DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68745#0248
CHAPTER XV
THE CHARACTER OF HIS ART
F, as we contended in our first chapter, his age more or less
decides the type of the artist, still his character is expressed
in his paintings, which are for him what his deeds are to the
man of action, and we have to inquire whether these proceed from
the soul, or if their genius has been merely guided by the skilled
hand and the accomplished intellect. The Venetian school under-
lies all the variations of its children. Venice was the place of all
others which appealed to the artist through his sensations and
emotions, yet her greatest painters have shown us that those
emotions need be no ignoble ones, and we cannot complain that
there is no room for variety within her limits. In Venice, the
freest and happiest side of the Renaissance is represented by a
warmth of joy that has much that is Pagan, and also much that
is Arcadian in its character, and which is charged more with the
emotions than with any striking development of intellectual life.
The calm and natural Venetian manner, the Giorgionesque
tranquillity of rich feeling, are the very ideal of a beautiful,
sensuous art, in which amplitude of sensation is restrained by a
dignified simplicity. Titian carries on the tradition with perfect
balance. He is inspired by patriotic pride, by joy in life, by the
consciousness of hardly-won and royally-kept supremacy. Thought
and colour, feeling and composition, act and re-act in rhythmic
flow upon his canvas. He is master of himself to a superlative
extent. He does what he chooses, and that is to express a sublime
but sensuous ideal, the dream of a cultivated mind, fused in
warmth and colour or embodied in the utmost beauty of the
human form and the material world; so that the same spirit
informs his heavy foliage and his melting or gloomy blues that
gives languorous passion to his saints and Venuses; as if the
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THE CHARACTER OF HIS ART
F, as we contended in our first chapter, his age more or less
decides the type of the artist, still his character is expressed
in his paintings, which are for him what his deeds are to the
man of action, and we have to inquire whether these proceed from
the soul, or if their genius has been merely guided by the skilled
hand and the accomplished intellect. The Venetian school under-
lies all the variations of its children. Venice was the place of all
others which appealed to the artist through his sensations and
emotions, yet her greatest painters have shown us that those
emotions need be no ignoble ones, and we cannot complain that
there is no room for variety within her limits. In Venice, the
freest and happiest side of the Renaissance is represented by a
warmth of joy that has much that is Pagan, and also much that
is Arcadian in its character, and which is charged more with the
emotions than with any striking development of intellectual life.
The calm and natural Venetian manner, the Giorgionesque
tranquillity of rich feeling, are the very ideal of a beautiful,
sensuous art, in which amplitude of sensation is restrained by a
dignified simplicity. Titian carries on the tradition with perfect
balance. He is inspired by patriotic pride, by joy in life, by the
consciousness of hardly-won and royally-kept supremacy. Thought
and colour, feeling and composition, act and re-act in rhythmic
flow upon his canvas. He is master of himself to a superlative
extent. He does what he chooses, and that is to express a sublime
but sensuous ideal, the dream of a cultivated mind, fused in
warmth and colour or embodied in the utmost beauty of the
human form and the material world; so that the same spirit
informs his heavy foliage and his melting or gloomy blues that
gives languorous passion to his saints and Venuses; as if the
142