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And with what exquisite feeling for every detail of the scene, every great emotion! Had the painting been preserved, as it deserved to be, surely it too could claim a part of that laurel wreath which Sandrart averred could not be torn from the Basel altar-piece by any rival, whether Italian or German. Hampton Court Gallery
For in 1627 Sandrart saw them in the collection of the latter, like his father an enthusiastic admirer of Holbein's work. After this, one or two vague notices suggest that they somehow drifted to Flanders, and thence to Paris. But there every trace of them is lost. Federigo Zucchero thought they yielded to no work of the kind, even among Italian masters; and copied them from pure admiration.
He died in the public hospital at Antwerp, and was buried in an obscure manner; but when Rubens knew it, he had the body reinterred, with funeral pomp, in the church of the Carmelites; and he intended also to have erected a superb monument to his memory, had he lived to see it executed; though Sandrart says there was a magnificent one over his tomb, with an epitaph to perpetuate his honor.
A more important influence on him, however, was that of Joachim Sandrart, one of the best of the later German painters, whom he met in Rome. Claude's earliest pictures of any importance were two which were painted for Pope Urban VII. in 1639, when he was just upon forty years old. These are the Village Dance and the Seaport, now in the Louvre.
The portrait of the father is certainly like Holbein's own drawing of him in the Duke d'Aumale's Collection, which Sandrart engraved in his account of the younger Holbein; while the heads of the two boys are very like those which we shall find later in a drawing in the Berlin Gallery.
The name of this illustrious painter was Tiziano Vecellio or Vecelli, and he is called by the Italians, Tiziano Vecellio da Cadore. He was descended of a noble family; born at the castle of Cadore in the Friuli in 1477, and died in 1576, according to Ridolfi; though Vasari and Sandrart place his birth in 1480. Lanzi says he died in 1576, aged 99 years.
Painters such as Sandrart, looking at it after it had survived a hundred and fifty years of vicissitude, could exclaim: "It is a work in which the utmost that our art is capable of may be found; yielding the palm to none, whether of Germany or Italy, and justly wearing the laurel-wreath among the works of former times." Alas! this laurel, too, has been filched from Holbein's fame.
This will not appear surprising, when Sandrart informs us that, on one occasion, in company with Peter de Laer, he visited Douw, and found him at work on a picture, which they could not forbear admiring for its extraordinary neatness, and on taking particular notice of a broom, and expressing their surprise that he could devote so much time in finishing so minute an object, Douw informed them that he should work on it three days more before he should think it complete.
His technical execution suits his design; it is carefully finished, and notwithstanding the closest attention to minute details, it is as firm and correct as it is light and free." Sandrart says that Mieris had a real friendship for Jan Steen, and delighted in his company, though he was by no means fond of drinking as freely as Jan was accustomed to do every evening at the tavern.
There are no less than 27 portraits of Rembrandt by himself. Sandrart relates the following anecdote of Christopher Schwarts, a famous German painter, which, if true, redounds more to his ingenuity than to his credit.
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