EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The great art of the Renaissance in the two peninsulas, Italy and Spain, had culminated when the eighteenth century arrived. Michel angelo, Raphael, Da Vinci, Titian, Murillo, and Velasquez were dead, and there were none who were worthy to tread in their footsteps and, like them, enrich the world with the splendors of commanding genius. Nor to this day has any painter appeared in Italy or Spain fit to be classed with the great masters of the magnificent art-epoch now closed. For a century and a quarter there were only two or three painters in Italy and only one in Spain even worthy of record. The void was almost com plete.
In the last century there was in Venice a small cluster of painters scarcely deserving to be classed as a school. They were painstaking delineators of Venetian views, accurate in detail; their works are chiefly valuable now because they reproduce for us the Venice that is passing away: they are the photographic views of a past age. The most promi nent of these painters in that age was Sebastiano Ricci (r66o-1734), a subject-painter who is remembered for some paintings he executed in England.
Antonio the painter of the time best known at the present day was Antonio Canale, called Canaletto in distinction from his father, who was a scene-painter. Canaletto was born in 1697 and died in 176S. As has been well said, " Canaletto constituted himself portrait-painter, not of the Venetians, but of the city of Venice." He painted, not her people nor her interior life, but her squares, her streets, her churches, her canals, with truth and sincere love for his native place. A series of Treekr I Yercs of I rune is especially noted. These paintings were executed with delicate refinement, and, if not suggesting greatness in the artist, are very clever. Canaletto's masterpiece, :1 Hew of the Church of The
.1Iadonna della Salule, challenges our respectful admiration.
Bernardo Bellotto (172o--1780), a nephew and pupil of Canaletto, imi tated his style; so also did Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), another of his pupils. Gnardi was a painter of finer artistic feeling than his master; his views of Venice show less architectural correctness than those of Canaletto, but more atmosphere and movement. With the death of this painter the art practically ceased in Italy for upward of forty years.
Francisco single Spanish painter worthy of record dur ing the dreary vacuity of the eighteenth century was Francisco Goya of Lucientes, generally known under the name of Goya. He was born at Fuente de Todos in 1746 and died in 1828. He was self-taught, studying the old masters of Spain, but having no technical tutelage. He did not imitate any painter; his style was entirely his own, partaking of his wild, fiery, sensual—nay, brutal—nature, irregular, forcible, original. He understood the limitations of his genius, and undertook nothing in the way of " high art." No Madonnas or martyrs for the pencil of this ribald painter, but bull-fights, village processions, and characteristic bits of genre often degenerating into low buffoonery. His technique, however, was that of a master, and has, perhaps, had more to do with forming the style of recent Spanish, French, and Italian genre-painters than is generally ad mitted. His celebrity will finally rest, however, on his portraits ; in spite of the imperfections arising from defective education, the bold, slashing touch of the master, the coloring, the character, the beauty, in these por traits—one of the most important of which was the likeness of the famous actress Tirana—stamp Goya as a man of genius.