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FAMOUS EUROPEAN ARTISTS

BY SARAH K. BOLTON

AUTHOR OF "POOR BOYS WHO BECAME FAMOUS," "GIRLS WHO BECAME
FAMOUS," "STORIES FROM LIFE," "FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS,"
"FAMOUS AMERICAN STATESMEN," "SOCIAL STUDIES IN
ENGLAND," "FROM HEART AND NATURE,"
"FAMOUS MEN OF SCIENCE," ETC.

"Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away.
Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live,
and it is in your power."--MARCUS AURELIUS.

NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
46 EAST FOURTEENTH STREET


COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.

C. J. PETERS & SON,
TYPOGRAPHERS AND ELECTROTYPERS,
146 HIGH STREET, BOSTON.


TO MISS ELIZABETH C. BULLARD
WITH THE APPRECIATION AND ESTEEM
OF THE AUTHOR.


[Illustration: MICHAEL ANGELO.]




PREFACE.


Hermann Grimm says, "Reverence for what is great is a universal
feeling.... When we look at great men, it is as if we saw a victorious
army, the flower of a people, marching along.... They all speak one
common language, know nothing of castes, of noble or pariah; and he who
now or in times to come thinks or acts like them rises up to them, and
is admitted into their circle."

Possibly, by reading of these great men some may be led to "think and
act like them," and thus "be admitted into their circle." All of these
possessed untiring industry and a resolute purpose to succeed. Most were
poor in early life.

S. K. B.




CONTENTS.

                         PAGE.
MICHAEL ANGELO               7

LEONARDO DA VINCI           66

RAPHAEL OF URBINO          105

TITIAN                     155

MURILLO                    203

RUBENS                     246

REMBRANDT                  286

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS        318

SIR EDWIN LANDSEER         367

TURNER                     396




MICHAEL ANGELO.


Who has ever stood in Florence, and been warmed by her sunlight,
refreshed by her fragrant flowers, and ennobled by her divine art,
without saying with the poet Rogers,--


     "Of all the fairest cities of the earth,
     None is so fair as Florence. 'Tis a gem
     Of purest ray; and what a light broke forth
     When it emerged from darkness! Search within,
     Without, all is enchantment! 'Tis the Past
     Contending with the Present; and in turn
     Each has the mastery."


Pitiful in her struggles for freedom, the very centre of art and
learning in the fifteenth century, she has to-day a charm peculiarly her
own.

"Other though not many cities have histories as noble, treasures as
vast; but no other city has them living, and ever present in her midst,
familiar as household words, and touched by every baby's hand and
peasant's step, as Florence has.

"Every line, every road, every gable, every tower, has some story of the
past present in it. Every tocsin that sounds is a chronicle; every
bridge that unites the two banks of the river, unites also the crowds
of the living with the heroism of the dead.

"The beauty of the past goes with you at every step in Florence. Buy
eggs in the market, and you buy them where Donatello bought those which
fell down in a broken heap before the wonder of the crucifix. Pause in a
narrow by-street in a crowd, and it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which
the people so baptized for love of the old painter and the new-born art.
Stray into a great dark church at evening time, where peasants tell
their beads in the vast marble silence, and you are where the whole city
flocked, weeping, at midnight, to look their last upon the dead face of
their Michael Angelo. Buy a knot of March anemones or April arum lilies,
and you may bear them with you through the same city ward in which the
child Ghirlandaio once played amidst the gold and silver garlands that
his father fashioned for the young heads of the Renaissance. Ask for a
shoemaker, and you shall find the cobbler sitting with his board in the
same old twisting, shadowy street-way where the old man Toscanelli drew
his charts that served a fair-haired sailor of Genoa, called Columbus."

Florence, Shelley's "Smokeless City," was the ardently loved home of
Michael Angelo. He was born March 6, 1475, or, according to some
authorities, 1474, the Florentines reckoning time from the incarnation
of Christ, instead of his birth.

Lodovico Buonarotti, the father of Michael Angelo, had been appointed
governor of Caprese and Chiusi, and had moved from Florence to the
Castle of Caprese, where this boy, his second child, was born. The
mother, Francesca, was, like her husband, of noble family, and but
little more than half his age, being nineteen and he thirty-one.

After two years they returned to Florence, leaving the child at
Settignano, three miles from the city, on an estate of the Buonarottis'.
He was intrusted to the care of a stone-mason's wife, as nurse. Living
among the quarrymen and sculptors of this picturesque region, he began
to draw as soon as he could use his hands. He took delight in the work
of the masons, and they in turn loved the bright, active child. On the
walls of the stone-mason's house he made charcoal sketches, which were
doubtless praised by the foster-parents.

Lodovico, who was quite too proud for manual labor, designed that his
son should become a dealer in silks and woollens, as probably he would
thus amass wealth. With such a project in mind, he was certainly unwise
to place the child in the exhilarating air of the mountains, where
nature would be almost sure to win him away from the counting-room.

When the boy was old enough he was sent by his father to