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By Root 2817 0

painters, worked in the city virtually all his life, adorned many of its chief public buildings, including the Doge’s Palace, and covered vast areas of canvas. His output was huge: there are, for instance, at least eight Last Suppers by him, some on a monumental scale. He carried Titian’s methods of painting still further and developed what is known as the prestezza technique of rapid brush strokes, creating impressions of faces and objects rather than working them out in detail. His major paintings are designed to be seen from a distance rather than minutely inspected from close up. But of course most people, especially patrons, want both: they survey from afar, then move in to inspect the workmanship. Many of them in sixteenth-century Venice considered Tintoretto’s work unfinished. They wanted him to have another go, and he refused. They turned instead to an artist from Verona, Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese (1528–88), who painted on an equally large scale but produced a more finished and smooth effect, and introduced the sumptuous settings and luxurious garments that Venetian high society loved.

Hence Tintoretto ended his life a comparatively poor man, and his widow had to petition the authorities for help. At his best, however, he achieved tremendous effects, of a kind Titian never even attempted. In his parish church of Santa Maria dell’Orto, where he is buried, he created a cataclysmic Last Judgment, which in many ways is more impressive than Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel. It is the end of the world presented in the most dramatic fashion, and a fit point at which to bring this survey to a close. Within a few years, Caravaggio had introduced his new and spectacular epoch of realism and scattered the last, lingering leaves of the Renaissance to the four winds.

PART 6

THE SPREAD AND DECLINE OF THE RENAISSANCE

The spread of Renaissance ideas and forms within Italy was initially slow, and outside Italy it was slower still. To northern minds and eyes, what we (not they; they had no name for it, it was normality) call Gothic was immensely satisfying and therefore tenacious. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a gracious flowering in painting, sculpture and architecture in parts of northern Europe, especially in Burgundy and the Low Countries, France and southern Germany. It culminated in the great panels of Jan van Eyck, in the magnificent illustrations by the Limbourg Brothers to the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, and in lofty cathedrals and splendid châteaux. In England, the latest phase of its insular style of late Gothic, Perpendicular, was still absolutely dominant in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. It was one of the most creative periods in European history, but what was done was in “the old style”; it was the art of the Middle Ages, refined, improved, more ornate and elaborate, but still medieval. Northern scholars were already avidly reading recovered Greek and Roman texts, but artists did not yet look to antiquity for models.

The first northerner to apply himself seriously to what was going on in the arts in Italy was Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the painter son of a Nuremberg goldsmith. An engraver himself, he caught glimpses of Italian ideas through prints, and in 1494, aged twenty-three, he went to Venice himself. He progressed slowly south on foot, punctuating his journey by a series of delightful watercolors, recording his amazement at the light and color of the south, the olive groves and the strange architecture (his view of Arco, painted on his return journey, is the first European landscape masterpiece done in water-color). He learned a great deal in Italy, and he returned again in 1505–7 to learn more. Later in life he set down his impressions in theoretical writings, especially his Treatise on Measurement. Germany, he said, was full of budding painters, “able boys” who were simply dumped on a master and told to copy him. “They were taught without any rational principle and solely according to the old usage. And thus they grew up in ignorance, like a wild and