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GREAT MASTERS 
 
 B Y 
 
 JOHN LAFARGE 
 
 GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 
■ Copyright, 1903, by 
 DOUBLEDAY. PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 /fi-'^ai 
 
PORTRAIT OF MICHELANGELO BY BONASONE 
 
TO A. F. JACCACI, ESQ., WITHOUT WHOSE HELP AND ADVICE 
 THESE ESSAYS WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These essays were written a year ago for the pages of 
 McClure's. In the magazine they were of necessity very 
 much cut down, for most practical reasons of space and for the 
 insertion of engravings. But as their ideal was that of con- 
 densed notices, they may not have suffered much in their 
 earlier abridged form. What form they have is the result of 
 a desire to write for a large public, which public needs the 
 ordinary biographical statements regarding illustrious lives, 
 and also of a wish so to write that those who had given time 
 and thought to the works of these artists, should feel that they 
 were expressly addressed — in short, that an artist might be 
 interested in these expositions of the lives and doings of cer- 
 tain other artists, and find therein some freshness of view, 
 while, at the same time, any reader might have his memories 
 established by the story, and his interest increased in the 
 works of art described or referred to. For these purposes, I 
 have followed the simplest of all plans, the record of the work- 
 ing life of each artist, which explains his genius, and which 
 keeps us within the salutary consideration of the outside limits 
 that define it. We are, perhaps, too apt to look upon the 
 
vi GREAT MASTERS 
 
 great artist of the past as a free agent, early possessed of all 
 the power and development acquired by long work against 
 outside pressure, and to think of him as imposing the form of 
 his ideas upon an easy world. Hence, sometimes we think 
 of Albrecht Diirer as bringing Teutonic art into Italy, while, 
 of course, he is nothing more than a German student going 
 to the land of greater art. We throw back into the early 
 position of the great man the image of his full development ; 
 we make him out as conscious from the beginning of all his 
 capacities. Instead of recognising m him the same laws that 
 belong to other developments, we insist on his being all of one 
 piece — as if, like Minerva, he had sprung all armed from the 
 brain of Jupiter. In short, we forget that these men had to 
 die long ago to obtain the authority which they hold to-day. 
 It is possible that none of them achieved their best work, or 
 carried out their intentions in full. Rubens and Raphael may 
 have had some such chance, but we know that we see in 
 Michelangelo and Rembrandt the expression of a struggle 
 against outside necessities. To give a full account of the 
 life of any great artist the history of each piece of work should 
 be taken up as we take up the story of a general's campaign. 
 
 I have not expressly stated these points in the brief essays, 
 but I have had them always in mind, because of a desire to 
 keep within the most certain and truthful attitude — such a 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 one as their subjects themselves would recognise in their 
 memories. Hence, also, I have dropped all anecdotes but the 
 most authentic ones, such as are certified by the men them- 
 selves. Nor have I tried to weigh their characters ; what they 
 were should properly come out for us in their story. Nor have 
 I attempted to criticise the point of view of any strictly estab- 
 hshed standards of art, because the definitions of art are estab- 
 lished by what these men have done. Their works make the 
 geogi-aphy, if I may so say, of what we call art. If there are 
 other countries to be found in it, then they have been discov- 
 ered by special men, acting upon their instincts, and forced into 
 new channels by the ordinary circumstances of life. This does 
 not belittle the heroes of whom I have written. It helps, in 
 reality, to place them higher than by a mere abstract lauda- 
 tory account. It saves them also from the exaggerated view 
 that makes them merely results of time and place, or victims 
 of temperament. We can feel all the more distinctly the 
 energies they employed ; and all the more we can reahse that 
 their superiority is eminently a moral one. In that way, we see 
 them praised by the whole tenor of their life, and they become, 
 in the most simple way, heroes of example and honours to 
 mankind. 
 
 I have chosen only these few, who are indubitably of the 
 greatest. I have added at the end a notice of one whose works 
 
viii GREAT MASTERS 
 
 are not separately of equal importance with those of his fel- 
 lows of the Western world, Hokusai. I am fully aware of the 
 classical Japanese views regarding the artist of the " vulgar 
 school." They are, in the main, right. There is no possible com- 
 parison between the elegant but somewhat superficial beauties 
 of the Japanese artists whom we know best, because we have 
 them in printed form, and the deep sentiment, the serenity, or 
 spiritual uplifting of the Buddhist art of Japan — or again the 
 synthetic view of all nature which belongs to the artists of an 
 earlier date. But the enormous amount of Hokusai's produc- 
 tions, his unflagging power, the spirit of his vision of life, and 
 his being, like the others I write about, an untiring workman, 
 make him touch at least the limits of the greatest art. And 
 then he has been given the special mark which lifts the 
 designer out of the lower categories — the gift of a fresh per- 
 ception of any subject, the sight of the result before it is un- 
 dertaken — so that not to have seen his manner of seeing would 
 be to miss an absolutely different part of the whole field of 
 representation. 
 
 The same necessities which limited the length of my writing 
 have also limited the number of prints which accompany these 
 essays. The works of the men of whom I write are so impor- 
 tant that it is very difficult to abridge them without diminish- 
 ing the explanation of what they did. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PASS 
 
 MICHELANGELO 1 
 
 RAPHAEL 69 
 
 REMBRANDT 95 
 
 RUBENS 127 
 
 VELASQUEZ 157 
 
 DURER 189, 
 
 HOKUSAI 217 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PORTRAIT OF MICHELANGELO, BY BONASONE Frontispiece 
 
 MICHELANGELO Facing 
 
 page 
 
 CUPID 4 
 
 PIETA 8 
 
 UNFINISHED GROUP OF THE PIETA 13 
 
 DAVID 16 
 
 MADONNA AND CHILD 20 
 
 THECREATIONOFMAN 29 
 
 THEDELPHICSIBYL 33 
 
 THETHINKER 36 
 
 TWILIGHT . . . . : 45 
 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT 48 
 
 MOSES 57 
 
 THE CAPTIVE 65 
 
 RAPHAEL 
 
 PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF 69 
 
 THE MADONNA OF THE TEMPI FAMILY .... 70 
 
 MARRIAGEOFTHEVIRGIN 75 
 
 THE MADONNA OF THE CHAIR ...... 76 
 
xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing 
 page 
 THE "LARGE" HOLY FAMILY 79 
 
 PORTRAIT OF POPE JULIUS II 82 
 
 THE MASS OF BOLSENA 84 
 
 THE WOMAN WITH THE VEIL 86 
 
 THEVISIONOFEZEKIEL 89 
 
 DETAIL FROM THE SISTINE MADONNA .... 91 
 
 PORTRAIT OF BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE ... 93 
 
 REMBRANDT 
 
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 
 
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S BROTHER . 
 PORTRAIT OF SASKIA (PENCIL DRAWING) 
 PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN 
 CHRIST HEALING THE SICK .... 
 
 DR. FAUSTUS 
 
 THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS 
 
 DETAIL FROM THE LESSON IN ANATOMY 
 THE SYNDICS OF THE CLOTH GUILD 
 JOSEPH INTERPRETING HIS DREAMS 
 JOB VISITED BY HIS FRIENDS 
 
 95 
 
 98 
 102 
 107 
 111 
 113 
 114 
 116 
 118 
 123 
 125 
 
 RUBENS 
 
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 
 THE ARTIST'S TWO SONS . 
 PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN 
 
 127 
 130 
 134 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii 
 
 Facing 
 page 
 
 DIANA'S RETURN FROM THE CHASE 139 
 
 THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS 143 
 
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AND HIS FIRST WIFE, 
 
 ISABELLA BRANT 144 
 
 PORTRAIT OF HELENA FOURMENT 146 
 
 THE WALK IN THE GARDEN 148 
 
 THE GARDEN OF LOVE 150 
 
 ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON 155 
 
 VELASQUEZ 
 
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 157 
 
 PHILIP IV 161 
 
 THE SPINNERS 162 
 
 MCENIPPUS 166 
 
 iESOP (DETAIL) 171 
 
 DON BALTASAR CARLOS ON HORSEBACK . . .175 
 
 DON BALTASAR CARLOS AND A DWARF .... 176 
 
 POPE INNOCENT X. (DETAIL) 178 
 
 THE ACTOR (PABLILLOS DE VALLADOLID) . . . 180 
 
 THE SURRENDER OF BREDA 183 
 
 ADMIRAL DON ADRIAN PULIDO PA REJA . . . 186 
 
 DiJRER 
 
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 189 
 
 PORTRAIT OF WILLIBALD PIRKHEIMER. . . .193 
 
 STUDY OF AN OLD MAN'S HEAD 194 
 
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facinff 
 page 
 THE KNIGHT, DEATH AND THE DEVIL .... 196 
 
 MELENCHOLIA 198 
 
 ST. JEROME IN HIS CELL 203 
 
 ADORATION OF THE TRINITY BY ALL SAINTS . . 205 
 
 PORTRAIT OF PHILIP MELANCTHON 207 
 
 PORTRAIT OF ERASMUS 208 
 
 ST. JOHN AND ST. PETER 211 
 
 ST. MARK AND ST. PAUL . . 212 
 
 HOKUSAI 
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST ' . .217 
 
MICHELANGELO 
 
\. 
 
 "The hand that rounded Peter's Dome 
 And groined the vaults of Christian Rome 
 Wrought in a sad sincerity ; 
 Himself from God he could not free." 
 
 EMERSON. 
 
MICHELANGELO 
 
 The story of this the greatest of known artists has a back- 
 ground of history so extraordinary and tumultuous that it 
 alone would give importance to any biography. In this special 
 case, the history of the artist is singularly entangled with the 
 history of the time. 
 
 The essential drama of human life remains the same, but 
 the peaceful occupation of the artist is subject to a violence of 
 outside pressure against which the man struggles with excep- 
 tional effort. A full history of Michelangelo would imply the 
 study of the passage from the Middle Ages of faith and of 
 society to the beginning of the modern world. His life closes 
 the end of the Old World and begins the New. That form of 
 civilization which he saw beginning has also made its mark 
 and taken its turn in the record of historical evolution. 
 
 The invention of the art of printing had just been made and 
 was beginning to establish new forms of education, to make 
 the learning of the past accessible and to allow free deliverance 
 of that which was to hasten every form of change in religious 
 and social life. 
 
4 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 The boy saw the first enthusiasm for the unfolding of class- 
 ical antiquity which moulded the culture of the Renaissance. 
 In his early youth came the discovery of America — the open- 
 ing of the other half of the world — the beginning of that enor- 
 mous Spanish Empire upon which the sun never set, and the 
 consequent changes in the knowledge and commerce of the 
 world. Slowly, in his youth and middle age, came the break- 
 ing up of the political system of Europe, involving in his own 
 land greater and more acute convulsions. The old man lived 
 to see a changed world, disturbed not only by social evolution, 
 but by great religious dissensions, which later changed the 
 very definitions of Christian thought. Around him in Italy 
 flourished a development of the " human plant," in which the 
 individual more distinctly than ever before asserted the powers 
 which make the adventurer. It was the end of the age of ty- 
 rants, crystallising into an ordered system of rule. It was an 
 age of extraordinary crime and passion, and also of virtue, 
 whose records are among the most singular in history. Noth- 
 ing in the State but was shaken, and the Church itself was 
 tossed in such a sea as might make man believe that Christ 
 slept in Peter's boat. 
 
 Against this background of an agitated world of hope and 
 struggle and despair is detached the important personality of 
 an artist whose extreme sensitiveness and interest in all ques- 
 
CUPID 
 
 SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM 
 
MICHELANGELO 5 
 
 tions must have made the tissue of his thoughts even as ex- 
 pressed in the forms of painting, sculpture, verse, and archi- 
 tecture. He was born in a centre of political, literary, religious, 
 and artistic evolution. Florence, to which he belonged, was a 
 centre of thought, of culture, and of trade, and was passing 
 from the ancient idea of the rights and liberties of the City to 
 forms of more modern tyranny and larger government more 
 centralised. We shall see how, even in his earliest youth, he 
 felt these influences. 
 
 This is the record of his birth. His father, Leonardo Buonar- 
 roti Simoni, wrote as follows in his private note- book: "I 
 record that on this day, March 6, 1474, a male child was born 
 to me. I gave him the name of Michelangelo, and he was 
 born on a Monday morning, four or five hours before daybreak; 
 and he was born while I was Podesta of Caprese ; and he was 
 born at Caprese ; and the godfathers were those I have named 
 below," etc. " Note that the date is 1474, according to Floren- 
 tine usage; according to Roman usage it is 1475." We are 
 also told by Condivi, the kindly pupil of Michelangelo, " that 
 the planets were propitious at this birth and showed how great 
 was to be this little child, and of how great genius, because as 
 Mercury and Venus entered with benign aspect into the House 
 of Jove this promised — as in fact did follow — that such a birth 
 was to be that of a noble and high capacity, fit to succeed uni- 
 
6 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 versally in any undertaking, but particularly in those arts which 
 please the senses, like painting, sculpture, and architecture." 
 
 When Michelangelo was born his father then was Podest^, 
 or governor, of this little place of Caprese. He was born in an 
 ancient family of distinguished descent, going back in ancestry 
 to the beginning of the thirteenth century. The family held 
 very strongly to this special distinction of origin, which in the 
 Florence of that date marked a special class, though many 
 such, as with us, might be devoted to trade or to occupations 
 which in other parts of Europe were separated from the possi- 
 ble chances of noble birth. Indeed, the Buonarroti family 
 claimed origin from the Counts of Canossa, illustrious not only 
 by their antiquity, but also by their connection with imperial 
 blood. Beatrice, the sister of Henry II**, the Emperor, mar- 
 ried that Boniface of Canossa to whom was born the famous 
 Countess Matilda, who held in Italy, among other places, what 
 was once called the Patrimony of St. Peter. 
 
 Objections have been made to this high descent, but in 1520 
 Alexander, Count of Canossa, wrote to Michelangelo claim- 
 ing this connection, and calling himself " your good relative." 
 Michelangelo also attached great importance to this descent, 
 and I mention it with care, because it connects with a part of 
 his character — a certain personal pride and sense of obligation 
 that marks him. This sense of high descent stood by him in 
 
MICHELANGELO 7 
 
 his relations with the great, and separated him from the mass 
 of artists and artisans, accustomed to greater subservience than 
 he allowed himself. 
 
 At the termination of his term of office, the father returned 
 to Florence and the lad was given to nurse to a woman of 
 Settignano, where the family had a villa which still stands. 
 Michelangelo's foster - mother was the daughter and wife of 
 stone-cutters, and Michelangelo reasonably attributed his 
 predilection for sculpture to this first childish impression. He 
 went to school in Florence, and is said to have learned no more 
 than reading, writing, and Italian, because he complained later 
 that he knew no Latin; but that may have been from his 
 modesty or from his pride ; we shall see him later writing in 
 Latin, and not ill. His acquaintance with boys, apprentices to 
 masters in painting and sculpture in this city of Art, developed 
 in the boy a strong desire for some such life. He met the usual 
 opposition from his family, who took it hard, and even beat 
 him on that account, as was but natural and reasonable. They 
 yielded, however, and we have the record which binds him as 
 an apprentice in the painter Ghirlandajo's workshop on the first 
 of April, 1488, for three ensuing years. We have stories about 
 ehis Ufe there which must have left a great impression upon him 
 from what later we shall see of his work as a painter, however 
 much he has protested that he was but a sculptor. He became 
 
8 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 one in this way: Lorenzo of Medici, the Magnificent, had 
 adorned his garden with antique statues and had placed a pupil 
 and follower of Donatello, the great sculptor, over these col- 
 lections, virtually to instruct any young men who might wish 
 to use them. Ghirlandajo was asked to select from his pupils the 
 most promising. From among them Michelangelo was chosen 
 and learned the practice of stone-cutting as a workman, acquir- 
 ing as a boy that practical skill which he developed further and 
 further through a long life so that the mark of his personal toil 
 is famous. It gives to the actual marble an importance of ex- 
 pression that no cast, no copy can render. The sight of the 
 actual work, even to one who knows it well by the photograph, 
 engraving, or the cast, is a special sensation like that of the 
 quality of a voice in music, untranslatable by another. 
 
 An anecdote is told that serves as a beginning of his relations 
 with the Medici which were to influence all his life. He had 
 used a piece of refuse marble to carve a grinning mask, upon 
 which he was at work when Lorenzo passed by. The Mag- 
 nificent was astonished at the quality of the work with re- 
 gard to the age of the boy, so that joking with him as 
 with a child he said : " Oh ! thou hast made that faun an 
 old one, and yet thou has left him all his teeth. Dost thou 
 not know that with old people of such an age there is al- 
 ways wanting some?" So that as soon as the Magnificent 
 
PIETA 
 
 ST. Peter's, rome 
 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
MICHELANGELO 9 
 
 had left, Michelangelo struck out a tooth from the upper 
 jaw, showing as if it had dropped from the gum, and waited 
 anxiously for the Magnificent on the following day. The lat- 
 ter having come and seeing the keenness and simplicity of 
 the boy left much to himself, then made up his mind to fa- 
 vour such a talent and to take him into his service, and learn- 
 ing whose son he was said: " Go tell thy father that I should 
 like to have a talk with him." 
 
 With great disgust at Michelangelo's artistic friends and with 
 great objection to his son's becoming a stone-cutter, the father 
 dared not refuse the services of his son to the great ruler of Flor- 
 ence, but replied that not only Michelangelo, but all the family 
 were at the pleasure of the Magnificent. Lorenzo insisted upon 
 doing him some favour in exchange. The father modestly asked 
 for a place in the Customs, saying in the old democratic way of 
 Florence: " Lorenzo, I am fit for nothing but reading and writ- 
 ing, I have never practised art nor trade, I have lived on prop- 
 erty that has come from my ancestors, and it has been my care 
 to preserve these estates and to increase them as I have been 
 able to do by my industry." The JMagnificent laid his hand 
 upon his shoulder, saying with a smile : " Thou wilt always be 
 poor. If thou desirest a place I can arrange it for thee until a 
 better become vacant." It is worth making out this little detail 
 as a record of the personal relations that were still the mark of 
 
10 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 earlier Florence, so that Michelangelo for three years, from 
 his fifteenth to his eighteenth, lived under the roof and in the 
 company of the greatest man in that part of the world, a man 
 whose name remains representative of culture and patronage 
 of art, associated with the other great name of Pericles in 
 Athens. 
 
 The boy's position was that of a guest. He had a room in the 
 palace and was treated as one of the sons of the house. With 
 these sons he continued an acquaintance through the greater 
 part of his life. One was to be the famous Pope Leo X., another 
 Pope Clement VII.; for the great families of Italy struggled to 
 put a hand upon the rudder of the boat of Peter. In this house- 
 hold were men of the noblest birth and highest rank, assembled 
 around the daily board. It was the custom for guests to take 
 their places next the master in the order of their arrival. Those 
 who were present at the beginning of the meal sat, each accord- 
 ing to his degree, next to the Magnificent, not moving after- 
 ward for any one who might appear; and so it happened that 
 Michelangelo found himself frequently seated above Lor- 
 enzo's children and other persons of great consequence with 
 whom that house was constantly filled. All these great men 
 paid him attention and encouraged him in the art which he had 
 chosen. Chief of all was the Magnificent himself, " who often sent 
 for him during the day in order to show him jewels, cornehans, 
 
MICHELANGELO 11 
 
 medals, and such-like badges of great variety." The business of 
 Michael's hfe in the Medicean house was to make himself a great 
 sculptor, and thus confer glory upon the illustrious City of Flor- 
 ence over which the Medicean house presided.* 
 
 These beautiful years of study and encouragement were the 
 few years of peace in Michelangelo's long life. We can imag- 
 ine these pleasant relations with the scholars of the new learn- 
 ing, the poets, and distinguished humanists who made of Flor- 
 ence an Itahan Athens. With them he must have joined in the 
 admiration of Greek and Roman antiquity, whose store-houses 
 were being opened for the world with a belief that their treas- 
 ures would fill completely that cup of knowledge which seems 
 to empty for each new generation. Nor was all this thirst for 
 studies merely. Lorenzo, as we know, occupied the Floren- 
 tines with shows and festivals, triumphs and choruses for mas- 
 queraders, with masques and wonderful dances to which the 
 artists of that day devoted their ingenuity. With others, the boy 
 must have joined with the meetings of the young folk out of 
 doors at the Baptistery or the Duomo where they read, they 
 sung or listened to the lyrics of Politian sung by girls on summer 
 evenings in the public squares or as they danced in the Piazza 
 di Santa Trinita. Michelangelo must have entered somewhat 
 
 * Most of what Michelangelo produced during that period belonged to himself ; and 
 ^ome of his work still remains in the ancient house of the Buonarroti. 
 
12 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 in the amusements of youth, but he seems always to have had 
 some sense of withdrawal within himself, and of consequent in- 
 difference to the doings of others which brought him occasion- 
 ally into momentary conflict. Thus, he came to have the quar- 
 rel with Torrigiano from which ensued the broken nose that 
 his portraits showed through life. The outrage was regarded by 
 the youth of Florence with aversion, as if a sacrilege, and Cel- 
 lini writes about it with anger and would have wiped out the 
 insult with blood ; but personal violence was not of Michel- 
 angelo, w^ho was rarely aroused except when injustice was 
 done to himself or others, says Condivi, his pupil and biographer. 
 Perhaps he was beginning to feel the strenuous check that 
 one-sided thought places on the enjoyment of life, on the ad- 
 miration of the beautiful, and the serenity that we desire for 
 our peace of mind. The great opponent of the Medici, the 
 searcher of men's hearts, the denouncer of pleasant vices — Sa- 
 vonarola — was preaching in Florence between 1491 and 1498. 
 Michelangelo's elder brother became a convert to the great 
 preachers teaching and entered religion. Michelangelo was 
 one of the listeners and was necessarily moved by the stormy 
 sweep of that religious revival that accompanied the first years 
 of the great preacher's influence in Florence. During all his life 
 he remembered even the very sound of the great Dominican's 
 voice. 
 
U N F I N I S H K I) G 1{ ( ) L 1' () F i II K I' I K I' A 
 
MICHELANGELO 13 
 
 This picture of opposing views struggling fiercely for mastery 
 is worth dwelling on, for it is the story of Michelangelo's en- 
 tire life. On one side a culture more than pagan, love of life all 
 through, contempt for abnegation of all kinds ; on the other 
 side a burning flame of spiritual austerity, condemning all, 
 however beautiful, that might turn the soul away from the 
 path of eternal life. 
 
 The pressure could not be escaped. The whole political 
 force of the reformer was thrown against the interests of the 
 student's patrons, and, however grateful Michelangelo may 
 have been for help and patronage, the ancient republican 
 spirit remained with him, and at a later day turned all his 
 energies to the maintenance of the liberties of Florence, 
 against the IMedicean house. For that house he seems to have 
 had a personal sentiment, but the children were not what the 
 older ones had tried to be. 
 
 Michelangelo must have seen intimately all the lower 
 and meaner traits that marked the successors of the great 
 house. Hence in part the deep disdain for all forms of mean- 
 ness which distinguished him through his later life and is 
 expressed more and more in the paintings and sculptures 
 through which he tells his feelings to us. 
 
 In 1492, Lorenzo the Magnificent died, leaving a great gap 
 in the fortunes of Florence. " In the state great was the dread 
 
14 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 for the future of those who had submitted to him ; his most 
 devoted friends fled or disappeared." Meanwhile, his son 
 Piero ruled for a time. Michelangelo had returned to his 
 father's house, where he pursued those researches, beginning 
 in anatomy, which are the special bases of the art he devel- 
 oped. Such studies were only just beginning, and Michelan- 
 gelo is one of those whose labours made the knowledge that 
 we carry so easily to-day. He carved and painted also. What- 
 ever we can ascribe to this early time is marked by the haugh- 
 tiness which is the stamp of his work as of his nature. The 
 new Medici, in his brutal way, still favoured the youth and 
 again he sat, unwilling, at the princely table. 
 
 All through his life we shall find Michelangelo sensitive 
 to premonitions of danger; over-sensitive in appearance, 
 apparently capricious but always justified by the events ; so 
 much so that his friends believed that the special protection 
 of God had followed him. 
 
 When Piero was about to be driven out of Florence, 
 Michael departed suddenly with a couple of young friends, 
 artists also. His singular premonition is enough reason without 
 recourse to the story of the dream so charmingly told by Con- 
 divi of his friend Cardiere having seen the dead Lorenzo in 
 mourning habit ; predicting some great misfortune. 
 
 The three fled to Bologna with little money; and by 
 
MICHELANGELO 15 
 
 curious chance — a trouble with the customs on arriving — 
 Michael was at once taken as a friend by John Francis Aldo- 
 vrandi, one of the " Sixteen," who invited him to his house. 
 Michael gave all his money to his friends and began a resi- 
 dence with the nobleman which lasted more than a year. 
 With his patron, who honoured and loved the intellect of the 
 boy, he read Dante or Petrarch and sometimes Boccaccio. 
 Through him, too, he found work on the shrine of St. Domi- 
 nic, where he finished some work of an older sculptor, and 
 made the charming statue of a kneeling angel, holding a can- 
 dle-stick, which is still there and which shows the contained 
 strength of the future artist. It still connects with the old 
 traditions natural to the boy brought up under a follower of 
 the great Donatello. Indeed, this continuation of both the 
 feeling, the manner, and the very details of older work con- 
 tinue with Michelangelo, either a sculptor or painter, long 
 after the Sistine Chapel had put him into habits in which we 
 detect no longer the great filiation. 
 
 Some supposed danger brought the youth back again to 
 Florence, which was safe again. And then the small chance of 
 having made a fraudulent antique turned him to Rome. The 
 Cardinal of St. Giorgio who had bought it, discovering its 
 maker from the man who sold it, invited him to Rome. 
 Nothing came, apparently, from this invitation, which was 
 
16 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 meant rather to discover the author of the supposed antique ; 
 but for a Roman gentleman by the name of Gallo, he made 
 the Bacchus which is now in Florence; and probably the 
 Cupid which is now in London. In both of them appears his 
 fondness for a momentary movement ; the passing of one 
 action into another. But the Bacchus is as realistic, as much a 
 study of the beautiful young drunkard, as the other is the 
 representation of a divine power. The two sides of INIichel- 
 angelo, as shown by this work of the same period, seem to 
 have been developed within the short period of the two years 
 between 1496 and 1498. 
 
 Young Michael was now twenty-three years old, and in the 
 next year was to imagine and execute with marvellous skill 
 one of the most important statues of the world, unrivalled in 
 the union of profound feeling and eesthetic bloom of beauty. 
 His friend Gallo obtained for him the order for what is called 
 " the Pieta," the Virgin with the dead Christ on her lap, which 
 was to be made for the French Cardinal of St. Denis. This was 
 promised within a year, and carried out as promised, and guar- 
 anteed also by Gallo to be the finest marble "which Rome to- 
 day can show, and that no master of our day shall be able to 
 produce a better." The business engagement of Gallo was car- 
 ried out even in that particular of a work superior to all others. 
 The statue has still for us the solemn charm which surprised 
 
DAVID 
 
 FLORENCE 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BR A UN, CLEMENT & 
 
 X 
 
MICHELANGELO 17 
 
 the Romans at the end of the fifteenth century. The extraor- 
 dinary knowledge acquired by the youth is felt in the beauti- 
 ful body of the Christ, not copied, but studied from nature. 
 The helplessness of death is represented without its harshness ; 
 the tenderness of feeling which the face and gesture of the 
 Mother express, seems carried into the very body of the Son ; 
 and the sculptor's idea of strength which has made him give to 
 the Madonna a form capable of lifting and carrying the grown 
 man, recalls or suggests the fact that he is still a child to her. 
 We know that Michael purposely gave to the Virgin greater 
 youth than could be true or was habitual in art. 
 
 It was an expression of human feeling that he justified by 
 the exceptional purity of mind of the mother, which, according 
 to his habit of thought, now slowly forming, was told by the 
 body. The reasons given by artists for what they do are but 
 fragments of many thoughts ; the sure feeling conveyed is still 
 that of the mother and child. 
 
 With his entrance, then, to his twenty-fifth year, Michel- 
 angelo had, to the knowledge of all artists, become an impor- 
 tant master. Still, sculpture was not what affected the public 
 mind at that date, and it is unUkely that his own people really 
 understood that m this work was the promise of the culmination 
 of Italian art. Another Madonna, that of Bruges, must have 
 been made about these days ; it may have helped to fill the 
 
18 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 young workman's time until he was recalled by his father in 
 1501 to Florence. He was still a minor, subject to his father's 
 rule. He returned to his home, apparently because he was 
 needed and his help was more accessible than at a distance. He 
 had already begun the support of his family, which was in 
 reality the main occupation that he followed, treating himself 
 harshly that he might give more to them, and meeting with the 
 usual experiences of miscomprehension by his relatives, who 
 could not understand why he did not make more money since 
 he was paid so much. They asked and begged for money which 
 he obtained for them, excusing himself for having written irri- 
 table letters because of distress of mind. At the same time, 
 they reproached him with too great economy, or rather penuri- 
 ousness, and asked him to avoid physical hardships for fear he 
 should become ill. It must have been entirely from a desire to I 
 save money for his family that Michelangelo acquired almost 
 sordid habits. He gave freely, but lived abstemiously, or rather 
 according to the result of the work he hoped to get out of him- 
 self His habits of parsimony may have arisen from that side of 
 his nature which seems to have been averse to the sensual, 
 however sensitive to beauty. It was not the enjoyment of 
 things by himself that resulted from his admirations. 
 
 Among other work done on his return to Florence is that of 
 the colossal David. This was made out of a great block of mar- 
 
MICHELANGELO 19 
 
 ble owned by the Board of Works, of Santa Maria del Fiore, 
 which for a century had remained useless, owing to its having 
 been badly blocked out by the sculptor of that date ; so that its 
 shape was an unpromising one from which to get out a human 
 figure. 
 
 Michelangelo made out of it what we know as the David, 
 getting it out so exactly without any piecing that on the top 
 of the head and on the base some vestige of the rough surface 
 still remains, left purposely as a sculptor's mark. On this he 
 laboured two years, finishing it on the 25th of January, 1504. 
 
 Many famous citizens were called together to decide, in 
 Florentine fashion, where it should be placed, which was left 
 at length to Michelangelo himself, who decided for the right 
 side of the entrance of the old Palace. Among the names of 
 the voters were : San Gallo the architect, Leonardo da Vinci, 
 Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, David Ghirlandajo, and the 
 father of Benvenuto Cellini. 
 
 The idea of the David was a popular symbol of Florence as 
 champion of a small, free community against the tyranny of 
 greater powers. It is an ideal of courage and youthful confi- 
 dence in a righteous cause, embodied in a figure carefully ad- 
 justed to the naturalistic view. 
 
 The extraordinary power of assimilating study and skill as a 
 workman have made it possible for the young sculptor to carry 
 
20 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 out together the conflicting impression of a young man, not 
 fully grown, with head and hands too large, yet of a heroic form, 
 and an energy flred by a great duty. The action, as was loved 
 by Michelangelo, is momentary. The hand holds the piece 
 of wood on which the sling is hung, easily, not grasping, but 
 gently feeling for the proper hold. The sling runs round the 
 back and its centre, filled with stone, is held with the left hand 
 poised on the left shoulder, ready to be loosed. This movement, 
 then, allows the expression of the face to be an important part 
 of the whole story. The statue is too well known to say more ; 
 it is one of the great statues ; the knowledge implied and the 
 execution are both extraordinary, and yet one feels, somehow, 
 that the youth of the artist is embodied in the youth of the 
 statue. 
 
 The statue has remained to us since that time, though in- 
 jured once in some riot. Even with all the good- will that 
 saluted it, mingled that undercurrent of ill-will and ill-luck 
 which marks one of the most successful careers of any man as 
 far as may go a fame, acquired in boyhood and increasing 
 steadily to extreme old age. Jealous hands attempted to de- 
 face the David in the night before its being placed, as other 
 jealous hands were said to have destroyed the next great work 
 of his which was to insure his pre-eminence as a draughtsman 
 over all the other artists of the world. He was now twenty- 
 
MADONNA AND CHILD 
 
 NATIONAL MUSEUM, FLORENCE 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BBOGI 
 
MICHELANGELO 21 
 
 nine years old. When he was asked to prepare the cartoon for 
 a painting to adorn the hall of the great Council in the old 
 Palace, to represent a scene of Florentine history, he chose a 
 moment of the war with Pisa, 1364, when a band of Floren- 
 tines was surprised, bathing, by the English band of mercenaries 
 commanded by Sir John Ilawkwood. Another painting was to 
 be executed by Leonardo da Vinci, his only possible rival at 
 the time. Da Vinci made both cartoon and painting, and both 
 have absolutely disappeared. A study by Rubens gives us a 
 fragment of extraordinary fire, known as the Battle for the 
 Standard, all that remains of the Leonardo. Of Michelangelo's 
 cartoon which was never carried into painting, all that remains 
 with certainty is a famous engraving of a few figures by Marc 
 Antonio. How and when this gigantic drawing disappeared is 
 not known exactly. Evil tongues charged an old enemy of 
 Michelangelo's ; but there are many fates which preside over 
 the destruction of things. For a long time the drawing hung in 
 the great hall it was to adorn, and the artists of the time came 
 to study from it. Their names are too numerous to mention ; 
 they include all who could possibly get to see it ; and with the 
 study of this new dispensation, Raphael begins the great lines 
 of his full development which were again to be increased and 
 broadened by further study of Michelangelo in the Sistinc 
 Chapel. The great cartoon makes a sort of division in the hi.:- 
 
22 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 tory of painting. For the first time, an apparently complete 
 representation of the form and movement of the human body 
 was presented with that knowledge of anatomy that was to be- 
 come common property. 
 
 Upon that, the young man rested for a time, absorbed within 
 himself In a desultory manner, not approved by others, he 
 studied, we are told, Italian verse in its ordinary forms, thus 
 giving way to those extraordinary alternations of dreamy rest 
 and solitude which mark the intervals of his great works ; dur- 
 ing which he retired into himself like a Creator : in so far a 
 type of the meditative artist who really prepares himself most 
 during the periods of inactivity. From this he was awakened 
 by a call from the new Pope, Julius the Second ; a call which 
 was to attach him for ever to the Papacy and the fame of 
 Rome. 
 
 Julius was a man of large and simple ambitions, of impetu- 
 ous and uncompromising spirit. He desired a free Italy and a 
 great Papacy, wishing all great about him, and, among other 
 things, great art. Julius summoned Michelangelo, now famous, 
 but not to the entire world, to come and serve him in Rome. 
 He was not alone: San Gallo, Bramante, and Raphael were 
 among the number whom the Pope gathered together to express 
 through art his views for the glory and power of the Papacy. 
 For some little while Michelangelo remained idle, then the 
 
MICHELANGELO 23 
 
 Pope asked him to make designs for his own tomb, which was 
 to be of extreme importance, of which we liave no accurate 
 account or design, which nev^er was carried out, of which we 
 hav^e some extraordinary fragments, not used, and which was 
 to be the curse of a great artist's Ufe ; in reference to which he 
 looked at all other work and which brought on him enmities 
 and business troubles, and loss of time and health. At once he 
 was rushed off into the mountains to quarry marble and to 
 prepare what was needed for tiiis monument, great enough for 
 him and for the great Pope. 
 
 A large part of the year was spent in this work ; the 
 sculptor returned to find the Pope pressing him, but so friendly 
 as to have a special drawbridge built from the Palace to the 
 artist's lodgings. 
 
 The great Pope and lie were men with a certain similarity of 
 temper and loftiness of purpose, and notwithstanding the quar- 
 rels which ensued between them, the sculptor seems to have re- 
 tained a certain sentiment for this other powerful and violent 
 man. They were each what the Italians call " terrible." That is 
 to say ; free to speak their minds on any and all occasions. 
 
 On one of these occasions, which repeatedly came to him, 
 as to most artists — the claiming of delayed payment from the 
 great patron — Michelangelo was refused entrance a second 
 or third time, notwithstanding the protests of some Bishop 
 
24 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 present. Upon which Michelangelo said : " Tell the Pope if 
 he wishes to see me he can find me elsewhere." Then returning 
 home he ordered all his furniture sold and his servants to fol- 
 low him to Florence; and, taking horse, got that night into 
 Florentine territory, where he stopped in a safe place. Courier 
 upon courier came from Julius to bring him back, wherever he 
 might be. Violence could not be used in a foreign territory 
 and Michelangelo threatened force in self-defence. He gave, 
 however, an answer to the letter of the Pope, in which he de- 
 clined to return, even under the threat of displeasure ; saying 
 that he deserved no such treatment after faithful service ; and 
 that he considered himself free nor wished to be tied up again. 
 
 Therefore he went to Florence, where again the Pope ad- 
 dressed the City, asking his return and threatening reprisal. 
 The artist refused, and proposed even to leave Italy and go to 
 serve the Turk at Constantinople, as he had been asked. The 
 City, however, prevailed upon him to go, with the title of Am- 
 bassador. And he met the Pope at Bologna, a city which Julius 
 had just taken by sheer courage and masterfulness. Some 
 words passed between the two great men ; words of apology 
 and forgiving ; and a few days later Julius asked for his statue 
 to be placed in the city to establish the fact of his lordship. 
 
 The gigantic statue held up its right hand in doubtful atti- 
 tude of blessing or of threat ; and in the other, by Julius's or- 
 
MICHELANGELO 25 
 
 der, it held a sword instead of a book. " What book ? " he had 
 said. "A sword; I know nothing about letters, not L" This 
 figure, three times the size of life, was made, and cast with dif- 
 ficulty, twice ; and left unpaid for ; as with much of the work 
 done for Julius, who meant generously, but forgot, absorbed in 
 the great strain of many great things. The statue has disap- 
 peared. A revolt in 1511 was the occasion of its destruction, 
 and we are somewhat uncertain even of how it looked. Some- 
 where or other the head is hidden. It had been saved and 
 weighed six hundred pounds. 
 
 THE SISTINE CHAPEL, 1509 
 
 A brief absence to Florence and Michelangelo was again 
 called back to Rome. We know the date, because his father 
 emancipated the son, March 13, 1508, which gave him full mas- 
 tery over his property and his person. The Pope delayed the 
 work on the tomb. He had fixed upon a wish to have the 
 Papal Chapel of Pope Sixtus, now known as the Sistine, 
 painted as to its vault. The walls had already been decorated 
 by various masters whose works remain. The friends of Michel- 
 angelo and Michelangelo himself through all his Ufe be- 
 lieved that he had been asked to do this at the suggestion of 
 enemies who wished to embroil him with the Pope and to pre- 
 vent his going on with the great project of the tomb, upon 
 
26 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 which he had set his heart ; so that it is rehited that Bramante, 
 the architect, a man of great talent, but not an honest man, a 
 manager and an intriguer, the head of a band of artists includ- 
 ing Raphael himself, proposed the scheme of Michael's painting 
 the vault with the hope that either he would refuse and dis- 
 please the Pope, or accepting, fail ; and in either case Raphael 
 might obtain the order. Of this, as I say, Michael remained 
 convinced during his long life. He did not wish to take the 
 difficult work upon his shoulders ; he had scarcely painted, and 
 he must have felt that weight which oppresses the artist of 
 whom still more is expected than he has given before. Still it 
 was a habit of the day to ask almost anything of men of great 
 capacity, and in that way the project was not as strange as it 
 might appear. 
 
 Protesting at every opportunity that painting was not his 
 trade, with a "God help me" Michelangelo undertook the 
 painting of the great vault, the work by which, after all, he is 
 best known and best measured, if it be possible to use the 
 word " measured " for one of the principal artists of history. 
 For there are no foreknown limits of art ; all that we know of 
 the laws of art comes from the works of certain men which 
 establish these limits. And the painter Parrhasius spoke with 
 Greek distinction when he said that he had defined certain lim- 
 its by what he had done. 
 
MICHELANGELO 27 
 
 Michelangelo had struggled greatly to be excused, propos- 
 ing other artists in his place, but the Pope acted upon him 
 like the head of Medusa, as he has jestingly remarked. Around 
 the work which he did cluster many legends and stories, all 
 unessential and frequently inaccurate ; for the man was soli- 
 tary, and as in the case of most great workers, it is specially 
 during the creation of the most important works of art that 
 we know less of what occupies the minds of their makers. The 
 great roof had to be prepared, and the building itself was 
 unsafe and had later to be made more stable. Michael had the 
 usual difficulties of the painter in establishing these facts, which 
 were outside of his control, but which tended to an endanger- 
 ing of his work during its progress and after completion. He 
 was abundantly right, as we know to-day by the many cracks 
 and seams and spottings that disfigure the work; and he ap- 
 pears to have wished to draw attention to this possibility for 
 the instruction of his lord and patron, for he has painted him- 
 self here and there artificial cracks, anticipating the possible 
 changes of the future. 
 
 We know that he was often discouraged, and that he could 
 not obtain the help of experienced hands from the very fact 
 that they were already skilled, and hence unwilling or unfit to 
 fall into the new technique, which he invented as he went 
 along. 
 
28 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 So the tradition has grown of his having painted these ten 
 thousand square feet of surface, unaided. But, of course, it is 
 not so. The mechanical necessities called for help, and he must 
 have used it. It is, notwithstanding, the most extraordinary 
 piece of technical work ever accomplished, both in perfection 
 of handling and in the fabulous rapidity of the execution. Some 
 of the most important and celebrated of the giant figures which 
 fill this space have been painted within two or four days, and 
 their finish is as admirable as their conception. But it is the 
 finish of the great master. There is nothing more done than 
 what tells the story. 
 
 Allowing for all interruptions, he was occupied from 1509 
 to 1512, from the inception to the final uncovering. The Pope 
 followed the work constantly, and in his eagerness had the 
 ceiling uncovered before the work was completed — on the 1st 
 of November, 1509. The effect on the world of Rome and on 
 the whole Italian world is one of the great triumphs of art. 
 Artists recognised that a new style had been introduced, and 
 that the limits of the art of painting had extended beyond their 
 dreams. It is one of the intellectual honours of Italy that this 
 was recognised on that very day, and that Michelangelo was 
 placed almost where he is now. The greater meanings, the ex- 
 treme reach of the artist, were not fully understood, it is true, 
 and even the last four hundred years have only begun to show 
 
O H p 
 
MICHELANGELO 29 
 
 us by what a distance this man s work is separated from that 
 of all others. He himself was necessarily dissatisfied with the 
 result, writing to his father that the blame of insuccess was not 
 entirely his own, but belonged to the times, which he judged 
 *' unfavourable for art." In theory he was placed, as his friend 
 and pupil Condivi says, " beyond the reach of envy," but in 
 reality that very moment of triumph drew upon him again the 
 machinations of the envious. In the usual way of business, the 
 same then as we know to-day, his success was used to ask for 
 work by others, that the chapel should contain specimens of 
 other artists, who would thus benefit by the superiority of his 
 work to obtain commissions for themselves. Eramante at once 
 asked the Pope that Raphael might have a share in the paint- 
 ing of the Chapel. The Raphael of that day was not the one 
 we know. He had not yet studied and adapted the forms of 
 Michelangelo to his own genius, so that the request was more 
 preposterous even than it was unjust. For Raphael began at 
 once to modify his style in his usual way by the example of 
 Michelangelo. He perhaps of all men could best discern the 
 extreme importance of the new phase of art, and thanked 
 heaven, we are told, that he was born during the lifetime of 
 the great painter. Michelangelo's indignation at the plot 
 broke up the project. He laid it all before the Pope, and ex- 
 posed the ill-doings of Bramante in Bramante's own work as 
 
30 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 an architect, which, hurried by incessant orders, was often un- 
 sound and dangerous. The struggle between them, or rather 
 between Michelangelo and the knot of intriguers that filled 
 Rome in that day of great enterprises, and consequent jeal- 
 ousies, lasted for many subsequent years, stopped JMichelan- 
 gelo's future work, and embittered the remainder of his life. 
 He outlived all, remaining the undisputed head of art, but 
 we owe to this the barrenness for many years of one of the 
 greatest producers known to the world. Julius stood by Michel- 
 angelo to his death, and the chapel went on, the vault being com- 
 pleted within the date that we know — October, 1512. The artist 
 speaks of his having endured "great hardships, illness, and 
 overwhelming labour." He was badly paid and distressed by 
 the demands of his family, who had grown to depend upon 
 him. Naturally they were unfeeling, or rather they could not 
 understand. The disasters of his country preyed upon him, as 
 well as his anxiety for the fortunes of his family, endangered 
 by the struggles of the politics of Florence. His great patron, 
 the Pope, was opposed to what Michael believed to be the 
 interests of Florence, and the artist's friendship for his master 
 must have struggled continually with the feelings of the born 
 and bred repubhcan. And it is also to the credit of the great 
 Pope that these underlying differences did not disturb his good- 
 will toward the man whom he employed for the glory of the 
 
MICHELANGELO 31 
 
 Papacy. It was an age, moreover, when personal valour and 
 value was admired beyond anything else, and rarely before or 
 after has the individual flourished in such magnificence. 
 
 The great vault of the Sistine is too well known, either by 
 sight, or by engraving, or photograph, or even by description, 
 for me to describe it again, or even to analyse its importance. 
 Its importance is not only one of technical beauties, but arises 
 from its being one of the greatest and most important stretches, 
 upon which an artist has been able to express what is in reality 
 himself To-day we do not understand art as expression of 
 sentiment : its vieans — imitation — seem to us its end. Hence 
 the Sistine is far away from the modern artist. 
 
 As I said before, these years of the artist's work are visible 
 to us almost only by his work. We have remaining his ordi- 
 nary letters of family or business intercourse, perhaps some 
 verses, but we feel that all that has happened outside, and the 
 evolution of the master's own mind, is written out in the sub- 
 jects and in the figures of the great painting. We shall never 
 know exactly, and the form of art that he employed must 
 always be mysterious in its absolute meaning, so that it pre- 
 sents intentions that vary according to the mind of him who 
 looks at it. The whole scheme is that of a picture, according 
 to the Bible, of the Creation of Man, his having sinned, his 
 being punished, his being admonished, his obstinacy in evil ; 
 
32 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 and also of the hope of escaping from sin, held out by the 
 Prophets; of a better day in which sin shall dwindle, promised 
 by the Prophets of the Law, and by the Sibyls of the so-called 
 Pagan world, who represent the constant aspiration of all man- 
 kind toward good and the hope of its final triumph. This vast 
 story is told in the form of a decoration. So that the poetic 
 designs, the dramatic expositions, the tragic figures are in 
 reality subsidiary parts of architectonic divisions and orna- 
 mental setting. This is not visible to our mind. We have 
 grown away, or fallen away, from the greater ideas of subservi- 
 ence to unity ; the modern mind, meaning thereby the average 
 artistic practitioner of to-day, would make the story-part 
 of his work — what we call the picture — so important as to 
 destroy the sense of a wall-embroidery. The greater man, ca- 
 pable of innumerable stories and master of the drama, has, 
 on the contrary, made all the pictures, which themselves are 
 among the celebrated works of man, subject to a great plan of 
 ornamentation. It is the richest in planning ever made. The 
 resources of the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting 
 have been called upon to unite in one great patterning of the 
 ceiling. The feeling of sculpture is as complete as if these 
 many figures had been in reality carved, but it is only a feel- 
 ing. There is only the slight deception necessary to bind them 
 to the simulated architecture, which, itself merely decorative, 
 
 I 
 
THE DELPHIC SIBYL 
 
 THE SISTINE CHAPEL 
 PHOTOGKAPH BY ALINARI 
 
MICHELANGELO 33 
 
 is still the web of the entire work. As this sculpture and archi- 
 tecture is represented by painting, that painting also is treated 
 as painting, and nowhere, even with the greatest colourists, has 
 a bolder and more logical use of the divisions of light which 
 we call tlie colours been applied to a surface. The unity is so 
 great, the balance of effects so harmonious, that it is only by 
 study that we see expressed in the methods of this painting 
 the ancient rules, handed down by practice, which unite with 
 the latest teaching of modern scientific colouring. 
 
 It would be hopelessly lengthy to describe the stories and 
 the characters which cover the great vault ; moreover, they are 
 among the best known of fiimous works, and any photograph 
 tells more than the forms of another method of expression. 
 But besides the Prophets and Sibyls and ancestors of the 
 Christ, the ornamentation consists largely of representations, 
 more or less nude, of the human form treated as if interchange- 
 able with any conventional shape, as if one shape were as easy 
 to give as another ; and yet they are apparently full of some 
 singular meaning, as if within them were confined the personal 
 story of the artist who in the dramas and their expounders 
 could not be so entirely himself In that way, they are sepa 
 rated from any previous work. Through all the rest, Michel- 
 angelo's originality is based on the previous work of Italy 
 back to the obscurest intentions of the JMiddle Ages. The half 
 
34 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 expressed desires of earlier sculptors are here completed. So 
 intimate is the connection that the student, as he goes through 
 the many details, will call up the memories of earlier frag- 
 ments inspired by a similar intensity. We think of this great 
 work as the flowering of the Renaissance. It is in reality the 
 last expression of the impulse and feeling of Mediaeval Europe, 
 But it is expressed in a new rhythm of form, that beats 
 through every figure, and with a knowledge of structure and a 
 representation unknown before. The extraordinary love of 
 beauty that possessed the artist, his sensitiveness to the won- 
 ders of the human form, cover the deeper feelings which he 
 had in common with the men of a more intense past. One 
 would like to associate with the meanings of the great vault 
 some of Michelangelo's own thoughts as expressed in words, 
 but on all that there is silence. We do not even know whether 
 those of his poems that reflect feelings, which we might con- 
 nect with it, belong to this period, but we feel the fiery tem- 
 perament when, much later, he wrote : 
 
 " Give me the time when loose the reins I flung 
 
 Upon the neck of galloping desire. 
 Give me the angel face that now among 
 
 The angels — tempers Heaven with its fire. 
 Give the quick step that now is grown so old. 
 
 The ready tears 
 
MICHELANGELO 35 
 
 ''Give me again ye fountains and ye streams 
 
 That flood of life^ not yours that swells your front 
 
 Beyond the natural fulness of your wont. 
 I gave, and I take back as it beseems. 
 And thou dense choking atmosphere on high 
 
 Disperse thy fog of sighs — for it is mine. 
 
 And make the glory of the sun to shine 
 Again on my dim eyes. O Earth and Sky. 
 
 "Give me again the footsteps I have trod. 
 
 Let the paths grow where I walked them bare. 
 The echoes where I waked them with my prayer 
 Be deaf — and let those eyes — those eyes, O God, 
 Give me the light I lent them. . . ."* 
 
 Michelangelo had thus modestly finished the great vault at 
 the end of 1512, and Pope Julius died in February, 1513. One 
 of the Medici succeeded him under the name, famous to us, 
 of Leo X. An era of peace was hoped for under a ruler less 
 strenuous than Julius, fond of art and literature, and fonder 
 still of his own ease. Michael might have looked to friendly 
 encouragement from this man whom he had known at his 
 father's table, and who was another son of artistic Florence. 
 But we know that Leo was offended by the characteristics of 
 Michelangelo, and surrounded as he was by a lower class of 
 men, could not have found a place for the representative of re- 
 
 * Translation of John Jay Chapman. 
 
36 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 publican directness. Full play was now given to the sr/ia/ler 
 minds, either jealous of the great master, or attempting to use 
 him for their own devices. 
 
 We are limited by whatever our definition of life may be, 
 high or low. The man of honour can hardly understand the 
 position of those who liedge in matters of integrity and Mich- 
 ael suffered by his lofty ideal of Hfe. He could not under- 
 stand his enemies, nor how they tried to get his work from 
 him on the very basis of its excellence. He himself recom- 
 mended them in his place many times. Nor could they under- 
 stand why justice was his ideal, thirsted for in a world of com- 
 promise. In that he is singular and alone above all his contem- 
 poraries; they could not breathe the air in which he lived. Nor 
 could he breathe in theirs. The court was what courts are, but 
 here tainted with a looseness which scandalised the world. 
 The great families of Italy who had struggled to obtain the 
 Papacy for national or family use, carried into it their past — 
 again Christ slept in the boat of Peter. 
 
 Nor was Michael a possible hanger-on ; apart from his self- 
 respect he held a strenuous ideal of life. He has explained him- 
 self in the light of common sense : " Those," he says, " whom 
 their profession obliges to lead a recluse life, ought in common 
 justice at least to be tolerated. What claim by right have you 
 on them ? Why should you force them to take part in those 
 
THE THINKER 
 
 TOMB OF LORENZO DI MEDICI 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUX, CLEMENT & CO 
 
]\1 1 C H E L A N G E L O 37 
 
 vain pastimes, which love for a quiet life induces them to shun? 
 Do you not know that there are sciences which demand the 
 whole of a man ? " 
 
 He meanwhile contracted anew with the heirs of Julius for 
 another arrangement of the dead Pope's monument, an arrange- 
 ment which was again to bring more trouble and difficulty upon 
 him by entangling him in engagements sure to conflict with 
 those he would owe to the new Pope. Julius had been indebted 
 indeed to him, apparently upon every piece of work accom- 
 plished, intending perhaps to make all right for the man he so 
 thoroughly appreciated. Michelangelo had begun upon the 
 new project, employing numerous work-people, masters from 
 Florence, and ordering supplies of marble. What remains of 
 the unfinished tomb belongs perhaps to this period. He writes 
 (1515) : " I am forced to put great strain upon myself this sum- 
 mer in order to complete my undertaking, for I think that I 
 shall soon be obliged to enter the Pope's service." These two 
 years of work were destined to be lost, for the Pope resolved 
 to build a new facade to the Church of San Lorenzo in Flor- 
 ence, erected by his family and other magnates, where lay his 
 father, the great Lorenzo. For this fa9ade he asked designs, 
 and a success, full of ill-luck, brought the choice upon Michel- 
 angelo's design. What it was to be exactly we do not know, 
 but it became an excuse for the sending of Michelangelo to the 
 
38 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 mountains of Carrara to excavate the necessary marbles, and 
 prepare the roads by which they should be carried to the sea. 
 In this tedious undertaking he was kept for a long time, thereby 
 wasting energies in work which might have been accomplished 
 by others, and becoming entangled in difficulties with the great 
 Urbino family of whom Julius had been one, and with whom 
 he had engaged to carry out the tomb of their illustrious rela- 
 tive. They had hoped, and he had hoped to protect himself by 
 clauses of contract, which should debar him from other work, 
 but the arbitrary power of the Pope interfered and placed him 
 for years in the position of antagonising the wishes of his pres- 
 ent master, and those of the influential family that claimed his 
 services also. There were also political difficulties complicated 
 by opposing business interests that were to make him still 
 more obnoxious to important people, for the Florentines wished 
 the use of certain other quarries and the Duke of Carrara 
 claimed engagements for using his. The outspokenness of 
 Michelangelo was perpetually in the way of either scheme 
 being carried out for the mere benefit of the owners of these 
 quarries, and both parties made him feel their displeasure. He 
 had to be in the mountains and then in Florence, and until 1520 
 he was not freed from his charge of quarrying and of road mak- 
 ing. Meanwhile he worked as he could on statues, which per- 
 haps may have been meant for the great tomb, and calmed his 
 
MICHELANGELO 39 
 
 sense of injury and insult during these four years of compul- 
 sory employment by occasional arduous work. During that 
 time he was asked to prepare for the commission of the sepul- 
 chral monuments of some of the later Medici, eventually car- 
 ried out under strange circumstances. All this kept him away 
 from Rome, to the great distress of his friends, who wished him 
 there and tried to urge him back into various competitions de- 
 clined by him. 
 
 On the 1st of December the Pope died suddenly, and for a 
 moment Adrian of Utrecht reigned in his stead — a good man, 
 a strict one, not devoid of love of art, but not of Italian art, and 
 with the wishes of a reformer in morals and religion. He was 
 thus unpopular with the artists and functionaries, but his ad- 
 vent gave this relief to Michael, that he was able to resume work 
 again unchallenged on his beloved project, the tomb of Julius. 
 That only for a short time, for another Medici was elected Pope 
 in November, 1523, taking the name of Clement as a mark of 
 his desire to forgive and make peace in Church and State. He 
 was a man of duties, but also with the traditional love of cul- 
 ture of his family and city, and friendly to that Michael whom 
 he had known at home, and whom he treated during his reign 
 with a consideration beyond that of other Popes. The goodwill 
 of the Pope did not extend, however, to granting the artist's 
 wishes to continue solely on the monument of Julius, and was 
 
40 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 in some ways a misunderstanding of the great artist. Michelan- 
 gelo not being married, and living an exemplary life, the Pope 
 wished that he should take orders so that he might belong more 
 fully to himself; perhaps also with some feeling that obedience 
 would be easier in the new relation, which had its definite 
 duties and privileges. This offer Michelangelo declined, as he 
 had also declined one of the most curious propositions wliich 
 that time, believing in personal value, has left on record. Thi.s 
 was to become the governor of one of the young Medici, des- 
 tined to be the terrible warrior, the leader of Italians, under i\^ 
 name of "John of the Black Bands." This is a mere incident, 
 but one of tlie most singular in the extraordinary career of 
 Michelangelo. It testifies, however, to the accumulated ap- 
 preciation of the seriousness of tlie man's character that he 
 should be thought of as an educator in a family whose actions 
 and influence in Florence he had opposed as far as his position 
 allowed. 
 
 This service of the Medici and this opposition to them was 
 again to occupy him in the most striking ways during the next 
 few years. Clement had before this, in the name of Leo, ordered 
 him to take up the work of the Laurentian I^ibrary and Chapel, 
 interfering again with the work on Julius's tomb, perhaps 
 on purpose. Michelangelo had yielded, though he secretly 
 worked at the statues of the tomb. In that usual secrecy whicl? 
 
MICHELANGELO 41 
 
 attends the work of most great artists, he was accused by the 
 heirs of Juhus in Rome of spending all his time in pleasure, the 
 usual explanation for the withdrawal of the hard worker from 
 pleasure. He was also charged with having received much 
 money from Julius, and of doing nothing about it. We know 
 the contrary to-day. 
 
 There was one grave consideration which appealed to him at 
 the time when " verily there was need of patience," and that was 
 the appeal to civic pride, thus expressed by Salviati to him: 
 " Reflect tliat having commenced a work of this nature, our 
 City of Florence is under great obligations to thee, and will be 
 permanently indebted to all of thine house." Not only was the 
 work distasteful to Michael's one lifelong wish to complete 
 the great tomb of Julius, but he did not consider himself an 
 architect, and liad not yet made those later studies, which have 
 placed him among the few extraordinary names in that form 
 of art. 
 
 The Pope managed to arrange some momentary agreement 
 with the heirs of Julius, and he returned again to Florence. 
 Aware perhaps of the secrets of conspiracies and political 
 movements, but not taking part in them, Michelangelo 
 seems to have had an instinct of change or danger beyond the 
 ordinary. He may be said to have fled from Rome with a fore- 
 knowledge of the curse about to fall upon the city, its capture 
 
42 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 and sack, of which we have the terrible record. As later he 
 helped to fortify Rome, he may have understood how defence- 
 less was the city. 
 
 With his return to Florence broke out the revolution, which 
 exiled the Medici and forced the now republican city to fortify 
 in expectation of an attack sure to come : again Michelangelo 
 was called upon and made Commissary- General. The record 
 of his work is too long for more than a mention. He threw 
 himself into the work and may be said to have arrested by 
 his provision the taking of the city. Here again his instinct of 
 danger and his straightforwardness brought him into trouble. 
 He denounced as a traitor the man who really was to betray 
 the city. Instead of thanks he received insult, was accused of 
 cowardice, and in danger of his life, he rode out of the gates 
 with two of his men and made for Venice. There he was pur- 
 sued with supplication and promises and returned through 
 great perils to help again in the defence. In this he worked 
 as before, devising ways of protection during the year through 
 which the war lasted. Then occurred what he had predicted — 
 an entrance through the treason of the man he had accused. 
 The city was captured and sacked, and Michael went into hid- 
 ing to escape certain death. Clement, however, wrote to the 
 new government, asking protection and courteous treatment 
 for Michelangelo, who if found was to go on with his work. 
 
MICHELANGELO 43 
 
 so that lie again returned to the sculptures of the Chapel, 
 " driven," says Condivi, " by fear rather than love. And in- 
 deed," continues Condivi, " none of these statues have ever had 
 the last touch, though they have been carried out in such a 
 way that the excellency is apparent, nor does the unfinished 
 part injure the absolute perfection df the work." These are the 
 great statues of Italy, rivals of the Greek, equal to anything 
 that man has done unless we suppose that the Minerva or the 
 Jove of Phidias may have reached further. They are known by 
 names : The Thinker,* Dawn, Day, Evening, and Night. The 
 Dawn perhaps belongs to happier days ; but we do not know 
 exactly when the others were projected, in intention or in 
 sketches, from the sculptor's thought. They are all charged with 
 some abundant meaning, inexpressible by words, and that all this 
 meaning is terrible, even in its most gentle expression, becomes 
 evident when we turn toward the unfinished statue of the Vir- 
 gin and Child, whose lines and motion are emphatic, as was 
 Michelangelo's habit; for he kept always to Savonarola's 
 idealisation of Mary as the Prophetess. There the meaning is 
 evident — an intention of love and peace. The statue of the 
 Duke Julian is apparently at peace; he even fingers the money 
 
 * In Italian "II Pensieroso ;" we translate "The Thinker," but it means not neces- 
 sarily the follower of abstract thought but the man who doubts the course he shall 
 follow. 
 
44 G R E A T M A S T E 11 S 
 
 in his hand in a careless way, but there is unsatisfactory suc- 
 cess in the flice and powerful body. He is not apart from the 
 anxiety of mind that we discern under the shadow of the great 
 helmet whicli hides the face of the other prince. 
 
 We have some verses by JMichelangelo in answer to others 
 written in praise of the Night, sleeping and dreaming on the 
 tomb below tlie statue of Duke Julian : 
 
 " Grateful is sleep, but more to be of stone 
 So long as ruin and dishonour reign : 
 Neither to hear nor feel is my great gain : 
 Then wake me not; speak in an imdertone " 
 
 Whatever form the thoughts of Michael may have taken 
 during this work, wiiatever contempt he may have felt for the two 
 princes whom he knew, and for whose mean or worthless memory 
 he was engaged in building a record of art, he never departed 
 from the dreams of beauty in which he w^orked. Tlie beautiful 
 bodies, their splendid movements, the nobility of their make, 
 nay, even the imaginary fiices of the two princes, are among the 
 most lovely creations of man ; it is we who are called upon to 
 supply some hidden meaning, all through the beauty of ex- 
 pression. There is no need of calling up the meaning w^hich a 
 soul that hated meanness and brutality might well have carried 
 in his mind ; nor of the lesser feelings of civic animosity in a 
 man who had struggled for another ideal of the State. Tlie 
 
^IICHELANGELO 45 
 
 thought of Life, divided into days, beginning in the dawn and 
 ending with night, and of Eternity beginning with Death, is 
 sufficient. But no hope is carried in the endless round of the 
 divisions of the Day. One might pursue this feeUng even into 
 the details of the architectural forms, which are used as a back- 
 ground for the figures and the tombs. They do not suit tiie 
 strict architectural mind any more than the sculpture suits the 
 professional sculptor, or Michelangelo's painting the mere 
 painter, but the whole appearance as you and I look at it to- 
 gether is a page to challenge the powers of any architect to 
 better. Most of the details are not the master's : parts are 
 probably changed, nor do we know exactly what others were 
 meant. Also we miss to-day the rich paintings by John of 
 Udine which Michael ordered for the walls and ceiling. They 
 were w^hitewashed after his death to give place to possible 
 jobbery by the men who used the fame of Michelangelo as 
 excuse for their own mediocrity— the great penalty that fol- 
 lows all noble ideas and all noble lives. Fortunately only the 
 whitewash is there. Nothing further was ever done by Vasari 
 and other exploiters of the old man's name. 
 
 Again Michelangelo feared for his life. His work was done, 
 and the brutal Duke of Florence hated him for many causes. 
 The Pope had forced him to repay moneys owing to JNIichel- 
 angelo, and Michelangelo had refused to help him in the 
 
46 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 fortification intended for the terrorising of Florence. These 
 causes I mention. They are not necessary to account for a 
 hatred of the base for the noble. " There is no doubt," says 
 Condi vi, " that but for the Pope s protection Michael would 
 have been removed from this world." In 1534 he left Florence 
 and never returned. " It was certainly by God's aid that he 
 happened to be away from Florence when Clement died." Cle- 
 ment had endeavoured, both by advice and authority, to free 
 him from a false position with regard to the advances, claimed 
 by the executors of Pope Julius, to have been made by the 
 Pope. The contrary was at length proven, and a final com- 
 promise was made through the Pope, notwithstanding Michel- 
 angelo's desire to carry out the contract in full. But there was 
 no one to advance the moneys, and the result, as we know, was 
 that of the fragmentary fa9ade against which the famous Moses 
 is placed, which was to have been one of the very many figures 
 necessary to the original scheme. Michael had fallen among law- 
 yers and dishonest men of affairs who even then managed to 
 falsify accounts and contracts, that gave him later still more 
 vexation. 
 
 THE PAINTING OF THE LAST JUDGMENT, 1534 
 
 Again Michelangelo was to be forced to the making of one 
 of his greatest works against his will, and against his vio- 
 
MICHELANGELO 47 
 
 lent desire to carry out the long-deferred contract for the tomb 
 of Julius. He had come back to Rome to carry out at length 
 this thwarted purpose. One month later, October, 1534, Alex- 
 ander Farnese became Pope under the name of Paul HL One 
 of the Pope's first wishes was to have Michelangelo in his 
 service. And against the artist's prayer to allow him to carry 
 out these engagements of honour, the Pope exclaimed : " I have 
 entertained this wish for thirty years, and now that I am Pope, 
 shall I not realise it ? " 
 
 Again Michelangelo thought of flight from Rome as an 
 escape and made his preparations; but remembering how im- 
 possible it had been to escape from the previous demands of 
 former Popes, wherever he fled, he yielded to the honours con- 
 ferred upon him, which made him chief architect, sculptor, and 
 painter with a salary for life. 
 
 The previous Pope Clement, after much meditation upon 
 subjects, chose the Last Judgment, for the theme of the wall- 
 painting above the altar of the Sistine Chapel. This then Paul 
 HL ordered to be carried out by Michelangelo. While the 
 necessary slow preparations of the wall were made, Michael 
 laboured in secret on the tomb of Pope Julius, that one desire 
 of his heart which he was never to see finished as he had 
 planned. The Pope's power, and that fatigue which attends the 
 carrying out of enterprises by lieirs and successors, managed to 
 
48 CHEAT MASTERS 
 
 induce a compromise by which the Urbiiio Princes conscuLcd 
 to a modification of the scheme, and by Papal brief JMichael 
 was ordered and allowed to enter into a new form of contract, 
 the Pope acknowledging at length that it was by obedience to 
 Papal commands that the artist had not been able to carry out 
 his engagements. 
 
 Michelangelo was at work on the great painting in 1536. 
 It was completed in 1541 when he was sixty-six years of age. 
 Few works of art have elicited more contradictory admiration. 
 When completed it seemed to the artists of the day a grammar 
 of the representation of the human body. All the old man's 
 knowledge of anatomy and of the movement of the human 
 body appeared to tlie men of his day to be expressed in this 
 great document of learning. For most of them, in a period of 
 general deadening of feeling, tlie astounding comprehension of 
 the human form was sufficient for the entire meaning and work. 
 At all moments of change, technique — the manner of doing 
 things — seems to be the main object of admiration. And the 
 painting was not only a monument of consummate learning, 
 never equalled, but was painted with an ease and rapidity 
 astonishing even in that period of most accomplished and facile 
 workmen. For twenty-two years, which had passed between 
 his paintings on the vault and this great task, JMichael seems 
 to have painted but once ; and yet the practical execution of 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 
 
 THE SISTINE CHAPEL 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRA UN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
MICHELANGELO 49 
 
 the Last Judgment is still more certain and facile than the 
 earlier work, which itself is one of the most remarkable pieces 
 of execution that ever came from a painter's hand. We usually 
 find that the abandonment of the practice of art entails a cer- 
 tain hesitancy upon its being again taken up. Here, on the 
 contrary, we can follow the artist's confidence in his own 
 powers, which we can gauge most accurately, as the methods 
 of fresco allow us to tell just how much work the painter does 
 in a day. Its execution is as careful and delicate as if it were 
 slow work, while we know that some of these gigantic figures, 
 replete with observation of detailed facts, have been painted in 
 a single day. This touches a point of his character, a side of the 
 mind or soul, that forced him, as it has others, to a fierce con- 
 centration of will and sentiment, which, increasing the interest 
 taken, drove attention and memory to an extreme unused by 
 the ordinary mind, except at moments of great danger or great 
 exaltation. And these great days of work the artist paid for by 
 other days of fatigue. He says of himself some years before : 
 " I have much work to do and am old and unwilling, so that if 
 I work for a day I must rest for four." This capacity for over- 
 straining followed IMichelangelo through all his life and all 
 his work. We know by the testimony of a French sculptor, 
 who saw him at work, that he drove the mallet and chisel in 
 such a way as to seem to endanger the very marble he was 
 
50 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 cutting. There is a year's work only on the painting which 
 occupied him most of the time for five years. 
 
 It is necessary to speak of the make of the great painting 
 because it is one of the great technical monuments, though 
 damaged and degraded by the indifference of man and by the 
 necessities of use. Nails have been driven in it to secure the 
 framework of hangings ; and the smoke of centuries of tapers 
 and of incense have made of this, that was once a painting, 
 only a large and grim cartoon. But nothing can absolutely 
 destroy it, its arrangement of divisions is of such importance. 
 There was also in the mind of the artist a certain balance of 
 light and shade and use of the same for effect, which tells, even 
 in the poor photographs that accompany this inadequate 
 notice. Not only is the painting the greatest example of a cer- 
 tain side of all art and the most consummate representation of 
 the learned art of the time, but it is the last limit reached in 
 the conveying of personal sentiment. 
 
 Perhaps on that side the great work was understood only 
 by a few, but who can tell ? The Pope himself followed it with 
 interest, and personally understood the terrible meaning con- 
 veyed in a subject not usually placed over the altar of Redemp- 
 tion. By the Pope, also a lover of art, understanding, perhaps, 
 the intentions of the painter, his representation of all these 
 figures as mostly nude seems to have been accepted not only 
 
MICHELANGELO 51 
 
 with sympathy, but with the defence of the artist. Later, many 
 were shocked and much offence was taken at the supposed 
 immodesty. The great Aretino, the writer of obscene hterature, 
 the blackmailer and journalist, has left somewhere a letter of 
 attack which may never have been sent; but he would not 
 have written had he not depended upon support from many 
 minds shocked, as still many are, by the representation of so 
 much nude form. So he said: "The Pagans, when they modelled 
 the Diana, gave her clothes ; and here comes a Christian who, 
 because he rates art higher than the faith, deems it a proper 
 spectacle to portray martyrs and virgins in improper attitudes. 
 Our souls need the tranquil emotion of piety more than the 
 lively impressions of plastic art. May God, then, inspire his Holi- 
 ness Paul with the same thoughts He instilled into Gregory of 
 blessed memory, who rather chose to despoil Rome of the 
 proud statues of Pagan deities, than to let their magnificence 
 deprive the humbler images of the devotion of the people." This 
 voicing of the infamous Aretino has not only been the objec- 
 tion of the libertine and the scoffer, but that of many sincerely 
 pious people, troubled by the fierce representation of Divine 
 wrath, and by the artist's literal acceptance of a resurrection 
 without clothing, which to most of us is a part of ourselves. It 
 may be that in the revolution of thought and taste nothing but 
 the conservatism of Rome has saved the painting. This protest 
 
52 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 of the time, howev er, is worth noting, as showing that Michel- 
 angelo's use of the nude with such indifference was not merely 
 according to the spirit of the time, but rather against it. Per- 
 haps the Pope understood it better than the public. 
 
 As usual with Michelangelo, as usual with the greater 
 artists, it is just during the painting of this great expression of 
 feeling that we have no other record of his inner life. About 
 this time must have begun the attachment to Vittoria Colonna, 
 "Of whose divine spirit he became enamoured." At this time, 
 too, "with great study and attention, he read the sacred scrip- 
 tures, both the Old and the New Testaments ; loving, moreover, 
 the writings of Savonarola, for whom he had always had a 
 great affection, retaining in his mind, even the memory of his 
 voice when living." 
 
 " Also was loved by him the beauty of the body, as by one 
 wlio understood it best. And in such kind, loved, as to shock 
 carnal men who cannot understand the love of beauty, except 
 dishonestly ; and cannot understand how, not only with nim 
 no ugly thoughts were born, but that he loved not only the 
 beauty of man, but universally all beautiful things, admiring 
 all with a marvelling affection. In that way no man was 
 further from the idea of the making his great painting a mere 
 expression of art, as it has appeared to many, confined within 
 the self-imposed necessity of a given formula. ' Why should 
 
MICHELANGELO 53 
 
 not,' is also the feeling of many delicate souls, ' such a Last 
 Judgment as that of Fra Angehco's sweet pencil be there, 
 instead of the terrible page of the impartial judgment ? Are 
 there not softer sides to the teaching of the gospel ? Are not 
 the promises of forgiveness and of mercy more consonant with 
 the sacred service of the chapel ? ' It may be so ; but in 
 the domain of thought the unity of the teaching of the great 
 Vault with that of the great painting above the altar, can 
 only be carried out in some such way. Even in the forms of 
 the figures of the Last Judgment, we see the continuation of 
 the spirit that animates those in the Vault above. As those 
 are the expressions by the body of Michelangelo's mem- 
 ories of the scripture, so it is he, himself, who is placed in 
 each one of the many bodies that represent the elect and 
 the unforgiven. He has used the body absolutely, as a musi- 
 cian uses notes to express emotion. Perhaps separated more 
 and more from other men and resorting less and less to 
 nature and to observation, he has not mitigated his own 
 strenuous feeling by passing it into something seen. The 
 figures of the Last Judgment are more decidedly abstractions 
 of feeling. But what fitter decoration could be used for the 
 chapel of the successor to the keys of St. Peter? What 
 better exposition over ceiling and wall of the idea of responsi- 
 bility? What greater reminder of the seriousness of obliga- 
 
54 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 tion, of the necessity of a final accounting before which even 
 * the just shall scarcely be secure ' ? " " Vix Justus sit securus." 
 
 All the more does one feel this when the pomp of the 
 world and of fashion fills the chapel, and in reserved places sit 
 the elect and the ordinators of law and justice. 
 
 The great prose of the Dies Ivse : " That day of wrath, 
 that dreadful day, Shall the whole world in ashes lay. As 
 David and the Sibyls say," echoes also in the pictures on roof 
 and wall. David is there and the Sibyls and all the Prophets ; 
 and their teaching is unfolded in the meaning of the Last 
 Judgment. 
 
 The sweetness of the earlier work does not appear in the 
 later design above the altar ; but the other great meanings are 
 told without flinching. Pope and prince can read them 
 written large. The Christ above is now the Eternal Judge. 
 Death and Hell rise from their sleep below His throne. Be- 
 fore His gesture even the elect tremble, and Mary feels her 
 own lowliness as a creature. Peter pleads the duties of his 
 office ; each martyr begs his testimony remembered. What- 
 ever prelate looked at the gigantic painting could see that 
 its significance was the same as that of the hymn sung about 
 him, and that before its meaning all men were alike. " Thou 
 who didst forgive the prostitute and the thief, to me also the 
 just and the virtuous, thou hast given a hope." 
 
MICHELANGELO 55 
 
 How much it says that this story has hung above the Popes 
 officiating in splendour of office ; accepted as preaching the 
 severe doctrine of the Church which allows no position and 
 no sanctity to be free from reproach and from possibility of sin. 
 
 The fame of the Last Judgment spread through Italy as 
 before had happened with each of the other great works of 
 Michael. Again he was acclaimed as the one great master, 
 notwithstanding those murmurs of dissatisfaction which began 
 then and which will always last, so long as we do not under- 
 stand the terrible sermon preached in this picture, not meant 
 to please but to impress. 
 
 Again for Michelangelo began " the tragedy of Julius's 
 tomb," as Condivi calls it. Now he thought himself free to 
 begin again. He had been insulted about it. Lies were circu- 
 lated and brought up to him about his non-completion of the 
 work, and yet now again tlie new Pope insisted upon more 
 paintings and frescoes for the Pauline Chapel. 
 
 Michelangelo made a final and painful compromise, using 
 for the moment the famous Moses that had been made for 
 the tomb and giving the designs for other parts to be carried 
 out by chosen workmen. Business details, quarrels between 
 his assistants, began again to take up his time. 
 
 The monument as we have it expresses just what has hap- 
 pened. It is a fragment or a makeshift for what could not be. 
 
56 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 Even this he obtained by petitioning the Pope. For a time 
 the artist suffered all the pain of the failure of a lifetime's hope 
 and of a false stigma put upon his integrity. Even at that 
 time he was being accused of having lent out money which he 
 had received on account of the execution of the monument, 
 while on the contrary, he had deposited fourteen hundred 
 crowns as guarantee of his carrying out the work — an extrem- 
 ity of injustice in his case all the greater as addressed to the 
 one person who had struggled faithfully for years against fate 
 to carry out an agreement from which he had been driven by 
 the other party to it. His own words and his private letters 
 describe his feelings. "Enough," he says, "for the loyalty of 
 thirty-six years and having given myself of my own free will 
 to others ; I deserve no better. Painting and sculpture, labour 
 and good faith have been my ruin. Better would it have 
 been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my 
 youth." Then he turns to the representative of the Pope, 
 who is urging him to begin the other new work, and says : 
 " Your lordship sends to tell me that I must begin to paint 
 and have no anxiety. I answer that one paints with the 
 brain and not with the hand. He who has not his brains at 
 command produces work that shames him; therefore until 
 this business is settled I can do nothing good. The ratifica- 
 tion of this last contract does not come. I am daily stoned 
 
MOSES 
 
 CHUFvCH OF SAN PIETRO IN VINCOLI, ROM] 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY ALIXARI 
 
MICHELANGELO 57 
 
 as though I had crucified Christ ; my whole youth and man- 
 hood have been lost, tied down to this tomb of Julius. With 
 all my immense labour, I toil to grow poor. I am not a thief 
 and usurer, but a citizen of Florence, a noble, the son of an 
 honest man. In the first year of his pontificate, Juhus com- 
 missioned me to make his tomb ; and I stayed eight months 
 at Carrara, quarrying marbles. Afterward the Pope decided 
 not to build his tomb during his lifetime and set me down to 
 painting. [That is the way he speaks of the Vault of the 
 Sistine Chapel.] Then he kept me two years at Bologna 
 casting his statue in bronze, which has been destroyed. After 
 that I returned to Rome and stayed with him till his death ; 
 always keeping my house open without post or pension ; 
 living on the money of the tomb since I had no other income. 
 After the death of Julius, the executor wished the tomb on a 
 larger scale ; that part of the mural scheme I finished which 
 is now walled in, and made the figures I have at home. Then 
 Leo, not wishing me to work at the tomb, wanted me to 
 complete the facade at San Lorenzo." Then he relates how 
 he had to borrow money for the freightage of more marbles, 
 and kept workmen, and boarded them, and at last quarrelled 
 with the Pope and fled to Florence. Nor was he able to 
 extricate himself, absolutely, for a long time, the representa- 
 tives of Pope Julius delaying their decision for no purpose 
 
58 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 apparent to us of to-day ; but perhaps, according to Italian 
 ways, waiting for some possible change in the Papacy. 
 
 We see the great Moses of the tomb out of its destined 
 place. Important as it is, we shall never see it right, for it 
 was to be but one small part of a great arrangement that we 
 do not know exactly. So for the famous Captives, as they 
 are called, which now rest in France. Rarely has the rhythm 
 of the body been so wonderfully sung. Even the special 
 liking of Michael for insisting upon a great living capacity 
 in the body, as in the tremendous chest of the statue, helps 
 a balance that perhaps the Greek sculptor would have had 
 more evenly adjusted. The expression of thought in dream, 
 that belongs to every part of the body, makes of the sleeping 
 Captive a special creation of sculpture ; a perfect example of 
 what separates its maker from all other artists, the using of 
 the entire human form as expression of a sentiment. 
 
 The Moses, aggressive and terrible, belonged, we know, to the 
 notion of strenuous effort and action upon men. The dream- 
 ing youth embodies perhaps the idea of eternal repose. Per- 
 haps the artist may have intended some allusion to the resur- 
 rection, the waking out of human sleep. The mass of stone 
 behind him, not chiselled out, has been thought by some to 
 represent a cynocephalus, which the learning of that day 
 might have considered an Egyptian symbol of immortality. 
 
MICHELANGELO 59 
 
 This is a work of JNIichelangelo's full physical strength. 
 He himself realised and has told us that even when the forces 
 of his body were at their worst he still felt youth in his mind. 
 But throughout his life it is most evident that the idea of 
 another world remained continuously with him. It went along 
 with the most intense and passionate admiration for the beau- 
 tiful, as seen by the senses, and with a temperament of absorb- 
 ing love. It is this unsatisfied capacity for love which informs 
 all his actions and all the expressions of his thoughts. He 
 himself has explained the balance held upon passion by the 
 thought of eternal responsibility. *' I may remind you that a 
 man who would return unto and enjoy his own self ought not 
 to indulge much in festivities, but to think on death. This 
 thought is the only one which makes us know our proper 
 selves, which holds us together in the bond of our own 
 natures, which prevents us from being stolen away by kins- 
 men, friends, great men of genius, ambition, avarice, and those 
 other sins and vices that filch the man from himself Mar- 
 vellous is the operation of this thought of death, which pre- 
 serves and supports those who think on death, and defends 
 them from all human passion." So that he looked at death 
 as the entrance into reality ; upon the thought of death as a 
 means of keeping hold of one's self in a world of illusions. So 
 he wrote : 
 
60 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 " Mortality doth little comprehend. 
 Before we understand we must have died." 
 
 Hence, also, to him, beauty of the flesh is as a reflection of the 
 divine idea, which will become clearer to the soul after death 
 than in the body. These ideas are so absolutely a part of 
 Michelangelo that they serve as guide in the understanding of 
 his devotion to the great lady, Vittoria Colonna, about whom 
 he spoke much, about whom he wrote beautiful verses, and to 
 whom he devoted much time in his busy later life. 
 
 The boy Michelangelo had been, we remember, brought 
 up among admirers of Plato, newly read in the Greek. The 
 ideas of an imagery of the divine here below and of a double 
 existence were as habitual to him as the teachings of the moral 
 code by Savonarola. 
 
 *' The heart is not the life of love like mine. 
 The love I love thee with has none of it. 
 For hearts to sin and mortal thought incline 
 And for love's habitation are iinfit. 
 God, when our souls were parted from Him, made 
 Of me an eye — of thee splendour and light. 
 Even in the parts of thee which are to fade 
 Thou hast the glory ; I have only sight. 
 Fire from its heat you may not analyse, 
 Nor worship from e^;ernal beauty take. 
 Which deifies the lover as he bows. 
 
MICHELANGELO 61 
 
 Thou hast that Paradise all within thine eyes 
 Where first I loved thee. 'Tis for that love's sake 
 My soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows."* 
 
 The nature of this love has been naturally misunderstood, 
 but only through wilfulness ; for the record of this beautiful 
 friendship is quite clear. His meeting with her was a consola- 
 tion, and, as he explained, a bettering of himself. She encour- 
 aged the religious turn of his mind ; and her courtesy and 
 feminine tact soothed the moments of despondency and 
 fatigue which came upon him in reaction from his passionate 
 devotion to his art. But all of his affections were passionate ; 
 those for whom he cared, he cared for jealously; and though he 
 was a hard hater of all that he thought base, he was infinitely 
 tender and kind to dependants and people in affliction. 
 
 In these last years when he was becoming rich, we know by 
 the private records of his letters that his nephew was in- 
 structed to seek out persons living in decent distress, who were 
 to be helped without its being known to be from him. Indeed, 
 he sometimes appeared to members of his family as too care- 
 less of his own interests, a charge he resented with a rigour 
 that belonged to the other side of his nature. 
 
 It was during these times of severe introspection that he 
 consented to carry out the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel, 
 
 * Translation of John Jay Chapman. 
 
62 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 which occupied several tedious years, broken by attacks of 
 severe illness and infirmities that never left him. He was, as 
 he said to his friend Vasari, too old to paint the large surfaces 
 of fresco which require being carried out to completion in their 
 divisions on a single day. The painting, completed when he 
 was seventy-five years old, is not deficient in skill ; but there is 
 an appearance of fatigue, a want of interest, which shows it to 
 be task work done to satisfy others with a mind otherwise 
 absorbed. It was not only illness that interrupted his work in 
 painting, but the engineering and architectural projects of the 
 Pope. 
 
 In April, 1546, he wrote answering the request of King 
 Francis the First of France for some work by himself. He 
 speaks of being much occupied by Pope Paul, though he 
 desires to serve the King in his art. Then he adds, in a vein 
 that shows his direction of thought, but also a humour which 
 recalls the last letters of the Japanese Hokusai :" Should 
 death interrupt this desire, then if it be possible to carve or 
 paint in the other world, I shall not fail to do so where no one 
 becomes old." 
 
 When he thus wrote he could not know that he was yet to 
 attain, by heavy work and much study and devotion, fame as 
 an architect as great as was his already as painter and sculptor. 
 He was still to leave for future ages the Dome of St. Peter, a 
 
MICHELANGELO 63 
 
 few fragments of sculpture of the most intense expression of 
 feeling, and verses that rival his expressions in the other arts. 
 
 To painting and sculpture he bids adieu. The feeling in- 
 creases with him that he has cared too much for the beauty of 
 the world, " the human form divine." So his verse records ; 
 
 " Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest 
 My soul that turns to His great love on high, 
 Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread." 
 
 During his remaining years he draws, however; often makes 
 schemes for others, but no longer with anything more than the 
 intention of record ; occasionally he works at marble, partly for 
 the mere exercise of the body, and yet once certainly with the 
 intention, unfulfilled, of leaving an expression of his last feel- 
 ings to be placed upon his tomb. 
 
 This, the most pathetic of all his work, was never used for 
 that end. The same misguided admiration that pursued him 
 all his life has directed the ordering of his sepulchre, devised 
 in an absolutely different notion of life and death than was his. 
 The broken and unfinished group of the dead Christ supported 
 by his Mother and friends is half hidden in the twilight behind 
 the altar of the Cathedral of Florence. Rightly said the Jew- 
 ish master (Rabbi Trypho) : "It is not for thee to finish the 
 work, nor art thou free to desist therefrom ; and faithful is the 
 Master who will pay thee thy reward." 
 
64 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 He had worked upon it at long intervals, and displeased by 
 defects in the marble, and suffering from the despondency 
 which so often followed his struggles for expression, he began 
 to break the statue; in another of his usual moods of kindness 
 he gave it to one of his servants, and so it comes down to us. 
 It is the most personal of all the works of the most personal 
 of artists. It is he himself who in the character of Nicodemus 
 supports the dead Saviour and relieves the JNIother from the 
 heavy burden. The ftice of the old artist, wrapped in a cowl, 
 looks down with infinite tenderness upon the group of the 
 Mother and the Son. Unfinished and fragmentary as it is, it 
 is the most complete expression of the subject known to art. 
 
 As if to meet the necessity for work of this man's nature, 
 when he had begun to turn away from painting and sculptures 
 the Popes, one after the other, commanded his services as 
 architect and engineer. He took part in the planning and 
 carrying out of the fortifications of Rome, bringing to the task 
 his former experience and, of course, that quality of mind which 
 had always answered the call made upon it. 
 
 He had evaded all requests to return to Florence; though 
 separated from political antagonisms, he knew enough not to 
 trust the new Medici. All courtesy came to him now from 
 them, as well as from all the princes and rulers with whom 
 he had relations. The great difficulties with the Princes of 
 
THE CAPTIVE 
 
 THE LOUVRE, PARIS 
 PHOTOGRAPH H Y li K A U X, f L E M E N T & CO 
 
MICHELANGELO 65 
 
 Urbino about the tomb of Julius had been adjusted. But 
 during the remainder of his career he met again, from the 
 banded interests of others, the same obstinate ill-will which 
 had followed him so far. 
 
 Called upon to take up architectural work, he stood in the 
 way of many others coveting the position or the profits. The 
 greatest of all these undertakings was that of the charge of 
 completing St. Peter's. Of the many others we need not 
 speak, but the great Dome remains as important a landmark 
 in architecture as his other records of achievement in painting 
 and sculpture. He devoted himself through pure obedience 
 to this task, refusing all compensation during the remainder of 
 his life ; offering his unpaid services in that way both to his 
 master and to the service of religion. He had to struggle 
 against the opposing ideas of the architects of the monument 
 who held by later plans than those of the first devisor ; and 
 their enmity and misapprehension of what was best aimed at 
 a continuous thwarting of all his intentions. He managed, 
 however, to bring back the building to its former plan, that of 
 his greatest enemy, Bramante, upon whom lie has left this 
 noble judgment : " It cannot be denied," he said, " that 
 Bramante's talent as an architect was equal to that of any 
 one from the times of the ancients till now. He laid the first 
 plan of St. Peter's, clear and simple, and all who have departed 
 
66 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 from his scheme have departed from the truth." We have not 
 the great Cathedral as Michael wished it, nor can we see in it 
 the creation of his genius. But the one thing which Michel- 
 angelo left to his successors in the work is the cupola whose 
 outline remains as an unparalleled idea. It is the mark of 
 Rome and the expression of Rome's grandeur. Michel- 
 angelo's life might well close upon this final expression of 
 himself. Little else occupied his last years. The work and 
 its necessities were sufficient for the strongest life. We 
 know this last portion of the great man's career by the records 
 of this tedious work, and what remains of his poems, which in 
 their rude and unfinished form tell us how the fire never burnt 
 out as long as any place remained to hold it. But he had 
 retired within himself and the ideas of religion filled the de- 
 mands of his desires. He had been disappointed in many 
 things : his ideal of civic life had disappeared from the world ; 
 he had not accomplished most of the work his heart was bent 
 on ; he viewed with austerity his own excessive enjoyment 
 of beauty ; he had met few other lives that could equally 
 move along with his own. Perhaps he was conscious of his 
 enormous importance, but he was modest beyond all other 
 men and devoid of what is called ambition. 
 
 One great satisfaction he must have felt : he had toiled for 
 the keeping of his family in their station of life, and the for 
 
MICHELANGELO 67 
 
 tune which he left was enough to guarantee these chances. 
 This was the moderate end for which he had created the mar- 
 vels of art which belong to his name. 
 
 His death marked for all Italy the close of the great period. 
 There was a contest between Rome and Florence as to which 
 city should keep his body. Florence, however, keeps him — and 
 gave him a princely funeral — and the usual unpoetic tomb that 
 serves for princes. Though both cities, and most men of the 
 time, misstated and misapprehended many of the reasons for 
 his greatness, they were not in so far different from most of 
 us. It has taken many centuries and many minds to build a 
 sufficient intellectual appreciation of the man who perhaps 
 was the greatest of all artists. 
 
PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF 
 
 UFFIZI GALLERY, FLORENCE 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BROGI 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 r 
 
THE MADONNA OF THE TEMPI FAMILY 
 
 ROYAL PINAKOTHEK. MUNICH 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
RAPHAEL 
 
 However desirous an artist may be of glorifying that type of 
 artistic beatitude whom we call Raphael, he must needs hesi- 
 tate. It is not only that he may have to analyse the move- 
 ments of a mind that has floated easily through most of the 
 spaces of art, marking its limits as if with the brush of a wing, 
 but he has to make a picture of Success itself, of that Fortune 
 which is so impenetrable that we are still pagans in our view 
 and unwilling to believe that it can be built, as the pagans 
 themselves made out, of smaller and more visible powers. 
 
 The easy and successful life of Raphael of Urbino is so 
 completely one with the effect of his work upon us, that his 
 very good fortune seems part of the means used by him. Every 
 one knows something about him, every one has seen something 
 by him. I have seen his Madonnas even in the huts of Canni- 
 bal Land. And to make this universal appreciation still more 
 extraordinary, we have the strange fact that any cheap copy 
 of some creation of his which appeals most distinctly to the 
 feeling is sufficient to tell us : here is a separate creation, 
 dependent upon something in it, so that its actual form may 
 
72 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 be insufficient, but its life persists far into the merest sugges- 
 tion of what the original was. Such is the extraordinary life 
 belonging to many of his invented people— a life such as 
 belongs to some few statues of the Greeks. And yet in the 
 originals we feel the slightest injury that time or the restorer 
 has inflicted. Sometimes we even feel that they themselves are 
 not so perfect, that they are deficient in the very quality that 
 still is the essence of the work. 
 
 Perhaps a mere story of the man's short life, which again 
 touches us, as determined by the foreordaining that abridges 
 all that is most beautiful, will be a manner of getting closer to 
 an understanding of how he came not to be but to flower. 
 
 He was born in a lovely country, ruled by princes liked of 
 their people and caring for them. The fortunes of his family 
 had been broken by war, and his father had taken to the trade 
 of the painter. For the position of the artist, in the smaller 
 places of Italy, was not like that of the important persons who 
 were changing the meaning of their profession in the great 
 centres of Florence and of Rome. This was at Urbino in 1483. 
 The father, Giovanni Santi, was literate; what we know of 
 the mother is pleasantly connected with the fate of the son, if 
 the little picture painted by the elder Sanzio — woman and 
 child — is a portrait of these two. It is a mere fancy, but a 
 pretty one, that the painter of the Madonna and the infant 
 
RAPHAEL 73 
 
 Christ should have been foreshadowed in this domestic frag- 
 ment. Of this mother, the boy Raphael knew little; and his 
 father married again and died when Raphael was still quite 
 young ; but he may have given him early lessons and trans- 
 mitted certain tendencies of feeling to this extremely sensitive 
 mind. 
 
 At fifteen, perhaps, the boy went to Perugia, where there 
 were artists and what we call schools ; that is to say, appren- 
 ticeship in the workshop of painters. Pietro Vanucci, called 
 Perugino, took him into his studio at the age of seventeen ; 
 perhaps he had some instruction ,at Urbino from Timoteo 
 Viti, who was always his friend. And the one great gift of 
 Raphael, a power of almost instant assimilation, must have 
 enriched him from the earliest times by whatever he liked or 
 tried to understand. All this early life is entangled with the 
 work of Perugino, though it is made out that some of the very 
 early pieces accredited to the more famous youth have a 
 something harking back to an earlier influence. Even these, 
 however, youthful and timid, whatever they may be as results 
 of importance, possess the undefinable mark which is that of 
 Raphael and which passes analysis; it is perhaps even more 
 distinctly visible than in the first important ones which he 
 works out, either with his master or from his master's designs, 
 or as a manner of duplicate, or of using a theme which the 
 
74 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 master has treated. For we are speaking of a period in the 
 development of the practice of art whose features we have for- 
 gotten. In those days, as in the Japan of to-day, the work of the 
 master was not only the example, but the model and the store- 
 house of the pupil. He borrowed this or that scheme and filled 
 in with fragments of his own ; or he imitated fragments to put 
 into his own new scheme. And so every one borrowed one from 
 the other ; it not being an injury but a manner of admiration, 
 and often a possible help when, as often happened, one artist 
 called upon others to help him carry out his work. In some 
 such way Pinturicchio, also of Perugia, called upon Raphael for 
 help in his work at Siena. It seems also as if the youngster 
 destined to be the more famous based some of his early work 
 on the studies of Pinturicchio. 
 
 Already Raphael had been asked to paint an important 
 work, a Coronation of the Virgin, for the altar of the Francis- 
 can Church in Perugia. The arrangement of the whole picture 
 and types of figures are a manner of duphcate of his master; 
 but there appears a something more intense, and a larger look 
 which marks the beginning of another man. So in another 
 painting, the Marriage of the Virgin, there is but a duplication 
 of the same story by Perugino. But another meaning has filled 
 it all, made another choice and build of architecture, changed 
 here and there a little more and a little less of the details 
 
MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN 
 
 THE BRERA, MILAN 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BROGI 
 
RAPHAEL 75 
 
 which were common property at that day. The whole has a 
 charm of simphcity and grace, and, if I may say so, of conven- 
 tionahty which dehghts us to-day as if the ideahstic presenta- 
 tion of a younger world. And one of the great qualities of his 
 master and his companions remains attached to it; the notion 
 of the picture being a place ; a place set apart, a space within 
 a space. So that the lines that make it, the gradations that fill 
 it, are complete and do not suggest any extension outside of 
 borders of the scene. It is an undefinable feeling and yet a 
 tradition belonging to many of these men in common ; and it 
 connects with what develops further and further until we see 
 the make of the picture later, in such building of light and 
 shade as we know in Rembrandt. This subtle quality is not 
 such a one as makes merely a pleasant arrangement ; it is as if 
 the eye wished to see no farther: as if seeing outside of the 
 edge would disturb one's pleasure ; later in the single figures 
 and portraits of Raphael we shall feel this assertion of the 
 picture; where his portrait ends, wherever the figure is cut, 
 that is sufficient — we do not care for the part of it not repre- 
 sented — it never occurs to us to think of it. 
 
 It was, therefore, with no small powers, original and ac- 
 quired, that, after having worked at Siena, the young Raphael 
 came up to Florence in 1504 with recommendation of the 
 Duchess of Urbino to the Gonfaloniere. There he found 
 
76 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo designing the famous 
 cartoons, now lost, which were among their greatest achieve- 
 ments, and which affected permanently the entire discipline of 
 Italian and European art. Both these men he must have stud- 
 ied to some extent, as he also studied the earlier painters whose 
 works were on the walls of the churches. Indeed, their memory 
 lasted to that extent that Raphael, long after, merely trans- 
 posed one of the great figures of Masaccio into his design of 
 Paul preaching at Athens. The gentle youth formed a friend- 
 ship with the Monk Fra Bartolommeo, himself a serious stu- 
 dent and painter, though only from obedience. Once upon a 
 time he had given up art and entered the cloister, and had 
 burned publicly the pagan works of his youth in the great bon- 
 fire which the puritans of Savonarola's preaching built in horror 
 of the excesses of art and luxury. There was an interchange 
 of knowledge between these two men; and in this beautiful 
 companionship and in the absorption of the influences of Flor- 
 ence, which were to determine the future, Raphael began to 
 form the style by which we know him best. He has said him- 
 self that he paid attention to everything. It must also be said 
 that he made all his own, that it was rather a renewal of him- 
 self than an accumulation of knowledge which defines this 
 continuous increase in the wealth of his resources. Therein, he 
 differs absolutely from imitators ; either those who need to have 
 
THE MADONNA OF THE CHAIR 
 
 PITTI PALACE, FLORENCE 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDERSON 
 
RAPHAEL 77 
 
 a staff to lean on, or those who try to find a sure method of 
 approval by themselves and others in the reference to a stand- 
 ard of something already done. That is not the imitation of 
 Raphael ; and never does he seem more original than in the 
 ideas that he borrows. He seem to show to what further use 
 the concealed life of the thing he admires can be turned. So 
 Michelangelo, when he merely intends to copy the early 
 Giotto, fills with his enormous knowledge of the figure the beau- , 
 tiful folds of the garments that he is transcribing. For centu- 
 ries Raphael has influenced others and told them secrets which 
 they did not understand. His imitators have never perceived 
 that he had been set apart and had received a divine commis- 
 sion, proven from the first moment, at which in his first imi- 
 tations he infused into manners that he found already made, 
 the undefinable charm that we know by the name of Raphael. 
 Certainly the earlier paintings of Mother and Child, which 
 are still further back than those of the Madonna cycle painted 
 in Florence, have the purity and the sweetness which the world 
 knows. But during those four years in Florence he painted a 
 series of poems in honour of the Blessed Mother and her Child, 
 in which he unfolded the bud to the full bloom of a perfect 
 flower. His story, like that of Michelangelo, is that of a 
 series of wonders, and that these few years should have been 
 sufficient for the production of so much perfection is one of 
 
78 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 those wonders. In these Madonnas, known to all the world, 
 repeated, copied, imitated in succeeding centuries, the young 
 Raphael builds a form to which he may add, but upon which 
 only in one immortal achievement can he improve. Early or 
 late, the picture embodies an ideal of Sculpture : a certain pose 
 contained within a certain shape — not a mere outline, but a 
 mass of which we see one contour at a time. And in his paint- 
 ing, as we said above, he realised again a sculpture ideal, of 
 one wishing to see no more than what we do, no more to either 
 side, or above or below. 
 
 It seems but natural that the great Pope Julius should then 
 call him to his service in Rome. Behind the poetry of the call 
 remains the prose that the men of Florence had all the work 
 that could be done there, and that a band of men from his 
 native Urbino were then in Rome around the Pope belonging 
 to that great house. That influence always remained with 
 him, as it opposed Michelangelo, the Florentine, even to 
 the end of JNIichelangelo's troubles with the great tomb, 
 whose control remained in the hands of the Dukes of Urbino. 
 But Raphael, as usual, gave more than he took. The support 
 that he received was returned a hundredfold by the prestige 
 that he soon threw over all his friends and admirers. We feel 
 it to-day ; what must it have been during the life of a youth 
 whose gracious manners and presence made him welcome to 
 
THE " L A. R G E " HOLY FAMILY 
 
 THE LOUVRE, PARIS 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUN, CLEMENT & CO, 
 
RAPHAEL 79 
 
 all ? The sweetness and elevation of mind which made him a 
 friend of the distinguished in all lines, the beauty of his face, 
 and even his love for women, have added to the attraction of 
 his works in the imagination of his time, as in that of the pres- 
 ent ; and his early death enclosed him within a definition of 
 youth and splendour that has made him, as it were, the repre- 
 sentative of his own art. Under the benevolence of his new 
 patron, his art developed in every direction ; he begins the 
 great wall paintings of the Vatican which are the full bloom 
 of decorative art ; he paints portraits which remain as surely 
 among the most prodigious representations of realistic study. 
 Even in the few painted in Florence we feel the uncompro- 
 mising perception of the individual. Their methods may be 
 undeveloped, but are faithful to the essential difference of the 
 portrait as having its own mode of life. They are few in 
 number, but they testify to a prodigious sincerity and a power 
 of suggesting some intimate life behind that of the external 
 one. The means by which he attains this are as mysterious as 
 the causes of the grace and nobility of his great show pieces. 
 
 Raphael painted the mighty Pope whose name is associated 
 with his and with Michael's. Once in the portrait I give 
 above and once, if possible more splendidly because more 
 easily, in the great fresco of the " Mass of Bolsena." In the 
 portrait we see the aged man burdened by a life of affairs : we 
 
80 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 are in the presence of an energy and concentration enclosed 
 within a certain dreaminess, that tell us what the man may be 
 when called into the action of will or duty. In the fresco 
 there is but one impression : It is the Pope. The face has the 
 character of both the man and the office. 
 
 But before he came to tliis one of the later frescoes, Raphael 
 had painted in the other chamber the much more famous sub- 
 jects which are known by the ultra-conventional names of the 
 Dispute and the School of Athens ; late names such as are 
 tacked on for convenience, but which often throw us off from 
 the real intention, which perhaps cannot be shut up in a single 
 word. 
 
 The processes of description are tedious and useless, except 
 in so far as they may draw one's attention to some general 
 principles, or some particular points, whose statement may 
 bring us nearer to a state of mind in harmony with the thing 
 we look at. The merest print or photograph is more useful. 
 Still, let us say that there is a great meaning in each of these 
 pictures ; a meaning suggested perhaps to Raphael or perhaps 
 of his own finding. It matters not ; for the meaning in art has 
 to pass through the lite of the maker. In the so-called Dis- 
 puta we see the dream of a heaven opened, and Christ and 
 God's law and the life of another world typified by grave and 
 solemn beautiful human figures, seated far up beyond the clouds 
 
RAPHAEL 81 
 
 in a great dome that looks like the heavens. All these figures 
 mean something, and they can be called by the names known 
 to Christian faith, JNIary, John, Adam, and Moses, and Paul, 
 and Peter, and others nearer to us ; and they have by them 
 angels, lovely companions floating above them, in beautiful 
 clouds, with wings and clothing to tell us what they are. But 
 what they are to us is, that they are beautiful, and solemn, and 
 majestic, and happy, and living some life like our own, but full 
 of peace. Below on earth, solemn and splendid but anxious 
 figures feel this presence and ask for a union with it. Popes, 
 bishops, philosophers, thinkers of all kinds, stand or move with 
 that common intention. They are all absorbed in the all- 
 powerful, wished-for truth. Some few, or a great many per- 
 ceive in the divine mysteries of the Church, in the Eucharistic 
 Offering the solution, the joining of earth and heaven. All 
 this is represented as a vast dream. Thus much for the claims 
 of Religion. The claims of Pure Thought, of the pursuit of 
 Truth in Science, are typified on the opposite wall. In an 
 earthly palace, one of the finest dreams of the Renaissance, 
 are placed here and there, as if in usual customary visit, repre- 
 sentatives of what the age called the Seven Liberal Arts: 
 Archimedes, Zoroaster, Ptolemy, Alcibiades, Socrates, Aspasia, 
 Diogenes move about in the gi-eat light hall, through whose 
 corridors advance toward us, surrounded and welcomed by 
 
82 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 illustrious thinkers, the representatives of two great paths of 
 thought : two names most important to the men of that day, 
 Plato and Aristotle. A wonderful life fills all these figures, 
 individually perhaps not more powerful than that of many a 
 weaker work; but altogether, as even the little photographs 
 show, the flow of the crowd is not merely owing to the inge- 
 nious subtlety of the composition, nor to the beautiful arrange- 
 ment of lines. All these things help ; there is nothing wasted ; 
 the movements and gestures are increased and made more 
 correct, apparently, by these subtleties, but there is still the 
 imponderable quality that makes the essential of a dream. 
 Nothing is dependent on real exactness of attitude or of draw- 
 ing. Hence, when others have tried, upon supposed lessons 
 deduced from these great examples, they have failed. The 
 formula becomes the formula of the theatre. That beautiful 
 architecture which is a necessity for Raphael, as giving the 
 meaning of the cloistered serenity of thought, becomes with 
 imitation the arrangement of the wings of a stage. The point 
 would lead us too far, and yet it is the one important clue to 
 what makes the so-called monumental or historical art of to-day 
 vary little from a theatrical setting; a thing we applaud, because 
 we see how well the stage has been" set; but rarely do we feel 
 as if a veil had been lifted and we beheld a scene, existing 
 apart from us and outside of the present moment. But it 
 
PORTRAIT OF 1' O 1' E JULIUS I 
 
 PITTI PALACE, FLORENCE 
 [OTOGRAPH BY BR A UN, CLEMENT & C 
 
RAPHAEL 83 
 
 has always been so, unfortunately, and the means of great 
 artists, either in form or sound, have been looked upon as laws 
 or as the aim of their works. While, on the contrary, each real 
 man, whether he be as gi*eat as Raphael or small as one of the 
 lesser Dutch painters, has made his own laws and built the 
 structure in which he lives. 
 
 This was not all the work that Raphael took upon himself. 
 Besides these great decorations to please the pride of place 
 of the great Pope, and to appease that hunger for the beauti- 
 ful which filled the Ruler's mind in common with the gi-eater 
 spirits of Italy, the habit of Raphael and the other men about 
 him was to take all that came along, sometimes beginning to 
 carry out some piece with their own hand, but usually accept- 
 ing everything as mere work, for which some one head was 
 responsible. That had been the way before them ; just as it 
 might be in building ; and they did not move out of the habits 
 of their craft. The amount of manual labor carried out by 
 Raphael himself, that we know of, is formidable. What he 
 did with his assistants remains as the largest undertaking 
 known to the art of the painter. We must remember that 
 these men who helped him were not only pupils, or ordinary 
 assistants, but men of distinguished talents famous to this 
 day, many of whom he had known before, many of whom 
 were older and more experienced than himself But the habit 
 
84 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 of the day was to do work in common, and Raphael, more 
 than any other leader known, exercised the same power of har- 
 monious combination with his assistants that we feel in his 
 paintings. To those who see these great pictures in the build- 
 ings, the fact of many hands having carried them out is but 
 too evident. Traditionally, some \of them have been consum- 
 mated from mere sketches and indications. It may be partly 
 true, but it must be remembered that they were the sketches 
 and indications of one of the most adjustable minds ever known, 
 and that the point of view of that day was the moral one — 
 lost by us — that the result was everything and that the aim 
 was the work itself, and not who did this or that part. It is to 
 the changes of the past century that we owe the departure 
 from that holy and only true ideal. We see many of these 
 great frescoes in lesser beauty than might be theirs, if their 
 texture could possibly have been that of Raphael's own hand. 
 Once or twice in the later ones this is traditionally so, and in 
 the " Mass of Bolsena " we see only the hand of Raphael, and 
 that hand moving with an ease and certainty that seems like 
 a prediction of the great executants who were to come. That 
 other portrait of Pope Juhus kneeling impassibly at the altar 
 where the miracle occurs, not as having been really there, but as 
 representing the faith of the Church, is painted with the appar- 
 ent velocity and ease which we credit to such a man as 
 
.€ 
 
 THE MASS OF BOLSENA 
 
 THE VATICAN, ROME 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUN, CLEMENT & 
 
RAPHAEL 85 
 
 Velasquez. The whole picture foreshadows the realism of a 
 later day, while it connects with the naive representation of 
 the previous century. One feels what we might have had if the 
 choice had been to have Kaphael alone put his hand-mark on 
 the wall. It is fitting that with such majestic representation 
 the life in art of the great Pope should close. After him came 
 Leo, less great, certainly less noble, but more distinctly fond 
 of the pleasures of art. That charm which satisfied the sterner 
 Pope was more than sufficient to make the self-indulgent 
 Medicean favour Raphael and his cohort of friends and depend- 
 ants, just as the independent standing of Michelangelo dis- 
 pleased him, though Julius had found it in the key of his own 
 character. Leo then displaces Julius in the gi'eat frescoes 
 where he symbolises the Papacy present in his person, at the 
 events more or less historical, which the brush of Raphael or 
 his assistants placed upon the walls. And again Raphael paints 
 the portraits of the new Pope with that same perception that we 
 recognise in the portrait of Julius. He paints with great care and 
 finish on the canvas as he paints with great ease and synthesis 
 on the wall, and we see the character of another important 
 man, the character of the intelligent, self-indulgent heir of 
 wealthy bankers and rulers, with no attempt at showing a 
 deeper and inner life; for now the heroic days were over. 
 Raphael had passed imperturbably through the stress of the 
 
86 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 previous days of war and crime and intellectual and religious 
 tumult. Still more beautifully he floated with the new current 
 in which new fortunes asserted themselves in the public eye. 
 Great moneyed men were now in the front, and in a day 
 which pre-eminently recognised achievement in every direc- 
 tion it seemed but fitting that their position should receive 
 the adornment of cultured art. Naturally, again the name of 
 Raphael becomes associated with that of the great banker 
 Chigi, and, for him and for others, adorns or presides over the 
 decorations of palaces. What we to-day call the Farnesina is 
 another of the buildings which Raphael marks with his name. 
 Most of what we see is not his own handiwork. No mere man 
 could have carried this out with the very many other decora- 
 tions and special paintings he had undertaken. So that these 
 buildings are translated into the language of his assistants; 
 even then they seem fine dreams of that classical antiquity 
 which was beginning to be dug out from the ruins of Rome. 
 One of the many sides of Raphael was a passionate love for 
 the discovery and resuscitation of the ancient Rome, carried 
 so far as to make him hope that he might bring back the 
 City to something like its former shape and splendour. Partly 
 from this love, and partly because he was asked to build also, 
 he followed with devotion the unearthing of the precious ruins. 
 To his eyes, the most sensitive of all eyes to just that form of 
 
THE WOMAN WITH THE VE 
 
 PITTI PALACE, FLORENCE 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BROGI 
 
RAPHAEL 87 
 
 beauty, many works of the past appeared for the first time 
 from the accumulated earth of ages. It is due to this perhaps 
 that he was carried off by an attack of the fever, so often 
 arising from such excavations. Meanwhile, however, he not 
 only placed before the eyes of the world the remains of clas- 
 sical antiquity, but in his usual way he gave to that antiquity 
 a new form, so much more adapted to our comprehension 
 that we still see the antique through the lovely vision by which 
 he expressed it. It became with him a means of expression. 
 He not only dressed Greek fable and story in his own shape, 
 opening to the common mind what before was the privilege of 
 a few, but he dressed in its way and manners the ancient 
 Bible and the whole Christian story. None of us have been 
 freed from this view of the Jewish and Christian past as he 
 made it out. The scenes of the Old Testament and those of the 
 New are still in our minds tinged with the classical feeling — • 
 semi-pagan — which Raphael chose to clothe them in. 
 
 I say semi-pagan, to fall in a little with conventional 
 arrangements of thought. The necessary weakness of our 
 grasp of ideas obliges us to catalogue and divide things that 
 really melt one into the other. Of course Paganism, that is to 
 say the habits of the world before Christianity, in the civilisa- 
 tion of Greece and Rome, melted into and affected the New 
 Dispensation. Even the forms of the Church are indissolubly 
 
88 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 connected with those of a Pagan era ; as the words of new 
 thought are those of a previous one ; as the forms of Greek 
 art were used at once for Christian Types. On this firm foun- 
 dation is based the naturalness of Raphael's success. 
 
 He seems to have moved in this new manner as if almost 
 for the first time he had freed the genius of himself and of his 
 race, in a country where these ancient influences had per- 
 sisted through ages of obscure feeling. What he now placed 
 before his nation must have appealed to the deepest fibres of 
 heredity. Again we see in these imitations of fresh-discov- 
 ered beauty, Raphael's power of adornment of a new love. 
 Most of the antiques which he uncovered are inferior in their 
 own spirit, if one may so say, to that spirit which he dis- 
 covered in them. The ornamental decorations which he un- 
 covered in ancient ruins are only in a very few exceptional 
 cases as rich, and largely understood, as the imitations which 
 he or even his disciples made out from the original. It 
 has happened with him as has happened with Virgil. We 
 have seen so much of them, or of imitations of them, 
 that they occasionally appeared conventional because 
 we do not realise that there was once a time when 
 there was nothing behind them. As tlie words of Virgil 
 become mere commonplace quotations, so the gestures 
 and arrangements of Raphael have grown to be the com- 
 
THE ^ I S I O N O F E Z E K I E L 
 
 THE PITTI PALACE, FLORENCE 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BROGI 
 
RAPHAEL 89 
 
 monplace of expression. It is so with all things that are 
 to pass into the public domain. All the more must we feel 
 the extraordinary place which they hold in the making of civi- 
 lisation. In only one direction do we feel that the harmo- 
 nious charm of Raphael could not absorb the important beauty 
 that he admired. The Sibyls, which he painted under the 
 blow of Michelangelo's great figures, have no kin with them. 
 They are graceful and beautiful, but they have not that story 
 to tell which defines the movements and the build of the 
 prophetic beings created by the Master of the Sistine Chapel. 
 Raphael's prophecy was another one. There are limits to 
 the powers of genius. The shape which it takes has its own 
 laws. And yet when reinformed by the admiration of the 
 antique, Raphael's genius is apt to give us such a dream as 
 that of "The Vision of Ezekiel," which in its smallest of 
 sizes seems as important as might have been the colossal 
 statues of Jove himself At this moment, perhaps, he may 
 have painted in another mood the Sistine Madonna, another 
 vision, in which for the last time, perhaps, he glorified that 
 Mother and Child who had his very earliest love and pre- 
 occupation. The days of his personal work re drawing to a 
 close. After 1517, his personal sharing in the work done is 
 small. None the less, the amount of work which he directed 
 or prepared or retouched continued increasing. In 1519, the 
 
90 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 paintings of Chigi and of the Vatican were not yet finished. 
 Daily, however, he was asked to undertake new work, to 
 draw cartoons for frescoes, or designs for ornaments, or for 
 dies for coinage. Foreign princes asked their ambassadors for 
 pictures from him. The Envoys found the Master unable to 
 satisfy them, though he accepted, and pretended to believe 
 that he might carry out, the orders. He lived in state, sur- 
 rounded by pupils and assistants, entertaining them, or friends, 
 and beginning to feel for the first time the pressure of his 
 gigantic work. He was giving designs for architecture in 
 which the serenity of his paintings is visible. He attended to 
 the excavation of ancient Rome. He accepted the position of 
 Architect of the new St. Peter's, obtaining, with his usual 
 good fortune, the help of a learned assistant who could be at 
 the same time his teacher, the celebrated Dominican Fra 
 Giocondo of Verona, and was having translated for him Vi- 
 truvius, in whose pages the men of that day hoped to find the 
 secret of all ancient architectural art. This he explains in one 
 of his few letters to his uncle, the brother of his mother, at 
 home in Urbino. He tells how he was staying at Rome, " as 
 he shall never be able to stay anywhere else again, out of love 
 of the building of St. Peter's. For what spot on earth is more 
 dignified than Rome ? What enterprise is more dignified than 
 St. Peter's — the first temple of the world and the greatest 
 
DETAIL FROM THE SISTINE MADONNA 
 
 ROYAL GALLERY, DRESDEN 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BR A UN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
RAPHAEL 91 
 
 piece of building that has ever been seen ? " He tells his uncle 
 how well satisfied he is, " how he holds property in Rome, and 
 an income, and a salary from St. Peter's never to fail so long 
 as he lives, and that he has more work for very large sums; 
 and finally that Cardinal Bibbiena, his friend and patron, 
 wishes him to marry a niece, and that he is engaged to her, 
 and therefore that he is doing credit to his family, and to the 
 lords of his native Urbino, to whom he sends homage. " This 
 position of security and of continual work is his, according to 
 the letter dated 1514. He had six more years to live. Some 
 of the work that we have recalled, and some of the paintings 
 by which we know him best, are painted in this last inter- 
 val of continued stress of production or superintendence. 
 Perhaps the very last work shows, not fatigue, but that strange 
 settling down into a given form which indicates for an artist 
 the closing of a period. It is difficult for us to imagine what 
 might have been the next great opening into some new field 
 of perception. However noble some of the later work, a cer- 
 tain heaviness indicates perhaps the moment when the young 
 man has definitely passed into a turn of mind that belongs to 
 middle age. At least I who write feel that something has 
 changed him when he paints with his own hand, leaving it 
 somewhat unfinished, the last great picture of " The Trans- 
 figuration." There is no loss of power. Indeed, the sense of 
 
92 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 mastery is as great as that expressed in his most energetic 
 works. It is only perhaps that the suggestion of attainment 
 seems to close the vista of a future. That future was to be 
 closed for ever for this world on Good Friday of that year 
 (1520), and his body lay in state before the unfinished picture. 
 The cord had been stretched too far and snapped. The longest 
 life of any artist had not produced as much as this short career 
 of thirty-seven years, a course accomplished without failure 
 and in so far happier, perhaps, than a longer one with a possi- 
 ble decline. All the more bright seems this young rounded 
 life. All the more do we think of a Raphael perpetually 
 young. Italy felt his death ; with him had departed the 
 serenity and sweetness of the classical revival. His is the typ- 
 ical representation of a fortunate life of the artist. To us it 
 seems as if he was the child of good fortune. We have seen 
 how innocently he expressed his own recognition of success, 
 how little stress he laid upon his glory and his importance. 
 One might believe that he had no moments of doubt or of 
 bitterness, and yet on the margin of one of his drawings 
 remain the verses — a record of what happened within him: 
 
 " Now this I well believe that any trifling thing 
 Offends thee so that it devours thy heart. 
 Great mayst thou be, but not in power of will. 
 Thou seest thy real value, but dost not believe. 
 
PORTRAIT OF BALD ASS A RE CASTIGLIONE 
 
 THE LOUVRE, PARIS 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY B R A U N , CLEMENT & CO. 
 
RAPHAEL 93 
 
 All jealousies of thee are now long past. 
 
 Be thou of stone, and feel no further grief." * 
 
 Within the mystery of the soul we therefore only see a little 
 distance ; nor can I, in this attempt at describing one of the 
 most glorious and successful of lives, do more than record 
 outside appearances. 
 
 * This drawing is owned by ray friend Mr. Henry Adams, of Washington. The drawing 
 itself is a mere suggestion and the large handwriting covers the page. 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 
 
 BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY B K A U N , CLEMENT & CO. 
 
REMBRANDT 
 
"When I desire to rest my mind, I do not seek honours, but liberty." 
 
 WORDS ATTRIBUTED TO REMBRANDT. 
 
 i 
 
REMBRANDT 
 
 We have seen the divine Raphael pass through Hfe as if on 
 wings, serenely beautiful, untouched by the great sorrows of 
 the world, helped all along by kindness and applause ; we 
 shall see Rubens also successful to the outer world and to 
 himself, healthy in mind and body, balanced and reasonable, 
 and yet exuberant in the joy of life. So we have seen Michel- 
 angelo an example of life full of sadness within a glory that 
 accompanied him from youth to extreme old age. With him 
 another of the great artists, Rembrandt — the only one to be 
 placed next him perhaps — has some connection of deep feeling, 
 of an interior life, revealed only by his work, of an extraor- 
 dinary aptitude and application as a workman and of struggle 
 against adverse fates. But while Michelangelo began and ended 
 his long life in full recognition of his pre-eminence, leaving 
 name and fortune to a family, Rembrandt, beginning in fair 
 repute, continuing in deserved reputation, ends obscurely, 
 less and less appreciated, misunderstood, disappearing in a 
 shadow like that which envelops the mystery of his paintings. 
 This darkness closes upon him and his story, so as to make him 
 
98 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 a subject of confused anecdotes, of misapprehended state- 
 ments. And indeed even during the success of his hfe the 
 man himself is hidden. Of what he really was we can know but 
 little except through his paintings, his etchings, his drawings. 
 His extreme absorption in work, which during his good days 
 was a happiness and during his bad days a relief, separated him 
 as a great worker, little known to the men of his day, in such 
 a way at least as we might have fairly expected. Now, at 
 length, we know all the ordinary facts of his life, the legends 
 have melted away, and we can follow year by year the quiet 
 accomplishment of his enormous tasks. Whatever of make- 
 believe romance has faded, the real Rembrandt is still a poetic 
 character from the very simplicity of his life, and the feeling 
 we have of an interior one that fills his work and is only known 
 thereby. His fame has increased year by year to such an extent 
 that he represents in the story of the world a great part of the 
 value of that native land which did not understand him. No 
 one has been to Holland but has felt the importance of his 
 name, and his memory pervades the cities in which he some- 
 what obscurely worked. 
 
 Rembrandt was born at Leyden, by a branch of the Rhine, 
 whose name his father had taken, and from which he gets his 
 full name of Rembrandt van Rijn. His father's name was 
 Harmen. Hence his other name of Harmensz, that is to say 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S BROTHER 
 
 BERLIN MUSEUM 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BR A UN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
R E ]M B R A N D T 99 
 
 Rembrandt the son of Harmen of the Rhine. This was in 
 1606. He was one of six children in a family of burghers of 
 moderate wealth and the owners of a mill, which has played 
 some part in the legends of Rembrandt's youth. It used to be 
 said, and there may be something in it, that his pleasure in 
 light and shadow, by which we know him most, began with 
 his watching the sunlight fall into the gloom of the old mill. 
 
 He was enrolled as a boy among the students of Latin liter- 
 ature at the then illustrious University ; probably for some ac- 
 quirement of learning, certainly for exemptions of taxation 
 that belonged to the members. The professors are still famous 
 to this day for law, literature, and theology. Among them are 
 Scaliger, Lipsius, Vossius, and that Arminius whose name 
 remains for us in the story of the Calvinistic struggle. The 
 printing presses of Leyden were celebrated and their fame re- 
 mains. Leyden was therefore a city of intellectual and liberal 
 culture. And it had also some masterpieces of earlier art. 
 When the boy began to show in the usual way his predilec- 
 tion for art, and was wisely allowed by the family to begin its 
 study at fifteen, he found a teacher in an artist of standing 
 there, now almost forgotten. Van Swanenburch. We are told 
 that under this gentlemanly painter, the boy so distinguished 
 himself during his three years of apprenticeship, that his fellow- 
 citizens were interested in him, that his parents agreed that he 
 
100 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 should go to a more important artistic centre, and that he was 
 sent to Amsterdam, to study under Peter Eastman. Eastman's 
 name or talent was not one from which to imagine the future 
 Rembrandt to develop. He was an " Italianiser." So the men 
 were called, who having studied in Italy brought back, as we 
 do to-day from Paris, certain academic tendencies and imita- 
 tions. Always in the beginnings of national work the preju- 
 dice is in favour of some art already made, which can be 
 copied. Though Rembrandt returned to Eeyden after a few 
 months' study, he retained for some time, and perhaps through 
 his entire life, certain smaller likings, derived from this influ- 
 ence. He also absorbed the tendencies of the men about him ; 
 certainly the Dutch fidelity to nature, the observation of light 
 and shade as a manner of enforcing this, and most certainly 
 that excellent workmanship which seems to us outsiders an 
 integral part of the Dutch character. Painting as a profession, 
 as a trade, was possessed in perfection by the Dutch painters. 
 They may be bold, or they may be timid, they may-have noth- 
 ing to say, or a great deal, but their mechanical work is a de- 
 light to the painter, and a lesson as to the importance of know- 
 ing one's trade. Therefore young Rembrandt had not to 
 struggle against the difficulties of unlearning methods of me- 
 chanical work, and is not separated by his execution, even when 
 most consummate, from the admirable scholastic qualities of 
 
REMBRANDT 101 
 
 the other men whom he overtopped by the simple fact that 
 he was Rembrandt. Already by 1627 the "St. Paul in Prison," 
 which is the work of a youth, dry and harsh, shows that some- 
 thing more which he was to express, and which to express fully 
 he needed a more accomplished and more skilful technique. 
 This power developed rapidly. The St. Paul has already the 
 type of what Rembrandt is about to give us — the look of a 
 portrait of a man actually known to the painter, represented 
 with those incidents of ordinary life meant to convince us still 
 more of the thing having really happened, of history being al- 
 ways the same ; even if, as often with him and other Dutch- 
 men, told in bad taste, and perhaps with some conventionality 
 acquired from Italy, or necessary to satisfy the habit of mind 
 of the client. Thus the sword of St. Paul, in the painting, 
 which is a mere symbol in the church pictures, like the keys of 
 St. Peter. But the look of St. Paul, its anxiety combined with 
 thought, is that of a prisoner with a great story to tell. By 
 1628 we know that Rembrandt practised etching. He was 
 learning to abbreviate details and to make complete studies 
 outside of that element of colour, which he was also studying, in 
 his paintings though with relatively less success. The first one 
 we know of is that of his mother, whose portrait reappears, 
 either painted or etched, for many years. He etches and draws 
 and paints from himself, so that we follow his portraits through 
 
102 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 his entire life. As many as fifty, I believe, remain to us. No 
 more simple way of studying nature could be followed by a 
 man desirous to understand the mechanism of expression, the 
 singular changes the human face can take, and the strange 
 meanings given to it by light or shade, as this or that point of 
 character flashes out, or is hidden, and trifles become of im- 
 portance to tell the story of character. We see the young Rem- 
 brandt, jolly and healthy, almost a boy ; then thoughtful and 
 reserved, or exuberant with success ; then in full possession 
 of himself, understanding what he is, then gi-ave, feeling the 
 weight of things ; then saddened by misfortune, or smiling 
 gently at keeping himself and his powers beyond the reach of 
 fortune, or finally aged and broken, the mind and intellectual 
 control contemplating the weary body. In these studies one 
 follows also the peculiar turn of mind which separates him 
 from most artists, the anxiety to go still farther in pursuit of 
 every quality of workmanship or every manner of expression. 
 He remains pleased, perhaps sometimes triumphant, but not 
 satisfied. Before him open still greater possibilities of more 
 comprehensive achievement, either greater force or greater 
 sweetness, or greater synthesis. 
 
 He seems to have been rapidly appreciated, to have been 
 fairly paid, and so to have been taken to the greater centre of 
 Amsterdam as early as 1631. We know where he lived in 
 
P O R T R A I T () F ri A S K I A (PENCIL DRAWING) 
 
 BERLIN PRINT ROOM 
 
REMBRANDT 103 
 
 Amsterdam, and the house he purchased later, where much of 
 his great work was done, and the httle house at the end of the 
 Canal of the Roses where he passed his last days of hard work 
 and relative poverty. At first all went well with him. He 
 married a girl of fortune, of good family, Saskia van Uylen- 
 burgh. He drew from her and he painted her many times. He 
 may have painted her before his marriage ; we have a sketch 
 three days afterward, as he has written on the margin. And 
 he loved to place her in many attitudes and in costumes more 
 or less fantastic, as he had done and kept doing for himself. 
 Never are these pictures sad or troubled. They represent a 
 pleasant mind, perhaps a gay one, painted by a great mind, 
 in youth and happiness, and the painter seems to have been 
 happy. We see this in his portraits of himself and his friends. 
 He paints and engraves and etches for many patrons and pur- 
 chasers. All this work is successful, sometimes extraordinary 
 in qualities of execution and vision of reality. But as yet that 
 special mark which is to distinguish him later, that of a deep 
 penetration of his subject, has not appeared. Nothing inter- 
 rupts his constant production. At some moment, perhaps with 
 the loss of the sunshine of Saskia, who dies quite young 
 (1642), the expression of his work becomes more intense, but 
 no personal distress, loss of loved ones, loss of friends, of money 
 and reputation, appears to place any hinderance in the continual 
 
104 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 flow of his work. His sincerity of mind and love of nature show 
 through all the earlier work ; the portraits are splendid or accu- 
 rate and the sensation of what he sees is each time fairly and 
 independently represented ; his mind sees farther and farther 
 the make and quality of what he looks at. The singular per- 
 ception of the mind of the subject of his portrait, or imagined 
 figure, belongs to a later period. The beggars whom he likes 
 to draw, the Jews who serv^ed to him as models, are at first 
 merely shown from outside. Little by little we feel in the rep- 
 resentation of poverty and of pain a growing sympathy, which 
 is to be the mark of the greater Rembrandt. His sketches and 
 etchings, as well as his painting, describe home fife, his own or 
 that of others, in all the details of domesticity, with more and 
 more sympathy, as if he sought for the very type of the study 
 of the home. The Mother and the Child pass more and more 
 into a typical representation. Family affections are embodied 
 more and more distinctly in the pictures or the etchings. He is 
 slowly passing into the power of representing the ideal of the 
 Scriptures as existing in ordinary life. Perhaps the steadiness of 
 home allows him to see more distinctly the meaning and value 
 of unheroic life, of the life of any one, rich or poor ; of ordinary 
 happiness or misfortune. His relations with the Jews ; the de- 
 graded, the poor, the wealthy, and the intellectual, connect 
 with his wish to use the Bible as the subject for these intui- 
 
REMBRANDT 105 
 
 tions ; and the sense of pity for man becomes more apparent. 
 The fashion of his day allowed for such representations. No 
 longer the great church paintings, meant to teach doctrine or 
 to adorn a splendid worship, could be used as the method of 
 expression of a painter's feelings. In Holland, influenced by 
 the Reformation, all, whether Catholic or Protestant, had 
 dropped the ancient forms. But the Bible remained as a hu- 
 man inspiration, and allusion to its study was easily understood. 
 Upon these themes Rembrandt worked, bringing the events of 
 a far back epoch into dreams of ordinary life. All his study of 
 the ordinary sights of life, all his fondness for realistic copying 
 helped now to give a true form to what he pictured, and to him- 
 self and to us the effect of a thing actually seen ; of a picture not 
 composed, but revealed at one blow, as if before the artist a cur- 
 tain had risen and fallen. Whatever of convention he used, he 
 tried to bring back to a knowledge of the Orient with which he 
 was well acquainted, as we know from his drawings made for 
 himself. The costumes of the Jews whom he saw about him he 
 modified by that acquired information. To us to-day with a 
 greater knowledge of the East as it is, these details are some- 
 times in the way. At his day they may have served the same 
 purpose as our accuracies of the present or the accuracies of 
 various epochs, which are always transient. 
 
 We have said that we know of his uneventful life nothing 
 
106 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 but the actual documentary facts that belong to every one — 
 who his parents were ; that he studied ; that he painted ; that 
 he married ; that he had a child ; that his wife died ; that he 
 was successful and had pupils, and was apparently in an 
 assured position as an artist ; that he collected works of art 
 which he studied assiduously— that he accumulated also those 
 masses of rubbish upon which painters depend for details and 
 for encouragement of their behef in the reality of what they 
 do — and we have, by great luck, of all these a full catalogue, 
 because they were sold by his creditors. We know that all this 
 collection, worth great sums before and after that day, went 
 for nothing, along with his paintings and his drawings, and the 
 very linen put out to wash ; that the great war in which Hol- 
 land was entangled had ruined him, with many others, by low- 
 ering all values suddenly, and stopping the purchase of such 
 luxuries as paintings ; that he withdrew from his house, sold 
 over his head, to small quarters and poor lodgings ; that his 
 son, now growing, up and a trusted servant protected him in 
 adversity by some legal arrangement through which they em- 
 ployed him ; that he became less known, through daily produc- 
 ing work which grew more and more important and reached 
 the highest grade of technical power known to the art of paint- 
 ing ; that his son died ; that he married again, and died ob- 
 scurely in that house on the Canal of the Roses. All this is an 
 
PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN 
 
 THE HERMITAGE, ST. PETERSBURG 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUN, CLEMENT & CO 
 
REMBRANDT 107 
 
 ordinary story, such as has always happened, and is only of 
 value because it happened to him, and that we hope to know 
 him better by these small details ; that is to say, that we may 
 perhaps follow his course of development by the marks of ex- 
 terior accidents ; but there is no clew that way to the constant 
 progress and affirmation of power which follows him to the end. 
 Misfortune or poverty seem to give still greater strength to his 
 faculties and to his absorption in his profession. Only one thing 
 can be traced, that the lessons of life enrich his mind and are 
 part of his work. More and more does his sympathy go out to 
 the feelings of others. More and more the tenderness of the 
 Bible story — the human side of it, its perpetual lessons — are 
 embodied in every drama that he paints or draws, in the very 
 portraits that he paints. The men and women, whoever they 
 may be, the artisan, the theologian, the nobleman, the profes- 
 sional man, the plain people or the wealthy — are looked at each 
 as having a history behind them. Something of an individual 
 soul unlike any other individual spirit, with special experiences, 
 shines within his portraits or imagined faces in a way that no 
 one before or after him has attained, or even perhaps has 
 dreamed of attaining. Each and all of these portraits are, as it 
 were, historic. They are important even if we have no idea of 
 what they represent ; and indeed it is in those cases that this 
 individuality of previous existence appeals to us most strongly. 
 
108 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 They are the nearest approach ever made to actual being, and 
 perhaps exist more powerfully in the pictures than our unper- 
 ceptive eyes could make out had we the real men and women 
 before us. Before his great portraits the refined crowd gazing 
 upon them in the galleries seems tamer and less valuable. 
 They are the common people ; and Rembrandt's paintings of 
 any ordinary acquaintance are the elect and the wonderful. 
 Within what Antiquity called the perso7i — that is to say the 
 part we play in life — appears the enormous value of the human 
 soul. Something like this we feel before all great portraits, 
 even when not painted with the multitude of details or the 
 easy synthesis of Rembrandt. Something like this we feel in 
 Raphael's portraits, even if they belong to methods of painting 
 early and tentative. Something like this with Velasquez, but 
 reversely from Rembrandt. He goes no farther than what is 
 sufficient to express a character and to express a position in 
 life, seeing what a gentleman may see without pretending to 
 judge or fathom. Of course, in the continuous work of Rem- 
 brandt as a mere workman following his trade of painting to 
 live by it, there are pieces which are necessarily the task of the 
 day carried out beautifully, but wherein the mind of the work- 
 man was tired. Even then these are masterpieces of some side 
 of the painter's art. Nor would it have been within the habit 
 of his nation to throw away a work always honestly made a.s 
 
REMBRANDT 109 
 
 work ; and it may be worth our while to-day to notice that 
 these very great artists are primarily workmen, without any 
 pose or assumption of doing more than a daily task. They 
 seem almost devoid of ambition. Their work is sufficient for 
 them. The great applause of a contest with others appears alien 
 to the integrity of the mind looking only at its own existence. 
 I have spoken of the portraits, not only because they are famous 
 and wonderful and well known, and we can appreciate them 
 according to the gradations of our perceptions, but because 
 that study of the actual fact seen, that we call realism, is the 
 foundation upon which Rembrandt stood, when he invented 
 the probable appearance of things he had not seen, but which 
 his mind wished to appear before him ; and it is from this basis 
 of enormous observation that he passes to the expression of 
 feeling in his imaginary paintings or etchings. " Christ Healing 
 the Sick," the famous etching known as the Hundred Guilder 
 Print, tells the story in the nearest approach ever made to a 
 realisation of its importance. A description of it might make it 
 appear too much to be the accumulation of facts. Others than 
 Rembrandt might have thought of similar necessary details, 
 but who could have brought them together, so that one is in- 
 separable from the other ? All the resources of what we call art 
 — that is to say the arrangement of lines and spaces, the divis- 
 ions of light and shade, the insisting on certain points and the 
 
110 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 elision of others are there, but so covered up that all seems 
 accidental. But the real picture as it happened in its day would 
 have been more accidental and its meaning less visible. Who 
 can forget the expression of the Christ, the manner in which He 
 welcomes with blessing the embarrassed mother bringing up 
 her unconscious child, at the same time that He is aware of 
 the objection and interference of the disciples unwilling to 
 have Him troubled ? His extended hand welcomes the misery 
 addressing him, and gently with the same movement puts aside 
 the too great officiousness of Peter. All around Him are 
 grouped the supplicants, the paralytic faintly stretching out a 
 helpless hand ; a daughter in expectant prayer ; the leper in 
 agony of hope, the disabled patient cripple; the impotent, 
 Wind old man led by his aged wife ; the friends and relatives 
 timidly recommending their charges — the gay child in perfect 
 health, looking at it all as a piece of play; and on the other 
 side, in the full light of reason, the wise men and the Pharisees, 
 watching with some curiosity and some interest this singular 
 performance, while the apostles gaze steadily in full belief, one 
 of them half turning to argue, as if accustomed to such remon- 
 strance; while the elegant young man of fine sensibility looks 
 on with sympathy, yet annoyed at the coarseness and ill-flavour 
 of the miserable crowd. In this etching we see the most splen- 
 did use of that great engine of representation and expression in 
 
D ^ 
 
REMBRANDT 111 
 
 art, of which Rembrandt is the great exponent, which he has 
 made so completely his that we know him mostly through it. 
 It is what the language of the studios calls " Chiaroscuro " — 
 that is to say, if we can define so complex a thing, the manner 
 in which what we see merges from shade into light or retreats 
 within the shadows. It has always been felt by painters and 
 by all the sculptors who are complete. We hke to see the form 
 made more distinct by the indistinctness of a part. It marks 
 the beauty of those times of the day where part of what we 
 see passes into indistinct air, bringing out all the more into 
 relief what is strongly lit. A struggle to express this can be 
 seen in the Italian paintings, let us say of the Venetians, or 
 Correggio, who used it as a form of sentiment, in Leonardo, who 
 studied it as science; even in the arrangement of Michel- 
 angelo's " Last Judgment " ; in Rubens, who used it for the 
 distribution of his story ; and its secrets were being studied by 
 the Dutchmen around Rembrandt. Rembrandt has insisted so 
 much upon this, has made it so much a means of telling his 
 story, has so used it to make certain things important and 
 others relative, and to impart the mystery of the half-seen to 
 what he wished to be felt and understood, but which might 
 distract the eye from what he wished to see in perfect clear- 
 ness, that this method of enlisting our interest and increasing 
 our belief in what he shows us seems to belong particularly to 
 
112 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 him. He has used it for all purposes ; from the mere embel- 
 lishment of an ordinary representation to the suggestion of 
 sentiment or the vision of the supernatural. See how the light 
 trembles around the mystic formula which appears at the call 
 of Dr. Faustus, held up by guessed-at hands. See how, above 
 it, the calm, steady light of the big library window tells us 
 how quiet the place was before the incantation. That is the 
 story of the light. It is not necessary that it should contain, as 
 it does, the initials that represent the name of the Saviour. Or 
 again, in the picture of " The Good Samaritan," painted at a 
 time he must have wished for help (1648), behold the story of 
 the falling shadows ; for it is almost night, and in a moment, 
 as soon as the kindly preserver has reached the door above the 
 steps, the wounded, pitiful wayfarer will be safe and cared for. 
 The painting is full of details of observation which many a 
 painter would not dare to drown in shade as Rembrandt has 
 done. The dreamy landscape, the quiet inn-yard with its stabled 
 horses, the tired beast that has carried the burden, and the 
 boy at the reins who looks over to see how ill this man may be; 
 the accuracy in rendering the different strength of the man and 
 the boy carrying in the wounded — all these homely observa- 
 tions are but a background for the few things that we see dis- 
 tinctly. The wounded man is the portrait for ever of a helpless 
 sufferer. Out of the gloom appear his face, his eyes half- closed, 
 
DR. FAUSTUS 
 
 ETCHED IN 1648 
 
REMBRANDT 113 
 
 one brow lifted, and his lips open with a tired groan half of 
 relief and half of pain. His chest sinks in, his body drops, and 
 his naked legs turn one around the other. One feels how 
 much he himself feels what a trouble he is to those who help 
 him. Of the actual painting all has been said in praise ; but one 
 cannot exaggerate the interest with which every detail is fol- 
 lowed, not one trifle more than is necessary, but fully made 
 out where necessary, and all rendered with a sincerity which 
 has not the slightest sign of cleverness. All through Rem- 
 brant's work, and it is his mark, except in the work of the 
 mere boy pleased with his success, there is no sign that the 
 painter knew how wonderfully he had succeeded ; not even 
 later when he has gained at length, just before the end, that 
 complete connection of all his faculties for which he struggled 
 through a lifetime. 
 
 Or, again, around the head of " The Christ at Emmaus " as He 
 breaks bread and the disciples recognise Him, the light in the 
 dark room has a something of phosphorescence, of a tone and 
 colour which belong to that face of the dead man, risen after 
 having suffered, and whose hands break bread slowly, as if to 
 give time to the astonished disciples to realise who is with 
 them. As I said, all this telling of a story by light and shade 
 presupposes below its sentiment and romance and mystery the 
 solid foundation of profound attention to form and gesture. 
 
114 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 Drawing for its own sake, form for its own sake, colour for its 
 own sake do not exist for Rembrandt. They are all so fused 
 together that in such a picture as that just mentioned the exe- 
 cution is so simple and yet so involved that no one would dare 
 to think of the possibility of copying it. 
 
 And yet for many there has been a great desire to imitate 
 him in some obvious ways, and his pupils were many, who had 
 his help and occasionally glided into the manner of the mas- 
 ter. We do not know what he taught. It must have been of 
 extraordinary importance, for it involves all that there is in the 
 art of painting. He might have shown them the secrets of his 
 earlier work, which is more connected with the work of the 
 Dutchmen around them. He was careful, apparently, of their 
 individuality, and taught them separately; though also they 
 must have helped him, as was the fashion of all those days. 
 They did so, even in his etchings, the method of which is more 
 personal than can be that of painting, because there are fewer 
 steps between the beginning and the end; while painting, 
 which is made up of surfaces covered one by the other, may 
 allow indefinite amount of work, well directed by one man, to 
 be covered completely by the last veilings and touches, which 
 are really the painting that we see. Why did he change as he 
 went along ? Why was he not suited with his manner when he 
 painted " The Lesson in Anatomy," where Dr. Tulp addresses 
 
THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS 
 
 THE LOUVRE, PARIS 
 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BR A UN, CLEMENT & 
 
REMBRANDT 115 
 
 the Regents or Inspectors of the Hospital ? Surely this master- 
 piece of his early days, for he was only twenty-six years old, is 
 a work sufficiently perfect and complete. We recognise that his 
 great characteristic is the anxiety to express still more in the 
 same direction. The painter of appearances had early attained a 
 power of formulation sufficient for a great place in art. Appar- 
 ently the student and worker kept on observing the infinite 
 modifications of nature. These studies were accompanied by 
 the experiences of life. To express that succession of experi- 
 ence and feeling, which was himself, some more intimate, more 
 delicate, more powerful means were necessary than what might 
 do to paint a handsome face, or brilliant eyes, or the velvets 
 and satins which make for instance the portraits of Burgomas- 
 ter Van Beeresteyn and his wife (owned by Mr. H. O. Have- 
 meyer) so delicious to the eye, so sincere and honest in the 
 rendering of the things seen. 
 
 As time went on he risked the changing of his manner, en- 
 dangering sometimes the beauty of certain details. He had for 
 his use only his past habits, his own and those of his school, for 
 he differs only from them by being what we call Rembrandt. 
 He had about him common models, or at the best people 
 whose forms were not heroic. The habits about him were vul- 
 gar where they were not plain and orderly. The costumes 
 were sober, or if rich were eccentric. He had little of what is 
 
116 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 called exquisite taste, nor did he differ in that from those 
 about him. He seems to have admired it in the men of the 
 past, but to have had a perfect wisdom which prevented his 
 gathering what he could not fully use, what he could not test 
 by the life of every day. What is bad taste in him belongs to 
 others around him. What is distinct and beautiful is appar- 
 ently his alone. For the building of the great structure of the 
 painter, the planes and directions of planes, the intersection of 
 lines, what is called the interior structure, his abundant etch- 
 ings and drawings must have made him master. Even in the 
 paintings occasionally, in the obscurity of corners, he resorts to 
 those abbreviations which his etchings and drawings show, a 
 manner of starting only a few points which the mind fills in. I 
 remember in a painting of " The Christ at Emmaus," which is 
 at Copenhagen, and which I copied in my youth, trying to fol- 
 low, touch by touch, a great dog lost in the shade, only ap- 
 pearing occasionally to the eye as if a little more light might 
 make him more distinct ; and this beast was made only of five 
 or six touches of definite space and colour, being in paint what 
 the few scratchings of his etchings suggest to us in black and 
 white. Perhaps, after all, the etchings and drawings tell us 
 more about himself, about his completeness of study, his in- 
 tensity of perception, and the extraordinary sympathy and feel 
 ing which separate him from all other artists. There he could— 
 
DETAILS FROM THE LESSON IN ANATOMY 
 
 THE IMPERIAL MUSEUM, THE HAGUE 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
REMBRANDT 117 
 
 for he was Rembrandt — throw away the greater part of his 
 armour of art. Perhaps in the drawings in which he worked 
 entirely for himself we see still more intimately the mind of 
 the master. But they are so subtle, they appeal to such a per- 
 ception of nature, such a sympathy with the expression of the 
 soul, that they require in the mind that looks at them a sym- 
 pathy that all cannot give. At my age, and after long experi- 
 ence, I can say so. As a younger man I only guessed at it. 
 With the great public and for us of the profession, the famous 
 picture, painted seven years before his death, known as " The 
 Syndics of the Drapers' Guild," represents perhaps the result of 
 all his work as a mere painter. In it he is young again not- 
 withstanding his approaching age ; but all that he has learned, 
 his thoughts during life, have helped him make it. All the 
 more do we feel this, because this one picture brings in 
 nothing but portraits, all separate and individual, but so con- 
 nected that one sees them at a blow. There is no apparent 
 arrangement as in " The Lesson in Anatomy." They are doing 
 nothing in particular more than what would take them around 
 a table to listen to the reading of accounts, and yet the ap- 
 pearance of importance of a number of men chosen for a pur- 
 pose of decision has never before or afterward been so well 
 expressed. They almost speak, but do not open their lips. 
 They are not posed. They are there. The slightest change and 
 
118 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 they would be sitting for their portraits, but they are not. 
 They have, as it were, been surprised by somebody's opening 
 the door, by some paper brought to them, and one sees what 
 they have been doing before, and what they will return to. 
 The painting as mere painting is as wonderful as that of the 
 most beautiful surfaces ever covered by the brush. Rembrandt 
 has joined here to deep appreciation of character that observa- 
 tion of life as it looks, which was the aim of his art ; that is of 
 the artist in the man. The man himself, as I have said, apart 
 from a few paintings, is better seen through the etchings or 
 the drawings. They have all the superiority that belongs to 
 the dependence on few things and a careful selection in those. 
 Not that they are separated from his pictures in any way, nor 
 can we disentangle them. But we see in them his predilections 
 and the external things on which he bases his dreams. For 
 after all, it is as the great dreamer that Rembrandt stands 
 almost alone, unless we choose to think of him with such other 
 dreamers as Michelangelo or Shakespeare. He remains the 
 great exponent of the pity and tenderness of Bible story, of its 
 being of all times, and a synopsis of all human life ; and he 
 remains, as well, the master of many realities, the poet of 
 the mystery of light, and the painter of the individual human 
 soul. 
 
REMBRANDT 119 
 
 CONCERNING THE DRAWINGS OF REMBRANDT 
 
 A singular fortune has preserved to us many of Rembrandt's 
 drawings and sketches, beyond the number to be expected in 
 the remains of an artist whose painted and engraved work is 
 so large. Usually the faint projects and intentions for com- 
 pleted work disappear; they are as scaffoldings taken down 
 and broken up when the building is completed. 
 
 We can see in the story of Rembrandt's life how these acci- 
 dental and private records have been preserved through a spe- 
 cial set of circumstances. Firstly, the fact that the artist at- 
 tained an early reputation must have given value to things 
 that he could use as gifts ; or have made some of them inter- 
 esting to collectors. Then the remarkable appreciation of his 
 etchings would have given to his drawings a value at least of 
 curiosity which would not belong to the drawings of a man 
 known only as a painter. The very anxiety to possess various 
 states of his etchings might also tend to preserve drawings re- 
 lated, more or less closely, to the etchings. Finally the catas- 
 trophe which threw every belonging of his upon the open mar- 
 ket, obliged the keeping for sale of ordinary scraps and bits of 
 work. But this does not at all mean that we have the good 
 
120 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 fortune to possess the studies for Rembrandt's famous paint- 
 ings, nor for a fair proportion of the celebrated etchings. There 
 is Uttle doubt that many of these were lost during the period 
 of his decline in public appreciation. And yet there always 
 remained admirers; and among engravers and etchers men 
 who would recognise, more or less distinctly, the enormous 
 value of his sketches and drawings as connected with the art 
 of etching or engraving, for their manner is intimately 
 connected with the manner of his etchings, with the extraor- 
 dinary use of line, and of the filling the line in with graduated 
 darks. 
 
 However it may be, all of Rembrandt's drawings, even the 
 merest scribblings, are of first importance. They testify to a 
 perception and power of expression which the etchings cannot 
 have so fully, for the latter are definitely chosen arrangements, 
 limited in their make by the material used. The extremely 
 delicate suggestion of the drawings could not be reproduced in 
 the scratch of metal on metal. And there is, necessarily, in the 
 work of art meant to address a great number of people a less 
 intimate side than in the work of art addressed to that one 
 judge of exquisitely trained perception, who is the artist, and 
 who can stay his hand at any moment he prefers, content with 
 a suggestiveness that he fully understands. To all artists the 
 successful sketch or partial study brings back a number of at- 
 
REMBRANDT 121 
 
 tending circumstances which cannot exist in the memory of 
 the outsider, who is not in the confidence of the moment and 
 of the feehngs which directed the record. 
 
 It is a surprising circumstance that so much in the sketch of 
 a great master should be in part our own creation ; our own 
 calling up of memories at his mere suggestion. This is true of 
 ever so many cases of masters, small as well as great. But in 
 no drawings is more conveyed by few means than in the draw- 
 ings of Rembrandt. They are appeals to the existence in his 
 mind and in yours of things that he does not say. The great 
 master of light and shade and of the planes and interchange of 
 these two sides of light, resorts in his drawings to a suggestion 
 of this enveloping atmosphere, by mere lines and sometimes 
 by the mere record of the direction of a line. A landscape 
 opens out into the sun or mist by merely the record of the 
 place of certain objects in the picture, of which he makes an 
 abbreviated note. In the same way the expression of a face or 
 of a whole attitude is given by the place in which the face or 
 attitude might be. A few great planes, as the painter, or sculp- 
 tor, or architect, calls them, are chosen, and we fill in at once 
 the necessary construction. A mere scratch or two, sometimes 
 merely indicating a direction, give in his drawings some of the 
 most intimate and delicate feelings that the human soul can 
 express through the body. This we know in the etchings ; but 
 
122 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 the drawings are still more intimate, still nearer the expression 
 of feehng or the accuracy of motion. 
 
 The special study and the appreciation of the look of the 
 eye is characteristic of Rembrandt all the way through his 
 work, painted or engraved, and, necessarily, in the drawings, 
 however abbreviated their expression. For example, in the 
 drawing of Joseph interpreting his dream — the eyes, made of 
 a couple of lines not bigger than a small pin's point, are each 
 one different. They all hsten, except Joseph's, which is, as it 
 were, turned within ; he is recalling what he has seen and his 
 eyes look on nothing around him. Even there, the little child 
 neither looks nor listens ; he has a plaything and that is all to 
 him. Jealousy, anxiety, disbelief, trust, all these things which 
 even Shakespeare has to unfold in many pages, are told within 
 the narrow compass of three or four inches. The name of 
 Shakespeare comes up easily in thinking of Rembrandt, who is 
 his nearest parallel in the art of painting. With Rembrandt, 
 too, the entire subject is tremulous with life — a life at first ob- 
 served, or noticed, or felt by the young man, and then gradu- 
 ally classified and recalled by him who has seen. In the Job 
 visited by his friends, the story is supremely informed as by 
 the experience of many things. There, we notice Rembrandt's 
 changing of the movement of the head of Job, which in both 
 cases expresses the resigned patience of the man subjected to 
 
^ ^;^^itr„...ii_J 
 
REMBRANDT 123 
 
 useless and misunderstood exhortation ; and yet they are sad 
 also, Job's comforters — they feel for him and muse on the as- 
 tonishing circumstances. And it is all so grave and so sad, so 
 far from anything but a high and broad view of the misery of 
 life. Here, as in most of his work, Rembrandt uses a modifica- 
 tion of Oriental costume, influenced by what he saw about 
 him to place his figures in a world somewhat remote, but still 
 touching that of the everyday of the period. It allows him to 
 bring home at once the drama he is unfolding into to-day. 
 These people are you or I or anybody, whatever. The lesson 
 is continued from the time of its occurrence ; it is not remote, 
 it cannot be avoided by saying that things were different then : 
 this is a religious mystery — this a classical fable. The lesson is 
 upon us at the moment. 
 
 Of course, in those of his drawings which are records of 
 nature seen, and sketches on the spot, all these points of sym- 
 pathy and observation are more evident, and, however wonder- 
 ful, are not so surprising. That is to say that we expect them. 
 We expect that he will be faithful in his copying, since he is so 
 faithful in his dream. And how completely he has observed 
 even things that he was unacquainted with, as in the sketch of 
 an Indian Prince, seated on a throne, receiving a written mes- 
 sage, in which the accuracy of costume and appreciation of 
 type antedate by almost two centuries our appreciation of for- 
 
124 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 eign representation. For we all know how this curious collector 
 was open to all sorts of influences and used them as fuel for 
 the fire kept up by him ; therein not differing from all the bet- 
 ter artists who are great absorbers of impressions, but whose 
 record of such impressions has not often remained to us. 
 
 There is a drawing representing Jacob w^eeping at the bring* 
 ing in of Joseph's bloody coat, which is an extraordinary speci- 
 men of Rembrandt's dramatic power, if one can call anything 
 so near nature dramatic. A few lines give the old man's sudden 
 breaking down ; a few more lines distort his face in an agony 
 which cannot be mistaken ; a form of speecliless pain to be re- 
 lieved later by hysterical weeping; and the shambling self-con- 
 sciousness of the lying messenger is so rapidly expressed by a 
 few sweeps of a brush that it is we who place the figure of a 
 man inside of these touches. There are also faces, or rather the 
 mere expressions of bystanders, watching the effect of the news, 
 and one or two other partial sketches on the edge of the paper 
 indicate that the artist saw the scene at first from another 
 point of view, and gave this up rapidly for a better one, how- 
 ever successful the first perception had been ; for these draw- 
 ings of Rembrandt which tell stories are not composed. They 
 are, as it were, *' the record of a former sight," almost instan- 
 taneous, but a thing really seen. So that a complete painting, 
 even his own (and he is one of the most complete and elabo- 
 

REMBRANDT 125 
 
 rate of painters), would not give more than the details of the 
 picture seen and noted in the few lines of the drawing. In that 
 way Rembrandt's drawings are the most remarkable ever made. 
 Nor could they have been so made with such evident rapidity, 
 as if translating in a hurry what he saw, without the prodig- 
 ious training of copying from nature which he had and which 
 he shares in common with the other Dutchmen of his day. 
 
 One cannot suppose these drawings begun, to take up again ; 
 they are so much the record of one impression. But looking at 
 them more coldly, we can see that they are sometimes cor- 
 rected or modified ; showing also the other side of Rembrandt 
 — the calmness and the critical judgment which must belong 
 to any very great " executant." There are drawings which are 
 more in the nature of a mere study from nature, to be used as 
 a mere formal document. In these, the correction and re- 
 touching is naturally more evident. So that also in the pass- 
 ing from one to another of his drawings we meet most dissimi- 
 lar intentions. But these are the natural sides of the work of a 
 profession which requires both great sensitiveness and sympa- 
 thy and even passion ; but also like all professions, calmness 
 and detachment and slow patience and critical judgment of 
 one's own work. 
 
 From what I have said one might suppose that every art 
 student should have these drawings. But that is a very differ- 
 
126 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 ent question. A similar one is presented in the study of the 
 greater poets. How near, should we ask ourselves, could the 
 student come to the best appreciaiton of the greater and more 
 difficult works ? It may be that he needs lower or less involved 
 forms that his mind can analyse and which he can copy. For 
 it is hopeless to copy Rembrandt or Michelangelo, except as 
 mere training. What we know of them involves long previous 
 study, and a special attitude of mind, often extremely personal. 
 Were it not for that, the drawings of the great masters would 
 be the easiest models. But portions of them can be studied, 
 as, for instance, we travel through a country. A student can 
 thereby appreciate the great difference and learn what it means 
 to be a great draughtsman. And if his lines of thought and 
 feeling are not in sympathy, there is no danger of his being 
 forced into a path he cannot tread. 
 
 But he can use these intimate records of a great man's mind 
 as a strong stimulus ; as an uphfting out of the ordinary into 
 larger life, at least for a moment, as we poor people read a 
 passage of Homer, or some lines of Shakespeare, or Dante, 
 without the slightest intention of even trying to imitate them. 
 Only that for a few moments we breathe a greater air than 
 that of every day. 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 
 
 IMPERIAL GALLERY, VIENNA 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HAN F ST A ENGL 
 
RUBENS 
 
" Pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body." 
 
 FROM THE TENTH SATIRE OF JUVENAL 
 
 Inscription on Rubens' s house, now rmmber 7 in the street that bears his name 
 
RUBENS 
 
 " Ex illustrissima stirpe Rubeniana" (Of that most illustrious 
 line of Rubens). This inscription I read nearly fifty years ago, 
 on the tomb of a lady of rank, recently deceased, and buried in 
 the Rubens chapel of the Church of St. James at Antwerp. 
 There the great master also lies under his own famous painting 
 called St. George, which traditionally represents himself and 
 his family.* 
 
 I quoted this inscription some little while after to an Amer- 
 ican gentleman, a descendant of Calvert of Baltimore, too, also 
 a descendant of Rubens, who often thought of the honour of 
 his own right to interment in that same chapel. This illustrious 
 descent has its beginnings, however, in the more humble 
 origin of Rubens 's family — a respectable and ancient family of 
 traders of the great commercial city of Antwerp. But he was 
 not born there, and even the certainty of his place of birth was 
 unsettled until recently. Rubens, himself, and his people seem 
 to have been ignorant of the singular secret. Those most inter- 
 ested were anxious not to reveal them, and his mother had 
 
 * Traditionally but incorrectly, I believe. 
 
130 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 promised to be silent. His father had not engaged in trade, but 
 had studied law, and had become a doctor in both civil and ec- 
 clesiastical law. He had married Mary Pypelinx, the daughter 
 of a merchant. The times were troubled. Antwerp had become 
 rich and prosperous with religious and commercial liberty. Re- 
 ligious dissension and the imperiahsm of Spain at the end of the 
 sixteenth century, brought disaster upon the Low Countries — 
 a record of political and religious persecution, whose memory 
 is still fresh in history. The reformation had many friends in 
 Antwerp ; and many people hke John Rubens, the father of 
 the artist, were more or less affected by the new ideas. Advo- 
 cates and preachers of the newer doctrines poured from Ger- 
 many, Switzerland, and Holland into Antwerp, where on the 
 other hand the Jesuits were struggling with equal courage, and 
 finally with greater success. The strife was intense. John Ru- 
 bens represents in himself this struggle. He was always sus- 
 pected of Calvinistic views, and even styled " the most learned 
 Calvinist." But externally he kept within legal bounds. Still, 
 denounced at length, he determined in 1568 to leave, obtain- 
 ing honourable recommendations from his colleagues on the 
 town council of Antwerp, and withdrew to Cologne, which was 
 a place of refuge and a manner of neutral ground. There John 
 Rubens, obliged to recover his fortunes, came into the service 
 of Anne of Saxony, wife of William of Nassau, the Silent 
 
THE ARTIST'S TWO SONS 
 
 ROYAL GALLERY, DRESDEN 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
RUBENS 131 
 
 Prince of Orange, a foremost champion of Protestantism, 
 whose name is for ever associated with the freeing of Holland, 
 and the establishment of its separate and tenacious power. 
 
 Anne of Saxony was living apart from her husband, and in 
 Cologne with the hope of recovering properties sequestrated by 
 the Duke of Alva. William was no model of conjugal virtue, 
 which may pass for some excuse of Anne, a passionate woman, 
 violent in her reproaches of his infidelities. John Rubens be- 
 came her steward and her lover, and followed her to the little 
 town of Siegen in the domain of John of Nassau, brother of 
 William. She had left her children and servants in the care of 
 Rubens's wife. There in Siegen in 1517, upon a denunciation, 
 John Rubens was thrown into prison, the princess acknowl- 
 edging everything with a hope of saving Rubens, who him- 
 self admitted his fault, writing to his wife in acknowledg- 
 ment. 
 
 The wife forgave him ; but the Nassaus were perplexed con- 
 cerning public scandal and the taint upon the birth of the prin- 
 cess's child. Rubens's vnfe threaten^ to reveal the secret if 
 her husband's Hfe were taken, but promised to keep silence with 
 TL hope of obtaining his release. Two years were passed in these 
 trying circumstances, until Mary Pypelinx obtained that the 
 prisoner should be released on bail under conditions of secrecy 
 and obscurity; and the family were allowed to remain in 
 
132 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 Siegen, where, on June 28, 1577, a second child, Peter Paul 
 Rubens, was born. 
 
 Later they were allowed to remove to Cologne, where 
 Rubens and his wife struggled for a competency, made more 
 difficult by the disgraceful exactions of the Nassau family and 
 the necessity of concealment. Even after the death of John 
 Rubens, his wife maintained this concealment to protect her 
 children from future danger. Hence the tradition of Rubens's 
 birth in Cologne and the fact that neither of the two sons 
 knew of this dangerous blot upon the name. Had he known 
 of it, Rubens later might have been inconvenienced when he 
 was sent as envoy to Holland by the Governor of the Low 
 Countries. Not only is this story necessary to explain the early 
 life of the great master, but it is right to record it in honour of 
 the mother of so great a man, whose success in life she pre- 
 pared and whose glory she ought to share. 
 
 The widow, with three surviving children, returned to Ant- 
 werp in 1587, to a city attempting to recover from disasters of 
 most cruel wars. Both brothers, Philip and Peter Paul, were 
 brought up in an atmosphere of study and learning, Peter 
 Paul being distinguished at school beyond other boys, know- 
 ing French, Flemish, German, and Latin also, well enough to 
 have kept them in practice during all his life. In Latin, neces- 
 sary for learned correspondence, he may have been grounded 
 
RUBENS 133 
 
 at Cologne, traditionally, under the Jesuits, the influence of 
 whose humane teaching seems to have persisted during his 
 entire life, and to have helped a nature singularly large and 
 open to all influences. 
 
 When later we shall follow him as an artist, we shall recog- 
 nise that of all men who have expressed themselves in the art 
 of painting, Rubens had the widest sympathy for the whole of 
 life. In his own works are reflected the attempt of that age to 
 unite all divergences, and to break down the lines which often 
 separate the more spiritual demands from the natural enjoy- 
 ment of nature and of art, and the common likings of man. 
 The boy was at first trained for the study of law, the natural 
 turn to a profession for energies which could not have the 
 support of acquired capital. Belgium, however, was a place 
 where art had flourished, and where the art of painting had 
 a special birth. To it in old days had come the students of 
 Italy, anxious to know the secret methods which gave splendour 
 and permanency to the work of Flemish masters. Apart from 
 the charms of religious feeling, of poetic expression, the art of 
 Flanders had preserved even in its poorer representatives a 
 tradition of practice in which still survived the solidity and 
 splendour born far back from practise in gold and metals and 
 the glories of transparent glass. Notwithstanding devastations 
 of war and religious bigotry, the buildings of the past still con- 
 
134 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 tained those great and little masterpieces which make Bel- 
 gium one of the richest of all countries in the art of painting. 
 The open, fresh nature of the boy, Peter Paul, must have 
 felt this joy of the eye, as well as the analogous splendours of 
 church worship and civic ceremonies in which the Netherlands 
 delighted. A practical demand for workers in such things was 
 then all ready, and the mother wisely allowed her boy to fol- 
 low the bent now beginning. There were masters preparing a 
 new path : some of them too much impressed by the mistrans- 
 lated meaning of Itahan art ; but among them a few already 
 indicating the path which Rubens was to make — the broadest 
 ever made in power of colour and expression of life. Jordaens, 
 whose work merges later into that of Rubens, was being pre- 
 pared under the teaching of Van Noort. The influence of the 
 latter upon Rubens as a pupil is obscure, uncertain all the 
 more that there are doubts upon the authenticity of some of 
 the teacher's paintings ; and Van Veen, to whom Rubens went 
 next, is rather a cold ground for such an exuberant plant as 
 Rubens. But Van Veen was scholarly, must have taught well 
 what he did teach, and Rubens was a lover of knowledge and 
 an assimilator of everything useful. Van Veen gave him all he 
 knew, as Philip Rubens tells us. We do not know exactly 
 what Rubens did at the time. It is traditional that the works 
 of master and pupil were often confused. But certainly the 
 
PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN 
 
 ROYAL PINAKOTHEK, MUNICH 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
RUBENS 135 
 
 teacher's praise of Italy and its marvels must easily have per- 
 suaded the youth to try the country whose name stood for art 
 itself. So that on May 9, 1600, he set out for Italy. 
 
 His stay was to last several years and his influence to shape 
 an art which, notwithstanding his education, has always taken 
 a shape just outside of Italian. A good fortune which was to 
 follow him through life, if we can call good fortune the power 
 of a happy use of circumstances, brought the young artist on 
 his arrival in Venice to the acquaintance and consequent pa- 
 tronage of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, who desired a 
 painter attached to his court. The very introduction of Rubens 
 to the great lord may have been already the result of a certain 
 fine manner and good-natured courtesy, which is one of the 
 marks by which he is remembered. Perhaps his brief appren- 
 ticeship as a page to the Countess Van Lalaing some years 
 before had made him more at ease with the manners of a 
 court. 
 
 The Duke of Mantua was a man of pleasure, an irregular 
 patron, but perhaps all the more had Rubens opportunity to 
 study the works of art which a residence in that part of Italy 
 allowed. We know that he appreciated almost everything in 
 the forms of art that he came across, and a residence in Rome 
 allowed him still larger study. Profoundly interested in the 
 remains of antiquity he made continuous studies of whatever 
 
136 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 he could see, learning to understand them also from the point 
 of view of the historian and antiquarian. Raphael and 
 Michelangelo were copied by him as one of the methods of 
 the painters of the time. In Northern Italy he studied what 
 was nearer to his feelings, the works of Correggio, those of 
 Tintoretto and Veronese, and his favourite Titian in Venice. 
 The paintings of Giuho Romano about him at Mantua in- 
 fluenced him and gave him confidence in his own powers of 
 arrangement. Statues and bas-reliefs he everywhere sketched 
 and copied, and the manner in which he has done this is a 
 shorthand explanation of the method of his study. Occasion- 
 ally he has copied, but very rarely, as our scholars do from the 
 cast : but usually it is a way of comprehending the image 
 before him and making it over again in more living form. The 
 marble or statue passes in his drawing into what it is meant to 
 represent — the living surface of flesh, the expression of the 
 eye or lip. Of himself he practised the manner of study 
 which he described years afterward in the little essay on the 
 imitation of statues which we know in its Latin text, and its 
 French translation by De Piles. " There are," he says, " paint- 
 ers for whom such imitation is very useful ; others, for whom 
 it is so dangerous that it may almost annihilate art in them. 
 In my opinion, in order to reach supreme perfection, 'tis 
 necessary not onlv to become familiar with the statues, but to 
 
RUBENS 137 
 
 be steeped in their innermost meaning. Yet such knowledge 
 must be used with prudence, a7id with enfu^e detachment from 
 the work ; for many unskilled artists, and even some of talent, 
 do not distinguish matter from form, nor the figure from the 
 substance which ruled the sculptor's work." Therein Rubens 
 has taught as wisely as is possible ; but only for those who can 
 understand. Therein, also, he has told us his entire story. 
 Fond as he was of introducing actual copies from nature and 
 making of the use of portraits in imaginary subjects the ap- 
 parent web of his work, his realism, that is to say his copy of 
 the thing before him, is only used to add to the illusion ; to 
 make one trust the reality of the entire work because of the 
 evidence of certain parts. During these times of study and of 
 copying pictures for presents by his patron he also painted 
 from orders mostly for church decorations in which he tried to 
 compose and imagine upon the lines of what became his fur- 
 ther development. A few more portraits, also, were part of 
 his duty. 
 
 In the various uses made of an attendant upon princes, he 
 was sent by the Duke of Mantua to accompany certain presents 
 made to the King of Spain and to persons of importance at that 
 court. Italy hung on the relations with the Spaniard ; and the 
 smaller princes had greater neighbours whose movements they 
 were obliged to foresee and propitiate. Of this modest form of 
 
188 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 embassy, Rubens acquitted himself well ; painting pictures for 
 Spain, as well as delivering those intrusted to him. In the de- 
 tailed record of this trip we recognise already a man anxious to 
 meet the good graces of those whom he has to serve, but main- 
 taining a dignified reticence and modesty as a manner of pro- 
 tection in an inferior position. When later he returns to Spain 
 as a trusted envoy from the aunt of the King, he will have 
 learned the habits and manners of the court. On his coming 
 back to Italy Rubens hesitated at leaving the uncertain service 
 of the Duke of Mantua, but the illness of his mother determined 
 his return on October 28, 1608, too late, however, to find her 
 alive. 
 
 We have a record, however inexact, of the grief felt by him 
 at her loss. Fond of Hfe and of enjoyment, Rubens showed, in 
 all his relations with those that he loved, a sensitiveness not dis- 
 similar to his delight in happiness, concerning which obedience 
 to natural feeUng he has written some touching words — words 
 which carry in the formal language of that day the repetition of 
 what I first assumed — that union of Christian sentiment with 
 the philosophic consideration of life spread out for him in the 
 teachings of the pagan thinkers he was fond of " I have no in- 
 tention of ever attaining an impassive stoicism. In my opinion, 
 no man can be wholly unmoved by the different impressions 
 that events produce in him, or preserve an equal indifference 
 
RUBENS 139 
 
 toward all worldly matters. I believe, on the contrary, that H 
 it right on certain occasions to blame such indifference rather 
 than praise it. And that the feelings that rise spontaneously in 
 our hearts should not be condemned." 
 
 Rubens returned to a more fortunate home, an artist not un- 
 known, a man accustomed to life of many degrees, to the habits 
 of courts, their dangers, and to the goodwill or indifference of 
 patrons. He was but thirty-two, handsome and stately, as we 
 know by his portraits, and by universal testimony. He had 
 developed by practice and study his natural artistic inclinations 
 and the teachings of his first masters. He had had much prac- 
 tice : painting now for study, now to please patrons, now to 
 accomplish some work that embodied the result of his acquired 
 knowledge. The continuance of copying, which he followed ac- 
 cording to the custom of the time, gave him not only insight 
 into the meanings of other minds and their manners of expres- 
 sion, but also that joining of habits of mind and hand which 
 make a secondary nature acting for us almost mechanically. 
 The habit of following by mind and hand beautiful proportions, 
 beautiful Unes, beautiful combinations, makes them a part of 
 one's self which works alongside of the more distinct intentions 
 of the will. The reminiscences which fill the works of the greater 
 artists are thus not copies or imitations, but the almost invol- 
 untary record of previous admiration and study. Perhaps in no 
 
140 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 one has this assimilation been greater than in Rubens. His 
 execution is a shorthand expression of the many records in his 
 mind. The swift and easy touch, the brief indication, the large 
 passages of paint flowing as easily as speech, are the brief state- 
 ment of enormous absorption of nature and of art. In that way 
 the mechanical execution of work has not the appearance with 
 him of a patient, protracted attention, which may tire both the 
 maker and the looker on. It shows a delight in summing up 
 what he has wished to say which is both enthusiastic and poetic. 
 The surfaces which he has painted are in themselves beautiful 
 expressions of the mind. Sufficient when other materials of his 
 work are coarse, or vulgar or commonplace, to cover them with 
 a gloried diction of colour that recalls the triumphs of the exe- 
 cution of music. This extraordinary power over his materials 
 Rubens was about to display suddenly to his country and the 
 world within a couple of years after his return. 
 
 He had come at once into the good graces of the rulers of 
 the Netherlands, the Archduke and Archduchess, Albert and 
 Isabella, who, prepared by strong recommendations, gave him 
 an official position that brought him standing and privileges 
 and some little income. He had made money in Italy and Spain, 
 and had begun the remarkable collection of works of art which 
 was a means of culture, of acquaintance with men of learning 
 and collectors, and later still a fortune. He had work at once to 
 
RUBENS 141 
 
 do in the usual way of court-painter, with portraits and with 
 paintings for churches, according to the habit of the time, and 
 especially the habits of his country. Paintings were, if not a 
 necessity, at least one of the usual manners of marking public 
 events or special happenings ; and they were placed in churches, 
 which made their appeal to all more lofty and more natural. 
 
 Thus, then, for the corporation of the Church of StWalburga 
 and for the Guild of the Arquebusiers of Antwerp, he painted 
 between 1610 and 1612 the great paintings of the *' Raising of 
 the Cross," and " The Descent from the Cross." The latter is the 
 more famous picture : perhaps one of the few best-known paint- 
 ings in the world. In it Rubens fixed the type of the subject, 
 absorbing in his work the impressions" received from earlier 
 master's. So tliat whatever the merits of others, however touch- 
 ing, however beautiful, however gi*eat, one feels in this extraor- 
 dinary achievement a result which can never be dispensed with. 
 The reminiscence of the big painting placed with almost no 
 separation on the high cold wall is that of a large, dark space, 
 almost black, down which slips a column of white — the sheet 
 that carries the body of the Christ into the arms of loving friends. 
 All their grief is contained. They are attending to those last 
 physical duties we pay to the departed ; and in the dramatic 
 expression of their feehng this exact balance is most beautifully 
 and truthfully observed. The fear of a fall that would shock the 
 
142 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 sense of reverence to the dead animates all the figures, each one 
 in a different degree. Thus according to the part they play in 
 the simplest of all dramas, the care for our dead, even the 
 workmen who detach the body have in their business just the 
 proportionate sympathy. It is this feeling of contained emo- 
 tion, difficult and rare in the work of a man of exuberant feel- 
 ings, that distinguishes this painting of Rubens, unless we 
 should except that other last scene, the " Death Communioir 
 of St. Francis," where again one feels the contained struggle 
 against outward emotion that fills the attendants who help the 
 dying Saint in a last homage to his Redeemer. '* The Descent 
 from the Cross " is, then, a wise and balanced work, composed 
 of marvellous adjustments of planes and lines, so that each 
 motion, each fold, even the out-balanced foot of the man at the 
 arms of the cross, who has just let shp from his shoulder the 
 body of the Christ, helps to form a pattern as ingeniously com- 
 bined as that of any ornamentation or brocade meant merely 
 for the soothing of the eye. But none of these subtleties are 
 insisted upon to the detriment of the dramatic story; and, as in 
 very many of Rubens's paintings, we are unaware of the subtlety 
 and combination of lines and surfaces which make the artis- 
 tic structure of what seems to us a mere rendering of nature, 
 or the sweep of exuberant and poetic passion. For Rubens is 
 really calm when he executes ; he is like the conductor of a 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS 
 
 ANTWERP CATHEDRAL 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BKAUN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
RUBENS 143 
 
 great orchestration who directs the expression of stormy or 
 gentle emotion according to a scheme, carefully devised and 
 elaborated by a mind that reduces all necessities to a single 
 effect. 
 
 The deep religious feeling animating the great painting is 
 not that of a mystical or of a self-inquiring or sentimental 
 mind. It is that of the Rubens we know in all the diversity of 
 his likings, but here contained in manly obedience to the simple 
 probabilities of such a scene and in their expression in a single 
 type. Hence the great standing of the painting and the perma- 
 nence of its fame. It is built to last for ever. 
 
 " The Raising of the Cross," painted also with many other 
 works during these four glorious years, is more the real Rubens, 
 letting himself flow into the dramatic situation, and using the 
 contrast of the actual, brutal, cruel splendour of nature, whose 
 glories are the same during any tragedy opposed to the call of 
 the spirit above the beastly world of blind force. The face of 
 the Christ, triumphant, almost joyful, floats above the sorrow 
 and the cruelty below him. Several times Rubens has opposed, 
 but never so simply the inner tragedy to the dramatic pomp of 
 outside circumstances. Many years afterward something of the 
 kind is visible in the " Christ Bearing the Cross on the Way to 
 Calvary." We are so much more accustomed to a more arbi* 
 trary and intentional presentation that we cannot always sym- 
 
144 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 pathise with the largeness of view belonging to this simple, 
 exuberant nature of Rubens. All the more that we associate 
 with whatever we see of him the memories of many other works 
 in which the joy of life is spread on canvases with colour and 
 moving line. 
 
 The two great pictures, the Descent from and the Raising of 
 the Cross, were painted during the first happy years of his mar- 
 riage with Isabella Brant, which was celebrated October 3, 1609. 
 Everything smiled upon Rubens : family affection, goodwill, 
 and as much work as it has ever been possible for a painter to 
 accomplish. The portrait of himself and wife is a beautiful 
 memento of young success. We see the strong body of a gay, 
 contented cavalier on whose wrist rests, in the fashion of the 
 day, the arm of the young wife, dressed in her best, and with a 
 contented and intelligent smile that tells a story of successful 
 life. The hand of Rubens lies upon his sword, which is the cen- 
 tral line of the composition ; a confidence in the future of the 
 battle of life even in this detail of costume. 
 
 This man was now to become the head of a national school 
 and to fix for Flanders, and later for the entire world, certain 
 methods of the art of painting — methods not entirely his own, 
 methods belonging to his immediate predecessors, refined and 
 cultivated by the influence of Italy, but based upon extreme 
 good sense and practical possibilities. 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AND II IS FIRST WIFE 
 ISABELLA BRANT 
 
 ROYAL PINAKOTHEK, MUNICH 
 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY H A X F S T A E X G L, 
 
RUBENS 145 
 
 The master found pupils and assistants to carry out his many 
 orders, and so distributed their efforts that all their work passes 
 into his as the performer's part in a great piece of music. A 
 master- workman, himself, and of a kindly and generous nature, 
 he remained in touch with all his workmen and assistants, as at 
 other moments he was a scholar with scholars, and a gentleman 
 of rank with gentlemen. 
 
 To carry out the commissions which came upon him with the 
 increasing prosperity of the country and the circumstances 
 that made painting a necessity of trade, he formulated a method 
 of life observed with accuracy. He rose early, devoted some 
 time to religious observance, worked steadily or directed his 
 pupils and assistants during the day, rode some gallant horse in 
 the afternoon, and spent the evening in learned and profitable 
 converse or correspondence. The gay and joyful Rubens of the 
 paintings had a serious side of desire for improvement of the 
 mind. Even when at work he had profitable books read to him. 
 He left little to chance, and his motto, " day and night to think 
 of it," explained the promptitude and decision of his artistic 
 execution. But he was specially gifted with power of express- 
 ing his emotions by the touch and sweep of his hand. In that 
 he remains a marvel. Without this special gift even his extreme 
 order and sobriety of life would not have allowed him to have 
 to his account the tremendous number of pictures, which varies 
 
146 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred ; many of such 
 dimensions as would justify years of work. Traditions or leg- 
 ends of his rapidity and facility are more or less exact, but 
 they all mean the same thing. It is not necessary to believe 
 that the Kermesse was done in a single day, but it must have 
 flowed through his brush with a rapidity justifying the tradi- 
 tion. He had the supreme advantage of having a taste whose 
 deficiencies met the ordinary taste of the day. In our own time 
 we feel the redundancy and inflation of much of his work, es- 
 pecially in arrangement or ornament, and sometimes a similar 
 defect in his compositions. But wherever that may be in his 
 painting, there some balance of colour and of fight redeems the 
 heaviness of form, incorrection of drawing, and confusion of 
 attitudes. His drawing is a mighty one, understood in a 
 greater way than that of a small accuracy. He is a master of 
 planes and of distances, and his study of sculpture developed a 
 sense too often lacking in what is called good drawing : that of 
 the existence of the other side of things which we do not see. 
 His years of orderly and abundant work, of acquired wealth, 
 and enjoyment of the same in his collections, in the houses that 
 he built, in the goodwill of all who came across him, were 
 broken into by the death of Isabella Brant. 
 
 The death of his mother, and later of his brother, are the 
 one inevitable suffering apparent in his life. A few vexa- 
 
PORTRAIT OF H p] L E N A FOTRMENT 
 
 RYKS MUSEUM. AMSTERDAM 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
RUBENS 147 
 
 tions in his employment as ambassador, and regret at the con- 
 tinuance of wars, are the only other thorns. 
 
 No other women seem to have touched his life but Isabella 
 and the other, Helena Fourment, whom he married a few years 
 later, no longer a young man. He was then fifty-three years old 
 and the bride only sixteen, about the age of his oldest son, whose 
 picture with his younger brother is at Dresden. In the wisdom 
 of his career this seems to be the only risk that he ran. The 
 result seems to have been a happy one. He had suffered from 
 the death of Isabella, and felt the loneliness of a great home 
 once adorned by a woman. For it is one of the marks of Rubens 
 that the lives of these two women mingled absolutely with his. 
 Always and everywhere in his paintings come the faces and the 
 forms of Isabella or Helena. Even far back their types of beauty 
 seem to have been divined by him, as with Leonardo the type 
 of Mona Lisa existed in the mind before he saw her in the body. 
 Even the Magdalen of the Descent, so expressive of Rubens's 
 love of woman, has the character of Helena before he knew her. 
 We know all of her beauty, even to indiscretion. 
 
 A charming picture, known as *'The Walk in the Garden," 
 represents Rubens and Helena in the early period of their mar- 
 riage. The artist's truthfulness shows him as he was then ; and 
 his maturity contrasts with the almost childish look of his bride. 
 But though Rubens is slightly older, thinner, grayer, and bends 
 
148 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 in a way that indicates the shght fatigue of Ufe, he is still a 
 gallant, handsome cavalier ; and in the picture full of spring 
 flowers blooming, and all nature gay, he fits sufficiently well 
 into this courtly expression of pleasant life. 
 
 Rubens had just returned from courts. His widowerhood 
 was much filled with certain embassies, imposed upon him by 
 his direct sovereign, the Archduchess Isabella, who relied upon 
 his sincerity, upon his acquaintance with many people. What- 
 ever we may think of the views which he held, or of his diplo- 
 matic career, he understood, and understood in a handsome 
 way, the wishes of his masters and carried them out faithfully. 
 He was helped, of course, by his grand manner, by the charm 
 of his conversation, and his culture, and perhaps all the more 
 by that influence of goodwill which so wonderful an artist 
 might inspire by his work. It was not a mere witty saying of 
 his when in his English embassy, from which he came back 
 knighted, he answered a courtier who had found him painting 
 and inquired, " Does His Most Catholic Majesty's representa- 
 tive amuse himself with painting? " with this : " No, the artist 
 sometimes amuses himself with diplomacy." He, thereby, kept 
 his position without trenching on the privileges of the esoteric 
 occupation. That was a danger and a difficulty. Once, indeed, 
 we have a record of some great lord (the Duke of Arschoet) 
 rebuking Rubens from the stand-point of certain assumed priv- 
 
RUBENS 149 
 
 ileges of rank (which circumstances Rubens forgave by order). 
 From the sovereigns he met nothing but kindness and even 
 favour, though Phihp of Spain had at first questioned his em- 
 ployment as envoy from Isabella, for the two reasons which 
 separate the artist from the man of affairs. In the first place, 
 the artist works with his hands, not by those of others ; and, 
 moreover, from the nature of his life his fortune cannot be 
 tied down, and, as Philip put it, " He can give no pledges." 
 
 There was a moment, in 1620, when Rubens's service as a 
 political correspondent coincided with great pictorial work. 
 That was when Maria de Medici, the Queen-mother, reconciled 
 to her son, Louis XIII. of France, proposed to adorn her pal- 
 ace, the Luxembourg, with great paintings, which might, ac- 
 cprding to the spirit of the time, record in a splendid way the 
 events of her life. Rubens was recommended by the ambassa- 
 dor of Albert and Isabella to the Queen-mother, sister of that 
 Duchess of Mantua whose husband had been the first patron 
 and master of Rubens. During the several years that Rubens 
 was in Paris for the preparation, or the fitting of the work, he 
 came into relations with the political managers of the time ; 
 and later, when again the Queen broke with her son and came 
 again to Belgium, he served her for a time as intermediary 
 in the singularly complicated circumstances of quarrels, which 
 this brief account can only hint at. The great paintings planned 
 
150 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 by him, and in part executed by his pupils, still adorn the 
 French capital. 
 
 They are magnificent examples of Rubens's eloquence of ora- 
 tory, if one can use the words for the art of painting ; splendid 
 discourses on the history of the Queen, in which allegory, and 
 fiction, and reality combine to cover up facts in courtly state- 
 ments. These splendid conceptions, important enough to fill the 
 life of any ordinary painter, show in the analysis of some of 
 their methods some of the main characters of his art, and how, 
 like all great artists, he used difficulties as a means of success. 
 With him the use of the portrait, the rendering of a person 
 seen, is one of his manners of completing the story of his pic- 
 tures, of introducing enough reality to make us accept easily 
 the improbable parts of his theatrical arrangement. All was 
 good that came into his net, and commonplace characters 
 serve to increase the splendour of the tableau. All of these 
 people, imaginary or real, live with a special life, and in a man- 
 ner which is his. They are all animated, courageous, splendid, 
 triumphant, and seen at a distance, as it were, in the function 
 of which they are part. I said all, but occasionally some char- 
 acter, prominently necessary, as with Maria de Medici her- 
 self, steps out from the crowd, as in the theatre the main 
 performers attract our principal attention. In the meaning 
 of these paintings, therefore, in their intention, in their right 
 
C Q 
 
 F^ Pi 
 
 O O 
 
 ^ '^' 
 
 C ^ 
 
 Pi < 
 
 < O 
 
 C ►J 
 
RUBENS 151 
 
 solution, Rubens was but using the methods of all his 
 compositions. 
 
 In this habit of painting portraits, Rubens could easily ob- 
 tain the good graces of the courtiers or princes whom he had 
 to meet. This was but an extension of his first training in the 
 court of Mantua. Later, when for really important business, 
 the Archduchess Isabella sends him to Spain, to inform the 
 King more closely than by correspondence, Phihp is painted 
 and has paintings made for him, and is charmed by the char- 
 acter and manners of the accomplished artist. For Philip was a 
 lover of art, and under his external woodenness a lover of all 
 that was pleasant. Another lover of art, of different complex- 
 ion in mind and morals, Charles I. of England, also felt the 
 charm of Rubens as ambassador. 
 
 He had been chosen by the Prime Minister, Ohv^arez, to as- 
 certain the intentions of England, then ready to treat with 
 France, and was despatched as envoy, having been made sec- 
 retary of the privy council of the Netherlands on the 29th of 
 April, 1629. He had already, of necessity, relations with Eng- 
 land, and had been introduced to the questions pending be- 
 tween the countries nine years before, in Paris. There he 
 gained the goodwill of the ill-fated Duke of Buckingham, 
 with whom he had important business concerning pictures, 
 ;ind works of art ; for the collections of Master Rubens of 
 
152 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 Antwerp numbered besides antiques of every kind, Titians, 
 Tintorettos, Veroneses, Raphaels, and, none the less, paintings 
 by himself. This fortune he exchanged for money : a great 
 sum in those days, ten thousand pounds sterling. 
 
 One would like to linger in the charming memory of this 
 picturesque character, at a moment suffused with the light oi 
 the romance of history. Rubens of Antwerp became Sir Pete ? 
 Paul Rubens in England ; and however little he may have 
 done under most adverse circumstances to forward that peace 
 which was his one desire, he laid the foundation of English 
 art. Most of th§ principles, many of the beautiful habits of 
 painting represented by Rubens have lived along in England. 
 One needs but to think of Reynolds, of Gainsborough, of 
 Lawrence. His disposition and treatment of the portrait found 
 a fortunate soil. 
 
 But that higher disposition of the mind, that personal eleva- 
 tion, was not transmitted. The painter and the sculptor are 
 more usually affected by life around them ; they cannot re- 
 treat as easily as the poet within the ivory tower of higher 
 thought. Rubens returned with honours, but weary of the life 
 of courts. Once more he made a brief and ineffectual diplo- 
 matic excursion into Holland. 
 
 His second marriage turned out as fortunate as his first. 
 He had wealth, position, beautiful children, hosts of friends, 
 
RUBENS 153 
 
 and now time to devote to that " sweetest art of painting," 
 which was his business, his trade, and his refuge. As he with- 
 drew from more active life he represented that outside hfe 
 with greater joy. Enchanted views of the joy of Hfe (the Gar- 
 den of Love, etc.), expressed in terms of mythology (the 
 Diana Returning from the Chase), landscapes whose half-arti- 
 ficial combinations rival the more realistic pictures of later 
 men ; portraits, of course ; great festal decorations, some great 
 religious paintings, and even, and especially, a few most as- 
 tounding representations of rural or boorish enjoyment, ani- 
 mated by a poetry that lifts them ir^to the rank of ideals, 
 filled these later years. Everywhere, on any sort of excuse, 
 comes in the reminiscence of Helena. Even when she is not 
 distinctly visible, some bloom of youth or happiness recalling 
 her passes into the images of others. He has painted her in al- 
 lusion, and he has also painted her almost indiscreetly as por- 
 trait. One of the beautiful ones is that of himself, of her, and 
 of their little girl. 
 
 His relations with learned men continued, and of course his 
 kindly behaviour with other artists, either those whom he em- 
 ployed or whom he encouraged. He was surrounded by other 
 masters whose help was an honour. The greatest of these, of 
 course, is Van Dyck, unexplainable without him, whose cre- 
 ation is a part of Rubens 's great glory. 
 
154 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 The amount of work which he accepted must have produced 
 some strain resulting in an illness unexpected in such a re- 
 markable body. He bore the suffering of his infirmities with 
 courage and with continued devotion to his work. In this pas- 
 sage through illness to death, any more than in his most joy- 
 ous moments, there is no sign of languor or of sadness. That is 
 his mark. 
 
 He has left a great, healthy, joyous place in the history of 
 painting — a place and position so important that we can think 
 of him alongside of Michelangelo himself The intensity that 
 marks either Michelangelo or Rembrandt is not his ; but the 
 story of his successful life accounts for this absence of shadow. 
 And even his portrait indicates an eye that saw clearly, as if in 
 a mirror, but which was not accustomed to penetrate below the 
 splendid surfaces which he liked. The feeling, disengaged from 
 his work, is difficult to trace to any part or any detail ; it must 
 reside in that imponderable element, the simple loftiness of the 
 man's mind. That was recognised amply during his life, and he 
 was seen almost as he is to-day. With him, in him, and" in Van 
 Dyck, a year later, died the art of the Netherlands. It had been 
 glorious but national ; he made it universal. 
 
 His end came rather suddenly on the 30th of May, 1640. 
 With his usual prudence and provision he had made all proper 
 dispositions for his family by will. Nor was he otherwise un- 
 
RUBENS 155 
 
 ready. One of his last letters to the Flemish sculptor, Du- 
 quesnoy, desires him to return " before his own eyes close 
 for ever." 
 
 He lies in the family chapel of St. James, where in 1642 was 
 placed the painting called St. George, by a touching legend 
 supposed to represent the types of himself, his father and 
 mother, his two wives, and their children. It would be pleasant 
 to believe the tradition, the painting is so beautiful, so triumph- 
 ant ; such a romance of portraits, and such a dream of happy, 
 self-sufficient, and beautiful family life. 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 
 
 CAPITOLINE GALLERY, ROME 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDERSON 
 
VELASQUEZ 
 
VELASQUEZ 
 
 In 1605, an English ambassador, with an escort of six hundred 
 attendants, entered ValladoHd to arrange for a treaty of peace, 
 and to present the congratulations of King James to the King 
 of Spain, on the birth of his son who was to be Philip the 
 Fourth, immortal for us through the paintings of Velasquez. 
 That same spring Cervantes pubhshed the first part of " Don 
 Quixote," in which famous book appear for all time the con- 
 trasts which declare in the Spaniard a singular and courageous 
 idealism and the love of a contradictory reality which was to 
 become the key-note of the art of Spain. The Knight-Errant 
 and Sancho Panza resume in the immortal story the heroic 
 Spain of the past, the Spain of adventure and conquest, and 
 the more sober payment for the same, which was to come. The 
 power and wealth of Spain were still pre-eminent. The gold of 
 America and the treasures of the East came there, and Seville 
 was a capital for the merchants of the world. There were colo- 
 nies of foreign traders, German, Flemish, French, and Italian ; 
 and the city was both a great mart and a very religious 
 city, full of churches and good deeds, and money spent upon 
 
160 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 them ; and it kept from earlier time a something of oriental 
 mark, both in its buildings, its habits of life, and those forms of 
 external splendour, which now fill our museums. 
 
 Here in 1599, six years before Philip IV., was born Diego 
 Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez. His father was Juan Rodriguez 
 de Silva, the son of a Portuguese ; and his mother, Geronima 
 Velasquez, daughter of a SeviUian gentleman. The mother's 
 name has remained. According to Spanish custom the painter 
 bore the double name. Reverse of fortune had brought the 
 grandfather, the Portuguese gentleman, to Spain. The family 
 were in sufficiently good circumstances to allow the boy, Diego, 
 who early showed a wish in that direction, to study for the 
 career of painter. " The boy was nurtured," says one of his 
 biographers, " on the milk of the fear of the Lord." He attended 
 school, where he did well, and learned Latin early in life. The 
 family may have felt the usual prejudices, then very strong, 
 against a gentleman's taking up the trade of a painter, but at a 
 very early age, at thirteen, the boy was already a student of 
 Herrera, traditionally as fierce in Ufe as he seems to us yet to- 
 day in his paintings. 
 
 The question of the realm of early influences is too delicate 
 a point to decide. It may or may not be that of the one year 
 under Herrera, Velasquez retained permanent impressions. The 
 anxiety to fix some beginnings of impressions for such a great 
 
PHOTOGRAPH B 
 
 PHILIP IV. 
 
 THE PRADO, MADRID 
 
 RAUN, CLEMENT 
 
VELASQUEZ 161 
 
 result is increased by the fact that for the next five years he 
 studied under Pacheco, a learned, but indifferent painter, who 
 gave him, however, instruction and affectionate interest, and 
 married him to his daughter, J nana de Miranda, at the end of 
 these five years. Rubens has told us what he thought of the 
 painters about the court of Spain. He speaks of " the miserable 
 insufficiency and negligence of these painters, and of their poor 
 manner of work." " Mine," he goes on to say, " is absolutely 
 different from these. Please God I may never be like them." 
 He also adds : " I am surprised at the quality and the quantity 
 of the paintings of the older masters, that is to say : of the 
 Raphaels, Titians, and such. But as to the modern, there is not 
 a single one that has any value." This was in 1603, during Ru- * 
 bens's first voyage to Spain, and he had not visited other parts 
 of Spain where already there were examples enough to influ- 
 ence the mind of a Velasquez, and where, already, the pupil of 
 Titian, El Greco, had brought the lessons and influence of 
 Venice. The teaching of Pacheco must have been of value, and 
 he certainly, during the remainder of his life, contributed in 
 every manner to the success of his favourite pupil. And yet, 
 companionship of such fellow-students as Zurbaran and Cano 
 would be enough for the helping of any artistic mind. They, 
 and a few others, are lost to us outsiders in the superiority of 
 Velasquez ; but they are a part of the Spanish movement, of 
 
162 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 the intense desire to express life in all its reality. Cano, the 
 man who carved the St. Francis, saw with a vision not so dif- 
 ferent from Velasquez, even if a something more passionate, 
 more spiritual, has touched for once the sculptor's vision of ordi- 
 nary monkish life. Whether the young man derived more or 
 less profit from the direct teaching of his master, Pacheco, he 
 probably received through admittance to his house that form of 
 education which carries throughout life. There came the artists, 
 the learned and literary men, poets of the new school, and occa- 
 sional great gentlemen who owned paintings, and statues, and 
 books, and whose manners must have prepared for a future resi- 
 dence in courts this man who was to live alongside of the King, 
 the representative of the strictest etiquette in the world. 
 Pacheco has told us that he read much, and studied in books 
 the "proportions" and the anatomy of Albert Diirer and Ve- 
 sale ; perspective and physiognomy in Porta and Barbaro ; 
 architecture in Vitruvius and Vignola, not forgetting the arith- 
 metic of Moya, and geometry according to Euclid ; and so with 
 works on the history and theory of art, and perhaps even theol- 
 ogy, in which his father-in-law was proud to be proficient. Bet- 
 ter still, his father-in-law gave him letters for the capital, 
 Madrid, where he made the acquaintance of influential per- 
 sons, and was even proposed for the portrait of the young 
 King. 
 
Pi K 
 
 I-. O 
 
VELASQUEZ 163 
 
 But Philip had not yet, in the soHtariness of regal splendour, 
 learned to look upon this as an amusement. That was for a 
 later day. Velasquez saw the great paintings belonging to the 
 crown, whose value had impressed the great Rubens. Mean- 
 while, on his return to Seville, he must have painted some of 
 the well-known realistic studies which we know. I use the word 
 studies, for notwithstanding their extraordinary success, and 
 even that they were occasionally paintings of great subjects 
 their methods are those of the student. Occasionally the more 
 difficult problem is introduced as an accessory, as in the case of 
 the picture called " Christ in the House of Martha," which is 
 in the National Gallery. There the picture is merely that of a 
 kitchen-maid preparing food under the direction of an older 
 woman ; there are portraits of fish, and eggs, and so forth, while 
 in the background, through a window or opening in the wall, 
 we see the Saviour, seated, addressing Martha, who stands, and 
 Mary kneeling before him. Notwithstanding the formal study 
 of this background event, the masterly apprehension of ordi- 
 nary truth strikes one in the attitude of the Saviour and the 
 two women. It is not necessary to know the story to under- 
 stand what it must mean : the revered teacher, the woman ab- 
 sorbed in his personality, and the other woman more attentive 
 to the needs of every day. The picture is one of the kind that 
 was current at the time : what the Spaniards called bodego7ies, 
 
164 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 pictures of still life, such as we think are fit for the rooms 
 where meals are taken. 
 
 A few years later, in March, 1623, one of his friends in Ma- 
 drid brought from the all-powerful minister, Olivarez, an order 
 for the young artist to come to Madrid, his expenses paid. 
 Velasquez went at once, accompanied by his mulatto slave, 
 Juan Pareja, whom he had used as a model over and over 
 again, and who became later a pupil of sufficient excellence to 
 recall his master, and be, in a few cases, confused with him. In 
 the hospitable house of his friend Fonseca he painted a portrait, 
 which, as soon as done, was carried to the palace by a young 
 nobleman, a son of a chamberlain of one of the princes. An 
 hour later that prince had seen it and the King and the King s 
 brother and the great lords, and Velasquez had entered the 
 career by which we know him. The King, who was to favour 
 our painter, and whose name is carried for the most of us 
 through Velasquez's portraits, was fond of art and, indeed, 
 painted, himself Only one picture, perhaps, remains to our 
 knowledge, though we have the name of several. He is said to 
 have written as good Spanish as any noble or any commoner. 
 He composed plays which perhaps remain under other names ; 
 these for the amusement of the court. He was a splendid horse- 
 man and a great hunter. He was kindly, and in escaping from 
 the iron pressure of formality and the enormous business of 
 
VELASQUEZ 165 
 
 such an empire, too much devoted to pleasure for a man who 
 had excellent qualities. Coming very early to this gigantic suc- 
 cession, his minister, the great Count-Duke Olivarez, was able 
 to keep an ascendancy fatal in all to the fortunes of Spain. His 
 evil genius plotted for the universal sway of Spain and left her 
 on the road of decrepitude. Personally, he was hard-working, 
 sober to an astonishing degree, interested in art and literature 
 for the benefit of his master, and above corruption through the 
 desire of wealth. He, as well as the King, steadily furthered the 
 fortune of Velasquez, and when he fell at last, the painter was 
 one of the few who insisted upon testifying to his gratitude. 
 These two men are. part of the life of Velasquez ; for thirty- 
 seven years Velasquez painted the King in such a way that the 
 two names are inseparable, and in the history made by art, the 
 King still holds his place through the brush-work of his servant, 
 the painter. The heavy but gentle face we follow from boyhood 
 to age. We all know the erect and stately form, naturally deli- 
 cate, kept healthy through exercise, the beautiful seat in the 
 saddle, the hands equally elegant, whether holding a petition 
 or the bridle of a curveting horse, and beneath the externals 
 shown by the artist, who wished to see no farther than the eye, 
 a something that we know to be the mark of fate, the closing 
 of a long descent. Of the Count-Duke we have fewer represen- 
 tations, but they also will never be forgotten. They represent 
 
166 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 the opposite nature : a violent temperament, an obstinacy 
 which is fiery, perhaps a certain vindictive and quarrelsome 
 suggestion. 
 
 It would be a delight to be able to add to these portraits the 
 lost one of Charles the First of England, which we know that 
 Velasquez painted.* It would be valuable to have the testimony 
 of that impartial eye to a more everyday sight of the romantic 
 figure, immortalised by the noble manner of Van Dyck. The 
 occasion itself is a romance : that of the sudden visit of Charles 
 with Buckingham to Spain in the hope of finding a Spanish 
 bride. The disguised prince and his friend, with false beards, 
 passed unknown through France into Spain, and dallied there 
 for months in the complications of the impossible attempt to 
 combine two contrary political situations. The difficulty was 
 made none the less by the intriguing characters of the two royal 
 favourites, both vain and hating each other — so that the result 
 remains within our domain of art : the bringing back by Charles 
 of Correggio's " Antiope," and other paintings, and his learning 
 to know, and later to possess, works of art which for a time 
 enriched England. 
 
 Velasquez then was painting for the King. He had obtained 
 a position of painter to the King, with a derisively small salary, 
 but with advantages much envied ; so much so that we have 
 
 * Or sketched. 
 
M (E N I P P U S 
 
 THE P R A D O . MADRID 
 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BR A t' X , f L E M K N T 
 
VELASQUEZ 167 
 
 the record of the jealous criticisms of fellow- artists attached to 
 the court, to whom he seems to have been generous and kind, 
 but who were annoyed by the rising star. There is a story that 
 the King brought up to Velasquez that it was said of him that 
 heads were all that he could paint. To which the artist replied, 
 unmoved, " JNIuch honour they do me. I know of no one capa- 
 ble of doing it." The story is given as a preface to a competi- 
 tion for an historical painting in which Velasquez triumphed. 
 The painting is lost, a great loss, not only because of the pos- 
 sible value of the work as art, but because the student would 
 wish to know how Velasquez, now in the first enjoyment of 
 his powers, would treat an historical subject. We have a descrip- 
 tion which scarcely helps us. Its subject was a glorification of 
 the expulsion of the descendants of the Moors from Spain : to 
 us of to-day, a disgraceful and harmful act, not to be immor- 
 talised by the brush of the gentle and sincere artist, delightful 
 to all men. But at all times, as even at this very moment, the 
 wish to be " thorough " in politics causes strange and useless 
 cruelties ; the advantages of expelling from a nation those of a 
 different and opposing race must have been obvious long ago 
 as they are to-day. And national pride may have justified 
 Velasquez as it has the writers of England for many centuries. 
 In reality, Velasquez, at that time and at all others, is not paint- 
 ing for a public. His one public is the King, more especially in 
 
168 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 his case perhaps than in any other's, for in the long record of the 
 succeeding years we know that the King made a practice of 
 visiting Velasquez at his work, spending much time with him, 
 getting, even out of the bore of posing, a relief from still 
 greater tediousness. Thus he suggested subjects ; and perhaps 
 the explanation of the choice of many of the works of Velas- 
 quez, even to their arrangement, may be due to this relation of 
 a patron who might be an adviser, as well as a friendly visitor. 
 It might be the King who suggested or wished, but the rela- 
 tion might not be different from that of the friendly habitu^ 
 of the studio. And if it be true that the King understood any- 
 thing of the practice of the art of painting, one cannot imagine 
 that even in hunting he could have had so complete an amuse- 
 ment as in watching the brush of the most skilful painter that 
 ever lived. 
 
 Velasquez was not at this moment as skilful as he was to 
 become. That is to say, that later the mystery of the execution 
 becomes almost an art in itself It varies with the subject, the 
 size, the spaces, the reasons for definite or indefinite work. Al- 
 ready it provoked, as we have seen, the jealousy of men who, 
 trained in academic studies, wished to be able to analyse by 
 rule the different divisions of the success they saw ; what was 
 due to line, and what was due to drawing, and what was due 
 to colour, and the other arbitrary divisions which help us to an- 
 
VELASQUEZ 169 
 
 alyse that general nature in which they exist or are blended, 
 regardless of mankind. Thus, Carducho, the Florentine court- 
 painter, also : " Who has ever painted, and painted so well, as 
 this monster of wit and talent, almost without rules, instruc- 
 tion, studies, merely with the art of his genius, and nature be- 
 fore his eyes? " Thus, the tendency to disbelieve in any form of 
 study whose mechanism is not our own. We, on the contrary, 
 recognise, as we know by record, that Velasquez had studied 
 all his young life, and, indeed, those early paintings, however 
 successful, are studies, as the joining of their parts indicates. 
 Even the masterpiece of the " Drunkards " is somewhat put to- 
 gether as a problem. This is one of the realistic forms of paint- 
 ing which Carducho abhorred. Traditionally, it was asked for 
 by Philip, and though later, very much later, he paints the fa- 
 mous dwarfs, buffoons, and idiots, or the two vagabonds, whom 
 he has called *' iEsop ' ' and " Moenippus," he never again 
 paints a subject which might imply either a liking or a tolera- 
 tion that might turn into vice. For the " Drunkards," as the 
 Spanish call them, are not such a bad lot; they recall the 
 Spanish stories of " picaresque " life, 'tis true ; they invest it 
 with a reality which is almost that of to-day ; but as compared 
 with the representation of Northern fondness for drink, they 
 are almost poetic. And it may be that in the painter's mind 
 they were but a realistic interpretation of the joys of Bacchus 
 
170 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 and of classic revelry. We must never forget the union of Don 
 Quixote and Sancho Panza. This is supposed to be the painter's 
 last work just before his first voyage into Italy, to which the 
 King gave his consent, and for which he gave as travelling ex- 
 penses precisely four hundred ducats. We are told that he was 
 much pleased with the work, and it is perhaps the painting of 
 Bacchus " done for the service of His Majesty " for which he 
 received one hundred ducats of that sum. Just then Velasquez 
 had met the great Rubens, who had come upon his embassy, 
 and who certainly would have influenced him toward the Ital- 
 ian journey which was one of the dreams of every cultured 
 Spaniard. We know that they saw each other ; that Rubens was 
 pleased with the young Spaniard, and especially with his ex- 
 treme modesty. They went together to the great palace in the 
 desert, the Escurial ; and we have Rubens's record of the trip, 
 and, indeed, but not finished by him, a sketch of the desert land- 
 scape he describes. " The range," he writes, " is high, steep, diffi- 
 cult to climb and descend ; we saw the clouds far below us with 
 the clear and bright sky above. On the summit, a huge cross, 
 easily distinguished from Madrid, and the small church of St. 
 John, where a recluse lives. . . . We saw much red deer." The 
 picture of it went to England and is probably the one at Long- 
 ford. There is a solitary figure of a monk, a wooden cross, a 
 stag running rapidly, gray clouds, and below, a gigantic palace 
 
.ESOP (DETAIL) 
 
 THE PRADO, MADRID 
 PHOTOURAPH BY BRAUN, CLEMENT & CO 
 
VELASQUEZ 171 
 
 monastery. Something has been written of the influence of Ru- 
 bens upon Velasquez through this short intercourse, when Ve- 
 lasquez may have seen the other great man paint, with as- 
 tounding ease, the pictures that mark his stay in Spain. But 
 that must be a fallacy ; the great picture of the " Drunkards " 
 was already painted ; the next ones done in Italy keep the same 
 path of almost cruel realism. Nothing in colour suggests Flan- 
 ders, and never, indeed, is Velasquez freer than after meeting 
 Rubens. In the meeting of men who feel that they each have 
 a part to play, the result would more reasonably be the increas- 
 ing of each one's personality, whether or no each one admires 
 the other's scope, the other's art. When, later, Velasquez saw 
 the work of El Greco, he may have taken a lesson therefrom, 
 and seen how Venice was recalled in a way that could be used 
 by him, and be encouraged all the more in his own manner 
 and handling, which, like the Greek's, varies with the matter 
 in hand. 
 
 Olivarez had supplemented the rather meagre payments of the 
 King, and Velasquez sailed for Italy, accompanying the great 
 General Ambrosio Spinola, who was going to take command 
 for Spain in Italy. Later, and after his death, Velasquez has 
 painted him in the great picture of " The Lances," or " The 
 Surrender of Breda," where he receives with a courtesy, typical 
 of all chivalry, the keys of the city from Justin of Nassau. 
 
172 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 Besides money, Velasquez received from Olivarez many and 
 special letters of recommendation to all Spanish agents in Italy ; 
 so many, and so pressing, as to have made the Italians suspect 
 him of a diplomatic mission. Ofthis, however, we have no trace. 
 His slave and pupil, Pareja, was with him, and the pilgrims of 
 art landed in Venice and lodged with the Ambassador of Spain. 
 The art of Venice was declining into Eesthetics. As usual the 
 admirers of manners (manierosi) marked the evil moment 
 when the love of nature has begun to become the property of 
 pupils. There was nothing to learn by Velasquez, except from 
 the dead, who were not responsible for their imitators. We know 
 that he copied, and we know that he copied with admiration, 
 Tintoretto. To the unprepared mind, the row of spears in 
 Tintoretto's wonderful "Crucifixion" recalls suddenly that 
 other row of spears which gives its other name, " The Lances," 
 to Velasquez's " Surrender of Breda." Apart from that other 
 side of Tintoretto, the aesthetic side, everything else must 
 have suited the Spaniard, even if he thought that Titian 
 " carried the banner : " * the study of space and air, and sug- 
 gestion of the tone of a special place, and, above all, that one 
 extraordinary impression of a thing seen and not composed. 
 Velasquez journeyed on through Italy, the guest of distin- 
 guished people, and came to Rome, then a great resort of artists. 
 
 * Words attributed to him by Boschini. 
 
VELASQUEZ 173 
 
 Domenichino, Guercino, Guido, Albano, and the Frenchmen 
 Poussin and Claude, were there. How much and how httle he 
 saw of them we know not. We know that he made studies, as 
 Rubens had done, from the Sistine Chapel, still uninjured by 
 time and the smoke of incense, and that he copied passages from 
 Raphael. He had asked permission to have accession at all times 
 to the Vatican, refusing the honour of a residence therein. His 
 usual discretion always led him that way in his intercourse 
 with the great. The memory of his residence at the Villa Medici, 
 obtained for him by the Ambassador of Spain, ennobles the 
 tradition of what is now the French Academy of Art. We still 
 have a few of his sketches made there, in a successful looseness 
 that brings to us the impression of the modern Corot. Notwith- 
 standing the antique marble, notwithstanding the classic 
 paintings, the record of his residence in Rome for us is that of 
 two great realistic paintings — " Vulcan's Forge " and " Joseph's 
 Coat," in which the Elizabethan freedom from correct tradition 
 and love of the probabilities of a story are combined with vig- 
 orous studies of the special models found at hand. The same 
 men are there to-day, the same places from which he painted, 
 giving them the names of Homeric tradition or of biblical story. 
 The pictures seem strange to us because we have become ar- 
 chaeologists, but seen in a turn of mind similar to that of the 
 art ist, they are nothing more than the working out of a probable 
 
174 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 story, modified by the young man's desire to learn more of his 
 trade of painting. 
 
 As the time for returning drew near, Velasquez was ordered 
 to bring back for the King a portrait of his sister, the Infanta 
 Maria, sister of the Queen of France, consort of Ferdinand, King 
 of Hungary, who was passing through Naples on her way to 
 her husband. This was the lady of whom Buckingham had writ- 
 ten to King James, "Without flattery, I believe there is no 
 sweeter creature in the world," and with whom seven years be- 
 fore Charles Stuart of England had signed a marriage contract. 
 
 There, too, in Naples, which we must remember to have been 
 a Spanish possession, Velasquez found another Spanish artist, 
 the Valentian, Ribera, about whom float many traditions of vio- 
 lence and terrorism, and whose works still remain a monument 
 of Spanish art, and of a certain side of Spanish harshness of feel- 
 ing ; but a great painter in his way, sufficiently like the early 
 Velasquez to have divided with him until recently the author- 
 ship of the "Adoration of the Shepherds," in the National Gal- 
 lery.* Without incurring the hatredof the jealous Ribera, Ve- 
 lasquez enjoyed during his stay in Naples the friendship of the 
 viceroy, the Duke of Alcala, who was the friend and patron of 
 his father-in-law. It is plausible that Velasquez's success, and 
 his peaceful enjoyment of the same success that allowed him 
 
 • It is now ascribed to Ribera. 
 
DON BALTASAR CARLOS ON HORSEBACK 
 
 THE PRADO, MADRID 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BR A UN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
VELASQUEZ 175 
 
 to practise his profession easily and nobly, is due all through 
 life to his having been taken care of by these early friends who 
 watched over him for many years. 
 
 In the spring of 1631 Velasquez had returned to Madrid, 
 was praised by Olivarez for not having filled out his two years 
 of vacation, and went at once to thank the King for not having 
 allowed any other painter to paint his portrait in his absence. 
 The next eighteen years Velasquez resided without interruption 
 at the court of Philip the Fourth. The King changed Velasquez's 
 studio, which was at a distance, to a nearer position within the 
 palace, where, as we know, he visited him often, having a special 
 key to one of the doors. The series of portraits of the Infant 
 Balthazar Carlos, heir to the throne, began with the return of 
 the painter. It seems useless to describe them, and in fact how 
 describe the masterpieces of Velasquez so much like the image 
 of nature itself, that it is difficult to realise that they must have 
 been thought out, and planned, and corrected, until they seem 
 to have been nothing but the flow of an easy brush. It is 
 possible to see one of the early portraits of the child, Bal- 
 thazar, here in the Boston Museum, painted probably within 
 a year or so of Velasquez's return. At this time, too, begins the 
 series of the dwarfs, the playthings of the court, famous to us 
 also through Velasquez's portraits. Perhaps of all the portraits 
 of the little prince, the one on horseback, when he gallops on 
 
176 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 his pony, full tilt, in a shimmering of daylight, is the most 
 astonishing, as suggesting the noise of motion in the silence of 
 nature. Not that these paintings of Velasquez, which repre- 
 sent the open space of out-of-doors, are authentic scientific imi- 
 tations. Most of them are really painted within the studio, with 
 the light not too far up, with shadows that we know are those 
 of an enclosed space, though rather by analysis than by feeling. 
 The painter saw the landscapes from his very rooms, and he has 
 brought them, if one may use such a figure, a little nearer. The 
 naturalism, therefore, which he employs, is not that of the strictly 
 modern student, however thoroughly the methods of the great 
 painter have suited the modern man, pursuer of a nearer repre- 
 sentation of out-door light and air. But all of these portraits are 
 better judged by photographs than by cold description of words. 
 They vary in merit or in quality, as may very well have been 
 when we consider that they are what might be called task- work. 
 But to us, they are the most easily natural of all representa- 
 tions. As the painter grows more learned, and more expert, 
 and more secure, his touch, his execution, vary more with the 
 subject and become more difficult to analyse. Yet in cases of 
 overmuch cleaning we learn that often under the easiest brush- 
 work lies a careful and minute study. Besides the task-work of 
 portraits came also the demand for that great Spanish necessity, 
 the religious picture, the great source of work, ot emulation, of 
 
DON BALTASAR CARLOS AND A DWARF 
 
 BOS TO N MUSEUM 
 
VELASQUEZ 177 
 
 enthusiasm, of feeling for the Spanish artist. Though regulated 
 by church discipline, these paintings never suggest anything but 
 a natural impulse and a wish to bring the facts to the eye of 
 the religious mind. In that way, they are some of the truest 
 expressions of religious feeling produced by art. They may not 
 suit the taste of to-day, or the sentiments of a more intellectual or 
 more refined habit of mind, but if ever the sentiment of the peo- 
 ple was reflected in art, it is there in the painting of the Span- 
 iards, and in those sculptures so brotherly to paintings, which 
 are impossible, apparently, to the modern capacity. The sculp- 
 tor Montanes, whom Velasquez has painted, has managed to 
 make painted dolls express tragic emotion, or feelings of love 
 and devotion, which rival the most intimate expressions in mar- 
 ble or canvas. It was, therefore, to be expected that Velasquez 
 could not escape the order for church paintings. Indeed, it is 
 surprising that only three remain to his account, unless we count 
 that charming poem, " The Meeting of the Two Hermits, An- 
 thony and Paul," one of the latest of his works, a quarter of a 
 century later, done at the same time as the cynical "yEsop " 
 and " Moenippus," or the cruelly true images of dwarf, buffoon, 
 or idiot, who posed before this mirror-like mind, which reflected 
 with Spanish sincerity either poetry or prose. In that delight- 
 fully reaHstic dream, " Paul and Anthony," we feel the secret of 
 the desert ; of the recesses of nature, the peace of solitude, the 
 
178 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 friendship of new acquaintance, the hfe of the ascete, and the 
 feehng of hopeful aspiration which comes to those who have 
 waited long and whose patience is to be rewarded. This romance 
 is expressed in terms of simple but beautiful realism, and the 
 painter must have felt that the scene had really been that way. 
 But this is far off at the end. In the middle years of A^elasquez, he 
 painted a wonderful picture, the " Christ on the Cross," impossi- 
 ble to describe, nearer a crucifix than a crucifixion, whose merits 
 are as much based on the facts of inaccuracy as of reality. A 
 great mass of black air, of nowhere in particular, lies behind 
 the cross, against which is placed the figure of the Saviour, beau- 
 tiful, but not too beautiful, perhaps only just dead, with no ex- 
 pression of agony, and yet by the sudden droop of the head, half 
 covered by its long hair, giving the strange feeling of sadness, 
 of injustice, and of final repose. That same balance of unreality 
 and realism exists in the Christ of the " Flagellation," where the 
 wearied, but not exhausted. Saviour, His arms tied to the pillar, 
 turns His head in blessing toward the little child saying its 
 prayers to Him at the distance of many centuries. 
 
 These eighteen years of successful work, covering what is 
 known as the middle period of Velasquez's art, were passed, as 
 I have said, in the employment of the King, in small honorary 
 positions, whose functions were concerned with daily service, so 
 that only a part of his time went to the great profession of 
 
POPE INNOCENT X . (DETAIL) 
 
 DORIA GALLERY, ROME 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAXJX, CLEMENT & CO 
 
VELASQUEZ 179 
 
 painting. The pay was small, and payments rare, and often past 
 balances unpaid were wiped out by further position or increas- 
 ing stipend. In thinking of the occupation of the court-painter, 
 we should never forget his other occupations, and his being 
 therefore a servant whose time was drawn upon, and that one 
 of the reasons for the small number of the great painter s works 
 has this simple explanation. Hence, too, there is little to say ex- 
 cept to record the paintings. At the end of his eighteen years 
 Velasquez went again to Italy by order. The painter, now fifty 
 years old, had been appointed director of the works undertaken 
 to rebuild certain portions of the Madrid Alcazar. He was to ob- 
 tain paintings and other art treasures and to engage decorative 
 artists, for all of which it was necessary to go to the great mar- 
 kets. Therefore, Velasquez embarked for Genoa, from which city 
 he went to Milan and saw the great Leonardo ; then to Venice 
 where he bought Tintorettos ; to Bologna, to Modena, where he 
 saw Correggios, and could see the work of the painters whom he 
 engaged for work in Madrid ; to Parma, where he saw Correggios 
 work still free from dust and stain, and smoke, and damp ; to 
 Florence, and Naples, and Rome, to which he returned and 
 where he painted the terrible portrait of Pope Innocent Tenth, 
 said to have been the ugliest of all the successors of St. Peter, 
 the lover of books, a protector of art, who ordered the Colonnade 
 of St. Peter's, and is of the Popes the most reproached with the 
 
180 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 favouring of his family. With this picture, and to steady his hand, 
 he painted also the portrait of his slave and pupil, Pareja. We 
 owe this great picture of the Pope to Velasquez's delay in return- 
 ing. The King had become impatient a year before and had 
 written to his ambassador in Rome, "since you know his phleg- 
 matic character, see that he does not use it to prolong his resi- 
 dence over there." And again, " 1 have ordered Velasquez not to 
 come back by land, considering his character." And six months 
 later he again insists that Velasquez should come back, adding, 
 " if he has not done it, which I doubt much, it would be well 
 that you should press him so that he should not delay his 
 departure a single minute." This was in 1650; in June, 1651, 
 Velasquez returned to Spain. Then came upon him more honour- 
 able occupations, especially that of quartermaster-general of 
 the King's house, obliging him to much work. The quarter- 
 master had charge of all public festivals, and had certain obliga- 
 tions within the palace. In travel he had charge of the lodging 
 of the King and of all his attendants. It was he who placed the 
 chair of the King at table at ceremonial dinners, who gave the 
 keys to the new chamberlains, and seated the cardinals and 
 viceroys at great ceremonies. He received three thousand 
 ducats a year, and wore a key to open all the doors of the 
 palace. To help him, Velasquez obtained as an assistant Del 
 Mazo, who became thereupon his son-in-law. By him we have 
 
THE ACTOR (PABLILLOS DE VALLADOLID) 
 
 THE PRADO, MADRID 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY BR A UN, CLEMENT & CO. 
 
VELASQUEZ 181 
 
 the portraits of Velasquez's family, and behind them a view of 
 the studio of Velasquez, with a long, wide window, not very high 
 up wherein we see the great executant at work. Little time did 
 Velasquez have to enjoy the calm of the studio. Notwithstand- 
 ing, the most marvellous of his paintings, those which seem to 
 be the result of a most undisturbed attention, were painted 
 during these years. They are, in a certain way, the most remark- 
 able of realistic renderings, in which the art is so complete, the 
 naturalness is so much that of actual nature, so little that of the 
 imitation of nature, that a description of their merits would pass 
 beyond the ordinary literary possibilities. These great pictures 
 of the " Meninas " (maids of honour) and of the " Hilanderas " 
 (the spinners) are those I am thinking of. One can realise how 
 they were suggested by the accidents of ordinary life in the 
 palace, and in the King's wishes of some records of them. 
 Similar desires explain the portraits of those curious attendants 
 of courts at the time : the buffoons, and the dwarfs, and similar 
 sad curiosities. But the mirror of Velasquez's eye reproduced 
 equally with impartial vision the aristocratic lineaments of 
 kings and princes, or the swollen face of an idiot boy. 
 
 We know how beautifully he could paint the nude as he 
 painted all things, but either the reason which I have insisted 
 upon, that of his work being merely from orders or of his rep- 
 resenting very thoroughly that Spanish tradition recommended 
 
182 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 by the Church, the avoiding subjects of doubtful morality, has 
 given us only one, but a most charming painting of the beauty 
 of the female form. And one of the notes of Velasquez's repro- 
 duction is the infrequency of repetition of subjects beyond those 
 official portraits for whose manufacture he was engaged by his 
 office. In any other country, under any other disposition of 
 time, a man who had painted the " Drunkards " would have 
 been asked to repeat them over and over again, and would 
 have made a reputation thereby. Such a wonderful historical 
 painting as " The Surrender of Breda " would have, as in mod- 
 ern times, determined the career of any master. Thus it hap- 
 pens with Velasquez ; the reverse having happened with many 
 painters is only a proof that occasion determines the career. It 
 does not follow that the man pre-eminent in any line is incap- 
 able of following another. This employment of the painter in 
 a fixed way has limited also to an extraordinary degree the 
 number of his paintings. First, and foremost, he was a member 
 and a servant of the court. It was only very late, and perhaps be- 
 cause in other countries honours were given as rewards to artists, 
 and also because the relations of Velasquez to the family of the 
 King might need it, that Philip made the artist a knight of 
 the order of Santiago. There was a pretty legend of the King 
 having himself painted, on the figure of the artist in the great 
 picture of the "Maids of Honour" (Meninas), the red cross 
 
< 
 
 Q 
 
 C a 
 p: ^ 
 
VELASQUEZ 183 
 
 which marks Velasquez's rank. According to Palomino, the 
 cross was added to the painting by order of the King after 
 Velasquez's death, and yet it may have been painted at the 
 time, as proper for a person needing a high degree of nobility 
 to be introduced into the intimate family of royalty. After the 
 King had granted this order it was necessary for Velasquez to 
 make the proof of his nobility in sufficient descent. Much time 
 and discussion were necessary to establish these rights in full ; 
 in part they were acknowledged. It is only within a few years 
 that we have the details of these transactions. There we see 
 conformably to what I am trying to make special in the posi- 
 tion of Velasquez, that the testimonies of other artists and of 
 many noblemen is, " that they have never heard that Velas- 
 quez had exercised the trade of painting or that he had sold 
 any paintings ; that he only practised his art for his own pleas- 
 ure and that he might obey the King." Notwithstanding, it was 
 necessary to receive a brief from the Pope (the order being a 
 religious order), and that the King himself should use his 
 greatest power in order that Velasquez should have this dis- 
 tinction conferred upon him. These are the words; they are 
 interesting: "Inasmuch as being king and natural lord, rec- 
 ognising no superior in temporal matters, of my own will, my 
 infallible wisdom, and my power royal and absolute, I create as 
 nobleman the said Diego de Silva, but only for the purpose of 
 
184 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 this suit." Thus, Diego de Silva, whom we know as Velasquez, 
 was received into the great order of Santiago with appropriate 
 ceremonies. This honour only increased the amount of court 
 business falling upon the painter whose last work in art was 
 over. " The Hermits, St. Anthony and St. Paul," must have 
 been his last work ; and the painting shows that degree of com- 
 mand of the resources of art which can only belong to the 
 practice of half a century. 
 
 In its expression of the romance of retirement and abne- 
 gation, the painting was a beautiful farewell before return into 
 the world in which Velasquez was to end his days. The mar- 
 riage of the daughter of Philip IV., Maria Teresa, was to task 
 to their utmost the functions of the quartermaster-general. 
 The preparations and ceremonies lasted from March to July, 
 1660. For two months Velasquez worked on the preparations 
 of the building in which the ceremony of the handing of the 
 Infanta to the ambassadors and the King of France was to 
 take place. From Madrid to the frontier the quartermaster 
 had to procure lodgings for the King and all the court. We 
 have all the details of the voyage and the ceremonies. The 
 cavalcade stretched over a space of eighteen miles, and the 
 King's necessities obliged the use of 3,500 mules, 82 horses, 
 70 carriages, and 70 waggons. After much delay the royal par- 
 ties met in the building provided for them at the Isle of the 
 
VELASQUEZ 185 
 
 Pheasants in the River Bidassoa, a Httle bit of neutral ground 
 five hundred feet long, which marked the frontier of Spain and 
 France. To-day it has almost disappeared. There, ages ago, 
 Louis XI. bargained with the courtiers of Henry IV. of Castile ; 
 there Francis I. bade good-bye to his sons, who were to be his 
 pledges on his release from captivity ; it was there he proposed 
 to the Emperor Charles V. to settle all matters by a hand-to- 
 hand fight. On the fourth of June the Kings met and signed 
 the treaty, and the young princess was given to her new court. 
 The presents of Louis XIV. were presented to the King 
 through Velasquez. The scene is famous, and the names of 
 Spaniards and Frenchmen present are among the great names 
 of history. The quartermaster-general of the King was of 
 course present, and we know how he was dressed. His clothes 
 " were fringed with silver lace; he wore the usual Castihan lace 
 collar, and the short cloak on which was embroidered the red 
 cross of Santiago. The decoration of that order, in diamonds, 
 hung from his neck by a gold chain ; his sword and scabbard 
 were marvels in silver of Itahan art." If only instead of man- 
 aging these beautiful ceremonies, Velasquez had been retained 
 to paint them I 
 
 News of his death had reached Madrid, but he returned in 
 apparent good health. Thirty days afterward, however, he began 
 to feel the effects of excess of work and was obliged to take to 
 
186 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 his bed, where he was visited by the Patriarch of the Indies, sent 
 by order of the King to comfort him with spiritual advice, as 
 his state seemed dangerous. A few days before, both had fig- 
 ured in the ceremonies on the River Bidassoa. Velasquez 
 signed his testament, chose his executors, received the sacra- 
 ment, and died on Friday, the sixth of August, 1660, in his 
 sixty-first year. He was buried with all the honours of the 
 Knights of Santiago, among knights and noblemen. And 
 eight days afterward his wife, Juana, died and was buried in 
 the same tomb. The King seems to have felt his death. His 
 own tremulous handwriting still remains on the margin of a 
 business statement of the Junta to the effect that Velasquez's 
 salary should return to the Commission. Philip has noted, " I 
 am overwhelmed." Velasquez's business was supposed to have 
 remained in disorder, and his property was levied upon for 
 claims of his office. It was only after several years, and pay- 
 ment of moneys by his son-in-law, that the claim was reversed 
 and the state shown to be in debt to the painter. As he was 
 thought of then, he remains to-day ; of all artists, the most of 
 a painter ; as having most naturally expressed the special dif- 
 ferences of painting from other forms of representations, the 
 appearance of things and not their analysis being the special 
 character of painting. His life is that of a modest, sincere, and 
 honourable man. There is not the slightest record of any fail- 
 
ADMIRAL DON ADRIAN PULIDO PAREJA 
 
 NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY THE BERLIN PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. 
 
VELASQUEZ 187 
 
 ing. We know that he was most generous to other artists and 
 an admirer of other men's talents. The directness and simplic- 
 ity of his mind we see in his painting. There is none other so 
 ingenuous, notwithstanding his astounding skill. He has the 
 admiration of the future student, and owing to his being pre- 
 eminently the painter of Spain, the continuance of race inter- 
 est which must continue for ages with those who speak the one 
 language that balances the spread of the Anglo-Saxon. 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 
 
 MUNICH GALLERY 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
DURER 
 
** Niimberg's hand goes through every land ' 
 
DURER 
 
 The very important commercial city of Niirnberg, still impor- 
 tant, was once, and is still, proud of its great citizen, Albert 
 Diirer. His name is one of those that help the German romance 
 which has formed about the city and which supplies for poetry, 
 for painting, and for music, themes more or less altered from 
 their original meagreness. At the end of many years of labour, 
 which had added to the wealth and fame of his city, Albert 
 Diirer, in a letter to the council, alluded to the little business 
 encouragement given to him by his fellow- citizens, saying: 
 " During the thirty years I have stayed at home, I have not 
 received from people in this town work worth 500 florins — - 
 and not a fifth of that has been profit." Praise and admiration 
 he had received, fully, but not that support which in a com- 
 mercial community is the only real measure of appreciation. 
 
 The free town of Niirnberg had reached by the end of the 
 fifteenth century a position in commerce second only to the 
 great Italian ports. It stood between Venice and the Low 
 Countries and sent out the work of its goldsmiths, armourers, 
 printers, publishers, metal-workers, and paper-makers to both 
 
192 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 ends of Europe. With the makers of these things the fortunes 
 of the family of Diirer were connected. The family which was 
 to add so much to the glory of the German name was not Ger- 
 man, but Hungarian. The very name of Durer (pronounced 
 Thiirer in Niirnberg) is a translation of the original : probably 
 Eytas, the name of a little hamlet in Hungary. In the Hun- 
 garian town of Gyula, Albert Diirer 's grandfather learned the 
 art and trade of the goldsmith. One of his sons, Albert Diirer, 
 the elder, came to Niirnberg, in 1455, at the age of twenty- 
 eight (as recorded in his son's memoranda), " on the same day, 
 March 11, 1455, that Pirkheimer was celebrating his wedding, 
 and a great dance was held under the big lime-tree." Diirer 
 must have noted this association with the Pirkheimers, because 
 in another generation, and when grown up, he was the friend 
 of Willibald Pirkheimer and remained his friend through life. 
 Pirkheimer was a type of the other class, whose edges met the 
 artists, and the intellectual men. Pirkheimer was a student 
 and a writer, and his greater wealth and position allowed him 
 to assist Diirer for many years, and to play to some extent that 
 part of patron and worldly friend needed by the artist in his 
 more secluded life. He represented also for Diirer amusement 
 and escape from confinement of work and narrowness of the 
 home circle ; we dimly feel this in their correspondence, and in 
 the legends of the artist's life. Hence, perhaps, a quiet animos- 
 
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 mm 
 
 IL!BALDiriRREYA\HERiEFFiGlES I 
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 A\ • d' • -K X • i V . • K 
 
 PORTRAIT OF W I L L I B A L D P I R K H E I M E R 
 
 ENGRAVIXG ON COPPER, 15 '2 4 
 
D U R E R 193 
 
 ity between the patron, who tempted the artist by outside 
 pleasures, and the wife who may have been grateful for money 
 assistance, but felt also some neglect through this rivalry. Not- 
 withstanding Pirkheimer's distinction of the moment, he lives 
 for us only through his acquaintance with Diirer, who has 
 made of him an immortal portrait. This was many years after, 
 when Pirkheimer was fifty-three years old, and the marvellous 
 engraving shows the scholar and the aristocrat, and the man 
 fond of a life of love and enjoyment, that has left its mark. 
 Many were the men of culture in the busy city, which held 
 also the great bookseller and publisher, Koburger, the god- 
 father of Albert Diirer. The art of printing had been recently 
 invented ; the beginnings of engraving on copper and on wood 
 were already well advanced, and the successful manufacture 
 of paper and printing ink was to secure the spread of the print 
 as well as of the bound book. Albert Diirer's father became an 
 important goldsmith in Niirnberg, having been first an appren- 
 tice to Jerome Holper, whose daughter Barbara he married in 
 1467. Of their eighteen children, only three lived to grow up. 
 Albert, born in 1471, Andrew, in 1484, and John, in 1490. By 
 marriage, Diirer the elder entered into the rights of a burgher 
 and held offices of repute. Diirer's account of his father says : 
 " that he spent his life in great industry and severe work to 
 earn by his own hand a living for himself and family ; that he 
 
194 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 was poor, and met with many troubles and adversities and was 
 esteemed by all, since he led an honest Christian life. He was 
 patient, gentle, and peaceful in his dealings with everybody ; 
 kept but little company and sought few pleasures ; he was a 
 man of few words and feared God ; he paid great attention to 
 his children's education, and his daily words to them were that : 
 * we should love God and deal truly with our neighbours.* " A 
 goldsmith was then somewhat of an artist, and, of course, an 
 engraver on metal. Andrew became another goldsmith, and 
 John ended as a painter in Poland, not far from the ancestral 
 home. The lines that we draw to-day between the divisions of 
 art were not of the same kind at the moments which have left 
 their mark. Though the methods were perhaps even more sep- 
 arate than they are to-day, the attitude of the worker in art 
 was much less specialised. Diirer's father wislied to make him 
 a goldsmith, a worker in metals, but the boy naturally passed 
 into a desire for the study of painting, then one of the arts 
 beginning to promise great things, which since have happened. 
 Albert, therefore, was apprenticed to the painter Michael 
 Wolgemut; this was in 1486 and lasted three years, during 
 which Diirer says : " God lent me industry so that I learned 
 well; but I had to suffer much annoyance from my fellow- 
 pupils." There is such a thing as German painting ; a some- 
 thing which is not the Flemish painting ; which is not even the 
 
STUDY OF AX OLD MAXS HEAD 
 
 THE ALBERTINA, VIENNA 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HA.VFSTAENGL 
 
DURER 195 
 
 painting of the Rhine. Along the Rhine for centuries some 
 flower of art had existed that must have connected with the 
 German world on the other side. A certam harshness, a diffi- 
 culty of meeting the outside mind half way, we feel through 
 what remains. Had I time I should plead the cause of the 
 artists struggling with inherited mental obstructions, whose 
 work is, however, beautiful if you can see through its ugliness. 
 As it was mainly task-work, meant to fit into churches, a part 
 of the merits of architecture have given it form and dignity, 
 and have assured a constructive arrangement far superior to 
 the looseness of a later time which had broken the laws of 
 obedience and respect. 
 
 In the provinces of Alsatia, Martin Schon, Martin the Beau- 
 tiful, was painting and engraving. The influence of Flemish 
 masters, perhaps of Burgundian art, was beginning to give 
 sweetness to cruder forms. The prospect before young Diirer, 
 after his apprenticeship with Wolgemut, was a residence and 
 study at Colmar with Martin. Meanwhile he helped as an 
 assistant and as a scholar with the Niirnberg painter and his 
 associates, for the men practised in what might be called firms, 
 and all hands helped in the manufacture of the work of art. 
 The boy from the very first was endowed with a capacity for 
 the use of the hand, which increased to a degree that marks 
 him as one of the principal executants the world has seen. His 
 
196 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 method, of course, was that of his teaching, but ah-eady the boy 
 of thirteen or fifteen recorded his observations in a manner stiff, 
 perhaps, and wanting in knowledge, but sufficient for the posi- 
 tion of any artist however important. His work must have been 
 that of the style of the day, merged into the work of his em- 
 ployers ; that excellent way by which the student learned from 
 the inside, and not as a follower of lectures or winner of marks 
 for proficiency. He was tested by what was actually saleable 
 then and there. Next to the years of apprenticeship the rule 
 was to have the years of travel (Wanderjahre). Diirer then 
 went to Colmar and to Strassburg — too late, however, to study 
 under Martin the Beautiful. He worked also at Basle and came 
 to Venice, where the space and splendour of the art of painting 
 first appeared to him. There he embarked in those delicious 
 studies, never to end, through which the dreamer hopes to get 
 at the secrets of the nature whose image he is in love with. We 
 have his own delightful young record of how he found ' ' that 
 things had been written about how to make out the propor- 
 tions of the human body, and how a man called Jacob (Jacob 
 " Walsh," or, Italian, " Jacopo Dei Barbari "), born in Venice, a 
 lovely painter, showed him how to make out the proportions of 
 man and woman, and how when he had made out its meaning 
 it was better to him than if he had had a kingdom. In that sin- 
 cerity which is the mark of the true artist, and especially of 
 
THE K M G H T , DEATH AND THE DEVIL 
 
 ENGRAVING ON COPPER, 1513 
 
DURER 197 
 
 Diirer, he wished to have it printed for the honour of this brother- 
 painter and for common use. This the lesser man refused, nor 
 even made the subject quite clear to Diirer. He goes on to say- 
 how at that time he was yet young and had not heard of such 
 things, but that art was very dear to him, and that " he took the 
 matter to heart so much that he might bring it to an issue. 
 This he saw perfectly well, however : that Jacob, and he marked 
 it well, did not wish to make the matter ' clearer.' So that he 
 took his own thing to himself and read in Vitruvius [he calls 
 him Fitruvius], who has written a little about the proportion 
 of a man. And so beginning with one or two men, he made a 
 beginning and followed that study from day to day." It oc- 
 cupied his entire life, and after his death we have his book of 
 *' Human Proportion," published by his widow, with a preface 
 by his friend Camerarius, who describes the appearance of the 
 man Diirer, at this earlier time, not yet twenty-two, in all the 
 beauty which he retained through most of his life : ' ' Nature 
 bestowed upon him a body remarkable in build and stature, and 
 not unworthy of the noble mind it contained. His head was 
 intelligent, his eyes flashing, his nose nobly formed, and as the 
 Greeks say, tetragonon (square). He had a long neck, broad 
 chest, narrow waist, powerful thighs, and steady legs. As to his 
 hands, you would have said that you had never seen anything 
 more elegant. And of his speech, the sweetness was so great 
 
198 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 that one wished it never to end." The delightful portrait of 
 himself (in the old-fashioned way on parchment), in his twenty- 
 second year, we still have, and later he has twice painted himself. 
 Camerarius goes on to say : " Almost with awe have we gazed 
 upon the bearded face of the man, drawn by himself in the 
 manner we have described, with the brush on the canvas, and 
 without any previous sketch.** 
 
 His long hair and beard — so beautifully and delicately painted 
 in his portraits, which give him a little of the conventional look 
 of the pictures of Christ — he combed and disposed with that 
 neatness and carefulness which belongs to his pictures and 
 drawings. But the portraits are more than representations of a 
 handsome man. It is not accidental that they remind one of 
 the type of Christ. There is in the expression a degree of sin- 
 cerity, which is the great mark also of all that he has done and 
 which we have distinctly expressed in the written notes of his 
 memorandum-book. He remained through life somewhat of a 
 dreamer, and always a man desiring the best, and hoping, in 
 the purity of his intentions, that that best could happen. That 
 charming portrait of himself at twenty-two with the symboli- 
 cal flower in his hand must have been painted just as his father 
 called him home to marry a girl chosen for him, Agnes, the 
 daughter of Hans Frei, who " came to terms with the father 
 and gave the son his daughter and two hundred gulden with 
 
M E L E N C H O L I A 
 
 NGRAVING ON COPPER, 1514 
 
DURER 199 
 
 her, so that they were married on the Monday before St. Mar- 
 garet's Day, July 7, 1494." Though Hans Frei was a man in good 
 position, it is unhkely that any more came to the young couple 
 through him than her wedding dowry, and Dlirer began the 
 struggle with life in the helping of his father, who, as we know, 
 was poor, with a wife and two boys yet to provide for. When 
 two years after this marriage the elder Diirer died, the artist 
 accepted the care of the entire family. He had begun to paint 
 and we have some few remarkable portraits and religious com- 
 positions of this early date. He is too great a man not to have 
 made of everything he touched a something carrying a special 
 importance, but his methods were not yet personal ; perhaps, 
 even, were his paintings not all of his own make, and it is by 
 engraving to which he then turned that he made a reputation 
 that, great at the beginning, has never decreased. To this 
 new art of engraving he gave some of the characters of paint- 
 ing, and developed it both on copper and on wood, in special 
 manners, whose technical success is still the highest mark 
 reached in each special line. He progressed slowly, his first 
 work being little distinguishable from that of others ; but as he 
 obtained control of his material he gave to his work the result 
 of continuous outside study and acquired a firm confidence 
 which is perhaps as striking as the delicacy of skill and the 
 strange capacity for copying nature. And yet, it is in the ruder 
 
200 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 work that one can best gauge the extraordinary quality of 
 mind brought to ordinary popular work. We little think to-day 
 of the practical use of his religious images with the ordinary 
 public of Catholic countries. This demand began with the in- 
 vention of engraving and printing and the improved manu- 
 facture of paper, all of which are just developed as Diirer 
 begins to draw. He made for the ordinary public a number of 
 woodcuts, then accepted by the public as in the run of trade, 
 and now ranking with the great works of less humble appeal 
 and materials. *' The Life of Mary " as later " The Passion 
 of Christ " gave cheap pictures, as accessible to the common 
 likings and kindly feelings of the multitude as they seem 
 to the special lovers of art masterpieces of design and exam- 
 ples of technical fitness. Perhaps the very fact of a more 
 humble material allowed Diirer to display in some of these, 
 and notably in the great "Apocalypse," without timidity or 
 fear of comparison in technique, a grasp of imagination un- 
 surpassed by the efforts of any artist at any time. 
 
 They are perhaps the only designs which seem adequate to 
 the prophetic poetry of the text. The images of the words are 
 translated literally into facts with the vision of actual sight, as 
 if in a record of those things that one feels assured of in 
 dreamland. He has mentioned himself the effort to recall on 
 waking the wonders of his dreams, and also the fact, simple to 
 
D U R E R 201 
 
 every artist, that the number of his imaginings was greater 
 than he could possibly record. It is useless to describe these 
 great and simple works of art — the woodcuts — a single copy 
 is worth more than pages of admiration or explanation. We 
 may note in them (though less perhaps than in the great en- 
 gravings on copper) the passionate desire to reproduce in every 
 piece of work something studied or observed, and to make of 
 such details both an interesting addition and a manner of con- 
 tinuous progress in study. This in the other engravings — those 
 on copper — which are carried to extraordinary finish of accu- 
 racy, is so great that to an artist accustomed to analyse the 
 original form of conception it might almost seem that the 
 study is the main thing, and that the great artist has dignified 
 the study by beauties of texture and line ; and yet more, as if the 
 most precious and most difficult was the easiest, by an impres- 
 sion of poetry as powerful as the finest verse or musical sound. 
 The famous engravings about which so much has been written, 
 " The Knight and Death " and the " Melencholia," may have 
 been in his mind merely " types of temperament " — a scheme of 
 subject which followed him through life. But however much 
 explained, there is within the innumerable details a connection 
 of thought felt by all, which can be nothing but the continu- 
 ous record of an attitude of mind. One ought to add the " St. 
 Jerome in his Cell " — in which the expression of peace and 
 
202 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 contemplative work is represented as well as unflinching cour- 
 age or depth of dejection in the " Knight " and in " Melen- 
 cholia." The three great engravings are as famous almost as 
 any painting, and contain perhaps as well within their small 
 size and quietness of appeal the suggestion of the supernatural. 
 
 But these great engravings were done after his return from 
 Venice, to which he went in 1506. His success had been great 
 with a public both German and Italian, and his works had been 
 pirated to his great detriment. An obvious reason may have 
 been his trying to obtain protection in Italy against the for- 
 geries of his works, for the art of engraving was spreading 
 throughout the world. Moreover, he may have wished to see 
 what was done there in that way, as also the paintings which 
 his northern home only heard of, and to which his ambition as 
 a painter must have turned with a desire such as we have had 
 for Europe. 
 
 In the second visit to Venice, DUrer now appeared as a rec- 
 ognised master ; and in a commercial city a man of conse- 
 quence, whose work was known and for sale, and had a stand- 
 ing demand. An older and wiser man, and perhaps all the 
 more sensitive, he distinguished, among the men he met, those 
 whom he admired and those whom he despised. Writing to 
 Pirkheimer, he says : " There are so many nice fellows among 
 the Italians ; learned men of importance, with players on the 
 
ST. JEROME IN HIS CELL 
 
 ENGRAVING ON COPPER, 1514 
 
D U R E R 203 
 
 lute and pipe, with great knowledge in painting, with much 
 noble and honest virtue, and they treat me with much honour 
 and friendship. On the other hand there are the most unworthy, 
 thievish rascals that ever lived on earth. Did I not know this I 
 would think them the nicest folk on earth. As for myself, I 
 cannot help laughing when they talk to me." He was com- 
 forted by the praise of John Bellini, then very old, but still, 
 though eighty years of age, at the full summit of his powers ; as 
 we know by the great picture of San Zaccaria. The nobles, 
 also, the gentlemen (tzentillamen), as Diirer calls them, treated 
 him well, but few of the painters. According to the protective 
 laws of Venice, Diirer was obliged to pay the tax for practising 
 his art of painting. The " Feast of the Garlands," painted for 
 the German Merchants' Church, vindicated his position as a 
 painter and made, as he says, a gentleman of him. He painted 
 others and lingered in Venice, tempted, perhaps, by the offer 
 from the city of a position and salary if he would take up a 
 permanent residence. Tempting as the offer must have been, it 
 was declined, and he wrote promising his return, but adding, 
 " how I shall freeze after this sun. Here 1 am a gentleman 
 born ; at home only a parasite. " The great Mantegna, on his 
 dying bed, asked to see Diirer, intending to help him in some 
 manner of bequest of knowledge, but though Albert, leaving 
 all engagements, tried to reach him in time, the older painter 
 
204 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 had passed away, September 13, 1506. This, Diirer said, was 
 the saddest event in all his life. His anxiety for learning is one 
 of his characteristics, occasionally to the detriment of his com- 
 pleted work, in which, throughout, remain some traces of the 
 use of the subject as allowing the solution of a problem. So 
 that he again wrote that, after certain work he should like to 
 ride to Bologna " to learn the secrets of the art of perspective, 
 which a man is willing to teach me." His thirsting for knowl- 
 edge was a desire that never left him, and which at first is a 
 reminder of Leonardo da Vinci. But the great Florentine was 
 a precursor of the scientific inquirers of our later age. He 
 studied to know the causes of things as well as their effects. 
 Diirer is anxious to know that he may use. He is bound to his 
 work, and to provide by that work the support of others. Even 
 in his dreams — as expressed in art, and he was a dreamer of 
 splendid dreams — there is a portion beautiful, perhaps, often 
 curious, which is meant to be of use as an appeal to our delight 
 in the rendering of facts. Exactly what other painting Diirer 
 made then in Italy, remains uncertain. There is the " Madonna 
 of the Finch," and the " Adam and Eve," still retaining the 
 look of a problem in proportions, but beautiful in modesty and 
 charm of feeUng. The profits of the Italian journey were con- 
 siderable : he has noted, " in the thirteenth year of my wed- 
 lock 1 have paid great debts with what I earned at Venice-" 
 
ADORATION OF THE TRINITY BY ALL SAINTS 
 
 IMPERIAL GALLERY, VIENNA 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
D U R E R 205 
 
 During his stay, his friend Pirkheimer, to whom he had ad- 
 dressed the letters which still remain, had helped him with 
 money, and, to a certain extent, had taken care of his people 
 at home. INIuch of the correspondence is devoted, naturally, to 
 little business matters, and a great part of the remainder to 
 friendly jokes. Many of them are amiable reproofs to Pirk- 
 heimer for a manner of life of a very loose contexture. 
 
 On his return, Diirer's reputation increased; outside of the 
 burghers of Niirnberg, who gave him nothing, he received com- 
 missions for some of his famous paintings : one from the Elec- 
 tor of Saxony, " The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Saints 
 by King Sapor of Persia," in which Diirer must have felt the 
 joy of rendering very many figures according to his increasing 
 knowledge. His own portrait and that of Pirkheimer are in it 
 and he holds a scroll inscribed, " This in the year of the Lord 
 1508 was done by Albert Diirer, the German." For Jacob Hel- 
 ler, of Frankfort, he made a painting now destroyed. It cost him 
 a whole year's work, and more money than he obtained, so that 
 he determined to give up painting on so costly a scale. " I shall 
 stick to my engraving, and had I done so before, I should have 
 been a richer man by one thousand florins." To this we owe the 
 " Saint Eustace," the great " Fortune " — more properly called 
 " Nemesis " — ^the *' Great and Little Passions, " and he was 
 able to move to the well-known house kept memorable on his 
 
206 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 account. The first painting executed for any one of his native 
 town by his own hand was done in 1511, and is known as the 
 " Adoration of the Trinity by All Saints." It is now in the Im- 
 perial Gallery at Vienna and closes the series of Albert Diirer 's 
 important paintings. It is as realistic as could well be devised, 
 and holds most naturally, in its lower corner, a far-off portrait 
 of the bearded and gowned painter holding a frame with the 
 inscription : " Albert Diirer of Niirnberg did this in the year 
 from the giving birth by the Virgin 1511." The complicated and 
 portrait-like realism throughout, only increases the sense of a 
 vision of an impossible circumstance really occurring. Like the 
 great engravings of the Apocalypse, it is a monument of the 
 power of imagination. Its realities are held together by the fear- 
 less representation of facts which we accept because the picture 
 proves them. 
 
 But how out of the accumulation of detailed observation, even 
 with the help to our being freed from prose, which is given by 
 the charm of composition, can we explain the result of such a 
 work in compelling our imagination ? That is Diirer's secret, 
 and the secret of very few men. Through this power he has 
 given to these few pieces of paper on which are printed the 
 great engravings, " The Knight," " Melencholia," " St. Jerome," 
 " Nemesis," a power of evoking the view of a certain place with- 
 in which occurs something which has a special meaning, appeal- 
 
VlVENTlS •I'OTVIT DVRERIVS- ORA PHI UPPI 
 MZNTEAVN ON • P OT VITPINGERE 'UO CTA 
 AVANV5 
 
 M 
 
 PORTRAIT OF PHILIP MELANCTHON 
 
 ENGRAVING ON COPPER, 1526 
 
D U R E R 207 
 
 ing to us almost at once, but whose exact definition is impos- 
 sible. They are like the dreams for which the prophet and the 
 seer were called in as interpreters. We see the stern decision 
 of the " Knight," the despondency of" Melenchoha" ; on the con- 
 trary, the pleasure in the accustomed task of " St. Jerome," in 
 his sunlit room, where all is in order even to the friendly lion 
 and the dog that wags its ear. But who are right : those who 
 see in the armoured knight, on his steady war-horse, the repre- 
 sentation of Christian fortitude, or those who take this to be a 
 stern vision of the hard-hearted plunderers of the weak, whose 
 bands, hired out to any ruler, ravaged for centuries the peace- 
 ful lands of Europe ? Either explanation is sufficient ; the dream 
 is there, read it who may. 
 
 The great success of Diirer's art, carried by commerce through 
 all that space of Europe which reached by land-ways and water- 
 ways from Holland to central Italy (England and France being 
 out of the way of travel), brought its attendant dangers. It 
 was not difficult to forge or imitate his work ; this was done at 
 once as soon as he produced his first woodcuts ; the forgeries 
 increased with a greater circulation of the originals. He met the 
 usual fate of the inventor : the pillaging of his store of ideas in 
 commercial communities. Notable among these is the Italian 
 forger and imitator, the great Marcantonio, who was like many 
 of the men surrounding the beautiful Raphael, not lifted by 
 
208 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 art above the uglier sides of temperament. Many of the Ger- 
 mans also pillaged the great master's stores, and part of his life 
 was spent in attempts at protection. For that he enlisted the 
 sympathy and help of the Emperor Maximilian, a protector of 
 art, a romantic and not too wise ruler, who took the artist under 
 his special care and patronage and gave him work, and prom- 
 ises to pay, which ended in still further annoyances. Among 
 Maximihan's many projects of self-glorification, fairly due to 
 his real and poetic position, was one of a great series of engrav- 
 ings made to depict the glories of the Austrian house. For that 
 work, among others, Albert Diirer was engaged and for some 
 years carried out the drawings and engravings connected with 
 the scheme. As payment, the always needy Emperor gave him 
 claims on the taxes of Niirnberg, unwillingly met by the city. 
 The Emperor's sudden death, January, 1519, rendered doubt- 
 ful the continuance of a pension of one hundred florins a year. 
 In spite of every effort on Diirer's part, the town council of 
 Niirnberg refused to pay the charge of two hundred florins on 
 the taxes of the city, assigned to Diirer by the Emperor. The 
 artist was then obliged to turn to the new Emperor, Charles the 
 Fifth, of Spain, for assistance, and for that to have personal ac- 
 cess to him. Therefore, he determined to travel to the Nether- 
 lands, to obtain the recommendation of the Emperor's daugh- 
 ter, Margaret, then governing there, and also to meet the Em- 
 
Imago- ERASMIROTERODA 
 AM AE) ALBERTO -DYREROAU 
 VI\AAV- EFFIGIEM-DELINIAT V 
 
 ThN KPEITTD. TA-SYrrP.\iVv 
 AVATA-AqZEI 
 
 PORTRAIT OF ERASMUS 
 
 ENGRAVING ON COPPER, 1526 
 
D U R E R 209 
 
 peror himself at his coronation in Aix-la-Chapelle. All this he 
 managed to do, obtaining in November, 1520, the Emperor's 
 confirmation of his yearly pension, on condition, however, of 
 relinquishing the claim on Maximilian, charged upon the 
 taxes of the city of Nurnberg. This voyage lasted until July, 
 1521, and its impressions are recorded in a sketch-book and 
 diary, a part of which still remains, so that we have an intimate 
 account of what he did, what he saw, what he paid, and some 
 of his most intimate feelings and wishes. 
 
 Durer was accompanied by his wife and her maid Suzanna. 
 Her portrait, their expenses, and the tips given to Suzanna are 
 marked in the note-book, as well as their visits to great people, 
 and to artists ; also the stays in great cities, the ceremonies he 
 attended, and certain drawings and paintings which he made. 
 Almost everywhere he was received according to his deserts ; 
 great and special honours were paid to him. The city of Ant- 
 werp, as once before the city of Venice, desired him for a 
 citizen, offering, as did Venice, to provide an income, besides a 
 residence. 
 
 At Ghent he saw the great picture of " The Adoration of 
 the Lamb " by the two Van Eycks, and admired it completely. 
 This, perhaps, of all paintings, is the nearest to what Albert 
 Diirer himself has done; but with less sweetness, with a less 
 natural turn toward painting, and a lesser knowledge of the mere 
 
210 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 mechanism of the craft. But Van Eyck's painting stands as one 
 of the exceptional works of art and fears no comparison with 
 even greater things. Diirer saw also the curiosities " brought to 
 the King from the new land of gold." He numbers them in 
 detail, saying " that never any sight excited and gratified him 
 so much as these extraordinary products of that distant coun- 
 try which showed art work of a subtlety altogether new." What 
 we look upon as barbarous was to the more intelligent mind of 
 Diirer a lesson in his own line. 
 
 The entire journal might be quoted, all the more that it con- 
 sists of drawings marvellous in accuracy and sympathy as well 
 as in details of food and lodging accounts, of sales of engrav- 
 ings, and descriptions of receptions in Diirer's honour. But it 
 has something more essentially valuable, the noting of Diirer's 
 aspirations toward a higher life in Church and State, and ex- 
 plains the meaning of his own portrait, that curious look of the 
 idealist which spiritualises the physical resemblance to what 
 we have made traditionally the portrait of the Saviour. 
 
 The Reformation was beginning, and the sympathies of Diirer 
 were with the hopes of a reformation ; with very many a wish to 
 overturn most things in Church and State ; with him, apparently 
 nothing more than the desire for the reign of God on earth. So 
 that though he buys Luther's tractate for five white pennies, he 
 also gives one for a rosary, and visits many relics which even in 
 
ST. JOHN AND ST. I' E T E 11 
 
 MUNICH GALLERY 
 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
DURER 211 
 
 those days were considered of doubtful sanctity. He made the ac- 
 quaintance of thegreat Erasmus and began the celebrated engrav- 
 ing of his portrait. The enthusiast within the artist who portrayed 
 the exterior man mistook the character of the great writer. He 
 thought of Erasmus as a champion of the Reformation, while 
 Erasmus's keen literary mind weighed more carefully the dan- 
 gers of an upsetting for the social fabric. Hence the touching 
 absurdity of the appeal to Erasmus entered in his journal. This 
 was written on Friday before Pentecost, 1521, when " the cry 
 reached them at Antwerp that Martin Luther had been treach- 
 erously seized." We know to-day the clever management of 
 the disappearance of the reformer, but to Diirer — and it was so 
 meant — it might be the work of murderers and tyrants. So he 
 cries : " Oh, Erasmus of Rotterdam, wilt thou see the injustice, 
 the blind tyranny of the powers now ruling ? Hear me, O knight 
 Christ, ride by the side of our Lord, XS ; old as thou art, and 
 but a feeble creature, thou too mayest win the martyr's crown : 
 I heard thee say that thou wilt give thyself only two years for 
 work ; employ them well for the love of the Gospel and the 
 true faith. Oh, Erasmus, may God thy judge be glorified in 
 thee 1 As of David it is written, so do thou slay Goliath, for 
 the Lord will be with thee in the Christian Church. Glory to 
 the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, Amen ! " In his 
 sadness about Luther he appeals in prayer to the Lord Jesus 
 
212 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 to collect his widely wandering sheep from all lands, some in 
 the Roman Church, some among Indians, Muscovites, and 
 Greeks, separated from each other by the pretensions of Popes. 
 He prays that in place of Luther another may be raised able to 
 gather all the world into the faith and bring Turks, pagans, 
 and Indians within the Christian fold. " But Lord, Thou whose 
 Son Jesus Christ died by the priests, hast willed that His fol- 
 lower, Martin Luther, may be killed treacherously through the 
 Pope's hirelings ; raise again the spirit of this apostle. Give us 
 a new Jerusalem adorned with the splendours as written in the 
 Apocalypse, a new evangel cleared of human commentaries." 
 
 It may be that Dlirer's feelings as well as opinions reached 
 the powers that ruled, for the Lady Margaret and the Emperor 
 do not seem to have continued their protection upon him. Yet 
 he had attained his object and returned home to Niirnberg 
 with the continuance of his appointment as painter to the 
 Kaiser, an important official position even if it led to no di- 
 rect practical advantage. Niirnberg was much affected by the 
 new movement. Melancthon was there and taught, and we 
 know some few things about Diirer through some of the re- 
 former's writings. All that he said of him is in the meaning 
 that I have tried to give — the record of a noble and spiritual 
 nature. 
 
 An interesting record of the state of mind existing then, as 
 
ST. MARK AND ST. PAUL 
 
 MUNICH GALLERY 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL 
 
DURER 213 
 
 well as in our day of greater freedom, is the trial of several of 
 Diirer's assistants for holding opinions dangerous to Church and 
 State, opinions as obnoxious to the reformers as to the most 
 conservative of the older view. These men are well known, too ; 
 we give them the name of the "Little Masters"; and their work 
 merges gently into all the religious images of a time which still 
 kept in touch with the mediaeval past. But the two Behams and 
 George Pencz, three of these assistants, were perfectly willing to 
 acknowledge that the existence of God was to them a matter 
 of great doubt; that they " knew nothing " of Christ and of His 
 teachings in the Bible, and of baptism and other doubtful graces, 
 and that all they believed in were views of a new form of society 
 more or less socialistic, or as we should say to-day, based on 
 anarchy. They were exiled for a time, but returned later and 
 seemed to have remained the somewhat inoffensive citizens that 
 artists mostly are. Diirer remained in the same sentiments. His 
 work was less, for he was ailing since his return. He still worked 
 upon theories of drawing and proportion and questions of en- 
 gineering, and he painted the four great images of John and 
 Peter, Mark and Paul, which he presented to the city, a city 
 never too kindly to him in the way of patronage. They were 
 sold long ago and are in Munich, but the city retained the 
 inscriptions the painter had attached to the pictures. In these 
 he asked his fellow-citizens to " hear these four right worthy 
 
214 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 men Peter, John, Paul, and Mark," and wrote texts from the 
 second of Peter, the first of John, the second of Paul to 
 Timothy, and the twelfth chapter of the Gospel according to 
 St. Mark, which contain warnings against false prophets and 
 teachers of heresy, repudiators of the divinity of Christ, blas- 
 phemers, and arrogant scribes. 
 
 On April 6, 1528, Diirer's continued illness ended in death 
 suddenly and peacefully. As Luther said of him, " Christ took 
 him away in good time from stormy days destined to become 
 more stormy still." Praise and regret followed him. The great 
 city slowly learned to understand the value of her greatest 
 citizen, and to-day his memory is sacred with Germany. 
 
 In his works, "Niirnberg's hand goes through every land," 
 according to the proverb. But the German side of his work is 
 its limitation. The national or race side of any work of art is its 
 weakness. What is called German is probably nothing more 
 than a form of less lengthy civilisation. The reason of the su- 
 periority of Italian expression in art is the extreme antiquity 
 of its origins, which for thousands of years have never aimed at 
 a national, but, on the contrary, at a general human expression. 
 Not that Diirer was guilty of error in this, but his habits were 
 those of his training, a training struggling into shape. His 
 personal expression is not exactly Teutonic, rather perhaps that 
 of his Hungarian ancestry. Whatever may be the hidden causes 
 
DURER 215 
 
 upon which his own efforts worked, he is one of the world's 
 great masters. His fortunes were so shaped by duty as to 
 prevent his having fully obtained the desire of his life to 
 become a painter equal to his extraordinary capacities. But the 
 history of engraving cannot be understood without him. The 
 work of his life is behind every print we see. 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 
 
HOi^USAI 
 
tx 
 
 1r 
 
 
 w ^:^;*] 
 
 SIGNATURE OF HOKUSAl 
 
HOKUSAI 
 
 We know, though we do not always have time to think of 
 it, that all forms of art are merely varieties of language — the 
 signs of meanings, not the things themselves — and require 
 two factors almost to exist, the person addressing and the per- 
 son who is addjfessed. 
 
 It is a matter of regret that the question of an essay about 
 Hokusai, or any artist whose form of art is far away from 
 ours, should divide into paths which tend away from a com- 
 mon point. Were this essay to appeal only to artists, one would 
 need but draw their attention to some point of technique, so 
 that they could gauge the merit of the person whose handi- 
 work, whose language, this was. For then the question of what 
 might almost be called the meaning of the picture could be 
 dropped; a mere movement of a pencil or of a brush, the 
 peculiar manner in which it is used, being to artists a proof of 
 the quaUty of the person who does it. Artists know that it 
 either takes very great study or very great natural capacity, or 
 both, to make certain movements of the hand over a canvas 
 and a bit of paper. They know just how complicated is the 
 
220 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 machinery which is to be set in motion for these feats of 
 sleight of hand, and it is often what seems the least impor- 
 tant, or, rather, less showy, which would be their test. But in 
 considering Hokusai for others than artists there is a necessity 
 to explain away some of his rather strange things, to diminish 
 their strangeness by this explanation, and thereby make this 
 foreigner speak, after all, a language not so far removed from 
 our own. This double current of statement is in a great degree 
 difficult. What I mean to do is to be as little didactic, as little 
 controversial as possible, because, after all, the appreciation of 
 art is and must remain a question of sympathy, and the appeal 
 art makes is and must ever be a personal one. I should be de- 
 lighted to suppose that everybody saw things as I do, and 
 I should not wish to increase the opposition which a very 
 healthy mind, sensitive to art, often feels before the very best 
 things that there are. One of the things that we learn is that 
 the merit of a work of art does not depend upon our liking it, 
 but yet that we must have some side in us to which there can 
 be an appeal. We may, for instance, not feel in the mood for 
 some of the greater music ; we may not feel in the mood for 
 the music that moves us at times so deeply — all of which 
 merely means that there are moments and times for things, 
 and especially that the great things are not the commonplace 
 or the light ones, which at times we need also. 
 
HOKUSAI 221 
 
 I can remember — some fifty years ago — seeing for the first 
 time some of Hokusai's woodcuts. I saw them in the usual 
 way, coming upon them by chance among Japanese curios in 
 some shop, and though I had seen a little of Japanese work, 
 such as we know in lacquer and porcelain, these were the first 
 drawings. I can very well remember the various impressions 
 and rapid conclusions of the moment. I noticed in the first 
 place the Japanese value of quality analogous to what we see 
 in the surface and material of lacquer or porcelain as con- 
 nected with its design. With us, of European descent, this feel- 
 ing for quality has diminished very greatly for several cen- 
 turies. I noticed, for instance, how intimately connected was 
 the surface and texture of the paper with the manner of mak- 
 ing the woodcut. The woodcuts of Hokiisai were not the 
 finest, and there were some by other men more refined in exe- 
 cution ; but all these things were remarkable from their tech- 
 nique, extremely superior to anything that we did. We had 
 no level of engraving, and no printing, and certainly no colour 
 printing, which could begin to compare with the poorer speci- 
 mens. As to the finer ones, they seemed impossible at first to 
 understand. There were delicacies of impression that were 
 scarcely distinguishable from the finest execution by hands 
 — I mean the more subtle touch of a human hand. There 
 were broad washes apparently, which looked as if made by a 
 
222 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 brush ; there were entangled Hnes as clean and distinct as if 
 made by an etcher. The mere mechanical execution of every- 
 thing was superior to anything that we did, and, to find a par- 
 allel, one would have to go back a couple of centuries to the 
 impressions of Rembrandt's etchings or Albert Diirer's en- 
 gravings — each of these rare and exceptional work by the 
 rarest and most exceptional of men. And yet it was evident 
 that all the work was more or less cheap and not outside of 
 very simple means. It was necessary, therefore, to accept a 
 level of superior artistic culture among the men who had 
 done these things. The drawing, in its intimate connection with 
 execution in the engi-aving, was very near to what I had seen 
 of the actual drawings of the old masters ; and of the wood- 
 cuts, Hokusai's bore a singular likeness to the work of Albert 
 Diirer. There seemed to be the greatest possible economy of 
 effort, and of what might be called work. Occasionally, on the 
 contrary, where it might please or amuse, there was a lavish 
 expenditure of care about the detail, as if either was a mere 
 matter of choice, and very careful detail or very broad gen- 
 eralisation was to be used for its real value and not to obey 
 some outside-imposed rule. Throughout there was an astound- 
 ing amount of observation. I did not know then, as I have 
 learned since, how much of this was collective and belonged 
 to many of the artists in common. I followed with delight the 
 
HOKUSAI 223 
 
 clearer perception on the part of the draughtsmen of things 
 that I had noticed more imperfectly than they — the growth of 
 plants, the flight of birds, the anatomy of insects, the easy 
 motion of the human body, or of the body of animals ; and 
 the subjects ranged from history and rehgion to the most 
 trivial details of life and the habits of the smallest birds or 
 insects. There seemed to be an almost fierce passion for the 
 universal life about us, and our drawings of to-day appeared 
 narrow and stupidly limited in their range by comparison. 
 When some one first translated for me the signature of Hokii- 
 sai, which is upon so many of his drawings, " Hokiisai, the Old 
 Man Crazy about Painting," I felt that my first instinct was 
 borne out by the story of the master. There seemed to be with 
 him a feverish necessity to give some account, careful or hur- 
 ried, of observations which he felt were infinite, and the fear 
 also that he might not be able to put down a sufficient number 
 of these notes. This passion, this being carried away by a fierce 
 desire of recording everything, was mingled with a something 
 of detachment from the object, as if to his eye all was equally 
 part of a great pageant ; as if a part of himself kept aloof and 
 recorded merely, without being swayed into judgment. To me 
 this was not the most pleasant side, and I still have that one 
 objection ; but such a disposition could never belong to any 
 but a strong mind, the mind of an observer reticent as to giv- 
 
224 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 ing himself away, and yet protecting himself through his very 
 personality. Something like that one sees in Albert Diirer ; 
 something like that one sees in the portraits of Velasquez. 
 With this self-imposed necessity of finding a way of represent- 
 ing everything with apparently equal interest, it seemed but 
 natural that special artificial methods must be employed, and, 
 therefore, I was less annoyed than I might have been other- 
 wise by methods and catches, as it were, which I supposed to 
 be the master's shorthand, not knowing exactly what he had 
 of his own in the way of conventionality, and what he had 
 taken from others — his predecessors. Of course 1 knew enough 
 to know that every form of art, and every man within that 
 form, fills up the gaps of his want of full observation by some 
 conventionality, as Hokusai does ; because of his being a very 
 finite being, with a very short time in comparison with the 
 duration of the world, for instance. Every school that I had 
 seen had accepted or invented some of the conventional, some 
 way of filling up gaps. My studies had been somewhat in the 
 way of classifying these variations, so that one or many more 
 could not surprise me ; and I had learned the first great les- 
 son, in that the fact of my being more or less pleased was not 
 the manner of measuring the intellectual value of a work of 
 the mind. 
 
 The record of these impressions of mine, far back — at first 
 
HOKUSAI 225 
 
 sight — is perhaps the best explanation that T can give of the 
 merits of Hokusai's work. At that time we had merely the 
 prints and a very few drawings of paintings, mostly of mere 
 commercial manufacture.* Fuller acquaintance with the Japa- 
 nese drawings and paintings themselves was almost impossi- 
 ble out of Japan. Since then much has been brought to us out 
 of old Japan, and to-day we can understand very well the ma- 
 chinery of the conventionalities we see in all Japanese prints, 
 drawings, or pictures. It is essential to have some idea of how 
 these conventionalities are preserved, and how a great part of 
 that extraordinary dexterity is secured. I only know a few 
 points of the training, and those in the case of one only of the 
 schools, but I take it that the differences are merely those that 
 result from the different character of the schools, and not from 
 their ideas of what training should be or of their general 
 aims. 
 
 Judged by his work, it is evident that the Japanese painter 
 is especially not ashamed of paying the greatest attention to 
 his methods. One can see in some of Hokusai's work the most 
 mechanical reproduction of detail, some, I think, with the use 
 of the stencil ; in others we observe a whole drawing executed — 
 
 * The prints from Hokusai's drawings were among the first to meet Western eyes, and 
 made this powerful impression, difficult to realise by some Japanese, who knew of so many 
 other manners of their own art. 
 
226 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 a perfectly incomprehensible marvel — with a finger-nail full of 
 ink. I don't know how many of our artists could do this with 
 one or any brushes. We see the broadest use of a very big 
 brush with very wet ink, or with very dry ink, and we also see 
 the softest kind of wash and the hardest and finest line, so 
 drawn that to our average eye it looks like the work of a 
 graver or the imprint of a wood-block. 
 
 The mastery of the hand-work is — very fairly — a great source 
 of pride, so much so as to be a matter of joke. Paintings have 
 been done with furniture ; with stools — with one's clothes 
 slapped into a bucket of ink and brushed against the paper. 
 These jokes are manners of showing extreme facility of com- 
 mand and even contempt, as it were, of material : the con- 
 tempt that one has when one has had all due respect for it. 
 Extreme rapidity has been aimed at — claimed as a matter of 
 glory. My Japanese servant once brought me as a present a 
 fan painted by one of the considerable artists of Japan — Kiosai, 
 who died recently — which fan had been painted within so many 
 minutes, and was one of the very many that he had painted on 
 the same evening. On that evening he had executed on a fine 
 clean gold screen a peculiar drawing in India ink — I mean 
 by drawing a sort of painting — as a manner of bravado. He had 
 taken off his outside silk coat — the short jacket of ceremony 
 ■ — and throwing it into a bucket of prepared India ink, he had 
 
H O K U S A I 227 
 
 used the body and the suddenly loosened sleeves as one would 
 a brush. 
 
 It is clear that only an extraordinary carefulness of training 
 allows the Japanese artist to do the very beautiful work that 
 we know, looking at it as merely work, or to perform the feats 
 of bravado I have mentioned. 
 
 In the school of the Kanos — a family of painters still exist 
 ing, I think, and which has had four centuries of continued 
 existence, Kano succeeding Kano — something like the follow- 
 ing is the method of instruction : There were a small number 
 of rooms occupied by the master and the students, the master 
 seldom entering, if at all, the room where the students worked. 
 One of these, a long corridor next to that and the master, was 
 devoted to pupils of medium grade, among whose duties was 
 that of attending to the wants of the master. In the largest 
 room, what would be properly the " atelier, " the studio, the stu- 
 dents of the highest grade had the best seats nearest the win- 
 dows, and the new pupils had their places in the dark parts 
 of the room. The floors are covered by mats, always of a regu- 
 lar size : six feet by three. The space of two of these was given 
 to each pupil ; there he kept his desk, his box of colours, and 
 whatever else he needed. Of course, he lay or sat on the mat 
 to paint or draw. Most requirements of the school were unwrit- 
 ten, orally transmitted from generation to generation like cer- 
 
228 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 tain of the secrets of touch and of handhng ; for everything in 
 Japan has secrets which are guarded with superstitious care 
 and importance. Certain written rules were as follows : 1st. 
 That the students should diligently apply themselves to study 
 by day and night. 2nd. That they should take the utmost pre- 
 caution against fire. 3rd. That, except to discharge business for 
 the master, they should not go out of the house without per- 
 mission ; and that in the event of any one's being obliged to 
 pass a night away from school a certificate must be brought 
 from the proprietor of the house where he had stayed. 4th. That 
 strict simphcity should be observed on all festive occasions, as, 
 for example, the admission of a new student for the " grant of 
 one character," of which I shall speak later. 5th. That except 
 on holidays or for inevitable business, visits must not be paid 
 to houses in the same compound. 6th. That students should 
 neither feast nor quarrel among themselves. 7th. That they 
 should be at their desks by seven in the morning, and not lie 
 down before ten at night. 8th. That before retiring to rest each 
 student should take his water-bowl — for remember, this is all 
 water-colour work — to the bamboo corridor outside. Lastly, the 
 students of the Kano were strictly forbidden to associate with 
 artists of the Chinese school, nor were they allowed to study 
 the paintings of the Ukioye, an opposing and more reahstic 
 school, of which Hoktisai is a prominent example. 
 
H O K U S A I 229 
 
 The course of instruction was quite as rigid — sixty pictures 
 by a famous artist of the Kanos, reproduced in five volumes 
 and duphcated, were kept in the school library for models. The 
 student first made a careful copy of one of these pictures ; from 
 this copy he made several others, until knowing thoroughly 
 every detail and every stroke of that picture, he was able to 
 submit a final copy to the master's judgment. Each one of the 
 sixty pictures was singly studied in the same way, and this was 
 supposed to occupy the first year and a half of apprenticeship. 
 The master's pictures of flowers and birds occupied six months 
 more with the same detailed study from sunrise to sunset. 
 Then the pupil began to study promiscuously works of other 
 masters of the school, and he was allowed to use colour. After 
 three years a proficient student was able to assist in the me- 
 chanical part of the master's picture, filling in the flat colour of 
 the dresses, etc. Members of the Kano family, when seven or 
 eight years old, were taught to paint simple forms, such as egg- 
 plants and melons. They learned shuan, which means strength 
 of the muscles of the arm. As they gradually advanced they 
 were taught to draw after designs — thirty-six in all — made by 
 Yosen for beginners. Their chief object was to develop skill 
 in the use of the brush. After the eighth year the pupil had 
 probably made himself worthy of the grant of one character of 
 his master's name. After the pupil had received the name of 
 
230 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 the house, he had one more degree to get. Each Kano had two 
 names besides Kano. For example, Hogai, who died a few 
 years ago, and whom I met in Japan, was a pupil under Sho- 
 shenin Yoshinobu, and was called Shokai when he received his 
 first degree, and afterward Yoshimichi. In the first name the 
 character " Sho " is the first letter of the name of his master's 
 house ; in the second name " Yoshi " is the first character of 
 his master's personal name Yoshinobu. This was not only a 
 comphment, but a form of intellectual adoption, and a manner 
 of asserting or claiming, or, as is said out West, " allowing " 
 that one belonged to a certain school. 
 
 The course of study in a Kano school usually took over ten 
 years, and the average age of graduates was thirty. This ex- 
 traordinary pursuit of mechanical excellence, this learning to 
 render each classified fact in nature by a certain touch, a certain 
 set of lines, a certain meeting of lines at certain angles — the 
 Kano school, for instance, teaches a different touch for relig- 
 ious and secular painting — all this has ended in so drilling the 
 pupil as to make him find original departure difficult. The 
 school system has been carried out with such extravagant fidel- 
 ity that weaker men have been more or less crushed out. But 
 they have been taught to preserve a perfectly respectable sur- 
 face manner, and to keep within the hmits of good taste. For 
 originality is only valuable when attended by a force of mind 
 
H O K U S A I 231 
 
 that uses it solely as a means. The small mind is tempted to 
 suppose that it is an end. And so in much Japanese work one 
 misses the sensation of freshness and freedom which only the 
 better men give. 
 
 I do not speak of this with any regret, for it will always be 
 a question in teaching whether it be not well that the weaker 
 minds should gain the support of a rule, and lose as much as 
 possible their chance of developing what is not worth saving. 
 But, however true or false these views may be, this account of 
 actual training is sufficient to explain the extreme persistency 
 of certain conventionalities. I might have added that brushes 
 of certain shapes, ink of certain colours, the use of certain 
 paints — all these were part of the inheritance of the school. 
 
 That name which Hokusai has signed so often, and which is 
 written on his tomb, " The Old Man Mad about Painting," is 
 also explained by the habit of taking the nom de plumCy or 
 rather, in this we may say, no7?i de pinceau. 
 
 The artist Hokusai signs at first " Sori." He seems at that 
 moment to have been working in the workshop of Sori ; but 
 before that he signed himself " Shunro," from the name of 
 Shunsho, with whom he appears first to have studied. He was 
 then already a young man, and not such a child as I have de- 
 scribed, going to the school of a master at a possible age of 
 eight or ten. It is at eighteen, apparently, that Hokusai enters 
 
232 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 the studio of Shunsho ; " plays in the gate of the master," as 
 the Japanese wording is. He seems to have done some work, 
 and learned engraving on wood before that ; but all this is fairly 
 obscure. Only it might seem that his father had some artistic 
 or intellectual ambition, and that his family name — that is to 
 say, of his father's family — was Kawamura. That is the name 
 chosen by his daughter for the tomb erected to him some time 
 after his death. 
 
 Shunsho is, therefore, his first master, and he was trained — 
 as properly belonged to his class of life and apparent habits 
 — in the school sometimes called the Vulgar School of Paint- 
 ing, " the Painters of the Floating World" : that is to say, the 
 ordinary world that moves all about us. This school is known 
 to us outsiders more than any other Japanese school of art, be- 
 cause its painters took to wood engraving and reproductions 
 by colour impressions, of which many repetitions have reached 
 us. They became more and more interesting and vigorous, 
 while the older schools narrowed the number of their personal- 
 ities at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. 
 
 Shunsho was one of the important persons of this school when 
 Hokiisai entered his studio, about the year 1775. This train- 
 ing and these tendencies, while giving to Hokiisai perhaps a 
 greater chance to break away from rules and to indulge in his 
 passion for universal representation, explain also a very fre- 
 
HOKUSAI 233 
 
 quent want of refinement, as compared with some of the other 
 and older artists, and also perhaps — though it must have been 
 more or less in his nature — a certain willingness to change 
 style and manner according to either the fashion of the day or 
 his own momentary fancies. 
 
 The time of Hokiisai is the end of an epoch in Japanese his- 
 tory known to us all in general as the time of national isolation. 
 This singular experiment was closed, almost immediately after 
 his death, by our coming to Japan and insisting upon the open- 
 ing of the country for commerce and outside circumstances. 
 But the curious policy of isolation and of immobility inflicted 
 upon an exceedingly impressionable race, who were in reality 
 extremely fond of every novelty, ended by withdrawing the 
 higher life and aspirations of the country from the ordinary 
 knowledge of every day. Whether thinkers, students, artists, and 
 literary men of the higher type were or were not in sympathy 
 with the despotic government which held Japan under a system- 
 atic control, their retirement allowed them no such contact with 
 the world in general that an artist like Hokiisai could get the 
 benefit of appreciation, and I might say of education, from the 
 higher and more intellectual classes. It was every one's fault ; 
 it was not especially Hokiisai's. Besides that, the greater side of 
 this system of government, the exaggeration of feudal pride and 
 duty and military obedience, placed also a wall between the 
 
234 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 ordinary people, to whom Hokusai belonged, and the governing 
 classes, through whose patronage he might have obtained en- 
 couragement and fairer living, and the sort of training that 
 comes of intercourse with superiors. All the more, perhaps, has 
 he been near the people and built into his enormous work — for 
 his drawings have been counted up to 30,000— the stories, the 
 traditions, the legends, the habits, the jokes, and manners of the 
 average people. 
 
 Another thing that affected him, as it affected other artists, 
 was the habit of representing the theatre ; and one sees with him 
 a certain theatrical exaggeration in gesture and character ren- 
 dering which gives a doubtful reality : in many cases the drama 
 is true, but it is true through a stage rendering. There is, 
 therefore, with him something like caricature, and one feels it 
 very much in the rendering of such things as are laughable, and 
 in those subjects in which the special character of the painter 
 and his ironical observation of life has made the turn toward 
 caricature a true one, representing life in a rapid way. 
 
 After all, this is only another way of representing truth, 
 or rather of using truth as a manner of giving one's impres- 
 sions. 
 
 Hokusai's extreme interest in everything that he saw with 
 the external eye, or the eye of imagination, has made him pass 
 from one to another of many styles which he had studied in 
 
H O K U S A I 235 
 
 others or developed for himself. Yet, through almost everything, 
 there is a special personal character which one recognises as 
 Hokiisai's. The story of his artistic life represents his varia- 
 tions. 
 
 After a time he leaves the studio and the training of 
 Shunsho ; it is said after some particular quarrel fastened upon 
 him by another more authorised pupil, who said that Hokusai 
 degraded the methods of the master. It appears that he had 
 painted some sort of a sign for a print-seller, who, estimating it 
 very highly, had it well placed in his shop, when a jealous and 
 older student, upon seeing it, tore it up to save, as he said, the 
 honour of the studio of Shunsho. 
 
 But it is more certain that he was dismissed by his master, 
 Shunsho, because of his secretly studying also under a master 
 of the Kano school ; naturally, a grievous offence. This is the 
 beginning of Hokusai's liberty, which will come up under what- 
 ever system he is willing to impose upon himself 
 
 He is next represented under the name of " Sori," which 
 begins with the date of 1798. He had been fascinated by the 
 cliarm of the style of Tawaraya Sori's painting, and this name 
 records the influence. I do not know of his having entered 
 Sori's studio — " Tai-sei-ken," " the House facing the Blue." 
 Then on New Year's day of 1799 he signs " Sori, who has 
 changed his name to Hokusai." He has abandoned this name 
 
236 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 of Sori to his pupil Soji, and now in 1800 he calls himself 
 Hokusai again. 
 
 This is the tradition of what had happened. He had been 
 reduced to the most abject poverty. He had even taken to 
 peddling cheap food, and later cheap almanacs. " Once, as he 
 made his way through the busy quarters of Yedo, he came 
 across his former teacher, Shunsho, accompanied by his wife. 
 He felt abashed and turned away." 
 
 " Just then a man came to him and asked him to paint a 
 flag for the Boys' Festival " — a great day in Japan — the fifth of 
 May. " The man was pleased and rewarded the artist with two 
 Ryos." 
 
 Looking upon this as a turn of luck, " he cast away the mean 
 thoughts of a mean life, and stood erect among the wants of 
 poverty." 
 
 " He swore to the God Myoken," the god of the North Star, 
 patron of intellectual occupations, " to make painting his pro- 
 fession through life." Hence his new name, Hokusai, which has 
 prevailed over all the others, even over that of " Manji," the 
 name of the mystic character 3^ which we call to-day the 
 " Swastika," emblematic enough, since, as my Japanese servant 
 remarks, it opens its arms to all sides. 
 
 Hokusai may mean Northern Studio, or Studio of the North, 
 or House of the North. And then immediately afterward, in 
 
H O K U S A I 237 
 
 the same year of the beginning of our century, 1800, he signs 
 '* Hokusai, the Man Crazy about Painting," a definition to which 
 he will return very frequently. 
 
 It would take a long time to describe the evolutions of 
 Hokusai, and what seem to be his frequent returns to certain 
 earlier methods, or methods of some of the men of his youth. 
 He develops certain great points for himself; among others, 
 such grandeur of line as one can see in the large outline study 
 of a woman passing her hand around her neck to arrange the 
 set of her garments. In this drawing is shown a side of 
 Hokusai so emphatically different from the hard and set line 
 which he affects apparently as wilhngly, that it is worth dwell- 
 ing upon for a moment. In another, the large representation 
 of a Chinese heroine, something of the same charm of round- 
 ness and flexibility will be noticed. In fact, notwithstanding 
 the frequent smallness and niggardliness of some of Hokusai's 
 representation of women at certain dates, he is as frequently, 
 in any subject where he thinks it fit or proper, impressed by 
 the roundness, the grace, the flexibility of the feminine form, 
 but a large number are known to many of us, and not a few are 
 reproduced in his woodcuts. It was only a few days ago that, 
 looking over many of them, I noticed a curious analogy to the 
 Greek habit of rendering the female form in the fold of the 
 neck (the "necklace of Venus," as it is called), the set of the 
 
238 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 shoulders and the proportion of the bosom, which, in some way 
 or other, allowed me to glance at the Venus of Milo without 
 feehng any want of connection. It is this surprising range 
 that estabUshes, even for a person as unsympathetic as I am 
 to Hokusai, the essential importance of the man and the 
 probability of his name becoming better known throughout 
 the world than it has ever been in Japan. Any subtle and 
 scholarly analysis of his work and its ups and downs would be 
 impossible in such an essay as mine. I shall merely mention 
 some little facts of his life — some surprising, some amusing — 
 and we can see by them how well these accidental anecdotes 
 give the many-sided mind of the painter as well as his char- 
 acter of looking at things from a place not within them. 
 
 It seems that almost through all his life he suffered from 
 poverty, sometimes in a grievous way, and that even at times 
 he " lay low," as the boys have it, so that he did not put out 
 his name, but was known as " the gentleman who lives in such 
 and such a place." His long life must have helped at times to 
 make him forgotten before he branched out anew into some 
 drawings or paintings that established him again. One of the 
 famous stories about him (another record of the very Japanese 
 eccentricities related of artists, done as bravado or defyings of 
 the public) is a proof that some of his merits were not suffi- 
 ciently recognised. I make it out to have occurred in 1817, 
 
H O K U S A I 239 
 
 while he was in the city of Nagoya, which is at a considerable 
 distance from his own Yedo. He had pupils there. He had 
 been asked to make drawings, and while his pupils made much 
 of the extraordinary variety and truthfulness of his representa- 
 tions of all things in his little drawings published in books, the 
 opponents of the vulgar school twitted them because Hokusai 
 could only draw in a small way. To this, he answered " that if 
 the talent of a painter had anything to do with great size and 
 with the grand brush-work necessary to great size, he could 
 astonish them all." So that with the help of his pupils and 
 friends he undertook to execute before the pubhc an enormous 
 painting. We have an account of it, with drawings, by an eye- 
 witness. 
 
 In the middle of the eastern court of one of the temples, 
 which was screened off, a paper, made on purpose by a maker 
 of the thick paper for the rain-cloaks that are used in Japan, 
 was stretched upon the ground on a bed of rice-husks of con- 
 siderable depth. From place to place timbers held it down to 
 prevent its being blown away ; for this piece of paper on which 
 he was to paint represented a surface of 120 mats, the mat be- 
 ing, as you know, six feet long by three wide. An enormous 
 scaffolding was raised against the council building, and cords 
 and pulleys were fixed so as to Hft this big drawing when it 
 should have been done, or at any moment when part of it would 
 
240 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 be better out of the way. India ink had been prepared in buck- 
 ets. All this occupied the morning, and in the afternoon, before 
 an enormous crowd of all classes, Hokusai and his pupils, in 
 ceremonial dress (but with bared arms), began their work, the pu- 
 pils taking the ink out of the buckets and carrying it about after 
 the painter in a bronze basin. The subject was to be the head 
 and shoulders of Dharuma, the Buddhist saint, of whom we 
 have so many representations. You will remember him seated 
 gravely, his head covered with his cloak, and rolled up in a sort 
 of ball, for, traditionally absorbed in meditation, he never moved, 
 and lost the use of his limbs from his immobihty. This, of course, 
 is the commonplace and jocose side of Dharuma. 
 
 With a brush made of a bundle of rice straw, Hokilsai 
 drew the nose and then the right eye and then the left eye 
 of the Dharuma ; then he took many steps, and he drew the 
 mouth and the ear, and then, running away, began to trace 
 the outline of the head, and then drew the beard and the 
 hair, using, to shade them, a bunch of buckwheat shells, which 
 he dipped into a thin India ink. Then, on an enormous table 
 another variety of brush was brought to him, already filled 
 with ink; it was made of many bags of rice, fastened together, 
 and to this so-called brush was fastened a cord. Hokusai in- 
 dicated the place where the mass should be laid down, and 
 then, taking the rope upon his shoulder, dragged the brush 
 
H O K U S A I 241 
 
 with slow and broken steps, and thus made the great sweep- 
 ing lines of the dress of Dharuma. The pupils then took the 
 colour or colours out of buckets with brooms and threw it upon 
 the dress, sponging up the lights with cloths. By night the great 
 Dharuma had been done, and with pulleys the great picture 
 was lifted. But it was only by the next morning that the en- 
 tire picture could be shown to the public, because of the scaf- 
 folding having been somewhat too short. 
 
 It is said by his biographer that Hokusai was a good poet in 
 the popular methods. It is related that he was a member of 
 a club or society of poets, and that he usually acted as chair- 
 man or president. Among the servants he was unknown as a 
 painter, which reminds us of the value and advantage of the 
 nom de guerre, or the nom de plume, assumed by a professional 
 man, in this that his name does not follow him everywhere. 
 One evening Hokusai painted upon a lantern — the paper hand- 
 lantern of Japan, which usually has some drawing or some let- 
 tering upon it — certain fern-stalks so marvellously rendered 
 that the servant who had brought the lantern exclaimed, 
 "Really sir, what a talent you would have for drawing." 
 
 Hokusai has left us occasionally among his innumerable draw- 
 ings, or rather books of drawings, certain statements and com- 
 
242 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 ments that are worth quoting as again giving his character ; and 
 1 take an extract from one of these albums which consists of 
 pictures of certain illustrious Chinese heroes, known as the he- 
 roes of the Suikoden. " It seems to me that in all Japanese and 
 Chinese representations of war I miss force and movement, 
 which are the essential characters in such cases. Saddened by 
 this want, I have burned myself in trying to find a remedy and 
 to bring to the task what has seemed to me to be wanting. 
 Doubtless, in my drawings there are faults and many excesses, 
 but all the same I am pleased to see that my pupils are willing 
 to use them as models." 
 
 However admirable many of his drawings of battles and 
 struggle may be, and however astounding they are to the pro- 
 fessional man in their endless variety and boldness, there are 
 moments when I become very tired of them. At other mo- 
 ments I see nothing but what he must have wished to see him- 
 self I can fancy quite well that Hokiisai, owing to his social 
 position and general tendencies, and the fate of the moment, to 
 which I have before alluded, was shut out from the sight of 
 many works of art that might have helped him and given him 
 a standard of high merit in battle-scenes. Certainly in a great 
 deal of the older work there is a wonderful reality that looks as 
 if it were familiar to the actual sight of the artist, who himself 
 may have been a sworded man belonging to the warrior class. 
 
H O K U S A I 243 
 
 With this reahty goes a freedom and a poetic sense that has 
 occasionally reminded me, especially in the drawings of horse- 
 men, of the fancy and vigour of Delacroix — another proof, if 
 necessary, of the observation and the imaginative power of the 
 great French painter. 
 
 However that may be, it will always be a question whether 
 a man as personal as Hokiisai would not still have been strange 
 and different. Even if he had seen everything else in painting, 
 his habits and the fierce necessity of everyday work for a bare 
 living would make a large number of the factors of what he 
 achieved. His case is an interesting one because of its being so 
 frequent. The daily food to be obtained in a hurry — with the 
 necessity of pleasing a public, and at the same time with the 
 intellectual necessity of suiting one's self and being one's self, no 
 matter how much and how continuously one varies according 
 to the fashion which brings one bread. If we have this well be- 
 fore our mind, the astounding importance of Hokusai — a sort 
 of art-labourer — is enhanced, and we can appreciate the fluc- 
 tuations and weaknesses of which he has contrived to make 
 strength and a steady course. 
 
 That he knew a good deal of what was outside, his occasional 
 imitation of certain European tendencies, the use of what we 
 call perspective, and some other points, might prove, even if he 
 had not written in a little book published under another name 
 
244 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 (a book on Colour) the following about the Dutch processes 
 for painting in oil in the European way. What he says gives in a 
 few words the essential differences between Europe and Japan, 
 both of which differences he admits as equally legitimate. 
 
 " In the Japanese painting," he says, " we try to give the 
 form and the colour without the relief or modelling, but in the 
 European process, relief is sought for and a manner of decep- 
 tive imitation." * 
 
 That is the essential difference, so much so as to justify quite 
 well the statement of the Japanese looking at the exhibition, 
 say of the Academy of Design or any other: " Do they think 
 that they can take me in ? I can see that these things are not 
 real." 
 
 So the Japanese gives up that question of making one beheve 
 that one could touch the thing ; he gives a statement, an intel- 
 lectual statement of certain sides of what one sees, to which he 
 sacrifices other points. 
 
 But the famous quotation at the beginning of the collection 
 of the hundred views of Fuji-Yama should always be repeated 
 whenever quoting from Hokusai : " From the time that I was 
 six years old I had the mania of drawing the form of objects. 
 As I came to be fifty I had published an infinity of designs ; 
 but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not 
 
 * The word form is perhaps mistranslated, but as near as I can get. 
 
H O K U S A I 245 
 
 worth being counted. It is at the age of seventy-three that 1 
 have somewhat begun to understand the structure of true nature, 
 of animals and grasses, and trees and birds and fishes and insects ; 
 consequently at eighty years of age I shall have made still more 
 progress ; at ninety I hope to have penetrated into the mystery 
 of things ; (then comes the inevitable irony of Hokiisai) at one 
 hundred years of age I should have reached decidedly a mar- 
 vellous degree, and when I shall be one hundred and ten, all 
 that I do, every point and every line, shall be instinct with life 
 — and I ask all those who shall hve as long as I do to see if I 
 have not kept my word. 
 
 " Written at the age of seventy-five by me who was formerly 
 Hokusai, and who is now Gwakio Rojin, the Old Man Crazy 
 about Drawing." 
 
 Ten years later he still lived and painted, and the last of his 
 drawings were painted at eighty-eight years of age. 
 
 He died in a house of Asakusa, a district of Tokio, then 
 called Yedo, which was the ninety-third place in which he 
 had lived during the course of his vagabond and struggling 
 existence. 
 
 It must be then that he wrote to his fi-iend Takagi this last 
 ironical letter : 
 
 "The king Em- Ma, the king of the under world, is very ill 
 and about to retire from business. He has had himself built 
 
246 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 on that account a pretty little country house, and he asks now 
 that I should go and paint something for him. I am, therefore, 
 forced to go, and when I go I shall take my drawings with me. 
 I intend to hire rooms at the corner of the street of the under 
 world, where I shall be glad to receive you whenever you shall 
 have occasion to pass there. 
 
 " HOKUSAI." 
 
 His dying words have been kept — one phrase again in the 
 usual strain : " If Heaven gave me only ten years more — if 
 Heaven gave me only five years more of hfe — I might become 
 a really great artist." With these words he passed away. 
 
 "The funeral was carried out with money contributed by 
 his pupils and friends. His coffin was of ordinary materials, 
 but among the train of one hundred persons that followed it 
 were gentlemen attended by armed retainers. This was greatly 
 envied by the neighbours, for there was no record in the history 
 of those low tenement houses that so imposing a funeral had 
 ever gone out from the quarter. " 
 
 He died probably on the 18th of April (others say the 10th 
 of May), 1848, just a little before Japan was opened to the 
 world. The tomb I have spoken of has on one side the name 
 we know so well, " The Tomb of Manji." JU " The Old Man 
 Crazy about Painting," and below the family name, Kawamura. 
 The other side of the monument bears a ceremonial inscription, 
 
H O K U S A I 247 
 
 as usual, more or less conventional or full of meaning, as we 
 wish to see it. It is the record of the passage out of this world, 
 and brings in again the Japanese habit of another name after 
 death. "Nanso In" he is called by his new name after death, 
 " the singularly illustrious, Hokusai, the sincere behever." 
 
 On a third side of the four-square pillar is given the verse 
 or sentiment — " Words of Departure," which, according to a 
 Japanese habit, he composed just before his death. I have 
 found them extremely difficult to translate, nor have I found 
 agreement as to their meaning. " Sorrow and the soul dissolved. 
 Pleasure (it will be) to roam the wide fields of Summer." 
 
 The biographer whom I have chiefly consulted seems doubt- 
 ful as to whether Hokusai was buried there. The priest of the 
 temple told him that this tomb was built by Kase Sakujiro, 
 Hokusai's son's son, after his death; that the body was not 
 there, but was under his father's tomb ; and there are still more 
 doubts as to whether he be not buried somewhere else. 
 
 The question of a monument to a man of the kind, even 
 if great and famous — a great poet, a great painter, a great 
 scientist — is of very little consequence. We can all remember 
 how absurd the honours — gi'eat as they were — that were paid 
 to Michelangelo by his solemn funeral and his tomb, meant to 
 be imposing. How much better the old man's request for a 
 simple burial, and on his tomb his unfinished statue of Christ's 
 
248 GREAT MASTERS 
 
 entombment, typical of his faith, and of the fact that no one in 
 the intellectual life can hope to close what he has lived in. 
 
 The whole question is another explanation of the position of 
 a man like Hokusai : the question of his being more or less the 
 representative of his nation, of its art, or, on the contrary, of his 
 being antagonistic to most of the higher traditions of the art of 
 Japan. The man who has carried out with more or less success 
 in his own life such a course of intellectual appreciation of the 
 world does not depend at all upon the approval or blame of his 
 people or his nation. They may even pass away, they and their 
 ideas and their civilisation — and his own civilisation embodied 
 in himself remains, as it has been with so many poets, artists, 
 and thinkers of the past. For the man who lives with the 
 support of others — statesmen, politicians — the monument is a 
 fit thing: his existence, his value is his connection with other 
 people. 
 
 There is a charming story, Japanese or Chinese — a story of a 
 famous Chinese painter who lived in Japan far back — ever so 
 far back — and who painted there sublime religious pictures. 
 But getting old, he went home to China to die, and at the end 
 he betook himself to landscape-painting. Every one knew that 
 he was so engaged, and that he was painting a great painting — 
 some screen, perhaps — a subject representing mountain scenery, 
 such a retreat as a man might wish to end in when he had given 
 
HOKUSAI 249 
 
 up the world. This was known to his pupils, but no one was 
 allowed to see it, until at length, by some sort of command, he 
 offered to show it to the emperor and the court. Of course it 
 was criticised; fault was found with the technique; and the 
 reality; and the composition; and the feehng; and whatever 
 else does not suit other people. The old painter listened without 
 answering. He bowed in acknowledgment to the people present, 
 and then, to quote the text, "As he had created this work of art 
 for his final abode," he stepped into the picture and disappeared 
 within the images that he had painted. And the painting also 
 faded from before the spectators. The moral of this story, good 
 for all artists and all critics, is natural enough — that the art of 
 the painter is his final abode. If it be really his, he is safe within 
 it — safe from praise as he is safe from blame. 
 
 THE END 
 
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
 GARDEN CITY. N.Y. 
 
1 
 
University of 
 Connecticut 
 
 Libraries