The Sun.
London, England, 1858-12-31 00:00:00

The Cartoons of Itaffaelle have not escaped the
usual fate of great works of art—to be more praised
than appreciated. Of the thousands who pass in
decorous file through the suite of rooms at Hamp-
ton Courtt. with this 7Pienlittr. listless !English
holidaymaker's gaze : which scems...; to swallow
everything it falls upon with equal indifferenee
from the .drums and ninaketoons of the guard;
chamber, or the Delf-dragons and bedu:pots of the
clireen's china-closet, to. the heads of Holbein, the ,
Venuses of Titian, or the Roman Triumph of Man-
tetrnit,--hOw many really feel, as they pass through
the .singularly ill-lighted' gallery:which WilHain
-the Dutchinan commissioned. Wren to build for. the
reeeption of the Cartoons, thtt• they are in the
, presence: of : some of the noblest designs of the.
greitest of painters ? , Tyohably!there -is none: of
that Tong series of rooms so. quickly or , so blankly
hurried thi-Cmg,h -by 99 out of every'loo-visitora as
, the Cartoon -Gallery; L tindafter -all,: humble. 'folk
may,own the fact without self,condemnaiion„for
it
:has not Reynolds, himself acknowledged tl ' f 'evCn
he found it a lt;ng._ "and. laborious disci line to
acqn inas rpieces
ire the taste by Which alone' the
'of the crowning epoch_of -Italian- art can b fairly
-estimated?' 'Perhaps it -WAS always so.
.: Did Leo,' when in 1514 he gave' Raffaelle the
commission for the designs-of his Sistinetapestries,
think as much of the power of the cartoon as of the
splendour of the arras ? We are at liberty to doubt
it. The 11 designs cost him only 43 ducats, not a
fifth part of the price of a single hanging. ' When
thetafiestries were finished and sent to the Vatican
no one thought of the cartoons. They seem to have
beeft left--slit, pricked, and abraded just as they
had been cut from the canvas of the Flemish looms
in, the cellars-of the-Weaving-house, unvalued and
unclaimed. Not even the pious care of Bernard von
Ortey : (who had. superintended. the execution of the
tapestries) reclaimed the designs on the deiath of
his great Master, a few months after the hangings
had been sutended for the firgt time in the Chapel
for the walls of which they . wore designed. I They
were sahung on St. Stephen's day (December 16),
1519.- On the 6th of April, 1520,- the brain ;which
had Manned them -was-still—the hand which. had :
traced theoriginal compositions, stiff and cold.. :
.IreilrapS the master himself, in the prodigality Of
his vOWer;:thoughft little:of these things—de4igned
-and inttly xe'crited,:it: is true; by himself bat : (in
the main} his only* thought and compoSitidn ; -hi
handiwork; his. pupils', , Franciso -Penni, Giulio
Romano; grid Giovanni da Udine, chief among them.
So 14 . the: cartoons in. the - Flethish. weaver's
cellars-7-seven -of them, at.. -least—for one, " The
Stoning of St.' Stephen,' was in the possession of
Cardinal Gtirnani at Venice'ds 'early as 1520, and
three others (" - Conversion of St. Paul,"
". Paul in Prison at Philippi;:and" ilia.CozolyohP
of the Virgin") bad disappeared, no oneknows how
or when—till Rubens, in 1630, called the attention
of Charles I. to them, and they were bought by the
King " for a high price." But they do not seem
to have been 'yet regarded as works of art, to be
hung -and admired, even on their rough paper, in
their half-effaced distemper colours,. with the marks
of the irreverent weaver's hands still upon them. It
Was no doubt to serve as designs for tapestry that
Charles bought them; and when his collections came
to be sold (after wat Dr. Waagen calls " his
lamentable death") the Cartoons were still (as we
learn from Vanderdoort's Catalogue) two of them
" in a slit deal case," and the other five in the hands
of Franz- Cleyn, the painter of Rostock, then
employed as chief designer by Sir Francis Crane,
who had established tapestry works at Mortlake
some 30 years befbre,.• under the auspices of James
I. Cleyn had the cartoons by him till 1646 at least,
as we know from the date on his drawing from
" the Ananias," and several sets of tapestry had
been woven from them in the interval between 1636
and the King's execution. Some of these may still
be seen, more or less complete, at old houses in
England. Petworth has some ; Burghley-house,
and Ford Abbey, in Devon, others. Whether a set
of tho seven is anywhere to be seen together we
are not aware.

At the sale of Charles's pictures Cromwell
secured the cartoons to the nation for £3OO, whe-
ther because he contemplated the continuance of
tapestry works—though such vanities as arras
hangings could hardly have been in strict Puritan
taste—or because he instinctively knew and re.

spected greatness in art.
It is remarkable that we owe to Cromwell and
William 111. respectively the acquisition of the
cartoons for the nation and their preservation from

utter deczy ; but in the interval between the two
they had a narrow escape. Charles 11. was on the
point of selling them to Louis XIV. It was all the
Lord Treasurer could do to save them from the

clutches of Barillon. Probably Danby found the
money they were to have raised by some other

means.

William 111. found the cartoons apparently still
in pieces, as the Mortlake tapestry weavers had left
them. 7-11 e employed Henry Cooke-:---an indifferent
painter, who, under Walton, had charge of the
Royal galleries—to piece the slips, to reline the
pieced sheets and (nuserabile dietu) to restore their
colour. To Henry Cooke are probably owing some of
the most startling coarse work of the cartoons as we

now see them, not a little bad piecing of the slips,
and a great _deal
nauell departure iu portions of his
coloured restorings from the original contours, as
'marked by the needle of the weaver when pricking
his outline preparatory to pouncing it on the canvas.
It was William, too, who directed Wren to design
and erect a gallery for the cartoons, the .one they
now hang in. Wren not the only great architect
who has built a picture gallery in which it is impos-
sible to see pictures. But thii at Hampton
Court is probably one of the • worst. of the many.
bad cases of this architectural achievement. The
light strikes just in front of five of the pictures,
and,- to make- matters worse, upwards instead of
clOwnwardS. At each extremity of the gallery hangs
a cartoon quite in shade. Any minute examination
of these works as now hung is perfectly impossible.
Something might be done to improve the lighting of
them, however, even where they are. If the De-
partment of Works, for instance, could venture to
block up all Wren's windows, and open apertures
iii the blank space now left between the window and
the ceiling, and at the same time to lower the car-
toons to the level of the eye, much that is now
altogether invisible would be brought to light, and
we might be enabled to judge better than we can
at present what may be Raffaelle's, and what Raf-
faelle's pupils', and what most certainly is neither
the one's nor ho others'.
We do not propose to say anything here of the
subjects or .merits of the cartoons. Their subjects
are so well known, and their merits have been so
abundantly Kt forth, that the little our Space would
enable us to say on either head would be very like

impertinence.
But the facts above mentioned as to the history
of the cartoons seemed worth recalling in a notice
of such a reproduction of them. as only the scien-
tific magic of our own day could have rendered pos-
idble. The cartoons, like the greatest works of
Raffaelle in the Stanze of the Vatican, have hitherto

been very_ inadequately . engraved. From the
miniature.version of Grebelin, and the meagre and
Mannered' line engravings of porigriy, which
-eniprciyed th-at artist and his assistants nearly.
seven years, and procured for *hint the honour of
knighthood -in 1719, the inadequate mezzotints
-Simon and -Ifirlial,-"and -the- "tame .and man-

* Published by Messrs. Colnaghi, Caldesi, and Mon-
echi, 13, Pall-mall-east, London.