St. Nicholas/Volume 32/Number 4/How to Study Pictures
How to Study Pictures.
By Charles H. Caffin.
A series of articles for the older girls and boys who read “St. Nicholas.”
Fourth Paper
Comparing Rubens with Velasquez.
The student of art, when he reaches the period of the seventeenth century, turns a sharp corner. Italy is left behind, Spain attracts his attention to the west, while far to the north Holland and Belgium beckon. Immediately three of the greatest names in art rise to our notice—Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velasquez. It is with the last two that we are concerned this month.
The pictures selected as a basis for the study of these two giants in art are “The Descent from the Cross,” by Rubens, and “The Maids of Honor” (“Las Meninas” in the Spanish), by Velasquez. “The Descent from the Cross” was painted when Rubens was thirty-five. He had completed his education by a sojourn of eight years in Italy. He was now returned to Antwerp, and one of the first works in which he revealed himself to he a master was “The Descent from the Cross.” “The Maids of Honor,” on the contrary, was painted by Velasquez only four years before he died, and represents the finest flower of his maturity.
Possibly our first impression of the Rubens picture will be “How beautiful!” of the Velasquez, “How curious!” In the former the figures almost fill the canvas, and are grouped so as to decorate it with an imposing mass of light and shade and a beautiful arrangement of lines; whereas in the other the figures are all at the bottom of the canvas and do not present a similarly beautiful pattern of lines and masses. The one looks like a magnificent picture, the other seems to be rather a real scene—as, indeed, it was. The story of “Las Meninas” is that Velasquez was painting a portrait of the Spanish king and queen (who sat where the spectator is when he looks at the picture), Their little daughter, the Infanta Margarita, came in with her maids of honor, her dog, and her dwarfs, and accompanied by her duenna and a courtier. The little princess asks for a drink of water; a maid of honor hands it to her with the elaborate etiquette prescribed by the formalities of the most rigidly ceremonious court in Europe. The scene presented so charming a picture that the king desired Velasquez to paint it. The artist has included himself in the group, at work upon a large canvas on which it is supposed he was painting a portrait of the king and queen when the interruption occurred. The reflection of the king and queen appears in the mirror at the end of the room, and the chamberlain, Don José Nieto, stands outside the door, drawing the curtain. The scene is, indeed, represented with such wonderful realism that a famous French critic said of it: “So complete is the illusion that, standing in front of ‘Las Meninas,’ one is tempted to ask, ‘Where is the picture?’”
It is the mature work of a painter whose motto was “Verdad no pintura” (“Truth, not painting”). By comparison, the principle which Rubens followed is ‘“Painting and truth.” Let us see how the two ideas are illustrated in the two pictures.
“The Descent from the Cross” arouses one’s feelings of awe and pity to an extraordinary degree. This is partly due to the actual moment in the great tragedy of the Redemption which the artist has seized, The terrible anguish of the Crucifixion is past; the poor, limp body is being tenderly cared for by the faithful few who have come, under the cover of night, to render the last office to the Dead. Joseph of Arimathea is superintending the lowering of the precious burden; young John, the beloved disciple, supports its weight; Peter has mounted the ladder, with characteristic eagerness, but the memory of his denial is with him, and, fixed in contemplation of the divine face, he lends no hand; and the three Marys are there—the one stretching out her arms with a mother’s yearning love and grief, the Magdalene grasping the foot that she had once bathed with her tears. Each.jpg)
“The Descent from the Cross.” by Rubans.
“The Maids of Honor.” by Velaquez.
Rubens has made sure that we shall have only a feeling of pity as we look upon it—partly by depicting in the living figures reverence and tenderness in which we instantly share, and partly by the beauty of the composition.
Let us study the picture’s composition: first, in its arrangement of line; secondly, in its arrangement of light and shade, though the two are really blended. Every figure in the composition has either the beauty of grace or that of character; and the most beautiful is the Saviour’s, which has the elongated, pliant grace of the stem and tendrils of a vine. And the drooping flower upon it is the head, to which all the principal lines of the composition lead. Start where you will, and follow along the direction of the figures, and your eye finally rests upon the head. It is the focus-point. And note that on the edges of the group the lines begin by being firm and strong in character, gradually increasing In suppleness and grace as they draw near the sacred figure, until finally all the dignity and sweetness of the picture come to an intensity in the head. Lest the central figure should be lacking in impressiveness as a mass, its effect has been broadened by the winding-sheet, against the opaque white of which its own whiteness of flesh is limpid and ashy in tone. Apart from the flesh-tints, the other hues in the picture are black, very dark green, and very dull red. Thus by its color as well as by the lines the figure of the Saviour is made the most prominent spot in the composition. Moreover, placed as it is upon the most brilliantly lighted part of the picture, its own tender lighting is made more emphatic. We might say that a beautiful and solemn melody is represented by the lighter portions of the composition, while the dark supply a weighty and magnificent accompaniment.
In this distribution of light, as well as in the arrangement of the lines, there has been a careful building up of effect; everything is calculated to arouse the emotion and make at once a noble spectacle and a profound impression. Painted as an altarpiece to be viewed from a distance, it is an example of the “grand style,” represented most often in Italian art.
Compared with it, “The Maids of Honor” may appear to have little grandeur. This Rubens picture presents a beautiful pattern of decoration, while in the Velasquez picture more than half the canvas is given up to empty space; the figures in the Rubens have a grand flow of line, those in the Velasquez seem stiff and awkwardly grouped; the first excites our emotion, the second our curiosity.
Before studying closely this painting of “The Maids of Honor,” we must recall the fact that in 1628 Rubens visited the court of Spain for nine months; that Velasquez watched him paint and came under the fascination of his personality; that he saw Rubens’s admiration for the great Italian pictures which hung in the king’s gallery; that by the advice of Rubens he shortly afterward visited Italy and studied in Venice, Milan, and Rome. In fact, Velasquez was well acquainted with the grandeur of Italian painting; and in the middle period of his life, between 1645 and 1648, he executed a grand example of decorative painting—his famous “Surrender of Breda.” It is a noble decoration, and at the same time one of the finest historical paintings in the world.
So it was not because he did not know what other great painters had done, or of what he himself could do to rival them on their own ground,—for the “Surrender of Breda” could hang, without loss of dignity, beside a Titian,—that he turned his back upon the Italian grand style, and in the years of his maturity produced “The Maids of Honor,” a new kind of picture. It was new because it was the product of a new kind of artist’s eyesight, of a new conception of realism.
We have seen in Hans Holbein’s “Portrait of Georg Gyze,” in the January number, an example of that kind of realism which is solely occupied in giving a faithful representation of the figure and its surrounding objects. But if you compare the portrait with Velasquez’s picture, you will feel, I think, that the attention is scattered over Holbein’s picture, while in the case of Velasquez’s the eye immediately takes it in us a whole. The little princess is the center of the scene, the light being concentrated on her as it is around the principal figure in Rubens’s picture; but though our attention is centered on the child, it revolves all round her, and immediately embraces the scene as a whole. The picture gives us a single vivid impression of the scene.
If we turn back again to “The Descent from the Cross” and “The Maids of Honor,” do we not realize a much more instantaneous and vivid impression in the Velasquez? The Rubens, also, is a noble example of unity; but it is a unity of effect produced chiefly by the balance of the dark and light parts. Rubens has put the light where he needed it for his composition; Velasquez has taken it as he found it. Streaming through the window, it permeates the whole room, not striking the figures simply on one side and leaving the other dark, but enveloping them and penetrating to the remotest corners of the ceiling. Even im the reproductions, you can see how much more real the light is in the Velasquez; how it is bright on the parts of the figures that lie in its direct path; less bright in the half-lights, where it strikes the figures less directly; reflected back, as, for example, from the dress of the little princess to that of the maid on her left; how it steals round everything and penetrates everywhere. For Velasquez recognized that light is elastic and illuminates the air. Hence he was the first to discover a new kind of perspective. Men long ago had learned to make lines vanish from the eye; to make the figures diminish in size and shape as they recede from the front; and to explain the distance by contrasts of light and shade. But he discovered the perspective of light. By the most delicate rendering of the quantity of light reflected from each and every part of the room and the figures and objects in it, he has given to the latter the reality of form and to the room its hollowness and distance.
Painters distinguish between the color of an object and its color as acted upon by light. Thus, in the case of a white dress, they would say that white was not white like a sheet of paper: it varies in degrees of whiteness, according to the quantity of light reflected from its various parts and from surrounding objects. And these varying quantities of light they call “values.” Velasquez excelled in the rendering of values,
His wonderful management of light introduced an appearance of real atmosphere into his pictures. You have only to compare this Velasquez with this Rubens to be sure that this is so.
Having thus briefly (and therefore imperfectly, I am afraid, for it is a large and difficult subject) glanced at the things that Velasquez tried for, we are in a better position to understand how his realism was a realism of impression. First, he saw his subject at a single glance, eye and hand instantaneously working together; and he confined his impression to what a less keen eye, assisted by him, could also take in as a single impression. Secondly, by his marvelous penetration into the action of light and his skill in rendering it, he set upon the canvas the scene, as he had received the impression of it, with such subtle fidelity that our own observation is stimulated, and we receive the impression vividly.
By this time the picture should no longer appear to be empty, nor the figures crowded at the bottom. We should feel that the background and ceiling are connected by that vertical strip of light up the edge of the canvas with the figures in the foreground, so as to make a unified composition of balanced masses of light and less light. In the wonderful truth to life of the figures—the exquisite daintiness of the little princess, the affectionate reverence of the maids, the grotesqueness of the dwarfs, and the courtly sensitiveness of the artist’s figure,—we should have entered into the intimate human feeling of the whole group and ceased ta be troubled by the curious style of the costumes.
These costumes, more than likely, and the fact that Velasquez lived in the palace, painting courtly scenes and portraits, had much to do with his striking out a new style. How could he introduce those hooped skirts into a picture in the grand manner of Italian painting? His great genius was therefore compelled to find another way, and did find it in directions which were new and lasting additions to the art of painting.
Rubens, on the other hand, not less original, took from the Italian style what could be of use to him, and then built upon it a style of his own. He was as intellectual a man as Velasquez, and, like the latter, was accustomed to court life; but while Velasquez, bound to the most punctilious, and superstitious court in Europe, was driven in upon himself, Rubens traveled from court to court with pomp as a trusted envoy at liberty to do as he pleased. As an artist, Rubens had the wonderful faculty of being constantly in a white heat of imagination, while perfectly cool and calculating in the control of his hand. Hence the enormous output of his brush.
Velasquez for nearly two centuries was forgotten outside of Spain. Italian art continued to be the model to imitate; and, even when a return to the truth of nature was made at the beginning of the nineteenth century, sixty years passed before this great example of “truth, not painting” was “discovered,” Then a few painters visited the Prado Museum at Madrid, which contains most of his pictures; others followed, and the world became gradually conscious that in these pictures of Velasquez, especially in the wonderful series of portraits of the king and members of the court which he made during forty years of royal intimacy, there was revealed a great and solitary genius. Since then he has exercised such an influence upon modern painting that he has been called “the first of the moderns,”