Rise of European Schools

Rubens.

The eclectic art of which the Carracci dreamed was realised by Rubens with the ease of genius, and the problem was much more complicated for a man of the north, who wished to add to it that fusion of the Flemish and Latin spirits of which the rather pedantic attempts of Romanism had only shown the difficulties. And he achieved it without losing anything of his overflowing personality, his questing imagination and the enchant ing discoveries of the greatest colourist known to painting.

There are in the Prado two magnificent pieces of painting the comparison of which is eloquent. They are the Original Sin by Titian and the full-sized copy which Rubens made of it. Rubens desired to be, and believed he had been, scrupulously faithful to the original, and indeed his work is nearly as lovely as the paint ing by the great Venetian. However, if one had not seen the model and had no information as to the circumstances of the copy, no one, I believe, would imagine he was seeing anything but an authentic composition by Rubens, so much has the Flem ing added all the riches as well as some of the faults of the Flem ish school and of his personal genius.

To complete the reflections suggested by this juxtaposition, the Brussels Museum also offers us a very curious one. On the same panel we can see the Miracles of St. Benedict, a large com position painted by Rubens in 1628 and the slightly reduced copy made of it by Delacroix in 1838, in preparing to paint his Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople. Here we have the same intention of respectful fidelity as in Rubens before Titian, and the same involuntary and mysterious transformation of the most expressive parts of the design and colour. We see here the violet and sulphurous tones which are the mark of the great romantic and as it were the emanation of his intimate spirit.

These two poles symbolise to some extent the scope of a genius at once powerful, happy and easy, who summed up in himself the finest conquests of the past and outlined the direction of the future for two centuries to come. His successors in France were Watteau and Delacroix, and, through Delacroix, Renoir.

The great English portraitists of the eighteenth century were also Rubens's direct descendants through Van Dyck, and so were even the landscape painters, beginning with Gainsborough.

A humanist in the manner of the great figures of the Renais sance and, as was no one after him, curious to know and under stand everything, deeply involved in the great affairs of his time, having the confidence of the princes and only using it in his diplo matic missions as a true Christian in the interests of peace, Rubens was one of those rare mortals who do real honour to humanity. He was handsome, good and generous, and he loved virtue. His laborious life was well ordered. The creator of so many delightful pagan feasts went each morning to mass before proceeding to his studio. He is the most illustrious type of happy and perfectly balanced genius, and combined in his own person passion and science, ardour and reflection. Rubens expressed drama as well as joy, since nothing human was foreign to him, and he could command at will the pathos of colour and expres sion which he required in his religious masterpieces.

Van Dyck.

We rarely see in one School a great master and a disciple resembling each other so closely as did Rubens and Van Dyck; or such a resemblance, leaving as it did all freedom of invention to the disciple or, indeed, a great painter educated by a great genius. Van Dyck inherited Rubens's marvellous facility in both draughtsmanship and colour, and his touch has sometimes a charm and elegance beyond his master's. But this facility was not, as in Rubens, the instrument of a great mind which embraced without effort the whole world of art. Like Rubens, Van Dyck tried to amalgamate the influences of Italy and Flanders and he succeeded in some paintings which have a touching grace, notably in his Madonnas and Holy Families, his Crucifixions and Depositions from the Cross, and also in some of his mythological compositions. But his main glory was as a portraitist, the most elegant and aristocratic ever known. In this sphere he outdistanced his master and had no rivals, save the great English portrait painters of the 18th century whose model he was. The great Portrait of Charles I. in the Louvre is a work unique of its kind, for its sovereign elegance achieves by means of excellent painting a noble and subtle psychological and historical poetry.