CCIX

Raphael, to be plain with you—for I like to be candid and outspoken—does not please me at all. In Venice are found the good and the beautiful; to their brush I give the first place; it is Titian that bears the banner.

Velasquez.

CCX

Perhaps some day the world will discover that Rembrandt is a much greater painter than Raphael. I write this blasphemy—one to make the hair of the Classicists stand on end—without definitely taking a side; only I seem to find as I grow older that the most beautiful and most rare thing in the world is truth.

Let us say, if you will, that Rembrandt has not Raphael's nobility. Yet perhaps this nobility which Raphael manifests in his line is shown by Rembrandt in the mysterious conception of his subjects, in the profound naÏvetÉ of his expressions and gestures. However much one may prefer the majestic emphasis of Raphael, which answers perhaps to the grandeur inherent in certain subjects, one might assert, without being stoned by men of taste—I mean men whose taste is real and sincere—that the great Dutchman was more a born painter than the studious pupil of Perugino.

Delacroix.

CCXI

Rembrandt's principle was to extract from things one element among the rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects. One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their "envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate them; but then, if he ignored grace and beauty, purity of line and the delicacy of the skin, he expressed the nude body by suggestions of suppleness, roundness, elasticity, with a love of material substance, a sense of the live being, which enchant the practical painter. He resolved everything into its component parts, colour as well as light, so that, by eliminating the complicated and condensing the scattered elements from a given scene, he succeeded in drawing without outline, in painting a portrait almost without strokes that show, in colouring without colour, in concentrating the light of the solar system into a sunbeam. It would be impossible in a plastic art to carry the curiosity for the essential to an intenser pitch. For physical beauty he substitutes expression of character; for the imitation of things, their almost complete transformation; for studious scrutiny, the speculation of the psychologist; for precise observation, whether trained or natural, the visions of a seer and apparitions of such vividness that he himself is deceived by them. By virtue of this faculty of second sight, of intuitions like those of a somnambulist, he sees farther into the supernatural world than any one else whatever. The life that he perceives in dream has a certain accent of the other world, which makes real life seem pale and almost cold. Look at his "Portrait of a Woman in the Louvre," two paces from "Titian's Mistress." Compare the two women, study closely the two pictures, and you will understand the difference between the two brains. Rembrandt's ideal, sought as in a dream with closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosphorescence that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial painting, real beyond any other master's work, and able to hold its own with a Rubens, a Titian, a Veronese, a Giorgione, a Van Dyck—this is Rembrandt's aim. Has he succeeded? The testimony of the world answers for him.

Fromentin.

CCXII

The painting of Flanders will generally satisfy any devout person more than the painting of Italy, which will never cause him to shed many tears; this is not owing to the vigour and goodness of that painting, but to the goodness of such devout person; women will like it, especially very old ones or very young ones. It will please likewise friars and nuns, and also some noble persons who have no ear for true harmony. They paint in Flanders, only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill, and saints and prophets. Their painting is of stuffs—bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reasonableness or art, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting, and finally, without any substance or verve; and in spite of all this, painting in some other parts is worse than it is in Flanders. Neither do I speak so badly of Flemish painting because it is all bad, but because it tries to do so many things at once (each of which alone would suffice for a great work), so that it does not do anything really well.

Only works which are done in Italy can be called true painting, and therefore we call good painting Italian; for if it were done so well in another country, we should give it the name of that country or province. As for the good painting of this country, there is nothing more noble or devout; for with wise persons nothing causes devotion to be remembered, or to arise, more than the difficulty of the perfection which unites itself with and joins God; because good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty. This painting is so rare that few are capable of doing or attaining to it.

Michael Angelo.

CCXIII

All Dutch painting is concave: what I mean is that it is composed of curves described about a point determined by the pictorial interest; circular shadows round a dominant light. Design, colouring, and lighting fall into a concave scheme, with a strongly defined base, a retreating ceiling, and corners rounded and converging on the centre; whence it follows that the painting is all depth, and that it is far from the eye to the objects represented. No type of painting leads with more certain directness from the foreground to the background, from the frame to the horizon. One can live in it, walk in it, see to the uttermost ends of it; one is tempted to raise one's head to measure the distance of the sky. Everything conspires to this illusion: the exactness of the aerial perspective, the perfect harmony of colour and tones with the plane on which the object is placed. The rendering of the heights of space, of the envelope of atmosphere, of the distant effect, which absorbs this school makes the painting of all other schools seem flat, something laid upon the surface of the canvas.

Fromentin.

CCXIV

In Van Eyck there is more structure, more muscle, more blood in the veins; hence the impressive virility of his faces and the strong style of his pictures. Altogether he is a portrait-painter of Holbein's kin—exact, shrewd, and with a gift of penetration that is almost cruel. He sees things with more perfect rightness than Memling, and also in a bigger and some summary way. The sensations which the aspect of things evokes in him are more powerful; his feeling for their colour is more intense; his palette has a fullness, a richness, a distinctness, which Memling's has not. His colour schemes are of more even power, better held together, composed of values more cunningly found. His whites are fatter, his purple richer, and the indigo blue—that fine blue as of old Japanese enamel, which is peculiar to him—has more depth of dye, more solidity of texture. The splendour and the costliness of the precious things, of which the superb fashions of his time were so lavish, appealed to him more strongly.

Fromentin.

CCXV

Van Eyck saw with his eyes, Memling begins to see with his soul. The one had a good and a right vein of thought; the other does not seem to think so much, but he has a heart which beats in a quite different way. The one copied and imitated, the other copies too and imitates, but transfigures. The former reproduced—without any preoccupation with the ideal types of humanity—above all, the masculine types, which passed before his eyes in every rank of the society of his time; the latter contemplates nature in a reverie, translates her with imagination, dwells upon everything which is most delicate and lovely in human forms, and creates, above all, in his type of woman a being exquisite and elect, unknown before and lost with him.

Fromentin

CCXVI

BRUGES, 1849

This is a most stunning place, immeasurably the best we have come to. There is a quantity of first-rate architecture, and very little or no Rubens.

But by far the best of all are the miraculous works of Memling and Van Eyck. The former is here in a strength that quite stunned us—and perhaps proves himself to have been a greater man even than the latter. In fact, he was certainly so intellectually, and quite equal in mechanical power. His greatest production is a large triptych in the Hospital of St. John, representing in its three compartments: firstly, the "Decollation of St. John Baptist"; secondly, the "Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine to the Infant Saviour"; and thirdly, the "Vision of St. John Evangelist in Patmos." I shall not attempt any description; I assure you that the perfection of character and even drawing, the astounding finish, the glory of colour, and, above all, the pure religious sentiment and ecstatic poetry of these works is not to be conceived or described. Even in seeing them the mind is at first bewildered by such godlike completeness; and only after some while has elapsed can at all analyse the causes of its awe and admiration; and then finds these feelings so much increased by analysis that the last impression left is mainly one of utter shame at its own inferiority.

Van Eyck's picture at the Gallery may give you some idea of the style adopted by Memling in these great pictures; but the effect of light and colour is much less poetical in Van Eyck's; partly owing to his being a more sober subject and an interior, but partly also, I believe, to the intrinsic superiority of Memling's intellect. In the background of the first compartment there is a landscape more perfect in the abstract lofty feeling of nature than anything I have ever seen. The visions of the third compartment are wonderfully mystic and poetical.

Rossetti.

CCXVII

VAN DYCK

Van Dyck completed Rubens by adding to his achievement portraits absolutely worthy of his master's brush, better than Rubens' own. He created in his own country an art which was original, and consequently he has his share in the creation of a new art. Besides this he did yet more: he begot a whole school in a foreign country, the English school—Reynolds, Lawrence, Gainsborough, and I would add to them nearly all the genre painters who are faithful to the English tradition, and the most powerful landscape painters issue directly from Van Dyck, and indirectly from Rubens through Van Dyck. These are high claims. And so posterity, always just in its instincts, gives Van Dyck a place apart between the men of the first and those of the second rank. The world has never decided the exact precedence which ought to be his in the procession of the masters, and since his death, as during his life, he seems to have held the privilege of being placed near the throne and of making a stately figure there.

Fromentin.