PLATE VIII.—THE SLEEP OF ST. JOHNThis is one of the last efforts of Dolci. It was painted after his return from Innsbrück, just before he was taken ill. It hangs in the Pitti Palace, Florence.
PLATE VIII.—THE SLEEP OF ST. JOHNThis is one of the last efforts of Dolci. It was painted after his return from Innsbrück, just before he was taken ill. It hangs in the Pitti Palace, Florence.
This is one of the last efforts of Dolci. It was painted after his return from Innsbrück, just before he was taken ill. It hangs in the Pitti Palace, Florence.
We cannot, then, look upon Carlo Dolci's life or work as being complete. He seems to afford an example of what talent will do when it lacks adequate direction, and we see too the danger into which the art of the painter falls when his inclinations are too literary. For it was no part of Carlo Dolci's aim in life to express harmonies in colour and line, although such expression may be taken to be the beginning and end of all that is greatest in painting. Dolci was always keen on telling a story, always intent upon preaching a sermon in paint, always forgetful that the provinces of art and literature have a very wide boundary line. It is rather interesting to compare the lives of Carlo Dolci and Fra Angelico of Fiesole, because each was a man who sought to express moral principles, sentiments, and belief on canvas, and, while theone succeeded beyond all possibility of doubt, the other has met with only a modified success. Beato Angelico was influenced by the Dominicans as Dolci was by the Benedictines; each gave his life work to the service of the Church and the pursuit of virtues that the Church teaches man to practise. One laboured in the cloister and the other outside it, but oddly enough, he who came first and decorated the walls of St. Mark's Convent knew the more about life and more about art, more about perspective and more about composition, than his successor, who followed so many years later. The truth is, perhaps, that when Fra Angelico came to the convent of the Dominicans the Renaissance was just blossoming in Italy. It was a season of great inspiration. Man and Learning were being discovered, and although some aspects of the discoverywere hidden from the good brother of St. Dominic, all the attendant enthusiasms came to him. Moreover, Angelico travelled and mingled freely with scholars and great artists, so that we can divide his life work into three stages, of which the second is better than the first, and the last is best of all.
On the other hand, when Dolci came on the scene the Renaissance had blossomed and budded and filled the face of the earth with fruit, but the fruit was already overripe. The great stimulus had passed; degeneration had set in, not only in the world of art. The mere fact that Carlo Dolci's gifts found an immediate acceptance shows that the times were not distinguished, and we do not find in Baldinucci's life of his friend one solitary suggestion that any of the great rulers who employed his brush ever turned to him with the request that heshould enter into competition with those who had gone before, that he should take a course of study and learning to strengthen the weak points of his work, sacrificing a little of its sweetness to gain some small measure of strength. At the same time we must not underrate Carlo Dolci's work because we have outgrown it, since, as was suggested on an early page of this little essay, his charm in certain aspects is perennial, and although its powers to hold us must pass when we have turned to higher things, those who are following us will find pleasure and inspiration in the painter's art when they visit for the first time the galleries of Italy. They will travel by easy degrees from pictures that please to those that call in the first place for study, and then for admiration and the recognition of masterpieces.
Carlo Dolci's place in art is not altogether unlike that of some of his living countrymen in the world of music. There are Italian musicians known to all of us who have such a gift of sweetness that we cannot endure their melodies for long. A song now and again, or some sparkling little work for piano or violin, gives us a passing thrill of pleasure, and then we turn with complete content to the clearer atmosphere and more serene moods of the great masters whose works endure for all time. So it is with Carlo Dolci; we go to him now and again, if only for a little while, conscious that sweetness as well as strength has its place in the world of art as in the world of music and letters. And we know, too, that criticism can say nothing worse about Carlo Dolci's gifts than that he was never able to turn them to the best account, that the rough diamond of histalent was never in the hands of a competent lapidary. His life is not one we are called upon to overlook, for his achievement, though it has little variety, is marked by certain definite qualities that call for recognition, even though these qualities are often moral rather than artistic.
Dolci was eminently a sentimentalist; he had no redeeming vices; a little of the devilry of a Benvenuto Cellini would have been invaluable to him and to his art. But it is futile to complain of a man for being as Nature made him, and if we will turn to Carlo Dolci's pictures for pretty, agreeable, and highly finished interpretations of moral ideas in terms of paint, we shall find no small amount of momentary satisfaction.
We must not forget that the world at large had suffered not a little when Carlo Dolci came upon the scene from the excessivedaring and superb initiative of the Renaissance. Its eyes were a little dimmed by the splendour of the great men who had gone before, and had travelled to heights beyond the ken of the average citizen. Carlo Dolci helped to bring his greatly dazzled fellow-countrymen back to earth, pleasantly and in fashion that flattered their vanity. In the eyes of hundreds of his contemporaries the devout, God-fearing, conscientious Florentine must have been regarded as the greatest artist Italy had ever seen, and if such a thought pleases some of the unsophisticated among their descendants, who should desire to complain? Let us rather put to Dolci's credit the facts that he did not pose as a heaven-born genius, that he was not greedy or grasping, that he did not seek to found a school. The portrait he painted of himself suggests that he was not altogetherdeficient in humour; perhaps there were hours when he laughed with himself at those who praised him for the gifts he lacked. If we could but be sure that he laughed now and again at himself and his pictures, recognising the limitations that are so patent to us to-day, the most superior critic could refuse no longer to have some regard for Carlo Dolci.
The plates are printed byBemrose Dalziel, Ltd., WatfordThe text at theBallantyne Press, Edinburgh