St. Nicholas/Volume 32/Number 2/How to Study Pictures
How to Study Pictures.
By Charles H. Caffin.
A series of articles for the older girls and boys who read “St, Nicholas.”
Second Paper
Comparing Da Vinci with Dürer, and Raphael with Wohlocemuth.
I.
As we look at the two masterpieces pictured on pages 130 and 130,—Dürer’s “Adoration of the Magi” and Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks,”—how differently they arouse our interest! In a general way, the difference consists in this: that the one is full of mystery; the other, of clear picturing. Leonardo has given us a painting which appeals to our imagination; Dürer presents one that delights the eye. The former’s picture we feel to be an imaginary scene; the latter’s, a wonderfully natural representation of an actual incident. In brief, while Dürer has tried to make everything plain to our eyes and mind, Leonardo has evidently used all his effort to make us forget the facts and realize the picture.
This contrast alone would make it worth while to compare the two paintings; but there are other reasons. These two men lived at the same time—the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Dürer was the greatest of German artists; Leonardo was in many ways the most remarkable of the Italian artists of his day. It has been said of him that “he is the most thoughtful of all painters, unless it be Albrecht Dürer.”
Leonardo's early years were spent in Florence, his middle age in Milan, and the last three years of his life in France. Dürer, except for a visit of two years to Venice and of one year to the Netherlands, remained faithful to Nuremberg, the city of his birth. Leonardo’s teacher was Verrocchio—first a goldsmith, then a painter and sculptor; Dürer received his first lessons from his father, who was a master goldsmith, and his training as an apprentice in the studio-workshop of Michael Wohlgemuth, a celebrated painter of Nuremberg. Both Leonardo and Dürer were fine-looking men, of great charm of manner and conversation and mental accomplishments,—being well grounded in the sciences and mathematics of the day,—while Leonardo was, also, a gifted musician. The skill of each as a draftsman was extraordinary. Leonardo left numerous drawings and comparatively few paintings, while Dürer is even more celebrated for his engravings on wood and copper than for his paintings.
Now, Dürer was born a German; Leonardo an Italian. This sums up much of the difference between their work as painters. The Italian race, under its sunny skies, has an inborn love of beauty. The Germans, in a sterner climate, retain, to this day, the energy that carved its way through the vast forests of their country.
Many of you have read something of the life of Martin Luther, the great German Reformer. Dürer was a great admirer of Luther; in his own work, as in Luther’s, there was a great love of truth. It is very serious and sincere, and addressed to the hearts and understandings of the masses of the people.
It is quite possible, however, for pictures to be simple, precise, and direct, yet very commonplace, Dürer’s work was never commonplace; he contrived to make it homely and natural, and yet always of an extremely high artistic quality.
That he did not possess, as well, the gift of ideal beauty is due partly to his having lived north of the Alps, for the feeling for ideal grace and beauty is fostered by the study of the human form, and this has always flourished best in southern countries, such as Greece and Italy, where the climate favors a free, open-air life. In the northern countries, clothes, being more necessary, assume a greater importance in pictures also. They are a very prominent feature in this picture of “The Adoration of the Magi.” We detect at a glance Dürer’s fondness for depicting stuffs, embroidery, and objects of curious and beautiful workmanship.
In the first place, no one has excelled him in delineating “textures.” You may see in this picture with what truth the different surfaces of wood, stone, hair, fur, feather, metal-work, embroidery, and so on, are represented, In this instance, it is to contrast the splendor of the visitors from the East with the lowliness of the Mother and Child, and with the meanness and ruin of their surroundings; also, to compare the gentle dignity of the Mother, the innocent sweetness of the Babe, and the profound reverence of the Wise Men. When we study it we discover that one reason why it impresses us so strongly is the skill with which the artist has represented all these things.
Here is the point at which the genius of Dürer, and that of Leonardo, similar in many respects, branch out like a Y into separate directions. It is not the outward appearance of objects, but their inward meaning, that most interested Leonardo, A glance at his picture “The Virgin of the Rocks” is sufficient to make us feel that the artist is not trying to impress us with the actual appearance of things; the outlines of his figures are not emphasized as in Dürer’s picture: the cavern curiously formed of a strange rock, and the little peep beyond of a rocky landscape and a winding stream, the group of figures in the foreground by the side of a pool of water,—all are seen as through a veil of shadowy mist. Leonardo loved to peer into the mysteries and secrets of nature and life. He was at once an artist and a man of science; turning aside, for a time, from painting to build canals, contrive engines of war, to make mechanical birds which flew, and animals that walked. He foresaw the possibilities of steam and of balloons, and several important discoveries of later scientists. Mathematician, chemist, machinist, and physiologist, geologist, geographer, and astronomer, he was also a supreme artist. And always it was the truth—just beyond the common experience of man, hidden in nature, or dimly discerned in the mind of man—that he strove to reach. Partly he grasped it, partly it escaped him; much of his life was spent in restless striving after the unattainable; so to him life presented itself as a mixture of certainty and uncertainty, of truth that is clearly seen and truth that is only felt. And in his pictures we find, first, extreme delicacy in the study and representation of faces and forms, and then a veiling of all in a gossamer web of light and shade. He did not invent the principles of light and shade in painting, but he was the first to cause light and shade to have a poetical effect. Others, as I explained last month, had secured the modeling of form, by the contrast of light upon the raised parts, with shadow on those farther from the eye; but Leonardo was the first to notice that, in nature, this contrast is not a violent one, but made up of most delicate gradations, so that the light slides into the dark and the dark creeps into the light, and even the darkest part is not opaque, but an almost transparent shadow.
How exquisite Leonardo’s skill was may be noted in this picture; for example, in the modeling of the bodies of the two infants, so soft as well as firm, and in the lovely mystery of the Virgin’s and angels’ faces, with their broad, high foreheads, dreamy eyes beneath drooping lids. and a smile, very sweet and a little sad. For, as he searched nature for her mysteries, so he scanned the face of woman to discover the inward beauty that was mirrored in the outward.
So, while he and Dürer were alike in many ways, in their eager study of nature and in the study of their art, each had a different ideal. The one is full of the meaning of actual things the other, of the mystery that lies behind them. Dürer is vigorous, direct, and powerfully interesting: Da Vinci is sensitive, strangely winning, but yet baffling and magical: and the character of each painter is reflected in his pictures.
II.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century the great Italian artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michel-angelo, and Titian had reached their prime, and during the long lives of these older men blossomed Raphael’s brief life of thirty-seven years.
Again we are to bring into comparison the Italian and the German art of that time. One might almost say that the difference is as wide and high as the Alps, which separate the two countries themselves, Look at the engraving pages 132 and 133, and see how Woblgemuth’s picture differs from Raphael's.
“The Adoration of the Magi.” by Albrecht Dürer.
The house in Urbino in which Raphael was born in 1483 still stands. His father, Giovanni Santi (or Sanzio in the Italian form), was a painter of considerable merit; so Raphael’s art education began in early childhood, and was continued through the thirty years of his life, for to the very end he was learning, He was only eight years old when his mother, Magia, died; but the father’s second wife, Bernardina, cared for him as if he had been her own son. In 1494 his father also died, leaving the boy, then eleven years old, to the care of an uncle, who, it is supposed, arranged for him to continue his studies under the painter Timoteo Viti, who was then living in Urbino, At about the age of sixteen he was sent to Perugia and entered the studio of the painter called Perugino.
The Madonna by Raphael here copied is called “degli Ansidei,” because it was painted for the rich Ansidei family, as an altar-piece to adorn the chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas of Bari, in a church at Perugia. This picture was painted when the artist was only twenty-two years old, But already the pupil had outstripped his master. The figure of St, Nicholas is nobler than anything that Perugino painted, and more full of character.
And in still another respect he had already outstripped his master—namely, in the noble serenity of the “composition,” of the grouping and arrangement. For this is Raphael’s supreme distinction. The Venetians surpassed him in color, the Florentines in drawing, but none to this day have ever equated him in his mastery over the filling of a space, whether it be inside a frame or on the large surface of a wall. Study the Madonna degl Ansidei, and you will admire the tenderness of the Madonna’s face, the rapture of St. John’s, and the noble sweetness of St. Nicholas’s. But the point I wish you to grasp—and it is difficult to put it into words—is that the composition as a whole is mainly responsible for the effect which the picture produces upon your imagination; that it is the actual direction of the lines, the shapes of the full and empty spaces and their relation to one another, which make the chief impression, and that the expression of the faces is only a minor detail, just as you are impressed by the total structure of some great building before you begin to notice the sculptures in its archways or the carved ornaments of the windows.
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“The Madonna of the Rocks.” by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Perhaps you will best understand the meaning and value of perfect composition by contrasting Raphael’s picture with Wohlgemuth’s “Death of the Virgin.” In the latter there is no composition, in the sense in which we are using the word—that is to say, of an arrangement carefully planned. It presents only a crowd of figures more or less naturally grouped. Our attention is not engrossed by the whole, but is scattered over the parts. And you will find, as you continue your studies, that there is even more art in knowing what to leave out than in knowing what to put in; that simplicity of the parts and unily of the whole are the characteristics of the greatest artists.
Among the many interesting contrasts presented by the two pictures, one may be singled out. Wohlgemuth has tried to represent the scene naturally, as it may have happened, and has introduced, around the Virgin, figures studied from the actual men who walked the streets of Nuremberg in his day, while Raphael's persons are idealized—are imagined by the artist to express the idea which was in his mind. It is the same with his arrangement of a throne, an arch, and a landscape. The scene is not a real one; it is made up of things selected in order to suggest to our mind the idea which was in his. Here is a sharp distinction in the way of seeing the facts of nature. One artist sees in them something to be copied or reproduced as accurately as possible; the other extracts from them an ideal view, on which he may found some fabric of his own imaginaton, From the one we get an impression of reality which is apt to go no further than would a mere beholding of the scene; but the other satisfies or excites our own imagination.
“The Death of the Virgin.” by Wohlgemuth.
Raphael was filled with admiration of the art of ancient Greece. He loved to paint scenes from the beautiful old myths, such as the story of “Galatea,” of “Psyche,” and the rest. And in some of his greatest paintings, beneath the arches of a noble building in Rome, he has pictured for us not only Dante and Petrarch and other great Italians of the Middle Ages, but also the greatest men of old Greece— Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Socrates. It is almost as if through Raphael the beauty of the antique world was brought back to the sight of modern men.
But even more remarkable is what Raphael did in representing Bible scenes and sacred subjects. As a gardener will blend the pollen of two kinds of flowers and produce a third, which unites the beauties of the two, so Raphael blended the Grecian and the Christian in his religious pictures; and this new ideal so captivated the imagination of the world that for nearly four hundred years men pictured the religious story to their eyes and minds through the beautiful atmosphere which Raphael had given to it. He did not waste his genius in the trivial task of simply showing how an event may have happened, as Wohlgemuth did in
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The “Madonna degl Ansidei.” by Raphael.