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It required the unlimited power of an architect, sculptor, and painter, to conceive a structural whole of so much grandeur, to design the decorative figures with the significant repose required by the sculpturesque character, and yet to preserve their subordination to the principal subjects, and to keep the latter in the proportions and relations best adapted to the space to be filled. Kugler.
Dr Kügler, a judicious critic, thus sums up his character as an artist: "The works of Jan Steen imply a free and cheerful view of common life, and he treats it with a careless humor, such as seems to deal with all its daily occurrences, high and low, as a laughable masquerade and a mere scene of perverse absurdity.
Even such men as the Gepperts, Franz Kugler, H. M. Romberg, Drake, Wilcke, and others, with whose moderate political views I became acquainted later, used to join us.
Both pictures were publicly exhibited in Rome, and by some people Sebastiano's was preferred to Raphael's. According to Waagen the whole composition was designed by Michelangelo, with whom Sebastiano had entered into the closest intimacy; and Kugler states that the group of Lazarus and those around him was actually drawn by the master.
Kugler calls this "a patchwork ideal," which puts the matter in a nut-shell. At one period the Eclectics produced harmonious pictures in a manner attractive to women, many of whom studied under Domenichino, Giovanni Lanfranco, Guido Reni, the Campi, and others. Sofonisba Anguisciola, Elisabetta Sirani, and the numerous women artists of Bologna were of this school.
Quintin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, was born at Louvain about 1460. Though he worked first as a smith he is said by Kugler to have belonged to a family of painters, which somewhat takes from the romance, though it adds to the probability of his story.
The history of this independent group of painters has only of late years been elucidated; Kugler, after a page devoted to Carpaccio, dismissed them with the remark that Mansueti and Bastiani were both pupils of Carpaccio, and that Benedetto Diana was "less distinguished."
Though it is certain, Kugler admits, that no other school of painting in Rembrandt's time neither that of Rubens, nor that of the Carracci, nor the French nor Spanish schools rendered the spiritual import of Biblical subjects with the purity and depth exhibited by the great Dutch master.
Kugler says, "The patient had made many visits to Hindu shrines, but the desire of her life, her child, was the result of an operation in a Mission Hospital. In our Hospital her living child was placed in her arms as a result of an operation performed by a Christian doctor." How did Dr. Paru, the Hindu medical student, develop into Dr. Paru, the Christian physician?
In this last he incurred strictures from the Inquisition more severe than those of Kugler upon Tintoretto's Last Supper, and possibly with as much reason, it being objected that the introduction of German soldiery, buffoons, and a parrot was "irreligious." His Family of Darius, now in the National Gallery, was one of his latest works.
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