The History of Painting in Italy, Vol. 5 (of 6): From the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth CenturyLanzi, Luigi
History
The History of Painting in Italy, Vol. 5 (of 6): From the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century
Lanzi, Luigi
Painting -- Italy -- History
enamoured of certain ideal manners, and of a rapid touch; consequently
careless of good practice and of rules." Respecting these alterations,
however, it is not yet time to treat.
To come down, at present, to the two heads of the school; Pasinelli, who
first ceased to live, will first come under our consideration. He received
his education in the art from Cantarini; subsequently from Torre, whose
school he too early left, owing to which, most probably, he never attained
to perfect correctness of design. In this, nevertheless, he surpassed Paul
Veronese, who formed his great prototype. He did not imitate him, according
to the sectarists; he borrowed from him that effective and majestic
composition; but the ideas of the faces, and the distribution of the
colours he acquired elsewhere. He was naturally too inclined to create
surprise by the display of copious, rich, and spirited compositions; such
as his two pictures at the Certosa, of Christ's Entrance into Jerusalem,
and his Return into Limbo; and such too is his History of Coriolanus, in
the Casa Ranuzzi, a piece found repeated in many collections. No one can
behold these paintings without granting to Pasinelli a true painter's fire,
great novelty of idea, and a certain elevated character, never the boast of
middling artists. With these gifts, however, he is sometimes too
extravagant in his attitudes, and in his Paolesque imitation of spectacles,
and strange novel draperies, which he is thought to have carried to an
extreme, as in his Preaching of John the Baptist, in which his rival,
Taruffi, found, instead of the desert of Judea, the piazza of St. Mark, in
Venice. He knew, withal, to restrain his fire according to the genius of
his themes, as we may see in that Holy Family in possession of the Scalzi;
a work partaking of Albani. He painted more for private persons than for
the public; uniform in the spirit, varied in the colours of his pictures.
Some of these private pictures boast, at once, a softness of hand, and a
peculiarly vivid and gay light, that might be taken for those of the
Venetians or Lombards; in particular, a few of his Venuses, which are
supposed to be portraits of one of his three wives. In a few of his other
specimens he displays very little relief, whole colours, a tint almost like
that of the Bolognese artists preceding the Caracci; and these I should
either attribute to his early youth, or his closing days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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