St. Nicholas/Volume 32/Number 3/How to Study Pictures
A series of articles for the older girls and boys who read “St. Nicholas.”
Third Paper
Comparing Titan with Hans Holbein the Younger
and Correggio with Michelangelo.
I.
It is because of the difference between these two wonderful portraits—Titian’s “Man with the Glove” and the “Portrait of Georg Gyze” by Hans Holbein the Younger—that it is interesting to compare them.
If we should try to sum up in one word the impression produced by each, might we not say: “How noble the Titian is; the Holbein how intimate”? Both persons portrayed are young men: Titian’s unmistakably an aristocrat, but with no clue given as to who or what he was; Holbein’s a German merchant resident in London, whose name is recorded in the address of the letter in his hand, and who is surrounded by the accompaniments of his daily occupation. Presently we shall find out something about the nature of his occupations; meanwhile we may surprised him in the privacy of his office, and are already interested in him as an actual man who lived and worked nearly four hundred years ago. And we are interested, too, in the objects that surround him. We note already that the flowers in the vase are just like the carnations of our own day, and that he evidently is a prosperous man. But compare the fewness of his letters with the packet which one morning’s mail would bring to a modern merchant. Each is fastened with a band of paper held in place by a seal; he has just broken the band of the newly arrived letter; his own seal is among the objects that lie on the table. Do we not feel already that we are growing intimate with the man?
Can we feel the same toward “The Man with the Glove”? I admit that when we have once possessed ourselves of the appearance of this man’s face, we shall not forget it. But that is a very different thing from knowing the man as a man. There is something, indeed, in the grave, almost sad, expression of the face which forbids, rather than invites, intimacy. He too seems to have been surprised in his privacy, but he is occupied, not with his affairs, as Georg Gyze is, but with his thoughts. It is not the man in his every-day character that we see; indeed, it is not the man himself that holds our attention, but rather some mood of a man—or, rather, some reflection in him of the artist’s mood at the time he painted him.
Titian found in the original of this portrait a suggestion to himself of something stately and aloof from common things; he made his picture interpret this mood of feeling; we may suspect that he was more interested in this than in preserving a likeness of the man; we may even doubt whether the man was actually like this. Certainly, this could not have been his every-day look; it is a very unusual aspect, in which everything is made to contribute to the wonder-ful calm and dignity of the mood. The name of the young man has not come down to us; there is no clue to who or what he was—only this wonderful expression of a mood; and as that itself is so exalted and idealized that it baffles description, posterity has distinguished this picture from others by the vague title, “The Man with the Glove.”
Here, then, is another distinction between these pictures of Titian’s and Holbein’s. The treatment of the former is idealistic, of the other realistic. Both these artists were students of nature, seeking their inspiration from the world of men and things that passed before their eyes. But Holbein painted the thing as it appealed to his eye; Titian as it appealed to his mind.
This, of course, is a difference not confined to these two artists, Indeed, all that we have been saying about these respective points of view can be applied to other artists. So large a subject cannot be exhausted by the comparison of any two pictures; yet from these by Titian and Holbein a considerable insight may be gained.
What is a realist ?- Naturally, one who represents things as they really are. But can anybody do that? If ten men the equals of Holbein in observation and skill of hand had sat down beside him to paint the portrait of Georg Gyze and his surroundings, would their pictures have been identical? Could any two men, even, working independently, paint the ink-pot alone so that the two representations would be exactly alike? Have any two men exactly similar capacity of eyesight? And, if they have, have they also exactly similar minds? The fact is, a man can draw an ink-stand only as its appearance affects his eye and makes a mental impression on his brain. In one sense, we cannot say, “This is what an apple really looks like,” but only, “This is how it presents itself as real to me.”
So, in the strict sense of representing an object as it really is, no painter can be a realist; while, in the general sense of representing an object as it seems real to his eye and brain, every painter may be called a realist.
How then shall we discover the meaning of the word “realist” as used in painting? Let us look for an explanation in the two pictures.
Both painters represented what seemed real to them. But do we not observe that while Titian was chiefly occupied with the impression produced upon his mind, it was the impression made upon the eye which gave greater delight to Holbein? No man who did not love the appearances of things would have painted them with so loving a patience. While to Titian the thing which appeared most real about this man—the thing most worth his while to paint—was the impression made upon his mind; so that what he painted is, to a very large extent, a reflection of himself, a mood of Titian’s own thoughts. Holbein, on the contrary, concentrated the whole of himself upon the man and the objects before his eyes. His intention was simply to paint Georg Gyze as he was known to his friends—a merchant at his office table, with all the things about him that other visitors to the room would observe and grow to associate with the personality of Gyze himself.
We may gather, therefore, that realism, as painters use the word, is a state of mind which makes the painter forget himself and his own personal feelings in the study of what is presented to his eye; which makes him rejoice in the appearances of things and discover in each its peculiar quality of beauty; which makes him content to paint life simply as it manifests itself to his eye, to be, indeed, a faithful mirror of the world outside himself.
It is not because Holbein was a. realist, however, that he is celebrated, but because of the kind of realist he was. You will find that realism often runs to commonplace; a man may see chiefly with his eye because he has no mind to see with; may take a delight in facts because he has no imagination; the material appeals to him more than the spiritual. But Holbein was a man of mind, who attracted the friendship of Erasmus, the greatest scholar of his age, and Holbein made his strength of mind help the keenness of his eye. The result is that the number and variety of the objects in this portrait do not distract our attention from the man, but rather seem to increase our acquaintance with his character and tastes. We recognize the order and refinement which surround him. On the other hand, when we examine the details, we find each in its way exquisitely pictured; for Holbein loved things of delicate and skilful workmanship, and left many designs for scabbards, goblets, and goldsmith’s work.
Yet, compared with all the finish and detail of Holbein’s picture, how large, simple, and grand is the composition of Titan’s! Holbein’s aim was to put in everything that was without injury to the total effect; Titan’s aim was to leave out everything but what was essential. Holbein’s picture is a triumph of well-controlled working-out of detail; Titian’s of simplicity.
Portrait of Georg Gyze, by Holbein
And, as 1 have said, while the Holbein is simply and appropriately dignified, the Titan is majestically grand. Turn again to “The Man with the Glove,” shut out with your fingers first one of the hands, then the other, and then the sweep of shirt, and notice each time how the balance and dignity of the composition are thereby destroyed; for its magic consists in the exact placing of the lighter spots against the general darkness of the whole. By this time we realize that the fascination of this portrait is not only in the expression of the face and in the wonderful eyes, but also in the actual balance of light and dark in the composition. Then, taking the face as the source and starting-point of the impression which the picture makes,we note how the slit of the open doublet and the extended right forefinger echo the piercing directness of the gaze; while the left hand has an ease and elegance of expression which correspond with the grand and gracious poise of the whole picture.
“The Man with the Glove”, by Titan
Grand and gracious poise! Quite suggestive, indeed, of Titian himself. At once a genius and a favorite of fortune, he moved through his long life of pomp and splendor serene and self-contained. He was of old and noble family, born at Pieve in the mountain district of Cadore. By the time that he was eleven years old his father, Gregorio di Conte Vecelli, recognized that he was destined to be a painter and sent him to Venice, where he became the pupil first of Bellini, and then of the great artist Giorgione; from the first, indeed, he enjoyed every privilege that an artist of his time could need. The Doge and Council of Venice recognized his ability, as did the Dukes of Ferrara and Mantua. As the years went on, kings, popes, and emperors were his friends and patrons. In his home at Biri, a suburb of Venice, from which in one direction the snow-clad Alps are visible and in the other the soft luxuriance of the Venetian lagoon, he maintained a princely household, associating with the greatest and most accomplished men of Venice, working on, until he had reached the age of ninety-nine years. Even then it was no ordinary ailment, but the visitation of the plague, that carried him off; and such was the honor in which he was held, that the law against the burial of the plague-stricken in a church was overruled in his case, and he was laid in the tomb which he had prepared for himself in the great Church of the Frari.
“The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine.”, by Correggio. (See page 216.)
No artist’s life was so completely and sustainedly superb; and such, too, is the character of his work. He was great in portraiture, in landscape, in the painting of religious and mythological subjects. In any one of these departments others have rivaled him, but his glory is that he attained to the highest rank in all; he was an artist of universal gifts. His was an all-embracing genius, courtly, serene, majestic. He viewed the splendor of the world in a big, healthful, ample way; and represented it with the glowing brush of a supreme master of color.
The genius of Holbein also blossomed early. In 1515, when he was eighteen years old, he moved from Augsburg, where he was born, to Basel, the center of learning, whose boast was that every house in it contained at least one learned man. In 1520 he was admitted to citizenship at Basel and to membership in the painters’ guild; good proof, as he was only twenty-three, of his unusual ability,
But the times were lean ones for the painter. Holbein found himself in need of money, and accordingly set out for London with a letter of introduction to Sir Thomas More, the King’s Chancellor.
“Jeremiah,” , by Michelangelo. (See page 217.)
“Master Haunce,” as the English called him, arrived in England toward the close of 1526. During this first visit to England, he painted portraits of many of the leading men of the day, But two years later, in consequence of an outbreak of the plague, he returned to Basel, only to be driven back to England in 1531 by poverty and the death of his old friends.
By 1537 Holbein had come to the notice of Henry VIII, and was established as court painter, a position which he held until his death. This seems to have occurred during another visitation of the plague in 1543 for at this date knowledge of the great artist ceases. When he died or where he was buried is not known.
What a contrast between his life and Titian’s! One the favorite, and the other the sport, of fortune. For though the greatness of both was recognized by the men of their time, Titian lived a life of sumptuous ease in the beautiful surroundings of Venice, while Holbein, often straitened for money, never wealthy, experienced the rigor of poverty; forced by need and circumstances to become an alien in a strange land, dying unnoticed and unhonored.
The world to Titian was a pageant, to Holbein a scene of toil and pilgrimage.
II.
It would be hardly possible to find a greater contrast than the one presented by these two pictures—Correggio’s “Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine” and the “Jeremiah” by Michelangelo. Correggio has here taken for his subject one of the beautiful legends of the early Christian church. Catherine was a lady of Alexandria who, living about 30 a.d., dared to be a Christian and eventually died a martyr to her faith. It is one of the legends of the church of that time that she is supposed to have had a vision in which it was made known to her that she should consider herself the “bride” of Christ; and the idea of this mystic marriage was a favorite one with painters in the sixteenth century.
But how has Correggio treated this subject? Does he make you feel the sacrifice of Catherine, in being willing to die for her faith, or does he suggest to one looking at the picture anything of the religious joy and devotion with which her vision must have inspired her?
What we get from the painting as a whole is a lovely, dreamy suggestion as of very sweet people engaged in some graceful pleasantry. The Madonna is absorbed in love of the Holy Child, who is eying with an expression almost playful the hand of St. Catherine. The latter plays her part in the ceremony with little more feeling than if she, too, were a child; while St. John, with his bunched locks reminding us of ivy and vine leaves, has the look of a young Greek.
There is not a trace of religious feeling in the picture, or of mystic ecstasy—only the gentle, happy peace of innocence. There may be violence and martyrdom out in the world, but no echo of them disturbs the serenity of this little group, wrapped around in warm, melting, golden atmosphere. These beings arc no more troubled with cares or suffering than are lambs and fawns. They are the creatures of a poet’s golden dream.
Compare with them the “Jeremiah.” Here, instead of delicate gracefulness, are colossal strength, ponderous mass, profound impressiveness; a bent back that has carried the burden, hands that have labored, head bowed in vast depth of thought. And what of the thought? More than two thousand years had passed since Jeremiah uttered a prophetic dirge over Jerusalem, which had become the prey of foreign enemies. And to the mind of Michelangelo as he painted this figure, sometime between 1508 and 1512,—that is to say, between his thirty-fifth and thirty-ninth years,—there was present a similar spectacle of his own beloved Italy speeding to ruin under the weight of its own sins and the rivalries of foreign armies. And as Jeremiah lived to see the fall of Jerusalem, so Michelangelo lived to see the city of Rome sacked in 1527 by the German soldiery under the French renegade Constable Bourbon.
It is the power and depth of Michelangelo’s own thoughts that fill this figure of “Jeremiah.”
The French philosopher Taine wrote: “There are four men in the world of art and literature so exalted above all others as to seem to belong to another race—namely, Dante, Shakspere, Beethoven, and Michelangelo.” Three, at least, of these modern giants in art, Dante, Beethoven, and Michelangelo, were at continual war in their souls with conditions that surrounded them in the times in which they lived. Such a man as Michelangelo could not escape from the tempest of the world by wrapping himself up with dreams of a “golden age,” as Correggio, for instance, did,
Once more compare the two pictures to observe the difference in the two artists’ methods. One reason for the difference is that Correggio’s is painted in oil on canvas, Michelangelo’s in fresco on the plaster of the ceiling. The meaning of the word “fresco” is “fresh,” and fresco pictures were painted on the plaster while it was still damp, so that the colors, which were mixed with water, in the process of drying sank into the surface of the plaster. The wall or ceiling to be so decorated was coated with the rough-cast plaster and allowed to dry thoroughly, after which a thin layer of smooth finish was spread over as large a portion of the surface as the artist could finish in one day, Meanwhile he had prepared his drawing, and, laying this against the surface, went over the lines of it with a blunt instrument, so that, when the drawing or cartoon was removed, the outline of the figures appeared, cut in the damp plaster. Then he applied the color, working rapidly, having no doubt that the effect would be exactly what he aimed to produce, since correction, or working over what had already been painted, was not easy,
On the other hand, with oil paints the artist can work at his leisure, allowing his canvas time to dry, working over it again and again, and finally toning it all together by brushing over it thin layers of transparent colors, called glazes. It was by the use of these glazes that Correggio obtained the golden glow of his pictures. We can realize at once how this method was suited to the dreamy luxuriance of his imagination; while, on the contrary, more in harmony with the genius of Michelangelo was the more forcible method of the fresco. For in the strict sense of the word he was not a painter; that is to say, he was not skilled in, and probably was impatient of, the slower, tenderer way in which a painter reaches his results, He was not a colorist, nor skilled in the rendering of light and atmosphere; but he was a great draftsman, a great sculptor, and a profound thinker. And in every case it was the result of some grand or fiery thought, straight out from himself in all the heat of kindled imagination, that he set upon the paper, or struck out with forceful action of the hammer and chisel.
In his later life, when sore oppressed, he would retreat to the marble-quarries of Carrara under the pretext of searching for material. To him each block of marble, rugged, hard, and jagged, held a secret, needing only the genius of a sculptor’s chisel to liberate it.
It is the feeling of the sculptor that we recognize in this painting of “Jeremiah”; the feeling for solidity and weight, for stability and pose; a preference for simple lines and bold surfaces. To appreciate this distinction, compare Correggio’s picture, composed of so many varieties of lighted and shadowed parts, and with no suggestion of the figures being firmly planted. While Correggio has relied upon beautiful drawing, upon exquisite expression of hands and faces, upon color, light and shade, and his golden atmosphere that envelops the whole, Michelangelo relied almost entirely upon form—the form of the figure and of the draperies. He told Pope Julian II, when the latter requested him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at Rome, that he was not a painter, but a sculptor; yet, after he had shut himself up for four years,—from 1508 to 1512,—and the scaffold was removed, a result had been achieved which is without parallel in the world.
Very wonderful is the work which Michelangelo spread over this vast area of ten thousand square feet. The fact that there are three hundred and forty-three principal figures, many of colossal size, besides numerous others introduced for decorative effect, and that the creator of this vast scheme was but thirty-three when he began his work—all this is marvelous, prodigious, and yet not so marvelous as the variety of expression in the figures. The Jeremiah is only one of twelve figures in the vault of the ceiling.
If there is one point more than another in which Michelangelo displayed his genius it is in this, that he was the first to make the human form, and not the face alone, express a variety of mental emotions—pity, terror, anguish, love, yearning, ecstasy, and so forth. Just as it is within the power of music to call up sensations, which we feel deeply and yet cannot exactly put into words, so Michelangelo’s figures carry our imagination far beyond the personal meaning of the name attached to them. We know, from our Bible, for example, who Jeremiah was, and what he did; but this figure, buried in thought, of what is he thinking? To each one of us, thoughtfully considering the picture, it might have a separate meaning, In a general way we are all agreed as to its significance; yet if I were to attempt to explain what I feel, you might say, “Yes; but I feel so and so about it.”
On the other hand, we could come very near to agreeing upon an understanding of the emotions aroused by Correggio’s picture; although he too, as we have seen, was not intent upon representing an actual marriage, but rather an ideal union of peace, happiness, and innocence. But while Correggio’s pictures appeal to us as a pastoral theme in music by Haydn might, Michelangelo, in the range of his sculptured and painted works, is to be compared to the inexhaustible grandeur and manifold impressiveness of Beethoven,
Michelangelo, therefore, compels us to widen our ideas of what is beautiful. To Correggio it was physical loveliness joined to loveliness of sentiment; but Michelangelo, with a few exceptions, cared little for physical beauty. The beauty of his sculpture and paintings consists in the elevation of soul which they embody and the power they have to stir and elevate our own souls, They have the far-reaching grandeur of Beethoven’s music. In Michelangelo’s figures, lines of grace are for the most part replaced by lines of power—the power of vast repose or of tremendous energy, even of torment, but always of some deep thought or emotion.
In a brief study of so great a man it is possible to allude to only one more feature of Michelangelo’s greatness—namely, that he was a great architect as well as a great sculptor, painter, and poet. For a time the building of St. Peter’s was intrusted to his care, and in the last years of his life he prepared plans and made a model of its wonderful dome.
Michelangelo died in Rome, February 18, 1564, after dictating this brief will: “I commit my soul to God, my body to the earth, and my property to my nearest relations.” His remains were conveyed to Florence, and given a public funeral in the Church of Santa Croce.
Compared with this long and arduous life, Correggio’s seems simple indeed. Little is known of it, which would argue that he was of a retiring dispostion. He was born in the little town of Correggio, twenty-four miles from Parma. In the latter city he was educated, but in his seventeenth year an outbreak of the plague drove his family to Mantua, By 1514 he was back in Parma, For some years he worked here and painted many famous pictures.
It may have been because of grief over the death of his young wife, but at the age of thirty-six, indifferent to fame and fortune, he retired to the little town where he was born. All that is known regarding the death of this really great painter is the date, March 5, 1534.
