Part 3 (1/2)

The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which titian finished in 1526, after having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps thethe extant altar-pieces of exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former conity, for well-ordered pomp and splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quite sufficient _vraisees, it has hardly a rival a the extant pictures of its class And yet, apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficulties overconificence teuidly interested by this famous canvas than we should care to confess It would hardly be possible to achieve a more splendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand

It is the subject itself thatorder It necessitates the poin and Child, of St Peter and other attendant saints, united by an invisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewed crowd of unseen worshi+ppers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's _Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud in their humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos (Baffo), at their head The natural tie that should unite the sacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power to ierously near to a condition in which they becoures in a decorative enseeneral schelorious colour-harmony, which has survived so s, is not possible on this occasion, or indeed necessary The ic of bold and subtle chiaroscuro is obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two gigantic pillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in thefrom the divine putti; the boldest feature in the sche cinnamon-yellow mantle of St Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, the two boldly contrasting with the ias croith the olive branch Peace[49] This is an unexpected note of theeffect, which braces the spectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness Thus, too, titian went to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarion note in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos The writer is unable to accept as froin and Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the preliroup in the Pesaro altar-piece The original sketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in the Albertina at Vienna The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds a like original study for the kneeling Baffo

[Illustration: SKETCH FOR THE MADONNA DI CASA PESARO ALBERTINA, VIENNA

_Froraph by Braun, Clement & Cie_]

[Illustration: Martyrdo by Henri Laurent]

By coh the centuries which have succeeded the placing of titian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St Peter the Dominican_ on the altar of the Brotherhood of St Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS

Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one of the most triumphant achieveust 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar for the lover of Venetian art--the _St Peter Martyr_ was burnt in the Cappella del Rosario of SS Giovanni e Paolo, together with one of Giovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels_, painted in 1472 Son influence had caused the temporary re the repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave Now the inal are compelled to form their esti copies and prints of all kinds that reive some sort of hint of what the picture was Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impressioncould well be reatest colourist by a translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he has conceived in the ood fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of the estive colour-scheme This Crowe and Cavalcaselleblacks and whites furnished by the robes of the Do landscape, in which lurid stor alle startling note of red in the hose of the executioner It is, therefore, with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the coeness and its treular felicity hich it is frarand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and unnatural in its elis influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who, returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had remained there until March in the saeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of passion based rather on the Raphaelisuration_? All through the wonderful career of the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entoh the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to consider the nobility, the acadeesture in priority to its natural dranificance Much less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_ and the _Cartoons_, in which true dran beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand The _Transfiguration_ itself is, however, theexample of the reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work In it are ures of unsurpassable majesty if we take them separately Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the sa broadened and developed by art, is here stifled In the _St Peter Martyr_ the tre in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all fluttering in the stor in nature It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied attitude that we have here, though of thekind In the same way the relation of the executioner to the ony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _draruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness An ihest subli its crest to the heavens, must ever have its feet firmly planted on earth Still, could one come face to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St

Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticisic of the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself Very curiously it is not any more less conteoli now, as a inal, at SS

Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this iinal would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work The best notion of the _St Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware, to be derived fros in the great hall of the ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris Even through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially in the landscape, which bring hi, to accept titian as he is A little reeing with Vasari, who, perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be discovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la piu colio intesa e condotta che altra, la quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor el S Marciliano, Venice Froraph by Anderson_]

It was after a public competition between titian, Palma, and Pordenone, instituted by the Brotherhood of St Peter Martyr, that the great coiven to the first-named master Palma had arrived at the end of his too short career, since he died in this saood notion fro of the _Martyrdom of St Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is either by or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at any rate in conception wholly his Aard and abrupt as this may seem in so perforic pathos Subliels aloft, and infinitely touching the Dominican saint who, in thethe drawings which have been deemed to be preliminary sketches for the _St Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-ink sketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of the victiazes at the saint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheet thumb-nail sketches of (or froels inof a soldier attacking the prostrate Do an adaptation or variation of that drawing by titian for the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A noble his Wife_, which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris As to none of the above-s does the writer feel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of titian himself[50]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now faedichten” (_Jahrbuch der Koniglich Preussischen Kunstsaeniously, and upon what ionesque of all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius, _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_ He gives reasons whichthe _Three Philosophers_, after a familiar incident in Book viii of the _Aeneid_, ”Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas conteenious explanation of titian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with a little later on These identifications are all-important, not only in connection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the first ti the students of Giorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, of the Venetian idyll generally

[2] For enious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and a sustained analysis of his art generally, Mr Bernard Berenson's _Lorenzo Lotto_ should be consulted See also M Emile Michel's article, ”Les Portraits de Lorenzo Lotto,” in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol

i

[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of titian, see Crowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of titian_ (second edition, 1881), in which are carefully sueneral and local authorities on the subject

[4] _Life and Times of titian_, vol i p 29

[5] _Die Galerien zu Munchen und Dresden_, p 75

[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school of art than as a Venetian painter of the late ti to Venice and learnt li apprese certa dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stesso Tiziano_” (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu Munchen und Dresden_)

[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_

[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided over by the Queen at Asolo, to which caunes, three Venetian gentleentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroider in many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman

A subject this which, transposed into an ather spirituality, ht well have served as the basis for such a picture as Giorgione's _Fete Chaazine of Art_, July 1895

[10] _Life and Times of titian_, vol i p 111

[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, taken after his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) his son_

[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du titien_, 1887