Chapter 9

It is not by mere activity that great things are done in art. In the great gallery we now enter we see the deathless work of the men who wrought in faith. This is the grandest room in Christendom. It is about three hundred and fifty feet long and thirty-five broad and high. It is beautifully lighted from above. Its great length is broken here and there by vases and statues, so placed between doors as nowhere to embarrass the view. The northern half of the gallery is Spanish, and the southern half Italian. Halfway down, a door to the left opens into an oval chamber, devoted to an eclectic set of masterpieces of every school and age. The gallery ends in a circular room of French and German pictures, on either side of which there are two great halls of Dutch and Flemish. On the ground floor there are some hundreds more Flemish and a hall of sculpture.

The first pictures you see to your left are by the early masters of Spain,--Morales, called in Spain the Divine, whose works are now extremely rare, the Museum possessing only three or four, long, fleshless faces and stiff figures of Christs and Marys,--and Juan de Juanes, the founder of the Valentian school, who brought back from Italy the lessons of Raphael's studio, that firmness of design and brilliancy of color, and whose genuine merit has survived all vicissitudes of changing taste. He has here a superb Last Supper and a spirited series of pictures illustrating the martyrdom of Stephen. There is perhaps a little too much elaboration of detail, even for the Romans. Stephen's robes are unnecessarily new, and the ground where he is stoned is profusely covered with convenient round missiles the size of Vienna rolls, so exactly suited to the purpose that it looks as if Providence sided with the persecutors. But what a wonderful variety and truth in the faces and the attitudes of the groups! What mastery of drawing, and what honest integrity of color after all these ages! It is reported of Juanes that he always confessed and prayed before venturing to take up his pencils to touch the features of the saints and Saviours that shine on his canvas. His conscientious fervor has its reward.

Across the room are the Murillos. Hung together are two pictures, not of large dimensions, but of exquisite perfection, which will serve as fair illustrations of the work of his youth and his age; the frio and the vaporoso manner. In the former manner is this charming picture of Rebecca at the Well; a graceful composition, correct and somewhat severe drawing, the greatest sharpness and clearness of outline. In the Martyrdom of St. Andrew the drawing and the composition are no less absolutely perfect, but there hangs over the whole picture a luminous haze of strangeness and mystery. A light that never was on sea or land bathes the distant hills and battlements, touches the spears of the legionaries, and shines in full glory on the ecstatic face of the aged saint. It does not seem a part of the scene. You see the picture through it. A step further on there is a Holy Family, which seems to me the ultimate effort of the early manner. A Jewish carpenter holds his fair-haired child between his knees. The urchin holds up a bird to attract the attention of a little white dog on the floor. The mother, a dark-haired peasant woman, looks on the scene with quiet amusement. The picture is absolutely perfect in detail. It seems to be the _consigne_ among critics to say it lacks "style." They say it is a family scene in Judaea, _voila tout._ Of course, and it is that very truth and nature that makes this picture so fascinating. The Word was made flesh, and not a phosphorescent apparition; and Murillo knew what he was about when he painted this view of the interior of St. Joseph's shop. What absurd presumption to accuse this great thinker of a deficiency of ideality, in face of these two glorious Marys of the Conception that fill the room with light and majesty! They hang side by side, so alike and yet so distinct in character. One is a woman in knowledge and a goddess of purity; the other, absolute innocence, startled by the stupendous revelation and exalted by the vaguely comprehended glory of the future. It is before this picture that the visitor always lingers longest. The face is the purest expression of girlish loveliness possible to art. The Virgin floats upborne by rosy clouds, flocks of pink cherubs flutter at her feet waving palm-branches. The golden air is thick with suggestions of dim celestial faces, but nothing mars the imposing solitude of the Queen of Heaven, shrined alone, throned in the luminous azure. Surely no man ever understood or interpreted like this grand Andalusian the power that the worship of woman exerts on the religions of the world. All the passionate love that has been poured out in all the ages at the feet of Ashtaroth and Artemis and Aphrodite and Freya found visible form and color at last on that immortal canvas where, with his fervor of religion and the full strength of his virile devotion to beauty, he created, for the adoration of those who should follow him, this type of the perfect Feminine,--

"Thee! standing loveliest in the open heaven! Ave Maria! only Heaven and Thee!"

There are some dozens more of Murillo here almost equally remarkable, but I cannot stop to make an unmeaning catalogue of them. There is a charming Gypsy Fortune-teller, whose wheedling voice and smile were caught and fixed in some happy moment in Seville; an Adoration of the Shepherds, wonderful in its happy combination of rigid truth with the warmest glow of poetry; two Annunciations, rich with the radiance that streams through the rent veil of the innermost heaven,--lights painted boldly upon lights, the White Dove sailing out of the dazzling background of celestial effulgence,--a miracle and mystery of theology repeated by a miracle and mystery of art.

Even when you have exhausted the Murillos of the Museum you have not reached his highest achievements in color and design. You will find these in the Academy of San Fernando,--the Dream of the Roman Gentleman, and the Founding of the Church of St. Mary the Greater; and the powerful composition of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in her hospital work. In the first, a noble Roman and his wife have suddenly fallen asleep in their chairs in an elegant apartment. Their slumber is painted with curious felicity,--you lower your voice for fear of waking them. On the left of the picture is their dream: the Virgin comes in a halo of golden clouds and designates the spot where her church is to be built. In the next picture the happy couple kneel before the pope and expose their high commission, and outside a brilliant procession moves to the ceremony of the laying of the corner-stone. The St. Elizabeth is a triumph of genius over a most terribly repulsive subject. The wounds and sores of the beggars are painted with unshrinking fidelity, but every vulgar detail is redeemed by the beauty and majesty of the whole. I think in these pictures of Murillo the last word of Spanish art was reached. There was no further progress possible in life, even for him. "Other heights in other lives, God willing."

Returning to the Museum and to Velazquez, we find ourselves in front of his greatest historical work, the Surrender of Breda. This is probably the most utterly unaffected historical painting in existence. There is positively no stage business about it. On the right is the Spanish staff, on the left the deputation of the vanquished Flemings. In the centre the great Spinola accepts the keys of the city from the governor; his attitude and face are full of dignity softened by generous and affable grace. He lays his hand upon the shoulder of the Flemish general, and you can see he is paying him some chivalrous compliment on the gallant fight he has lost. If your eyes wander through the open space between the two escorts, you see a wonderful widespread landscape in the Netherlands, which would form a fine picture if the figures all were gone. Opposite this great work is another which artists consider greater,--Las Meninas. When Luca Giordano came from Italy he inquired for this picture, and said on seeing it, "This is the theology of painting." If our theology were what it should be, and cannot be, absolute and unquestionable truth, Luca the Quick-worker would have been right. Velazquez was painting the portrait of a stupid little infanta when the idea came to him of perpetuating the scene just as it was. We know how we have wished to be sure of the exact accessories of past events. The modern rage for theatrical local color is an illustration of this desire. The great artist, who must have honored his art, determined to give to future ages an exact picture of one instant of his glorious life. It is not too much to say he has done this. He stands before his easel, his pencils in his hand. The little princess is stiffly posing in the centre. Her little maids are grouped about her. Two hideous dwarfs on the right are teasing a noble dog who is too drowsy and magnanimous to growl. In the background at the end of a long gallery a gentleman is opening a door to the garden. The presence of royalty is indicated by the reflection of the faces of the king and queen in a small mirror, where you would expect to see your own. The longer you look upon this marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely the placing of color on canvas which causes this perfect illusion. It does not seem possible that you are looking at a plane surface. There is a stratum of air before, behind, and beside these figures. You could walk on that floor and see how the artist is getting on with the portrait. There is space and light in this picture, as in any room. Every object is detached, as in the common miracle of the stereoscope. If art consist in making a fleeting moment immortal, if the True is a higher ideal than the Beautiful, then it will be hard to find a greater painting than this. It is utterly without beauty; its tone is a cold olive green-gray; there is not one redeeming grace or charm about it except the noble figure of Velazquez himself,--yet in its austere fidelity to truth it stands incomparable in the world. It gained Velazquez his greatest triumph. You see on his breast a sprawling red cross, painted evidently by an unskilful hand. This was the gracious answer made by Philip IV. when the artist asked him if anything was wanting to the picture. This decoration, daubed by the royal hand, was the accolade of the knighthood of Santiago,--an honor beyond the dreams of an artist of that day. It may be considered the highest compliment ever paid to a painter, except the one paid by Courbet to himself, when he refused to be decorated by the Man of December.

Among Velazquez's most admirable studies of life is his picture of the Borrachos. A group of rustic roysterers are admitting a neophyte into the drunken _confrerie._ He kneels to receive a crown of ivy from the hands of the king of the revel. A group of older tipplers are filling their cups, or eyeing their brimming glasses, with tipsy, mock-serious glances. There has never been a chapter written which so clearly shows the drunkard's nature as this vulgar anacreontic. A thousand men have painted drunken frolics, but never one with such distinct spiritual insight as this. To me the finest product of Jordaens' genius is his Bohnen Koenig in the Belvedere, but there you see only the incidents of the mad revel; every one is shouting or singing or weeping with maudlin glee or tears. But in this scene of the Borrachos there is nothing scenic or forced. These topers have come together to drink, for the love of the wine,--the fun is secondary. This wonderful reserve of Velazquez is clearly seen in his conception of the king of the rouse. He is a young man, with a heavy, dull, somewhat serious face, fat rather than bloated, rather pale than flushed. He is naked to the waist to show the plump white arms and shoulders and the satiny skin of the voluptuary; one of those men whose heads and whose stomachs are too loyal ever to give them _Katzenjammer_ or remorse. The others are of the commoner type of haunters of wine-shops,--with red eyes and coarse hides and grizzled matted hair,--but every man of them inexorably true, and a predestined sot.

We must break away from Velazquez, passing by his marvellous portraits of kings and dwarfs, saints and poodles,--among whom there is a dwarf of two centuries ago, who is too like Tom Thumb to serve for his twin brother,--and a portrait of Aesop, which is a flash of intuition, an epitome of all the fables. Before leaving the Spaniards we must look at the most pleasing of all Ribera's works,--the Ladder-Dream of Jacob. The patriarch lies stretched on the open plain in the deep sleep of the weary. To the right in a broad shaft of cloudy gold the angels are ascending and descending. The picture is remarkable for its mingling the merits of Ribera's first and second manner. It is a Caravaggio in its strength and breadth of light and shade, and a Correggio in its delicacy of sentiment and refined beauty of coloring. He was not often so fortunate in his Parmese efforts. They are usually marked by a timidity and an attempt at prettiness inconceivable in the haughty and impulsive master of the Neapolitan school.

Of the three great Spaniards, Ribera is the least sympathetic. He often displays a tumultuous power and energy to which his calmer rivals are strangers. But you miss in him that steady devotion to truth which distinguishes Velazquez, and that spiritual lift which ennobles Murillo. The difference, I conceive, lies in the moral character of the three. Ribera was a great artist, and the others were noble men. Ribera passed a youth of struggle and hunger and toil among the artists of Rome,--a stranger and penniless in the magnificent city,--picking up crusts in the street and sketching on quiet curbstones, with no friend, and no name but that of Spagnoletto,--the little Spaniard. Suddenly rising to fame, he broke loose from his Roman associations and fled to Naples, where he soon became the wealthiest and the most arrogant artist of his time. He held continually at his orders a faction of _bravi_ who drove from Naples, with threats and insults and violence, every artist of eminence who dared visit the city. Car-racci and Guido only saved their lives by flight, and the blameless and gifted Domenichino, it is said, was foully murdered by his order. It is not to such a heart as this that is given the ineffable raptures of Murillo or the positive revelations of Velazquez. These great souls were above cruelty or jealousy. Velazquez never knew the storms of adversity. Safely anchored in the royal favor, he passed his uneventful life in the calm of his beloved work. But his hand and home were always open to the struggling artists of Spain. He was the benefactor of Alonzo Cano; and when Murillo came up to Madrid, weary and footsore with his long tramp from Andalusia, sustained by an innate consciousness of power, all on fire with a picture of Van Dyck he had seen in Seville, the rich and honored painter of the court received with generous kindness the shabby young wanderer, clothed him, and taught him, and watched with noble delight the first flights of the young eagle whose strong wing was so soon to cleave the empyrean. And when Murillo went back to Seville he paid his debt by doing as much for others. These magnanimous hearts were fit company for the saints they drew.

We have lingered so long with the native artists we shall have little to say of the rest. There are ten fine Raphaels, but it is needless to speak of them. They have been endlessly reproduced. Raphael is known and judged by the world. After some centuries of discussion the scorners and the critics are dumb. All men have learned the habit of Albani, who, in a frivolous and unappreciative age, always uncovered his head at the name of Raphael Sanzio. We look at his precious work with a mingled feeling of gratitude for what we have, and of rebellious wonder that lives like his and Shelley's should be extinguished in their glorious dawn, while kings and country gentlemen live a hundred years. What boundless possibilities of bright achievement these two divine youths owed us in the forty years more they should have lived! Raphael's greatest pictures in Madrid are the Spasimo di Sicilia, and the Holy Family, called La Perla. The former has a singular history. It was painted for a convent in Palermo, shipwrecked on the way, and thrown ashore on the gulf of Genoa. It was again sent to Sicily, brought to Spain by the Viceroy of Naples, stolen by Napoleon, and in Paris was subjected to a brilliantly successful operation for transferring the layer of paint from the worm-eaten wood to canvas. It came back to Spain with other stolen goods from the Louvre. La Perla was bought by Philip IV. at the sale of Charles I.'s effects after his decapitation. Philip was fond of Charles, but could not resist the temptation to profit by his death. This picture was the richest of the booty. It is, of all the faces of the Virgin extant, the most perfectly beautiful and one of the least spiritual.

There is another fine Madonna, commonly called La Virgen del Pez, from a fish which young Tobit holds in his hand. It is rather tawny in color, as if it had been painted on a pine board and the wood had asserted itself from below. It is a charming picture, with all the great Roman's inevitable perfection of design; but it is incomprehensible that critics, M. Viardot among them, should call it the first in rank of Raphael's Virgins in Glory. There are none which can dispute that title with Our Lady of San Sisto, unearthly and supernatural in beauty and majesty.

The school of Florence is represented by a charming Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci, almost identical with that of the Louvre; and six admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and who admiring his genius regret his errors, is a portrait of his wife Lucrezia Fede, whose name, a French writer has said, is a double epigram. It was this capricious and wilful beauty who made poor Andrea break his word and embezzle the money King Francis had given him to spend for works of art. Yet this dangerous face is his best excuse,--the face of a man-snarer, subtle and passionate and cruel in its blind selfishness, and yet so beautiful that any man might yield to it against the cry of his own warning conscience. Browning must have seen it before he wrote, in his pathetic poem,--

"Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, You beautiful Lucrezia, that are mine!"

Nowhere, away from the Adriatic, is the Venetian school so richly represented as in Madrid. Charles and Philip were the most munificent friends and patrons of Titian, and the Royal Museum counts among its treasures in consequence the enormous number of forty-three pictures by the wonderful centenarian. Among these are two upon which he set great value,--a Last Supper, which has unfortunately mouldered to ruin in the humid refectory of the Escorial, equal in merit and destiny with that of Leonardo; and the Gloria, or apotheosis of the imperial family, which, after the death of Charles, was brought from Yuste to the Escorial, and thence came to swell the treasures of the Museum. It is a grand and masterly work. The vigorous genius of Titian has grappled with the essential difficulties of a subject that trembles on the balance of ridiculous and sublime, and has come out triumphant. The Father and the Son sit on high. The Operating Spirit hovers above them. The Virgin in robes of azure stands in the blaze of the Presence. The celestial army is ranged around. Below, a little lower than the angels, are Charles and Philip with their wives, on their knees, with white cowls and clasped hands,--Charles in his premature age, with worn face and grizzled beard; and Philip in his youth of unwholesome fairness, with red lips and pink eyelids, such as Titian painted him in the Adonis. The foreground is filled with prophets and saints of the first dignity, and a kneeling woman, whose face is not visible, but whose attitude and drapery are drawn with the sinuous and undulating grace of that hand which could not fail. Every figure is turned to the enthroned Deity, touched with ineffable light. The artist has painted heaven, and is not absurd. In that age of substantial faith such achievements were possible.

There are two Venuses by Titian very like that of Dresden, but the heads have not the same dignity; and a Danae which is a replica of the Vienna one. His Salome bearing the Head of John the Baptist is one of the finest impersonations of the pride of life conceivable. So unapproachable are the soft lights and tones on the perfect arms and shoulders of the full-bodied maiden, that Tintoret one day exclaimed in despair before it, "That fellow paints with ground flesh."

This gallery possesses one of the last works of Titian,--the Battle of Lepanto, which was fought when the artist was ninety-four years of age. It is a courtly allegory,--King Philip holds his little son in his arms, a courier angel brings the news of victory, and to the infant a palm-branch and the scroll _Majora tibi._ Outside you see the smoke and flash of a naval battle, and a malignant and tur-baned Turk lies bound on the floor. It would seem incredible that this enormous canvas should have been executed at such an age, did we not know that when the pest cut the mighty master off in his hundredth year he was busily at work upon a Descent from the Cross, which Palma the Elder finished on his knees and dedicated to God: Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit Palma reverenter absolvit Deoque dicavit opus.

The vast representation of Titian rather injures Veronese and Tintoret. Opposite the Gloria of Yuste hangs the sketch of that stupendous Paradise of Tintoret, which we see in the Palace of the Doges,--the biggest picture ever painted by mortal, thirty feet high and seventy-four long.

The sketch was secured by Velazquez in his tour through Italy. The most charming picture of Veronese is a Venus and Adonis, which is finer than that of Titian,--a classic and most exquisite idyl of love and sleep, cool shadow and golden-sifted sunshine. His most considerable work in the gallery is a Christ teaching the Doctors, magnificent in arrangement, severely correct in drawing, and of a most vivid and dramatic interest.

We pass through a circular vaulted chamber to reach the Flemish rooms. There is a choice though scanty collection of the German and French schools. Albert Durer has an Adam and Eve, and a priceless portrait of himself as perfectly preserved as if it were painted yesterday. He wears a curious and picturesque costume,--striped black-and-white,--a graceful tasselled cap of the same. The picture is sufficiently like the statue at Nuremberg; a long South-German face, blue-eyed and thin, fair-whiskered, with that expression of quiet confidence you would expect in the man who said one day, with admirable candor, when people were praising a picture of his, "It could not be better done." In this circular room are four great Claudes, two of which, Sunrise and Sunset, otherwise called the Embarcation of Sta. Paula, and Tobit and the Angel, are in his best and richest manner. It is inconceivable to us, who graduate men by a high-school standard, that these refined and most elegant works could have been produced by a man so imperfectly educated as Claude Lorrain.