A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools. National Gallery (Great Britain)

rel="nofollow" href="#n11" type="note">11 Another incidental source of interest in a collection of pictures such as ours, is the historical development of art as it may be traced in the several representations of the same subject by different painters, in successive periods, and in different schools. Such comparisons are instructive to those interested alike in the evolution of art and in the history of religious ideas. In the art of mediæval Christendom we find an unwritten theology, a popular figurative teaching of the sublime story of Christianity blended with the traditions of many generations. On the walls of the National Gallery we may see a series of typical scenes from the Annunciation to the Passion, from the childhood of Christ to His Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, together with ideal forms of apostles and saints. These pictures, contemplated in sequence and compared with one another, afford, as a writer in the Dublin Review (October 1888) has pointed out, a large and interesting field for thought. Very interesting it is also to trace the different types which prevail in the different schools. Thus at Florence, the Madonna is a tender, shrinking, delicate maiden. At Venice, she is a calm, serene, and pure-spirited mother. The Florentine "handmaiden of the Lord" often wears a mystic, and almost always an intellectual air. The Venetian type, seen at its central perfection in Bellini, has a neck firm as a column; the child is nude and plays with a flower or fruit; grandeur of mien and a noble type of motherhood are the ideals the Venetian painters set before themselves. The Lombard Madonna is less spiritual and severe than the Florentine. A refined worldly beauty replaces here the poetic idealism of the Tuscan artists. With the Umbrian painters the model of the Madonna is usually a softly-rounded and very girlish maiden. A certain mystic pensiveness informs her features. Her feet tread this earth, but her soul is absorbed in the contemplation of the infinite.12 A study of the successive characteristics of Raphael's Madonnas, passing from the vaguely divine to the frankly human, would form material for a volume in itself.13 In another department of the painter's art, the comparative method of study is no less suggestive. It is one of the most curious points of interest in any large collection of pictures to notice the different impressions that the same elements of natural scenery make upon different painters. As figure painting came to be perfected, some adequate suggestion of landscape background was required. Giotto and Orcagna first attempted to give resemblance to nature in this respect. Subsequent painters carried the attempt to greater success, but it was long before landscape for its own sake obtained attention. When it did, the preferences of individual painters, now freed from conventionalism, found abundant scope, as we may see by pausing in succession before the flowery meadows of the "primitives," the "fiery woodlands of Titian," the savage crags of Salvator Rosa, the "saffron skies of Claude."14 These are some of the incidental points of interest upon which additional notes have been supplied in recent editions. Many others will be discovered by the patient reader of the following pages.

      Notices of Painters.– Lastly, the biographical and critical notices of the painters have been revised and expanded since the first appearance of the book. Many have been re-written throughout, nearly all have been re-cast, and a good many references to pictures in other galleries and countries have been introduced. The important accession to the National Gallery of the Arundel Society's unique collection of copies from the old masters affords an opportunity even to the untraveled visitor to become acquainted, in some sort, with the most famous wall-paintings of Italy. Mr. Ruskin, by whose death the National Gallery lost one of its best and oldest friends, once expressed a hope to me that the notices of the painters given in this Handbook would be found useful by some readers not only as a companion in Trafalgar Square, but also for other galleries, at home and abroad. Nobody can know better than the compiler how far Mr. Ruskin's kindness led him in the direction of over-indulgence.

      I can only hope that the later editions have been made – largely owing to the suggestions of critics and private correspondents – a little more deserving of the kind reception which, now for a period of nearly twenty-five years, has been given by the public to my Handbook.

E. T. C.

      May 1912.

      GUIDE TO THE GALLERY

      AND

      INTRODUCTIONS TO THE SCHOOLS OF PAINTING

      The pictures in the National Gallery are hung methodically, so far as the wall-space and other circumstances will admit, in order to illustrate the different schools of painting, and to facilitate their historical study. Introductions to the several Foreign Schools of Painting, thus arranged, will be found in the following pages together with references to many of the chief painters in each school who are represented in the Gallery. Introductory remarks on the British School and British Painters will be found in Volume II.

      At the present time (May 1912) the arrangement of the Gallery is in a transitional state, as some of the Rooms are still in process of reconstruction or rearrangement. When this work is finished, the arrangement of the whole Gallery will, it is expected, be as shown below: —

      Archaic Greek Portraits: North Vestibule.

      Italian Schools: —

      Early Tuscan: North Vestibule.

      Florentine and Sienese: Rooms I., II., V.

      Florentine (later): Room III.

      Milanese: Room IV.

      Umbrian: Room VI.

      Venetian: Room VII.

      Venetian (later): Room IX.

      Paduan: Room VIII.

      Venice, etc.: the Dome.

      Brescian and Bergamese: Room XV.

      Bolognese: Room XXV.

      Late Italian: Room XXIII.

      Schools of the Netherlands and Germany: —

      Early Netherlands: Room XI.

      Later Flemish (Rubens, etc.): Room X.

      Dutch (landscape: Ruysdael, etc.): Room XII.

      Dutch (Rembrandt): Room XIII.

      Dutch: Room XIV.

      German: Room XXIV.

      Spanish School: Room XVI.

      French School: Rooms XVII., XVIII.

      British Schools: —

      Hogarth, etc.: Room XXII.

      Reynolds, Gainsborough, etc.: Room XXI.

      Romney, Morland, etc.: Room XX.

      Turner: Room XIX.

      The rooms on the ground floor, hitherto occupied by the Turner Water-Colours (now for the most part removed to the Tate Gallery: see Vol. II.), will be arranged with pictures of minor importance, with the Arundel Society's collection and other copies, and with photographs and other aids to study.

      It should, however, be understood that the scheme of arrangement set out above is provisional, and may be modified. It is also possible that the numbering of the rooms may be altered. Should this be the case, the visitor would have no difficulty in marking the changes on the Plan.

      PLAN OF THE ROOMS.

      THE EARLY FLORENTINE SCHOOL

      "The early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants"

(Ruskin: Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. i. sec. i. ch. ii. § 7)

      Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory

      For daring so much, before they well did it.

      The first of the new, in our race's story,

      Beats the last of the old; 'tis no idle quiddit.

Browning: Old Pictures in Florence.

      On entering the Gallery from Trafalgar Square, and ascending the main staircase, the visitor reaches the North Vestibule. What,