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thereby enabling foreign amateurs, and their own countrymen, to form a correct notion of its merit and value. Although they, perhaps, hardly do justice to John van Eyck, since they cannot display the brilliancy and clearness of colouring which constitute one, if not the chief, of the excellences of that master, they form a most instructive exhibition of the varieties and progress of the Flemish and German schools, in drawing, composition, and expression. In all these points they establish, as fully as we could desire, the immense superiority of Albert Durer over his German predecessors and contemporaries, showing him amply endowed with the art of telling his story, and, we will venture to say, with the soul and the inspiration of a painter.

This gallery, always most liberally shown, drew, perhaps even in its incipient state, the attention of patriotic lovers of the arts, and German authors began to write of German artists. The first who, to the best of our knowledge, zealously took up the subject, was that mighty veteran of literature, who for more than half a century exercised an influence, we believe unexampled, over the tastes and opinions of his countrymen, and indeed of a large portion of Europe,-we mean Goethe. From the first number of that great author's later periodical, entitled Hefte über Kunst und Alterthum, (Papers upon Art and Antiquity,) we shall take the liberty of borrowing much of what we have to say upon the subject.

When the Fine Arts, banished by political convulsions and the devastations of war from Italy, took refuge at Constantinople, in a Greece far unlike the Hellas that had given them birth, they assumed a peculiar character, which Goethe terms "the gloomy oriental aridity," and describes as chiefly marked in painting by stiff symmetrical composition, a gilded background, and a Moorish or Ethiopian complexion, distinctively and habitually given to the representations of our Saviour and the Virgin;whence this last strange peculiarity was derived he professes himself unable to explain. He conceives this Byzantine school of painting to have prevailed in all those parts of Germany which were sufficiently polished to value the Fine Arts, and especially on the wealthy and populous banks of the Rhine, having been there introduced either by pictures brought from Constantinople, or by painters educated in that metropolis, then boasting itself the only Christian seat of luxury, refinement, learning, and cultivation. This lasted until the thirteenth century, of which era Goethe says:

"But now a gladsome feeling of nature breaks suddenly through, and that not as a mere imitation of individual reality; it is a genial revelling of the eye-sight, as though then first opening upon the sensible world. Apple

cheeked boys and girls, egg-shaped faces of men and women, comfortable looking old men with flowing or curly beards, the whole race good, pious, and cheerful, and although sufficiently individualized, collectively embodied by a delicate and tender pencil. So with respect to the colours. These are cheerful, clear, aye and powerful too, without especial harmony, but likewise without gaudiness, and always agreeable and pleasing to the eye."

The painters on whom Goethe bestows these praises, he nevertheless considers as mere improvers upon the Byzantine school, to which they still indubitably belonged-we are not even sure whether they had discarded the unaccountable negro complexion-and John van Eyck was the first who fully emancipated himself from its trammels. Him he calls a pre-eminent man, and says further:

"We do not for an instant hesitate to place our Eyck in the first class of those whom nature has endowed with pictorial faculties. * His compositions possess great truth and loveliness. * He was a right-thinking and right-feeling artist."

Upon an artist thus eulogized by Goethe-to say nothing of the herd of minor and more extravagant encomiasts-an artist who was the real founder of the Flemish school of painting, and is believed to have materially influenced the art even in Italy, we must dwell for a few minutes, notwithstanding he be not our immediate subject.

John van Eyck was a native of the Netherlands, and although considerable discrepancy of opinion exists as to the precise dates of his birth and death, it is certain that he was alive, and at the height of his celebrity, about the middle of the fourteenth century. He had then discarded the gilt back-ground, substituting landscape, buildings, or whatever best suited his subject; had rejected the established formal symmetry of composition, and, whether his predecessors had or had not ventured on such an innovation, he was in the habit of giving every beauty of colour as well as of feature to the divine persons he depicted. His chief merits were fidelity to truth and nature, just expression, correct drawing of his heads, careful and high finishing, great beauty, brightness, and clearness of colouring, and especially a skill in composition, then and there at least previously unknown, by which he not only told the story he meant to represent, but, introducing into his landscape-background some totally unconnected incident of ordinary life, gave a singular air of reality to the whole. His faults were an ignorance of anatomy, that made his drawing of body and limbs as defective as that of his heads was good, great stiffness of attitude and drapery, a want of blending in his colours, and a total absence of

all aspiration after ideal beauty or sublimity. The very qualities by the way, good and bad, that might have been expected in the founder of the Flemish school.

These faults are admitted by the warmest of van Eyck's modern admirers, and Dr. Waagen, in his publication Ueber Hubert und Johann van Eyck, expresses his surprise at the unqualified assertion of the painter's contemporary, the Genoese, Facius, who, in his work De Viris illustribus, says that John van Eyck was esteemed the first painter of his day. This superlative praise from an Italian appears, however, less extraordinary when we recollect that the dark and hard school of Cimabue, then prevailing in Italy, must have given peculiar effect to the brilliancy and clearness of the Netherlander's colouring. But there is another circumstance, extraneous to his skill as an artist, that might very materially influence the judgment of his contemporaries, and of which we must briefly speak ere we dismiss this really talented man.

It was long generally believed that John van Eyck was the first discoverer and inventor of the art of oil-painting, all his predecessors having mixed their colours with water, and secured their preservation by different varnishes dried upon the pictures in the sun. This opinion originated, we believe, with Vasari, who, in his Vite de' piu eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, ed Architetti, relates a long story concerning the rise of the invention, from the disaster that befel a picture carefully finished by van Eyck, which split with the sun's heat whilst the varnish was drying. Vasari goes on to state, that the mortified painter, who was skilled in chemistry, such as the science then was, forthwith applied himself to seek some mode of mixing his colours that should supersede the use of sun-dried varnish, and found linseed oil, duly prepared, to answer his purpose. Vasari further names the two favourite scholars of the discoverer, viz. Roger of Bruges, and Antonello da Messina, an Italian attracted to the Low Countries by the fame of van Eyck, to whom he at length imparted his secret, and through whom, after years of concealment and some death-bed revelations, it was finally made public.

In later and more critical times the truth of this whole story has been questioned. Authors of all countries have attacked Vasari; a treatise upon oil painting, written in the tenth or eleventh century, by a monk named either Rogerus, or Theophilus, or Tutilo, has been discovered; and Bernardo di Domenici, in his Lives of Neapolitan Painters and Architects, published in 1744, speaks of an oil painting bearing the date of 1309, a period when John van Eyck was certainly unborn. We have hinted that we love not controversy, and the investigation of this matter

would require us to wade through piles of dull volumes, probably leaving us at the end of our labours little more enlightened upon the subject than we are now; when we incline to think with Dr. Waagen that oil colours had been used by early painters, but in an imperfect manner, perhaps equally with the varnishes used for water colours, requiring to be dried in great heat, and that van Eyck's discovery was a mode of preparing the oil that enabled it to dry without heat. We moreover conceive with Goethe, that he devised a mode of using oil, which gave his colours the clearness so much admired in his pictures.

John van Eyck was followed by a constant succession of painters formed in his school, whom we may pass unnoticed, our object being merely to show the state of the arts north of the Alps prior to Albert Durer. In order to do which completely, we must now turn to another part of the subject, and mention a curious, and, we believe, exclusively German regulation, touching the social condition of the votaries both of the arts and of the muses, which could not but powerfully act upon their genius, taste and feelings; and which, a priori, might well have induced the conclusion, that never by any, the remotest possibility, could Germany produce poet, painter, or sculptor.

These creative spirits "of imagination all compact," poets, painters, and sculptors, were constituted into regular guilds, or incorporated companies, as carpenters, blacksmiths, haberdashers, and other trades. The youthful aspirant, deemed by his parents or himself a genius, was formally bound to a master of his craft, and subjected to all the bye-laws, in Germany many and whimsical, applicable to common apprentices and journeymen, ere he could be admitted a master, and set up in trade on his own account. Freedom or mastership was earned by a specimen of the candidate's skill in his business. In poetry this skill was, we know, appreciated more by the observance of arbitrary rules and the management of mechanical difficulties, than by the imagination or passion displayed, and the same spirit would probably prevail in the painters' company.

Turn we now to Albert Durer, whom Germany still esteems one of the brightest jewels in her crown of fame, and who in all other countries, if not regarded with such passionate enthusiasm, is admired as an extraordinary man. As a painter, he is univer sally allowed to have excelled in conception, in composition, in fertility of invention, (these Vasari says were a mine of wealth, whence subsequent painters, even Italians, borrowed,) in brilliancy of colouring, and in high finish; to have drawn correctly, if somewhat stiffly; and to have reformed, if he did not found the German school of painting. It must be recollected that in

the 15th century facility of intercourse and consequent diffusion of knowledge were not quite what they are in the 19th; and the German school had not yet adopted the improvements of the Flemish. Durer's pictures, for the most part crowded with figures, are still preserved in great numbers in public and private galleries, and that even in Italy. What remain to us form, however, in all likelihood, a very small part of what he produced, the works of the older masters having in Germany suffered cruelly from the insane iconoclastic zeal of some of the fanatical sects which there swarmed at the era of the reformation. As an engraver, Albert Durer raised the art from infancy to a degree of perfection that has only in late years been surpassed. Vasari pronounces some of his woodcuts so good, that in many respects it would be impossible to do better. And a recent English author says, "It would perhaps be difficult to select a more perfect specimen of executive excellence than his print of St. Jerome, dated 1514." Albert Durer, moreover, carved in wood and in ivory; studied and understood the arts in all branches immediately or remotely influencing his own; and wrote treatises, translated into Latin, French, and Italian, upon Perspective, Anatomy, Geometry, Architecture, and the science of Fortification, as well as upon Painting and Sculpture. And all this was accomplished in a life considerably shorter than that usually allotted to man, inasmuch as he who achieved the whole died at the age of 57, of a disease, however irksome, seldom fatal, i. e. a penurious and termagant wife.

We will now open the little volume, to which all we have hitherto said has been but an introduction. It is illustrated with four engravings, namely, of Albert Durer's portrait from his own pencil, of his house, most religiously preserved by the Nurembergers as he inhabited it, of his tomb, and of that of his friend, Wilibald Pirkheimer, a man of considerable consequence in his day, whose wealth, high character and literary connexions, afforded the humbler artist his best means of cultivation. The portrait offers as happy an exemplification of the painter's merits and defects as could well be hoped. Even in the print, we perceive the beautifully high finish of the painting; the resemblance is manifestly of the kind called a speaking likeness; the features, the flesh, the mild and tranquil intellectual expression, are perfect; the hair is incomparable; and yet the effect of the whole is rather unpleasing, from its inconceivable stiffness and formality. It looks as though the original were spell-bound in

Bryan's Biographical and Critical Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, &c. 9 vols. 4to. London, 1816.

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