28
The realism and the morbid taint in the religious pictures of the Italian decadence were in some measure the direct outcome of ecclesiastical teaching. "Depict well the flaying of St. Bartholomew," said a Jesuit father, "it may win hearts to piety." The comment of Shelley on the Bolognese Schools was this: "Why write books against religion when we may hang up such pictures?"
29
Sir W. M. Conway:
30
The letters often found on pictures, which for a long time excited the curiosity and imagination of critics, are now fully explained as the initials not of the painters but of the patrons (see Wauters:
31
This statement, like all others in so short and general a summary as alone can be here attempted, is of course only broadly true.
32
It is interesting to note that this spirit of anti-religious revolt is what fascinated Heine in Dutch pictures. "In the house I lodged at in Leyden there once lived," he says, "the great Jan Steen, whom I hold to be as great as Raphael. Even as a sacred painter Jan was as great, and that will be clearly seen when the religion of sorrow has passed away… How often, during my stay, did I think myself back for whole hours into the household scenes in which the excellent Jan must have lived and suffered. Many a time I thought I saw him bodily, sitting at his easel, now and then grasping the great jug, 'reflecting and therewith drinking, and then again drinking without reflecting.' It was no gloomy Catholic spectre that I saw, but a modern bright spirit of joy, who after death still visited his old workroom to paint many pictures and to drink" (Heine's
33
"The Dutch painters were not poets, nor the sons of poets, but their fathers rescued a Republic from the slime and covered it with such fair farms that I declare to this day I like Dutch cheese as well as any, because it sends one in imagination to the many-uddered meadows which Cuyp has embossed in gold and silver. What savoury hares and rabbits they had in the low blunt sand-hills, and how the Teniers boor snared them, and how the big-breech'd Gunn-Mann (I haven't any knowledge of Dutch, but I am sure that must be the Dutch for 'sportsman') banged off his piece at them, and then how the shining Vrow saw them in the Schopp and bargained for them. The Schopp had often a window with a green curtain in it, and a basso-relievo of Cupids and goats beneath, with a crack across the bas-relief, and iron stains on the marble, and a bright brass bulging bottle on the sill, and such pickling cabbage as makes the mouth water" (
34
On the ground floor small copies of many of the famous pictures at Madrid may be seen.
35
This statement, though broadly true, requires, of course, much modification: see the early Spanish picture (of the 15th century) on loan in this room from the Victoria and Albert Museum.
36
Elsewhere Mr. Ruskin speaks of "Twickenham classicism" (with a side allusion, of course, to Pope) "consisting principally in conceptions of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most of our suburban villas" (
37
In a later lecture on landscape (delivered at Oxford and reported in Cook's
38
It is worth noting that a similar incident (which in this picture has greatly shocked some of the critics) is introduced in Orcagna's great fresco of the Triumph of Death. "The three kings of the German legend are represented looking at the three coffins containing three bodies of kings, such as themselves, in the last stage of corruption… Orcagna disdains both poetry and taste; he wants the
A comparison of the various opinions expressed on this picture would form a diverting chapter in the history of art criticism. Thus in Kugler's
The poet Tennyson was another great admirer of the picture. His son, describing visits with the poet to the National Gallery, says, "he always led the way first of all to the "Raising of Lazarus," by Sebastian del Piombo, and to Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne."" "The Christ I call Christlike," said Tennyson on one occasion to Carlyle, "is Sebastian del Piombo's in the National Gallery" (
39
"When they went to nature, which I believe to have been a very much rarer practice with them than their biographers would have us suppose, they copied her like children, drawing what they knew to be there, but not what they saw there" (
40
The "Claude Lorraine glass" – a convex dark, or coloured hand-mirror used to concentrate the features of a landscape in a subdued tone – "gives the objects of nature," says an old writer, "a soft mellow tinge like the colouring of that master."
41
But Ruskin does not quite keep his promise. "If Claude had been a great man he would not have been so steadfastly set on painting effects of sun; he would have looked at all nature, and at all art, and would have painted sun effects somewhat worse, and nature universally much better" (
42
The