Chapter 7

THE RENAISSANCE IN VENICE

A visit to Venice is one of the joys which perhaps few of us have yet experienced. But whether we have been there or not, we all know that the very sound of her name is enchanting for those who are fresh from her magic--her sunrises and sunsets unmatched for colour, and her streets for silence.

The Venetians were a proud and successful people, wealthier by virtue of their great sea-trade than the citizens of Florence or of any other town in Italy; their foremost men lived in great high-roomed palaces, richly furnished, and decorated with pictures of a sumptuous pageantry. But the Venetians were not merely a luxurious people. The poetry of the lagoons, and the glory of the sunset skies, imparted to their lives the wealth of a rare romance. Even in Venice to-day, now that the steamers have spoilt the peace of the canals and the old orange-winged sailing-boats no longer crowd against the quays, the dreamy atmosphere of the city retains its spell.

Few artists ever felt and expressed this atmosphere better than Giorgione, the painter of the first of our Venetian pictures. He was one of the great artists of the Renaissance who died young, ten years before Raphael, but their greatness is scarcely comparable. Like Raphael, Giorgione was precocious, but unlike him he painted in a style of his own that from the very beginning owed little to any one else. He saw beauty in his own way, and was not impelled to see it differently by coming into contact with other artists, however great. Unlike Raphael, he was not a great master of the art of composition. In the little picture before us the grouping of the figures is not what may be called inevitable, like that in the 'Knight's Dream.' It seems as though one day when Giorgione was musing on the beauties of the world, and the blemishes of life, even life in Venice, he thought of some far-off time beyond the dawn of history when all men lived in peace. The ancient Greeks called this perfect time the 'Golden Age' of the world. In many ways their idea of it tallies with the description of the Garden of Eden, and they were always contrasting with it the 'Iron Age' in which they thought they lived, as the Hebrews contrasted the life of Adam and Eve in the garden with their own. As the fancy flashed across Giorgione's mind, perchance he saw some just king of whom his subjects felt no fear seated upon a throne like this. A dreamy youth plays soft music to him, and another hands him flowers and fruit. Books lie strewn upon the steps, and a child stands in a reverent attitude before him. Wild and domestic animals live together in harmony; the ground is carpeted with flowers; all is peaceful. Such a subject suited the temperament of Giorgione, and he painted it in the romantic mood in which it was conceived. Nothing could be further from everyday life than this little scene. It has the unlaboured look that suits such an improvised subject. Of course no one knows for certain that this is a picture of the Golden Age, and you may make up any story you like about it for yourselves. That is one of the charms of the picture. It has been said that the throned one is celebrating his birthday, and that his little heir is reciting him a birthday ode accompanied by music. You may believe this if you like, but how do you then account for the leopard and the peacock living in such harmony together?

Giorgione painted a few sacred pictures and many mythological scenes, besides several very beautiful portraits of dreamy-looking poets and noblemen. But even when he illustrated some well-known tale, he did not care to seize upon the dramatic moment that gives the crisis of the story, as Giotto would have done, and as the painter of our next picture does. Violent action did not attract him. Whatever the subject, if it were possible to group the figures together at a moment when they were beautifully doing nothing, he did so. But he liked still more to paint ideal scenes from his own fancy, where young people sit in easy attitudes upon the grass, conversing for an instant in the intervals of the music they make upon pipes and guitar. He was the first artist, so far as I know, to paint these half real, half imaginary scenes, of which our picture may be one. In all of them landscape bears an important part, and in some the background has become the picture and completely subordinated the figures. In this little 'Golden Age' the landscape is quiet in tone, tinged with melancholy, romantic, to suit the mood of the figures. Its colouring, though rich, is subdued, more like the tints of autumn than the fresh hues of spring. The Venetians excelled in their treatment of colour. They lived in an uncommon world of it. Giorgione saw his picture in his mind's eye as a blaze of rich colour; he did not see the figures sharply outlined against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael's 'Knight's Dream.' That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard II. diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of colour, whereas to Giorgione's eye outline was nothing without colour and light and shade. The body of the King upon the throne in our picture is massed against the background, but there is no definite outline to divide it from the tree behind. In this respect Giorgione was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures of a still later time.

Giorgione was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague in 1510, the same year as Botticelli. His master, Giovanni Bellini, who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great Titian, his fellow-pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century or more.

Titian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art. His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgione, except during the short space of time when he painted under the spell of his brother artist. It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between Titian's early and Giorgione's late work. Titian perhaps had the greater intellect. Giorgione's pictures vary according to his mood, while Titian's express a less changeable personality. In spite of his youth, Giorgione made a profound impression upon all the artists of his time. They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy mood. It was almost as though Giorgione had absorbed the romance of Venice into his pictures, so that for a time no Venetian painter could express Venetian romance except in Giorgione's way.

But in 1518, eight years after Giorgione's death, another great innovating master was born at Venice, Tintoret by name, who in his turn opened new visions of the world to the artists of his day. While painting in the rest of Italy was becoming mannered and sentimental, lacking in power and originality, Tintoret in Venice was creating masterpieces with a very fury of invention and a corresponding swiftness of hand. He was his own chief teacher. Outside his studio he wrote upon a sign to inform or attract pupils--'The design of Michelangelo and the colouring of Titian.' Profound study of the works of these two masters is manifest in his own. Like Michelangelo he worked passionately rather than with the sober competence of Titian. His thronging visions, his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures. His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale. He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance had deviated but little from it. In Tintoret the freedom of the Renaissance reached its height. For him tradition had no fetters. When he painted a picture of Paradise for the Doge's Palace it measured 84 by 34 feet, and contained literally hundreds of figures. His imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a figure. New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush in exhaustless multitude.

It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret's most famous works, still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which they were painted, or in which they have been brought together. But the National Gallery is fortunate in possessing one relatively small canvas of his which shows some of his finest qualities. The subject of St. George slaying the dragon was not a new one. It had been painted by Raphael and by several of the earlier Venetian painters, but Tintoret's treatment of it was all his own. In the earlier pictures, the princess, for whose sake St. George fights the dragon, was a little figure in the background fleeing in terror. St. George occupied the chief place, as he does upon the back of our gold sovereigns, where the princess has been left out altogether. Tintoret makes her flee, but she is running towards the spectator, and so, in her flight, stands out the most conspicuous figure. One of the victims that the dragon has slain lies behind her. In the distance St. George fights with all his might against the powers of evil, whilst 'the splendour of God' blazes in the sky. There is a vividness and power about the picture that proclaims the hand of Tintoret. In contrast to Giorgione he liked to paint figures in motion, yet he was as typical an outcome of Venetian romance as the earlier painter. Nothing could be more like a fairy-tale than this picture. It was no listless dreamer that painted it, but one with a gorgeous imagination and yet a full knowledge of the world, enabling him to give substance to his visions. Tintoret's stormy landscapes are as beautiful in their way as Giorgione's dreamy ones, and each carries out the mood of the rest of the picture. This one is full of power, mystery, and romance. Tintoret had modelled his colouring upon Titian and was by nature a great colourist, but too often he used bad materials that have turned black with the lapse of years. In this picture you see his colour as it was meant to be, rich, and boldly harmonious. The vivid red and blue of the princess's clothes are a daring combination with the brilliant green of the landscape, but Tintoret knew what he was doing, and the result is superb. With his death in 1594 the best of Venetian painting came to an end.

There were as many excellent painters in the fairy city as there had been in Florence; contemporaries of Giovanni Bellini (who, in his early years, worked in close companionship with Mantegna, his brother-in-law), as well as contemporaries of Titian and Tintoret. The painter Veronese, for instance, died a few years before Tintoret. For pomp and pageantry his great canvases are eminent. Standing in some room of the Doge's Palace, decorated entirely by his hand, we are carried back to the time when Venice was Queen of the Seas, unrivalled for magnificence and wealth. He was the Master of Ceremonies, before whom other painters of pomps and vanities pale. Gorgeous colouring is what all these Venetian painters had in common. We see it in the early days when Venetian art was struggling into existence. In her art, as in her skies and waters, we are overwhelmed by a vision of colour unsurpassed.

We have now touched on a few prominent points in the history of painting in Italy from its early rise in Florence with Giotto; through its period of widespread excellence in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, when Raphael, Giorgione, Michelangelo, and Leonardo were all painting masterpieces in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan at the same moment; to its final blaze of sunset grandeur in Venice. It is time to return to the north of Europe. In the next chapter we will try to gain a few glimpses of the progress of painting in Germany, Holland, Flanders, and our own country.