DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68745#0028
TINTORETTO
that it is difficult to lay too much stress upon environment or to
overlook the importance of setting the painter in his atmosphere.
Never did the stream of heredity wax to a fuller flood than
in the days of Venetian grandeur, never did the plant of art
bear a more glorious fruit than Venetian colour, so nowhere does
its secret become more mysterious and elusive; for though we are
assured that the full-blown flower is but the unmistakable witness
to the germinating seed, yet this flower, when it appears, is a
sudden thing, like an inspiration. Not that colour is lacking in
the work of early Venetian painters, whose pictures are ablaze
with hues richer and deeper than are to be found in the schools of
mid-Italy. Yet even up to the time of Bellini, the colour is often
crude and undeveloped. Bellini himself, except in one or two late
works, like the Frari Madonna or the altarpiece of S. Zaccaria, is
seeking principally after the intellectual; he is not irresistibly
overcome; his temperament is overlaid till late in life by the
Paduan formalism.
It is with Giorgione, the pupil of Bellini, that the colour-
emotion sprang at one bound to perfection. A colour-scheme is
developed, which in its sensuous quality is as distinct from all
that was dominating artists in other parts of Italy as the deep
glow of velvet and jewels is from the pure beauty of a flower,
and though Giorgione did not live to be old, and though so little
of his work has come down to us, what is of far greater import-
ance, he left the Giorgionesque; he kindled the spark which
blazed up in such inflammable geniuses as Titian and Tintoretto,
men carved out by the same influences, sharing the same
heritage, eager for kindred expression, and it is this heredity, these
influences in which they were steeped, which we must bear in
mind if we would understand them.
The unique position of Venice in art is owing not less to her
emphatic severance from the West, than to her close connexion
with the East. Her origin was the outcome of escape from the
barbarous West. One of her first acts was to close the lagoons
to the trade of the mainland, not excepting her neighbours at
Padua; then she stretched out her arms with such goodwill
to the East, that by the eighth century her life had already
assumed an oriental aspect. For long centuries, antipathy to the
2
that it is difficult to lay too much stress upon environment or to
overlook the importance of setting the painter in his atmosphere.
Never did the stream of heredity wax to a fuller flood than
in the days of Venetian grandeur, never did the plant of art
bear a more glorious fruit than Venetian colour, so nowhere does
its secret become more mysterious and elusive; for though we are
assured that the full-blown flower is but the unmistakable witness
to the germinating seed, yet this flower, when it appears, is a
sudden thing, like an inspiration. Not that colour is lacking in
the work of early Venetian painters, whose pictures are ablaze
with hues richer and deeper than are to be found in the schools of
mid-Italy. Yet even up to the time of Bellini, the colour is often
crude and undeveloped. Bellini himself, except in one or two late
works, like the Frari Madonna or the altarpiece of S. Zaccaria, is
seeking principally after the intellectual; he is not irresistibly
overcome; his temperament is overlaid till late in life by the
Paduan formalism.
It is with Giorgione, the pupil of Bellini, that the colour-
emotion sprang at one bound to perfection. A colour-scheme is
developed, which in its sensuous quality is as distinct from all
that was dominating artists in other parts of Italy as the deep
glow of velvet and jewels is from the pure beauty of a flower,
and though Giorgione did not live to be old, and though so little
of his work has come down to us, what is of far greater import-
ance, he left the Giorgionesque; he kindled the spark which
blazed up in such inflammable geniuses as Titian and Tintoretto,
men carved out by the same influences, sharing the same
heritage, eager for kindred expression, and it is this heredity, these
influences in which they were steeped, which we must bear in
mind if we would understand them.
The unique position of Venice in art is owing not less to her
emphatic severance from the West, than to her close connexion
with the East. Her origin was the outcome of escape from the
barbarous West. One of her first acts was to close the lagoons
to the trade of the mainland, not excepting her neighbours at
Padua; then she stretched out her arms with such goodwill
to the East, that by the eighth century her life had already
assumed an oriental aspect. For long centuries, antipathy to the
2