Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6
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Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6
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This same cherub appears in other places, once blowing a horn in
another's ear; and again he is tickling a sleeping brother's foot
with a straw. These putti play all the tricks that real babies do,
and besides have a goodly list of "stunts" of their own. One thing
is sure, to Correggio heaven would not be heaven without putti; and
the chief difference that I see between putti and sure-enough babies
is, that putti require no care and babies do.
Then putti are practical and useful--they hold up scrolls, tie back
draperies, carry pictures, point out great folks, feed birds, and in
one instance Correggio has ten of them leading a dog out to
execution. They carry the train of the Virgin, assist the Apostles,
act as ushers, occasionally pass the poorbox, make wreaths and
crowns--but, I am sorry to say, sometimes get into unseemly scuffles
for first place.
They have no wings, yet they soar and fly like English sparrows.
They are not troubled with nerv. pros. or introspection. What they
feed upon is uncertain, but sure it is that they are well nourished.
A putti needs nothing, not even approbation.
In the dome of the Cathedral at Parma, there is a regular flight of
them to help on the Ascension. They mix in everywhere, riding on
clouds, clinging to robes, perching on the shoulders of Apostles--
everywhere thick in the flight and helping on that glorious
anabasis. Away, away they go--movement--movement everywhere--right
up into the blue dome of Heaven! As you look up at that most
magnificent picture, a tinge of sorrow comes over you--the putti are
all going away, and what if they should never come back!
A little girl I know once went with her Mamma to visit the Cathedral
at Parma. Mother and daughter stood in silent awe for a space,
looking up at that cloud of vanishing forms. At last the little girl
turned to her mother and said, "Mamma, did you ever see so many bare
legs in all the born days of your life?"
Some years ago in a lecture John La Farge said that the world had
produced only seven painters that deserved to rank in the first
class, and one of these is Correggio. The speaker did not name the
other six; and although requested to do so, smilingly declined,
saying that he preferred to allow each auditor to complete the list
for himself.
One person present made out this list of seven Immortals, and passed
the list to Edmund Russell, seated near, for comments. This is the
list: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Correggio,
Velasquez, Corot.
Mr. Russell approved the selection, but added a note claiming the
privilege to change and substitute names from time to time as his
mood might prompt. This seems to me like a very sensible verdict.
"Who is your favorite author?" is a question that is often asked.
Just as if any one author ever got first place in the mind of a
strong man and stuck there! Authors jostle each other for first
place in our hearts. We may have Emerson periods and Browning
periods, when they alone minister to us; and so also pictures, like
music, make their appeals to mood.
This peaceful, beautiful May day, as I write this at my cabin in the
woods, Correggio seems to me truly one of the world's marvelous men.
He is near, very dear, and yet before him I would stand silent and
uncovered.
He did his work and held his peace. He was simple, modest,
unobtrusive and unpretentious. He was so big that he never knew the
greatness of his work, any more than the author of Hamlet knew the
immensity of his.
Correggio was never more than a day's journey from home--he toiled
in obscurity and did work so grand that it made its final appeal
only to the future. He never painted his own portrait, and no one
else seemed to consider him worth while; his income was barely
sufficient for his wants. He was so big that following fast upon his
life came a lamentable decline in art: his personality being so
great that his son and a goodly flock of disciples tried to paint
just like him. All originality faded out of the fabric of their
lives, and they were only cheap, tawdry and dispirited imitators.
That is one of the penalties which Nature exacts when she vouchsafes
a great man to earth--all others are condemned to insipidity. They
are whipped, dispirited and undone, and spontaneity dies a-borning.
No man should try to do another man's work. Note the anatomical
inanities of Bernini in his attempts to out-Angelo Michelangelo.
In this "rushing-in" business, keep out, or you may count as one
more fool.
Correggio struck thirteen because he was himself, and was to a great
degree even ignorant and indifferent to what the world was doing. He
was filled with the joy of life; and with no furtive eye on the
future, and no distracting fears concerning the present, he did his
work and did it the best he could. He worked to please himself,
cultivated the artistic conscience--scorning to create a single
figure that did not spring into life because it must. All of his
pictures are born of this spirit.
Good old Guido of Parma, afar from home, once asked, with tear-
filled eyes, of a recent visitor there--"And tell me, you saw the
Cathedral and the Convent of San Paola--and are not the cherubs of
Master Correggio grown to be men yet?"
It is only life and love that give love and life. Correggio gave us
both out of the fulness of a full heart. And growing weary when
scarce forty years of age, he passed out into the Silence, but his
work is ours.
BELLINI
And if in our day Raphael must give way to Botticelli, with how
much greater reason should Titian in the heights of his art, with
all his earthly splendor and voluptuous glow, give place to the
lovely imagination of dear old Gian Bellini, the father of Venetian
Art?
--_Mrs. Oliphant, in "The Makers of Venice"_
[Illustration: Bellini]
It is a great thing to teach. I am never more complimented than when
some one addresses me as "teacher." To give yourself in a way that
will inspire others to think, to do, to become--what nobler
ambition! To be a good teacher demands a high degree of altruism,
for one must be willing to sink self, to die--as it were--that
others may live. There is something in it very much akin to
motherhood--a brooding quality. Every true mother realizes at times
that her children are only loaned to her--sent from God--and the
attributes of her body and mind are being used by some Power for a
Purpose. The thought tends to refine the heart of its dross,
obliterate pride and make her feel the sacredness of her office. All
good men everywhere recognize the holiness of motherhood--this
miracle by which the race survives.
There is a touch of pathos in the thought that while lovers live to
make themselves necessary to each other, the mother is working to
make herself unnecessary to her children. The true mother is
training her children to do without her. And the entire object of
teaching is to enable the scholar to do without his teacher.
Graduation should take place at the vanishing-point of the teacher.
Yes, the efficient teacher has in him much of this mother-quality.
Thoreau, you remember, said that genius is essentially feminine; if
he had teachers in mind his remark was certainly true. The men of
much motive power are not the best teachers--the arbitrary and
imperative type that would bend all minds to match its own may build
bridges, tunnel mountains, discover continents and capture cities,
but it can not teach. In the presence of such a towering personality
freedom dies, spontaneity droops, and thought slinks away into a
corner. The brooding quality, the patience that endures, and the
yearning of motherhood, are all absent. The man is a commander, not
a teacher; and there yet remains a grave doubt whether the warrior
and ruler have not used their influence more to make this world a
place of the skull than the abode of happiness and prosperity. The
orders to kill all the firstborn, and those over ten years of age,
were not given by teachers.
The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where there was only one
before.
Just here, before we pass on to other themes, seems a good place to
say that we live in a very stupid old world, round like an orange
and slightly flattened at the poles. The proof of this seemingly
pessimistic remark, made by a hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the
fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the
business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions
ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger
medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as
coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack of
everything but overwork.
I will never be quite willing to admit that this country is
enlightened until we cease the inane and parsimonious policy of
trying to drive all the really strong men and women out of the
teaching profession by putting them on the payroll at one-half the
rate, or less, than what the same brains and energy can command
elsewhere. In this year of our Lord, Nineteen Hundred Two, in a time
of peace, we have appropriated four hundred million dollars for war
and war-appliances, and this sum is just double the cost of the
entire public-school system in America. It is not the necessity of
economy that dictates our actions in this matter of education--we
simply are not enlightened.
But this thing can not always last--I look for the time when we
shall set apart the best and noblest men and women of earth for
teachers, and their compensation will be so adequate that they will
be free to give themselves for the benefit of the race, without
apprehension of a yawning almshouse. A liberal policy will be for
our own good, just as a matter of cold expediency; it will be
Enlightened Self-interest.
With the rise of the Bellinis, Venetian art ceased to be provincial,
blossoming out into national. Jacopo Bellini was a teacher--mild,
gentle, sympathetic, animated. His work reveals personality, but is
somewhat stiff and statuesque: sharp in outline like an antique
stained-glass window. This is because his art was descended from the
glassworkers; and he himself continued to make designs for the
glassworkers of Murano all his life. Considering the time in which
he lived he was a great painter, for he improved upon what had gone
before and prepared the way for those greater than he who were yet
to come. He called himself an experimenter, and around him clustered
a goodly group of young men who were treated by him more as comrades
than as students. They were all boys together--learners, with the
added dignity which an older head of the right sort can lend.
"Old Jacopo" they used to call him, and there was a touch of
affection in the term to which several of them have testified. All
of the pupils loved the old man, who wasn't so very old in years,
and certainly was not in heart. Among his pupils were his two sons,
Gentile and Gian, and they called him Old Jacopo, too. I rather like
this--it proves for one thing that the boys were not afraid of their
father. They surely did not run and hide when they heard him coming,
neither did they find it necessary to tell lies in order to defend
themselves. A severe parent is sure to have untruthful children, and
perhaps the best recipe for having noble children is to be a noble
parent.
It is well to be a companion to your children, and just where the
idea came in which developed into the English boarding-school
delusion, that children should be sent away among hirelings--
separated from their parents--in order to be educated, I do not
know. It surely was not complimentary to the parents. Old Jacopo
didn't try very hard to discipline his boys--he loved them, which is
better if you are forced to make choice. They worked together and
grew together. Before Gian and Gentile were eighteen they could
paint as well as their father. When they were twenty they excelled
him, and no one was more elated over it than Old Jacopo. They were
doing things he could never do: overcoming obstacles he could not
overcome--he clapped his hands in gladness, did this old teacher,
and shed tears of joy--his pupils were surpassing him! Gian and
Gentile would not admit this, but still they kept right on, each
vieing with the other. Vasari says that Gian was the better artist,
but Aldus refers to Gentile as "the undisputed master of painting in
all Venetia." Ruskin compromises by explaining that Gentile had the
broader and deeper nature, but that Gian was more feminine, more
poetic, nearer lyric, possessing a delicacy and insight that his
brother never acquired. These qualities better fitted him for a
teacher; and when Old Jacopo passed away, Gian drifted into his
place, for every man is gravitating straight to where he belongs.
The little workshop of one room now was enlarged: the bottega became
an atelier. There were groups of workrooms and studios, and a small
gallery that became the meeting-place for various literary and
artistic visitors at Venice. Ludovico Ariosto, greatest of Italian
poets, came here and wrote a sonnet to "Gian Bellini, sublime
artist, performer of great things, but best of all the loving
Teacher of Men."
Gian Bellini had two pupils whose name and fame are deathless:
Giorgione and Titian. There is a fine flavor of romance surrounds
Giorgione, the gentle, the refined, the beloved. His was a spirit
like unto that of Chopin or Shelley, and his death-dirge should have
been written by the one and set to music by the other--brothers
doloroso, sent into this rough world unprepared for its buffets,
passing away in manhood's morning. Yet all heard the song of the
skylark. Giorgione died broken-hearted, through his ladylove's
inconstancy. He was exactly the same age as Titian, and while he
lived surpassed that giant far, as the giant himself admitted. He
died aged thirty-three, the age at which a full dozen of the
greatest men of the world have died, and the age at which several
other very great men have been born again--which possibly is the
same thing. Titian lived to be a hundred, lacking six months, and
when past seventy used to give alms to a beggar-woman at a church-
door--the woman who had broken the heart of Giorgione. He also
painted her portrait--this in sad and subdued remembrance of the
days agone.
The Venetian School of Art has been divided by Ruskin into three
parts: the first begins with Jacopo Bellini, and this part might be
referred to as the budding period. The second is the flowering
period, and the palm is carried by Gian Bellini. The period of ripe
fruit--o'erripe fruit, touched by the tint of death--is represented
by four men: Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Paul Veronese. Beyond
these four, Venetian Art has never gone, and although four hundred
years have elapsed since they laughed and sang, enjoyed and worked,
all we can do is wonder and admire. We can imitate, but we can not
improve.
Gian Bellini lived to be ninety-two, working to the last, always a
learner, always a teacher. His best work was done after his
eightieth year. The cast-off shell of this great spirit was placed
in the tomb with that of his brother Gentile, who had passed out but
a few years before. Death did not divide them.
Giovanni Bellini was his name. Yet when people who loved beautiful
pictures spoke of "Gian," every one knew who was meant, but to those
who worked at art he was "The Master." He was two inches under six
feet in height, strong and muscular. In spite of his seventy summers
his carriage was erect and there was a jaunty suppleness about his
gait that made him seem much younger. In fact, no one would have
believed that he had lived over his threescore and ten, were it not
for the iron-gray hair that fluffed out all around under the close-
fitting black cap, and the bronzed complexion--sun-kissed by wind
and weather--which formed a trinity of opposites that made people
turn and stare.
Queer stories used to be told about him. He was a skilful gondolier,
and it was the daily row back and forth from the Lido that gave him
that face of bronze. Folks said he ate no meat and drank no wine,
and that his food was simply ripe figs in the season, with coarse
rye bread and nuts. Then there was that funny old hunchback, a
hundred years old at least, and stone-deaf, who took care of the
gondola, spending the whole day, waiting for his master, washing the
trim, graceful, blue-black boat, arranging the awning with the white
cords and tassels, and polishing the little brass lions at the
sides. People tried to question the old hunchback, but he gave no
secrets away. The master always stood up behind and rowed, while
down on the cushions rode the hunchback, the guest of honor.
There stood the master erect, plying the oar, his long black robe
tucked up under the dark blue sash that exactly matched the color of
the gondola. The man's motto might have been, "Ich Dien," or that
passage of Scripture, "He that is greatest among you shall be your
servant." Suspended around his neck by a slender chain was a bronze
medal, presented by vote of the Signoria when the great picture of
"The Transfiguration" was unveiled. If this medal had been a
crucifix, and you had met the wearer in San Marco, one glance at the
finely chiseled features, the black cap and the flowing robe and you
would have said at once the man was a priest, Vicar-General of some
important diocese. But seeing him standing erect on the stern of a
gondola, the wind caressing the dark gray hair, you would have been
perplexed until your gondolier explained in serious undertone that
you had just passed "The greatest Painter in all Venice, Gian, the
Master."
Then if you showed curiosity and wanted to know further, your
gondolier would have told you more about this strange man.
The canals of Venice are the highways, and the gondoliers are like
'bus-drivers in Piccadilly--they know everybody and are in close
touch with all the secrets of State. When you get to the Giudecca
and tie up for lunch, over a bottle of Chianti, your gondolier will
tell you this: The hunchback there in the gondola, rowed by the
Master, is the Devil, who has taken that form just to be with and
guard the greatest artist the world has ever seen. Yes, Signor, that
clean-faced man with his frank, wide-open, brown eyes is in league
with the Evil One. He is the man who took young Tiziano from Cadore
into his shop, right out of a glass-factory, and made him a great
artist, getting him commissions and introducing him everywhere! And
how about the divine Giorgione who called him father? Oho!
And who is Giorgione? The son of some unknown peasant woman. And if
Bellini wanted to adopt him, treat him as his son indeed, kissing
him on the cheek when he came back just from a day's visit to
Mestre, whose business was it? Oho!
Besides that, his name isn't Giorgione--it is Giorgio Barbarelli.
And didn't this Giorgio Barbarelli, and Tiziano from Cadore, and
Espero Carbonne, and that Gustavo from Nuremberg, and the others
paint most of Gian's pictures? Surely they did. The old man simply
washes in the backgrounds and the boys do the work. About all old
Gian does is to sign the picture, sell it and pocket the proceeds.
Carpaccio helps him, too--Carpaccio, who painted the loveliest
little angel sitting crosslegged playing the biggest mandolin you
ever saw in your life.
That is genius, you know--the ability to get some one else to do the
work, and then capture the ducats and the honors for yourself. Of
course Gian knows how to lure the boys on--something has to be done
in order to hold them. Gian buys a picture from them now and then;
his studio is full of their work--better than he can do. Oh, he
knows a good thing when he sees it. These pictures will be valuable
some day, and he gets them at his own price. It was Antonello of
Messina who introduced oil-painting into Venice. Before that they
mixed their paints with water, milk or wine. But when Antonello came
along with his dark, lustrous pictures, he set all artistic Venice
astir. Gian Bellini discovered the secret, they say, by feigning to
be a gentleman and going to the newcomer and sitting for his
picture. He it was who discovered that Antonello mixed his colors
with oil. Oho!
Of course not all of the pictures in his studio are painted by the
boys--some are painted by that old Dutchman what's-his-name--oh,
yes, Durer, Alberto Durer of Nuremberg. Two Nuremberg painters were
in that very gondola last week just where you sit--they are here in
Venice now, taking lessons from Gian, they said. Gian was up there
at Nuremberg and lived a month with Durer--they worked together,
drank beer together, I suppose, and caroused. Gian is very strict
about what he does in Venice, but you can never tell what a man will
do when he is away from home. The Germans are a roystering lot--but
they do say they can paint. Me? I have never been there--and do not
want to go, either--there are no canals there. To be sure, they
print books in Nuremberg. It was up there somewhere that they
invented type, a lazy scheme to do away with writing. They are a
thrifty lot--those Germans--they give me my fare and a penny more,
just a single penny, and no matter how much I have talked and
pointed out the wonderful sights, and imparted useful information,
known to me alone--only one penny extra--think of it!
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