FullReads

TITIAN, as we see him in what some have thought his noblest work, the large altar-piece, dated 1522, his forty-fifth year, of SS. Nazaro e Celso, at Brescia, is certainly a religious–a great, religious painter. The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight, in all the effortless energy of an angel indeed, and Sebastian, adapted, it was said, from an ancient statue, yet as novel in design as if Titian had been the first to handle that so familiar figure in old religious art–may represent for us a vast and varied amount of work–in which he expands to their utmost artistic compass the earlier religious dreams of Mantegna and the Bellini, affording sufficient proof how sacred themes could rouse his imagination, and all his manual skill, to heroic efforts. But he is also the painter of the Venus of the Tribune and the Triumph of Bacchus; and such frank acceptance of the voluptuous paganism of the Renaissance, the motive of a large proportion of his work, might make us think that religion, grandly dramatic as was his conception of it, can have been for him only one of many pictorial attitudes. There are however painters of that date who, while their work is great enough to be connected (perhaps groundlessly) with Titian’s personal influence, or directly attributed to his hand, possess at least this psychological interest, that about their religiousness there can be no question. Their work is to be looked for mainly in and about the two sub-alpine towns of Brescia and Bergamo; in the former of which it becomes definable as a school–the school of Moretto, in whom the perfected art of the later Renaissance is to be seen in union with a catholicism as convinced, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, as that of Giotto or Angelico.

Moretto of Brescia, for instance, is one of the few painters who have fully understood the artistic opportunities of the subject of Saint Paul, for whom, for the most part, art has found only the conventional trappings of a Roman soldier (a soldier, as being in charge of those prisoners to Damascus), or a somewhat commonplace old age. Moretto also makes him a nobly accoutred soldier–the rim of the helmet, thrown backward in his fall to the earth, rings the head already with a faint circle of glory–but a soldier still in possession of all those resources of unspoiled youth which he is ready to offer in a moment to the truth that has just dawned visibly upon him. The terrified horse, very grandly designed, leaps high against the suddenly darkened sky above the distant horizon of Damascus, with all Moretto’s peculiar understanding of the power of black and white. But what signs the picture inalienably as Moretto’s own is the thought of the saint himself, at the moment of his recovery from the stroke of Heaven. The pure, pale, beardless face, in noble profile, might have had for its immediate model some military monk of a later age, yet it breathes all the joy and confidence of the Apostle who knows in a single flash of time that he has found the veritable captain of his soul. It is indeed the Paul whose genius of conviction has so greatly moved the minds of men–the soldier who, bringing his prisoners “bound to Damascus,” is become the soldier of Jesus Christ.

Moretto’s picture has found its place (in a dark recess, alas!) in the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, in the suburbs of Milan, hard by the site of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a moment when in one of his many conflicts a “sign” was needed, found the bodies of Nazarus and Celsus, youthful patrician martyrs in the reign of Nero, overflowing now with miraculous powers, their blood still fresh upon them–conspersa recenti sanguine. The body of Saint Nazarus he removed into the city: that of Saint Celsus remained within the little sanctuary which still bears his name, and beside which, in the fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of the Madonna, with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner, a facade richly sculptured in the style of the Renaissance, and sumptuously adorned within. Behind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the miraculous picture which gave its origin to this splendid building, the rare visitor, peeping as into some sacred bird-nest, detects one of the loveliest works of Luini, a small, but exquisitely finished “Holy Family.” Among the fine pictures around are works by two other very notable religious painters of the cinque-cento. Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, may seem to have introduced into fiery Italian latitudes a certain northern temperature, and somewhat twilight, French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts. Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, after work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to labour, as both sculptor and painter, in the “stations” of the Sacro Monte, at a form of religious art which would seem to have some natural kinship with the temper of a mountain people. It is as if the living actors in the “Passion Play” of Oberammergau had been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted terra-cotta. The scenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus’ daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the naive piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, truly Italian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain. Even in his great, many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there are traces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form; the armour of the Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt. It is as if this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again into mountain “grotesque,” with touches also, in truth, of a peculiarly northern poetry–a mystic poetry, which now and again, in his treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of Blake. There is something of it certainly in the little white spectral soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the dishonoured body along the beam of his cross.