Venice.St. Mark’s: The Pala d’ Oro.Vicenza.Death of the Virgin.
Lorenzo da Venezia.
Venice.Academy: Altarpiece.Correr Museum: Saviour giving Keys to St. Peter.S. Giovanni in Bragora: Ancona.Berlin.Two Saints.
Nicoletto Semitocolo.
Venice.Academy: Altarpiece.Padua.Biblioteca Archivescovo: Altarpiece.
Stefano da Venezia.
Venice.Academy: Coronation of Virgin, with false signature of Semitocolo.
Jacobello del Fiore.
Venice.Academy: Justice.S. Trovaso: S. Grisogono.
Niccolo di Pietro.
Venice.S. Maria dei Miracoli: Altarpiece.
Michele Giambono.
Venice.Academy: St. James the Great and other Saints.London.Mond Collection: A “Throne.”
INFLUENCES OF UMBRIA AND VERONA
Gentile da Fabriano, the Umbrian master, when he reached Venice in the early years of the fifteenth century, was already a man of note. He had received his art education in Florence, and he brought with him fresh and delicate devices for the enrichment of painting with gold, which, derived as it was from the Sienese assimilation of Byzantine methods, was very superior in fancy and refinement to anything that Venice had to show. He was a man of a gentle, mystic temperament, but he was accustomed to courts, and a finished master whose technique and artistic value was far beyond anything that the local painters were capable of. He spent some years in Venice, adorning the great hall with episodes from the legend of Barbarossa; one of these, which is specially cited, was of the battle between the Emperor and the Venetians. Gentile was working till about 1414, and the walls, finished by Pisanello, were covered by 1416. After this Gentile remainedsome time in Bergamo and Brescia, and settled in Florence about 1422. The year after reaching Florence, he painted the famous “Adoration of the Magi,” now in the Florentine Academy. Even after leaving Venice his fame survived; pictures went from his workshop in the Popolo S. Trinità, and he sent back two portraits after he had returned to his native Fabriano.
We have no positive record of Gentile and Vittore Pisano, commonly called Pisanello, having met in Venice, but there is every evidence in their work that they did so, and that one overlapped the other in the paintings for the Ducal Palace.
The School of Verona already had an honourable record, and its Guild dates from 1303. The following are its rules, the document of which is still preserved, while that of Venice has been lost:
Rules of the Veronese Guild(abridged)1. No one to become a member who had not practised art for twelve years.2. Twelve artists to be elected members.3. The reception of a new member depends on his being a senior.4. The members are obliged in the winter season to take upon themselves the instruction of all the pupils in turn.5. A member is liable to be expelled for theft.6. Each member is bound to extend to another fraternal assistance in necessity.7. To maintain general agreement in any controversies.8. To extend hospitality to strange artists.9. To offer to one another reciprocal comfort.10. To follow the funerals of members with torches.11. The President is to exercise reference authority.12. The member who has the longest membership to be President.
Rules of the Veronese Guild(abridged)
1. No one to become a member who had not practised art for twelve years.
2. Twelve artists to be elected members.
3. The reception of a new member depends on his being a senior.
4. The members are obliged in the winter season to take upon themselves the instruction of all the pupils in turn.
5. A member is liable to be expelled for theft.
6. Each member is bound to extend to another fraternal assistance in necessity.
7. To maintain general agreement in any controversies.
8. To extend hospitality to strange artists.
9. To offer to one another reciprocal comfort.
10. To follow the funerals of members with torches.
11. The President is to exercise reference authority.
12. The member who has the longest membership to be President.
There were also by-laws, which provided that no master should accept a pupil for less than three years, and this acceptance had to be definitely registered by the public notary, a son, brother, grandson, or nephew being the only exceptions. No master might receive an apprentice who should have left another master before his time was out, unless with that master’s free consent. There were penalties for enticing away a pupil, and others to be enforced against pupils who broke the agreement. Severe restrictions existed with regard to the sale of pictures, no one but a member of the Guild being allowed to sell them. No one might bring a work from any foreign place for purposes of sale. It might not even be brought to the town without the special permission of theGastaldiones, or trustees of the Guild, and those trustees were permitted to search for and destroy forged pictures. Every painter, therefore, had to subordinate his interests and inclinations to the local school. It helps us tounderstand why the individual character of the different masters is so perceptible, and one of the primary causes of this must have been the careful training of the pupils in the master’s workshop.
The fresco left by Altichiero, Pisanello’s first master, in the Church of S. Anastasia in Verona, shows how worthily a Veronese painter was at this early time following in the footsteps of Giotto. Three knights of the Cavalli family are presented by their patron saints to the Madonna. The composition has a large simplicity, a breadth of feeling which is carried into each gesture. The knights with their raised helmets, in the pattern of horses’ heads, are full of reality, the Madonna is sweet and dignified, and the saints are grand and stately. The picture has a delightful suavity and ease, and the colouring has evidently been lovely. The setting is in good proportion and more satisfactory than that of the Giottesques. From the series of frescoes in S. Antonio, Verona, we gather that while Venice was still limited to stiff anconæ, the Veronese masters were managing crowds of figures and rendering distances successfully. Altichiero puts in homely touches from everyday life with a freedom which shows he has not yet mastered the principles of selection or the dignified fitness which guided the great masters; as, for instance, in the case of the old woman, among the spectatorsof the Crucifixion, who shows her grief by blowing her nose. He lets himself be drawn off by all manner of trivial detail and of gay costume; but again in such frescoes as S. Lucia, or the “Beheading of St. George,” in the Paduan chapel of the Santo, he proves how well he understands the force of solid, simply-draped figures, direct in gesture and expression, while the decorative use he makes of lances against the background was long afterwards perhaps imitated, but hardly surpassed, by Tintoretto.
Pisanello, who followed quickly upon Altichiero and his assistant, Avanzi, exhibits the same chivalresque and courtly inclinations which commended Gentile da Fabriano to the splendour-loving Venetians. Verona, under the peaceful but gallant government of the Scaligeri, had long been the home of all knightly lore, and the artists had been employed to decorate chapels for the families of the great nobles. Among these, Pisanello had attained a high place. Though very few of his paintings remain, they all show these influences, and his subtly modelled medals establish him as a master of the most finished type. A much destroyed fresco in S. Anastasia, Verona, portrays the history of St. George and the Dragon. In the St. George we probably see the portrait of the great personage in whose honour the fresco was painted. He is mounting his horse, which, seen from behind, reminds us of thefore-shortened chargers of Paolo Uccello. The rescued princess, also a portrait, wears a magnificent dress and an elaborate headgear in the fashion of the day. Other horses, fiery and spirited, are grouped around, and in the band of cavaliers, beyond St. George, every head is individualised; one is beautiful, another brutal, and so on through the seven. A greyhound and spaniel in the foreground are superbly painted, the background is excellent, and a realistic touch is given by the corpses which dangle unheeded from the trees outside the castle-gate. A ruined, but fortunately not restored, “Annunciation” in S. Fermo, has a simple, slender figure of the Virgin sitting by her white bed, and the angel, with great sweeping, rushing wings and bowed, child-like head with fair hair, is a most sweet and keen figure, thrilling and convincing, in contrast to all the dead, over-worked frescoes round the church. All these paintings are too small to be the least effective at the height at which they are placed, and can only be seen with a good glass. Pisanello’s art is not well adapted to wide, frescoed walls, and he seems to have enjoyed painting miniature panels, such as the two we possess. In these he is full of originality, and shows his love for the knightly life, the life of courts, in the armedcap-à-piedfigure of St. George, whose point-device armour is crowned by a wide Tuscan hat and feather. The artist’s knowledge and love of animals andwild nature comes out in them, and his interest in beauty and chivalry as opposed to the outworn conventionalities of ecclesiastic demands.
We shall be able to trace the influence of both the Umbrian and the Veronese painter on men like Antonio di Murano and Jacopo Bellini, and it is important to note the likeness of the two to one another. In Gentile’s “Adoration” we have on the one hand the Holy Family and the gay pageant of the kings, of which we could find the prototype in many an Umbrian panel. On the other we see those contrasting elements which were struggling in Pisanello; the delight in flowers and animals, in gaily apparelled figures, in dogs and horses. The two have no lasting effect, but though they created no actual school, they gave a stimulus to Venetian art, and started it on a new tack, enabling it to open its channels to fresh ideas. During the time they were in Venice, Jacobello del Fiore shows some signs of adapting the new fashion to his early style, and the horse of S. Grisogono is very like that of Gentile in the “Adoration,” or like Pisano’s horses. Michele Giambono is actually found in collaboration, in the chapel of the Madonna da Mascoli in St. Mark’s, with such a virile painter as the Florentine, Andrea del Castagno, who is evidently responsible for God the Father and two of the Apostles; but Castagno must have been thoroughly antipathetic to theVenetians, and though he may have taught them the way to draw, he has not left any traces of a following.
Facio, writing in 1455, speaks of Gentile’s work in the Ducal Palace as already decaying, while Pisanello’s was painted out by Alvise Vivarini and Bellini.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Gentile da Fabriano.
Florence.Academy: Adoration of the Magi.Milan.Brera: Altarpiece.
Altichiero.
Padua.Capella S. Felice, S. Antonio: Frescoes.Capella S. Giorgio, S. Anastasia: The Cavalli Family.
Pisanello.
Padua.S. Anastasia: St. George and the Dragon.Verona.S. Fermo: Annunciation.London.S. George and S. Jerome; S. Eustace and the Stag.
THE SCHOOL OF MURANO
The important little town of Murano, a satellite of Venice, lies upon an island, some ten minutes’ row from the mother State, distinct from which it preserved separate interests and regulations. Its glass manufacture was safeguarded by the most stringent decrees, which forbade members of the Guild to leave the islet under pain of death. Its mosaics, stone work, and architecture speak of an early artistic existence, and we recognise the justice of the claim of Muranese painters to be the first to strike out into a more emancipated type than that of the primitives. The painter Giovanni of Murano, called Giovanni Alemanus or d’ Alemagna, names between which Venetian jealousy for a time drew an imaginary distinction, had certainly received his early education in Germany, and betrays it by his heavier ornamentation and more Gothic style; but he was a fellow-worker with Antonio of Murano, the founder of the great Vivarini family, and the Academy contains severallarge altarpieces in which they collaborated. “Christ and the Virgin in Glory” was painted for a church in Venice in 1440, and has an inscription with both names on a banderol across the foreground. The Eternal Father, with His hands on the shoulders of the Mother and Son, makes a group of which we find the origin in Gentile da Fabriano’s altarpiece in the Brera, and it is probable that one if not both masters had been studying with the Umbrian and absorbing the principles he had brought to Venice. It is easy to trace the influence of Giovanni d’ Alemagna, though not always easy to pick out which part of a picture belongs to him and which to Antonio working under his influence. In S. Pantaleone is a “Coronation of the Virgin,” with Gothic ornaments such as are not found in purely Italian art at this period, but the example in which both masters can be most closely followed is the great picture in the Academy, the “Madonna enthroned,” where she sits under a baldaquin surrounded by saints. Here the Gothic surroundings become very florid, and have a gingerbread-cake effect, which Italian taste would hardly have tolerated. Many features are characteristic of the German; the huge crown worn by the Mother, the floriated ornament of the quadrangle, the almost baroque appearance of the throne. Through it all, heavily repainted as it is, shines the dawn ofthe tender expression which came into Venetian art with Gentile.
Antonio da Murano.ADORATION OF THE MAGI.Berlin.(Photo, Hanfstängl.)
Giovanni d’ Alemagna and Antonio da Murano were no doubt widely employed, and when the former died Antonio founded and carried on a real school in Venice. In 1446 he was living in the parish of S. Maria Formosa with his wife, who was the daughter of a fruit merchant, and the wills of both are still preserved in the parish archives. Gentile da Fabriano had set the example for gorgeous processions with gay dresses and strange animals; winding paths in the background and foreshortened limbs prove that attention had been drawn to Paolo Uccello’s studies in perspective, while many figures and horses recall Pisanello. A striking proof of the sojourn of Gentile and Pisanello in Venice is found in an “Adoration of Magi,” now ascribed to Antonio da Murano, in which the central group, the oldest king kissing the Child’s foot, is very like that in Gentile’s “Adoration,” but the foreshortened horses and the attendants argue the painter’s knowledge of Pisanello’s work. A comparison of the architecture in the background with that in the “St. George” in S. Anastasia shows the same derivation, and the dainty cavalier, who holds a flag and is in attendance on the youngest king, is reminiscent of St. George and St. Eustace in Pisanello’s paintings in the National Gallery, so that in this one picture the influences of the two artists are combined.
Antonio took his younger brother, Bartolommeo, into partnership, and the title of da Murano was presently dropped for the more modern designation of Vivarini. Both brothers are fine and delicate in work, but from the outset of their collaboration the younger man is more advanced and more full of the spirit of the innovator. In his altarpiece in the first hall of the Academy the Nativity has already a new realism; Joseph leans his head upon his hand, crushing up his cheek. The saints are particularly vivid in expression, especially the old hermit holding the bell, whose face is brimming with ardent feeling.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Giovanni d’ Alemanus and Antonio da Murano.
Venice.Christ and the Virgin in Glory; Virgin enthroned, with Saints.
Antonio da Murano.
Berlin.Adoration of Magi.
THE PADUAN INFLUENCE
And now into this dawning school, employed chiefly in the service of the Church, with its tentative and languid essays to understand Florentine composition, resulting in what is scarcely more than a mindless imitation, and with its rather more intelligent perception of the Humanist qualities of Pisanello’s work, there enters a new factor; or rather a new agency makes a slightly more successful attempt than Gentile and Castagno had done to help the Venetians to realise the supreme importance of the human figure, its power in relation to other objects to determine space, its modelling and the significance of its attitude in conveying movement. Giotto had been able to present all these qualities in the human form, but he had done so by the light of genius, and had never formulated any sufficient rules for his followers’ guidance. In Ghiberti’s school, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the fascination of the antique in art was making itself felt, butDonatello had escaped from the artificial trammels it threatened to exercise, and had carried the Florentine school with him in his profound researches into the human form itself. Donatello had been working in Padua for ten years before Pisanello’s death, and in an indirect way the Venetians were experiencing some after-results of the systematising and formulating of the new pictorial elements. Though the intellectual life had met with little encouragement among the positive, practical inhabitants of Venice, in Padua, which had been subject to her since 1405, speculative thought and ideal studies were in full swing. There was no re-birth in Venice, whose tradition was unbroken and where “men were too genuinely pagan to care about the echo of a paganism in the remote past.” St. Mark was the deity of Venice, and “the other twelve Apostles” were only obscurely connected with her religious life, which was strong and orthodox, but untroubled by metaphysical enthusiasms and inconvenient heresies. Padua, on the other hand, was absorbed in questions of learning and religion. A university had been established here for two centuries. The abstract study of the antique was carried on with fervour, and the memory of Livy threw a lustre over the city which had never quite died out. It seemed perfectly right and respectable to the Venetians that thesavants, lying safely removed from the busy stream of commercial life, should cultivateinquiries into theology and the classics, which would only have been a hindrance to their own practical business; but such, as it was well known, were of absorbing interest in the circles which gathered round the Medici in Florence. The school of art, which was now arising in Padua, was fed from such sources as these. The love of the antique was becoming a fashion and a guiding principle, and influenced the art of painting more formally than it could succeed in doing among the independent and original Florentines.
Francesco Squarcione, though, as Vasari says, he may not have been the best of painters, has left work (now at Berlin) which is accepted as genuine and which shows that he was more than the mere organiser he is sometimes called. He had travelled in Greece, and was apparently a dealer, supplying the demand for classic fragments, which was becoming widespread. When he founded his school in Padua he evidently was its leading spirit and a powerful artistic influence. His pupils, even the greatest, were long in breaking away from his convention, and few of them threw it off entirely, even in after life. That convention was carried with undeviating thoroughness into every detail. Draperies are arranged in statuesque folds, designed to display every turn of the form beneath; the figures are moulded with all the precision and limitations of statuary. The very landscape becomes sculpturesque, and rocks of avolcanic character are constructed with the regularity of masonry. The colour and technique are equally uncompromising, and the surface becomes a beautiful enamel, unyielding, definite in its lines, lacquer-like in its firmness of finish, while the Gothic forms, which had hitherto been so prevalent, were replaced by more or less pedantic adaptations from Roman bas-reliefs. This system of design was practised most determinedly in Padua itself, but it soon spread to Venice. Squarcione himself was employed there after 1440, and though Antonio da Murano clung to the old archaic style he saw the Paduan manner invading his kingdom, and his own brother became strongly Squarcionesque.
The two brothers of Murano come most closely together in an altarpiece in the gallery of Bologna, where the framework is more simple than Alemanus’s German taste would have permitted, and the Madonna and Child have some natural ease, and the delicacy of feeling of primitive art. Bartolommeo, when he breaks away and sets out to paint by himself, is crude and strong, but full of vital force. In his altarpiece of 1464, in the Academy, he gives his saints reality by taking them off their pedestals and making them stand upon the ground, and though they are still isolated from one another in the partitions of an ancona, their sparkling eyes, individual features, and curly beards give them a look of life. The draperies, thin and clinging, with little ruckedfolds, which display the forms, and the drawing of the bony structure, exaggerated in the arms and legs, are Squarcionesque. The rocks and stones, too, show the Paduan convention. In several of his other altarpieces, Bartolommeo introduces rich ornaments and swags of fruit, such as Donatello had first brought to Padua, or which Paduan artists delighted to copy from classic columns. Antonio’s manner to the end is the local Venetian manner, infused as it was with the soft and charming influence of Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello, but Bartolommeo adopts the new and more ambitious style. Though not a very good painter, and inclined to be puffy and shapeless in his flesh forms, he was the head of a crowd of artists, and works of his school, signedOpus factum, went all over Italy, and are found as far south as Bari. Works of his pupils are numerous; the “St. Mark enthroned” in the Frari is as good if not better than the master’s own work, and the triptych in the Correr Museum is a free imitation.
Round this early school gathered such painters as Antonio da Negroponte and Quirizio da Murano, who were both working in 1450. Negroponte has left an enthroned Madonna in S. Francesco della Vigna, which is one of the most beautiful examples of colour and of the fanciful charm of the Renaissance that the early art of Venice has to show. The Mother and Child are placed in a marble shrine, adornedwith antique reliefs, rich wreaths of fruit swag above her head, a little Gothic loggia is full of flowers and fruit, and birds are perched on cornucopias. On either side, four badly drawn little angels, with ugly faces and awkwardly foreshortened forms, foreshadow the beautiful, music-making angels which became such a feature of North Italian art. The Divine Mother, adoring the Child lying across her knees, has an exquisite, pensive face, conceived with all the delicacy and simplicity of early art. It seems quite possible, as Professor Leonello Venturi suggests, that we have here the early master of Crivelli, in whom we find the love of fruit garlands, of chains of beads and rich brocades carried to its farthest limits, who takes keen pleasure in introducing the ugly but lively little angels, and who gives the same pensive and almost mincing expression to his Madonnas.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Antonio da Murano and Bartolommeo Vivarini.
Bologna.Altarpiece.
Bartolommeo Vivarini.
Venice.Academy: Altarpiece, 1464; Two Saints.Frari: Madonna and four Saints.S. Giovanni in Bragora: Madonna and two Saints.S. Maria Formosa: Triptych.London.Madonna and Saints.Vienna.S. Ambrose and Saints.
Antonio da Negroponte.
Venice.S. Francesco della Vigna: Altarpiece.
JACOPO BELLINI
While Venice was assimilating the spirit of the school of Squarcione, which in the next few years was to be rendered famous by Mantegna, another influence was asserting itself, which was sufficient to counteract the hard formalism of Paduan methods.
When Gentile da Fabriano left Venice, he carried with him, and presently established with him in Florence, a young man, Jacopo Bellini, who had already been working with him and Pisanello, and who was an ardent disciple of the new naturalistic and humanist movement. Both Gentile and his apprentice were subjected to annoyance from the time they arrived in Florence, where the strict regulations which governed the Guilds made it very difficult for any newcomer to practise his art. The records of a police case report that on the 11th of June 1423 some young men, among them, one, Bernabo di San Silvestri, the son of a notary, were observed throwing stones into the painter’s room. Hisassistant, Jacopo Bellini, came out and drove the assailants away with blows, but Bernabo, accusing Jacopo of assault, the latter was committed to prison in default of payment. After six months’ imprisonment, a compromise of the fine and a penitential declaration set him at liberty. The accounts declare that Gentile took no steps to be of service to his follower; but Jacopo soon after married a girl from Pesaro, and his first son was christened after his old master, which does not look as though they were on unfriendly terms. Jacopo travelled in the Romagna, and was much esteemed by the Estes of Ferrara, but he was back in Venice in 1430. He has left us only three signed works, and one or two more have lately been attributed to him, but they give very little idea of what an important master he was.
Jacopo Bellini.AGONY IN GARDEN—DRAWING.British Museum.(Photo, Anderson.)
His Madonna in the Academy has a round, simple type of face, and in the Louvre Madonna, which is attributed but not signed, it is easy to recognise the same arched eyebrows and half-shut, curved eyelids. In this picture, where the Madonna blesses the kneeling Leonello d’ Este, we see how Pisanello acted on Jacopo and, through him, on Venetian art. The connection between the two masters has been established in a very interesting way by Professor Antonio Venturi’s discovery of a sonnet, written in 1441, which recounts how they painted rival portraits of Leonello, and how Bellini made so lively a likenessthat he was adjudged the first place. The landscape in the Louvre picture is advanced in treatment, and with its gilded mountain-tops, its stag and its town upon the hill-side, is full of reminiscences of Pisanello, especially of the “St. George” in S. Anastasia. We come upon such traces, too, in Jacopo’s drawings, and it is by his two sketch-books that we can best judge of his greatness. One of these is in the British Museum; the other, in the Louvre, was discovered not many years ago in the granary of a castle in Guyenne. These drawings reveal Jacopo as one of the greatest masters of his day. He is larger, simpler, and more natural than Pisanello, and he apparently cares less for the human figure than for elaborate backgrounds and surroundings. Many of his designs we shall refer to again when we come to speak of his two sons. His “Supper of Herod” reminds us of Masolino’s fresco at Castiglione d’ Olona. He sketches designs for numbers of religious scenes, treated in an original and interesting manner. A “Crucifixion” has bands of soldiers ranged on either side, an “Adoration of the Magi” has a string of camels coming down the hill, the executioners in a “Scourging” wear Eastern head-dresses. In a sketch for a “Baptism of Christ” tall angels hold the garments in the early traditional way; on one side two play the lute and the violin, while the two on the other side have a trumpet and an organ. He has sketches for the Ascension,Resurrection, Circumcision, and Entombment, repeated over and over again with variations, and one of S. Bernardino preaching in Venice (where he was in 1427). Jacopo delights even more in fanciful and mythological than in sacred subjects. A tournament with spectators, a Faun riding a lion, a “Triumph of Bacchus” with panthers, are among such essays. The fauns pipe, the wine-god bears a vase of fruit. His love of animals is equal to that of Pisanello, and S. Hubert and the stag with the crucifix between its horns is directly reminiscent of the Veronese. His horses, of which there are immense numbers, sometimes look as if copied from ancient bas-reliefs. His treatment of single nude figures is often poor and weak enough, and his rocks have the flat-topped, geological formation of the Paduan School, but no one who so drank in every description of lively scene about him could have been in any danger of becoming a mere archeological type, and it was from this pitfall that he rescued Mantegna. To judge by his drawings, Jacopo did not overlook any source of art open to him; he delights in the rich research of the Paduans as much as in the varieties of wild nature and all the incidents of contemporary life first annexed by Pisanello. He is often very like Gentile da Fabriano, he makes raids into Uccello’s domains of perspective, he is frankly mundane and draws a revel of satyrs and centaurs with a real interpretationof the lyrical and pagan spirit of the Greeks, and he has an idealism of the soul, which found its full expression in his son, Giovanni. We cannot call Jacopo Bellini the founder of the Venetian School, for its makings existed already, but it was his influence on his sons which, above all, was accountable for the development of early excellence. His long, flowing lines have a sweep and a fanciful grace which form an absolute antidote to the definite, geometrical Paduan convention. In Jacopo we see the thorough assimilation of those foreign elements which were in sympathy with the Venetian atmosphere, and while up to now Venice had only imbibed influences, she was soon to create for herself an artisticmilieuand to become the leader of the movement of painting in the north of Italy.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Jacopo Bellini.
Brescia.Annunciation and Predelle.Verona.Christ on Cross.Venice.Academy: Madonna.Museo Correr: Crucifixion.London.British Museum: Sketch-book.Paris.Madonna and Leonello d’ Este: Sketch-book.
CARLO CRIVELLI
We must turn aside from the main stream when we come to speak of Carlo Crivelli, who, important master as he was, occupies a place by himself. A pupil of the Vivarini and perhaps, as we have noted, of Antonio Negroponte, Crivelli was profoundly influenced by the Paduans, from whom he learned that metallic, finished quality of paint which he carried to perfection. Crivelli shows intellect, individuality, even genius, in the way in which he grapples with his medium and produces his own reading, and the circumstances of his life were such as to throw him in upon himself and to preserve his originality. His little early “Madonna and Child” at Verona is linked with that of Negroponte by the elaborate festoons, strings of beads, and large-patterned brocades used in the surroundings, and has those ugly, foreshortened littleputti, holding the instruments of the Passion, of the type elaborated by Squarcione and Marco Zoppo, and which, in their improvedstate, we are accustomed to think of as Mantegnesque.
When Crivelli was thirty-eight years old, he was condemned to six months’ imprisonment and to a fine of two hundred lire for an outrage on a neighbour’s wife. Perhaps it was to escape from an unenviable reputation that he left Venice soon after and set up painting in the Marches, where he lived from 1468 to 1473. He then went on to Camerino in Umbria, where his great triptych, now in the Brera, was painted, and a few years later he was in Ascoli, with a commission for an Annunciation in the Cathedral. This is the picture now in the National Gallery, in which the Bishop holds a model of the Duomo. After 1490 he worked in little towns in the Marches, and is not mentioned after 1493. He does not seem ever to have come back to Venice.
Shut up in the Marches, where there was little strong local talent, and where he could not keep up with the progress that was taking place in Venice, he was obliged himself to supply the artistic movement. He kept the Squarcionesque traditions to the end, but moulded them by his own love of rich and exuberant decoration. Moreover, he was of a very intense religious bias, and this finds a deeply touching and mystical expression, more especially in his Pietàs. The love of gilded patterns and fanciful detail was deep-seated in all the Umbrian country. His altarpieceswere intended as sumptuous additions to rich churches, and were consequently arranged, with many divisions, in the old Muranese manner. His great ancona, in the National Gallery, is a marvel of elaborate ornament and enamel-like painting. The Madonna is delicate, almost affected in her refinement. Her long fingers hold the Child’s garment with the extreme of dainty precision, the croziers and rings of the saints and bishops are embossed with gold and real jewels. The flowers in the panel of “The Immaculate Conception,” which hangs beside it, are twisted into heads of mythological beasts and grotesques or cherubs; but Crivelli has plenty of strength, and his male saints have vigorous, bony limbs and fierce fanatical eyes. It is, however, in his colour that he charms us most, and though he does not touch the real fount, he is of all the earlier school the most remarkable for subtle tender tones and lovely harmonies of olive-greens and faded rose and cream embossed with gold.
Crivelli continued executing one great ancona after another, limiting his progress to perfecting his technique, and his influence was most deeply felt by such Umbrian painters as Lorenzo di San Severino and Niccola Alunno. The honours paid him testify to the reputation he acquired. He was created a knight and presented with a golden laurel wreath. But though he never, that we can hear of, revisited his native State, he always addsVenetusto the signature on his paintings, a fact which tells us that far from Venice and in provincial districts, her prestige was felt and gave his work an enhanced commercial value. He had no after-influence upon the Venetian School, and in this respect is interesting as an example of the tenacity exercised by the Squarcionesque methods, when, unchecked by any counter-attraction, they came to act upon a very different temperament; for in his love of grace and beauty and of rich effects, and especially in his intensity of mystic feeling, Crivelli is a true Venetian and has no natural affinity with the classic spirit of the Paduans.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Venice.SS. Jerome and Augustine.Ascoli.Duomo: Altarpiece and Pietà.Berlin.Madonna and six Saints.London.Pietà; The Blessed Ferretti; Madonna and Saints; Annunciation; Ancona in thirteen compartments; The Immaculate Conception.Mr. Benson: Madonna.Sir Francis Cook: Madonna enthroned.Mond Collection: SS. Peter and Paul.Lord Northbrook: Madonna; Resurrection; Saints; Crucifixion; Madonna; Madonna and Saints.Milan.Brera: SS. James, Bernardino, and Pellegrino; SS. Anthony Abbot, Jerome, and Andrew.Poldi-Pezzoli: S. Francis in Adoration.Rome.Vatican: Pietà.
GENTILE BELLINI AND ANTONELLO DA MESSINA
What, then, is the position which art has achieved in Venice a decade after the middle of the fourteenth century, and how does she compare with the Florentine School? The Florentines, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Castagno, and Pesellino were lately dead. Antonio Pollaiuolo was in his prime, Fra Lippo was fifty-four, Paolo Uccello was sixty-three. But though the progress in the north had been slower, art both in Padua and Venice was now in vigorous progress. Bartolommeo Vivarini was still painting and gathering round him a numerous band of followers; Mantegna was thirty, had just completed the frescoes in the Eremitani Chapel and the famous altarpiece in S. Zeno; and Gentile and Giovanni Bellini were two and four years his seniors.
Francesco Negro, writing in the early years of the sixteenth century, speaks of Gentile as the elder son of Jacopo Bellini. Giovanni is thought to have been an illegitimate son, as Jacopo’swidow only mentions Gentile and another son, Niccolo, in her will. There is every reason to believe that, as was natural, the two brothers were the pupils and assistants of their father. A “Madonna” in the Mond Collection, the earliest known of Gentile’s works, shows him imitating his father’s style; but when his sister, Niccolosia, married Mantegna in 1453, it is not surprising to find him following Mantegna’s methods for a time, and a fresco of St. Mark in the Scuola di San Marco, an important commission which he received in 1466, is taken direct from Mantegna’s fresco at Padua.
As the Bellini matured, they abandoned the Squarcionesque tradition and evolved a style of their own; Gentile as much as his even more famous brother. Gentile is the first chronicler of the men and manners of his time. In 1460 he settled in Venice, and was appointed to paint the organ doors in St. Mark’s. These large saints, especially the St. Mark, still recall the Paduan period. They have festoons of grapes and apples hung from the architectural ornaments, and the cast of drapery, showing the form beneath, reminds us of Mantegna’s figures. But Gentile soon becomes an illustrator and portrait painter. Much of his work was done in the Scuola of St. Mark, where his father had painted, and this was destroyed by fire in 1485. Early, too, is the fine austere portrait of Lorenzo Giustiniani, in the Academy. In 1479 an emissary from theSultan Mehemet arrived in Venice and requested the Signoria to recommend a good painter and a man clever at portraits. Gentile was chosen, and departed in September for Constantinople. He painted many subjects for the private apartments of the Sultan, as well as the famous portrait now in the possession of Lady Layard. It would be difficult for a historic portrait to show more insight into character. The face is cold, weary, and sensual, with all the over-refined look of an old race and a long civilisation, and has a melancholy note in its distant and satiated gaze. The Sultan showed Gentile every mark of favour, loaded him with presents, and bestowed on him the title of Bey. He returned home in 1493, bringing with him many sketches of Eastern personages and the picture, now in the Louvre, representing the reception of a Venetian Embassy by the Grand Vizier. Some five years before Gentile’s commission to Constantinople Antonello da Messina had arrived in Venice, and the spread and popularisation of oil-painting had hastened the casting off of outworn ecclesiastical methods and brought the painters nearer to the truth of life. Antonello did not actually introduce oils to the notice of Venetian painters, for Bartolommeo Vivarini was already using them in 1473, but he was well known by reputation before he arrived, and having probably come into contact with Flemish painters in Naples, he had hadbetter opportunities of seizing upon the new technique, and was able to establish it both in Milan and in Venice. A large number of Venetians were at this time resident in Messina: the families of Lombardo, Gradenigo, Contarini, Bembo, Morosini, and Foscarini were among those who had members settled there. Many of these were patrons of art, and probably paved the way to Antonello’s reception in Venice. At first all the traits of Antonello’s early work are Flemish: the full mantles, white linen caps and tuckers, the straight sharp folds and long wings of the angels have much of Van Eyck, but when he gets to Venice in 1475, its colour and life fascinate him, and a great change comes over his work. His portraits show that he grasped a new intensity of life, and let us into the character of the men he saw around him. His “Condottiere,” in the Louvre, declares the artist’s recognition of that truculent and formidable being, full of aristocratic disdain, the product of a daring, unscrupulous life. The “Portrait of a Humanist,” in the Castello in Milan, is classic in its deepest sense; and in the Trivulzio College at Milan an older man looks at us out of sly, expressive eyes, with characteristic eyebrows and kindly, half-cynical mouth. It was not wonderful that these portraits, combined with the new medium, worked upon Gentile’s imagination and determined his bent.
The first examples of great canvases, illustratingand celebrating their own pageants, must have mightily pleased the Venetians. Scenes in the style of the reception of the Venetian ambassadors were called for on all hands, and when the excellence of Gentile’s portraits was recognised, he became the model for all Venice. When his own and his father’s and brother’s paintings perished by fire in 1485, he offered to replace them “quicker than was humanly possible” and at a very low price. Giovanni, who had been engaged on the external decorations, was ill at the time, but the Signoria was so pleased with the offer that it was decided to let no one touch the work till the two brothers were able to finish it. Gentile still painted religious altarpieces with the Virgin and Child enthroned with saints, but most of his time was devoted to the production of his great canvases. Some of these have disappeared, but the “Procession” and “Miracle of the Cross,” commissioned by the school of S. Giovanni Evangelista, are now in the Academy, and the third canvas, executed for the same school, “St. Mark preaching at Alexandria,” which was unfinished at the time of his death, and was completed by his brother, is in the Brera.