The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance: Third Edition — John Shaqi
The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance: Third EditionBerenson, Bernard
History
The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance: Third Edition
Berenson, Bernard
Art, Renaissance; Painters -- Italy -- Venice
The pictures required for a house were naturally of a different kind
from those suited to the Council Hall or the School, where large
paintings, which could be filled with many figures, were in place. For
the house smaller pictures were necessary, such as could easily be
carried about. The mere dimensions, therefore, excluded pageants, but,
in any case, the pageant was too formal a subject to suit all moods--too
much like a brass band always playing in the room. The easel picture had
to be without too definite a subject, and could no more permit being
translated into words than a sonata. Some of Giovanni Bellini's late
works are already of this kind. They are full of that subtle, refined
poetry which can be expressed in form and colour alone. But they were a
little too austere in form, a little too sober in colour, for the gay,
care-free youth of the time. Carpaccio does not seem to have painted
many easel pictures, although his brilliancy, his delightful fancy, his
love of colour, and his gaiety of humour would have fitted him admirably
for this kind of painting. But Giorgione, the follower of both these
masters, starting with the qualities of both as his inheritance,
combined the refined feeling and poetry of Bellini with Carpaccio's
gaiety and love of beauty and colour. Stirred with the enthusiasms of
his own generation as people who had lived through other phases of
feeling could not be, Giorgione painted pictures so perfectly in touch
with the ripened spirit of the Renaissance that they met with the
success which those things only find that at the same moment wake us to
the full sense of a need and satisfy it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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