A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools. National Gallery (Great Britain)

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СКАЧАТЬ for further favours and for arrears of pensions. But if he gathered like a beggar, he spent like a prince. There is a story of two cardinals coming to dine at his house. He flung his purse to the steward, and bade him make ready, for "all the world was coming to dine with him." Certain too it is that if he knocked too much at the doors of princes, it was for the sake of his children rather than of himself. At the loss of his wife (when he was fifty-seven) he was "utterly disconsolate," says the letter of a friend. His sister Orsa afterwards kept house for him – "sister, daughter, mother, companion, and steward of his household," so Aretino described her; and it was his daughter Lavinia whom he oftenest loved to paint. She was "the person dearest to him in all the world," and many years after she had died (1560) in childbirth, he described her to Philip II. as "absolute mistress of his soul." A less pleasant light is thrown upon the great painter by his friendship and close association with the infamous Aretino. This curious product of the Renaissance came to Venice in 1527, and with Titian and Jacopo del Sansovino formed "the so-called Triumvirate, which was a kind of Council of Three, having as its raison d'être the mutual furtherance of material interests, and the pursuit of art, love, and pleasure." To Titian's association with Aretino some critics have ascribed the stronger vein of sensuality which is discernible in some of his later works. To the extreme limit, however, of his long life his hand never lost its cunning, nor was the force of imagination abated. He was carried off by the plague, and received even in that time of panic the honour of solemn obsequies in the church of the Frari – "the man as highly favoured," says Vasari, "by fortune as any of his kind had ever been before him." His house at Venice is still shown. It looks across the lagoons to the distant mountains of his early home.

      One of the pictures which mark the advance made by Titian in the art of landscape. Look at the background of some earlier Holy Family – at the "purist" landscape, for instance, of Perugino (288), – and the change will be seen at once – a change from the conventional or ideal to the real and the actual. Titian was one of the first to "relieve the foreground of his landscapes from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded formalism of the early painters, and give a close approximation to the forms of nature in all things; retaining, however, this much of the old system, that the distances were for the most part painted in deep ultramarine blue, the foregrounds in rich green and brown" (Lectures on Architecture and Painting, p. 158). In particular he was the first43 to "apprehend the subduing pathos that comes with eventide" (see Gilbert's Cadore or Titian's Country, p. 33). Titian, says Ruskin (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ii. § 1, ch. vii. § 15), "hardly ever paints sunshine, but a certain opalescent twilight which has as much of human emotion as of imitative truth in it:

      The clouds that gather round the setting sun

      Do take a sober colouring from an eye

      That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."

      5. A SEAPORT AT SUNSET

Claude Lorraine (French: 1600-1682). See 2.

      An instance of false tone (cf. under Cuyp, No. 53). "Many even of the best pictures of Claude must be looked close into to be felt, and lose light every foot that we retire. The smallest of the three Seaports in the National Gallery is valuable and right in tone when we are close to it, but ten yards off it is all brick-dust, offensively and evidently false in its whole hue." Contrast "the perfect and unchanging influence of Turner's picture at any distance. We approach only to follow the sunshine into every cranny of the leafage, and retire only to feel it diffused over the scene, the whole picture glowing like a sun or star at whatever distance we stand, and lighting the air between us and it" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. i. § 20).

      6. DAVID AT THE CAVE OF ADULLAM.44

Claude Lorraine (French: 1600-1682). See 2.

      David, in front of the cave, "longed and said, 'Oh that one would give me to drink of the water of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!' And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines (seen in the valley), and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David" (2 Samuel xxiii. 15, 16). With regard to the landscape, the picture is a good instance at once of Claude's strength and weakness. Thus "the central group of trees is a very noble piece of painting" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. ii. § 8). On the other hand the rocks, both in the left corner and in the right, are highly absurd. "The Claudesque landscape is not, as so commonly supposed, an idealised abstract of the nature about Rome. It is an ultimate condition of the Florentine conventional landscape, more or less softened by reference to nature" (ibid., vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. § 27). So, too, "the brown foreground and rocks are as false as colour can be: first, because there never was such a brown sunlight, for even the sand and cinders (volcanic tufa) about Naples, granting that he had studied from these ugliest of all formations, are, where they are fresh fractured, golden and lustrous in full light, compared to these ideals of crags, and become, like all other rocks, quiet and gray when weathered; and secondly, because no rock that ever nature stained is without its countless breaking tints of varied vegetation" (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 16).

      7, 37. GROUPS OF HEADS

After Correggio. See under 10.

      Copies by Annibale Carracci from Correggio's compositions in the church of S. Giovanni at Parma (Layard's edition of Kugler's Italian School of Painting, ii. 631). These pictures have had an eventful history, and been connected with the fortunes of many sovereigns. They came to the National Gallery from Mr. Angerstein, who bought them from the Orleans collection. They had formerly been in the possession of Queen Christina, having been carried off to Sweden as part of the plunder of Prague when that city was captured by the Swedes in 1648. The pictures collected there by the Emperor Rudolph II. were removed to Stockholm.

      8. A DREAM OF HUMAN LIFE

From a design by Michael Angelo. See 790.

      The naked figure, typical of the human race, and reclining against a slippery globe, – with the world, we may say, before him, – is awakening, at the sound of a trumpet from above from the dream of life to the lasting realities of eternity. It may be the sound of the "last trump" or the call to a "new life" that comes before. Behind his seat are several masks, illustrating the insincerity or duplicity of a world in which "all is vanity"; and around him are visions of the tempting and transitory hopes, fears, and vices of humanity. On the right sits a helmed warrior, moody and discomfited; his arms hang listlessly and his face is unseen – hidden perhaps from the cruelty of War. Above him are battling figures – emblematic of Strife and Contention. A little detached from this group is a son dragging down his parent by the beard – "bringing his grey hair with sorrow to the grave." On the other side sits Jealousy, gnawing a heart; and above are the sordid hands of Avarice clutching a bag of gold. On the left hand Lust and Sorrow are conspicuous; Intemperance raises a huge bottle to his lips; and Gluttony turns a spit (see Landseer's Catalogue of the National Gallery, 1834, p. 41). Thus all around the figure of Human Life there wait —

      The ministers of human fate

      And black Misfortune's baleful train!..

      These shall the fury Passions tear,

      The vultures of the mind,

      Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,

      And shame that sculks behind;

      Or pining Love shall waste their youth,

      Or Jealousy, with rankling tooth,

      That inly gnaws the secret heart;

      And Envy wan, and faded Care,

      Grim-visag'd comfortless Despair,

      And Sorrow's piercing dart.

Gray: Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College.

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