The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857

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The world could show no sharper and more affecting contrast. Outside, all
suggests the competitions and struggles of trade, the crowded street, the
bustle of the exchange, the cold and dry elements of purely unimaginative
life. Inside, all suggests the quietness and composure of solitary and
delightful labor, the silence of the studio, the resort to nature, and the
frequenting of the springs of poetry. From the present, one is suddenly
transferred to the past; from the near, to the remote. In place of the
blank, black factory wall, there is the low wall of some Italian Campo
Santo, its painted sides more precious than marbles or gold could have made
them; in place of the dull and heavy stone of the Exchange, the glowing
mosaics of some southern cathedral; in place of the factory bell and
the rush into the steaming and dirty workroom, the bell of a convent on
Fiesole, and the slow walk through its cool cloisters; in place of the dead
files of uniform ugly houses, Venetian palaces, with the water at their
base, reflecting the colors which Giorgione and Titian, housepainters at
Venice, left upon their stones; in place of the racket of the street, the
quiet greenness of an English lane, or the inaccessible ice and glory of
a far-off mountain summit; in place of the burnt waste of fields covered
with ashes and coal-dust, the burning stretch of the desert with the Sphinx
looking out over it century after century; in place of the shower coming
down through the dirty air to wash the dirty roofs, a storm breaking over
the sea-shore rocks, or beating down on the broken wreck; instead of the
drabbled calico of the factory girl and her face old before its time,
the satins of Vandyck's beauties, and the fair looks of Sir Peter Lely's
heroines; instead of Manchester mayors and masters of factories, Tintoret's
noble Venetian counsellors and doges, and Titian's Shakspearian men. It was
a bold thought thus to bring pictures and statues into one great collection
at Old Trafford, and to set off the art of the world against the
manufactures of Manchester.

The Exhibition building was admirably designed for its purpose. Its plan
is simple, and not unpleasing, although the proportions, which its object
required, were such as to prevent any attempt at grand architectural
effect. The general arrangement of the interior is easily understood, even
without the aid of a ground-plan. The chief entrance leads into a nave,
which has on each side an aisle of less height, separated from it by a
wall. The wall is broken by two openings, through which is the passage from
nave to aisle, or aisle to nave. The nave and aisles end in a transept,
and behind the transept are two small saloons, and a large hall or aisle
crossing the building transversely and forming its western end. A gallery
runs round the transept, and another crosses the nave at its eastern end.
This is the general arrangement. The walls of the nave or central hall are
occupied by the gallery of British portraits, and between the iron columns
that support the roof are set pieces of sculpture, and the cases containing
the precious collection of Ornamental Art, (works of the minor arts, as
they might be called,) which has been brought together from private and
public sources, and is quite unrivalled in its completeness. The southern
aisle contains the main collection of pictures by ancient, foreign masters;
while the opposite aisle is filled with the works of the British school.
The transept, being chiefly given up to arrangements for an orchestra,
contains below little but a collection of busts, but its galleries are
occupied with the collection of miniatures, a most admirable and extensive
historical series of engravings, a large number of photographs, and a very
precious collection of original drawings by the old masters. The saloon
at the north end of the transept is filled with East Indian and Chinese
tapestries, furniture, and works of ornamental design; while the opposite
saloon continues the collection of paintings of ancient masters, being
chiefly occupied with works from the gallery of the Marquis of Hertford,
which he sent to the Exhibition on condition that they should be kept
together. The hall that crosses the building at the western end is filled
with a collection of water-color drawings.--Such, in brief, is an outline
of the distribution of the treasures contained in this great palace of Art.

The first impression, on entering the nave, is that of the vast space
filled with light and rich with color. The attention is not attracted to
particular details. Separate objects are dwarfed in the long vista. The eye
rests on nothing that is not precious, and is at first contented to wander
rapidly from one object to another, without attempting to delay on any
thing. Passing down the middle between the ordered files of statues, (all
modern works, and few of them worthy of remark,) we enter from the transept
the south nave, where the works of the foreign schools of painting are
arranged for the most part in chronological order. This nave, like the
opposite, is divided into three saloons and two vestibules. We are now in
the first saloon. On the one side are the works of the earlier Italian
masters, and on the other those of the masters of the earlier German and
Flemish schools. And it is here that one observes the chief deficiency of
the collection. The pictures which are here have been brought from the
private galleries in which England is so rich. Many a famous country-house,
full of historic and poetic associations, gains additional interest from
its gallery of pictures or of marbles. Blenheim, Wilton House, Warwick
Castle, have their old walls hung with pictures by Titian, Vandyck, and
Holbein. Who does not remember, as one of his most delightful recollections
of England,--delightful as all his recollections of that dear old
Mother-land are, if he has really seen her,--who does not thus remember the
drive from the little country town to the old family place, up the long
avenue under its ancestral trees, the ferny brook crossed by the stone
bridge with its carved balustrade, the deer feeding on the green slope
of the open park or lying under some secular oak, the heavy white clouds
casting their slow shadows on the broad lawn, the dark spreading cedars
of Lebanon standing on the edge of the bright flower-garden,--the old
house itself, with its quaint gables and oriels, the broad flight of
steps leading to the wide door,--the cheerful reception from the prim,
but good-natured housekeeper,--her pride in the great hall, and in the
pleasant, home-like rooms, in Vandyck's portrait of the beautiful countess,
and in Holbein's of the fifth earl,--the satisfaction with which she would
point to the pictures and the marbles brought two centuries ago from
Italy, now stopping before this to tell you that "it is considered a very
improportionable Virgin by Parmigianino," and calling you to observe this
old statue "of a couching Silenius wrapped in the skin of a Pantheon,"--and
then, when the Rubens, and the Claude, and all the other pictures have been
seen, her letting you pass, as a great favor, through the library with its
well-filled oaken shelves, the gilding worn off the backs of many of its
books by the love of successive generations;--who does not remember such
scenes as these, and recall the glorious pictures from Florence, or from
Venice, or from Antwerp, that enrich many an English country home?

It was, indeed, from such homes that the Manchester collection was, in
great measure, brought together; and this being the case, it is not to be
wondered at that it was difficult to form an historic sequence of pictures
by which the course and progress of Art should be properly illustrated,
or that many of the old pictures that hang on the walls of the Exhibition
bear the names of greater masters than they deserve to be honored with. Nor
is it strange that the earlier schools of Art should be but very scantily
represented. The earlier painters did not do much work that would answer
for the decoration of homes; their work was of a public, and, for the most
part, a consecrated nature. The pictures of later centuries are more easily
appreciated by those who have not made a thoughtful study of Art, and they
have consequently been more loudly praised and more generally sought for.
The later works have attractive qualities in which the earlier are often
deficient, and it is not until very recently that the real beauty and
value of these first pictures of the revival have been felt with any due
appreciation. The masters of the fourteenth, and of the greater part of
the fifteenth century, did not, as we have said, paint pictures simply as
objects of beauty or for mere purposes of adornment, nor were those methods
of painting then in use which have brought pictures into private homes and
within private means. And so it happens that the schools of this period are
not represented at Manchester in any fair proportion to the schools of the
sixteenth century.

The two most important centuries of Art are not to be studied here. Of
the six pictures, for instance, that profess to be by Giotto, the great
head and master of Italian Art, there are but two from which even a faint
impression of his style can be gained. There is nothing here which would
enable one who had not seen his works in Italy to conceive a true idea
of their character and merits. Giotto stands at the threshold of the
fourteenth century, breaking open the door, so long barred up, that was to
let men into the glories of the unseen world. The friend of Dante, he, as
painter, stands side by side with the poet. In the midst of the tumults,
the confusion, and violence of those bloody times, his soul rose above
the discord of the world, his hand snapped the fetters of authority and
tradition, and revealed by line and color the exalted visions of his
imagination. Painting, with him, took its inspiration from religious faith,
and spent itself in religious service. Whether at Padua, in the little
withdrawn Arena chapel, or on the bare mountains at Assisi, in the great
church of St. Francis, or at Naples, in the king's chapel, his frescos,
though dimmed by the dust of five hundred years, blackened by the smoke
of incense, abused by restorers, still show a power of imagination, a
spirituality and tenderness of feeling, a simplicity and directness of
treatment, which give them place among the most sacred and precious works
that Art has yet produced. That quiet, solitary chapel of the Arena at
Padua is one of the places most worthy of reverence in Italy; for in the
pictures from the lives of the Virgin and the Saviour, that are painted
upon its walls, there is the expression of such religious fervor, such
faith and love, as Art has rarely or never reached in later times.

Nor is there at Manchester any picture by Duccio da Siena, the great, and,
one may almost say, the worthy contemporary of Giotto, from which his power
and feeling are to be well estimated. Like Giotto he struggled to free
himself from the swathing-clothes in which the traditions of Byzantine Art
had bound up the limbs and the imaginations of artists, and he succeeded
in at last breaking loose. But the long restraint had impaired the power
of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the
rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression,
which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the
inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will
striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and
imperfect knowledge of the materials and limits of painting. It is this
groping effort after truth which results often in the _naive_ rendering
of details, and the quaintness of composition, which are so common in
the works of these early masters; but the deep feeling of the artists
penetrates through all, and thus even their awkward and imperfect drawing
frequently produces a stronger effect, and seems a better rendering of
nature, than the cold, unfeeling, academic accuracy of Bologna, or all the
finished science of the eclectic schools.

In passing down through the century one finds lamentable omissions at
Manchester. Fifty pictures, of which half at least have been restored,
(that is to say, in part or wholly spoiled,) and half originally the work
of inferior masters, do not represent the art of a century which was full
of the glow of reawakening life, and which, as the spring covers the
earth with flowers, covered Italy with cathedrals, campaniles, churches,
baptisteries, and camposantos, and decorated their walls with sculpture and
painting. Art was gaining gradually a knowledge of her own powers. Orgagna,
the Michel Angelo of his time, (one of his pictures is at Manchester,) was
opening a wider field for her progress; and ten years after his death Fra
Angelico was born. He was a boy of fifteen years old when in 1402 Masaccio
was born at Florence, and the brightness of the fifteenth century had
begun.

There is one, among the four pictures ascribed to Fra Angelico in this
collection, from which something of the heavenly purity, the sweetness,
and the tenderness of this great and gentle master may be learned. It is a
picture of the Last Judgment. Unfortunately, it has been much injured by
time and by neglect; its brilliant colors have sunk and become dim,--those
pure, clear colors which give to Fra Angelico's panel pictures the
brilliancy of a missal illumination, and which reflect the purity and the
clearness of his tranquil life and his reverential soul. It is no fanciful
theory which connects the uses of color with moral qualities, and which
from the coloring of a picture will deduce something of the moral character
of its painter. Thus it is not only from the exquisite delicacy of form,
the spirituality of expression, and the sweet, reverent fancy in attitude,
of the angels from which Fra Angelico derived his name, but also from the
brightness of their golden wings, from the deep glow of their crimson, or
scarlet, or azure robes, and from the clear shining of the stars on their
foreheads, that one learns that he deserved that name as characteristic of
his temper and his life. Something of the influence of the cloister shows
itself in most of his larger works; but if his vision was narrowed within
convent walls, it did but pierce the more clearly into the regions of
tranquillity and loveliness that lay above them.

With the end of the fifteenth century religion almost disappears from Art.
John Bellini, dying ninety years old in 1516, was the last and one of the
greatest of the long line of artists who had loved Art as the means granted
them of serving God upon earth. The manly vigor of his conceptions, the
tender and holy purity of his imagination, the delicate strength of his
fancy, are not to be discovered in the few pictures that bear his name at
Manchester. His pictures are to be fairly seen only at Venice, where, in
out-of-the-way churches, over tawdry altars, his colors gleam undimmed
by time, and the faces of his Virgins look down with a still celestial
sweetness. But there is one picture here, by a Venetian contemporary
of John Bellini, before which we shall do well to pause. It is a St.
Catharine, by Cima da Conegliano. It is the picture of a noble woman, full
of fortitude, serenity, and faith. The richness of the color of her dress,
her calm dignity, the composure of her attitude, recall to mind and make
her the worthy companion of the beautiful St. Barbara of the church of
Santa Maria Formosa. It is well to look at her, for we are coming to those
days when such saints as these were no longer painted; but in their places
whole tribes of figures with faces twisted into every trick of sentimental
devotion, imbecile piety, and pretended fervor.

But before this time, somewhere about the middle of the fifteenth century,
the fashion of painting pictures upon panel for private purposes, though as
yet religious subjects were principally chosen for treatment, had already
begun; and we find the masters of the early part of the sixteenth century
represented with tolerable fulness at Manchester. English collectors have
long had a passion for Raphael, and England is almost as rich in his works
in oils as Italy herself. Italy, however, keeps his frescos; and may she
long keep them! There are more than thirty works ascribed to Raphael
hanging on the walls of the Exhibition. Many of them are of doubtful
genuineness; many of them have been restored.

It is impossible to trace in these pictures the progress of Raphael's
manner, and to mark the development of his style; but even in these one may
see something of the change from the simplicity and feeling of his early
works, produced under the influence of religious sentiment, and the still
clinging stiffness of traditional restraints, to the freedom and coldness
of his later works, painted under the influence of success at a dissolute
court, of flattery, of jealousy, and of indifference to the motives of
religion.

The Venetian masters of the sixteenth century fill a large portion of the
sides of one of the great saloons of this aisle, covering it with a glow of
deepest color. The opposite side is hung with many pictures by Rubens; and
the contrast between the works of the mighty colorists of Venice and the
famous colorist of Antwerp is not without curious interest and instruction.
The Venice wall has the color of Venetian sunsets, the gold and crimson
of its clouds, the solemn blue of the Cadore hills, the deep green of the
lagoons, the brown and purple of the seaweeds, and the shadows of the city
of decaying palaces. Here are such harmonies as Nature strikes in her great
symphony of color. But on the other wall are the colors of the courts in
which Rubens passed so many of his days,--the dyes of tapestry, the sheen
of jewels and velvet, the glaring crimson and yellow of royal displays;
while the harmonies that he strikes out with his rapid and powerful hand
are like those of the music of some great military band.

There are noble pictures here by Giorgione, and Titian, and Tintoret, and
Paul Veronese, and Bonifazio. Look at this Musical Party by Giorgione, this
landscape by Titian, this portrait of the vile Duke of Alva by the same
great master, the greatest master of all in portraiture. It is the Duke
himself, not merely in his outward presence, but such as the insight of
one as profoundly versed in human as in external nature beheld him. The
portrait is a biography of the man, and one may read in the narrow, hard,
and wily face the history of his cruel life. The same qualities of inward
vision are displayed by Tintoret in his more hasty portraits, and one
learns as much of Venetian men and of their lives from the pencil of Titian
and of Tintoret as from the pens of contemporary chroniclers. The picture
by Bonifazio of a Virgin and Child surrounded by saints is a splendid
example of this almost unsurpassed colorist; while several of the pictures
by Paul Veronese are among the most precious things in all the Exhibition,
as clear and uninjured specimens of admirable Venetian work.

The Bolognese school is represented at Manchester out of all proportion to
its worth, in comparison with the earlier and greater schools of Italy. It
is essentially the school of decline, and, after the time of Francia, very
few pictures proceeded from it dignified by noble thought, or exhibiting
either purity or power of imagination. Its very method condemned it
to inferiority. But debased as it is, it has been during the last two
centuries the object of perhaps more real and affected admiration than any
other of the schools of Italian art. Fortunately, we have entered upon a
better period of criticism, and a change is fast coming over the public
taste. But it is a curious fact, that the most popular picture in the whole
gallery of ancient masters, the picture before which larger crowds assemble
and linger than before any other, is one from this school,--the three
Maries weeping over the body of the Saviour, by Annibale Caracci. A portion
of the interest which it excites undoubtedly arises from the report that
Louis Napoleon has offered the sum of L20,000 for it to its possessor, the
Earl of Carlisle; but its intrinsic qualities are such as to explain much
of its attraction for uneducated eyes. The attitudes of the figures are
violent and theatrical, the colors are strong, the surface is smooth, the
subject is easily recognized and of general interest. But whatever value
be set upon these points, it is an example of many of the worst defects of
the school. The expressions of the figures are exaggerated and unnatural,
the color, though strong, is cold and inharmonious, the drawing feeble and
incorrect, the sentiment inconceivably material. It is a true exponent of
the low ebb of artistic power and of religious feeling at the period at
which it was painted.

But we are delaying too long in these halls of the old painters. We have
scarcely looked at a tithe of the eleven hundred pictures that hang around,
and we must pass by with only a glance the long lines of German, Flemish,
and Dutch works, and the rows of pictures by the great Spanish masters. We
can but see how much there is for pleasure and for study, and wish in vain
to pause before Rembrandt, and Cuyp, and Ruysdael, and Vandyck, before
Murillo and Velasquez.

We come out into the nave, and, forgetting for a time pictures as works of
art, let us look at them as representations of men, as we pass along before
the portraits of British worthies, with which the two sides of this great
hall are hung. It is a gallery of which every one of British blood may be
proud; for no other country could show such a long line of the portraits
of her famous men, and feel at the same time that so many of her greatest
were not to be found in the collection. The gallery begins with a portrait
of King Henry IV.; it ends with that of Mr. Prescott. After nearly four
hundred English worthies, at last one American,--and only one; for in the
whole collection there is but one other portrait of an American,--West, the
painter,--and he was English by adoption, though not by birth. We could
spare his fame without great loss, but it would not do for us to give
up that of our popular historian. In the next great assemblage of the
portraits of the worthies of the English race and speech, perhaps those
born on this side of the Atlantic may appear in larger numbers and in even
rank of honor.

The first portrait on the catalogue is that of King Henry IV.; but he has
displaced here, as in life, his predecessor on the throne. Henry VI. and
Richard III. follow in near succession; but it is not till Henry VIII.'s
time that we really enter upon the field of English portraiture. We begin
with the king himself. Here is Holbein's famous picture of him; a picture
that represents a man so gross, so sensual, so disgusting in appearance,
that one recognizes its truth, and wonders that the court-painter did not
lose his head for such a libellous sincerity.

Wolsey is near his master; his face is that of a man "exceeding wise,
fair-spoken, and persuading"; he has a large, full brow, narrow and shrewd
eyes, a delicate nose, and somewhat heavy and sensual cheeks. A little
later the portraits become more numerous. Of Queen Elizabeth there are
seven here, and in them may be traced the great changes of her face,--from
that of the plain, awkward, not altogether unpleasing, red-haired girl, to
that of the hard, bitter, disappointed old woman. Some of her courtiers
surround her;--Leicester, with a treacherous uncertainty of expression;
and Burleigh, riding on a mule, and holding flowers in his hand,--an
odd representation of the great Lord Treasurer. And here, too, is Henry
Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, finding a deserved place among the
chief men of his time,--for he was Shakspeare's friend, and to him the
"Rape of Lucrece" was dedicated, with the words, "What I have done is
yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours."
Here is Holbein's portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, with the face of a true
knight. Sidney is not here, but "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," has
an honored place,--and though her portrait is not of so "fair" a woman as
one might desire to have seen her, it has the look of a woman "wise and
good." And here are Shakspeare and Ben Jonson themselves;--the Chandos
portrait of Shakspeare, with which all the world is familiar, more
interesting from its own fame than from its being either an authentic or a
satisfactory likeness of the poet; and Ben Jonson close by, with his strong
features and manly face. And Fletcher, and Shirley, and Dick Burbadge, who
first acted Hamlet, and whose picture explains why the queen should say,
"He's fat and scant of breath,"--and others of the same great band of
contemporaries. Their heads belong for the most part to one broad type;
their common characteristics are strongly marked. There were never finer
heads than these;--the broad, uplifted, solidly based skulls; the strong
and vigorous marking of the features, giving evidence, both in shape and in
expression, of the union of pure intellect and pure imagination. Compare
with them the heads of the wits and statesmen of Charles II.'s time. See
the difference;--the high, wide arch of the skull is lowered or narrowed;
the broad brow cramped; the features finer cut, but losing in force what
they gain in fineness. Look, for instance, at this Vandyck of Sir John
Suckling,--only the next generation after the great men; but his portrait
is that of an idler, his head that of a man without great thoughts or great
interests. The age of imagination had passed; the age of fancy was setting
in. Here and there in the later days one finds a man who might belong to
the earlier time;--for instance, this likeness of Sir Henry Wotton, also by
Vandyck, gives us a broad and noble head; but one sees the time to which
he belonged in his somewhat affected meditative attitude, and in the word
_Philosophemur_, which is inscribed upon the canvas. The finest type of
head which England has had since the time of Elizabeth was that developed
among the Roundheads. _Round_ heads they were, and noble heads too. They
are well represented here. Look at this portrait of Cromwell;--it has
the same character and expression with that still nobler likeness of
him which he sent to the Duke of Tuscany, and which hangs now in one
of the back halls of the Pitti Gallery, a stern, silent monitor to the
dull Florentines. Frederick Tennyson said of it, that it was the best
battle-piece he ever saw;--"In its red ruggedness it looks as if it had
been sketched in by the gleam of Dunbar's cannon flashes." Hampden,
Eliot, and Pym, with wide individual differences, all belong to the same
class;--the lines of their faces, which in Hampden and in Eliot have
settled into a cast of resolute melancholy, and in Pym betray the sternness
of his nature, tell in all of the hard discipline of their lives, and the
upright patriotism of their hearts. Compare the faces of these patriots
with those of the leaders of the French Revolutions. The Cavaliers, with
a type of head less fine, were for the most part handsomer men than the
Roundheads. Here is Lovelace, the poet, for instance; Aubrey says of him,
"He was an extraordinary handsome man," and this likeness bears out the
assertion. His face has a look of enthusiasm and of gallantry, appropriate
to the man who could write, "Stone walls do not a prison make." With the
portraits of Brooke, and Fairfax, and Falkland, and Astley, and others of
the time, the comparison between Roundhead and Cavalier might be carried
still farther,--but we must pass on.

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