↪ you wandered here via “garden fishpond Renaissance” — the connecting lines are tinted below
of shipping pinned on a green board. In their marine battles, there is seldom anything discernible except long rows of scarlet oars, and men in armor falling helplessly through them.
- Late Roman Period. That is to say, the time of the beginning of the
Renaissance landscape by the Caracci, Claude, and Salvator. First, in their landscapes, shipping begins to assume something like independent character, and to be introduced for the sake of its picturesque interest; although what interest could be taken by any healthy human creature in such vessels as were then painted has always remained a mystery to me. The ships of Claude, having hulls of a shape something between a cocoa-nut and a high-heeled shoe, balanced on their keels on the top of the water, with some scaffolding and cross-sticks above, and a flag at the top of every stick, form perhaps the purest exhibition of human inanity and fatuity which the arts have yet produced. The harbors also, in which these model navies ride, are worthy of all observation for the intensity of the false taste which, endeavoring to unite in them the characters of pleasure-ground and port, destroys the veracity of both. There are many inlets of the Italian seas where sweet gardens and regular terraces descend to the water's edge; but these are not the spots where merchant vessels anchor, or where bales are disembarked. On the other hand, there are many busy quays and noisy arsenals upon the shores of Italy; but Queen's palaces are not built upon the quays, nor are the docks in any wise adorned with conservatories or ruins. It was reserved for the genius of Claude to combine the luxurious with the lucrative, and rise to a commercial ideal, in which cables are fastened to temple pillars, and lighthouses adorned with rows of beaupots. It seems strange also that any power which Salvator showed in the treatment of other subjects utterly deserts him when he approaches the sea. Though always coarse, false, and vulgar, he has at least energy, and some degree of invention, as long as he remains on land; his terrestrial atrocities are animated, and his rock-born fancies formidable. But the sea air seems to dim his sight and paralyze his hand. His love of darkness and destruction, far from seeking sympathy in the rage of ocean, disappears as he approaches the beach; after having tortured the innocence of trees into demoniac convulsions, and shattered the loveliness of purple hills into colorless dislocation, he approaches the real wrath and restlessness of ocean without either admiration or dismay, and appears to feel nothing at its shore except a meager interest in bathers, fishermen, and gentlemen in court dress bargaining for state cabins. Of all the pictures by men who bear the reputation of great masters which I have ever seen in my life
(except only some by Domenichino), the two large "Marines" in the Pitti
Palace, attributed to Salvator, are, on the whole, the most vapid and vile examples of human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of
Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied of pain and motion, but not of infection.