For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. O love-lit eyes, of star-surpassing light! A wandering alien in a land of night! O envious Death, dark monarch of the tomb, Unnumbered fair in that cold realm are thine, Full many maids hast thou in nether-gloom, What need hast thou of her in icy shade? Who marr❜st the beauty that thou may'st Nay, take me too; a victim undismayed! Peace, angry heart! Thine utterance is Thy words are lost upon the wandering air, There is no solace for thy hunger-pain, Nor help, nor hope, nor answer to thy prayer. My love is dead; there is no more to tell. Of this our home, the prison-house of Farewell, O Sweet! Without reply, fare- VALE. THERE is a sickness of the human soul save, DISILLUSION. WIDE was the world in days gone by, Fair was the world in days of old, The lips of love slow-blanching to the I saw the gloom, I saw the glow, grave, Which morn and only morn can show: And known Death's kiss upon the eyelids On flowerless field and leafless way, dim. O lips of love, that shamed the summer O wild-rose lips, most beautiful to see! snows, Death's are ye now, that sacred were to me! Nor cloud nor color steals to-day. My feet went lightly to the strain Argosy. I From The Edinburgh Review. painting, not only in Italy but elsewhere in Europe. Now, every one with the slightest claim to culture is familiar with the names of Ghiberti, the sculptor in whose school worked the leading painters of the day, Paolo di Dono, who first understood the principles of perspective, Piero della Francesca, Masolino da Panicale, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, Verrocchio, Squarcione, Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, the Bellinis, Cima da Conegliano, Carpaccio, Marziale, Basaiti, and other immediate forerunners of the mighty masters, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, and Correggio, who, one and all inspired with the same love of beauty and imbued with the same incomparable gifts, finally raised the art of painting to the highest rank. IT is a significant fact that the criticism of the art of painting and the appreciation of the works of the old Italian masters have undergone a complete revolution in the present century. Many causes have contributed to this result : our knowledge of the works themselves has increased with greater facilities of travel and research; our taste has been refined; and in art, as in every other branch of criticism, we have learnt to distrust the authority of tradition. We require now something more than the testimony of the unlearned connoisseur of the past before we can accept as final the assignment of any particular work to any particular hand. As in science so in art, we now demand of our guides knowledge from within as well as from without, and whilst availing ourselves of collateral evidence as an aid to the formation of our opinion, we accept nothing as final but the evidence of the work itself as interpreted by a competent critic who has been able closely to examine it. The nearer acquaintance with the great masters of the Italian schools and their pupils resulting from this searching method of inquiry has brought to light a multitude of able artists whose works can now be identified, although their very names, except in the pages of Vasari, Lanzi, and Baldinucci, were scarcely known some fifty years ago. Hence, to take but one or two typical instances, the Bolognese school and the painters of the seventeenth century. Guido Reni; the Caracci, the Poussins, and even Domenichino and Guercino-have lost the pre-eminence they so long enjoyed, whilst the attention of artist and artcritic is concentrated on the brilliant galaxy of painters who flourished between 1450 and 1550, the golden age of 11. Morelli's Italian Painters. Critical Studies is of infinite value to the student, howof their Works. By Giovanni Morelli (Ivan Lermolieff). The Borghese and Doria-Pamfili Galleries in Rome. Translated by Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes. With an Introduction by Sir Henry A. Layard. London, 1892. 2. Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, with Biographical Notices of the Painters. By Sir Frederic Burton, Director. London, 1889. But it is one thing to have an historical knowledge of art, quite another to be in personal rapport with its exponents. We may enter a picture-gallery primed to the finger-tips with historical lore, our art education already advanced enough to have abandoned belief in the pathetic first meeting of Giotto and Cimabue; we may know that Ghirlandajo's real name was Domenico Bigordi, and that he was called Ghirlandajo because of his master's skill in making garlands; that Paolo di Dono was surnamed Ucelli on account of his love of birds; we may have deplored Raphael's early death and studied the grand career of Michael Angelo, yet be unable to distinguish between the work of Perugino and Raphael or that of Sebastiano del Piombo and Giorgione, Verrocchio Solario. And although to a very great extent it is true that the art critic as well as the artist is born, not made, yet the help of the experience of a veteran in criticism ever great the acumen with which nature has originally endowed him. To whom, then, should the embryo critic turn in his first introduction to the works of the masters of the past? Surely to some member of the new school of criticism, a school which, with due reverence for true and authenti- tains that, to form an opinion upon the cated tradition, yet sifts with scientific authenticity of a picture, to judge of its remorselessness every atom of evidence which bears upon the matter in hand. Of this new school one of the most active of the promoters, or we might almost say creators, is without doubt Signor Morelli, the writer of the book before us. Signor Morelli is in fact the father of what must be termed the analytical or scientific criticism of the arts of design. Disregarding perhaps a little too much that intuitive faculty by which the elder conoscenti were supposed to trace the hand of a master and assign a given work to its real author or authors, and attaching small importance to collateral literary evidence, Morelli's system of criticism is based on a scientific analysis of the picture itself, as minute as that of a naturalist who examines an insect or a plant. To him the smallest peculiarities of form and technic afford a clue as significant as the minutia which distinguish the lowest germs of animal or vegetable life, or as the unconscious idiosyncrasies which stamp handwriting with the inalienable personality of the calligraphist. He follows these indications with the skill of an anatomist, with the result that he frequently opposes some stubborn fact to reputations based on less demonstrative evidence, and, alas! fatal to the authenticity of many well-known works of art, dispelling many a cherished illusion and forcing us to own with the reason, if not with the heart, the claims of men unendeared to us by early associations. Sir Henry Layard, who has prefixed a valuable introduction to the translation of this volume, thus describes what Morelli terms his "principles and method : " merits, and to determine, first, the school of painting to which it belongs, and then by whom painted, it is not merely necessary to of the presumed author, to discover the collect a number of facts concerning the life exact dates of his birth and death, and to point out the mis-statements of Vasari and other writers with respect to him. His identification and the genuineness of the work attributed to him depend upon scientific analysis, upon an accurate knowledge derived from long and careful study of his manner and style, and especially of his delineation of the different parts of the human body, or what Morelli denominates “his treatment of form, and his peculiar sense of color." Even long years of practice and constant study do not always enable a man to distinguish an original from a good work of the school; striking proofs of this are afforded in the public galleries of France and Italy, and more especially of Germany. The present writer must, however, disclaim all pretensions to having himself understood the tournure de l'esprit, l'âme of any great Italian painter. Assuredly he would never be so presumptuous, for often enough it has seemed to him as though, after prolonged years of study of the Italian masters, he had scarcely conquered the first principles of the language of art. On one point, however, there is not, and cannot be, any longer the slightest doubt in his mind that, in pursuing such studies, it is essentially through the medium of "'form' " that we must penetrate to the spirit in order, through the spirit, to win our way back to a truer knowledge of the form itself. Such a philosophical precept sounds like a truism, and may therefore appear not altogether worthless to the modern reading public, in whose eyes such things find favor as a rule. For myself, however, I can testify, from long experience, that its practical application is by no means so easy as it appears, and, moreover, costs no little time or trouble. What, for instance, is the form in a picture through which the spirit of the master-l'âme, la tournure de l'esprit finds expression? Surely not the force and movement of the human frame alone, nor the expression, type of countenance, coloring, and the treatment of the drapery? These are, undoubt and the 1 or the so-called harmony of color. In the edly, important parts of form, but do not | Giovanni Bellini, and Botticelli. After constitute the whole form. There still re- these cursory and introductory remarks, main, for instance, the hand-one of the our author proceeds to examine closely most expressive and characteristic parts of the hands represented in the work of the the human body—the ear, the landscape three Florentine painters, Fra Filippo, background, if there be any, and the chords, Sandro Botticelli, and Filippino Lippi, calling upon us to note that Fra Filippo practically imitated in his hands his prototypes Fra Angelico and Masaccio, and adhered to the same form to the end of his life. Even his contemporaries [adds Morelli], as Vasari relates, found fault with this hand, and its form is certainly not beautiful, being stumpy, awkward, and badly modelled. Fra Filippo's ear, too, is round and clumsy in form and usually curved inwards. work of a true artist, all these several parts Pregnant with suggestion and conAfter dwelling further upon this, the vincing as is much of this exposition of nucleus of his theory of art criticism, the scientific method of criticism, it Morelli gives an example of the practi- would, we think, be misleading to overcal working of his method in the follow-look the force of the remark that "it ing words: is the artist's idea which gives birth to I have already observed [he says] that, the form, and hence determines the after the head, the hand is the most charac- character or style." The stamp of his teristic and expressive part of the human own individuality is combined with body, how most painters, and rightly that of his subject, and he who gives enough, put all the strength of their art the same style to the ear, or eye, or into the delineation of the features, which nose, or hand, as the case may be, they endeavor to make as striking as possi- must necessarily become, in the worst ble; and pupils for this part of their work sense of the term, a mannerist. As in often appropriated ideas from their masters. This is rarely the case in the representation landscape painting, so in figure subjects, of the hands and ears, yet they also have a and in portraiture it is the spirit, not different form in every individual. The the letter, which the true artist gives types of saints . . . having been transmit- on his canvas; no literal transcript of ted through the master's works to his pupils a scene, however accurate -no copy of and imitators, every independent master a face, however true - rises to the dighas his own special conception and treat-nity of a work of art if this spirit be ment of landscape, and, what is more, of lacking; and could Morelli prove the the form of the hand and ear, for every infallibility of his scientific method, painter has, so to speak, a type of hand and unaided by collateral evidence, he would ear peculiar to himself. necessarily at the same time destroy the Here the text is illustrated with ex-claim of the men he wishes to serve to amples of eight typical hands which being artists at all. But, fortunately for Morelli claims to be respectively char- him and for his readers, Morelli's inacteristic of the work of Fra Filippo nate critical faculties were not cramped Lippi, Filippino, Pollajuolo, Bernardino by his analytical skill; and he is himde' Conti, Giovanni Bellini, Cosimo self unaware how much of his own Tura, Bramantino, and Botticelli. This power was from within, not from withquaint and interesting exhibition of out. He says himself, in his preface to hands is succeeded by one of ears; typ- the second volume of his work: ical examples of the mode of treating the ear by Signorelli, Mantegna, and Bonifazio being shown side by side with the work of Fra Filippo, Fillippino, It has been asserted in Germany that I profess to recognize a painter and to estimate his work solely by the form of the hand, the finger nails, the ear, or the toes. |