§ 30. Fresco painting of the Venetian exteriors. Canaletto. suggestive, and would be utterly false except as a frame or background for figures. The same may be said with respect to Raffaelle and the Roman school. If, however, these men laid architecture little under contribution to their own art, they made their own art a glorious gift to architecture; and the walls of Venice which, before, I believe, had received colour only in arabesque patterns, were lighted with human life by Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese. Of the works of Tintoret and Titian, nothing now, I believe, remains. Two figures of Giorgione's are still traceable on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, one of which, singularly uninjured, is seen from far above and below the Rialto, flaming like the reflection of a sunset. Two figures of Veronese were also traceable till lately; the head and arms of one still remain, and some glorious olive branches which were beside the other; the figure having been entirely effaced by an inscription in large black letters on a whitewash tablet, which we owe to the somewhat inopportunely expressed enthusiasm of the inhabitants of the district in favour of their new pastor.1 Judging, however, from the rate at which destruction is at present advancing, and seeing that in about seven or eight years more Venice will have utterly lost every external claim to interest, except that which attaches to the group of buildings immediately around St. Mark's Place, and to the larger churches, it may be conjectured that the greater part of her present degradation has taken place, at any rate, within the last forty years. Let the reader, with such scraps of evidence as The inscription is to the following effect,-a pleasant thing to see upon the walls, were it but more innocently placed : : CAMPO DI S. MAURIZIO. DIO CONSERVI A NOI LUNGAMENTE LO ZELANTIS. E REVERENDIS. D. LUIGI PICCINI NOSTRO NOVELLO PIEVANO. GLI ESULTANTI PARROCCHIANI. were may still be gleaned from under the stucco and paint of the Italian committees of taste, and from among the drawing-room innovations of English and German residents, restore Venice in his imagination to some resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. Let him, looking from Lido or Fusina, replace, in the forest of towers, those of the hundred and sixty-six churches which the French threw down; let him sheet her walls with purple and scarlet, overlay her minarets with gold1, cleanse from their pollution those choked canals which are now the drains of hovels, where they once vestibules of palaces, and fill them with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sadness and stain as had been set upon it by the declining energies of more than half a century, and he will see Venice as it was seen by Canaletto; whose miserable, virtueless, heartless mechanism, accepted as the representation of such various glory, is, both in its existence and acceptance, among the most striking signs of the lost sensation and deadened intellect of the nation at that time; a numbness and darkness more without hope than that of the Grave itself, holding and wearing yet the sceptre and the crown, like the corpses of the Etruscan kings, ready to sink into ashes at the first unbarring of the door of the sepulchre. The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know. in the whole range of art. of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadows; it single architectural ornament, however near, so much might enable us even to guess at its actual one; and this I say not rashly, for I shall prove it by placing portions of detail accurately copied from Canaletto side by side with engravings from the daguerreotype: it gives the buildings neither their architectural beauty nor their ancestral dignity, for there is no texture of stone nor character of age in Canaletto's touch; which is invariably violent, black, sharp, ruled penmanlike line, as far removed from gives no form as I could not now be traced or credited without reference to the authority of Gentile The quantity of gold with which the decorations of Venice were once covered Bellini, The greater part of the marble mouldings have been touched with it in lines and points, the minarets of St. Mark's, and all the florid carving of the arches entirely sheeted. The Casa d'Oro retained it on its lions until the recent commencement of its restoration. § 31. Expression of the effects of age on architecture by S. Prout. the grace of nature as from her faintness and transparency and Let it be observed that I find no fault with Canaletto for his want of poetry, of feeling, of artistical thoughtfulness in treatment, or of the various other virtues which he does not so much as profess. He professes nothing but coloured daguerreotypeism. Let us have it; most precious and to be revered it would be: let us have fresco where fresco was, and that copied faithfully; let us have carving where carving is, and that architecturally true. I have seen daguerreotypes in which every figure and rosette, and crack and stain, and fissure is given on a scale of an inch to Canaletto's three feet. What excuse is there to be offered for his omitting, on that scale, as I shall hereafter show, all statement of such ornament whatever? Among the Flemish schools, exquisite imitations of architecture are found constantly, and that not with Canaletto's vulgar black exaggeration of shadow, but in the most pure and silvery and luminous greys. I have little pleasure in such pictures; but I blame not those who have more; they are what they profess to be, and they are wonderful and instructive, and often graceful, and even affecting but Canaletto possesses no virtue except that of dexterous imitation of commonplace light and shade; and perhaps, with the exception of Salvator, no artist has ever fettered his unfortunate admirers more securely from all healthy or vigorous perception of truth, or been of more general detriment to all subsequent schools. Neither, however, by the Flemings nor by any other of the elder schools, was the effect of age or of human life upon architecture ever adequately expressed. What ruins they drew looked as if broken down on purpose; what weeds they put on seemed put on for ornament. Their domestic buildings had never any domesticity; the people looked out of their windows evidently to be drawn, or came into the street only to stand there for ever. A peculiar studiousness infected all accident; bricks fell out methodically, windows opened and shut by rule; stones were chipped at regular intervals; everything that happened seemed to have been expected before; and above all, the street had been washed and the houses. dusted expressly to be painted in their best. We owe to Prout, I believe, the first perception, and certainly the only existing expression, of precisely the characters which were wanting to old art; of that feeling which results from the influence, among the noble lines of architecture, of the rent and the rust, the fissure, the lichen, and the weed, and from the writing upon the pages of ancient walls of the confused hieroglyphics of human history. I suppose, from the deserved popularity of the artist, that the strange pleasure which I find myself in the deciphering of these is common to many. The feeling has been rashly and thoughtlessly contemned as mere love of the picturesque; there is, as I have above shown, a deeper moral in it, and we owe much, I am not prepared to say how much, to the artist by whom pre-eminently it has been excited: for, numerous as have been his imitators, extended as his influence, and simple as his means and manner, there has yet appeared nothing at all to equal him; there is no stone drawing, no vitality of architecture like Prout's. I say not this rashly; I remember Mackenzie, and Haghe, and many other capital imitators; and I have carefully reviewed the architectural work of the Academicians, often most accurate and elaborate. I repeat there is nothing but the work of Prout, which is true, living, or right, in its general impression, and nothing, therefore, so inexhaustibly agreeable. Faults he has manifold, easily detected, and much declaimed against by second-rate artists; but his excellence no one has ever approached, and his lithographic work (Sketches in Flanders and Germany), which was, I believe, the first of the kind, still remains the most valuable of all, numerous and elaborate as its various successors have been. The second series (in Italy and Switzerland) was of less value; the drawings seemed more laborious, and had less of the life of the original sketches, being also for the most part of subjects less adapted for the developement of the artist's peculiar powers: but both are fine; and the Brussels, Louvain, Cologne, and Nuremberg subjects of the one, § 32. His excellent com position and colour. together with the Tours, Amboise, Geneva, and Sion of the other, exhibit substantial qualities of stone and wood drawing, together with an ideal appreciation of the present active and vital being of the cities, such as nothing else has ever approached. Their value is much increased by the circumstance of their being drawn by the artist's own hand' upon the stone, and by the consequent manly recklessness of subordinate parts (in works of this kind, be it remembered, much is subordinate), which is of all characters of execution the most refreshing. Note the scrawled middle tint of the wall behind the Gothic well at Ratisbonne, and compare this manly piece of work with the wretched smoothness of recent lithography. Let it not be thought that there is any inconsistency between what I say here and what I have said respecting finish. This piece of dead wall is as much finished in relation to its function, as the masonries of Ghirlandajo or Leonardo in relation to theirs ; and the refreshing quality is the same in both, and manifest in all great masters, without exception, that of the utter regardlessness of the means so that their end be reached. The same kind of scrawling occurs often in the shade of Raffaelle. It is not, however, only by his peculiar stone touch, nor by his perception of human character, that he is distinguished. He is the most dexterous of all our artists in a certain kind of composition. No one can place figures as he can, except Turner. It is one thing to know where a piece of blue or white is wanted, and another to make the wearer of the blue apron or white cap come there, and not look as if it were against her will. Prout's streets are the only streets that are accidentally crowded; his markets the only markets where one feels inclined to get out of the way. With others we feel the figures so right where they are, that we have no expectation of their going anywhere else; and approve of the position of the man with the wheelbarrow, without the slightest fear of his running it against our legs. One other merit he has, far less generally acknowledged than it should be; he is among our most sunny and substantial colourists. Much conventional colour occurs in his inferior pictures (for he is very unequal), and some in all; but portions are always of quality so luminous and pure, that I have found these works the only ones capable of bearing juxtaposition with Turner |