were their characteristics, could upon occasion be both religious and sublime. The same phenomenon is displayed in Italian literature as in Italian art. In no other country have poetry and prose been simultaneously developed. We know the long but glorious interval between the poetry of Homer and the prose of Xenophon. France first asserted the fitness of its language for prose in Pascal's Provincial Letters. Swift, Bolingbroke, and Addison developed the prose qualities of our own centuries after Chaucer and Shakspeare. Whereas almost one age saw Dante and Petrarch, who brought Italian poetry to its highest development, and Boccaccio, who did the same for Italian prose. As animals inhaling pure oxygen live with greater intensity, while, if a certain quantity of inactive nitrogen is introduced, they live a longer though less energetic life: so in nations like Italy, the principle of life seems to work itself out with greater intensity, but with more brevity, than in the comparatively sluggish histories of Rome, of England, or even of France. However sad the shortness of Italian development, the splendour and glory of it were increased by its concentration. In addition to the opposite schools of Rome and the Venetian artists, the one full of faith and severe sublimity, the other more sensuous and less believing, there was a third school in Italy, that of Correggio. Now, duly to appreciate the causes of Correggio's peculiarities, we have little else to do than to regard his political relations. He was of a small independent state, called Correggio, not far from Mantua. He worked there and at Parma, both of them places out of the great world in Italy; places neither exposed to the infidelity which had seized upon the most active minds of Rome, Florence, and Venice, nor taught the ways of luxury by a native town plutocracy. He was employed chiefly by convents and ecclesiastical potentates * See Prescott, Misc., p. 463. to decorate churches, to paint for places where men come to be taught that there is something better and higher than themselves. He may be supposed to have studied the great works of Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle, and Leonardo da Vinci on the one side, and the Venetian school on the other. He lived at a time when, in those parts of Italy from which all faith had ebbed, the tide had begun to return, and the church which employed him was daily regaining its lost ground in the advanced states of Italy. Now, what was the combined effect of all these circumstances upon Correggio? His design is grand and vigorous, and he aims to represent beings more sublime than every-day mortals; in this he is like a Roman artist; but he colours gorgeously, he invests with rich hue and flowing drapery, he manages his lights and shadows cunningly like a Venetian, and even improved their art by a harmony of colouring peculiarly his own. His paintings were those of a believing man; but it was a less severe and self-condemning belief than that of the old Roman school. While he made the spectators of his canvas feel the sublime, though less intensely than the Roman and Florentine, he pleased their senses with the beautiful, though with a less degree of it than they derived from Titian, Tintoret, or Paul Veronese; and, like the painters of unbelief, he produced mythological scenes with exquisite grace and beauty, but, of course, no sincerity. Critics of art have long celebrated Correggio for blending the Roman and Venetian schools.* Do not the place and time of his birth and the nature of his patrons sufficiently explain how he came to be the painter of gorgeous plutocratic religion? Do the There is a country possessing a celebrated school of painters to which I have not yet alluded. Spanish artists support or confute the positions laid down in this chapter? In no country was the influence of religion more strong, in no country was the early faith See Sir J. Reynolds's Works, iii. 180. continued longer after cultivation and art had arisen; and therefore we find that the flourishing period of religious painting in Spain lasted proportionately longer than among any other people; indeed so long that there was scarce opportunity for the non-religious art to arise, for the influences which foster art declined almost at the same moment when the first decline in religious empire became perceptible. Much of the wealth which the merchants brought from the New World was spent in constructing -not city palaces the most gorgeous ecclesiastical buildings which any country has ever possessed. The general character of Spanish painting is grave, religious, dark, such as mystifies and depresses the spectator rather than delights or ravishes him. Their paintings were for churches, not for saloons or banqueting halls. The Church exercised not merely a moral but even a decretal power over the painter, whom she forbad to deviate from the established type by which sacred personages were represented. The artist was not crushed by this, for he firmly believed in what he painted, and by that earnestness of belief produced upon his canvas much of the religious sublime. At last, when art became more imitative and less purely devotional, it yet took its subjects from the monastic population - the monks, and the beggars that lay at the cathedral porch. A plutocracy arose in Seville, formed of the merchants who traded with the golden colonies. In Seville arose a school of painters abandoning sublimity, taking nature for their subject, and revelling in gorgeous colouring, yet still acknowledging to some extent the sway of religion. This was the school of Murillo and Velasquez; Murillo, whose colour rivals that of Titian; Velasquez, who, disliking Raffaelle, placed the Venetians upon the throne of his admiration. It came after that of Juan Sanchez de Castro and his scholars*, who painted in the hard, dry, heavy style of early devo *Life of Murillo, trans. by Davies, 1819, p. 16. tional painting, so inexpressive of anything but superhumanity, that labels contained the words supposed to issue from the holy mouths. It came just before that of La Feria*, whose paintings of blended brilliant colours but little drawing were scrambled up for lucre and exported to the Indies, there to adorn the homes of the Spanish-American plutocrats; a class of patrons, indeed, who while they almost produced the school of Seville, are said at last to have damaged Murillo's style by giving him orders for more paintings than he had time to execute well. So long as there existed in Spain a school of respectable artists, they never gave way to the Renaissance style of Julio Romano. They never ceased to be religious by becoming mythological, poetic, or ideal. The current of artistic representation never triumphed over the current of devotional imagery, for the latter was in Spain continued so late that when it sunk the arts were sinking likewise. There was no such thing in Spanish artists as a feeling for the beautiful apart from the religious, for Velasquez, the head of the naturalist school, never succeeded in the ideal. Though the plutocracy of Spain assisted the Church in patronising art, and has imprinted its tastes upon Spanish art in its best period, they imported from the Low Countries the works of artists who, more free from religious thraldom, could abandon themselves with more freedom to the light tastes of a plutocracy; and under monarchs like Charles the Fifth, Philip the Second, and Philip the Fourth, the great painters of foreign schools, for example, Titian and Rubens, were patronised in the palace of Madrid, as Holbein and Vandyke were patronised in England. The Spaniards never cared for minute paintings or engravings, for they had little sympathy with mechanical and exact occupations. * Life of Murillo, trans. by Davies, 1819, pp. 35, 36. Thus then, out of the examination of national histories, where une social force alone works its way uninterrupted, or at the most modified by not more than one other face, o mes the establishment of principles which may show or tend to show how to each social state a certain olition of art is by nature attached. I do not dare to embark on the enterprise of applying these principles to English art, for that were to launch into a sea of connoisseurship, where not only should I be no safe pilot, but where every knot we make would lead us further from the land it is ours to explore. But let these facts be remarked. It is only since England has seen rise within it a plutocratic element that we can be said to have had a school of painting. As town life and plutocracy increase, the patronage of the fine arts increases. The cotton lords of Manchester, the woollen lords of Leeds, and the merchants of London and Liverpool, are the patrons for whose gratification has arisen a school of painting in this country; a school which our aristocracy, like that of other countries, failed to evoke. We have no saintly, fervid, holy-figure-loving school, for we are a Protestant people, and shy of ceremonious religion. Our wisest painters do not affect the sublime of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, and therefore they are our wisest. The patronage for portraits increases, even though it has the rivalry of daguerreotypism. And large pompous gorgeous pictures, such as those which are now produced in goodly number in plutocratic France, are coming into favour here. But I am mistaken if English art will not make it its aim to reflect the excellencies of many types and many forms. Some will excel in devotion, others in the repose and grandeur of historical scenes, others delighting * Before Gainsborough, our landscape artists were all dry mannerist imitators of the Italian schools, or hopeless daubists, and Gainsborough was a product of Bath, which in his day was the chief place in England where plutocratic fashionable town-life existed. |