grave-clothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin.” Jesus in the middle of the picture is uttering the words, "Loose him, and let him go;" with his right hand Jesus points to heaven, as it he said, "I have raised thee by the power of him who sent me." The three men, who have already removed the lid of the sepulchre, are fulfilling Christ's command. The grave-clothes, by which the face of Lazarus is thrown into deep shade, express the idea of the night of the grave which but just before enveloped him; and the eye looking eagerly from beneath the shade upon Christ shows the new life in its most intellectual organ. To the left, behind Christ, is St. John, answering objections raised against the credibility of the miracle. Farther off, behind this group, is one of the Pharisees, whose unbelief is combated by the man who points in evidence to the raised Lazarus. Behind Lazarus is his sister Martha, sickening now at what she most desired; behind her are other women-holding their noses.1 At the foot of Jesus is the other sister, Mary, full of faith and gratitude— Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, Nor other thought her mind admits TENNYSON: In Memoriam, xxxii. 20. IPPOLITO DE' MEDICI AND THE ARTIST. Sebastiano del Piombo (Venetian: 1485-1547). In 1531 Sebastiano received from the Pope the office of Frate del Piombo, Monk of the Leaden Signet, which was affixed to the pontifical diplomas. The painter is here dressed 1 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 stages of corruption. . Orcagna disdains both poetry and taste; he wants the facts only; he wishes to give the spectator the same lesson that the kings had, and, therefore, instead of concealing the dead bodies, he paints them with the most fearful detail. And then, he does not consider what the three kings might most gracefully do. He considers only what they actually, in all probability, would have He makes them looking at the coffins with a startled stare, and one done. " holding his nose (Lectures on Architecture and Painting, pp. 209, 210). in the black robe of his office; on the table are two parchment-deeds, with Sebastiano's hand on the seal of one of them, and the picture thus represents, perhaps, the ratification of the appointment by his friend and patron, the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. The artist's portrait of himself agrees very well with what Vasari says of his character. He was a painter more of necessity than of choice, and when once he received his valuable sinecure he forsook his palette for the lute, and people found it very hard to get any work out of him. He much preferred talking about pictures, says Vasari, to executing them. He was "of a very full habit," and young painters who resorted to him "rarely made any great profit, since from his example they could learn little beside the art of good living." But he was a thoroughly good fellow, and a kindly withal. A better or more agreeable companion never lived; and when he died he commanded that his remains should be carried to the tomb without any ceremony of priests and friars, and that the amount which would have been thus expended should be distributed to the poor, for the love of God: and so was it done. But in one branch of art, adds Vasari, Sebastiano was always ready to work, namely, in painting portraits, such as this, from the life. "In this art he did certainly surpass all others in delicacy and excellence-so much so that when Cardinal Ippolito fell in love with the lady Giulia Gonzaga, he sent Sebastiano with four swift horses to her home for the purpose of taking her portrait, and in about a month the artist completed the likeness, when, what with the celestial beauties of that lady, and what with the able hand of so accomplished a master, the picture proved to be a most divine one." No. 24, p. 136, was formerly thought to be the portrait in question. 635. THE "REPOSE." Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See under 34, p. 138. One of the pictures painted by Titian for the King of Spain (it has the Escurial mark on the back of it). The subject is the familiar Repose of the Holy Family, during their flight into Egypt. The introduction of St. John the Baptist, and St. Catherine1 embracing the Holy Child, and in the distance 1 "The piece of St. Catherine's dress over her shoulders is painted on the under dress, after that was dry. All its value would have been lost, had the slightest tint or trace of it been given previously. This picture, I the angel appearing to the shepherds, serve as the sign-manuals to mark the sacred subject. For the rest it is a simple domestic scene, laid amongst the hills of Titian's country, near Ceneda, on the way to Cadore. "To this Ceneda scenery I would assign those charming mixtures of woodland and plain, -those sweeping intermingling lines of hill, here broken by a jutting rock, sinking there into the sudden depth of bosky shades, which are another characteristic of Titian's landscape. The play of light and shade over such a country, throwing out now this, now that, of the billowy ranges as they alternately smiled in sunshine, or frowned in shadow; now printing off a tower or a crag, dark against a far-off flitting gleam, now touching into brightness a cottage or a castle; he specially delighted to record. . . . It must have been from the village of Caverzano, and within an easy walk from Belluno, that he took the mountain forms, and noted the sublime effect upon them of evening light, introduced in the Madonna and St. Catherine.' The lines of hill and mountain are identical with a record in my sketch-book, and the sharp-pointed hill, almost lost in the rays, is one of the most familiar features in the neighbourhood of Belluno" (Gilbert: Cadore, pp. 36, 59). Mr. Gilbert makes another interesting remark, which may be verified in this picture with its flocks of sheep, as well as in 270, p. 152, with its farm buildings: "Another characteristic of Titian's landscape, and new in his time, is his perception of its domestic charm-the sweetness of a home landscape. A cottage, a farm, a mill, take the place with him of the temples, towers, and lordly palaces of town-bred painters. . . . Honest travellers on a country track, or sleeping in the shade; the peasant going forth to labour, or returning with his tools; the high-roofed, quaintly gabled farm, with its nondescript surroundings, and all set snugly on the bosky knoll . . . these are his favourite subjects. But they never would have been so to a thorough Venetian. They show us the man of the hills-the breezy, happy hills: the man of many pleasant memories, upon the sward, beside the brook, under the bending boughs the man who carried no city apprehensions, or city squeamishness to country places, but was at home anywhere under the broad heaven " (ibid., p. 60). ... think, and certainly many of Tintoret's, are painted on dark grounds; but this is to save time, and with some loss to the future brightness of the colour" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. viii. ch. iv. § 17 n.) 1025. AN ITALIAN NOBLEMAN. Il Moretto (Brescian: 1498-1555). See under 625, p. 131. A true character portrait, a picture of a soul as well as of a face. It is an Italian nobleman with all the poetry and aspiration of chivalry. On his scarlet cap he bears his proud device—a medallion in gold and enamel of St. Christopher bearing the infant Saviour-the ideal of Christian chivalry: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of one of these, ye have done it unto me." 35. BACCHUS AND ARIADNE. Titian (Venetian: 1477-1576). See under 34, p. 138. A picture which is at once a school of poetry and a school of art. It is a translation on canvas of the scene described in Catullus, where Bacchus, the wine-god, returning with his revel rout from a sacrifice, finds Ariadne on the seashore, after she had been deserted by Theseus, her lover. Bacchus no sooner sees her than he is enamoured and determines to make her his bride Bounding along is blooming Bacchus seen, Carmen Ixiv.: Sir T. Martin's translation. Nothing can be finer than the painter's representation of Bacchus and his rout: there is a "divine inebriety" in the god which is the very "incarnation of the spirit of revelry." "With this telling of the story,” says Charles Lamb (Essay on Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art), "an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. . . . But Titian has recalled past time, and made it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant, her soul undistracted from Theseus, Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.” But though as yet half unconscious, Ariadne is already under her fated star: for above is the constellation of Ariadne's crown-the crown with which Bacchus presented his bride. And observe in connection with the astronomical side of the allegory the figure in Bacchus's train with the serpent round him this is the serpent-bearer (Milton's "Ophiucus huge") translated to the skies with Bacchus and Ariadne. Notice too another piece of poetry: the marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne took place in the spring, Ariadne herself being the personification of its return, and Bacchus of its gladness; hence the flowers in the foreground which deck his path. The picture is as full of the painter's art as of the poet's. Note first the exquisite painting of the vine leaves,1 and of these flowers in the foreground, as an instance of the "constant habit of the great masters to render every detail of their foreground with the most laborious botanical fidelity": "The foreground is occupied with the common blue iris, the aquilegia, and the wild rose (more correctly the Capparis spinosa); every stamen of which latter is given, while the blossoms and leaves of the columbine (a difficult flower to draw) have been studied with the most exquisite accuracy." But this detail is sought not for its own sake, but only so far as is necessary to mark the typical qualities of beauty in the object. Thus "while every stamen of the rose is given because this was necessary to mark the flower, and while the curves and large characters of the leaves are rendered with exquisite fidelity, there is no vestige of particular texture, of moss, bloom, moisture, or any other accident, no dewdrops, nor flies, nor trickeries of any kind; nothing beyond the simple forms and hues of the flowers, even those hues themselves being simplified and broadly rendered. The varieties of aquilegia have in reality a greyish and uncertain tone of colour, and never attain 1 "If you live in London you may test your progress accurately by the degree of admiration you feel for the leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne" (Elements of Drawing, p. 82). Another technical beauty referred to in the same book (p. 77 n.) is "the points of light on the white flower in the wreath of the dancing child-faun." Similarly, "the wing of the cupid in Correggio's picture (IX. 10, p. 203) is focused to two little grains of white at the top of it." |