Even Moretto’s _Supper at Emmaus_ (in Brescia) is superior to Veronese’s, though his Christ in pilgrim’s cockle-hat and cloak has to the modern eye the look of an officer with a cocked hat and a gold epaulette.
But Veronese is not the only Italian who would have been happier as a lay painter. I am convinced that some of the romanticists of the Renaissance were born with the souls of Dutchmen, and these, as it happens, the very men who have not worn well; a proof that they were out of their element and gave up to romance and religion what was meant for realism. Take Guido Reni, the very synonym of a fallen star, the _Aurora_ in Rome, perhaps his one enduring success—though even here Aurora’s skirt is of too crude a blue, and there is insufficient feeling of mountain and sea below her. His portrait by Simone Cantarini da Pesaro shows him with a short grey beard, a black doublet, a lawn collar, and a rather pained look—there is nothing of the _Aurora_ in this sedate and serious figure. And better than either his violent Caravaggio martyrology or his later mythologic poesy I find his portraits of his mother and his foster-mother; the mother in black with a black turn-down collar, a muslin coif, and grey hair thinning at the temples, and the foster-mother a peasant woman with bare and brawny arms. The _St. Peter Reading_ in the Brera is also a strong study of an old man’s head. Moroni had the good sense or the good fortune to shake himself almost free of religious subjects and to produce a _Tailor_ who is worth tons of _Madonnas_, but even he did not utterly escape the church-market, and when one examines such a picture as his _Madonna and Son, St. Catherine, St. Francis, and the Donor_ in the Brera, one rejoices even more that an overwhelming percentage of his product is pure portraiture. For the holy women in this picture are quite bad; St. Francis is rather better, but the real Moroni appears only in the smug donor who prays, his clasped hands showing his valuable ring. Here, of course, the painter had simply to reproduce his sitter. As much can be said of Garofalo and many another religious painter, whose “Donors” often constitute the sole success of their pious compositions.