The publication by Mr. Heinemann of a large, costly, and elaborately illustrated book upon Pintoricchio is evidence that this long-neglected Umbrian painter is growing in popularity. Effaced for more than two and a half centuries by the dazzling radiance of his younger contemporary’s fame, Pintoricchio’s individuality, first appreciated by Rumohr, began clearly to stand out again only when Morelli demonstrated that he was the author of two frescoes in the Sixtine chapel. Even then he borrowed his lustre from working where Michelangelo left his masterpieces, and from having, as Morelli pointed out, influenced Raphael. It remained for the anarchical taste of recent years to exalt him into an important ‘Master’ on his own account. ¶ The occasion was offered by the reopening in 1897 of the Borgia apartments, which he decorated; for although the popes may have lost their power to immortalize themselves by feats of statesmanship, the ambition to signalize their pontificates by the patronage of art appears not wholly to have died out. Leo XIII in restoring and opening to the public the magnificent suite of rooms where, in the service of Alexander VI, Pintoricchio toiled to make a monument to his patron, was no less the maker of an artistic reputation than his Renaissance predecessors—with the significant difference, however, that he conferred a posthumous fame, a succès d’archéologie, instead of the renown that came from the commission to rebuild and decorate that city of cities which has now passed from under the papal sway. ¶ But, unless the lay world had been independently attuned to Pintoricchio’s art, papal patronage would not have carried his renown far. But modern art is just at a point where Pintoricchio is really more sympathetic than the masters of the great style, for in the break-up of artistic tradition and the decline of classical taste the decorator of to-day is thrown back upon parading the mere materials of his art, upon bright colour and relief, upon sumptuousness, and the startling and attractive. He has, in fact, dedicated himself to ornamentation—for we must not debase the word decoration! And of ornamentation, of the sumptuous, the attractive, the gay and the ingenious, Pintoricchio was a master. The gorgeousness of the Borgia apartments delude even critics who ought to distinguish more subtly, into praising them as art. It is so difficult to be stern with the attractive! ¶ And so Pintoricchio, becoming popular, needed a handsome book to reveal him further to his English admirers; and for them, being English, a volume of mere illustrations, like the French tome of M. Boyer d’Agen, did not suffice. There must be the flavour of pedantry, of Morellianism, of research into origins, without omitting the necessary historical setting. And so the publisher commissioned the valiant Dr. Ricci, head of the great gallery of the Brera, to prepare such a work, knowing well that he could not entrust it to more skilful and conscientious hands. But, contrary to the Biblical story, instead of blessing Israel the emissary of Balak was unable to keep his tongue from curses! Dr. Ricci’s taste was too cultivated, his experience of great art too profound, to permit him to raise the chosen painter to the altar prepared for him, and the publisher was thus constrained to write a short ‘Note’ explaining that, in spite of what the author says, Pintoricchio really is a great artist, standing only just below ‘the three or four supreme masters’—close, that is to say, to Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Giorgione! Turning, however, to Dr. Ricci’s estimate, we find it absolutely sane and just:—‘Pintoricchio ... was more attracted by the external splendours of art than by its sentiment ... is wholly destitute of passion ... and shows but little research in the matter of expression.’ And instead of joining in the unreserved praise accorded to him in the publisher’s ‘Note’ as a ‘master of decoration,’ he, on the contrary, criticizes his artist’s gaudiness and his lack of composition, and utters a protest, particularly welcome at the present moment, against the use of raised ornament in decorative painting. Indeed, while Morelli’s account of Pintoricchio leaves the reader with a general sense that he was to be preferred to his master Perugino, Dr. Ricci nowhere loses his sense of proportion, nowhere unduly exalts the subject of his work, and the resulting impression of his long book is to place Pintoricchio in a just relation to the artists of his time: attractive, sweet, agreeable, ‘exuberant and instinctively elegant,’ but almost never entering into rivalry with any master who possessed, in however small a degree, any of the specifically artistic qualities. His treatment, indeed, of Pintoricchio’s greatest work, the frescoes of the cathedral library of Siena, scarcely does justice to the real artistic merits of the decorative scheme. As these works so far surpass the frescoes of the Borgia apartments, the impression they give of ‘gaiety and well-being,’ which Dr. Ricci barely touches on, might well have been amplified. But one is grateful to him for pronouncing himself so clearly against the current notion that the young Raphael assisted Pintoricchio in these frescoes, instead of mystifying us with the usual non-committal generalities on this subject; and also for ranging himself so openly with Morelli and against Signor Venturi in refusing the absurd ascription of Gentile Bellini’s drawings to Pintoricchio. He calls attention to a phrase in Gentile’s will which speaks of drawings of his in Rome, thus amply accounting for the introduction of figures similar to those in Gentile’s sketches into the Roman frescoes of the Umbrian painter so notoriously given to pilfering. ¶ Singularly full and complete is Dr. Ricci’s list of Pintoricchio’s works; indeed, the fault lies just in this! While we thank him for sparing no pains to look up every possible work of his painter, we must reproach him with being too liberal in questions of authenticity. It is particularly among what Dr. Ricci considers the early works that we find him too generous. It is in my opinion quite impossible that Pintoricchio should have executed the Presentation at Torre d’ Andrea, which shows so many of the characteristics of that (deservedly) little known painter, Antonio da Viterbo[85], while the copy at Siena of the central figures in the great ancona of 1498 at Perugia cannot of course be, as he supposes, an early work, and seems to me too crude and flaccid to be by him at any period of his career. The early Madonna in the Bufalini collection at Città di Castello I cannot clearly remember, but the ruined Madonna with the infant John in the duomo of that town could certainly never have been touched by Pintoricchio’s own hand, and Lord Crawford’s Madonna and Angels at Wigan is too cold and hard for him, and indeed seems to be the work of some Romagnol imitator of Pintoricchio, whose youthful hand was trained under the benumbing influence of Palmezzano. ¶ I regret that I cannot quite follow our author in his chronology of Pintoricchio’s works, for the clear arrangement of which at the end of his book he nevertheless earns our gratitude. The assumption that the Ara Coeli frescoes were painted after those in the Sixtine chapel seems to me to confuse Dr. Ricci’s view of the chronology from the start. To my eyes they are clearly earlier works, although I know that Morelli here for once agreed with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and dated them as late as 1496. But the whole question is by no means clear, and I confess to being unable to discover in Dr. Ricci’s book the exact criteria he uses to determine the date of a particular work. The Sienese tondo which he calls early seems to me definitely to belong to the period after 1500, and the two Madonnas at Spello do not convince me that they are early, or even that they are of the same date. Dr. Ricci professes himself not quite convinced of the adequacy of internal evidence; nevertheless, like all unbelievers, he constantly takes refuge in it, but not consistently, and it is this uncertainty of method which, perhaps more than anything else, prevents our following his conclusions with intelligent sympathy. And this one regrets the more, because with the broad lines of his book, and, above all, with his estimate of Pintoricchio, one has such hearty sympathy. ¶ A word of protest must be added about the strange translation and about certain carelessness apparent in the book-making. ‘Coetanean’ is an odd word to meet on the first page, and surely Dr. Ricci never spoke of the ‘coast of Subasio’! ‘S. Bernardine,’ or, worse still, ‘San Bernardine,’ is not a happy way of anglicizing the name of the Sienese saint, nor is ‘Cybo’ an improvement upon the usual form. ‘Enea’ recurs in an irritating manner, where every cultivated English person expects Aeneas; for, since Bishop Creighton’s sympathetic account, ‘Aeneas Silvius,’ whether as humanist or pope, has become a familiar name. Just here, by the way, I may express my surprise that among Dr. Ricci’s historical references for Pope Alexander VI (p. 87) he did not place Creighton’s account, the best in English, or perhaps in any language. ¶ The subject of the first coloured plate is misnamed ‘S. Bernardino,’ although in the text correctly described as St. Louis of Toulouse. And this leads me to protest against cheap colour reproductions of this kind. The feeblest, young-lady water-colour sketch after Pintoricchio could not resemble him less than these coarse, smeared, falsely-tinted reproductions. They are worse than useless; they are hideously misleading. The other illustrations of the book, however, are copious and accurate, and we cannot be too grateful for the reproduction of so many of the pictures in private collections, photographs of which it is often almost impossible for the student to procure. M. L.
Mr. Fred Roe’s book of ancient coffers and cupboards must surely be the first of many such monographs. To-day the process block has made it possible to illustrate with ease the most elaborate details of the work of the ancient craftsmen, and within the covers of a book we may bear home our museum to be pored over at leisure. And here we have the chosen pieces of many museums, many churches, and many collectors’ hoards, in a form which makes them as useful to the new craftsmen as to the antiquary. It is true that Mr. Roe has not given us process work alone. Although such illustrations as those of the famous chest of the twelve knights at the Cluny and the St. George chest at South Kensington leave nothing to be desired, Mr. Roe does not allow it to be forgotten that he can use a pencil with effect. His drawings, although they have nothing of the tight and T-squared manner familiar in architects’ drawings of old pieces, yet give a pleasant impression of truth and trustworthiness, and err not on the side of that dangerous cleverness which so often persuaded that great man M. Viollet le Duc to translate ornament and detail from every scratch and stain of his model. With a volume of the Mobilier Français at hand Mr. Roe may be at issue with the Frenchman on a definite point. Here we have the great armoire of Noyon as presented spick and span in the coloured drawing of M. Viollet le Duc, and here we have it also from the pencil of Mr. Roe. To our mind Mr. Roe seems the more trustworthy interpreter, but one or other is at fault. On the first of the eight doors of the armoire Mr. Roe gives us a figure of the Virgin in a sweeping robe, holding the Child in her arms. M. Viollet le Duc, with abundant detail, gives us the same door with a bare-legged St. John Baptist in his camel’s hair, supporting in his arms a lamb. ¶ It is no disparagement to Mr. Roe’s written commentary to say that the early history of the chest is told clearly enough by his well-arranged series of drawings and photographs. We owe him thanks that he has avoided the temptation which would persuade the writer upon any side of English archaeology to gallop through his subject from Stonehenge to the great exhibition within the covers of a single book. Here we have the history of the mediaeval chest, from the thirteenth-century examples with which we must perforce begin, to the end of the Gothic work in the fifteen hundreds. There Mr. Roe stays, and for the story of the Elizabeth and seventeenth-century chests, which are still in such plenty amongst us, we may wait in good content for Mr. Roe’s future work. ¶ To those who are familiar with inventories, and wills, and such-like documents of the intimate life of our ancestors, the picture of the ancient English home rises up furnished with a bed, a brass pot, and a chest; for these good things came ever foremost amongst the few household goods of folk of the middling sort. It would be difficult to say where the collector might lay his hand nowadays upon the woodwork of a mediaeval bed; the brass pots have for the most part served their day and gone back to the foundry furnace; but the oaken chest remains here and there in the countryside for a most curious and venerable relic. ¶ We can hardly doubt that the familiar chest was from the beginning cunningly decorated; but accurate knowledge begins with the thirteenth century, with vast fronts of one or more broad beams set longways between two broad uprights. For ornament we have suggestions of arch-work simply indicated with chiselled lines and roundels of tracery. The ends are solidly framed with massive timbers. Of painted chests a notable example remains at Newport in Essex, and this Mr. Roe shows us in its colours. The inside of the lid when upreared shows like a painted reredos with a rood, the Virgin and St. John, and St. Peter and St. Paul, each within a painted archway of reds and greens. Twelve shields appear upon the chest, but on these remains no trace of the painted bearings which would have told us the story of the piece. Below the twelve shields, fessewise across the front of the chest runs a most singular ornament, a broad band of open tracery cast in pewter. ¶ The thirteenth century closes with the richly ornamented chest-fronts which endure for the rest of the medieval period. The long chest in Saltwood church is assigned by Mr. Roe to the century-end. The front is covered with tracery work with deep mullions, the broad uprights at the ends being filled with winged dragons in square panels. To this century-end belongs also that most famous and glorious chest which is the pride of the Musée Cluny, along whose mullioned front stand twelve knights with shields and ailettes of their arms; and here again we feel that, although the lighting of Mr. Roe’s photograph was unfortunate, our modern illustrations must take the place of Viollet le Duc’s too highly wrought drawings. ¶ Throughout the fourteenth century we find in England the traditional window tracery along the chest front, and the dragons or beasts in squared compartments of the broad uprights. From Hultoft, in Lincolnshire, we have in a late fourteenth-century chest an early example of a panelled and buttressed piece, in which pierced and cut-out tracery has been applied to a flush front. A lid painted inside with shields of arms belongs to a chest formerly in the Chancery court of Durham, and, apart from its beauty, claims our interest by the fact that the first shield is that of the Aungerviles, of whom came Richard of Bury, bishop of Durham, and author of the ‘Philobiblon,’ one of those few mediaeval books which yet find readers. Concerning this shield, we may remark that Mr. Roe’s ‘Gules, a cinquefoil or (or argent) ermine pierced (of the field?)’ is not a very lucid piece of blazonry. Between the shields a dragon meets with a centaur-like figure in yellow hood and red kilt ‘running a tilt,’ as Mr. Roe somewhat loosely phrases it, but really playing with the sword and buckler. Forty-five years ago this chest was still in the Chancery court; if we ask why it is now in the hands of an ‘eminent antiquary,’ we should have for answer a familiar story of the ignorance and wanton folly of our half-civilized English official classes. A sad side of Mr. Roe’s narrative is the recurrent exclamation at the fact that a church chest, perfect in the days of Parker, Cotman, or Shaw, is now staved in, or clumsily restored. This in such cases where the chest has been suffered to remain. The Wittersham chest does not seem to have stayed at Wittersham long after its beauties had been published to the world in a ‘Dictionary of Architecture,’ and the fact that the nameless connoisseur who removed it took with him the ancient parish stocks as well leaves Wittersham without the means of dealing with the offence of those who should have been its custodians. Parker engraves a famous chest at Guestling, of which but one panel remained when the present rector came to Guestling, and even this poor relic has gone the way of the rest. It would be well if the thief were the one enemy of such treasures—in that case the nation might come to its own some day; but the church stove, even in our own time, has crackled with fuel for the loss of which our descendants will curse their pig-hearted ancestry. ¶ Of the most interesting type, which Mr. Roe, who shuns the English word chest, is pleased to call a ‘tilting coffer,’ we are afforded a valuable set of pictures. It is good to see that perhaps the finest panel of St. George and his dragon and Dame Cleodolinde is in our own national collection at South Kensington. The barbarously fine chest at Ypres will stand to all who know it for a familiar example. Mr. Roe, being possessed with the idea that these figured chests are English in design and working, is persuaded that the Ypres chest may have been abandoned by the English army which sieged Ypres in 1383; but we may confess that we find no notably English feeling in this chest or its fellows. ¶ To follow the story of the gothic chest to its running to seed in the sixteenth century were to encroach upon the office of Mr. Roe’s excellent monograph. Mr. Roe’s work is clear and to the point. We feel that he has not only drawn and photographed, but handled and rummaged the chests of which he tells us. He is cunning in hinges and locks, and forgeries of respectable standing and the mis-datings of long tradition do not entangle him. It may perhaps be said of his terminology that he attaches too definite and settled a meaning to the words which he chooses to apply to various forms of the objects of his study. The definition of a coffer as ‘a box of great strength for the keeping and transport of weighty articles, having its front formed by a single panel,’ as distinct from a hutch, ‘a household coffer of a rough description,’ strikes us as too assured and exact. A more serious blemish arises from Mr. Roe’s apparent belief that from the character of the work upon a chest one may easily guess whether its first home were in church or hall. The familiar window tracery of many chest-fronts spells for him plainly church or monastery. By the same token Mr. Roe would have us set down for a churchman every fourteenth-century man who wore ‘Poules windowes’ cut in his shoe leather, and the knights and dragons of many miserere-seats would show him that the first place of their setting-up was in the castle hall. Another odd fancy of Mr. Roe’s persuades him that the ‘civil wars,’ apparently those of the king and commonwealth, account for the loss of many pieces of English gothic furniture. Such a fancy does not argue an intimate knowledge of the history of the seventeenth-century struggles, than which no wars have been waged with less sacking and burning; and Mr. Roe, as his last words show, knows full well that the fellest enemies of our mediaeval relics flourished in the nineteenth century in the close and the rectory, sat at high tables of old foundations, and even came to good credit as scholars and antiquaries. There are honoured names amongst us to-day whose bearers have done deeds of destruction to which Merciful Strickalthrow or Corporal Humgudgeon would not have set their hands.
O. B.
Certainly it never rains but it pours. Siena, so long without any adequate guide to her intensely interesting history and art, has suddenly broken out into quite a literature to herself. Scarcely has the controversy over the respective merits, or the reverse, of Professor Langton Douglas’s ‘History’ and Mr. Gardner’s ‘Story’ ceased to rouse our interest before a third guide appears in the field, which to our mind is infinitely the best of the three. Less pretentious and less costly, it contains in its smaller compass a mass of information in a readable form that is within the comprehension of the dullest, and yet worthy of the careful perusal of the most critical. Both Mr. Heywood and Miss Olcott live in and love Siena, so that their several parts are not only written con amore, but on carefully studied data. The history is written with a swing that carries one along, and yet leaves one at the end with a clear idea of what Siena was at her best. Mr. Heywood’s charm of style—as might be expected from his former work—is very great. It is easier, more lucid, and, without being any the less expressive or forcible, is wholly free from the few blemishes that might be objected to in his previous essays. No one understands better than he the complications and kaleidoscopic changes that occurred with so much abruptness in the government of the republic. Therefore we have the more occasion to be grateful to him for having set the main facts of her story before us, unhampered by superfluous digressions and comments. Once only he pauses to give eloquent expression to his admiration for that much-misunderstood and much-abused body, the Nove, whose rule (1292–1355) was the longest and most prosperous of all the various combinations that held sway in Siena. They are usually represented as ruthless tyrants, and generally detested and hateful; whereas there can be no question that their firm, autocratic rule, if severe and sometimes cruel, held in check alike arrogant noble and turbulent demagogue, and that under their guidance Siena reached the highest point of her prosperity, internal and external. At home flourished the arts of peace as they never did again, and abroad her fame was European, her merchants were respected, and her produce in demand throughout the civilized world. With the fall of the Nove fell Siena. Their hold over the reins of government lasted sixty-three years;—no other body again held them so long until she finally sank into the position of a subject city. Mr. Heywood’s notices as to the saints and writers of Siena are all too brief, and we would like to hear more from him about them, but space clearly forbids: and, as he points out, readers may turn to his other works for much that is perforce left unrelated here. We can only regret one note (on p. 68), which we feel must have been inadvertent on his part, and certain expressions in the bibliographical notice, to which we refer presently. ¶ Miss Olcott’s section, being, we believe, her first literary work, deserves an unusually high meed of praise. One may not always agree with her attributions, and her judgement on painters that she does not like is severe and not always quite just;—for example, her attitude towards Sodoma and Beccafumi, respectively, will not be endorsed by all her readers;—still, she has so evidently studied her subject with thoroughness and care, working under the best direction, and weighing her facts with so much patience and real insight, that one can scarcely praise this first essay of hers too highly. Her attitude towards the native Sienese artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is so truly devotional that, even if it blinds her to the beauties and merits of later workers, it disarms severe criticism. She points out very truly—and in this respect she follows the same line as Mr. Heywood in his history—that the art of Siena never rose again after the middle of the fourteenth century (i.e., contemporarily with the fall of the Nove) to the point that it then attained. The various foreign influences that eventually came into the state wrought fine achievements, but native talent was never again what it had been in the days of Duccio, Simone Martini, and their immediate successors. It is, however, true that in the following century very great artists did arise, in whose praise the authoress is specially eloquent. That she has great reason, the lovely works of such men as Matteo di Giovanni, Neroccio di Landi, Lorenzo di Pietro (Vecchietta), and Giovanni di Stefano (Sassetta) amply testify to those who have eyes to see. To Neroccio and Vecchietta, moreover, she draws further notice, since, like so many artists of their day, they were both sculptors and painters, and obtained more than ordinary success in either of the greater arts. Thus panel, bronze, and marble, when touched by them, produce effects of exquisite charm in gracious line and lovely expression that are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. We feel no doubt that to walk through the city in Miss Olcott’s company will be a pleasure, which student and traveller cannot fail to appreciate. That small mistakes as to fact have occasionally crept in was of course unavoidable; but for practical purposes they are unimportant. She has managed to avoid the dullness of a mere record of facts, though her notes are full of practically useful side-information; while, on the other hand, she has not fallen into that temptation to dogmatize, so difficult to escape from when dealing with a specialized school of painting like that of Siena. ¶ Student and traveller alike have much reason to be grateful for the work; mainly on account of its directness and simplicity; though also for the valuable footnotes supplied by both authors. The bibliographical lists are of great interest, but we cannot refrain from remarking that the notice as to books to be avoided is, to say the least of it, in doubtful taste. We understand the irritation caused by such books as those specified to writers who have studied the subject carefully, and we recognize fully the incalculable mischief done by the inaccuracies of the modern catchpenny magazine contributor; but we cannot but think so long and virulent an attack, however justly deserved, quite unsuitable within the pages of a guide book. We suggest that in a future edition these pages might be omitted, as being the only serious blemish to a book on which authors and publisher may be very heartily congratulated.
R. H. H. C.
The prospectus issued by the publisher of this work contained the extraordinary statement that ‘E. T. Rogers Bey, in his contributions to the subject, established beyond doubt that coats of arms and armorial bearings were introduced into Europe by the crusaders in imitation of the practice of the eastern princes whom they had encountered in the field of battle.’ It would surprise no one acquainted with the vexed question of heraldic ‘origins’ to know that he did nothing of the kind. What he did advance was that ‘... les avis sont partagés sur la question de savoir si les Croisés ont pulsé en Orient les notions de cet art [blazon] ou s’il est exclusivement d’origine européenne. Les arguments en faveur de son origine orientale me paraissent les mieux fondés, car ils sont soutenus par des données historiques. Un esprit militaire et même chevaleresque existait parmi les Musulmans de l’Arabie, de la Syrie et de l’Égypte, longtemps avant la formation de nos ordres de templiers et de chevaliers; et il est fort probable que cet esprit guerrier s’est communiqué par l’entremise des Venitiens et des Génois et repandu peu à peu en Europe même avant la première croisade.’ We do not hesitate to say that beyond this string of theory there is nothing in the forty-nine pages of Rogers Bey’s ‘Le Blason chez les Princes Musulmans de l’Égypte et de la Syrie’ (Bulletin de l’Institut Égyptien, 1880) offering proof of the derivation of European armory from the east. All this we quote in extenso because Artin Pasha’s work is, he states, to be regarded as the sequel to Rogers Bey’s memoir, and because, where he touches the origin of western heraldry, his remarks are likewise mere unfounded assertion. Neither does his knowledge of European arms appear to be of the most accurate order; he states that Louis IX of France was the first to adopt the fleur de lys, when in fact the seal of that monarch’s father, Louis VIII, bears a shield semé de lys, bearings which may be traced back to the mantle and shoes worn by Philip Augustus at his ‘sacre’ in 1179, similarly sown with fleurs de lys. Needless to say, the correctness of no theory concerning the origin of European blazon is demonstrable, and it is to be regretted that the author did not steer clear of it altogether. As an account of Moslem blazon and of the emblems found upon Arabic glass, pottery, sculpture, coins, metal-work and arms, Artin Pasha’s work, in spite of such blemishes, will be of great value to archaeologists and collectors. The author has been at pains to obtain as complete a series as possible of the strange insignia frequently figuring upon these works of art. His plan is to discuss the bearings such as the fleur de lys, lion, fish, eagle, cup, dice, horns, the so-called hieroglyphic signs, the sword and sabre, crescent, cross, dagger, separately, each with its history, and a catalogue of extant examples. Of these over three hundred are reproduced, many in colour, from Egypt and the continental and London museums. Unfortunately many are unidentified, and it seems to us that it would have increased the value of the book if approximate dates had been assigned to the objects decorated with such insignia as remain for the present in this category. The constitution of mameluke society, to which the majority of mediaeval armigerous Egyptians belonged, is the great obstacle to a systematic identification or study of their heraldry, if heraldry it can be called. The cases in which insignia are known to have been inherited are so few, says the author, that one cannot affirm that hereditary blazon generally existed in Egypt, though in the case of the emirs he concludes for the existence of transmission from father to son; admittance to the mameluke body was closed, apparently, to their legal offspring, and in the majority of cases their insignia denoted official or court rank and changed with it. ¶ Artin Pasha gives also a great deal of information concerning the emblems used by other oriental nations, though his arguments seem occasionally to bring within the net heraldic purely conventionalized animal or vegetable forms, attributing to much merely symbolical or ornamental material a character unwarranted by the strict significance of the term blazon.
A. V. DE P.
This, the second and much enlarged edition of a volume published thirty years ago and long out of print, contains the fruits of the author’s researches, not only at Liége and in the Mosan towns, but also in many museums and private collections. ¶ In the first fifty pages he has brought together all the documentary evidence as to the introduction and progress of art in the principality, illustrating the same by reproductions of the paintings on the mutilated shrine of Saint Odilia at Kerniel, of miniatures from manuscripts in the British Museum, the Royal Library at Brussels, etc., and of the exquisite storied embroideries on the antependium from the church of Saint Martin at Liége, now in the Industrial Art Museum at Brussels. In the next three chapters the author treats of the Benedictine artists of Liége, of the Mosan contemporaries of the Van Eycks, and of the paintings executed in the fifteenth century, of which so little has escaped destruction. As to the painters who flourished in the sixteenth century there is fuller information, though there yet remains much to be done before the history of Joachim Patenir and Henry Bles can be cleared up and their works classified. Of Lambert Lombard and his pupils and followers the author gives us a full account, and from their time onwards to the end of the eighteenth century this volume contains a thoroughly complete history of the painters who flourished in the district and of the paintings they executed. We congratulate the author on the termination of this work, which, with the volume on sculpture and the plastic arts published by him in 1890, constitutes a very satisfactory and well-illustrated history of art in the principality of Liége.
W. H. J. W.
JAHRBUCH DER KÖNIGLICH PREUSSISCHEN KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN, 1903, 2. HEFT.—The article of most general interest in the current number is that by Drs. Ludwig and Bode on the picture of the Resurrection recently acquired by the Berlin gallery from Count Roncalli of Bergamo. The assumption that this is by Giovanni Bellini himself rests on the following evidence: The church of St. Michael, on the cemetery island of Venice, was so ruined in 1469 that the abbot of the Camaldulensian house to which it belonged began to rebuild it. In the year 1475 the patrician Marco Zorzi, of the Bertucci family, obtained permission to build and furnish a family chapel in the church. The chapel was dedicated to the Virgin, but in his mother’s will, dated 1479, it is already referred to as the chapel of the Resurrection. Then follows the testimony of later writers. Sansovino, 1581, describing the church, says, ‘La risurrezzione a olio fu del medisimo Gian Bellino.’ Ridolfi, 1648, describes the picture fully, and attributes it to Bellini. Boschini, 1664, calls it a Cima, an attribution which clung to the picture in St. Michael’s till 1810, when it disappeared. It will be noted that there is hitherto no proof that the Roncalli picture stood once in the chapel in question. That a composition of this kind by Bellini existed was already to be guessed from various motives copied in other pictures. The question remains whether this is the identical picture, and not, as has been hitherto thought, a late version by Basaiti, Previtali or Bartolommeo Veneto. On the other hand it is noted that Ridolfi’s account of the picture is so minute that one may assume that the Roncalli picture is either the actual one that stood in Zorzi’s chapel or an exact copy. The problem therefore resolves itself into the question of whether the existing picture is a copy or not. Drs. Ludwig and Bode are agreed that it is an original, and in spite of some curious points which do not precisely agree with any other existing Bellini we think they are right. The picture with which it has most affinity is the Transfiguration at Naples, to which for various reasons we may assign a date just a year or two previous to 1478, the date of this work. If this is correct the likeness to Basaiti, Cima and Bartolommeo Veneto is to be explained by the fact that this work exercised a profound influence on the rising generation of Venetian painters. It is to be noted also that we have here already the peculiar honeycombed rock formation which the Vicentine painters, Montagna in particular, afterwards employed. Whatever be the final verdict as to the authorship of the work, the authorities of the Berlin gallery are to be congratulated upon having secured one of the most imaginative compositions in the whole range of Venetian art.—R. E. F.
Dr. Bode writes on the work of Hercules Segers, whose pictures, long forgotten or ascribed to other masters, Rembrandt, Van Goyen, or Vermeer of Haarlem, have recently been rediscovered, mainly through the insight of Dr. Bode himself. The Berlin gallery has possessed since 1874 the only signed picture hitherto known; another signed work is now in the possession of Dr. Hofstede de Groot. These two, a second landscape lately acquired by the Berlin gallery, and a picture exhibited in London in 1901 under the name of Vermeer, but now the property of Herr Simon, are reproduced. Other pictures discussed in the text are a landscape ascribed to Rembrandt in the Uffizi and another, also under Rembrandt’s name, in the National Gallery of Scotland. A great part of the article is devoted to the etchings, the true starting-point of all our knowledge of Segers. About sixty of these are known, of which the Amsterdam cabinet has fifty, while very few other collections possess any considerable number. Several admirable facsimiles in colour accompany the article, and the interesting announcement is made that a publication of the entire work of Segers is contemplated, under the editorship of Prof. Jaro Springer. Almost all the etchings are landscapes, generally printed in colour on a prepared ground, and often finished by the artist with the brush. Dr. Bode discusses the question whether the wild mountain scenery depicted in most of them was invented by the artist or true to nature, and decides for the latter alternative. A great curiosity is the etching in colours of the Lamentation for Christ, copied by Segers from a wood-cut by Hans Baldung. An excellent reproduction is given of the impression recently acquired by the Berlin cabinet. Dr. Bode does not mention the fact that an impression was already known in the collection of King Frederick Augustus II at Dresden, where it passed for a drawing by Baldung till its true character was discerned some years ago by Prof. Lehrs.
C. D.
L’ARTE. Parts I–IV. 1903.—The publication of L’Arte, suspended owing to a strike at Rome, has been resumed, and we have received the first four parts for the current year. Signor Venturi appears to have finally discovered the authorship of the small bronze doors which close the reliquary containing St. Peter’s keys in S. Pietro in Vincoli. These, which have been variously praised as Pollajuolo’s and disparaged as Filarete’s, are really not Florentine at all, but by the Milanese Caradosso, working doubtless under Florentine influence. There are two replicas of the two bas reliefs on the doors in question. Both, though alike in the general composition, are curiously modified in some essential particulars which render the subjects unintelligible. One of these replicas is in the Louvre, where it is attributed to the Florentine school; the other, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is more rashly ascribed to Lorenzo Ghiberti, to whose style it does not conform at all. ¶ M. Marcel Reymond solves satisfactorily a puzzling question connected with the tomb of Onofrio Strozzi in the church of Sta. Trinità in Florence. This has been ascribed on documentary evidence to Piero di Niccolò, who was supposed to have executed it in 1418. In 1423 Piero di Niccolò executed at Venice the essentially gothic monument of Doge Mocenigo, while Donatello himself only arrived at a conception like that of the Strozzi tomb in his monument of Giovanni de’ Medici in 1429. On stylistic grounds there can be no doubt that the Strozzi tomb is nearly a decade later than the Medici tomb, and yet the documentary evidence has been hitherto allowed as authoritative. On closer examination, however, this appears to be quite inconclusive; it is a warning of the necessity for re-examining documents in the light of the evidence afforded by style. The Strozzi tomb may be safely considered to be no earlier than the close of the fourth decade of the century. It is either, M. Reymond thinks, by Donatello himself, or by some sculptor who carried out a design by him. ¶ The remains of Pisan domination in Sardinia are the subject of researches by Signor Dionigi Scano, who has had the good fortune to discover at Oristano a signed statue by Nino Pisano, together with a number of bas reliefs in which he traces Pisan influence. The very crude architectural settings of most of these, however, betray a strain of northern influence. Far finer than these are the thirteenth-century lion-head door handles in bronze which he reproduces. ¶ Dr. Seidlitz returns to the question of Zenale and Buttinone à propos of Signor Malaguzzi Valeri’s interesting book on Lombard painters. He points out the impossibility of supposing, as Signor Valeri does, that the Castelbarco altarpiece in the Brera belongs to the fifties. The supposed 5 of the date must be a mutilated 8. In the main, however, he appears to have come independently to similar conclusions about the respective shares of Buttinone and Zenale in the great Treviglio altarpiece. He calls attention to the important picture by Zenale (the Circumcision) in the Louvre overlooked by the Italian writer, but by far the most interesting suggestion that he makes is that the strangely imaginative composition of the Adoration in the Ambrosian Library which Morelli described as an early Bramantino is by Buttinone himself. It must be admitted that in no other work does that artist display a freedom and originality of invention comparable to this, but the likenesses to his peculiarly uncouth style are certainly striking. We should like to call attention to the fact that most of these ideas were suggested some years ago by Mr. Herbert Cook in his catalogue to the Lombard exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Both Dr. Seidlitz and Signor Valeri are acquainted with this work, but neither has had the courtesy to make full acknowledgement of Mr. Cook’s priority. ¶ Signor Francesco La Grassa-Patti writes on the works of the Della Robbia in Sicily. The full-length Madonna at Trapani he attributes to Andrea, though the coarse vigorous forms suggest Giovanni while still working in his father’s style as more likely. The work is described as Giovanni’s by Miss Cruttwell. The second is a tondo at Messina (Sta. Maria della Scala) which Miss Cruttwell describes as a school piece. This also is attributed by Signor Grassa-Patti to Andrea, while the one work for which Andrea’s authorship might be claimed, the Madonna del Cuscino at Palermo, is called a school piece. A fourth work is the Adoration in the church of S. Niccolò lo Gurgo at Palermo. This M. Reymond considers to be one of many replicas of the motive. The author makes no mention of Miss Cruttwell’s exhaustive researches, although, with the exception of the last, all these works have been fully and critically treated by her. ¶ Signor Gino Fogolari describes some wooden sculptures of the twelfth century at Carsoli and Alatri. Those at the latter place comprise a magnificent Madonna and Child, one of the finest specimens of the type which was usual in Italian sculpture of this period, and twelve has reliefs of the doors which originally closed the Madonna’s shrine. These are of interest as still possessing some of the original colouring and for their similarity in technique to the ivory work of the period. ¶ Dr. Romualdi describes an admirable plan which has been formed for making a complete catalogue raisonné of all publications on the history of Italian art. The scheme is to treat the subject by means of regional committees, whose work will be united and revised by central committees at Florence and Rome. The importance of such a catalogue in a subject of which the literature has become so unwieldy cannot be overrated: the scheme deserves every encouragement. ¶ Signor Venturi replies at length to Dr. Julius von Schlosser’s views concerning the sketch-book attributed to Giusto of Padua in the National Gallery of Engravings at Rome, maintaining the correctness of his original attribution. ¶ Among the ‘miscellanea’ there are descriptions of a fourteenth-century pastoral staff in the cathedral at Treviso, which Signor Biscaro attributes to a Venetian goldsmith. He seems scarcely to explain the peculiarly French character of most of the forms. ¶ Signor Venturi gives a description with a collotype reproduction of the newly-discovered Jacopo di Barbari at Naples. It is evidently a striking picture in which the influence of Antonello da Messina strongly predominates. The two men represented in it are Luca Pacioli, the celebrated mathematician, and the artist himself, whose apparent age agrees with that indicated by the inscription, namely, twenty years. This, since the picture bears the date 1495, throws a new light on Barbari’s position in Venetian art. Signor Venturi also reproduces a drawing in the Piancastelli collection at Rome, which appears to be the original work by Timoteo Viti of which the head in the Taylorian at Oxford, hitherto thought to be an original, is a replica. If the reproductions are to be trusted, there can be no doubt about the superiority of the Roman drawing. Signor Toesca attributes the coarse picture of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Naples gallery (there ascribed to Matteo di Giovanni) to Christoforo Scacco. He also reproduces an Antoniazzo Romano in the depôt of the Uffizi. Signor Venturi maintains in a vehement but unconvincing argument his former opinion that the Resurrection which the Berlin gallery acquired recently from Count Roncalli at Bergamo is not by Giovanni Bellini, but by Bartolommeo Veneto. ¶ Signor P. D’Achiardi publishes a picture which is in the house of the cathedral chaplains at Pisa which has hitherto been supposed to be merely a school piece of Benozzi Gozzoli’s atelier, but which a recent restoration has shown to be worthy of the master. It is dated 1470, and is therefore one of the earliest of his Pisan works. Signor Manceri adduces a document which shows that Pietro di Bontate, who was supposed to have assisted Laurana in his works at Palermo, was not an artist but a stonemason.
GAZETTE DES BEAUX ARTS, June.—M. Henri Cochin begins, in ‘Some reflections on the Salons,’ a delightful article which is none the worse for containing very little about the pictures and a good deal of general speculation about the aims which modern art has proposed to itself. He regrets that the present moment is one in which the public has to some extent lost confidence in its own omniscience, and that the artists are without any clearly formulated ideals to arouse their devotion or hatred. ¶ Owing to the activity of M. Paul Meurice, Paris is going to have yet another museum, that of Victor Hugo. In what was once the poet’s house in the Place Royale, there have been collected and arranged all kinds of records and mementos of the poet-politician’s career. Not the least important of these are the pen-and-ink drawings in which he often made the first record of scenes, elaborated afterwards in prose or verse. It is to these slight but by no means insignificant performances that M. Emile Berteaux devotes a serious study. There was, in fact, a time when Victor Hugo nearly turned artist; he got so far as to master the processes of etching and to produce one successful plate. But he realized the danger of this parergon interfering with his real work and never repeated the experiment. Nevertheless, to the end of his life he noted ideas or striking effects in pen-drawings of astonishing force and brilliance, on which he smudged a melodramatic chiaroscuro with a finger dipped in ink or coffee. The results cannot be treated as great works of art, but none the less every one of them proclaims the man of genius; nor are they unimportant for the understanding of Victor Hugo’s development, since the sombre mood of his later poems was already foreshadowed in these hasty improvisations. ¶ M. Moreau-Nélaton describes the genesis of one of Corot’s late works, the view of Sin-le-noble, now forming part of the Thomy-Thiéry bequest to the Louvre. M. Denis Roche begins an account of Dmitri Grigorévitch Lévitski, a little-known Russian portraitist of the eighteenth century, whose works have decided merit. A certain influence of contemporary Venetian art is apparent in his composition, but for the most part he was formed under the influence of French artists like Tocqué, whom the Empress Elizabeth invited to Russia in the middle of the century. The portrait of Diderot by Lévitski, which is reproduced here, shows that his feeling for character was keener than the average run of West European painters of his time. It is comparable to a Chardin rather than any of the more mannered masters of the day.
RASSEGNA D’ARTE, June.—Signor Carlo Gamba describes two works of art in the royal villa of Castello; one, a Florentine picture (a Nativity) of about 1460, in which the influence of Baldovinetti is most apparent; the other a polychrome stucco attributed to Agostino di Duccio. The composition is undoubtedly his, but the type of face is longer and more accented than is usual with that master. ¶ Signor Antonio Gobbo points out the great differences between the ancient methods of mosaic work and those which obtain in the modern factories at Venice and elsewhere. He insists rightly on the necessity of doing the mosaic in situ, instead of reversed on a cartoon, on the desirability of a restricted colour-scheme and of a less mechanically even fabrication of the tesserae. It is interesting to have explained thus the extreme discomfort one experiences in front of most modern mosaics. ¶ Signor Annoni describes some remains of fifteenth-century work in the northern suburb of Milan, the most interesting being a fresco which he attributes to Borgognone at Garignano. ¶ Signor Antonio della Rovere endeavours to prove by Morellian methods that a feeble and late sixteenth-century Venetian picture, representing St. Jerome, is by none other than Giorgione. As he relies for his proof on the attribution to Giorgione of the Three Ages in the Pitti, and a well-known Torbido in the Venice academy, his extraordinary result is not entirely the fault of the method he employs. ¶ The Antonello da Messina of Christ at the Column in the museum at Piacenza is reproduced in this number. It is evidently a work of the highest importance for our knowledge of this great and still scarcely understood master. In conception and execution alike it surpasses all the numerous works by Solario and others that it inspired.
THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW, June, contains an account of Orvieto cathedral by Mr. Langton Douglas. He effectively disparages Commendatore Fumi’s theory that the original design for the church which follows the plan of a Roman basilica was by Arnolfo di Cambio, and attributes it to ‘some mediocre master of the conservative Roman school.’ With regard to the façade and the importance of Lorenzo Maitano’s work at Orvieto he is in accordance with Burckhardt and Bode. He has done a real service to students in reproducing the two beautiful designs of the façade by the great Sienese master. In discussing the sculptures of the façade he shows excellent reasons for assuming, as was already done by Burckhardt and Bode, that Maitano was the master sculptor. We are rather surprised to find him however admitting M. Marcel Reymond’s contention that Andrea da Pontedera also had a hand in the work, though at a much earlier date than that writer supposed. The work, we think, is throughout thinner, slighter, and of a more facile elegance than the known works of Andrea Pisano. Mr. Langton Douglas tends to exaggerate the indifference of previous writers to Sienese sculpture: the list of works which he gives, with the remark that they have ‘entirely escaped the notice of M. Reymond and other writers upon Tuscan sculpture,’ is more completely given in Bode’s ‘Italienische Plastik’. ¶ For the rest the Architectural Review is devoted to contemporary works, among which we may call attention to Mr. Gilbert Scott’s remarkable designs for the Liverpool Cathedral competition. We may hope that even now it is not too late for the committee to revise their verdict and give us the chance of seeing the execution of a really vital and original gothic design.
The May number of the Emporium (Bergamo) which did not reach us in time for our last issue contains an interesting account by Signor Frizzoni of the Tadini gallery at Lovere. The gallery which, with the immense modern palace that contains it, was left to the remote little town of Lovere by Count Tadini, has, it must be admitted, a very small proportion of notable works, but since Signor Frizzoni has rearranged it, its value for the lover of art is considerably enhanced. It is no longer necessary to wander through innumerable seventeenth-century copies in order to pick out the few works that demand serious attention. And these few are indeed of such excellence that no one need regret the time spent in coasting up the winding shores of the Lake of Iseo in order to visit it. By far the most remarkable of these is the incomparable Jacopo Bellini of the Madonna and Child, perhaps the finest existing work of this rare master. Besides this there is Bordone’s greatest masterpiece, a Madonna and Child enthroned with SS. Christopher and George below—a work of almost Giorgionesque splendour, though it is needless to say more florid in taste and more agitated in line. The curtain suspended behind by flying putti reminds one for a moment of Lotto’s S. Bernardino altarpiece. Another fine picture is the portrait of a knight by Parmigiano, while in a picture which the catalogue describes as ‘un bellissimo quadro di Pietro Perugino,’ it is possible to recognize the forms of an early Veronese master, probably Domenico Morone himself. We can only hope that the trustees of the Tadini bequest will carry out Signor Frizzoni’s suggestion and have this picture, which has suffered from clumsy repainting, restored so far as possible to its original condition. An early Venetian picture, falsely signed Cornelio Fiore, and attributed, quite rightly we think, to Lorenzo Veneziano by the author, and a crudely-painted Pietà, signed by Girolamo da Treviso, are other original works.
R. E. F.