SOUTHERN AND NORTHERN CHIAROSCURO COMPARED.
Two great artists, Correggio and Rembrandt, may be regarded as the musicians among painters. The forte of each lies in investing a mental state with sensuous form and expression, but the sentiment of the Italian is emotional and intense; that of the Dutchman, strong and contained. With both the power of idealization, the poetizing element of art, resides not so much in thoughtful composition, in majesty or loveliness of form, as in coloring. They create a powerful effect by grouping masses of color and making clearness and unity in the picture result from the harmony of their tones. They let reflections play into one another, light and shade commingle; so that all brilliancy is soft and free from garish ness, all gloom is brightened with an illuminating touch. In the undu waves of light the firm outlines of objects are softened and oblit erated, and the magic of chiaroscuro sheds a dreamy, unreal charm over the picture.
Correggio loves the open air, the poesy of the forest, whose shadows soften the sunlight which brightens them. Rembrandt's taste is more for the pleasant privacy of the Northern home, whose chambers, shut off from the sky, receive by the windows an illumination varying in degree for the different parts of the room, where we look closely before form and color become apparent to us in the dusky light. Thus both these masters are to be placed with the Venetians and Rubens as having contributed to develop the specifically picturesque quality in art.
(1494-15341 throws equal warmth of feeling and charm of expre:.:,ion into representation: of sensuous pleasure, of religious rapture, and of woe and suffering. The naked forms of his lo and his Leda shine forth from under their lightly-woven coverings; his .1/ado1lna is borne by exultant bands of angels aloft into the radiant splendor of heaven. In his picture called _Nikki (p1. 37,Ac. t) a light streams out from the infant Christ upon the happy mother, the herdsmen who stand around, and the angels hovering above, while in the distance the day is breaking. The figures, whose outlines afford little pleasure to the eye, owe all their value to this charm of coloring which is shed over them. On soft moss in the shade of the trees lies the fair form which is called a R•adinc 2); to us this half-clad woman in the bloom of beauty, stretched out ill such a charming, sweetly-pensive attitude, has always seemed like Correggio's OWIl Muse. Both these pictures are treasures of the Dresden Gallery.
Rembrandt (16o6-1669) has given us an enchanting picture of the happy time of his first marriage. Holding his beautiful little wife upon his lap and in joyous mood raising the wineglass aloft, he looks out upon us laughingly in hearty enjoyment of life (fic. 4). At a later time both his life and his spirit became more gloomy; then the shadows threaten to absorb the light, and the bright, cheerful colors are subdued by shading with brown. But his genius triumphed over this tendency. Rembrandt
was a realist in details; Ins patriarchs, apostles, and Pharisees have Oriental physiogimmies and costumes, and the air of direct contemporary reality thus imparted is strikingly blended with an imaginative element. Ile was a master in the use of the etching-needle as well as of the brush, and a famous etching of his is the so-called " thousand-florin sheet," which depicts the Resurrection of Lasarus (lic. 3). Christ stands in an attitude full of spiritual majesty; the first stirrings of life in Lazarus as he awakes from the slumbers of death, and the various degrees of aston ishment in the lookers-on, are faithfully portrayed; but the work, like all of Rembrandt's, is greatest by the poesy of its illumination.
/Ind Poiler.—Rembrandt exercised a controlling influence upon the Dutch genre- and landscape-painters. The animal-painters, too—and notably Paul Potter (1625-165.1)—did not content themselves with a right understanding of the instincts of cattle and sheep, and of their characteristic movements and attitudes: they brought the landscape into play, divided their pictures into masses of light and shade, empha sized single details, and made the whole effective and pleasing by all illumination in harmony with the scene (jir:-. 5).
Claude Lorraine and Jacob Correggio and Rembrandt, Claude Lorraine (i600-16S2) and Jacob Ruysdael (1625-1681)—leaders in landscape-painting—are the representatives respectively of Southern and Northern Europe. In France, Poussin, following in the footsteps of Italian art, had introduced in landscape-painting- the heroic style, where everything is on a grand scale—an imposing range of hills in the back ground, in the middle grounds classic buildings, in the foreground a stately group of trees. 'l'o these well-balanced forms of composition Claude Lorraine added the splendor of light and color, the soft breeze which rustles in the tree-tops and makes the waves of the sea heave with a gentle motion. Nature in his pictures seems to be keeping her Sabbath, and there is always the freshness of morning or the calm of evening (pi. 37, fig. 6).
The Dutch studied the things of insignificant appearance which lay about them, and love for their native soil proclaimed itself in their works. A sandhilI, the trunk of a willow reflected in a pond, a forest path with an outlook into the open, are sufficient, in conjunction with the air and the clouds, to exercise a melancholy or a cheerful influence. Ruysdael depicts both the peacefulness and the terrors of the forest. In Figure 7 we see an elegy written in lines and color: a shower veils the ruins of a church in the background, and a flooded brook in the foreground makes a way for itself among graves on which there glimmers through the dusk a last smile of the departing sun.