THE ART OF THE DRESDEN GALLERY.
The Art of the Dresden Gallery : a Critical Survey of the Schools and Painters as Represented in the Royal Collection. By Julia de Wolf Addison. (George Bell and Sons. 6s. net.)—If American millionaires are now annexing the available treasures of the European art markets, the press of the States is sending us compensation in the shape of useful guide-books to our galleries. In the present handy volume, printed in Boston, Mass., the American authoress exhibits the instincts, knowledge, and merits of style that characterised her former works. The Dresden arrangements follow a common-sense plan generally ignored elsewhere : little pictures are hung in cabinets lighted from the sides, greater pictures in halls with top-lights, an exception being made for the Sistine Madonna, who enjoys a sanctuary apart. Near the " primitives " and their allies, who are not lavishly represented at Dresden, is the little Reading Magdalen, held to be one of Correggio's finest creations until twenty-five years ago Morelli's critical iconoclasm assigned that little copper panel to a Flemish decadent, a revolution accepted, of course, by our authoress, who justly says that the recumbent personage in the ultramarine gown is "too virginally fresh and youthful looking for a Magdalen." The world-famed series of four religious pictures, "the finest row of Correggios in Europe," make Mrs. Addison wonder at the painter's love of beauty unalloyed and his power of hypnotising- you with a " smile or a sentimental languishing pose." This language is less disrespectful than the criticism of Correggio's Parma friend, who, as we remember, when his decorations of the cupola of the Cathedral were unveiled let fall the remark, " guazzetto di rare,"—hash of frogs. The visitor used to pass with indifference a " Sleeping Venus," muttering " Sassoferrato," adding, if well informed, that carnal displays of that character were unusual with that painter, and that the figure bore a strong family resemblance to Titian's Venus in the Uffizi. All that is now changed. No one contests Morelli's epoch-making demonstration that this most faultless of the cinquecento representations of naked bodily beauty is the work of Giorgione. After a reminder on the necessity of studying the shape of painted ears and hands, you are admitted to " the Mecca of all visitors to the gallery," the Holy of Holies where the. Sistine Madonna and her child offer a vision of the Infinite charged with a message for the professor and "the untutored peasant " alike (a personage it was never our lot to meet before the picture !) We doubt whether a jury of experts would admit that the green curtains are "stagy," or endorse the dicta that Raphael has here "made the nearest approach to painting the soul that has ever been achieved," and that the canvas is " a flawless epitome of the Christian religion." More applicable is the ex- pression " apotheosis of motherhood," but may not that also be said of such Madonnas as, e.g., the Seggiola, the Belle Jardiniere, and our own Ansidei ? As seen through Bostonian spectacles, the astounding vitality of the Rembrandt with Saskia on his knee and the glass of champagne in his hand is, perhaps, undervalued ; however, the " magician in light and shade " holds up to us " the mystery and romance of imagination and the subtler thoughts of the elect " (whoever they may be !) That unrivalled master of air and colour, Vermeer of Delft, is well described : the notion that Ruysdael is "damp, peaceful, unwholesome," would have pleased Ruskin as much as the boycotting of the sea- painter contemptuously dubbed " Back-something " by that critical Olympian. The lady's glances at the three hundred and fifty representatives of modern schools show sound cosmopolitan feeling : they reach from Cornelius and Menzel to Makart and Uhde. We cordially approve the remark that our idealism must revolt when Uhde's great triptych places the holy incident in Bethlehem in a nasty modern stable with dirty attendants, and rafters on which, clad in German garments, squat gutter-snipe cherubs with corns on their toes. Astounding is the verdict on the great Genevan painter, etcher, lithographer, Calame, that "very correct workman- ship is his only redeeming feature." To spite the authoress, we withhold her capital story of the angry French artists who, when masterpieces like the Genevan's Monte Rosa and Paestum were hung in the Salon, used to avenge themselves by perpe- trating a splendid pun on his name. With her silence on two recent episodes in the history of the gallery whereby serious aspersions have been cast on the Blessed Sistine Madonna we cannot but sympathise.
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