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The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 75
 
 Progress Within the Great Italian Collections By Selwyn Brinton
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and all are treated with dignity with elevation, and with that profound poetic sense which before all else goes to the making of a true picture.

His landscapes possess a charm, a repose all their own. The tender brightness of early morning, the still, sleepy heat of noonday in village street or harvest field, the mystery of dusky twilight, the summer night when stars hang in the blue-black sky over Pisa, or a single light shines through the chink of a shutter in the silent houses along the canal of some French country-town — of all these Cazin renders the suave and subtle attraction, the penetrating intensity, as of some plaintive and soothing melody. For in all he touched the complex personality of the man makes itself felt — a personality — which as his friend Léonce Benedite has truly said was typified by his actual appearance — “a singular mixture of physical force and moral faculties, of materiality and of dreams, of powerful, active, and vigorous life, and of intellectual and imaginative development”. And when to these complex qualities you add a gracious charm of manner and the simplicity of a true artist, no wonder that all who have been privileged to know him, mourn the loss of Jean-Charles Cazin.


PROGRESS WITHIN THE GREAT ITALIAN COLLECTIONS - BY SELWYN BRINTON M. A.

The evidence of the last twenty years shows that modern Italy has thoroughly awakened to a knowledge of the treasures — immense from their mere monetary value, yet far higher in their intellectual significance — that she possesses in those art creations which fill her galleries from Turin to Naples. Even yet there are unknown masterpieces to be traced and found. Within the better known collections an immense work of criticism, investigation, sometimes restoration, is waiting to be accomplished; but much has been and much is being done, and it is my object to show this in these notes of several conversations this spring with the Directors of some of the world-famous Italian galleries.

At Turin (Royal Gallery) I found Count Alessandro Baudi di Vesme deep in the archives of early Piedmontese art — an art most fascinating, as we see in the beautiful religious paintings of Defendente de Ferrari within this very collection; but most difficult — so the Director assured me — to trace, owing to the constant wars in which the frontier kingdom of Piedmont was generally plunged preventing all accumulation of documents, all continuity of artistic evolution.

Then — coming south to Florence — one day when the arctic and unexampled severity of last February had changed to something more approaching to southern sunshine, I went to visit Cavaliere Ridolfi in his sanctum within the great Uffizi collection. Here the recent changes have been marked and beneficial. A whole series of new rooms thrown open contains the pictures brought from the Hospital of S. Maria Nuova, noticeable among which is the grand “Crucifixion” of Andrea del Castagno; and in his report of
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 76
 
 Progress Within the Great Italian Collections By Selwyn Brinton
Footnotes:
1Rubens had certainly studied, and made a transcript from, the Mantuan “Triumph of Julius Caesar,” now in Hampton Court Palace. Cavaliere Ridolfi traces the inspiration of Mantegna’s great fresco in this “Triumph of Henry IV.”
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1899 to the Italian Government (Le Gallerie di Firenze, Roma, 1899), which the Director was kind enough to present to me, he gives an account of some of the earlier changes.

First of all, in the Pitti Palace, “that sublime ‘Deposition’ by Pietro Perugino”, says Cavaliere Ridolfi, “was among those which needed my care”. This is the painting which I have mentioned in my Renaissance in Italian Art (Part III, page 143) as one of the finest works of the Perugian master’s ripest period. It was painted for the nuns of S. Chiara, to whom the Master himself said he could not repaint its equal, and is signed and dated 1495. Here the Director considered it imprudent to remove entirely the great masses of repainting which have been added to the draperies, from the fear that ruthless cleaning had removed the under-painting; only surface spots and dirt seem to have been approached most judiciously.

But of his treatment of the two colossal paintings by Rubens Cavaliere Ridolfi speaks with conscious pride. Florence, he remarked, is most rich in the works of the great Flemish Master, and he enumerated seven in the Pitti Palace, among them the “Results of War” (Le Consequenze della Guerra), the “Nymph surprised by Satyrs” and the “Holy Family”.

In the Uffizi collection two colossal canvases had been placed in the Sala di Niobe. The history of these paintings is interesting. They were commissioned from Rubens by the Queen Mother, when in March of 1622 he had gone to Paris to arrange and locate that magnificent series from the story of Maria de' Medici, which has just been rearranged with such success within the Louvre collection.

With what passion and enthusiasm the great Master had approached his new commission these paintings themselves give evidence: but quarrels supervened between Louis XIII and his mother, the commission was broken off, the paintings themselves came, unfinished, into the hands of the Medici, and, in 1773, into their collection of the Uffizi.

Cleaning and thorough overhauling were here sadly needed, and the removal of the portraits of painters to the lower floor left free a room in which they could be placed: dirt had accumulated, and the underlining of the canvas, strengthened with an application of wax, glue, and some oily substance, had, as the chemical processes worked out, produced ugly depressions of the surface. Pictured tapestries have been chosen to take the place, as a background to Niobe and her children, of these magnificent Flemish canvases. The cleaning process has been carried through with marked success, and we are now able to study “The Triumph of King Henry IV”,1 restored, as the Director says, “alia sua originaria finezza ed elasticita”, beside the splendid passion and energy of that “Battle of Ivry”, which, though unfinished, though only a colossal sketch, seems to come to us straight from the Master’s brain, to breathe the very spirit of his first inspiration.
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: -
 
 Progress Within the Great Italian Collections By Selwyn Brinton
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“La Schiava” Of The Barberini Palace, Rome

By Jacopo Palma, Called Palma Vecchio
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 77
 
 Progress Within the Great Italian Collections By Selwyn Brinton
Footnotes:
1 This splendid Venetian beauty, of whom I propose to give an illustration, appears under Titian’s name in the Barberini Palace at Rome. The Director considers her an early, even sei-cento copy of Palma. I myself prefer to hold this glorious creation to be from Jacopo Palma's own hand.
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And I turn then from his past work to question the Director on his new acquisitions, his future programme: a Tiepolo has arrived from Venice to fill a gap in the Venetian side of the great collection; there are the new arrivals from the Ospedale di S. M. Nuova, including most precious Flemish work beside that of Fra Bartollomeo, Castagno, Fra Angelico, and the Florentines; the terracottas and sculpture are to be transferred later to the Museo Nazionale, their proper resting place, and then a great change is to be accomplished, the magnitude of which all who know the Uffizi collection will appreciate. This is the removal into inner rooms of all those early Florentine and Sienese paintings — from the Byzantines and Giotto to Uccello and Roselli — which line the entrance passages. The influence of atmospheric conditions, especially during the great heats, renders, it would seem, this change advisable; rich tapestries which are now stored away will take their place, and the paintings will be arranged within a new series of rooms.

Now I am about to carry off the reader who would follow me from the Florence Gallery to the City of the Lagoons: it is a morning of uncompromising wet and storm, with even the famed Piazza (a rare event) becoming rapidly submerged, when I turn my steps through the rain to visit the Director of the Venetian Academy, with whom last year I had discussed the authorship of the Barberini “Schiava”1 Here great and most important acquisitions are to be recorded, and I appreciate the opportunity of visiting them with the Director himself, whose own energy and keen insight have added these treasures to Venice. First the new Bassano, a painting of S. Jerome, who sits in contemplation before the crucifix.

And next I come to the greatest find of all, that magnificent Palma Vecchio of whose addition the Director may be justly proud. “Both these paintings”, he tells me at my request for detailed information, “that is, the Palma Vecchio and the Jacopo Bassano recently acquired for the Gallery of Venice, belonged to Signore Alessandro Bedendo of Mestre. They were both at one time in the Palazzo Widman of Venice. Mention of them is found in Ridolfi (‘Vita del Palma Vecchio '), and the notes of Martinoni on the ‘Venetia Nobilissima’ of Sansovino”.

The Widman, I may add here, were a family who seem to have belonged to the later Venetian aristocracy of the Sei-cento, and were inscribed then within the Libro d’Oro; and the works alluded to are Ridolfi’s “Le Meraviglie dell’ Arte, &c”. (Padua, 1824) and “Venetia cittk Nobilissima” of Francesco Sansovino (Venice, 1664). Now let us turn to the picture itself, which I have no hesitation in describing as an undoubted Palma Vecchio, and also as one of the grandest masterpieces left us from the ripest period of Venetian painting. I have before me at this moment both the photograph of this new Palma Vecchio, which the Director most courteously presented to me, and
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 3  May 1901  Page: 78
 
 Progress Within the Great Italian Collections By Selwyn Brinton
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of the famous “Holy Family”, by Palma, of the Dresden collection; the similarity is absolutely convincing, but, beautiful though the Dresden picture Is, it is, I think, surpassed by that of the Palazzo Widman. The Virgin, who holds upon her knee the naked Child, is of Palmas splendid Venetian type, “the twin sister”, said the Director to me, “of the famous ‘S. Barbara’, of S. Maria Formosa”: beside her sits S. Catherine, one of Palma’s exquisite blondes, in a robe of deep luminous green, while near her kneels in adoration the Baptist, and on the other side of the Virgin S. Joseph too is kneeling. The subject is thus what is known as a Sacra Conversazione, and the Director tells me that the painting acquired this year was formerly on a ceiling, in bad condition, and has been cleaned, but very slightly retouched. Most beautiful is the background, with a castle lying in the hills among great trees, and in the far distance a river or bay with sailing boats just visible; something there is of Giorgionesque feeling in this background, but it resembles also those of two other famous works of Palma — the “Holy Family” of Dresden, and that beautiful “Meeting of Jacob and Rachel”, also in the Dresden collection.

With such a glorious acquisition as this the Director might rest on his laurels; but he is still indefatigable, and his eyes glow with the collector’s delight as he tells me “I am on the track (sulle traccie) of a Titian”.

And now my space compels me, reluctantly, to curtail a most specially interesting visit to the Director of the Brera Gallery of Milan. Cavaliere Corrado Ricci as a critic stands unsurpassed in Italy, if not in Europe; but when one meets him one almost forgets the critic in the fascination of his personality. He seems one of those beings born to rule or to create, instinct with vital force, with will and energy. Having made already, as Director, the Parma Gallery one of the best arranged in Europe, and which he justly described to me as his own creation, he is called to a higher post, and one which might tax even his energies. Some treasures just acquired were first pointed out to me within his inner office — a delicious Benozzo Gozzoli, still breathing the very sentiment of his saintly teacher Angelico; a grand Dosso Dossi, in which the armour of the warrior saint seems to gleam back in the flesh tones; but the greatest marvel was reserved to me when I accompanied the Director through the Gallery itself. Room after room we traversed, still in the workmen’s hands, but with newly-acquired pictures stacked against the walls: an entire chapel is being reconstructed within the Gallery to contain the lovely fresco work of Luino; and the Brera, already a famous collection, is to emerge from a corner of the vast Palace to the whole primo piano, to become, in its Director’s hands, one of the most superb picture collections of Europe. The seed of Cavaliere Ricci’s study and experience at Parma is bearing fruit in the magnificent work he is now accomplishing, and — even apart from Turin, Florence, and Venice — Milan alone could justify my title of “Progress within the Great Italian Collections”.