He was not a colorist as Titian
was a colorist, or a painter as Velazquez was a painter--he was just so
much of a colorist and a painter as is compatible with being the
greatest of decorative designers. Everything in his finest works is
entirely subordinated to the beauty and expressiveness of composition,
and nothing is allowed to have too great an individual interest for its
predestined part in the final result. Probably he could not have drawn
like Michelangelo or painted like Hals--certainly, when he once
understood himself, he would not have desired to do so.
Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of
the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in
design. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field
than the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardiniere." Nearly at
the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" of
the Borghese Gallery. It was his most ambitious effort up to this time
and he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to draw
like Michelangelo and to express emotion like Mantegna. He made a host
of studies for it, tried it this way and that, lost all spontaneity and
all grasp of the ensemble. What he finally produced is a thing of
fragments, falling far below his models in the qualities he was
attempting to rival and redeemed by little or nothing of the quality
proper to himself.
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