Part 9

In Rome, on the contrary, in Milan, and to some extent in Venice, as well as in many of the smaller towns throughout Italy, there is a sharp line of demarcation between the guide-book city and its background. In some cases, the latter is composed mainly of objects at which the guide-book tourist has been taught to look askance, or rather which he has been counselled to pass by without a look. Goethe has long been held up to the derision of the enlightened student of art because he went to Assisi to see the Roman temple of Minerva, and omitted to visit the mediæval church of Saint Francis; but how many modern sight-seers visit the church and omit the temple? And wherein lies their superior catholicity of taste? The fact is that, in this particular instance, foreground and background have changed places, and the modern tourist who neglects Minerva for Saint Francis is as narrowly bound by tradition as his eighteenth-century predecessor, with this difference, that whereas the latter knew nothing of mediæval art and architecture, the modern tourist knows that the temple is there and deliberately turns his back on it.

IV

Perhaps Rome is, of all Italian cities, the one in which this one-sidedness of æsthetic interest is most oddly exemplified. In the Tuscan and Umbrian cities, as has been said, the art and architecture which form the sight-seer’s accepted “curriculum,” are still the distinctive features of the streets through which he walks to his gallery or his museum. In Florence, for instance, he may go forth from the Riccardi chapel, and see the castle of Vincigliata towering on its cypress-clad hill precisely as Gozzoli depicted it in his fresco; in Siena, the crenellated palaces with their iron torch-holders and barred windows form the unchanged setting of a mediæval pageant. But in Rome for centuries it has been the fashion to look only on a city which has almost disappeared, and to close the eyes to one which is still alive and actual.

The student of ancient Rome moves among painfully-reconstructed débris; the mediævalist must traverse the city from end to end to piece together the meagre fragments of his “epoch.” Both studies are absorbing, and the very difficulty of the chase no doubt adds to its exhilaration; but is it not a curious mental attitude which compels the devotee of mediæval art to walk blindfold from the Palazzo Venezia to Santa Sabina on the Aventine, or from the Ara Cœli to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, because the great monuments lying between these points of his pilgrimage belong to what some one has taught him to regard as a “debased period of art”?

Rome is the most undisturbed baroque city of Italy. The great revival of its spiritual and temporal power coincided with the development of that phase of art of which Michael Angelo sowed the seed in Rome itself. The germs of Bernini and Tiepolo must be sought in the Sistine ceiling and in the Moses of San Pietro in Vincoli, however much the devotees of Michael Angelo may resent the tracing of such a lineage. But it is hard at this date to be patient with any form of artistic absolutism, with any critical criteria not based on that sense of the comparative which is the nineteenth century’s most important contribution to the function of criticism. It is hard to be tolerant of that peculiar form of intolerance which refuses to recognize in art the general law of growth and transformation, or, while recognizing it, considers it a subject for futile reproach and lamentation. The art critic must acknowledge a standard of excellence, and must be allowed his personal preferences within the range of established criteria: æsthetically, the world is divided into the Gothically and the classically minded, just as intellectually it is divided into those who rise to the general idea and those who pause at the particular instance. The lover of the particular instance will almost always have a taste for the Gothic, which is the personal and anecdotic in art carried to its utmost expression, at the cost of synthetic effect; but if he be at all accessible to general ideas, he must recognize the futility of battling against the inevitable tendencies of taste and invention. Granted that, from his standpoint, the art which evolved from Michael Angelo is an art of decadence: is that a reason for raging at it or ignoring it? The autumn is a season of decadence; but even by those who prefer the spring, it has not hitherto been an object of invective and reprobation. Only when the art critic begins to survey the modifications of art as objectively as he would study the alternations of the seasons, will he begin to understand and to sympathize with the different modes in which man has sought to formulate his gropings after beauty. If it be true in the world of sentiment that _il faut aimer pour comprendre_, the converse is true in the world of art. To enjoy any form of artistic expression one must not only understand what it tries to express, but know

_The hills where its life rose, And the sea where it goes._

Thus philosophically viewed, the baroque Rome--the Rome of Bernini, Borromini and Maderna, of Guercino, the Caracci and Claude Lorrain--becomes of great interest even to those who are not in sympathy with the exuberances of seventeenth-century art. In the first place, the great number of baroque buildings, churches, palaces and villas, the grandeur of their scale, and the happy incidents of their grouping, give a better idea than can elsewhere be obtained of the collective effects of which the style is capable. Thus viewed, it will be seen to be essentially a style _de parade_, the setting of the spectacular and external life which had developed from the more secluded civilization of the Renaissance as some blossom of immense size and dazzling colour may develop in the atmosphere of the forcing-house from a smaller and more delicate flower. The process was inevitable, and the result exemplifies the way in which new conditions will generate new forms of talent.

It is in moments of social and artistic transformation that original genius shows itself, and Bernini was the genius of the baroque movement. To those who study his work in the light of the conditions which produced it, he will appear as the natural interpreter of that sumptuous _bravura_ period when the pomp of a revived ecclesiasticism and the elaborate etiquette of Spain were blent with a growing taste for country life, for the solemnities and amplitudes of nature. The mingling of these antagonistic interests has produced an art distinctive enough to take rank among the recognized “styles”: an art in which excessive formality and ostentation are tempered by a free play of line, as though the winds of heaven swept unhindered through the heavy draperies of a palace. It need not be denied that delicacy of detail, sobriety of means and the effect of repose were often sacrificed to these new requirements; but it is more fruitful to observe how skilfully Bernini and his best pupils managed to preserve the balance and rhythm of their bold compositions, and how seldom profusion led to incoherence. How successfully the Italian sense of form ruled over this semi-Spanish chaos of material, and drew forth from it the classic line, may be judged from the way in which the seventeenth-century churches about the Forum harmonize with the ruins of ancient Rome. Surely none but the most bigoted archæologist would wish away from that magic scene the façades of San Lorenzo in Miranda and of Santa Francesca Romana!

In this connection it might be well for the purist to consider what would be lost if the seventeenth-century Rome which he affects to ignore were actually blotted out. The Spanish Steps would of course disappear, with the palace of the Propaganda; so would the glorious Barberini palace, and Bernini’s neighbouring fountain of the Triton; the via delle Quattro Fontane, with its dripping river-gods emerging from their grottoes, and Borromini’s fantastic church of San Carlo at the head of the street, a kaleidoscope of whirling line and ornament, offset by the delicately classical circular cortile of the adjoining monastery. On the Quirinal hill, the palace of the Consulta would go, and the central portal of the Quirinal (a work of Bernini’s), as well as the splendid gateway of the Colonna gardens. The Colonna palace itself, dull and monotonous without, but within the very model of a magnificent pleasure-house, would likewise be effaced; so would many of the most characteristic buildings of the Corso--San Marcello, the Gesù, the Sciarra and Doria palaces, and the great Roman College. Gone, too, would be the Fountain of Trevi, and Lunghi’s gay little church of San Vincenzo ed Anastasio, which faces it so charmingly across the square; gone the pillared court-yard and great painted galleries of the Borghese palace, and the Fontana dei Termini with its beautiful group of adjoining churches; the great fountain of the piazza Navona, Lunghi’s stately façade of the Chiesa Nuova, and Borromini’s Oratory of San Filippo Neri; the monumental Fountain of the Acqua Paola on the Janiculan, the familiar “Angels of the Passion” on the bridge of Sant’ Angelo, and, in the heart of the Leonine City itself, the mighty sweep of Bernini’s marble colonnades and the flying spray of his Vatican fountains.

This enumeration includes but a small number of the baroque buildings of Rome, and the villas encircling the city have not been named, though nearly all, with their unmatched gardens, are due to the art of this “debased” period. But let the candid sight-seer--even he who has no tolerance of the seventeenth century, and to whom each of the above-named buildings may be, individually, an object of reprobation--let even this sectary of art ask himself how much of “mighty splendent Rome” would be left, were it possible to obliterate the buildings erected during the fever of architectural renovation which raged from the accession of Sixtus V to the last years of the seventeenth century. Whether or no he would deplore the loss of any one of these buildings, he would be constrained to own that collectively they go far toward composing the physiognomy of the Rome he loves. So far-spreading was the architectural renascence of the seventeenth century, and so vast were the opportunities afforded to its chief exponents, that every quarter of the ancient city is saturated with the _bravura_ spirit of Bernini and Borromini. Some may think that Rome itself is the best defence of the baroque: that an art which could so envelop without eclipsing the mighty monuments amid which it was called to work, which could give expression to a brilliant present without jarring on a warlike or ascetic past, which could, in short, fuse Imperial and early Christian Rome with the city of Spanish ceremonial and post-Tridentine piety, needs no better justification than the _Circumspice_ of Wren. But even those who remain unconverted, who cannot effect the transference of artistic and historic sympathy necessary to a real understanding of seventeenth-century architecture, should at least realize that the Rome which excites a passion of devotion such as no other city can inspire, the Rome for which travellers pine in absence, and to which they return again and again with the fresh ardour of discovery, is, externally at least, in great part the creation of the seventeenth century.

V

In Venice the foreground is Byzantine-Gothic, with an admixture of early Renaissance. It extends from the church of Torcello to the canvases of Tintoretto. This foreground has been celebrated in literature with a vehemence and profusion which have projected it still farther into the public consciousness, and more completely obscured the fact that there is another Venice, a background Venice, the Venice of the eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-century Venice was not always thus relegated to the background. It had its day, when tourists pronounced Saint Mark’s an example of “the barbarous Gothick,” and were better acquainted with the ridotto of San Moisè than with the monuments of the Frari. It is instructive to note that the Venice of that day had no galleries and no museums. Travellers did not go there to be edified, but to be amused; and one may fancy with what relief the young nobleman on the grand tour, sated with the marbles of Rome and the canvases of Parma and Bologna, turned aside for a moment to a city where enjoyment was the only art and life the only object of study. But while travellers were flocking to Venice to see its carnival and gaming-rooms, its public festivals and private _casini_, a generation of artists were at work brushing in the gay background of the scene, and quiet hands were recording, in a series of memorable little pictures, every phase of that last brilliant ebullition of the _joie de vivre_ before “the kissing had to stop.”

Longhena and his pupils were the architects of this bright _mise en scène_, Tiepolo was its great scene-painter, and Canaletto, Guardi and Longhi were the historians who captured every phrase and gesture with such delicacy and precision that under their hands the glittering Venice of the “Toccata of Galuppi” lies outspread like a butterfly with the bloom on its wings.

Externally, Venice did not undergo the same renovation as Rome. As she was at the close of the Renaissance, with the impress of Palladio and Sansovino on her religious and secular architecture, so she remains to this day. One original architect, Baldassare Longhena, struck the note of a brilliant _barocchismo_ in the churches of Santa Maria della Salute and the Scalzi, and in the Pesaro and Rezzonico palaces on the Grand Canal; and his pupils, developing his manner with infinitely less talent, gave to Venice the long squat Dogana with its flying Fortune fronting the Lagoon, the churches of Santa Maria Zobenigo, San Moisè and the Gesuiti, the Monte di Pietà, and a score of imposing palaces. The main effect of the city was, however, little modified by this brief flowering of the baroque. Venice has always stamped every new fashion with her own personality, and Longhena’s architecture seems merely the hot-house efflorescence of the style of Sansovino and Scamozzi. Being, moreover, less under the sway of the Church than any other Italian state, she was able to resist the architectural livery with which the great Jesuit subjugation clad the rest of Italy. The spirit of the eighteenth century therefore expressed itself rather in her expanding social life, and in the decorative arts which attend on such drawing-room revivals. Skilful _stuccatori_ adorned the old saloons and galleries with fresh gilding and mirrors, slender furniture replaced the monumental cabinets which Venice had borrowed from Spain, and little _genre_-pictures by Longhi and landscapes by Canaletto and Battaglia were hung on the large-patterned damask of the boudoir walls. Religion followed the same lines, adapting itself to the elegancies of the drawing-room, and six noble families recognized their social obligations to heaven by erecting the sumptuous church of Santa Maria degli Scalzi, with its palatial interior, in which one may well imagine the heavenly hostess saying to her noble donators: “Couvrez-vous, mes cousins.”

Though begun by Longhena about 1650, the church of the Scalzi is so identified with the genius of Tiepolo that it may be regarded as an epitome of eighteenth-century Venetian art. Herr Cornelius Gurlitt, the most penetrating critic of the Venetian baroque, has indeed justly pointed out that Longhena was the forerunner and _Geistesgenossen_ of the great master of eighteenth-century decorative painting, and that the architect’s bold and sumptuous structural effects might have been designed as a setting for those unsurpassed audacities of the brush which, a hundred years later, were to continue and complete them.

On the soaring vault of the Scalzi, above an interior of almost Palladian elegance and severity, the great painter of atmosphere, the first of the _pleinairistes_, was required to depict the transportation of the Holy House from Palestine to Loreto. That Tiepolo, with his love of ethereal distances, and of cloud-like hues melting into thin air, should have accepted the task of representing a stone house borne through the sky by angels, shows a rare sense of mastery; that he achieved the feat without disaster justifies the audacity of the attempt.

Tiepolo was above all a lover of open spaces. He liked to suspend his fluttering groups in great pellucid reaches of sky, and the vast ceiling of the Scalzi gave him an exceptional opportunity for the development of this effect. The result is that the angels, whirling along the Virgin’s house with a vehemence which makes it seem a mere feather in the rush of their flight, appear to be sweeping through measureless heights of air above an unroofed building. The architectural propriety of such a _trompe l’œil_ is not only open to criticism but perhaps quite indefensible; yet, given the demand for this particular illusion, who but Tiepolo could have produced it?

The same ethereal effect, but raised to a higher heaven of translucency, is to be found in the ceiling of the Gesuati (not to be confounded with the Gesuiti), on the quay of the Zattere. This charming structure, built in the early eighteenth century by Massari, one of the pupils of Longhena, but obviously inspired by the great churches of Palladio, is dedicated to Saint Mary of the Rosary; and Tiepolo, in three incomparable frescoes, has represented on its ceiling the legend of Saint Dominick receiving the chaplet from the Virgin in glory.

The guide-books, always on the alert to warn the traveller against an undue admiration of Tiepolo, are careful to point out that the Mother of God, bending from her starry throne above the ecstatic saint, looks like a noble Venetian lady of the painter’s day. No doubt she does. It is impossible to form an intelligent estimate of Tiepolo’s genius without remembering that the Catholicism of his time was a religion of _bon ton_, which aimed to make its noble devotees as much at home in church as in the drawing-room. He took his models from real life and composed his celestial scenes without much thought of their inner significance; yet by sheer force of technique he contrived to impart to his great religious pictures a glow of supernatural splendour which makes it not inapt to apply to them the lines of the “Paradiso”:

_Che la luce divina è penetrante Per l’universo, secondo ch’è degno, Sichè nulla le puote essere ostante._

VI

It is quite true, however, that Tiepolo was not primarily a devotional painter. He was first of all a great decorative artist, a master of emotion in motion, and it probably mattered little to him whether he was called on to express the passion of Saint Theresa or of Cleopatra. This does not imply that he executed his task indifferently. Whatever it was, he threw into it the whole force of his vehement imagination and incomparable _maestria_; but what he saw in it, whether it was religious or worldly, was chiefly, no doubt, the opportunity to obtain new effects of light and line.

If he had a special bent, it was perhaps toward the depicting of worldly pageants. In the Labia palace on the Canareggio, a building in which Cominelli, the ablest Venetian architect of the eighteenth century, nobly continued the “grand manner” of Sansovino and Scamozzi, Tiepolo found an unequalled opportunity for the exercise of this side of his talent. Here, in the lofty saloon of the _piano nobile_, he painted the loves of Antony and Cleopatra transposed to the key of modern patrician life. He first covered the walls with an architectural improvisation of porticoes, loggias and colonnades, which might have been erected to celebrate the “triumph” of some magnificent Este or Gonzaga. In this splendid setting he placed two great scenes: Cleopatra melting the pearl, and Antony and Cleopatra landing from their barge; while every gallery, balcony and flight of steps is filled with courtiers, pages and soldiers, with dwarfs and blackamoors holding hounds in leash, and waiting-maids and lacqueys leaning down to see the pageant.

From this throng of figures the principal characters detach themselves with a kind of delicate splendour. Royal Egypt,

_On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed_,

in her brocaded gown of white and gold, with a pearl collar about her throat, and a little toy spaniel playing at her feet, is an eighteenth-century Dogaressa; Antony is a young Procurator travestied as a Roman hero; while the turbaned black boy, the maid-servants, the courtiers, the pages, are all taken _sur le vif_ from some brilliant rout in a Pisano or Mocenigo palace. And yet--here comes the wonder--into these “water-flies” and triflers of his day, the ladies engrossed in cards and scandal, the abatini preoccupied with their acrostics, the young nobles intriguing with the _prima amorosa_ of San Moisè or engaged in a sentimental correspondence with a nun of Santa Chiara--into this throng of shallow pleasure-seekers Tiepolo has managed to infuse something of the old Roman state. As one may think of Dante beneath the vault of the Gesuati, one may recall Shakespeare in the presence of these rouged and powdered Venetians. The scene of the landing suggests with curious vividness the opening scene of “Antony and Cleopatra”--

_Look where they come! The triple pillar of the world transformed Into a strumpet’s fool--_

and one can almost hear the golden Antony, as he brushes aside the importunate Roman messengers, whispering to his Queen: “What sport to-night?”

Still more Shakespearian is the scene of the pearl. Cleopatra, enthroned in state at the banqueting-table, lifts one hand to drop the jewel into her goblet, and in her gesture and her smile are summed up all the cruel grace of the “false soul of Egypt.” It is Tiepolo’s best praise that such phrases and associations as these are evoked by his art, and that, judged from the painter’s standpoint, it recalls the glory of another great tradition. Studied in the light of Venetian painting, Tiepolo is seen to be the direct descendant of Titian and Veronese. If the intervening century has taken something from the warmth of his colour, leaving it too often chalky where that of the Renaissance was golden, he has recovered the lines, the types and the radiant majesty of the Venetian _cinque cento_, and Veronese’s Venice Enthroned, in the Ducal Palace, is the direct forbear of his Virgins and Cleopatras.

VII

It is perhaps no longer accurate to describe Tiepolo as forming a part of the Venetian background. Recent criticism has advanced him to the middle distance, and if there are still comparatively few who know his work, his name is familiar to the cultivated minority of travellers.

Far behind him, however, still on the vanishing-point of the tourist’s horizon, are the other figures of the Venetian background: Longhi, Guardi, Canaletto, and their humbler understudies. Of these, Canaletto alone emerges into relative prominence. His views of Venice are to be found in so many European galleries, and his name so facilitates the association of ideas, that, if few appreciate his work, many are superficially acquainted with it; whereas Guardi, a painter of greater though more unequal talent, is still known only to the dilettante.