PAINTING
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PAINTING
is chiefly represented by the three Bellini, the last of
whom, Giovanni, is not only one of the most beautiful
of painters, but also one of the most elevated and
recollected. The works of Giorgione are no less poeti-
cally inspired, and his heads of Christ are marvels of
emotion. It may be questioned how Titian can be
charged with irreHgion in his "Assumption", his
Pesaro Madonna, his "Martyrdom of St, Lawrence",
his frescoes in the Santo of Padua, or his " Death of St.
Peter Martyr". In his "Bacchanal" of Madrid and
the "Flora" of the Uffizi we encounter the same prob-
lem presented by Raphael, which then faced all cul-
tured minds. We can scarcely accuse of religious
insincerity^ the author of the "Entombment" and
"Crowning with Thorns" of the Louvre, who after so
many joyous pictures painted as his last testament
and farewell to life the funereal "Pieta" of the Acca-
demia of Venice. The same is true of the other great
Venetians, Palma, Veronese, Bonifazio, Tintoretto,
and the divine Corregio.
But the Church was obliged by harsh criticism to be vigilant with regard to humani.stic extremes. At Florence the work of Fra Bartolommeo or Andrea del Sarto, at Ferrara that of Garofalo, at Brescia that of Moretto or Romanino, at Vercelli that of Gaudenzio Ferrari, at Venice itself that of Lorenzo Lotto, are so many heralds of a "counter-reformation", which be- came definite about 1550, at the time of the Council of Trent, and which derived its origin from Venice. A significant circum.stance was the action of the Inquisi- tion against Veronese for having introduced fanciful figures into his religious pictures. The painter was acquitted, but the art of the Renaissance had received a blow from which it never recovered. It was the period when the pope ordered Daniele di Volterra (Ricciarelli) to clothe decently the too audacious nakedness of his "Last Judgment", when the learned Molanus (Meulen) wrote his work on images, when St. Charles Borromeo and his cousin the cardinal, with their circle of zealous associates, preached a return to an enlightened, serious religion, purified of popular medieval superstitions and recovered from the danger- ous compromise with the external forms of pagan nat- uralism (cf. J. A. Symond's "Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction", I, i-iv). After having exer- cised great toleration the Church was about to take vigorously in hand the direction of ideas. Tintoretto's last works at the Scuola di S. Rocco display a system of symbols as abstract as a stained-glass window of the thirteenth century; painting once more became the handmaid of theology. From Venice itself came the last Byzantine, the strange Greco, the pupil of Titian and Veronese, whose emaciated, sickly, dried-up style is a proti^st against the whole luxuriant ideal of the Renaissance, and who became the founder of Spanish painting.
C. The Baroque School. — The most striking trait of the new school was its unity of style and method. In the fifteenth and even in the six-teenth century there was an endless number of little schools, each town having its own, but in the seventeenth century paint- ing once more became international. A single manner of seeing and thinking predominated and there was no essential difTerence between a Flemish and an Italian or Spanish picture. More than one social or political reason may be advanced for this, e. g., the politi- cal supremacy of Spain and the establishment of the Viceroyalty of Naples, or the cosmopolitanism of the painters. But the only good reason was the existence of a general organization, a universal institute which forced a common direction on all ideas. But the time has gone by when the word baroque was used to dis- parage two centuries of art, as the word Gothic thinly disguised a condemnation. What science is to the modern world the idea of beauty was to sixteenth- century Italy. Thus the lost Grecian ideal was re- stored tlirough Florence and Venice, but the cultiva- XI.— 26
tion of the form without thought for its import was
what dried up and poisoned the school which issued
from Raphael and especially from Michelangelo, the
art of Giulio Romano, Zuccheri, Vasari, and Giusep-
pino. Before the end of the century a strong reaction
set in against this corrupt and empty art. In 1582 the
Carracci founded their academy at Bologna, and at
Rome, about the same time, the independent and
eccentric Caravaggio scandalized the public by brutal
painting roughly borrowed from the lowest reality.
In his "Death of the Blessed Virgin" (c. 1605) now at
the Louvre he did not hesitate to copy a drowned
woman. Nevertheless Caravaggio did much to turn
art once more in the direction of nature and truth.
His "Entombment", at the Vatican, is one of the im-
portant works of modern painting and the manifesta-
tion of a new art.
Thus, of its own volition, art inclined to return to naturalism while religion endeavoured to hold it back. St. Ignatius in his "Spiritual Exercises" indicates the share of sentiment and imagination in the psychology of belief, laying great stress on the "composition of place " and the use of the senses as aids to the imagina- tion with the object of arousing an emotion. It will readily be seen what assistance painting would be to such a system, and that is why the Jesuits restored to art all the importance which the Protestants had taken from it. Naturalism was the necessary result of this spirit, and in this Jesuit art merely resumed the con- stant tradition of Christianity. Nor was this all; the picture should inspire emotion, and the corollary of naturalism was pathos. By more than one character- istic the Catholic school of the seventeenth century recalls the great Franciscan school of the fourteenth. A curious fact is the recurrence of popularity of Fran- ciscan legend. The "Vision of St. Francis", the "Stigmata", the "Vision of St. Anthony of Padua", the "Last Communion of St. Francis of Assisi" are the titles of masterpieces in the schools of Antwerp, Bo- logna, Naples, and Seville. A still more significant circumstance was that the Renaissance, like the an- cient Byzantine art, had avoided all portrayal of the sufferings of Christ: Raphael, Titian, or Rlichelan- gelo never painted a Crucifixion, though among the masterpieces of Rubens were an "Ascent of Calvary ", an "Erection of the Cross", a "Piercing with the Lance", and a "Descent from the Cross". The Renaissance had also lost the taste for and the sense of narrative; but the art of the seventeenth century presents numerous examples of this ability restored, such as the "Life of St. Cecilia" at S. Luigi di Fran- cesi and the "Life of St. Nilus" at Grottaferrata, by Domenichino; the Lives of St. Thomas and St. Peter Nolasco by Zurbaran, etc. The Gospel and the "Legenda aurea" were restored to honour. If the Renaissance had been a retrogression or an eclipse of Christian sentiment. Baroque art was a real resurrection.
V. Modern RELiGions Painting. — Great religious painting ends with Tiepolo; his Spanish imitators, Bayeii and Goya, produced charming works, but did nothing new. Save for a few somewhat touching works of Lesueur the classic French school was wholly lacking in religious originality. Philippe de Cham- pagne was a Fleming, a good painter whose talent Jansenism almost destroyed. New theories and the spirit of the eighteenth century struck a fatal blow against the painting of the Church. To the admirers of extreme antiquity such as Winckelmann and Lessing, and their disciple, Diderot, Christianity was an inferior religion wljirh had diffused an unworthy system of ;estlic1ics tlirnufilioul tlie worid. l')in'opean painting was dominated liy a, sort of artistic Jacoli- inism. David and his school produced no rehgious painting; under the Empire the only "(Jhrist'" worthy of mention is that of the gentle Prud'hon. However, a curious reaction followed this arid fanaticism; the
