DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61252#0031
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. XXvii
Carlo Cignani!! “ Hector and Achilles,” Nicholas Poussin
or Peter Festa !! “A Landscape, with a Magdalen in it,”
Albani or Breemberg!! “ Conversation, with dancing,”
Annibal Carracci; and so on, page after page. What
reliance can be placed on such an absurd nomenclature?
In those days, when a great or rich man built a house,
“ some demon whispered, Visto! have a taste!” and forth-
with he gave an order to the connoisseur of the day, some
Mr. Dalton, or Mr. Smith, to buy him pictures and antiques,
in the same spirit, we may presume, as Prince Korkasoffs
order to his bookseller : “ Buy me a library : large books
at bottom—small books at top!”
In the midst of all this quackery and ignorance, there
was still something truly respectable in the wish to possess
books and pictures as an appendage to rank, instead of
horses, diamonds, ribbons, and uniforms. The wish to
possess is followed by delight in the possession. What we
delight in, we love; and love becomes in time a discriminating
and refined appreciation. In time—but it must be allowed
that the progress to such refinement was, and is, in this
cold, working-day country of ours, wondrous slow. Let
us turn again to the old catalogues. It is clear, that in the
middle of the last century the elder Italian masters were
considered gothic and barbarous. Every Venetian portrait
was “ a Titian,” and every hard-looking German head “ a
Holbein.” The Bassani were popular; but the Carracci
and their school—Domenichino, Guido, Guercino, Albano
—seem to have been most sought after, and their names
almost as ridiculously misapplied as those of Raphael and
Correggio. The feeble and superficial masters of the later
degenerate schools of Italy abound—Carlo Dolce, Carlo
Maratti, Pietro da Cortona, Giordano, Lucatelli, and such
gentaccia.
Yet such, it shordd seem, was the fashion everywhere.
Not in France, nor even in Italy, where the productions
Carlo Cignani!! “ Hector and Achilles,” Nicholas Poussin
or Peter Festa !! “A Landscape, with a Magdalen in it,”
Albani or Breemberg!! “ Conversation, with dancing,”
Annibal Carracci; and so on, page after page. What
reliance can be placed on such an absurd nomenclature?
In those days, when a great or rich man built a house,
“ some demon whispered, Visto! have a taste!” and forth-
with he gave an order to the connoisseur of the day, some
Mr. Dalton, or Mr. Smith, to buy him pictures and antiques,
in the same spirit, we may presume, as Prince Korkasoffs
order to his bookseller : “ Buy me a library : large books
at bottom—small books at top!”
In the midst of all this quackery and ignorance, there
was still something truly respectable in the wish to possess
books and pictures as an appendage to rank, instead of
horses, diamonds, ribbons, and uniforms. The wish to
possess is followed by delight in the possession. What we
delight in, we love; and love becomes in time a discriminating
and refined appreciation. In time—but it must be allowed
that the progress to such refinement was, and is, in this
cold, working-day country of ours, wondrous slow. Let
us turn again to the old catalogues. It is clear, that in the
middle of the last century the elder Italian masters were
considered gothic and barbarous. Every Venetian portrait
was “ a Titian,” and every hard-looking German head “ a
Holbein.” The Bassani were popular; but the Carracci
and their school—Domenichino, Guido, Guercino, Albano
—seem to have been most sought after, and their names
almost as ridiculously misapplied as those of Raphael and
Correggio. The feeble and superficial masters of the later
degenerate schools of Italy abound—Carlo Dolce, Carlo
Maratti, Pietro da Cortona, Giordano, Lucatelli, and such
gentaccia.
Yet such, it shordd seem, was the fashion everywhere.
Not in France, nor even in Italy, where the productions