The scholarly and authoritative article on Italian Art by Professor Venturi brings vividly before us the splendid array of masters from athe Lighthouse of Art" as Giotto was called, to the time of sudden and swift decay. The days are not yet passed when a great gallery of art is not ranked by critics and laymen accord ing to the number of the Italian masters on its walls. But, dominant as Italian art was be fore, during and after the High Renaissance, just so impotent or dead it was during the 19th century, a time which saw in Great Britain, on the Continent and in America such tremendous movements in art and the advent of such radi cal changes. Even when Italians again take up the brush once wielded by such magic hands as those of Giorgione, the Bellini, da Vinci, Titian, del Sarto, Moroni,— to name only these,— it is to but follow the Dusseldorf School, the Munich School, the story-telling schools and the chic Parisian "gems,s wherein grisette and soubrette attract by their "pretti ness," The mystic English brotherhood, heralded by Ruskin, went to the Italians before the days of Raphael for a sincere basis for their art. Our modern Italians took no part in any such movement, unless the adoption of some of the non-vascular style of the Nazarenes can be stretched into the statement that they followed the Pre-Raphaelites. There is a strange similarity in the kind of painting and in the choice of subject that stamp the beginning and rise of the American School of painting and that of the Italians who (in Italy) devoted them selves to painting within the past century, due, no doubt, to both groups drinking from the same ( Germanic ) fountain,— the academic. Within the last two decades all has changed; sculpture and painting show the influence of the great motifs animating the Barbizon men, and also that of Rodin, Manet, Whistler and the Luminists.
Centuries ago there was a renaissance in Italy. There are now signs of another, at least in the art of painting, for Italy has been called the "grave of painting° in that great. century, the 19th. From the mass of men who painted during that era conspicuous for its myriad mechanical and are hAiological dis coveries, few names there are that will linger in records of art. Roman civilization domi nated art still, the more so because of ex humation of her long-buried treasure both plastic and pictorial.
There was Carnevali, the eccentric, known as Piccio; the two Induni, Domenico excelling in genre, and Girolamo in military subjects; and Cremona, who was perhaps more technical than the Romanticists.
The turbulent Morelli (1826-1901) had a life resembling that of Salvator Rosa. He may be said to have founded the Neapolitan School of brilliant, dazzling, Fortuny-like color. Morelli may have been swayed by the pale school of the Nazarenes, but his pupil, P. Michetti and the younger Italian element were under the influence of Mariano Fortuny, a Spaniard painting brilliantly in the French manner in Rome, whose pictures were "fetes of the sun.) Among this last-named group is the joyous Favretto, who has been likened. to Guardi. His paintings are full of life, animation, splendor and truth. His colors are more tonal than the Spaniard's and his art more robust. His bril liant career was ended before the age of forty.
A. and T. Conti and F. Vinea worked in the meticulous way of Meissonier, painting furniture, costumes, tapestries and the like with astonishing facility, and little else.
Scaramuzzo, illustrator of Dante, who also painted portraits and historical scenes; and Luigi Serra, a close observer of nature, must be named among the dextrous draughtsmen in the Italy of to-day.
One of the first men to break away from Romanticism was the erratic and poetic Fontanesi, who seems to have felt the solemn ity of Barbizon.
Boldini, too, came under the thrall of Parisian, Manet-like fondness for flat color.
The figures in his portraits are attenuated al most too much for the effect of the distinction he seeks; and yet one is reminded of Velasquez, from the predominance of lustreless black that were monotonous save for an occasional spot of rose or red, as in his portrait of Whistler.
Professor Simonetti, a pupil of Fortuny, and G. de Nittis, a pupil of Gerome, produced chiefly genre subjects.
"Giovanni says Muther, °demon strates that it is possible for a man to be an Italian and yet a serious artist.° The genre canvases of the horde of merry-making, almost opera painters were relegated at once to obscurity when Segantini painted his peasants. In cool gray colors he painted in the high Alps, straightforwardly and sympatheti cally, the poor, the miserable, the afflicted and the unhappy. Segantini is a sane Impressionist and Luminist; full of sentiment he is never sentimental. The great fascination for artists in Segantini is his mastery of the line and its rhythm or cadence.
And finally, now that the 20th century art movement is well started, now that art is less national and more cosmopolitan, it is gratify ing to see the young painters in Italy produc ing canvases that are neither reminiscent nor mannered, but work that goes to prove Whistler's dictum: "There is but one Art.• Francesco Sartorelli loves boats and shores as the Hollanders do, and the cluttered water ways, tows, festoons of masts and shipping at rest for the night. All these he paints simply and largely.
Pietro Fragiacomo gives vaguely-massed im pressions of Venice's lagoons and gondolas moored in groups at twilight. His treatment is broad, suggestive and poetical.
A strong and Barbizon-like landscape mas ter is G. M. Zanetti, who has a favorite "plac ing° of a sturdy, noble tree in the centre of his pictures, dividing the distant light and dramatic ally silhouetting his central blacks.
A. Milesi is one of modem Italy's many figure painters. He differs from the horde in depicting the prolific peasant-mother mid sim ple but never sordid surroundings and all with. out "Mignardisement° or sentimentality. He is with and of his people, as is the Frenchman, Jean Francois Millet.
Beppi Ciardi paints fine cattle in broad meadows and like Troyon, uses the horizontal, undulating line to make the land recede. He is a student of aerial perspective. Guglielmo Ciardi paints moving skies, the broad sea and reaches of land far into it. Less impressive than the others, there is a straightforwardness in his style that recalls John Constable.
E Tito arranges his spots, lines and masses so as to beautifully "pattern° his picture. Drawing is less to him than the balance of color and the "arrangement° of his motifs.
L. Bazzaro has all the feeling for canals and bridges of a modem Fleming; indeed, some of his Venetian scenes might well be in Bruges or Amsterdam.
G. Carozzi is like the gentle Daubigny in his treatment of quiet streams and river banks at dose of day; and the versatile F. Cascano is as much at home near the flat dunes by a still sea as on a glacier or in Milan's myster iously dark cathedral.
The painters, E. Borsa, G. Belloni, A. Patti and Emma Ciardi show, as the other 20th coo tury artists do, the extinction of national schools and the struggle for idealistic and Impressionism. Their tendencies are not social, ethical or classical, but poetical and, fortunately, popular.