OJ3D14AJ3AHDIM CONTENTS MICHELANGELO 3 REMBRANDT 39 RUBENS 79 MEISSONIER 117 TITIAN 145 ANTHONY VAN DYCK 171 FORTUNY 199 ARY SCHEFFER 223 FRANCOIS MILLET 257 JOSHUA REYNOLDS 285 LANDSEER 309 GUSTAVE DORE 327 (Ko t¥ %omii of MICHELANGELO How can that be, lady, which all men learn By long experience? Shapes that seem alive, Wrought in hard mountain marble, will survive Their maker, whom the years to dust return! Thus to effect, cause yields. Art hath her turn, And triumphs over Nature. I, who strive with sculpture, Know this well: her wonders live In spite of time and death, those tyrants stern. So I can give long life to both of us In either way, by color or by stone, Making the semblance of thy face and mine. Centuries hence when both are buried, Thus thy beauty and my sadness shall be shown, And men shall say, "For her 't was wise to pine." — Sonnets of Michelangelo MICHELANGELO ALL me by my pet name," wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in one of those incomparable sonnets of which the Portuguese never heard. And the task yet remains for some psychologist to tell us why, when we wish to bestow the highest honor, coupled with familiar affection, we call the individual by a given name. Young men and maidens will understand my allusion; and I hope this book will not suffer the dire fate of fall- ing into the hands of any one who has forgotten the days of his youth. In addressing the one we truly revere, we drop all prefix and titles. Soldiers marching under the banner of a beloved leader ever have for him a name of their own. What honor and trust were once compressed into the diminutive, "Little Corporal," or Kipling's "Bobs"; or, to come down to something even more familiar to us, say, " Old Abe " and " Little Phil "! The earth is a vast graveyard where untold millions of men lie buried, but out of the myriads who pass into forgetfulness every decade, the race holds a few names embalmed in undying amber. Lovers of art, the round world over, carry in their minds one character, so harmoniously developed on 5 MICHELANGELO every side of his nature that we say twenty centu- ries have never produced his equal. We call him " Leonardo" — the one ideal man. Leonardo da Vinci was painter, poet, sculptor, architect, mathematician, poli- tician, musician, man of science, and courtier. His dis- position was so joyous, his manner so captivating, his form and countenance so beautiful, that wherever he went all things were his. And he was so well ballasted with brains, and so acute in judgment, that flattery spoiled him not. His untiring industry and transcendent talent brought him large sums of money, and he spent them like a king. So potent was his personality that wherever he made his home there naturally grew up around him a Court of Learning, and his pupils and followers were counted by the score. To the last of his long life he carried with him the bright, expectant ani- mation of youth; and to all who knew him he was " Leonardo — the only Leonardo." But great as was Leonardo, we call the time in which he lived, the age of Michelangelo. When Leonardo was forty, and at the very height of his power, Michel Agnola Buonarroti, aged twenty, liberated from the block a marble Cupid that was so exquisite in its proportions that it passed for an antique, and men who looked upon it exclaimed, " Phidias!" *I Michel Agnola became Michelangelo, that is to say, " Michel the Angel," in a day. The name thrown at him by an unknown admirer stuck, and in his later 6 MICHELANGELO years when all the world called him " Angelo " he cast off the name his parents had given him and accepted the affectionate pet name that clung like the love of woman 53 53 Michelangelo was born in a shabby little village but a few miles from Florence. In another village near by was born Leonardo. " Great men never come singly," says Emerson. And yet Angelo and Leonardo exercised no influence upon each other that we can trace. The younger man never came under the spell of the older one, but moved straight on to his destiny, showing not the slightest arc in his orbit in deference to the great luminary of his time. The handsome Leonardo was social: he loved women, and music, and festivals, and gorgeous attire, and magnificent equipage. His life was full of color and sweeping, joyous, rainbow tints. Michelangelo was homely in feature, and the aspect of his countenance was mutilated by a crashing blow from a rival student's mallet that flattened his nose to his face. Torrigiano lives in history for this act alone, thus proving that there are more ways than one to gain immortality 53 53 Angelo was proud, self-centered, independent, and he sometimes lashed the critics into a buzzing, bluebottle fury by his sarcastic speech. " He affronted polite society, conformed to no one's dictates, lived like an ascetic and worked like a packmule," says a contemporary. M ICHELANGELO Vasari, who among his many other accomplishments seems to have been the Boswell of his time, compares Leonardo and Michelangelo. He says, " Angelo can do everything that Leonardo can, although he does it differently." Further, he adds, "Angelo is painter, sculptor, engineer, architect and poet." " But," adds this versatile Italian Samuel Pepys, somewhat sorrow- fully, " he is not a gentleman." It is to be regretted that Signor Vasari did not follow up his remarks with his definition of the term " gentle- man." 3$ 53 Leonardo was more of a painter than a sculptor. His pictures are full of rollicking mirth, and the smile on the faces of his women is handed down by imitation even to this day. The joyous freedom of animal life beckons from every Leonardo canvas; and the back- grounds fade off into fleecy clouds and shadowy, dreamy, opiate odor of violets. Michelangelo, however, is true to his own life as Leo- nardo was to his— for at the last the artist only repro- duces himself. He never painted a laugh, for life to him was serious and full of sober purpose. We can not call his work somber — it does not depress — for it car- ries with it a poise and a strength that is sufficient unto itself. It is all heroic, and there is in it a subtle quality that exorcises fear and bids care begone. No man ever portrayed the human figure with the same fidelity that Angelo has. The naked Adam, when the 8 MICHELANGELO finger of the Almighty touched him into life, gives one a thrill of health to look upon, even after these four hundred years have struggled to obliterate the lines. *I His figures of women shocked the artistic sense of his time, for instead of the Greek idealization of beauty he carved the swelling muscles and revealed the articu- lations of form as no artist before him had ever dared. His women are never young, foolish, timid girls — they are Amazons; and his men are the kind that lead na- tions out of captivity. The soft, the pretty, the yield- ing, were far from him. There is never a suggestion of taint or double meaning; all is frank, open, generous, honest and fearless. His figures are nude, but never naked S3 5$ He began his artistic work when fourteen years old, and he lived to be eighty-nine; and his years did not out- last his zeal and zest. He was above the medium size, an athlete in his lean and sinewy strength, and the whipcord quality of his body mirrored the silken strength of his will. In his old age the King arose when Michelangelo en- tered the Council-Chamber, and would not sit until he was seated at the right hand of the throne; the Pope would not allow him to kneel before him; when he walked through the streets of Rome the people removed their hats as he passed; and today we who gaze upon his work in the Eternal City stand uncovered. 9 MICHELANGELO ICHELANGELO was the firstborn in a large family. Simone Buonarroti, his father, be- longed to an ebbtide branch of the nobility that had lost everything but the memory of great ancestors turned to dust. This father had am- bitions for his boy; ambitions in the line of the army or a snug office under the wing of the State, where he might, by following closely the beck and nod of the prince in power, become a magistrate or a keeper of customs 33 33 But no boy ever disappointed a proud father more. When great men in gilt and gold braid, with scarlet sashes across their breasts, and dangling swords that clicked and clanged on the stone pavement, strode by, rusty, dusty little Michel refused to take off his cap and wish them " Long life and God's favor," as his father ordered. Instead, he hid behind his mother's gown and made faces. His father used to say he was about as homely as he could be without making faces, and if he did n't watch out he would get his face crooked some day and could n't get it back. Simone Buonarroti had qualities very Micawber-like mixed in his clay, and the way he cringed and crawled may have had something to do with setting the son on the other tack. The mother was only nineteen when Michel was born, and although the moralists talk much about woman's vanity and extravagance, the theory gets no backing 10 MICHELANGELO from this quarter. She was a plain woman in appear- ance, quiet and self-contained, with no nerves to speak of, a sturdy, physical endowment, and commonsense enough for two. When scarcely out of dresses the boy began to draw pictures. He drew with charcoal on the walls, or with a stick in the sand, and shaped curious things out of mud in the gutters. It was an age of creative art, and most of the work being in the churches the common people had their part in it. In fact, the common people were the artists. And when Simone Buonarroti found his twelve-year- old boy haunting the churches to watch the workmen, and also discovered that he was consorting with the youths who studied drawing in the atelier of Ghirlan- dajo, he was displeased. Painters, to this erstwhile nobleman, were simply men in blue blouses who worked for low wages on high scaf- folds, and occasionally spattered color on the good clothes of ladies and gentlemen who were beneath. He did n't really hate painters, he simply waived them; and to his mind there was no difference between an artisan and an artist. The mother, however, took a secret pride in her boy's drawings, as mothers always do in a son's accomplish- ments. Doubtless she knew something of the art of decoration, too, for she had brothers who worked as day laborers on high scaffolds. Yet she did n't say much about it, for women then did n't have so much 11 MICHELANGELO to say about anything as now.