THE LIFE OF TITIAN.* [SECOND NOTICB.1
THE art of Titian probably reached the utmost technical per- fection attainable in painting. In his work, with absolute mastery of unison, the three great principles of Form and Colour and Chiaroscuro, being subordinated and interrelated one to another with profound subtlety, are more nearly analogous to their originals in Nature, where " mannerism " is untraceable, and where "out- line" is indicated by cessation of mass, and not by the emphasized convention of a line however grand ; and where " Colour " is the very soul, as it were, of which Form and Chiaroscuro are but the frame, than in the works of any other great painter of the human figure. (To illustrate more clearly what we mean as to "outline," compare the figure of Atalanta by Mr. Poynter, in last year's Academy, drawn with such fine and powerful, though very pro- nounced outlines, with the Ariadne of Titian in our National Gallery. The limbs in the Atalanta are evidently learned and most artistic diagrams of limbs, of a pleasant, Academy grey tint ; while in the Ariadne we are sensible alone of the burning glow of flesh, as we should be in Nature, exquisitely right in shape, with- out our feeling the edge too distinctly ; its boundaries telling not as outlines, but as the lovely, almost untraceable transition from warm flesh to cool verdure of grass.) The school of Michel- angelo deny Titian's mastery of form. They assert that Titian was often weak in drawing, Michelangelo never ; that the highest quality of art is the majesty of form, to which colour must be subordinated. To this it should be answered that as in nature form is often hid in gloom—as faces are often tinged with sunset light or pale moonlight, and are loveliest then—so in the art of Titian form is always mysterious, sometimes nearly lost, revealing itself with exquisite faintness, though with great precision, and not seeking the seemingly more wonderful and dexterous line of demar- cation of Michelangelo. The modern French school, headed by Gerame, has shown us the most perfect results of the Michelangel- esque skill ; and our distinguished English painter, Mr. Poynter, while retaining the French manner, and dutifully obedient to the laws of what Mr. Ruskin so truly calls the "School of Clay,' from the absence of glow of life in its flesh-painting, presents us, we English think, with healthier and wholesomer themes than the school of Gerome. Mr. Leighton, forming a curious link between the two schools, seems to hold that perfect colour can be combined with Michelangelesque drawing, though Titian knew that much of what Mr. Leighton delights in is un- necessary articulation of form, and in nature would be hidden in flood and gloom of colour. So that when we turn from pictures by these men to Titian's work, the change is inevit- able and complete, the soft, clouded delicacy of Titian approaching far nearer to nature, where such a convention as " outline " does not exist, than the most accomplished work of even Michelangelo. Mr. Watts, of modern men, has been truest to the Titianesque cause ; while Turner, among landscape painters, has handed down Titian; his Life and limes, with some Account gilds Family, chiefly from New and Unpublished Records. By J. A. Crowe and (1. B. eavalcaselle. 2 vols., with Illustra- tions. London : Murray.
its laws and its truths, to be moulded in fresh subtleties quite lately by Frederick Walker, whose loss is irreparable, and by some of our more delicate living landscape painters, pre-eminently Mr. Alfred W. Hunt
The authors of the present volumes, Messrs. Crowe and Caval- paselle, have used their well-known powers of research to the greatest advantage ; the care observed in their compilation is extreme, and everything that can be done to knit together the few threads that remain to us of Titian's life has been done. indeed, those portions of the volumes concerned with the history of the times are too full of names and elaboration, and will be hardly intel- ligible except to those who are well versed in the European history of the time. But the care and candour with which the qualities of the differeat pictures attributed to Titian are discussed are worthy of all praise. We shall content ourselves in this article with noticing a few pictures that should be well known in England, leaving the reader of these volumes to discover for himself accounts of the great Louvre 'Titians; of the pictures in Venice, headed by "The Assumption of the 'Virgin ;" the wonderful series at Madrid especially, and also those at Vienna, Rome, and Florence. In our National Gallery, the most finished picture by Titian is undoubtedly the "Bacchus and Ariadne ;" one of the gorgeous realisations of those sensuous, mythical dreams that still rank so high in our ideals of poetry and of painting, but which, with the progress of thought, and the better obedience to the laws that "refuse and restrain" of Christ's religion, will gradually fade and be left in perfection only in the noble works of earlier men, by the side of which our aesthetic sensuousness is nearly always meagre and soulless ; though when, as in Mr. Swinburne's writing, it rises to a tone even shriller and more exa/ij than that of the ancient religions, the effect is a saddening one, and the triumphant exhilaration that one feels before the "Bacchus and Ariadne "—as a relic of a civilisation that is past and gone— gives place to pain at the waste of such extreme and rare beauty of style, in this more thoughtful age that is "heir of all the ages."
The portrait of Ariosto, referred to in the first notice of this book, is also in our National Gallery, and it is significant that with this hung near the place of honour in our own public gallery, for all to look at, our demand for portraits of our friends can be so easily satisfied with the careless crudity of much of the paint- ing of to-day. The portraits by a great painter are always amongst those pictures to which he devotes himself with most labour and most love. Titian's portraits are the finest yet done in art, and the vulgar notion that the painter of portraits may be the second-rate man, who leaves " imagination " to the master, is for ever silenced before the solemn glow, the very outlook of the soul, in a great Titian portrait. In London, at this present time, is being exhibited at South Kensington, with the rest of Lord Spencer's collection, a portrait of one of the Corner° family by Titian that is noble in its calm simplicity, while in the Old Masters' Exhibition at Burlington House can be seen the likeness of the aged Titian himself. This picture, lent by the Queen, and attributed to Titian, our authors believe not to be genuine, —undoubtedly with perfect correctness,—but to date from the seventeenth century. Still it is probably a copy, and a very early copy, of a real Titian now destroyed, and the fine head of the old man is well portrayed in it. There is one more Titian in qur own gallery to be mentroned, a small but very perfect picture of "Christ Appearing to Mary—Noli Me Tangere." This is a work of Titian's youth, exceedingly beautiful, and as precious a picture as we or any other nation possess. As an instance of our authors' manner of descriptive writing, which is thoroughly imbued with the Titianesque spirit, and often of great beauty, we give the following, relating to the " Noli Me Tangere ":— " Tho scene is laid in a dip of hills near the shore of a bay, the dis- tant, unrippled surface of which is tinged with the deep, pure blue of an evening sky, scantily flaked with cloud. On a hill to the right is a clump of farm-buildings, from which a road descends. In the bends of the ground the bushes are toned to the dark of the gloaming. In strong relief upon the sky, an oak sapling throws out its boughs and jagged leafage, the trunk rising from a brown-tinged knoll clothed with verdant grasses in the foreground of which Christ appears to the
Magdalen His shape is fair, and the flesh is surprisingly modelled in silver tones broken with tender greys. We may feel dis- appointed by sketchy extremities and neglected drawing, but there is rare beauty in the mild and regular features, which are lighted with compassion as Christ looks down and utters the words. The Magdalen seems to have trailed up to Christ on her knees, and raises her hand to touch him as she rests her left with the ointment-pot on the ground, her attitude full of longing, as she stretches forward and gazes with half-open lips. One cannot look without transport on the mysterious calm of this beautiful scene, which Titian has painted with such loving care. The picture is like a leaf out of Titian's journal, which tells na how he left his house on the canals and wandered into the country beyond the lagoons, and lingered in the fresh and sweet landscape at eventide, and took Nature captive at summer's end."
In describing a picture usually, but quite erroneously, called the "Bella di Titiano," in the Pitti Palace at Florence, the following beautiful passage occurs, and but for the bit of artistic pedantry at its close, would be quite a lovely Titianesque word-picture ; not that any of the writing in these volumes has the rhythmic flow of the best prose, but though frequently brusque and abrupt, it is nearly always without affectation, and always endeavours with brevity to express truly the character of Titian's painting :—
" The pose, the look, the dress are all noble. The face was so win- ning that it lurked in Titian's memory, and passed as a type into numerous canvases, in which the painter tried to realise an ideal of loveliness. The head being seen about two-thirds to the left, whilst the eyes are turned to the right, the spectator is fascinated by the glance in whatever direction he looks at the canvas. The eye is grave, serene, and kindly ; the nose delicate and beautifully shaped, the mouth divine. Abundant hair, of a warm auburn, waves along the temples, leaving a stray curl to drop on the forehead. The rest is plaited and twisted into coils round a head of the most symmetrical shape. A gold chain falls over a throat of exquisite model, and the low dress, with its braided ornaments and slashed sleeves alternately, tinted in blue and white and white and purple, is magnificent. One hand—the left—is at rest ; the other holds a tassel hanging from a girdle. Nothing can exceed the delicacy and subtlety with which the flesh and dress are painted, the lines being harmonised and thrown into keeping by a most varied use and application of glazings and scumblings."
There are one or two passages in the book containing serious affectation, particularly the opening sentence in the description of the great " Entombment " at the Louvre :—" The Entombment,' though incomparably below Raphael's version of the same theme in respect of balanced distribution and complexity of line, is still for Titian a representative piece." This savours of art cant. At that last sad moment, when the body was being lowered into its grave, though Raphael does indeed lead the eye towards elegant disposal of drapery and "balanced distribution," the solemn group of Titian's " Entombment " is greater by very reason of rising beyond the studied canons of Art, and the expression of the agonised grief of the two Marys would be little helped by "balanced distribution and complexity of line." The painter of the "Assumption," when he chose, could hold his own even against Raphael on his own ground.
But take them all in all, these volumes form a true and exhaus- tive record of what is still left of the work of the most perfect painter of the Venetian school, and therefore, some think, the most perfect painter of the world. It is a strange and melancholy fact that nearly all the best art in the world has been either de- faced or destroyed. The finest work by Phidias—the Elgin Marbles—though they now lie still and quiet in the galleries of the British Museum, are headless and shattered, and were once made targets of by the Turks. Titian's greatest pictures are either burned or repainted, a fire having broken out in the Hall of the Great Council, where many of his finest pictures were hung, the very year after his death, in 1577. Enough, however, of both the greatest sculpture and the greatest painting is left to show us that the Greeks perfectly mastered the modelling of the body, the Venetians its colour and its flush of life. With both it is the flesh, the exposed beauty of body, that is sought, and though in Titian's portraits a great spiritual advance is made upon the Greek statues,—which, it has been affirmed, are not seriously injured by the loss of the head, show- ing that the expression of the soul was in entire abeyance,—yet even Titian devoted half his life to the passion of carnal painting; and this, as we trust, may be the result, —that the two great States of Athens and Venice will have left, as their inheritance for ages to come, ideals of technical perfection, to be used for nobler ends at the periods of other nations' strength, and no longer to adorn the chambers of luxury on the eve of a nation's decline, like lovely lichens round the funk now stricken and dying :—" I saw the last traces of the greatest works of Giorgione," says the author of Modern Painters. "yet glowing like a scarlet cloud on the Fondaco de Tedeschi. And though
that scarlet cloud may indeed melt away into paleness of night, and Venice herself waste from her islands, as a wreath of wind- driven foam fades from their weedy beach, that which she won of faithful light and truth shall never pass away. From the lips of the sea-Sibyl men shall learn for ages to come what is most noble and most fair ; and far away as the whisper in the coils of the shell, withdrawn through the deep hearts of nations, shall sound for ever the enchanted voice of Venice."
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