Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 11

"The Venetian School proposed to itself the representation of the effect of colour and shade on all things; chiefly on the human form. Here you have the most perfect representation possible of colour, and light, and shade, as they affect the external aspect of the human form, and its immediate accessories, architecture, furniture, and dress. This external aspect of noblest nature was the first aim of the Venetians, and all their greatness depended on their patience in achieving it" (Ruskin: Two Paths, §§ 20, 22).

The general characteristics of the Venetian School, as defined by Mr. Ruskin in the passage above quoted, may be traced both to historical circumstances and to physical surroundings. Thus the first broad fact to be noticed about the Venetian School of painting is that it is later than the Florentine by some hundred years or more. From the point of view of art, Venice, from her intimate connection as a trading power with the East, was almost a Byzantine colony. St. Mark's is a Byzantine church, her earliest palaces are Byzantine palaces. And so, too, for painting she relied exclusively on a Byzantine supply. It was not till the latter end of the fourteenth century that the influence of Giotto's works in the neighbouring town of Padua began to rouse Venice to do and think for herself in art, instead of letting her Greek subjects do all for her.24 But by the time Venetian painters had acquired any real mastery over their art, Venice was already in a state of great magnificence; her palaces, with their fronts of white marble, porphyry, and serpentine, were the admiration of every visitor. Painters paint what they see around them, and hence at the outset we find in the Venetian School the rendering of material magnificence and the brilliant colours that distinguish it throughout. Look, for instance, at the pictures by a comparatively early Venetian, like Crivelli (see 602); no other painter of a corresponding age showed such fondness for fruits and stuffs and canopies and jewels and brilliant architecture. And then, in the second place, there is the colour of Venice itself, caused by her position on the lagoons. The Venetians had no gardens; "but what are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, anemone, or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow-grasses or trained in quiet cloister garden-beds, when compared with that melodrama of flame and gold and rose and orange and azure, which the skies and lagoons of Venice yield almost daily to the eye?" (Symonds's Renaissance, iii. 255). But, thirdly, the sea had a further influence on Venetian painting – it caused at once their love of bodily beauty and the kind of such beauty that they loved. Compare, for instance, a typical Venetian "beauty," such as Paris Bordone's (674), with one of Botticelli's (915): how great is the difference between them! Well, the sea "tends to induce in us great respect for the whole human body; for its limbs, as much as for its tongue or its wit… To put the helm up at the right moment is the beginning of all cunning, and for that we need arm and eye; – not tongue. And with this respect for the body as such, comes also the sailor's preference of massive beauty in bodily form. The landsmen, among their roses and orange-blossoms, and chequered shadows of twisted vine, may well please themselves with pale faces, and finely drawn eyebrows and fantastic braiding of hair. But from the sweeping glory of the sea we learn to love another kind of beauty; broad-breasted; level-browed, like the horizon; – thighed and shouldered like the billows; – footed like their stealing foam; – bathed in clouds of golden hair like their sunsets." Then further, "this ocean-work is wholly adverse to any morbid conditions of sentiment. Reverie, above all things, is forbidden by Scylla and Charybdis. By the dogs and the depths, no dreaming! The first thing required of us is presence of mind. Neither love, nor poetry, nor piety, must ever so take up our thoughts as to make us slow or unready." Herein will be found the source of a notable distinction between the treatment of sacred subjects by Venetian painters and all others. The first Venetian artists began with asceticism, just as the Florentines did; "always, however, delighting in more massive and deep colour than other religious painters. They are especially fond of saints who have been cardinals, because of their red hats, and they sunburn all their hermits into splendid russet brown" (see 768). Then again, through all enthusiasm they retain a supreme common sense. Look back, for instance, from the religious pictures in this room, from Titian's "Holy Family" (635), or Cima's "Madonna" (634), to those of the Umbrians, which we have just left. The Umbrian religion is something apart from the world, the Venetian is of it. The religion of the Venetian painters is as real as that of Fra Angelico. But it was the faith not of humble men or of mystics, not of profound thinkers or ecstatic visionaries, so much as of courtiers and statesmen, of senators and merchants, for whom religion was not a thing by itself but a part and parcel of ordinary life. "Throughout the rest of Italy, piety had become abstract, and opposed theoretically to worldly life; hence the Florentine and Umbrian painters generally separated their saints from living men. They delighted in imagining scenes of spiritual perfectness; – Paradises, and companies of the redeemed at the judgment; – glorified meetings of martyrs; – madonnas surrounded by circles of angels. If, which was rare, definite portraitures of living men were introduced, these real characters formed a kind of chorus or attendant company, taking no part in the action. At Venice all this was reversed, and so boldly as at first to shock, with its seeming irreverence, a spectator accustomed to the formalities and abstractions of the so-called sacred schools. The madonnas are no more seated apart on their thrones, the saints no more breathe celestial air. They are on our own plain ground – nay, here in our houses with us." Cima places the Madonna in his own country-side, whilst at Venice itself Tintoret paints Paradise as the decoration for the hall of the Greater Council of the State. The religion of the Venetian School was not less sincere than that of others, but it was less formal, less didactic; for Venice was constantly at feud with the popes, and here we come to the last circumstance which need be noticed as determining the characteristics of the school. "Among Italian cities Venice was unique. She alone was tranquil in her empire, unimpeded in her constitutional development, independent of Church interference, undisturbed by the cross purposes and intrigues of the despots, inhabited by merchants who were princes, and by a freeborn people who had never seen war at their gates. The serenity of undisturbed security, the luxury of wealth amassed abroad and liberally spent at home, gave a physiognomy of ease and proud self-confidence to all her edifices… The conditions of Florence stimulated mental energy and turned the face of the soul inwards. Those of Venice inclined the individual to accept life as he found it" (Symonds, iii. 259). Hence the ideal of Venetian painting was "stateliness and power; high intercourse with kingly and beautiful humanity, proud thoughts, or splendid pleasures; throned sensualities; and ennobled appetites."

A speciality of the Venetian School arising from the characteristics we have described is its portraiture. "If there be any one sign by which the Venetian countenance, as it is recorded for us, to the very life, by a school of portraiture which has never been equalled (chiefly because no portraiture ever had subjects so noble), – I say, if there be one thing more notable than another in the Venetian features, it is their deep pensiveness and solemnity. In other districts of Italy, the dignity of the heads which occur in the most celebrated compositions is clearly owing to the feeling of the painter. He has visibly realised or idealised his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults or failings of the human nature around him, so that the best of his work is that which has most perfectly taken the colour of his own mind; and the least impressive, if not the least valuable, that which appears to have been unaffected and unmodified portraiture. But at Venice, all is exactly the reverse of this. The tone of mind in the painter appears often in some degree frivolous or sensual; delighting in costume, in domestic and grotesque incident, and in studies of the naked form. But the moment he gives himself definitely to portraiture, all is noble and grave; the more literally true his work, the more majestic; and the same artist who will produce little beyond what is commonplace in painting a Madonna or an Apostle, will rise into unapproachable sublimity when his subject is a Member of the Forty, or a Master of the Mint" (Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. § lxxv.).

In its historical development the Venetian School may be divided, like other schools, into three main periods. First we have the Giottesque or heroic period, or, as it should in the case of Venice be called, "the Vivarini epoch, bright, innocent, more or less elementary, entirely religious art, reaching from 1400-1480." Next comes the Bellini epoch, sometimes classic and mythic as well as religious, 1480-1520. In this period Venetian art is "entirely characteristic of her calm and brave statesmanship, her modest and faithful religion." "Bright costumes, distinct and sunny landscapes, broad backgrounds of architecture, large skies, polished armour, gilded cornices, young faces of fisher-boys and country girls, grave faces of old men brown with sea-wind and sunlight, withered faces of women hearty in a hale old age, the strong manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity of patrician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the rosy whiteness and amber-coloured tresses of the daughters of the Adriatic and the lagoons – these are the source of inspiration to the Venetians of the second period… Among the loveliest motives in the altar-pieces of this period are the boy-angels playing flutes and mandolines beneath the Madonna on the steps of her throne. They are more earthly than Fra Angelico's melodists, and yet they are not precisely of human lineage. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that they strike the keynote of Venetian devotion, at once real and devoid of pietistic rapture" (Symonds, iii. 266.) Thirdly comes the epoch of "supremely powerful art corrupted by taint of death," 1520-1600.

This final transition may perhaps best be seen by tracing the similar progress in the technical feature which distinguishes the Venetian painters. They are the school of colour. Their speciality consists in seeing that "shadow is not an absence of colour, but is, on the contrary, necessary to the full presence of colour; every colour in painting must be a shadow to some brighter colour, and a light to some darker one – all the while being a positive colour itself. And the great splendour of the Venetian School arises from their having seen and held from the beginning this great fact – that shadow is as much colour as light, often much more. In Titian's fullest red the lights are pale rose-colour, passing into white – the shadows warm deep crimson. In Veronese's most splendid orange the lights are pale, the shadows crocus colour… Observe that this is no matter of taste, but fact. It is an absolute fact that shadows are as much colours as lights are; and whoever represents them by merely the subdued or darkened tint of the light, represents them falsely." But in the two earlier periods above specified, the Venetians are further "separated from other schools by their contentment with tranquil cheerfulness of light; by their never wanting to be dazzled. None of their lights are flashing or blinding; they are soft, winning, precious; lights of pearl, not of lime: only, you know, on this condition they cannot have sunshine: their day is the day of Paradise; they need no candles, neither light of the sun, in their cities; and everything is seen clear, as through crystal, far or near. This holds to the end of the fifteenth century. Then they begin to see that this, beautiful as it may be, is still a make-believe light; that we do not live in the inside of a pearl; but in an atmosphere through which a burning sun shines thwartedly, and over which a sorrowful night must far prevail. And then the chiaroscurists succeed in persuading them of the fact that there is mystery in the day as in the night, and show them how constantly to see truly, is to see dimly. And also they teach them the brilliancy of light, and the degree in which it is raised from the darkness; and instead of their sweet and pearly peace, tempt them to look for the strength of flame and coruscation of lightning." Three pictures may be noted in which the whole process may be traced. First in Bellini's "St. Jerome"25 (694) is the serene light of the Master of Peace. In another Bellini (726) is a first twilight effect – such as Titian afterwards developed into more solemn hues; whilst in No. 1130 is an example of the light far withdrawn and the coils of shade of Tintoret. (For Ruskin's general remarks on the Venetian School see Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii.; Guide to Venetian Academy; Oxford Lectures on Art, §§ 134, 173-177.)