THE DECADENCE AND MODERN WORK. 1600-1894.
Books Recommended: As before, also General
Bibliography, (page xv.); Calvi, Notizie della vita e delle opere di Gio.
Francesco Barbiera; Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice; Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Discourses; Symonds, Renaissance in Italy—The Catholic Reaction;
Willard, Modern Italian Art. oil painting for sale
THE DECLINE: An art movement in history seems like a wave that rises
to a height, then breaks, falls, and parts of it are caught up from beneath to
help form the strength of a new advance. In Italy Christianity was the
propelling force of the wave. In the Early Renaissance, the antique, and the
study of nature came in as additions. At Venice in the High Renaissance the
art-for-art's-sake motive made the crest of light and color. The highest point
was reached then,
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the scattering of the wave. This took place in Central Italy after 1540, in
Venice after 1590.
Art had typified in form, thought, and expression everything of which the
Italian race was capable. It had perfected all the graces and elegancies of line
and color, and adorned them with a superlative splendor. There was nothing more
to do. The idea was completed, the motive power had served its purpose, and that
store of race-impulse which seems necessary to the making of every great art was
exhausted. For the men that came after Michael Angelo and Tintoretto there was nothing. All
that they could do was to repeat what others had said,
where to buy oil paintings, or to recombine the old
thoughts and forms. This led inevitably to imitation, over-refinement of style,
and conscious study of beauty, resulting in mannerism and affectation. Such
qualities marked the art of those painters who came in the latter part of the
sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth. They were unfortunate men in
the time of their birth. No painter could have been great in the seventeenth
century of Italy. Art lay prone upon its face under Jesuit rule, and the late
men were left upon the barren sands by the receding wave of the Renaissance.
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FIG. 52.—BRONZINO. CHRIST IN LIMBO. UFFIZI.
ART MOTIVES AND SUBJECTS: As before, the chief subject of the art of
the Decadence was religion, with many heads and busts of the Madonna, though
nature and the classic still played their parts. After the Reformation at the
North the Church in Italy started the Counter-Reformation. One of the chief
means employed by this Catholic reaction was the embellishment of church
worship, and painting on a large scale, on panel rather than in fresco, was
demanded for decorative purposes. But the religious motive had passed out,
original oil paintings wholesale,though its subject was retained, and the pictorial motive had reached its climax at
Venice. The faith of the one and the taste and skill of the other were not
attainable by the late men, and, while consciously striving to achieve them,
they fell into exaggerated sentiment and technical weakness. It seems perfectly
apparent in their works that they had nothing of their own to say, and that they
were trying to say over again what Michael Angelo, Correggio, and Titian had
said before them much better. There were earnest men and good painters among
them, but they could produce only the empty form of art. The spirit had
fled.
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THE MANNERISTS: Immediately after the High Renaissance leaders of
Florence and Rome came the imitators and exaggerators of their styles. They
produced large, crowded compositions, with a hasty facility of the brush and
striking effects of light. Seeking the grand they overshot the temperate. Their
elegance was affected, their sentiment forced, their brilliancy superficial
glitter. When they thought to be ideal they lost themselves in incomprehensible
allegories; when they thought to be real they grew prosaic in detail. These men
are known in art history as the Mannerists, and the men whose works they
imitated were chiefly Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Correggio. There were many of
them, and some of them have already been spoken of as the followers of Michael
Angelo.
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Agnolo Bronzino (1502?-1572) was a pupil of Pontormo, and an imitator
of Michael Angelo, painting in rather heavy colors with a thin brush. His
characters were large, but never quite free from weakness, except in
portraiture, where he appeared at his best.
Vasari (1511-1574)—the same
Vasari who wrote the lives of the painters—had versatility and facility, but his
superficial imitations of Michael Angelo were too grandiose in conception and
too palpably false in modelling.
Salviati(1510-1563) was a friend of
Vasari,
dafen oil painting village, a painter of about the same cast of mind and hand as Vasari, and
Federigo
Zucchero (1543-1609) belongs with him in producing things muscularly big but
intellectually small.
Baroccio (1528-1612), though classed among the
Mannerists as an imitator of Correggio and Raphael, was really one of the strong
men of the late times. There was affectation and sentimentality about his work,
a prettiness of face, rosy flesh tints, and a general lightness of color, but he
was a superior brushman, a good colorist, and, at times, a man of earnestness
and power.
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