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THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



Milites urbem combusserunt. 13. Literas legi, quas scripsisti. 14. 

 Metuo ne hostes urbem obsidione cincturi sint. 15. Corrige ilium 

 pueruiu. 16. Praeceptor curabit ut discipulos corrigat. 17. Narra 

 mihi, quid patri dixeris. 18. Cupiditates coerceto. 19. Cupiditates 

 coercero debemus. 20. Puer coercens cupiditates arnatur. 21. Streuue 

 anifflum cole, mi fill. 



THE HISTORY OF ART. 



XIII. THE FLEMISH AND SPANISH SCHOOLS. 



THE progress achieved in the sixteenth century broke down the 

 comparative isolation of the various European countries. Up 

 to the beginning of that time there had been but little inter- 

 national life ; each people saw hardly anything of the habits 

 and manners of its neighbours. Hence Art diffused itself but 

 slowly, and while painting in Italy had risen to its greatest 

 heights, it hardly existed as a separate art among the northern 

 nations at all. The matrimonial arrangements, however, which 

 culminated in the conjunction of the Empire, the Low Countries, 

 and Spain, in the hands of Charles V., rapidly brought about a 

 new state of things. Spain, Italy, and Flanders became almost 

 like one kingdom ; and new arts and a new literature began to 

 spread over the entire united empire. It was partly through this 

 circumstance, and partly through the commercial changes 

 which turned the Atlantic into the great highway of trade, that 

 the Western nations now began to enter into the glorious heri- 

 tage of Italian art. 



Flanders was the country where the effects of this silent 

 revolution were first seen. Already during the middle ages a 

 certain careful and painstaking style of pictorial art had arisen 

 in the Low Countries, suitable to the solid, slow, and deliberate 

 habits of that branch of the Teutonic race. Among the 

 wealthy burghers of Antwerp, Ghent, and Brussels the Liver- 

 pools and Manchesters of the West a taste for a congenial type 

 of workmanship had naturally developed itself ; and with the 

 first flush of the Renaissance spirit it bore fruit in the earliest 

 great Flemish painter, Quentin Matsys. Like so many other 

 artists of his time, Matsys had been originally a handicrafts- 

 man tradition says a blacksmith, but that is probably only a 

 graphic way of saying that he started by being a decorative 

 worker in metal, as Ghirlandajo and many other Italian 

 painters also did about the same time. He was born at Antwerp, 

 the centre of Flemish commercial life, in 1460 ; and his style to 

 the last retained evident traces of the minute and patient train- 

 ing ho had received in his original trade. His paintings are like 

 miniatures in their detailed treatment, and they are realistic in 

 the extreme. Matsys did not usually choose for his subject any 

 ideal or idealised model : he took some old man or woman from 

 the mass of common humanity around him by preference a 

 wrinkled and care-worn face and reproduced it with almost 

 startling fidelity on his panels. Such naive treatment and care- 

 ful finish exactly suited the homely class of patrons for whom 

 he worked ; and it struck the key-note of the method to be 

 adopted by the later Dutch school. The importance of Qnentin 

 Matsys is rather that of a point in the history of the evolution 

 of art than that of a really great master. 



A century later, after being carried on by a number of lesser 

 artists of some note, the Flemish school culminated in the 

 person of Peter Paul Eubens. This great and powerful, but 

 very coarse painter was born in Westphalia in 1577 ; but he 

 was brought up at Antwerp, and received all his earliest artistic 

 ideas in the Flemish city. Studying first under the local 

 painter Van Veen, who had learnt at Home from Zucchero, 

 Eubens determined to complete his artistic training in Italy, 

 where he was deeply influenced by the works of Titian. Indeed, 

 all the art of the period may be affiliated more or less directly 

 upon the Venetian school. He also visited Spain, one among 

 the many proofs how much the imperial connection was binding 

 all Europe together into a continuous whole. Returning to 

 Antwerp, Rubens became painter by appointment to the Arch- 

 duke Albert, the stern Spanish Governor of the Provinces ; and 

 later on he went to Paris, where, by order of Marie de Medicis, 

 he painted the great, but disappointing, series of works repre- 

 senting the life of Henri IV. of France, now in the gallery of 

 the Louvre. These well-known pictures represent Rubens at 

 his worst ; they consist for the most part of large and coarse 

 figures the women especially being large and vulgar -looking 

 in the extreme boldly and vigorously painted in an effective 



broad style. Animalism is the great fault of Rubens' s work : 

 he represents the strong homely Flemish nature somewhat 

 corrupted rather than refined by sensuous Italian influences. 

 Meeting the Duke of Buckingham in Paris, Rubens was induced 

 to visit England, and was knighted by Charles I., for whom he 

 painted some of his best-known pictures. Rubens had a rapid, 

 dashing style, and worked with almost careless haste ; but 

 his wonderful power of hand still kept his work from ever 

 degenerating into anything slipshod. His merits are all those of 

 execution, his defects those of taste and character. He was a 

 coarse-minded man, but a great painter. His famous " Dessent 

 from the Cross " at Antwerp shows his workmanship perhaps 

 at its best, though even this, with all its power, is singularly 

 wanting in the tenderness and pathos which we expect in the 

 treatment of such a solemn subject. 



Vandyck, a pupil of Rubens, born at Antwerp in 1599, was 

 the last great painter of the Flemish school. Like his master, 

 he visited Italy, and studied colouring from the works of Titian. 

 He devoted himself entirely to portrait painting, and he far sur- 

 passes in this department any other of the great masters, except 

 perhaps Titian himself, and possibly Rembrandt. Charles I. 

 was the earliest English king who effectively patronised the 

 fine arts, and he invited Vandyck, as ho had invited Rubens, to 

 his court. Vandyck's best portraits are those of Charles I. 

 himself and his children, and all his greatest works are still pre- 

 served in England a point which marks the gradual westward 

 advance of the artistic spirit, for up to the seventeenth cen- 

 tury England was a mere cypher in art. His style accords 

 well with that of the Court which he served ; there is in it 

 much of the grace, the delicacy, and the hauteur of the Cavaliers 

 and their ladies, and the costume of the time is indeed most 

 familiar to us as handed down in his pictures. Vandyck died in 

 London in 1641. 



The Spanish school is closely connected with the Flemish on 

 the one hand, and with the Roman on the other. Even before 

 the intimate intercourse between Italy and Spain, brought 

 about by the common sovereignty of Charles V., a succession of 

 native artists had arisen in the Peninsula, whose works, how- 

 ever, are very little known beyond the Pyrenees. But under 

 the great Castilian and Austrian dynasty, the influence of 

 Italian art naturally spread into Spain. Velasquez, the earliest 

 Spanish painter whose works have obtained any great note out- 

 side the Peninsula itself, was born at Seville in 1599, the same 

 year as Vandyck, and studied at first under local masters. The 

 influence of the Moorish tone is strong in his works, as in all 

 those of the Spanish school ; it throws over his painting a certain 

 subtle kind of sense for colour, which is wanting to most 

 northern artists. Invited to Madrid, then almost a foreign 

 city for a Seville man, he executed portraits of Philip IV. and 

 his suite, and became painter by appointment to the Court. He 

 next visited Italy, having previously become acquainted with 

 Rubens at Madrid ; and while there he spent a year at Rome, 

 studying the great works of Raffael and Michel Angelo, in the 

 Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, besides going to Naples and 

 elsewhere. No painter was ever more universal in his choice of 

 subjects than Velasquez. He excelled especially in portraits ; 

 but he was also fond of animal painting, and his landscapes and 

 historical pieces are almost equally good in their way. Unfor- 

 tunately, in order to see Velasquez at his best it is necessary 

 to visit Madrid, as very few of his pictures have ever left 

 the Spanish galleries. We have a few examples in England, 

 however, amongst them three in the National Gallery. Velasquez 

 died in 1660. 



The Spanish school finally culminated in the person of 

 Bartolomeo Esteban Murillo. Like Velasquez, Murillo (1618- 

 1682) was born under the shadow of the great cathedral of 

 Seville, and brought up among the semi-Moorish architecture of 

 the southern city. He came, as so often happens, of a family 

 of painters, and received his first artistic education in the studio 

 of his uncle. In his youth he went to the capital, and there 

 was encouraged by Velasquez, whose pupil he became. Later 

 on in life he returned to Seville, where he worked till his death. 

 Murillo's work is the most intensely Spanish and individualist 

 of any Peninsular painter's. He had great delicacy of touch 

 and a certain air of inspiration which ca.nnot fail to touch the 

 beholder. The intense faith and strong idealism of the Spanish 

 nature speak out in every line. His treatment of colour was 

 remarkably mellow and harmonious, and his devotional works 



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