The History of Italian Painting. Luigi Lanzi
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perhaps, too strongly of the manner of the Caracci. This picture, which he painted at Rome, was much admired at Siena, and was the origin of his great employment in that city, where his pictures are always decorated with most pleasing choirs of angels. His cabinet pictures were also lively; witness the four Seasons at Volte, a seat of the noble family of Chigi. He kept an open academy for painting in his house, which was much frequented by natives of Siena, and honoured by the attendance of Borgognone, who stopt some months with Astolfo before he went to Rome. Hence, many of this artist's early battle-pieces and landscapes are to be met with at Siena: the house of Sig. Decano Giovanelli, a literary ornament of that city, abounded with them.
I find some other painters of this school who are known beyond the state of Siena. Antiveduto Grammatica, an eminent painter, of Sienese extraction, was known at Rome, where he was president of the academy of S. Luke. It is true that he was deprived of that office for attempting to substitute one of his own copies for a S. Luke, by Raffaello, which he had sold to a gentleman. He had a peculiar talent in the art of copying, especially heads, and, on this account, he was a good portrait painter. Although we are not certain that he had any master but one Domenico Perugino, a painter of little wooden scenes,[304] he obtained applause in large compositions. There is an Annunciation by Grammatica of a most brilliant colouring, in the hospital of the Incurables; and several of his other pictures, in different churches. He died at Rome in 1626.
Two other artists, unknown in their native place, are made known to me by their signatures. On a Last Supper, in the convent of the Angioli, below Assisi, I discovered Franciscus Antonius Senensis, 1614, or thereabouts. The style has enough of Baroccio to lead me to suspect that he was the scholar of Vanni, or of Salimbeni: nor must he be reckoned the meanest of that school, for he was master of expression in a degree superior to mediocrity. The figure of the departing Judas is the image of desperate resolve, and would be much better had he not given it the feet of a bat; a grotesque conceit. In the same neighbourhood, at the church of Foligno, I read, beneath a Holy Family, the name of Marcantonio Grecchi, and the date 1634. The style is solid, expressive, and correct; more resembling Tiarini di Bologna than any master of Siena. Niccolo Tornioli, lately mentioned, painted in the church of S. Paul, at Bologna, in various cities of Italy: in Siena he left, perhaps, no picture in public but the Vocation of S. Matthew, still remaining in the custom-house. Towards the close of the century, painting was practised at Siena chiefly by foreigners. Annibale Mazzuoli, a fresco painter of rapid execution but of little merit, was most employed: he afterwards went to Rome, and is the last name inserted in the Eulogies of Pio.
Painting, however, came again into repute at Siena, about 1700, when its credit was restored by Cav. Giuseppe Nasini, a scholar of Ciro Ferri. Nasini possessed the qualities for which I have commended many of his nation, a fervid genius, a fertile imagination, and a poetic vein; but his poetry was of the species that prevailed in Italy during his younger days, a composition unrestrained by fixed rules. To this spirit we not unfrequently discover some analogy in his paintings, in which we could desire to find more order, a more choice design, and colouring less vulgar. He always shews, however, a taste for allegory, great command of pencil, and an imposing air on the whole; and the observation of Redi, that "he stuns the beholder," is not without some foundation.[305] This remark was made when Nasini had finished the cupola of the chapel of S. Anthony, in the church of the Apostles at Rome; in which chapel there is a picture by Luti. He afterwards entered into a competition with Luti, and the first artists then in Rome, in the large prophets of the lateran cathedral. His masterpiece is supposed to be the S. Leonard, in Madonna del Pianto, at Foligno, the ceiling of which he painted with good frescos. Siena contains some of his finest productions of every kind; above all, the pictures of the Novissimi, intended for the Pitti palace, but transferred from it to the church of the Conventuals of Siena. It contains a great number of figures neither so select nor so well arranged as to arrest the eye of the spectator; but he who would contemptuously overlook it, let him say how many painters then in Italy could have produced such a picture.
Giuseppe brought up two pupils in his house. He had a brother named Antonio, who was a priest, whose likeness is among the eminent portrait painters in the gallery at Florence. Cav. Apollonio Nasini, the son of Giuseppe, was inferior to his father in the profession; yet assisted him in his greatest works, and held an honourable rank among his contemporaries. Gioseffo Pinacci, of Siena, a disciple of Mehus in figures, and of Borgognone in battle-pieces, lived in the time of Nasini. He was a good painter of portraits, and made a considerable fortune, first at the court of Carpio, Viceroy of Naples, and afterwards in the service of the grand duke Ferdinand, at Florence, where several of his works remain. But his chief merit consisted in a knowledge of the pencilling of the old masters. Nicolo Franchini distinguished himself rather by restoring the work of other hands than by his own productions, and thus furnished Pecci with much convenient information for his City Guide; "by his skill," says the Cavaliere, "in restoring injured specimens to their original beauty, without applying to them a fresh pencil, and in supplying the faded colours with others taken from paintings of less value, he entitled himself, in fact, to the praise of a new discovery." We shall here conclude the school of Siena; and shall add in its praise, that if it did not produce painters of the very highest class, it at least boasts many artists, eminent when we consider their era, and few inferior, or not above mediocrity.[306] It indeed appears, that either a genius for painting is natural to that people, or that none of them have embraced the art who were not capable of prosecuting it successfully.
[299] See Malvasia, tom. i. p. 571; and tom. ii. p. 355.
[300] It has his name and the year 1579, which date must be false. The widow of Arcangiolo married again, and bore Francesco Vanni in 1565. Consequently the latter could not be the scholar of Arcangiolo, though such an idea is very prevalent; and he could give lessons only for a short time to his son, Ventura, or to Sorri, and Casolani, if the period of their birth is true.
[301] See letter 127 in vol. v. of Lett. Pittor., in which there is a catalogue of those painters.
[302] The idea that the brilliant colouring of the Venetian school was owing to the use of a peculiar vehicle for the colours, or a certain varnish, has been long entertained by artists and connoisseurs; and the opinion has been sanctioned by great names: yet it is highly probable that the great secret of the Venetian painters consisted not in vehicles nor in varnishes, but in employing mineral colours, and in laying them on the canvas as little mixed as possible. No colour derived from the vegetable kingdom will stand well when mixed with oil, and our best colours are composed of metallic oxides, or earthy bodies highly charged with those oxides. When colours are much mixed on the palette they become invariably muddy, and to him who aims at brilliancy of colouring no maxim is of greater consequence than to keep his palette as clean as possible. The use of transparent colours in the shadows is another great cause of brilliancy, and this cannot be obtained by the use of mixed colours. It is produced by what is called glazing, or laying transparent colours one over another. In nothing is the effect of glazing, in giving transparency, more obvious, than in the astonishing clearness of the skies and water in the works of the best Dutch artists. That the magical effect of Kuyp's pictures is thus produced, I had an opportunity of knowing, from the blunder of a picture-cleaner, who thought he had made a great discovery when he found the Rhine of a deep blue in a picture by this master; from which, along with the varnish, he had removed a thin coating of yellow, with which the blue was glazed over, to produce the beautiful greenish hue of the water. (Note by Dr. Traile.)
[303] Tom. i.
[304] His name alone