Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 96

Garofalo (Ferrarese: 1481-1559).

Benvenuto Tisio, called Garofalo91 from the village of that name on the Po to which his family belonged, was (like Sodoma) the son of a shoemaker, and having shown a strong taste for art, was apprenticed as a lad to the Ferrarese painter, Domenico Panetti. Seven years later he went to Cremona and attached himself to Boccaccino (806). He left Cremona suddenly, as described in a letter, still extant, from Boccaccino to Garofalo's father: "Had your son," he writes, "learnt good manners as thoroughly as he has learnt painting, he would scarcely have played me such a shabby trick. He has taken himself off, I know not whither, and without a word. But this may be a clue to his whereabouts, that he said, if he is to be believed, that he would see Rome." From Rome he returned to Ferrara, where he formed a warm friendship with the brothers Dossi. In 1509 he was again in Rome, where he saw and admired Michael Angelo's frescoes in the Sixtine Chapel in all the splendour of their freshness. He also greatly admired the work of Raphael; "and displayed," says Vasari, "so much diffidence as well as courtesy that he became the friend of Raphael, who, kind and obliging as he was, assisted and favoured Benvenuto much, teaching him many things." In 1511 Benvenuto was at Mantua, but in the following year he returned to Ferrara, which remained his home for the rest of his life. There, says Vasari, who was entertained by him, he lived a particularly happy and busy life, being "cheerful of disposition, mild in his converse, warmly attached to his friends, beyond measure affectionate and devoted, and always supporting the trials of his life with patient resignation." These trials were very heavy, for soon after he was forty he lost the sight of one eye; "nor was he without fear and much danger of losing the other. He then recommended himself to God, and made a vow to wear grey clothing ever after, as, in fact, he did, when by the grace of God the sight of the left eye was preserved to him so perfectly that the works executed by Garofalo in his sixty-fifth year are so well done, so delicately finished, and evince so much care, that they are truly wonderful." For the last nine years of his life he was totally blind, in which affliction he solaced himself by cultivating music. Garofalo's works are very numerous; many of them are in France and in Rome, and in our own Gallery he is well represented. "He was conscientious and truthful within his scope, and the ease and delicacy with which he carried out his smaller works could hardly be exceeded." He was an eclectic rather than an original painter, though he remained Ferrarese throughout in his system of colouring. "His fellow-countrymen have called him the 'Ferrarese Raphael,' in the same way that the Milanese have called Luini the 'Lombard Raphael,' and, if properly understood, both appellations have their meaning; for these painters occupy much the same position in their respective schools as did Raphael in the Umbrian, Andrea del Sarto in the Florentine, etc., though the individual gifts of each were of course very different." (Morelli's Borghese and Doria-Pamfili Galleries, pp. 200-214, contains a detailed account of Garofalo. His theory that the works attributed to Ortolano are in reality early works of Garofalo is very doubtful. See on this point under 699, and cf. Venturi's criticism in the Catalogue of the Ferrarese Exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club).

A well-known incident in the life of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Africa (A.D. 354-430), one of the "doctors" of the Christian Church whose writings have had a greater effect than those probably of any one man on the beliefs and lives of succeeding Christian ages. Whilst busied, he tells us, in writing his discourse on the Trinity, he one day beheld a child, who, having dug a hole in the sand, was bringing water, as children at the seaside do, to empty the sea into his hole. Augustine told him it was impossible. "Not more impossible," replied the child, "than for thee, O Augustine! to explain the mystery on which thou art now meditating" ("Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea," Job xi. 7-9). The painter shows the visionary nature of the scene by placing beside St Augustine the figure of St. Catherine, the patron saint of theologians and scholars, and in the background, on a little jutting cape, St. Stephen, whose life and actions are set forth in St. Augustine's writings. The saint himself receives the child's lesson with the contemptuous impatience of a scholar's ambition; but all the time the heavens whose mysteries he would fain explore are open behind him, and the angel choirs are singing that he who would enter in must first become as a little child, "for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."