LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

as matters of the very smallest possible importance. All her work and her attention would be given to bring out from underneath this, and through this, the forms and the material character which this can only be valuable to illustrate, not to conceal. Every one of those broad spaces she would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you fresh lessons in every hair's-breadth of it, until the mind lost itself in following her; now fringing the dark edge of the shadow with a tufted line of level forest; now losing it for an instant in a breath of mist; then breaking it with the white gleaming angle of a narrow brook; then dwelling upon it again in a gentle, mounded, melting undulation, over the other side of which she would carry you down into a dusty space of soft crowded light, with the hedges and the paths and the sprinkled cottages and scattered trees mixed up and mingled together in one beautiful, delicate, impenetrable mystery, sparkling and melting, and passing away into the sky, without one line of distinctness, or one instant of vacancy"65 (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 8).

      32. THE RAPE OF GANYMEDE

School of Titian. See under 4.

      Ganymede – so the Greek story ran – was a beautiful Trojan boy beloved of Jupiter, and was carried off by an eagle to Olympus to be the cup-bearer of the gods. Which things, say some, are an allegory – for "those whom the gods love die young," and are snatched off, it may be, in sudden death, as by an eagle's swoop.

      Flushed Ganymede, his rosy thigh

      Half-buried in the Eagle's down,

      Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky.

Tennyson: Palace of Art.

      This picture was painted, like Tintoret's "Milky Way" (1313) and the four Veroneses (1318, 1324-6), for a compartment of a ceiling. It corresponds with a picture described by Ridolfi as painted by a scholar of Titian, though some connect it rather with Tintoret (see J. B. S. Holborn's Tintoretto, 1903, pp. 34, 35). It was formerly in the Colonna Palace: the background is a restoration by Carlo Maratti (see 174).

      33. THE VISION OF ST. JEROME

Parmigiano (Parmese: 1503-1540).

      A picture of great interest both for itself and for the circumstances under which it was painted. Parmigiano was painting it at Rome in 1527 when the city was sacked by the army of the Emperor Charles V. under Constable Bourbon. So intent, says Vasari, was our artist on his work that "when his own dwelling was filled with certain of these men, who were Germans, he remained undisturbed by their clamours, and did not move from his place; arriving in the room therefore, and finding him thus employed, they stood confounded at the beauty of the paintings they beheld, and, like good and sensible men as they must have been, they permitted him to continue his occupation."66 Parmigiano had other narrow escapes in his career, which ultimately came to a bad end, owing, Vasari says, to his forsaking painting for alchemy, "since he believed that he should make himself rich much more rapidly by the congelation of mercury than by his art."

      Francesco Maria Mazzola was called Parmigiano from Parma, his birthplace. After Correggio settled there, Parmigiano devoted himself to the study and imitation of that master. In 1523 he went to Rome, to study the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo. In 1531 he returned to Parma, and undertook an important commission to paint in one of its churches. He was paid in advance, and when after five years he had not begun the work he was imprisoned for breach of contract. He was released on a promise that he would proceed with the frescoes, but he fled the city, and shortly afterwards died, in his thirty-seventh year. The chequered life of the artist finds a parallel in the varying fortunes of his reputation as an artist. He was an imitator both of Correggio and of Michael Angelo – here, for instance, the head of the infant Christ recalls the former master, the figures of St. Jerome and St. John recall the latter; and in his own day was held to have imitated them successfully, whilst Vasari adds that "the spirit of Raphael was said to have passed into Parmigiano." Of one of his works Reynolds, two hundred years later, expressed himself "at a loss which to admire most, the correctness of drawing or grandeur of conception." But the fashion in art has changed since Reynolds's day, and modern critics have found Parmigiano's work "incongruous," "insipid," and "affected." This difference of opinion is well exemplified in the case of this picture. Vasari calls it "singularly beautiful," and its subsequent popularity is attested by the number of copies of it extant (visitors on Students' Days will still often see copyists at work on it). But other critics have attributed its fame "more to its defects than its beauties" (Passavant), and have found it "mannered and theatrical" (Mrs. Jameson), and "a pernicious adaptation of an incongruous style" (Dr. Richter).

      Leaving the visitor to form his own judgment, we may remind him that the subject is a supposed dream of St. Jerome when doing penance in the desert. He is asleep on the ground – doing penance, it might seem from his distorted position, even in his sleep, with a skull before him and a crucifix beside him. He is in the same desert where John the Baptist once preached, and thinking, we may suppose, of him, St. Jerome sees him in vision – with his camel skin about him – pointing upwards to the sky. There is the Virgin Mary seated as queen of heaven on a crescent moon, with a palm branch in her hand – the symbol now, not of martyrdom, but of victory over sin and death. And on her knee is the Divine Child, who rests his right hand on a little book on the Madonna's lap. It is a volume, we may suppose, of the Scriptures which St. Jerome had translated, and the vision thus foreshadows the time when it should be said unto him, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant; … enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

      34. VENUS AND ADONIS

Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See 4.

      Venus is endeavouring to detain Adonis from the chase; but the sun is up (see his chariot in the sky) and the young huntsman is eager to be off with his hounds and his spear. The enamoured goddess caresses him, but it will be in vain. For Cupid, the god of love, is not there: he is asleep and at a distance, with his bow and quiver hanging on a tree; and all the blandishments of beauty, unaided by love, are as naught.

      Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face

      Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,

      Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;

      Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn;

      Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,

      And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him.

Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis.

      This picture (formerly in the Colonna Palace at Rome) is probably a studio-repetition of an original which is now at Madrid, and which was painted by Titian for Philip II. of Spain, then King-Consort of England. It was forwarded to him in London in 1554. The picture is thus forty years later than the "Bacchus and Ariadne," and critics find in it not unjustly a lack of the finer poetry which characterises the earlier classical works of the master. "That the aim of the artist was not a very high one, or this poesia very near to his heart, is demonstrated by the curiously material fashion in which he recommends it to his royal patron. He says that 'if in the Danaë (now at Naples) the forms were to be seen front-wise, here was occasion to look at them from a contrary direction – a pleasant variety for the ornament of a camerino.' Our worldly-wise painter evidently knew that material allurements as well as supreme art were necessary to captivate Philip" (Claude Philips: The Later Work of Titian, p. 80).

      35. BACCHUS AND ARIADNE

Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See 4.

      A picture which is at once a school of poetry and a school of art – "in its combination of all the qualities which go to make a great work of art possibly the finest picture in the world" (Poynter). It is a translation on canvas of the scene described in Catullus, where Bacchus, the wine-god, returning with his revel rout from a sacrifice, finds Ariadne on the seashore, after she had been deserted by Theseus, her lover. Bacchus no sooner sees her than he is enamoured and determines to make her his bride —

      Bounding along is blooming

Скачать книгу