It
still glowed with traces of its old lustre on the canvases of Giovanni
Contarini, or Tiberio Tinelli, or Pietro Liberi; and though there was a
perfect fury of production, without order and without law, there can
still be perceived the survival of that sense of the decorative which
kept the thread of art. We discover it in the ceiling of the Church of
San Pantaleone, where Gianbattista Fumiani paints the glorification of
the martyred patron, and which, fantastic and extravagant as it is,
with its stupendous, architectural setting, and its acutely, almost
absurdly foreshortened throng, is not without a certain grandiose
geniality, ample and picturesque, like the buildings of that date. In
Alessandro Varotari (il Padovanino), whose "Nozze di Cana" in the
Academia is a finely spaced scene, in which a charming use is made of
cypresses, we seem to recognise the last ray of the Titianesque. The
painting of the seventeenth century passed on towards the eighteenth,
and, from ceilings and panels, rosy nymphs and Venuses smile at
us, attitudinising and contorted upon their cloudy backgrounds.
Lackadaisical Magdalens drop sentimental tears, and the Angel of the
Annunciation capers above the head of an affected Virgin, while violent
colours, intensified chiaroscuro, and black greasy impasto betray
the neighbourhood of the _tenebrosi_. When, towards the end of the
seventeenth century, Gregorio Lazzarini set himself to shake off these
influences, he went to the opposite extreme. Although a beautiful
designer, he becomes cold and flat in colour, with a coldness and
insipidity, indeed, that take us by surprise, appearing in a country
where the taste for luminous and brilliant tints was so strongly rooted.
The student of Venetian painting, who wishes to fill up the hiatus which
lies between the Golden Age and the revival of the eighteenth century,
cannot do better than compare Fumiani's vault in San Pantaleone with
Lazzarini's sober and earnest fresco, "The Charity of San Lorenzo
Giustiniani," in San Pietro in Castello, and with Pietro Liberi's
"Battle of the Dardanelles" in the Ducal Palace. In all three we have
examples of the varied and accomplished yet soulless art of this period.
Not many of the scenes painted for the palaces of patricians in the
seventeenth century have survived. They are to be found here and
there by the curious who wander into old churches and palaces with a
second-hand copy of Boschini in their hands; but in t