Edward Hutton: Venetian Renaissance

 

Below find Edward Hutton's thoughts on Giorgione and other great painters of the Venetian Renaissance. The painting he refers to as the soldier and the gypsy is usually called The Tempest but I believe its subject is the Rest of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt.

For the truth is that Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto are each an absolutely new impulse in painting. Fundamentally they owe nothing, accidentally even very little, to their predecessors; and if, as we have said, Titian and Tintoretto were able to find full expression because of the work of Giorgione, it is only in the way that Shakespeare and Milton may be said to owe something… to Spencer;… the work of Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto are absolutely new things in the world, the result of a new impulse and a new vision, individual and personal to the last degree, owing little to any school and making little of tradition. (149)

Giorgione: Tempest

For with Giorgione (1478-1510), the pupil of Giovanni Bellini…we have a new creation in Art; he is the first painter of the true “easel picture,” the picture which is neither painted for church nor to adorn a great public hall, but to hang on the wall of a room in a private house for the delight of the owner. For Giorgione the individual exists, and it is for him, for the most part, he works, and thus stands on the threshold of the modern world…. In these short thirty-two years, however, he found time to re-create Venetian painting, to return it to its origins, and to make the career of his great fellow-pupil, Titian, whom he may be said to have formed, possible. ... (160)

 It is almost the same with the Gipsy and the Soldier of Prince Giovanelli, only there, I think, anyone who has ever doubted that Giorgione was born at Castelfranco has his answer, for it is that little towered city beside the Musone that we see in the background, under that gathering storm sweeping down from the hills. (233)

 [Castelfranco] This little city…is the happy possessor of what will ever remain, I suppose, the work that is most certainly his very own—I mean the altarpiece of the Madonna enthroned with her little Son between S. Francis and S. Liberale. This glorious picture…is one of the very few Venetian pictures…which possess that serenity and peace, something in truth spellbound, that is necessary to and helps to make what I may call a religious picture. For something must be added to beauty, something must be added to art, to achieve that end which Perugino seems to have reached so easily, and which almost every Sienese painter knew by instinct how to attain. That quality is serenity, the something spellbound we find here. And Giorgione is the last Venetian master to possess that secret. Is it not the same in music? God forbid that I should claim that Palestrina is a greater master than Mozart, any more than I should claim that Giorgione is greater than Titian. It remains, however, that just as Giorgione, the Sienese and Perugino, to name no others, attained to this effect, while Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, and a host of very great masters  could not, so Palestrina, Byrd, and di Lasso could achieve it, yet Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest never once in all their work--something has gone out of the world of which we are ignorant, only we miss it more and more in looking back on the beauty that was in the hearts of our fathers. (233-234)

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*Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia,  London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911. 

Venice: Giorgione's Tempest

 I first saw Giorgione's Tempest in 2005 in Edward Hutton's book, Venice and Venetia, originally published in 1911. Below is his beautiful and imaginative description of Giorgione's mysterious painting as he saw it in the Palazzo Giovanelli before its acquisition by the Italian state. He was describing the art treasures of the palace. Few can match his descriptive powers but I disagree with him on the subject of this painting. See note below. *

Giorgione: The Tempest
Accademia, Venice 

Undoubtedly the greatest of these is a picture by Georgione, which has passed under various names--the Family of Georgione, or simply the Gipsy and the soldier--and which in itself sums up all that we mean by the Georgionesque in painting. There we see, in a delicious landscape of green and shady valley, of stream and ruin and towered country town, a woman nude but for a cape about her shoulders giving her breast to her child in the shadow of the trees by a quiet stream. On the other side of this jewelled brook a young man like a soldier--or is it a shepherd? --stands resting on a great lance or crook and seems to converse with her. Close by are the ruins of some classical building overgrown by moss and lichen and half hidden in the trees, and not far off up the stream in the sunset we see the towers and walls and roofs and domes of a little town with its bridge across the stream leading to the great old fortified gate of the place. But what chiefly attracts us in the work is something new we find there, an air of golden reality, something dreamlike too, though and wholly of this our world, an air of music which seems to come to us from the noise of the brook or the summer wind in the trees, or the evening bells that from far-off we seem to hear ring Ave Maria. One of the golden moments of life has been caught here for ever and perfectly expressed. Heaven, it seems, the kingdom of Heaven, is really to be found in our midst, and Giorgione has contrived a miracle the direct opposite of that of Angelico; for he found all the flowers of Tuscany and the byways of the world in far off Paradise, but Georgione has found Paradise itself here in our world. And we must remember that such a work as this was the true invention of Georgione. Before him there was nothing but church pictures. It is to him we owe these pieces which have nothing directly to do with religion, that were painted to light up the rooms we live in, to bring the sun, if you will, into a cabinet and all the sunset and the quiet out-of-doors into a rich man's study. Here, in truth, we have humanism and its essence, and for once perfectly understood and expressed. **

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** Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, New York, 1911, p. 121-122.

*Note: Giorgione: La Tempesta. In the fall of 2005 I interpreted the subject of the Tempest as “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” In this interpretation all the major elements in the painting are identified. The nude woman nursing an infant is the Madonna. The man standing at the left, functioning as an “interlocutor”. is St. Joseph with his traditional staff. The broken columns are commonplace in depictions of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” The city in the background is Judea from where the Holy Family has fled but could also be equated with Padua during the Cambrai war. The scraggly plant in the foreground is identified as a “belladonna” a plant associated with witchcraft and the Devil. Even the bird on the distant rooftop is shown to be derived from a famous Psalm. A short essay was published in the Masterpiece column of the Wall St. Journal in May, 2006. The full paper can be found on academia.edu.

** Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, New York, 1911, p. 121-122.

Edward Hutton Bibliography

Last weeks post on Edward Hutton's Italy was the last in a series that began  on March 19, 2020. On that date I began transcribing passages that I thought were the best from his many books on Italian towns and regions. Most were written early in the twentieth century when the Englishman found his second home in Italy. Now, old age and poor eyesight prevent me from continuing to transcribe passages from his other volumes. 

However, I intend to continue by repeating past posts starting from the beginning. Hopefully, new readers who were not around three years ago will appreciate seeing Italy through Hutton's eyes, and older readers might also enjoy re-reading these passages. I find it always a pleasure to read Hutton's descriptions of Italian art, culture, religion, history, and scenery over and over again.

Below is a list of books from which I have excerpted passages over the past three years. These books and others can still be purchased on the web, or even read online. Next week we begin again with Venice.

Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911.

    Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches. NY, 1925.

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.

     Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition,                                      London, 1908. 

    Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912.

    Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953.

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Gubbio: St. Francis

                                                                                                                                      

 

 

Edward Hutton concluded Assisi and Umbria Revisited in Gubbio. As usual, he related the history of the town, and visited the various churches. He also quoted at length the familiar story of the taming of a ferocious wolf by St. Francis. But here is a less familiar story as well as the ending of Hutton's book.  I also include two end notes that might be of interest to followers of Hutton. 

Just before I crossed the watershed I came on the hill-top to a mass of building with tower and bell-turret which proved to be the Badia di Vallengegno, but of old was the monastery of San Verecondo, where it is said S. Francis was employed as a scullion after he had been thrown into a ditch full of snow by brigands on his first wandering to Gubbio. He was thus employed, according to Thomas of Celano, for several days, “wearing nothing but a wretched shirt and desired to be filled at least with broth. But when, meeting with no pity there, he could not even get any old clothing, he left the place (not moved by anger but by need) and came to the city of Gubbio, where he got him a small tunic from a former friend of his. But afterwards,” says Thomas, “when the fame of the man of God was spreading everywhere, and his name was noised abroad among the people, the prior of the aforesaid monastery, remembering and realizing how the man of God had been treated, came to him and humbly begged forgiveness for himself, and his monks.” …

 

It is said of S. Francis that death, which is to all men terrible, and hateful, he praised, calling her by name: “Death, my sister, welcome be thou”; and that one of those best-loved brothers saw his soul pass to heaven in the manner of a star, “like to the moon in quantity, and to the sun in clearness”. And however we may think of him, whether he is to us the most beloved saint in all the calendar, or whether he is merely a delightful figure, a little ailing, a little mad from the Middle Age, he went honourably upon the stones, as Voragine reminds us. “He gadryd the wormes out of the ways, by cause they should not be trodden with the feet of them that passed by.” He called the beasts his brethren; and in all that age of passion and war, of immense ambition and brutal hate, he loved us as Christ has done, and was content if he might be an imitation of Him. “He beheld the Sonne, the Mone, and the Starres, and summoned them to the Love of their Maker.”

 

As we pass up and down the Umbrian ways, it is his figure which goes ever before us.

 

                                         Que pacis crescit oliva

                               Regnat amor, concors, gratia, vera fides.*

 

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*           Where the olive tree of peace grows

           Love, concord, grace, and true faith reign.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 221,233-234.

Note 1: In his introduction to the above volume, Hutton alluded to one of his first books, The Cities of Umbria, written in 1907.

"When I was a young man I wrote a book, Cities of Umbria, which went into eight or more editions and finally fell out of print in the war of 1939-45. I have not thought to reprint it. Since it was written I have wandered about Umbria many times and most recently spent some months of spring, summer and autumn in that country where one cannot go a mile but one finds oneself in the footsteps of Saint Francis. and now that my life has nearly completed its circle, the pages which follow recount these fortunate wanderings and recall those happier still, of earlier days."

Note 2: I would also like to mention that Hutton included in this volume an appendix in which he discussed the controversy surrounding the frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi. In the course of that discussion he mentioned that before the First World War, he and his friend, F. Mason Perkins had been working on a critical edition of Vasari's Lives of the Painters.

"Mr. Perkins and the present writer were engaged on a critical edition of the Lives of Vasari. The new English translation of the text was made by Mr. De Vere and was published by the Medici Society. It was to be followed by three or four volumes of critical notes by Mr. Perkins, but though the first volume of these notes was set up and printed, the war of 1914 prevented publication and the type was distributed."

 

Gubbio

Edward Hutton concluded his tour of Assisi and Umbria with a visit to Gubbio. He discussed its history at length and noted that it was not altogether insignificant in the history of Umbrian art. In particular, he praised the Madonna del Belvedere, a painting by Ottaviano Nelli in the Church of S. Maria Nuova.

 

It was on another early summer day that I set out from Perugia by the Porta Pesa for Gubbio, across the mountains. The way was musical with streams, for there had been rain in the night, and the world was refreshed and beautiful. Downhill into the valley of the Tiber I went, past the olives and the willows, whose leaves were dancing gravely in the wind, watching their own beauty in the shallows of the great river. Then when I had crossed the Tiber and had begun to climb, after about five miles I came on the left to the Franciscan convent of Farneto. …

 

I now came, as I climbed, into a desolate land of mountains and bare hill-sides, utterly forlorn and without the fellowship of trees or flowers. The wind was dismal and lonely, wandering over the moorland as if in search of companions. Now and again a shepherd clad in goatskins towered in silhouette against the farthest sky—a magnificent figure, simple and antique, keeping the world sweet; and sometimes a little group of trees, scarcely sufficient for a copse, whispered together as though in fear of the indestructible silence. Far away, the beautiful valleys of Umbria led me down innumerable vistas towards Subasio, and many a little city, full even yet of lovely things—the dreams made material of the great artists, or the lives of the saints. And all day the uplifted Apennine towered in the sunlight, with brows even yet white with snow that the sun dazzled with glory. …

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I continued on my way. Presently, as I topped the ascent, a stupendous panorama rose before me over Gubbio and its valley, dominated by the five mountain peaks, the most formidable of which are Monte Catria, Monte Ingino and Monte Calvo. After another climb the road began its descent into the Eugubian plain and, crossing it in magical evening light, so tender and grave and serene, I entered Gubbio.

 

Gubbio is the dream of some medieval miniaturist; it must be, I thought, the only extant work of that most famous artist, Oderisi. Built on the lower slopes of Monte Calvo, the little city, now too small for its great old walls, lies in terraces one after another, where cypresses behind and among the palaces and churches point their joined hands ever upwards in that long life which is an everlasting prayer. … 

 

Leaving the cathedral and descending to the Via Venti Settembre or the Via Savelli della Porta, which runs parallel to it, and following either eastward towards the Porta Romana, at the end of Via Savelli stands the church of Santa Maria Nuova, which contains Ottaviano Nelli’s masterpiece, the Madonna del Belvedere. This is a mural painting, executed in tempera, not in fresco, and is one of the loveliest pieces of colour in all Umbrian painting, astonishingly fresh, and for the most part intact. The Virgin is seated in the centre, the Divine Child on her lap; she is looking at the spectator while the Child is blessing the donor, a woman, presented by an angel. About the Virgin, as though part of her court, are two musical angels, and two other angels hold aside a flowered curtain. Above, God the Father, among the cherubim and angels, crowns her. Two full-length figures of saints, SS. John Evangelist and Antony Abbot, who presents a kneeling donor, perhaps the husband of the woman on the other side, frame the idyllic scene within two spiral columns ornamented with Renaissance, even pagan figures. … This exquisite work is the best and most charming painting left in Gubbio.

                

            

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 220-221, 229.

Umbertide and Montone: Two Masterpieces

Edward Hutton visited Umbertide and nearby Montone to see two masterpieces, the first, Luca Signorelli's Descent from the Cross, and the other a gonfalon or processional banner that he attributed to Bartolommeo Caporali. He saw them in churches but now they are in local museums.

 

It was for the sake of Luca Signorelli that one early summer day, I set out from Perugia in the morning by train for Umbertide. The way is fair enough, as all ways are in Umbria, and before long I came into the characteristic upper valley of the Tiber, and passing up-stream to Umbertide, I found there a majestic octagonal domed church of the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Regia, of lovely portion and full of light, which was rebuilt in the middle of the seventeenth century…

It was in Santa Croce, near the bridge over the Tiber, however, that I found the picture of Signorelli, the Descent from the Cross, which I had set out to see. The great old painter was seventy-five when he painted this picture, yet his vigour was not abated. He seems, indeed, to have painted this fine work himself and to have left little or nothing to assistants. The church is small and dark and the picture has been half spoiled by restoration, but it is still a beautiful and noble work, and if some of the figures are perhaps life-studies, especially the figure in the foreground on the left, the composition is wonderful, and there can be no doubt about the sincerity of the emotion. They have just loosed the divine body from the Cross, a rainbow-coloured scarf of Umbria supports it and is caught round the crutch and held by one of the Apostles. The others are mounted on ladders, and gently, slowly, they are trying to lower the body of the Son of God that it may rest for three days in the tomb. Others of the Apostles hold the ladders, and at the foot of the Cross itself the Virgin Mother has swooned away. Two of the women look upon her, while the Magdalen, half mad with tears, places her hand under the wounded feet of her Lord and, grasping the Cross to save herself from falling, seems about to gather her Saviour into her arms almost as one might a child. In the foreground, on the right, St. John seems to be praying. And then suddenly into this picture, so solemn and tragic, steels the beautiful and only half-sorrowful figure of a girl splendidly dressed, her hands clasped before her. She seems just to have halted for a moment at the sight, and to have lowered her eyes as Madonna, swaying like a lily, has fallen softly to the ground. Who is this figure that passes by? …

 

When at Umbertide I proposed to myself to go to Montone, a little lofty town some eight miles away in the mountains to the north. It was for the sake of a Bonfigli I set out, for, as I was told, he had painted a gonfalon for that very place, a thing so splendid and lovely that to see it was worth all the weariness of the way, for the road is steep and long. It was not, however, any work of Bonfigli I saw, when just after Mass on Sunday morning I entered the church of San Francesco.

Montone has many traditions … The magnificent Standard, which a place once so famous was able to command, was painted in 1482, and, if we judge from its style, by Bartolommeo Caporali, certainly Bonfigli can have had no hand in it. In the midst the Madonna rises like a flower, her arms spread a little wearily, supporting her cloak over the people of Montone and their city, above which she stands. Her hands, which S. Francis and S. Bernardino seem about to kiss, are more delicate and fair than the petals of the lilies, and her body, clothed in a marvellous patterned cloak, as delicate as the calix of a flower, rises like the hope of the world from the midst of the people. … In truth this gonfalon is worth all the trouble of the way, since it is without doubt the most beautiful Standard in the world.

                                              

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 214-216.

Città della Pieve: Perugino

Edward Hutton wrote a little book on Perugino, the fifteenth century painter has been eclipsed by later masters like his pupil Raphael. Hutton's great admiration for Perugino led him to visit his birthplace, Citta della Pieve.

 

I went from Perugia to Citta della Pieve—it is but six miles—for the sake of Perugino, who was born there. I stayed there for its own sake. It is a little towered city, some miles from the railway, set on a hill 1,600 feet above sea-level.

 

The Peruginos which remain there are not the best works of the master. It would seem that for the most part they are the work of his pupils, or of his old age. But the city itself, with its views of the lakes of Trasimeno and Chiusi and the valley southward towards Rome, the quiet peace of the place, the magnificent woods beneath it, are in themselves more valuable than the faint and fading beauty of the mediocre work of the great painter who was born there; for they remain for ever in the memory and seem worth everything else in the world because of the sun—the sun which is the smile of God.

And so it is perhaps to the sun, which robes this little city, too, in a mantle of splendid colour all through the day, and at evening adorns her with bright fire and radiant glory, that we owe the curious fascination of this towered place, so small, so poor, so desolate, so forlorn….

 

This was the little city in which Perugino received his first impressions of the world. Here he spent his childhood. This was the landscape he first looked on. It was to this, it might seem, … it was to this he returned in his age and these hills and valleys were what his eyes last rested on. The impressions one receives as a child, are they ever lost? Might one not hope then, among these hills and valleys, to discover the secret of his landscapes, so full of golden air and serene light and space, where the hills are almost transparent—the trees, those “trees of heaven”, so delicate and ethereal? Might one not hope here to surprise the secret of the first realistic landscape painter in Italian art?

 

The first realistic landscape painter in Italian art: but others before him had put landscapes in their pictures even in the fourteenth century, but there was nothing realistic about them. … It is true that Piero della Francesca, a whole generation younger than Perugino, in his Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, and in his portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi, was a master of landscape; but beautiful though these landscapes are, they are “distance” landscapes … they have no middle distance, they are all background and are really experiments, beautiful experiments, in perspective.

Giovanni Bellini: Agony in the Garden

The greatest gift of the true landscape painter is an “emotional response to light”. This response to light is to be found, perhaps for the first time, in the pictures of Giovanni Bellini, a greater master than Perugino. In an early work of his, the Agony in the Garden in the National Gallery, the landscape is marvelously beautiful, most moving and tragically lovely in the light of dawn, but it is dramatic rather than realistic. Who has ever seen such a landscape, even in the Veneto? The painter has conceived it, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the subject of his picture. …

With Perugino it seems the exact opposite is true. The landscape is the subject of his pictures, it is an end in itself, and the figures are there to emphasize or express the emotion of the landscape. Not only is the landscape inspired with light and full of spacious air, it is realistic, as we say, just what his eyes had seen first as a child, what had most filled them with delight all his life long and what he last looked upon as he lay dying, not, it seems, in this little city of Citta della Pieve, his birthplace, but at Fontignano half-way between it and Perugia. …

In an age when all the arts were becoming more and more pagan, his art, at any rate remains wholly and unmistakably Christian, but it is our business to discover what it is that moves us in his pictures, what they really mean to us. The artist who painted the marvellous portraits in the Uffizi was certainly not without ability to represent life, but his large achievement had little to do with life, contenting itself, as it did, with a sort of music; the effect of music, at any rate, composed with space; so that what we see in his pictures, that exquisite grave and serene landscape of Umbria, quite apart from the figures there, moves us as the plainsong does, quite apart from the words which accompany it, to a real religious emotion in which we become partakers of that universal life whose rhythm we seem to have overheard for a moment during an interval of particular silence, when our souls suddenly seem attuned to the movement of eternity. What in fact we see, what in fact he paints, is Umbria Santa.    

 

                                              

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 209, 210-212.