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

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      1

      The Tate Gallery is ten minutes' drive or twenty minutes' walk from Trafalgar Square. It is reached in a straight line by Whitehall, Parliament Street, past the Houses of Parliament, Millbank Street, and Grosvenor Road.

      2

      Mr. Ruskin himself was converted by the acquisition of the great Perugino (No. 288). In congratulating the Trustees on their acquisition of this "noble picture," he wrote: "It at once, to my mind, raises our National Gallery from a second-rate to a first-rate collection. I have always loved the master, and given much time to the study of his works; but this is the best I have ever seen" (Notes on the Turner Gallery, p. 89 n.).

      3

      See, for instance, Nos. 10, 61, 193, 195, 479 and 498, 757, 790, 896, 1131, and 1171.

      4

      The exterior of the building is not generally considered an architectural success, and the ugliness of the dome is almost proverbial. But it should be remembered that the original design included the erection of suitable pieces of sculpture – such as may be seen in old engravings of the Gallery, made from the architect's drawings – on the still vacant pedestals.

      5

      The several extensions of the Gallery are shown in the plan on a later page.

      6

      The total number should thus be

1

The Tate Gallery is ten minutes' drive or twenty minutes' walk from Trafalgar Square. It is reached in a straight line by Whitehall, Parliament Street, past the Houses of Parliament, Millbank Street, and Grosvenor Road.

2

Mr. Ruskin himself was converted by the acquisition of the great Perugino (No. 288). In congratulating the Trustees on their acquisition of this "noble picture," he wrote: "It at once, to my mind, raises our National Gallery from a second-rate to a first-rate collection. I have always loved the master, and given much time to the study of his works; but this is the best I have ever seen" (Notes on the Turner Gallery, p. 89 n.).

3

See, for instance, Nos. 10, 61, 193, 195, 479 and 498, 757, 790, 896, 1131, and 1171.

4

The exterior of the building is not generally considered an architectural success, and the ugliness of the dome is almost proverbial. But it should be remembered that the original design included the erection of suitable pieces of sculpture – such as may be seen in old engravings of the Gallery, made from the architect's drawings – on the still vacant pedestals.

5

The several extensions of the Gallery are shown in the plan on a later page.

6

The total number should thus be 28; but in the reconstruction four smaller rooms were thrown into two larger ones. The plan thus shows 25 numbered rooms and one called the "Dome."

7

This sum only includes amounts paid out of Parliamentary grants or other National Gallery funds or special contributions.

8

In 1894, however, an alteration was made in the Minute, and the responsibility for purchases was vested in the Director and the Trustees jointly.

9

Sir William Gregory relates in his Autobiography the following story: "In 1884, when the Trustees were endeavouring to secure some of the pre-eminently fine Rubenses from the Duke of Marlborough, Alfred Rothschild met me in St. James's Street, and said, 'If you think the Blenheim Rubenses are more important than your Dutch pictures to the Gallery, and that you cannot get the money from the Government, I am prepared to give you £250,000 for the Peel pictures; and I will hold good to this offer till the day after to-morrow.'"

10

Of the 1170 pieces thus unaccounted for (the total number belonging to the Trustees being roughly 2870) the greater number are at Millbank. Others are on loan to provincial institutions (see App. II.).

11

With this object in view, several of them have been published with descriptive letterpress by Mr. Sydney Vacher.

12

These contrasts were worked out and illustrated by Mr. Grant Allen in his papers on "The Evolution of Italian Art" in the Pall Mall Magazine for 1895.

13

See Raphael's Madonnas, by Karl Károly, 1894.

14

Ruskin's Modern Painters is of course the great book on this subject. The evolution of "Landscape in Art" has been historically treated by Mr. Josiah Gilbert in a work thus entitled, which contains numerous illustrations from the National Gallery.

15

My references to this book are to the new edition of 1897.

16

It should be noted that the Italian terms quattro-cento and cinque-cento correspond with our fifteenth (1400-1500) and sixteenth (1500-1600) centuries respectively.

17

Italian Masters in German Galleries, p. 124. My references to this work are to Mrs. Richter's translation, 1883; in the case of Morelli's Borghese and Doria-Pamfili Galleries in Rome, they are to Miss Ffoulkes's translation, 1892.

18

Well said: but it remains to be asked, whether the "grace" sought is modest, or wanton: affectionate, or licentious (J. R.).

19

Not by its own natural course or decay; but by the political and moral ruin of the cities by whose virtue it had been taught, and in whose glory it had flourished. The analysis of the decline of religious faith quoted below does not enough regard the social and material mischief which accompanied that decline (J. R.)

20

See Dante, Inferno xxix. 121. There was, moreover, in Siena a "Prodigal Club," and a poet of the day wrote a series of sonnets (translated by D. G. Rossetti) "Unto the blithe and lordly fellowship."

21

History of the Renaissance in Italy, iii. 161.

22

See for Correggio's connection with the Ferrarese-Bolognese School, Morelli's German Galleries, pp. 120-124.

23

With the pictures of Venice, those of many neighbouring towns – Brescia, Bergamo, Treviso, and Verona – are associated. All these local schools have certain peculiarities of their own, and some of them are well represented here. Nowhere, for instance, out of Brescia itself can the Brescian School be so well studied as in the National Gallery. But above these local peculiarities there are common characteristics in the work of all these schools which they share with that of Venice. It is only these common characteristics that can here be noticed. (Some interesting remarks by Dr. Richter, on the independence of the Veronese School, will be found in The Art Journal, February 1895.)

24

It should, however, be remembered that "before the Venetian School of painting had got much beyond a lisp, Venetian artists were already expressing themselves strikingly and beautifully in stone, in architectural and sculptural works" (see Morelli's German Galleries, p. 5).

25

Now ascribed, however, to Catena.

26

The earlier Paduan School, represented in the National Gallery by № 701, was only an offshoot from the Florentine.

27

It was this false striving after "the ideal," as Mr. Symonds points out, that caused Reynolds, with his obsolete doctrine about the nature of "the grand style," to admire the Bolognese masters. For Reynolds's statement of his doctrine see his Discourses, ii. and iii., and his papers in the Idler