B - NOTES ON CARPACCIO AND VENETIAN ART

Summary

FRA FILIPPO LIPPI AND CARPACCIO

1. Of these two pictures, the Florentine one represents the highest reach of pure or ideal religious art, next to Angelico; the Venetian one represents the highest reach of religious art, accepting the weakness of human nature, believing in it, abiding by it, and becoming greater therefrom.

The Lippi, therefore, is of the school called “Purist” in Modern Painters; the Carpaccio of the school called “Naturalist.”

Carpaccio is also much the stronger artist, but trained in a more or less imperfect peasant's and fisherman's school of art, and, like all the greatest men, not caring always to show his strength, and not always capable of doing so. Lippi is a far weaker genius, but trained in the most accomplished school of art the world has seen, and putting forth his utmost strength, as a religious duty, at all times and in the least things. Hence the Carpaccio has a natural charm of conception, and a simplicity of execution, which can be more easily represented in copying, by a man who feels them, than the qualities of the Lippi; and Mr. Murray has, therefore, been able to make such a drawing from the Carpaccio as may, in the absence of the original, give nearly as much pleasure (the rather as he is already himself a very strong master, both of colour and expression); but he has been quite unable to do justice to the exquisite fineness of draughtsmanship in the Lippi, or to give to colours, not reduced to melody, as in the Carpaccio, by the skill of their arrangement, the charm which in the feeble (in comparison) arrangement of the Lippi they receive in the original, from mere exquisiteness of painting.