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Hals versus Van Dyck:
“It is no mere conceit to compare the allegro feroce [fast furious tempo] of Frans Hals with the andante con moto [slowly, but with motion] of Van Dyck….”
Spengler uses a musical device comparing the painting technique of Hals (fast, quick) with Van Dyck (studied composition).
Hals was notable for his loose painterly brushwork & helped introduce this lively style of painting into Dutch art. Hals was a master of a technique that utilized something previously seen as a flaw in painting, the visible brushstroke. The soft curling lines of his brush are always clear upon the surface, materially just lying there, flat, while conjuring substance and space in the eye. In contrast to Rembrandt (who used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom) Hals was fond of daylight and silvery sheen. Both painters were painters of touch: Rembrandt was the bass, Hals the treble. With rare intuition Hals seized a moment in the life of his subjects; what nature displayed in that moment he reproduced thoroughly in a delicate scale of colour, mastering every form of expression. He was able to achieve the exact tone, light & shade, and modelling with a few marked and fluid strokes of the brush.
Van Dyck's fame rests on his portraits: idealizing his models without sacrificing individuality. Although he used patterns of portraiture formulated earlier (Holbein, Titian, Rubens) he invented innumerable variations in composition, never losing sight of the fundamental necessity to retain an impeccable formality. While Rembrandt (age 26 when Van Dyke went to London) would explore individual psychology, Van Dyck would investigate a different order of identity: the faces of his sitters are recorded with scrupulous particularity, their total personalities are heroically idealised by means of gesture, pose and costume, by the grandeur of their mundane setting. Full-length renderings prevail along with his particular extraordinary elegance of grace. He had a gift for combining formality & casualness reflected in portraits involving groups of people.
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“It is no mere conceit to compare the…minor of Guercino with the major of Velasquez.”
Spengler again uses a musical device- the minor and major keys- to allude to the differences between these two painters. He is suggesting that Guercino (the minor key) paints work which are darker and sadder compared to Velasquez (the major key) who creates brighter, cheerier art.
Velázquez's brushstroke is loose, fluid, and utterly present on the canvas, as if in defiance of the picture's very realism. For instance his technique in the rendering of fabrics was far different from that of his contemporaries or predecessors. He eschewed careful, precise brushwork and instead employed loose, impressionistic flurries of paint that create an astounding, realistic image from afar, but which upon closer inspection appear almost abstract. He disdained to delineate precise contours, instead creating form out of pure colour & light. Despite this somewhat abstract style, he still manages to convey a sense of utter realism and liveliness.
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Early in his career Guercino forged his own unique style, notable for its chiaroscuro & dramatic tenebrism, that is the employment of by large areas of dark colours, usually relieved with a shaft of light. This was a popular 17th-century Spanish style and owed much to Caravaggio. Later, sensitive to artistic fashions in Rome, he pursued a more Classical manner, adopting “disegno” (the intellectual art of drafting, the use of drawings as the basic building blocks of a finished composition) successfully integrating it with Venetian colorito (encoding in paint the tonal & colour relationships of objects seen under particular light conditions).
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“This brown does not repudiate its descent from the" infinitesimal" greens of Leonardo's, Schongauer's and Grunewald's backgrounds…”
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world, is one of the first portraits to depict the sitter in front of an imaginary landscape; Leonardo was one of the first painters to use aerial perspective. The enigmatic woman is portrayed seated in what appears to be an open loggia with dark pillar bases on either side. Behind her, a vast landscape recedes to icy mountains. Winding paths and a distant bridge give only the slightest indications of human presence. Leonardo has chosen to place the horizon line not at the neck (as he did with an earlier portrait-Ginevra de' Benci), but on a level with the eyes, thus linking the figure with the landscape and emphasizing the mysterious nature of the painting.
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Schongauer is mostly known as an engraver (most of his paintings did not survive). He made a series of engravings of matching size detailing the events of Christ's Passion (1479-80). The engraving Agony in the Garden from this series closely matches the details of the oil painting by the same name.
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Grunwald’s dusky green is illustrated page 246 above