Part 23

Even in the Dutch and Flemish images of doom I have thought to detect a note of earth-laughter, almost an irresponsible gaiety. Pierre Breughel paints the _Fall of the Angels_ as a descent to lower forms—the loyal angels beat the rebels down, and they change as they fall into birds, beasts, and fishes, into frogs and lizards, and even into vegetables. There are bipedal carrots, and winged artichokes and bird-tailed pomegranates. ’Tis as if the worthy painter was anxious to return to the kitchen, to his genre subjects. Or may we sniff a belated Buddhism or a premature Darwinism? Instead of a sacred picture we get a pantomimic transformation scene: metamorphosis caught grotesquely in the act. This _Fall of the Angels_ seems a favourite Flemish subject—one reads almost an allegory of Art hurled down from heaven to earth.

The same sportive fantasy frolics it over the Flemish hell. De Vos gives us a devil playing on the fluted nose of a metamorphosed sinner. In a triptych of Jerome Bosch, the _Last Judgment_ is the judgment of a Merry Andrew who turns the damned into bell-clappers, strings them across harp-strings, or claps their mouth to the faucets of barrels till they retch. So far goes the painter’s free fancy that he invents air-ships and submarines for the lost souls to cower in, unwitting of the day when these would hold no terrors for the _manes_ of erring aeronauts and torpedoists.

Italian art even in the childish grotesqueries of its Inferno never falls so low as this freakish farrago. One cannot help feeling that the Italians believed in hell and the Netherlanders made fun of it.

One of these extravaganzas of Bosch has drifted to Venice, though this _Temptation of St. Antony_ (of which there is a replica in Brussels) is also attributed to Van Bles. The nude ladies coming to the saint with gifts are most unprepossessing, and what temptation there is in the whirl of carnival grotesques I cannot understand. No doubt some allegory of sin lurks in these goblin faces, with their greedy mouths full of strange creatures, and in this great head with black-tailed things creeping in through eye and mouth, with frogs suspended from its earrings and a little town growing out of its head. Such uncouth ugliness has no parallel in Venice, unless it be a German Inferno with a belled devil. From such puerilities one turns with relief to the coldest and stateliest conventions of High Art.

And yet Dutch art and Italian are not wholly discrepant the link, as I have said, comes through the minor figures of religious scenes, or even occasionally through the major. A Dutch homeliness lurks shyly in the background of Italian art, and at times appears boldly in the foreground. From one point of view nothing could be more Dutch than the innumerable Madonnas who suckle their _Bambini_. Nor do their haloes destroy their homeliness. The peasant girl of Tintoretto’s _Annunciation_ in S. Rocco wears a halo, but neither that nor the angel bursting through the crumbling brick of the door can prevent this scene from being a Dutch interior with a cane chair. Realism, smuggled in under the cloak of religion, is none the less realism, and when Moretto shows us the _Bambino_ about to be bathed by mother and nurse, and paints us a basket of belly-bands, he has given us a genre picture none the less because rapt saints and monks look on in defiance of chronology, and, perched on a bank of cloud over a romantic landscape, angels sing on high. Even as early as Giotto the nurse who presides at _The Birth of the Virgin_ is washing the baby’s eyes. Very curious and realistic is the pastoral study which Luca Cambiaso styled _Adoration of the Shepherds_. And in Veronese, for all his magnificence, and in Carpaccio, for all his fairy-tale atmosphere, and above all in Bassano, for all his golden glow, we get well-established half-way houses between High Art and Low. Under the pretext of _The Supper in Emmaus_ Bassano anticipates all Dutch art. Here be cats, dogs, plucked geese, meat in the pan, shining copper utensils scattered around, the pot over the glow of the fire, the rows of plates in the kitchen behind. What loving study of the colour of the wine in the glasses of the guests, and of their robes and their furs! These things it is that, with the busy figures behind the bar or stooping on the floor, fill up the picture, while the Christ on a raised platform in the corner bulks less than the serving-maid, and the centre of the stage is occupied by a casual eater, his napkin across his knees. If this sixteenth-century picture is Venetian in its glowing colour and its comparative indifference to form, it is Dutch in its minuteness and homeliness.

The same love of pots and pans and animals glows in _The Departure of Jacob_, with his horse and his ass and his sheep and his goats and his basket of hens, and even beguiles Bassano into attempting a faint peering camel. But not even the presence of God in a full white beard can render this a sacred picture. It is, however, in his favourite theme of _The Animals going into the Ark_ that Bassano brings the line between the sacred and secular almost to vanishing point. Although Savonarola preached on the Ark with such unction, as became the prophet of a new deluge, the just Noah himself seems the least religious figure in the Old Testament, perhaps because—after so much water—he took too much wine. There is even a tradition recorded by Ibn Yachya that after the Flood he emigrated to Italy and studied science. At any rate Bassano always treated him as a mere travelling showman, packing his animals and properties for the next stage. In a picture at Padua Noah’s sons and daughters are doing up their luggage—one almost sees the labels—and Noah, with his few thin white hairs, remonstrates agitatedly with Shem—or it may be Ham or Japhet—who is apparently muddling the boxes. A lion and lioness are treading the plank to the Ark, into which a Miss Noah is just pushing the leisurely rump of a pig, which even the lions at its tail fail to accelerate. Countless other pairs of every description, including poultry, jostle one another amid a confusion of pots, wash-tubs, sacks, and bundles, the birds alone finding comfortable perching-room on the trees. Mrs. Noah wears her hair done up in a knot with pearls just like the Venetian ladies, and a billy-cock hat lies on one of the bundles. In his _Sheep-shearing_ (in the Pinacoteca Estense of Modena) Bassano throws over all pious pretences and becomes unblushingly Dutch—nay, double-Dutch, for he drags in agricultural operations and cooking as well as sheep-shearing.

But it is in Turin that Bassano’s Batavianism runs riot. For his market-place is a revel of fowls, onions, prezels, eggs, carcases, sheep, rams, mules, dogs gnawing bones, market-women, chafferers, with a delicious little boy whose shirt hangs out behind his vivid red trousers. And his _Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan_ is an extravaganza in copper pots and pans; and yet another market masterpiece is an inventory of all he loved—butcher’s meat and rabbits and geese and doves, and lungs and livers, and gherkins and melons, and cocks and hens, and copper pans and pewter spoons, and a cow and a horse and an owl and lambs, all jostling amid booths and stalls on a pleasant rustic background as in a Tintoretto Paradise of luscious paintabilities.

Gaudenzio Ferrari has the same love of sheep, and these, with horses and dogs, force their way into his pictures. The Bible is an encyclopædia of themes, and even had any subject been wanting, apocrypha and sacred legend would have provided it. For his pet lambs Ferrari goes to the copious broidery on the Gospel, and his _Angels predicting the Birth of Maria_ is really a study in sheep on the background of a domed and towered Italian city. Giotto too had attempted sheep, though they are more like pigs, and dogs, though they are elongated and skinny; his camel with grotesque ears and a sun-bonnet one can forgive.

The lives of the saints supplied other opportunities for “Dutch” pictures in the shape of miracles at home. Titian himself stooped to record the miracle of putting on again the foot which the man who had kicked his mother cut off in remorse. And in the same Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua you may see the neglectful nurse carrying safely to its parents at table the babe she had allowed to boil.

And yet despite all these manifold opportunities, no Italian seems quite to get the veracious atmosphere of the Dutch and to achieve the dignity of Art without departing from the homeliness of Nature. No Italian has brought Christ into the street so boldly as Erasmus Quellinus in that picture in the Museo Vicenza in which a girl with a basket of live hens on her head stops to watch the fat Dutch baby sleeping in its mother’s arms. Despite the unreal presence of adoring saints in the crowd, there is here a true immanence of divinity in everyday reality. The sixteenth-century Italian Baroccio did indeed depict a Dutch peasant-feast in his _Last Supper_ in the cathedral of Urbino, with its bare-legged boy cook stooping for platters from a basket and its dog drinking at a bronze dish, but its homeliness is marred by the hovering of angels. Realism unadorned is essayed by Fogolino in his _Holy Family_ in Vicenza, with the carpenter’s shop, the rope of yarn, the hammer; with a boy Christ in a black tunic saying grace before a meal of boiled eggs, pomegranate, and grapes, washed down by a beaker of red wine; with the Madonna bending solicitously over him, her wooden spoon poised over her bowl; but, alas! the whole effect is of a cheap oleograph.

But then Fogolino was not a great painter, and it would have been interesting to see a superb craftsman like Paul Veronese try his hand at homely nature, unadorned by great space-harmonies and decorative magnificences. As it was, he had the delight of a Dutchman in dogs and cats, copper pots and jugs, and earthen pans and groaning tables and glittering glasses, and these it is which fascinate him, far more than the spiritual aspect of the _Supper in the House of the Pharisee_, so that even when he wishes to paint the soul of the pink-gowned Venetian Magdalen, he paints it through a little bowl which she overturns in her emotion at kissing the feet of Christ. This is why meals are the prime concern of Veronese, obsess him more than even his noble pillared rhythms and arched perspectives. How eagerly he grasps at _The Marriage of Cana_ and _The Disciples at Emmaus_ and _The Meal in the House of Levi_, with which that hold-all of the Bible supplied him! Spaces and staircases, arches and balconies and lordly buildings, all the palatial poetry of Verona, with its fair women and rich-robed men—these are his true adoration, and he paints, not Jesus, but the loaves and fishes. Nay, it may almost be said that unless there be food in the picture Veronese grows feeble, and must have pillars at least to prop him up. See, for example, his _Susannah and the Elders_, with no trace of food and only a wall to sustain him. When the Biblical cornucopia was wholly depleted of its food-stuffs, he had to forage for manna, especially when the need of decorating a monastic refectory was added to his own passion for provender. One of his discoveries was _The Banquet of Gregory the Great_, which is in the Monastery of the Madonna del Monte outside Vicenza, and which is based on the legend that Gregory invited twelve poor men to eat with him and Christ turned up as one of them. But Christ, who is removing the cover from a fowl, is less striking than Paul Veronese himself—who stands on the inevitable balcony with his own little boy—and at best a mere item in the rhythm of pillars and staircases and sky-effects. Nothing brings out the defect of Veronese as a religious painter so clearly as a comparison of his _Disciples at Emmaus_ with Titian’s. Titian too gives us fine shades of bread and fruit and wine, and even a little “Dutch” dog under the table; Titian too plays with pillars and a romantic background. But how his picture is suffused with the spirit! These things know their place, are absorbed in the luminous whole. A certain blurred softness in the modelling, a certain subdued glow in the colouring—as of St. Mark’s—give mystery and atmosphere. The food is, so to speak, transubstantiated.

Even Moretto’s _Supper at Emmaus_ (in Brescia) is superior to Veronese’s, though his Christ in pilgrim’s cockle-hat and cloak has to the modern eye the look of an officer with a cocked hat and a gold epaulette.

But Veronese is not the only Italian who would have been happier as a lay painter. I am convinced that some of the romanticists of the Renaissance were born with the souls of Dutchmen, and these, as it happens, the very men who have not worn well; a proof that they were out of their element and gave up to romance and religion what was meant for realism. Take Guido Reni, the very synonym of a fallen star, the _Aurora_ in Rome, perhaps his one enduring success—though even here Aurora’s skirt is of too crude a blue, and there is insufficient feeling of mountain and sea below her. His portrait by Simone Cantarini da Pesaro shows him with a short grey beard, a black doublet, a lawn collar, and a rather pained look—there is nothing of the _Aurora_ in this sedate and serious figure. And better than either his violent Caravaggio martyrology or his later mythologic poesy I find his portraits of his mother and his foster-mother; the mother in black with a black turn-down collar, a muslin coif, and grey hair thinning at the temples, and the foster-mother a peasant woman with bare and brawny arms. The _St. Peter Reading_ in the Brera is also a strong study of an old man’s head. Moroni had the good sense or the good fortune to shake himself almost free of religious subjects and to produce a _Tailor_ who is worth tons of _Madonnas_, but even he did not utterly escape the church-market, and when one examines such a picture as his _Madonna and Son, St. Catherine, St. Francis, and the Donor_ in the Brera, one rejoices even more that an overwhelming percentage of his product is pure portraiture. For the holy women in this picture are quite bad; St. Francis is rather better, but the real Moroni appears only in the smug donor who prays, his clasped hands showing his valuable ring. Here, of course, the painter had simply to reproduce his sitter. As much can be said of Garofalo and many another religious painter, whose “Donors” often constitute the sole success of their pious compositions.

Lorenzo Lotto, too, should perhaps have confined himself to portraiture, if of a fashionable _clientèle_. His pretty _Adoration of the Infant_ might be any mother adoring any infant. Near it—in the Palazzo Martinengo in Brescia—Girolamo Romanino has a frightful fresco in the grand manner, and quite a good portrait of an old gentleman; which suggests that Romanino too should have avoided the classic. There is an altar-piece of his in Padua which, although by no means devoid of beauty, confirms this suggestion, for the Madonna and Child lack character and originality, and are infinitely inferior to the Dutch painting of the robes. The whole composition, indeed, glows and has depth only in its lower and more terrestrial part, including in that term the little girl angel who plays a tambourine below the throne.

Bronzino was another victim to his pious epoch, though he emancipated himself almost as largely as Moroni. His _Madonna_ in the Brera is remarkable for the secular modernity of the Virgin’s companions. On her right is an ultra-realistic old woman; on her left Bernard Shaw looks down with his sarcastic, sceptical gaze.

Even the Netherlanders who had had the fortune to be born free would, after their wander-years in Italy, come back as Italians and paint in the grand manner. Hence the religious and historic Van Dycks which compare so poorly with the portraits, hence Rembrandt’s fat _vrow_ as Madonna, hence the Lenten attempts of Rubens to bant.

AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN FALLACIES

Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of sainted Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval leaves grow the biographies of the brethren. They lived, they prayed, they died—that is all. One little leaf suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third was found after his death covered with a rough hair shirt (_aspro cilicio_). In the holy shade of this goodly tree sits St. Dominic, separating—as though symbolically—the monks on his right from the nuns on his left.

_Naïveté_ can no further go. And, indeed, if one were to regard the _naïveté_ and forget the sweet simplicity, there is much in the mediæval world that one would relegate to the merely absurd. The masterpieces of Art have been sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written upon its grotesques!

The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in grottoes or excavated Roman tombs; those fantastic combinations of the vegetable and animal worlds by which the art of Islam avoided the representation of the real. But by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved with no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor have I in mind its first fumblings, its crudities of the catacombs, its simplicities of the missal and the music-book, its Byzantine paintings with their wooden figures and gold embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early Masters whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced by a delicious primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese Madonna preferable to a Raphael, and the early mosaics of St. Mark’s more desirable than the sixteenth-century work that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper than unscientific drawing; it mingles even with the work of the most scholarly Masters, and springs from the absence of a sense of history or a sense of humour. That the Gospel incidents should be depicted in Italian landscape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural, since, as I have already pointed out, every nation remakes the Christ in its own image—psychologically when not physically. Even the Old Testament was de-Orientalised by Raphael and his fellow-illustrators. Bonifacio Veronese, for example, put Italian hills and music-books into _The Finding of Moses_, and his Egypt is less Eastern than the Venice he lived in. But that the fancy-dress Bible should include also Doges and Cardinals and Magnificent Families, and that a Tintoretto in everyday clothes should look on at his own _Miracle of St. Mark_ or a Moretto come to his own _Supper at Emmaus_, this it is that lifts the eyebrows of a modern. One can permit Dominican friars to witness _The Incredulity of St. Thomas_, or Franciscans to assist—as in Marco Basaiti’s picture—at _The Agony in the Garden_. These holy brethren are at least in the apostolic chain; and in the latter picture, which is becomingly devotional, the scene is suggested as a mystic vision to justify the presence of these anachronistic spectators. But how is it possible to tolerate proud Venetian senators at _The Ascension of Christ_, or to stomach the Medici at the building of the Tower of Babel? It is true sacred subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits, but what absence of perspective!

It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps by which the objective conception of a picture—true to its own time and place—was reached, or the evolution by which singleness of subject was substituted for exuberance of episodes and ideas, till at last Art could flower in a lovely simplicity like that of Simone Martini’s _Annunciation_. You shall see St. Barbara throned at the centre of her anecdotal biography, or the Madonna della Misericordia sheltering virtues under her robe, while her history circles around her. Even when the picture itself is simple and single, the predella is often a congested commentary upon the text, if, indeed, it has any relevant relation to the text at all. What can be more charming than the little angels round the throne of the Madonna in Benaglio Francesco’s picture in Verona—angels with golden vases of red and white roses, angels playing spinets and harps and pipes and lutes and little drums and strange stringed instruments that have passed away! But what can be more grotesque than the predella of this delightful picture, the Entombment and the saints with the insignia of their martyrdom (hammer and tongs and fiery braziers), and the cock that crew, and the kiss of Judas!

In a picture by Lorenzo Monaco at Florence the Virgin and St. John raise Christ out of his tomb, and above are not only a cross and the instruments of martyrdom, but a bust and floating hands, while spice vessels figure below.

To a modern the mere treatment of God the Father suffices to create a category of the grotesque, even though His head has usually the venerable appearance of the aged Ruskin and He is kept a discreet kit-kat or a half-length. But Fra Bartolommeo in Lucca paints Him at full length with His toes on a little angel and a placard in His hand bearing the letters alpha and omega. And Lorenzo Veneziano parts His hair neatly in the middle.

Our catalogue of grotesques is swollen by the explanatory scrolls and inscriptions of the early pictures; by the crude religious allegories, in which devils gnash teeth when Virtue routs Temptation; by the political cartoons at Siena—of Good and Bad Government (though these are more primitive than comic); by the literal genealogic trees—like that of Jesse in St. Mark’s, or on the stone door-posts of the Baptistery of Parma; by the Tree of the Cross in Florence, which shoots out branches with round leaves containing scenes from the life of the central crucified figure, and supports a pyramid of saints and celestials; by the devices of symbolism for representing abstract ideas or identifying saints. All haloes are proleptic even from childhood, and a martyr and his passion can never be parted. Those poor martyrs, what they suffered at the hands of painters without a gleam of humour!