THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE
FOR CONNOISSEURS

VOL. II

The
Burlington Magazine
for Connoisseurs

Illustrated & Published Monthly

Volume II—June to August

LONDON
THE SAVILE PUBLISHING COMPANY, LIMITED
14 NEW BURLINGTON STREET, W.

PARIS: LIBRAIRIE H. FLOURY, 1 BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES
BRUSSELS: SPINEUX & CIE., 62 MONTAGNE DE LA COUR
LEIPZIG: KARL W. HIERSEMANN, 3 KÖNIGSSTRASSE
VIENNA: ARTARIA & CO., I., KOHLMARKT 9
AMSTERDAM: J. G. ROBBERS, N. Z. VOORBURGWAL 64
FLORENCE: B. SEEBER, 20 VIA TORNABUONI
NEW YORK: SAMUEL BUCKLEY & CO., 100 WILLIAM STREET

1903

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

Walker & Cockerell, Ph.Sc.

The Judgement of Cambyses
from the picture by Gerard David in the Bruges Museum.

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❧ EDITORIAL ARTICLES ❧

I.-CLIFFORD’S INN AND THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS

WE must confess that when we published Mr. Philip Norman’s appeal to the Government to save Clifford’s Inn, we had little hope that the appeal would be listened to; it is too much to expect an English Government to take any interest in a question of an artistic nature; in agreeing to ignore such questions the unanimity of political parties is wonderful. Nor does the English public really care about such matters. The appeal received considerable support in the press, but it was a support given by men who, whatever they themselves think, know well enough that an agitation for the preservation of an ancient building would only bore most of their readers. ¶ So Clifford’s Inn has been sold, and sold at a ridiculously low price. It is some satisfaction to know that legal education, which condemned it to destruction, will profit little if at all by its sale, for the income derived from the purchase money can be no larger than could have been derived from the rents of the Inn under proper management. The end, however, is not yet, for the gentleman who now owns Clifford’s Inn is happily not without appreciation of its artistic and historical interest; for the present, at any rate, he will leave matters in statu quo, and all the tenants have been informed that they need not fear early ejection. Moreover we have every reason to believe that, if there were any movement to preserve the Inn, the present owner would be willing to part with his property at a very moderate premium on the sum of £100,000 that he paid for it. ¶ The London County Council—the only public authority in London that cares about such matters—has had its eye on Clifford’s Inn, and a committee of the Council only refrained from recommending its purchase from fear of the ratepayers. We would, however, appeal to the County Council to cast aside fear of the Philistines and reconsider the matter. Expert opinion in such matters holds that Clifford’s Inn could be made, as it stands, to return £3,000 a year; its purchase, therefore, at a little more than £100,000 would involve little or no loss to the ratepayers. The County Council has done and is doing admirable work for the preservation of ancient buildings; it might well add to its laurels by acquiring Clifford’s Inn for the citizens of London. ¶ The case of Clifford’s Inn raises the larger question of the preservation of ancient buildings generally. We in England pretend to be an artistic nation; we talk and write very much about art, and we all collect more or less works of art or imitations thereof; most of us try to paint pictures, and the world will soon be unable to contain the pictures that are painted. But there is one fact that brands us as hypocrites, the fact that Great Britain shares with Russia and Turkey the odious peculiarity of being without legislation of any kind for the protection of ancient buildings and other works of art such as is possessed to some degree by every other country in Europe, and by almost every State of the American Union. We have calmly looked on while amiable clergymen, restoring architects, and legal peers with a mania for bricks and mortar and more money than taste, have hacked, hewn, scraped and pulled to pieces the greatest architectural works of our forefathers; too many modern architects, when they are not engaged in copying the work of their predecessors, are engaged in destroying it. Though the legend of ‘Cromwell’s soldiers’ still on the lips of the intelligent pew-opener accounts for the havoc wrought in many an ancient church, the historian and the antiquary know that to the sixteenth and not the seventeenth century must that havoc be in the first place attributed, and the observer of recent history knows that the mischief worked by the iconoclast of the sixteenth century has been far exceeded by that worked by the restorer and the Gothic revivalist of the nineteenth. And if this has been done by persons who imagined themselves to be artistic and were actuated by the best possible motives, what has been the destruction wrought by those who made no profession of any motive but that of commercial advantage? Within the memory of the youngest among us, buildings of great artistic and historical interest have been ruthlessly swept away in London and in every other town in the kingdom, and the few that have been left are rapidly disappearing. ¶ There is no way of saving the remnant of our heritage but that of legislation; but we cannot honestly recommend the advocacy of such legislation to a minister or a party in need of an electioneering cry, and we are not sanguine as to the prospects of anything being done. Still, it may be interesting to some to learn what the despised foreigner has done in this respect; we take the information from a Parliamentary paper presented to the House of Commons on July 30, 1897.[1] ¶ We will briefly summarize the facts given in this paper, referring those of our readers who wish for further information to the paper itself. In Austria there has existed for many years a permanent ‘Imperial and Royal Commission for the investigation and preservation of artistic and historical monuments.’ This Commission had, in 1897, direct rights only over monuments belonging to the State (in which churches are included); but it acted in concert with municipalities and learned societies, and promoted the formation of local societies to carry out its objects. No ancient monument coming within its scope can be touched without the sanction of the Commission. Since 1897 its powers have, we believe, been extended. Not only buildings, but objects of art and handicraft of every kind as well as manuscripts and archives, of any date up to the end of the eighteenth century, come within the scope of activity of the Commission, which is a consultative body advising the Minister of Public Worship and Education, who is the executive authority for these purposes. ¶ In Bavaria, alterations to all monuments or buildings of historical or artistic importance (including churches) belonging to the State, municipality, or any endowed institution, have, since 1872, required the sanction of the Sovereign, who is advised by the Royal Commissioners of Public Buildings. The ecclesiastical authorities and even religious communities are prohibited from altering a church or dealing with its furniture without the consent of the Commissioners. ¶ In Denmark there has been a Royal Commission with similar objects since 1807; ancient monuments are scheduled, and since 1873 the Royal Commission has had power to acquire them compulsorily if their owners will not take proper measures for their preservation. ¶ In France the Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, who is advised by a Commission of Historical Monuments, has as drastic powers as the Danish Royal Commission; some 1,700 churches, castles, and other buildings (including buildings in private ownership) have been scheduled and classified, and cannot be destroyed, restored, repaired, or altered except with the approval of the Minister, who has power to expropriate private owners under certain circumstances. ¶ Belgium has statutory provisions of a similar character; there a Royal Commission on Monuments was constituted so long ago as 1835, so that Belgium is second only to Denmark in this matter. The Commission may schedule any building or ancient monument, and the scheduled building cannot be touched without the consent of the Commission, even if it is in private ownership. In Belgium, as in France and Denmark, grants of public money are given for the purchase and preservation of ancient monuments, and the Belgian municipalities are very zealous in the same direction. In Bruges, we understand, the façades of all the houses belong to the municipality, so that their preservation is secured, and also congruity in the case of new buildings. No object of art may legally be alienated or removed from a Belgian church; this law, however, is unfortunately still evaded to some extent. ¶ In Italy several laws have been passed, beginning with an edict of Cardinal Pacca for the old Papal States in 1820. The Minister of Public Instruction may, by a decree, declare any building a national monument, and the municipalities have large powers; works of art, as is well known, cannot legally be taken out of Italy, but this law is often evaded. ¶ In Greece the powers of the State are perhaps more drastic than anywhere else. Even antique works of art in private collections are considered as national property in a sense and their owner can be punished for injuring them; if the owner of an ancient building attempts to demolish it or refuses to keep it in repair, the State may expropriate him. ¶ Holland, Prussia, Saxony, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, and many American States have provisions of a more or less stringent character with the same purpose. But we need not now go further into details; the whole of the facts will be found in the Parliamentary paper, and we have given enough of them to show how far behind every other civilized country England is in this matter. The protection of monuments of the past which Denmark has had for nearly a century and Belgium for nearly seventy years we have not yet thought of. Surely the time has come to wipe out this reproach; until it is wiped out let us have done with the hypocritical claim that we are an artistic people.

II.—THE PUBLICATION OF WORKS OF ART BELONGING TO DEALERS

IN the April number of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE we stated that it was our intention not to exclude from the Magazine works of art likely to be of interest to the student and collector because they happened to be in the hands of dealers. The policy of including objects belonging to dealers has been adversely criticized by friends who have the interests of the Magazine at heart; we therefore think it well to refer again to the matter, although the purpose of our decision was, as it seems to us, clearly enough stated in the April number. Suggestions have, it seems, been made in certain quarters that some corrupt or at least commercial arrangement with the dealers concerned is accountable for the publication in the Magazine of objects belonging to them. Such suggestions we may pass over, for they are not and will not be credited by anyone whose opinion need concern us. But we owe it to the friendly critics who are concerned for the welfare of the Magazine, and anxious that it should not be affected even by a breath of suspicion, to state our position quite frankly. ¶ In the first place we may say that we entirely sympathize with their point of view, and we recognize as fully as they do the harm that has been done to artistic enterprises—literary and otherwise—by commercial entanglements, and, in the case of periodicals, by a too intimate relation between the advertisement and editorial pages. So much has this been the case that we are not surprised at the alarm which is felt by some of our friends lest even a suspicion of a similar tendency should attach to a periodical in the success of which they are, we are glad to know, keenly interested. But we would point out that in such cases as those to which we have referred far more subtle methods are resorted to than that of frankly publishing a work of art that may happen to be for the time in the hands of a dealer; a little reflection will convince anyone that an Editor of a periodical ostensibly devoted to art, if he wishes—to put it quite plainly—to puff the goods of this or that individual, does not set about it in so palpable a way as that of publishing without subterfuge objects which are frankly stated to be in the possession of the individual or individuals whom it is desired to advertise. It is the very purity of our motives that has enabled us to take a course the boldness of which we do not for a moment deny. Nor must it be supposed that the publication of works of art in their possession is necessarily desired by the dealers themselves; on the contrary, as is well known to every one with experience in these matters, the idiosyncrasies of collectors are such that in many cases a dealer who has a fine work of art in his possession does not wish it to be generally known. We have in some cases had considerable difficulty in inducing dealers to allow their property to be reproduced, and we will go so far as to say that, strange as it may seem to the purist in these matters, we believe that some of them are really actuated by a desire to assist the study of art. It would be false modesty on our part to affect to believe that publication of a work of art in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE is injurious to the owner, whether dealer or collector; we are willing to admit that such publication may, on the contrary, be advantageous to the owner of the work of art published. But, surely, that is not the question to be considered; the only question, it seems to us, is whether the work of art is likely to be of interest to readers of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE and of value to students. This is, at any rate, the only question that we have taken into consideration; and we have felt that if any particular work of art is of interest to our readers, and particularly to those who make a special study of the branch of art concerned, we ought not to hesitate to publish it merely because it happens to be in the hands of a dealer. ¶ Is there not after all just a suspicion of cant in this squeamishness about the publication of pictures or other objects belonging to dealers? Even private collectors have, we believe, been known to sell objects out of their collections, and, so far as our information goes, they do not invariably sell them at a loss; indeed, when one comes to define the boundary between collecting and dealing one finds a considerable difficulty in doing so with exactitude; the border country between the two is very wide in extent and very hazy. We have heard of cases in which private collectors, who would not for the world be considered to be dealers, have written anonymously in a periodical about objects in their own possession and then put them up to auction with a quotation from their own article in the catalogue. Any such practice as that we shall certainly discourage or rather repress; these are difficulties which beset the path of an editor of an art periodical. But if we are to be deterred by such difficulties it will end in our being afraid to publish any work of art in case we haply enhance its value, and thus indirectly do a service to its owner. ¶ Let us restate more fully the case which we have already stated shortly in the April number of this Magazine. At any given time there are in the hands of London dealers not a few pictures which are of profound interest to all students of art, and which may indeed throw light on vexed problems and assist in their solution. Are we to deprive the readers of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE of the opportunities which the publication of such pictures may give them? Doubtless in a normal state of things such pictures would ultimately find their way either into the National Gallery or at least into the possession of some English collector. But as things are they are far more likely to find a home either, let us say, in the Berlin, Amsterdam, or Munich Museum, or in a private collection on the other side of the Atlantic; and it may be very difficult to trace them if the opportunity is lost of publishing them while they are in London. Were the National Gallery still a buyer of pictures, it might not be necessary for a periodical to take such a course as we have taken. But it is notorious that the National Gallery is no longer a buyer of pictures; not merely is the money allotted by the Government absurdly inadequate, but it is also the case that, inadequate as it is, it is not made the best use of. Only last month Mr. Weale pointed out in this Magazine that the Berlin Gallery had recently bought for £1,000 a charming picture by a rare Flemish master, which was sold at Christie’s eight years ago for £3 10s., and this is merely one example of the almost innumerable opportunities that escape those who at present direct the National Gallery. Although we are told that present prices in England are prohibitive so far as public collections are concerned, it is nevertheless the fact that museums such as those of Berlin, Boston, Munich, and Amsterdam find it worth while to buy largely in London, and we do not suppose that they always pay exorbitant prices, although of course a large and wealthy country like Bavaria can afford to spend more on art than a country like England. In former years a London dealer who had a particularly fine picture in his possession would have offered it to the National Gallery; now that is the last thing that he thinks of doing; he knows too well that the authorities of the National Gallery would probably not take the trouble even to look at it, and that some of those who would have a voice in deciding whether it should be purchased have not the necessary qualifications for making such a decision. The evil has been increased by the insane rule now in force, that the trustees of the National Gallery must be unanimous before any picture is purchased—a rule which, as anyone with sense would have foreseen, has led to an absolute deadlock. Within the last few weeks, for instance, the chance of purchasing a superb work of Frans Hals at a very moderate price has been lost to the nation, simply because one of the trustees of the National Gallery refuses to agree to any purchase that does not suit his own preference for art of what may be called the glorified chocolate-box type. ¶ But we need not now enlarge upon this subject, with which we hope to deal at some future time; we have said enough perhaps to support our contention that it is hopeless to expect that fine pictures which have passed into the hands of London dealers will find their way into that collection which has been made by former directors one of the most representative in the world of the best European art. This being so, we feel very strongly that we ought to risk something in order to give the readers of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE the opportunity of seeing, at least, reproductions of works of art which they may otherwise never have the opportunity of seeing. At the same time we cannot lightly reject the objections which have been raised by those who, as we know, have only the best interests of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE at heart; and, while we do not at present feel disposed to alter our policy in this respect, we are nevertheless open to argument, and if the considerations which we have put forward can be shown to be unsound or inadequate we are prepared to be convinced. We invite from our readers expressions of opinion on the subject.

THE FINEST HUNTING MANUSCRIPT EXTANT

❧ WRITTEN BY W. A. BAILLIE-GROHMAN ❧

WHEN the burly Landsknechte stormed the walls of the deer park and therewith won the hard-fought battle of Pavia, one of the treasures they captured in Francis’s sumptuous gold-laden tents was a vellum Codex of folio size, almost every leaf of which bore beautifully illuminated pictures of hunting scenes. We know from other evidence that this precious volume was one of the favourite books of the luxury-loving French king, and the fact that he took it with him to the Italian wars in preference to a printed copy, infinitely more portable, such as had been turned out in three different editions by the hand-presses of Antoine Verard, Trepperel, and Philippe le Noir, is a further proof that Francis’s love for finely illuminated manuscript was a ruling passion with him. It is this very MS. which forms the subject of these lines, and the facsimile reproductions, which the writer obtained permission to have executed by competent hands, show the rare skill of the fifteenth-century miniaturist of whose identity we unfortunately know but little. ¶The history of this Codex is an extremely interesting one and well worth the research expended upon it by Gaucheraud, Joseph Lavallée, Werth, and others. The eighty-five chapters are written in a wonderfully regular and perfect hand, and the ink is today as black and clean of outline as it was four and a half centuries ago. The author of what is unquestionably the most beautiful hunting manuscript extant was Count Gaston de Foix, the oft-cited patron of Froissart. This great noble and hunter began the book on May Day 1387, and we know that it was completed when a fit of apoplexy, after a bear hunt, cut short his remarkable career four years later, when he was in his sixty-first year. Of the forty, or possibly forty-one, ancient copies of this hunting book that have come down to us, one or two were written it is almost certain during the author’s lifetime, though the original itself, which was dedicated by Gaston to ‘Phelippes de France, duc de Bourgoigne,’ disappeared in a mysterious manner from the Escurial during the eventful year of 1809, and has not turned up since. None of the other contemporary copies have illuminations at all comparable to those in our MS., for the simple reason that it was not until some decades later that art had reached, even in France, the brilliancy that our illuminations show. For although Argote de Molina—who in his ‘Libro de la Monteria,’ published in Seville in 1582, describes the lost original—says ‘el qual se vee illuminado de excelente mano,’ it is safe to say that, could we place the original side by side with the MS. of which we are speaking, its illuminations would be found to be far inferior to those in the MS. owned by Francis I. ¶ Very likely the lost original MS. was written by one or the other of the four secretaries Froissart tells us were constantly employed by Count de Foix. These he did not call John, or Gautier, or William, but nicknamed them ‘Bad-me-serve,’ or ‘Good-for-nothings.’ The illuminations were probably the work of some wandering master-illuminator attracted to the splendid court at Orthéz by the Count’s well-known prodigal liberality. ¶ Gaston de Foix, to interrupt for a brief spell our tale, was the lord of Foix and Béarn; buffer countships at the foot of the Pyrenees—the castle of Pau was one of Foix’s strongholds. He succeeded, as Gaston III, at the age of twelve to his principalities. Two years later he was serving against the English, and shortly afterwards was made ‘Lieutenant de Roi’ in Languedoc and Gascony, and at the age of eighteen he married Agnes daughter of Philip III King of Navarre. His person was so handsome, his bodily strength so great, his hair of such sunny golden hue, that he acquired the name of Le Roi Phoebus or Gaston Phoebus, by which latter both he and his hunting book have gone down to posterity.

STRIPPING THE BOAR
FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.

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The oldest copy that is extant is preserved in the same treasure-house that contains our MS. and some fourteen other copies of it, namely the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It bears the number 619 (anc. 7,098), while our MS. is numbered f.fr. 616 (anc. 7,097), and if P. Paris MSS. Franc. V 217 is right, it was Gaston’s working copy. The pictures in this MS. are shaded black-and-white drawings, and are not illuminations. That its origin was the south of France is proved, as M. Joseph Lavallée says, by the spelling of certain words: car being spelt guar, baigner as bainher, montagne as montainhe, a manner peculiar in the fourteenth century to the langue d’Oc. The fact that in the MS. 616 these words are spelt in the more modern fashion supports the theory, according to the last-mentioned authority, that it was written at a later date, i.e. in the first half of the fifteenth century, thus confirming the impression already produced by the far superior illuminations in MS. 616. These latter, as we see by a glance at the two full-page reproductions, somewhat reduced in size though they necessarily had to be to find space in this place, evince the unmistakable signs of having been created during a period of transition in the miniaturist’s art. For while the one has the characteristic diapered background, the other has a more realistic horizon, which betokens a later origin than the beginning of the fifteenth century. Of the eighty-seven illuminations in our MS. 616, only four have a natural horizon as background, the rest are diapered in the conventional older manner, in the invention of which the miniaturists of the fourteenth century developed a perfectly wonderful ingenuity, and of which this exquisite Codex is one of the most remarkable examples. ¶ In the opinion of some experts the illuminations in MS. 616 are by the hand of the famous Jean Foucquet, born about 1415, who was made painter and valet-de-chambre to Charles VII. Amongst the choicest works of this artist rank, it is perhaps hardly necessary to mention, the Book of Hours that he executed for Estienne Chevalier, Charles VII’s Treasurer, another Hours which he made for the Duchess Marie of Cleves, and most famous of all the ninety miniatures of the Boccaccio of Estienne Chevalier which is one of the principal treasures of the Royal Library in Munich. Those who are acquainted with Count Bastard’s monumental work will probably discover a distinct resemblance between one of his reproductions, especially in the foliage and scroll work, and the two full-page pictures now before the reader. On the other hand, the opinion of such a painstaking critic as is Levallée deserves attention. According to him—and nobody expended more time and trouble in Gaston Phoebus researches—the illuminations are not by Foucquet’s hand, but possibly by an artist of his school. If they are Foucquet’s, they cannot have been executed before 1440, or at the earliest 1435. ¶ And now to return to the romantic history of our Codex. On one of the front leaves is painted a large coat-of-arms. It is that of the Saint-Vallier family, and two events connected with the then possessors of this precious manuscript throw a telling sidelight upon French social conditions at the period to which the opening scene on Pavia’s bloody field has introduced us. A generation before that event, namely in 1477, Jacques de Brézé, a rich noble of well-known sporting proclivities, returning suddenly home found his wife in a compromising position with a young noble. Swords flashed on slighter provocation than this one in those days, and the angry husband killed both the lover and his wife without further ado. Unhappily for him, the latter was no less a personage than Charlotte of France, natural daughter of Charles VII, and it cost the stern husband a fine of 100,000 ducats, a huge sum in those days, and a couple of years’ confinement in a castle to save his life. The eldest of the six children who were made motherless by this event subsequently married Diane of Poitiers, who not long afterwards became the all-powerful mistress of Francis I, and later on of Henry II, his son. Now Diane de Poitiers was the daughter of Jean de Poitiers, Sieur of Saint-Vallier, on whom his King (Louis IX) had bestowed the hand of his natural daughter Marie. The Codex whose reproductions we have before us had been given, probably as part of the King’s dower, to Jean de Poitiers’s wife, hence the armorial bearings. If we want to become acquainted with the circumstances that probably were the cause of its presence in King Francis’s tents on the eventful day of Pavia, we have to turn to another tragic event which occurred two years before Pavia. In 1523 Jean de Poitiers involved himself in the Connétable de Bourbon’s conspiracy, and the discovery by the King’s minions, among Jean’s secret papers, of the code treacherously used by the Connétable in his correspondence with Charles V of Germany, sent Jean speedily to the scaffold. He was in the act of kneeling down to receive the deathblow when the pardon obtained by his daughter from her royal lover, the King, saved his life. But all his goods and chattels were confiscated by Francis I, and amongst them was most probably our Codex, and thus it came to form part of the vast booty captured by Emperor Charles’s rough-handed Landsknechte. ¶ These formidable soldiers, who, under their giant leader, Georg von Frundsberg, had performed in the Italian campaigns deeds of great prowess—they were really the first trained infantry—were recruited almost exclusively in Tyrol, and for this reason it is not surprising that the next authentic news we have of our Codex is from that country. Bishop Bernard of Trent purchased it evidently from some returning booty-laden Landsknecht, and, recognising its great value, he presented it about the year 1530 to Archduke Ferdinand, Duke of Tyrol, one of the greatest collectors of his time, whose museum and library at his castle Ambras, near Innsbruck, was the wonder of the day. ¶ It remained in the possession of the Hapsburgs for about 130 years, when victory returned it once more to the country from whence defeat had removed it. During Turenne’s campaign in the Netherlands, General the Marquis of Vigneau became possessed of the volume—how remains unfortunately a mystery—and on his return to Paris presented it, July 22, 1661, to his King, Louis XIV. Bishop Bernard’s and General Vigneau’s dedications to the respective royalties are inscribed on the fly leaves, the former, in the shape of a long-winded Latin ‘humblest offering,’ taking up a good deal of space, though, unlike the Frenchman’s dedication, it fails to indicate the year when the presentation was made. ¶ Louis XIV deposited it in the Royal Library, where it received its librarian’s birthmark, the number 7,097, which it retained down to recent days, when it was rechristened, to be known henceforth, as already stated, as MS. 616. It never should have left those sacred halls, but Louis XIV was no venerator of his own law when it suited him to break it. Regretting his gift to the Library, a few years afterwards he demanded the volume back, and back again he got it, his son, the Count of Toulouse, becoming the next owner of it. From him it passed to Orleans princes until, in the fateful year 1848, it formed part of the private library of Louis Philippe at Neuilly, when that royal residence was plundered and fired by the populace.

HUNTING THE FALLOW BUCK
FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.

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By a wonder it escaped complete destruction on that occasion, and though the covers were badly damaged and blood-bespattered, the inside of the book was left intact. Although a new cover of somewhat gaudy modernity has been supplied to it in consequence of the fiery ordeal through which it had passed, the student visiting the great Paris library, where this unique Codex is exhibited in what is known as the Reserve, will find its vellum leaves in very much the same perfect condition as they were when Diane de Poitiers and Francis I turned them over with the care that is bestowed upon a work one loves. ¶ Another fine copy of Gaston Phoebus is preserved in the late Duc d’Aumale’s magnificent library at Chantilly, now the property of the French nation. When recently making some researches there the writer came across a pathetic little note in the late Duke’s catalogue respecting our Codex, which, as we have heard, belonged to the House of Orleans for upwards of a century. It occurs where the Duc d’Aumale speaks of the MS. 616, and it runs: ‘Saved from the conflagration of 1848, it was taken to the Bibliothèque Nationale, but our appeals for a return of the volume addressed to the Conservateurs of the Library were rejected, however well founded we considered our claim!’ The miniatures in the Chantilly copy are finely drawn, but evince in some instances a grotesqueness which is absent from those adorning MS. 616. Thus the much suffering reindeer comes in for some exceedingly quaint limning, with antlers of perfectly ludicrous proportions and a coat like an Angora goat’s. ¶ One curious fact obtrudes itself upon our notice as we examine the illumination in almost all the Gaston Phoebus copies that are adorned with illuminations (the majority of the existing forty MSS. are not illuminated, or at best only with very inferior pictures). It is the bright colours of the huntsmen’s dress in the fifteenth century. With the exception of the wild-boar hunters, who are generally garbed in grey costumes, mounted and unmounted hunters engaged in the pursuit of the stag, buck, bear, otter, fox, wild cat, wolf, hare, and badger, wear with curious promiscuousness blue, scarlet, mauve, white, and yellow costume quite as often as they appear in the more orthodox green-coloured dress. It may possibly have been merely an instance of artistic licence on the part of the miniaturists, for according to the text grey and green were the only colours of venery known to the good veneur. ¶ To come to the contents of our MS. we can introduce it by the broad statement that Gaston Phoebus is the first mediaeval hunting-book in prose that does not deal with the subject in the catechism-like form of question and answer. The few previous prose works that have come down to us take the form of questions asked by the keen young apprentice and answered by his instructor, an experienced veneur, explaining to him the A B C of venery. Some bits in Gaston’s Livre de Chasse are borrowed from Roy Modus, written about sixty years earlier, some from Gace de la Buigne (or Vigne), King John’s first chaplain, written less than thirty years earlier, and a few from La Chace dou Serf, a poetic effusion of the second half of the thirteenth century. But taking it as a whole Gaston Phoebus is unquestionably as original as could be any work upon such a popular subject as hunting then was. ¶ To those who know their Froissart, Count Gaston de Foix’s personality will be very familiar; but, considering that the chronicler’s visit occurred in 1388, the year after the commencement of the Livre de Chasse, it is somewhat strange, in view of his long stay and intimate intercourse at the Count’s court, that he does not mention the opus upon which his host was then engaged. ¶ The prologue mirrors in a characteristic manner the spirit of the age, as does also the last miniature in MS. 616, which represents the noble sportsman in an attitude of beatitude kneeling in a chapel. That Gaston was a pious lord we can see by the score or so of Latin prayers said to have been composed by him in the dire hour of mortal distress after the tragic death of his only son by his—the father’s—hand. ‘By the Grace of God’ Count Gaston speaks wisely and well of the good qualities that a hunter should have, and how hunting causeth a man to eschew the seven deadly sins, concluding his homily with a sentiment that appeals to the sportsman of the twentieth century as much as it did to him of the fourteenth. ‘And also, say I, that there is no man who loves hunting that has not many good qualities in him, for they come from the nobleness and gentleness of his heart of whatsoever estate he be, great lord or little, poor or rich.’ ¶ The prologue once finished, Gaston starts with zest on his task, beginning with the stag, or, to be quite correct, with the ‘nature’ of what was considered in all Continental hunting the most important beast of venery. The next thirteen chapters deal respectively in a similar way with the natural history of the reindeer, the fallow deer, the ‘bouc,’ under which the ibex and the chamois were included, the roe-deer, the hare, the rabbit, the bear, the wild boar, the wolf, the fox, the badger, the wild cat, and the otter. ¶ Following these fourteen chapters, we get ten very interesting ones on the various kinds of sporting hounds, their training, treatment when ill, the construction and management of the kennel, and other details relating to the subject. In Gaston’s time there were five kinds; the first is the Alaunt, which he subdivides into the Alaunt gentle and the Alaunt veautres; the second is the levrier or greyhound; the third the chien courant or running hound; the fourth the bird dog or espainholz, from which the modern spaniel has sprung; and the fifth the mastin or mastiff. Then come two chapters on how to make nets, and how to blow and trumpet, followed by eighteen chapters on how to track the stag and the wild boar, and how to judge of their presence, size, age, etc., by the various signs known to the veneur, who made a very exact science of what we would call woodcraft. The next fifteen chapters relate to the chase proper of the fourteen beasts named at first, with a double chapter on the chase of the wild boar. The concluding twenty-six chapters deal with the various manners of netting, snaring, trapping, and poisoning of wild beasts of prey and other less noxious animals. They are mostly short chapters, and in more than one place the author displays his unwillingness to deal with matter that a good sportsman need have no ken of, except in so far as was necessary to keep down vermin and destroy ‘marauders of the woods’ for the benefit of his legitimate quarry. ¶ Certain historians have called Gaston Phoebus a ‘cruel voluptuary,’ and no doubt some of his repressive measures sound unnecessarily harsh, not to say merciless, in these soft times; but the spirit in which he wrote his famous book is unquestionably that of a really good sportsman who abhors all underhand advantages that curtail the hunted beast’s chances, and who takes his bear or wild boar single-handed, and pursues his stag to a finish, be the forest a trackless maze, and the river to which the hunted deer finally takes a swift flowing stream, into which to plunge is but a minor incident of an exciting sport. ¶ Of the forty or forty-one ancient MS. copies of Gaston Phoebus that are known to exist in Europe to-day, twenty-one are in France, fifteen keeping our MS. 616 company on the shelves of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Five form part of the Vatican Library, and six adorn the principal libraries of Continental capitals. Of the eight copies that are or were in England one is in the British Museum, and two form part of the well-known collection formed in the first half of the last century by the late Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt., a bibliophile as wealthy as he was discerning. Of these two MSS., No. 11,592 is an incomplete late copy of little value; but the other MS., 10,298, is on the other hand a treasure of great value. Of all the Continental and English copies that the writer has examined this one contains, next to those in MS. 616, the finest miniatures. It is less carefully written, and there are some variations, but nothing of importance so far as is known, though it has never been carefully collated with the best French copies.

FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.

FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.

FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.

The British Museum copy of Gaston Phoebus, catalogued as Addit. MS. 27,699, is on vellum, quarto, written in the first half of the fifteenth century. The miniatures are by an indifferent hand, and have been left in an unfinished state, the miniaturist having apparently expended most of his time, and nearly all his bright colours and shining gold, upon the diapering of the backgrounds. It was bought at the Yemeniz Sale in Paris, in May 1867, for something less than £400. The Ashburnham Library contained two copies, both early ones, and of these MS. App. 179 is interesting on account of an hitherto unknown treatise on hawking and birds being added at the end of the hunting book, which is incomplete, and the spaces at the head of each chapter for the usual miniatures are left blank. It was bought at the fourth Ashburnham Sale in May 1899 by the writer. ¶ Of the copy which Werth and Lavallée quote as being in the possession of a Cambridge Library, it is regrettable that no information could be obtained by them or by myself. As a rule the lot of the student making researches of this sort in English libraries, always excepting, of course, the British Museum and the Bodleian, is not a happy one. Not only is study in the libraries discouraged, and letters of inquiry are left unanswered, but valuable MSS. seem to get mislaid, lost, or stolen, rather more frequently than should be. The two remaining copies of Gaston Phoebus in this country, one being in a public museum, the other in a well-known ducal library, have shared this fate, and their whereabouts are unknown. The latter copy must have been a very beautiful MS., for it is described in Dibdin’s Decameron, Vol. III, p. 478, and was bought in 1815 for £161, then a large sum, by Loché; and according to Werth (Altfranzösische Jagdlehrbücher, 1889, p. 70) it was, when he wrote, in the Duke of Devonshire’s library, from which, however, it seems to have disappeared, for no trace of it can be found. Curiously enough, this fate is shared by yet another valuable hunting MS., which for the English student has even greater interest, namely, one of the few existing copies (nineteen all told) of the Duke of York’s translation of Gaston Phoebus, which has disappeared from a well-known nobleman’s library. ¶ In conclusion, it is necessary to say a few words respecting the subject matter of the MS. just mentioned, for many erroneous impressions regarding it are abroad. Gaston Phoebus deals with some animals that were not found in England in Plantagenet times, e.g. the reindeer, the ibex and chamois, and the bear. Hence when Edward, second Duke of York, who filled the position of Master of Game at the court of his cousin, Henry IV, made a translation of his famous contemporary’s hunting book, he took only those parts of it which related to game and dogs found in England, and added five original chapters, calling the whole ‘The Master of Game.’ This book is the oldest hunting book in English, but has never been published. The writer’s reproduction of it, illustrated by photogravure copies of the illuminations in the Paris Codex MS. 616, some of which are reproduced in the present article, is now going through the press.[2] It will, it is hoped, fill a gap in English hunting literature, and remove numerous misconceptions concerning this subject.

A NEWLY DISCOVERED ‘LIBRO DI RICORDI’ OF ALESSO BALDOVINETTI

❧ WRITTEN BY HERBERT P. HORNE ❧

PART I

AMONG the books of the Spedale di San Paolo, at Florence, is a volume marked on the cover ‘Testimenti,’ and lettered ‘B.’ It contains a record of all wills between the years 1399 and 1526 under which the hospital in any way benefited; and on fol. 16 recto is the following entry: ‘Alexo di Baldovinecto Baldovinetti has this day, the 23rd of March, 1499, made a donation to our hospital of all his goods, personal and real, after his death, with obligation that the hospital support Mea, his servant, so long as she live: [the deed was] engrossed by Ser Piero di Leonardo da Vinci, notary of Florence, on the day aforesaid.’ ‘Alexo died on the last day of August, 1499; and was buried in his tomb in San Lorenzo; and the hospital remained the heirs of his goods. May God pardon him his sins!’[3] ¶ Milanese, who quotes this ‘ricordo’ textually, though not without some slight errors, in his notes to Vasari, states that the volume in which it occurs is preserved in the Archivio di Stato at Florence; whereas the archives of the hospital are now in the ‘Archivio’ of Santa Maria Nuova, San Paolo having been united to the latter hospital by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, c. 1783.[4] ¶ At first sight, this ‘ricordo’ would not seem to bear out the story which Vasari tells of Alesso and his dealings with the authorities of San Paolo. It states only that Alesso made a donation to the hospital of all his worldly goods after his death, upon the condition that his faithful servant, Mea, was to be lodged, clad, and fed, during her life; whereas Vasari, on the contrary, states that the painter himself became an inmate of San Paolo. ‘Alesso,’ he says, ‘lived eighty years; and when he began to grow old, desirous of being able to attend to the studies of his profession with a quiet mind, he, as many men often do, entered the Hospital of San Paolo: and in order, perhaps, that he might be received the more willingly, and be better treated (though it might, indeed, have happened by chance), he caused a great chest to be brought into his rooms, in the hospital; acting as if a goodly sum of money were therein: whereupon the master and the other ministrants of the hospital, believing that this was so, bestowed on him the greatest kindness in the world; since they knew that he had made a donation to the hospital, of whatever was found in his possession at his death. But when Alesso died, only drawings, cartoons, and a little book which set forth how to make the tesserae for mosaic, together with the stucco and the method of working them, were found therein.’[5] ¶ The apparent discrepancy between the ‘ricordo’ in the books of San Paolo and Vasari’s account led me to search, and not without success, for the deed by which Alesso’s property passed to the hospital. I found that both the name of the notary and the date of the execution of the instrument were incorrectly given in the ‘ricordo’ cited above. The instrument was engrossed by Ser Piero di Antonio di Ser Piero da Vinci, the father of Leonardo da Vinci, and executed on March 16, 1497–8. By this deed Alesso, ex titulo et causa donationis, ‘irrevocably gave and bequeathed during his life-time, to the Hospital of the Pinzocheri of the third order of St. Francis, otherwise called the Hospital of San Pagholo, and to the poor of Christ living in the said hospital for the time being,’ etc., ‘all his goods, real and personal, present and future, wherever situate or existent,’ etc., reserving to himself ‘the use and usufruct of the said goods,’ etc., ‘for the term of his natural life.’ The ‘rogiti’ of Ser Piero da Vinci for the year 1498 have not been preserved among the ‘protocols’ of that notary now in the Archivio di Stato at Florence; and so it is no longer possible to say under what conditions, if any, the donation was made: but it is to be presumed upon the evidence of the ‘ricordo’ cited above, that it entailed the obligation on the part of the hospital, to maintain Mea, his servant, during her life. ¶ On October 17, 1498, Alesso executed what was technically known as a ‘renuntiatio,’ which was likewise engrossed by Ser Piero da Vinci. This second instrument, which begins by reciting the former deed of donation in the terms quoted above, sets forth how, on that day, Alesso, ‘by reason of lawful and reasonable causes of motion influencing, as they assert, his mind, and by his mere, free, and proper will,’ etc., ‘renounced the said use and usufruct, expressly reserved to himself in the aforesaid donation, and freely remitted and released the said use and usufruct to the said hospital, and to the poor of Christ dwelling in the said hospital,’ etc. The text of this document, which is preserved in the Archivio di Stato at Florence, is printed at length at the end of this article.[6] It allows us to draw but one conclusion; namely, that when the painter executed the deed of donation on March 16, 1497–8, he had been left without wife or children; and that he anticipated but two contingencies against which he would provide after his death—the health of his soul and the maintenance of his faithful servant, Mea. ¶ Alesso had married late in life. It appears from the ‘Portata al Catasto,’ returned by him in 1470, that he was still unmarried at that time, and that he was possessed of no real property, but rented a house in the ‘popolo’ of San Lorenzo, in Florence, described in his later ‘Denunzie,’ as being in the Via dell’ Ariento, at the Canto de’ Gori.[7] In another ‘Denunzia’ returned in 1480, Alesso thus describes his family:—‘Alesso Baldovinetti, aforesaid, aged 60, painter; Monna Daria, his wife, aged 45; Mea, his maid-servant, aged 13.’ As a matter of fact, Alesso was 63 years of age, having been born on October 14, 1427, Milanesi, by the way, in his notes to Vasari, gives the name of his, Alesso’s wife, as Diana, in error for Daria.[8] According to the same ‘Denunzia,’ the painter was at that time possessed of a parcel of land of twelve staiora, situate in the ‘popolo’ of Santa Maria a Quinto, and another parcel of seven staiora, in the same ‘popolo,’ the latter having been bought in 1479, with a part of his wife’s dowry. It is, therefore, probable that he had not long been married at that time.[9] It appears from a yet later ‘Denunzia’ on which the ‘Decima’ of 1498 was assessed, though the return itself was probably drawn up in 1495, that he possessed, in addition to the two parcels of land in the ‘popolo’ of Santa Maria a Quinto, a third parcel of over eleven staiora, in the adjoining ‘popolo’ of San Martino a Sesto, on the road to Prato. He was still living at that time in the same house at the Canto de’ Gori; and he also enjoyed the rents of two shops, with dwellinghouses above, which had been made over to him for the term of his natural life, by the Consuls of the Arte dei Mercanti, on February 26, 1483–4, in payment of his ‘magistero e esercitio et trafficho,’ in having restored the mosaics of the Baptistery of San Giovanni.[10] ¶ The Spedale di San Paolo, of which the beautiful loggia, with its ornaments by Andrea della Robbia, still remains on the Piazza of Santa Maria Novella, was originally a hospital for the care of the sick; and as such it is mentioned in a document of 1208.[11] From the time that St. Francis himself is said to have lodged at San Paolo, the hospital appears to have been administered by Franciscans, called in the records ‘Fratres tertii Ordinis de Penitentia S. Pauli.’ During the fourteenth century, the house underwent certain reforms; and in 1398 it was decreed by the Signoria, ‘that the place was to be no longer a hospital, but a house of Frati Pinzocheri of the third order.’[12] Notwithstanding, the members of the community continued to devote themselves to the care of the sick; and a papal brief of 1452 directs that the revenues of the house were to be set apart for the infirm.[13] At an early period in the history of San Paolo, mention occurs of Pinzochere, that is to say, women attached to the community, no doubt for the service of the hospital; but unlike the men of the house, who are invariably called Frati Pinzocheri, they were not dignified by the title of ‘Monache’: from this Stefano Rosselli infers that they originally had no share in its government.[14] Owing, however, to some cause which is not very clear, the Frati Pinzocheri appear to have died out towards the latter part of the fifteenth century, leaving the women in possession of the hospital. From evidence that Rosselli and Richa adduce, it seems that in 1497 San Paolo was controlled and administered entirely by Pinzochere; and in the document of 1499, cited below, it is called ‘lo spedale di pizichora del terzo ordjne dj san franchesco.’[15] From this we must conclude that, when Alesso renounced the use and enjoyment of his property on October 17, 1498, he entered the hospital of San Paolo, not as a member of the community, but as a sick man who sought nothing more on earth than to be tended during the brief span of life that was left to him. He died ten months later, on August 29, 1499, and was buried in his own tomb in San Lorenzo.[16] The hospital of San Paolo probably inherited, along with Alesso’s other property, all his cartoons and drawings, as Vasari asserts: they, certainly, came into the possession of his books and papers, as we know. The little treatise on the art of Mosaic has long been lost; but Milanesi has stated in a well-known passage in his Vasari, that the autograph manuscript of certain ‘Ricordi’ of Alesso Baldovinetti still existed in his time, in the Archivio of Santa Maria Nuova, among the books of the hospital of San Paolo. He adds that these ‘Ricordi were published at Lucca in 1868, by Dr. Giovanni Pierotti, per le nozze Bongi e Ranalli.’[17] Few of those innumerable, little pamphlets with which Italians, learned and unlearned, delight to celebrate the marriages of their patrons, friends, or relatives, are more difficult to find than the little brochure of ten leaves, in a green paper wrapper, to which Milanesi alludes. The title page runs thus: ‘Ricordi di Alesso Baldovinetti, pittore fiorentino del secolo xv. Lucca. Tipografia Landi. 1868.’ Unfortunately only a portion of Baldovinetti’s manuscript is given in this pamphlet. The extracts, which fill less than a half of its twenty pages, are partly given in the text, and partly in an abstract, of the original. The rest of the pamphlet is filled with the introductory preface and notes of Dr. Pierotti. ¶ It is now some years ago since I first made an attempt to find the original manuscript of these ‘Ricordi,’ in the Archivio of Santa Maria Nuova, only to discover that I was not the first student of Florentine painting to search in vain for the volume. Whether it had been borrowed by Pierotti, or merely mislaid, or in what way it had disappeared, no one could tell me. Not long after this attempt, however, I chanced upon what proved to be a clue to its history. While searching among the ‘Carte Milanesi,’ the voluminous manuscript collections which the famous commentator of Vasari left to the Communal Library of Siena, I came across a series of extracts from the ‘Ricordi’ of Baldovinetti, in the handwriting of Milanesi, with the title: ‘Estratto del libro dei Ricordi di Alesso Baldovinetti autografo essitente nell’ Archivio dello Spedale di Santa Maria Nuova di Firenze.—Libri dello Spedale di San Paolo, 12 Febb^o. 1850.’ On comparing these extracts with Pierotti’s pamphlet, I found that the two copies agreed word for word with one another. It was evident that Pierotti had made use of Milanesi’s manuscript (indeed, he owns as much in his concluding note), and that he may never have seen the original manuscript. ¶ Last autumn, having occasion to make some researches in the Archivio of Santa Maria Nuova, with my friend Sir Domenic Colnaghi, for his ‘Dictionary of Florentine Painters,’ I took the opportunity of renewing my search for the missing volume. On the top shelf of one of the presses which contain the books and papers of the hospital of San Paolo, I came across a ‘filza’ labelled ‘Libri Diversi,’ and filled with miscellaneous account-books of the hospital, chiefly of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among these was a small, upright book of forty-seven leaves, bound in a parchment cover which was inscribed:—

RICHORDI[18]

·Ḅ̇·

PAINTED-GLASS WINDOW DECORATED WITH FIGURES OF GOD THE FATHER AND ST. ANDREW, FROM CARTOONS BY ALESSO BALDOVINETTI; OVER THE ALTAR OF THE PAZZI CHAPEL IN THE CLOISTER OF SANTA CROCE, FLORENCE

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On the recto of the first leaf was written: ‘1470. In this book I will keep a record of all the expenses that I shall incur in the chapel of the High Altar of Santa Trinita, namely of gold, blue, green, lake, with all other colours and expenses that shall be incurred on behalf of the said chapel; and so we may remain in agreement [I and] Messer Bongiani Gianfigliazi, the commissioner of the work, and the patron of the said chapel, as appears by a writing which I hold, subscribed by his own hand.’ ¶ Fol. 2 tergo, and fol. 3 recto, were filled with entries relating to the purchase of colours and other materials for the work of the chapel, and fol. 3 tergo contained two further entries in the same hand; after which was written, in a different hand: ‘Here follow the records of the hospital of the Pinzochere of the third order of St. Francis, written by Giovanni di Ser Antonio Vianizzi.’ The remainder of the book was filled with entries relating to the hospital of San Paolo, the first of which recorded a payment of twenty-three lire, made by the hospital on October 19, 1499, to Luca d’Alesso Baldovinetti. On comparing the ‘Ricordi’ relating to Santa Trinita, with the ‘Portata al Catasto,’ returned by Alesso in 1471, it was clearly evident that both documents were in the handwriting of the painter. Of the ‘Portata al Catasto,’ returned by Alesso in 1480, two copies exist in the same hand; but they do not appear to have been written by the painter himself, although Milanesi has reproduced a portion of one of them, in his ‘Scrittura di Artisti Italiani,’ Florence, 1876, Vol. 1, No. 74, as a specimen of his handwriting. ¶ What is more, this manuscript, which I may call ‘Libro B,’ throws a light upon the nature of the missing volume, ‘Libro A.’ In the case of ‘Libro B,’ what undoubtedly happened was, that the good Pinzochere, on looking over Alesso’s property after his death, found an account-book of which only the first three leaves had been used. With a proper spirit of economy, they determined to make use of the rest of the book for the accounts of their hospital: but instead of tearing out the leaves containing Alesso’s ‘Ricordi,’ they fortunately allowed them to stand; their procurator adding the note I have cited above. The same thing probably happened in the case of ‘Libro A.’ From the extracts that Milanesi made, it appears that Alesso’s ‘Ricordi’ only filled some sixteen pages of a volume, that cannot well have contained fewer leaves than ‘Libro B.’ With this clue to its discovery, I leave my friends and rivals in Florence to continue the search for a volume, whose loss every genuine student of Italian painting must regret. ¶ The history of the Cappella Maggiore of Santa Trinita affords a curious instance of the tardy process by which many of the Florentine churches and their chapels were brought to completion. The present church of Santa Trinita was begun c. 1250, but many of the lateral chapels remained unfinished until the fifteenth century, and among them the Cappella Maggiore. On November 1, 1371, the abbot of Santa Trinita, inter missarum solepnia, made an appeal to many of the chief parishioners, who had assembled for mass, to contribute to the expenses necessary for the erection of the Cappella Maggiore.[19] The work appears to have proceeded very slowly, since it is on record that the chapel was but half built in the year 1463. In order to bring it to completion, the abbot, having assembled the parishioners in the church, gave notice that since money was wanting to finish the work, licence to do so would be granted to the family that was able and willing to undertake the expense; and accordingly on February 4 of the same year, the patronage of the chapel was granted by acclamation of the parishioners, to Messer Bongianni Gianfigliazzi and his descendants.[20] ¶ The Gianfigliazzi were an ancient Florentine family, of no little repute in the conduct of affairs and arms during the last two centuries of the republic. Ugolino Verino celebrates them in his Latin poem, ‘De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae’:—

Non genus externum est: agro venere paterno,

Janfiliazze, tui, si vera est fama, priores.

Protulit illustres equites generosa propago.[21]

According to Piero Monaldi, the Gianfigliazzi were descended and took their name from one ‘Ioannes filius Acci,’ who is named in a treaty concluded between the Sienese and Florentines in the year 1201.[22] Besides knights of Malta and Santo Spirito, this family boasted of ten gonfaloniers of the republic, and thirty priors; the first of whom held office in 1345. Gherardo Gianfigliazzi was gonfalonier in 1462; and Messer Bongianni, his brother, in 1467, and again in 1470. The latter, ‘magnificus miles’ as he is styled in documents, was a ‘cavalier spron d’oro,’ and famous in his day as a leader of the Florentine forces. He was several times created ambassador of the Florentine republic, and one of the Dieci di Balia. In 1471 he was one of the six ‘orators’ sent to felicitate Sixtus IV on his election to the papacy; and in 1483 he was appointed ‘commessario’ in the war against the Genoese, which ended in the capture of Sarzana. Alesso was not the only famous artist which this family patronized. Their shield of arms, carved with a lion rampant, by Desiderio da Settignano, is still to be seen on the front of their palace on the Lung’ arno Corsini, at Florence.[23] ¶ Giuseppe Richa states that the deed granting the patronage of the Cappella Maggiore of Santa Trinita to the Gianfigliazzi, was engrossed by Ser Pierozzo Cerbini on February 13, 1463–4, which we may well believe;[24] but he adds that the ‘ius patronale’ was vested in the persons of Messer Bongianni and Messer Gherardo.[25] The latter statement, however, would seem to be incorrect, for Gherardo was already dead at that time, as we learn from the inscription on the sepulchral slab (one of the most beautiful of its kind in Florence), which is still to be seen on the floor of the chapel, but now partly covered by a choir-organ:

GHERARDO . IANFILIATIO . DE . SE .
FAMILIA . ET . PATRIA . BE[? NE-
MERITO BONIOANNES] . FRATRI .
PIENTISSIMO . SIBI ..... IDVS . SEP .
AN . SAL . MCCCCLXIII

Photo, Alinari

THE ALTAR-PIECE PAINTED BY ALESSO BALDOVINETTI FOR THE CAPPELLA MAGGIORE OF SANTA TRINITÀ, AT FLORENCE, AND NOW PRESERVED IN THE FLORENTINE ACADEMY

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Messer Bongianni appears to have proceeded at once with the work of finishing the chapel. His share of the work may yet be made out: the vaulting, with its heavy roll ribs, too large for the corbels on which they rest, was clearly erected by him. The corbels themselves probably date from the thirteenth century. Furthermore, he constructed the large window of two round-headed lights, and an a ‘occhio,’ or circular light, above, which is still to be seen in the head of the chapel. The structure being completed, he next turned to the decoration, which he began by filling the lights of the window with painted glass. Alesso Baldovinetti enters, in his ‘Ricordi,’ Libro A, that ‘Lionardo di Bartolommeo, surnamed Lastra, and Giovanni di Andrea, glazier, owe me this 14th day of February, 1465[-6], lire 120; which moneys are for the painting of a window placed in the Cappella Maggiore of Santa Trinita; and Bongianni di Bongianni Gianfigliazzi has ordered this window to be executed by the said Lastra and Giovanni, master-glaziers; and I, Alesso, have designed and painted it for them, at the rate of forty soldi the square braccio: the ‘occhio’ above being estimated with the said window, in the said sum, and according to the said measure.‘[26] It appears from the ‘Trattato’ of Cennino Cennini that it was the common practice of the ‘maestri di finestre’ in Florence in the fifteenth century not only to employ painters to design cartoons for their windows, but also to paint the design upon the glass. The ‘maestro di finistre,’ says Cennini, ‘will come to you with the measure of his window, both breadth and length. You will take as many sheets of paper glued together as will be necessary for your window; and you will draw your figure first in charcoal, afterwards you will outline it in ink, having shaded your figure as completely as if you were drawing it on panel. Then the master-glazier takes this design and spreads it out on a desk or board, large and even, and according as he wishes to colour the draperies of the figure, so, piece by piece, he cuts the glasses, and gives you a colour made of copper filings, well ground; and with this colour, piece by piece, you proceed with a little pencil of minever, having a good point, to contrive your shadows, making the joins of the folds and other parts of your figure agree, one piece of glass with another, just as the master-glazier has cut and put them together; and with this colour you are able, without exception, to shade on every sort of glass.’[27] ¶ In 1616, the glass designed and painted by Alesso, ‘being all spoiled, broken, and patched, in such a manner that it yielded no light, except where there was no wire-screen,’ the whole of the lights were reglazed anew, at the joint expense of the monastery and the patrons of the chapel.[28] The beautiful stonework of the window, however, designed in the classic taste of the time, with finely-wrought pilasters at the jambs and mullion, was restored and filled with modern stained-glass during the recent restoration of the church, in 1890–7. ¶ It appears from the ‘Ricordi,’ Libro A, of Alesso Baldovinetti, that the painter gave designs for several windows to the ‘maestri di finestre.’ In 1472, he designed an Annunciation to be executed in glass for the cathedral church of San Martino, at Lucca; and in 1481, he designed a window for the church of Sant’ Agostino, at Arezzo.[29] These windows have perished, but there still remains in Florence a painted window which was undoubtedly executed from a cartoon by Alesso. This window, which, so far as I am aware, has never been ascribed to him, is above the altar of the Pazzi chapel, in the first cloister of Santa Croce. [Plate I.] It consists of two lights, a lower circular-headed light containing a full-length figure of St. Andrew, the patron saint of the chapel, with the arms of the Pazzi below; and an upper round window, or ‘occhio,’ containing a half-length figure of God the Father. This window affords a good example of the use of the pure and brilliant colours which the Florentine ‘maestri di finestre’ employed in the fifteenth century, and which to our northern eyes are apt to appear crude and too little wrought upon. But seen, as such windows were doubtless intended to be seen, with the full power of the Italian sun upon them, their colours become fused, and take that jewel-like quality which is essentially distinctive of the finest painted-glass. The figure of St. Andrew is draped in a golden leaf-green robe, lined with a smalt blue, and worn over an underrobe of a warm and brilliant purple. The frieze of the niche behind the figure is of a colder purple; the capitals of a madder tint; the cupola of a smalt blue; and the sky in the background of a full ultramarine. The figure of God the Father in the ‘occhio’ above, wears a golden purple vest, and a mantle of smalt blue; and the curtains of a madder purple, lined with green, which are drawn apart, reveal a skyey background of ultramarine behind the figure. During the recent restoration of the Pazzi chapel, this window was repaired, and several missing pieces of the glass made good. These repairs are especially noticeable in the ultramarine glass. ¶ The high altar of Santa Trinita was originally placed immediately below the window, in the head of the Cappella Maggiore. Its beautiful marble frontal, carved with the symbol of the Trinity in relief, was found during the recent restoration of the church, in the Cappella della Pura, in Santa Maria Novella, and has once more been put to its original use. For this altar Alesso, as he records in Libro A, received the commission from Messer Bongianni, on April 11, 1470, to paint an altar-piece, in which was to be a Trinity with two saints, namely, St. Benedict and St. John Gualbert, and angels. He finished it on February 8, 1471, and received eighty-nine gold florins in payment for the work.[30] In 1569, the high altar was brought forward, and placed below the arch of the Cappella Maggiore; and the choir which anciently lay before the high altar, in the body of the church, was reconstructed in the chapel, behind the altar. In 1671, the crucifix of St. John Gualbert was brought from San Miniato, and placed upon the new high altar; and Alesso’s altar-piece was left hanging in its original position, below the window of the choir, where it was to be seen when Don Averardo Niccolini collected his notices of Santa Trinita, towards the middle of the seventeenth century.[31] At a later time the picture was removed into the sacristy; and finally, upon the suppression of the monastery in 1808, it was taken to the Florentine Academy, where it is still preserved, No. 159. [Plate II.] It is painted on a panel measuring 7 ft. 8½ ins. in height, and 9 ft. 1¾ ins. in length. God the Father is seated in the centre of the composition, in the midst of a glory of seraphim, supporting the cross on which the figure or Christ is hanging. The Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, hovers above the crucifix; and at the foot of the cross, which rests upon the earth, is the skull of Adam. In the lower left-hand corner kneels St. Benedict, in the habit of his order; and on the opposite side of the picture kneels St. John Gualbert. In the upper corners, two angels draw back a curtain embroidered with pearls; while other angels hover around, against the skyey background. Dry, almost unpleasing as a whole, and with little or nothing of that delicate feeling for sensuous beauty which distinguishes Alesso’s early works, this altar-piece is, nevertheless, one of the most remarkable productions extant of Florentine painting in the fifteenth century. In execution, it shows a mastery of technique to which few of Alesso’s contemporaries attained. The draperies, for instance, are wrought with a richness of colour and texture which recalls the work of some great Fleming. In conception too severely understood, in presentation too precisely wrought out, and with too exacting a definition, this altar-piece seems to forestall something of that profoundly intellectual rendering of constructed form, which Michael Angelo afterwards carried to its height in the fresco of the Last Judgement. Certainly, there are few more striking instances of the manner to which the Florentine painters of the fifteenth century developed the technique and science of painting.

[To be continued.]

THE BLESSED VIRGIN AND CHILD, WITH ANGELS, SURROUNDED BY VIRGIN SAINTS (DEXTER: SS. FAUSTA, AN UNKNOWN SAINT, AGNES, CATHERINE, AND DOROTHEA; SINISTER: SS. APOLLINA, GODELIVA, CECILIA, BARBARA, AND LUCY); IN THE BACKGROUND, THE PAINTER AND HIS WIFE ON EITHER SIDE; BY GERARD DAVID; IN THE ROUEN MUSEUM

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THE EARLY PAINTERS OF THE NETHERLANDS AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE BRUGES EXHIBITION OF 1902

❧ WRITTEN BY W. H. JAMES WEALE ❧

ARTICLE IV

THE Exhibition included a number of other works attributed to Memlinc. Three of these are supposed to have been executed in his early years: the Passion of Saint Sebastian (69), belonging to the Brussels Museum; the triptych with the Deposition of Christ in the centre, and Saints James and Christopher (92), formerly at Liphook in the Heath collection, now the property of M. R. von Kaufmann; and the Blessed Virgin and Child with a donor protected by Saint Anthony. The first of these was probably painted by a follower of Dirk Bouts; the second by an imitator of Bouts and Memlinc; the third only has any claim to be considered the work of Memlinc; the date 1472, inscribed in the background, is certainly modern, but probably copied from the frame when this was discarded. The Blessed Virgin and Child (78), lent by Mr. A. Thiem, is a school picture in not very good condition; another (83) belonging to Baron P. Bethune, having long served as the lid of a miller’s flour box, has very little of the original work left. A Madonna enthroned with two angels (82) entirely overpainted, lent by Mrs. Stephenson Clarke, and another belonging to the Museum of Woerlitz (29), are like similar pictures in the Museum at Vienna and in the possession of the Duke of Westminster, works probably painted after Memlinc’s death from his patterns by Louis Boels. The three large panels from the monastery of Najera (84), belonging to the Antwerp Museum, are fine decorative works painted about 1490 by an imitator of Memlinc and Van Eyck. As to the Annunciation lent by Prince Radziwill (85), said by Dr. Waagen to have been painted in 1482, I should, looking at the colour and execution, think it at least twenty years later, and am convinced that Memlinc never had anything whatever to do with it. Mr. Hulin calls it Memlinc’s most perfect composition; Dr. Friedländer, ‘an extremely original composition of remarkable delicacy of sentiment and execution’ (von höchst eigenartiger Komposition und besonderer Feinheit in Empfindung und Durchführung); while a writer in the Athenaeum of September 20 says: ‘In conception it belongs entirely to the master, and the composition is as fine and original as anything to be found in his work,’ and thinks that ‘it was a beautiful and new conceit thus to represent the Virgin as sinking down tremblingly at the angel’s word, but held by the supporting arms of two other attendant angels who look up to her with reassuring smiles.’ Now it is certain that Memlinc, far from being an innovator and an inventor of what the writer properly calls new conceits, was a faithful follower of ecclesiastical tradition, and would never have dreamt of introducing into the representation of this mystery these two sentimental and affected angels. No doubt the Gospel says that Mary was troubled at the words of the angel, but there is nothing to warrant this impertinent addition. The fact is that the beautiful long waving line of the Virgin’s robe with its sudden returning lines has made these critics shut their eyes to these points, which I think are by themselves sufficient evidence that the picture is the work of a sixteenth-century innovator. As to the six panels (176) lent by the Strassburg Museum, it is an outrage to suggest that Memlinc was their author. ¶ After Memlinc, the greatest master who worked at Bruges was another foreigner, Gerard son of John, son of David, a native of Oudewater in South Holland, who in all probability learnt his art either at Haarlem or under Dirk Bouts at Louvain. He came to Bruges at the end of 1483, and was admitted into the Guild of Saint Luke as free master on January 14, 1484. Although we have no written evidence as to his history previous to that date, yet certain details in his works make it almost certain that he had travelled in Italy after the termination of his apprenticeship. Bruges still possesses the earliest works by him of which the authenticity is established; these with a number of others by his followers not only afforded an excellent opportunity for studying the variations in his manner, but showed the great influence he exercised over his contemporaries and followers. In 1488 Gerard David was commissioned to paint two pictures by the magistrates elected by the three members of Flanders to succeed those who had been deposed after the imprisonment of Maximilian; they were intended by them to commemorate the execution of the judge Peter Lanchals and other members of the late administration who, having been found guilty of corruption and malversation, had been condemned to death and executed. Gerard, however, instead of painting the history of Lanchals, took for his theme an analogous subject originally recorded by Herodotus, which he probably drew from the then much better known works of Valerius Maximus. By so doing he avoided the resentment of the friends of the deposed magistrates, while the subject chosen was equally well adapted to recall to the sitting magistrates that they must be honest and impartial. In the first of the two panels (121), which we reproduce (as the frontispiece of this number), Cambyses, accompanied by his court, is represented entering the hall of justice and ordering the arrest of the unjust judge Sisamnes. In the background Sisamnes is seen at the porch of his house receiving a bag of money from a suitor. The groups of nude children and the garlands of fruit and flowers, the earliest instance of the occurrence of such details in a Netherlandish picture, must have been copied from Venetian or Florentine pictures, and the two Medicean cameos are almost proofs of a visit to Florence; one of these, the Judgement of Marsyas by Apollo, is represented as a breast ornament worn by Lucretia Tornabuoni (?) in the portrait of that lady by Botticelli in the Städel Institute at Frankfort. It is interesting to note that the square seen in the background is an almost exact representation of the Square of St. John at Bruges. The flaying of Sisamnes (122) is an extremely realistic picture vigorously painted with wonderful finish. The composition and pose of the figures in both scenes remind one of Carpaccio, the heads have a great deal of character, and the hands are admirably modelled. For the two pictures, which were not completed until 1498, Gerard received in three instalments the sum of £14 10s. ¶ The National Gallery contains two pictures painted between 1500 and 1510, both formerly in the Cathedral of Saint Donatian at Bruges, the one an altar-piece executed for Richard De Visch Van der Capelle, who held the office of cantor in that church; the other, the dexter wing of a triptych painted for Bernardine Salviati, a canon of the same cathedral. These of course were not at Bruges, but I mention them here because they form a connecting link with the triptych representing the Baptism of Christ (123), of which the centre and the inner face of the shutters were painted before 1502, and the outer in 1508. The next work in order of date, and in my opinion David’s masterpiece, is the picture (124) presented by him in 1509 to the convent of the Carmelite nuns of Sion at Bruges, and now in the Rouen Museum; it represents the Blessed Virgin and Child surrounded by virgin saints and two angels, the one playing a mandoline, the other a viola, whilst at the extreme ends in the background the painter has represented himself and his young wife. The composition is not quite original; Memlinc had already painted for John Du Celier a small Sacra Conversazione now in the Louvre, and another artist who has not as yet been identified had executed in 1489, for the Guild of Saints Mary Magdalene, Katherine, and Barbara, an altar-piece (114) which doubtless suggested not only the composition of this picture but the mode of characterizing the saints. The author of this earlier work, if one may judge by its colouring, was probably accustomed to design tapestries; most of the figures are exceedingly plain and wanting in expression, whereas in Gerard’s picture the colouring is harmonious and the figures remarkable for beauty of expression, the angels being amongst the most charming conceptions realized by the school.

TRIPTYCH: THE BELESSED VIRGIN AND CHILD, ST. CATHERINE, AND ST. BARBARA; BY CORNELIA CNOOP, WIFE OF GERARD DAVID; IN THE POSSESSION OF MESSRS. P. AND D. COLNARGHI

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The large triptych (125) lent by M. de Somzée, with life-size figures of Saint Anne with the Blessed Virgin and Child in the centre, and Saints Nicholas and Anthony of Padua on the shutters, painted for some Spanish church, is a late work inferior in execution to those already mentioned. Six other panels with scenes from the lives of the two saints, said to have been the predella of this altar-piece, not exhibited, are on the contrary charming works; they are now in the possession of Lady Wantage. Two shutters of a triptych (138) with full-length figures of four saints, lent by Mr. James Simon, of Berlin, appear to me to be authentic works; the Saints Christopher and Anthony are especially good. ¶ Of the other eleven works attributed to Gerard by their owners or by those who have written on the exhibition, I can only say caveat lector. We know no picture painted by Gerard before 1488 or after 1512, and the variation of style in the works executed between those dates of which the authenticity is established makes it difficult to say with certainty that any picture painted at Bruges between 1512 and 1527 is or is not by him, and it is certainly mere guesswork to attribute to him any pictures of an earlier date than 1488; it is indeed probable that, being a stranger, he would during his first four years at Bruges have confined himself to the execution of small pictures of religious subjects which would meet with a ready sale. The Adoration of the Magi (135) lent by the Brussels Museum, formerly supposed to be by John van Eyck, was first attributed to Gerard by Dr. Scheibler. Dr. Friedländer believes it to be an original work of about 1500, often copied. It was originally in the Premonstratensian abbey of Saint Michael at Antwerp, and I doubt its being a Bruges picture or an original composition. The original painting was certainly executed shortly after 1490 and was copied by the miniaturist who adorned a Dominican Breviary which was in the possession of Francis de Roias in Spain before 1497. ¶ The style of the figures and the colouring of the Annunciation (128) lent by the Museum of Sigmaringen are very much in Gerard’s manner, and it may possibly be by him; the Städel Museum at Frankfort contains a copy of these two panels apparently painted by a Netherlandish artist in the Peninsula or by a Portuguese artist in the Low Countries, the inscription on the border of the angel’s vestments being in Portuguese: Modar de Senor. A triptych representing the Deposition of Christ (126), which though thrice restored, in 1675, 1773, and 1827, is still in fairly good condition, was first included by me in 1863 among the works by Gerard on the authority of a document of the year 1675, preserved in the archives of the Confraternity of the Holy Blood, to which the picture has always belonged. It certainly differs considerably from the pictures painted by him between 1488 and 1510, and shows a strong influence of Quentin Metsys, and I do not think that the opinion of two or three modern critics warrants the rejection of the evidence in its favour. The picture was certainly painted c. 1520 in Bruges, where several old copies of it were preserved until the middle of the last century. ¶ A Holy Family (343) lent by M. Martin Le Roi is an excellent work painted about the same time, showing even more strongly the influence of Quentin Metsys, and I have little doubt painted by an Antwerp master. Yet this is classed by Dr. Friedländer as an excellent work of David’s later time (Vortreffliches Werk aus der Spätzeit Davids), although there is neither tradition nor documentary evidence in favour of this attribution. The Transfiguration (117) belonging to the church of Our Lady, another work of about the same date, is of interest as representing an event rarely treated by the early masters of the Netherlands. The composition shows an Italian influence; the figures, especially those in the group on the left, that of Gerard; the colouring is light and cool; the picture has suffered very much from neglect. The shutters of this altar-piece, not exhibited, were painted by Peter Pourbus. The lunette (149) lent by Baron de Schickler is a fine piece, but the types of the figures are unlike any in Gerard’s authentic works. ¶ Gerard was not only a painter but also a miniaturist, and as such a member of the Guild of Saint John and the head of a school of miniaturists. Two specimens of his own work—(129) Saint John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness and the Baptism of Christ—and three by his wife, Cornelia Cnoop, were formerly in the Cistercian abbey of Saint Mary in the Dunes; the three last (130), lent by Messrs. P. and D. Colnaghi, are here reproduced; they have been framed as a triptych.

[The previous articles of this series were published in Nos. 1, 2, and 3 of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE for March, April, and May, 1903.]

EDITORIAL NOTE

WE give reproductions of the portraits of Thomas Portunari and his wife, referred to by Mr. Weale in his third article (THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, No. 3, May 1903, p. 336), as they may be of interest to students of Flemish art, since their authorship is a disputed question. These portraits have hitherto been attributed to Memlinc, but, when they were exhibited at Bruges last year, this attribution was doubted by many critics. Mr. Weale, as our readers know, has suggested that the portraits may be early works of Hugh van der Goes. The question is one on which further opinion will be welcome. Amateurs of mediaeval jewellery, by the way, should notice the very beautiful necklace worn by Portunari’s wife, which is a remarkably fine example of fifteenth-century work.

PORTRAITS OF THOMAS PORTUNARI AND HIS WIFE; ATTRIBUTED TO HANS MEMLINC; IN THE COLLECTION OF MONSIEUR LÉOPOLD GOLDSCHMIDT

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ON ORIENTAL CARPETS

❧ ARTICLE III.—THE SVASTIKA ❧

UNTIL a comparatively few years ago, the literature of science was almost wholly silent on the subject of the Svastika. Professor Wilson, of the Smithsonian Institute, writing in the early nineties, sets forth that in most of the best-known encyclopedias, both European and American, the word Svastika is not so much as mentioned. It was indeed, he says, this to him incomprehensible omission, and consequent admittedly general ignorance, that prompted him to make an exhaustive study of the subject, and to embody the results of his researches in what is undoubtedly the standard work on Svastika at the present time. Yet even Professor Wilson, while giving to his readers the great mass of evidence he has collated, is chary of expressing any definite opinion as to the origin and significance of this universal symbol. In this reserve he is doubtless prudent, at least in so far that he has avoided entering upon a controversy which must probably be endless. The theories, indeed, that have been presented concerning the origin and the symbolism of the Svastika are as numerous as they are diverse. Every kind of suggestion has been made as to its relation to the most ancient Deities, and as to its typifying of certain qualities. Various writers have regarded it as being the emblem, respectively, of Zeus and of Baal, of the Sun God, of the Sun itself as a God, and of the Sun chariot. Of Agni (the Ignis of the Romans) the fire God, and of Indra the rain God. In the estimation of others, again, it is typical of the sky and of the sky God; and finally of the Deity of all Deities, the great God, the maker and ruler of the universe. Again, it has been held to symbolize light and the God of light, and the forked lightning, as a manifestation of that Deity; and yet again, according to some, from its intimate association with the Lotus, it has been regarded as the emblem of the God of water. That it is the oldest known Aryan symbol is hardly in dispute. There are writers who have announced their conviction that it represents Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer. Certainly it appears in the footprints of Buddha, engraved upon the living rock of Indian mountains; equally certainly it stood for the Jupiter Tonans and Pluvius of the Latins, and for the Thor of the Scandinavians, though that it represented a variety of the ‘Thor hammer’ is now considered to be disproved. Many have attributed a Phallic meaning to it, or, regarding it as the symbol of the female, have claimed that it represents the generative principles of mankind, while its appearance on the person of certain Goddesses, Artemis, Hera, Demeter, Astarte, and the Chaldean ‘Nana,’ the leaden Goddess from Hissarlik, has caused it to be claimed as a sign of fecundity. But, as Professor Wilson points out, and as every other writer has allowed, whatever else the Svastika may have stood for, and however many meanings it may have had, it was always, if not primarily, ornamental. It may have been used with any or all and other than the above significations, but it was always ornamental as well.

But in whatever other connexion it may have been employed, it was invariably, and still is to-day, an auspicious sign. It is still used by the common people of India, of China, and of Japan, as a sign of ‘long life, good wishes, and good fortune.’ Among many North American Indian tribes it is called ‘the luck,’ and the men wear it embroidered on their garters, and the women on the borders of their skirts; and in ancient times it was wont to be embroidered in quills on the bags in which they carried their medicinal herbs. In Thibet it is a not uncommon mode of tattooing; and in this connexion it is interesting to note that Higgins in his ‘Anacalypsis’ says, concerning the origin of the cross, that the official name for the Governor of Thibet comes from the ancient Thibetan name for cross, the original spelling of which is “Lamh.” Davenport corroborates this view in his “Aphrodisiaco.” There is, according to Balfour, despite Mr. Gandhi’s contradictions of Colonel Cunningham, a sect in Thibet who receive their name from this symbol. They are the ‘Tao-sse’ of the Chinese. The founder of this doctrine is said to have flourished B.C. 604 to 523. They were rationalists who held that peace of mind and contentment were the only objects worthy of attainment in this life. They assumed the name of Tirthakar, or pure-doers. Professor Max Müller, discussing the question why the sign should have had an auspicious meaning, mentions that Mr. Thomas, the distinguished oriental numismatist, has called attention to the fact, that in the long list of the recognized devices of the twenty-four Jain Tirthankara[32] the sun is absent, but that while the eighth Tirthankara has the sign of the half moon, the seventh is marked with a Svastika, i.e. the sun. Here, then, is clear indication that the Svastika with the ends pointing in the right direction was originally a symbol of the sun, perhaps of the vernal sun as opposed to the autumnal sun, the ‘Suavastika,’ and therefore a natural symbol of light, life, health, and wealth. This ‘Suavastika,’ Max Müller believes, was applied to the Svastika sign with the ends bent to the left, but with the exception of Burnouf (‘Des Sciences et Religions’) no one agrees with him. Burnouf supports his theory (which is, that the word Suavastika is a derivation of the Svastika, and ought to signify ‘he, who, or that which bears or carries the Svastika or a species of Svastika’) by the story of Agni (Ignis), the god of Sacred Fire, as told in the ‘Veda’ (the four sacred books of the Hindus). ‘The young Queen, the Mother of Fire, carried the Royal infant mysteriously concealed in her bosom. She was a woman of the people, whose common name was Arani—that is, the instrument of wood (the Svastika) from which fire was produced by rubbing.’ Burnouf says that the origin of the sign is now easy to recognize. It represents the two pieces of wood which compose the Arani, of which the extremities were to be retained by the four nails. At the junction of the two pieces was a fossette or cup-like hole, and there was placed a wooden upright in the form of a lance (the pramantha), the violent rotation of which (by whipping after the fashion of the whipping-top) brought forth fire.

Form of Svastika at the end of Kolpâpur Inscription.

Svastika at end of Kûdâ.

Croix Svasticale (Zmigrodski).

SECTION OF ORIENTAL CARPET IN THE POSSESSION OF MR. HAROLD HARTLEY, SHOWING THE SVASTIKA

Zmigrodski agrees with this view; but, as with every other theory connected with Svastika, it has many opponents. ¶ Professor Dumontier holds that Svastika is nothing else than a development of the ancient Chinese characters C. h. e, which carries the idea, according to Count Goblet D’Alviella (in ‘La Migration des Symboles’), of perfection or excellence, and signifies the renewal and perpetuity of life. Max Müller, Waring, and D’Alviella are agreed that neither in Babylonia nor in Assyria are any traces of Svastika to be found. Ludwig Müller, however, finds ample evidence of it on Persian coins of the Arsacides and Sassanides dynasties. ¶ Arsacides was the name of the Parthian kings whose family name was Arseus. The Arsacidean kings of Armenia, according to Moses of Chorene, began to reign B.C. 130, and ruled until A.D. 45, when the Armenian kingdom was extinguished. The Sassanian kings of Persia ruled from A.D. 226 to 641, when the last monarch, Yez-de-jird the Third, was overthrown by the Mahomedans. This monarchy took its origin when Artaxerxes (the Greek and Roman way of pronouncing Ardeshir) overthrew the Parthian dynasty. This prince, Ardeshir Babekan, son of Sassan, was an officer of King Arsaces Artabanus the Fifth, whom he murdered, assuming the Persian throne as the first of the Sassanian dynasty. ¶ Ohnefalsch Richter holds the view that although no trace of Svastika had been found in Phoenicia, yet that travellers to that country had brought it from the Far East, and had introduced it into Cyprus, and into Carthage and the north of Africa generally. As against the denial of it in Assyria, however, is Wilson’s assertion that the three-rayed design is found on Assyrian coins, as also as a countermark on those of Alexander, B.C. 333 to 323. Professor Sayce, on the other hand, is of opinion that Svastika was a Hittite symbol which passed by communication to the Aryans, or to some of their important branches before their final dispersion took place. The Professor regards it as being fairly established that the symbol was in more or less common use among the peoples of the bronze age anterior to either the Chaldeans, Hittites, or Aryans.

Egyptian Intrusive Seals.

Ogee Svastika.
With circle. Plain.

As against all these theories, Major-General Gordon, writing to Dr. Schliemann in 1896 from the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, of which he was then Controller, points out that the Svastika is obviously Chinese, and that on the breech of a large gun captured in the Taku Fort in ’61, and at the time of writing lying outside his office at Woolwich, the same symbol is displayed. Dr. Lockyer, who was for many years a medical missionary in China, also says that the sign is thoroughly Chinese. Colonel Sykes, another authority on matters Chinese, concludes that according to the Chinese authorities, Fa-hiau, Soung-Young, and Hiuantusang, the ‘doctors of reason,’ Taosee or followers of the mystic cross were diffused in China and India before the advent of Sakya in the sixth century B.C. (according to other authorities in the eleventh century B.C.), continuing to Fa-hiau’s time, and that they were professors of qualified Buddhism, which it is stated was the universal religion of Thibet before Sakya’s advent, and continued until orthodox Buddhism was introduced in the ninth century A.D. As to this Colonel Tod holds the opinion that the first Buddha of the four flourished circa B.C. 2250. This was Budh the parent of the lunar race. ¶ The Greeks undoubtedly connected the symbol with the cult of Apollo, but it seems probable that the sign came to them from Egypt, where the Tau which was a cross was anciently a symbol of the generative power, and afterwards was introduced into the Bacchic mysteries. Such a cross has been found at Pompeii in a house, in juxtaposition with the Phallus and with other symbols embodying the same idea. This mystic Tau, or Standard of the Cross as it has been called, formed just half of the Labarum,[33] or idolatrous war standard of the Pagans. The Labarum bore at once the crescent and the cross, the crescent as the emblem of Astarte the Queen of Heaven, and the cross as that of Bacchus. ¶ The controversy, if so it can be called, will doubtless rage for all time, but the one essential point remains salient: namely, that the symbol is admittedly universal, and equally admittedly it is the basis and the mainstay in one form or another of all conventional decorative design. It is to be found everywhere in our modern life. In our household appointments, in our mural decorations, in the shapes and adornment of articles of our furniture. Even does it come down to us in the shape of those old irons on houses with which we are all familiar, and which, though a few persons fondly believe them to be so placed for the purpose of remedying cracking walls, are regarded by every right-thinking country person as a protection against lightning and fire. Unconsciously Svastika permeates our whole existence. We cannot even sit down to dinner without finding it set before us in some of our table appointments; and nowhere is the symbol more constantly and more permanently evident than in oriental rugs and carpets. In every specimen of these, of whatsoever provenance, and no matter how much the flowing line of curves may have encroached on the rectilineal design of convention, the Svastika is traceable. It may not be at once discovered in the main body of the pattern, though it is always present, but it is invariably and inevitably to be found in the border, which it may at once be said is as much an historical asset as is the central design itself.

Irons on Old Houses.

Sunsnakes.
Double. Single.

Of course throughout the natural working of Time’s processes, the merging of myths and the blending of conceptions, certain bold and salient developments, if projected with sufficient force and persistency, must ever remain paramount. This is the case with the Svastika and with that other symbol, that of the lotus, with which it is almost invariably found in conjunction. There are many indeed who claim that the two symbols are indivisible. Professor Goodyear, no mean authority, is specially insistent on this point. He holds that it is the lotus that is the keynote of decoration. The lotus, he contends, is the Tree of Life, or rather the accepted Tree of Life is really the lotus in one or another of its many aspects. The spiral scroll, he urges, comes from the bent sepals of the lotus much exaggerated, which being squared becomes the Greek fret or meander or key pattern, and this doubled forms the Svastika. ¶ The Lotus and the Tree of Life will form the subject of the next article.

[Previous articles of this series were published in Nos 1 and 3, for March and May, 1903.]

THE COOK ASLEEP, BY JAN VERMEER OF DELFT, IN THE COLLECIION OF MONSIEUR RUDOLPHE KANN

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THE DUTCH EXHIBITION AT THE GUILDHALL

❧ ARTICLE I.—THE OLD MASTERS ❧

THERE is every probability that the current exhibition of early and modern pictures by Dutch artists will prove to be one of the most popular which has yet been held at the Guildhall; not, indeed, because it is of finer quality than its predecessors, but from the fact that the pictures are well within the grasp of the average man. There is nothing incomprehensible to those least acquainted with Dutch art, and there is something that will appeal to all. It must have occurred to many with regard to pictures of Holland by artists of varying nationality that only the Dutchman really grasps the subtleties of the country. All the rest look upon it with alien eyes, and give us but the external form. They never get behind the veil and infect us with that indefinable exquisiteness and charm so characteristic of Holland with its pastoral flats, pollard willows, canals, picturesque craft and windmills and, most wonderful of all, that delicate atmosphere softening the harshest lines into a melodious ensemble, and overhead the immensity of sky, vast in its expanse and with its delicacies of blues and greys. The finest Dutch landscape painters have always painted in a minor key; whenever they seek to modulate into the major they lose themselves and become commonplace. This applies equally to Rüysdael and to Jacob Maris; doubtless it is an expression of the national temperament of the Dutchman. Generally upon emerging from a contemplation of the old men into a modern artistic environment a feeling of repulsion creeps over one, but this is not the case here. Rüysdael and Rembrandt seem strangely in harmony with Maris and Mauve, and in this fact may be found a plea for the endurance of the latter. A very different impression is given, for instance, when one leaves an eighteenth-century French picture and comes to a modern French landscape. The modern Dutch school have maintained the traditions of their predecessors, and one of them at least—Jacob Maris—is worthy to be put on the same plane as Rüysdael and Hobbema. ¶ In the small gallery upstairs the student of seventeenth-century Dutch art will find much to admire, still more to interest him, and not a few examples which will tax his ingenuity as to attribution. Among these last are some of the six pictures ascribed to Rembrandt. The most important, and perhaps the one which should attract the most attention, is the large landscape Le Commencement d’Orage, which is surpassed by little in the landscape work of Rembrandt for poetical intensity and incisive truth. This picture is by most modern critics denied to Rembrandt; as the question is one which must be fully dealt with, its discussion may conveniently be postponed to the end of this paper. ¶ When we leave this and come to the portraits we find but one, the Portrait of the Painter’s Son Titus, which has any serious pretensions to be considered as coming from his brush. Against this, however, nothing can be urged in point of quality. Of the Dutch master’s last and finest manner—it is dated 1655—it has all the pathetic realism of his unsubdued genius. It is interesting to compare this canvas, which is undoubtedly a portrait of Titus, with that of the same boy in the Wallace collection. As this is dated authentically 1655, the Hertford House picture should be painted within the next year, or at the latest in 1657, whereas it is approximately dated in the catalogue 1658–60. On the score of quality there is little to choose, but perhaps the English picture is in a better state of preservation. The Head of a Man, a careful work, and with many good qualities to recommend it, is in all probability a work of Solomon de Koninck, who was one of those pupils of Rembrandt who assimilated most of his technicalities. The extreme timidity of many of those points in which the bolder qualities of Rembrandt would be brought into play, such as the handling of the nose, mouth and hair, go far to convince us of the correctness of this attribution. Coming to The Portrait of the Artist, it appears quite incomprehensible that a picture of such inferior artistic qualities should have been seriously considered for so long a period as a work of the master. Coming from the collections of M. de Calonne, the Marquis Gerini and Mr. Agar, engraved by Seuter and Townley, quoted in Smith, it serves to show the hazy idea of even the best connoisseurs in the early days of the last century. Such a work would be difficult to affiliate upon any of the best known of Rembrandt’s pupils. The weakness of the drawing and lack of power and roundness are clearly the work of but a second-rate man of the period. The signature, moreover, presents no claim to serious consideration. In Ruth and Naomi is possibly to be found the work of a very interesting painter of the school of Rembrandt—Karel Fabritius, who is little known yet in this country. It is painted with remarkable strength and solidity, and although not a great achievement, is worthy of comparison with some of those pictures which are ascribed to the greater light upon very slender foundation. The picture, however, is in such bad condition and has suffered so much that no one can tell what it may have been when fresh. ¶ More interesting upon the whole than the representation of Rembrandt and his School is that of Frans Hals. His so-called Admiral de Ruyter (which is not a portrait of that admiral) for decision and fearless handling has not an equal in the gallery. It is not Hals as we see him at Hertford House, careful and conscientious, though successful, but the spontaneous, daring master whom we find at Haarlem and in the Louvre, at Cassel and St. Petersburg. It is the Hals that we not only admire but also love, the wonder of the cultured art-loving public, and—may we add it?—the despair of the modern portrait painter. Such brushwork has only been equalled, we shall not say surpassed, by a few masters, of whom Velasquez stands out prominently. When, however, we turn to Van Goyen and his Wife and Child, we have another instance of more than doubtful attribution. The landscape is probably by Van Goyen, for it has many of his characteristics of tree draughtsmanship and sober colour. The figures, however, betray nothing of Hals beyond his influence, and even the latter is only just allowable. They are well and strongly painted in parts; but Hals would never be guilty of such loose handling as is observable in the child in the foreground or such weak drawing as the foot of Van Goyen betrays. There is but little from which to deduce an attribution with any degree of certainty. The present ascription is part of that system which insists on fathering upon Hals all the portraits in this manner and of this period, in much the same way as in the past all portraits which betrayed any of the technicalities of Rembrandt were attributed to that master.

PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF, BY JAN STEEN, IN THE COLLECTION OF THE EARL OF NORTHBROOK

PORTRAIT OF THE WIFE OF THOMAS WIJCK, BY JAN VERSPRONCK, IN THE COLLECTION OF MRS. STEPHENSON CLARKE

Turning from this to a Group of Three we have a splendid example by a master whose history is enshrouded still in much mystery, but who was, if one can judge from his art, a pupil of Hals—we are referring to Jan Miense Molenaer. It was evidently painted in the earlier portion of his career and has much in common with The Spinet-players in the Rycks Museum at Amsterdam. A scene which Hals would have revelled in depicting, full of uproarious good humour, the picture presents attractions quite apart from its superb technical qualities and masterly composition. Curiously enough, upon the same wall we have two examples, Jovial Companions and The Health of the Troop, by Molenaer’s wife, Judith Leyster, a painter of the school of Haarlem of the period when Hals was at the height of his fame. They are both catalogued as being collaborations by Hals and Judith Leyster, but beyond the potent influence of the former they have nothing to do with him. As pictures they are interesting to the student, but not for any striking qualities which they present. The brushwork is of a character which one expects from a painter who from self-assurance endeavours to emulate a bold and dashing manner without possessing the ability of the prototype, with the inevitable result of a coarse disjointedness irritating to the last degree. The colour scheme of each is unpleasing too, blues and reds being foiled against one another with a rashness which is born of over confidence. Of quite another character is the little Portrait of a Gentleman by Thomas de Keyser. The strong and firm modelling of the face has not a weakness apparent anywhere, whilst, as is usual with this master, he has placed a restraint upon himself which sustains him through the most arduous task without loss of dignity or ease of presentment. This grasp of his material leaves him when he attempts anything on a large scale: he loses concentration and becomes straggling. The picture is, however, overcleaned. ¶ But to revert to the school of Hals again, there are few more instructive pictures in the exhibition than The Portrait of a Dutch Lady by Jan Verspronck, who was in many respects his cleverest pupil. This is a remarkably characteristic example, the authenticity of which is convincingly attested by the presence of the signature with the date 1643. It must have occurred to many students that the scarcity of Verspronck’s pictures is accounted for by their being not infrequently converted into examples of the better-known master. They lend themselves very readily to this from the strong affinities of technique. The great point of difference is to be found in the lack of brilliancy and freedom, qualities eminently characteristic of Hals, both in his early and late period. But the delicate silveriness and luminosity of Hals find an echo in the finest portraits of Verspronck. I remember seeing a portrait of a man some years ago in London which was ascribed with all confidence to Hals, until a close examination revealed the traces of an obliterated signature of Verspronck on the background. Further, I have always held the opinion that the superb Portrait of a Lady at Antwerp is by this master, and a contemplation of the present picture strengthens this view. ¶ One other portrait is well worthy of mention, although it may be observed that it hardly comes within the scope of an exhibition of Dutch Art, but we should have been considerably the losers without it—the Portrait of Ambrogio, Marchese di Spinola, by Cornelis de Vos. It is a superb piece of direct portraiture, full of dignity and precision, and the ruff and breastplate are handled with remarkable accuracy and vigour. ¶ Of the genre paintings the most attention will be attracted by The Cook Asleep, a picture ascribed to that very rare master Jan Vermeer of Delft. There is little of his characteristic technique displayed in the treatment of the accessories—the fruit and the bottle. Still, the girl, particularly in the head and bosom, and the handling of the table-cloth, point to the work of the great Delft master, to say nothing of the signature, which has every appearance of being authentic. Nevertheless, to extol it as a masterpiece—it is set forth as such in the catalogue—by Vermeer, is quite unjustifiable when one remembers the picture in Mrs. Joseph’s possession, the two in the Six Collection at Amsterdam, or those in the Rycks Museum, the Louvre, and at Dresden and Berlin. There are weaknesses, as witness the flat painting of the arms, and the diffusion of light is not grasped with his wonted skill. It lacks just that which delights one most in the master’s work. It is unfortunate that a better picture to represent Vermeer’s contemporary Gabriel Metzu could not be obtained than A Woman Dressing Fish. I cannot agree with Smith in describing it as ‘this excellent little picture’; indeed I have grave doubts as to its being a genuine picture at all. Neither does a Portrait of a Lady worthily display the magic and refined art of Terborch, for the painting is careful even to timidity. Better by far is the Portrait of a Young Woman, which, in spite of an unequal tussle with the restorer, still presents some of his most charming qualities. Both the head and hands are in his best manner, and the black dress with its semi-transparent frills is full of such delicate painting as characterizes The Portrait of a Gentleman in the National Gallery. ¶ A most interesting panel, A Lady at a Harpsichord, is ascribed to Palamedes. Great confusion has existed with regard to his works in the past, arising from the fact that several painters have an almost identical technique and painted similar subjects. Foremost among these are Willem Cornelisz Duyster, Pieter Codde, Dirk Hals, and that controversial and mysterious master, Hendrik Pot. The fine picture at Hampton Court, described in the Commonwealth Inventory as ‘A Souldier making a Strange Posture to a Dutch Lady, by Bott,’ which has been in turn assigned to Pieter Codde, Poelenburgh, Palamedes, Mytens, and Hendrik Pot, is now permanently and rightly ascribed to the last, an attribution arrived at by careful comparison with other works, and further confirmed by the presence of Pot’s initials on the chimneypiece—all in addition to the suggestive entry in the Commonwealth Inventory. Now the panel in the exhibition is almost identical in treatment, and also with that of the Convivial Party in the National Gallery, and I think that Pot is much more likely to be its creator than Palamedes. ¶ The life work of Jan Steen, so badly illustrated at present in our public galleries, is well summed up by the humorous and most masterly Portrait of Himself. Seated on a chair, he bawls without restraint a ditty, no doubt culled from his own cabaret, accompanying himself with a mandoline, which he plays with evidently greater gusto than expression. Steen was no idealistic dreamer: he believed in earthly enjoyment, and from this fact arose the tales of dissipation of which modern investigation has proved the falsity. Still, he seems to have largely been in sympathy with the views of Omar Khayyam, and making ‘the most of what we yet may spend.’ ¶ The ascription to Adriaen Brouwer of An Interior with Figures is perhaps another misnomer. There is none of his exquisite transparency, the colouring is opaque and lacks the brilliancy of his palette, and the draughtsmanship has not nearly his precision. Again, the figures in the foreground, although having much in common with Brouwer, betray the influence of David Teniers, an influence still more marked in those talking through the window. Consequently there is a strange mixture of Dutch and Flemish art, which points to a master conversant with both. Two men suggest themselves as its author, Hendrik Sorgh and Joost van Craesbeeck, and the weight of evidence is in favour of the latter, largely because of the Flemish sentiment which pervades the whole composition and the presence of mannerisms which are peculiar to Brouwer, which leads one to give the preference to Craesbeeck rather than to Sorgh. Some particularly fine examples of the still-life painters of Holland are shown, Jan van Huysum and Jan van Os especially; whilst one of the three canvases by Willem van Aelst (No. 167) is quite a new revelation of his powers.

OFF SCHEVENINGEN, BY JAN VAN DE CAPELLE, IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. CHARLES T. D. CREWS

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Coming to the landscape men, in some respects a pleasurable surprise awaits us, and in others something akin to disappointment. The latter was furnished by the representation of Jacob van Rüysdael, by whom no less than three examples are shown. Good as they all will be considered, not one shows to the full the intensely poetical side of his genius, a side which, exemplified by the magnificent View of Haarlem in the Mauritshuis at the Hague or the View over an extensive flat wooded Country in our own National Gallery, places him far ahead of any painter of the Dutch school for the rendering of dreamy poetry of nature. He must yield the palm to Hobbema in tree painting and to Cüyp in landscape full of delicate shimmer and sunny glow, and if Philips de Koninck is his equal in the presentment of immensity of distance, he is left far behind by Rüysdael’s atmospheric achievements. One point may be conceded to Hobbema, namely, that he is more equal: he never painted a bad picture, whereas Rüysdael frequently did so; but when the two are seen at their best, the latter surpasses him by reason of his superiority in catching that essentiality of landscape—stimmung. For want of these qualities A Forest Scene, fine as it is from a technical standpoint, and in a perfect state of preservation, does not show the better side of Rüysdael. The Seapiece is better, but fails by reason of its obviously forced sky. Its redeeming feature is the masculine painting of the sea and its finely-felt distance. Perhaps the best is the so-called View on the Brill, which is impressive whilst remaining unsatisfactory. It is particularly unfortunate that a picture of Rüysdael in his best and most soulful mood could not be found, for then he would more than hold his own against any of the plein air men in the remaining galleries. By Hobbema there are two superb panels, A Woody Landscape with a gentleman on a grey horse, and A Landscape, between which, although painted at different periods of his career, there is little to choose in point of quality. However, the latter suffers from over cleaning, particularly in some of those parts—notably the middle distance—where Hobbema shines most, and this gives it a rawness quite foreign to the picture in its pristine state. Still, they are both profound in their grasp of nature and magnificence of achievement. Cüyp, too, is equally well represented by A Herdsman and a Woman tending Cattle, with its suffusion of golden sunlight over the placid river. A delicately soft and delicious haze, so essential a feature on a summer afternoon in the vicinity of a river, envelops the whole composition from the finely-grouped cattle and figures in the immediate foreground to the distant tower, and the portrayal of the relation of the exquisitely truthful sky to the landscape was vouchsafed to no Dutchman to a greater degree than to Cüyp. This is the only example here of the Dordrecht master, for few will consider seriously the pretensions of the Head of a Cow to be from his hand. It is signed (but it is to be questioned if it is a contemporary signature) Berchem, and it is possible that it is by that master, but there are other men equally likely. ¶ A capital little landscape with cattle represents the art of Adriaen van de Velde at its best. It is well that such a picture has been chosen, for it is in its original condition, unlike all too many which have become dark in parts owing to the employment of unstable pigments. Another noteworthy example is that by Jan van der Heyden; whether or not one is allowed to altogether admire such finish, one cannot but wonder at the minute and painstaking rendering of detail and at the masterly way with which, in spite of his finesse, he preserves the unity of his composition. ¶ When we come to the Aart van der Neer, a Moonlight River Scene, we are confronted with a clever picture, but one which almost presents doubts as to its being really from the hand of the master. In the first place it is painted with a much fuller brush and broader handling than is usual with Van der Neer. The trees, instead of being delicately, even minutely wrought, are treated in broad masses, and the buildings have not his directness; and one’s doubts are strengthened by the figures. Now Van der Neer was never loose—if anything, his failing is in the opposite direction—but here we have men in the foreground who are even clumsy, whilst the whole work has a lack or transparence which raises grave doubts whether it is a Dutch picture at all. Here and there is just a trace of a copyist, although a man of no mean talent and one who was copying to arrive at the spirit of the Dutchmen. We have at least one man of the English school who, if this hypothesis has foundation, is capable of this, and many little mannerisms are very like him; but some good authorities regard the picture as an early work of Van der Neer, much over-cleaned and repainted. ¶ The two Jan van de Cappelles are of unsurpassable beauty. In the little Seapiece, with its placid water, an awful stillness pervading the whole scene before the approaching storm, the last glimpses of lurid light which catch the distant town before a complete envelopment in inky blackness of the scene is accomplished, and the depth of the picture, are quite wonderful. But it is rather to Off Scheveningen we look for a thoroughly characteristic Van de Cappelle. The wonderful sky and the amount of atmosphere infused into the whole theme raises it quite on a level with the River Scene of the Wynn Ellis bequest in the National Gallery, an equal of which for pure aerial painting we have yet to see in a European Gallery. The present example is one which surpasses Willem van de Velde at his best in all the higher qualities of art. Another curious picture is the Rising in a Dutch Town, ascribed to Gerrit Berkheyde. ¶ We will now return to Le Commencement d’Orage; and in this connexion it may be convenient to quote the passage referring to this picture which occurred in the notice of the Guildhall Exhibition published in The Times, since it expresses a view now widely held. The passage is as follows:—‘Another picture, of great beauty and greater importance, has for more than a century borne Rembrandt’s name—ever since de Marcenay engraved it with that attribution. Yet it is absolutely certain that Lady Wantage’s great picture, The Beginning of the Storm (174), is not by Rembrandt at all, but is the masterpiece of Philip de Koning, who has two or three similar but smaller works in the National Gallery, and whose signed pictures since the days when Dr. Waagen wrote, have become perfectly well known. Such a picture places de Koning in the very first rank of landscape painters, and it is unjust to deprive him of it. It would take us too long to give reasons for the change of name, but there can be no doubt whatever about it. The picture, of course, shows the influence of the mighty teacher throughout, but it is in point of fact a better, truer, less fantastic landscape than he himself ever painted. It makes the Cassel and other landscapes seem what they really are—dreams, not transcripts from nature in any sense of the term.’ ¶ That the opinion thus dogmatically expressed is that of the majority of critics cannot be denied, but I venture still to acquiesce in the attribution to Rembrandt and I will give my grounds for so doing. In the first place the view is just of such a character as de Koninck painted—an extensive landscape seen from a height with river and distant sandhills, the intervening space studded here and there with hamlets. When, however, we come to compare the technique here with that in accepted pictures by de Koninck, such as the landscape No. 836 in the National Gallery, the only similarity which can be traced to him is in the handling of the bank of the river at the right and the bushes above it. But this is much too powerfully realized for de Koninck, it has a force and breadth which the pupil never put forward. This point can be observed by comparison with the National Gallery picture, which has a very similar foreground only much more restrainedly achieved. Again, the qualities to be found in the roofs by the windmill on the left of the picture and the trees over them are such as are found in all Rembrandt’s work, whether he is working in oil or with the etching needle. Further, none of the finest works of Philips de Koninck have such an impressive and powerful opposition of sunlight and gloom as we have here. He may be wonderfully fascinating in rendering the delicate silveriness of certain phases of atmospherical freshness but he is never soul-stirring, which is a quality I claim for Lady Wantage’s picture. In the sky painting there is much affinity between this and the Peel picture as regards the cloud cumuli, but a reference to the Landscape with Tobias and the Angel (No. 72) in the National Gallery will disclose an identity which demonstrates that the other similarity is only of such a character as would be found in the work of a very clever pupil assimilating his master’s technique.

LE COMMENCEMENT D’ORAGE, VARIOUSLY ATTRIBUTED TO REMBRANDT VAN RIJN AND PHILIPS DE KONINCK; IN THE COLLECTION OF LADY WANTAGE

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Before leaving this picture it would be useful to draw attention to the parallel rendering of several details—the trees and the sunlight hill in the background. Now in the second period of Rembrandt, which is tentatively placed by students as lying between 1640 and 1649, much attention to landscape is a prominent characteristic. Particularly was this the case with regard to his work with the needle. This culminated in the production of that most impressive of all his landscape etchings, The Three Trees. If that etching is compared with the present picture, many points of similarity will be observed, not only with regard to the extensive view on the left of that etching, but with regard to its realization and general feeling, beside which the art of de Koninck appears but a triviality. The Three Trees is dated 1643, and I am inclined to place this picture at about the same period, or at any rate between 1640 and 1643. With this date the technique is in strict consonance. Philips de Koninck we know was born in 1619, so that at this period he would be twenty-one, a very impressionable age, and I would hazard the suggestion, although the evidence is purely presumptive, that not only was this landscape the forerunner of The Three Trees, but that its production at the period when de Koninck was probably a pupil of Rembrandt, or at any rate had but just emerged from his studio, influenced the former to such an extent that it actually inspired his future landscapes, the similar character of which is so well known. Hence the importance of Le Commencement d’Orage for us. ¶ Yet another plea may be urged for the acceptance of the work as being by Rembrandt. It is an accepted fact, that the etchings of Hercules Seghers had great influence on Rembrandt. The inventory of his effects made in 1656 shows that he had in his possession six landscapes by Seghers in addition to the copper of Tobias and the Angel, which latter he reworked and it appears in Rembrandt’s work as the Flight into Egypt. Seghers, as is well known, was a lover of these vast Dutch plains seen from a height, as witness his flat Dutch landscape seen from a height with water in the foreground, and a flat Dutch landscape with a winding river. Now Seghers was born about 1590 and died somewhere about 1640, and it is fair to presume that at this latter date Rembrandt came into possession of the plate of Tobias and the Angel. This is the very period to which I attribute the production of Le Commencement d’Orage, and it is a noteworthy fact that prior to this date we have nothing akin to this and subsequent landscapes, so that it is fair to presume that the art of Seghers created the landscape art of Rembrandt as exemplified by The Three Trees and subsequent etchings, and through him the art of Philips de Koninck. ¶ Moreover the picture of Tobias and the Angel in the National Gallery is directly executed under the influence of Seghers, and I have already drawn attention to the similarity between the building of the sky in this picture and that of Lady Wantage’s. In view of these considerations it would seem that the champions of Philips de Koninck must show more adequate reasons before robbing Rembrandt of the authorship of this superb landscape.

EARLY STAFFORDSHIRE WARES
ILLUSTRATED BY PIECES IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

❧ WRITTEN BY R. L. HOBSON ❧

ARTICLE I

IN beginning a series of articles on Staffordshire wares, which are intended to sketch the history of those fascinating old pieces now so eagerly sought by the collector of pottery, our first duty is to select a convenient starting point. It is improbable that in a county so rich in materials as Staffordshire the making of pottery has suffered any serious intermission since prehistoric times; but I think we may safely assume that the collector, as distinct from the antiquary, will feel little interest in any of the productions of this district prior to the seventeenth century. If we except Gothic paving tiles, a few of the better costrels or pilgrim’s bottles, and the mysterious ‘poteries gracieuses de la reine Elizabeth’ (which, whatever they are, no one thinks of claiming for Staffordshire), it may be said that for five centuries after the Norman conquest the ceramic art of this country boasted nothing better than coarse pitchers, gotches, gourds, and gorges of clumsy shape and uncouth ornament, which appeal to few but the sternest antiquarians. With the seventeenth century, however, begins a new period of development, very gradual at first, but full of interest. ¶ To anyone who has recently visited the Potteries, and seen the great conglomerate of towns intersected by railways and tramlines, with its forest of chimneys and the constantly burning kilns of numberless factories that supply the markets of the world, it is difficult to picture the same district 300 years ago, wooded, wild and picturesque. The great towns were then represented by a few moorland hamlets, the teeming factories by occasional ‘hovels’ and ‘sun-kilns,’ and the armies of workmen by the solitary potter, who, helped by one or two labourers or by his own household alone, threw, glazed and fired his weekly ovenload of crocks, which his wife took to town on a donkey to exchange for the necessaries of life. It is not a very promising picture from a collector’s point of view; and yet in the first few years of the seventeenth century and in circumstances little less primitive than those we have just described, a number of pieces were made that are now eagerly sought after by persons of taste. I need hardly say that it is not the common crocks made for the market or fair that have achieved this apotheosis. The vessels with which we are at present concerned were, we may be sure, of the kind ‘made for honour,’ tours de force to celebrate special occasions, and to be cherished among the heirlooms of the poor.

FIG. I.—Slipware Dish. Depth, 16 ins.
The Pelican in her Piety.

FIG. II.—Tyg with Incised Ornament, dated 1640. Height, 5½ ins.

FIG. III.—Tyg with Seven Handles. Height, 8 ins.

FIG. IV.—Puzzle Tyg with the Sign of the Mermaid. Height, 7½ ins.

FIG. V.—Tyg with Streaked Glaze. Height, 10 ins.

FIG. VI.—Posset Pot with Stamped Ornament. Height, 10¼ ins.

FIG. VII.—Cradle of Slipware, dated 1691. Length, 7½ ins.

FIG. VIII.—Fuddling Cup. Length. 7¼ ins.

For the right understanding of our subject, it will be necessary to go into a few technical details gathered from the earliest notice (in Dr. Plot’s ‘Natural History of Staffordshire,’ 1689) of the industry, and from the silent evidence of the pots themselves. At Burslem, which even in Plot’s time was the ‘greatest pottery’ of the district, only four kinds of clay were in use for the body of the wares: bottle clay, hard fireclay which was mixed with red blending clay to make black wares, and a white clay, so called because it produced a yellow ware, which was the nearest approach to white then obtainable. Besides these there were three finer clays reserved for decorative purposes, known as orange slip, white slip, and a red slip which burnt black. Slip, it must be explained, was a creamy fluid made of clay softened by water. The glaze was produced by powdered lead ore dusted on to the ware. For special pieces the ore was first calcined. Used in its simple form, this powder, when fired, covered the ware with a transparent glass of a warm yellow tone, which gave a rich reddish brown surface to a red body, a yellow colour to white slip ornament, and a similar augmentation to clays of other tints. Only two colouring oxides appear to have been used—manganese, from which a colour was obtained varying according to its intensity from purplish brown to black, and commonly used to streak or mottle the glaze, and oxide of copper, which produced a bright green effect. The unsophisticated potter called the lead ore smithum and the manganese magnus. A little Latin went a long way in the district. ¶ Such were the simple materials that the seventeenth-century potter had at his disposal, differing scarcely at all from those used by his mediaeval forerunners. Let us see what use he made of them, when working at his best. [Fig. I] shows an ornamental dish for a cottage dresser. [Fig. II] is a type of drinking cup used on special occasions. Other not inelegant drinking vessels of the period are beaker-shaped, or in the form of an elongated dice-box with two handles close together; these are always in black ware. Another shape is seen in [Fig. III]. The principal feature of most of these quaint tygs, or loving-cups, is their astonishing number of handles, which range from two to as many as twelve. It is supposed that the purpose of this equipment was that the cup might pass from hand to hand, and each guest have a fresh portion of the rim to himself, no doubt an excellent arrangement for the first time round! Not content with half a dozen or so of full-grown handles, the potter frequently inserted between each of them a sort of rudimentary handle consisting of a looped strip of clay. Another variety of the tyg was called a posset pot, and was usually distinguished by a spout. The posset pot would seem to have been a family possession preserved with great respect, and used only on special occasions, such as Christmas time. It also suffered from a plethora of handles. Of any exact recipe for a posset I must plead ignorance, but I fancy it as a compound of mulled ale with an indefinite something floating on the surface, succulent, and exceedingly popular. There were other and still more fanciful drinking vessels besides these. A fuddling cup is shown in [Fig. VIII]. When it is realized that the six cups communicate with each other internally, so that to empty one you must empty all, the force of the name will be apparent. Any doubt as to the use of these formidable vessels is dispelled by the inscription on a similar piece, Fill me ful of sidar, drink of me. The puzzle jug is another playful variety. [Fig. IX] is an elaborate example from which it will be seen that the liquor must be extracted in some unusual way if the drinker wants to get his full measure, and has any respect for his clothes. The rim and handle are tubes, communicating with the body of the jug, through which the contents must be sucked from a spout in front of the rim, in this case the bird’s beak. To complicate matters there are usually one or more concealed holes in the tubes which must be stopped by the fingers, in addition to a false spout or two, such as is seen on the side of the rim. The puzzle jug is a joke of long standing. Specimens have been found which go back to the fourteenth century, and the trick is not quite unknown at the present day. No doubt their existence was prolonged by the far-seeing publican who appreciated the possibilities implied in the following doggerel that appears on one of them:—

Gentlemen, now try your skill.

I’ll hold you sixpence, if you will,

That you don’t drink unless you spill.

FIG. IX.—Puzzle Jug. Height, 9½ ins.

FIG. X.—Horn Lantern of Slipware.

FIG. XI.—Owl Jug with Combed Feathers. Height, 8½ ins.

FIG. XII.—Posset Cup of Slipware. Height, 7¼ ins.

Another pleasant surprise was furnished by the toad mug, in which the drinker as he neared the bottom discovered a well-modelled toad, usually of red clay with white slip eyes. [Fig. XI] is an example of a rarer class. The owl jug was made with a removable head which could be used as a cup. It is, however, a disputed question whether these jugs are of Staffordshire origin, and it is hinted that they have a suspiciously close parallel in German pottery. Other special forms of a less bibulous kind are shown in [Fig. VII], a model of a cradle which tells its own tale; and [Fig. X], a horn lantern. Candlesticks, handovens and condiment trays also occur. ¶ We must now return for a moment to technicalities in order to understand the remaining feature of our wares, their ornament. The tyg, jug, cradle or piece of whatever form, was sometimes left to depend for its popularity on its streaky purplish brown or glossy black glaze alone, neither of them a recommendation to be despised; or it was embellished with a scratched design, a pattern impressed by wooden stamps, or applied pads of clay moulded or stamped with rosettes, formal ornament, and occasionally with the human form. I have seen a tyg with busts of King Charles I disposed round its perimeter, an unusually ambitious design for a potter of the period. The handles were made a still more conspicuous feature by the addition of twists of coloured clay, knobs and bosses. ¶ Another and a larger group were ornamented with the slips we spoke of above. These were applied in various ways. First as simple washes to give a light surface to a dark body or vice versa (see Figs. [IX] and [XII]). Or again they were dropped or trailed on from a spouted vessel in quaint tracery, dotted patterns, or outlined designs. As might be expected at this period, the tulip more or less conventionalized was a favourite motive. The process is best understood by taking an example. [Fig. VII] is of light buff ware: the ornament on the upper part, and the inscription and date, WILLIAM CHATERLY, 1696, were traced in black slip dotted with white; the lower half was immersed in black slip, and the pattern added in white; the whole was then leaded and fired. ¶ A third method consisted in dropping slip of one or more colours on the surface and working it about with a wire brush or leather comb until an effect similar to our graining or paper marbling was obtained. Wares so treated are called combed or marbled wares (see Figs. [XI] and [XIII]). This process, seen on the tall bottle-shaped costrels attributed to the sixteenth century, continued in its primitive form to the middle of the eighteenth century, when it developed into the agate ware of Whieldon and Wedgwood and their contemporaries. ¶ Lastly, there was graffiato ware, in which a thick coating of slip was laid over a body of contrasting colour and the pattern scratched through so as to discover the body beneath (see [Fig. VIII]). This kind of ornament has been in use in all countries and from the earliest times. It is seen at its best on Italian pottery from the quattrocento onwards, and the continuance of its Italian name is a compliment to the masterpieces of that country.

FIG. XIII.—Tyg with Trailed and Combed Slip. Inscribed Ralph Tumor, 168–. Height, 4¾ ins.

FIG. XIV.—Puzzle Jug of Slipware. Inscribed I.B.

It remains to speak of dates and localities. Those of our wares that have no slip decoration can be traced back to the first years of the seventeenth century, if not to Elizabethan times. They continued to the early part of the eighteenth century, when they either disappeared or were improved out of recognition. Like all primitive wares, they were manufactured all over the country, and though it is certain that a large number of them were made in Staffordshire, it would be difficult to claim any particular piece for that district. Slip decoration, which dates back to mediaeval times, was equally universal. Indeed we know that a well-defined class of slip ware with stamped ornaments and patterns of dots and dashes was made at Wrotham in Kent from 1612–1717. Another group with a distinctive kind of scroll and fern ornament in thin white slip, and inscriptions usually of Puritanical tone, was made in or near London from the middle of the sixteenth century. A third kind is attributed with much probability to Cockpit Hill, Derby. It is characterized by moulded patterns with raised outlines which contained the coloured slips much as the cloisons contain the enamels on cloisonnée work. ¶ But the best slipware of Staffordshire, as exemplified by Figs. [I], [XII], and [XIV], is unmistakable in style, and yields to none in picturesque effect. Our earliest clue to its history was given by the simple legend scratched on the back of a dish similar to [Fig. I], THOMAS TOFT. TINKERS CLOUGH. I MADE IT., 166–. Tinker’s Clough is a lane between Shelton and Wedgwood’s Etruria. On the strength of this modest confession the name Toft ware has been applied by many writers to all slipwares of this class, and even to slipware generally. A number of other names, sometimes with dates, are found on these wares (e.g. Ralph Toft 1676, Charles Toft, Ralph Turnor 1681, Robart (sic) Shaw 1692), many of them no doubt the names of potters, others of those for whom the pots were made. Slipware, though naturally superseded by the finer earthenwares of the eighteenth century, is not yet extinct, and may be seen occasionally at country fairs of the present day. ¶ The question of Staffordshire delft ware is too long to consider here. It is a moot point if any such thing existed before the eighteenth century, and it is certain that delft was never made there to any extent worth considering. But this article would be incomplete if one omitted to give a few of the quaint inscriptions that are a feature of the various kinds of pots we have discussed. They tell their own story and need no comment:—

The gift is small, Good will is all.

Mary Oumfaris your cup. 1678. [Can this spell Humphreys!]

This for W. F. 1691.

The best is not to good for you. 1697. I.B. R.F.

Anne Draper this cup I made for you and so no more. I.W. 1707.

Come good wemen drink of the best Ion my lady and all the rest.

Brisk be to the med you desier as her love yow ma requare.

Robert Pool mad this cup With gud posset fil and

The aposiopesis in the last is pregnant with meaning. ¶ Naturally after all these years good examples of old Staffordshire wares are scarce, and when they appear in the market they can only be bought at proportionately good prices, owing to the eagerness with which they are sought by the collector. And me judice they deserve all the attention they get. There is something genuinely fascinating in their naïve simplicity and their entire lack of all that is artificial or extraneous. We do not, of course, pretend that for instance the use of slip originated in this country, but the particular application of it that is so characteristic of the Staffordshire wares is of purely native development. These early pots are like the potters who made them and their friends who used them, English to the backbone.

FIG. XV.—Cup of Slipware, dated 1719.

NEW ACQUISITIONS AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

A MEDIAEVAL SILVER CHALICE FROM ICELAND

THE national collection of silversmiths’ work at South Kensington has lately been enriched by the acquisition of a silver chalice of exceptional beauty and interest, which has reached this country, by way of Denmark, with the history of having belonged formerly to the church of Grundt, a village in the north of Iceland. ¶ As will be seen from the illustration, the chalice is of the early type in which the round contour prevails, in hemispherical bowl, bulb-shaped knop, and circular foot. The bowl is of fine workmanship, fashioned with the hammer with admirable uniformity, and finished with a high polish on the outside. Round its margin runs the leonine hexameter (with some allowances) + SVMMITVR HINC NVNDA DIVINI SANGVINIS VNDA (no doubt for ‘sumitur hinc munda divini sanguinis unda ’).[34] The lettering of the inscription, of which a rubbing is shown, is interesting, apart from the beauty and freedom of its forms, in helping to fix an approximate date for the object it adorns. ¶ The knop, separated from the bowl by a narrow indented necking with beaded edges, is cast hollow, pierced and chiselled with four compartments of foliage. The leafage in each compartment is of a different design, and in each springs from the turned-up ends of a circumscribing band stamped with a row of annulets (see [illustration]). The upper spandrels so formed are filled each with a small leaf; the lower are blank. ¶ The trumpet-shaped foot is finished round the margin with a bevel, engraved with a rudimentary fret and turned out at the edge in a narrow rim. At its junction with the knop it is enriched with a border of vertical leaves rising from a kind of nebuly band. The workmanship of the foot is notably inferior to that of the bowl; the hammermarks are plainly visible inside, and outside no careful polishing has smoothed away the concentric markings of the turning tool which was used, after the hammer, on both bowl and foot. It may perhaps be suggested that the inferior finish of the foot is evidence of its not having originally belonged to the bowl; but the suggestion is discredited by the excellent proportion existing between the two, and by the similarity of both to the corresponding parts of other examples about to be noticed. It is more probable that a higher finish was imparted to the bowl in deference to its function as the receptacle of the consecrated wine. ¶ To conclude the description, the enriched portions, that is to say, the band of inscription round the bowl, the knop with the parts adjacent, and the bevel of the foot, and these only, are gilt, by the old mercury process, with a pale gold. The measurements are: height 413⁄16 in. (12˙2 cm.), diameter of bowl 3¾ in. (9˙5 cm.), diameter of foot 39⁄16 in. (9 cm.). With the chalice is a paten of plain silver, a slightly concave disc 51⁄16 in. (12˙9 cm.) in diameter, with a roughly-formed circular depression. As this is of very rough make, and has no appearance of being that which originally accompanied the chalice, it need not be referred to further.

A SCANDINAVIAN CHALICE OF THE EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY, WITH DETAILS (ACTUAL SIZE) OF INSCRIPTION AND DECORATION; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON.

⇒
LARGER IMAGE

The shape of the chalice is sufficient, by comparison with other examples, to determine its date approximately. It may be compared, in respect of its hemispherical bowl, its flattened globular knop, and its trumpet-shaped foot with bevelled margin, with a much larger and more ornate example in the church of the Holy Apostles at Cologne, shown by the character of its ornament to be of the early part of the thirteenth century.[35] While in the latter example, however, the bowl and knop are separated by a stem equal in length to at least half of the height of the knop, in our chalice they are separated only by the narrow indented band with beaded edges already noticed.[36] ¶ A closer parallel, though again on a larger scale, is furnished by an example dated 1222, formerly in the Heckscher collection, and now in the possession of Sir Samuel Montagu, where all the main features referred to are reproduced, and a much closer similarity in the spacing of bowl and knop is observable.[37] ¶ Still more to the point, however, is a silver chalice found at Sorö, in Denmark, in the year 1827, with an episcopal ring, in the grave of Absalon, bishop of Lund (died 1201).[38] We have here an example from the latter part of the twelfth or the first year of the thirteenth century, reproducing almost exactly the outlines of our chalice already described, and in almost the same dimensions. In the bishop’s chalice the knop is plain, and set off by a band of shallow fluting above and below; but these differences of detail, and even a somewhat wider separation of bowl and knop, cannot veil the striking resemblance of type between the two. ¶ The inscription with its combination of uncial and capital letters furnishes further evidence of date. In general style, as well as in its peculiarities of the use of both varieties of D, the freely curved G, and the A with bent cross-stroke, it shows considerable affinity to the inscription on the ivory cross of Gunhilda (died 1076), grand-niece of Canute, in the Copenhagen Museum.[39] The same peculiarities, as well as the V with a circle on its sinister stroke, are to be observed in the inscriptions on the altar frontal of Lisbjerg, in Denmark, assigned to the twelfth century. The tendency towards curved forms, however, shown in the rounding of the interior of the capital D’s and in the curving-in of the tails of these letters and of the R may be more closely matched, in default of a Scandinavian example, in the inscriptions on the bronze font at Hildesheim, assigned to the second quarter of the thirteenth century.[40] At this date, however, the fully-developed Lombardic character has so far prevailed over the roman capital that it is only by picking out letters here and there, existing as survivals among their curved supplanters, that such pure capital or transitional characters as form the staple of our inscription can be matched. ¶ The foliage on the knop is in two of the groups of that conventional type which, apparently in reality a debasement of the classical acanthus, is employed in the decoration of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the leafage of the symbolical vine; and the bud-shaped objects springing among the leaves in one compartment are clearly intended for such bunches of grapes as are similarly rendered in ironwork of the thirteenth century. Foliage of similar character, rising in the same way from the curved ends of the circumscribing band, may be observed on certain of the carved church doors of the twelfth century in Norway,[41] where such groups, employed in rows side by side, distinctly recall an enrichment of classical architecture. It is less easy to speak confidently of another of the bunches of leaves, which suggests the growth either of a trumpet-shaped lichen or possibly of an arum lily. The single flat leaf with curled edges seems clearly the leaf of a water-plant. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see in this and the vine foliage already noticed a reference to the two constituents of the sacramental element. ¶ Turning to the question of nationality, it is to be remarked that the inscription and the lines enclosing it, one above and two below, are entirely engraved in that zigzag line, reminding one of the mark of an assayer’s tool, which is an almost constant characteristic, even till recent times, of Scandinavian silversmiths’ work; and the fret round the foot shows the same peculiarity. It has already been said that the chalice comes to us with a tale of a distant but active centre of Scandinavian art. If it be doubted whether such highly developed work could have been produced in Iceland at the date indicated it may be recalled that this remote island, whose inhabitants anticipated by five centuries the discovery of Columbus, was at this time the home of a culture such as could hardly be boasted by continental Scandinavia—a land, indeed, ‘where, long before the “literary eras” of England or Germany, a brilliant period of intellectual life produced and elaborated in its own distinct form of expression a literature superior to any north of the Alps.’[42] ¶ Gathering the conclusions to which all indications point, there seems every reason to regard this beautiful little chalice as an example of Scandinavian work, of a date not later than the early part of the thirteenth century, produced, it may well be, in that farthest outpost of European culture whence already in the dark ages a hand was stretched out from the old world to the new.

H. P. MITCHELL.

THE REID GIFT.—II

One of the most interesting of the Italian manuscripts is a Book of Hours—Officium Beatae Virginis Marine secundum consuetudinem Romanae Curiae—belonging to the early part of the sixteenth century, and evidently made for a member of the famous Bentivoglio family: perhaps Giovanni, born in 1505. The Bentivoglio arms appear on the first page; on folio 41 in two cartouches within the border are the words IOANNES, BEN; and on folio 109, in one cartouche similarly placed, IO·BEN. The writing of this volume is very good; the more important initials are well drawn, and pleasantly placed in architectural compartments decorated above and below with the characteristic ornament of the period. Indeed one would say that the composition and arrangement of the less ornate pages of the book are its best features. There are twenty-two full-page illuminations, each containing an elaborate initial, within a rich border of brightly-coloured arabesque ornament, generally in compartments. The decoration is well drawn and distributed, though the drawing of the figures in the initials, and of the half-human grotesques in the borders, leaves something to be desired. An interesting and useful feature—though one by no means uncommon—is the use of jewellery to give relief to the arabesques. ¶ From the calligraphic point of view only, a tall folio of the four Gospels, with commentary (Italian, twelfth century), is possibly the most important of the gift, and should be especially useful to students. The text is written in a large minuscule character, beautifully spaced and proportioned, occupying the centre of each page. In either margin occur the notes in much smaller writing. Practically the whole decoration consists of initials in blue and red, with here and there a rare display of bold but simple pen-drawn ornament and a few chapter headings of tall, cramped lettering, of which the initial has never been supplied. A ‘Thesaurus’ of St. Cyril of Alexandria is another valuable example of fine Italian writing; in this instance, of the end of the fifteenth century in date. A border and a few fine initials in gold, blue, pale red and green of cunningly contrived interlacements—in the case of the border further embellished with amorini, birds, etc.—are the only decorations of note. This volume also includes a work by St. John Chrysostom, and formerly belonged to the Minutoli Tegrimi family of Lucca, whose stamp defaces some of the pages. A small Book of Hours is to be referred to the same period and locality as the latter; it has, however, much more elaborate decoration; the superposition of numerous beasts, birds, and insects on the interlacing scroll-work of the borders, is, though interesting, by no means an improvement. These animals are, it must be admitted, rendered with curious care; while the two full-page miniatures adorning the volume, as it stands, are of quite a high order of merit. They represent The Annunciation and David killing Goliath—a particularly spirited drawing, with a beautiful little miniature of the Man of Sorrows in a cartouche on the page facing it; four storied initials within borders also serve to mark the commencements of various offices. The capitals, in gold, on these pages are very finely written. The kalendar is complete, and contains references to several local saints, indicating Umbria as the district for use in which it was made. ¶ A Missal belonging in date to the beginning of the fifteenth century, is a good example of Italian writing adorned with fine pen-drawn scrolls and storied initials treated in a broad, simple style of colouring and foliage. The pen-work, interesting for its restraint and formality, differs greatly in this respect from that of the more northern schools. There are sixteen large storiated initials, of which attention may be drawn to those on folios 283, a Monstrance displayed on an altar; 292, the Celebration of Mass; and a representation of the absolutions at the side of a dead man, clothed and hooded in red and lying on a couch; the prayer is read by a monk in a white habit, attended by another similarly dressed who supports a tall cross which has lighted candles on either arm. The kalendar is very full, and has been corrected in a later handwriting in several places. Immediately following it, in two pages of small script, is the Ordo ad faciendum aquā bn̄dictam. ¶ A small Italian Book of Hours is archaeologically interesting because it is signed in a colophon on folio 266. ‘Frater paulus de mediolano ordīs scī B’tholomei de hermineis sc’psit’ (late fifteenth century). The name of this writer is believed to be unrecorded hitherto; the script is thoroughly Italian in character, but the decoration has decided Netherlandish tendencies. Several northern saints are inserted in the kalendar—by another hand—including St. Brandan. ¶ In conclusion mention may be made of a small Book of Devotions with borders and miniatures of considerable merit and interest, placed within architectural frames. On the first page is a coat of arms, which however has evidently been superimposed on an earlier design. The writing is good and the initials well placed and coloured. At the end on a tablet are the initials S.H., but these have not been identified. The work is French, probably southern, and in date belongs to the first half of the sixteenth century. ¶ The works mentioned in these notes are only a few of the large collection given by Mr. Reid. They are all now exhibited near the entrance to the National Art Library.

E. F. S.

THE PRINT ROOM OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

The most interesting among recent additions to the Print Room are woodcuts, both old and new. A chiaroscuro by Andreani, after Alessandro Casolani of Siena, representing the Pietà, or Lamentation for Christ, is remarkable both for its great size—it measures nearly six feet by four—and for its rarity. Other impressions exist at Bassano and Berlin. The figures, St. John supporting the dead Saviour, and a second group of three holy women in attendance on the Virgin, are nearly of the size of life, and the wood-engraver evidently set himself the task of producing the closest possible facsimile of a large cartoon, outlined in charcoal and washed with neutral tints. He has succeeded very well, and he was fortunate, considering the date, 1592, in obtaining so fine a composition on which to exert his skill. The design has been cut throughout on three sets of blocks, one for the black outline and two for tone. The impression, on many sheets of paper joined together, is in good preservation, but the lowest portion has perhaps been cut away, for there is no trace of the inscription, recorded by Kolloff in his catalogue of Andreani’s works (No. 15), that contains the dedication of the print to Vincenzo Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, with the names of the artists and the date and place of publication. Andreani had worked hitherto at Rome, Florence, and Siena. It was to this dedication, apparently, and to his success in such an important print, that he owed a summons to Mantua, his native city, and a commission from the duke to reproduce in chiaroscuro Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar. ¶ Another woodcut of smaller but still considerable dimensions (39¾ by 28¼ inches) bears the address ‘Gedruckt zu Nürmberg Bey hans Wolff Glaser,’ cut upon the block in a tablet at the left lower corner. Glaser was a ‘Briefmaler’ or petty publisher, printer, and wood-engraver, who was at work at Nuremberg in the middle, or third quarter, of the sixteenth century. His name is most familiar as the publisher of one of the late editions of the portrait of Dürer at the end of his life. The present work represents the Trinity, with angels in adoration. These angels are copied, for the most part, from Dürer’ fine woodcut of 1511 (B. 122), but they have been sadly spoilt in the process of enlargement. Glaser’s work is coarse throughout, and remarkable only for the rarity which it shares with most early woodcuts of exceptional size. ¶ A fine impression of the portrait of Luther as an Augustinian friar, after Cranach, dated 1520 (P. 194), has been well coloured by a contemporary hand. A tablet at the bottom contains the undescribed Latin inscription, EFFIGIES DOCTORIS MARTINI LVTHERI | AVGVSTINIANI WITTENBERGĒSIS | 1520. The Holy Dove is added at the top on a separate block, which also completes the arch. The portrait, rare in the early, original impressions, hardly deserves to rank with the woodcuts drawn by Cranach himself on the block; it seems, rather, to be a good adaptation of an engraving on copper of the same year (P. 8, Sch. 7), in which Luther stands in front of a niche. Dr. Flechsig finds much fault with the engraving itself, and will not allow it to be more than a copy of the other engraved portrait of Luther (B. 5, Sch. 6), with a plain background. With this woodcut were purchased three interesting and undescribed etchings of knights arrayed for the tournament, by the monogrammist C. S., a German artist of about 1550. ¶ A dainty little book, without text, but with the address, A LION | PAR IAN DE TOVRNES. | M.D. LVI, within a graceful arabesque border, on the first page, contains proofs of sixty blocks by wood-engravers of the Lyons school, printed throughout on the recto of the leaf. ‘Das gebet Salomonis’ (S. Grimm, Augsburg, 1523; 8vo.) has a pretty border to the title, and a woodcut, Moses receiving the Tables of the Law, both by the fascinating illustrator known provisionally as ‘The Master of the Trostspiegel.’ A more important illustrated book is ‘Die Legend des heyligen vatters Francisci,’ printed by Hölzel at Nuremberg in 1512, and profusely illustrated with woodcuts by Wolf Traut. The fine copy recently purchased for the Print Room was formerly in the library of William Morris. ¶ Another volume, still more intimately associated with the author of ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ is the gift of Mr. George Young Wardle, a friend and associate of Morris. It contains a complete set, one of a very small number in existence, of proofs rubbed by hand from unpublished blocks, designed by Burne-Jones, to illustrate the tale of ‘Cupid and Psyche.’ The illustrations, forty-four in number, were drawn upon the block by Mr. Wardle himself from the rough sketches of Burne-Jones, which are now at Oxford. Morris, in revolt against the methods of professional wood-engravers, had a few blocks cut by amateurs, chosen among his own friends, and then took up the task himself and cut by far the larger number with his own hands. To these illustrations are added some initials and decorative borders, both designed and cut by Morris. The story of the projected edition has been told in ‘A Note on the Kelmscott Press.’ The scheme was abandoned about 1870. The woodcuts, accordingly, belong to the period of English illustrations generally described as ‘the sixties,’ and are separated by a long interval from the later Burne-Jones woodcuts, including the Chaucer series, which were printed in the ‘nineties,’ at the Kelmscott Press. They are as full of romance as anything that Burne-Jones ever drew, and the cutting, inexperienced and occasionally faulty as it is, often preserves the freshness of the original sketch as no mere hack engraver’s work would have done. It must not be forgotten, however, that the defects of the cutting, in the opinion of Morris and Burne-Jones themselves, were so serious as to make the publication of the blocks undesirable. In addition to such rubbed proofs as those lately in Mr. Wardle’s possession, a small number of proofs exist which were pulled at a later date in the printing-press, and do more justice to the blocks.

C. D.

NOTES ON VARIOUS WORKS OF ART

TWO ALLEGED ‘GIORGIONES’

THE Leuchtenberg Gallery at St. Petersburg has lately yielded up some of those treasures which it has long and jealously guarded. In 1852 Passavant published a catalogue raisonné of the pictures, with illustrations in outline, and to many this large volume has been the sole medium of introduction to the collection. Several of the originals have now found their way to London, among them two which bear the great name of Giorgione—an Adoration of the Shepherds, and a Madonna and Child. Both appear in outline in Passavant’s book, under the name of Barbarelli, the supposed cognomen of Giorgione, to which, however, as modern research has shown, he is not entitled.[43] ¶ The Madonna and Child picture has now passed into the rich collection of Mr. George Salting, of which assuredly it will not be one of the least ornaments; here moreover it will hang in company with another picture from the same hand, each admirably illustrating two different phases of Cariani’s art. For to Cariani, the Bergamesque painter, must be ascribed the authorship of this Madonna and Child, which reveals him in a mood no less characteristic than does the fine Portrait of one of the Albani Family, which Mr. Salting has generously placed on loan at the National Gallery. It would be a fitting complement to see the new Cariani hung near the other, if only to prove how charming an artist he can be at times, and how far superior these examples are to the two which the nation actually possesses at Trafalgar Square. ¶ Like all artists not absolutely in the first rank, Cariani varies considerably in quality of workmanship; indeed, owing to the peculiar local characteristics of Bergamesque art Cariani is exceptionally protean in form, appearing now in Venetian guise, now in Brescian, now in his own native awkwardness. For by nature he was not gifted with great refinement, or with a strong individuality, and when the temporary influence of Lotto, or of Palma Vecchio, or even of Previtali, was withdrawn, he easily lapsed into a slovenliness which repels, or into a tastelessness which betrays his provincial origin. Fortunately this is not the mood we feel in Mr. Salting’s Madonna. There is a homely strain indeed, which makes the subject simply Mother and Child; a conception which we find exactly paralleled in another charming work of his known as La Vergine Cucitrice, or The Sempstress Madonna, in the Corsini Gallery in Rome (see [illustration]). But the homeliness of conception is in each case relieved by the exquisite setting; the landscape background and especially the decorative foliage being treated with a rare feeling for beautiful effects. Girolamo dai Libri’s lemon trees and the leafy arbours of Lotto and Previtali do not make more charming bowers than do Cariani’s rose hedge and his hanging limes. Add, moreover, a certain fullness of form, a softness of expression, and a harmony of colour, which can be traced to the direct influence of Palma Vecchio in Venice, and you have in Mr. Salting’s picture probably the most attractive Madonna and Child which Cariani ever painted. Can there be better evidence of appreciation on the part of some bygone owner than that he considered it worthy of the great Giorgione himself, and that up to now it has borne this courtesy title?

Walker & Cockerell, Ph.Sc.

Madonna and Child by Giovanni Busi (Cariani) in the collection of Mr. George Salting.

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LARGER IMAGE

Photography by Anderson

THE SEMPSTRESS MADONNA (LA VERGINE CUCITRICE) BY CARIANI; IN THE CORSINI GALLERY, ROME

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LARGER IMAGE

The second ‘Giorgione’ which comes from the Leuchtenberg Gallery is an Adoration of the Shepherds, now in the possession of Mr. Asher Wertheimer, by whose kind permission it is reproduced here. No excuse need be offered for its publication in The Burlington Magazine, inasmuch as it bears directly on one of the lesser problems in our National Gallery, where, in the Venetian Room, has hung for some years a similar painting ascribed to Savoldo. That this ascription is erroneous is admitted in the large illustrated edition of the catalogue, published a year or two ago by Sir Edward Poynter, the director, and it seems a pity to keep the old label with Savoldo’s name still attached to the frame. The National Gallery is a place of public resort, and the public believes in the labels it reads; for what does the public know of Savoldo? Those, however, who have studied his work at Venice, Milan, Verona, and elsewhere know that our National Gallery picture is only in a remote degree akin to him in style, and anyone who will take the trouble to make a comparison with the Magdalen in the same room (which is a genuine example), and also with the two pictures by him at Hampton Court, will be able to convince himself that Sir Edward Poynter is right in removing the Brescian master’s name from the catalogue, and more wisely substituting ‘Venetian School.’ Now comes the Leuchtenberg picture, a comparison with which proves that such likenesses exist as to exclude all theory of chance resemblance, yet such differences also exist as to dispel any suspicion that the one may be a copy of the other. In such cases a common original can usually be inferred, a deduction which modern archaeologists habitually make in similar circumstances; and rightly, for a common idea, or conception, underlies the outward divergencies of detail, so that when the highest common factor can be found we can reconstruct in idea what such an original must have been like. Now it is curious that Giorgione’s name is attached to the Leuchtenberg picture, for anyone at all familiar with Venetian painting must see at a glance that the style proclaims a period at least a decade after his death in 1510. It is more than probable that both this picture and that in the National Gallery date from about 1530 or so. Giorgione cannot possibly have produced either the one or the other: but is it altogether beyond possibility that some idea of his may have served as basis for later artists to work up? Strictly speaking, neither picture is Giorgionesque, except by reflection, for the dazzling personality of the young Castelfrancan shed lustre even on the succeeding generation in Venice. In neither does the painting show much trace of that mysterious glamour which the master, above all Venetian painters, knew how to impart. Yet in the romantic rendering of the subject, and in the picturesque treatment of landscape, we may trace an ultimate connexion with the art of Giorgione. In neither is the handling so unmistakably individual as to warrant a positive opinion as to authorship. It is true that several competent judges profess to recognize the hand of Calisto da Lodi in the National Gallery picture,[44] but further research is needed before certainty of judgement is reached; and as to the Leuchtenberg example—well, it matters little whether Beccaruzzi or some other imitator of better things be the author. Two separate painters have taken a common theme, they have treated the group of St. Joseph and the two Shepherds practically alike, and have laid down the outlines of landscape and architecture in the same way. Each has shown his independence in the treatment of the Madonna and Child and in the minor accessories. One of these details in the Leuchtenberg picture shows the sort of man the painter was, for he has calmly appropriated the idea of the boy angel playing at the trough, a motive which Titian first introduced in the world-famous Sacred and Profane Love. He seems also prone to introduce non-significant detail, such as the dog (very wooden, by the way) and the elaborate accessories of the ruined stable, the architecture of which baffles analysis. The Magi also appear in procession, thus distracting attention from the simple theme of the Adoration of the Shepherds. Yet as a colourist this painter is worthy of praise, though not such a master of chiaroscuro as his fellow-artist of the National Gallery. We may say then that the Leuchtenberg picture adds to the interest attaching to the other, and raises the question whether some Giorgionesque motive is not at the bottom of the composition.

HERBERT COOK.

TWO ITALIAN BAS-RELIEFS IN THE LOUVRE

THE two bas-reliefs reproduced were not only known but also celebrated before they came to the Louvre. The first, a bust and profile, represents a juvenile figure, almost feminine, clothed in shining armour, wearing a helmet decorated with a surprising dash and fantasy, round which may be read this unexpected and rather unusual inscription: ‘P. Scipioni.’ It is not known under what circumstances this was acquired by M. Paul Rattier, an amateur of Paris. On his death he bequeathed it to the Louvre with reserve of usufruct on behalf of his brother. The latter has just died, and the museum thus enters into absolute possession of the legacy. In the various exhibitions where this bas-relief has been displayed it has not failed, as may be imagined, to attract the attention and excite the curiosity of students and critics. As it recalls by the expression of the face a great number of Leonardo’s figures and, in the decoration of the armour and the helmet, motives frequent in the work of the master, notably the celebrated warrior in the Malcolm collection, we think firstly and very naturally of Leonardo da Vinci. We know, too, that he was a sculptor as well as a painter; he himself says expressly in his treatise on painting that, having practised the two arts with equal care, he has a good foundation for pronouncing on the difficulties of both. But we know of no authentic sculpture from his hand which could serve as a starting-point or as a means of comparison for the purpose of making a decisive attribution. Is the St. John the Baptist in the South Kensington Museum, which came from the Gigli Campana collection, really from his hand? No one can prove it. And of the busts of children and women which, according to Vasari, he executed in clay (‘Facendo nella sua giovanezza di terra alcune teste di femine che ridono, che vanno formate per l’ arte di gesso, e parimente teste di putti che parevano usciti di mano d’ un maestro’), none have come down to us. ¶ Bode, who was the first to pronounce the name of Leonardo in connexion with the Scipio of the Rattier collection, proposed, afterwards, that of his master Verrochio. The reasons which prompted him are as follows: Vasari has told us that Verrochio had made ‘due teste di metallo; una d’Alessandro Magno in profilo; l’ altro d’ un Dario, a suo capriccio, pur di mezzo rilievo, e ciascuno da per se, variando l’ un dall’ altro ne cimieri, nell armadura od in ogni cosa; le quali amendue furono mandate dal magnifico Lorenzo vecchio de’ Medici al re Mattia Corvino in Ungharia, con molte altre cose....’ Why should not the Scipio belong to the same series? The ornamentation of the helmet, the design of the streamers which decorate it, especially the modelling of the mouth, do they not recall other works of Verrochio, and notably the execution of the mouth of his David? These arguments, no matter on what authority we have them, are not decisive. Courajod, Muntz, Muller-Walde, and the latest historian of Verrochio, M. Mackowsky, incline rather towards maintaining the name of Leonardo da Vinci or of his school. All that can be said with certainty is, that the sculptor who turned out this brilliant piece of work must have been a very skilful decorative artist, and that he was evidently inspired by the achievements and the spirit of the master. But it would be very rash to assert that the hand of Leonardo himself worked this marble.

ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS; VENETIAN SCHOOL; FROM THE LEUCHTENBERG COLLECTION

ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS, VENETIAN SCHOOL; IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

BAS-RELIEF; SCHOOL OF LEONARDO DA VINCI; RECENTLY ADDED TO THE LOUVRE

BAS-RELIEF BY AGOSTINO DI DUCCIO; RECENTLY ADDED TO THE LOUVRE

If There does not seem any possibility for doubt or difference of opinion with regard to the attribution of the other bas-relief which, only a few days after the arrival of the Scipio, was acquired by the museum. To him who has seen the interior decoration of the temple of Rimini, the front of San Bernardino at Perugia, and the Madonna of the Opera di Duomo at Florence, the name of Agostino di Duccio invincibly presents itself. This bas-relief was found framed, over an altar, in the wall of a little church in the department of the Oise, a dependent of the commune of Neuilly-sous-Clermont. This rural church was originally the chapel belonging to the chateau of Auvillers, which belongs to the family of Bonnières-de-Wierre. One of the general officers of Bonaparte’s army was a member of this family, and brought this precious bas-relief home with him (the archives of the family might possibly reveal to us the place and the circumstances under which he found it), and he placed it in the chapel belonging to the chateau. It was thence that the Louvre, with the consent of the members of the family of Bonnières and of the commune, acquired it. A former lamented head of the department of Mediaeval and Renaissance Sculpture, Louis Courajod, published, in 1892, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, an account of this charming piece of sculpture, and, to put it out of the reach of any attempts that might be made by collectors or merchants, he had it placed on the list of historical monuments. Events have proved that this was not an unnecessary precaution; however, the admission of this bas-relief into the Louvre puts a stop to all competition.

ANDRÉ MICHEL.

TWO PICTURES IN THE POSSESSION OF MESSRS. DOWDESWELL

THESE two remarkable and curious pictures appear to us likely to interest students of mediaeval painting. They are painted on thin panels measuring 12⅛ ins. by 7⅞ ins. The wood has first been covered with a rather coarse canvas, over which the usual gesso ground has been laid; directly on this, and without the usual preparation of bole, gold leaf was laid over the whole surface. The gold is elaborately tooled in the halos and crowns. The pictures are painted in tempera over the gold ground. The handiwork is of exceptional fineness, the hatchings being extremely minute, and the whole is wrought to an enamelled surface of extreme beauty. I can recall only one other work in which quite the same minuteness and perfection of surface quality are attained, and that is the Richard II diptych at Wilton House, which indeed surpasses the present examples. Unfortunately the tempera has not adhered perfectly to the gold, and in many places only a trace of colour is left; the faces are, however, for the most part intact. ¶ This somewhat lengthy description of the methods employed in these pictures may not be without value in view of the attempt to determine the origin of these curious and unusual works. Many characteristics of the pictures seem to point to a Siennese origin, such, for instance, as the tooling of the halos, which may be almost be matched in the works of Ceccharelli and Vanni; the Madonna’s face seems like a vulgarized version of Simone Martini’s type, while the treatment of the hair by separate, rather thick, continuous, and parallel lines of light is such as we find frequently in Siennese art. The seated figures in the Dormition of the Virgin, again, if not distinctly Siennese are decidedly Italian, and are among the common properties of Giotto’s heirs. Italian, again, is the appearance of the inlaid woodwork of the bed-stand. The use of a canvas basis for the gesso ground is, too, in Italy, a peculiarly Siennese tradition, though it is there only a late survival of what was probably a universal practice. On the other hand the absence of a bole foundation for the gilding is quite unlike the practice of any Italian painters. Again, the types with their heavily modelled features, their full round staring eyes and protruding noses, seem to suggest a northern origin for these works. No less distinctive is the colour. The chief characteristic of this is the extraordinary brilliance and purity of the local tints, combined with an absence of any feeling for a distinct colour scheme as opposed to the mere putting together of agreeable tints. The main notes are an ultramarine of quite astounding intensity and saturation, a pure deep rose, and a bright green midway between apple and myrtle green. The flesh is florid and full coloured without traces of a terra verte foundation being apparent. These qualities of colour are such as we might expect from a miniaturist, and other things point to the same conclusion; first, the extreme minuteness and the marvellous perfection of the workmanship, then the crowding of the composition, and the elegant but singularly unstructural disposition of the draperies. Finally, one may surmise that no artist who was accustomed to work on a large scale would have made so elementary a blunder in space construction as our unknown master has in the Adoration of the Magi. The Madonna is clearly intended to be seated beneath the thatched roof, yet the foremost support, instead of coming down in front of her knees, is placed behind her. Such a mistake would be possible, however, to an artist who was accustomed to the almost hieroglyphic symbolism of miniature painting. ¶ Taking all these points into consideration I think it most probable that we have here two of the rare and singularly beautiful works of the French school of painting of the fourteenth century. This is made probable most of all by the colouring. This intense ultramarine never occurs in Italian work, but is to be found in the paintings attributed to Jean Malouel in the Louvre. It indeed remained endemic in French art, for we find it in many miniaturists, and something not unlike it turns up again in the work of Ingres. There is, moreover, in the Louvre a small picture, No. 997, representing the Entombment, in which not only does the same blue appear, but united with the same deep rose and vivid myrtle green. It has also the same rare perfection of surface quality, the same even, hard smalto. This picture is no doubt rightly attributed to the French school of the end of the fourteenth century. But neither this nor any other French picture in the Louvre shows so strong an Italian influence as our panels do, and it is partly for their interest as yet another proof of the constant interchange of ideas between Italy and the North about this period that we give them publicity. Of such intercourse there are, of course, already many proofs in the work of painters like Enguerrand de Charenton, of Fouquet, and most remarkable of all in a miniature by Pol de Limbourg, which is a free copy of a fresco by Taddeo Gaddi in Santa Croce at Florence.

R. E. F.

A MARBLE STATUE BY GERMAIN PILON

BORN towards 1515, either at Paris or Loué, and dying only in 1590, Germain Pilon lived through a momentous century in the history of France. The native art, so prolific during the two preceding centuries, which commands our admiration to-day by its originality and simplicity, was essentially French in feeling and execution, but towards the close of the fifteenth century the all-powerful influence of the great Italians manifested itself, partly by the general spread of knowledge which noised abroad the fame of achievements in Italy to which the civilized world was then paying homage, and again by the migration of Italian artists to adjacent countries, which, in the majority of cases, received them with acclamation.

ADORATION OF THE MAGI, AND DORMITION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN; PROBABLY FRENCH OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

LA CHARITÉ, SCULPTURE IN MARBLE, BY GERMAIN PILON

In one way this had a beneficial effect upon the productions of the northern countries, for it incited a spirit of emulation laudable in the extreme, but it was also the cause of a decline in native resourcefulness and originality due to an unduly thorough assimilation of Italian methods and aims. The result of this was a strange co-mingling of Italian and native ideas and technique producing an eclecticism which robbed art somewhat of the virility apparent in the creations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Still, side by side with this we have a growing tendency to tenderness and sympathetic treatment quite in keeping with the lofty aims of the sixteenth century, which compensates to some extent for the loss of robustness and impetuous energy. ¶ In such a condition did Pilon find art in France, when, leaving his father, also a sculptor, with whom he had hitherto collaborated, he came to Paris about 1550, and here we find him, in conjunction with Pierre Bontemps and Ambrose Perret, at work upon the tomb of François I, which had been designed by Philibert Delorme. After the designs of the latter Pilon was employed from 1560 to 1565 upon the well-known tomb at Saint-Denis of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis, which must be counted amongst his most important achievements. For the King and Queen he executed about this time the fine group of Les Trois Grâces in the Louvre, which represents, perhaps, the culminating point of his genius, and is manifestly superior both in elegance of contour and in technical qualities to Les Trois Parques ascribed to him which has found a permanent resting place in the Hôtel de Cluny. In Les Trois Grâces he presents to us the culmination of the French Renaissance in sculpture; the rhythm and balance of the composition is aided by the superb technique displayed in the modelling of the well-chosen figures, and a further beauty is added by the grace with which they support the urn. ¶ But quite equal to any single figure is the fine example of Pilon’s art which we illustrate this month by permission of Mr. E. Lowengard, its present owner. It represents as an emblematical figure of Charity a tall and dignified woman holding a child to her breast with the right hand, whilst the left, with protecting care, sustains another, which is clinging to her mantle; a third stands at her feet with a look of trustful assurance upon its upturned face. The head of Charity is crowned with laurel. The drapery is entirely characteristic of Pilon at his best; while not unduly severe, it does not err in being too florid, a failing of Pilon on many occasions. Moreover, it fully illustrates the French master’s profound knowledge of anatomy, a study in which he easily outstripped most of his contemporaries. It is open to question whether such an important and characteristic example of Pilon’s work has been seen in London before, and its presence at the moment furnishes an admirable opportunity of studying the style of this master.

LACE IN THE COLLECTION OF MRS. ALFRED MORRISON AT FONTHILL

THE lace of Mrs. Alfred Morrison at Fonthill House is of special interest among private collections. Mrs. Morrison has long interested herself in the exertions of M. M. Lefébure, the Honiton revival by the late Mrs. Treadwin of Exeter, and even the crochet work of Ireland, and has in many cases supplied designs, or suggestions for design, to these centres; hence, with her well-known collection of antique lace she has included the best of its modern derivatives and modern design. Among the specimens illustrated are:—

Plate I: (1) A curious example of a rare type of lace made in Russia, consisting of a scarf with arms worked upon either end. This lace was made in the early part of the nineteenth century (when needle-point was first introduced into Moscow) at a private lace school. The design, which is upon net, and very unlike the characteristic Russian vermiculate patterns with their oriental character and occasional colouring, consists of a chain of jours enclosing coarse, simple, and prominent fillings similar to those of provincial pillow-laces of England and France, and a semé of small sprigs. Although the workmanship is even throughout, the drawing is so naïve as to suggest that the lace-worker was unused to that type of lace. There is a border of similar jours alternating with small leaves and sprays.

(2) Gros point de Venise.—In the central strip of this lace very few brides have been introduced, and only so far as is necessary for strength, and those used are plain. The bride work forms no essential part of the design, the parts of the pattern being chiefly held together by being worked in contact with one another. In the joined border, which is of later date, the work, and especially the raised scallops, is of a superior evenness and regularity. Short brides, both plain and picotées, connect the design, which is closer and more florid, and remarkable for the compact, firm character which careful and precise workmanship has given to the piece, as it were scolpito in rilievo.

(3) Point de Venise.—Two long strips (3½ inches wide) of excellent and open scroll and floral design. The brides which connect the design are decorated with small stars and whirls. Upon some of the raised borders are set small scallops, or picots. Seventeenth century.

(4) Alençon lappet, a design of interlacing ribbons, filled in with light modes, enclosing a small ornament. Eighteenth century. Period, Louis XV.

(5) Modern Irish Needle-point lace, à brides picotées, specially made and designed for Mrs. Alfred Morrison [very much reduced]. Nineteenth century.

Plate II: (1) Brussels veil (three sides of which are ornamented, the fourth being plain), containing floral devices made in pillow, and applied to pillow-made mesh grounds. The softness of the grounds, the workmanship of the flowers, of which the cordonnets have little or no relief, the lightness of the fillings of the modes, place these Brussels points in a category quite distinct from any other lace. The design is of light leafy festoons of roses and forget-me-nots. In the corner is an urn-shaped ornament with lateral festoons. The border has a scalloped edge. Throughout the veil are pillow renderings of various modes, the réseau rosacé, star devices, etc. Eighteenth century.

(2) Honiton lace, made by the late Mrs. Treadwin of Exeter, from an old design. The pattern is connected by small brides covered with a number of small picots.

(3) Rose point à brides (Venetian), of close workmanship, in silk (natural-coloured). The free use of ornate picots clustering upon flying loops edging the scallops, as well as upon the brides, is noticeable. The brides are thickly ornamented with stars and whirls. [This sort of lace is sometimes called point de neige, probably on account of its snowy appearance.] The stems of the pattern are of light work, and not strengthened on the edge by an outer cordonnet or button-hole stitched work. Seventeenth century.

A very similar specimen of Venetian needle-point lace in silk is to be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum [835–’68]. It is also square and of similar size and date, and is also remarkable for the series of scallops and picots upon the raised portions of the design. The design of this specimen ‘consists of a symmetrical distribution of floral forms grouped about an ornamental arrangement in the centre.’ It was probably a ‘pall’ or covering for a chalice or sacramental cup. Though Mrs. Morrison’s specimen is said to be of Jewish work, and used in the synagogue to cover the law, it is more probable that it is a ‘pall,’ like the above-mentioned example.

I

PLATE II

PLATE III

(4) Drawn thread-work [Turkish?].

(5) Point de Venise, period Louis XIII.—A conventional design somewhat resembling Italian Renaissance ironwork. The pattern and some of the short brides which connect it are ornamented with picots, giving lightness and variety to the work.

(6) Irish crochet lace, specially made for Mrs. Alfred Morrison, adapted from the above design, which it well reproduces. An experiment in improving the spiritless and confused effect of Irish crochet, where conventional motifs are fitted together without any pre-arranged design. In natural-coloured silk.

(7) Imitation point d‘Alençon.—The ground or réseau of this piece is a very wide-meshed knotted net of coarse thread. A stiff and simple flower issuing from a horn or vase is set in the centre of a waved diamond-shaped compartment. The flowers are filled in with small pieces of coarse linen, and are appliqué to the net by stitches which hold the twisted thread outlines—the substitute for the cordonnet of button-hole stitches in the Alençon it imitates—to the little bits of linen.

Plate III: (1) Embroidered Turkish drawn thread work.—An eight-pointed star within the centre of which is a circle of drawn-work, of which the threads are overcast with fine button-hole stitches.

(2) The old conventional cut-work of Italy; Reticella, with punto in aria vandykes attached. Reticella differs from cutwork in that, though it also is worked on a linen foundation, the linen has almost entirely disappeared. The threads left as the framework of the design, dividing it into square compartments, are closely covered with stitches. Into these squares are introduced geometrical forms (star-forms) set in circles and enriched with patterns in solid needlework. This lace is frequently called Greek lace, principally owing to the fact that a great deal was found during the occupation of the Ionian islands by the English. It is, however, undoubtedly Italian in origin. The lace is shown upon the linen on which it is made; most specimens have been cut off for sale from the original linen ground. The punto in aria vandykes developed from the reticella, and are made with the same geometrical designs. The pointed edge was worked on threads laid down in the required shape, and the spaces filled in various designs. Brides picotées were sparingly added to connect the various portions of the pattern.

(3) Venetian-made Alençon (Burano).—A design of small sprays upon mixed grounds. Along the lower portion of the design runs a twisting ribbon enclosing various à jours and diapered grounds. The scalloped border shows blossom modes set upon a large hexagonal mesh picoté, alternating with a scalloped ribbon, enclosing varieties of diaper-patterned grounds, similar to those to be seen in the modes of Venetian heavy point laces.

(4) Venetian-made Alençon, design of palm leaves, with straight-edged border of flowerets and leaves.

(5) Alençon bordering lace, eighteenth century. Period, Louis XVI.—Under Louis XVI it became the fashion to multiply the number of flounces to dresses and to gather them into pleats, or, as it was termed, to badiner them, so that ornamental motifs, more or less broken up or partially concealed by the pleats, lost their significance and flow. The spaces between the motifs, therefore, widened more and more, until the design deteriorated into semés of small devices, detached flowers, pots, larmes, or, as in the present design, a dot set within a rosette. Instead, also, of wreaths, ribands, or festoons undulating from one side of the border to another, we have a stiff rectilinear border of purely conventional design. Naturalistic patterns are not met with in lace of that period.

M. JOURDAIN.

❧ BIBLIOGRAPHY ❧

FRENCH ENGRAVERS AND DRAUGHTSMEN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By Lady Dilke. George Bell and Sons.

The book published by Lady Dilke, at the end of last year, is one of the most complete and definite works on an important section of our artistic history that we French possess. For we are marked by this rare characteristic, that the qualities of our own distinguished men are most often revealed to us by foreigners. While we have in our midst a number of specialist writers to instruct us in minute detail concerning the most trifling acts and deeds of a Fleming or Italian, we lack historians who will take a general view of our national art. It would seem that the Frenchman who shall have written a book on the eighteenth century as full and thorough as Lady Dilke’s is yet to be born. From time to time men of great attainments have produced a monograph, have described the work of a Watteau or a Lancret, but this has always wanted the necessary general commentary, the linking with general history, the grouping of facts, which lend so great an attraction to the works of Lady Dilke. It affords me a two-fold pleasure to say this, first because I profess a deep and very respectful sympathy for the author’s person, and secondly because I have always been greatly touched by the French side of her character. Lady Dilke and I know the faults of our respective countrymen; we speak of them when necessary; but we also know our reciprocal good qualities and speak of these too. Lady Dilke has written in praise of the school of the French Minor Masters of the eighteenth century with a conviction and an ardour of which we are very proud, and I feel charged to express to her in this review our deep-felt gratitude. ¶The difference between England and ourselves is made manifest from the very first. Whereas with us a more or less florid, amusing, or, let us say, sensational narrative is in most cases sufficient to satisfy the French reader, Lady Dilke’s book, although intended to be read by everybody, does not fear to display an integral erudition. This handsome and well-illustrated book, while it gladdens the eyes of a person indifferent to these questions, will interest profoundly the specialist and the scholar. It contains not a line unsupported by at least one reference and often by many. All that the contemporaries of our eighteenth-century artists have left concerning them, all records of inventories and even judicial notes, have been read and employed in their season by their kindly historian. It is easy to read into the impartial, nicely-turned, but apparently impassive text a genuine woman’s admiration for these feminine, evasive and exquisite artists; but the passion is restrained and displays itself only at the last. When the author is occasionally obliged to lament certain rather gross errors, she does so with filial moderation, with that which a child might show towards its grandfather; and we have learnt all, we are able to deplore all, while not one serious word of blame shall have fallen from the historian’s pen. ¶ Lady Dilke divides her work into eleven chapters, each bearing the name of an art-lover or artist. The first of these chapters is devoted to the Comte de Caylus and the great amateurs. For, though the collectors date very far back, the ‘amateur,’ in the French and modern sense of the word, came into being together with the speculations of Law. There is a singular and never-changing agreement between the rabid collector and the stock jobbing financier; it is as though the man who had grown suddenly rich wished to find no less suddenly in his new palace the ancestral elegance of the man of quality. ¶ Lady Dilke has selected the Comte de Caylus because he exercised an enormous influence upon the whole of the eighteenth century. Himself an engraver—though of no great merit—he was the cause that men and women of the world amused themselves with the pastime, that Madame de Pompadour tried her hand at engraving, and that, trying her hand, but with only slight success, she favoured to an extreme degree the artist-engravers of her time. ¶ The second chapter is devoted to those lovers of engravings, the print-collectors Mariette and Basan, who, for the rest, had no great affection for the artists of their time, but who favoured the iconographic movement. ¶ The typical French engraver of the eighteenth century is Charles Nicolas Cochin, who was known as the Chevalier Cochin. Cochin, through his family, his connexions and his works, touches every section of society. He belongs to the Court, to the nobility, to the middle class. His mother was a Horthemels; his sisters were Mesdames Tardieu and Belle. Cochin was trained in the school of different masters; he shows traces of Watteau, Gillot, Chardin and Detroy. But he is above all himself; his mind is composed of a thousand amiable, witty, and refined things; his art is the very spirit of a nation; and it is not too much to say that in him French art is summed up. ¶ The men whom Lady Dilke studies in Chapter IV of her book, the engravers Drevet and Daullé, are different people. They descend from the great century; they go back by easy degrees to Louis XIV and those famous artists, Audran, Nanteuil and Edelinck. But, though they have style and even majesty, they have neither the charm nor the grace of their contemporaries. This is also, to a certain extent, the case with Wille, who came to France to learn and who borrowed from us only the solemn and majestic side of the great masters. ¶ Lady Dilke studies in succession the Laurent Cars, the Le Bas, and, lastly, Gravelot. Gravelot the author regards almost in the light of a fellow-countryman. The greater part of his career was spent in London. We know that, in so far as this part is concerned, the author is in possession of even still more varied and personal notes. From Gravelot to Eisen, from the “Opera de Flora” to the “Contes de Lafontaine,” is an imperceptible transition. And thus we come to the masters of the end of the century, to Moreau the younger in particular, who presents its definite synthesis, linked as he is to Cochin by the brothers Saint-Aubin, the “exquisite poets of the most charming decadence.” ¶ Finally, Lady Dilke speaks of the engravers in colours, of those men, such as Demarteau, Debucourt, and others, who, without eclipsing their English colleagues, keep step with them. And then we come to the relations of the engravers with the Academy. Here, what severity is shown! On one occasion, the engraver Balechou, who is a member of the Academy, engraves a full-length portrait of the King of Poland, Augustus III. He had promised not to pull a separate proof of it. Having done so in one single case—this proof is still preserved in the Paris Print-room—he was struck off the list of Academicians. ¶ It is impossible, in a short review, to set forth in detail the importance of a book of this kind. We need this book in France, and it is to be hoped that one of our publishers will issue a translation, because it is a revelation to us. The English publisher has undoubtedly produced a practical and easily-handled book, but his reproductions are a little inferior in quality, given the value of the work. It would have been desirable that all the illustrations should have taken the form of heliogravures. Nevertheless, and putting this little criticism on one side, Lady Dilke’s book is, sincerely speaking, the newest and most “encyclopaedic” work that we at present possess on the French draughtsmen and engravers of the eighteenth century.

HENRI BOUCHOT.

THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY. Edited by Lionel Cust, M.V.O., F.S.A. Cassell.

It was a happy thought of Messrs. Cassell to issue an illustrated catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery similar to that of the National Gallery. The Portrait Gallery, in spite of great difficulties in the matter of space and funds, has become a place of which the nation may well be proud. It already contains a series of British portraits which if not absolutely complete, is at least representative, sensibly arranged, and catalogued with much more fullness and accuracy than some better endowed collections. One or two possible improvements may suggest themselves to the outsider—the addition, for instance, of photographs (we hear that some arrangement of this kind is actually contemplated) or careful copies of unique portraits of famous men which can never leave their present owners. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge contain several pictures which would fill gaps in the Gallery, and other works in private hands are equally desirable. Nevertheless, the National Portrait Gallery, like the British Museum, has hitherto been so fortunate in its directors that there is no reason for regarding its future with serious anxiety. ¶ Nor can we be surprised that Mr. Cust, who has had so much to do with the well-being of the Portrait Gallery, has edited its illustrated catalogue on thoroughly sound lines. To precisians a chronological arrangement may seem to have disadvantages. These disadvantages, in our opinion, are minimized by the addition of an index of portraits and an index of artists, while the grouping together of men of the same generation, family, or profession, has the enormous advantage of making the book a thing attractive both to the casual reader and to the student of history, instead of a dry alphabetical list. ¶ We have only one fault to find with the abbreviated biographies which Mr. Cust supplies. They are laudably impartial, but the impartiality is sometimes carried to an extreme which places a second-rate man on the same level as a first-rate one. ¶ As a rule, a very wise discretion has been exercised in reproducing the pictures on a scale proportionate to their actual size and importance, so that the defects which marred the kindred volumes on the National Gallery have generally been avoided. One or two exceptions may perhaps be noted. We do not, for instance, think that justice is done to Kneller’s vivid portrait of the poet Gay (No. 622) by a cut less than two inches in height and less than one and a half inches in breadth, especially when Mr. Sargent’s portrait of Coventry Patmore is honoured by a full-page engraving. The juxtaposition of the two portraits of Sir William Hamilton also is not a success. The figure by David Allan looks a giant compared with that painted by Reynolds. ¶ The photographing, engraving, and printing of the pictures have on the whole been so admirably done that we have no more fault to find with them than with the letterpress or the arrangement of the book. We notice, indeed, that Kneller is again unfortunate. His portrait of John Smith, the mezzotint engraver (No. 699), is one of his most masterly works, showing a grip of character, an artistic taste, and a technical perfection for which in his Court portraits we seek in vain. In the reproduction the portrait loses all its spirit and all its quality. On the other hand, almost all the slight sketches and pencil drawings in the gallery come out excellently, so that any occasional failure cannot be attributed to want of care or want of science. ¶ Perhaps, considering its price, the publishers might have bound the book more strongly, even if they retained the limp cover which allows the book to open comfortably. The present paper binding is too flimsy for a book that has to be used for reference, and to send a work of reference to the binder often results in deprivation just when one needs the book most. ¶ These, after all, are minor details. As a whole, the catalogue is a thoroughly sound piece of work, and does credit to its editor, publishers, and printers (if not to its binder), and we have no doubt it will take its place by the Dictionary of National Biography on the shelves of all who are interested in the past history of the British race.

C. J. H.

ISABELLA D’ESTE, MARCHIONESS OF MANTUA, 1474–1539. A Study of the Renaissance. By Julia Cartwright (Mrs. Ady). John Murray. 1903.

There are three ways of writing history which rejoice all serious readers and students. The first and best is, alas, rare, for it requires constructive imagination based on sound scholarship. It is the history which bestows upon the characters portrayed that quality which makes them live on in the reader’s mind like great myths. Gibbon’s ‘Julian,’ Mommsen’s ‘Hannibal,’ Carlyle’s ‘Voltaire,’ Creighton’s ‘Pius II’—to take a very few instances chosen at random—live on in our imaginations like the heroes of romance, like Don Quixote, or Julien Sorel, or the ‘Egoist.’ ¶ On the other hand, there is the work of the mere archivist, the conscientious finder and transcriber of documents, who leaves the imaginative reconstruction of character entirely to the reader. For this, too, the student cannot be too grateful. And then there is the via media of the gifted compiler, whose efforts are also welcome, provided they are honest and careful, and free from the taint of journalism. ¶ It is this middle path that Mrs. Ady is accustomed to take, and always with peculiar success in her biographies of women. Those who have already enjoyed her ‘Beatrice d’Este’ will be prepared for finding interest and pleasure in reading her account of that noble lady’s even more accomplished and more famous sister, Isabella, marchioness of Mantua, the leader for more than forty years of the most continuously brilliant and intellectual court in Italy. Mrs. Ady does not claim originality of research, but her task of weaving the documentary researches of others into a readable, accurate, and interesting account is extremely well done. It is true that she has no great or genial gifts for the presentment of character, but she knows at least how to describe it with the appropriate background of historical events and of court and family life. She has better taste than to make of it a lurid tale, as some popular writers would have done. Isabella is painted as the faithful and devoted wife and daughter and sister, the careful and affectionate mother—nay, even the doting grandmother—as well as the ‘prima donna del mondo,’ the Muse of poets and humanists, the patroness and friend of great artists, the confidante of popes and emperors, and the victim, too, of family and political tragedies. ¶ For us in this place, her interest lies chiefly in one aspect of her many activities—in her relations with the artists of her day. Her portrait was drawn by Leonardo, and painted by Mantegna, Titian, Francia, Costa, as well as by various artists of less importance, such as Maineri and Buonsignori, and her medal was cast in bronze by the sculptor Cristoforo Romano. She was a passionate collector of beautiful things, decorating her private apartment with pictures by Mantegna, Costa, and Perugino, and sending her emissaries over nearly the whole of Italy to extort from dilatory or overworked painters the fulfilment of commissions she had given them, getting now a Nativity from Giovanni Bellini, a Magdalen and a St. Jerome from Titian, Allegories from Correggio, portraits from Francia, and even from Raphael himself. She employed Timoteo Viti to make designs for her majolica dinner-service, and most of the northern sculptors of note were at one time or another set to work for her. Lorenzo da Pavia made her priceless viols and lutes of inlaid ivory and ebony, and Caradosso carved her a wonderful inkstand in ebony and silver, while the most famous glass-blowers and jewellers of her time contributed their best efforts to her matchless collection. But even dearer to her than contemporary art was the antique, and she spared no pains or expense, no wiles or selfishness, to get into her possession every available antique statue or fragment that she heard of. The collector’s passion was on her, and even her fine taste and that of her cultivated advisers did not always protect her from the collector’s misfortunes. In the light of recent revelations, it is amusing to hear how she was taken in by the forgeries of a certain Roman dealer who bore the splendid name of Raphael of Urbino, and how this shifty precursor of many an Italian ‘antiquario’ of to-day managed to get out of giving her back her money! ¶ Curiously enough, Isabella, although a fast friend of the Medicean popes and their relatives, seems to have taken no interest at all in the art of Florence, except in Michelangelo, and in Leonardo, who came to her, not from Florence, but from Milan. She sent to Florence, it is true, for a picture, but it was to Perugino she wrote, and not to any of the great Florentine masters. ¶ Mrs. Ady has tried to trace carefully the present whereabouts of Isabella’s portraits and possessions, but we miss in the index any assembling of her scattered remarks on this interesting subject. The Leonardo pastel sketch (reproduced as frontispiece to Vol. I, but wrongly described as red chalk) is well known in the Louvre; one of the Titians (the one copied by Rubens) she identifies in the collection of M. Leopold Goldschmid at Paris, while the other, in Vienna, is reproduced as the frontispiece to the second volume. As to the latter, she says it was painted by Titian after a portrait by Francia, itself not done from the life, but from sketches and descriptions. If this be indeed the one referred to, Titian has managed to give no hint of his obligation to the Bolognese master. The portrait by Maineri, a painter of Parma, the author suggests as being the same as that in Mrs. Alfred Morrison’s collection, exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1894; but she admits, on the other hand, that this portrait may be from the hand of Beltraffio, which indeed it clearly is. Although it has apparently not occurred to Mrs. Ady, is it not possible that the untraced portrait of Isabella painted by Costa, was, like so many of her treasures, bought for Charles I, and that it is the Portrait of a Lady which now hangs in Hampton Court (No. 295)? The face resembles the one he painted as Isabella’s in the Louvre Allegory, but, on the other hand, they are both so thoroughly Costa in every detail that neither can be called real portraits in the modern sense of the word. The objective photographic style of portraiture in vogue to-day was quite foreign to the habits of most Renaissance painters, who were satisfied, once they had found a type that suited them, to stick to it for everything—Madonnas, portraits of ladies, and allegorical figures, indifferently. ¶ Perhaps the most vivid part of Mrs. Ady’s book is her description of Isabella’s experiences in that fatal sack of Rome, which, as Erasmus wrote to her friend Sadoleto, was ‘not the ruin of one city, but of the whole world.’ Barricaded in the Palazzo Colonna with three thousand distressed souls under her care, Isabella, safe in the protection of her son, Ferrante, one of the leaders of the imperial forces, looked down from her windows with anguish upon the scenes of horror and vandalism enacted in the streets below. Her house was the only one in Rome that escaped, except the Cancelleria, which was occupied by Cardinal Colonna. But except for the irreparable destruction of so many of the world’s masterpieces of beauty, this and many another interesting incident in Isabella’s career belong rather to history than to art.

M. L.

FRANS HALS. By Gerald S. Davies, M.A. George Bell and Sons.

On comparing the number of monographs that have appeared on other than Dutch artists with that of books in our possession treating of Dutch painters, we see that the latter have been allotted but a scanty measure in literature; indeed, one may go further and say that during the past twenty years, excepting Rembrandt and a few other great masters, no extensive and comprehensive work has been written on the old Dutch painters. For this neglect a very well-founded reason exists: the native art historians of the Netherlands are still collecting materials, and cannot as yet think of writing exhaustive books concerning their great masters; for they are much too well aware of the vast gaps that are still to be found in their knowledge. This is so in the case, among others, of Frans Hals, and it will remain so for many years to come; we must needs wait until all the records are accessible before being able to arrive at a definite knowledge of Hals’s personality. ¶ Mr. Davies has been deterred by no such considerations; he not only, with a ready pen, describes Hals’s life and works, but, thanks to the spacious manner in which he conceives his subject, finds occasion to indulge in digressions on old Dutch conditions, art and so forth, which might undoubtedly possess an interest for English readers if they were correct, but that, unfortunately, is far from being always the case. ¶ After treating in his first two chapters of the ‘Rise of a National Art’ and ‘Holland and its Art in the Seventeenth Century’ the author collects the few known facts concerning Hals’s life in Chapter III, and endeavours to draw a conclusion touching his personality. We quite admit that legend may have represented Hals as being a more dissolute man than he actually was. Nevertheless, one who ill-treated his wife as he did can really not have had any particularly aristocratic manners. It would be better for us to say that we do not know enough about his life to be able to white-wash it of the few disagreeable facts that have been handed down to us. There can be no doubt, however, that he was a Bohemian, as Mr. Davies rightly characterizes him. ¶ The following chapters are devoted entirely to Hals’s artistic career and works; those preserved at Haarlem of course occupying a great place. The description of these is a lively one, and is evidently based upon a repeated examination. There are a good index, bibliography, useful indications such as the approximate dates of Hals’s life and of his principal paintings, etc. In a word, the writer has industriously brought together all that he has been able to ascertain touching his subject from books and pictures. But there is one matter in which Mr. Davies has not succeeded, and that is the producing of a critical work. It is true that he himself expressly says this as regards the catalogue,[45] but he constantly makes the same mistakes in the text itself. This is an exceedingly dangerous standpoint; for, thanks to it, so soon as one sets to work on a scientific basis, one finds him, for instance, describing two pictures (Illustrations Nos. 1 and 54) as Portraits of the Painter which do not represent Hals at all, while, again, the Portrait of Admiral de Ruyter (Illustration No. 55) is not a picture of that admiral. ¶ In the same way, the catalogue—which, from the very nature of the standpoint of the writer, is incomplete—contains childish mistakes, which are due to a lack of adequate critical knowledge. For to say of the Hille Bobbe with a young man smoking behind her, merely that it is ‘generally recognized as the work of F. Hals the son’ surely denotes an excess of caution, considering that it is established beyond all doubt that this picture was, in fact, painted by the son, and therefore it ought not to have been included in the catalogue. Some of the paintings in English collections which we missed in the catalogue we were fortunate enough to find mentioned in the ‘List of Pictures which have appeared ... in the Winter Exhibitions ... at Burlington House,’ which is inserted after the ‘List of Works.’ But these data are also, we regret to say, uncritical. We also searched the catalogue in vain for the oldest dated portrait by Frans Hals, namely, that of Scriverius, dated 1613, which forms part of the Warneck Collection in Paris, although it is mentioned by the author on pp. 27, 29, 84, and 96 of the text. Again, we find no mention of the delightful Portrait of a Man[46] in the Van Lynden collection, at present lent to the Mauritshuis at the Hague, nor of various other pieces.[47] As regards the drawings, there is no doubt whatever that the drawing in the British Museum is an original Hals. There are more of this sort, and we are sorry not to find them mentioned in Mr. Davies’s book. ¶ We must deliver ourselves of one or two further remarks, not from any love of fault-finding, but to remove mistaken ideas. The picture mentioned on p. 22, which is traditionally, and by Mr. Davies, supposed to represent Hals’s workshop, was painted by Michiel Sweerts, and has nothing to do with Hals’s workshop. Nor is what the author observes touching Hals’s manner of painting (p. 124) quite correct. Hals slowly perfected his technique, proceeding along a road which is quite easily traced. It is true that he underpainted a considerable number of his pictures, but there are also many, very many indeed, which he finished at once, in the wet paint, without the least underpainting. One of the best examples of the latter is the Portrait of a Man, in Lord Spencer’s collection, which is at present in the Guildhall Exhibition. ¶ Mr. Davies’s book has been very handsomely printed and produced, and is filled with mostly satisfactory illustrations. It is to be regretted that the contents of the book are not more worthy of its format; as a critical guide to the art of Frans Hals it is wholly untrustworthy.

W. M.

PERIODICALS

GAZETTE DES BEAUX ARTS.—The April number opens with an article by M. Salomon Reinach, in which he brings to light a great unknown miniaturist whom he identifies with the painter Simon Marmion, known as the author of the altarpiece of St. Bertin, now in the castle of Wied. Of this magnificent and little-known work the National Gallery possesses two fragments representing a chorus of angels rejoicing at the birth of the saint and two angels carrying his soul up to heaven, a strange and imaginative composition, in which the ridge of a roof cutting into the base of the composition gives an effect of supernatural strangeness. The manuscript in which the miniatures in question occur is in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, and has remained till now unnoticed. It is in the main the French compilation entitled the ‘Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denys,’ but the history is continued with extracts from various historians to the beginning of the reign of Charles V. It contains fifteen full-page miniatures which are of quite extraordinary merit, and which may be by Simon Marmion. The smaller miniatures are by another hand, and are distinctly inferior. The most interesting of the miniatures is the title-page representing Fillastre, Abbot of St. Bertin, offering the Grandes Chroniques to Philippe le Bon of Burgundy, by whose side stands the aged Chancellor Rollin; behind stand three figures, among which M. Reinach recognizes the youthful Charles the Bold and the Grand Bâtard. The heads are admirably rendered, and show that Marmion, if it be indeed he, must be reckoned as one of the great masters of portraiture of a school in which portraiture attained to the utmost perfection. The landscapes are, however, scarcely less remarkable. They do not, of course, rise quite to the height of imaginative realism shown in the Hubert van Eyck miniatures published by M. Durrieu, but they are conceived in a similar vein and executed with absolute mastery. If M. Reinach’s conjecture is correct, and it rests on a number of subsidiary proofs besides the likeness of style to the Wied altarpiece, he has done a great service in bringing to light the work of a great artist whose reputation as a miniaturist was such that his name was coupled with that of Fouquet in the eulogies of contemporary poets. Marmion was born at Amiens about 1420. In 1454 he was at Lille employed by the Duke of Burgundy, but he seems to have worked chiefly at Valenciennes. His style shows the influence of the Van Eycks, and still more of Van der Weyden. But there is, we think, in his manner of composition, and in the freedom of his fancy, something which distinguishes him from the pure Flemish painters, something which is due to his French origin and early training. ¶ The next article by M. Casimir Stryienski is concerned with French art of a very different kind. There exist a number of catalogues of the early exhibitions of the Salon, illustrated throughout with minute sketches by Gabriel de St. Aubin. The author has had the idea of reconstructing by the aid of one of these catalogues the Salon of 1761, and discussing the subsequent history of the various works. Many of these are quite lost, and survive only in St. Aubin’s marvellous sketches. Delicate as St. Aubin’s more serious work is, as a tour de force nothing could equal the dexterity of these minute notes. Between two lines of the catalogue he will insert a whole row of sketches, in which not only the composition but some suggestion of the chiaroscuro of the originals is given. Many of the works of Vien, J. B. M. Pierre, Vanloo, and Hallé make a more pleasing impression when interpreted thus than the originals can have done. ¶ M. André Michel, who carries on the work inaugurated by the genius of Courajod, commences a series of articles on the acquisitions made by his department of the Louvre. The finest of these came from Courajod’s collection, and include a wooden crucifix of the twelfth century, in which we can trace the first germs of the new sentiment for life and dramatic expressiveness working in the old hieratic formula. The exquisite statue of a man of the thirteenth century, also in wood, shows the new art arrived already at perfect command of the means of expression, but still restrained by a reminiscence of earlier schematic treatment. This and the stone statue of St. Geneviève show French sculpture at a point which it has never surpassed. The fifteenth and sixteenth century sculptures which have been added to the national collection, though of great beauty, have nothing of the supreme sense of design of the earlier work. ¶ M. F. de Mely publishes two sarcophagi with figures in relief discovered at Carthage. In spite of Greek and Egyptian influences the author considers that at least one of the figures, that of the priestess, bears the impress of a special racial type, and he considers that this and the Elche head taken together give us an idea of a distinctively Punic ideal type. M. Pierre Gusman describes, without adding anything very new, the Villa Madama, and M. André Pascal begins an account of the eighteenth century sculptor Pierre Julien.

In the May number Monsieur Gaston Migeon, who has done much towards the classification of Mahommedan copper work, writes on the Exhibition of Mahommedan Art recently held at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in the Pavillon de Marson. Several remarkable specimens of copper work are reproduced, perhaps the most interesting being that lent by M. Sarre which is supposed to date from the first years of the Hegira, and to be of Sassanian workmanship. Some fourteenth-century Persian velvets and tissues of singularly fine and naturalistic design are also figured, as well as two splendid Indo-Persian miniatures from the collection of M. Bing. ¶ In his second and concluding article on the acquisition of the department of sculpture in the Louvre, M. André Michel describes a remarkable polychrome wooden statue of the beginning of the sixteenth century belonging to the Franconian school. In this the author finds the influence of Albert Dürer. It is certainly a more deliberate and scientific work of art than the majority of Franconian sculptures of the period. Several works by Houdon, Deseine and Clodion are also described and reproduced. The prints of the Dutuit Collection are described in a brilliant and humorous article by M. Henri Bouchot, in which he concerns himself more with the collector than the collection, which is in fact rather remarkable for the number of prints of ascertained pedigree than for its artistic character. M. Pascal completes in this number his study of Pierre Julien.

JAHRBUCH DER KUNSTHISTORISCHEN SAMMLUNGEN DES ALLERHÖCHSTEN KAISERHAUSES. Band XXIII, Heft 5.—The present fascicule is devoted entirely to researches by Herr Julius von Schlosser on ‘Artistic Tradition in the late Middle Ages.’ Under this title the author brings together several separate researches; the connexion between them lies in their illustration of the contrast between mediaeval art with its direct visual symbolizing of ideas and the Renaissance and modern habits of actual imitation of natural forms. ¶ The first of his researches is concerned with a large illuminated parchment, too large to have formed part of a book and probably meant to be framed and hung on a wall. It depicts in the centre the Nativity, around which, in a large number of medallions enclosed in late Gothic scrollwork, are represented the various analogies by which the immaculate conception was rendered credible. It is an early example of the ‘Defensorium inviolatae virginitatis beatae Mariae,’ in which the miracle is rendered plausible by a record of all the miraculous things in nature. The origin and propagation of this popular form of doctrinal exegesis is discussed. The author of the ‘Defensorium,’ Franciscus of Retz, was a Dominican, and professed theology in the University of Vienna from 1385 to 1411. The earliest illustrated version is the manuscript of Frater Antonius of Tegernsee of 1459, and the work was published as a block-book as early as 1470. The best-known is Eysenhut’s block-book of 1471, of which the British Museum possesses a copy. In the early sixteenth century it was published also in a French translation at Rouen, but it was most popular in Bavaria and Austria. The parchment picture of the Vienna Hofmuseum, which forms the subject of these researches, is, the author considers, by an Austrian artist of the latter half of the fifteenth century. ¶ Of greater artistic merit are the small folding tablets of the Vienna Hofmuseum, in which are depicted a series of men and animals which served as patterns for artists. There are, for instance, the heads of Christ, the Virgin, and St. John, in poses which show that they would serve for a Crucifixion; there is the Veronica, and a number of varied types which experience and tradition showed were likely to be useful to an artist. It is certainly a striking example of the essentially practical methods of artistic production at a time when painting was an actual necessity, and when, therefore, the picture was of more importance than the artist’s personality. This work belongs to about the year 1400. ¶ Another artist’s pattern-book discussed by Herr von Schlosser, though this has already been published in part, is that used by the miniaturists of a Rhenish monastery, now in the Hofbibliothek at Vienna. This contains, besides initials and borders, the traditional receipts for various animals both real and fabulous. This the author compares with Villars de Honnecourt’s famous sketch-book and the similar pattern-book of Stephen of Urach in Munich. Villars de Honnecourt, however earlier in date, had indeed much more than a merely practical aim in view. He had already begun those researches into the laws of proportion and harmony in natural form which later on absorbed Leonardo da Vinci and Dürer. ¶ Herr von Schlosser aptly concludes this part of his researches by a reproduction of an Attic vase in Berlin, on which is represented the workshop of a vase maker with the pattern receipts for gods and animals hanging on the wall. ¶ Finally, in an appendix, Herr von Schlosser discusses Giusto of Padua’s frescoes of the virtues in the Eremitani at Padua, which have recently been relieved in part of their covering of whitewash. He reproduces the two best preserved figures. Here again the question is of the rôle played by a traditional pattern-book, for there exist similar representations of the virtues in manuscripts at Florence and Vienna, while recently Signor Venturi has acquired for the national collection at Rome another version, which he considers is Giusto of Padua’s own sketch-book and the model for the frescoes. Herr von Schlosser shows, we think conclusively, that this is of later origin by a belated Giottesque of the early fifteenth century, while he brings forward as the original of the whole series a MS. at Chantilly by Bartolommeo de’ Bartoli, executed in all probability between 1353 and 1356 in Bologna.

REPERTORIUM FÜR KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT. 1903. Part II.—Constantin Winterberg continues his minute analysis of Albert Dürer’s theory of the proportions of the figure. In this article he deals with the second book, and shows how Dürer freed himself increasingly from the traditional mediaeval canon and sought to establish his theory on inductive lines. ¶ Mr. Campbell Dodgson publishes a transcript of David de Necker’s preface to the Landsknechts, from which it appears that the original drawings were by Hans Burkmair, Christopher Amberger, and Jörg Breu, and were engraved by Jost de Necker, David’s father. This settles a much-disputed point, and shows that Beham, to whom a number of the originals were ascribed, must be excluded altogether. ¶ Count Luigi Manzoni writes on the stained glass in Perugia in the quattrocento, and in particular on the great window in S. Domenico, which he ascribes in part to Fra Bartolommeo di Pietro Accomandati, who appears to have worked in stained glass already in the fourteenth century at a time when most Italian towns were forced to employ foreigners for such work. The greater part of the window was executed, according to the author, in the second half of the fifteenth century, and by the painter Benedetto Bonfigli. ¶ In this number Dr. Friedländer concludes his notices of the Bruges Exhibition. He deals with Albert Cornelis, an artist who was first recognized by Mr. James Weale, and with Jan Provost, with regard to whom he follows M. G. Hulin. He agrees therefore in giving to the artist, Mr. Sutton-Nelthorpe’s Legend of St. Francis. More surprising is his suggestion that the Madonna, lent by Madame André under the name of Van Eyck, which was reproduced in the April number of The Burlington Magazine, is a youthful work of Jan Provost. With regard to Jan van Eeckele, the author maintains a sceptical attitude. He supposes the signature J.V.E. attached to certain works to be forgeries intended for Jan Van Eyck. After discussing the works of the later Flemish and Dutch artists, Dr. Friedländer discourses on the works which are not of purely Flemish origin. Among them the most interesting was the so-called Antonello da Messina, lent by Baron d’Albenas, representing the Pietà. This, following M. Hulin, Dr. Friedländer gives to a French artist, and dates about 1470. The mixture of Italian and Flemish influence in this work is, we think, of quite a different kind from that found in French works of the period.

RASSEGNA D’ARTE.—To the April number M. George le Brun contributes an enthusiastic, though by no means exaggerated, appreciation of the elder Breughel, ‘the only artist of his time who knew how to withstand the enchantments of the Italian masters,’ though he too travelled in Italy. Signor Enrico Cavilia calls attention to the imposing ruins of the basilica at Squillace which he ascribes to about the year 600. If this is accurate it becomes, after St. Abbondio at Como, the earliest example of a basilica in the form of a Latin cross. This important example of early Christian architecture has been little noticed hitherto. Signor Rivoira, for example, makes no mention of it. ¶ A small piece of stuff with a woven pattern of figures, rabbits, birds, and ornamental intreccie, which was found at Modena in 1900, forms the subject of an article by Isabella Errera. This has hitherto been supposed to be of Byzantine workmanship, but the author by comparison with other pieces of similar design and workmanship ascribes it to Arab workmen under Byzantine influence.

In the May number Signor Paoletti publishes an ancona (insufficiently reproduced) by Jacobello Bonomo. This ancona in its original carved frame is dated 1385, and is important as showing how early the traditional form of the ancona as it appears in the works of the Muranese school was fixed. This indeed differs but slightly from the altarpieces of Antonio da Murano in Sta. Zaccharia at Venice, which are dated nearly half a century later. ¶ Signor Ricci continues to elucidate the little-known Giovanni Francesco da Rimini, an artist of the Romagna influenced by Benedetto Bonfigli, and through him deriving many motives which recall the work of Filippo Lippi. These are specially noticeable in the Baptism belonging to Signor Blumenstihl at Rome. The other picture, which he attributes to this mediocre but agreeable painter, is a Madonna adoring the Infant Saviour which is No. 255 of the Bologna Gallery. ¶ Signor Augusto Bellini Pietri discourses on the frescoes of S. Piero a Grado which were brought to light in 1885 at Cavalcaselle’s instigation. Cavalcaselle himself judged of them as feeble productions of the early Pisan school which might be connected with the name of Giunta Pisano. He failed to see traces of true Byzantine influence. Signor Pietri’s view practically coincides with this, except that he considers them of much greater artistic significance and as indicating the dawn of the new Italian spirit, the beginnings of a dramatic and expressive art as opposed to the hieratic and purely architectonic character of the Byzantine. ¶ Signor Ricci calls attention to an interesting portrait of Luca Pacioli acquired by the Naples Gallery with a Cartellino bearing the inscription JACO. BAR. VIGENNIS. 1495. If vigennis is a corruption of ventenne, and if Jaco. Bar. stands for Jacopo de Barbari, it brings that artist’s birth down to a much later period than has hitherto been assumed. Unfortunately Signor Ricci does not indicate how far the painting in question conforms to the manner of Jacopo de Barbari’s known works. ¶ Signor Ferrari announces the installation of the new museum at Piacenza, and describes its two chief treasures, the Christ at the Column by Antonello da Messina and the tondo (poorly reproduced), which is ascribed, somewhat rashly we think, to Botticelli himself.

ONZE KUNST contains two articles by Max Rooses; in one he describes the Pacully collection in Paris, which has recently come into the market, and, à propos of the picture of a young woman writing, by the Master of the half-figures, which was exhibited at Bruges, makes a suggestion that possibly the half-figure pictures were executed by Jan Matsys when he was absent from the Netherlands, and may have come into connexion with Clouet’s school in France. The colour scheme and scale of modelling of Jan Matsys’s signed Lucretia is, we should have thought, quite distinct from that of the half-figure pictures. ¶ In the second article the author makes known a Rubens belonging to the Countess Constantin de Bousies. The picture is of a satyr pressing grapes into a cup held by a young satyr; in the foreground a tigress is suckling her young. M. Rooses declares this to be the original of the similar picture at Dresden.

ATENEUM. HELSINGFORS.-No. 1 contains an article on mediaeval art in Finland with illustrations of sculptures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which shows how closely the types of early French and German Gothic sculptures were followed. The St. Margaret from Vemo has almost the grace and ease of movement and the large disposition of draperies of the best French work of the end of the thirteenth century. The later work indicates more clearly German influence. Osvald Siren publishes two Florentine Madonna reliefs, at present in Sweden. One is a stucco copy of a relief by Desiderio, lately in the possession of Mrs. Pepys Cockerell.

THE REVUE DE L’ART contains some illustrations from the Pacully collection, and the record by M. Paul Vitry of an interesting discovery, an almost contemporary copy of a lost portrait of the Comte de Dunois, the original probably being by Jean Fouquet.

L’ART, for April, contains a number of reproductions of mediaeval works by royal and titled amateurs, an article on the Museum of Tapestry at the Gobelins factory, one on Horace Vernet as a caricaturist, and one on the exhibition of the Société National des Beaux-Arts, remarkable for its violent and ill-judged attack on Rodin, à propos of the fact that he is not exhibiting this year.

THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW, May, is mostly devoted to contemporary architecture, but contains the second part of Mr. Lethaby’s article on ‘How Exeter Cathedral was Built,’ with many illuminating remarks on mediaeval methods of work; not the least interesting is the suggestion that when columns of Purbeck marble were ordered from Corfe, the designs of mouldings and sections were left to the Corfe masons.

R. E. F.

ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR BÜCHERFREUNDE, April, 1903.—The first number of the seventh annual volume of this periodical opens with a detailed account by H. A. L. Degener of the John Rylands Library at Manchester. The building is described and the history of its foundation related. The biography of John Rylands himself is followed by an interesting account of the founders of the Althorp collection, now incorporated, through the munificence of Mrs. Rylands, with the other contents of the palatial building at Manchester. The purchase of the Crawford collection of MSS. by Mrs. Rylands is duly recorded, and a good summary is given of the most important treasures of the library in the way of block-books and incunabula, with special attention to the books from early English presses. The article is illustrated with sketches of the building and facsimiles of rare specimens of printing. An article follows on the contemporary book-decorator, Hugo Hoppener, whose pseudonym is Fidus. His work is unknown in this country, and such specimens as are given do not inspire us with any desire for a closer acquaintance with it. Modern printing in Russia is described by P. Ettinger, and there is a review of two important facsimiles of block-books recently published by Heitz, and edited by Professor W. L. Schreiber, the ‘Twelve Sibyls,’ at St. Gallen, and the edition of the ‘Biblia Pauperum,’ in fifty leaves, at Paris. A specimen of each facsimile accompanies the review.

C. D.

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