Art in England | Page 6

the saints of Verrio or Laguerre, On gilded clouds in fair
expansion lie, And bring all paradise before the eye,' etc.
Who was Verrio? Who was Laguerre?
ANTONIO VERRIO was born in Lecce, a town in the Neapolitan
province of Terra di Otranto, in the year 1639. Early in life he visited
Venice to study the colouring of the Venetian masters. He returned a
successful, not a meritorious painter. In 1660 he was at Naples, where
he executed a large fresco work, 'Christ healing the Sick,' for the Jesuit
College. This painting, we are told, was conspicuous for its brilliant

colour and forcible effect.
Subsequently the artist was in France, painting the high altar of the
Carmelites at Toulouse. Dominici says that 'Verrio had such a love for
travelling that he could not remain in his own country.'
Charles II., desiring to revive the manufacture of tapestry at Mortlake,
which had been stopped by the civil war, invited Verrio to England; but
when he arrived the king changed his plans, and intrusted the painter
with the decoration in fresco of Windsor Castle. Charles was induced to
this by seeing a work of Verrio's at Lord Arlington's house at the end of
St. James's Park, the site of Buckingham House. 'In possession of the
Cartoons of Raphael,' Fuseli lectured, angrily, on the subject, years
afterwards, 'and with the magnificence of Whitehall before his eyes, he
suffered Verrio to contaminate the walls of his palaces.' But there was
raging then a sort of epidemical belief in native deficiency and in the
absolute necessity of importing art talent. In his first picture Verrio
represented the king in a glorification of naval triumph. He decorated
most of the ceilings of the palace, one whole side of St. George's Hall
and the Chapel; but few of his works are now extant. Hans Jordaens'
lively fancy and ready pencil induced his critics to affirm of him, 'that
his figures seemed to flow from his hand upon the canvas as from a
pot-ladle.' Certainly, from Verrio's fertility in apologue and allegory,
and the rapidity of his execution, it might have been said that he
spattered out his works with a mop. Nothing daunted him. He would
have covered an acre of ceiling with an acre of apotheosis. As Walpole
writes, 'His exuberant pencil was ready at pouring out gods, goddesses,
kings, emperors, and triumphs over those public surfaces on which the
eye never rests long enough to criticise, and where one should be sorry
to place the works of a better master. I mean ceilings and staircases.
The New Testament or the Roman History cost him nothing but
ultramarine; that and marble columns and marble steps he never
spared.'
He shrunk from no absurdity or incongruity. His taste was even worse
than his workmanship. He delighted to avenge any wrong he had
received, or fancied he had received, by introducing his enemy, real or

imaginary, in his pictures. Thus, on the ceiling of St. George's Hall, he
painted Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, in the character of Faction
dispersing libels; in another place, having a private quarrel with Mrs.
Marriott, the housekeeper, he borrowed her face for one of his Furies.
Painting for Lord Exeter, at Burleigh, in a representation of Bacchus
bestriding a hogshead, he copied the head of a dean with whom he was
at variance. It is more excusable, perhaps, that, when compelled by his
patron to insert a Pope in a procession little flattering to his religion, he
added the portrait of the Archbishop of Canterbury then living. In a
picture of the 'Healing of the Sick,' he was guilty of the folly and
impropriety of introducing among the spectators of the scene, portraits
of himself, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Mr. May, surveyor of the works,
all adorned with the profuse periwigs of the period. But he could not
transfer to his pictures a decorum and a common sense that had no
place in his mind. Hence he loved to depict a garish and heterogeneous
whirl of saints and sinners, pan-pipes, periwigs, cherubim, silk
stockings, angels, small-swords, the naked and the clothed, goddesses,
violoncellos, stars, and garters. A Latin inscription in honour of the
painter and his paintings appeared over the tribune at the end of St.
George's Hall:--'Antonius Verrio Neapolitanus non ignobili stirpe natus,
ad honorem Dei, Augustissimi Regis Caroli Secundi et Sancti Georgii,
molem hanc felicissimâ manu decoravit.'
The king lavished kindness upon this pretentious and absurd Italian. He
was appointed to the place of master-gardener, and lodgings in a house
in St. James's Park, to be afterwards known as Carlton House, were set
apart for his use. Here he was visited by Evelyn, who records that 'the
famous Italian painter' was 'settled in His Majesty's garden at St.
James's, which he had made