214. CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN. Guido (Eclectic-Bologna: 1575-1642). See under 196, p. 321. In pictures of this subject two distinct conceptions may be noticed. In some the coronation of the Virgin is, as it were, dramatic; the subject is represented, that is to say, as the closing act in the life of the Virgin, and saints and disciples appear in the foreground as witnesses on earth of her coronation in heaven. 1155 in Room II. p. 47 is a good instance of this treatment. This picture, on the other hand, shows the mystical treatment of the subject-the coronation of the Virgin being the accepted type of the Church triumphant. The scene is laid entirely in heaven, and the only actors are the angels of the heavenly host. Notice the carefully symmetrical arrangement of the whole composition, as well as the charming faces of many of the angel chorus. 198. THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY. Annibale Carracci (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609). The legend of the temptation of St. Anthony, here realistically set forth, is the story of the temptations that beset the ascetic. In the wilderness, brooding over sin, he is tempted; it is only when he returns to the world and goes about doing good that the temptations cease to trouble him. St. Anthony lived, like Faust, the life of a recluse and a visionary, and like him was tempted of the devil. "Seeing that wicked suggestions availed not, Satan raised up in his sight (again like Mephistopheles in Faust) the sensible images of forbidden things. He clothed his demons in human forms; they hovered round him in the shape of beautiful women, who, with the softest blandishments, allured him to sin." The saint in his distress resolved to flee yet farther from the world; but it is not so that evil can be conquered, and still "spirits in hideous forms pressed round him in crowds, scourged him and tore him with their talons-all shapes of horror, 'worse than fancy ever feigned or fear conceived,' came roaring, howling, hissing, shrieking in his ears." In the midst of all this terror a vision of help from on high shone upon him; the evil phantoms vanished, and he arose unhurt and strong to endure. But it is characteristic of the love of horror in the Bolognese School that in Carracci's picture the celestial vision does not dissolve the terrors. Nay, the pointing and sprawling angels in attendance on the Saviour seem themselves to be part of the same horrid nightmare. 160. A "RIPOSO." Pietro Francesco Mola (Eclectic-Bologna: 1612-1668). Mola, a native of Milan, and the son of an architect, studied first at Rome and Venice, but afterwards at Bologna-returning ultimately to Rome, where he held the office of President of the Academy of St. Luke. The Italians gave this title to the subject of the Holy Family resting on the way in their flight to Egypt," the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt." 11. ST. JEROME IN THE WILDERNESS. Guido (Eclectic-Bologna: 1575-1642). See under 196, p. 321. For St. Jerome, see II. 227, p. 41. 936. THE FARNESE THEATRE, PARMA. Ferdinando Bibiena (Bolognese: 1657-1743). A scene in the theatre with Othello being played. The pit is unseated: it is a kind of "promenade play." 942. ETON COLLEGE. Canaletto (Venetian: 1697-1768). See under 939, p. 316. Painted during the artist's English visit, 1746-1748, perhaps in the same year (1747) that Gray published his well-known ode Ye distant spires, ye antique towers That crown the watery glade, 1192, 1193. SKETCHES FOR ALTAR-PIECES. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Venetian: 1696-1770). "Touched in with all the brilliant, flashing, dexterous bravura of the last of the rear-guard of the Venetians. The pictorial art of Venice finished with Tiepolo, and it seemed as if he was resolved it should not die ignominiously, for in spirit and gaiety he was little inferior to Veronese himself. He had not the stronger qualities of his model; Veronese's grasp of character, his air of nobility, his profound and imaginative harmonies of colour are wanting in the eighteenth century painter. It must be confessed also that the graces of the latter are too obviously borrowed; he has caught the trick of Veronese rather than assimilated his style. The two pictures recently added to the Gallery are compositions of four or five figures each, representing bishops and saints, with attendant boys and the usual child-angels in the clouds. The manipulation indicates a full brush and fluent colour. Tiepolo required a large canvas to display his skilful handling to the best advantage" (Times, December 22, 1885). 1100. A SCENE IN A PLAY. Pietro Longhi (Venetian: 1702-1762). Pietro Longhi, who studied in Bologna, but afterwards settled in his native Venice, has been called "the Italian Hogarth," but he is greatly inferior in every respect to that painter. Moreover he was not a satirist like Hogarth, and there is more truth in the description of him as "the Goldoni of painters "—Goldoni, the popular playwright, with whom Longhi was nearly contemporary, and who, like him, just reflects "the shade and shine of common life, nor renders as it rolls grandeur and gloom." The engraved portrait on the wall is inscribed "Gerardo Sagredo di Morei," and perhaps the picture is a group of the Sagredo family, in whose palace in Venice Longhi is known to have worked. The family preferred, perhaps, to be taken in the characters of a scene in a play of Goldoni's or some other popular writer-just as in the "Vicar of Wakefield" they resolved to be drawn together, in one large historical piece. "This would be cheaper, since one frame would serve for all, and it would be infinitely more genteel; for all families of any taste were now drawn in the same manner." 935. A RIVER SCENE. 937. Salvator Rosa (Neapolitan: 1615-1673). VENICE: SCUOLA DI SAN ROCCO. Canaletto1 (Venetian: 1697-1768). See under 939, p. 316. The principal building is the Scuola of the religious fraternity of St. Roch-"an interesting building of the early 1 The figures are by Tiepolo (see above under 1192, p. 313). Renaissance (1517), passing into Roman Renaissance," and, "as regards the pictures it contains (by Tintoret), one of the three most precious buildings in Italy" (Stones of Venice, Venetian Index). From the adjoining Church of St Roch, the Holy Thursday procession of the Doges and Officers of State, together with the members of the Fraternity, is advancing under an awning on its way to St. Mark's. Notice the carpets hung out of the windows-a standing feature, this, in Venetian gala decorations from very early times (see, for instance, VIII. 739, p. 184). Notice, also, the pictures displayed in the open air-a feature which well illustrates the difference between the later "easel pictures" and the earlier pictures intended to serve as architectural decorations. "A glance at this picture is sufficient to show how utterly the ordinary oil painting fails when employed as an architectural embellishment. Pictures which were to adorn and form part of a building had to consist of figures, separated one from another, all standing in simple and restful attitudes, and all plainly relieved against a light ground" (Conway: Early Flemish Artists, p. 270). Apart from one of the conditions of early art thus suggested, the picture is interesting as showing how in the eighteenth century in Italy, as in the thirteenth, art was part and parcel of the life of the people. Cimabue's pictures were carried in procession; and here in Canaletto's we see Venetian "old masters" hung out to assist in the popular rejoicing. 940. See below under 939, 940, p. 316. 1193. See above under 1192, p. 313. 1101. MASKED VISITORS AT A MENAGERIE. Pietro Longhi (Venetian: 1702-1762). See under 1100, p. 314. A characteristic glimpse of Venetian life a hundred years ago. "At that time," it has been said, "perhaps people did not amuse themselves more at Venice than elsewhere, but they amused themselves differently. It is this seizing on peculiarities, on local and characteristic details, that makes Longhi's little canvasses so curious." Here he shows us two ladies in dominoes, escorted by a cavalier, at a menagerie. The trainer exhibits a rhinoceros to them. 1 Visitors who have been to Venice will remember that "Carpaccio trusts for the chief splendour of any festa in cities to the patterns of the draperies hung out of windows" (Bible of Amiens, p. 3). 25. ST. JOHN IN THE WILDERNESS. Annibale Carracci (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609). "And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel" (Luke i. 80). In his left hand is the standard of the Lamb, the symbol of his mission, for which he is preparing himself in the desert solitude, while with his right he catches water in a cup from a stream in the rocks, symbolical of the water by which that mission, the baptism unto repentance, was to be accomplished. 939, 940. VENICE: THE PIAZZETTA, AND THE Canaletto (Venetian: 1697-1768). Antonio Canale, commonly called Canaletto, was born in Venice, lived in Venice, and painted Venice. The numerous pictures by him in this room should be compared at once with Turner's Venetian pictures. It is impossible to get a more instructive instance of the different impression made on different minds by the same scenes. Canaletto drew, says one of his admirers (Lanzi, ii. 317), exactly as he saw. Well, what he did see we have shown us here. What others have seen, those who have not been to Venice can discover from Turner's pictures, from Shelley and Byron's verse, or Ruskin's prose. "Let the reader restore Venice in his imagination to some resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. Let him, looking from Lido or Fusina, replace, in the forest of towers, those of the hundred and sixty-six churches which the French threw down; let him sheet her walls with purple and scarlet, overlay her minarets with gold, ... and fill her canals with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sadness and stain as had been set upon it by the declining energies of more than half a century, and he will see Venice as it was seen by Canaletto (as it might have been seen by him, Mr. Ruskin means); whose miserable, virtueless, heartless mechanism, accepted as the representation of such various glory, is, both in its existence and acceptance, among the most striking signs of the lost sensation and deadened intellect of the nation at that time. . . . The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole range of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadows; it gives no single architectural ornament, however near, so much form, as might enable us even to guess at its actual one;. it gives the buildings neither their architectural beauty nor their ancestral dignity, for there is no texture of stone nor character of age in Canaletto's touch; which is invaribly a violent, black, sharp, ruled penmanlike line, as far removed from the grace of nature as from |