are, they give a kind of feminine charm to his work, which partly accounts for its wide influence. To whatever their character may be traced, it renders him incapable of enjoying or painting anything energetic or terrible. Thus a perfectly genuine and untouched sky of Claude is beyond praise in all qualities of air. But he was incapable of rendering great effects of space and infinity. (2) As with his skies, so too with his seas. They are the finest pieces of water painting in ancient art. But they are selections of the particular moment when the sea is most insipid and characterless. (3) He had sincerity of purpose; but in common with the other landscape painters of his day, neither earnestness, humility, nor love, such as would ever cause him to forget himself. Hence there is in his work no simple or honest record of any single truth, and his pictures, when examined with reference to essential truth, are one mass of error from beginning to end. So far as he felt the truth, he tried to be true; but he never felt it enough to sacrifice supposed propriety, or habitual method, to it. Very few of his sketches and none of his pictures show evidence of interest in other natural phenomena than the quiet afternoon sunshine which would fall methodically into a composition.
40 One would suppose he had never seen scarlet in a morning cloud, nor a storm burst on the Apennines. (4) He shows a peculiar incapacity of understanding the main point of a matter, and of men of name is the best instance of a want of imagination, nearly total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nature, and much feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none whatever for harmony of expression. (5) Yet in spite of all his deficiencies Claude effected a revolution in art. This revolution consisted in setting the sun in heaven. We will give him the credit of this with no drawbacks.
41 Till Claude's time no one had seriously thought of painting the sun but conventionally; that is so say, as a red or yellow star (often), with a face in it, under which type it was constantly represented in illumination; else it was kept out of the picture, or introduced in fragmentary distances, breaking through clouds with almost definite rays. Claude first set it in the pictorial heaven (collected from
Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3, 5, 14, sec. iii. ch. i. § 9, ch. iii. §§ 13-15, 17; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18; vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xviii. §§ 22, 27, and Appendix i.; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. v. §§ 10, 11). This summary should show that it is a mistake to represent Ruskin as blind to the merits of Claude. He has done full justice to Claude's amenity and pensive grace; to the beauty of his skies and the skill and charm of his aerial effects. At the time when Ruskin began to write
Modern Painters, Claude was still accounted the prince of all landscape painters. The estimate of Claude against which Ruskin protested may be found in Goethe. "Claude Lorraine," he said, "knew the real world thoroughly, even to its smallest detail, and he made use of it to express the world contained in his own beautiful soul. He stands to nature in a double relation, – he is both her slave and her master: her slave, by the material means which he is obliged to employ to make himself understood; her master, because he subordinates these material means to a well reasoned inspiration, to which he makes them serve as instruments." And elsewhere, Goethe expresses his admiration for the depth and grasp of Claude's powers. Ruskin, in vindicating the greater sweep and depth of Turner's genius, fastened with all the emphasis of an advocate upon the weak points in Claude's artistic and intellectual armoury. By so doing he cleared the ground for a truer appreciation of Claude. As a corrective or supplement to Ruskin's adverse criticisms, the reader may be referred to Constable's enthusiastic appreciations. "I do not wonder," wrote Constable to his wife, "at you being jealous of Claude. If anything could come between our love, it is him… The Claudes, the Claudes are all, all, I can think of here" (Leslie's
Life of Constable, 1845, p. 121). Constable was writing from Sir George Beaumont's house, where several of the Claudes, now in the National Gallery, were then hanging. Constable, however, was alive to some of Claude's defects. "Claude's exhilaration and light," he wrote to Leslie, "departed from him when he was between fifty and sixty, and he then became a professor of the 'higher walks of art,' and fell in a great degree into the manner of the painters around him; so difficult is it to be natural, so easy to be superior in our own opinion. When we have the pleasure of being together at the National Gallery I think I shall not find it difficult to illustrate these remarks, as Carr has sent a large picture of the latter description" (
ibid., p. 221). The picture in question is No. 6, painted in 1658.
For the story of Cephalus, who is here receiving from Procris the presents of Diana, the hound Lelaps, and the fatal dart with which she was killed, see under 698. As for the landscape, Mr. Ruskin cites this picture as an instance of the "childishness and incompetence" of Claude's foregrounds.
"I will not," he writes, "say anything of the agreeable composition of the three banks, rising one behind another from the water, except only that it amounts to a demonstration that all three were painted in the artist's study, without any reference to nature whatever. In fact, there is quite enough intrinsic evidence in each of them to prove this, seeing that what appears to be meant for vegetation upon them amounts to nothing more than a green stain on their surfaces, the more evidently false because the leaves of the trees twenty yards farther off are all perfectly visible and distinct; and that the sharp lines with which each cuts against that beyond it are not only such as crumbling earth could never show or assume, but are maintained through their whole progress ungraduated, unchanging, and unaffected by any of the circumstances of varying shade to which every one of nature's lines is inevitably subjected. In fact the whole arrangement is the impotent struggle of a tyro to express by successive edges that approach of earth which he finds himself incapable of expressing by the drawing of the surface. Claude wished to make you understand that the edge of his pond came nearer and nearer; he had probably often tried to do this with an unbroken bank, or a bank only varied by the delicate and harmonious anatomy of nature: and he had found that owing to his total ignorance of the laws of perspective such efforts on his part invariably ended in his reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and making it look perpendicular. Much comfort and solace of mind in such unpleasant circumstances may be derived from instantly dividing the obnoxious bank into a number of successive promontories, and developing their edges with completeness and intensity" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. iv. §§ 17, 18).
3. A CONCERT
School of Titian (Venetian). See under next picture. The young man in the red velvet cap plays on the violoncello; the other on the oboe, of which only the reed is visible. The other three are vocalists. The master is keeping time, and is intent on the boy pupil. The young girl, with her hand on her husband's shoulder, is waiting to chime in, and looks far away the while to where the music takes her. "In Titian's portraits you always see the soul, – faces 'which pale passion loves.' Look at the Music-piece by Titian – it is 'all ear,' – the expression is evanescent as the sounds – the features are seen in a sort of dim chiaroscuro, as if the confused impressions of another sense intervened – and you might easily suppose some of the performers to have been engaged the night before in
Mask or midnight serenade
Which the starved lover to his mistress sings
Best quitted with disdain."
(Hazlitt: Criticisms on Art, edition 1843, p. 10). Perhaps it is indeed a travelling party of musicians practising for a serenade. Certainly one thinks of this picture as one reads of a supper party at Titian's house. "Before the tables were set out, we spent the time in looking at the lifelike figures in the excellent paintings of which the house was full, and in discussing the real beauty and charm of the garden, which was a pleasure and a wonder to every one. It is situated in the extreme part of Venice upon the sea, and from it may be seen the pretty little island of Murano, and other beautiful places. This part of the sea, as soon as the sun went down, swarmed with gondolas adorned with beautiful women, and resounded with varied harmonies – the music of voices and instruments till midnight" (Priscianese, describing a visit to Titian in 1540: cited in Heath's Titian, "Great Artists" series, p. 53).
4. A HOLY FAMILY
Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). Tiziano Vecellio – "il divino Tiziano," as his countrymen called him – is one of the greatest names in
