Chapter 16

Giordano may be said to have been born with a pencil in his hand, and by constant practice, added to a natural quickness, he acquired that extraordinary facility of hand which, while in his subsequent career, it tended to corrupt art, materially aided his fame and success. He was also indefatigable in his application. Bellori says, "he made twelve different designs of the Loggia and paintings by Raffaelle in the Vatican; and twenty after the Battle of Constantine by Giulio Romano, besides many after Michael Angelo, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and others. The demand for his drawings and sketches was so great, that Luca, when obliged to take refreshments, did not retire from his work, but gaping like a young bird, gave notice to his father of the calls of nature, who, always on the watch, instantly supplied him with food, at the same time repeating, _Luca, fa presto_. The only principle which his father instilled into his mind was despatch." Probably no artist, not even Tintoretto, produced so many pictures as Giordano. Lanzi says, "his facility was not derived wholly from a rapidity of pencil, but was aided by the quickness of his imagination, which enabled him clearly to perceive, from the commencement of the work, the result he intended, without hesitating to consider the component parts, or doubling, proving, and selecting, like other painters." Hence Giordano was also called, _Il proteo della pittura_, and _Il Falmine della pittura_--the Proteus, and the Lightning of painting. As an instance of the latter, it is recorded that he painted a picture while his guests were waiting for dinner.

GIORDANO'S POWERS OF IMITATION.

Giordano had the rare talent of being able to imitate the manner of every master so successfully as frequently to deceive the best judges; he could do this also without looking at the originals, the result of a wonderful memory, which retained everything once seen. There are numerous instances of pictures painted by him in the style of Albert Durer, Bassano, Titian, and Rubens, which are valued in commerce at two or three times the price of pictures in his own style. In the church of S. Teresa at Naples, are two pictures by him in the style of Guido, and there is a Holy Family at Madrid, which Mengs says may be easily mistaken for a production of Raffaelle. Giordano also had several scholars, who imitated his own style with great precision.

GIORDANO'S FAME AND REPUTATION.

Perhaps no artist ever enjoyed a greater share of contemporary fame than Luca Giordano. Possessed of inexhaustible invention, and marvellous facility of hand, which enabled him to multiply his works to any required amount he had the good fortune to hit upon a style which pleased, though it still farther corrupted the declining taste of the age. He despatched a large picture in the presence of Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Florence, in so short a space of time as caused him to exclaim in wonder, "You are fit to be the painter of a sovereign prince." The same eulogium, under similar circumstances, was passed upon him by Charles II. A similar feat at Naples, had previously won the admiration and approbation of the Viceroy, the Marquess de Heliche, and laid the foundation of his fortune. It became _the fashion_, to admire everything that came from his prolific pencil, at Madrid, as well as at Naples. Everywhere, his works, good or bad, were received with applause. When it was related as a wonder that Giordano painted with his fingers, no Angelo was found to observe, "Why does not the blockhead use his brush." That Giordano was a man of genius, there can be no doubt, but had he executed only a tenth part of the multitude he did, his fame would have been handed down to posterity with much greater lustre. Cean Bermudez says of his works in Spain, "He left nothing that is absolutely bad, and nothing that is perfectly good." His compositions generally bear the marks of furious haste, and they are disfigured in many cases by incongruous associations of pagan mythology with sacred history, and of allegory with history, a blemish on the literature as well as the art of the age. Bermudez also accuses him of having corrupted and degraded Spanish art, by introducing a new and false style, which his great reputation and royal favoritism, brought into vogue. Still, he deserves praise for the great facility of his invention, the force and richness of his coloring, and a certain grandeur of conception and freedom of execution which belong only to a great master. The royal gallery at Madrid possesses no less than fifty-five of his pictures, selected from the multitude he left in the various royal palaces. There are also many in the churches. Lanzi says, "Naples abounds with the works of Giordano, both public and private. There is scarcely a church in this great city which does not boast some of his works."

REMARKABLE INSTANCE OF GIORDANO'S RAPIDITY OF EXECUTION.

Giordano, on his return to Naples from Florence, established himself in Ribera's fine house, opposite the Jesuit's church of S. Francesco Xavier. In 1685 he was commissioned by the Fathers to paint a large picture for one of the principal altars, and agreed that it should be completed by the approaching festival of the patron saint. Giordano, having other engagements on hand, put off the execution of the altar-piece so long, that the Jesuits began to be clamorous, and at length appealed to the Viceroy to exercise his authority. Determined to see for himself how matters stood, that great man paid an unexpected visit to Giordano's studio. The painter had barely time to escape by a back door to avoid his wrath, when the Marquess de Heliche entered, who perceiving that he had not touched the vast canvas with his brush, as suddenly retired, muttering imprecations and menaces. Luca's dashing pencil now stood him in good stead. He immediately sketched the outlines of his composition, and setting his disciples to prepare his palettes, he painted all that day and night with so much diligence that by the following afternoon, he was able to announce to the impatient Fathers the completion of the picture. The subject was the patron of the church, St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit missionary, baptizing the people of Japan. He is represented standing on a lofty flight of steps; behind him, in the distance, is a party of zealous converts pulling down the images of their gods, and beneath in the foreground, kneels St. Francis Borgia in the attitude of prayer. The picture was executed with such boldness and freedom, and excellence of coloring, that at the proper distance it produced a grand and magnificent effect. It was immediately carried to the church, and placed over the destined altar, the day before the appointed festival, and the Viceroy whose anger had hardly cooled, invited to inspect it. Charmed with the beauty of the work, and amazed by the celerity of its execution, he exclaimed, "the painter of this picture must be either an angel or a demon." Giordano received his compliments, and made his own excuses with so much address, that the Marquess, forgetting all past offences engaged him to paint in the palace, and passed much of his time by his side, observing his progress, and enjoying his lively conversation.

REVIVAL OF PAINTING IN ITALY.

"Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture," says Cunningham, "are of the same high order of genius; but, as words provide at once shape and color to our thoughts, Poetry has ever led the way in the march of intellect: as material forms are ready made, and require but to be skillfully copied, Sculpture succeeded; and as lights and shadows demand science and experience to work them into shape, and endow them with sentiment, Painting was the last to rise into elegance and sublimity. In this order these high Arts rose in ancient Greece; and in the like order they rose in modern Italy; but none of them reached true excellence, till the light of knowledge dawned on the human mind, nor before civilization, following in the steps of barbarism, prepared the world for the reception of works of polished grace and tranquil grandeur.

"From the swoon into which the Fine Arts were cast by the overthrow of the Roman Empire, they were long in waking: all that was learned or lofty was extinguished: of Painting, there remained but the memory, and of Sculpture, some broken stones, yet smothered in the ruins of temples and cities the rules which gave art its science were lost; the knowledge of colors was passed away, and that high spirit which filled Italy and Greece with shapes and sentiments allied to heaven, had expired. In their own good time, Painting and Sculpture arose from the ruins in which they had been overwhelmed, but their looks were altered; their air was saddened; their voice was low, though it was, as it had been in Greece, holy, and it called men to the contemplation of works of a rude grace, and a but dawning beauty. These 'sisters-twin' came at first with pale looks and trembling steps, and with none of the confidence which a certainty of pleasing bestows: they came too with few of the charms of the heathen about them: of the scientific unity of proportion, of the modest ease, the graceful simplicity, or the almost severe and always divine composure of Greece, they had little or none. But they came, nevertheless, with an original air and character all their own; they spoke of the presence of a loveliness and sentiment derived from a nobler source than pagan inspiration; they spoke of Jesus Christ and his sublime lessons of peace, and charity, and belief, with which he had preached down the altars and temples of the heathen, and rebuked their lying gods into eternal silence.

"Though Sculpture and Painting arose early in Italy, and arose with the mantle of the Christian religion about them, it was centuries before they were able to put on their full lustre and beauty. For this, various causes may be assigned. 1. The nations, or rather wild hordes, who ruled where consuls and emperors once reigned, ruled but for a little while, or were continually employed in expeditions of bloodshed and war. 2. The armed feet of the barbarians had trodden into dust all of art that was elegant or beautiful:--they lighted their camp-fires with the verses of Euripides or Virgil; they covered their tents with the paintings of Protogenes and Apelles, and they repaired the breaches in the walls of a besieged city, with the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles;--the desires of these barbarians were all barbarous. 3. Painting and Sculpture had to begin their labors anew; all rules were lost; all examples, particularly of the former, destroyed: men unable, therefore, to drink at the fountains of Greece, did not think, for centuries, of striking the rock for themselves. 4. The Christian religion, for which Art first wrought, demanded sentiment rather than shape: it was a matter of mind which was wanted: the personal beauty of Jesus Christ is nowhere insisted upon in all the New Testament: the earliest artists, when they had impressed an air of holiness or serenity on their works, thought they had done enough; and it was only when the fears of looking like the heathen were overcome, and a sense of the exquisite beauty of Grecian sculpture prevailed, that the geometrical loveliness of the human form found its way into art. It may be added, that no modern people, save the Italians alone, seem to share fully in the high sense of the ideal and the poetic, visible in the works of Greece.

"The first fruits of this new impulse were representations of Christ on the Cross; of his forerunner, St. John; of his Virgin Mother; and of his companions, the Apostles. Our Saviour had a meek and melancholy look; the hands of the Virgin are held up in prayer; something of the wildness of the wilderness was in the air of St. John, and the twelve Apostles were kneeling or preaching. They were all clothed from head to heel; the faces, the hands, and the feet, alone were bare; the sentiment of suffering or rejoicing holiness, alone was aimed at. The artists of the heathen religion wrought in a far different spirit; the forms which they called to their canvas, and endowed with life and beauty, were all, or mostly naked; they saw and felt the symmetry and exquisite harmony of the human body, and they represented it in such elegance, such true simplicity and sweetness, as to render their nude figures the rivals in modesty and innocence of the most carefully dressed. A sense of this excellence of form is expressed by many writers. 'If,' says Plato, 'you take a man as he is made by nature, and compare him with another who is the effect of art, the work of nature will always appear the less beautiful, because art is more accurate than nature.' Maximus Tyrus also says, that 'the image which is taken by a painter from several bodies, produces a beauty which it is impossible to find in any single natural body, approaching to the perfection of the fairest statues.' And Cicero informs us, that Zeuxis drew his wondrous picture of Helen from various models, all the most beautiful that could be found; for he could not find in one body all those perfections, which his idea of that princess required.

"So far did the heathens carry their notions of ideal beauty, that they taxed Demetrius with being too natural, and Dionysius they reproached as but a painter of men. Lysippus himself upbraided the ordinary sculptors of his day, for making men such as they were in nature, and boasted of himself, that he made men as they ought to be. Phidias copied his statues of Jupiter and Pallas from forms in his own soul, or those which the muse of Homer supplied. Seneca seems to wonder, that, the sculptor having never beheld either Jove or Pallas, yet could conceive their divine images in his mind; and another eminent ancient says, that 'the fancy more instructs the painter than the imitation; for the last makes only the things which it sees, but the first makes also the things which it never sees.' Such were also, in the fulness of time and study, the ideas of the most distinguished moderns. Alberti tells us, that 'we ought not so much to love the likeness as the beauty, and to choose from the fairest bodies, severally, the fairest parts.' Da Vinci uses almost the same words, and desires the painter to form the idea for himself; and the incomparable Raphael thus writes to Castiglione concerning his Galatea: 'To paint a fair one, it is necessary for me to see many fair ones; but because there is so great a scarcity of lovely women, I am constrained to make use of one certain idea, which I have formed in my own fancy.' Guido Reni approaches still closer to the pure ideal of the great Christian School of Painting, when he wishes for the wings of an angel, to ascend to Paradise, and see, with his own eyes, the forms and faces of the blessed spirits, that he might put more of heaven into his pictures.

"Of the heaven which the great artist wished to infuse into his works, there was but little in painting, when it rose to aid religion in Italy. The shape was uncooth, the coloring ungraceful, and there was but the faint dawn of that divine sentiment, which in time elevated Roman art to the same eminence as the Grecian. Yet all that Christianity demanded from Art, at first, was readily accomplished: fine forms, and delicate hues, were not required for centuries, by the successors of the Apostles; a Christ on the Cross; the Virgin lulling her divine Babe in her bosom; the Miracle of Lazarus; the Preaching on the Mount; the Conversion of St. Paul; and the Ascension--roughly sculptured or coarsely painted, perhaps by the unskilful hands of the Christian preachers themselves--were found sufficient to explain to a barbarous people some of the great ruling truths of Christianity. These, and such as these, were placed in churches, or borne about by gospel missionaries and were appealed to, when words failed to express the doctrines and mysteries which were required to be taught. Such appeals were no doubt frequent, in times when Greek and Latin ceased to be commonly spoken, and the present languages of Europe were shaping themselves, like fruit in the leaf, out of the barbarous dissonance of the wild tongues which then prevailed. These Christian preachers, with their emblems and their relics, were listened to by the Gothic subverters of the empire of art and elegance, with the more patience and complacency, since they desired not to share in their plunder or their conquests, and opened to them the way to a far nobler kingdom--a kingdom not of this earth.

"Though abundance of figures of saints were carved, and innumerable Madonnas painted throughout Italy, in the earlier days of the Christian church, they were either literal transcripts of common life, or mechanical copies or imitations of works furnished from the great store looms of the Asiatic Greeks. There were thousands--nay, tens of thousands of men, who wrote themselves artists, while not one of them had enough of imagination and skill to lift art above the low estate in which the rule and square of mechanical imitation had placed it. Niccolo Pisano appears to have been the first who, at Pisa, took the right way in sculpture: his groups, still in existence, are sometimes too crowded; his figures badly designed, and the whole defective in sentiment; but he gave an impulse--communicated through the antique--to composition, not unperceived by his scholars, who saw with his eyes and wrought with his spirit. The school which he founded produced, soon after, the celebrated Ghiberti, whose gates of bronze, embellished with figures, for the church of San Giovanni, were pronounced by Michael Angelo worthy to be the gates of Paradise. While the sister art took these large strides towards fame, Painting lagged ruefully behind; she had no true models, and she had no true rules; but 'the time and the man' came at last, and this man was Giovanni Cimabue."

GIOVANNI CIMABUE.

This great painter is universally considered the restorer of modern painting. The Italians call him "the Father of modern Painting;" and other nations, "the Creator of the Italian or Epic style of Painting." He was born at Florence in 1240, of a noble family, and was skilled both in architecture and sculpture. The legends of his own land make him the pupil of Giunta; for the men of Florence are reluctant to believe that he was instructed in painting by those Greek artists who were called in to embellish their city with miracles and Madonnas. He soon conquered an education which consisted in reproducing, in exact shape and color, the works of other men: he desired to advance: he went to nature for his forms; he grouped them with a new skill; he bestowed ease on his draperies, and a higher expression on his heads. His talent did not reside in the neat, the graceful, and the lovely; his Madonnas have little beauty, and his angels are all of one make: he succeeded best in the heads of the old and the holy, and impressed on them, in spite of the barbarism of his times, a bold sublimity, which few have since surpassed. Critics object to the fierceness of his eyes, the want of delicacy in the noses of his figures, and the absence of perspective in his compositions; but they admit that his coloring is bright and vigorous, his conceptions grand and vast, and that he loved the daring and the splendid. Nevertheless, a touch of the mechanical Greek School, and a rudeness all his own, have been observed in the works of this great painter. His compositions were all of a scriptural or religious kind, such as the church required: kings were his visitors, and the people of Florence paid him honors almost divine.

CIMABUE'S PASSION FOR ART.

Cimabue gave early proof of an accurate judgment and a clear understanding, and his father designed to give him a liberal education, but instead of devoting himself to letters, says Vasari, "he consumed the whole day in drawing men, horses, houses, and other various fancies on his books and different papers--an occupation to which he felt himself impelled by nature; and this natural inclination was favored by fortune, for the governors of the city, had invited certain Greek painters to Florence, for the purpose of restoring the art of painting, which had not merely degenerated, but was altogether lost; those artists, among other works, began to paint the chapel of Gondi, situated next to the principal chapel in S. Maria Novella, where Giovanni was being educated, who often escaping from school, and having already made a commencement in the art he was so fond of, would stand watching these masters at their work the day through." Vasari goes on to say, that this passion at length induced his father, already persuaded that he had the genius to become a great painter, to place Giovanni under the instruction of these Greek artists. From this time, he labored incessantly day and night, and aided by his great natural powers, he soon surpassed his teachers.

CIMABUE'S FAMOUS PICTURE OF THE VIRGIN.

Cimabue had already distinguished himself by many works, executed in fresco and distemper for the churches at Florence, Pisa, and Assisi, when he painted his famous picture of the Holy Virgin for the church of S. Maria Novella in the former city. This picture was accounted such a wonderful performance by his fellow citizens, that they carried it from the house of Cimabue to the church in solemn procession, with sound of trumpets and every demonstration of joy. "It is further reported," says Vasari, "that whilst Cimabue was painting this picture in a garden near the gate of San Pietro, King Charles the elder, of Anjou, passed through Florence, and the authorities of the city, among other marks of respect, conducted him to see the picture of Cimabue." This picture, representing the Virgin and Infant Jesus surrounded by angels, larger than life, then so novel, was regarded as such a wonderful performance, that all the people of Florence flocked in crowds to admire it, making all possible demonstrations of delight. It still adorns the chapel of the Rucellai family in the church of S. Maria Novella for which it was painted. The heads of the Virgin, of the infant Jesus, and the angels, are all fine, but the hands are badly drawn; this defect, however, is common with the Quattrocentisti, or artists of the 14th century. The editors of the Florentine edition of Vasari, commenced in 1846, by an association of learned Italians, observe, "This picture, still in fair preservation, is in the chapel of the Rucellai family; and whoever will examine it carefully, comparing it, not only with works before the time of Cimabue, but also with those painted after him, by the Florentine masters, particularly Giotto, will perceive that the praises of Vasari are justified in every particular."

THE WORKS OF CIMABUE.