple fea-
tures of humanity embodied divine, or, what is
the same, incomprehensible and infinite powers.
To him who could contrive and give this com-
bination, the unlimited praise lavished on the
inferior characters who surround the hero,
whilst his success in that was doubted — ap-
pears to me not only no praise, but a gross
injustice.

Yet such was the judgment of Vasari, and
in our days of Lanzi, both founded on the pre-
tended impossibility of transcribing the beauty
of forms and the varied energies of expression
distributed by the artist among the disciples.
" The moment," says Lanzi, and says well, <f is
that in which the Saviour says to the Disciples,
" One of you will betray me !" On every one
of the innocent men the word acts like light-
ning : he who is at a greater distance, distrust-
ing his own ears, applies to his neighbour ;
others, according to their variety of character,
betray raised emotions. One of them faints,

LIONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER." Jl

one is fixed in astonishment ; this wildly rises,
the simple candour of another tells that he
cannot be suspected : Judas, meanwhile, as-
sumes a look of intrepidity, but, though he
counterfeits innocence, leaves no doubt of being
the traitor. Vinci used to tell, that for a year
he wandered about, perplexed with the thought
how to embody in one face the image of so
black a mind ; and frequenting a village which
a variety of villains haunted, he met at last, by
the help of some associated features, with his
man. Nor was his success less conspicuous in
furnishing both the Jameses with congenial and
characteristic beauty ; but being unable to find
an ideal superior to theirs for Christ, he left
the head, as Vasari affirms, imperfect, though
Arminine ascribes a high finish even to that."

Thus is the modesty and diffidence of the
artist, who, in the midst of the most glorious
success, always sought and wished for more,
brought as evidence against him by all his pre-
tended judges and critics, if we except the
single Bottari, who finds in it, with the highest
finish, nil the fortitude of mind characteristic
of the Saviour, united to lively consideration of

12 LECTURE XI.

the suffering that awaited him —though even
that is, in my opinion, below the conception of
Lionardo.

Lest those who have read and recollect the
character of Lionardo which I have submitted
to the public, should, from the predilection
with which I have dwelt on what I think the
principal feature of his performance, the face
and attitude of the hero, suspect I shift my
ground, or charge me with inconsistency, I re-
peat what I said then, when I was nearly un-
acquainted with this work, that the distin-
guishing feature of his powers lay in the
delineation of character, which he often raised
to a species, and not seldom degraded to cari-
cature. The triumphant proof of both is the
great performance before us ; the same mind
that could unite divine power with the purest
humanity, by an unaccountable dereliction, not
only of the dignity due to his subject, but of
sound sense, thought it not beneath him to
haunt the recesses of deformity to unkennel a
villain. Did he confine villainy to deformity ?
If he had, he would have disdained to give
him two associates in feature ; for the face of
him who holds up his finger, and his who

LIONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER." 13

argues on the left extremity of the table, seem
to have proceeded, if not absolutely from the
same, from a very similar mould, yet they are
in the number of the elect, and, though on the
brink of caricature, have the air of good men.
Expression alone separates them from the
traitor, whom incapacity of remorse, hatred,
rage at being discovered, and habitual mean-
ness, seem to have divided into equal shares.

The portrait of Cesar Borgia, by Giorgione,
now hung up for your study in the Academy for
Painting, proves that the most atrocious mind
may lurk under good, sedate, and even hand-
some features. Though his hand were not
drawing a dagger, who would expect mercy or
remorse from the evil methodized villainy of
that eye ? But Judas was capable of remorse ;
intolerant of the dreadful suffering with which
the horrid act had overwhelmed him, he rushed
on confession of his crime, restitution, and
suicide.

To the countenance and attitude of St. John,
blooming with youth, innocent, resigned, par-
taking perhaps somewhat too much of the
feminine, and those of the two James's invi-
gorated by the strength of virility, energetic

14 LECTURE XI.

and bold, none will refuse a competent praise
of varied beauty ; but they neither are nor
ought to be ideal, and had they been so, they
could neither compete nor interfere with the
sublimity that crowns the Saviour's brow, and
stamps his countenance with the God.

The felicity, novelty, and propriety of Lio-
nardo's conception and invention, are power-
fully seconded by every part of execution :—
the tone which veils and wraps actors and
scene into one harmonious whole, and gives it
breadth; the style of design, grand without
affectation, and, if not delicate or ideal, cha-
racteristic of the actors ; the draperies folded
with equal simplicity, elegance, and costume,
with all the propriety of presenting the high-
est finish, without anxiety of touch, or throng-
ing the eye.

So artless is the assemblage of the figures,
that the very name of composition seems to
degrade what appears arranged by Nature's
own hand. That the nearest by relation, cha-
racters and age, should be placed nearest the
master of the feast, and of course attract the
eye soonest, was surely the most natural ar-
rangement; but if they are conspicuous, they

LIONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER." 15

are not so at the expense of the rest : distance
is compensated by action ; the centre leads to
all, as all lead to the centre. That the great
restorer of light and shade sacrificed the effects
and charms of chiaroscuro at the shrine of
character, raised him at once above all his
future competitors ; changes admiration to
sympathy, and makes us partners of the feast.

As expression sprang from the subject, so it
gave rise to competition. That Raffaello was
acquainted with Leonardo's work, and felt its
power, is evident from his composition, en-
graved by M. Antonio : finding invention an-
ticipated, he took refuge in imitation, and filled
it with sentiments of his own ; whether, be-
yond the dignity of attitude, he attempts to
approach the profundity of Leonardo's Christ,
cannot, from a print of very moderate dimen-
sions, be decided. In the listening figure of
Judas, with equal atrocity of guilt he appears
to have combined somewhat more of apostolic
consequence.

The well-known Last Supper of the Loggia,
painted, or what is more probable, superin-
tended by Raffaello, is, by being made a night
scene, by contrast and chiaroscuro, become an

16 LECTURE XL

original conception ; but as it presents little
more than groups busy to arrange themselves
for sitting down or breaking up, it cannot
excite more interest than what is due to con-
trast and effect, and active groups eager to
move yet not tumultuary.

But if Lionardo disdained to consult the
recesses of composition and the charms of arti-
ficial chiaroscuro, he did not debase his work
to mere apposition : uniting the whole by tone,
he gave it substance by truth of imitation, and
effect by the disposition of the characters ; the
groups flanking each side of the Saviour,
emerge, recede, and support each other with
a roundness, depth, and evidence which leave
all attempts at emendation or improvement
hopeless. But why should I attempt to enu-
merate beauties which are before you, and
which if you do not perceive yourselves, no
words of mine can ever make you feel ?

The universality of Lionardo da Vinci is
become proverbial: but though possessed of
every element, he rather gave glimpses than a
standard of form ; though full of energy, he
had not powers effectually to court the various
graces he pursued. His line was free from

LIONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER." 17

meagreness, and his forms presented volume,
but he appears not to have ever been much
acquainted, or to have sedulously sought much
acquaintance, with the Antique. Character
was his favourite study, and character he has
often raised from an individual to a species,
and as often depressed to caricature. The
strength of his execution lay in the delineation
of male heads ; those of his females owe nearly
all their charms to chiaroscuro, of which he is
the supposed inventor : they are seldom more
discriminated than the children they fondle ;
they are sisters of one family. The extremities
of his hands are often inelegant, though timo-
rously drawn, like those of Christ among the
Doctors in the picture we lately saw exhibited.
Lionardo da Vinci touched in every muscle of
his forms the master-key of the passion he
wished to express, but he is ideal only in
chiaroscuro.

Such was the state of the Art before the ap-
pearance of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, and the
establishment of style.

Of M. Agnolo it is difficult to decide who
have understood less, his encomiasts or his cri-
tics, though both rightly agree in dating from

VOL. III. C

18 LECTURE XT.

him an epoch— those of the establishment, these
of the subversion of Art.

It is the lot of Genius to be opposed, and to
be invigorated by opposition. All extremes
touch each other : frigid praise and frigid cen-
sure wait on easily attainable or common pow-
ers : but the successful adventurer in the realms
of Discovery, in spite of the shrugs, checks, and
sneers of the timid, the malign, and the envious,
leaps on an unknown or long lost shore, en-
nobles it with his name, and grasps immortality.

M. Agnolo appeared, and soon discovered
that works worthy of perpetuity could neither
be built on defective and unsubstantial forms,
nor on the transient whim of fashion and local
sentiment ; that their stamina were the real
stamina of Nature, the genuine feelings of hu-
manity ; and planned for painting what Homer
had planned for poetry, the epic part, which,
with the utmost simplicity of a whole, should
unite magnificence of plan and endless variety
of subordinate parts. His line became generic,
but perhaps too uniformly grand : character and
beauty were admitted only as far as they could
be made subservient to grandeur. The child,
the female, meanness, deformity, were by him

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 19

indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A
beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of po-
verty ; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with
dignity ; his women are moulds of generation ;
his infants teem with the man ; his men are a
race of giants. This is the " terribil via," this
is that " magic circle," in which we are told that
none durst move but he. No, none but he
who makes sublimity of conception his element
of form. M. Agnolo himself offers the proof :
for the lines that bear in a mass on his mighty
tide of thought in the Gods and Patriarchs and
Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, already too osten-
tatiously show themselves in the Last Judge-
ment, and rather expose than support his ebb-
ing powers in the Chapel of Paul. Considered
as a whole, the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the
Conversion of Paul, in that place, are the do-
tage of M. Agnolo's style ; but they have parts
which make that dotage more enviable than the
equal vigour of mediocrity.

With what an eye M. Agnolo contemplated
the Antique, we may judge from his Bacchus,
the early production of his youth : in style it
is at least equal, perhaps in pulp and fleshiness
superior, to what is called the Antique Roman

c 2

20 LECTURE XL

Style. His idea seems to have been the per-
sonification of youthful inebriety, but it is the
inebriety of a superior being, not yet forsaken
by grace, not yet relinquished by mind. In
more advanced years, the Torso of Apollonius
became his standard of form. But the Daemons
of Dante had too early tinctured his fancy to
admit in their full majesty the Gods of Homel-
and of Phidias.

Such was the opinion formed of the plan and
style of M. Agnolo by the judges, the critics,
the poets, the artists, the public, of his own and
the following age, from Bembo to Ariosto, from
Raffaello to Tiziano, down to Agostino and
Annibale Carracci. Let us now compare it
with the technical verdict given by the great-
est professional critic, on the Continent, of our
times. " M. Agnolo," says Mengs, " seeking
always to be grand, was perhaps only bulky,
and by the perpetual use of a convex line, over-
spanned the forms and irrecoverably lost the
line of Nature. This charged style attended
him in his youth, and engrossed him when a
man. For this reason his works will always be
much inferior to the antique of the good style ;
for though they made robust and muscular

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 21

figures, they never made them heavy : — an in-
stance is the Hercules of Glycon, who, though
so bulky, and of form so majestic, is easily
seen to be swift like a stag, and elastic like a
ball. The style of M. Agnolo could not give
similar ideas, for the joints of his figures are too
contracted, and seem only made for the posture
into which he puts them. The forms of his
flesh are too round, his muscles of a mass and
shape always similar, which hides their springs
of motion ; nor do you ever see in his works
a muscle in repose, than which a greater fault
Design knows not. He perfectly knew what
place each muscle ought to occupy, but never
gave its form. Nor did he understand the
nature of tendons, as he made them equally
fleshy from end to end, and his bones too
round. Raffaello partook of all these defects,
without ever reaching the profundity of his
muscular theory. Raffaello's strength lay in
characterizing aged and nervous frames ; he
was too hard for delicacy, and in figures of
grandeur an exaggerated copy of M. Agnolo."
So far Mengs.

M. Agnolo appears to have had no infancy ;
if he had, we are not acquainted with it. His

22 LECTURE XI.

earliest works are equal in principle and com-
pass of execution to the vigorous proofs of his
virility. Like an oriental sun, he burst upon
us at once, without a dawn. Raffaello Sanzio
we see in his cradle, we hear him stammer,
but propriety rocked the cradle, and character
formed his lips. Even in the trammels of
Pietro Perugino, dry and servile in his style
of design, he traced what was essential, and
separated it from what was accidental in his
model. The works of Lionardo da Vinci and
the Cartoon of Pisa are said to have invigo-
rated his eye, but it was the Antique that
completed the system which he had begun to
establish on Nature ; from them he learned
discrimination and choice of forms. He found
that in the construction of the body the articu-
lations of the bones were the true cause of ease
and grace in the action of the limbs, and that
the knowledge of this was the reason of the
superiority of antique design. He found that
certain features were fittest for certain expres-
sions and peculiar to certain characters ; that
such a head, such hands, such feet, are the
stamen or the growth of such a body, and
on physiognomy established homogeneousness.

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 23

Of all artists lie was the greatest, the most pre-
cise, the most acute observer. When he de-
signed, he first attended to the primary inten-
tion and motive of his figure, next to its ge-
neral measure, then to the bones and their arti-
culations ; from them to the principal muscles,
or the muscles eminently wanted, and their
attendant nerves, and at last to the more or
less essential minutise. But the characteristic
part of the subject is infallibly the characteristic
part of his design, if it be formed even by a
few rapid or a single stroke of his pen or pen-
cil. The strokes themselves are characteristic,
they follow or indicate the texture or fibre of
the part ; flesh in their rounding, nerves , in
straight, bones in angular touches.

Such was the felicity and such the propriety
of Raffaello when employed in the dramatic
evolutions of character, — both suffered when
he attempted to abstract the forms of subli-
mity or beauty. The painter of humanity not
often wielded with success superhuman wea-
pons. His Gods never rose above prophetic
or patriarchial forms : if the finger of M. Ag-
nolo impressed the divine countenance oftener
with sternness than awe, the Gods of RafFaello

24 LECTURE XI.

are sometimes too affable and mild, like him
who speaks to Jacob in the ceiling of the Va-
tican ; sometimes too violent, like him who se-
parates light from darkness in the Loggia : but
though made chiefly to walk with dignity on
earth, he soared above it in the mild effulgence
and majestic rapture of Christ on Tabor, not
indeed as we see his face now from the re-
pairs of the manufacturers in the Louvre,
and still more in the frown of the angelic
countenance that withers all the strength of
the warrior Heliodorus. Of ideal female
beauty, though he himself, in his letter to
Count Castiglione, tells us that from its scar-
city in life he made attempts to reach it by
an idea formed in his own mind, he certainly
wanted that standard which guided him in
character. His Goddesses and mythologic fe-
males are no more than aggravations of the
generic forms of M. Agnolo. Roundness,
mildness, sanctimony, and insipidity, compose
the features and air of his Madonnas : tran-
scripts of the nursery, or some favourite face.
The Madonna del Impanato, the Madonna
Bella, the Madonna della Sedia, and even the
longer proportions and greater delicacy and

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 25

dignity of the Madonna formerly in the col-
lection of Versailles, share more or less of
this insipidity : it chiefly arises from the high,
smooth, roundish forehead, the shaven vacuity
between the arched semicircular eye-brows,
their elevation above the eyes, and the un-
graceful division, growth and scantiness of
hair. This indeed might be the result of his
desire not to stain the virgin character of
sanctity with the most distant hint of co-
quetry or meretricious charms ; for in his
Magdalens, he throws it with luxuriant pro-
fusion, and surrounds the breast and shoulders
with undulating waves and plaits of gold.
The character of Mary Magdalen met his, —
it was the character of a passion.

It is evident from every picture or design
at every period of his art in which she had
a part, that he supposed her enamoured when
she follows the body of the Saviour to the
tomb, or throws herself dishevelled over his
feet, or addresses him when he bears his cross.
The cast of her features, her forms^ her action,
are the character of love in agony. When cha-
racter inspired Raffaello, his women became
definitions of grace and pathos at once.

26 LECTURE XI.

Such is the exquisite line and turn of the
averted half -kneeling female with the two chil-
dren among the spectators of Heliodorus. Her
attitude, the turn of her neck, supplies all face,
and intimates more than he ever expressed by
features ; and that she would not have gained
by showing them, may be guessed from her
companion on the foreground, who, though
highly elegant and equally pathetic in her ac-
tion, has not features worthy of either. The
fact is, form and style were by Raffaello em-
ployed chiefly, if not always, as vehicles of cha-
racter and pathos ; the Drama is his element,
and to that he has adapted them in a mode and
with a propriety which leave all attempts at
emendation hopeless : if his lines have been
excelled or rivalled in energy, correctness,
elegance, — considered as instruments of the
passions, they have never been equalled, and
as parts of invention, composition and expres-
sion relative to his story, have never been
approached.

The result of these observations on M. Agriolo
and Raffaello is this, that M. Agnolo drew in
generic forms the human race ; that Raffaello

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 27

drew the forms and characters of society diver-
sified by artificial wants.

We find therefore M. Agnolo more sublime,
and we sympathise more with RafFaello, be-
cause he resembles us more. When Reynolds
said that M. Agnolo had more imagination, and
RafFaello more fancy, he meant to say, that the
one had more sublimity, more elementary fire ;
the other was richer in social imagery, in genial
conceits, and artificial variety. Simplicity is
the stamen of M. Agnolo ; varied propriety,
with character, that of Raffaello.

Of the great restorers of Art, the two we
have considered, made Design and Style the
basis of their plan, content with negative and
unambitious colour ; the two next inverted the
principle, and employed Design and Style as
vehicles of colour or of harmony.

The style of Tiziano's design has two pe-
riods : he began with copying what was before
him without choice, and for some time con-
tinued in the meagre, anxious, and accidental
manner of Giovanni Bellino; but discovering
in the works of Giorgione that breadth of form
produced breadth of colour, he endeavoured,

28 LECTURE XI.

and succeeded, to see Nature by comparison,
and in a more ample light. That he possessed
the theory of the human body, needs not to be
proved from the doubtful designs which he is
said to have made for the anatomical work of
Vesalio ; that he had familiarized himself with
the style of M. Agnolo, and burned with ambi-
tion to emulate it, is less evident from adopting
some of his attitudes in the pictures of Pietro
Martyre and the Battle of Ghiaradadda, than
from the elemental conceptions, the colossal
style, and daring foreshortenings which asto-
nish in the Cain and Abel, the Abraham and
Isaac, the Goliah and David, on the ceiling of
the fabric of St. Spirito at Venice. Here, and
here alone, is the result of that union of tone
and style which, in Tintoretto's opinion, was
required to make a perfect painter, — for in
general the male forms of Tiziano are those of
sanguine health, often too fleshy for character,
less elastic than muscular, or vigorous without
grandeur. His females are the fair dimpled
Venetian race, soft without delicacy, too full for
elegance, for action too plump ; his infants are
poised between both, and preferable to either.
In portrait he has united character and re-

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 29

semblance with dignity, and still remains un-
rivalled.

A certain national character marks the bright-
est sera of the Venetian school : however de-
viating from each other, Tiziano, Tintoretto,
Bassan, and Paolo, acknowledged but one ele-
ment of imitation, Nature herself. This prin-
ciple each bequeathed to his followers ; and no
attempt to adulterate its simplicity, by uniting
different methods, distinguished their imme-
diate successors. Hence they preserved fea-
tures of originality longer than the surround-
ing schools, whom the vain wish to connect
incompatible excellence soon degraded to me-
diocrity, and from that plunged to insigni-
ficance.

The soft transitions from the convex to the
concave line, which connect grandeur with
lightness, form the style of Correggio ; but
using their coalition without balance, merely to
obtain a breadth of demi-tint and uninterrupted
tones of harmony, he became, from excess of
roundness, oftener heavy than light, and fre-
quently incorrect.

It is not easy, from the unaccountable ob-
scurity in which his life is involved, to ascer-

30 LECTURE XI.

tain whether he saw the Antique in sufficient
degrees of quantity or beauty ; but he cer-
tainly must have been familiar with modelling,
and the helps of sculpture, to plan with such
boldness, and conquer with such ease, the un-
paralleled difficulties of his foreshortenings.
His grace is oftener beholden to convenience
of place than elegance of line. The most ap-
propriate, the most elegant attitudes were
adopted, rejected, perhaps sacrificed to the
most awkward ones, in compliance with his
imperious principle : parts vanished, were ab-
sorbed, or emerged in obedience to it.

The Danae, of which we have seen dupli-
cates, the head excepted, he seems to have
painted from an antique female torso. But
ideal beauty of face, if ever he conceived, he
never has expressed ; his beauty is equally re-
mote from the idea of the Venus, the Niobe,
and the best forms of Nature. The Magdalen,
in the picture of St. Girolamo of Parma, is be-
holden for the charms of her face to chiaros-
curo, and that incomparable hue and suavity of
bloom which scarcely permit us to discover the
defects of forms not much above the vulgar.
But that he sometimes reached the sublime, by

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 31

hiding the limits of his figures in the bland
medium which inwraps them, his Jupiter and
lo prove.

Such were the principles on which the Tus-
can, the Roman, the Venetian, and the Lom-
bard schools established their systems of style,
or rather the manner which, in various direc-
tions and modes of application, perverted style.
M. Agnolo lived to see the electric shock which
his design had given to Art, propagated by the
Tuscan and Venetian schools as the ostentatious
vehicle of puny conceits and emblematic quib-
bles, or the palliative of empty pomp and de-
graded luxuriance of colour.

Of his imitators, the two most eminent are
Pellegrino Tibaldi, called " M. Agnolo rifor-
mato" by the Bolognese Eclectics, and Fran-
cesco Mazzuoli, called Parmegiano.

Pellegrino Tibaldi penetrated the technic
without the moral principle of his master's
style; he had often grandeur of line without
sublimity of conception ; hence the manner of
M. Agnolo is frequently the style of Pellegrino
Tibaldi. Conglobation and eccentricity, an ag-
gregate of convexities suddenly broken by rec-
tangular, or cut by perpendicular lines, compose

32 LECTURE XI.

his system. His fame principally rests on the
Frescoes of the Academic Institute at Bologna,
and the Ceiling of the Merchants' Hall at An-
cona. It is probably on the strength of those,
that the Carracci, his countrymen, are said to
have called him their " M.Agnolo riformato,"
— M.Agnolo corrected. I will not do that in-
justice to the Carracci to suppose, that for one
moment they could allude by this verdict to
the Ceiling and the Prophets and Sibyls of the
Capella Sistina ; they glanced perhaps at the
technic exuberance of the Last Judgement, and
the senile caprices of the Capella Paolina.
These, they meant to inform us, had been
pruned, regulated, and reformed by Pellegrino
Tibaldi. Do his works in the Institute war-
rant this verdict ? So far from it, that it ex-
hibits little more than the dotage of M.Agnolo.
The single figures, groups, and compositions
of the Institute, present a singular mixture of
extraordinary vigour and puerile imbecility of
conception, of character and caricature, of style
and manner.

The figure of Polypheme groping at the
mouth of his cave for Ulysses, and the compo-
sition of jEolus granting to Ulysses favourable

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 33

winds, are striking instances of both. Than
the Cyclops, M. Agnolo himself never con-
ceived a form of savage energy, provoked by
sufferings and revenge, with attitude and limbs
more in unison ; whilst the God of Winds is
degraded to the scanty and ludicrous sem-
blance of Thersites, and Ulysses with his
companions travestied by the semi-barbarous
look and costume of the age of Constantine
or Attila.

From Pellegrino Tibaldi, the Germans,
Dutch, anS Flemings, Hemskerk, Goltzius,
and Spranger, borrowed the compendium of
the great Tuscan's peculiarities, dropsied the
forms of vigour, or dressed the gewgaws of
children in colossal shapes.

Parmegiano poised his line between the grace
of Correggio and the energy of M. Agnolo,
and from contrast produced Elegance ; but in-
stead of making propriety her measure, de-
graded her to affectation. That disengaged
play of delicate forms, the " sueltezza" of the
Italians, is the prerogative of Parmegiano,
though nearly always obtained at the expense
of proportion. He conceived the variety, but
not the simplicity of beauty, and drove con-

VOL. III. D

34 LECTURE XL

trast to extravagance. The figure of St. John,
in the altar-piece of St. Salvador at Citta di
Castello, now at the Marquis of Abercorn's,
and known from the print of Giulio Bona-
sone, which less imitates than exaggerates its
original in the Cartoon of Pisa, is one proof
among many : his action is the accident of
his attitude ; he is conscious of his gran-
deur, and loses the fervour of the apostle in
the orator.

So his celebrated Moses, if I see right, has in
his forms less of grandeur than agility, in his
action more passion than majesty, and loses
the legislator in the savage. This figure, to-
gether with Raphael's figure of God in the
Vision of Ezekiel, is said to have furnished
Gray with some of the master-traits of his
Bard, — figures than which Painting cannot
produce two more dissimilar : calm, placid
contemplation, and the decided burst of passion
in coalition.

Whilst M. Agnolo was doomed to live and
brood over the perversion of his style, death
prevented Raffaello from witnessing the gra-
dual decay of his.

Such was the state of style, when, toward

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 35.

the decline of the sixteenth century, Lodovico
Carracci, with his cousins Agostino and Anni-
bale, founded at Bologna, on the hints caught
from Pellegrino Tibaldi, that Eclectic School
which, by selecting the beauties, correcting the
faults, supplying the defects, and avoiding the
extremes of the different styles, attempted to
form a perfect system. The specious ingre-
dients of this technic panacea have been pre-
served in a complimentary sonnet of Agostino
Carracci, and are compounded of the design
and symmetry of Raffaello, the terrible manner
of M. Agnolo, the sovereign purity of Cor-
reggio's style, Tiziano's truth and nature, Tin-
toretto's and Paolo's vivacity and chiaroscuro,
Lombardy's tone of colour, the learned inven-
tion of Primaticcio, the decorum and solidity
of Pellegrino Tibaldi, and a little of Parme-
giano's grace, all amalgamated by Niccolo dell'
Abbate.

I shall not attempt a parody of this pre-
scription by transferring it to Poetry, and pre-
scribing to the candidate for dramatic fame
the imitation of Shakspeare, Otway, Jonson,
Milton, Dryden, Congreve, Racine, Addison,
as amalgamated by Nicholas Howe. Let me

D 2

36 LECTURE XI.

only ask whether such a mixture of demands
ever entered with equal evidence the mind of
any one artist, ancient or modern ; whether,
if it be granted possible that they did, they
were ever balanced with equal impartiality;
and grant this, whether they ever were or
could be executed with equal felicity ? A
character of equal universal power is not a
human character ; and the nearest approach to
perfection can only be in carrying to excel-
lence one great quality with the least alloy of
collateral defects: to attempt more will pro-
bably end in the extinction of character, and
that, in mediocrity — the cypher of Art.

And were the Carracci such ? Separate the
precept from the practice, the artist from the
teacher, and the Carracci are in possession of
my submissive homage. Lodovico is the in-
ventor of that solemn hue, that sober twilight,
which you have heard so often recommended
as the proper tone of historic colour. Agos-
tino, with learning, taste, and form, combined
Corregiesque tints. Annibale, inferior to both
in sensibility and taste, in the wide range of
talent, undaunted execution and academic
prowess, left either far behind. But if he pre-

HISTORY OF PAINTING. 37

served the breadth of the style we speak of,
he added nothing to its dignity ; his pupils
were inferior to him, and to his pupils, their
successors. Style continued to linger, with
fatal symptoms of decay, in Italy ; and if it
survives, has not yet found a place to re-esta-
blish its powers on this side of the Alps.

TWELFTH LECTURE.

ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART,
AND THE CAUSES WHICH CHECK ITS PROGRESS.

TWELFTH LECTURE.

SUCH is the influence of the plastic Arts on
society, on manners, sentiments, the commo-
dities and the ornaments of life, that we think
ourselves generally entitled to form our esti-
mate of times and nations by its standard. As
our homage attends those whose patronage
reared them to a state of efflorescence or ma-
turity, so we pass with neglect, or pursue with
contempt, the age or race which want of cul-
ture or of opportunity averted from developing
symptoms of a similar attachment.

A genuine perception of Beauty is the high-
est degree of education, the ultimate polish of
man ; the master-key of the mind, it makes us
better than we were before. Elevated or
charmed by the contemplation of superior
works of Art, our mind passes from the images

42 LECTURE XII.

themselves to their authors, and from them to
the race which reared the powers that furnish
us with models of imitation or multiply our
pleasures.

This inward sense is supported by exterior
motives in contact with a far greater part of
society, whom wants and commerce connect
with the Arts ; for nations pay or receive
tribute in proportion as their technic sense
exerts itself or slumbers. Whatever is com-
modious, amene, or useful, depends in a great
measure on the Arts : dress, furniture, and
habitation owe to their breath what they can
boast of grace, propriety, or shape: they teach
Elegance to finish what Necessity invented,
and make us enamoured of our wants.

This benign influence infallibly spreads or
diminishes in proportion as its original source,
a sense of genuine Beauty, flows from an ample
or a scanty vein, in a clear or turbid stream.
As Taste is adulterated or sinks, Ornament
takes a meagre, clumsy, barbarous, ludicrous, or
meretricious form ; Affectation dictates ; Sim-
plicity and elegance are loaded; interest va-
nishes : in a short time Necessity alone remains,
and Novelty with Error go hand in hand.

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 43

These obvious observations on the importance
of the Arts, lead to the question so often dis-
cussed, and at no time more important than
ours — on the causes that raised them at various
times, and among different nations — on the
means of assisting their progress, and how to
check their decay. Of much that has been
said on it, much must be repeated, and some-
thing added.

The Greeks commonly lead the van of the
arguments produced to answer this question.
Their religious and civil establishments; their
manners, games, contests of valour and of
talents; the Cyclus of their Mythology, peo-
pled with celestial and heroic forms; the ho-
nours, the celebrity of artists ; the serene Gre-
cian sky and mildness of the climate, are the
causes supposed to have carried that nation
within the ken of perfection.

Without refusing to each of these various
advantages its share of effect, History informs
us that if Religion and Liberty prepared a
public, and spread a technic taste over all
Greece, Athens and Corinth must be considered
as the principal nurses of Art, without whose
fostering care the general causes mentioned

44 LECTURE XII.

could not have had so decided an effect; for
nothing surely contributed so much to the gra-
dual evolution of Art, as that perpetual oppor-
tunity which they presented to the artist of
public exhibition ; the decoration of temples,
halls, porticoes, a succession of employments
equally numerous, important, and dignified :
hence that emulation to gain the heights of
Art; the fervour of public encouragement,
the zeal and gratitude of the artists were re-
ciprocal : Polygnotus prepared with Cimon
what Phidias with Pericles established, on pub-
lic taste, Essential, Characteristic, and Ideal
Styles.

Whether human nature admitted of no more,
or other causes prevented a farther evolution
of powers, nothing greater did arise ; Polish,
Elegance, and Novelty supplied Invention :
here is the period of decay ; the Art gradually
sunk to mediocrity, and its final reward-
Indifference.

The artist and the public are ever in the
strictest reciprocity: if the Arts flourished
nowhere as in Greece, no other nation ever in-
terested itself with motives so pure in their
establishment and progress, or allowed them so

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 45

ample a compass. As long as their march was
marked with such dignity, whilst their union ex-
cited admiration, commanded attachment, and
led the public, they grew, they rose ; but when
individually to please, the artist attempted to
monopolize the interest due to Art, to abstract
by novelty and to flatter the multitude, ruin
followed. To prosper, the Art not only must
feel itself free, it ought to reign : if it be
domineered over, if it follow the dictate of
Fashion or a Patron's whims, then is its dis-
solution at hand.

To attain the height of the Ancient was im-
possible for Modern Art, circumscribed by nar-
rower limits, forced to form itself rapidly and
on borrowed principles ; still it owes its origin
and support to nearly similar causes. During
the fourteenth, and still more in the course of
the fifteenth century, so much activity, so ge-
neral a predilection for Art spread themselves
over the greater part of Italy, that we are
astonished at the farrago of various imagery
produced at those periods. The artist and the
Art were indeed considered as little more than
craftsmen and a craft ; but they were indem-
nified for the want of honours, by the dignity

46 LECTURE XII.

of their employment, by commissions to de-
corate churches, convents, and public build-
ings.

Let no one to whom truth and its propaga-
tion are dear, believe or maintain that Chris-
tianism was inimical to the progress of Arts,
which probably nothing else could have revived.
Nothing less than Christian enthusiasm could
give that lasting and energetic impulse whose
magic result we admire in the works that illus-
trate the period of Genius and their establish-
ment. Nor is the objection that England,
France, and Germany professed Christianity,
built churches and convents, and yet had no
Art, an objection of consequence ; because it
might with equal propriety be asked, why it
did not appear sooner in Italy itself. The Art
forms a part of social education and the ulti-
mate polish of man, nor can it appear during
the rudeness of infant societies ; and as, among
the Western nations, the Italians were the first
who extricated themselves from the bonds of
barbarism and formed asylums for industry,
Art and Science kept pace with the social pro-
gress, and produced their first legitimate essays
among them.

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 47

How favourably religious enthusiasm ope-
rated on Art, their sympathetic revolutions
still farther prove; they flourished, they lan-
guished, they fell together. As zeal relent-
ed and public grandeur gave way to private
splendour, the Arts became the hirelings of
Vanity and Wealth ; servile they roamed from
place to place, ready to administer to the
whims and wants of the best bidder : in this
point of sight we can easily solve all the phe-
nomena which occur in the history of Art, —
its rise, its fall, eclipse, and re-appearance in
various places, with styles as different as vari-
ous tastes.

The efficient cause, therefore, why higher
Art at present is sunk to such a state of inac-
tivity and languor that it may be doubted
whether it will exist much longer, is not a
particular one, which private patronage, or the
will of an individual, however great, can re-
move ; but a general cause, founded on the
bent, the manners, habits, modes of a nation, —
and not of one nation alone, but of all who at
present pretend to culture. Our age, when
compared with former ages, has but little occa-
sion for great works, and that is the reason

48 LECTURE XII.

why so few are produced :* — the ambition, ac-
tivity, and spirit of public life is shrunk to the
minute detail of domestic arrangements — every
thing that surrounds us tends to show us in
private, is become snug, less, narrow, pretty,
insignificant. We are not, perhaps, the less
happy on account of all this ; but from such
selfish trifling to expect a system of Art built
on grandeur, without a total revolution, would
only be less presumptuous than insane.

What right have we to expect such a revo-
lution in our favour ?

Let us advert for a moment to the enormous
difference of difficulty between forming and
amending the taste of a public — between legis-
lation and reform : either task is that of Genius ;
both have adherents, disciples, champions ; but
persecution, derision, checks will generally op-
pose the efforts of the latter, whilst submis-
sion, gratitude, encouragement, attend the
smooth march of the former. No madness is so
incurable as wilful perverseness ; and when men
can once, with Medea, declare that they know
what is best, and approve of it, but must, or
choose to follow the worst, perhaps a revolu-

* Vel duo vel nemo — turpe et miserabile !

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 49

tion worse to be dreaded than the disease itself,
must precede the possibility of a cure. Though,
as it has been observed, the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries granted to the artists little
more than the attention due to ingenious
craftsmen ; they were, from the object of their
occupations and the taste of their employers,
the legitimate precursors of M. Agnolo and
Raffaello, who did no more than raise their
style to the sublimity and pathos of the sub-
ject. These trod with loftier gait and bolder
strides a path, on which the former had some-
times stumbled, often crept, but always ad-
vanced : the public and the artist went hand
in hand — but on what spot of Europe can the
young artist of our day be placed to meet with
circumstances equally favourable? Arm him,
if you please, with the epic and dramatic
powers of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, where
are the religious and civic establishments,
where the temples and halls open to receive,
where the public prepared to call them forth,
to stimulate, to reward them ?

Idle complaints ! I hear a thousand voices
reply ! You accuse the public of apathy for
the Arts, while public and private exhibitions

VOL. III. E

50 LECTURE XII.

tread on each other's heels, panorama opens on
panorama, and the splendour of galleries daz-
zles the wearied eye, and the ear is stunned
with the incessant stroke of the sculptor's ham-
mer, and our temples narrowed by crowds of
monuments shouldering each other to perpetu-
ate the memory of Statesmen who deluded, or
of Heroes who bled at a Nation's call ! Look
round all Europe — revolve the page of his-
tory from Osymandias to Pericles, from Peri-
cles to Constantine — and say what age, what
race stretched forth a stronger arm to raise the
drooping genius of Art ? Is it the public's
fault if encouragement is turned into a job, and
dispatch and quantity have supplanted excel-
lence and quality, as objects of the artist's emu-
lation?— And do you think that accidental
and temporary encouragement can invalidate
charges founded on permanent causes ? What
blew up the Art, will in its own surcease ter-
minate its success. Art is not ephemeral; Re-
ligion and Liberty had for ages prepared what
Religion and Liberty were to establish among
the ancients : the germ of the Olympian Ju-
piter, and the Minerva of Phidias, lay in the
Gods of Aegina, and that of Theseus, Hercules,

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 51

and Alcibiades in the blocks of Harrnodios and
Aristogiton.

If the revolution of a neighbouring nation
emancipated the people from the yoke of super-
stition, it has perhaps precipitated them to irre-
ligion. He who has no visible object of wor-
ship is indifferent about modes, and rites, and
places ; and unless some great civil provisional
establishment replaces the means furnished by
the former system, the Arts of France, should
they disdain to become the minions and hand-
maids of fashion, may soon find that the only
public occupation left for them will be a repre-
sentation of themselves, deploring their new-
acquired advantages. By a great establish-
ment, I mean one that will employ the living
artists, raise among them a spirit of emulation
dignified by the objects of their occupation,
and inspire the public with that spirit ; not an
ostentatious display of ancient and modern
treasures of genius, accumulated by the hand
of conquest or of rapine. To plunder the earth
was a Roman principle, and it is not perhaps
matter of lamentation that Modern Rome, by
a retaliation of her own principle, is made to
pay the debt contracted with mankind. But

E 2

52 LECTURE XII.

let none fondly believe that the importation of
Greek and Italian works of Art is an importa-
tion of Greek and Italian genius, taste, esta-
blishments and means of encouragement ; with-
out transplanting and disseminating these, the
gorgeous accumulation of technic monuments
is no more than a dead capital, and, instead of
a benefit, a check on living Art.

With regard to ourselves, the barbarous,
though then perhaps useful rage of image-
breakers in the seventeenth century, seems
much too gratuitously propagated as a princi-
ple in an age much more likely to suffer from
irreligion than superstition. A public body in-
flamed by superstition, suffers, but it suffers
from the ebullitions of radical heat, and may
return to a state of health and life ; whilst a
public body plunged into irreligion, is in a
state of palsied apathy, the cadaverous symp-
tom of approaching dissolution. Perhaps nei-
ther of these two extremes may be precisely
our own state; we probably float between both.
But surely in an age of inquiry and individual
liberty of thought, when there are almost as
many sects as heads, there was little danger
that the admission of Art to places of devotion

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 53

could ever be attended by the errors of idola-
try ; nor have the motives which resisted the
offer of ornamenting our churches perhaps any
eminent degree of ecclesiastic or political sa-
gacity to recommend them. Who would not
rejoice if the charm of our Art, displaying the
actions and example of the sacred Founder of
our religion and of his disciples in temples and
conventicles, contributed to enlighten the zeal,
stimulate the feelings, sweeten the acrimony, or
dignify the enthusiasm of their respective audi-
ences? The source of the grand monumental
style of Greece was Religion with Liberty.
At that period the artist, as Pliny expresses
himself, was the property of the public, or in
other words, he considered himself as responsi-
ble for the influence of his works on public
principle: with the decline of Religion and
Liberty his importance and the Art declined ;
and though the Egyptian custom of embalm-
ing the dead and suffering the living to linger
had not yet been adopted, from the organ of
the public he became the tool of private pa-
tronage ; and private patronage, however com-
mendable or liberal, can no more supply the
want of general encouragement, than the con-

54 LECTURE XII.

servatories and hotbeds of the rich, the want of
a fertile soil or genial climate. Luxury in
times of taste keeps up execution in proportion
as it saps the dignity and moral principle of the
Art ; gold is the motive of its exertions, and
nothing that ennobles man was ever produced
by gold. When Nero transported the Politic
Apollo to the golden house, and furnished the
colossal shoulders of the god with his own
head, Sculpture lent her hand to legitimate the
sacrilege : why should Painting be supposed to
have been more squeamish when applied to
to decorate the apartments of his pleasures
and the cabinet of Poppaea with Milesian pol-
lutions, or the attitudes of Elephantis ?

The effect of honours and rewards has been
insisted on as a necessary incentive to artists :
they ought indeed to be, they sometimes are,
the result of superior powers ; but accidental
or partial honours cannot create Genius, nor
private profusion supply public neglect. No
genuine work of Art ever was or ever can be
produced, but for its own sake ; if the artist do
not conceive to please himself, he never will
finish to please the world. Can we persuade
ourselves that all the treasures of the globe

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 55

could suddenly produce an Iliad or Paradise
Lost, or the Jupiter of Phidias, or the Ca-
pella Sistina ? Circumstances may assist or
retard parts, but cannot make them : they are
the winds that now blow out a light, now ani-
mate a spark to conflagration. Nature herself
has set her barriers between age and age, be-
tween genius and genius, which no mortal
overleaps ; all attempts to raise to perfection
at once, what can only be reared by a succes-
sion of epochs, must prove abhor tive and nu-
gatory : the very proposals of premiums, ho-
nours, and rewards to excite talent or rouse
genius, prove of themselves that the age is
unfavourable to Art ; for, had it the patronage
of the public, how could it want them ?

We have now been in possession of an Aca-
demy more than half a century ; all the in-
trinsic means of forming a style alternate at
our commands ; professional instruction has
never ceased to direct the student ; premiums
are distributed to rear talent and stimulate emu-
lation, and stipends are granted to relieve the
wants of genius and finish education. And
what is the result ? If we apply to our Exhi-
bition, what does it present, in the aggregate,

56 LECTURE XII.

but a gorgeous display of varied powers, con-
demned, if not to the beasts, at least to the
dictates of fashion and vanity ? What there-
fore can be urged against the conclusion, that,
as far as the public is concerned, the Art is
sinking, and threatens to sink still deeper,
from the want of demand for great and signi-
ficant works ? Florence, Bologna, Venice, each
singly taken, produced in the course of the six-
teenth century alone, more great historic pic-
tures than all Britain taken together, from its
earliest attempts at painting to its present ef-
forts. What are we to conclude from this ?
that the soil from which Shakspeare and Mil-
ton sprang, is unfit to rear the Genius of Po-
etic Art? or find the cause of this seeming
impotence in that general change of habits,
customs, pursuits, and amusements, which for
near a century has stamped the national cha-
racter of Europe with apathy or discounte-
nance of the genuine principles of Art ?

But if the severity of these observations, this
denudation of our present state moderates our
hopes, it ought to invigorate our efforts for the
ultimate preservation, and, if immediate resto-
ration be hopeless, the gradual recovery of Art.

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 57

To raise the Arts to a conspicuous height may
not perhaps be in our power ; we shall have
deserved well of posterity if we succeed in
stemming their farther downfall, if we fix
them on the solid base of principle. If it be
out of our power to furnish the student's ac-
tivity with adequate practice, we may contri-
bute to form his theory ; and Criticism found-
ed on experiment, instructed by comparison, in
possession of the labours of every epoch of
Art, may spread the genuine elements of taste,
and check the present torrent of affectation and
insipidity.

This is the real use of our Institution, if
we may judge from analogy. Soon after the
middle of the sixteenth century, when the
gradual evanescence of the great luminaries in
Art began to alarm the public, an idea started
at Florence of uniting the most eminent art-
ists into a society, under the immediate patron-
age of the Grand Duke, and the title of Aca-
demy : it had something of a -Conventual air,
has even now its own chapel, and celebrates an
annual festival with appropriate ceremonies ;
less designed to promote than to prevent the
gradual debasement of Art. Similar associa-

58 LECTURE XII.

tions in other places were formed in imitation,
and at the time of the Carracci even the pri-
vate schools of painters adopted the same name.
All, whether public or private, supported by
patronage or individual contribution, were and
are symptoms of Art in distress, monuments
of public dereliction and decay of Taste. But
they are at the same time the asylum of the
student, the theatre of his exercises, the repo-
sitories of the materials, the archives of the
documents of our art, whose principles their
officers are bound now to maintain, and for
the preservation of which they are responsible
to posterity, undebauched by the flattery, heed-
less of the sneers, undismayed by the frown of
their own time.

Permit me to part with one final observa-
tion. Reynolds has told us, and from him
whose genius was crowned with the most bril-
liant success during his life, from him it came
with unexampled magnanimity, " that those
who court the applause of their own time,
must reckon on the neglect of posterity." On
this I shall not insist as a general maxim ; all
depends on the character of the time in which
an artist lives, and on the motive of his ex-

PRESENT STATE OF THE ART. 59

ertions. M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano, and
Vasari, Giuseppe d'Arpino, and Luca Gior-
dano, enjoyed equal celebrity during their own
times. The three first enjoy it now, the three
last are forgotten or censured. What are we
to infer from this unequal verdict of posterity ?
What, but what Cicero says, that time obli-
terates the conceits of opinion or fashion, and
establishes the verdicts of Nature ? The age
of Julio and Leone demanded genius for its
own sake, and found it — the age of Cosmo,
Ferdinand, and Urban, demanded talents and
dispatch to flatter their own vanity, and found
them too ; but Cosmo, Ferdinand, and Urban,
are sunk in the same oblivion, or involved in
the same censure with their tools — Julio and
Leone continue to live with the permanent
powers which they had called forth.

APHORISMS,

CHIEFLY RELATIVE TO

THE FINE ARTS.

APHORISMS.

1. LIFE is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy,
practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

2. The price of excellence is labour, and
time that of immortality.

3. Art, like love, excludes all competition,
and absorbs the man.

4. Art is the attendant of nature, and genius
and talent the ministers of art.

5. Genius either discovers new materials of
nature, or combines the known with novelty.

6. Talent arranges, cultivates, polishes, the
discoveries of genius.

64 APHORISMS.

7. Intuition is the attendant of genius ; gra-
dual improvement that of talent.

8. Arrangement presupposes materials : fruits
follow the bud and foliage, and judgment the
luxuriance of fancy.

9. The fiery sets his subject in a blaze, and
mounts its vapours ; the melancholy cleaves
the rock, or gropes through thorns for his ;
the sanguine deluges all, and seizes none ; the
phlegmatic sucks one, and drops off with re-
pletion.

10. Some enter the gates of art with golden
keys, and take their seats with dignity among
the demi-gods of fame ; some burst the doors
and leap into a niche with savage power ; thou-
sands consume their time in chinking useless
keys, and aiming feeble pushes against the
inexorable doors.

11. Heaven and earth, advantages and ob-
stacles, conspire to educate genius.

. Organization is the mother of talent ;

APHORISMS. 65

practice its nurse ; the senses its dominion ;
but hearts alone can penetrate hearts.

13. It is the lot of genius to be opposed, and
to be invigorated by opposition : all extremes
touch each other ; frigid praise and censure
wait upon attainable or common powers; but
the successful adventurer in the realms of dis-
covery leaps on an unknown or long-lost shore,
ennobles it with his name, and grasps immor-
tality.

14. Genius without bias, is a stream with-
out direction : it inundates all, and ends in
stagnation.

15. He who pretends to have sacrificed ge-
nius to the pursuits of interest or fashion ; and
he who wants to persuade you he has indis-
putable titles to a crown, but chooses to wave
them for the emoluments of a partnership in
trade, deserve equal belief.

16. Taste is the legitimate offspring of na-
ture, educated by propriety : fashion is the
bastard of vanity, dressed by art.

VOL. III. F

66 APHORISMS.

17. The immediate operation of taste is to
ascertain the kind ; the next, to appreciate the
degrees of excellence.

Coroll. — Taste, founded on sense and ele-
gance of mind, is reared by culture, invigorated
by practice and comparison : scantiness stops
short of it ; fashion adulterates it : it is shackled
by pedantry, and overwhelmed by luxuriance.

Taste sheds a ray over the homeliest or the
most uncouth subject. Fashion frequently
flattens the elegant, the gentle, and the great,
into one lumpy mass of disgust.

If " foul and fair" be all that your gross-
spun sense discerns, if you are blind to the in-
termediate degrees of excellence, you may per-
haps be a great man — a senator — a conqueror;
but if you respect yourself, never presume to
utter a syllable on works of taste.

18. If mind and organs conspire to qualify
you for a judge in works of taste, remember
that you are to be possessed of three things
— the subject of the work which you are to
examine ; the character of the artist as such ;
and, before all, of impartiality.

Coroll. — All first impressions are involuntary

APHORISMS. 67

and inevitable ; but the knowledge of the sub-
ject will guide you to judge first of the whole ;
not to creep on from part to part, and nibble at
execution before you know what it means to
convey. The notion of a tree precedes that of
counting leaves or disentangling branches.

Every artist has, or ought to have, a charac-
ter or system of his own ; if, instead of referring
that to the test of nature, you judge him by
your own packed notions, or arraign him at the
tribunal of schools which he does not recognize
— you degrade the dignity of art, and add an-
other fool to the herd of Dilettanti.

But if, for reasons best known to yourself,
you come determined to condemn what yet
you have not seen, let me advise you to drop
your pursuits of art for one of far greater im-
portance— the inquiry into yourself; nor aim
at taste till you are sure of justice.

19. Misconception of its own powers is the
injurious attendant of genius, and the most
severe remembrancer of its vanity.

Coroll. — Much of Leonardo da Vinci's life
evaporated in useless experiment and quaint
research ; Michael Angelo perplexed the limbs

68 APHORISMS.

of grandeur with the minute ramifications of
anatomy ; Rafaelle forsook humanity to peo-
ple a mythologic desert with clumsy gods and
clumsier goddesses ; Shakspeare, trusting time
and chance with Hamlet and Othello, revised a
frozen sonnet, or fondled his Adonis ; whilst
Milton dropt the trumpet that had astonished
hell, left Paradise, and introduced a pedagogue
to Heaven. When genius is surprised by
such lethargic moments, we can forget that
Johnson wrote Irene, and Hogarth made a so-
lemn fool of Paul.

20. Reality teems with disappointment for
him whose sources of enjoyment spring in the
elysium of fancy.

21. Where perfection cannot take place, a
very high degree of general excellence is im-
possible. Negligence is the shade of energy ;
where there is neither, expect mediocrity, the
common expletive of society ; capacity without
elevation, industry without predilection, prac-
tice without choice.

Coroll. — " About this time," says Tacitus,
" died Poppasus Sabinus, who, from a middling

APHORISMS. 69

origin, rose to imperial friendships, the consul-
ate, and the honours of the triumph : he was
selected for the space of four- and- twenty years
to govern the most important provinces,* not
for any distinguished merit of his own, but be-
cause he was equal to his task, and not above it."
Behold here the most comprehensive epitaph
of mediocrity, and the most unambiguous so-
lution of every riddle with which its brilliant
success may have perplexed your mind.

22. Determine the principle on which you
commence your career of art: some woo the
art itself, some its appendages ; some confine
their view to the present, some extend it to fu-
turity : the butterfly flutters round a meadow ;
the eagle crosses seas.

23. In ranging the phenomena of art, re-
member carefully, though you place it on the
side of exceptions, that a decided bias is not
always a sign of latent power ; nor indolence,
indifference, or even apathy, a sign of im-
potence.

* Tacit. Annal. lib. VI. " Nullam ob eximiam artem, sed
quod par negotiis, neque supra erat."

70 APHORISMS.

24. Circumstances may assist or retard parts,
but cannot make them : they are the winds
that now blow out a light, now animate a spark
to conflagration.

CorolL — Augustus and Maecenas are said to
have made Virgil : what was it, then, that
prevented Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two
Antonines, from producing at least a Lucan ?

25. Deserve, but expect not, to be praised by
your contemporaries, for any excellence which
they may be jealous of being allowed to pos-
sess themselves ; leave the dispensation of jus-
tice to posterity.

26. If wishes are the spawn of imbecility,
precipitation is the bantling of fool-hardiness :
legitimate will, investigates and acquires the
means. Mistake not an itching finger for au-
thentic will.

27. Some of the most genuine effusions of
genius in art, some of the most estimable qua-
lities in society, may be beholden for our ho-
mage to very disputable principles.

CorolL — The admission of a master's huma-

APHORISMS. 71

nity to his slave supposes the validity of an
execrable right ; and the courage shown in a
duel cannot be applauded without submitting
to the dictates of feudal barbarity. Had the
poet's conception prepared us for the rashness
of Lear, the ambition of Macbeth's wife, and
the villany of lago, by the usual gradations of
nature, he could not have rushed on our heart
with the irresistibility that now subdues it.
Had the line of Correggio floated in a less
expanse, he would have lost that spell of
light and shade which has enthralled all eyes ;
and Rubens, had he not invigorated bodies to
hills of flesh, and tinged his pencil in the rain-
bow, would not have been the painter of mag-
nificence.

28. Genius has no imitator. Some can be
poets and painters only at second-hand: deaf
and blind to the tones and motions of Nature
herself, they hear or see her only through some
reflected medium of art ; they are emboldened
by prescription.

29. — Let him who has more genius than
talent give up as impossible what he finds dif-

72 APHORISMS.

ficult. Talent may mimic genius with suc-
cess, and frequently impose on all but the first
judges; but genius is awkward in the attempt
to use the tools of talent.

Cor oil. — Hyperides, Lysias, Isocrates, might
imitate much of Demosthenes ; but he would
have become ridiculous by stooping to collect
their beauties.* The spear of Roland might
be couched to gain a lady's favour ; but its sole
ornament was the heart, torn from the breast-
plate of her foe.

30. Mediocrity is formed, and talent submits,
to receive prescription ; that, the liveried at-
tendant, this, the docile client of a patron's
views or whims : but genius, free and un-
bounded as its origin, scorns to receive com-
mands, or in submission, neglects those it
received.

Coroll. — The gentle spirit of Rafaelle em-
bellished the conceits of Bembo and Divizio,
to scatter incense round the triple mitre of his
prince ; and the Vatican became the flattering
annals of the court of Julius and Leo : whilst
Michael Angelo refused admittance to master

* D. Longin. negi tn[/ouf, § 34.

APHORISMS. 73

and to times, and doomed his purple critic
to hell.*

31. Distinguish between genius and singu-
larity of character ; an artist of mediocrity may
be an odd man : let the nature of works be
your guide.

32. The most impotent, the most vulgar,
and the coldest artists generally arrogate to
themselves the most vigorous, the most dig-
nified, and the warmest subjects.

33. He has powers, dignity, and fire, who
can inspire a trifle with importance.

34. Know that nothing is trifling in the
hand of genius, and that importance itself be-
comes a bauble in that of mediocrity :— the
shepherd's staff of Paris would have been an
engine of death in the grasp of Achilles ; the

* "Les hommes qui ont change" Tunivers,, n'y sont jamais
parvenus en gagnant des chefs ; mais toujours en remuant
des masses. Le premier moyen est du ressort de 1'intrigue,
et n'amene que des resultats secondaires; le second est
la marche du Genie, et change la face du monde." —
Napoleon.

74 APHORISMS.

ash of Peleus could only have dropped from
the effeminate fingers of the curled archer.

35. Art either imitates or copies, selects or
transcribes ; consults the class, or follows the
individual.

36. Imitative art, is either epic or sublime,
dramatic or impassioned, historic or circum-
scribed by truth. The first astonishes, the
second moves, the third informs.

37. Whatever hides its limits in its great-
ness— whatever shows a feature of immensity,
let the elements of Nature or the qualities of
animated being make up its substance, is sub-
lime.

38. Whatever by reflected self-love inspires
us with hope, fear, pity, terror, love, or mirth —
whatever makes events, and time, and place,
the ministers of character and pathos, let fiction
or reality compose its tissue, is dramatic.

39. That which tells us, not what might be,
but what is ; circumscribes the grand and the

APHORISMS. 75

pathetic with truth of time, place, custom ;
what gives " a local habitation and a name," is
historic.

CorolL — No human performance is either
purely epic, dramatic, or historic. Novelty
and feelings will make the historian sometimes
launch out into the marvellous ; or will warm
his bosom and extort a tear.

The dramatist while gazing at some tre-
mendous feature, or the pomp of superior
agency, will drop the chain he holds, and be
absorbed in the sublime; whilst the epic or
lyric poet, forgetting his solitary grandeur,
will sometimes descend and mix with his
agents.

The tragic and the comic dramatists formed
themselves on Hector and Andromache, on
Irus and Ulysses. The spirit from the prison-
house breathes like the shade of Patroclus;
Octavia and the daughter of Soranus* melt
like Ophelia and Alcestis.

40. Those who have assigned to the plastic
arts beauty, strictly so called, as the ultimate

* Tacit. Annal. lib. xiv. et xvi.

76 APHORISMS.

end of imitation, have circumscribed the whole
by a part.

CorolL- — The charms of Helen and of Niobe
are instruments of sublimity : Meleager and
Cordelia fall victims to the passions ; Agrip-
pina and Berenice give interest to truth.

41. Beauty, whether individual or ideal,
consists in the concurrence of parts to one
end, or the union of the simple and the
various.

Coroll. — Whatever be your powers, assume
not to legislate on beauty : though always the
same herself, her empire is despotic, and subject
to the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-
day, dethroned to-morrow : in treating subjects
of universal claim, most has been done by leav-
ing most to the reader's and spectator's taste or
fancy. " It is difficult," says Horace, " to pro-
nounce exactly to every man's eye and mind,
what every man thinks himself entitled to
estimate by a standard of his own." The
Apollo and Medicean Venus are not by all
received as the canons of male and female
beauty ; and Homer's Helen is the finest wo-

* Difficile est proprie communia dicere. Hor. A. P.

APHORISMS. 77

man we have read of, merely because he has
left her to be made up of the Dulcineas of his
readers.

42. Beauty alone, fades to insipidity; and
like possession cloys.

43. Grace is beauty in motion, or rather
grace regulates the air, the attitudes and move-
ments of beauty.

44. Nature makes no parade of her means —
hence all studied grace is unnatural.

Coroll. — The attitudes of Parmegiano are ex-
hibitions of studied grace. The grace of Guido
is become proverbial, but it is the grace of
the art.

45. All actions and attitudes of children
are graceful, because they are the luxuriant
and immediate offspring of the moment — di-
vested of affectation, and free from all pre-
tence.

Coroll. — The attitudes and motions of the
figures of Rafaelle are graceful because they
are poised by Nature.

78 APHORISMS.

46. Proportion, or symmetry, is the basis of
beauty ; propriety, of grace.

47. Creation gives, invention finds existence.

48. Invention in general is the combination
of the possible, the probable, or the known, in
a mode that strikes with novelty.

Coroll. — Invention has been said to mean no
more than the moment of any fact chosen by
the artist.

To say that the painter's invention is not to
find or to combine its own subject, is to confine
it to the poet's or historian's alms— is to anni-
hilate its essence ; it says in other words, that
Macbeth or Ugolino would be no subjects for
the pencil, if they had not been prepared by his-
tory and borrowed from Shakspeare and Dante.

49. Ask not — Where is fancy bred ? in
the heart? in the head? how begot? how
nourished ?

Coroll. — The critic who inquires whether in
the madness of Lear, grief for the loss of em-
pire, or the resentment of filial ingratitude pre-
ponderated— and he who doubts whether it be

APHORISMS. 79

within the limits of art to embody beings of
fancy, agitate different questions, but of equal
futility.

" 50. Genius may adopt, but never steals.

Coroll.—An adopted idea or figure in the
works of genius will be a foil or a companion ;
but an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity
scorns the base alliance and crushes all its mean
associates — it is the Cyclop's thumb, by which
the pigmy measured his own littleness, — "or
hangs like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief."

51. Genius, inspired by invention, rends the
veil that separates existence from possibility ;
peeps into the dark, and catches a shape, a fea-
ture, or a colour, in the reflected ray.

52. Talent, though panting, pursues genius
through the plains of invention, but stops short
at the brink that separates the real from the
possible. Virgil followed Homer in making
Mezentius speak to Rhosbus, but shrank from
the reply of the prophetic courser.*

Toy S'ag* two

Iliad xix. 404.
Rhoebe diu, etc. — Virg. x.

80 APHORISMS.

53. Whenever the medium of any work,
whether lines, colour, grouping, diction, be-
comes so predominant as to absorb the subject
in its splendour, the work is degraded to an
inferior order.

54. The painter, who makes an historical
figure address the spectator from the canvass,
and the actor who addresses a soliloquy to you
from the stage, have equal claims to your con-
tempt or pity.

55. Common-place figures are as inadmissible
in the grand style of painting as common-place
characters or sentiments in poetry.

Coroll.— Common-place figures were first in-
troduced by the gorgeous machinists of Venice,
and adopted by the Bolognese school of Eclec-
tics ; the modern school of Rome from Carlo
Maratta to Battoni knew nothing else ; and they
have been since indiscriminately disseminated
on this side of the Alps, by those whom medi-
ocrity obliged to hide themselves in crowds, or
a knack at grouping stimulated to aggregate a
rabble.

APHORISMS. 81

56. — The copious is seldom grand.

57. Glitter is the refuge of the mean.

58. All apparatus destroys terror, as all orna-
ment grandeur : the minute catalogue of the
cauldron's ingredients in Macbeth destroys the
terror attendant on mysterious darkness ; and
the seraglio-trappings of Rubens annihilate his
heroes.

59. All conceits, not founded upon probable
combinations of nature, are absurd. The ca-
pricci of Salvator Rosa, and of his imitators,
are, to the fiends of Michael Angelo, what the
paroxysms of a fever are to the sallies of vigor-
ous fancy.

60. Distinguish carefully between bold fancy
and a daring hand ; between the powers of na-
ture and the acquisitions of practice : most of
Salvator's banditti are a medley made up of
starveling models and the shreds of his lumber-
room brushed into notice by a daring pencil.

VOL. III. G

82 APHORISMS.

61. Distinguish between boldness and bru-
tality of hand, between the face of beauty and
the bark of a tree.

6%. All mediocrity pretends.

63. Invention, strictly speaking, being con-
fined to one moment, he invents best who in
that moment combines the traces of the past,
the energy of the present, and a glimpse of the
future.

64. Composition has been divided into na-
tural and ornamental : that is dictated by the
subject, this by effect or situation.

65. Distinguish between composition and
grouping: though none can compose without
grouping, most group without composing.

Coroll. — The assertion that grouping may not
be composing, has been said to make a distinc-
tion without a difference: as if there had not
been, still are, and always will be squadrons of
artists, whose skill in grouping can no more be
denied, than their claim to invention, and con-
sequently to composition, admitted, if invention

APHORISMS. 83

means the true conception of a subject and
composition the best mode of representing it.
After the demise of Lionardo and Michael
Angelo, their successors, however discordant
else, uniformly agreed to lose the subject in the
medium. Raffaello had no followers. Tiziano
and something of Tintoretto excepted, what
instance can there be produced of composition
in the works of the Venetian school ? Are the
splendid masquerades of Paolo to be dignified
with that name? If composition has a part in
the effusions of the great founder of the Lom-
bard school, it surely did not arrange the celestial
hubbub of his cupolas, content to inspire his
lo, the Zingaro, Christ in the Garden, perhaps
(I speak with diffidence) his Notte. So cha-
racteristically separate from real composition
are the most splendid assemblages, the most
happy combinations of figures, if founded on
the mere power of grouping, that one of the
first, and certainly the most courteous critic in
Art of the age, in compliment to the Vene-
tian and Flemish Schools, has thought proper
to divide composition into legitimate and or-
namental.

84 APHORISMS.

66. Ask not, what is the shape of compo-
sition ? You may in vain climb the pyramid,
wind with the stream, or point the flame ; for
composition, unbounded like Nature, and her
subjects, though resident in all, may be in
none of these.

67. The nature of picturesque composition is
depth, or to come forward and recede.

Cor oil. — Pausias, in painting a sacrifice, fore-
shortened the victim, and threw its shade on
part of the surrounding crowd, to show its
height and length.*

68. — Sculpture composes in single groups or
separate figures, but apposition is the element
of basso-relievo.

Coroll. — Poussin painted basso-relievo, Al-
gardi chiselled pictures.

69. He who treats you with all the figures
of a subject save the principal, is as civil or
important as he who invites you to dine with
all a nobleman's family, the master only ex-

Plin. lib. xxxv.

APHORISMS. 85

cepted : this sometimes may be no loss, but
surely you cannot be said to have dined with
the chief of the family.

70. Examine whether an artist treats you
with a subject, or only with some of its limbs :
many see only the lines, some the masses,
others the colours, and not a few the mere back-
ground of their subject.

71. Second thoughts are admissible in paint-
ing and poetry only as dressers of the first con-
ception ; no great idea was ever formed in
fragments.

72. He alone can conceive and compose, who
sees the whole at once before him.

73. He who conceives the given point of a
subject in many different ways, conceives it not
at all. Appeal to the artist's own feelings ; you
will ever find him most reluctant to give up
that part of it which he conceived intuitively,
and readier to dismiss that which harassed him
by alteration.

86 APHORISMS.

74. Metaphysical composition, if it be nu-
merous, will be oftener mistaken for dilapi-
dation of fragments than regular distribution
of materials.

Corott. — The School of Athens as it is called,
by Raffaelle, communicates to few more than
an arbitrary assemblage of speculative groups :
yet if the subject be the dramatic represen-
tation of philosophy, as it prepares for active
life, the parts of the building are not connected
with more regular gradation than those groups :
fitted by physical and intellectual harmony,
man ascends from himself to society, from so-
ciety to God.

75. No excellence of execution can atone for
meanness of conception.

76. Grandeur of conception will predominate
over the most vulgar materials — if in the sub-
jects of Jesus before Pilate, by Rembrandt, and
the Resuscitation of Lazarus by Lievens,* the
materials had all been equal to the conception,

* This picture, during a period of nearly half a century,
graced the collection of Charles Lambert, Esq. of Paper-
buildings, Temple ; where it remained without having been

APHORISMS. 87

they would have been works of superhuman
powers.

77. Repetition of attitude and gesture invi-
gorates the expression of the grand : as a tor-
rent gives its own direction to every object it
sweeps along, so the impression of a sublime or
pathetic moment absorbs the contrasts of in-
ferior agents.

78. Tameness lies on this side of expres-
sion, grimace overleaps it ; insipidity is the re-
lative of folly, eccentricity of madness.

79. The fear of not being understood, or felt,
makes some invigorate expression to grimace.

80. The temple of expression, like that of
religion, has a portico and a sanctuary ; that is
trod by all, this only admits her votaries.

81. Propriety, modesty and delicacy, guard
expression from the half-conceits of the weak,
the intemperance of the extravagant, and the
brutality of the vulgar.

washed or varnished. At his death it was purchased by my
friend Mr. Knowles, has been cleaned by a skilful hand, and
restored to nearly its pristine state.

88 APHORISMS.

82. Sensibility is the mother of sympathy.
How can he paint Beauty who has not throb-
bed at her charms ? How shall he fill the eye
with the dew of humanity whose own never
shed a tear for others ? How can he form a
mouth to threaten or command, who licks the
hereditary spittle of princes ?

83. He fails with greater dignity, who ex-
presses the principal feature of his subject and
misses or neglects all the secondary, than he
who consumes his powers on what is subordi-
nate and comes exhausted to the chief.

Corott. — Those who have asserted that Lio-
nardo, in finishing the Last Supper, was so ex-
hausted by his exertions to trace the characters
and emotions of the disciples, that, unable to
fix the physiognomy of Christ, he found him-
self reduced to the necessity of leaving that
head unfinished, — either never saw it, or if they
did, were too low- to reach the height, and too
shallow to fathom the depth of the conception.

84. The coward, driven to despair, leaps
back into the face of danger ; and the tame,
stimulated to exertions and aiming at expres-

APHORISMS. 89

sion, puffs spirit into flutter ; or tears the garb
of passion and flourishes the rags.

85. Affectation cannot excite sympathy.
How can you feel for him who cannot feel for
himself? How can he feel for himself, who
exhibits the artificial graces of studied atti-
tude?

86. The loathsome is abominable, and no en-
gine of expression.

Cor oil. — When Spenser dragged into light
the entrails of the serpent, slain by the Red-
cross Knight, he dreamt a butcher's dream and
not a poet's : and Fletcher,* or his partner, when
rummaging the surgeon's box of cataplasms
and trusses to assuage hunger, solicited the
grunt of an applauding sty.

87- Sympathy and disgust are the lines that
separate terror from horror: though we shud-
der at, we scarcely pity what we abominate.

Coroll. — Howe, when he congratulates the
ghost on bidding Harnlet spare his mother,
accuses her of a crime with which the poet

* Sea Voyage, Act 3rd. sc, 1st.

90 APHORISMS.

never charged her : that Shakspeare might be
hurried on to horror let the " vile jelly" wit-
ness, which Cornwall treads from Gloster's
bleeding sockets.

88. Expression animates, convulses, or ab-
sorbs form. The Apollo is animated ; the
warrior of Agasias is agitated ; the Laocoon is
convulsed ; the Niobe is absorbed.

89. The being seized by an enormous pas-
sion, be it joy or grief, hope or despair, loses
the character of its own individual expression,
and is absorbed by the power of the feature
that attracts it : Niobe and her family are assi-
milated by extreme anguish ; Ugolino is petri-
fied by the fate that sweeps his sons; and
every metamorphosis from that of Clyde to the
transfusion of Gianni Fucci * tells a new alle-
gory of sympathetic power.

90. Reject with indignant incredulity all self-
congratulations of conscious villainy, though
they be uttered by Richard or by lago.

* Dante Inferno, Cant. xxiv.

APHORISMS. 91

91. The axe, the wheel, saw-dust, and the
blood-stained sheet are not legitimate substi-
tutes of terror.

92. All division diminishes, all mixtures im-
pair the simplicity and clearness of expression.

93. The epoch which discovered expression,
or what the Greeks called " manners,"* is mark-
ed by Pliny as that which gave importance and
effect to art.

Cor oil. — Homer invested his heroes with
ideal powers, but copied nature in delineating
their moral character. Achilles, the irresistible
in arms, clad in celestial armour, is a splendid
being, created by himself; Achilles the fool of
passions, is the real man delivered to him by
tradition.

That the plastic artist should have had an
aim beyond the poet is improbable, because the
poet, in general, furnished him with materials ;
he composed his man of beauty and ideal limbs,
not to obscure, but to invigorate his character
and our attention.

The limbs, the form of Ajax hurling defi-
t H0H. Mores. Plin. 1. xxxv.

92 APHORISMS.

ance from the sea-swept rock unto the murky
sky, were, no doubt, exquisite ; but if the artist
mitigated his expression, the indignation due
to blasphemy from the spectator gave way to
sterner indignation at the injustice of his gods.

The expression of the ancients, from the
heights and depths of the sublime, descended
and emerged to search every nook of the hu-
man breast ; from the ambrosial locks of Zeus,
and the maternal phantom fluttering round
Ulysses,* to the half-slain mother, shuddering
lest the infant should suck the blood from her
palsied nipple, and the fond attention of Pe-
nelope dwelling on the relation of her returned
son.f

The expression of the ancients explored na-
ture even in the mute recesses, in the sullen
organs of the brute ; from the Argus of Ulys-
ses, to the lamb, the symbol of expiatory resig-

* The Necromantia of Nicias — the sacking of a town, by
Aristides. Plin. 1. xxxv.

t A group of Stephanus in the Villa Ludovisi, known by
the name of Papyrius and his mother, called a Phaedra and
Hippolytus, or an Electra with Orestes, by J. Winkelmann,
bears more resemblance to an JSthra with Theseus, or a Pe-
nelope \vith Telemachus.

APHORISMS. 93

nation, on an altar, and to the untameable fea-
ture of the toad.

The expression of the ancients roamed all
the fields of licit and illicit pleasure ; from the
petulance with which Ctesilochus exhibited the
pangs of a Jupiter delivered by celestial mid-
wives, to the libidinous sports of Parrhasius,
and from these to the indecent caricature*
which furnished Crassus with a repartee.

The ancients extended expression even to
the colour of their materials in sculpture : to
express the remorse of Athamas, Aristonidas
the Theban mixed metals ; and Alcon formed
a Hercules of iron, to express the perseverance
of the God.f

94. Invention, before it attends to composi-
tion, group, or contrast, classes its subject and
ascertains what kind of impression it is to make
on the whole.

95. Invention never suffers the action to
expire, nor the spectator's fancy to consume

* Gallum inficetissime linguam exserentem. — Plin. 1. xxxv.
f Plin. 1. xxx. W. c. xiv.

94 APHORISMS.

itself in preparation, or stagnate into repose :
it neither begins from the egg, nor coldly
gathers the remains ; for action and interest
terminate together.

96. The middle moment, the moment of
suspense, the crisis, is the moment of import-
ance, big with the past and pregnant with the
future : we rush from the flames with the War-
rior of Agasias, and look forward to his enemy ;
or we hang in suspense over the wound of the
Expiring Soldier,* and poise with every drop
which yet remains of life.

97. Distinguish between the hero and the
actor ; between exertions of study and effects
of impulse.

98. Know that expression has its classes.
The frown of the Hercynian phantom may re-
press the ardour, but cannot subdue the dig-

* Commonly named the Dying Gladiator ; by J. Winkel-
mann called a Herald ; with more probability the " Vulrieratus
deficiens, in quo possit intelligi quantum restet animse." A
work of Ctesilas in bronze, was probably the model of this.
Plin. 1. xxxiv.

APHORISMS. 95

nity of Drusus ;* the terror of the Centurion at
the Resurrection,! is not the panic of his sol-
diers ; the palpitation of Hamlet cannot dege-
nerate into vulgar fright.

Coroll. — Of all the eclectics, Domenichino
alone composed for expression ; but his expres-
sion compared with Raffaello's is the expres-
sion of Theocritus compared with that of Ho-
mer. A detail of pretty images is rather cal-
culated to diminish than to enforce energy with
the whole : a lovely child taking refuge in the
bosom of a lovely mother is an idea of nature,
and pleasing in a lowly or domestic subject ;
but amidst the terrors of martyrdom, it is a
shred tacked to a purple robe. In touching
the circle that surrounds the Ananias of RafFa-
elle, you touch the electric chain ; an irresistible
spark darts from the last as from the first, and
penetrates and subdues. At the Martyrdom
of St. Agnes,^: you saunter amidst the mob of
a lane, where the silly chat of neighbouring
gossips announces a topic as silly, till you find,

* Sueton. 1. vi.

f In one of the cartoons of Raffaello, now lost, but still
in some degree existing in tapestry and in print.
I Engraved by G. Audran.

96 APHORISMS.

with indignation, that instead of a broken pot,
or a petty theft, you are to witness a scene for
which Heaven opens, the angels descend, and
Jesus rises from his throne.

99. Expression alone can invest beauty with
supreme and lasting command over the eye.

Coroll. — On beauty, unsupported by vigour
and expression, Homer dwells less than on ac-
tive deformity ; he tells us, in three lines, that
Nireus led three ships, his parentage, his form,
his effeminacy ; but opens in Thersites a source
of comedy and entertainment.

Raffaelle not only subjected beauty to ex-
pression, but at the command of invention, de-
graded it into a handmaid of deformity : thus
the flowers of infancy and youth, virility and
age, are scattered round the temple-gate, to im-
press us more by comparison with the distorted
beings that crawl before and defy the powers
of every other hand but the one delegated by
Omnipotence.*

100. Imitation seems to cease, where the
ideal part begins.

* In the cartoon of Peter and John.

APHORISMS. 97

101. The imitator rises above the copyist
by generalizing the individual to a class ; the
idealist mounts above the imitator by uniting
classes.

102. The imitator, by comparison and taste,
unites- the scattered limbs of kindred excel-
lence ; the idealist, by the " mind's eye," fixes,
personifies, embodies possibility : modes and de-
grees of single powers are the province of the
former; the latter unites whatever implies no
contradiction in an assemblage of varied excel-
lence.

Coroll. — This is best explained by the Ilias.
Each individual of Homer forms a class, and is
circumscribed by one quality of heroic power ;
Achilles alone unites their different energies.

The height, the strength, the giant-stride
and supercilious air of Ajax ; the courage, the
impetuosity, the never-failing aim, the never-
bloodless stroke of Diomedes ; the presence of
mind, the powerful agility of Ulysses ; the ve-
locity of the lesser Ajax ; Agamemnon's sense
of prerogative and domineering spirit, — assign
to each his separate class of heroism, yet lessen
not their shades of imperfection. Ajax appears

VOL. III. H

98 APHORISMS.

the warrior rather than the leader ; Ulysses is
too prudent to be more than brave ; the hawk
more than the eagle predominates in the son of
Oileus ; Agamemnon has the prerogative of
power, but not of heroism ; Diomede alone
might appear to have been raised too high, had
he been endowed with an assuming spirit. So
far the poet found, ennobled, classified ; but
all these he sums up, and creates an ideal form
from their assemblage, in Achilles : — he is the
grandson of Jupiter, the son of a goddess,
the favourite of Heaven — * " What arms can
fit me but the shield of Ajax ? The lance
maddens not in the grasp of Diomede to chase
the flames from the ships. Let him confer
with thee, Ulysses, and the rest." Such is
his language. Before the pursuer of Hector
vanishes the velocity of Ajax ; from destroying
Agamemnon he is prevented by Minerva ; he
gives his armour to the son of Mencetius, and
disperses all but the gods ; his spear none can
throw, and none tear from the ground when
thrown ; a miracle alone can save those that
oppose him singly ; when else he fights, 'tis not
to gain a battle, but to subvert Troy.

* Iliad, L. xviii. I. 93 ; L. xvi. 1. 74 and 75 ; L. ix. 1. 346.

APHORISMS. 99

What Achilles is to his confederates, the
Apollo, the Torso, the statues* of the Quirinal,
are to all other known figures of gods, of demi-
gods and heroes.

103. Fancy not to compose an ideal form
by mixing up a mass of promiscuous beauties ;
for, unless you consulted what was homoge-
neous and what was possible in Nature, you
have hatched only a monster : this, we suppose,
was understood by Zeuxis when he collected
the beauties of Agrigentum to compose a per-
fect female.f

104. If there be any thing serious in art, it
certainly then ought to be exerted when reli-
gion is the subject ; but idolaters and icono-
clasts seem to have conspired, either to banish
the author of their faith to the cold sphere of

* Commonly called the Castor and Pollux of Monte Ca-
vallo, — the name given from their horses to the Quirinal.

t Plin. N. H. 1. xxxv. c. ix. Tantus diligentia, ut Agri-
gentinis facturus tabulam, quam in templo Junonis Lucinse
publice dicaient, inspexerit virgines eorum nudas, et quinque
elegerit, ut quod in quaque laudatissimum esset, pictura
redderet.

H 2!

100 APHORISMS.

mythology, or to debase him to the dregs of
mankind.

Coroll. — Majesty is the feature of the Su-
preme Being ; no eternal Father of the mo-
derns approaches the majesty of Jupiter.

The gods of Michael Angelo are stern.
The gods of Raffaelle are affable and weak.
The gods of Guido have the air of ancient
courtiers.

In the race of Jupiter, majesty is tempered
by emanations of beauty and of grace, but
never softened into love.

The Christ of Michael Angelo is severe. The
Christ of Raffaelle is poised between the herald-
ry of church tradition and the dignified mild-
ness of his own character. The Christ of
Guido is a well suspended corpse.

" The character corresponding with that of
Christ," says a critic and a painter,* " is a mix-
ture of the characters of Jupiter and Apollo,
allowing only for the accidental expression of
the moment." What magic shall amalgamate
the superhuman airs of Rhea's and Latona's
sons with sufferings and resignation ? The

* Mengs Lettera a don A. Ponz. Opere di A. R. Mengs,
t. ii. p. 83.

APHORISMS. 10J

critic, in his exultation, forgot the leading fea-
ture of his master — humility.

Whatever be the ideal form of Christ, the
Saviour of mankind, extending his arm to re-
lieve the afflicted, the hopeless, the dying, is a
subject that comes home to the breast of every
one who calls himself after his name : — the
artist is in the sphere of adoration with the
Christian.

A great and beneficent character, eminently
exerting unknown healing powers over the fa-
mily of disease and pain, claims the participa-
tion of every feeling man, though he be no
believer : — the artist is in the sphere of senti-
ment with the Deist or Mahometan.

But a mean man marked with the features
of a mean sect, surrounded by a beggarly ill-
shaped rabble and stupid masks — is probably
a juggler that claims the attention of no one.

The Resurrection of Christ derives its in-
terest from its rapidity, the Ascension from its
slowness.

In the Resurrection, the hero, like a ball of
fire, shoots up resistless from the bursting tomb,
and scatters terror and astonishment, — what

102 APHORISMS.

apprehension could not dream of, what the eye
had never beheld, and tongue had never ut-
tered, blazes before us, — tumultuous agitation
rends the whole. Such is the spirit of the
Resurrection by Raffaelle.

The Ascension is the last of many similar
scenes : no longer with the rapidity of a con-
queror, but with the calm serenity of trium-
phant power, the hero is borne up in splen-
dour, and gradually vanishes from those who,
by repeated visions, had been taught to expect
whatever was amazing. Silent and composed,
with eyes more absorbed in adoration than
wonder, they followed the glorious emanation,
till addressed by the white-robed messengers of
their departed King.

105. We are more impressed by Gothic than
by Greek mythology, because the bands are
not yet rent which tie us to its magic : he has
a powerful hold of us, who holds us by our
superstition or by a theory of honour.

106. The east expands, the north concen-
trates images.

APHORISMS. 103

107. Disproportion of parts is the element
of hugeness,— proportion, of grandeur ; all Ori-
ental, all Gothic styles of Architecture, are
huge ; the Grecian alone, is grand.

108. The female, able to invigorate her taste
without degenerating into a pedant, sloven or
virago, may give her hand to the man of ele-
gance, who scorns to sacrifice his sense to the
presiding phantoms of an effeminate age.

109. The collector who arrogates not to him-
self the praise bestowed on his collections, and
the reader who fancies himself not the author
of the beauties he recites to an admiring circle

—are not the last of men.

110. The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics,
criticisms in a nation, will add to their stock of
authors in the same proportion as it diminishes
their stock of genius : their productions will
bear the stamp of study, not of nature ; they
will adopt, not generate; sentiment will sup-
plant images, and narrative invention ; words
will be no longer the dress but the limbs of

104 APHORISMS.

composition, and feeble elegance will supply the
want of nerves.

111. He " lisped not in numbers, no num-
bers came to him," though he count his verses
by thousands, who has not learnt to distin-
guish the harmony of two lines from that of
a period — whom dull monotony of ear con-
demns to the drowsy psalmody of one return-
ing couplet.

Some seek renown as the Parthians
sought victory — by seeming to fly from it.

113. He has more than genius — he is a hero
— who can check his powers in their full career
to glory, merely not to crush the feeble on his
road.

114. He who could have the choice, and
should prefer to be the first painter of insects,
of flowers, or of drapery, to being the second in
the ranks of history, though degraded to the
last class of art, would undoubtedly be in the
first of men by the decision of Caesar.

APHORISMS. 105

115. Such is the aspiring nature of man,
that nothing wounds the copyist more sorely
than the suspicion of being thought what he is.

116. He who depends for all upon his
model, should treat no other subject but his
model.

117. The praises lavished on the sketches of
vigorous conception, only sharpen the throes of
labour in finishing.

118. As far as the medium of an art can be
taught, so far is the artist confined to the class
of mere mechanics ; he only then elevates him-
self to talent, when he imparts to his method,
or his tool, some unattainable or exclusive ex-
cellence of his own.

119. None but the first can represent the
first. Genius, absorbed by the subject, hastens
to the centre; and from that point dissemi-
nates, to that leads back the rays : talent, full
of its own dexterities, begins to point the rays
before they have a centre, and aggregates a
mass of secondary beauties.

106 APHORISMS.

120. The ear absorbed in harmonies of its
own creation, is deaf to all external ones.

121. Harmony disposes, melody determines.

. There is not a bauble thrown by the
sportive hand of fashion, which may not be
caught with advantage by the hand of art.

Corott. — Shakspeare has been excused for
seeking in the Roman senate what he knew
all senates could furnish — a buffoon. Paulo of
Verona, with equal strength of argument, may
be excused for cramming on the foreground of
an assembly or a feast, what he knew a feast or
assembly could furnish — a dog, an ape, a scul-
lion, a parrot, or a dwarf.

123. He has done much in art who raises
your curiosity — he has done all who has raised
it and keeps it up restless and uniform ; pro-
strate yourself before the genius of Homer.

124. Difficulties surmounted to obtain what
in itself is of no real value, deserve pity or con-
tempt : the painted catalogue of wrinkles by

APHORISMS. 107

Denner are not offsprings of art, but fac-similes
of natural history.

125. Love for what is called deception in
painting, marks either the infancy or decrepi-
tude of a nation's taste.

126. Indiscriminate execution, like the mon-
key's rasor, cuts shear asunder the parts it meant
to polish.

Cor oil. — Francesco Barbieri broke like a tor-
rent over the academic rules of his masters.
As the desire of disseminating character over
every part of his composition made Raphael
less attentive to its general effect, so an un-
governable itch of copying all that lay in his
way made this man sacrifice order, costume,
mind, to mere effects of colour : a map of
flesh, a pile of wood, a sleeve, a hilt, a feathered
hat, a table-cloth, or a gold-tissued robe, were
for Guercino what a quibble was for Shak-
speare. The countenance of his Dido has that
sublimity of woe which affects us in the ^Eneis,
but she is pierced with a toledo and wrapped
in brocade ; Anna is an Italian Duenna ; the

108 APHORISMS.

scene, the Mole of Ancona or of Naples, the
spectators a brace of whiskered Spaniards, and
a deserting Amorino winds up the farce. In
his St. Petronilla the rags and brawny limbs of
two gigantic porters crush the effect which the
saint ought to have, and all the rest is frittered
into spots. Yet is that picture a tremendous
instance of mechanic powers and intrepidity
of hand. As a firm base supports, pervades,
unites the tones of harmony, so a certain stern
virility inspires, invigorates and gives a zest
to all Guercino's colour. The gayer tints of
Guido vanish before his as insipid,* Domeni-
chino appears laboured, and the Carracci dim.
Nor was Guercino a stranger to the genuine
expressions of untaught nature, and there is
more of pathos in the dog which he introduced
caressing the returned prodigal, than in all the
Farnese gallery ; as the Argus of Ulysses, look-
ing up at his old master, then dropping his
head and dying, moves more than all the me-
tamorphoses of Ovid. If his male figures be

* Such was probably that austerity of tone in the works
of Athenion, which the ancients preferred to the sweetness
or gayer tints of Nicias — " austerior colore et in austeritate
jucundior." — Plin. 1. xxxv. c. xi.

APHORISMS. 109

brought to the test of style, it may be said,
that he never made a man ; their virility is
tumour or knotty labour; to youth he gave
emaciated lankness, and to old age little be-
sides decrepitude and beards — meanness to all :
and though he was more cautious in female
forms, they owe the best part of their charms
to chiaroscuro.

127. Execution has its classes.

Coroll. — Satan summoning the Princes of
Hell stretched over the fiery flood ; or the
giant snake of the Norway seas hovering over
a storm-vexed vessel, by Gerard Douw, or Van-
derverf, — are incongruous ideas ; would be
incongruous though Michael Angelo had plan-
ned their design and Rembrandt massed their
light and shade.

128. It has been said, but let us repeat it :
the proportion of will and power is not always
reciprocal. A copious measure of will is some-
times assigned to ordinary and contracted
minds; whilst the greatest faculties as fre-
quently evaporate in indolence and languor.

110 APHORISMS.

129. Mighty execution of impotent concep-
tion, and vigour of conception with trembling
execution, are coalitions equally deplorable.

130. He is a prince of artists and of men
who knows the moment when his work is
done. On this Apelles founded his superiority
over his contemporaries ; the knowledge when
to stop, left Sylla nothing to fear, though dis-
armed; the want of knowing this, exposed
Csesar to the dagger of Brutus.

131. Next to him who can finish, is he who
has hid from you that he cannot.

132. If finishing be to terminate all the
parts of a performance in an equal degree, no
artist ever finished his work. A great part of
conception or execution is always sacrificed to
some individual excellence which either he pos-
sesses or thinks he possesses. The colourist
makes lines only the vehicle of colour ; the de-
signer subordinates hue to his line ; the man
of breadth or chiaroscuro overwhelms some-
times both, and the subject itself to produce
effect.

APHORISMS. HI

133. The fewer the traces that appear of the
means by which any work has been produced,
the more it resembles the operations of Nature,
and the nearer it is to sublimity.

134. Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection in-
fallibly leads to mediocrity.

Coroll. — Take the design of Rome, Venetian
motion and shade, Lombardy's tone of colour,
add the terrible manner of Angelo, Titian's
truth of nature, and the supreme purity of
Corregio's style ; mix them up with the deco-
rum and solidity of Tibaldi, with the learned
invention of Primaticcio, and a few grains of
Parmegiano's grace : and what do you think will
be the result of this chaotic prescription, such
elemental strife ? 'Excellence, perhaps, equal to
one or all of the names that compose these in-
gredients? You are deceived, if you fancy
that a multitude of dissimilar threads can com-
pose a uniform texture — that dissemination of
spots will make masses, or a little of many
things produce a whole. If Nature stamped
you with a character, you will either annihilate
it by indiscriminate imitation of heterogeneous
excellence, or debase it to mediocrity and add
one to the ciphers of art. Yet such is the pre-

1J2 APHORISMS.

scrip tion of Agostino Carracci,* and such in
general must be the dictates of academics.

135. If you mean to reign dictator over the
arts of your own times, assail not your rivals
with the blustering tone of condemnation and
rigid censure ; — sap with conditional or lament-
ing praise — confine them to unfashionable ex-
cellence— exclude them from the avenues of
fame.

136. If you wish to give consequence to
your inferiors, answer their attacks.

Coroll. — Michael Angelo, advised to resent
the insolence of some obscure upstart who was
pushing forward to notice by declaring him-
self his rival, answered : " Chi combatte con
dappochi, non vince a nulla :" who contests
with the base, loses with all !

137. Genius knows no partner. All partner-
ship is deleterious to poetry and art : one must
rule.f

* See the sonnet of Agostino Carracci,~which begins " Chi
farsi un bon Pittor cerca e desia," &c. which the author him-
self seems to ridicule by the manner in which he concludes.

f Ot5x ay«0ov TToAuxoipavnj e»£ xoigavoj ICTTCO- H» ii. 204.

The

APHORISMS. 113

138. The wish of perpetuating a name by
enlisting under the banners of another, is the
ambition of inferior minds : biography, with all
its branches of " Ana," translation and engrav-
ing, however useful to man or dear to art, is
the unequivocal homage of inferiority offered
by taste and talent to the majesty of genius.

139. Dive in the crowd, meet beauty : fol-
low vigour, compare character, snatch the fea-
ture that moves unobserved and the sudden
burst of passion — and you are at the school of
nature with Lysippus.*

140. The lessons of disappointment, humilia-
tion and blunder, impress more than those of a
thousand masters.

141, There are artists, who have wasted
much of life in abstruse theories on proportion,
who have measured the Antique in all its forms
and characters, compared it with Nature, and
mixed up amalgam as of both, yet never made
a figure stand or move.

The conception of every great work must originate in one,
though it may be above the power or strength of one to
execute the whole. * Pliny, 1. xxxiv. c. 8.

VOL. III. I

114 APHORISMS.

Cor oil. — " The Apollo is altogether composed
of lines sweetly convex, of very small obtuse
angles, and of flats, but the soft convexities
predominate the character of the figure, being
a compound of strength, dignity and delicacy.
The artist has expressed the first by convex
outlines, the second by their uniformity, and
the third by undulation of forms. The con-
vex line predominates in the Laocoon, and the
forms of the muscles are angular at their in-
sertions and ends to express agitation ; for by
these means the nerves and tendons become
more visible, straight lines meeting with con-
cave and convex ones, form those angles which
produce violence of action. The sculptor of
the Farnesian Hercules invented a style totally
different ; to obtain fleshiness, he composed the
figure of round and convex muscles, but made
their insertions flat to signify that they are
nervous and unincumbered with fat, the cha-
racteristic of strength."

" In the Gladiator there is a mixture of the
Herculean and the Laocoontic forms, the mus-
cles in action are angulated, whilst those at
rest are short and round, a variety conforma-
ble -to nature," &c.

Opera di A. R. MENGS, t. i. p. 203.

APHORISMS. 115

142. Neither he who forms lines without the
power of embodying them, nor he who floats
on masses, can be said to draw : the one is the
slave of a brush, the other of a point.

143. Pulp without solidity absorbs, and re-
lentless tension tears character.

144. In following too closely a model, there
is danger in mistaking the individual for Na-
ture herself; in relying only on the schools,
the deviation into manner seems inevitable :
what then remains, but to transpose yourself
into your subject ?

145. Style is the selection of forms and
groups and tones to suit a subject.

Coroll. — The Italian Style Grandioso, the
French II y a du style, the English great
style and breadth, when applied to a perform-
ance, only mean, that the artist followed those
who have enlarged the principles of imitation
and execution.

146. Style pervades the object; manner
floats on the surface.

116 APHORISMS.

147. Antient art was the tyrant of Egypt,
the mistress of Greece, and the servant of
Rome.

148. The superiority of the Greeks seems
not so much the result of climate and society,
as of the simplicity of their end and the uni-
formity of their means. If they had schools,
the Ionian, that of Athens and of Sicyon appear
to have directed their instruction to one grand
principle, proportion : this was the stamen
which they drew out into one immense con-
nected web ; whilst modern art, with its schools
of designers, colourists, machinists, eclectics,
is but a tissue of adventitious threads. Apol-
lonius and the sculptor of the small Hesperian
Hercules in bronze are distinguished only by
the degree of execution ; whilst M. Angelo
and Bernini had no one principle in common
but that of making groups and figures.

149- Art among a religious race produces
reliques ; among a military one, trophies ; among
a commercial one, articles of trade.

150. Modern art, reared by superstition in

APHORISMS. 117

Italy, taught to dance in France, plumped
up to unwieldiness in Flanders, reduced to
" chronicle small beer" in Holland, became
a rich old woman by " suckling fools" in
England.

151. The rules of art are either immediately
supplied by Nature herself, or selected from
the compendiums of her students who are
called masters and founders of schools. The
imitation of Nature herself leads to style, that
of the schools to manner.

Coroll. — The line of Michael Angelo is uni-
formly grand ; character and beauty were ad-
mitted only as far as they could be made sub-
servient to grandeur: — the child, the female,
meanness, deformity were indiscriminately
stamped with grandeur; a beggar rose from
his hand the patriarch of poverty ; the hump
of his dwarf is impressed with dignity ; his
women are moulds of generation ; his infants
teem with the man, his men are a race of
giants.

The design of Raphael is either historic or
poetic. The forms of his historic style are cha-
racteristic, those of his poetic style he himself

118 APHORISMS.

calls ideal :* the former are regulated by nature,
but these are only exaggerations of another
style.

The forms of Julio Pipi are poised between
character and caricature, but verge to this ;
even his dresses and ornaments are caricatures ;
but no poet or painter ever rocked the cradle
of infant mythology with simpler or more
primitive grace ; none ever imparted to alle-
gory a more insinuating power, or swayed the
strife of elemental war with a bolder hand.
What ever equalled the exuberance of invention
scattered over the T of Mantoua?

The line of Polydoro, is that of the antique
basso-relievo, seen from beneath (da sotto
in su).

The forms of Titian are those of sanguine
health; robust, not grand ; soft without delicacy.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of
Michael Angelo with colour, without tracing
its principle.

As Michael Angelo was impressed with an
idea of grandeur, so Correggio was charmed
with a notion of harmony : his line was correct

* In the Letter to C. B. Castiglione. Ideal is properly
the representation of pure human essence.

APHORISMS. 119

when harmony permitted; it strayed as har-
mony commanded,

Elegance (sueltezza) was the principle of
Parmegiano's line, but he forgot proportion.

Annibale Carracci, one of the founders of the
Eclectic school, attempted to combine in his
line the appearance of Nature with style, and
became the standard of academic drawing.

The medium, not the thing, was the object
of the Tuscan and Venetian schools ; the school
of Urbino* aimed at subjecting the medium to
the character of things ; the Lombards strove to
unite the separate attainments of the three with
the unattainable spell of Correggio ; the Ger-
mans, with their Flemish and Dutch branches,
now humbly followed, now boldly attempted
to improve their Italian masters ; the French
passed the Alps to study at Rome and Venice
what they were to forget at Paris.

Domenichino aimed at the characteristic line
of Raffaelle, the compactness of Annibale, and
the beauty of the antique ; and mixing some-
thing of each fell short of all.

* Raffaelle and the best of his pupils ;v their successors,
commonly known by the name of the Roman school, fol-
lowed principles diametrically opposite.

120 APHORISMS.

Rosso carried anatomy, and the Bolognese
Abbate the poetry of their art to the court of
Francis. To the haggard melancholy of the
Tuscan and the laboured richness of the Lom-
bard, the French added their own cold gaiety,
and the French school arose.

The forms of Guido's female heads are abs-
tracts of the antique. The forms of his male
bodies are transcripts of models, such as are
found in a genial climate, though sometimes
distorted by fatigue or emaciated by want.

Pietro Testa copied the Torsos of antiquity,
and supplied them with extremities drawn from
the dregs of Nature.

The forms* of Caravaggio are either substan-
tial flesh or the starveling produce of beggary
rendered important by ideal light and shade.

The limbs of Joseph Hibera are excrescences
of disease on hectic bodies.

Andrea Mantegna was in Italy what Albert
Durer was at Nuremberg ; Nature seems not
to have existed in any shape of health in his
time : though a servile copyist of the antique,
he never once adverted from the monuments he
copied to the originals that inspired them.

* " Macinava carne," said Annibale Carracci.

APHORISMS. 121

The forms of Albert Durer are blasphemies
on Nature, the thwarted growth of starveling
labour and dry sterility — formed to inherit
his hell of paradise. To extend the asperity
of this verdict beyond the forms of Albert
Durer, would be equally unjust and ungrate-
ful to the father of German art, on whom
invention often flashed, whom melancholy
marked for her own, whose influence even on
Italian art was such that he produced a tem-
porary revolution in the style of the Tuscan
school. Andrea del Sarto and Giacopo da Pun-
tormo became his imitators and his copyists;
nor was his influence unfelt by RafFaelle him-
self, but his Christ led to the Cross (engraved
by E. Sadler),* compared with that of the Ma-
donna del Spasimo, leaves the claim of supe-
riority doubtful for sublimity and pathos. It is
likewise probable that we owe the horrors of the
St. Felicitas to the abominations of his Martyr
scenes. The felicity of his organs, the delicacy
of his finger, the freedom and sweep of his
touch, have found an encomiast in the author
of the life prefixed to the Latin edition of his
works. What would have been the result of his

* jEgidius Sadeler sculpsit ex Prototype Alberti Dureri.

122 APHORISMS.

intended interview, when in Italy, with Andrea
Mantegna, had the death of the latter (1505)
not prevented it, is difficult to guess : if some
amelioration, certainly not the entire change
of style, which the uninterrupted study of the
antique, during a long life, had failed to pro-
duce in Andrea himself.

The forms of Luke of Leyden are the ve-
getation of a swamp.

The forms of Martin Hemskerck are dislo-
cated lankness.*

The forms of Spranger and Goltzius are
blasphemies on art ; the monstrous incubations
of dropsied fancy on phlegm run mad. This
verdict, though uniformly true of every male
figure of Goltzius that demanded energy of
exertion, cannot be equally applied to his fe-
males, the features of the face excepted. On
limbs and bodies resembling the antique in ele-
gance if not correctness, he placed heads with
Dutch features, ideally, often voluptuously
dressed : such are his Venus between Ceres
and Bacchus ; and still more his Diana and

* " Elumbis/' as applied by the author of the Dialogue on
Orators to the style of Brutus, will nearly suit all imitators of
Michael Angelo.

APHORISMS. 123

Calisto, a composition which in elegance
dignity excels that of Tiziano. In the dread-
ful familiarity with which the guardian snake
of the Beotian well approaches the companions
of Cadmus, he has touched the true vein of
terror and its limits, and atoned in some degree
for the loathsome horror that had polluted his
graver, when he condescended to copy the abo-
minable process of that scene from the design
of Pistor.

The male forms of Rubens are the brawny
pulp of slaughtermen, his females are hillocks
of roses : overwhelmed muscles, dislocated
bones, and distorted joints are swept along in a
gulph of colours, as herbage, trees and shrubs
are whirled, tossed, or absorbed by vernal in-
undation.

The female forms of Rembrandt are prodi-
gies of deformity ; his males are the crippled
produce of shuffling industry and sedentary
toil.

The line of Vandycke is balanced between
Flemish corpulence and English slenderness.

Sebastian Bourdon, sublime in his concep-
tions, filled classic ground and eastern vests
with local limbs and Gallic actors.

]24 APHORISMS.

Poussin renounced his national character to
follow the antique ; but could not separate the
spirit from the stone.

152. The imitator seldom mounts to the in-
vestigation of the principles that formed his
model ; the copier probably never.

153. Many beauties in art come by accident,
that are preserved by choice.

Cor oil. — Neither the froth formed on the
mouth of Jalysus' hound by a lucky dash from
the sponge of Protogenes, nor the modern ex-
periments of extracting composition from an
ink-splashed wall, are relatives of the beauties
alluded to in this aphorism.

154. The praise due to a work, reflects not
always on its master ; and superiority may
beam athwart the blemishes that we despise
or pity ; some, says Milton, praised the work
and some the master : would you prefer him
who is able to finish the image which he was
unable to conceive, to its inventor ?

APHORISMS. 125

155. It is the privilege of Nature alone to
be equal. Man is the slave of a part ; the most
equal artist is only the first in the list of me-
diocrity.

156. He who seeks the grand, will find it
in a trifle : but some seem made to find it only
there. Rosel saw man like an insect, and in-
sects as Michael Angelo men.

157. Physiognomy teaches what is homo-
geneous and what is heterogeneous in forms.

158. The solid parts of the body are the
base of physiognomy, the muscular that of
pathognomy ; the former contemplates the ani-
mal at rest, this its action.

159. Pathognomy allots expression to cha-
racter.

160. Those who allow physiognomy to re-
gulate the great outlines of character, and re-
ject its minute discriminations, admit a lan-
guage and reject its elements.

J26 APHORISMS.

161. The difficulty of physiognomy is to
separate the essence from accident, growth
from excrescence.

He who aims at the sublime, consults
the classes assigned to character by physiog-
nomy, not its anatomy of individuals ; the oak
in its full majesty, and not the thwarted pollard.

163, None ever escaped from himself by
crossing seas ; none ever peopled a barren fancy
and a heart of ice with images or sympathies
by excursions into the deserts of mythology or
allegory.

164. The principles of allegory and votive
composition are the same; they unite with
equal right the most distant periods of time
and the most opposite modes of society : both
surround a real being, or allude to a real act,
with symbols by long general consent adopted,
as expressive of the qualities, motives, and cir-
cumstances that distinguished or gave evidence
to the person or the transaction. Such is the
gallery of the Luxembourg, such the Attila of
the Vatican.

APHORISMS. 127

165. Pure history rejects allegory.

Coroll. — The armed figure of Home, with
Fortune behind her frowning at Coriolanus,
surrounded by the Roman matrons in the
Volscian camp (by Poussin), is a vision seen by
that warrior, and not an allegory ; it is a sub-
lime image, which, without diminishing the cre-
dibility of the fact, adds to its importance, and
raises the hero, by making him submit, not to
the impulse of private ties, but to the destiny
of his country.

166. All ornament ought to be allegoric.

167. Dignity is the salt of art.

Coroll. — In the Salutation of Michael An-
gelo,* the angelic messenger emerges from
solitary twilight, his countenance seems to
labour with the awful message, and his knees
to bend as he approaches the mysterious per-
sonage : with virgin majesty and humble grace
Mary bows to the extended arm of the lucid
herald, as if waked from sacred meditation,
and appears entranced by celestial sounds.

* In the Sacristy of St. Giovanni in. Laterano, painted from
the cartoon by Marcello Venusti.

128 APHORISMS.

The Madonnas of Raffaelle, whether hailed
parents of a God, or pressing the divine off-
spring to their breast, whether receiving him
from his slumbers, or contemplating his infant
motions, are uniformly transcripts from the
daily domestic images of common life and of
some favourite face matronized : the eyes of his
Fornarina beamed with other fires than those
of sanctity ; the sense and native dignity of her
lover could veil their fierceness, but not change
their language.

The Madonna of Titiano receives her celes-
tial visitant under an open portico of Palladian
structure, and skirted by gay gardens ; the usual
ray precedes the floating angel ; gold-ringleted
and in festive attire, he waves a lily wand : in
sable weeds the Virgin receives the gorgeous
homage, proudly devout, like a young abbess
amidst her cloistered lambs.

Tintoretto has turned salutation into irrup-
tion. The angel bursts through the shattered
casement and terrifies a vulgar female ; but his
wings are tipped in heaven.*

* This and the foregoing picture are in the Scuola di S.
Rocco at Venice. The skeleton of the former is known by
an etching of Le Fevre.

APHORISMS. 129

168. Dignity gives probability to the impos-
sible : we listen to the monstrous tale of Ulys-
ses with all the devotion due to a creed. By
dignity, even deformity becomes an instrument
of art : Vulcan limps like a god at the hand of
Homer : the hump and withered arm of Richard
are engines of terror or persuasion in Shak-
speare ; the crook-back of Michael Angelo
strikes with awe.

169. Luxuriance of ornament destroys sim-
plicity and repose, the attendants of dignity.

CorolL — " Simon Mosca, one of the most dis-
tinguished sculptors of ornament and foliage
in the sixteenth century, when proposed by
Vasari to embellish by his designs the mo-
nument of the Cardinal di Monte, was dis-
countenanced by Michael Angelo on this
principle." Vasari, vita de Simone Mosca.

170. Judge not an artist from the exertions
of accidental vigour or some unpremeditated
flights of fancy, but from the uniform tenor,
the never-varying principle of his works : the
line and style of Titian sometimes expand
themselves like those of Michael Angelo ; the

VOL. III. K

130 APHORISMS.

heads and groups of Raphael sometimes glow
and palpitate with Titiano's tints ; and there are
masses of both united in Correggio : but if you
aim at character, let Raphael be your guide ; if
at colour, Tiziano; if harmony allure, Correggio:
they indulged in alternate excursions, but never
lost sight of their own domain.

Coroll. — No one, of whatever period of art,
of whatever eminence or school, out-told Rem-
brandt in telling the story of a subject, in the
choice of its real crisis, in simplicity, in per-
spicuity : still, as the vile crust that involves
his ore, his local vulgarity of style, the ludi-
crous barbarity of his costume, prepossess eyes
less penetrating than squeamish against him,
it requires some confidence to place him with
the classics of invention. Yet with all these
defects, with every prejudice or superiority of
taste and style against him, what school has
produced a work (M. Angelo's Creation of
Adam, and the Death of Ananias by Raffaelle
excepted,) which looks not pale in the super-
human splendour that irradiates his conception
of Christ before Pilate, unless it be the raising
of Lazarus by Lievens, a name comparatively
obscure, whose awful sublimity reduces the

APHORISMS. 131

same subject as treated by Rembrandt and Se-
bastian of Venice, to artificial parade or com-
mon-place ?

171. Tone is the moral part of colour,

172. If tone be the legitimate principle of
colour, he who has not tone, though he should
excel in individual imitation, colours in frag-
ments and produces discord.

173. Harmony of colour consists in the due
balance of all, equally remote from monotony
and spots.

174. The eye tinges all nature with its own
hue. The eye of the Dutch and Flemish schools,
though shut to forms, tipped the cottage, the
boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and even the
haze of winter, with orient hues and the glow
of setting suns.

175. Clearness, freshness, force of colour,
are produced by simplicity ; one pure, is more
than a mixture of many.

K

132 APHORISMS.

176. Colour affects or delights like sound.
Scarlet or deep crimson rouses, determines, in-
vigorates the eye, as the war-horn or the trum-
pet the ear ; the flute soothes the ear, as pale
celestial blue or rosy red the eye.

177. The colours of sublimity are negative
or generic — such is the colouring of Michael
Angelo.

178. The passions that sway features and
limbs equally reside, fluctuate, flash and lower
in colour.

179. The colours of pleasure and love are
hues.

180. The colour of gravity, reverie, solem-
nity, approaches to twilight.

181. Colour in Raffaelle was the assistant of
expression; to Titian it was the vehicle of
truth ; Correggio made it the minister of har-
mony. It was sometimes seized, and though
reluctant held, but oftener neglected by the

APHORISMS. 133

first; it was embraced, it domineered over, it
coalesced with the second ; it attended the third
like an enchanted spirit.

182. Lodovico Carracci was the first who
gave in oil the colours of gravity, the dignified
twilight of cloistered meditation.

183. Annibale Carracci, from want of feelings,
though impressed by a grave principle, changed
the mild evening-ray of his master to the bleak
light of a sullen day.

184. Colour owes its effect sometimes more
to position and gradation than to its intrinsic
value.*

185. The colour of Titian is the most inde-
pendent of surrounding objects; their union may
assist, but their discrepance cannot destroy it.

* " Whoever looks at a picture by Correggio of a glorified
Madonna with a St. Sebastian and other figures, at Dres-
den, is instantly surprised by the light of the glory, which
has all the splendour of a sun, though painted with a low-
toned yellow, and dim at the extremities."

Opera di R. Mengs, t. ii. p. 161.

134 APHORISMS.

186. The harmony of Correggio is indepen-
dent of colour.

187. Historic colour imitates, but copies not.

188. The portrait-painter copies the colour
of his object, but chooses the medium through
which that object is seen.

189. The mixtures that anticipate the beau-
ties of time are big with the seeds of prema-
ture decay.

190. The colours of health are neither cada-
verous nor flushed like meteors.

191. There are works whose effect is entirely
founded on the contrast of tints, of what is
termed warm and cold colour, and on reflected
hues : strip them of this charm, reduce them to
the principles of light and shade and masses,
and as far as the want of those can degrade a
picture, they will be fit to take their places on
sign-posts. .

192. Him who has freshness without frigi-

APHORISMS. 135

dity, who glows without being adust, whose
tints luxuriate though not fermented by putre-
faction ; who is juicy yet not clammy, though
broad not empty, sharp without dryness, clear
not pellucid, airy not volatile, without being
clumsy plump — him you may venture to call a
colourist.

193. Breadth is not vacuity — Breadth might
easily be obtained if emptiness could give it.

194. The forms of virtue are erect, the forms
of pleasure undulate : Minerva's drapery de-
scends in long uninterrupted lines ; a thousand
amorous curves embrace the limbs of Flora.

195. Subordination is the character of dra-
pery. The heraldry of dress, the rows of ag-
gregated mitres and pontifical trappings, are no-
ticed only for the sake of their wearers in the
compositions of the Vatican.

CorolL — The superiority of style in drapery
over that of the limbs which it covers in the
earliest essays of art after its restoration, is not
accounted for by the assertion that it is tran-
scribed from the antique : if it is, by what

136 APHORISMS.

unaccountable perverseness did the forms of
the nudities uniformly escape observation ? In
painting, this dissonance continues more or
less offensively from the epoch of Cimabue to
that of Masaccio, and, him excepted, down to
Pinturicchio ; and ceases not to shock us in
sculpture from the Pisani, to the appearance
of Lorenzo Ghiberti. Nor did that style of
drapery mark only the productions of Italian
art ; on this side of the Alps it invested that
of Germany, from the Angels and Madonnas
of Martin Schongaver and Albert Durer, to
those of Aldegraver and Sebald Behm : in near-
ly all their performances, Trans and Cisalpine,
the wearer is the appendix of his garment,
chucked into vestments not his own, a dwarf-
ish thief hid in a giant's robe.

196. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of cha-
racter ; in Michael Angelo it envelopes gran-
deur; it is in Rubens the ponderous robe of
pomp.

197. If Nature has not taught you to sketch,
you apply in vain to art to finish your work.*

* John, called da Bologna, showed a model to Michael

APHORISMS. 137

198. Some must be idle lest others should
want work.*

199* He who submits to follow, is not made
to precede.f

200. Consider it as the unalterable law of
Nature that all your power upon others de-
pends on your own emotions. Shakspeare
wept, trembled, laughed first at what now
sways the public feature; and where he did
not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.

201. None but indelible materials can sup-
port the epic. Whatever is local, or the vola-

Angelo smoothly polished ; Michael Angelo took, and, heed-
less of its finish, twisted it about ; then giving it back to the
student, " Learn," said he, " to sketch VJefore you attempt
to finish."

* Such was the proud answer of Fra Sebastian del Piombo,
grown fat by the signet of St. Peter, when asked why he had
entirely resigned all exercise of his art.

f Said Michael Angelo, when asked whether the copy of
the Laocoon by Baccio Bandinelli was not equal or superior
to the original. Titiano, with more mordacity though surely
with less discrimination, ridiculed the copyist by a carica-
ture in which the Trojan with his sons were changed to ba-
boons.

138 APHORISMS.

tile creature of the time, beauties of fashion
and sentiments of sects, tears shed over roses,
epigrammatic sparkling, passions taught to
rave, and graces trained to move, the anti-
quary's mouldering stores, the bubbles of alle-
gorists — are all with equal contempt passed
over or crushed by him who claims the last-
ing empire of the human heart.

202. The invention of machines to supersede
manual labour will at length destroy popu-
lation and commerce ;* and the methods con-
trived to shorten the apprenticeship of artists
annihilate art.

203. Expect no religion in times when it
is easier to meet with a saint than a man; and
no art in those that multiply their artists be-
yond their labourers.

204. Expect nothing but trifles in times
when those who ought to encourage the arts

* " Sineret se plebeculam pascere," said Vespasian to the
artist who had contrived a machine to convey some large
columns with a trifling expense to the Capitol, and rewarded
him without accepting his offer.

APHORISMS. 139

are content to debase them by their own per-
formances.

205. Mediocrity despatches and exults ; the
man of talent congratulates himself on the
success of his exertions — Genius alone mourns
over defeated expectation.

206. Pride. — Call not him proud who is in-
fluenced by the tide and ebb of opinion.

207. Modesty. — The touchstone of genuine
modesty is the attention paid to criticism, and
the temper with which it is received, or its
advice adopted ; the most arrogant pretence,
the most fiery ambition, the most towering
conceit, may fence themselves with smoothness,
silence and submissive looks — Oil, the smoothest
of substances, swims on all.

208. Praise. — Despise all praise but what he
gives who has been praised for similar efforts ;
or his whose interest it is to blame.

209. Emulation. — The vindication of the in-
nate powers, of the individual dignity of man,

140 APHORISMS.

careless of appendages and accidental advantage,
grasps the substance of its object.

210. Envy, the bantling of desperate self-
love, grasps the appendages, heedless of things.
Emulation embalms the dead ; Envy the vam-
pire, blasts the living.

. Flattery, the midwife of half-born con-
ceits and struggling wishes, sometimes per-
suades, a boy that he is a man, a dwarf that he
is a giant, but too often enervates the limbs of
energy.

. Vanity. — The vain is the most humble
of mortals : the victim of a pimple.

213. Those reduced to live on the alms of
genius, are the first to deny its existence.

214. Shakspeare is to Sophocles what the
incessant flashes of a tempestuous night are to
daylight.

215. Things came toRaffaelle and Shakspeare;
Michael Angelo and Milton came to things.

APHORISMS.

216. The women of^ Michael Angelo are
the sex.

CorolL — Eve emerging from the side of
Adam ; Eve reclining under the tree of know-
ledge, in the Capella Sistina; the figures of
Night and Dawn on the tombs of the Medici,
are pure generic forms, little discriminated by
character, and more expressive by action than
emotion of features ; solidity without heaviness
separates them from the females in the Last
Judgment, which, with the exception of the
Madonna and St. Catharine, are less beholden
to grace than anatomy. The Cartoon of the
Leda proves that he was not inattentive to the
detail of female charms, but beauty did not
often visit his slumbers, guide his hand, or in-
terrupt the gravity of his meditation.

217. The women of Raffaelle are either his
own mistress, or mothers.

CorolL — This relates chiefly to his Ma-
donnas— Of his saints the St. Cecilia at Bologna
has most of antique beauty, and, whether imi-
tated or conceived, resembles the Niobe; but
pride is absorbed in devotion, she is the en-
raptured victim of divine love, and glows with

142 APHORISMS.

celestial fire : the goddesses of the Farnesina,
however gracefully imagined, are too ponderous
for aerial forms and amorous conceits.

218. The women of Correggio are seraglio
beauties.

Coroll. — The enchantment of the Magdalen,
in the picture of the St. Jerome in the Pilotta
at Parma, is produced by chiaroscuro and at-
titude. Sensuality personified is the general
character of his females, and the grace of his
children, less naivet6 than grimace, the cari-
cature of jollity.

219. The women of Titiano are the plump,
fair, marrowy Venetian race.

Coroll.— Venus taking a reluctant farewell
of Adonis ; Diana starting at the intrusion of
Act eon, with every allure of attitude, with
heads dressed by the Graces, are local beauties,
sink under the weight of Venetian limbs, and
are only distinguished by contrast from the
model that plumped herself down for his
Danae. The reposing figure commonly called
the Venus of the Tribuna, is an exquisite
portrait of some favourite female, but not a
Venus.

APHORISMS. 143

220. The women of Parmegiano are co-
quettes.

221. The women of Annibale Carracci are
made up by imitation and vulgarity.

Corott. — Venus with Anchises, Juno with
Jupiter, Omphale with Hercules, Diana and
Calisto in the Farnese gallery, owe their charms
and dignity of action to imitation ; the cele-
brated three Maries, Magdalen penitent in her
hempen shroud, are the conceptions of his own
rnind.

. The women of Guido are actresses.

223. The forms of Domenichino's female
faces are ideal ; their expression is poised be-
tween pure helpless virginity and sainted
ecstasy.

224. The veiled eyes of Guercino's females
dart insidious fire.

225. Such is the fugitive essence, such the
intangible texture of female genius, that few
combinations of circumstances ever seemed to
favour its transmission to posterity.

144 APHORISMS.

226. In an age of luxury women have taste,
decide and dictate ; for in an age of luxury wo-
man aspires to the functions of man, and man
slides into the offices of woman. The epoch of
eunuchs was ever the epoch of viragoes.

227. Female affection is ever in proportion to
the impression of superiority in the object. Wo-
man fondles, pities, despises and forgets what is
below her ; she values, bears and wrangles with
her equal ; she adores what is above her.

228. Be not too squeamish in the choice of
your materials; you will disgrace the best, if
you cannot give value to the worst : the gold
and azure wasted on Rosselli's* draperies cannot
give value to their folds or hide the wants
beneath.

229. There are moments when all are men,
and only men, and ought to be no more ;
but the artist, who when his daily task is over
can lock his meditation up with his tools —
ranks with mechanics.

* Cosmo Rosselli, one of the Tuscan painters who pre-
ceded Michael Angelo in decorating the Chapel of Sixtus IV.

APHORISMS. 145

230. Date the death of emulation and of ex-
cellence from the moment of your employer's
indifference ; and mediocrity of success from
the moment of his meddling with the process
of your work.

231. One of the most unexplored regions
of art are dreams, and what may be called the
personification of sentiment : the Prophets, Si-
byls and Patriarchs of Michael Angelo are so
many branches of one great sentiment. The
dream of Raffaello is a characteristic represen-
tation of a dream ; the dream of Michael An-
gelo is moral inspiration, a sublime sentiment.

CorolL — Of three visionary subjects ascribed
to Raffaello and known from the prints of
Marc Antonio, Georgio Mantuano, and Agos-
tino Veneziano, this alludes to the last, called
by the Italians Stregozzo, by the French " La
Carcasse :" an association of ideas big with the
very elements of dreams, and almost a defini-
tion. That it be a conception of Raffaello rests
on no other proof than the tablet of Marc An-
tonio and its own internal merit ; which is so
uniform that although one principal figure is
undoubtedly transcribed from another in the

VOL. III. L

146 APHORISMS.

cartoon of Pisa, the whole can never be con-
sidered as a pasticcio.

232. A trite subject becomes interesting by
the introduction of appropriate ornaments ; a
small statue of Moses breaking the tables in
the back-ground of a Salutation ; and a num-
ber of Baptists in that of a Madonna with her
son and Joseph, expressing the dissolution of
the old and the institution of the new doctrine,
both by Michael Angelo,* give unexpected
sublimity to subjects for which Raffaelle and
Titiano had ransacked in vain the nursery and
heaven.

233. Compilation is the lowest degree in art,
but let him who means to borrow with impu-
nity, follow the statesman's maxim : " strip the
mean and spare the great."

Coroll. — A composition of which every thing
was borrowed from himself, being shown to

* This is the Madonna painted for Angelo Doni, now in
the Tribuna of Florence, and probably the only existing oil-
picture of Michael Angelo, though Lanzi rejects its title to
that. Vasari mentions it with his usual extravagance of praise,
but appears ignorant of the real meaning of the figures.

APHORISMS. 147

Michael Angelo, and his opinion asked, " I
commend it," said he, " but when on the day of
judgement each body shall claim its original
limbs, what will remain in this picture ?"

2134. He ought to possess some himself, who
attempts to make use of borrowed excellence :
a golden goblet on a beggar's table, serves only
to expose its companions of lead.

235. Resemblance, character, costume, are
the three requisites of portrait : the first distin-
guishes, the second classifies, the third assigns
place and time to an individual.

236. Landscape is either the transcript of a
spot, or a picturesque combination of homoge-
neous objects, or the scene of a phenomenon.
The first pleases by precision and taste ; the se-
cond adds variety and grandeur; the third may
be an instrument of sublimity, affect our pas-
sions, or wake a sentiment.

237. Selection is the invention of the land-
scape painter.

148 APHORISMS.

238. He never can be great who honours
what is little.

Coroll. — Grandeur of style and execution do
not exclusively depend upon dimensions : but
in an age and amidst a race who have erected
littleness or rather diminutiveness of size to the
only credentials of admissibility into collec-
tions, to the passports without which Raffaelle
himself finds it difficult to penetrate the sanc-
tuaries of pigmy art, that which ennobled the
age of Pericles, of Julio, and Leone, must be
content to look to posterity for its reward. If
it were physiognomically true, that the struc-
ture of every human face bears some analogy
to that of some brute, it might reasonably sur-
prise, that an individual marked by nature
with no very remote resemblance to a Hippo-
potamus, should be considered as the legislator
of a taste equally noted for tameness of concep-
tion and effeminate finish ; but as it is impro-
bable that one individual, however favoured by
circumstances or endowed with all-persevering
activity, or arrogance, could stamp the taste of
a nation exclusively with his own, it may be
fairly surmised that he did no more than find

APHORISMS. 149

and rear the seeds of that Micromania which
infects the public taste.

239. The medium of poetry is time and ac-
tion ; that of the plastic arts, space and figure.
Poetry then is at its summit, when its hand
arrests time and embodies action: and these,
when they wing the marble or the canvass,
and from the present moment dart rays back
to the past and forward to the future.

Coroll. — Subjects are positive, negative, re-
pulsive. The first are the proper materials, the
..voluntary servants of invention ; to the second
she gives interest and value ; from the last she
can escape only by the help of execution, for
execution alone can palliate her defeat by the
last. The Laocoon, the Heemon and Antigone,
the Niobe and her daughters, the death of
Ananias, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Elymas struck
blind, are positive subjects, speak their meaning
with equal evidences to the scholar and the un-
lettered man, and excite the sympathy due to
the calls of terror and pity with equal energy
in every breast. St. Jerome presenting the
translation of his Bible to the Infant Jesus, St.

150 APHORISMS.

Peter at the feet of the Madonna receiving the
thanksgivings of victorious Venice, with every
other votive altar-piece, little interesting to
humanity in general, owe the impression they
make on us to the dexterous arrangement, the
amorous or sublime enthusiasm of the artist;
— but we lament to see invention waste its
powers, and execution its skill, to excite our
feelings for an action or event that receives its
real interest from a motive which cannot be
rendered intuitive ; such as Alceste expiring,
the legacy of Eudamidas, the cause of Deme-
trius's disorder.

HISTORY OF ART

IN

THE SCHOOLS OF ITALY.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

THE analogy of style observable in the
figures impressed on Tuscan coins of the tenth,
eleventh, and twelfth century, and those found
in the miniatures that decorate the manuscripts
of the contemporary periods, proves that Tus-
cany had its artists long before the epoch which
Vasari and his copyists fix for the importation
of Greek art with Greek artists : whether those
paintings be all pure Tuscan, or here and there
interspersed with Greek ones, none will ven-
ture to decide, who knows the impossibility of
drawing a limitary line sufficiently severe to
distinguish the last spasms of an expiring art
from the first stammerings of an infant one.
Of the still surviving monuments of painting
during those epochs, it may be sufficient to men-

154 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

tion the famed Christ, painted on canvass and
glued to a wooden cross, of a date anterior to
1003.

In subsequent times, the earliest and least
unsuccessful essays in art, were made by the
Pisano. Whilst a Greek sarcophagus at Pisa,
storied with the incidents of Hippolytus and
Phaedra, furnished some elements of form to the
sculptors Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, paint-
ing made some progress with Giunta Pisano :
his composition of Christ on the Cross at the
Angeli of Assisi, though defective in design,
possesses life and expression.*

A similar progress was made by his contem-
porary Guido or Guidone of Sienna ; a name
not mentioned by Vasari, though in his fre-
quent excursions to Sienna, he could not remain
unacquainted with the works of Guido, at least
one which still exists in the chapel of the Male-

* This picture has been confounded with another of the
same subject by the same master, and the addition of the
Donor's portrait, Frate Elia, which exists no more. The mu-
tilated inscription on that mentioned above, has been thus
restored by Lanzi,

JuNTA PISanus
JunTINI Me fecit.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 155

volti in S. Dominico, with the following often
repeated inscription and date : —

Me Guido de senis diebus depinxit amenis
Quern Christus lenis nullis velit agere penis.

A.D. M.CCXXI.

This Madonna, twenty years anterior to the
birth of Cimabue, is superior to his Madonna
in expression, and nearly equal in taste and
colour, though inferior in style.

Duccio di Boninsegna, probably of his school,
was celebrated as the restorer of that inlaid
kind of Mosaic, called " Lavoro di Commesso."
His works are from 1275, the year in which he
received a commission for Sta. Maria Novella at
Florence, to 1311, the period at which he was
employed in the Domo of Sienna. If these dates
be genuine, he can scarcely have lived till 1357,
the year at which Fiorillo fixes his death. It
is not probable that he should have stretched
his span beyond a century, which must have
been the case, if we suppose that he was twenty
at the time he painted in S. Maria Novella ; it
is not probable that he should have chosen, or
been suffered, to remain idle with the celebrity
he had acquired in the labours of the Domo ;
and it is still less probable, that, if he was em-

156 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

ployed, what he produced in the interval, be-
tween that period and his death, should have
perished or been destroyed, whilst we are still
in possession of the paintings in the Domo,
which made nearly an epoch in art, at which
he laboured three years, for which he was paid
upwards of 3000 scudi d'oro, the expense of
gilding and ultramarine included. That part
of it which faced the audience, represented in
large figures the Madonna and various saints ;
that which fronted the choir, divided into many
compartments, exhibited numerous composi-
tions of Gospel subjects in figures of small pro-
portion ; it cannot be denied, that with all its
copiousness, the whole savours strongly of the
Greek manner.

Andrea Taffi, born 1213, the scholar of
Apollonius, a Greek painter, and his assistant
in some mosaics at S. Giovanni of Florence,
is not mentioned out of that line by Vasari
and Baldinucci: but the discovery of a pic-
ture with his name by Ignazio Stugford adds
another legitimate name to the predecessors of
Cimabue.

Buonamico di Cristofano, or Buffalmacco, of
facetious memory, was the pupil of Taffi. His

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 15?

best works are lost, but from the remains it
may be suspected that he owes at least as much
to the tales of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, for the
preservation of his name, as to his own powers.
There still exists in Campo Santo at Pisa, a
fresco of the Creation with a God Father
five ells high, supporting Heaven and the ele-
ments ; and three other stories of Adam, Noah
and his Sons ; a Crucifix, a Resurrection, and
an Ascension. We must not look here for
much symmetry of design or Giottesque ele-
gance ; his heads have little variety, and less
beauty ; sameness of features, a vulgar cast, and
a gaping deformity of mouth, characterize his
women ; but now and then attention rests on
the vivacity or physiognomy of some male
countenance, especially that of Cain. Some-
times he snatches some movement from nature,
such as that of the terrified man who flies from
Calvary : he overflows in particoloured dra-
pery, and delights in laboured ornaments of
flowers and lace. A St. John the Baptist of
his, yet existing, deserves to be mentioned as
an instance of the utility of comparing works in
painting and sculpture with contemporary coins,
in order to ascertain their dates ; for the same

158 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

figure is exactly repeated on the Florentine
scudo d'oro of that age. A jocular host of
artists, scholars of this school, we pass over, as
more important to the reader of the Decame-
rone and the Novelle, than to the student
of art.

Lucca, about 1235, possessed Bonaventura
Berlingieri, whose St. Francis still exists in the
castle of Guiglia, near Modena, and is describ-
ed as a work of considerable merit for its time.
Margaritone of Arezzo, a pupil and follower of
the Greeks, appears to have been several years
anterior to Cimabue. He painted on canvass,
and was the first, according to Vasari, who
found the method of giving a more solid tex-
ture to pictures. Some crucifix of his is still
seen at Arezzo, and another at Santa Croce in
Florence, facing one of Cimabue. The style
of both is antiquated, but not so different in
merit to make us refuse a painter's name to
Margaritone if we grant it to Cimabue.

Giovanni Cimabue,* of noble lineage, was an
architect and painter. He is considered as the
father of Italian art, because with him legiti-
mate history and a less interrupted series of

* Born 1240, died 1300.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 159

dates, begin ; because he succeeded better than
his predecessors in disentangling himself from
the shackles of Greek barbarity, and chiefly be-
cause he discovered and called forth the genius
of Giotto. Vasari may be right in making him
the scholar of those Greeks whom the Floren-
tine Government had employed to paint the
Church of Santa Maria Novella ; but he errs in
placing them in the Chapel Gondi, which, with
the body of the church, was not erected till the
subsequent century ; he should have assigned
them another chapel under the church, where
time has discovered some vestiges of ancient
painting. It seems, however, more probable,
that Giunta Pisano gave Cimabue instruction,
if it be ascertained, as Fiorillo asserts, that he
worked in the great church of Assisi, 1253,
when he was in his thirteenth year, and Giunta
superintended the decorations of that fabric.

The pompous visit which Charles of Anjou
paid to Cimabue in passing through Florence,
sufficiently proves the celebrity he enjoyed,
if it has not been sanctioned by the authority of
Dante, who calls him the unrivalled champion of
his day. Cimabue was then painting the Ma-
donna with the Infant adored by six angels ;

160 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

the picture when finished was carried in pro-
cession from Borgo Allegro to Santa Maria
Novella, and placed in the Chapel Rucellai,
where it still exists. The heraldic arrange-
ment of the figures, their physiognomic mono-
tony, the exility of the detail and barbarous
execution, contrast strangely with the elevation
and novelty of the artist's conception. Cima-
bue lost the female and the mother in the
Queen of Heaven. Insensible to the blandish-
ments of beauty, fierce like the age in which he
lived, he excelled in male, especially aged cha-
racters; these he impressed with something of
a stern grandeur, not often surpassed since.
Vast and comprehensive in his ideas, he seized
on subjects of numerous composition, arid ex-
pressed them in large proportions ; those fea-
tures of prophetic grandeur which surprise in
his frescoes at the Dominicans and Santa Trinita
of Florence, are still excelled by the features
which he displayed in the upper church of
Assisi — meteors of the age in which he lived.
They still exist, nor is it easily conceived how
works of so different style, against the testi-
mony of Vasari, and the uniform tradition of
five centuries, could, as they were of late, be

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

ascribed to the more regulated hand and
gentler spirit of Giotto.

Giotto's year of birth has been disputed ; Va-
sari fixes it to 1276, Baldinucci to 1265. He
was the son of a cottager at Vespignano, and
bred to be a shepherd ; but, a painter born, he
amused himself from infancy with attempts to
draw whatever object struck his fancy. A
sheep which he had copied on a flat stone
caught the eye of Cimabue, who was in the
neighbourhood, happened to pass by, demanded
him of his father, and carried him to Florence
to instruct him ; but he soon rivalled, and in a
short time eclipsed his master by a grace and
an amenity of execution which remained un-
equalled to the time of Masaccio.

For the rapidity of this progress, unless we
were to ascribe it to inspiration, we must ac-
count from the happy coincidence of external
advantages with the genius of the man. A
period so obscure, admits of little more than
conjecture, but there is no improbability in
supposing that Giotto outstripped his master
and the times by the same means which render-
ed Michael Agnolo so soon superior to Ghir-

VOL. III. M

162 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

landaio, — modelling and the study of the an-
tique. We know that he was a sculptor, and
that his models still existed in the time of Lo-
renzo Ghiberti. Good originals he could find
among the fragments of antiquity discovered
before his time, and scattered over Florence
and Rome : from what other source could
he derive the character of his male heads, and
that squareness of form so different from the
exility and indecision of all contemporary
styles ? The few majestic natural folds of
his draperies, and the composure and unaf-
fected air of his figures, breathe the spirit of
the antique. His very defects are the conse-
quences of such a study. His manner has
been charged with a kind of statmne preci-
sion (del statuino), unknown to other schools,
and unknown to artists who do not form them-
selves on the antique.

If to these conjectures it be objected, that
the want of uniformity, dryness of design, ex-
tremities either faulty or hid under a preposte-
rous length of drapery, rather betray a nurseling
of Pisa than a pupil of the ancients ; it ought
to be considered that uniformity is the result of
settled principles ; that he who had to remove

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 163

the rubbish could not be expected to give the
polish ; that he who had to teach eyes to look,
hands to move, and feet to stand, could not be
supposed to make them do it with all the
correctness, propriety or elegance, they were
capable of; that a certain gymnophobia equal-
ly attends the infancy and the decrepitude of
taste, and that the approbation of a public and
an artist's flattery are always reciprocal.

And no artist commanded more of public
favour than Giotto. Legislator of taste, not in
Tuscany alone, but at Rome, Naples, Bologna,
and the Venetian State, he excelled his master
as much in celebrity as he had excelled him in
grace and method. How soon he did this
may be seen on comparing his earliest works
at Assisi with those of his master in the same
place. Genuine elements of composition, ex-
pressions inspired by Nature, accuracy of de-
sign, progressively appear. It is no hyperbole
to affirm, that in certain characters no artist
ever went nearer the source of expression than
Giotto, and that in the maiden airs of untainted
virginity none ever excelled, and perhaps, Ra-
phael and Domenichino excepted, few ever
approached him.

M 2

164 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

Though not the inventor, Giotto was the
restorer of portrait-painting ; resemblance, with
character of face and attitude, date from him.
He gave us Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Do-
nato, &c. Mosaic was improved by him, and
his powers in it shown by the celebrated Navi-
cella, or boat of Saint Peter, in the portico of
the Basilica at Rome ; though restoration has
transformed it to a work of shreds and patches,
and reduced his claim on it to the mere name.
Missal painting likewise owes him some grati-
tude ; and in architecture the grand steeple of
the Domo at Florence is the work of Giotto.

Implicit imitation checks progress; the nu-
merous school of Giotto were for the greater
part content to walk behind their master. Tad-
deo Gaddi, the most familiar and most favoured
of his pupils, is said by Vasari, whom time still
suffered to judge with some competence, to
have excelled him in colouring and mellowness.
The works of Taddeo in Sta. Croce are inferior
in originality and execution to his compositions
in the Capitolo degli Spagnuoli, where, in the
ceiling, he represented some Gospel subjects, and
in the Cenacolo the Descent of the Holy Spirit,
one of the beautiful relics of the fourteenth

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 165

century. On the sides he painted the Sciences,
with their most eminent professors under each,
no unfair specimen of poetic conception ; here
is what remains of vivacity and brightness in
his tints. Taddeo outlived the period as-
signed him by Vasari ; we find him mentioned
as late as 1352, which still might not be the
ultimate date of his life.

Another conspicuous name among his pupils
is Stefano of Florence, (Fiorentino,) whom Va-
sari, without hesitation, in every part of the art
prefers to his master. He was the son of one
Catharina, a daughter of Giotto ; an ardent and
inquisitive spirit, quick to discover and eager
to overcome difficulties ; the first who ventured
on foreshortening, and if success did not fully
second his efforts in that, it favoured him in
perspective, which he much improved, and in
the attitudes, variety and vivacity of heads.
Landino fancied to compliment his memory by
repeating the silly epithet of " Scimia della
Natura," "Ape of Nature," which, from the
resemblance of his portraits, was given him by
the vulgar and the dilettanti of his day. His
works in Ara Cceli at Rome, at S. Spirito of
Florence, and elsewhere, perished, and nothing

166 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

can safely be stamped with his name, if it be
not a Madonna in Campo Santo at Pisa, grander
in style than those of his master, but retouched.

Of Tommaso, his son and reputed scholar, a
Pieta, which might be taken for a work of
Giotto, exists at S. Remigi of Florence ; and
still some frescoes at Assisi. They entitle him
to the surname of " Giottino," given him by
his fellow-citizens, who used to say that the
spirit of Giotto had passed into him and ani-
mated his hand.

Without embarrassing ourselves with conjec-
tures on Ugolino da Sienna, we pass to the more
celebrated name of Simone Memmi, or Simon di
Martino, a native of the same place, the painter
of Laura, and the friend of Petrarca, who in
two affected sonnets has transmitted him to
posterity. Whether Simone were the pupil of
Maestro Mino as the Siennese, or of Giotto as
the Florentine writers pretend, is a point be-
yond decision : he restored a picture of the first,
and his style has some analogy to that of the
second, though with more suavity of colour, and
more poetry of conception. He was the first
who dared to fill a spacious facade with one
composition without dividing it into compart-

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 167

ments. Such is that in the Capitolo degli
Spagnuoli of Santa Maria Novella at Florence,
where Vasari discovered every beauty of his
own time, and where, in the crowd of intro-
duced portraits, many have fancied, in spite of
chronology, to discover the portraits of Laura
and her friend ; whom probably he did not
become personally acquainted with till four
years after the completion of that work, 1336,
when he was sent to the Pope at Avignon, be-
came familiar with Petrarca, painted Laura,
and, strange to tell, reached the expectation of
the lover, who saw

" II lampegiar dell' angelico riso."
Miniature, though the last object of this work,
was not the least of Memmi's powers.. Lanzi
has noticed one which fronts a MS. Virgil with
the commentary of Servius, now in the Am-
brosiana at Milan, but formerly possessed by
Petrarca, who probably dictated the subject,
and added the following lines : —

Mantua Virgilium qui talia carmina finxit,
Sena tulit Simonem digito qui talia pinxit.

The painting represents Virgil in a sitting atti-
tude ready to write, with his face turned up-
wards as invoking the Muse. ./Eneas, in mar-

168 THE'TUSCAN SCHOOL.

tial vest and attitude, stands before him, and
pointing to his sword, alludes to the subject of
the JEneis, " Arma Virumque." A shepherd
and a husbandman, symbols of the Pastorals
and Georgics, placed somewhat lower, listen to
the theme ; whilst Servius draws a transparent
curtain, to denote his labours in unveiling the
beauties and removing the obscurities of the
poet. In this miniature, the originality of con-
ception, the beauty and harmony of colour, the
varied and appropriate drapery, are, however,
balanced by rudeness of design, vulgarity of
character, and deformed extremities.

It was a barbarous singularity of Simone,
promiscuously to admit different proportions
on the same plane: to flank or cross figures
of natural size with figures a third less than
nature.

Lippo, or Filippo Memmi, was the rela-
tive, scholar, and imitator, of Simone: assist-
ed by his designs, Lippo often executed works,
which, had he not marked them with his name,
would be ascribed to the master : when left to
his own invention, he rose in nothing above
mediocrity, but in colour. Sometimes they
were partners in the same picture, as in that at

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

S. Ansano di Castel Vecchio, at Sienna ; some-
times the second finished what the first began,
as in some works at Ancona and Assisi ; and at
Sienna there remains still something entirely
executed by Lippo.

Simone co-operated in the works of S. Maria
Novella with Taddeo Gaddi, who, with his
son, Angelo Gaddi, left a number of pupils,
imitators through him of Giotto, inferior to
both, not much distinguished by tradition,
and less favoured by time. Of Jacopo di
Casentino, the most conspicuous, what ves-
tiges remain in the church of Orsanmichele at
Florence, are in conformity with the style of
Taddeo ; barriers soon overleaped by the vivid
fancy of his scholar, Spinello the Aretine, whom
his own conception of a demon is said to have
terrified into insanity and death. His son,
Parri Spinelli, with barbarous incongruities of
line, possessed exquisite colour; and his pu-
pil, Lorenzo di Bicci, has been compared to
Vasari, for the number, dispatch, and opinion
of his works. Antonio, surnamed Veneziano,
whether he were a Venetian or a Florentine,
is, against evidence of dates and style, sup-
posed to have been a pupil of Angelo Gaddi,

170 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

and to have educated Paolo Uccello, the first
master of perspective, and Gherardo Stamina,
an artist of gay style, whose relics live still
in a chapel of Ste. Croce. They are numbered
among the last productions of Giotto's ex-
piring epoch, and the verge of the fourteenth
century, in which we have still to mark,
though pupils of some other school, the
family of Orcagna; Bernardo, a painter; Jacopo,
a sculptor ; but chiefly Andrea, conspicuous for
writing, painting, sculpture, and architecture,
in a degree little inferior to Giotto himself.
Architects date from him the abolition of the
acute angle and restoration of semicircular
arches, as in the Loggia of the Lanzi, which
he likewise decorated with sculpture. Some,
without attention to time, have supposed
him the pupil of Angelo Gaddi, but he was
probably trained to the art by his brother
Bernardo, jointly with whom he painted in
the Capella Strozzi of Sta. Maria Novella, in
the Campo Santo at Pisa, and alone and bet-
ter in Sta. Croce, Death, Judgement, Paradise,
and Hell, placing with Dantesque licence his
friends among the elect, his enemies with the
damned.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 171

The downfall of Pisa had raised Florence to
the metropolis of Tuscany, and the spirit of its
citizens to render its appearance worthy of that
pre-eminence. Cosmo, styled the father of his
country, who tuned the public affairs, might
with better right have been called the father
of distinguished talents : never was tyranny
meditated on a less suspicious plan, or approach-
ed by more popular means. The house of the
Medici, in the quaint Italian phrase, became
the Lyceum of Philosophers, the Arcadia of
Poets, the Academy of Artists. Dello, Paolo,
Masaccio, the two Peselli, both the Lippi,
Benozzo, Sandro, the Ghirlandai, were the cli-
ents of the family, arid emulated each other in
their homage. Their pictures, according to the
usage of the age, full of portraits, perpetually
presented to the people likenesses of the Medici,
and often in the characters of the Magi royally
robed, the sceptre firmly held in the gripe of
the Medici, to prepare the public eye gradually
for what it was soon to witness, the firm esta-
blishment of sovereignty in that House. The
competition of rival citizens, and still more the
wide-extended influence of religion, diffused
Taste and beckoned Talent to Florence as to

172 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

its centre, from every part of Italy. At her
call Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Filarete,
the Rossellini, Verrocchio arose, and with their
works spread the Elements of Art.

Poetry, that supplies the real features and
materials of expression when it inspires the
thought, arrives at the full display of its powers
long before its sisters have disentangled them-
selves from the impediments of infancy ; and of
these, Sculpture, whose aim is infinitely less
complex, raises the vigorous fabric of forms,
whilst Painting is still impotently struggling
with the rudiments of line, perspective, keep-
ing, chiaroscuro, colour; which to unite in
an equal degree has hitherto been found above
the lot of humanity. The imitators of Giotto
were in this state of struggle ; they saw little
in chiaroscuro, and less in perspective and line ;
their figures still slip from their planes, their
fabrics have no true point of sight, their fore-
shortenings depended solely on the eye :
Stefano dal Ponte rather saw than overcame;
the rest either avoided or palliated these diffi-
culties. The Umbrian Pietro della Francesca
seems to have been the first who called geo-
metry to the assistance of painting, and taught

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 173

by his works at Arezzo the principles of per-
spective; Brunelleschi formed it into system
for architecture, and the mathematician Manetti
roused the attention of Paolo Uccello, who owes
the perpetuity of his name nearly exclusively
to the study of that science. His immoderate
attachment to perspective is become proverbial ;*
and almost equalled his fondness for birds, from
which he got his surname. He applied it,
from grounds and buildings, to the human bo-
dy, which he foreshortened with a skill un-
known to his predecessors : and some proofs of
it still exist in the figures of God and No£
among the chiaroscuroes in the chiostro of Sta.
Maria Novella, and in the equestrian colossus
of Gio. Aguto (John Montacute), which he
painted in chiaroscuro of terra verde, and which
is still in the duomo. The art, since its revival,
perhaps for the first time showed that, if it had

* " Oh che dolce cosa e questa prospettiva !" Oh what
a dulcet thing is this perspective ! This exclamation, usual
with Paolo nodding over his compasses when his wife called
him to bed, though too late to furnish the hint of a Novel to
Boccaccio, has been fondly repeated by some grave writers
from Vasari to the author of Lorenzo de' Medici, and has
contributed to place Paolo, with the mystic help of his sur-
name, in rather a ludicrous light.

174 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

dared much, it had dared well : nor did he fall
short of it in the gigantic imagery of the
House Vitali at Bologna; he was, however,
more employed in painting private furniture :
the triumphs of Petrarch on some small presses
in the gallery of Florence are supposed to come
from his hand. That he was a master of ex-
pression, the instances adduced by Vasari
leave no doubt ; and in describing the flying
drapery of some friar in the series of pictures
relative to S. Benedetto, the same writer tells
us, that it served as a model to all succeeding
artists : to such powers, praise of variety is added
by the truth and diligence with which he
copied trees, plants, birds and animals, and for
which some critic styles him the Bassano of
the first epoch. In the nearly general wreck
of Paolo's works, it is difficult to form a j udg-
ment of his technic character independent of
tradition : but, comparing what remains with
what we are told, it is evident that he reached
from one extreme of the Art to the other ; and
that, if he was blameable for frequently playing
with a tool instead of using it, mistaking
an instrument of the Art for Art itself, and
means for the end of execution, he has been

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 175

deprived by partiality of the praise due to
powers which he appears to have possessed in
a degree unknown to the times that preceded
Masaccio.

Masolino da Panicale cultivated chiaroscuro :
he was enabled to treat it with more truth
than his predecessors, by a long practice of
modelling under the tuition of Lorenzo Ghi-
berti, the master of design and grouping in
those days, but whose animation he did not
attain. Stamina instructed him in colour ; and
thus by uniting the characteristics of two
schools, he produced that new style, which,
though still infected by dryness and clogged
by inelegance, possesses grandeur, union and
breadth : the proofs still remain in the chapel
of S. Pietro al Carmine, where, besides the
Evangelists, he painted several subjects from
the story of that Apostle. The remaining ones,
which he did not live to finish, were some years
afterward added by his scholar Tomaso Gisioli,
celebrated by the name of Masaccio from his
careless way of living.

Historians, biographers, and poets, unite in
dating a new period from Masaccio. The com-
pass of his mind led him to uniformity of

176 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

pursuit, and the introduction of style ; he had
formed his principles on the works of Ghiberti
and Donatello ; perspective he had learnt of
Brunelleschi, and in an excursion to Rome, it
is unreasonable to suppose that he did not
improve himself on the antique. Gentile da
Fabriano and Vittore Pisanello were then at
Rome, and the high opinion which they are
said to have expressed of him* as the first pain-
ter of the age has been recorded : it is, however,
difficult to say on what that opinion could be
founded : they were too far advanced in life
to see more of Masaccio than his juvenile essays,
perhaps such as the S. Anna in S. Ambrogio at
Florence, or what he painted in the chapel of
St. Catherine, in the church of St. Clemens
of Rome, the figures of the ceiling excepted,
all retouched, and though fine works for the
time, of doubtful authority, and in no manner
to be compared to the pictures del Carmine.
Here appear the virility of his powers and the
legitimacy of his superior claim : here the
figures, however varied by attitude, pose or are
foreshortened with that truth and uniformity
of success which the less established principles

* MafFei's Verona Illustrata, t. iii. p. 277.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. ]77

of Paolo Uccello did not always reach. In ex-
pression, sublimity distinguishes Donatello ; he
always aims at, and sometimes succeeds in per-
sonifying a sentiment or a passion.* Masaccio,
more dramatic, poises expression by character
and propriety ; hence he has been said, and
truly said, to resemble Raffaello.

To be praised immoderately for what, with
regard to judgment, deserved it least, has, as of
others, been likewise the lot of Masaccio : the
introduction and masterly execution of the
man who, in the baptism of St. Peter, appears
to shiver with cold, is extolled by Vasari,
and makes, by the verdict of Lanzi, an epoch
in art. Had the apostle immersed the race
of a Northern clime, a man frost-bitten, (asside-
rando di freddo,) or impatient of cold, might
have been admitted without impropriety, but
under an Asiatic sun he is worse than su-
perfluous. This either Masaccio did not con-
sider, or if he did, fondly sacrificed propriety
to the expression of an incident, which, had it

* He was the precursor of Michael Agnolo, and deserved
the motto by which Borghini marked some of their designs
in the portfolio of Vasari, (Vita di Donate.) viz.
'H
'H
VOL. III. N

178 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

even been admissible, had in itself less dignity,
and incomparably less pathos, than that of the
sick monk on whose eyes and lips the hope of
recovery seemed to tremble, introduced among
the series of pictures from the life of St. Bene-
dict, by Paolo Uccello.*

A higher and more legitimate praise of Ma-
saccio's expression is, that Raffaello not only
imitated its general character, but in the same
or similar subjects sometimes individually adopt-
ed it, as in the gesture of Paul in the Cartoon
of the Areopagus, and that of Adam dismissed
from Paradise, in the Loggia ; and that, if he
improved the taste and added elegance to the
Tuscan's drapery, he closely adhered to its prin-
ciples, simplicity, propriety, and breath.

Of Masaccio's colour, what remains possesses
truth, variety, delicacy, union, and great relief.
He lived not to finish the whole of the Chapel,
some stories still remaining to be added in
1443, the reputed year of his death,f which was

* "Vi e un monacho vecchio con due grucce sotto le
braccia, nel qual si vide un affetto mirabile, e forse speranza
di riaver la sanita." — Vasari, Vita di P. Uccello, t. ii. p. 56.

f Born in 1401.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 179

not without suspicion of having been hastened
by poison. His other frescoes at Florence have
been destroyed by time, and perhaps no gallery
can produce an authentic picture by his hand,
if we except the portrait of a youth in the
Pitti palace, a work that breathes life.

Ghiberti and Donatello had taught Masaccio
to find style by selection from nature ; his fol-
lowers for half a century, content to look at
him without adhering to his method, gradually
shrunk back to the exility and meagreness of
the preceding age : without embarrassing our-
selves with the angelic prettinesses of Era Gio-
vanni da Fiesole, a name dearer to sanctity
than to art, and whom both his age and missal-
taste prove the nursling of another school, we
pass to Benozzo Gozzoli, his pupil, who strove
to forget his puny lessons in the bolder dic-
tates of Masaccio.

That he could not soon do it, is evident from
the profusion of ornamental glitter and tinsel
colouring in the frescoes of the Chapel Riccardi.
He succeeded better at Pisa, where his Scrip-
ture stories cover an entire wing of Campo
Santo. This enormous enterprise, which, in

N 2

180 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

the phrase of Vasari might smite with fear a
legion of painters,* he is said to have com-
pletely achieved in two years. Everywhere
inferior to his model in composition, design,
and expression, he often goes beyond him in
vastness and amenity of scenery, a certain play
of ideas and picturesque exuberance. After
all, perhaps more than one hand shared in the
execution. Benozzo lived long, and lies buried
near his work, where public gratitude had placed
his sepulchre, and inscribed it with an eulogy.*
Filippo Lippi, a Carmelitan friar, studied
and imitated the works of Masaccio, especially
in compositions of small proportion, with great
success. Suavity of conception and colour ani-
mates his angels and Madonnas : in the large
historic frescoes at Pieve di.Prato, he intro-
duced proportions exceeding the natural size,
praised as his masterpieces by Vasari, who has
related Lippi's escape from the convent ; his
captivity among the Moors ; the pictures which
he painted at Naples, Padoua, and elsewhere ;

* " Opera Terribilissima — impresa chi arebbe giustamente
fatto paura a una legione di pittori." On the whole, Vasari
seems to lay more stress on the quantity than the quality of
Benozzo's works. f 1478.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 181

•

his premature death by poison from the rela-
tives of the female by whom he had a natural
son, Filippino Lippi. Fra Filippo died at Spo-
leti, 1469, on the point of finishing his great
work in the dome, where Lorenzo de' Medici,
who had demanded but not obtained his ashes
from the citizens, entombed them under a
stately monument inscribed by Angelo Poli-
ziano. His scholars and imitators were F. Dia-
mante of Prato, the partner of his last work ;
F. Pesello of Florence, and Pesellino his son,
whom, if we believe Vasari, shortness of life
alone intercepted from superior excellence.

About this period the first attempts of paint-
ing in oil were made at Florence, by Andrea
dal Castagno, of detested memory, who had im-
proved himself by looking at Masaccio. Do-
menico, called Veneziano, to whom Antonello
of Messina had communicated the novel mys-
tery of Johan Van Eyk, after practising it with
success at home, Loretto, and other parts of the
Papal State, came to exercise it at Florence :
caressed and encouraged, he excited the envy
and cupidity of Castagno, who under the mask
of submissive attachment, wheedled himself in-
to his confidence, obtained the secret, and then

182 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

assassinated the hapless donor. The treache-
rous but complete acquisition added lustre to
his practice during life, but time has swept the
sacrilegious produce of his hand, and left no-
thing to the memory of " Andrea degli Impic-
cati," but the execration of posterity.*

The farther we leave Masaccio behind, the
nearer we approach the golden epoch, the more
lurid becomes the atmosphere of art. Medio-
crity, tinsel ostentation, and tasteless diligence
mark the greater number of that society of
craftsmen whom Sixtus IV. conscribed (1474,
Manni,) to decorate or rather to disfigure the
panels of the grand Chapel which took its name
from him (La Sistina) : one of its sides was to
be occupied by subjects from the Pentateuch,
the other by Gospel stories. Pietro Perugino

* 1478, when by the conspiracy of the Pazzi and their
adherents, Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated in S. Maria
del Fiore, and his brother Lorenzo wounded, it was resolved
by the Signoria that paintings of the conspirators, hung by
their feet, should be exposed in front of the Governor's
palace ; and the commission being given to Andrea, he exe-
cuted it with such felicity of resemblance, such variety of
hanging attitudes, and so much to the contentment of con-
noisseurs, that from that instant he lost the name of Andrea
dal Castagno in that of " Andrea degli Impiccati," or of the
hanged. — Vasari. Of this exhibition the loss may be re-
gretted, as it would have showed us Andrea in his element.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 183

excepted, the artists convoked were nearly all
Florentines or Tuscans ; viz. Sandro Botticelli,
Domenico Bigordi, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca, Sig"
norelli of Cortona, and Don Bartolomeo of
Arezzo, with their assistants. The superintend-
ence of the whole the Pope, with the usual
vanity and ignorance of princes, gave to Sandro,
the least qualified of the group, whose barbar-
ous taste and dry minuteness palsied, or assimi-
lated with his own, the powers of his associates,
and rendered the whole a monument of puerile
ostentation, and conceits unworthy of its place.
Nor is it from what there remains of either, that
the names of Luca Signorelli and Domenico Bi-
gordi claim that attention which history owes
to the first as the real precursor of Michael
Angelo, and to the second as the master of his
rudiments.

Luca Egidio Signorelli, of Cortona,* less to
be considered as the reviver of Masaccio's style
than as the founder of that which distinguished
the succeeding epoch, might have led its ban-
ners, as his life stretched beyond that of Ra-
phael and Lionardo, had his principle been more
uniform. The greater part of his works exhibit

* 1439-40—1521.

184 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

the evident struggle of his own perceptions
with the prescriptive ones of his time, and a
kind of coalition between the barbarity of the
expiring and the emancipated taste of the
rising eera. The best evidence of this is in the
Duomo of Orvieto, where in the mixed imagery
of final dissolution and infernal punishment, he
has scattered ideas of original conception, cha-
racter and attitude, in copious variety, but not
without numerous remnants of Gothic alloy.
The angels who announce the impending doom
or scatter plagues, exhibit with awful simpli-
city bold foreshortenings, whilst the St. Michael
presents only the tame heraldic figure and at-
titude of a knight all cased in armour. In the
expression of the condemned groups and dse-
mons, he chiefly dwells on the supposed per-
petual renewal of the pangs attending on the
last struggles of life with death, contrasted
with the inexorable scowl or malignant grin of
fiends methodizing torture : a horrid feature
reserved by Dante for the last pit of his Infer-
no, and far beyond the culinary abominations
of Sandro Botticelli.*

* There is to the old edition in folio, of Dante, by Niccolo
della Magna> a print of the Inferno annexed, which bears

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 1Q5

Though Luca's style of design was no more
that of Masaccio than Michael Agnolo's that of
Raphael, less characteristic than grand, and fit
to be the vehicle of those conceptions and at-
titudes which furnished hints of imitation to
the painter of the Last Judgement in the Sis-
tina, yet he was master of a grace in celestial
scenery and angelic attitudes unapproached by
his contemporaries, seldom equalled and never
surpassed by his successors.

Luca Signorelli was a painter of much popu-
larity. Urbino, Volterra, Florence, Rome, his
native and many other towns, possess or pos-
sessed works of his. He was related to the
family of the Vasari of Arezzo, and caressed
and encouraged to the art his infant bio-
grapher.*

Another of the artists employed in the Sis-

the name of Sandro Botticelli ; Vasari in his Life says, that
he commented a part of Dante and figured his Inferno and
published it.

* He was the nephew of Lazzaro Vasari, a helper of Pietro
della Francesca, and great uncle of Giorgio the biographer ;
who in the Life of Luca, with not less fondness than vanity,
relates the admonition and encouragement he gave to his
father and himself, in a visit which he paid in his old age
to their family at Arezzo. — Vita di L. Signorelli, t. iii. p. f).

186 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

tina, inferior to Luca, but of no despicable
(though, if we look at Masaccio, too highly
rated) powers, was Domenico Bigordi, com-
monly called Del Ghirlandajo;* this is he
under whose auspices not only his son Kidolfo,
but even Bonaroti and the best artists of the
succeeding epoch, began their course. Precision
of outline, decorum of countenance, variety
of ideas, facility and diligence, distinguish his
works. He is the first of Florentines, who
gave depth and keeping to composition : if
gold and tinsel glitter are not entirely banished
from his colours, they appear at least less often.
He was fond of introducing portraits among
his actors, but with selection and of distin-
guished characters ; though hands and feet
had no part in his attention to physiognomy.
The churches Degli Innocenti, Santa Trinita,
and Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, possess his
most celebrated productions, and many are
scattered over Tuscany and the Ecclesiastic
State. Of the two which he painted in the

* His father, who was a goldsmith, invented and first
manufactured the garlands which were at that time the
fashionable head-dress of the Florentine girls. — Vasari, Vita
di D. Ghirlandajo, vol. ii. p. 410.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 187

Sistina, the Resurrection of Christ perished ;
the Vocation of Peter and Andrew to the
Apostolate survives,

Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo like-
wise employed at the Sistina, inferior in all
essential parts to their competitors, owe the
perpetuity of their names less to their parti-co-
loured glare and immoderate display of gold and
azure, which attracted the vulgar eye of their
employer the Pope, than to the luck of having
been the masters of Bartolomeo della Porta,
and Andrea del Sarto.

Piero and Antonio Pollajuoli, though employ-
ed only as statuaries in the same Chapel, posses-
ed no inconsiderable powers as painters. Piero's
pictures at S. Miniato discover the scholar of
Castagno, austere countenances and deep and
massy colour; but in novelty of composition
and design he yields to his brother and pupil
Antonio, whose Martyrdom of St. Sebastian
in the Chapel Pucci of that church, though
humble in style, crude in colour, and oddly
rather than originally conceived, has been num-
bered with the first productions of the age,
because with the earliest traces of legitimate
anatomy it exhibits its application, and subor-

188 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

dinates enumeration to function. Both the
Pollajuoli died at Rome.

Don Bartolomeo of Arezzo, having nothing
to add of his own to the works of the Sistina,
is mentioned here only as the helper of Luca
Signorelli and Pietro Perugino; nor is Filip-
pino Lippi, the natural son of Fra Filippo,
numbered among the companions of Sandro his
master, though the perpetual recurrence of an-
tique customs and dresses in his works makes it
probable that he formed his juvenile studies at
Rome. Inferior in real capacity to his father,
he may be praised rather for the accessory
than the substantial parts of his works : he
filled with an unequal hand the remaining
panels left by Masaccio al Carmine ; and in the
Minerva at Rome, yields the palm in expres-
sion and amenity of ideas to his own scholar
Raffaelino del Garbo, whose early works at
Monte Oliveto of Florence, and elsewhere, give
sufficient evidence that he might have raised
himself to the first artists of his day, had not
the cravings of a numerous family crushed his
powers, and poverty and dejection hastened his
death. His contemporary Andrea Verocchio,
though a celebrated statuary, and a designer of

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL. 189

style, has deserved our notice as a painter,
only because he was the master of Lionardo da
Vinci, the first name in the annals of Tuscany's
golden epoch.

Vinci, a burgh of Lower Valdarno, had the
honour of giving a surname to Lionardo, the
natural son* of one Ser Piero, a state notary at
Florence. Elevated by nature above the com-
mon standard of men, born to discover, he
joined to boundless inquiry intrepidity of pur-
suit, and lofty conception to minute investiga-
tion, nor only in the arts connected with his
own, music and poesy, but in science, philoso-
phy, mathematics, mechanics, hydrostatics : this
wide mental range, supported by equal vigour
and gracefulness of body, was commended by
every accomplishment of a gentleman. Such

* Among the uncertainties of dates, those relative to
the birth of illegitimate children, for obvious reasons
the most frequent, are the most perplexing. The birth
of Lionardo has been fixed at various dates, viz. 1443 ;
Lett. Pittor. t. ii. p. 192 ; 1445, according to the computa-
tion of Vasari ; 1455, by Dargenville ; 1467, by Padre
Resta ; with more probability 1444, by D. V. Pagave of Mi-
lano, followed by Fiorillo ; but with most at 1452, by Du-
razzini, adopted by Lanzi. It seems improbable that Ver-
occhio, the friend of Ser Piero, should have been only twelve
years older than his pupil. Lionardo died in 1519.

190 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

was the genius whom Nature had destined to
establish art on elements, to open the realms of
light and shade, to inspire the subject with its
tone, and to poise expression between insipidity
and caricature.

Notwithstanding the distractions of so many
diverging inclinations, for powers they could
not yet be called, an innate attachment to the
art appears to have predominated at the ear-
liest period to such a degree that Ser Piero de-
termined to place Lionardo under his friend
Verocchio, whom he soon excelled in paint-
ing,* and in modelling equalled.

The obscurity which involves the life of
Lionardo from his boyish years, through the
bloom of youth, to the vigour of manhood, can
only be accounted for by that independence of

* In the figure of the Angel, conceived and executed by
him, in the Baptism of the Saviour, at St. Salvi, which ex-
celled the work of Verocchio so much, that indignant to be
outdone by a boy, he dropped the pencil, and for ever aban-
doned painting. The statues of St. Thomas, in Orsanmi-
chele at Florence, and of the Horse of Collevere at Venice,
prove that Verocchio's real talent was sculpture : but the
models of the three statues cast in bronze, by Rustici, for
S. Giov. at Florence, and that of the great horse at Milano,
place the pupil at least upon a level with the master in that
branch of art.

THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

mind which made him prefer indulgence of his
own various inclinations to a decided, steady,
and if more confined, more lucrative pursuit of
art. By what means he, whom Vasari describes
as possessing " nothing,"* was enabled to gratify
studies and fancies equally expensive, no where
appears ; it appears not that he was patronized
by the great and rich ; he escaped the eye of
the Medici ;f it was reserved for Lodovico
Sforza to discover and to conduct the first citi-
zen of Florence to Milano, and for aught we
are told, rather from expectation of amusement
than motives of homage. Lodovico was a di-
lettante in music, and wished to increase the
harmony of his concerts with the silver tones of
the lyre, invented and constructed by Lion-
ardo, who, we are told, soon distanced all rival
performers, and by the aid of his powers as an

* " E non avendo egli, si puo dir nulla, e poco lavoran-
do, del continue tenne servitori, e cavalli, &c." For all
this it is the more difficult to account, as an attempt to pos-
sess himself of the philosopher's stone has never been men-
tioned among Leonardo's eccentricities, though he was fa-
miliar with alchy mists.

f Lorenzo de' Medici occurs not in the Life of Lionardo,
and his acquaintance with Leo X. and Giuliano de' Medici
relates to the latter periods of it.

192 THE TUSCAN SCHOOL.

" Impro visa tore," became the object of general
admiration : it was then, and perhaps not till
then, that the Duke cast a steadier eye on his
superior accomplishments, and allowed the mu-
sician to become a benefactor to the public in
adopting his plans for the establishment and
direction of an academy ; and granting the
means for carrying into effect the still more im-
portant ones of conducting the Adda to Mi-
lano, and a navigable canal from Martisana to
Chiavenna, and the Valteline, &c. plans and
effects only interrupted by the fall of the
Sforzas and the captivity of Lodovico.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

WE are now arrived at the epoch which
forms the distinctive character of the Tuscan
school, the epoch of Michael Agnolo. In
placing him here, chronology has been less at-
tended to than the spirit of works ; for Fra Bar-
tolomeo, Andrea del Sarto, and others, his con-
temporaries or juniors, belong more properly to
the period of Lionardo than his ; the elements
of which he gave in the Cartoon of Pisa, and
the consummation in the Capella Sistina, on
which his school and the imitation of his style
were founded ; and to which the politics of his
time, the splendid oligarchy of the Medici, and
the fierce republican spirit of their opponents,
gave an energy and produced efforts, unknown
to society in repose.

Notwithstanding the insinuating arts by

VOL. in. o

194 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

which the Medici had debauched public affec-
tion, and that undermining power which at last
changed influence to tyranny, they were in
less than a century* three times exiled from
their country. The first, the banishment of
Cosmo, called the Father of his Country, lasted
not above one year, and drew no consequences ;
for the interval between it and the next (1494)
was marked with uniform success, and its last
twenty years f with the splendid administration
and the extended patronage of Lorenzo the
Magnificent. His Garden near the church of
S. Marco, which he opened as a repository and
a school of art, has been little less celebrated
than the Hesperian ones of old : it contained,
if not all that had been discovered, what could
be purchased of antique statues, basso-relievoes,
and fragments of every kind ; and the apart-
ments were hung with pictures, cartoons, and
designs of Donatello, Brunellesco, Paolo Uc-
cello, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, Masaccio, &c. ;
here the student was not only instructed, but,
by the magnificence of the founder, supported ;

* 1433 — 1527. They underwent three banishments in less
than a century.

t 1472 — 1492, Most splendid period of Florence this.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. J95

and it may without exaggeration be asserted,
that whatever rose to eminence in the art at
that period, was the offspring of Lorenzo's
garden.

His death was followed by the expulsion of
his sons, Pietro, Giovanni, afterwards Leo X.,
and Julian, in the sequel Duke of Nemours.
An immediate anarchy succeeded the expul-
sion ; the populace broke into their houses,
destroyed or carried off their furniture, and de-
molished the residence of Giovanni, the garden
of Lorenzo, and the palace on the Via Larga,*
at once. The numerous partisans of the fa-
mily, however, contrived to save much.f

Other circumstances conspired to render this
interval of anarchy pernicious to art, till the re-
turn of the Medici in 1512. Towards the close
of the fifteenth century, the Dominican Fra Gi-
rolamo Savonarola, of enthusiastic memory, by
prophecies and sermons, loaded with democra-
tic principles, gained gradually such an ascen-

* Nardi Storia, lib. 1 . Bernardo Rucellai de Bello Italico,
Lond. 1733, 4to. p. 52. Pauli Jovii Histor. sui temporis,
lib. 1. Memoires de Philippe de Comines, 1. vii. c. 9.

t Vasari, Vita di B. Bandinelli, Ed. del Bottari, t. ii. p.
576 ; e Vita del Torrigiano, t. ii. p. 75.

O 2

196 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

dancy over the minds of the people, that the
Signoria found themselves forced to adopt a
senate at large ; in other words, to submit to a
democracy. But Savonarola, not content with
political victory, aimed at a total revolution in
morals, and continued to lash the profligacy
of public manners, overflowing in voluptuous
song and music, or gazing at the lascivious nu-
dities of statues and pictures, as irresistible in-
centives to vice. It had been customary during
carnival, to erect certain cabins in the market-
place, to set them on fire on the eve of Ash-
Wednesday, and bid them farewell amid the
shouts of convivial mirth and the frolic of amo-
rous dalliance. Savonarola instituted in 1497 a
public festival of another kind : a large scaffold
was erected in the market-place, a vast number
of the finest specimens in painting and sculp-
ture, offensive from their nudities, were collect-
ed ; the pictures placed on the first step ; the
sculptures, especially when portraits of first-rate
Florentine belles, disposed on the second ; the
whole inclosed by foreign precious tapestry, and
that, with great solemnity, set on fire. The
scaffolding of the next year excelled the first in
magnificence ; its gorgeous apparel invested the

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 197

busts of the most celebrated beauties of former
years ; those of the Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina
and Maria de' Lenzi, works of the most eminent
sculptors ; on it was placed a copy of Petrarca,
decorated with gold, missal-painting, and minia-
tures, estimated at fifty scudi d'oro ; and to pre-
vent theft, the whole was constantly guarded.
The procession approached, surrounded the scaf-
fold, and amid a concert of consecrating hymns,
bells, trumpets, cymbals, and the acclamations
of the Signoria and the people, the victims,
sprinkled with holy water, were delivered to
flame by the torches of the guards.* Such was
the epidemic influence of this enthusiasm, that
even artists, the gentle Fra Bartolomeo, Lo-
renzo di Credi, and many more caught the in-
fection, and contributed to the sacrifice, till the
death of Savonarola and the return of the Me-
dici extinguished the furor, j-

The democracy, however, gave origin to two
works, which not only atoned for the ravages

* Nardi, Storia di Firenze, lib. ii. Vasari, Vita di Fra
Bartolomeo ; but chiefly the Life of Savonarola, by Bnrlama-
chi, inserted in Balusii Miscell. ed. Mansi, t. i. p. 558, &c.

t Giovanni dalle Carniole, a celebrated engraver on stone,
was an adherent of Savonarola ; there is a portrait of that

198 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

it had committed, but whose splendour no sub-
sequent sera of art has been able to eclipse, or
perhaps to equal : the two Cartoons of Lionardo
da Vinci and M. Angelo Buonarroti, destined to
decorate the senatorial hall, by order of Pietro
Soderini. They produced an immediate revolu-
tion in art, but disappeared like meteors in the
tumult that attended the reinstatement of the
Medici and the fall of the Gonfaloniere, 1512.

The third expulsion of the Medici — Hippo-
lyto and Alessandro, the sons of Giuliano the
Magnificent, and all their relatives — was the
consequence of the sack of Rome, 1527, and
the Pontificate of Clemente VII. The Medici,
pressed by the moment, consigned part of
their technic treasure, their bronzes, cameos,
&c. to the care of their client Baccio Ban-
dinelli.* During the havoc, Michael Angelo's

reformer by him, on a cornelian of uncommon size, in the
Museo Flor. with this inscription,

Hieronymus Ferrariensis Ord. Freed.
Propheta Vir et Martyr.

It is known from impressions in paste and bronze. In
politics, at least, Michael Angelo was a votary of Fra Giro-
lamo, although the nursling of the Medici.
* Vasari, Vita di B. B. t. ii. p. £57.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 199

statue of David lost an arm,* and the waxen
figures of Leo X. and Clemente VII. in the
church of the " Annunciata," were mutilated
and carried off; and perhaps much more
was lost in the demolition of the suburbs,
which took place to secure the town itself
against the siege of 1 529. But active resistance
and lampoons proved equally ineffectual; the
destiny of the Medici prevailed, and Florence
paid ducal homage in 1530 to Alessandro;
whose assassination, indeed, by Lorenzo his re-
lative, commonly called Lorenzino, produced,
six years afterwards, another sedition and far-
ther damage to their stores of art by the sol-
diers, who, at the instigation of Alessandro
Vitelli, broke into and plundered both their
houses. Cosmo the First succeeded Alessandro,
and left uninterrupted dominion to his heirs :
but if the consolidation of monarchy prevented
the momentary devastations of insurrection, it
failed to re-produce the splendid period that
flashed athwart the storms of democracy.

» Varchi, Storia Fiorent. p. 36.

200 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

MICHAEL ANGELO BUONARROTI.

1474—1564.

M. Angelo was born at Castel Caprese, and
showed such early proofs of a decided attach-
ment to art, that he was put into the school of
Domenico del Ghirlandaio. Here he soon ad-
vanced beyond the principles of the master,
who, jealous of a rival in his pupil, recom-
mended him to Lorenzo de Medici, for admis-
sion among the students of sculpture in his
garden ; where, under the tuition of Bertoldo,*

* " The two masters of Michael Angelo," says Fiorillo,
" descend in equidistant degrees from the School of Cima-
bue and Giotto : the following scale shows the technic pedi-
gree of M. Angelo at one glance :
Cimabue.
Giotto.

Taddeo Gaddi.

Angelo Gaddi. Jacopo Casentino.

Ant. Veneziano. Spinello.

Paolo Uccello. Lorenzo Bicci.

Aless. Baldovinetti. Donatello.

Dom. del Ghirlandaio. Bertoldo.

M. A. Buonarroti."

What pity that this laboured scale, which has all the air
of an astrologic conceit of Vasari, and gives to chance the
sanction of predestination, could not be extended to Architec-
ture ! As the notion of a writer who dates the subversion of Art
from the epoch and style of M. Angelo, it must appear ludi-

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 201

an ancient scholar of Donatello, he soon mas-
tered the elements, and, equally conspicuous for
his superiority and diligence, attracted the at-
tention and gained the patronage of Lorenzo,
but excited the envy of his fellow-students, one
of whom, Torrigiano, on some slight provoca-
tion, with a blow of the fist shattered his nose,
which left him with a mark for life.

That predilection for sculpture imbibed from
his earliest days and now invigorated by the
incessant study of the antique with practice,
the successful specimens mentioned in copies
and productions of his own,* leave little autho-
rity to the tradition that he studied much after
Masaccio.

His mind appears to have anticipated the ex-
pulsion of the Medici, and he left Florence for
Bologna, where he found a protector in Aldro-
vandi, for whom he executed two small statues,
of an Angel and of a St. Petronius on the tomb
of S. Dominico. After his return to Florence
he continued to work in sculpture, and a legend,
less probable than amusing, of an Amor sold

crous even to the most declared votary of that great name
on this side of idolatry.

* The mask of an antique Satyr, and the basso-relievo of
the Centaurs, undertaken at the suggestion of Poliziano.

202 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

for an antique to Cardinal Riario, has been
fondly repeated by his biographers. He now
went to Rome and produced two of his most
surprising works — the Bacchus of the Museo
Fiorentino, and the Madonna della Pieta in
one of the chapels of the Basilica of S. Pietro.
On his return to Florence, Pietro Soderini
tried his powers on a huge block of mar-
ble, mutilated by the ignorance of one Ma-
estro Simone : he contrived to rear from it the
statue of David, which, in 1504, was placed,
and still remains in front of the old palace.
These works, not less discriminated by peculi-
arity of character, than connected by propriety
of style and energy of finish, were produced
within the short period of six years, and equally
prove the wide range of his powers, and the
perseverance of his application to sculpture.

What he did as painter, during, or soon
after this period, is for us reduced to the single
specimen which he executed for Angelo Doni ;
for the far-famed Cartoon of Pisa, of which we
soon shall have occasion to speak, begun in
contest with Lionardo da Vinci, but not finish-
ed till after his second return from Rome,
perished, as a whole, long before the middle
of the sixteenth century.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 203

Soon after his election to the Pontificate, Giu-
lio II. smitten with the wish of a sepulchral mo-
nument, called M. Angelo to Rome for that pur-
pose. His first plan was to make it colossal, and
on all sides detached, but the obstacles which
were thrown in its way for a number of years,
reduced it at length to the form in which it now
appears at S. Pietro in Vincoli, with probably
one figure only by M. Angelo's own hand,
the celebrated statue of Moses in front. The
attachment of Giulio to M. Angelo was great,
but the independent spirit of the artist greater.
Indignant at being refused access once to the
Pontiff, whose mind was worried by the dis-
turbances at Bologna, he fled, and though pur-
sued by five messengers with letters pressing
him to come back, obstinately went on to Flo-
rence ; nor could his three breves * addressed

* One has been preserved, and as a document of the rela-
tion in which power at that time stood with art, may interest
the reader.

" Julius P. P. II. Dilectis Filiis Prioribus Libertatis, et
Vexillifero Justitise Populi Florentini. ,

" Dilecti filii, salutem et apostolicam benedictionem.
Michael Angelus sculptor, qui a nobis leviter et inconsulte
discessit, redire, ut accepimus, ad nos timet, cui nos non suc-
censemus : Novimus hujusmodi hominum ingenia. Ut tamen
omnem suspicionem deponat, devotionem vestram hortamur,
velit ei nomine nostro promittere, quod si ad nos redierit,

204 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

to the Signoria, draw him from his asylum ;
till Pier Soderini guaranteed his safety by in-
vesting him with the title of envoy from the
Republic. Thus equipped, and accompanied by
Cardinal Soderini, brother to the Gonfaloniere,
he set out for Bologna, was reconciled to the
Pope, and made his statue in bronze. It was
placed over the gate of S. Petronio, but
was thrown down in 1511 by the party of the
Bentivogli, and, with the exception of the
head, said to have been preserved by Duke
Alfonso of Ferrara, converted into a piece of
heavy artillery.

Scarcely returned to Rome, M. Angelo, by
command of Giulio, instigated as it is supposed
by Bramante and Giuliano da Sangallo, found
himself forced to try his powers on a novel
theatre of art, the decoration of the ceiling
and lunette of the Capella Sistina. Whatever
were the motives of the two architects, whether
private pique, or envy of M. Angelo's influ-
ence over the Pontiff, or friendship for Raffa-
ello, and the desire of showing his superiority
over one whom they deemed a novice in fresco,

illaesus inviolatusque erit, et in ea gratia apostolica nos
habiturus, qua habebatur ante discessum. Datum Romae,
8 Julii, 1506, Pontificates nostri Anno Hi."

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 205

they deserved the thanks of their own and
every succeeding epoch, for the most eminent
service ever rendered to art. Vasari owns that
M. Angelo, conscious of his want of practice,
endeavoured to escape from the commission,
and even proposed RafFaello as fitter for the
task ; but his powers soon supplied what cir-
cumstances had refused, and single conquer-
ed with every obstacle Time itself; for, nearly
fabulous to relate, the whole, though inter-
rupted more than once by the Pontiff's im-
patience, was sufficiently finished to be ex-
hibited to the public in one year and ten
months.

This task finished, M. Angelo, eager to re-
sume his labours on the monument, was disap-
pointed by the sudden death of Giulio, (1513,)
and the election of Leo X. produced a total
change in his situation ; he was ordered to Flo-
rence to construct the front of the Lauren tian
Library.

Though the death of Leo, or rather the ac-
cession of Adrian VI. had paralysed art, Mi-
chael Angelo employed the dull interim by add-
ing some statues to the monument of Giulio ;
till, in 1523, Clemente VII. reappointed him
to the superintendence of the new sacristy and

206 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

library of S. Lorenzo. It was about this
time that he finished and sent to Rome the
statue of Christ, still placed in the Minerva.

The arts received a new shock from the sack
of Rome, 1527, and the expulsion of the Medici
from Florence, at which crisis the Signoria con-
ferred on Michael Angelo, who was a warm
Republican,* the superintendence of the forti-

* There went a tale that Michael Angelo proposed to de-
molish the palace of the Medicis, like that of the Bentivogli
at Bologna, and to call the site " Piazza de' Muli," the place
of Bastards, in allusion to the illegitimacy of Clemente VII.
Alessandro, and others of that family. " A feature," says
Fiorillo, " if true, as characteristic of his natural ferocity
as disgraceful to his heart, after the benefits heaped on him
from his infancy by that family. Varchi, however, defends
him against this charge. "f Whether this tale confutes itself
or not, may be left to the reader ; but on an estimate of his
private and public conduct, as man and artist during the
long course of his life, it must be owned, that this is the period
which offers the most specious opportunity to a sceptic in
morals, of fixing some doubts on the integrity of his prin-
ciples. His earliest actions prove that he drew a severe line
between the duty which he owed to his country, and grati-
tude imposed by private obligations. He left the family of
Pier de' Medici on finding his principles incompatible with
the laws of a free state ; and on the expulsion of the petty
tyrants, without lending a hand to the devastation of their
property, felt it his duty to act as a free man on the re-es-

f Stor. Fior. lib. vi. p. 154.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 207

fications and the defence of Monte Miniato,
on which the safety of the city depended.
Meanwhile what time he could save from his
public trust, he secretly* employed to finish or
advance the symbolic and monumental statues

tablishment of liberty, and to obey the laws of a state whose
right to legislate for itself had been acknowledged by all
Italy. It will not be said, that it is palliating duplicity to
assert, that as a private individual he had a right to accept
the behests of Leo X. and Clemente VII. for decorating a
sacred edifice ; but when he became a leader of the revolu-
tion, the trustee of his country's safety, the main defender of
the city, did he not more than degrade himself, by forgetting
the patriot in the artist, and " secretly" sacrificing time to raise
monuments to men whose titles he opposed and whose prin-
ciples he detested ? Thus, whilst his conduct may prove the
absurdity of the tale, that he publicly, and with illiberal sar-
casms, advised the demolition of palaces belonging to a family
whose memory he secretly laboured to perpetuate in mo-
numents inspired by the most amorous phantasy ; it cer-
tainly does not screen his character from the imputation
of a duplicity to which no other period of his life offers a
parallel. *V

* " Lavorava," says Vasari, " le statue per le sepolture
di S. Lorenzo segretamente," — p. 224, ed. B. And again,
" Lavorando egli con sollecitudine e con amore grandissimo
tali opere, crebbe (che pur troppo gli impedi il fine) lo assedio."
— p. 229. Impossible as the secrecy of his labours for the
Chapel of S. Lorenzo may appear, the publicity of his situa-
tion considered, it must be admitted, to account for the con-
fidence placed in him by the City.

208 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

of S. Lorenzo, and from the cartoon to paint
in distemper a Leda for the Duke of Ferrara.
Finding, however, that no defence could save
the city, he saved himself by the secret paths
of S. Miniato, and escaped to Venice, 1529 ;
from whence he only returned to find the do-
minion of the Medici once more established,
himself pardoned, again employed by Clemente
at S. Lorenzo, and soon after sent for to Rome
on a plan of painting two central frescoes,
the Last Judgement and the Fall of Lucifer,
for the Sistine Chapel, — long favourite ideas of
the artist,* but with the works at Florence for

* Of the Fall of Lucifer and his Host, which was to face the
altar-piece of the Last Judgement, no sketch that could give
an idea of the whole has yet been discovered ; its place over
the grand door of the Chapel was reserved for the sacrile-
gious ' bravura' of the Neapolitan Matteo da Lecca, under the
pontificate of Gregorio XIII.: his composition, if impudence
of grouping deserve that name, must be supposed to bear
infinitely less analogy to the original conception of Michael
Angelo, than the tumultuary fresco of the Sicilian ; who, says
Vasari, having lived many months with Michael Angelo as
a servant and colour-grinder, became possessed of some de-
sign of his for that subject, and painted it in fresco in a
chapel of the Trinita del Monte. Notwithstanding the in-
competence of the adventurer to manage such materials, the
naked groups showering from Heaven, and the hubbub of

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 209

that time checked by the death of Clemente,
1534. He now with redoubled ardour ap-
plied to the monument of Giulio, urged by his
devotion to the house of De Rovere, the consi-
derable pecuniary advance he had received, and
the threats of the executors and the Duke of
Urbino ; but the accession of Paul III. again
frustrated his exertions : the Pontiff resolved
to have the exclusive boast of powers he had so
long admired, interposed his authority, and
obliged the executors and agents of the Duke
to give up the original circumambient plan,
arid content themselves with the storied front
which exists now.

This adjusted, Michael Angelo immediately
proceeded to comply with the wishes of the
Pope : if Paolo was inferior to Giulio in im-
petuosity, he was his equal in fervour of at-
tachment to art, and excelled him, if not every
other name which patronage has distinguished,
in personal respect and public homage to the
artist. No work ever received countenance

transformed fiends grappling below in the abyss, struck the
beholder with terror and surprise; — a mass of Dantesque
images, and in Dantesque language described by the biogra-
pher.—V. di M. A. t. vi. 237.
VOL. III. P

210 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

and honours equal to those conferred on the
Last Judgement of Michael Angelo, from its
plan to its ultimate finish by Paolo Farnese.
His first visit to the artist was attended by a
train of ten cardinals :* though ambitious to
have the work consecrated to his own name,
in deference to Michael Angelo's attachment
to the memory of Giulio, he submitted to his
refusal of displacing the arms of De Rovere at
the top of the picture, in favour of the Far-
nesian.f Induced by the specious sophistry of

* This pompous visit appears to have been made for the
purpose of inspecting the Cartoon ; to remove the obstacles
to its completion which the unfinished state of the Giulian
monument still presented ; and to convince the artist of the
value he set on the exclusive service of his genius. But, be-
sides the obligation of fulfilling his contract with the House
of De Rovere, Vasari seems to think that one principal reason
of Michael Angelo's tardiness to comply with the wishes of
the Pope, was the Pontiff's age, (vedendolo tanto vecchio,)
t. e. apprehension, if he lived long enough to prevent the
termination of the monument, of his dying too soon for the
completion of the fresco, and thus leaving him exposed to
the revenge of the Duke of Urbino : a conjecture not coun-
tenanced by the Pontiff's age, who, at his accession, was
only eight years older than the artist.

f Bastiano, says Vasari, was a favourite of Michael An-
gelo, but a disagreement took place between them about the

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 211

Sebastian del Piombo to prefer oil to fresco in
the execution of the work; he permitted the
wall to be prepared for that purpose, but on
Michael Angelo's declaring oil painting an
art for women only and sedentary tameness,
he yielded to the decision, and patiently saw the
whole apparatus dashed to the ground. When,
before its final disclosure to the public, he took
a private view of the whole composition at the
Chapel, less convinced than irritated by the
bigoted philippic of an attendant prelate
against the daring display of immodest nu-
dity, he acquiesced in the artist's well-known
revenge, and refused to revoke or mitigate

best method of painting the Last Judgement. Fra Bas-
tiano had persuaded the Pontiff to give the preference to
oil, but Michael Angelo resolved to execute it only in fresco.
On seeing the Frate's preparation adopted, without agreeing
to it or opposing it, he remained inactive for several months ;
till, on being pressed, he finally declared, that he would
either do it in fresco or not at all ; that oil paint was a wo-
man's art, and the refuge of idlers at their ease like Fra Bas-
tiano. In consequence of which, the Frate's incrustation
being dashed to the ground, and the wall duly prepared for
fresco, he set about the work, but never forgot the insult he
fancied to have received from the friar during life. — Vasari,
Vita di F. S.

P 2

2]2 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

the punishment inflicted on the unlucky
critic.*

The first conception of the Last Judgement,
which completes the plan originally laid down
for the decoration of the Chapel, notwithstand-
ing the obstacles which protracted the execu-

* Michael Angelo had finished more than three-fourths of
the work, when the Pontiff visited the Chapel, and on inspec-
tion, turning to Messer Biagio, of Cesena, then master of
ceremonies, in his train, asked him what he thought of the
work? The scrupulous prelate replied, that so daring an
aggregate of shameless nudities in a sacred place was ob-
scene profanation, and an exhibition fitter for a tavern or a
brothel than a papal chapel. Michael Angelo, indignant,
and eager to revenge the affront, only waited for his depar-
ture, and then, from memory, drew him in the character of
Dante's Minos, with a snake encircling his body and gnaw-
ing his middle, in the midst of a hillock of fiends. In vain
did Messer Biagio supplicate the Pontiff and Michael Angelo
to take him out ; he remained, and is there still. So far Va-
sari ; but tradition adds, that on Biagio's application, the
Pope asked in what part of the picture he was placed, and
being answered, in Hell, replied, had you been lodged in
Purgatory, you might perhaps have been dismissed, " sed ex
Inferno nulla est redemptio." Condivi notices the story not
at all.

In the Diary of Paris de' Grassi, Messer Biagio is said to
have been appointed master of ceremonies by Leo X. 1518,
in the room of Nicola da Viterbo, and, if we believe Du-
cange, (Table des Auteurs dans le Supplement du Glossaire,)
he has written a diary himself. — See Fiorillo, i. p. 389.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 213

tion, must find its date in the Pontificate
of Giulio, from the Cartoons probably begun
under Clemente. M. Angelo proceeded to the
fresco itself at an early period, if not imme-
diately after the accession of Paolo, 1534, and
finished it in 1541, or perhaps 15421 ; for both
these years are mentioned by Vasari ; who, if
not present at the removal of the scaffolding,
attended its immediate display to the public.
The completion of this ( multitudinous' work,
M. Angelo, at an age of 68, or somewhat beyond,
might justly consider as the consummation of
his public career in painting : but the Pontiff,
still ambitious to possess exclusive specimens
of his powers in a fabric built by his own orders
and consecrated to his own name, obliged him
to continue his labours in two huge frescoes of
the Capella Paolina, representing the Conver-
sion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter.
The lassitude inseparable from the waste of so
much energy on the Last Judgement, the mental
and bodily fatigue attendant on the arrange-
ment and execution of new plans, if less enor-
mous less congenial, protracted their ultimate
completion to his 75th year, proved them
children of necessity rather than choice, and

214 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

confirmed the truth of his observation to Va-
sari, that painting in fresco, the union of powers
required for a great public work, is not an art
of old age.

And here indeed terminates the career of the
Painter ; the remainder of his life was divi-
ded between architecture and sculpture. This,
which had always been his favourite pursuit, was
now become the darling companion of his pri-
vate hours, the amusement of his solitude, and
the preservative of his health — for this purpose
he furnished his study with a colossal block, des-
tined for the complicated group of a Pieta : but
though age had neither tamed his conception nor
palsied his hand,* it checked his perseverance ;
he no longer struggled to subdue the flaws of his

* Blaise de Vigenere, the translator of Philostratus and
Callistratus, tells us, in his observations on the latter, page
855, that "he saw M. Angelo, at the age of sixty, strike
off more marble from a block in one quarter of an hour,
than four stonemasons usually did in three or four hours."
If this happened in 1550, as will appear from the fol-
lowing passage, M. Angelo was then in his seventy-sixth
year< — « L'entrepris aussi de Michel FAnge estoit hautaine et
fort hardie, sentant bien sa main assuree, le quel comman^a
1'an 1550, que j'estois a Rome, un Crucifiement ou il y
avoit de dix a douze personnages, non pas moindres que le
naturel, le tout d'une seule piece de marbre, qui etait un

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 215

materials or to give them the air of beauties ;
he dismissed the group unfinished, and con-
tinued to exercise himself on another of in-
ferior size.

The death of Antonio da S. Gallo, 1546,
put it in the power of Paolo to create M.
Angelo architect of S. Pietro, a trust of which
he acquitted himself with a superiority which
baffled all the opposition of venality and envy.
He was probably, from Ictinus to our time, the
first and the last of architects who refused
salary and emolument, and consecrated his la-
bours to divine love. Some of his successors,
perhaps, might insinuate that he indemnified
himself with being at the same time architect
of the Campidoglio and the Farnese Palace.

After the demise of Paolo, Cosmo I. Duke
of Florence, by means of Vasari, earnestly in-
treated him to pass the remainder of his life at
Florence ; but the infirmities of age, and still
more, inward grief for the subversion of the re-
public, with indignation at the established usur-
pation of the Medici, rendered these intreaties

chapiteau de Tune de ces huict grandes colomnes du
temple de la Paix de Vespasian, dont ii s'en void encore une
toute entiere et debout, mais la mort "

216 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

ineffectual. Equally unshaken by them and the
vile rumour of his dotage, spread by the venal
gang of Pirrho Ligorio, after crowning the Ba-
silica with its cupola, he steered through calm
and tempest on to his ninetieth year, the last of
his life, 1564, and was buried in S. Apostoli ;
but, by the orders of Cosmo, secretly conveyed
to Florence, where the pornp of academical
exequies, the starched eloquence of Varchi, and
a monument in Santa Croce from a design of
Vasari, awaited his remains.

It is difficult to decide who understood
Michael Angelo less, his admirers or his cen-
sors ; though both rightly agree in placing him
at the head of an epoch ; those of the re-es-
tablishment, these of the perversion, of style.

All extremes touch each other : languid
praise and frigid censure belong to the paths
of mediocrity, but he who enlarges the cir-
cle of knowledge, passes from the realm of
talents to that of genius, leaps on an undis-
covered or long-lost shore, and stamps it with
his name, commands indiscriminate homage,
and provokes irreconcilable censure. He who
reflects on the " Piii che Uman, Angelo di-
vino" of Ariosto, the " via terribile" of Agos-

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 217

tino Carracci, and for centuries on the gene-
ral homage of a nation allowed to legislate
in art, will not be easily persuaded that these
epithets, this prerogative, were granted to an
artist merely for correctness of design or ana-
tomic discrimination, or that he exclusively
obtained them for uniting sculpture, painting,
and architecture in himself ; three branches
of one stem, and diverging only in mecha-
nism and application, they have been more
than once eminently united by others, and
were seldom altogether separated before the
time of Carlo Maratta. And yet this is all
on which the eminence of Michael Angelo
has been hitherto supposed to rest, all that can
be gathered from the astrologic nonsense and
the Tuscan loquacity of his blind adorer, Va-
sari — and what he found not, it would be time
idly lost to search for in his contemporaries and
successors, down to Reynolds, who, though
chiefly smitten with the breadth of Michael
Angelo, knew him better than all the copyists
of his school.

The art preceded Michael Angelo as a craft ;
more or less practice alone distinguishes Pietro
Perugino from Cimabue : whilst copy and imi-

218 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

tation remain synonymes, there can be no
choice in art ; instead of the real nature it
will copy the accidents of objects, and sub-
stitute the model for the man.

Michael Angelo appeared and soon felt that
the candidate of legitimate fame is to build his
works, not on the imbecile forms of a degene-
rate race, disorganized by clime, country, edu-
cation, laws, and society ; not on the transient
refinements of fashion or local sentiment, unin-
telligible beyond their circle and century to
the rest of mankind ; but to graft them on
Nature's everlasting forms and those general
feelings of humanity, which no time can efface,
no mode of society obliterate ; — and in conse-
quence of these reflections discovered the epic
part of painting : that basis, that indestructi-
bility of forms and thoughts, that simplicity of
machinery on which Homer defied the rava-
ges of time, which sooner or later must sweep
to oblivion every work propped by baser ma-
terials and factitious refinements.

The subject of the Sistine Chapel is Theo-
cracy and Religion, the Origin and the first
Duty of Man. All minute discrimination of
character is alien to the primeval simplicity

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 219

of the moment — God and Man alone appear.
The veil of Eternity is rent ; Time, Space,
and Matter teem ; life darts from God, and
adoration from the creature ; deviation from
this principle is the origin of Evil ; the eco-
nomy of Justice and Grace commences ; Pro-
phets and Sibyls in awful synod are the heralds
of the Redeemer, and the host of patriarchs
the pedigree of the Son of Man. The brazen
Serpent and the fall of Haman, the Giant sub-
dued by the Stripling, and the Conqueror de-
stroyed by female weakness, are types of His
mysterious progress, till Jonah pronounces Him
immortal, and the magnificence of the Last
Judgement sums up the whole and re-unites
the Founder and the race.

Michael Angelo, in his Last Judgement,
with a few exceptions, has wound up the life
of man, considered as the subject of religion,
faithful or rebellious ; and in a generic man-
ner has distributed happiness and misery.

The more finished a character, the more, dis-
criminated by his actions and turn of thought
from his contemporaries, he pursues paths of
his own, so much the more he attracts, so much
the more he repels ; the ardour of the one is

220 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

equal to the violence of the other : he is not
merely disliked, he is detested by all who have
no sense for him ; whilst by those who enter his
train of thought, or sympathise with him, he is
adored. Indifference has no share in what re-
lates to him, it is a softer word for antipathy —
it resembles the indifference of a female wooed ;
her indifference, her apathy, is a refusal without
a verbal repulse. Where yes or no must de-
cide, the mouth that can form neither, rejects.
The principles, the style of Michael Angelo,
are of that so closely-connected magnitude,
that they are either all true or all false : pre-
tended gold is either gold or not — the purer,
the simpler a substance, the less it can coalesce
with another ; a pretended diamond of the
size of a fist, is either of inestimable value or
of none. If Michael Angelo did not establish
art on a solid basis, he subverted it ; he can
claim only the heresies of paradox and receive
their reward — disgust.

What Armenini relates as a proof of his
nearly intuitive power of conception and exe-
cution, may be repeated as a much stronger
instance of his deference and gratitude for the
most humble claims. " Meeting one day, behind

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 221

S. Pietro, with a young Ferrarese, a potter who
had baked some model of his, M. Angelo thank-
ed him for his care, and in return offered him
any service in his power : the young man, em-
boldened by his condescension, fetched a sheet of
paper, and requested him to draw the figure of a
standing Hercules : M. Angelo took the paper,
and retiring to a small shed near by, put his
right foot on a bench, and with his elbow on
the raised knee and his face on his hand stood
meditating a little while, then began to draw
the figure, and having finished it in a short
time, beckoned to the youth, who stood waiting
at a small distance, to approach, gave it him,
and went away toward Belvedere. That design,
as far as I was then able to judge, in precision
of outline, shadow, and finish, no miniature
could excel ; it afforded matter of astonishment
to see accomplished in a few minutes what
might have been reasonably supposed to have
taken up the labour of a month."

After the demise of Raffaello, legislation in
Art was no longer disputed with M. Angelo ;
he not only became the oracle of youth, but ap-
pears to have inherited all the popularity of his
great rival. A signal, though little known proof

222 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

of this, is told by Bellori, in the Life of Federigo
Barrocci, who, he says, used to tell, that when,
drawing one day in company with Taddeo Zuc-
cari a frieze of Polidoro, Michael Angelo, as
usual, passed by on his little mule on his way
to the palace, all the youths rose and ran to
meet him with their drawings in their hands ;
Federigo alone remained bashfully behind in
his place, which when Taddeo saw, he took his
little portfolio to Michael Angelo, who atten-
tively examined the designs, among which was
a careful copy of his Moses ; he praised it, and
desiring to see the lad who had drawn that
figure, animated him to pursue the method of
study which he had begun.

The deference which he paid to the unassum-
ing and the humble, he amply redeemed by the
full assumption of his rights, and conscious asser-
tion of superiority, when provoked to the con-
test by those who considered themselves as his
equals, entered into competition with him, or at-
tempted to share in his labours. Thus he repaid
the sarcasms of Pietro Perugino, by calling him
publicly a dunce in art; and when Pietro smart-
ing, impatient of the ridicule, summoned him
to the Tribunal of the Eight, he made good his

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 223

charge, and saw him dismissed with contempt.
Thus he rejected all partnership with Jacopo
Sansovino, in the execution of the Facciata of
San Lorenzo at Florence, though Leone X.
appears to have intended it, by sending both
together to Pietra Santa to provide "the mar-
bles necessary for that purpose, and examin-
ing both their models.

When Paolo III. had resolved on the fortifica-
tions of the Borgo, and, in order to ascertain the
best mode of doing it, had assembled many per-
sons of rank, with Antonio da Sangallo, Michael
Angelo, as architect of the fortifications of S.
Miniato at Florence, was likewise invited to join
the assembly, and, after much contest, his opi-
nion asked ; he freely told it, though contrary to
that of Sangallo and others present ; and when
the architect bade him to be content with the
prerogatives of sculpture and painting without
pretending to skill in fortification, he replied,
that of the former two he knew little, but that
of fortification, considering the time his mind
had dwelt on it, and the proofs he had given of
the solidity of his theory, he did not hesitate to
claim more knowledge than what came to the
share of Sangallo and all his relatives; and then

224 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

proceeded, in the presence of all, to point out
the many errors which Antonio had committed.
Another instance of a still greater indepen-
dence of mind, Vasari* has recorded in the pe-
remptory answer which M. Angelo gave to the
Committee of Cardinals, &c. instigated by the
partisans of Sangallo, (La Setta Sangallesca,
Vasari,) to inspect the process of the fabric
of S. Pietro, and to examine his plan. Ig-
norant of his design to derive the main light
of the edifice from the cupola, they found
fault with the scanty distribution of light, and
told the Pontiff that M. Angelo had spoiled
S. Pietro, and instead of a luminous temple,
was erecting a gloomy vault. Giulio having
communicated this to him at a general meet-
ing of the deputies and inspectors, M. Angelo
replied, I wish to hear these deputies talk
myself: " Here we are," answered Cardinal
Marcello — " Then know, Monsignore," said
he, " that over these windows, in the vault
which is to be raised, there are to be placed
three more." — " You never told us this before !"
said Cervino. — " No," replied M. Angelo, " I am
not, nor ever will be bound to tell your Emi-
nence, or any other person, what I must or

* Vol. vi. p. 272.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 225

what I mean to do : your duty is to provide
money and take care that it be not stolen ;
what belongs to the plan and execution of the
building you are to leave to me." Then turning
to the Pope, "Holy Father," continued he, "you
see what I gain ; the fatigue I undergo is time
and labour lost, unless my soul gain by it."
The Pope, who loved him, and rejoiced at the
defeat of the cabal, laying hands on his shoul-
ders, said, " Doubt not your soul and body shall
be equal gainers by it."

Among the many expectations in which he
was disappointed, that which he appears to have
formed on the early talent of JacopoCarucci, as it
was the most sanguine, must have been the most
distressing ; for, on seeing his figures of Faith
and Charity with attendant Infants, in fresco,
at the Nunziata, and considering them as pro-
duced by a youth of nineteen, he said, in the
words of Vasari, " This young man, from what
appears, grant life and pursuit, will raise this
art to heaven."

But Jacopo did neither long pursue the same
principles nor adopt superior ones : infected,
like Andrea del Sarto, by the temporary fever
which the style of Albert Durer had spread

VOL. III. Q

226 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

over Florence. He was, however, the favour-
ite copyist in oil of M. Angelo's Cartoons, and
as such, in preference, recommended by him to
Alfonso D'Avalo, Marchese del Guasto, and
Bartolomeo Bettini, his friend, who had ob-
tained cartoons, the former of a Noli-me-tan-
gere ; this of a naked Venus caressed by Cupid.*

* Vasari's account of both pictures is sufficiently curious
to be communicated in his own words. " Alfonso D'Avalo,
Marchese del Guasto, having obtained from Michael An-
gelo, by means of Fra Nicolo della Magna, a cartoon of
Christ appearing to Magdalen in the Garden, made every
exertion to have it executed in painting by Puntormo, as he
had been told by Michael Angelo that no one could serve
him better. Jacopo undertook the work, and succeeded to
a degree of excellence, which made Alessandro Vitelli, cap-
tain of the Florentine guards, bespeak a second copy of him,
which he placed in his house at Civita di Castello."

" Michael Angelo, to oblige his intimate friend Bartolomeo
Bettini, made him a Cartoon of Venus naked and Cupid
kissing her, to be executed by Puntormo in oil, for the
centre piece of an apartment, on the sides of which Bronzino
had begun to paint Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, to be
followed by the rest of Tuscan love-songsters. The picture
of Puntormo was miraculous, but instead of being given to
Bettini for the price stipulated, was, by some favour-hunters,
his enemies, nearly extorted from Jacopo, and carried off as
a present to Duke Alessandro, returning the cartoon to
Bettini. A transaction which, when he heard it, irritated
Michael Angelo, who loved his friend, and made him dislike
Jacopo for it." — Vasari, Vita di Jacopo da, P. V.

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 227

The name of Giuliano Bugiardini, supported
only by its own feeble powers, would proba-
bly long have sunk to oblivion, had it not been
kept afloat by the personal attachment of M.
Angelo. In Vasari, Giuliano is the synonyme
of helpless impotence ; he had certainly neither
the dexterity nor the grasp of the Aretine bio-
grapher ; but he also had neither the preten-
sion nor the craft. There is, and chiefly among
artists, a singular class of men, who, with great
moral simplicity, but a capacity less than mo-
derate, court with ungovernable passion an art
which they are doomed never to possess, but to
whom self-complacency compensates for every
disappointment of the most ungrateful perse-
verance, public neglect and private irrision :
they neither envy nor suspect, and though not
intimidated by a superiority which they do
not fully comprehend, are ready to respect the
part that comes within their compass. Such a
man was Bugiardini ; and such a character M.
Angelo was likely to appreciate ;* and though
aware that he was not equal to serious commu-
nication in art, to select him as a companion of

* They had been fellow-scholars in the garden of Lorenzo
de' Medici.

Q 2

228 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

his leisure, and to assist or submit to him, as the
simplicity of his character required; — of either
we shall select from Vasari an instance. When
he was occupied with the picture of Sta. Ca-
therina, for the Church of Sta. Maria Novella,
he requested the advice of M. Angelo on the
arrangement of a file of soldiers which he
meant to place on the foreground, flying, fall-
en, wounded, killed ; because the idea of their
having formed a file, could not be expressed
within the scanty space he had allotted them,
without having recourse to fore-shortenings,
which he confessed to be beyond his power.
M. Angelo, to please him, took a coal, and
with his own comprehension drew on the panel
a file of naked figures, variously fore- short-
ened, falling different ways, forwards, back-
wards, with others dead or wounded : but the
whole being merely in outlines, left Giuliano
still at a loss. Tribolo, therefore, to draw him
from this dilemma, undertook to form them in
clay, leaving the surface of each figure rough,
to increase more forcibly the chiaroscuro : this
method, however, so little pleased the neatness
of Giuliano, that the moment Tribolo left
him, he with a wet pencil licked them into a
polish, which took away grain and effect to-

THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE. 229

gether, and when the picture was finished, left
no trace of M. Angelo's ever having seen it.

Messer Ottaviano de' Medici had requested
Giuliano to paint him a portrait of M. Angelo.
He obtained the consent of M. Angelo : having
held him between chat and work two hours at
the first sitting — for M. Angelo delighted to
hear him talk— Giuliano got up, and said, " M.
Angelo, if you want to see yourself, rise : I
have settled the character of the face." M. An-
gelo rose, looked at the portrait, and said,
smiling, " What the devil (che diavolo) have you
been doing ? you have clapt one of the eyes
into one of the temples — look to it." Giuliano
having for some time looked silently, at the
portrait, and the sitter, resolutely replied, " I do
not see what you said ; but take your place, and
I '11 give another glance at nature." M. Angelo,
who knew where the defect lay, sat down again
sneering ; and Giuliano, having eyed repeatedly
now the picture and now M. Angelo, at last
rose and said, " It appears to me that the
thing is as I have drawn it, and that nature
shows it so." " Oh, then it is a defect of na-
ture !" replied Michael Angelo, " go on and
prosper in your work."

Francesco Granacci, the companion of his

230 THE SCHOOL OF FLORENCE.

early studies, and Jacopo, called L'Indaco, the
enlivener of his solitude, enjoyed the same de-
gree of his familiarity ; but as the real basis
of friendship is equality, and mutual esteem
founded on similarity of character and powers,
attachments merely formed by early habits or
congenial humour between men too dissimilar
else to admit of comparison, never can aspire
to its privileges and name. Condescension is
not always delicate, and the indiscretions of
simplicity sooner or later provoke the pride,
contempt, and arrogance of superior powers.
Giuliano, Granacci, and L'Indaco, experienced
all three from Michael Angelo; they were
among his conscripts for assisting in the fres-
coes of the Capella ; but finding their pigmy
capacities unequal to his colossal style, he not
only, in lofty silence, destroyed what they
had begun, but barring all access to the Chapel
and himself, forced them to return, vainly
grumbling, to Florence.

SCHOOL OF SIENA.

IN the enumeration of Tuscan art, some
lovers of subdivision have fancied, with more
refinement than solidity, to discover in the
style of Sienese artists a characteristic suffi-
ciently distinct from the Florentine, to erect
Siena into a school. This characteristic, we
are told, is a peculiar gaiety in the selection
of colour, and an air of physiognomic vivaci-
ty and serenity of face ; both, it seems, the in-
heritance of the Sienese race. They have, ac-
cordingly, divided this school into three epochs :
the first is that of the ancients (gli antichi) ;
and its first palpable patriarch, Guido, or Gtii-
done, commonly called Guido da Siena, and no-
ticed already in the beginning of our chapter on
the Florentine school. He flourished before the
birth of Cimabue, in the first half of the thir-

232 SCHOOL OF SIENA.

teenth century, and is followed by the names
of Ugolino da Siena and Duccio surnamed di
Boninsegna, the precursors of Simone Memmi,
the contemporary of Giotto, who painted Laura
and survives in the sonnets of her lover. Lip-
po Memmi and Cecco da Martino, his relatives,
float in the obscurity which prevailed till the
appearance of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti.
Of the first there still exists an extensive work
in the public palace, or rather a didactic poem,
which in suitable allegories and in varied
views, exhibits the vices of a bad government,
and personifies the qualities necessary to form
the rulers of a virtuous republic — a work
which, with less monotony of features, and
more judgment in the division of the subjects,
would, in the opinion of Lanzi, find little to
envy in the best-treated histories of Pisa's Cam-
po Santo. In partnership with his brother
Pietro, he painted, in the Hospital of Siena, the
Presentation and the Espousal of the Madonna
— pictures destroyed in 1720. This is that
Pietro who, in the Campo Santo of Pisa,
painted the Hermits of the Desert, and the
Terrors of Solitude invaded by an Infernal
Apparition, with a novelty of conception and a
richness of fancy, that render his work the

SCHOOL OF SIENA. 233

most interesting of the whole series. That,
notwithstanding the plague, which had wasted
the population of Siena at that period, the art
continued to flourish, is proved by the num-
bers who formed themselves into a civil body
under the immediate patronage of the Republic
itself. In some families it became an heirloom :
such were the Vanni and the Bartoli. Andrea di
Vanni, or more properly, di Giovanni, not only
figured as an artist in his native city, but was
delegated by the Republic to the Pope at Avig-
non, and appears in the records as " Capitano
del Popolo ;" and among the letters of Santa
Caterina da Siena, there are three addressed to
him.* Vasari has mentioned Taddeo di Bar-
tolo, (1351 — 1410.) whose works still exist
in the public palace and the adjoining hall.
They pretend to represent a number of cele-
brated republicans, and chiefly Greeks and
Romans, but their physiognomies are all ideal,
and their dresses the costume of Siena. Some-
thing was added to the monotony of these fa-
mily styles under the Pontificate of Pio II.
or Enea Silvio, (1503,) by Matteo di Giovanni,

* Lettere della Beata Vergine, S. Caterina da Siena.
Venez. 1562., 4to. p. 286, 242. The last was written at the
period of Vanni's dignity.

234 SCHOOL OF SIENA.

in disposition, variety, expression, drapery ; he
has accordingly been complimented by some
as the Masaccio of Siena, but remained un-
known to Vasari. The art gained still more
under the auspices of a second Piccolomini,
Pio III. (1503.) He employed Pinturicchio,
Raffaello, and other strangers, to perpetuate
the achievements of his predecessor Enea ; and
they, Raffaello excepted, continued with Sig-
norelli and Genga to exercise their talents in
decorating the Palace of Pandolfo Petrucci,
who had usurped supreme power in the Re-
public.

The second period of Sienese art opens with
the sixteenth century, and the works of Gia-
como Pacchiarotto, or Pacchiarotti. They
resemble the produce of Perugino's school,
though distinguished by more vigour of com-
position. But what entitles this epoch to the
claim of establishing the peculiar style of this
school, must be looked for in the works of
Giannantonio Razzi, Domenico Beccafumi, and
Baldassare Peruzzi.

Giannantonio Razzi,* commonly called " II
Soddoma," is said by some to have been a na-

* 1481—1554.

SCHOOL OF SIENA. 235

live of Vergille, in the territory of Siena ; by
others, of Vercelli, in Piedmont. Long resi-
dence, however, supplied the want of birth-
right : Siena claims him for her own ; and if a
charming whole, suavity of tint combined with
force of chiaroscuro, be the principal characte-
ristic of that school, no native has expressed it
with equal evidence and felicity. This gaiety of
tone and manner some have traced to the jovial
turn of the man himself; as careless as gay, ever
in pursuit of youth and beauty, though with
an indiscretion that brands him with the stain
tacked to his name, from a character so volatile
and dissipated, that inequality of execution
might be expected which marks his happiest
effusions. Thus, in the Church of S. Domenico,
where he represented Sta. Caterina of Siena, on
receiving the stigmata, fainting in the arms of
two sister nuns, we forgive to the energy of
conception, the pathos of expression, and the
sympathy of tone that press the principal group
on our hearts, that neglect which left the figure
of the Saviour below mediocrity, and own, with
Baldassare Peruzzi, that we never saw mental
dereliction and fainting beauty expressed with
deeper sentiment and truth ; a verdict which

236 SCHOOL OF SIENA.

receives full sanction from him who relates it,
Vasari, less the biographer than the merciless
censor of the obnoxious Razzi, for whose moral
turpitude and technic slovenliness his sanctimo-
nious asperity found no other excuse than that
of madness, which swayed him to neglect or mis-
apply the powers of genius. Thus, in speaking
of the fresco at Monte Oliveto, in which Sod-
doma had chosen to represent a bevy of har-
lots let loose with song and dance on St.
Benedetto and his flock, to try their sancti-
ty, he reprobates the licentiousness that had
larded the subject with additional obscenity,
whilst he concludes by owning that it is one
of the best pictures in the Convent. How are
we to reconcile the neglect which, disdaining
to consult Nature, or to regulate a picture by
cartoon or design, relied for the whole on
practice and on chance, with the praise be-
stowed on Razzi's composition, the faces that
speak, the breasts that palpitate, the torsos
compared by some to the antique, by others
to Michael Angelo, but by that indifference
which often distinguishes the man of genius
from the man of talent, him who possesses
by Nature from him who acquires by art?

SCHOOL OF SIENA. 237

Capacity and attachment unite not always ;
and to Soddoma, vain, whimsical, volatile, art
appears to have been no more than the readiest
means of procuring amusement or pleasure.
" My art dances to the sound of your purse,"
said he to the Abbot of Monte Oliveto.

Agostino Chigi, pleased with the art, and
still more the whimsies of Soddoma, if we be-
lieve Vasari, carried him to Rome, and intro-
duced him to Giulio II. to co-operate with
Pietro Perugino, &c. in the Vatican ; but his
labours being superseded by the novel powers
of RafFaelle, Agostino, whose attachments were
not regulated by the Pontiff's whims, employ-
ed him in the decorations of his own palace,
now the Farnesina ; where, in a principal apart-
ment leading to the great saloon reserved for
Raffaelle, he painted the Nuptials of Alexander
and Roxana in a style no doubt inferior to the
Loves of Amor and Psyche, but not of an in-
feriority sufficient to account for the enormous
disparity of fame that separates both.

Domenico Mecherino,* the son of a Sienese
peasant, better known by the adopted name of
Beccafurni, inferior to Razzi in elegance of line

* 1484—1549?

238 SCHOOL OF SIENA.

and suavity of colour, excelled him in energy
of conception and style. Vasari, who invests
Beccafumi with every excellence and virtue,
of which the defect or opposite vice disgraced
Razzi, still owns that he did not reach the
physiognomic suavity that marks the faces
of Soddoma ; and after leading him from the
scanty elements of Pietro Perugino to Rome,
the Antique, the Chapel of M. Angelo, and the
works of RafFaelle, by a kind of anticlimax
brings him back to Siena to complete his stu-
dies by adopting the principles of Giannantonio.
A modern writer,* on the contrary, has dis-
covered that the talents of Domenico, over-
powered by the genius of M. Angelo, turned
their current awry, and failed to produce the
legitimate efforts which might have been ex-
pected from a steady adherence to the prin-
ciples of Raffaelle — opinions less founded on
the character of the artist and the spirit of his
works than on the partiality and prejudice of
the critics. Beccafumi was not of the first
class, less made to lead than to follow with an
air of originality ; to amalgamate principles not
absolutely discordant — thus, in single figures,

* Fiorillo, i. 335.

SCHOOL OF SIENA. 239

he sometimes more than imitates, he equals
M. Angelo, as in those noticed by Bottari ; —
and again, in larger compositions, such as those
on the pavement of the Cathedral, works by
which he is chiefly known, we see him on the
traces of RafFaelle, and emulating the variety
and graces of Polydoro : these graces frequently
vanished, and correctness as often ceased with
the increased size of his figures : the foreshort-
enings, in which he delighted, savour more of
the " sot to in su," introduced by Correggio to
Upper Italy, than of the principles of M. Angelo;
they are generally attended by a magic chiar-
oscuro, like that of the figure of Justice, on
which Vasari expatiates, on the ceiling of the
public hall at Siena, which, from profound
darkness gradually rising into light, seems to
vanish in celestial splendour. He is said by
Vasari to have preferred fresco and distemper
to oil paint, as a purer, simpler, and of course
more durable medium; and though the pre-
dominant red of his flesh-tints has more fresh-
ness than glow, such is the solidity of his
impasto and the purity of his method, that
his panels present us to this day less with
the injuries than the improvements of time.

240 SCHOOL OF SIENA.

The style of Mecherino did not survive
him : for Giorgio da Siena, his pupil, confined
himself to grotesque work, in imitation of
Giovanni da Udine ; Giannella, or Giovanni of
Siena, turned to architecture : of Marco Pino,
commonly called Marco da Siena, his reputed
pupil, the style, decidedly built on the prin-
ciples of M. Angelo, renders all notion of his
having received more than the first rudiments
from Beccafumi or any other master, nugatory :
but the conjecture of Lanzi, that Domenico
was the master of Danielle Ricciarelli, known
to have begun his studies at Siena, though
unsupported by tradition, acquires an air of
probability less from the supposed mutual at-
tachments to M. Angelo, than the versatility
of their talents and similarity of pursuits.

Baldassare Peruzzi,* born in the diocese of
Volterra, but in the Sienese State, and of a
citizen of Siena, with considerable talents for
painting, possessed a decided genius in ar-
chitecture. His style of design is temperate
and correct, but quantity is the element of
his composition, if indeed an aggregate of
fortuitous figures deserve that name. The

* 1481-1536.

SCHOOL OF SIENA. 241

Adoration of the Magi, preserved in various
coloured copies from his original chiaroscuro,
embraces every fault of ornamental pain ting-
without its only charm : it is not exaggeration to
say, that the principal figures are the least con-
spicuous, that the leaders are sacrificed to their
equipage, that the architect every where crosses
the painter, and that the quadrupeds, however
brutally placed or impertinently introduced, for
conception, chiaroscuro, spirit and style, give to
the work what merit it can claim. The same
principle prevails in his fresco of the Presen-
tation at the Pace, and both are so evidently
opposite to Raffaello's system of composition,
that it is not easily understood how he could
be supposed to have been a pupil or imitator of
that master in propriety. If he resembles him
any where, it is in single expressions, as in the
Judgement of Paris at the Castello di Belcaro,
according to Lanzi ; and still more in the pro-
phetic countenance of the celebrated Sibyl
predicting the birth of the Virgin to Augustus,
at Fonte Giusta, in Siena, whose divine enthu-
siasm no prophetess of Raffaello has excelled,
and no Sibyl of Guido or Guercino approached.

VOL. III. R

THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

THE Roman School comprises, besides the
natives of the metropolis, those of the whole
Ecclesiastic State, Bologna, Ferrara, and some
part of Romagna excepted.

The origin of this school recedes into the
earlier periods of modern art, if we consider
Oderigi of Gubbio, a painter of miniature, con-
temporary with Cimabue, as one of its founders.
His death, which preceded that of the Floren-
tine at least one year, the branch of art he ex-
ercised, missal-painting, and what we know of
his situation, make it extremely improbable
that he owed the elements of design to that
master, with whom he seems to have had little
in common but the honour of rearing a pupil,
who in the sequel eclipsed his name, and be-
came the founder of another school.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 243

Perhaps he made some scholars too at home :
in 1321 we find Cecco and Puccio of Gubbio,
engaged as painters to the Dome of Orvieto ;
and about 1324, Guido Palmerucci Eugubino,
employed in the Town -hall of Gubbio ; a few
half figures yet remaining of this evanescent
work are in a style not inferior to that of Gi-
otto, at whose period we are now arrived.

Giotto, at Rome, gave instructions to Pietro
Cavallini in painting and mosaic, and with what
success we may form some idea from the won-
der-working Christ in S. Paolo at Rome, the
Salutation at S. Marco of Florence, and a Cru-
cifixion at Assisi ; a crowded composition of
soldiers, mob, and horses, varied in dress and
not ill discriminated by expression, with groups
of angels hovering over them in sable robes. In
vastness of conception and spirit it resembles
Memmi, and in one of the crucified men, fore-
shortening is not unsuccessfully attempted ;
the colours have still a degree of freshness,
especially the blue, which here and in other
places of the church forms, in the metaphor of
Lanzi, a ceiling of oriental sapphire.

After the demise of Cavallini, who, notwith-
standing a life of eighty-five years, appears to

R 2

244 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

have left taste nearly in the state he found it ;
a band of obscure and insignificant artists led
the art in a style neither Giottesque nor Greek
to the verge of the fifteenth century — that im-
portant period when the Popes, re-established at
Rome, searched for the best hands to decorate
its Vatican and temples. The first name that
occurs, is that of Ottaviano Martis, whose Ma-
donna in Sta. Maria Nuova at Gubbio, bears the
date of 1403 ; she has a choir of stripling angels
round her in attitudes not ungraceful, but with
faces as like to each other as if they had all
been cast in one mould.

The name of Gentile da Fabriano is of more
consequence ; it is he whose style Michael An-
gelo compared to his name (Gentile.) About
1417 we find him at Orvieto among the
painters of its Dome, registered with the title
of Magister Magistrorum. Under Martin V.
he painted with Pisanello in the Lateran at
Rome : what he did there perished, and so
did his works in the public palace at Venice,
where he resided, was pensioned, and raised to
the rank of Patrician. " In that city," says
Vasari, " he was the master and like a pa-
rent to Giacopo Bellini, the father of Gio-
vanni and Gentile Bellini, founders of the Ve-

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 245

netian school and masters of Giorgione and
Tizian. Of his numerous works the remains
are in the Marca d'Ancona, the state of Urbino,
at Gubbio and Perugia : Florence still preserves
two of his pictures, one in S. Nicolo with the
image and histories of that bishop, another in
the sacristy of the Trinita, with an Epiphany
and the date of 1423. His style resembles that
of Fra Angelico da Fiesole, with the exception
of forms less elegant, less female grace, and more
profusion of gold lace and brocade. Antonio
da FabrianO) with the date 1454, and Bartholo-
m&us Magistri Gentilis de Urbino, 1497 and
1508, are inscriptions on pictures at Matelica,
Pesaro, and Monte Cicardo, that have no other
claim to attention than the relation their names
seem to indicate with Gentile.

Piero della Francesca, or Piero Borghese,
an Umbrian, of Borgo S. Sepolcro, is a superior
name. He must have been born about 1398,
as, according to Vasari, his works were about
1458 ; he grew blind at sixty, and died eighty-
five years old. He was instructed in painting
at the age of fifteen, after having laid a foun-
dation in mathematics, and distinguished him-
self in both. His beginnings were minute ;
his master has escaped search. The first scene

246 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

of his talent was the Court of Guidobaldo
Feltro the old, Duke of Urbino, where the per-
spective of a vase drawn by him, provokes the
astonishment of his biographer ; but besides
perspective, Painting owes to him her first
notions of the effects of light, of muscular pre-
cision, and the method of preparing clay mo-
dels for the study of drapery.*

He painted much at Rome, and in the Flo-
reria of the Vatican there still exists a large
fresco reputed his, representing Niccolo V. with
some cardinals and prelates, whose faces interest
by a character of truth. At Arezzo, he seems
to have improved even upon Giotto and his
school, by the novelty of his foreshortenings,
vigour of tone, and powers which attended by
equal grace, would have set him on a level with
Masaccio.

Nicolo Alunno of Foligno, advanced the art
still farther ; this is evident on comparing a
picture of his painted 1480, with another at S.
Nicolo of Foligno, dated 14921. The tone of
his colour, even in distemper, has novelty and
vigour; his heads have vivacity, though with
trivial and sometimes caricatured characters :
and in gilding he is moderate. Vasari, who
* Bramante.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 247

places him in the time of Pinturicchio, praises
above all a Pieta in a chapel of the Domo, in
which, he says, " there are two angels who
weep with such expression of grief, that, in
my opinion, no other painter, however excel-
lent, could have done much more."

Nor was Urbino without painters at this
period: Fiorillo names Lorenzo da San Seve-
rino. At Urbino some pictures still remain of
Giovanni Sanzio, the father of Raphael, who
by the Duchess Giovanna della Rovere is
called a very ingenious artist : a foreshortened
figure of St. Sebastian, painted by him for the
church of that saint, has been imitated by Ra-
phael in an early picture of Our Lady's Wedding,
at Citta di Castello. He subscribed himself
To. Sanctis Urbi. ; viz. Urbinas. Such at least is
the inscription on his Annunciation at Sinigaglia,
a work of high finish, but unequal in its parts,
and in the best, though less genial, approaching
the style of Pietro Perugino, with whom he had
for some time co-operated. But the most dis-
tinguish edUrbinese artist was Bartolommeo Cor-
radini, a Dominican, commonly called Fra Car-
nevale : at the Osservanza there is a picture of
his, defective in perspective, with draperies frit-
tered into the usual tatters of the time, but

248 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

with faces that breathe and speak, and airs of
dignity and ease : he was one of the first who
introduced portrait into historic composition,
a method adopted and often practised by Ra-
phael, who at Urbino had studied his works.

Perugia laid an early claim to Art, at least
as a craft. Mariotti tells of one Tullio a Pe-
rugine painter about 1219, and in a long file
of quattrocentists, allots the most conspicuous
places to Lorenzo di Lorenzo, Bartolommeo
Caporali, whose works are dated about 1487, but
above all to Benedetto Bonfigli. Yet with this
abundance of home-bred artists, Perugia em-
ployed in its public works the hands of stran-
gers, and chiefly Tuscans ; it was to Florence,
States and Princes looked for that master-style
which could give splendour to a great commis-
sion. When Sisto IV. planned the decorations
of the Sistina, the greater number of conscripts
for the work were Tuscans, and Pietro Peru-
gino the only artist drawn from his subjects
among them.

Pietro Vannucci, of Citta della Pieve, as he
subscribed some pictures, or of Perugia, as he
did others, being a citizen of that place, studied,
if we believe Vasari, under a master of little

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 249

eminence ; but according to the more authentic
researches of Mario tti,* was a pupil, and suffi-
ciently advanced himself by the instructions of
Bonfigli and Piero della Francesca, to finish his
style on the works of Giotto and Masaccio at
Florence, without entering the school of Ver-
rocchio.

Those who have contemplated the works of
Pietro will without much difficulty discover
two styles of composition, form, colour, and ex-
ecution : the first was the result of the instruc-
tions he received in the Roman, the second,
that of the impression made on his mind and
hand by the Tuscan School : what he painted
in oil and of small dimensions, generally be-
longs to the first ; what he executed in fresco
to the second period. There we find the hard-
ness, the haggard forms, the miserly scantiness
of drapery, the Gothic apposition and anxious
finish with which he is charged, relieved by
azure blues, emerald greens, violet and crimson
hues, the legacies of missal-painting, and a cer-
tain air of juvenile and female grace, with
suavity of countenance and colour: beauties
which not only followed him in his second
style, but were rendered more impressive by
* Lett. Perug. V.

250 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

rudiments of that breadth which seems to be
the privilege of fresco, by keeping, mellowness,
tone, and approaches to composition, as in the
altar-piece of the Kindred of the Saviour and
the fresco in the Hall of the Change, at Perugia.
Whilst the physiognomic monotony which
had hitherto dulled the human feature, began
to give way to expression and character in the
works of this period, it is not easy to explain
why its companion, that Gothic symmetry in
the arrangement of the whole, should not only
have been retained but aggravated into a stu-
died parallelism ; not that pathetic repetition of
attitude and gesture which forces the moment
of the subject more irresistibly on the mind
than the most varied contrasts, but a nearly
rectilinear apposition, whose principal law was
to place, by a central figure, on each side of the
picture, an equal number of subordinate ones ;
a law that extended itself to the most minute
detail, and bade buildings, flowers, clouds and
pebbles, re-echo each other ; and all this in the
face of Giotto, whose Navicella, Death of Maria,
and other works, gave evidence that his com-
position had, a century before, disdained to
move in the trammels which were now suffered

THE ROMAN SCHOOL 251

to check that of Pietro Perugino, and for no
inconsiderable time the composition of Raphael
himself.

Invention was not the element of Pietro.
His crucifixions, depositions, burials, ascensions,
and assumptions, are the brothers and sisters of
one family. He was blamed for this sterility
even in his own time, and defended himself by
saying that, if he possessed little, he owed no-
thing, and that what had pleased in one place
could not displease in another. It does not in-
deed offend to find the scenery of his St. Peter
receiving the keys in the Sistina, repeated in
the Wedding of our Lady at Perugia, and to
meet the beauties here concentrated which he
had singly scattered over various places.

Pietro had vigour of constitution and length
of life, and if he profited by the works of Ra-
phael, whom he outlived, might have done so
by those of Lionardo and Buonarroti. In few
men so many contradictory qualities seem to
have united : ridiculed for a degree of avarice,
which, it was said, made him withhold the ne-
cessary drapery from his figures, he is yet al-
lowed by Vasari to have been greedier to accu-
mulate than sordid* in the use of wealth, and to

252 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

have pleased himself by marrying " a beautiful
damsel, whom he so much delighted in seeing
elegantly dressed both abroad and at home,
that he was often suspected of having dressed
her himself." By her he had children, but no
records enable us to judge of him as a parent.
That he was a good and kind master, is proved
by the numerous scholars he reared, and still more
by the pride which the most eminent and best of
them took, by introducing him more than once
in his works, to perpetuate with his own grati-
tude the memory of his master. With this
kindness for his pupils, Pietro connected in-
tolerance of rivals and a mordacity of language,
which provoked Michael Agnolo to call him pub-
licly a dunce (goffo) in art. His life was spent in
receiving commissions from the clergy, in me-
ditating and composing subjects of devotion ;
and yet, if we believe his biographer, he car-
ried infidelity to a degree which resisted all
arguments for the immortality of .the soul, and
with words dictated by an obstinacy worthy of his
marble brains,* rejected all invitations to better
information. Of the numerous scholars whom
he had reared, the greater part followed his
* " Cervello di porfido."

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 253

manner with servile attachment ; hence many
of their works have been ascribed to him, by
those who did not form their judgment at Pe-
rugia, or at Florence in Sta. Chiara and the
Ducal palace: thus he pays forfeit for many
a holy family of Guerino da Pistoia, Rocco
Zoppo, or some other of his Tuscan scholars.
The best and least enthralled of his pupils be-
long to the Roman school : Bernardino Pintu-
ricchio, less praised by Vasari than he deserves,
without the correctness of his master, and with
more Gothic profusion of gold-lace and brocade,
possesses magnificence of plan, expression of
countenance, and propriety of composition. Fa-
miliar with Raphael, who was his assistant at
Siena, he made attempts to imitate his grace,
and sometimes not without success : at Rome,
the Vatican and Araceli Temple possess some
of his works ; at Siena he painted, in ten pic-
tures, the history of Pio II. and added one of
Pio III. his employer, and these, with what he
left in the Dome of Spello, are the best of his
labours.

Of a more independent and grander spirit
was Andrea Luigi, of Assisi, surnamed L'ln-
gegno, the Genius. He assisted Pietro in the

254 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

Change-hall at Perugia, and there and in his
Prophets and Sibyls at Assisi, aggrandized and
mellowed the style of his master to a degree,
which led Sandrart, with others, to ascribe the
latter work to Raphael ; but blindness checked
his career in the bloom of life, and left the art
to Raphael without a rival.

Domenico di Paris Alfani added, likewise,
some improvements to the style of Pietro. His
name was nearly sunk in that of his son or
brother Orazio, and time and dates alone have
re-asserted its right to some excellent works
long adjudged to the other ; and which, were
it not for an insipid sweetness of tone border-
ing on that of Baroccio, seem to have been in-
spired by the principles of Raphael.

Of Pietro's many ultramontane pupils, Gio-
vanni Spagnuolo, a Spaniard, called Lo Spagna,
who settled at Spoleto, is considered by Vasari
as the most eminent, But all these names
united confer less celebrity on Pietro, than the
felicity of having reared the powers of Raffa-
ello Sanzio, if not the founder, the great esta-
blisher of the Roman School.

Raffaello Sanzio, born at Urbino on Holy
Friday, April 1483, was the son of Giovanni

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 255

Sanzio, named among the contemporaries and
occasional helpers of Pietro, in whose school,
after having imparted the first rudiments of
Art to his son, conscious of his own inferiority,
he had the modesty to place him. Here his
progress was so rapid that he soon rendered
himself completely master of Vannucci's style,
soon became his favourite pupil, soon his co-
adjutor, and in a short period more than his
competitor : for though the pictures which he
painted at Civita di Castello and Perugia, and
are so amorously dwelt on by Lanzi, still be-
tray in composition, design, and colour, the
principles of the master, they exhibit symp-
toms of that expression, that beauty, those
simple graces, that refinement and precision of
finish, which not only had remained unknown
to Pietro, but in their purity were never at-
tained by any subsequent artist. — Some of
these are perceivable already, if scantily, in the
Procession to Golgotha, preceded by horsemen
and attended by the Madonna and her female
train ; and still less perceptibly in one of its
predelle which exhibits the Saviour held ex-
tended by his Mother, Magdalen and John :
they cannot be mistaken in the predelle which

256 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

represents him among the sleeping disciples
praying in the garden, — performances of his
puerility, and most probably before he left the
school of Pietro.

After an enumeration of RafFaello's juvenile
works at Civita di Castello and at Perugia, we
are told that he who ascribed Sanzio's art to
length of study and not to nature, was not
acquainted with the powers of his mind.*

That such was the verdict of Michael Agnolo,
is recorded by Condivi ; and from aught that
appears, it does not seem either invidious or
incompetent. If Art be a complete system of
invariable rules, he only is a master of Art who
substantiates its precepts by equal uniformity
of execution and taste ; and till he arrives
at that point, he can only be said to have
seized more or less of its parts in making ap-
proaches to the whole, and to be indebted to
" study" and not to " nature," if he put himself
at last in possession of it.

Such was the progress of Raffaello ; he arrived
by degrees at style in design, by degrees at
style in composition, by degrees at invention,
expression, and at what appeared to him colour.

* See Vasari on Michael Angelo's observations on Tizian.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 2*57

His genius emancipated him from the shackles of
prescription and fashion, rapidly, if we compare
his progress with the shortness of his life or
the progress of the rest of his contemporaries,
but slowly, if we compare him with Michael
Angelo, whose system of Art seems to have
been born with him, whose infancy, virility,
age, exhibit one uniform principle. Every ele-
ment of the system displayed in the Capella
Sistina and on the tombs in S. Lorenzo, may
be traced in his essays at the garden of the
Medici and in the Holy Family painted for
Angelo Doni : but what eye will discover the
future painter of the Heliodorus, or the com-
poser of the Cartoons in the bridal arrangements
of our Lady's Wedding at Civita di Castello,
or even in the Cartoons for the sacristy of the
Duomo at Sienna ?

Though the commission of painting in that
place a series of the most memorable events in
the life of Pope Pio II. (a Siennese celebrated
by the name of Enea Silvio,) had been given
to Pinturicchio, who had sufficient modesty
and taste to avail himself of the superior and
growing powers of his friend, — it has been
asked what enterprise of equal magnitude had

VOL. III. S

258 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

in that infant state of Art ever been consigned
to a single hand, without considering that the
co-operation of Raffaello was adventitious, and
less owing to the opinion which he had es-
tablished of himself in the public mind than
to the modesty of Pinturicchio. And had not
Luca Signorelli singly been entrusted with a
work at Orvieto, whose tremendous and uni-
versally interesting subjects beyond comparison
excelled whatever the embassies, the poetic and
papal honours, the canonization of a nun, the
ceremonies of a council, the death of the hero
himself, and the transportation of his corpse
from Ancona to Rome, however varied by cha-
racter, impressed by the sensibility of the artist,
or raised above the heraldry of the times, could
pretend to achieve beyond the precincts of
Sienna ?

Whether Raffaello furnished the whole of
the Cartoons for that work, or only part, cannot
be ascertained from the contradictory account
of Vasari,* who in the life of Pinturicchio as-

* " Fece li Schizzi e i Cartoni di tutte le Istorie."

Vita di Pinturicchio.
" Fece alcuni de' disegni e Cartoni di quell* opera."

Vita di Ra/aello.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 259

serts the first, and in that of Raffaello, the se-
cond. As he, however, did not leave Sienna for
Florence till 1504, it is probable that he con-
tinued to assist his friend in completing the
whole historic series : the work itself is in per-
fect preservation, and though better informed
eyes than those of Bottari* might not be com-
petent to discriminate the parts which ex-
clusively belong to Raffaello, it is certain that
in the progress of the pictures there is an evi-
dent progress toward style.

Aggrandisement of style might reasonably
be supposed to have been the motive that
drew Raffaello to Florence. The David of
M. Angiolo was placed; he had begun his
cartoon, which from its very inaccessibility,
and the high character of the artist whom it
opposed, must have been an object of eager
curiosity to the public, and of tremulous ex-
pectation to the student. Florence was, no
doubt, at that period divided into two tech-
nic factions, Vinciists and Bonarotists ; it
does not, however, appear that Raffaello ad-

* In the picture on the facciata, Bottari says, " Si vede
non solo il disegno, ma in molte teste anche il colore di
Raffaello."

S g

260 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

hered to either of the two leaders ; neither
the learning and energy of Bonaroti, nor the
magic chiaroscuro of Lionardo, could divert
the future painter of the passions from his
course; he therefore attached himself to the
study of Masaccio, as a more direct guide to
the drama. The implicit application of that
master's conceptions in the same or similar
subjects, when he was in the vigour of his
powers, if it be the most celebrated proof of
this, is a less convincing one than the simi-
larity of taste and vein of thought which per-
vades their works, and might, to men of bolder
conjecture than I pretend to, prove that Ma-
saccio might have been what Raffaello was,
had time and means conspired.

According to the account of Vasari,* Raf-
faello went three times to Florence : the first

* Essendo con Pinturicchio a Siena — messo da parte
quell' opera, e ogni utile e commodo suo, se ne venne a
Fiorenza. Morta la Madre, parti e aridb a Urbino, e
accomodate le cose sue, ritorno a Perugia. Prima che
partisse, &c. — Cosi venuto a Firenze, fece il cartone per
il quadro di Madonna Atalanta Baglioni ; dipinse per A.
Doni e Dom. Canigiani; studio le cose vecchie di Ma-
saccio ; acquisto miglioramento dai lavori di Lionardo

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 261

time when, according to the biographer, roused
by the fame of Lionardo and M. Angiolo, he
left the partnership of Pinturicchio, 1504 — the
date of the recommendatory letter with the
affixed name of Joanna Feltria, Duchess of

e di Michelagnolo ; ebbe stretta domestichezza con Fra
Bartolomeo di S. Marco; ma in su la maggior frequenza
di questa pratica fu richiamato a Perugia, dove fini 1'opera
della gia detta Madonna Atalanta Baglioni, &c. — Finito
qiiesto lavoro e tomato a Fiorenza. gli fu dai Dei cittadini
Fiorentini allegata una tavola, &c. ma chiamato da Bra-
man te si trasferi a Roma. — Vasari, Vita di RafFaello da
Urbino, ed. Firenze, 1771. p. 163, 167. 172.

According to this account of Vasari, Raffaelle went three
times to Florence ; the first time, when roused by the fame
of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, he left Pinturicchio 1504,
and continued at Florence till he was called away by the
death of his mother to Urbino, from whence, having settled
his affairs, and painted certain things, he went to Perugia,
and after some public works there, returned again to Flo-
rence with a commission from A. Baglioni. This is the
period fixed by Vasari of his acquaintance with Bartolomeo
di S. Marco, the progressive improvements of his style,
and his pictures for A. Doni and D. Canigiani, and must
have been his longest stay in that capital, though inter-
rupted by a new call to Perugia, during which he finished
the picture of the Burial of Christ, now in the Borghese
Palace, for the Chapel Baglioni, arid then returned for the
third time to Florence.

262 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

Urbino, addressed to the Gonfaloniere Pietro
Soderini, and said to be still preserved at Flo-
.rence among the papers of the Gaddi family.
Supposing the date of the letter (1st October,
1504) to be correct, and the writer of it to
have been acquainted with the person she re-
commends, its genuineness, as Fiorillo observes,
is liable to strong suspicion. Its expressions
might fit a lad of ten or twelve years, but cer-
tainly not a young man of one-and-twenty,
the age of Raffaello, who had painted many
pictures, was at that very time employed in a
great public work, and only three years after
was called to Rome by Giulio the Second.

Though Raffaello's talents had spread his
name, and attracted the attention and the
wishes of Giulio the Second to employ him in
the decoration of the Vatican, it may be pre-
sumed that the persuasive influence of his rela-
tive, Bramante Lazzari, decided the Pontiff to
distinguish him by that immediate and exclu-
sive call to Rome, which raised him above all
rival competition, and opened the most splendid
period of his life, most probably 1507. Which
was the picture he began with, would not have
been contested by his biographers, encomiasts,

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 263

and critics, from Vasari to Mengs, had they
attended less to hearsay, for tradition it cannot
be called, than to the evidence of the works
themselves. To date the dispute on the Sa-
crament after the School of Athens, equally in-
verts the progressive powers of the artist in
conception, taste, style, and execution. Every-
where that composition betrays a young per-
former, enviably successful in each individual
part, but whom experience has not yet enabled
to spread an harmonious whole. The connec-
tion of its upper with the lower scene, less
divided than rent asunder, depends entirely
on a mental effort in the spectator. The pa-
rallelism of the celestial synod, impresses more
with formal monotony than awful energy, and
the ostentatious abuse of gold impairs its dig-
nity. In the lower part of the picture, less
sublime than dramatic, the artist moves in
his own element ; its parallelism and its con-
trasts, no longer the result of ceremonious sym-
metry, but of the inspiring principle, warms
contemplation to sympathy, and its charac-
teristic correctness exhibits in Raffaello's own
unassisted, or rather unalloyed hand, the
style of the School of Athens, the Mass of

264 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

Bolsena, the female part of the Heliodorus,
and with a felicity unattained in the Parnassus
and the Attila, — the more ample outlines and
the increased volume of forms in the Angels,
and the Heliodorus and his accomplices on the
foreground.

A description of two Drawings by Raff aello, from an
account of the Collection of Drawings and Prints
in -the Gallery of Duke Albrecht, of Sachsen Teschen,
at Vienna.*

I.

Two naked male figures, apparently studies
from Nature, on one leaf, drawn in red chalk :
one with nearly all his back turned to the eye,
rests the left hand on his hip, and with the
right points to something before him. Some-
what behind you see the other, sideways, in
perfect repose, leaning with both hands on a
long spear-like staff; the background has some
rudiments of a sketched head. To the right of
the spectator, at the side of the first figure, you
read, " 1515, Raffahell di Urbin der so hoch
vom Pobst geacht ist gwest, hat diese nakte

* From the " Annalen der bildenden Kiinste fur die Os-
teireichischen Staaten,Von Hans Rudolph Fiiessli." Erster
theil. Wien. 1801. Annals of the Plastic Arts in Austria.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 265

Bild gemacht, und hat sy dem Albrecht Durer
gen Nornberg geschikt, in seini hand zu weis-
sen." *

That Raffaello in his last years, and when at
the height of his celebrity, did exchange draw-
ings with Albert Durer, is attested by the bio-
graphers of both : and that the design here de-
scribed is one of that number, is incontestably
proved, not only by the peculiarity of style,
the elegance and facility of outline, the cha-
racteristic contrast of solid and muscular parts,
but by the identity of the handwriting with
the manuscripts of Albert still existing at
Niirnberg, his native city.

I therefore think it no improbable conjecture
to suppose that Raffaello, by transmitting this
specimen of his hand to Albert, intended to
make him sensible of the difference between
imitating Nature and dryly copying a model,
and so impress him with the necessity of con-
trasting his outline according to the differ-
ent texture of the parts in the bodies before
him.

* 1515. Raffahell di Urbin, who was so highly esteemed
by the Pope, has made these naked figures, and has sent
them to Albrecht Durer at Nornberg, to show him his hand.

266 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

This interesting leaf is one foot three inches
three lines in height, and ten inches eight lines
in width, Vienna measure ; and in perfect pre-
servation.

ii.

This design differs in nothing from the well-
known picture of the Transfiguration, but the
absolute nudity of all the figures.

That Raffaello was accustomed to sketch in
naked outlines, may be known from most col-
lections that possess something of his hand ;
but perhaps none but this may be able to pro-
duce a design, of a numerous and complete
composition, in which every figure is rendered
with anatomical correctness and finished chia-
roscuro.

Another singularity of this important leaf
is, the characteristic disparity of execution in
the figures ; for though all are drawn with the
pen, and on the first glance seem hatched in
one uniform manner, it soon appears on close
inspection, that they cannot have been pro-
duced by the same hand.

The figures of the three Disciples on the
Mount, especially the foreshortened one, are

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 267

treated with that spirited facility and confident
decision which always mark the pen of Raf-
faello. Those of the Saviour and the collateral
prophets, though drawn with less precision and
contours here and there, by repeated strokes, cor-
rected, still exhibit on the whole the same spirit,
facility, and confidence of hand. Of the actors
below, the figure of John, with hands crossed
on his breast, and the three next to him have
the same Raffaellesque characteristics, and so
the whole of the females kneeling on the fore-
ground ; but of the adjoining apostle, with the
book in his hand, the projected leg and foot
are absolutely out of drawing ; whilst the De-
moniac and his father, with all the remaining
figures, drawn by mere practice, without a
symptom of the master spirit, give palpable
proofs of a different hand.

It appears no improbable conjecture that
Raffaello, after settling the plan and fully ar-
ranging the figures of his picture, drew the
nudities of this design as the bases of his dra-
peries : for this reason only, the principal parts
of the forms, and those muscles that would act
most visibly on the draperies, are designed cor-
rectly, and finished with decision ; whilst the

268 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

heads, and what was either to be naked in the
picture or did not act immediately on the dra-
pery, remained in careless and superficial lines.

That Raffaello suffered parts of his Transfi-
guration, and in my opinion some of the most
important parts, to receive all but the last finish
from a pupil, if tradition had not told us,
there is ocular demonstration in the picture
itself. The proportions of the Demoniac's
father are neglected as a whole, in relation of
limb to limb, and the figure is sacrificed to
place. The face of Christ himself, as it was
seen in the Louvre, is unworthy of Raffaello's
hand and conception.*

The reason why some of the figures are
drawn in the true spirit of the artist, and others
in a bald and insignificant manner, may be,

* This observation is founded on close inspection of this
picture, in the room of the " Restoration," in 1 802. The face
of Christ not only appeared no longer that which all thought
it to be who had seen it at S. Pietro in Montorio, but
even inferior to that in the print of Dorigny, had assumed an
expression nearer allied to meanness than to dignity, without
sublimity austere, and forbidding. It is probable, however,
that these changes originated under the sacrilegious hands
of the restorers, who had before destroyed the better part of
the Madonna di Foligno.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 269

that after slightly sketching the whole, he gave
his own finish in the design to those parts only
which he intended to execute with his own
hand in the picture ; and less solicitous for the
rest, left them to the hand of some inferior
pupil.

The height of this extraordinary design is
one foot eight inches four lines ; its breadth
one foot two inches five lines ; it is without
injury.

Taddeo and Federigo Zuccari, the first de-
clared mannerists of this school, sons of Ottavi-
ano Zuccari, a mediocre painter of S. Angiolo
in Vado, came to Rome successively, formed
a school, and filled towns and states with an im-
mense farrago of good, tolerable, and bad pic-
tures. From the instructions of Pornpeo da
Fano and Giacomone da Faenza, but chiefly
from an obstinate study of Raffaello's works,
Taddeo, at no protracted period, gathered
enough to diffuse over his own, an air, though
not reality, of style, and to anticipate by con-
trivance and facility the rewards which time
owes to invention and genius. Courting the

270 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

senses of the multitude, he became the hero of
the day ; they saw their portraits in his faces,
their limbs in his forms, their action in his
attitudes ; his draperies, hair, beards, had a cut
of fashion. The simplicity of his disposition is
often contrasted by half figures emerging from
his foregrounds ; perhaps less from a principle
of imitating his more remote predecessors, than
to invigorate the effect of his chiaroscuro, a
method not unknown to Parmegiano.

Rome possesses vast works in fresco of Tad-
deo ; among the best of these are some Gospel
stories at the Consolazione. He seldom painted
in oil, and less commendably in large than small:
some of these are cabinet pictures of exqui-
site finish, — such a one, (formerly in the collec-
tion of the Duke of Urbino, but more recently
at Osimo in the Palace Leopardi,) is the Nativity
of the Saviour, and in Taddeo's very best style.
But the work on which his fame chiefly rests,
are the paintings of the Palazzo Farnese, at
Caprarola (engraved in a moderate volume, by
Prenner, 1748). They represent the Feats of
the Farnese Family, in peace and war; to
which are joined other stories, both sacred and

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 271

profane; but what attracts attention most, is
the celebrated " Stanza del Sonno," an apart-
ment dedicated to Sleep, replete with a great
variety of allegoric imagery, suggested to him
by Annibale Caro, in a long, quaint letter,
printed among his familiar ones, and repro-
duced among the " Lettere Pittoriche," t. iii.
1.99.

Dissimilar in the pursuits of life, Taddeo
resembled Raffaello in death ; he completed
thirty-seven years, and obtained a monument
close to Sanzio, in the " Rotonda."

His brother and pupil Federigo, inferior in
design, resembles him in taste, though more
mannered, more capricious in conceit, more
crowded in composition. He completed what
death had prevented Taddeo from finishing in
the Sala Regia, that of Farnese, the Trinita de'
Monti, and elsewhere, with the airs of heir-at-
law to his brother's talents. Thus he raised an
opinion of capacity for greater enterprise, and
was invited by Francis I. to paint the great
Cupola of the metropolitan church at Florence,
which death alone had saved from Vasari's
hands. There Federigo painted more than

272 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

three hundred figures of fifty feet in height each,
besides that of Lucifer, " so enormous," to use
his own phrase, " that it makes the other figures
appear infants ; * — figures," he adds, " larger
than the world ever witnessed before in Art."
So little, however, hugeness excepted, is there
to admire in this work, that at the time of Pier
da Cortona, a painting of that master would have
been substituted for it, had it not been feared
that he would not live long enough to termi-
nate the whole. After the Cupola, every work
of consequence at Rome appeared his due, and
he was recalled by Gregorio to paint the ceiling
of the Paolina, and give a successor to Michael
Angelo. It was at that period, that, on a charge
preferred against him by some courtiers or
domestics of Gregorio, he painted and exhibit-
ed the picture of Calumny, and his accusers
with asses-ears, which raised a clamour that
obliged him to fly from Rome. During his
exile, which lasted some years, he visited Flan-
ders, Holland, England ; had a call even from
Venice to paint a subject in the Ducal Palace,

* " Si smisurata, che fa parere le altre, figure di Bam-
bini," &c. Idea de' Pittori, Scultori, e Architetti, inserted
among the Lettere Pittoriche, t. vi. p. 147.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 273

was everywhere caressed and remunerated, and,
the Pope being mitigated, returned to reassume
his interrupted labours in the Capella ; the best
work perhaps which, without the assistance of
his brother, he has produced at Rome, though
the larger altar-piece of S. Lorenzo in Damaso,
and that of the Angioli at Gesu, with some
others dispersed in other churches, may claim
their share of merit. He built a house on
Monte Pincio, rapidly and with the assistance
of his scholars furnished with family portraits,
conversations, arid other whims in fresco, and
left to prove him a trifler in Art, and the
leader of decay.

Invited by Philip II. he went to Madrid,
but failed to please ; his place was supplied by
Tibaldi, and he sent back with a good pen-
sion to Italy. Towards the end of his life he
made another journey, scouring the prin-
cipal towns of Italy, and leaving his works
wherever he could place them : of these the
Assumption of the Madonna in an oratorio at
Rimini on which he wrote his name, and her
Death at Sta. Maria in Acumine of the same
place, with figures more than usually studied,
deserve notice. His Presepio in the Duomo

VOL. III. T

274 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

of Foligno, has simplicity and grace ; nor less
have the two stories relative to the Madonna,
painted for the Duke of Urbino in a chapel at
Loretto. The Miracle of the Snow, in the li-
brary of the Cistercians at Milano, is a multi-
tudinous composition filled with portraits as
usual, variously coloured and well preserved.
The Borromean College at Pavia, has a saloon
painted in fresco from incidents in the life of S.
Carlo : the most approved of these is the Saint
praying in his recess : nor might the other two,
that of the consistory in which he received
the Cardinal's hat, and the Pest of Milano,
want commendation had they overflowed less in
figures. At Torino he painted for the Jesuits
a St. Paul ; began to ornament a gallery for the
Duke, Charles Emanuel ; published his Idea
de'Pittori Scultori ed Architetti, and dedicated it
to the Duke. This was followed, at his return to
Lombardy, by two other treatises ; " La dimora
di Parma del Sig. Cav. Federico Zuccaro ; and
II passaggio per Italia, colla dimora di Parma
del Sig. Cav. Federigo Zuccari" both printed
at Bologna 1608. Next year, on his return to
Rome, he fell sick at Ancona, and there died.
His talents, which extended to sculpture and

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 275

architecture, were inferior to his fortune, which
preceded that of all his contemporaries, and was
in a great measure the effect of personal qua-
lities; lordly aspect and demeanour, some li-
terary culture, persuasive manners, arid a libe-
rality that absorbed the wealth which his hand
had accumulated.

Emulation seems to have been his chief
motive of writing : he longed to break a lance
with Vasari, whom, from whatever cause, as
appears from the postils tacked to the Vite, he
disliked. They have been sometimes, especially
in the Life of Taddeo, quoted and treated as
effusions of envy and malignity by the anno-
tator of the Roman edition. To prove his su-
periority over the Tuscan, he chose a style as
obscure and inflated as that of Giorgio is diffuse
and plain ; the whole of the treatise printed
at Torino reels in a round of internal and ex-
ternal design, and contains less precept than
peripatetic speculation, which rendered the
schools of that day more loquacious than
learned. His language runs over in intellec-
tive* and formative conceits, in substantial sub-

* Disegno interiore ed esteriore ; concetti intellettivi e
formativi ; sostanze sostanziali, forme formal i. — Titolo del

T 2

276 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

stances and formal forms ; even the titles of his
chapters are larded with equal fulsomeness of
phrase, like that of the Xllth., that "philo-
sophy and to philosophize, is metaphoric and
similitudinarious design." These are the bait of
fools— for none but fools can hope to gather
meaning from the bubbles of sophistry, or
stoop to disentangle etymologies which derive
disegno from " Dei signum," the sign of God !

This treatise was probably the offspring of
his presidency in the Academy of St. Luke ; for
office gives insolence. The Academy dates its
origin from the Pontificate of Gregorio XIII.,
who granted the brief of its foundation* to
Muziano. It had not, however, its full effect
till after the return of Zuccari from Spain,
who put it in force and was unanimously de-
clared " Principe," or President. That was his
day of triumph ; he returned from the inau-
guration in the church of S. Martino at the foot
of the Campidoglio, accompanied by a great
concourse of artists and litterators to his own
house, where shortly after he built a saloon

capitolo XII. che la filosofia e il filosofare e disegno me-
taforico similitudinario. — Disegno, Segno di Dio.
* Baglioni, Vita di Muziano.

THE ROMAN SCHOOL. 277

for the accommodation of the Academy, in
whose praise he overflowed in prose and poems,
more than once quoted in his larger treatise;
and to seal his extreme affection, bequeathed
like Muziano, in case his own line should fail,
the bulk of his fortune to the establishment.

Giuseppe Cesari, sometimes distinguished by
the name of II Cavaliere d'Arpino,* his native
place, was in art what Marino was in poetry —
brilliancy without substance is the character-
istic of both, and either proved the ancient
observation, that Arts and Republics receive
the greatest damage from the greatest capaci-
ties. The talent of Cesari bubbled up from
his infancy, made him an object of admiration,
procured him through F. Danti, the protec-
tion of Gregorio XIII., and in a short time the
reputation of the first master at Rome. Less
than the felicity with which he is said to have
executed some pictures from certain designs of
M. Agnolo, in the possession of Giacomo
Rocca, his exuberance alone was sufficient to
establish supremacy of name among a race
who measured genius by quantity, and science
by confidence of method. If his numbers were

* 1560—1640.

278 THE ROMAN SCHOOL.

rabble, he arranged them with the skill of a
general ; if common-place furnished him with
features, arrogance of touch brushed them into
notice ; and the horses which he drew with
equal truth and fire, supplied the incorrectness
or imbecility of the rider. The excellence of his
colour in fresco, the gaiety which he spread
over a vast surface, hid from the common eye
monotony of manner, poverty of character, and
want of finish in the detail of parts.

They were observed, reprobated and opposed
by M. A. Caravaggio, A. Caracci, and the few
who saw and thought with them. Quarrels
arose, and challenges were given : that of Cara-
vaggio, Cesari refused to accept, because he had
not yet been knighted, and Annibale rejected
that of Cesari, because, said he, " I know no
other weapon than my pencil." They both
experienced the difference of the difficulties
that attend legislation and reform of taste,
and were left ineffectually to struggle with an
empiric, who outlived either upwards of thirty
years, and then left a race worse than himself
behind him.

THE SCHOOL OF NAPLES.

SOCIAL refinements and elegance of taste in
arts had shed their splendour over the Hespe-
rian colonies of Greece long before Rome had
learnt to value more than the ploughshare and
the sword; Herculaneum, Stabiae, Pompeii,
with their still remaining multitude and variety
of legitimate monuments, prove that a technic
school of eminence flourished in the Neapo-
litan states after they had been incorporated
with the Roman empire; and what time has
spared or tradition recorded of the attempts
made by Goths, Greeks, Longobards, Saracens,
and Normans, to repair their waste of deso-
lation, sufficiently shows, that though the art
itself at intervals vanished, the craft still sub-
sisted during the gloom of the middle ages.

280 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

But not to soil these pages with too much
legend, we date the revival of Neapolitan art
from the name of Tommaso de' Stefani, born
1230, the contemporary of Cimabue and Charles
of Anjou, who, though on his passage through
Florence he had been led to visit that object of
Tuscan dotage, on his establishment at Naples
employed Tommaso in his new-founded church ;
a questionable honour, of which a native writer*
avails himself to insinuate the superiority of his
countryman over Cimabue, as if the suffrage of
a prince could defeat the evidence of works, or
stand against the verdict of Marco da Siena,f
who from them, judged him inferior to the
Florentine in grandeur of style and breadth.

The favours of Charles were continued to
Tommaso by his successor, and emulated by
the principal families of the city ; the chapel
de' Minutoli, named by Boccaccio, was storied
by him with subjects drawn from the Saviour's
passion ; and others from the life of S. Gen-

* Dominici.

t " Le opere superstiti ne deon decidere ; e secondo
queste Marco da Siena, ch'e il padre della Storia pittorica
Napolitana, giudico che in grandezza difare Cimabue preva-
lepe." — Lanzi, ii. I. 580.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 281

naro, and some sainted bishops, by his hand, are
said still to exist in a roomy chapel of the an-
cient Episcopio. Some semblance of the same
saint in S. Angelo a Nido, formerly S. Michele,
is considered as his work, and some fragments
have survived of others, with dates of 1270 and
1275. He was the master of Filippo Tesauro,
who painted in the church of S. Restituta
the life of S. Nicholas the Hermit, the only
fresco of his which has reached our time.*

About 1325, Giotto was invited by King
Robert to Naples, for the purpose of painting
the church of Sta. Chiara ; he came and filled it
with Gospel history, and apocalyptic mysteries,
from inventions, said in the time of Vasari to
have been formerly communicated to him by
Dante. These works, because they darkened
the church, were whitewashed in the beginning
of the last century, with the exception of a
Madonna called della Grazia, and some other

* Tommaso had a brother Pietro de' Stefani, who professed
painting, but practised sculpture : of his works the monu-
ments of Pope Innocenzio IV., who died at Naples 1254,
of Charles the First and Second, are the most eminent. The
two sitting statues of these two kings are still seen over the
small gates of the Episcopal palace.

282 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

sainted image, preserved by female piety.
Giotto conducted other works in Sta Maria
Coronata, and still others, which no longer
exist in the Castle dell' Uovo. Maestro Sim one,
a Cremonese, according to some, but more pro-
bably a native of Naples, was the chosen partner
of these works, and from so distinguished a
choice, acquired some celebrity himself: from
the resemblance of his style to Tesauro and to
Giotto, he might have been the pupil of either,
and was perhaps of both. Certain it is, that
after the departure of Giotto, he received from
Robert and Queen Sancia, many important
commissions for various churches, and espe-
cially that of S. Lorenzo ; there he painted
Robert receiving the crown from his brother
Lewis, Bishop of Toulouse, but died before
he could finish the compartment of the chapel
dedicated to that prelate after his demise and
canonization. Though confessedly inferior in
invention, character, and suavity of tone, he
has nearly reached Giotto in some of his works :
such as the dead Christ supported by his mo-
ther, in the church del? Incoronata, and the
Madonna with the Infant, on a gold-ground,

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 283

now in the convent of the church della Croce,
supposed by some to have been painted in oil.*

Simone had a son, Francesco di Simone, who
died in 1360. His works are not numerous,
but what has reached our days in the Capi-
tolo di S. Lorenzo, is distinguished by an air
of superior dignity and grace. Two other pu-
pils of Simone, Gennaro di Cola and Stefa-
none, a similarity of manner associated in se-
veral public works, such as the chapel of S.
Lewis, begun by Simone, and what still exists
in S. Giovanni da Carbonara of subjects rela-
tive to our Lady. They are similar, however,
without monotony. Gennaro, impressed by the
difficulties of his art, and bent to overcome
each obstacle by labour, appears precise, stu-
died, and hard. Stefanone, guided by a spirit
which in better days might have been called
genius, boldly executed what he had con-
ceived with warmth.

The pretended improvements of Colantonio del
Fiore, (born 1352, died 1444,) a pupil of Fran-
cesco, neither appear to have been considerable
enough in themselves, nor sufficiently authen-

* Signorelli Vicende della Coltura delle due Sicilie, —
t. iii. 116.

284 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL,

ticated, to place him at the head of a new epoch
in style. Those barbarous relics of the middle
ages, that meagerness of contour, dry ness of
colour, and want of perspective, which he is
said to have abolished, had in a great measure
vanished before, at the glance of Giotto. The
gold grounds continued after both ;* and if in
enumerating some of his works his encomiast
is in doubt whether they may not rather be-
long to M. Simone, what is it but a tacit
confession, that the art had made no consi-
derable progress during the course of a cen-
tury ?

The life of Colantonio grasped nearly the half
of two centuries, and the refinements for which
he has been extolled must be looked for in
those of his works, on whose authenticity there
is no hesitation, produced on the verge of life.
Such is the Madonna, &c. in Ste. Maria Nuova,
a compound of harmonious hues, though paint-
ed on a gold ground ; and still more in S. Lo-
renzo, Saint Jerome drawing a thorn from the
lion's foot, the date 1436, a picture full of

* The Vatican alone is sufficient to prove that gold-
grounds were still recurred to in the best years of the six-
teenth century.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 285

truth, in high esteem with foreigners, and for
its better preservation removed by the fathers
of the convent from the church itself to the
sacristy. He had a scholar in Angiolo Franco,
who has obtained the praise of Marco di Siena,
for having invigorated the most successful imi-
tation of Giotto by the tone and chiaroscuro of
his master.

But a name of far greater importance to art
is that of Antonio Solario, commonly called
Lo Zingaro, the reputed son-in-law of Colan-
tonio. His story, still more romantic than that
which in Quintin Metsis transformed a black-
smith to a painter, tells that Solario, bred to
the forge, became enamoured of a daughter of
Colantonio, forsook the anvil, and by successful
submission to a ten years' trial of painting, and
the mediation of a queen, obtained the idol of
his soul. Let those who told the tale vouch for
its truth : what is less disputable, and interests
this history more, are his travels from Naples
to Bologna, where for several years he studied
under Lippo Dalmasio, and from thence over
Italy, to become acquainted with the principles
of other masters ; those of Vivarini at Venice ;
of Bicci at Florence ; of Galasso at Ferrara ; of

286 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano at Rome.
These two, it is believed that he assisted, and
Luca Giordano asserted that some heads in
their pictures at the Lateran bore the legiti-
mate marks of Solario's pencil. In heads he
excelled ; he inspired them, according to Marco
da Siena, with the air of life. In perspective,
if the times be weighed, his skill was consider-
able ; in composition not contemptible. There
is variety in his scenery ; and if his dresses be
not drapery, they are at least naturally folded.
In the design of the extremities he was less
happy ; his attitudes often border on carica-
ture, as his colour on crudeness. On his re-
turn to Naples, nine years after his departure,
applauded by Colantonio and the public, he
enjoyed the patronage of King Alfonso. His
greatest work is the Life of S. Benedetto, in
the compartments of the cloister of S. Seve-
rino, — frescoes filled with an incredible va-
riety of objects. Other churches possess some
altarpieces by him : he left many portraits and
some very attractive Madonnas ; but in the
Dead Christ of S. Domenico Maggiore, and the
S. Vincent of S. Pier Martire, including some
stories of that Saint's life, he is said to have

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 287

excelled himself. Zingaro reared a school,
which with more or less felicity disseminated
his principles for nearly half a century, and
retained his name. Of its pupils, Niccola di
Vito, long forgot in his works, is barely re-
membered as a buffoon ; Simone Papa and
Angiotillo di Roccadirame, scarcely emerged
to mediocrity ; Pietro and Ippolito (Polito) del
Donzello deserve less transient attention. Sons-
in-law of Angiolo Franco, and pupils of Giu-
liano da Majano in architecture, they were,
according to Vasari,* employed by him to de-
corate with paintings the fabric of Poggio
Reale, which he had constructed for King
Alfonso, where, continuing to operate under
his son and successor Ferdinand, they re-
presented the story of the Conspiracy formed
against him, a work celebrated by Jacopo
Sannazaro.f Ippolito, alone or with his brother,
filled the refectory of Sta. Maria Nuova with
a number of subjects for the same prince,

* In the life of Giuliano da Majano. They are the first
painters of the Neapolitan schools mentioned by him, though
with an ambiguity which might induce us to believe that he
meant to give them for Tuscany.

f In the forty-first sonnet, addressed to King Federigo :
" Vedi invitto Signor come risplende," &c.

288 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

and then retired to Florence, where, not
long after, he died. Piero remained at Na-
ples distinguished and followed. Their style
is that of their master, but with more suavity
of colour. The first successful imitation of
friezes, trophies, and storied basso-relievoes in
chiaroscuro, may with probability be dated
from them. That Pietro excelled in portraits,
is evident from some animated heads saved
among the ruins of certain frescoes of his on
a wall of the Palace Matalona. Both were,
however, surpassed in tone, and force of light
and shade, and mellowness of outline, by Sil-
vestro de Buoni, their pupil, whose pictures,
scattered over the temples of Naples, have
been enumerated by Dominici. Silvestro him-
self yields to Tesauro of questionable name,*
whose works approach much nearer to the suc-
ceeding epoch than the united labours of his
predecessors in vigour of invention, in judg-
ment, propriety of attitude, truth of expres-
sion, and general harmony of the whole, with
a relief beyond what seems credible in an artist
unacquainted with other schools and other

* Some call him Giacomo, some Andria, most, and with
greater probability, Bernardo.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 289

works than those of his native place. Such
was his power of execution, that it challenged
the wonder of Luca Giordano in the vigour
of his career, when he contemplated the ceil-
ing of San Giovanni de' Pappacodi, where
Tesauro had painted the Seven Sacraments.
They have been minutely described, and
the portraits of Alfonso II. and of Ippolita
Sforza, whom he is said to have represented,
for the work itself is no more, in the Sacra-
ment of Matrimony, afford some light as to the
time in which it was painted. Another of his
works, equally praised, in the Chapel Tocco
of the Episcopal church, which represented a
series of subjects from the life of Saint As-
prenas, perished under the hands of one of
Solimena's pupils. He was the father or uncle
of Raimo Epifanio Tesauro, a considerable
Frescante, who, according to Stanzioni, rekin-
dled the evanescent spark of Zingaro's prin-
ciples. Some few vestiges of his works re-
main in Sta. Maria Nuova and Monte Vergine.
His dates reach from 1480 to 1501, and he
may be considered as the last of this school, for
Gio. Antonio d'Amato acquired fame by aban-
doning its style for that of Pietro Perugino.

VOL. III. U

290 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

Such were the masters that marked the first
epoch of the Neapolitan school ; neither incon-
siderable in number, nor contemptible in pro-
gress, for a state nearly always perplexed by
war : it derives, however, its greatest lustre
from having produced within the state the me-
morable artist whose resolution and persever-
ance made Italy mistress of the new-discovered
method in oil-painting, and changed the face of
art.*

Antoniello, a Messinese, of the Antonj family,

* See the remarks relative to Antoniello, in the history of
Venetian art ; but it is in place here to observe on the asser-
tions of the Neapolitan writers, that, if the tradition of a Greek
picture in oil at the Duomo of Messina be not fabulous, An-
toniello could not have remained ignorant of it. If Colan-
tonio was in possession of oil painting, how is the astonish-
ment to be accounted for, which the method of John ab Eyk
excited at Naples ? How came the name of an obscure
Fleming to fill in a short period all Europe, every prince to
solicit his pencil, every painter to submit to his dictates or
those of his scholars ? Who, on the contrary, who out of
Naples or its state, knew then Colantonio ? who courted
Solario ? a man so apt, the son-in-law and scholar of the
former, and before of Lippo Dalmasio— how forgot he to
learn, or why did he neglect a method they are said to
have practised so well, for the vulgar one of distemper ?
Either they knew nothing of the mystery at all, or in a de-
gree too insignificant to atfect the authority of Vasari, and
the claims of John ab Eyk and Antoniello.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 291

universally known by the name of Antoniello
da Messina, educated, according to Vasari, to
the art at Rome, returned from that place to
Sicily, and after some successful practice at Pa-
lermo and Messina, sailed to Naples, where he
saw an historical picture painted in oil by John
ab Eyk, which had been presented or dis-
posed of to king Alfonso, by some Florentine
traders. Charmed by the method, Antoniello
forgot every other concern, passed into Flan-
ders, and by close attendance, and some pre-
sents of Italian designs, captivated the heart of
the old painter, who made him completely
master of the secret, and soon after died. An-
toniello then left Flanders, and after some
months spent at Messina, repaired to Venice,
where he practised with general admiration of
his new method ; communicated it to Dome-
nico there, and he at Florence to the felon
Castagna, till by gradual progress it embraced
all Italy. What remains to be related of An-
toniello, is reserved for the history of the Ve-
netian school, to which by residence and prac-
tice he properly belongs, and which alone car-
ried his new discovered method to the height
it was capable of.

u 2

292 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

The second epoch of Neapolitan art was aus-
picious. P. Perugino had painted for the Ca-
thedral an Assumption of the Virgin, now
lost, a work which led to a better taste. Al-
ready, Amato, as we observed, had abandoned
the manner of Zingaro to follow Pietro, though
his style had still too much of the former to
form more than the connecting link between
the two epochs ; when Raffaello and his school
came into vogue, Naples was the first of ex-
terior towns to profit by them, and they,
about the middle of the century, were followed
by some adherents of Michael Angiolo ; nor
till near 1600, was any attention paid to other
masters, if we except Tiziano.

The new series begins with Andrea Sab-
batini* of Salerno. Smitten with the style of P.
Perugino, Andrea set out for Perugia, to enter
his school ; but hearing some painters at an inn
on the road talk of .Raffaello and the Vatican,
he altered his mind and route, and went to
Rome. Though not long under the guidance
of Sanzio, being by the death of his father,
1513, obliged to return to Naples, he returned
another man. He is said to have painted with
Raffaello at the Pace and in the Vatican. A

* A, Sabbatini fromUSO to 1545.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 293

good copyist, and what is rare, a better imi-
tator, if he did not soar with Giulio, he kept
pace with the best of that school, and excelled
some in correctness, and a style equally remote
from affectation and manner, with depth of
chiaroscuro, breadth of drapery, and a colour
which has defied time. His works in oil and
fresco, scattered over the metropolis and the
kingdom at large, have been celebrated as mi-
racles of art, though now either lost or greatly
impaired.

Of his scholars all persevered not in his man-
ner : thus Cesare Turco, as commendable in
oil as unsuccessful in fresco, drew nearer to P.
Perugino. More of Andrea was retained by
Francesco Santafede, the father and master of
Fabrizio, — painters whom few of that school
equal in colour, and so uniform that their
works can only be discriminated by the supe-
rior tinge and chiaroscuro of the father. But
the scholar who most resembled Andrea was
one Paolillo, whose works, nearly ah1 ascribed
to his master, till restored to their real author
by Dominici, leave little doubt of his right to
the first honours of that school, had his career
not been intercepted by a violent death, oc-
casioned by intrigue. Polidoro Caldara, of Ca-

294 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

ravaggio, escaped to Naples in 1527? from the
sack of Rome, but not, as Vasari with less in-
formation than credulity relates, to starve. Re-
ceived in the house of Andrea, formerly his
fellow scholar, he soon acquired acquaintance,
commissions, and even formed pupils before
his departure for Sicily. He had been cele-
brated for his chiaroscuros at Rome : at Naples
and Messina he attempted colour. The sha-
dowy and pallid specimens he has left, leave a
doubt whether he would ever have arrived at
a degree of strength or brilliancy worthy of
invention and style, though he has been praised
with enthusiasm by Vasari for the colour of
the Christ led to Calvary, a numerous com-
position, and the last before his assassination at
Messina.

Gian Bernardo Lama left the school of
Amato to attach himself to Polidoro, whom he
more than once imitated with sufficient success
to incur the suspicion of having been assisted
by the master : he had, however, more sweet-
ness than energy, and, in the sequel, was noted
for his opposition to the vigorous inroads of the
Tuscan style and the prevalence of Marco di
Pino.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 295

Francesco Rubiales, a Spaniard, from his fe-
licity of imitation called Polidorino, is like-
wise named in Naples among the scholars of
Caldara, whom he assisted in painting for the
Orsini, and singly conducted several works at
Monte Oliveto, and elsewhere, the greater part
of which are no more.

There are who class with the scholars of Po-
lidoro, Marco Cardisco, called Marco Calabrese.*
Him Vasari prefers to all the natives of that
epoch, and admires as a plant sprung from a
soil not its own : he knew not, perhaps, that, of
Magna Grecia, modern Calabria was the spot
most favoured by the arts. Possessed of a dex-
trous hand and florid colour, Cardisco spread
his labours over Napoli and the State : of what
remains, the most praised is the Dispute of
Saint Augustine at Aversa. Gio. Batista Cre-
scione and Lionardo Castellani are slightly
mentioned by Vasari as his scholars.

Gio. Francesco Penni, called " II Fattore,"
came to Naples some time after Polidoro ; and,
during the short time which he lived, for he
died in 1528, contributed to the advancement
of the art by leaving his great copy of Raf-

* 1508 to 1542.

296 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

faello's Transfiguration and his pupil Lionardo
Grazia, of Pistoia, behind him, a name more
celebrated for colour, and far less for design,
than might have been expected from a nurse-
ling of the Roman School. He is said to have
been one of the masters of Francesco Curia,
who went to Rome to study the style of Raf-
faello, but returned with the manner of Zuc-
chero. His composition is, however, praised
for decorum and suavity, his angels and female
countenances for beauty, and his colour for a
tone of nature : — their full display distinguish-
ed that Circumcision at the Church della
Pieta, which Ribera, Giordano, and Solimene
placed among the masterpieces of Naples. Cu-
ria left a close imitator in Ippolito Borghese,
of whom little is seen at home, where he sel-
dom resided, but the Assumption of Maria
at the Monte della Pieta, — an extensive work,
marked by equal vigour of execution.

Perino del Vaga, at Rome, instructed, and
was assisted by, two Neapolitans, Giovanni
Corso and Gianfilippo Criscuolo. The best that
remains of Corso at Naples, is a Christ bearing
his Cross, in S. Lorenzo. Long a pupil of
Sabbatini, Criscuolo, during the little time of his

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 297

stay at Rome, studied the works of Raffaello
with a perseverance which acquired him the
name of the Studious Neapolitan ; but without
native vigour, timid, correct, and dry, he re-
mained fitter to teach than to lead. Such were
the principal followers of the Roman School
at Naples ; for neither Francesco Imparato,
who abandoned the dry precepts of Criscuolo
for the genial example of Tiziano, nor his son
Girolamo, who long after followed the same
principles with more pretence and less success,
can properly be classed among the pupils of
Rome. About 1544* a Tuscan introduced at
Naples, what is as commonly as impertinently
called, the style of Michael Angiolo : a cold
enumeration of sesquipedalian muscles, groups
uninspired by thought, feeble in effect, and
crude or faint in colour, methodized by man-
ner and despatched by practice. Thus Giorgio
Vasari filled the Refectory of Monte Oliveto,
during one year of residence, with an enor-
mous work, which he considered as the electric
stroke that was to animate that indolent taste,
till then vainly solicited by Raffaello and his
school. Whether he disgusted the national

* Vasari.

298 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

pride by such insolent civility, or provoked the
indignation of those who, in Andrea Sabbatini,
venerated a superior name, it appears that, so
far from creating a school, he was discounte-
nanced by the public, and incurred the per-
petual censure of every Neapolitan writer on
art. He ought to have known, that he who
challenges a nation, courts an eternal feud.

Another, less pompous, but more effectual
follower of Michael Angiolo, was Marco da
Pino, or Marco da Siena : the date * of his ar-
rival at Naples ought probably to be placed
after 1560. He was well received, presented
with the freedom of the city, and deserved the
courtesy by the amenity of his manners and
sincerity of character. With the reputation of
the first artist, Marco was employed in the
most conspicuous churches of the city and the
state. Though he sometimes repeated his
inventions, he approached Michael Angiolo
nearer than any other Tuscan, because he af-
fected less to do it. His forms are appealed
to by Lomazzo as instances of just proportion,
and, in keeping and aerial perspective, he is
ranked with Lionardo and Robusti. As his

* Said to be in 1587.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 299

design is less charged, so is his colour more
vigorous and glowing than the usual tinge of
the Tuscan School : sometimes, however, he is
unequal, trusts to practice, and deviates into
manner. He was an able architect, and of the
good writers on that art.

Of many pupils reared in his school, none
was comparable to Gio. Angiolo Criscuolo, bro-
ther of G. Filippo. Though bred a notary, he
had practised miniature from his youth ; emu-
lation with his brother prompted him to at-
tempt larger proportions; and, under the tu-
ition of Marco, he became a good imitator of
his style.*

To dwell circumstantially on the crowd
of artists that fill the biographic pages of
this period, humiliating as mere nomenclature

* These two laid the foundation of a History of Neapoli-
tan Art. The transient mariner in which Vasari had men-
tioned Marco in the new edition of his Lives, his silence on
many Sienese, and omission of most Neapolitan painters,
were probably the causes that provoked the literary oppo-
sition of Marco. His pupil, the Notary, furnished him with
materials, from the archives and domestic tradition, for the
Discourse which he composed in 1569, the year after the
edition of Vasari ; though it remained in MS. till 1 742, when,
jointly with the Memoirs of Criscuolo, in the Neapolitan dia-
lect, &c., the greater part of it was published by Dominici.

300 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

may appear, is below the dignity of an art,
which, like poetry, admits not of mediocrity.
Reputation during life, the partiality of friends
and countrymen, some single work which es-
caped to excellence from the insignificant pro-
ductions of a long career, are but equivocal
claims on the homage of posterity : and more
legitimate ones in oil or fresco, have neither
Silvestro Bruno, Simone del Papa, the younger
Amato, Mazzolini, Cola del? Amatrice, Pom-
peo dell' Aquila, Giuseppe Valeriani, Marco
Mazzaroppi, Gio. Pietro Russo, Pietro Ne-
grone of Calabria, nor the Sicilian Gio. Bor-
ghese. Pirro Ligorio, the favourite architect
of Pio IV. in Rome, and the engineer of Al-
phonso II. at Ferrara, owes the preservation
of his name more to his Augean collections of
antiquarian lumber and the intrigues by which
he perplexed the last years of M. Angiolo,
than to the flimsy exertions of his pencil,

Matteo da Lecce, of obscure education, dis-
played in Rome a perverse attachment to the
manner of M. Angiolo by the usual conglo-
bation of muscles and extravagance of action.
He worked chiefly in fresco, and with a relief,
which, in the phrase of Baglioni, makes some

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 301

of his figures burst from the wall. Though
many Florentines were then at Rome, he alone
appeared capable of completing the plan of
Buonarroti, in the Sistina, by facing the Last
Judgement with the Fall of the Rebel Angels.
Matteo girt himself boldly for the work, and
left it a lamentable proof of the ridicule that
must attend the presumption of a mere crafts-
man to ally himself with a man of genius. He
worked likewise in Malta and in Spain, and,
passing from thence to the Indies, became a
thriving trader, till duped by the rage of
digging for treasures, he dissipated his wealth,
and died of penury and grief.

After the middle of the sixteenth century,
the flame-like rapidity of Tintoretto's style at
Venice, and soon after, the powerful contrast
of Caravaggio's method at Rome, and the
eclectic system of the Carracci, at Bologna,
spread general emulation over Italy, and di-
vided Naples into three parties, of nearly equal
strength, led by Corenzio, Ribera, and Carac-
ciolo, differing from each other, but ready to
unite against all foreign competition. During
their flourish, Guido, Domenichino, Lanfranco,

302 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

Artemisia Gentileschi were at Naples, and
formed some pupils ; — a period as enviable in
the number of excellent artists and the pro-
gressive powers of execution, as disgraceful for
the dark manoeuvres and the vile intrigues
that fill it — intrigues and manoeuvres too closely
interwoven with the history of Neapolitan art,
and, unfortunately, too well attested, merely
to be dismissed with silence and contempt.

Belisario Corenzio,* an Acheean Greek, after
passing five years in the school of Tintoretto,
fixed his abode at Naples about 1590. A
native stream of ideas and unparalleled celerity
of hand placed him, perhaps, on a level with
his master in the dispatch of a prodigious num-
ber, even of most extensive works ; but his
rage was too ungovernable often to admit of
more distinguished comparisons with Hobusti;
though few excelled him in design, and his
works abound in conceptions, attitudes, and
airs of heads confessedly inimitable to the Ve-
netians themselves. The work in which he
has best succeeded as an imitator of Tintoretto,
is the Miraculous Feeding of the Crowd by
the Saviour, in the Refectory of the Benedic-

* B. Corenzio, 1558 to 1643.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 3Q3

tines, a huge performance, but, under his hands,
a task of forty days. Though generally too
much of a mannerist to sacrifice the readiest
to the best, he still preserves a character of his
own, an air of originality, in glories especially,
which he embosomed in darkness and clouds
pregnant with showers. With a decided turn
for works of large dimension in fresco, which
seldom allowed him to submit to the finish of oil
colour, he contrived to please by various com-
positions of sacred history, in small propor-
tions, and is even said to have enlivened the
perspectives of the Frenchman Desiderio with
diminutive figures admirably toned and adapt-
ed to the scenery.

The native country of Giuseppe Ribera*
was a subject of dispute between the Spa-
niards and Neapolitans, till the production of

* In an inscription on one of his pictures, mentioned by
Palomino, he styles himself " Jusepe de Ribera Espanolde la
Ciutad de Xativa, e reyno de Valencia, Academico Romano,
ano 1630;" but the Neapolitans, who maintained that he
was born of Spanish parents in the neighbourhood of Lecce,
ascribe this and similar subscriptions on his works rather to
his ambition of ingratiating himself with the government,
which was Spanish, than to a genuine desire of acquainting
posterity with his native country.

Lo Spagnoletto 1588, vivo in 1649.

304 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

an extract from the baptismal register of Xa-
tiva (Antologia di Roma, 1795) decided the
claim in favour of Spain, and proved him a
native of that place, now " San Felipe," in the
district of Valencia. If the date of his birth,
January 12, 1588, be correct, he must have come
to Italy and entered the school of Caravaggio
at a very early period. From him Ribera went
to Rome, Modena, Parma, saw Raffaello, Anni-
bale, Correggio, and in imitation of their works
attempted to form a more luminous and gayer
style, in which he had little success, dismissed
it soon after his return to Naples, and once
more embraced the method of Caravaggio, as
more eminently calculated by its force, truth,
and effect to fix the eye of the multitude, the
object of his ambition ; he soon became painter
to the court, and by degrees the arbiter of its
taste.

The studies he had pursued enabled him to
go beyond Caravaggio in invention, mellowness,
and design : the grand Deposition from the
Cross at the Certosa proves the success of his
emulation, a work, by the verdict of Giordano,
alone sufficient to form a painter : the Martyr-
dom of S. Gennaro in the royal chapel, and

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 3Q5

the S. Jerome of the Trinita, excel his usual
style, and possess Titianesque beauties. S. Je-
rome was among his darling subjects ; S. Jerome
he painted, he etched in numerous repetition,
in whole-length and in half figures. He de-
lighted in the representation of hermits, ancho-
rets, apostles, prophets, perhaps less to impress
the mind with gravity of character and the ve-
nerable looks of age, than to strike the eye
with the imitation of incidental deformities
attendant on decrepitude, and the picturesque
display of bone, veins, and tendons athwart
emaciated muscle. A shrivelled arm, a drop-
sied leg, were to Ribera what a breast-plate
and a gaberdine were to Rembrandt. As in
objects of imitation he courted meagreness or
excrescence, so in the choice of historic sub-
jects he preferred to the terrors of ebullient
passions, features of horror or loathsomeness,
the spasms of Ixion, St. Bartholomew under
the butcher's knife. Nor are the few ideas of
gaiety by which he endeavoured to soothe his
exasperated fancy, less disgusting : Bacchus and
his attendants are grinning Lazaroni or bloated
wine-sacks ; brutality under his hand distorts
the feature of mirth.

VOL. III. X

306 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

Giambatista Caracciolo,* first attached to
Franc. Imparato, then to Caravaggio, grew to
manhood before he had produced any work
of consequence : roused afterward by the fame
and the impression made on his mind by some
picture of Annibale, he went to Rome, and
by a pertinacious study of the Farnese Gallery
became one of the best imitators of that style.
This was the basis of his fame on his return to
Naples, and by this, whenever provoked to
competition, he maintained it : such are the
Madonna of S. Anna de' Lombardi ; S. Carlo,
in the church of S. Agnello ; and the Christ
under the Cross, at the Incurabili. The rest
of his performances, by their strength of chiar-
oscuro, betray the school of Caravaggio. From
so considerate and finished an artist, haste and
flimsiness were not to be feared, and yet there
exist productions of his so feeble that his bio-
grapher f is reduced to account for them from
the artist's wish of retaliating by paltry work
for paltrier prices ; or from suffering them to
be finished by Mercurio d' A versa, no very
estimable pupil.

Such were the three leaders of that cabal

Caracciolo di Batistiello, died 1641. f Dominici.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 3Q7

which for some years persecuted every stranger
of eminence in the art who freely came, or was
invited to come, to Naples. Reputation, fiction,
violence, had raised Belisario to the tyranny of
fresco ; the most lucrative commissions he con-
sidered as due to himself, the rest he distri-
buted among his dependants, the greater num-
ber of whom possessed little merit. Massimo
Santafede, though independent of him, remain-
ed neuter, afraid to interfere with a man who,
to obtain his purpose, would stop at neither
fraud nor crime ; a proof of which he is said to
have given, in administering poison to the gen-
tlest and best of his pupils, Luigi Roderigo,
whose growing powers he envied.

To maintain his primacy in fresco, the exclu-
sion of every stranger who excelled in that
branch became, of course, his principal object.
Annibale Caracci arrived at Naples in 1609, to
paint the churches " dello Spirito Santo" and
" di Gesu Nuovo," and produced a small pic-
ture as a specimen of his style. The Greek
and his associates, called upon to give their
opinion of it, unanimously condemned it as
cold, and its master far too tame to manage an
extensive work. Thus baffled, Annibale re-

x 2

308 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

turned to Rome during the most oppressive
heats of summer, and soon after died. But
the work most contested with strangers was the
royal chapel of S. Gennaro, which the deputies
had reserved for Giuseppe d'Arpino, then paint-
ing the choir of the Certosa. Belisario, leaguing
himself with Spagnoletto, not less fierce and
arrogant, and with Caracciolo, who both aspired
to that commission, attacked Cesari with a
fury which forced him, before he could termi-
nate his choir, to fly for safety, first to Monte
Cassino, and then back to Rome. The com-
mission was now given to Guido ; but not long
after, two men unknown cudgelled his servant
and dismissed him with a message to his master
immediately to depart or to prepare for death.
Guido fled; but Gessi his pupil, not intimi-
dated, having demanded and obtained the
grand commission, repaired to Naples with two
assistants, G. Batista Ruggieri and Lorenzo Me-
nini ; both were decoyed on board a galley, that
immediately slipped its cable and transported
them to some place which no researches could
discover, and Gessi was obliged to return with
his disappointment to Rome.

Dispirited by the violence of these ma-

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 309

nceuvres, the deputies began to give way to
the cabal of the monopolists, allotting the fres-
coes to Correnzio and Caracciolo, and flattering
Spagnoletto with the hope of being intrusted
with the altar-pieces ; when all at once, repent-
ing of their agreement, they ordered the two
fresco painters to throw up their work, and
transferred the whole of the chapel to Dome-
nichino, at the splendid price of a hundred
ducats for every entire, fifty for each half
figure, and twenty-five for every head.* They
likewise took measures for his personal safety, by
obtaining the Viceroy's protection, but in vain.
The faction, not content with crying him down
as a cold insipid painter and discrediting him
with those who see with their ears and fill
every place, alarmed him with anonymous let-
ters, threw down what he had painted, mixed
ashes with his materials to crack the ground
he had prepared, and, by a stroke of the most
refined malice, persuaded the Viceroy to give
him a commission of some pictures for the
Court of Spain. These, when little more than

* As it is evident that the deputies broke a formal con-
tract with Correnzio and Batistiello, it is not easily disco-
vered on what principle Lanzi has praised their conduct.

310 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

dead-coloured, they carried from his study to
court, where Ribera superciliously ordered
what alterations he thought proper, and then,
without allowing him leisure to terminate the
whole, dispatched them to Spain. The inso-
lence of the rival, the complaints of the depu-
ties on the successive interruptions of their
work, and hence the suspicion of mischief, in-
duced Domenichino at last secretly to depart
for Rome, in hopes of being able from thence
to bring his affairs into a better train, — and
not without success ; the rumours of his flight
subsided, new measures for his safety were
taken, he returned to Naples, and, without
more interruption, completed the greater part
of the frescoes, and considerably advanced the
altar-pieces.

Here death surprised him, accelerated, as
some have suspected, by poison, certainly by
repeated causes of disgust from his relations,
competitors, and, above all, the arrival of his
old adversary Lanfranco. He succeeded to
Domenichino in the remaining fresco, Spagno-
letto in one of the oil pictures, and Stanzioni
in another. Caracciolo was dead ; Belisario,
excluded by age from sharing in the spoil, soon

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 3H

after was destroyed by a ruinous fall from a
scaffold. Nor had Ribera, if the prevailing-
fame be true,* a desirable end ; dishonoured
in his daughter, gnawed by remorse for the
vile persecutions in which he had shared,
odious to himself, and sick of light, he escaped
to sea, and none tells where he perished.

Opposed at its onset by these three, the
School of Bologna triumphed after their de-
mise, and Naples was divided into its imita-
tors ; for the mannered style of Cesari, which
approached that of Belisario, terminated with
Luigi Roderigo, and his relative Gian Bernar-
dino.

At the head of those who adopted Carac-
ciesque principles with success, may be placed
Massimo Stanzioni,f a scholar of Caracciolo, and,
as he himself asserts, of Lanfranco in fresco, in
portrait of Santafede. At Rome he strove to
embody the forms of Annibale with the tints
of Guido. Thus equipped, he braved the fore-
most talents at Naples, and opposed at the

* It is contradicted only by the unsupported assertion of
Bermudez, who tells that Ribera died rich and honoured
1656 at Naples.

f M. Stanzioni, 1585 to 1656.

312 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

Certosa a Dead Christ among the Maries to
Spagnoletto, who, to escape comparisons, per-
suaded the friars to have the picture of his
rival washed to recover its somewhat darkened
tone, and with a corrosive liquor so defaced it,
that Stanzioni, declaring so black a fraud ought
to remain an object of public indignation,
refused to retouch it ; he left, however, other
specimens of his powers at that repository of
rival talents, and above all the masterpiece of
S. Bruno. The ceilings of Gesu Nuovo and
of S. Paolo give him a distinguished rank
among fresco painters. His gallery pictures,
though not rare at Naples, are seldom met with
elsewhere. Whilst single, he sought and aimed
at excellence, and courted the art for its own
sake ; after his marriage, with a woman of
fashion, gain became necessary to maintain her
in a state of splendour, and he sunk by degrees
to mediocrity.

The School of Massimo is celebrated for the
number and excellence of its pupils, but the
two who promised most, Muzio Rossi and An-
tonio de Bellis, perished in the bloom of life.
The first, who had entered the School of Guido
at Bologna, was at the age of eighteen thought

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 313

worthy to face at the Certosa men of the first
ability, and shrinks from no comparison, but
scarcely survived his work. The second, whose
style is nearly balanced between Guido and
Guercino, began at the church of S. Carlo va-
rious pictures from the life of that Saint, which
he lived not to finish.

Francesco di Rosa, called Pacicco, another
pupil of that school, gave himself up to the
imitation of Guido, by Massimo's own advice.
Pacicco is one of the few artists mentioned by
Paolo de Matteio in a MS. which admits no
name of mediocrity. His forms, his colour,
the elegance of his extremities, the grace and
dignity of his characters, are equally commend-
ed. He had models of beauty in three nieces,
one of whom, Aniella di Rosa, in charms, ta-
lents, and manner of death has been compared
to Elizabeth Sirani: poison, administered by
the malignity of strangers, swept the Bolog-
nese — a dagger and a husband's jealousy, the
Neapolitan : he was Agostin Beltrano, her fel-
low pupil, and frequent partner of her works.

The remaining scholars of this school, Paul
Domenico Finoglia, Giacinto de' Popoli, and
Giuseppe Marullo, all three of Orta,— Andrea

314 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

Malinconico, and Bernardo Cavallino, were, if
we except the last, with more or less felicity,
imitators of their master. Cavallino, more ori-
ginal, is said to have provoked the jealousy
of Massimo, who advised him to paint in small :
this ought to be admitted with hesitation, for
it is difficult to believe, that he who feels him-
self made for the grand, could be persuaded to
waste his life on trifles.

Another convert to the Caracci School, was
Andrea Vaccaro,* the friend and competitor of
Massimo, a man made for imitation, says Lanzi,
and says too much ; for, if he had no equal
in that of Caravaggio, he was, when imitating
Guido, inferior to Massimo : nor did he, till
after the demise of Stanzioni, acquire that su-
premacy at Naples which remained undisputed
till the arrival of Giordano, young, vigorous,
and fraught with the novel style of Pietro Be-
retini. Both concurred for the great altar-piece
of Sta Maria del Pianto, both presented their
sketches, and Vaccaro obtained preference by
the verdict of Pietro da Cortona himself, who
declared him equally superior in experience
and correctness of style to his own scholar;

* Vaccaro, 1598 to 1671.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 315

but, when contending with Giordano in fresco,
to which he had not been trained by early prac-
tice, Vaccaro lost the honours he had gained.
The best of his school was Giacomo Farelli,
whom Luca found no contemptible antagonist :
had he been content to follow the style of his
master, without aspiring at that of Domeni-
chino, for which he was unfit, he might have
deserved the historian's notice for more than
one picture.

On the School of Domenichino, the Sicilians,
Pietro, Giacomo, and Teresa del Po, cannot
confer much honour. The father had more
theory than practice, the son less evidence than
ostentation, the daughter shone in miniature.
Nearer to the master, both in style and temper,
was Francesco di Maria : correct, slow, irreso-
lute, author of few but eminent works, espe-
cially the subjects relative to S. Lawrence, at
the Conventuals of Naples. He excelled in
portraits, one of which, exhibited at Rome with
one .of Vandyk and another by Rubens, was,
by Poussin, Cortona, and Sacchi, preferred to
both. He often has been mistaken for his mas-
ter, and commands high prices : the want of
grace alone betrays him — of grace Nature had

316 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL,

not been liberal to Francesco. Hence he be-
came the proverb of Giordano, " that sicken-
ing over bone and muscle, he rendered beauty
tame." He, in retort, held up Giordano's style
as heresy in art, a flowery medley of incoherent
charms.

Though the reputed master, Lanfranco was
not the model of Massimo ; his principal imi-
tator was Giambatista Benaschi, or Bernaschi,
numbered with Roman artists by Orlandi, but
who fixed his residence at Naples, and opened
a numerous school ; a decided machinist, but
with a grasp of fancy which never suffered him
to repeat a figure in the same attitude. His
points of sight from below upward, are correct,
and his foreshortenings dextrously contrived.
None ever approached a master nearer, and for-
sook him with less success.

Guercino never saw Naples, but Mattia Pre-
ti,* commonly called Calabrese, smit with his
novel style, went to study it at Cento ; not in-
deed exclusively, for no Italian school escaped
the attention of Preti. Unpractised in colour
to his twenty-sixth year, he attended solely to
design, less to form beauty or trace characters
* M. Preti, 1613 to 1699.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 31?

of delicacy, than to express robust and ener-
getic ones : in such he often succeeded, but
sometimes sunk to heaviness. His colour re-
sembled his line, not soft and airy, but dense,
cut into masses of chiaroscuro, and with a ge-
neral tone of ashy hues, tints of sorrow, con-
trition, anguish, the favourite topics of his
pencil. The frescoes of Calabrese at Modena,
Naples, Malta, have a stamp of grandeur. At
Rome, in S. Andrea della Valle, he appears
to less advantage, too enormous for the place,
and too ponderous at the side of Domenichino.
Italy is filled with his oil pictures, for his life
was long, his hand rapid, and every place he
visited, a scene of exercise : what he painted
for galleries consisted commonly of half figures,
like those of Guercino. He long, and nearly
alone, contested the field with Giordano, to
whose captivating airiness his weight was at
last forced to yield. He retired and died in
Malta, a Knight of its order, without leaving a
pupil who rose above mediocrity.

After this survey of the Bolognese School
at Naples, the native one of Bibera claims at-
tention. None ever swore more implicitly to
a master's dictates : the energy of his style ab-

318 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

sorbed their eye, the atrocity of his character
too often debauched their hearts. Inferiority
alone discriminates the works of Giovanni
Do and Bartolommeo Passante from those of
Spagnoletto; though, in the advance of life,
the first attempted to tinge with less vulgarity,
and the second now and then affected a more
select outline. Francesco Fracanzani had a
certain grandeur of execution and bloom of
colour : his " Transito," or Death of St. Joseph,
at the Pellegrini, is among the first pictures of
the city. But, by the pressure of poverty, he
first became a dauber, then a criminal, and re-
ceived sentence of death, which respect for his
profession, from the public ignominy of the
halter, mitigated to secret execution by poison.
Aniello Falcone* and Sal vat or Rosa, who is
to be mentioned more at large elsewhere, are
the greatest boast of this school, though Rosa
frequented it for a short time only, and chiefly
profited by the instruction of Falcone. The
strength of Falcone lay in battles, which he
painted in all dimensions, from the Sacred
books, history, or poems. Countenance, arms,
dresses were in unison with the national cha-
* A. Falcone, 1600 to 1665.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 319

racter of the combatants. His expression was
vivid, the figures and movements of his horses
select and natural, and his tactics correct,
though he had neither served in, nor seen a
battle. He drew with precision, everywhere
consulted the life, and laid his colour on with
equal strength and finish. That he instructed
Borgognone is not probable. Baldinucci, who
published the Memoirs of that Jesuit, is silent
on that head ; but they knew and esteemed
each other. He had a numerous set of scho-
lars, and with them, and the assistance of some
other painters, contrived to revenge the murder
of some relative and of a pupil assassinated by
the presidial Spaniards : for, at the revolution-
ary hubbub of Maso Aniello, he and his gang
formed themselves into a troop, which they
called " the Company of Death," and, protected
by Ribera, who palliated their proceedings at
court, spread horrid massacre, till, scared by
the return of order, this band of homicides dis-
persed, and sought their safety in flight. Fal-
cone himself retired for some years to France,
which has many of his works ; the rest escaped
to Rome, or sought the usual asylums of re-
venge and murder.

320 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

A numerous set of various but inferior art-
ists, in power and pursuit, fills the remaining
period of this epoch and the Neapolitan cata-
logues of art : the best of these issued from
the desperate School of Falcone, to whose me-
thod they adhered in all their diverging branches.
Of these Domenico Gargiuoli, nicknamed Micco
Spadaro, a character as fierce as pliant, leads the
van — no contemptible figurist in large, but of
endless combination in groups of small pro-
portion. The perspectives of Viviano Coda-
gora, his sworn brother, receive an exclusive
lustre from his figures. The battles of their
fellow scholar, Carlo Coppola, might sometimes
be mistaken for those of Falcone, had he given
less fulness to his horses. Paolo Porpora left
battles to paint quadrupeds, but chiefly and
best, fish and sea-shells : in fruit and flowers he
was far surpassed by Abraham Brueghel, who
at that time had settled at Naples. Giuseppe
Recco and Andrea Belvedere, from the same
school, excelled in game and birds ; and the
last still more in flowers and fruit, so as to con-
test superiority in that branch with Giordano,
asserting that no figurist could reach the polish,
or give the finish required in minute objects.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 321

Luca maintained, that the more implies the
less, and, composing a picture of game, fruit,
and flowers, gave it such an air of illusion,
that Andrea, shrinking from his presence crest-
fallen, retired among the literati of the day,
of whom he was not the least.

After the middle of the seventeenth century,
the revolutionary style of Luca Giordano* re-
versed every preceding principle, and, by the
suavity of its ornamental magic, enchanted the
public taste. A vast, resolute, creative talent
attended him from infancy : in his eighth year
he is said to have painted, and not for the first
time in fresco, two infant angels, for the church
of Sta Maria La Nuova.f Struck with won-
der, the Vice R& Duke Medina de Las Torres
placed him with Ribera, whose principles he
studied for some time, but, aspiring to a more
ample theatre of art, escaped to Rome, follow-
ed by his father, Antonio, a weak artist, but
an unceasing monitor, and the more relentless
because he placed all his hopes on the rapid
success of his son. To insure it, he did not, if

* Born 1632, died 1705.

f The assent of Carlo Celano (Giornata IV.) seems to
authenticate this tradition.
VOL. III. Y

322 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

we believe one writer, suffer Luca to intermit
his labours by regular meals, but fed him whilst
at work, as birds their callow young, perpetu-
ally chirping into his ear, Luca, dispatch !*
— Luca, dispatch ! repeated his fellow -students,
till the joke became a nickname, by which he
is oftener distinguished than by his own.

So brutal a method would have excited in a
mind less vigorous nothing but weariness and
despondency, but to the combining spirit of
Luca gave with portentous velocity of hand
the rudiments of that varied power, which, to a
degree of deception, taught him to imitate the
predominant air of every master's style in line
and colour, which he was set or chose to copy,f

* Luca, fa Presto !

f He used to tell, that then he had drawn twelve times the
Stanze and the Loggia of Raffaello, and nearly twenty the
Battle of Constantine, without mentioning his copies from
the Sistina, Polidoro, A. Caracci, &c. ; hence, some one has
called him by a bold but pertinent allusion " The Thunder-
bolt of Art," as others its Proteus, from the singular talent
of mimicking the manner and touch of every master. Many
are the pictures painted by him, which passed for works
of Albert Durer, Bassano, Tiziano, and Rubens, not only
with connoisseurs, a task less difficult, but with his rivals,
whose eyes malignity as well as discernment might have
sharpened: these deceptions fetched at sales doubly and

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 323

and he had in nearly endless repetition, copied
the best of what Rome possessed of its own,
the Lombard, Venetian, and foreign schools,
when he entered that of Pietro da Cortona,
whose wide-extended and ostentatious plans
met most congenially his own.

No single master's manner did he, however,
exclusively adopt. His first works exhibit the
pupil of Ribera, with evident aims at the en-
ergy of that style ; his subsequent and best
manner is marked by the beauties and the faults
of Pietro da Cortona, the same contrast of com-
position, the same masses of light, with equal
monotony of expression, which in female fea-
tures was often supplied by his wife ; a predi-
lection for the ornamental splendour of Paolo
Veronese distinguishes with less advantage a
third class of his works — in this, stuffs are
mixed with draperies, the tints are less vigor-
ous, the chiaroscuro less decided, the execu-
tion heavier. It has been observed, that his

trebly the price of an ordinary Giordano. Specimens are
still to be found in the churches of Naples ; for instance,
the two altar-pieces in that of S. Teresa, which have all the
air of Guido, especially that which represents the Nativity
of the Saviour.

Y 2

324 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

works, when compared with the finished mas-
ter-pieces of the classic schools, are little better
than embryos, that he carried nothing to per-
fection, and that the delusive power alone,
by which he united a number of jarring parts
in one pleasing whole, can save him from sink-
ing to the mediocrity which overwhelmed his
imitators. But it ought likewise to be consi-
dered, what was the object of his exertions, and
the end which he pursued ; — they were, by con-
quering the eye, to become the favourite of
the public, and he was made for both. Others
see by degrees, arrange, reject, select ; — into the
fancy of Giordano, the subject with its parts
showered at once ; the picture stood complete
before him. In colour, little solicitous about
the dictates of art, or the real hues of Nature,
he created an ideal and arbitrary tone, which
represented the air of things without diving
into their substance, and, content with abso-
lute dominion over the eye, left it to others to
inform the mind. If his method was compen-
diary ; none ever knew better how to improve
an accident to a beauty, and give to the random
strokes of haste the look of deliberate practice.
That he knew the laws of design, we know,

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 325

but debauched by facility and the rage of gain,
neglected the toil of correctness : hence like-
wise the superficial manner in which he often
laid on his colours, diluted, unembodied, and
unable to retain the fugitive imagery of his
pencil.

Naples is full of Giordano— few, if any in so
vast a metropolis, are the churches that want
his hand. In that of the P. P. Girolamini, the
Expulsion of the Venders is one of his most
admired works ; but the best of his frescoes, in
which he seems to have concentrated his pow-
ers, are those in the treasury of the Certosa.
The cupola of S. Brigida, rapidly painted in
competition with Francesco di Maria, exhibits
the first specimens of that flattering tone which
baffled the learning of his rival, intoxicated
the vulgar, and corrupted the growing taste.
The admired picture of St. Xavier, of copious
composition and the most seductive colour, was
the work of one day and a half. Among the
public and private paintings at Florence, the
chapel Corsini and the gallery Riccardi are by
the hand of Luca ; nor was he unemployed by
the Sovereign ; and Cosmo III., in whose pre-
sence he invented and coloured a large com-

326 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

position with momentary velocity, declared
him a painter formed for princes. He obtained
the same praise from Charles II. of Spain, whom
he served for thirteen years, but from the mul-
titude of his works might be supposed to have
served during a long life. There he continued
the series of pictures begun by Cambiasi, in the
church of the Escurial, on the most extensive
plan, but inferior in style and execution
to the frescoes of Buon-Ritiro. Of his oil
pictures, that of the Nativity, for the Queen
Mother, has shared unlimited praise, as com-
bining with superior felicity of execution, a
research and a depth of study seldom found
in his other works.

Grown old, he returned to Naples, loaded
with riches and honours, and soon after died,
regretted as the first painter of his time.

Though Giordano did not propose his pro-
cess as a model of imitation to his scholars, it
may easily be guessed that his success made
a deeper impression on them than his precepts,
and that without previously submitting to the
labours of his education, they attempted to
snatch with the charms the profits of his man-
ner. Hence a swarm of bold craftsmen and

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 327

mannerists was let loose upon the public, who
with gay mediocrity overwhelmed what yet
was left of principles in art. Of these, his
favourites were Aniello Rossi, and Matteo
Pacelli, who accompanied him to Spain, re-
turned well pensioned, and continued to live
in obscure ease. Niccolo Rossi, Giuseppe
Simonelli, Andrea Miglionico and Ramondo
de Dominici, came nearer their master ; and
the Spaniard Franceschitto, as he had raised
the hopes, might have excited the jealousy of
Luca, had he not been intercepted by death.
He left a specimen of his powers in the picture
of S. Pasquale, at Sta Maria del Monte.

But the best of his pupils, and heir of his
dispatch, was Paolo de' Matteis, a name that
ranks with the foremost of that day, not un-
known to France or Rome; his chief abode
was, however, Naples, where his frescoes are
spread over churches, galleries, halls and ceil-
ings ; if unequal to those of his master in
merit, nearly always produced with equal speed.
It was his unexampled vaunt to have painted
the enormous Cupola del Gesu Nuovo in sixty-
six days, a boast which Solimene checked with
the cool reply, that the work told its own tale

328 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

without assistance : and yet it possesses beau-
ties, especially in the parts that imitate Lan-
franco, which excite wonder, considering the
fury of execution. Nor, if he chose to work
with previous study and with diligence, as in
the church of the 6 Pii Operai/ in the gallery
Matatona, and in many private pictures, was
he destitute of composition, grace of outline,
or beauty of countenance, though little varied.
His colour at the onset was Giordanesque ; in
the sequel he increased the force of his chiar-
oscuro, though not without delicate gradation
of tints : particularly in Madonnas and Infants,
which give an idea of Albano's suavity, and
the Roman style. A school more numerous
than distinguished by talent, contributes little
to his celebrity.

Francesco Solimene,* called "L' Abate Ciccio,"
born at Nocera de' Pagan i, took the elements
of art from his father Angelo, formerly a pupil
of Massimo, and went to Naples. He succes-
sively frequented the schools of Francesco di
Maria and of Giac. del Po, and left both to
follow his own inclination, which at first ex-

* Born 1657; died 1748.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 329

clusively led him to imitate the style of Pietro
da Cortona, and even to adopt his figures. He
next formed a manner which, of all others, ap-
proached next to Preti ; the design, indeed, is
less exact, the colour less true, but the faces
handsomer, now in imitation of Guido, then
nearer to Maratta, and often picked* from life :
hence the byname of " the Gentler Calabrese."*
To Preti he joined Lanfranco, whom he sur-
named the " Master," and from him borrowed
and exaggerated that serpentine sweep of com-
position : his chiaroscuro, balanced between
both, lost some of its vigour and became softer
with the advance of life. He drew and re-
vised his forms from Nature with much ac-
curacy before he painted, but often sacrificed
his outline to the fire of execution in the pro-
cess. The facility and elegance which dis-
tinguish him in poetry, mark his invention
in painting, to no branch of which he could
be called a stranger, and might have excelled
singly in each. His works are scattered over
Europe, for he lived to the age of ninety, and
yielded in velocity of hand to Giordano only,

* II Calabrese ringentilito.

330 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

his competitor and friend, at whose demise he
succeeded to the Primacy of taste.

Of the public works that most distinguish
Solimene, are the stories of the sacristy in S.
Paolo Maggiore de' P. P. Teatini, nor less the
pictures substituted for those of Giacomo del
Po on the arches of the Chapels in the Church
de' S. S. Apostoli. Specimens of his high
finish may be seen in the Chapel of S. Filippo
in the Church dell' Oratorio ; he painted the
principal altar-piece of the Nuns di " S. Gau-
dioso," and the four large histories in the choir
of the church at Monte Cassino. Of private
works, the gallery of Sanfelice is the most con-
spicuous at Naples ; at Rome, some stories in
the Albani and Colonna palaces ; and at Mace-
rata, in the Buoancorsi collection, among seve-
ral mythologic subjects, the Death of Dido, a
picture of large dimensions and striking effect.
In the refectory of the Conventuals of Assisi,
the Last Supper of our Lord, a polished per-
formance, is by his hand.

Of that most numerous band of pupils whom
he let loose upon the public, the most cele-
brated was, no doubt, Sebastiano Conca, a
native of Gaeta, generally classed with the

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 331

Roman school, for Rome became his residence
and the theatre of his talent. After having
served a pupilage of sixteen years under Soli-
mene, and persevered in the practice of that
style for several years at Rome, he ominously
proved the futility of attempting at an ad-
vanced period to escape from the tyranny of
early habits. At forty he dared to leave his
brushes, became once more a student, and spent
five years in drawing after the antique and the
masters of design : but his hand and eye, de-
bauched by manner, refused to obey his mind,
till, wearied by hopeless fatigue, he followed
the advice of the sculptor Le Gros, and returned
to his former practice, though not without con-
siderable improvements, and nearer to Pietro da
Cortona than to his master. Conca had fertile
brains, a rapid pencil, and a colour which at
first sight fascinated every eye by its splendour,
contrast, and the delicacy of its flesh-tints. His
dispatch in fresco and in oil was equal to his
employment, and there is scarcely a collection
of any consequence without its Conca. He
was courted by sovereigns and princes, and
Pope Clement XI. ennobled him at a full
assembly of the academicians of St. Luke. He

332 THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL.

was assisted in his labours by his brother Gio-
vanni, a man of similar taste, but less power,
and an excellent copyist. The maxims of
Conca are considered * as having completed
the ruin of art ; but every school had its own
canker, and his influence did not extend to all.
Without deviating into a catalogue of medio-
crity, it may be sufficient to name three of his
principal scholars, Gaetano Lapis of Cagli, Sal-
vator Monosilio, a Messinese, and Gaspero
Serenari, a Palermitan. Lapis had too much
originality of conception and too much solidity
of taste to adopt the flowery style of his mas-
ter. The public works he left at home, and
the Birth of Venus in a ceiling of the Borghese
Palace, as correct as graceful, deserved and
would have attained more celebrity, had not
self-contempt and diffidence intercepted the
fortune which his talent might have command-
ed. The two Sicilians, complete machinists,
shared with the imitation the success of their
master.

Next to Conca, the most successful pupil of
Solimene was Francesco de Mura, surnamed
Franceschiello, born at Naples and greatly

* Mengs.

THE NEAPOLITAN SCHOOL. 333

employed in its churches and private galleries :
the works, however, to which he owes most of
his celebrity, were the frescoes painted in va-
rious apartments of the royal palace at Torino,
in competition with Claudio Beaumont, who
was then at the height of his vigour. Mura
ornamented the ceiling of some rooms, chiefly
filled with Flemish pictures, with subjects
widely different, Olympic games, and actions
of Achilles.

Corrado Giaquinto of Molfetta, may con-
clude what yet deserves to be recorded of this
school. He too left Naples, came to Rome,
and attached himself to Conca, whose maxims
he made nearly all his own ; as resolute, as
easy, but less correct. Rome, Macerata, and
other parts of the Roman state, are acquainted
with his works. He painted in Piemont, was
employed by Charles III. in Spain, appointed
Director of the Academy of S. Fernando,
pleased and continued to please the greater
part of the public, even after the arrival of
A. R. Mengs.

THE SCHOOL OF VENICE.

THE conquests, commerce and possessions of
Venice in the Levant, and thence its uninter-
rupted intercourse with the Greeks, give proba-
bility to the conjecture, that Venetian art drew
its origin from the same source, and that the first
institution of a company, or, as it is there called,
a School (Schola) of Painters, may be dated up
to the Greek artists who took refuge at Venice
from the fury of the Iconoclasts at Constanti-
nople. The choice of its Patron, which was not
St. Luke, but Sta. Sophia, the patroness of the
first temple at that time, and prototype of St.
Mark's, distinguishes it from the rest of the
Italian Schools. Anchona, the vulgar name
of a picture in the technic language, the sta-

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 335

tutes,* and documents of those times, is evi-
dently a depravation of the Greek Eikon. The
school itself is of considerable antiquity ; its
archives contain regulations and laws made in
1290, which refer to anterior ones ; and though
not yet separated from the mass of artisans, its
members began to enjoy privileges of their own.
In various cities of the Venetian State we
meet with vestiges of art anterior in datef to the
relics of painting and mosaic in the metropolis,
which prove that it survived the general wreck
of society here, as in other parts of Italy. • Of
the oldest Venetian monuments, Zanetti has

* Thus in an order of the Justiziarii we read : " Mcccxxu.
Indicion Sexta 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 fores-
tiera 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.
Donate at Murano, has the following inscription : " Corendo
Mcccx. indicion vm. in tempo de lo nobele homo Miser
Donate Memo honorando Podesta facta fo questa Anchona
de Miser S. Donato,"

f In the church at Cassello di Sesto, which has an abbey
founded in 762, there are pictures of the ninth century.

336 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

given a detailed account, with shrewd critical
conjectures on their chronology ; though all
attempts to discriminate the nearly impercepti-
ble progress of art in a mass of works equally
marked by dull servility, must prove little bet-
ter than nugatory ; for it does not appear that
Theophilus of Byzantium, who publicly taught
the art at Venice about 1200, or his Scholar
Gelasio*, had availed themselves of the improve-
ments made in form, twenty years before, by
Joachim the Abbot, in a picture of Christ. Nor
can the notice of Vasari, who informs us that
Andrea Tafi repaired to Venice to profit by
the instructions of Apollonios in mosaic, prove
more than that, from the rivalship of Greek
mechanics, that branch of art was handled with
greater dexterity there than at Florence, to
which place he was, on his return, accompanied
by Apollonios. The same torpor of mind con-
tinued to characterise the succeeding artists till
the first years of the fourteenth century, and
the appearance of Giotto, who, on his return
from Avignon 1316, by his labours at Padua,

* Gelasio di Nicolo della Masuada di S. Giorgio, was of
Ferrara, and flourished about 1242. Vid. Historia almi Fer-
rariensis Gymnasii, Ferraria, 1735.

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 337

Verona, and elsewhere in the state, threw the
first effectual seeds of art, and gave the first
impulse to Venetian energy and emulation* by
superior example.

He was succeeded by Giusto, surnamed of
Padova, from residence and city rights, but
else a Florentine and of the Menabuoi. To
Padovano, Vasari ascribes the vast work of the
church of St. John the Baptist ; incidents of
whose life were expressed on the altar-piece.
The walls Giusto spread with gospel history
and mysteries of the Apocalypse, and on the
Cupola a glory filled with a consistory of saints
in various attire : simple ideas, but executed
with incredible felicity and diligence. The
names ' Joannes & Antonius de Padova,' for-
merly placed over one of the doors, as an
ancient MS. pretends, related probably to some
companions of Giusto, fellow pupils of Giotto,

* 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.

VOL. III. Z

338 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

and show the unmixed prevalence of his style,
to which Florence itself had not adhered with
more scrupulous submission, beyond the middle
of the century, and the less bigoted imitation of
Guarsiento, a Padovan of great name at that
period, and the leader of Ridolfi's history. He
received commissions of importance from the
Venetian senate, and the remains of his labours
in fresco and on panel at Bassano and at the
Eremitani of Padova, confirm the judgment
of Zanetti, that he had invention, spirit, and
taste, and without those remnants of Greek
barbarity which that critic pretends to dis-
cover in his style.

Of a style still less dependant on the princi-
ples of Giotto, are the relicks of those artists
whom Lanzi is willing to consider as the pre-
cursors of the legitimate Venetian schools, and
whose origin he dates in the professors of minia-
ture and missal-painting, many contemporary,
many anterior to Giotto. The most conspicuous
is Niccolo Semitecolo, undoubtedly a Venetian,
if the inscription on a picture on panel in the
Capitular Library at Padova be genuine, viz.,
Nicoleto Semitecolo da Venecia, 1367. It re-
presents a Pieta, with some stories of S. Se-

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 339

bastian, in no contemptible style : the nudities
are well painted, the proportions, though some-
what too long, are not inelegant, and what adds
most to its value as a monument of national
style, it bears no resemblance to that of Giotto,
which, though it be inferior in design, it equals
in colour. Indeed the silence of Baldinucci,
who annexes no Venetian branch to his Tuscan
pedigree of Art, gives probability to the pre-
sumption, that a native school existed in the
Adriatic long before Cimabue.

A fuller display of this native style, and its
gradual approaches to the epoch of Giorgione
and Tizian, were reserved for the fifteenth cen-
tury : an island prepared what was to receive
its finish at Venice. Andrea da Murano, who
flourished about 1400, though still dry, formal,
and vulgar, designs with considerable correct-
ness, even the extremities, and what is more,
makes his figures stand and act. There is still
of him at Murano in S. Pier Martire, a picture,
on the usual gold ground of the times, repre-
senting, among others, a Saint Sebastian, with
a Torso, whose beauty made Zanetti suspect
that it had been copied from some antique sta-
tue. It was he who formed to art the family

z 2

340 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

of the Vivarini, his fellow-citizens, who in unin-
terrupted succession maintained the school of
Murano for nearly a century, and filled Venice
with their performances.

Of Luigi, the reputed founder of the family,
no authentic notices remain. The only picture
ascribed to him, in S. Giovanni and Paolo, has,
with the inscription of his name and the date
1414, been retouched.* Nor does much more
evidence attend the names of Giovanni and An-
tonio de' Vivarini, the first of which belonged
probably to a German, the partner of Antonio,f
who is not heard of after 1447, whilst Antonio,

* Fiorillo has confounded this questionable name with the
real one of Luigi, who painted about 1490. — See Fiorillo
Geschichte, ii. p. 11.

f 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 " Anto-
nio de Muran e Zohan Alamanus 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.

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 341

singly or in society with his brother Bartolom-
meo Vivarini, left works inscribed with his
name as far as 1451.

Bartolommeo, probably considerably younger
than Antonio, was trained to art in the princi-
ples before mentioned, till he made himself
master of the new- discovered method of oil-
painting, and towards the time of the two Bel-
lini became an artist of considerable note. His
first picture in oil bears the date of 1473 ; his
last, at S. Giovanni in Bragora, on the autho-
rity of Boschini, that of 1498; it represents
Christ risen from the grave, and is a picture
comparable to the best productions of its time.
He sometimes added A Linnel Vivarino to his
name and date, allusive to his surname.

With him flourished Luigi, the last of the
Vivarini, but the first in art. His relics still
exist at Venice, Belluno, Trevigi, with their
dates ; the principal of these is in the school of
St. Girolamo at Venice, where, in competition
with Giovanni Bellini, whom he equals, and
with Vittore Carpaccia, whom he surpasses, he
represented the Saint caressing a Lion, and some
monks who fly in terror at the sight. Compo-
sition, expression, colour, for felicity, energy,

342 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

and mellowness, if not above every work of the
times, surpass all else produced by the family
of the Vivarini.

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 pro-
cured him an annual provision, and the privi-
lege 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 Bassano, Lanzi
surmises that Nasocchio di Bassano 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 Bel-
lini, 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 Gat-

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 343

tamelata, are works that exist in history only.
One single picture, subscribed by his name,
Lanzi mentions to have seen in a private collec-
tion, resembling the style of Squarcione, whom
he seems to have followed in his rnaturer 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
surpassed him, several performances still ex-
ist, from 1401 to 1436. Vasari has wan-
tonly 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 pic-
ture of Justice at the Magistrate del Proprio,

344 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

have shared the first praise, had not the prin-
cipal 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* by the vaunted one
of Vittore Pisanello, of S. Vito : though ac-
counts grossly vary on the date in which he

* In no instance seems Vasari to have given a more deci-
sive 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.

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 345

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 occu-
pied, 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 eblamented, as the
remains of his less considerable works at S.
Firmo and Perugia, far from sanctioning the
opinion which tradition has taught us to enter-
tain of Pisano, are finished indeed with the mi-
nuteness of miniature, but are crude in colour,
and drawn in lank and emaciated proportions.
It appears from his works, that he under-
stood the formation, had studied the expres-
sion, and attempted the most picturesque atti-
tudes of animals. His name is well known to

346 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

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 sub-
sequent century.*

From the crowd f of obscure contemporary
artists, which the neighbouring Vicenza pro-
duced, the name of Marcello, or as Hidolfi calls
him Gio. Battista Figolino, deserves to be dis-
tinguished : a man of original manner, whose
companion, in variety of character, intelligence
of keeping, landscape, perspective, ornament,
and exquisite finish, will not easily be disco-
vered 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

* 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 assertion ; and still more the fore-
shortened 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 attitude of parallel
motion. The medal has been published by Ducange in the
appendix to his Latin Glossary, by Padre Banduri, Gori and
Maffei.

f See their lists in Descrizione delle Architetture, Pitture e
Sculture di Vicenza con akune osservazioni, fyc. Vicenza,
1779, 8vo. p. i. ii.

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 347

of Art : in proof of which Vicenza may still
produce his Epiphany in the church of Sl.
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 Fran-
cesco Squarcione,* of Padova ; in whose nume-
rous school perhaps originated that eclectic prin-
ciple 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 passed 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, basso-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,

* 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.

348 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

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 S*. 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 in-
disputably genuine, though retouched work of
his, is mentioned by Lanzi; which, in various
compartments, represents different saints, sub-
scribed ' Francesco Squarcione,' and conspi-
cuous 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 hitherto described ; slowly emerging
from barbarity, and still too much busied with
the elements to think of elegance and ornament.
Even then, indeed, canvass 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 pu-
rity ; but unfriendly to union and mellowness.

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 349

It was reserved for the real epoch of oil-paint-
ing to develope the Venetian character, display
its varieties, and to establish its peculiar pre-
rogative.

TIZIANO, the son ©f Gregorio Vecelli, was
born at Piave, the principal of Cadore on the
Alpine verge of Friuli, 1477.* His education
is said to have been learned, and Giov. Battista
Egnazio is named as his master in Latin and
Greek ;f 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
Zuccati4

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

* Vasari dates his birth USO.

f Liruti, Notizie de' Letterati del Friuli, t. ii. p. 285,
J Sebastiano Zuccati of Trevigo, flourished about 1490.
He had two sons, Valerio and Francesco, celebrated for mo-
saic 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.

350 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

his imitation at every period of his art. Thus
when, more adult, in emulation of Albert
Durer, he painted at Ferrara* 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 discrimi-
nated, and the surrounding objects seen re-
flected 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 assists the beau-
ties 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 vir-
tue of the Venetian school, because it rests its

* 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

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 351

prerogative on despatch in execution, and there-
fore is proud of Tintoretto, who had no other
merit." * Such, in speaking of the great genius
before us, is the equally rash, ignorant, unphi-
losophic 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.f
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 rivalship 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 gene-
rally defeats its own designs, the uncourteous

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.

* *' Si puo quasi dire, che il vizio sia la virtu della Scuola
Veneziana, poiche fa pompa della sollecitudine nel dipin-
gere ; e percio fa stima di Tintoretto, che non avea altro
merito." Mengs, Opere, t. i. p. 175. ed. Farm.

t It has supplanted, was probably perpetuated in allu-
sion to his rapidity of execution, and remains familiar to ears
that never heard of Robusti.

352 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

dismissal, instead of dispiriting, roused the en-
ergies 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 surpass 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 masses opposed to each other.

The first essays of this complicated system,
in single figures, are probably the frescoes of
the palace Gussoni ;* and in numerous com-

* See Varie Pitture a fresco de' principal! Maestri Vene>
ziani, &c. Venez. fol. 1 760. Tab. 8, 9, p. viii. No one who
has seen the original figures of the Aurora and Creposcolo

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 353

position, the Last Judgement, and its counter-
part, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, in the
church of Sta. Maria dell' Orfo.

It is evident that the spirit of Michael An-
gelo 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 masses, the
living motion of the agents, notwithstanding
their frequent aberrations from their centre of
gravity,* and the harmony that rules the whirl-
wind of that tremendous moment, must for
ever place it among the most astonishing pro-
ductions of art. Its sublimity as a whole tri-
umphs even over the hypercriticisms of Vasari,
who thus describes it : — " Tintoretto has paint-
in S. Lorenzo, can mistake their imitation, or rather tran-
scripts, in these.

* The frequent want of equilibration found in Tintoretto's
figures, even where no violence of action can palliate or ac-
count for it, has not without probability been ascribed to his
method of studying foreshortening from models loosely sus-
pended and playing in the air ; to which he at last became
so used that he sometimes employed it even for figures rest-
ing on firm ground, and fondly sacrificed solidity and firm-
ness to the affected graces of undulation.

VOL. III. 2 A

354 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

ed the Last Judgement with an extravagant
invention, which, indeed, has something awful
and terrible, inasmuch as he has united in
groups a multitudinous assemblage of figures
of each sex 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 concep-
tion been executed with a correct and regular
design, had the painter estimated its indivi-
dual parts with the attention which he be-
stowed 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, re-
mains astonished, whilst to him who exa-
mines 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 inven-
tion ; 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 dimen-

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 355

sion appears to be the result of the composition.
Here too, as in the Transfiguration of Raffaelle,
some short-sighted sophist may pretend to dis-
cover two separate subjects and a double action ;
for Moses receives the tables of the decalogue
in the upper part, whilst the idolatrous cere-
mony occupies the lower ; but the unity of
the subject may be proved by the same argu-
ment which defended and justified the choice
of Sanzio. Both actions are not only the off-
spring 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 assert, that
the artist who has found the secret of repre-
senting together two inseparable moments of
an event divided only by place, has impaired
the unity of the subject ?

Nowhere, however, does the genius of Tinto-
retto 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 concep-

356 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

tion; purity of style and ruthless mariner;
bravura of hand with mental dereliction ; celes-
tial or palpitating hues tacked to clayey, raw,
or frigid masses ; a despotism of chiaroscuro
which sometimes exalts, sometimes eclipses,
often absorbs subject and actors. Such is the
catalogue of beauties and defects which charac-
terize the Slave delivered by St. Marc; the
Body of the Saint landed; the Visitation of
the Virgin ; the Massacre 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 Tin-
toretto, and by its anomaly equals or surpasses
the most legitimate offsprings of art, the Cru-
cifixion.*

* It would be mere waste of time to recapitulate what has
been said on the efficient beauties of this astonishing work
in the lectures on colour and chiaroscuro, and in the article
of Tintoretto, in the last edition of Pilkington's Dictionary. It
has been engraved on a large scale by Agostino Carracci,
if that can be called engraving which contents itself with
the mere enumeration of the parts, totally neglecting the
medium of that tremendous twilight which hovers over the
whole and transposes us to Golgotha. If what Ridolfi says
be true, that Tintoretto embraced the engraver when he
presented the drawing to him, he must have had still more

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 357

It is singular that the most finished and best
preserved work of Tintoretto should be one
which he had least time allowed him to termi-
nate — the Apotheosis of S. Rocco in the prin-
cipal ceiling-piece of the Schola, conceived, exe-
cuted, 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 con-
structed 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

deplorable moments of dereliction as a man than as an
Artist, or the drawing of Agostino, must have differed totally
from the print.

358 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

bordering on illusion, is proved with more irre-
sistible because more copious evidence, in the
picture of the Angelic Salutation; though it can-
not 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 mes-
senger into boisterous irruption, the silent recess
of the mysterious mother into a public dis-
mantled 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 irresist-
ibly than in the sopraporta by Tiziano on the
same subject and in the same place, had that
exquisite master been inspired more by the
sanctity of the subject than the lures of courtly
or the ostentatious bigotry of monastic devo-
tion. 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 de-
vout, submitting to canonization, amongst
her delicate lambs ; if the angel was not to

THE VENETIAN SCHOOL. 359

rush through a shattered casement on a timid
female with a whirlwind's blast, the waving
grace and calm dignity of his gesture and atti-
tude, ought to have been above the assistance of
theatrical ornament ; nor should Palladio have
been consulted to construct classic avenues for
the humble abode of pious meditation. It must
however be owned that we become reconciled
to this mass of factitious embellishments by a
tone which seems to have been inspired by
Piety itself ; the message whispers in a celestial
atmosphere,

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 :* 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 wrork in
which sublimity of conception, beauty and

* It is engraved by Pietro Monaco, as that of Tiziano, by
Le Fevre, but in a manner which makes us lament the lot of
those who have no means to see the original.

360 THE VENETIAN SCHOOL.

dignity of form, velocity and propriety of mo-
tion, 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 ab-
sorbed eye.

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

MANTOUA,* the birth-place of Virgil, a name
dear to poetry, by the adoption of Andrea
Mantegna and Giulio Pippi claims a distin-
guished place in the history of Art, for restoring
and disseminating style among the schools of
Lombardy.

Mantoua, desolated by Attila, conquered by
Alboin, wrested from the Longobards by the

* Mantoua preserved a certain attachment to Virgil in the
darkest ages ; for besides numerous coins stamped with his
image, his statue, honoured by annual festivals, remained in
the forum, till the brutal fanaticism of Carlo Malatesta con-
demned it to the river. Vide Ant. Possevini Junioris Gon-
zaga, lib. v. p. 486. Paul of Florence and Peter Paul Ver-
gerius wrote against Malatesta : the latter under the follow-
ing title, ' De Diruta Statua Virgilii P.P.V. eloquentissimi
Oratoris epistola ex tugurio Blondi sub Apolline.' No date.

362 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

Exarch of Ravenna, was taken and fortified by
Charles the Great : from Bonifazio of Canossa
it descended to Mathilda; after her demise, 1115,
became a republic tyrannized by Bonacorsi, till
the people conferred the supremacy on Lodo-
vico Gonzaga, under whose successors it rose
from a marquisate, 1433, to a dukedom, 1531,
and finished as an appendage to the spoils of
Austria.

Revolutions so uninterrupted, aggravated by
accidental devastations of floods and fire, may
account for the want of earlier monuments of
art in Mantoua and its districts, than the re-
mains from the epoch of Mathilda.* A want
perhaps more to be regretted by the antiquary

* Some codices decorated with miniatures and the por-
trait of that Countess : the most conspicuous of which is
that by Donizone, a Benedictine at Canossa, in the diocese
of Reggio, but a German by extraction, who lived at the
court of Mathilda, and in two books of barbarous verse com-
posed her life and history. It is preserved in the Vatican
Library, No. 4922, and was first published by Sebastian
Tagnagolio, at Ingolstadt, 1612. 4to.

The original portrait of Mathilda, by an unknown hand,
drawn from her monument at Polirone, has been published
by /. Bat. Visi in Notizie Storiche delta cittd di Mantoua
e ddlo stato, t. ii. p. 122. She is represented on a horse with
a pomegranate in her hand.

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 363

than the historian of art, whose real epoch
begins with the patronage of Lodovico Gonzaga
and the appearance of Andrea Mantegna.*

This native of Padovaf was the adopted
son and pupil of Squarcione, in whose school
he acquired that taste for the antique which
marks his works at every period of his practice;
if sometimes mitigated, never supplanted by
the blandishments of colour and the precepts
of Giovanni Bellino, whose daughter he had
married.

Perhaps no question has been discussed with
greater anxiety, and dismissed from investiga-

* In the Convent " alle Grazie," tradition dates the re-
mains of several old pictures from the time of Mantegna.
That miniature or rather missal painting had attained a high
degree of excellence at that period, is proved by a large folio
Bible, in the Estensian Library, decorated with admirable
copies of insects, plants, and animals. The contract made
between Duca Borso, 1455, and the two artists who paint-
ed it, Taddeo de Crivelli and Zuanne de Russi da Mantova,
has been preserved by Bettshelli, Lett. Mant. Mahtova,
1774. 4to.

•f Vasari, whom rage of dispatch and eager credulity sel-
dom suffered to wait for authentic information, not content,
in spite of his epitaph, to tell us that he was born of low
parents in some district of Mantoua, confounds the date of
his death with that of the inscription itself.

364 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

tion with less success, than that of Correggio's
origin, circumstances, methods of study, and
death.

The date of his birth is uncertain, some place
it in 1475, others in 1490 ; were we to follow
a MS. gloss in the Library at Gottingen, men-
tioned by Fiorillo, which says he died at the
age of forty in 1512, he must have been born in
1472 ; but the true date is, no doubt, that of
the inscription set him at Correggio, viz. that
he died in 1534, aged forty. The honour of
his birth-place is allowed to Correggio, though
not without dispute.* His father's name was
Pellegrino Allegri, according to Orlandi, coun-
tenanced by Mengs. He was instructed in the
elements of literature, philosophy, and mathe-
matics ; however doubtful this, there can be
no doubt entertained on the very early period
in which he must have applied to Painting.
The brevity of his life, and the surprising num-
ber of his works, evince that he could not
devote much time to literature, and, of mathe-
matics, probably contented himself with what
related to perspective and architecture. On
the authority of Vedriani and of Scannelli,

* See Nic. Vleughels, in his notes to Dolci.

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 365

Mengs and his follower Ratti make Correggio
in Modena the pupil of Franc. Bianchi Ferrari,
and in Mantoua of Andr. Mantegna, without
vouchers of sufficient authenticity for either:
the passage quoted by Vedriani from the chro-
nicle of Lancillotto, an historian contemporary
with Correggio, is an interpolation ; and Man-
tegna, who died in 1505, could not have been
the master of a boy who at that time was
scarcely in his twelfth year.

Some supposed pictures of Correggio at Man-
toua, in the manner of Mantegna, may have
given rise to this opinion. An imitation of
that style is visible in some whose originality
has never been disputed : such as in the St.
Cecilia of the Palace Borghese, and a piece in
his first manner of the Gallery at Dresden.

Father Maurizio Zapata, a friar of Casino,
in a MS. quoted by Tiraboschi, affirms that
the two uncles of Parmegianino, Michele and
Pier Stario Mazzuoli, were the masters of Cor-
reggio,— a supposition without foundation ; it
is more probable, though not certain, that he
gained the first elements from Lorenzo Allegri
his uncle, and not, as the vulgar opinion states,
his grandfather.

366 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

Equal doubts prevail on his skill and power
of execution in architecture and plastic : the
common opinion is, that for this he was
beholden to Antonio Begarelli. Scannelli,
Resta, and Vedriani, pretend that Correggio,
terrified by the enormous mass and variety of
figures to be seen foreshortened from below
in the cupola of the Domo at Parma, had the
whole modelled by Begarelli, and thus escaped
from the difficulty, correct, and with applause.
They likewise tell in Parma, that by occasion of
some solemn funeral, many of those models were
found on the cornices of the cupola, and consi-
dered as the works of Begarelli: hence they
pretend that Correggio was his regular pupil,
and as such finished those three statues which
a tradition as vague as silly has placed to his
account in Begarelli's celebrated composition of
the Deposition from the Cross in the church of
St. Margareta.

That either Correggio himself or Begarelli
made models for the cupola admits no doubt,
the necessity of such a process is evident from
the nature and the perfection of the work ; but
there is surely none to conclude from it to that
of a formal apprenticeship in sculpture. He
who had arrived at the power of painting the

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 367

cupola at Parma, may without rashness be sup-
posed to have possessed that of making for his
own use small models of clay, without the in-
structions of a master, especially in an age when
painting, sculpture, and architecture frequently
met in the same artist ; and, as we have else-
where* observed, when sketching in clay was a
practice familiar to those of Lombardy.

Correggio's pretended journey to Rome is
another point in dispute : two writers of his
century, Ortensio Landi and Vasari, reject it.
The first saysf Correggio died young without
having been able to visit Rome; the second
affirms that Antonio had a genius which
wanted nothing but acquaintance with Rome
to perform miracles. Padre Resta, a great
collector of Correggio's works, was the first
who opposed their authority4 He pretends,
in some writing of his own, to have adduced
twelve proofs of Correggio's having twice visited
Rome, viz. in 1520 and 1530. But the allega-
tions of a crafty monk, a dealer in drawings
and pictures, cannot weigh against authorities
like those of Vasari and Landi. His conjectures
rest partly on some supposed drawings of Cor-

* Garofalo. f Catalog'hi, p. 498.

I Indice del Pam. de' Pittori, p. 21.

368 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

reggio's in his possession, from the Loggie of
the Vatican, and partly on an imaginary jour-
ney, in which, he tells us, Correggio traversed
Italy incognito, and made everywhere copies,
which all had the good luck to fall into his own
reverend hands. These lures, held out to en-
snare the ignorant and wealthy, he palliated by
a pretended plan of raising a monument to the
memory of the immortal artist at Correggio, the
expenses of which were to be defrayed by the
produce of his stock in hand. He had even
face enough to solicit from that town an attes-
tation that their citizen had travelled as a jour-
neyman painter.

Mengs, and of course Batti, embrace the
same opinion. Mengs draws his conclusion
from the difference between Correggio's first
and second style, which he considers less as the
imperceptible progress of art than as the imme-
diate effect of the works of Raphael and Michel
Agnolo. Mengs was probably seduced to be-
lieve in this visionary journey on the authority
of Winkelmann, who pretended to have disco-
vered, in the museum of Cardinal Albani, some
designs after the antique by Mantegna, Correg-
gio's reputed master. Bracci, in opposition,

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 369

asserts that Allegri was beholden to none but
himself for his acquirements, and appeals to a
letter of Annibale Carracei, who says that Cor-
reggio found in himself those materials for
which the rest were obliged to extraneous help.
The words of Carracci, however, with all due
homage to the genius of Correggio and the
originality of his style, appear to refer rather to
invention and the poetic, than to the executive
part of his works.

If there be any solidity in the observation of
Mengs on Correggio's first manner, as a mix-
ture of Pietro Perugino's and Leonardo's style,
and of course not very different from Raphael's,
how comes it that in the works of his second
and best manner all resemblance to either, and
consequently to Raphael, disappears ? The
simplicity of Raphael's forms is little beholden
to that contrast and those foreshortenings which
are the element of Correggio's style. Raphael
sacrificed all to the subject and expression ; Cor-
reggio, in an artificial medium, sacrifices all to
the air of things and harmony. Raphael speaks
to our heart ; Correggio insinuates himself into
our affections by charming our senses. The es-
sence of Raphael's beauty is dignity of mind ;

VOL. III. 2 B

370 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

petulant ndweti that of Correggio's. Raphael's
grace is founded on propriety ; Correggio's
on convenience and the harmony of the whole.
The light of Raphael is simple daylight ; that
of Correggio artificial splendour. In short, the
history of artists scarcely furnishes characteris-
tics more opposite than what discriminate these
two. And though it may appear a paradox to
superficial observation, were it necessary to find
an object of imitation for Allegri's second and
best style, the artificial medium, the breadth of
manner and mellowness of transition, with the
enormous forms and foreshortenings of Michel
Angelo, though adopted by so different a
mind, from as different motives, for an end still
more different, will be found to be much more
congenial with his principles of seeing and exe-
cuting, than the style of any preceding or coeta-
neous period.

The authenticity of Correggio's celebrated
" Anch' io son Pittore," is less affected by the
improbability of his journey to Rome, than by
its own legendary weakness : though not at Mo-
dena or Parma, for there were no pictures of
Raphael in either place during Antonio's life,
he might have seen the St. Cecilia at Bologna ;

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 371

and if the story be true, perhaps no large picture
of that master that we are acquainted with
could furnish him with equal matter of exulta-
tion. He was less made to sympathize with
the celestial trance of the heroine, the intense
meditation of the Apostles, and the sainted
grace of the Magdalen, than to be disgusted by
a parallelism of the whole which borders on
primitive apposition, by the total neglect of
what is called picturesque, the absence of chiar-
oscuro, the unharmonious colour, and dry
severity of execution.

The next point is to fix the dates of Cor-
reggio's works ; the certain, the probable, the
conjectural.

The theatre of Correggio's first essay sin art
is supposed to have been his native place
and the palace of its princes ; but that palace
perished with whatever it might contain.
From a document in the parochial archive of
Correggio, of 1514, it appears that in the same
year he painted an altar-piece for one hundred
zechini, a considerable price for a young man
of twenty. This picture was in the church of
the Minorites, where it remained till 1638, when
a copy was unawares put into the place of the

2 B 2

372 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

original. The citizens alarmed, in vain made
representations to Annibale Molza, their go-
vernor ; it even appears from a letter of his to
the Court of Modena, in whose name he govern-
ed, that, many years before, two other pieces
of Antonio had been removed from the same
chapel by order of Don Siro, the last prince
of the House of Correggio ; those represented
a St. John and a St. Bartholomew ; the sub-
ject of the altar-piece was the Madonna with
the child, Joseph and St. Francis.

The fraternity of the Hospital della Miseri-
cordia possessed likewise an altar-piece of An-
tonio. The centre piece represented the Deity
of the Father ; the two wings, St. John and
Bartholomew. According to a contract which
still remains in the archives, it was estimated by
a painter of Novellara, Jacopo Borboni, at three
hundred ducats, bought for Don Siro in 1613,
and a copy put in its place. The originals of
all these pictures are lost.

The picture with the Madonna and child on
a throne, St. John the Baptist, the Sts. Catha-
rina, Francis, and Antony, inscribed " Anto-
nius de Allegris P." now in the gallery of
Dresden, was, as Tiraboschi correctly supposes,
an altar-piece in the church of St. Nicolas of

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 373

the Minorites, at Carpi : a copy of it by Are-
tusi, is at Mantoua. To this period, and per-
haps even an earlier one, belongs the St.
Cecilia of the Borghese palace. The general
style of this picture is dry and hard, and the
draperies in Mantegna's taste ; but the light
which proceeds from a glory of angels, and im-
perceptibly expands itself over the whole, is a
characteristic too decisive to leave any doubt
of its originality.

In the gallery of Count Briihl was the Wed-
ding (sposalizio) of St. Catharine, with the
following inscription on the back : — " Laus
Deo : per Donna Metilde d' Este Antonio
Lieto da Correggio fece il presente quadro
per sua divozione, anno 1517." This inscription
appears, however, suspicious, as at that time
there was no princess of that name at the
court of Ferrara. At the purchase of the
principal pictures in the Modenese gallery by
Augustus III. this was presented by the Duke
to Count Briihl ; from him it went to the Im-
perial Gallery at Petersburg. A similar one
was in the collection of Capo di Monte at
Naples, and Mengs considers both as originals.
Copies of merit by Gabbiani and Volterrano
are in England and Toscana. It is singular

374 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

that an artist, than whom none had more
scholars and copyists, and whose short life was
occupied by the most important works, should
be supposed to have painted so many dupli-
cates, and that a set of men, as impudent as
ignorant, should meet with dupes as credulous
as wealthy, eager to purchase their trash at
enormous prices, in the face of the few legiti-
mate originals.

In 1519, Antonio went to Parma, and soon
after his arrival is said to have painted a room
in the Nunnery of St. Paul. The authenticity
of this work, placed within the clausure of the
convent and consequently inaccessible, has been
recently disputed, and the author of a certain
dialogue even attempts to prove the whole a
fable. To ascertain the fact, a special licence
to visit the place was obtained for some painters
and architects of note, and on their declaring
the paintings one of Correggio's best works,
Don Ferdinando de Bourbon, with some of the
courtiers and Padre Iveneo AfFo, followed to
inspect it. What he tells us of monastic con-
stitution in those times accounts for the ad-
mission of so profane an ornament in such a
place ; for in the beginning of the sixteenth cen-

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 375

tury, clausure was yet unknown to nunneries ;
abbesses were elected for life, their power over
the revenue of the Convent was uncontrolled,
their style of life magnificent, and their poli-
tical influence not inconsiderable. Such was
the situation of nunneries when Donna Gio-
vanna da Piacenza, descended from an eminent
family at Parma, the new-elected abbess of St.
Paul's, ordered two saloons of her elegant
apartments to be decorated with paintings ; one
by Correggio, and another, as it is conjectured,
either by Alessandro Araldi of Parma, or Cris-
toforo Casella, called Temperello. Padre Affo
proves that Correggio must have painted his
apartment before 1520, immediately after his
arrival at Parma, and four or five years before
the introduction of the clausure. Of a work so
singular and questionable, it will not appear
superfluous to repeat some of the most striking
outlines from his account : — " The chimney-
piece represents Diana returned from the chase,
to whom an infant Amor offers the head of a
new-slain stag ; the ceiling is vaulted, raised in
arches over sixteen lunettes ; four on each side
of the walls ; the paintings are raised about an
ell from the floor, and form a series of mytho-

376 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

logic and allegoric figures, which breathe the
simplicity, the suavity, and the decorum of
Art's golden age. Of these the three Graces
naked, in three different attitudes, offer a
charming study of female beauty, and a strik-
ing contrast with the Parcee placed opposite ;
the most singular subject is a naked female
figure, suspended by a cord from the sky,
with her hands tied over her head — her body
extended by two golden anvils fastened with
chains to her feet, floating in the attitude of
which the Homeric Jupiter reminds his Juno.*
The high-arched roof embowers the whole with
luxuriant verdure and fruit, and is divided into
sixteen large ovals, overhung with festoons of
tendrils, vine-leaves, and grapes, between which
appear groups of infant Amorini, above the
size of children, gamboling in various pic-
turesque though not immodest attitudes."

Neither the pretended inaccessibility of place,
nor the veil thrown by monastic austerity over
the profaneness of the subject, can sufficiently
account for the silence of tradition, and the ob-

Xpu<reov, appijxTOv. — Ilias, xv. 19.

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 377

scurity in which this work was suffered to linger
for nearly three centuries. Supposing it, oh the
authorities adduced, to be the legitimate pro-
duce of Correggio, and considering its affinity
to the ornamental parts of the Loggie in the
Vatican, it affords a stronger argument of
Allegri's having seen Rome, studied the an-
tique, and imitated Raphael, than any of those
that have been adduced by Mengs, who (with
his commentator D'Azara,) appears to have
been totally uninformed of it, notwithstanding
his familiarity at Parma with every work of
Correggio, his perseverance of inquiry and
eager pursuit of whatever related to his idol,
the influence he enjoyed at Court, and unlimit-
ed access to every place that might be sup-
posed to contain or hide some work of art.

Soon after his arrival at Parma, Antonio pro-
bably received the commission of the celebrated
cupola of S. Giovanni, which he completed in
1524, as appears from an acquittance for the
last payment subscribed ' Antonio Lieto,' still
existing at Parma.

In the cupola he represented the Ascension of
the Saviour, with the Apostles, the Madonna,
&c. and the Coronation of the Virgin on the

378 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

tribune of the principal altar, whose enlarge-
ment in 1584 occasioned, with the destruction
of the choir, that of the painting : a few frag-
ments escaped ; an exact copy had, however,
been provided before, by Annibale Carracci,
from which it was repainted on the same place
by Aretusi. The same church preserved two
pictures in oil of Correggio, the martyrdom of
St. Placidus and Flavia, and Christ taken from
the cross on the lap of his mother ; both are
now (1802) in the collection of the Louvre.

The success of the cupola of S. Giovanni
encouraged the inspectors of the Domo to com-
mit the decoration of theirs to the same mas-
ter. Of their contract with him, the original
still remains in the archive of their chapter ;
it was concluded in 1522, and amounted to
about one thousand zecchini, no inconsiderable
sum for those times, and alone sufficient
to do away the silly tradition of the artist's
mendicity. The decorations of the chapel,
next to the cupola, were distributed among
three of the best Parmesan painters at that
time, Parmegianino, Franc. Maria Rondani,
and Michael Angelo Anselmi. From all the
papers hitherto found, it appears, however, that

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 379

Correggio did not actually begin to paint the
cupola before 1526 : it represents the Ascen-
sion of the Virgin, and without recurring to
an individual verdict, has received the sanction
of ages, as the most sublime in its kind, of all
that were produced before and after it ; a work
without a rival, though now dimmed with
smoke, and in decay by time. These were the
two first cupolas painted entire, all former ones
being painted in compartments. Nothing occurs
to make us surmise that Correggio had partners
of his labour in these two works ; for Lattanzio
Gambara of Brescia, mentioned by Rossi as his
assistant in the Domo, was born eight years
after Correggio's death.

During the progress of these two great works,
Correggio produced others of inferior size but
equal excellence; the principal of which are
the two votive pictures of St. Jerome, and La
Notte. That of St. Jerome represents the
Saint offering his Translation to the Infant
Christ, who is seated in his Mother's lap,
with St. Magdalen reclining on and kissing
his feet, and flanked by Angels. The com-
mission for this picture is said to have been
given in 1523, by Donna Briseide Colla, the

380 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

widow of Orazio or Ottaviano Bergonzi of
Parma, who in 1528 gave it as a votive offer-
ing to the church of S. Antonio del Fuoco.
The price agreed on, was 400 lire ; 40,000 ducats
were offered for it afterwards by the King of
Portugal ; and the then Abbot of the convent
was on the point of concluding the bargain,
when the citizens of Parma, to prevent the
loss, applied to the Infante Don Philippo.
He ordered it in 1749 to be transposed from
S. Antonio to the Domo ; there it remained
till 1756, when, on the application of a French
painter, expelled by the Canons for his attempt
to trace it, the Prince had it transferred under
an escort of twenty-four grenadiers to Colorno ;
and from thence to the newly instituted aca-
demy, where it remained till 1797, and now,
(1802,) with other transported works of Art,
glitters among the spoils of the Louvre.

The second picture known by the name of
" La Notte," represents the birthnight of the
Saviour, and was the commission of Alberto
Pratonieri, as appears from a writing dated in
1522, though it was not finished till 1527
according to Mengs, or 1530 as Fiorillo sur-
mised, when it was dedicated in the Chapel

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 381

Pratonieri of S. Prospero at Reggio : from
whence, 1640, it was carried to the gallery of
Modena, by order of Duke Francesco I. and
from thence at length to that of Dresden.

A chapel in the church del S. Sepolcro
at Parma, possessed formerly the altar-piece
known by the name of " La Madonna della
Scodella," because the Virgin, represented on her
flight to Egypt, holds a wooden bowl in her
hand : a figure, whom Mengs fancies the Genius
of the Fountain, pours water into it ; and in
the back- ground an angel, whose action and
expression he considers as too graceful for the
business, ties up the ass. This picture, he tells us,
was, thirteen years before the date in which he
wrote, nearly swept out of the panel by the bar-
barous wash of a Spanish journeyman painter
who had obtained permission to copy it. It
is now in the Louvre, and how much of its
present florid colour is legitimate, must be
left to the decision of the committee " de la
Restoration.''

If the most sublime degree of expression be
entitled to the right of originality, Mengs must
be followed in his decision on the Ecce Homo,
formerly in the Palace Colonna, without much

382 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

anxiety whether it be the same that belonged
to the family of Prati at Parma, or that which
Agostino Carracci engraved.

The Madonna seated beneath a palm-tree,
bending in somnolently pensive contemplation
over the Infant on her lap, watched by an
Angel above her, and attended by a Leveret,
known by the name of " La Zingarella" or
the Egyptian, from the sash round her head,
formerly in the gallery of Parma, and now
at Naples in that of Capo di Monte, has
suffered so much from a modern hand, that
little of the master remains but the conception.
Nearly a duplicate of it was presented by
Cardinal Alessandro Albani to king Augustus
of Poland ; but Mengs hesitates to pronounce
it an original.

In the period of these, about 1530, we may
probably place the two celebrated pictures of
Leda and Danae, than which no modern works
of art have suffered more from accident and
wanton or bigoted barbarity, or been tossed
about by more contradictory tradition.

If the subject that takes its name from Leda
be, as Mengs says, rather an allegory than a
fable, it alludes to what would aggravate even

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 383

the story of that mistress of Jupiter. The cen-
tral figure represents a female seated on the
verge of a rivulet with a swan between her
thighs, who attempts to insinuate his bill into
her lips ; but at her side, and deeper in the
water, is a tender girl, who with an air of inno-
cence playfully struggles to defend herself from
the attacks of another swimming swan ; farther
on, a girl more grown up to woman, gazes,
whilst a female servant dresses her, with an air
of satiate pleasure after a swan on the wing,
that seems just to have left her; at some dis-
tance appears half a figure of an aged woman,
draped, and with looks of regret. On the other
side of the principal group, the graceful form
of a full-grown Amor strikes the lyre, and two
Amorini contrive to wind some horn instru-
ments. The scene of all this is a charming
grove on the brink of a pellucid lake.

The second picture represents the daughter
of Acrisius, but with poetic spirit. The virgin
gracefully reclines on her bed ; a full-grown
Cupid, perhaps a Hymen, lifts with one hand
the border of the sheet on her lap that receives
the celestial shower, whilst his other presents
the mystic drops to her enchanted glance : two

384 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

Amorini at the foot of the bed try on a touch-
stone, that, one of the golden drops, this, the
point of an arrow, and he, says Mengs, has
a vigour of character much superior to the
other, plainly to express, that Love proceeds
from the arrow, and its ruin from gold; he
likewise finds that the head and head-dress of
Danae are imitated from those of the Medicean
Venus.

Vasari, and after him Mengs with others,
tell that in 1530, Federigo Gonzaga, then
created Duke of Mantoua, intended to present
Charles the Fifth at the ceremonial of his coro-
nation with two pictures worthy of him, and
in the choice of artists gave the preference to
Correggio. From this, a correct inference is
drawn against that pretended obscurity in
which Correggio is said to have lingered ; for
at that time Giulio Romano lived at the Court
of Mantoua, and Tizian was in the service of
the Emperor. Vasari is silent on the date of
the pictures, but he affirms that, at their sight,
Giulio Romano declared he had never seen a
style of colour approaching theirs. So far all
seems correct ; but that they were actually pre-
sented to Charles, sent to Prague, and after the

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 335

sacking of that city by Gustavus Adolpbus, car-
ried to Stockholm, is unproved or erroneous. If
it is not likely that the Emperor, instead of
sending them to Madrid, the darling depository
of his other works of art, should have sent them
into a kind of exile to Prague, it is an error
to pretend they were removed from thence by
Gustavus Adolphus, who was slain at Lutzen
sixteen years before the Swedes sacked that city,
1648. The truth is, that these pictures were
not given to the Emperor, but placed in his
own gallery by the Duke, where they remained
till 16*30, when the Imperial General Colalto
stormed Mantoua, sacked it, deprived it of
its cabinet of treasures, of the celebrated vase
since possessed by the House of Brunswick,
and transmitted its beautiful collection of pic-
tures to Prague, from whence by the event of
war we have mentioned, they became the pro-
perty of Queen Christina, at whose abdication,
when the whole was packing up for Rome,
the two pictures in question were discovered
in the royal stables, where they had served as
window-blinds, mutilated and despised. Whe-
ther so unaccountable a neglect be imputable to
the Queen's want of taste, as Tessin asserts, or to
VOL. in. 2 c

386 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

accident, or, what is most unlikely, to her mo-
desty, cannot now be decided. They were re-
paired, and at her demise left to Cardinal Az-
zolini, of whose heirs they were purchased by
Don Livio Odescalchi, and by him left to the
Duke of Bracciano, were sold to the Regent of
France, whose son, from a whim of bigotry,
had the picture of the Leda cut to pieces in his
own presence, in which state Charles Coypel
requested and obtained it for his private study.
At his death it was vamped up, repieced, dis-
posed of by auction, and, at a high price, sold
to the King of Prussia. What became of the
Danae is matter of dispute.*

The picture of lo embraced by Jupiter, in-
bosomed in clouds, by a silent water in which a
stag quenches his thirst, was their companion :
a work to which the most lavish fame has done
no justice, and beyond which no fancy ever
soared. The lo shared a still more barbarous
fate. Not content with mangling her like the
Leda, the bigot prince burnt her head ; and,
were it not for the beautiful duplicate which
fortune preserved in the Gallery of Vienna,f we

* Du Change. Copy of the Leda in the Colonna.
f In the palace Godolphin.

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 387

should be reduced to guess at Correggio in the
fragments at Sans Souci, and the prints of Sur-
regue and Bartolozzi. The Imperial Gallery
possesses, likewise, the Rape of Ganymede, by
Correggio, of the same size with the lo ; a
Mountain Scene ; a full-grown Cupid, seen from
behind, with his head turned to the spectator,
shaping a bow, accompanied by a laughing and
a weeping infant, in struggling attitudes, which
was likewise sold by the heirs of Don Livio
Odescalchi, has equally exercised opinion. Va-
sari, Tassoni, Du Bois, de St. Gelais, &c. ascribe
it to Parmegiano ; Mengs and Fiorillo, who
judge from the duplicate at Vienna, with
greater probability give it to Correggio. The
contrast of the attitudes is produced more by
naivete* than affectation, the lines have more
simplicity than the style of Mazzuola admitted
of, and the colour more breadth. The concep-
tion of the whole, whether the infants be the
symbols of successful and unsuccessful love, or
denote the dangers of love, or be simply chil-
dren, though not beyond the fancy of Par-
megiano, has more the air of a Correggiesque
conceit. Numberless copies were made after it,
2 c 2

388 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

some by Parmegiano himself, whose handling
may be recognized in the picture at Paris.

We are now arrived at those works of Cor-
reggio's which cannot be fixed to a certain pe-
riod. Such are probably, in the Gallery of
Dresden, those known under the names of S.
Giorgio and S. Sebastian o, of both of which
Mengs gives a circumstantial account. He is,
however, mistaken when he imagines the last
to have been voted by the City of Modena after
a plague : the commission of it was given by
the fraternity of St. Sebastian.

The half-length portrait, formerly known at
Modena as that of Correggio's Physician, be-
longs to the same doubtful period. Mengs,
though he praises the colour and the impasto of
it, is inclined to think it painted about the
time of his first Cupola, when he had not yet
sufficiently studied detail of forms and variety
of tints. The style resembles that of Giorgione,
but is less vivid, though of equal pasto, and
somewhat more limpid.

The last, though not least celebrated piece of
Antonio in this Gallery, is the small Meditating
Magdalena : of the pictures mentioned, it is the

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 389

only one painted on copper, the rest are on
panel. It is little more than a palm in height,
and not quite a palm and a half long. It was,
with other small pictures, stolen out of the Gal-
lery in 1788, but soon recovered. The purchase
price, according to Mengs, when the Gallery
was disposed of, was 27,000 Roman crowns. It
has been copied by Albani, and, if we believe
Richardson, by Tizian.

Besides the spoils of Parma, there is now
(1802) in the Gallery of the Louvre, from the
former collection of Versailles, a picture repre-
senting in half-length figures of natural size the
Wedding of St. Catherine, with a St. Sebastian,
and their Martyrdom in the distance. It does
not appear that Mengs ever saw more than some
good copy of it, or the prints engraved from it,
else his praise would have probably been nearer
to astonishment than admiration ; and though
none would dare to repeat what he ventures to
say of the Magdalen's head in the St. Jerome,
it might safely be asserted, that perhaps no
other picture can boast to have united in the
same degree the tints of Tizian, the glow and
impasto of Giorgione, and the breadth of Guido,

390 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

with that bloom of hue and suavity of manner
peculiar to Correggio.

This divine performance was presented by
Cardinal Barberino to Cardinal Mazarin, with
two others painted in water colours on canvass,
representing in allegoric figures the heroism of
Virtue and the debasement of Vice. The first,
in physiognomy and attitudes, abounds in what
is commonly called the grace of Correggio ; the
second in picturesque energy and expression :
they are likewise placed among the collections
of the Louvre. An unfinished repetition of
the first in the House Doria Panfili at Rome,
is adduced by Mengs as a proof of Correggio's
intelligence in sketching, and the superiority
of his principle in the progress of a work.

Of two pictures in the Cabinet at Madrid,
the principal is that of Christ praying in the
Garden, with an Angel on high pointing to a
Cross and a Crown of Thorns on the ground,
scarcely discernible. The open but drooping
arms of the Saviour express his entire resigna-
tion to the will of his Father. The most poetic
singularity of this picture is its chiaroscuro :
Christ receives his light from Heaven, the An-
gel from Christ : at a distance on lower ground,

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 391

and nearly evanescent, are the three Disciples
in graceful and picturesque attitudes, and farther
off, the approaching host of captors. At first
sight, the whole seems to be divided into two
masses only of light and darkness, but on in-
spection, the ambient medium and the more
and less of distinctness in the objects as they
approach the light or recede from it, is divinely
expressed. There is a tale, which even Lo-
mazzo and Scanelli repeat, that Correggio
parted with this picture to his apothecary for
four scudi, which he owed him ; that after-
wards it was sold for five hundred crowns to
Pirrho Count Visconti, who resold it for seven
hundred and fifty gold doubloons, to the Mar-
chese Camarena, Governor of Milan, by whom
it was bought in commission for Philip the
Fourth. Every day discovers some copy, or, if
you choose to believe those who wish to dispose
of them, some duplicate or triplicate of this
picture. Padre Resta possessed not one, but
four, all of which he insisted on being believed
in as originals : one on copper, another on
wood, which Lelio Or si was said to have copied
on canvass ; a third, likewise on panel but
somewhat worm-eaten, disposed of to Mon-

392 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

signer Marchetti, and a fourth again on copper.
Some of these are probably in England.

The companion of this picture is the Ma-
donna dressing the Infant, with Joseph planing
a board in the back-ground ; a performance
though inferior in style to the former, not less
original from the pentimenti still discoverable
in the two principal figures.

The Duke of Alba possesses of Correggio, in
figures somewhat less than Nature, Mercury
teaching Cupid to read in the presence of Venus.
Venus has the singular attribute of wings, and
of a bow in her left hand ; and Mengs persuades
himself to discover in her forms a reminiscence
of an imitation of the Apollino, formerly in
the Villa Medici at Rome. The characteristic
excellence of the execution, and an evident
pentimento in the arm of the Mercury, leave no
doubt of its having a better claim to originality
than the duplicates in France and Germany.
It formerly made part of the collection of
Charles the First, and Sandrart saw it in the
Palace of Whitehall, from whence it was pur-
chased by an ancestor of the Duke of Alba.

Not to waste time on conjectural works, we
finish this list with a picture formerly in the

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 393

house Barberini, now supposed to be in Eng-
land : it is painted on panel, and represents from
the narrative of S. Marc, the young man who fol-
lowed our Saviour at the moment of his capti-
vity, but fled on being laid hold of, and left his
garment in the hands of the captors. Mengs
describes a duplicate of this picture, painted on
canvass, at his time in the hands of an English-
man at Rome, and though, in his opinion, only
the study for the other, in the principal parts,
especially the figure of the youth, highly finish-
ed : his expression, form and attitude, remind
the critic so strongly of the same in the eldest
son of the Laocoon, that he is persuaded they
are an imitation, though in a style more con-
sonant with Correggio's manner.

The cause and circumstances of his death we
are not acquainted with, since the idle tale has
been discarded which Vasari tells, of his perish-
ing in consequence of having carried home a
load of sixty scudi in copper, which he had re-
ceived in payment at Parma. He who consi-
ders what strength would be required to carry
sixty crowns in quattrini, will find its confuta-
tion in the tale itself ; let it be added that the
extreme heat w,hich is said to have aggravated

394 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

the fatigue, and accelerated his death, is, even
in Italy, not coincident with the season in which
he must have taken the journey,* as he died
on the fifth of March. The magnificence and
number of his commissions ; the deference paid
to his powers in the face of rival artists, by the
very patrons of those men, or societies, that
might have saved expense by admitting concur-
rence ; the handsome, though not quite metro-
politan prices, which he received, and what
Mengs has observed, the expensive goodness of
his colours, of his panels, and canvasses — make
it not only extremely improbable that he should
have lived in the depressed circumstances, to
which vulgar tradition has sunk him ; but add
an air of truth to the opinion of those who
thought him, if not opulent, yet nearer allied
to affluence than want,

Correggio was a monument without a tomb ;
but it appears strange that a century and a half
should have elapsed before the thought of
erecting him one occurred to the Senate and
citizens of his native place, and then was suf-

* In the obituary of the Franciscans at Correggio we read,
" A di 5 Marzo 1534 mori Maestro Antonio Allegri Dipintore
e fu sepolto a 6 detto in S. Francesco sotto il Portico."

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 395

fered to evaporate in ineffectual projects. The
boastful intentions of Padre Resta proved
equally nugatory : the tombstone set and in-
scribed by Girolamo Conti still remains a soli-
tary offering to his genius :

D. O. M.

Antonio. Allegri. Civi.

Vulgo. II Correggio.
Arte. Picturse. Habitu. Probitatis.

Eximio.

Monum. Hoc. Posuit.

Hier. Conti. Concivis.

Siccine, Separas. Amara. Mors.

Obiit. Anno. jEtatis. XL. Sal. MDXXXIV.

On such a face as Correggio's, physiognomy
might have established principles or drawn some
inferences from it, had not a perverse destiny
left us as ignorant of it, as of his complexion,
stature, character, and habits. Vasari's exer-
tions to obtain a portrait of him were not only
unsuccessful, but hopeless; and the profile
which is shown in the dome of Parma as his,
becomes inadmissible from the very name of
the artist to whom it is ascribed.* The head
which found its way into the third and every
following edition of Vasari, has certainly no-

* Lattanzio Gambara.

396 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

thing repugnant with the notions we may form
of his character, but age. Meditation, simpli-
city, serenity, compose it. It is said to have
been copied from a picture not quite finished,
which appears to have the touch of Correggio,
and came from Sicily to Naples. He is repre-
sented contemplating a design, the original of
which, report has placed at Vienna with Prince
Esterhazy. The portrait which is at Turin, in
the "Vigna della Regina," engraved by Val-
perga, with the epigraph, in part hid by the
frame, but read by Lanzi " Antonius Cor-
rigius f." (i. e. fecit) though by some believed
genuine, appears spurious from this very cir-
cumstance, the large character of the letters
and the space they occupy ; a manner of writ-
ing often used to indicate the person painted,
never the painter. Another portrait, which
from Genoua is said to have been carried to
England, with the indorsed inscription " Dosso
Dossi dipinse questo ritratto di Antonio da Cor-
reggio," fronts the Memorie of Ratti. With-
out examining the authenticity of this inscrip-
tion, it is sufficient to observe, that Antonio da
Correggio is likewise the name of Antonio Ber-
nieri, a celebrated miniature painter, and fel-

THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA. 39?

low citizen of Allegri, whose date coincides
with that of Dosso, and whom there will be
occasion to mention again.

Of Correggio's numerous pretending imita-
tors, Lodovico Carracci appears to be the only
one who penetrated his principle. The axiom,
that the less the traces appear of the means by
which a work has been produced, the more it
resembles the operations of Nature, is not an
axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art.
The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn
twilight ; that tone of devotion and cloistered
meditation, which Lodovico Carracci spread
over his works, could arise only from the con-
templation of some preceding style, analogous
to his own feelings and its comparison with
Nature ; and where could that be met with in a
degree equal to what he found in the infinite
unity and variety of Correggio's effusions?
They inspired his frescoes in the cloisters of
S. Michele in Bosco : the foreshortenings of the
muscular labourers at the hermitage, and of
the ponderous demon that mocks their toil ; the
warlike splendour in the Homage of Totila ; the
Nocturnal Conflagration of Monte Casino ; the
wild graces of deranged beauty, and the insi-

398 THE SCHOOL OF MANTOUA.

dious charms of the sister nymphs in the gar-
den scene, equally proclaim the pupil of Cor-
reggio.

His triumph in oil is the altar-piece of St.
John preaching in a chapel of the Certosa at
Bologna, whose lights seem embrowned by a
golden veil, and the shadowy gleam of Valom-
brosa ; though he sometimes indulged in tones
austere, pronounced, and hardy : such is the
Flagellation of Christ in the same church, whose
tremendous depth of flesh-tints contrasts the
open wide-expanded sky, and less conveys
than dashes its terrors on the astonished sense.

THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA.

THREE epochs divide the history of painting
in Bologna and the neighbouring districts. The
first is from its restoration to the time of Fran-
cesco Raibolini, or Francia ; the second reaches
from him to the Carracci, when it attained its
height, and gradually decayed in the variety of
deviations which mark the third.

Bologna, at an early period of the fifth cen-
tury, appears to have been considered as a
nursery of sciences and arts ; the foundation of
its University is dated up to Petronius, its
bishop at that period ; afterwards, under the
successive invasions of barbarians, when the
alternate prey of clerical and secular rapacity,
as a powerful republic, or oppressed by civic
usurpation, and at last reduced to a Papal pro-

400 THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA.

vince, Bologna never lost its predilection for
sciences and arts.

Of the progress made in painting anterior to
the time of Cimabue, some monumental relics
still remain, though by far the greater part
were ignorantly destroyed at the beginning of
the last century. Some that escaped the white-
washer's hand are ascribed to an artist who
marked his work with the letters P. F. Of
these, one which represents a Maria, is pre-
served in the Church della Baron cella, and was
done about 1120. Two others are in the
Basilica of S. Stephano.

Baldi, a collector of antique pictures, in a
MS. quoted by Malvasia, mentions some of
Guido da Bologna, painted in 1178 and 1180,
and others executed by Ventura da Bononia in
1197. Of this last something still remains,
especially one picture with the date 1217, and
the inscription Ventura pinsit : and the name of
Urso, or Ursone, a contemporary of Guido da
Siena, is found on a picture inscribed Urso f.
1226 ; and some others ascribed to him have
dates of 1242 and 1244. In those times paint-
ing, sculpture, architecture, chasing, were fre-
quently exercised by one man. A certain

THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA. 4QI

Manno, contemporary with Cimabue, is men-
tioned as the painter of a Madonna by Baldi,
and as the sculptor of Pope Bonifazio VIII.
by Ghirardacci, who calls him likewise a gold-
smith. His dates are from 1260 to 1301.
Some remains or rather ruins of these masters
are still visible in the palace Malvezzi.

The age of Giotto and Dante gives Art an
air of greater certainty. Tradition and monu-
ment go hand in hand. Franco of Bologna,
with his supposed master Oderigi of Gubbio,
are celebrated in the poet's poem of the Pur-
gatory. Franco was called to Rome by Boni-
fazio VIII. to decorate the books and missals
of the Vatican library with miniature ; and on
his return to Bologna founded a school which
numbered among its scholars Vitale, Loremo,
Simone, and Jacopo d? Avanzi, whose works,
especially what remains of the two last, make
it probable that Vasari is correct when he
asserts that Franco excelled in large as well as
in miniature painting. Michael Agnolo and
the Carracci are said to have been struck with
the fire of conception and the tone of colour
in the pictures still preserved of Simone and
Jacopo d' Avanzi, at the Madonna di Mezza-

VOL. ITT. 2 D

402 THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA.

ratta, and to have advised a careful restoration
of the decaying parts. Simone, who loved to
paint the crucifix, from the number which he
executed obtained the surname of " de' Croce-
fissi ;" and Jacopo, smitten with the love of
Maria, was marked by the title " dalle Ma-
donne." He excelled, however, in subjects of
a martial kind, if the conflict in the Chapel
of S. Jacopo del Santo at Padova, and the
Capture of Jugurtha, with the Triumph of
Marius, in a saloon at Verona, be his per-
formances : works which excited the wonder
of Mantegna. As he sometimes subscribed
" Jacobus Pauli," it has been surmised that he
was of Venetian extraction, and perhaps the
son and assistant"^ that Paolo who painted
the Ancona of S. Marc.

Of the arstists who at that period painted
in Mezzaratta, Cristoforo, whether of Ferrara,
Modena, or Bologna, for he is claimed by all,
seems to have shared the highest repute. He
had the commission of the principal altar, where
he painted on panel the Madonna with the
Infant between her knees, and some figures
kneeling before her; it still exists, marked
with his name Christofano, 1380. A most

THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA. 4Q3

copious work of his, divided into ten compart-
ments of saints, rudely designed, languid in
colour, but of original style, is preserved among
the fragments of the house Malvezzi.

Lippo di Dalmatio, — who was supposed to
have been a Carmelite, till Bianconi, in Pia-
cenza's edition of Baldinucci, produced proofs
of his wife and family,— came from the school of
Vitale, and from his predilection for the Mother
of Christ acquired, like Jacopo d'Avanzi, the
byname of " Lippo dalle Madonne." There
goes a tale that he gave instruction to Saint
Catherine Vigri, of whom certain miniatures
and an Infant Christ on panel still re-
main. A better union of tints, and some easier
arrangement in the folds of his draperies,
though with a profusion of gold lace, is all
that discriminates him from the crudeness and
exility of the ancient style. Such, however,
was his felicity in the character of Madon-
nas, that they captivated Guido Reni,* who
used to repeat that Lippo, in expressing at
once the majesty, the sanctity, and the mild-
ness of the divine mother, must have been
assisted by a celestial power. Some of these
* Malvasia.

404 THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA.

Madonnas are said to be in oil colours, with
dates of 1376, 1405, and 1407. Guido is
likewise the guarantee of certain frescoes re-
presenting facts of Elia, painted with great
spirit by the same master.

After 1409, the last date of Lippo's pictures*
the School of Bologna somewhat declined, nor
could it be otherwise : no vigorous school ever
sprang from the timid precepts of a portrait
painter, and Dalmatio possessed more of that
than of historic power : this, rather than the
supposed imitation of certain images imported
from Constantinople, was the cause of that in-
significance which consigned, with few excep-
tions, his school and successors to oblivion. Of
Pietro Lianori, Michele di Matteo, Bombo-
logno, Severo and Ercole Bologna, Catherina
di Vigri, Giacopo Ripanda, Marco Zoppo,
time has left little but the names, and of that
little, enough not to regret the loss of what
vanished. Let us not, however, be too fasti-
dious to repeat what tradition has persevered
to report of some ; if Bombologno may be left
to the votaries of the crucifix, and Catherina to
the rubric that saints her, Michele Lambertini
claims the attention of artists for a mellowness

THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA. 4Q5

of tints which Albano judged superior to the
tints of Francia ; Giacopo Ripanda for the dan-
gers which he braved in designing the groups
of the Trajan pillar ;* and Marco Zoppo as no
despicable competitor of Andrea Mantegna, and
the reputed master of Francesco Francia.

Francesco Raibolini, surnamed Francia, born
in 1450, may be considered as the head of the
Bolognese school, because his works appear to
have been framed on that collective principle
which became its leading feature in the sequel,
and was probably the result of the long theory
that preceded his practice, assisted by that
readiness in design which distinguished him
as a goldsmith, chaser,f and die-cutter, profes-

* " Floret item nunc Romae Jacobus Bononiensis, qui
Trajani Columnce picturas omnes ordine delineavit, magna
omnium admiratione, magnoque periculo circum machinis
scandendo." — V. Raphaelis Volaterrani Anthropologia, p.
774. A. ed. 1603. fol.

t " Unum apud modernos reperio, de quo apud antiques
nulla extat memoria, de incisoribus seu sculptoribus in ar-
gento ; quoe sculptura Niellum appellatur. Virum cognosco
in hoc celeberrimum et summum, nomine Franciscum Bono-
niensem, aliter Franza, qui adeo in tarn parvo orbiculo seu
argenti lamina, tot homines, tot animalia, tot montes, arbores,
castra ac tot diversa ratione situque posita figurat seu inci-
dit, quod dictu ac visu mirabile apparet." — Camillo Leonardi,
Speculo Lapidum, lib, iii. c. 2, The

406 THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA.

sions to which he had been trained up from
his infancy, and which he raised to celebrity be-
fore he attained complete manhood.

Francia was fortunate in contemporaries ; the
School of Squarcione had furnished him with
style and form ; the genius of Lionardo da Vin-
ci, with effect and chiaroscuro ; Pietro Vanuc-
chi with arrangement if not composition, and
though not beauty, with amenity of aspect ; and
Bellino with tone, breadth of drapery and co-
lour. Ardour of mind, energy of application and
dexterity, supplied the want of early practice,
and we find him in the palace of Giov. Bentivo-
glio on a par with the most expert Frescanti
con scribed from Ferrara and Modena, and soon
after intrusted with the commission of painting
the altar-piece of his chapel at S. Jacopo, a
work of great subtlety of execution ; though
modestly inscribed " Opus Francia Aurificis,"

The assertion that Niello was unknown to the ancients,
it is unnecessary to refute here. Francia was master of the
mint during the usurpation of the Bentivogli, after their
expulsion by Giulio the Second, and continued to superin-
tend its issue to the Pontificate of Leo. His coins and me-
dals are said by Vasari to equal those of the Milanese Cara-
dosso ; and it is probably for their excellence that he was
looked up to as a god (un Dio) at Bologna.

THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA. 407

and a pledge of that superior style at which he
aimed and in the sequel attained.

If from what has been premised of Bolognese
artists anterior to Cimabue, it is evident that
the germs of art belong to their own soil, their
claim to originality in the progress of style has
been and still is matter of dispute between the
champions of the Tuscan school and those of
their own. The Florentines insist on having
taught the Bolognese, what the Bolognese deny
to have learnt from the Florentines.* As in a
dispute of this kind, candour is often sacrificed
to the fervour of patriotic vanity, and the ob-
stinacy of local attachment, the real state of the
question is better learnt from those monuments
of the fourteenth century, which still remain
scattered over Romagna or collected and more
classically arranged in Bologna itself. Among
all these some specimens will be found evident-
ly Greek, others as evidently Giottesque ; some
in a Venetian style, and not a few in a manner
peculiar to Bologna only. These have a body of

* Auo svelxeov •

6 p,sv ev%slO) TSOIVT a7roS«i/«<,

6 8' otvaivslo, /x>j&ev iAfcrdou.

Ilia*. Lib. xviii. 1. 498.

408 THE SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA.

colour, a taste in perspective, a mode of design
in figures, and a choice of forms and hues in dra-
peries, which no other school practised. From
all which it appears, that if Giotto during his
stay at Bologna raised pupils, and formed imi-
tators, his own school had no influence on, nor
dislodged, that aboriginal one which continued
to disseminate and to improve the principles
imbibed from the antique mosaics and the pain-
ters of miniature.

THE END.

LONDON :
PRINTED P,Y SAMUEL BENTLEY,

Doiset Slict't, Fleet Street.

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