I Was Predetermined Not To Like Them For Two
Reasons:
First, that I dislike allegorical subjects; and second, that
I hate and despise that Medici family and all that belongs to them.
So
no sympathy with the subjects blinded my eyes, and drew me gradually
from all else in the hall to contemplate these. It was simply the love
of power and of fertility that held me astonished, which seemed to
express with nonchalant ease what other painters attain by laborious
efforts. It occurred to me that other painters are famous for single
heads, or figures, and that were the striking heads and figures with
which these pictures abound to be parcelled out singly, any one of
them would make a man's reputation. Any animal of Rubens, alone, would
make a man's fortune in that department. His fruits and flowers are
unrivalled for richness and abundance; his old men's Leads are
wonderful; and when he chooses, which he does not often, he can even
create a pretty woman. Generally speaking his women are his worst
productions. It would seem that he had revolted with such fury from
the meagre, pale, cadaverous outlines of womankind painted by his
predecessors, the Van Eyks, whose women resembled potato sprouts grown
in a cellar, that he altogether overdid the matter in the opposite
direction. His exuberant soul abhors leanness as Nature abhors a
vacuum; and hence all his women seem bursting their bodices with
fulness, like overgrown carnations breaking out of their green
calyxes. He gives you Venuses with arms fit to wield the hammer of
Vulcan; vigorous Graces whose dominion would be alarming were they
indisposed to clemency. His weakness, in fact, his besetting sin, is
too truly described by Moses: -
"But Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked;
Thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick,
Thou art covered with fatness."
Scornfully he is determined upon it; he will none of your scruples;
his women shall be fat as he pleases, and you shall like him
nevertheless.
In this Medici gallery the fault appears less prominent than
elsewhere. Many of the faces are portraits, and there are specimens
among them of female beauty, so delicate as to demonstrate that it was
not from any want of ability to represent the softer graces that he so
often becomes hard and coarse. My friend, M. Belloc, made the remark
that the genius of Rubens was somewhat restrained in these pictures,
and chastened by the rigid rules of the French school, and hence in
them he is more generally pleasing.
I should compare Rubens to Shakspeare, for the wonderful variety and
vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly
resembles. Like Shakspeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a
thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords,
only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use
even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse
and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellences. Some of
Shakspeare's finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like
skyrockets - the thought blows the language to shivers.
As to Murillo, there are two splendid specimens of his style here, as
exquisite as any I have seen; but I do not find reason to alter the
judgment I made from my first survey.
Here is his celebrated picture of the Assumption of the Virgin, which
we have seen circulated in print shops in America, but which appears
of a widely different character in the painting. The Virgin is rising
in a flood of amber light, surrounded by clouds and indistinct angel
figures. She is looking upward with clasped hands, as in an ecstasy:
the crescent moon is beneath her feet. The whole tone of the picture -
the clouds, the drapery, her flowing hair - are pervaded with this
amber tint, sublimated and spiritual. Do I, then, like it? No. Does it
affect me? Not at all. Why so? Because this is a subject requiring
earnestness; yet, after all, there is no earnestness of religious
feeling expressed. It is a _surface_ picture, exquisitely
painted - the feeling goes no deeper than the canvas. But how do I know
Murillo has no earnestness in the religious idea of this piece? How do
I know, when reading Pope's Messiah, that _he_ was not in
earnest - that he was only most exquisitely reproducing what others had
thought? Does he not assume, in the most graceful way, the language of
inspiration and holy rapture? But, through it all, we feel the
satisfied smirk of the artist, and the fine, sharp touch of his
diamond file. What is done from a genuine, strong, inward emotion,
whether in writing or painting, always mesmerizes the paper, or the
canvas, and gives it a power which every body must feel, though few
know why. The reason why the Bible has been omnipotent, in all ages,
has been because there were the emotions of GOD in it; and of
paintings nothing is more remarkable than that some preserve in them
such a degree of genuine vital force that one can never look on them
with indifference; while others, in which every condition of art seems
to be met, inspire no strong emotion.
Yet this picture is immensely popular. Hundreds stand enchanted before
it, and declare it imbodies their highest ideal of art and religion;
and I suppose it does. But so it always is. The man who has exquisite
gifts of expression passes for more, popularly, than the man with
great and grand ideas who utters but imperfectly. There are some
pictures here by Correggio - a sleeping Venus and Cupid - a marriage of
the infant Jesus and St. Catharine. This Correggio is the poet of
physical beauty. Light and shadow are his god. What he lives for is,
to catch and reproduce fitting phases of these. The moral is nothing
to him, and, in his own world, he does what he seeks. He is a great
popular favorite, since few look for more in a picture than exquisite
beauty understood between us that his sphere is to be earth, and not
heaven; were he to attempt, profanely, to represent heavenly things, I
must rebel.
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