DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61252#0276
232
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.
followers, of far greater originality and diversity of power
than those who succeeded the Carracci. Van Dyck,
Snyders, Jordaens, Teniers, Wildens, and the whole race
of Dutch and Flemish genre and landscape painters who
came after them, down to the beginning of the 18th cen-
tury, were all more or less influenced by the impulse given
by one master spirit. Since the time of Giotto, there had
not been such a complete revolution in the means adopted
and the end proposed.
It appears to me that many critics have fallen into a
mistake in supposing that Rubens, like Ludovico Carracci,
deliberately chose and formed for himself a particular style,
and proposed to himself the attainment of certain objects
and effects in the selection of forms and the combination of
colour. If he had worked upon a system, as it has been
said, he would not have exaggerated, and at times almost
caricatured his own style; he would have been more cor-
rect. I should conceive that the original temperament of
the man left him no choice. He must have painted as he
did paint, or not at all. That exulting and exuberant life,
that flood of light and colour which gushed forth on his
canvas, came from the depths of his own soul, and seems
to have at times confounded all system, all judgment. I
have elsewhere observed that “ it is only by understanding'
this superflu d'ame et de vie, that we can account for cer-
tain strange anomalies in his works. That he was a learned
classical scholar, yet committed the wildest anachronisms
in manners and costume; that he was familiar with the
grace and grandeur of the antique, and could feel and
understand both, yet was guilty of the strangest solecisms
in character and form; that he was a humane and a moral
man, yet occasionally revelled in depicting scenes the most
sensual, and ferocious, and depraved,* arose not from
incapacity, or from ignorance, or inconsistency, but from
His martyrdoms and Bacchanalian revels, for instance.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.
followers, of far greater originality and diversity of power
than those who succeeded the Carracci. Van Dyck,
Snyders, Jordaens, Teniers, Wildens, and the whole race
of Dutch and Flemish genre and landscape painters who
came after them, down to the beginning of the 18th cen-
tury, were all more or less influenced by the impulse given
by one master spirit. Since the time of Giotto, there had
not been such a complete revolution in the means adopted
and the end proposed.
It appears to me that many critics have fallen into a
mistake in supposing that Rubens, like Ludovico Carracci,
deliberately chose and formed for himself a particular style,
and proposed to himself the attainment of certain objects
and effects in the selection of forms and the combination of
colour. If he had worked upon a system, as it has been
said, he would not have exaggerated, and at times almost
caricatured his own style; he would have been more cor-
rect. I should conceive that the original temperament of
the man left him no choice. He must have painted as he
did paint, or not at all. That exulting and exuberant life,
that flood of light and colour which gushed forth on his
canvas, came from the depths of his own soul, and seems
to have at times confounded all system, all judgment. I
have elsewhere observed that “ it is only by understanding'
this superflu d'ame et de vie, that we can account for cer-
tain strange anomalies in his works. That he was a learned
classical scholar, yet committed the wildest anachronisms
in manners and costume; that he was familiar with the
grace and grandeur of the antique, and could feel and
understand both, yet was guilty of the strangest solecisms
in character and form; that he was a humane and a moral
man, yet occasionally revelled in depicting scenes the most
sensual, and ferocious, and depraved,* arose not from
incapacity, or from ignorance, or inconsistency, but from
His martyrdoms and Bacchanalian revels, for instance.