LEANDREIllustrating the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, or Impromptu ComedyLEANDRE Illustrating the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, or Impromptu Comedy
Gratarol, at the close of these transactions, finding himself disfavoured by the Senate, did not take the prudent course of sending in his resignation and lying by for a better turn of affairs, such as is always to be looked for in a government like ours of{321}Venice. On the contrary, he flung out with all the violence of his headstrong and indomitable temper. He left the country in a rage, exposing himself and his relatives to the thunderbolts which were hurled upon him, partly by the mechanical operation of our laws, but also by the force of a rapacious and inhuman tyranny.
I shall not enlarge upon what followed after Gratarol's flight to foreign lands. These circumstances, disastrous to himself and prejudicial to the enemies he left behind him, are only too fresh in the memory of men. But I may indulge in one philosopher's reflection. The man was said to be, in spite of his many profligacies and excesses, gifted with exuberant health and physical vigour. Considering his mental parts and moral qualities, it is a pity that he did not suffer from a tertian or a quartan fever, the headache, the colic, or peradventure piles. Handicapped in this salutary way, he might have continued to be a prosperous and able servant of the State. So true is it that men often find the faculty on which they most pride themselves their worst stumbling-block in life!
After Signer Gratarol's departure to the frozen North, I felt strongly inclined to have done, at once and for ever, with my lucubrations for the stage. Friends, however, pointed out that a sudden retirement from the pastime of many previous years would expose me to malignant comments. Accordingly,{322}I completed two plays which I had already planned—Il MetafisicoandBianca Contessa di Melfi—giving them to Sacchi in exchange for the autograph and all the copies of my now too notoriousDroghe d'Amore. Those manuscripts I locked up in my escritoire, vowing that the comedy should never see the footlights of a theatre again.
It will not be impertinent, as I have touched upon these stage-affairs, to relate the dissolution of Sacchi's company in detail.
I had patronised my friends with heroico-comical perseverance for a quarter of a century. The time now came for me to part with them. Sacchi himself, aged in years, was falling rapidly to pieces. Absurd octogenarian love-affairs completed the ruin of his dotage. His daughter, who not unreasonably expected to inherit money, plate, and jewels of considerable value, never ceased inveighing against her father's anachronistic fondnesses. These invectives reached his ears, and exasperated a naturally irritable temper. Meanwhile, his partners in the company resented the despotism with which he claimed to rule the roost and use their common purse for benefactions to his mistresses. Detected in these private foibles, yet far from being taught the error of his ways, old Sacchi became a kind of demon. He never opened his lips without insulting his daughter, his partners, and the whole troupe. I do not expect my reader to imagine that their replies{323}were sweetmeats. Discord ruled in every hall and chamber of this house of actors. It came to drawing swords and knives; and bloodshed was only obviated by the bodily intervention of bystanders.
I felt that the moment had come to take my leave. With this in view, I packed up a bundle of Spanish books lent to me by Sacchi and returned them. But things had gone too far to be remedied by hints and intimations. Petronio Zanerini, the best actor of Italy; Domenico Barsanti, a very able artist; Luigi Benedetti and his wife, both of them useful for all ordinary purposes; Agostino Fiorelli, stupendous in the rôle of Tartaglia; each and every one of these retired in disgust and took engagements with rival companies. Sacchi's eccentricities had reduced his troupe to a mere skeleton. Finally, the patrician who owned S. Salvatore, scenting disaster in the air, gave the lease of his theatre to another set of players.
I took certain steps at this juncture to keep what remained of the company together and to heal its breaches. Through my mediation Atanagio Zannoni, a splendid actor, an excellent fellow, and Sacchi's brother-in-law, consented to hold on upon the understanding that Sacchi should execute a deed according his partners their just share in the management. The document was drawn up and signed. Sacchi cursed and swore while signing; and Zannoni told me that it would prove waste paper, as indeed it did.
Patched up in this way, the company removed to the{324}theatre of S. Angelo, which had been their old quarters before I succeeded in transferring them to S. Salvatore. They were scarce of money, scarce of actors, and the few actors they had were people of no talent. Two pieces I composed for them,Cimene PardoandLa Figlia dell'Aria, could not be put upon the stage for want of funds and proper players to sustain the parts. I had eventually to give these dramas to two different companies. The history of one of them,Cimene Pardo, brings my old friend and gossip, Teodora Ricci, once more upon the scene; but I do not think that I should interest my readers by relating it.[83]
Suffice it to say, that everything went daily from bad to worse with Sacchi's troupe. He did not improve in temper. Receipts dwindled. The paid actors had to recover their salaries by suits at law, and left the company. Nothing was heard but outcries, lamentations, mutual reproaches, threats, complaints, demands for money, talks about executions, writs, and stamped papers from the courts. At last, after two years of this infernal squabbling, a troupe which had been the terror of its rivals and the delight of our theatres broke up in pitiable confusion.
Sacchi, on the point of setting out for Genoa, came to visit me, and spoke as follows, shedding tears thereby. I remember his precise words: "You{325}are the only friend on whom I mean to call before I leave Venice secretly and with sorrow for ever. I shall never forget the benefits you have heaped upon me. You alone have told me the truth with candour. Do not deny me the favour of a kiss at parting, the favour of your pardon, and of your compassion."
I gave him the kiss he asked for. He left me weeping; and I—I am bound to say it—remained not less affected at the closing of this long and once so happy chapter in my life.[84]
After that moment I laid my pen down, and never again resumed it for dramatic composition.
We cannot always go on laughing.—Deaths of friends.—Dissolution of the old Republic of S. Mark.—I lay my pen down on the 18th of March 1798.
As years advanced, it came to me, as it comes to all, to be reminded that we cannot go on always laughing. One Sunday I was hearing mass in the Church of S. Moisè, when a friend came up and asked me in a whisper whether I had heard of the{326}fatal accident to the patrician Paolo Balbi. "What accident?" I said with consternation. "Last night he died," was the reply. "What!" exclaimed I, still more terrified: "why, I was with him three hours yesterday evening; he was in perfect health and spirits." "Nevertheless," said my informant, "the poor gentleman is dead. Excuse me if I have been the bearer of disastrous news." When the mass, to which I listened without listening, was over, I ran to the patrician's house. I cherished warm affection for this friend of many years, and hoped against hope that the news might be false. Alas! the house resounded with funeral lamentations; the widow and children had already left it for the palace of their relatives, the Malipieri.
Not many days afterwards I received the sad announcement that my brother Francesco was seriously ill of a kind of cachexy on his estate in Friuli. A few days later I learned that he had breathed his last. The poor fellow left his wife and three sons well provided for; but when the salutary restraint of his authority was removed by death, they showed every inclination to dissipate what he had brought together for their comfort.
One morning my friend Raffaelle Todeschini was announced. His countenance wore an expression of alarm, while he began: "I come to bring you painful news. Last evening, in the coffee-house at the Ponte dell'Angelo, that honourable gentleman,{327}Carlo Maffei, died suddenly." The blow fell heavy on my heart; for I have enjoyed few friendships equal to that of this most excellent gentleman. In his will he mentioned me in terms of the highest and most unmerited praise, bequeathing me his gold snuff-box by way of remembrance. That was the one and only legacy which fell to my share in the course of my whole life.
In a short period of time I lost successively several other relatives and friends. My brother Gasparo expired at Padua, recommending his second wife, the Mme. Cenet who had nursed him through his long illness, to my care. A sudden stroke of apoplexy robbed me of the first and faithfullest friend I ever had, Innocenzio Massimo. My sister Laura, who was married and lived at Adria, passed away while yet in the prime of womanhood. I could add other names to this funereal catalogue, if I were not unwilling to detain my readers longer in the graveyard.
Meanwhile, a terrible attack of fever laid me low in my turn. The physician, Giorgio Cornaro, a man of the highest probity and candour, who showed a vigilant affection for his patients, came at once to visit me. The intense pains I suffered during the following night, and the excessive fierceness with which the fever renewed its assaults, made me feel that I was about to follow my relatives and friends to the tomb. I waited through those sombre hours; but when I heard my servant stirring, I sent him for{328}a confessor. The man refused at first, and had to be dispatched upon his errand by a voice more worthy of a cut-throat than a penitent. While I was confessing, Dr. Cornaro entered. He inquired what I had been about, and I replied that I did not think it amiss to be prepared beforehand. "I felt sufficiently ill to fulfil the duties of a Catholic upon his death-bed, and have saved you the trouble of breaking the news to me in case of necessity." "Very well," said he, feeling my pulse and frowning. "We must cut short this fever with quinine, before it reaches the third assault. It is a violent attack of the sort we call pernicious." How many pounds of the drug I swallowed is unknown to me. I only remember that they brought me a large glassful every two hours. The fever abated; but I had to drag through three months of a slow and painful convalescence.
But now it is time to close these Memoirs. The publisher, Palese, informs me that the third volume will be more than large enough. I lay my pen aside just at the moment when I should have had to describe that vast undulation called the French Revolution, which swept over Europe, upsetting kingdoms and drowning the landmarks of immemorial history. This awful typhoon caught Venice in its gyration, affording a splendidly hideous field for philosophical reflection. "Splendidly hideous" is a contradiction in terms; but at the period in{329}which we are living paradoxes have become classical.
The sweet delusive dream of a democracy, organised and based on irremovable foundations—the expectation of a moral impossibility—made men howl and laugh and dance and weep together. The ululations of the dreamers, yelling outLiberty,Equality,Fraternity, deafened our ears; and those of us who still remained awake were forced to feign themselves dreamers, in order to protect their honour, their property, their lives. People who are not accustomed to trace the inevitable effects of doctrines propagated through the centuries see only mysteries and prodigies in convulsions of this kind. The whole tenor of my writings, on the other hand, and particularly my poemMarfisa bizzarra, which conceals philosophy beneath the mantle of burlesque humour, prove that I was keenly alive to the disastrous results which had to be expected from revolutionary science sown broadcast during the past age. I always dreaded and predicted a cataclysm as the natural consequence of those pernicious doctrines. Yet my Cassandra warnings were doomed to remain as useless as these Memoirs will certainly be—as ineffectual as a doctor's prescriptions for a man whose lungs are rotten. The sweet delusive dream of our physically impossible democracy will end in the evolution of....
But Palese calls on me to staunch this flow of ink upon the paper. Let us leave to serious and{330}candid historians the task of relating what we are sure, if we live, to see.
To-day is the 18th of March in the year 1798; and here I lay my pen down, lest I injure my good publisher. Farewell, patient and benign readers of my useless Memoirs!
SEQUEL TO GOZZI'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
Supplied by the Translator.
Gozzi broke off his Memoirs on the 18th of March 1798. He lived another eight years, and died upon the 4th of April 1806, aged eighty-six. On reviewing his life, we find four clearly marked periods. The first ends with the death of his father in 1745, and includes his three years' service in Dalmatia. The second closes with the year 1756, and is marked by the break-up of the Gozzi family and his engagement in those litigations and affairs of business which formed his real occupation for a long series of years. Short as was this second period, it gave a decisive tone to his character by confirming the man's natural obstinacy and litigiousness. Undoubtedly it was not for nothing that he frequented the Venetian law-courts and studied the{331}arts of chicanery. In all his polemical writings we detect the habit of forensic warfare, the wariness of an experienced pleader, and the licensed plausibility of one who is accustomed to conceal the weak points in his own case while magnifying the shortcomings of his adversary. His unremitting attention to practical matters made him an experienced man of business. This was the true Carlo Gozzi; not that fantastic dreamy plaything of the sprites and fairies which his romantic French and German critics have discerned in the author of theFiabe. At the same time, during this second period, he never neglected literature, but went on writing in the intervals of serious affairs. Self-taught, well-nigh devoid of systematic culture in history, philosophy, and language, but gifted with a sincere admiration for the best Italian authors, with an active fancy and a natural bias for burlesque humour, he formed that peculiar manner, at once prolix and forcible, effective and slovenly, which distinguishes his published works. Unequal in style, incorrect in diction, incapable of giving perfect form or polish to his compositions, he nevertheless posed as a purist and threw himself with passion as a conservative into the literary polemics of his day. The Accademia Granellesca, founded at the close of this period, recognised in him its stoutest champion and most quarrelsome fore-fighter. I have mentioned the year 1756 as the date which opens the third period in Gozzi's life. It marks the publication of his{332}Tartana degli Influssiand the return of Sacchi's company to Venice. This period terminates in 1781, and includes all that was most memorable in his career—the quarrel with Goldoni and Chiari, the alliance with Sacchi, the composition of theFiabeand twenty-three plays on Spanish subjects, the liaison with Teodora Ricci, and the episode of Gratarol. Gozzi was past sixty when Sacchi's company broke up, and Gratarol's misfortunes threw a gloomy light upon his past theatrical career. The fourth period of seventeen years is distinguished by little literary activity. Yet we owe to it theMemorie Inutili, which were professedly written as an answer to Gratarol'sNarrazione Apologetica. Partly composed in 1780, but suppressed by order of the Government, they did not see the light until the year 1797-98, when Gozzi completed the work and sent it in a hurry to the press. Meanwhile the Republic of S. Mark had fallen, never to rise again. In the midst of this political earthquake, Gozzi retained his old aristocratic principles intact, though he bowed to custom and used the shibboleths of the French Revolution, as he confesses, with conscious cynicism.[85]The period of old age was passed in comparative solitude, cheered, however, by the friendly relations which he maintained with the{333}surviving members of his family. The cycle of his dramatic works was closed; and after 1782 he had the mortification of seeing hisFiabeneglected, while Goldoni's star reascended the firmament of popularity and fame. Indeed, theFiabehad no chance of surviving the improvised style of comedy, to support which Gozzi composed them, and which he fondly imagined immortal. Goethe, in 1788, was present at a performance given by the last débris of Sacchi's company; but when the oldCommedia dell'Arteand the old actors died out, theFiabewere relegated to marionettes and puppet-shows. The poet and the man of letters dwindled in Gozzi, but the man of business survived. His correspondence during this fourth period shows him engaged in various commercial affairs upon a small scale, minute in his accounts, involved in litigation, attentive to the produce of his farms, busied about the interests of friends, trafficking in lace and stuffs, groceries, wine, fowls, and carriages.[86]This forms a curious contrast to the romantic portrait of the old man vamped up for us by Paul de Musset. The ordinary troubles of advanced age—rheums, aches, and infirmities—fell upon him. In one of his letters to Innocenzio Massimo he describes their correspondence as "a hypochondriacal gazette." On the 13th of February 1804 he signed a holographic will, which shows him still loyal to his{334}conservative creed in religion, politics, philosophy, and morals. At this time he appears to have been living in the Campo S. Angelo, one of the broadest, busiest, and sunniest squares of Venice. Indeed, he had quitted the ancestral palace of the Gozzi at S. Cassiano many years before, finding it too distant from the theatres and the piazza. For a long while he occupied a casino alone in the Calle Lunga S. Moisè. The little dwelling belonged to him; and in a passage of his Memoirs, which did not lend itself to the scheme of my translation, he relates the circumstances of his removal to this habitation.[87]I shall insert it here, because it throws light upon the last stage of Gozzi's journey in this world. "Many years," he says, "had passed away since my brothers Francesco and Almorò with their families were established in Friuli, while I remained at Venice, the sole occupant of our paternal mansion. For me alone, the vast place was like a wilderness. In the winter I shivered with cold there. Snow, rain, and the Rialto caused me innumerable annoyances when I left the theatres at night to gain my distant home. I was growing old, and this made the journey seem each year more irksome. A casino which I owned in the quarter of S. Maria Zobenigo, Calle Lunga S. Moisè, not far from S. Marco, had been let for sixty ducats a year to the majordomo of a Venetian nobleman. This man left Venice with his master on an{335}embassy, giving me no notice that he had sold his furniture and handed over my casino to the mistress of some man about the town. By a series of similar changes, the tenement passed successively through the hands of several women of the same sort. I always got the rent and asked no questions. The best of it was that the money was punctually paid me by priests, who uttered panegyrics on the heroism of my female tenants. The last of these heroines sent to tell me that my house needed certain repairs. Accordingly I went there, and was received by a well-restored relic of womanhood, who pointed out the alterations she judged necessary in her dwelling-place. Casting my eyes over the lodgings, I thought that they would serve my purpose admirably, and told the lady so. In a moment she changed her honeyed tone and language of affected flattery to oaths and threats and declarations that nothing in the world would make her turn out. I phlegmatically remarked that she had no lease, that my lessee had no power to sublet, and that I would grant her sufficient time to seek another nest. In such matters, as is well known to readers of these Memoirs, I have always had some trouble. But at last, by taking over certain pieces of damaged furniture, I came to terms with the Nymph of Cocytus, and installed myself in my casino. I did it up, and stayed there fourteen years, letting on lease my former abode at S. Cassiano. I should have been there still, had not{336}my brother Almorò written to say that he was tired of Friuli. A widower, with a son and daughter, he should like to send the former to the university at Padua, and to make a home with me in Venice. I was always ready to oblige my brother, and this casino could not hold us all. Accordingly, we took a larger house at S. Benedetto; and here my brother, much aged in my eyes, as I must probably have seemed in his, came to live with me. His children, whom I had only known as little creatures, had grown into giants. Before a year was over, the daughter made a good match in Friuli, and the son went to Padua, whence the troubles of the Revolution drove him away before he had obtained the laurels of a doctor's degree. In that commotion the laurel, destined for the brows of students, was consecrated to the kitchen and the garnishing of dishes on the table."[88]
It is possible that the marriage of this niece and the subsequent marriage of his nephew broke up the joint-household at S. Benedetto, and that Gozzi then removed to the neighbouring quarter of S. Angelo.[89]{337}Almorò and his son Gasparo were appointed executors to Carlo Gozzi's will, which winds up with the following characteristic admonition to the young man: "Preserve your affection for your well-bred, well-behaved, and excellent wife. Look to the careful education of your children, and protect them from the false maxims of that sophistic science which is the bane of our age, involving all humanity in disastrous mists of error and confusion, in labyrinths of infelicity and misery." Gozzi died on the 4th of April 1806, and was buried in the church of S. Cassiano.{338}
The Painter of Venetian Society during the Period ofGozzi and Goldoni.[90]
decorative bar
Theeighteenth century was marked in Venice by a partial revival of the art of painting. Four contemporary masters—Tiepolo, Canaletti, Longhi, and Guardi—have left abundance of meritorious work, which illustrates the taste and manners of society, shows how men and women dressed and moved and took their pastime in the City of the Waters, and{339}preserves for us the external features of Venice during the last hundred years of the Republic.[91]
As an artist, Tiepolo was undoubtedly the strongest of these four. In him alone we recognise a genius of the first order, who, had he been born in the great age of Italian painting, might have disputed the palm with men like Tintoretto. His frescoes in the Palazzo Labia, representing the embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and their famous banquet at Canopus, are worthy to be classed with the finest decorative work of Paolo Veronese. Indeed, the sense for colour, the robust breadth of design, and the firm, unerring execution, which distinguish that great master, seem to have passed into Tiepolo, who revives the splendours of the sixteenth century in these superbly painted pageants. It is to be regretted that one so eminently gifted should have condescended to the barocco taste of the age in those many allegories and celestial triumphs which he executed upon the ceilings of palaces and the cupolas of churches. Little, except the frescoes of the Labia reception-hall, survives to show what Tiepolo might have achieved had he remained true to his native instinct for heroic subjects and for masculine sobriety of workmanship.
Of Canaletti it is not necessary to say much. The{340}fame which he erewhile enjoyed in England has been obscured of late years—to some extent, perhaps by the fussy eloquence of Mr. Ruskin, but really by the finer sense for landscape and the truer way of rendering nature which have sprung up in Europe. Canaletti's pictures of Venetian buildings and canals strike us as cold, tame, and mechanical, accustomed as we are to the magic of Turner's palette and the penetrative force of his imagination.
Guardi, the pupil and in some respects the imitator of Canaletti, has met with a different fate. Less prized during the heyday of his master's fame, he has been steadily acquiring reputation on account of certain qualities peculiar to himself. His draughtsmanship displays an agreeable sketchiness; his colouring a graceful gemmy brightness and a glow of sunny gold. But what has mainly served to win for Guardi popularity is the attention he paid to contemporary costume and manners. Canaletti filled large canvasses with mathematical perspectives of city and water. At the same time he omitted life and incident. There is little to remind us that the Venice he so laboriously depicted was the Venice of perukes and bag-wigs, of masks and hoops and Carnival disguises. Guardi had an eye for local colour and for fashionable humours. The result is that some of his small pictures—one, for instance, which represents a brilliant reception in the Sala del Collegio of the Ducal Palace—have a real value for us by{341}recalling the life of a vanished and irrecoverable past. Thus Guardi illustrates the truth that artists may acquire posthumous importance by felicitous accident in their choice of subjects or the bias of their sympathies. We would willingly exchange a dozen so-called "historical pictures" for one fresh and vivid scene which brings a bygone phase of civilisation before our eyes.[92]
In this particular respect Longhi surpasses Guardi, and deserves to be styled the pictorial chronicler of Venetian society in the eighteenth century. He has even been called the Venetian Hogarth and the Venetian Boucher. Neither of these titles, however, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, rightly characterise his specific quality. Could his numerous works be collected in one place, or be adequately reproduced, we should possess a complete epitome of Venetian life and manners in the age which developed Goldoni and Casanova, Carlo Gozzi and Caterina Dolfin-Tron.{342}
Very little is known of Longhi's career, and that little has no great importance. He was the son of a goldsmith, born at Venice in 1702, and brought up to his father's trade. While yet a lad, Pietro showed unusual powers of invention and elegance of drawing in the designs he made for ornamental silver-work. This induced his parents to let him study painting. His early training in the goldsmith's trade, however, seems to have left an indelible mark on Longhi's genius. A love of delicate line remained with him, and he displayed an affectionate partiality for the minutest details of decorative furniture, dress, and articles of luxury. Some of his drawings of plate—coffee-pots, chocolate-mills, ewers, salvers, water-vessels—are exquisite for their instinctive sense of graceful curve and unerring precision of contour. It was a period, as we know, during which such things acquired an almost flawless purity of outline; and Longhi felt them with the enthusiasm of a practised artisan.
He studied painting under Antonio Balestra at Venice, and also under Giuseppe Maria Crespi at Bologna. The baneful influences of the latter city may be traced in Longhi's earliest known undertaking. This is an elaborate work in fresco at the{343}Sagredo Palace on the Grand Canal. The patrician family of that name inhabited an old Venetian-Gothic house at San Felice. Early in the last century they rebuilt the hall and staircase in Palladian style, leaving the front with its beautiful arcades untouched. The decoration of this addition to their mansion was intrusted to Pietro Longhi in 1734. The subject, chosen by himself or indicated by his patron, was the Fall of the Giants—La Caduta dei Giganti. Longhi treated this unmanageable theme as follows. He placed the deities of Olympus upon the ceiling. Jupiter in the centre advances, brandishing his arms, and hurling forked lightnings on the Titans, who are precipitated headlong among solid purple clouds and masses of broken mountains, covering the three sides of the staircase. The scene is represented without dignity, dramatic force, or harmony of composition. The drawing throughout is feeble, the colouring heavy and tame, the execution unskilful. Longhi had no notion how to work in fresco, differing herein notably from his illustrious contemporary Tiepolo. A vulgar Jove, particularly vulgar in the declamatory sweep of his left hand, a vulgar Juno, with a sneering, tittering leer upon her common face, reveal the painter's want of feeling for mythological grandeur. The Titans are a confused heap of brawny, sprawling nudities—studied, perhaps, from gondoliers or stevedores, but showing a want of even academical adroitness in their ill-drawn extremities and inadequate foreshortenings.{344}It was essential in such a subject that movement should be suggested. Yet Longhi has contrived to make the falling rocks and lurid clouds look as though they were irremovably wedged into their places on the walls, while his ruining giants are clearly transcripts from naked models in repose. Here and there upon the ceiling we catch a note of graceful fancy, especially in a group of lightly-painted goddesses,—elegant and natural female figures, draped in pale blues and greens and pinks, with a silvery illumination from the upper sky. But the somewhat effeminate sweetness of this episode is ill-combined with the dull and impotent striving after violent effect in the main subject; and the whole composition leaves upon our mind the impression of "sound and fury, signifying nothing."
It is singular that Longhi should have reached the age of thirty-two without discovering his real vocation. The absence of brain-force in the conception, of strength in the design, and of any effective adaptation to architecture, which damns the Sagredo frescoes, is enough to prove that he was here engaged on work for which he had no faculty and felt no sympathy.
What revealed to him the true bias of his talent?{345}Did he perchance, just about this period, come across some prints from Hogarth? That is very possible. But the records of his life are so hopelessly meagre that it were useless to indulge in conjecture.
I am not aware whether he had already essayed any of those domestic pieces and delineative scenes from social life which displayed his genuine artistic power, and for the sake of which his name will always be appreciated. He is said to have been of a gay, capricious temperament, delighting in the superficial aspects of aristocratic society, savouring the humours of the common folk with no less pleasure, and enjoying all phases of that easy-going Carnival gaiety in which the various classes met and mingled at Venice. These inclinations directed him at last into the right path. For some forty years he continued to paint a series of easel-pictures, none of them very large, some of them quite small, in which the Vanity Fair of Venice at his epoch was represented with fidelity and kindly feeling.
The panels attributed to Pietro Longhi are innumerable. They may be found scattered through public galleries and private collections, adorning the walls of patrician palaces, or thrust away in corners of country-houses. He worked carefully, polished the surface of his pictures to the finish of a miniature, set them in frames of a fixed pattern, and covered them with glass. These genre-pictures, while presenting notes of similarity, differ very considerably{346}in their technical handling and their scheme of colour. Our first inference, after inspecting a miscellaneous selection, is that Longhi must have started a school of imitators. Indeed this is probably the case; and it is certain that some pieces ascribed to his brush are the production of his son Alessandro, who was born in 1733. Yet closer study of authentic paintings by Pietro's hand compels the critic to be cautious before he rejects, on internal evidence of style, a single piece assigned by good tradition to this artist. The Museo Civico at Venice, for example, contains a large number of Longhis, some of which seem to fall below his usual standard. I have, however, discovered elaborate drawings for these doubtful pictures in the book of his original sketches, which is also preserved there. Longhi must therefore have painted the pictures himself, or must have left the execution of his designs to a pupil. Again, the style of his two masterpieces (theSala del Ridottoand theParlatorio d'un Convento, both in the Museo Civico) differs in important particulars from that of the elaborately finished little panels by which he is most widely known. These fine compositions are marked by a freer breadth of handling, a sketchy boldness, a combined richness and subtlety of colouring, and an animation of figures in movement, which are not common in the average of his genre-pieces. When I come to speak of the family portrait of the Pisani, signed by his name, I shall have to point out that{347}the style of execution, the scheme of colour, and the pictorial feeling of this large composition belong to a manner dissimilar from either of those which I have already indicated as belonging to authentic Longhis.
It has been well observed by a Venetian writer, whose meagre panegyric is nearly all we have in print upon the subject of this painter's biography, that "there is no scene or point of domestic life which Longhi has not treated many times and in divers ways. All those episodes which make up the Day of a Gentleman as sung at a later date by Parini, had been already set forth by the brush of Longhi."[93]
The duties of the toilette, over which ladies and young men of fashion dawdled through their mornings; the drinking of chocolate in bed, attended by a wife or mistress or obsequious man of business; the long hours spent before the looking-glass, with maids or valets matching complexions, sorting dresses from the wardrobe, and fixing patches upon telling points of cheek or forehead; the fashionable hairdresser, building up a lady's tower with tongs, or tying the knot of a beau's bag-wig; the children trooping in to kiss their mother's hand at{348}breakfast-time—stiff little girls in hoops, and tinycavalieriin uniform, with sword and shoe-buckles and queue; the vendors of flowered silks and laces laying out their wares; the pert young laundress smuggling abillet-douxinto a beauty's hand before her unsuspecting husband's face; the fine gentleman ordering a waistcoat in the shop of a tailoress, ogling and flirting over the commission, while a running footman with tall cane in hand comes bustling in to ask if his lord's suit is ready; the old patrician lolling in his easy-chair and toying with a fan; the abbé turning over the leaves of some fresh play or morning paper: scenes like these we may assign to the Venetian forenoon.
Afternoon brings ceremonious visits, when grand ladies, sailing in their hoops, salute each other, and beaux make legs on entering a drawing-room, and lacqueys hand round chocolate on silver salvers. Dancing-lessons may perhaps be assigned to this part of the day; a spruce French professor teaching his fair pupil how to drop a curtsey, or to swim with solemn grace through the figures of the minuet. At night we are introduced to the hall of the Ridotto; patricians in toga and snow-white periwig hold banks for faro beneath the glittering chandeliers; men and women, closely masked, jostle each other at the gambling-tables, where sequins and ducats lie about in heaps. The petty houses, orcasini, now engage attention. Here may be seen a pair of stealthy,{349}muffled libertines hastening to complete an assignation. Then there are meetings at street-corners or on the landing-places oftraghetti—mysterious figures flitting to and fro in wide miraculousbauttebeneath the light of flickering flambeaux. Both men and women in these nocturnal scenes wear muffs, trimmed with fur, and secured around their waist by girdles.
Theatres, masked balls, banquets and coffee-houses, music-parties in villa-gardens, the assemblies of literary coteries, promenades on the piazza, and Carnival processions, obtain their due share of attention from this vigilant observer. But, as is the way with Longhi, only episodes are treated. He does not, like some painters of our own time—like Mr. Frith, R.A., for instance—attempt to bring the accumulated details of a complex scene before us. He leaves the context of his chosen incident to be divined.
The traffic of the open streets—quack-doctors on their platforms with a crowd of gaping dupes around them, mountebanks performing tricks, the criers of stewed plums and sausages, fortune-tellers, itinerant musicians, improvisatory poets bawling out their octave stanzas, cloaked serenaders twangling mandolines—such motives may be found in fair abundance among Longhi's genre-pieces. Nor does he altogether neglect the country. Many of his pictures are devoted to hunting-parties, riding-lessons, shooting and fishing, all the amusements of the Venetianvilleggiatura. Peasants lounging over their wine or pottage{350}at a rustic table are depicted with no less felicity than the beau and coquette in their glory. The grimy interior of a village-tavern is portrayed with the same gusto as a fine lady's gilt saloon.
Longhi used to tell Goldoni that they—the painter and the playwright—were brethren in Art; and one of the poet's sonnets records this saying:—
It seems that their contemporaries were alive to the similar qualities and the common aims of the two men; for Gasparo Gozzi drew a parallel between them in a number of his Venetian Gazzetta. Indeed the resemblance is more than merely superficial. Longhi surveyed human life with the same kindly glance and the same absence of gravity or depth of intuition as Goldoni. They both studied Nature, but Nature only in her genial moods. They both sincerely aimed at truth, but avoided truths which were sinister or painful.
This renders the designation of Venetian Hogarth peculiarly inappropriate to Longhi. There is neither tragedy nor satire, and only a thin silvery vein of humour, in his work. Indeed it may be questioned{351}whether he was in any exact sense humorous at all. What looks like humour in some of his pictures is probably unconscious. In like manner he lacked pathos, and never strove to moralise the themes he treated. Where would Hogarth be if we excluded Gargantuan humour, Juvenalian satire, stern morality, and cruel pathos from his scenes of social life? Longhi is never gross and never passionate. With a kind of sensitive French curiosity, he likes to graze the darker and the coarser side of life, and pass it by. He does not want to probe the cancers of the human breast, or to lay bare the festering sores of vice. What would become of Hogarth if he were deprived of his grim surgical anatomy? Neither in the heights nor in the depths was Longhi at home—neither in the region of Olympian poetry nor in the purgatory of man's sin and folly. He sailed delightfully, agreeably, across the middle waters of the world, where steering is not difficult.
In all this Goldoni resembles him, except only that Goldoni had a rich vein of cheerful humour. It would be therefore more just to call Longhi the Goldoni of painting than the Venetian Hogarth.
Longhi's portrait, unlike that of Goldoni, betrays no sensuousness. He seems to have had a long, refined face, with bright, benignant black eyes, a pleasantly smiling mouth, thin lips, and a look of gently subrisive appreciation rather than of irony or sarcasm. The engraving by which I know his{352}features suggests an intelligent, attenuated Addison—not a powerful or first-rate man, but a genially observant superior mediocrity.
Although Longhi, as a personality, is clearly not of the same type as Hogarth, there are certain points of similarity between the men as artists. Both were taught the goldsmith's trade, and both learned painting under Bolognese influences. Both eventually found their sphere in the delineation of the life around them. There the similarity ceases. Longhi lacks, as I have said, the humour, the satire, the penetrative imagination, the broad sympathy with human nature in its coarser aspects, which make Hogarth unrivalled as a pictorial moralist. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that Longhi was not influenced by Hogarth. In the technique of his art he displays something which appears to be derived from the elder and stronger master—a choice of points for observation, an arrangement of figures in groups, a mode of rendering attitude and suggesting movement; finally, the manner of execution reminds us of Hogarth. Longhi abandoned his false decorative style, the style of the Palazzo Sagredo, at some time after 1734. This date corresponds with Hogarth's triumphant entrance upon his career as a satirical painter of society. Possibly Longhi may have met with the engravings of theMarriage à la Mode, and may have been stimulated by them to undertake the work, which he carried on with nothing{353}of Hogarth's moral force, and with a small portion of his descriptive faculty, yet still with valuable results for the student of eighteenth-century manners.
In 1763 an Academy for the study of the arts of design was opened by some members of the Pisani family in their palace at S. Stefano. The chiefs of that patrician house were four sons of the late Doge Alvise Pisani. According to Lazari, my sole authority for this passage in Longhi's biography, the founder of the Academy was a Procuratore di S. Marco, who had a son of remarkable promise. This son he wished to instruct in the fine arts; and Pietro Longhi was chosen to fill the chair of painting, which he occupied for two years. At the end of that time young Pisani died, and the institution was closed—now that the hopes which led to its foundation were extinguished.[94]
Among the few facts of Longhi's life this connection{354}with the Pisani Academy has to be recorded. It is also of some importance in helping us to decide whether a large portrait-picture, representing the chiefs of the Pisani family, together with the wife and children of one of its most eminent members (Luigi, a godchild of Louis XIV.), is rightly ascribed to him. The huge canvas, which is now in the possession of the Contessa Evelina Almorò Pisani, was found by her rolled up and hidden away in a cabinet beneath the grand staircase of the Palazzo Pisani at S. Stefano.[95]It proved to be in excellent preservation; and it is signed in large clear text letters—opus Petri Longi. So far there would seem to be no doubt that the picture is genuine; and I, for my part, am prepared to accept it as such, when I consider that Longhi enjoyed the confidence of the Pisani family and presided over their Academy about the period when it was executed. Yet the student of his works cannot fail to be struck by marked differences of style between this and other authentic pictures from his hand.
The central group consists of the noble Lady{355}Paolina Gambara, wife of Luigi Pisani, seated with her children round her.[96]Her husband stands behind, together with his three brothers and an intimate friend of the house. Allegorical figures representing the arts and sciences complete the composition. In the distance is seen the princely palace of Stra upon the Brenta, which was designed in part by one of the Pisani brothers. The arrangement of these inter-connected groups is excellent; the characterisation of the several heads, admirable; the drawing, firm and accurate; and the whole scene is bathed in a glow of roseate colour which seems actually to radiate light. Longhi, so far as I am aware, produced nothing in the same style as this complicated masterpiece of portraiture and allegorical suggestion. In conception, execution, and scheme of colour, it reminds us of a French painter; and if he had left a series of such works, he might have deserved what now seems the inappropriate title of the Venetian Boucher.
I cannot pretend to have seen more than a small portion of Longhi's pictures. But this portrait of the Pisani family detaches itself as something in a different key of feeling and of workmanship from any with which I am acquainted. Admirers of his art should not fail to pay it the attention it deserves; and if the{356}day comes when a thorough study of this interesting master shall be made, it is not impossible that genuine paintings in the same manner may be discovered.
A series of frescoes attributed to Pietro Longhi should also here be mentioned. They decorate three sides of the staircase of the Palazzo Sina (formerly Grassi) on the Grand Canal. The balustrades of an open loggia or gallery are painted with bold architectural relief. Behind the pilasters of this balcony a motley company of life-sized figures promenade or stand about in groups. Some are entering in Carnival costume, with masks and long mantles. Others wear the gala dress of the last century. Elderly ladies are draped in the black zendado of Venetian aristocracy. Grave senators bend their courtly heads beneath the weight of snowy periwigs. Lacqueys in livery and running footmen in Albanian costume wait upon the guests, handing chocolate or wines on silver trays. This scene of fashionable life is depicted with vivacity; the studies of face and attitude are true to nature; an agreeable air of good tone and sober animation pervades the whole society. Probably many of the persons introduced were copied from the life; for it is reported of Longhi that one of his greatest merits was the{357}dexterity with which he reproduced the main actors in thebel mondeof Venice—so that folk could recognise their acquaintances upon his canvas merely by the carriage of their mask and domino.
Owing to restoration, it is difficult to say how far the fresco-painting was well executed, and to what extent the original tone has been preserved. At present the colouring is somewhat chalky, dull, and lifeless; and I suspect Longhi's brush-work suffered considerably when the palace was internally remodelled some years ago.
It only remains to speak of Pietro Longhi's sketch-book. This collection of original drawings, numbering 140 pieces, and containing a very large variety of studies (several pages being filled on front and back with upwards of ten separate figures) was formed by Alessandro Longhi. It came into the possession of the patrician Teodoro Correr, who bequeathed it, together with the rest of his immense museum, to the town of Venice.
As a supplement to Longhi's paintings, this sketch-book is invaluable. It brings us close to the artist's methods, aims, and personal predilections in the choice of motives. Most of the drawings are done in hard black pencil or chalk, heightened and{358}corrected with white; a few in soft red chalk. Unfortunately, they have suffered to a large extent from rubbing; and this injury is likely to increase with time, owing to the clumsy binding of the volume which contains them.
Studies from the nude are conspicuous by their extreme rarity and want of force. Great attention has been paid to the details of costume and furniture. Thezendado, thebautta, the hoop, the bag-wig, the fop's coat and waistcoat, the patrician's civil mantle, the knee-breeches and stockings of a well-dressed gentleman, are copied and re-copied with loving care. Painters at the easel, ballet-girls with castanets, maid-servants holding trays, grooms and lacqueys, men on horseback, serenaders with lute or mandoline, ballad-singers, music and dancing-masters, women working at lace-pillows, gentlemen in bed, sportsmen discharging their fowling-pieces, gondoliers rowing, little girls in go-carts or fenced chairs, sellers of tarts upon the street, country boys in taverns, chests of drawers, pots, pans, jugs, gourds, wine-flasks, parrots in cages, ladies at the clavichord, queues, fans, books, snuff-boxes, tables, petticoats, desks, the draperies of doors and windows, wigs, footmen placing chairs for guests, beaux bowing in the doorway or whispering tender nothings at a beauty's ear, old men reclining in arm-chairs, embroiderers at work, muffs, copper water-buckets, nurses with babies in their arms, silver plate of all{359}descriptions:—such is the farrago of this multiform and graceful, but limited, series of transcripts from the world of visible objects. It is clear that Longhi thought "the proper study of mankind is man;" and man as a clothed, sociable, well-behaved animal.
His sketches are remarkable for their strenuous sincerity—their search after the right attitude, their serious effort to hit the precise line wanted, their suggested movement and seizure of life in the superficies. They have a sustained air of good-breeding, refined intelligence, and genial sympathy with the prose of human nature. Landscape might never have existed so far as Longhi was concerned. I do not think that a tree, a cloud, or even a flower will be found among the miscellaneous objects he so carefully studied and drew so deftly. The world he moved in was the world of men and women meeting on the surface-paths of daily intercourse. Even here, we do not detect the slightest interest in passionate or painful aspects of experience. All Longhi's people are well-to-do and placid in their different degrees. The peasants in the taverns do not brawl, nor the fine gentlemen fight duels, nor the lovers in the drawing-rooms quarrel. He seems to have overlooked beggary, disease, and every form of vice or suffering. He does not care for animals. With the exception of a parrot, a caged canary, and a stiffly drawn riding-horse, the brute creation is not represented{360}in these sketches. No sarcasm, no grossness, no violence of any kind, disturbs the calm artistic seriousness, the sweet painstaking curiosity of his mental mood. The execution throughout is less robust than sensitively delicate. We feel a something French, a suggestion of Watteau's elysium of fashion, in his touch on things. In fine, the sketch-book corroborates the impression made on us by Longhi's finished pictures.
With all his limitations of character and artistic scope, Longi remains a very interesting and highly respectable painter. In an age of social corruption he remained free from impurity, and depicted only what was blameless and of good repute. We cannot study his work without surmising that manners in Italy were more refined than in our own country at that epoch—a conclusion to which we are also led by Goldoni's, Carlo Gozzi's, and even Casanova's Memoirs. Morally licentious and politically decadent the Venetians undoubtedly were; but they were neither brutal, nor cruel, nor savage, nor sottish. Even the less admirable aspects of their social life—its wasteful luxury and effeminate indulgence in pleasure—have been treated with so much reserve{361}by this humane artist, that youth and innocence can suffer no contamination from the study of his works. At the same time they are delightful for their gracious realism, for their naïve touch upon the follies of the period. Those who love to dream themselves back into the days of hoops and perukes—and there are many such among as now—should not neglect to make themselves acquainted with Pietro Longhi.{362}