The artist has painted heaven, and is not absurd. In
that age of substantial faith such achievements were possible.
There are two Venuses by Titian very like that of Dresden, but the heads
have not the same dignity; and a Danae which is a replica of the Vienna
one. His Salome bearing the Head of John the Baptist is one of the
finest impersonations of the pride of life conceivable. So
unapproachable are the soft lights and tones on the perfect arms and
shoulders of the full-bodied maiden, that Tintoret one day exclaimed in
despair before it, "That fellow paints with ground flesh."
This gallery possesses one of the last works of Titian, - the Battle of
Lepanto, which was fought when the artist was ninety-four years of age.
It is a courtly allegory, - King Philip holds his little son in his arms,
a courier angel brings the news of victory, and to the infant a
palm-branch and the scroll Majora tibi. Outside you see the smoke and
flash of a naval battle, and a malignant and tur-baned Turk lies bound
on the floor. It would seem incredible that this enormous canvas should
have been executed at such an age, did we not know that when the pest
cut the mighty master off in his hundredth year he was busily at work
upon a Descent from the Cross, which Palma the Elder finished on his
knees and dedicated to God: Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit Palma
reverenter absolvit Deoque dicavit opus.
The vast representation of Titian rather injures Veronese and Tintoret.
Opposite the Gloria of Yuste hangs the sketch of that stupendous
Paradise of Tintoret, which we see in the Palace of the Doges, - the
biggest picture ever painted by mortal, thirty feet high and
seventy-four long.
The sketch was secured by Velazquez in his tour through Italy. The most
charming picture of Veronese is a Venus and Adonis, which is finer than
that of Titian, - a classic and most exquisite idyl of love and sleep,
cool shadow and golden-sifted sunshine. His most considerable work in
the gallery is a Christ teaching the Doctors, magnificent in
arrangement, severely correct in drawing, and of a most vivid and
dramatic interest.
We pass through a circular vaulted chamber to reach the Flemish rooms.
There is a choice though scanty collection of the German and French
schools. Albert Durer has an Adam and Eve, and a priceless portrait of
himself as perfectly preserved as if it were painted yesterday. He wears
a curious and picturesque costume, - striped black-and-white, - a graceful
tasselled cap of the same. The picture is sufficiently like the statue
at Nuremberg; a long South-German face, blue-eyed and thin,
fair-whiskered, with that expression of quiet confidence you would
expect in the man who said one day, with admirable candor, when people
were praising a picture of his, "It could not be better done." In this
circular room are four great Claudes, two of which, Sunrise and Sunset,
otherwise called the Embarcation of Sta. Paula, and Tobit and the Angel,
are in his best and richest manner. It is inconceivable to us, who
graduate men by a high-school standard, that these refined and most
elegant works could have been produced by a man so imperfectly educated
as Claude Lorrain.
There remain the pictures of the Dutch and the Flemings. It is due to
the causes we have mentioned in the beginning that neither in Antwerp
nor Dresden nor Paris is there such wealth and profusion of the
Netherlands art as in this mountain-guarded corner of Western Europe. I
shall have but a word to say of these three vast rooms, for Rubens and
Van Dyck and Teniers are known to every one. The first has here a
representation so complete that if Europe were sunk by a cataclysm from
the Baltic to the Pyrenees every essential characteristic of the great
Fleming could still be studied in this gallery. With the exception of
his Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral at Antwerp, painted in a
moment of full inspiration that never comes twice in a life, everything
he has done elsewhere may be matched in Madrid. His largest picture here
is an Adoration of the Kings, an overpowering exhibition of wasteful
luxuriance of color and fougue of composition. To the left the Virgin
stands leaning with queenly majesty over the effulgent Child. From this
point the light flashes out over the kneeling magi, the gorgeously
robed attendants, the prodigality of velvet and jewels and gold, to fade
into the lovely clear-obscure of a starry night peopled with dim camels
and cattle. On the extreme right is a most graceful and gallant portrait
of the artist on horseback. We have another fine self-portraiture in the
Garden of Love, - a group of lords and ladies in a delicious pleasance
where the greatest seigneur is Peter Paul Rubens and the finest lady is
Helen Forman. These true artists had to paint for money so many ignoble
faces that they could not be blamed for taking their revenge in painting
sometimes their own noble heads. Van Dyck never drew a profile so
faultless in manly beauty as his own which we see on the same canvas
with that of his friend the Earl of Bristol. Look at the two faces side
by side, and say whether God or the king can make the better nobleman.
Among those mythological subjects in which Rubens delighted, the best
here are his Perseus and Andromeda, where the young hero comes
gloriously in a brand-new suit of Milanese armor, while the lovely
princess, in a costume that never grows old-fashioned, consisting of
sunshine and golden hair, awaits him and deliverance in beautiful
resignation; a Judgment of Paris, the Three Graces, - both prodigies of
his strawberries-and-cream color; and a curious suckling of Hercules,
which is the prototype or adumbration of the ecstatic vision of St.
Bernard.
