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RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
THE FINE ARTS
BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
AUTHOR OF
"AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF DANTE", "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS"
AND "SKETCHES IN ITALY AND GREECE"
* * * * *
Dii Romae indigetes, Trojae tuque auctor, Apollo,
Unde genus nostrum coeli se tollit ad astra,
Hanc saltem auferri laudem prohibete Latinis:
Artibus emineat semper, studiisque Minervae,
Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma;
Quandoquidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit,
Tanta Italos inter crevit discordia reges;
Ipsi nos inter saevos distringimus enses,
Nec patriam pudet externis aperire tyrannis
VIDA, _Poetica_, lib. ii.
* * * * *
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER & CO
1899
PREFACE[1]
This third volume of my book on the "Renaissance in Italy" does not
pretend to retrace the history of the Italian arts, but rather to define
their relation to the main movement of Renaissance culture. Keeping this,
the chief object of my whole work, steadily in view, I have tried to
explain the dependence of the arts on mediaeval Christianity at their
commencement, their gradual emancipation from ecclesiastical control, and
their final attainment of freedom at the moment when the classical revival
culminated.
Not to notice the mediaeval period in this evolution would be impossible;
since the revival of Sculpture and Painting at the end of the thirteenth
century was among the earliest signs of that new intellectual birth to
which we give the title of Renaissance. I have, therefore, had to deal at
some length with stages in the development of Architecture, Sculpture,
and Painting, which form a prelude to the proper age of my own history.
In studying the architectural branch of the subject, I have had recourse
to Fergusson's "Illustrated Handbook of Architecture," to Burckhardt's
"Cicerone," to Gruener's "Terra-Cotta Buildings of North Italy," to
Milizia's "Memorie degli Architetti," and to many illustrated works on
single buildings in Rome, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venice. For the history
of Sculpture I have used Burckhardt's "Cicerone," and the two important
works of Charles C. Perkins, entitled "Tuscan Sculptors," and "Italian
Sculptors." Such books as "Le Tre Porte del Battistero di Firenze,"
Gruener's "Cathedral of Orvieto," and Lasinio's "Tabernacolo della Madonna
d'Orsammichele" have been helpful by their illustrations. For the history
of Painting I have made use principally of Vasari's "Vite de' piu
eccellenti Pittori," &c., in Le Monnier's edition of Crowe and
Cavalcaselle's "History of Painting," of Burckhardt's "Cicerone," of
Rosini's illustrated "Storia della Pittura Italiana," of Rio's "L'Art
Chretien," and of Henri Beyle's "Histoire de la Peinture en Italie." I
should, however, far exceed the limits of a preface were I to make a list
of all the books I have consulted with profit on the history of the arts
in Italy.
In this part of my work I feel that I owe less to reading than to
observation. I am not aware of having mentioned any important building,
statue, or picture which I have not had the opportunity of studying. What
I have written in this volume about the monuments of Italian art has
always been first noted face to face with the originals, and afterwards
corrected, modified, or confirmed in the course of subsequent journeys to
Italy. I know that this method of composition, if it has the merit of
freshness, entails some inequality of style and disproportion in the
distribution of materials. In the final preparation of my work for press I
have therefore endeavoured, as far as possible, to compensate this
disadvantage by adhering to the main motive of my subject--the
illustration of the Renaissance spirit as this was manifested in the Arts.
I must add, in conclusion, that Chapters VII. and IX. and Appendix II. are
in part reprinted from the "Westminster," the "Cornhill," and the
"Contemporary."
CLIFTON: _March_ 1877.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS
Art in Italy and Greece--The Leading Phase of Culture--AEsthetic Type of
Literature--Painting the Supreme Italian Art--Its Task in the
Renaissance--Christian and Classical Traditions--Sculpture for the
Ancients--Painting for the Romance Nations--Mediaeval Faith and
Superstition--The Promise of Painting--How far can the Figurative Arts
express Christian Ideas?--Greek and Christian Religion--Plastic Art
incapable of solving the Problem--A more Emotional Art needed--Place of
Sculpture in the Renaissance--Painting and Christian Story--Humanization
of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art--Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to
Art--Compromises effected by the Church--Fra Bartolommeo's S.
Sebastian--Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and
Philosophy--Recapitulation--Art in the end Paganises--Music--The Future of
Painting after the Renaissance.
CHAPTER II
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture of Mediaeval Italy--Milan, Genoa, Venice--The Despots as
Builders--Diversity of Styles--Local Influences--Lombard, Tuscan,
Romanesque, Gothic--Italian want of feeling for Gothic--Cathedrals of
Siena and Orvieto--Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages--Florence and
Venice--Private Palaces--Public Halls--Palazzo della Signoria at
Florence--Arnolfo di Cambio--S. Maria del Fiore--Brunelleschi's
Dome--Classical Revival in Architecture--Roman Ruins--Three Periods in
Renaissance Architecture--Their Characteristics--Brunelleschi
--Alberti--Palace-building--Michellozzo--Decorative Work of the
Revival--Bramante--Vitoni's Church of the Umilta at Pistoja--Palazzo del
Te--Villa Farnesina--Sansovino at Venice--Michael Angelo--The Building of
S. Peter's--Palladio--The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--Lombard
Architects--Theorists and Students of Vitruvius--Vignola and
Scamozzi--European Influence of the Palladian Style--Comparison of
Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.
CHAPTER III
SCULPTURE
Niccola Pisano--Obscurity of the Sources for a History of Early Italian
Sculpture--Vasari's Legend of Pisano--Deposition from the Cross at
Lucca--Study of Nature and the Antique--Sarcophagus at Pisa--Pisan
Pulpit--Niccola's School--Giovanni Pisano--Pulpit in S. Andrea at
Pistoja--Fragments of his work at Pisa--Tomb of Benedict XI. at
Perugia--Bas-reliefs at Orvieto--Andrea Pisano--Relation of Sculpture to
Painting--Giotto--Subordination of Sculpture to Architecture in
Italy--Pisano's Influence in Venice--Balduccio of Pisa--Orcagna--The
Tabernacle of Orsammichele--The Gates of the Florentine Baptistery
--Competition of Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Della Quercia--Comparison
of Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's Trial-pieces--Comparison of Ghiberti
and Della Quercia--The Bas-reliefs of S. Petronio--Ghiberti's
Education--His Pictorial Style in Bas-relief--His Feeling for the
Antique--Donatello--Early Visit to Rome--Christian Subjects--Realistic
Treatment--S. George and David--Judith--Equestrian Statue of
Gattamelata--Influence of Donatello's Naturalism--Andrea Verocchio--His
David--Statue of Colleoni--Alessandro Leopardi--Lionardo's Statue of
Francesco Sforza--The Pollajuoli--Tombs of Sixtus IV. and Innocent
VIII.--Luca della Robbia--His Treatment of Glazed Earthenware--Agostino
di Duccio--The Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia--Antonio
Rossellino--Matteo Civitali--Mino da Fiesole--Benedetto da
Majano--Characteristics and Masterpieces of this Group--Sepulchral
Monuments--Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. Maria del Popolo--Desiderio da
Settignano--Sculpture in S. Francesco at Rimini--Venetian
Sculpture--Verona--Guido Mazzoni of Modena--Certosa of Pavia--Colleoni
Chapel at Bergamo--Sansovino at Venice--Pagan Sculpture--Michael Angelo's
Scholars--Baccio Bandinelli--Bartolommeo Ammanati--Cellini--Gian
Bologna--Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture.
CHAPTER IV
PAINTING
Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy--Florence and Venice
--Classification by Schools--Stages in the Evolution of Painting--Cimabue
--The Rucellai Madonna--Giotto--His widespread Activity--The Scope of his
Art--Vitality--Composition--Colour--Naturalism--Healthiness--Frescoes at
Assisi and Padua--Legend of S. Francis--The Giotteschi--Pictures of the
Last Judgment--Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel--Ambrogio Lorenzetti at
Pisa--Dogmatic Theology--Cappella degli Spagnuoli--Traini's "Triumph,
of S. Thomas Aquinas"--Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco--Sala della
Pace at Siena--Religious Art in Siena and Perugia--The Relation of the
Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.
CHAPTER V
PAINTING
Mediaeval Motives exhausted--New Impulse toward Technical
Perfection--Naturalists in Painting--Intermediate Achievement needed
for the Great Age of Art--Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth
Century--Masaccio--The Modern Manner--Paolo Uccello--Perspective--Realistic
Painters--The Model--Piero della Francesca--His Study of Form--Resurrection
at Borgo San Sepolcro--Melozzo da Forli--Squarcione at Padua--Gentile da
Fabriano--Fra Angelico--Benozzo Gozzoli--His Decorative Style--Lippo
Lippi--Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto--Filippino Lippi--Sandro
Botticelli--His Value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy--His Feeling
for Mythology--Piero di Cosimo--Domenico Ghirlandajo--In what sense he
sums up the Age--Prosaic Spirit--Florence hitherto supreme in
Painting--Extension of Art Activity throughout Italy--Medicean Patronage.
CHAPTER VI
PAINTING
Two Periods in the True Renaissance--Andrea Mantegna--His Statuesque
Design--His Naturalism--Roman Inspiration--Triumph of Julius
Caesar--Bas-reliefs--Luca Signorelli--The Precursor of Michael
Angelo--Anatomical Studies--Sense of Beauty--The Chapel of S. Brizio at
Orvieto--Its Arabesques and Medallions--Degrees in his Ideal--Enthusiasm
for Organic Life--Mode of treating Classical Subjects--Perugino--His
Pietistic Style--His Formalism--The Psychological Problem of his
Life--Perugino's Pupils--Pinturicchio--At Spello and Siena--Francia--Fra
Bartolommeo--Transition to the Golden Age--Lionardo da Vinci--The Magician
of the Renaissance--Raphael--The Melodist--Correggio--The Faun--Michael
Angelo--The Prophet.
CHAPTER VII
VENETIAN PAINTING
Painting bloomed late in Venice--Conditions offered by Venice to
Art--Shelley and Pietro Aretino--Political Circumstances of
Venice--Comparison with Florence--The Ducal Palace--Art regarded as an
adjunct to State Pageantry--Myth of Venezia--Heroic Deeds of
Venice--Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Picture of a Ball--Early
Venetian Masters of Murano--Gian Bellini--Carpaccio's Little Angels--The
Madonna of S. Zaccaria--Giorgione--Allegory, Idyll, Expression of
Emotion--The Monk at the Clavichord--Titian, Tintoret, and
Veronese--Tintoretto's Attempt to dramatise Venetian Art--Veronese's
Mundane Splendour--Titian's Sophoclean Harmony--Their Schools--Further
Characteristics of Veronese--of Tintoretto--His Imaginative
Energy--Predominant Poetry--Titian's Perfection of Balance--Assumption of
Madonna--Spirit common to the great Venetians.
CHAPTER VIII
LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO
Contrast of Michael Angelo and Cellini--Parentage and Boyhood of Michael
Angelo--Work with Ghirlandajo--Gardens of S. Marco--The Medicean
Circle--Early Essays in Sculpture--Visit to Bologna--First Visit to
Rome--The Pieta of S. Peter's--Michael Angelo as a Patriot and a friend of
the Medici--Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa--Michael Angelo and Julius
II.--The Tragedy of the Tomb--Design for the Pope's Mausoleum--Visit to
Carrara--Flight from Rome--Michael Angelo at Bologna--Bronze Statue of
Julius--Return to Rome--Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--Greek and Modern
Art--Raphael--Michael Angelo and Leo X.--S. Lorenzo--The new
Sacristy--Circumstances under which it was designed and partly
finished--Meaning of the Allegories--Incomplete state of Michael Angelo's
Marbles--Paul III.--The "Last Judgment"--Critiques of Contemporaries--The
Dome of S. Peter's--Vittoria Colonna--Tommaso Cavalieri--Personal Habits
of Michael Angelo--His Emotional Nature--Last Illness.
CHAPTER IX
LIFE OF BENVENUTO CELLINI
His Fame--His Autobiography--Its Value for the Student of History,
Manners, and Character in the Renaissance--Birth, Parentage, and
Boyhood--Flute-playing--Apprenticeship to Marcone--Wanderjahr--The
Goldsmith's Trade at Florence--Torrigiani and England--Cellini leaves
Florence for Rome--Quarrel with the Guasconti--Homicidal Fury--Cellini a
Law to Himself--Three Periods in his Manhood--Life in Rome--Diego at the
Banquet--Renaissance Feeling for Physical Beauty--Sack of Rome--Miracles
in Cellini's Life--His Affections--Murder of his Brother's
Assassin--Sanctuary--Pardon and Absolution--Incantation in the
Colosseum--First Visit to France--Adventures on the Way--Accused of
stealing Crown Jewels in Rome--Imprisonment in the Castle of S.
Angelo--The Governor--Cellini's Escape--His Visions--The Nature of his
Religion--Second Visit to France--The Wandering Court--Le Petit
Nesle--Cellini in the French Law Courts--Scene at Fontainebleau--Return to
Florence--Cosimo de' Medici as a Patron--Intrigues of a Petty
Court--Bandinelli--The Duchess--Statue of Perseus--End of Cellini's
Life--Cellini and Machiavelli.
CHAPTER X
THE EPIGONI
Full Development and Decline of Painting--Exhaustion of the old
Motives--Relation of Lionardo to his Pupils--His Legacy to the
Lombard School--Bernardino Luini--Gaudenzio Ferrari--The Devotion
of the Sacri Monti--The School of Raphael--Nothing left but
Imitation--Unwholesome Influences of Rome--Giulio Romano--Michael
Angelesque Mannerists--Misconception of Michael Angelo--Correggio founds
no School--Parmigianino--Macchinisti--The Bolognese--After-growth of Art in
Florence--Andrea del Sarto--His Followers--Pontormo--Bronzino--Revival of
Painting in Siena--Sodoma--His Influence on Pacchia, Beccafumi,
Peruzzi--Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrari--The Campi at
Cremona--Brescia and Bergamo--The Decadence in the second half of the
Sixteenth Century--The Counter-Reformation--Extinction of the Renaissance
Impulse.
APPENDICES
I.--The Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello
II.--Michael Angelo's Sonnets
III.--Chronological Tables
FOOTNOTES:
[1] To the original edition of this volume.
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS
Art in Italy and Greece--The Leading Phase of Culture--AEsthetic Type of
Literature--Painting the Supreme Italian Art--Its Task in the
Renaissance--Christian and Classical Traditions--Sculpture for the
Ancients--Painting for the Romance Nations--Mediaeval Faith and
Superstition--The Promise of Painting--How far can the Figurative Arts
express Christian Ideas?--Greek and Christian Religion--Plastic Art
incapable of solving the Problem--A more Emotional Art needed--Place of
Sculpture in the Renaissance--Painting and Christian Story--Humanization
of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art--Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to
Art--Compromises effected by the Church--Fra Bartolommeo's S.
Sebastian--Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and
Philosophy--Recapitulation--Art in the end Paganises--Music--The Future of
Painting after the Renaissance.
It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and
to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase
and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art. Nothing notable
was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries
that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of
science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present
time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a
like controlling influence. Not only was each department of the fine arts
practised with singular success; not only was the national genius to a
very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but
the aesthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone
would imply. It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their
intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations
of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be
ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the aesthetic point
of view.
We see this in their literature. It is probable that none but artistic
natures will ever render full justice to the poetry of the Renaissance.
Critics endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of outline and to
harmony of form than the Italians, complain that their poetry lacks
substantial qualities; nor is it except by long familiarity with the
plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to understand the ground
assumed by Ariosto and Poliziano. We then perceive that these poets were
not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go beyond a certain
circle of effects. They subordinated their work to the ideal of their age,
and that ideal was one to which a painter rather than a poet might
successfully aspire. A succession of pictures, harmoniously composed and
delicately toned to please the mental eye, satisfied the taste of the
Italians. But, however exquisite in design, rich in colour, and complete
in execution this literary work may be, it strikes a Northern student as
wanting in the highest elements of genius--sublimity of imagination,
dramatic passion, energy and earnestness of purpose. In like manner, he
finds it hard to appreciate those didactic compositions on trifling or
prosaic themes, which delighted the Italians for the very reason that
their workmanship surpassed their matter. These defects, as we judge them,
are still more apparent in the graver branches of literature. In an essay
or a treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced disposition of
parts or beautifully rounded periods, though elegance may be thought
essential to classic masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant
observations. Having the latter, we can dispense at need with the former.
The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought
after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. Therefore we condemn
their moral disquisitions and their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of
intellectual voluptuaries. Yet the right way of doing justice to these
stylistic trifles is to regard them as products of an all-embracing genius
for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were aesthetic.
The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal
of manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men,
were alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age of splendid
ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the
armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the
pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. On the
meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and
chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of
artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled
in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the Pope upon
S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every
Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without
which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that
period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with
an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in
every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day,
when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done their worst to denude
the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and
countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture
galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the
palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still forced upon us: how could
Italy have done what she achieved within so short a space of time? What
must the houses and the churches once have been, from which these spoils
were taken, but which still remain so rich in masterpieces?
Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in
the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains,
that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study
their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the
labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise
that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the
secret of their intellectual weakness.
It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the
different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the
aesthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance.
Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for the
limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with
Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from the
achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and architecture more
superficially. Not only is painting the art in which the Italians among
all the nations of the modern world stand unapproachably alone, but it is
also the one that best enables us to gauge their genius at the time when
they impressed their culture on the rest of Europe. In the history of the
Italian intellect painting takes the same rank as that of sculpture in the
Greek. Before beginning, however, to trace the course of Italian art, it
will be necessary to discuss some preliminary questions, important for a
right understanding of the relations assumed by painting to the thoughts
of the Renaissance, and for explaining its superiority over the sister art
of sculpture in that age. This I feel the more bound to do because it is
my object in this volume to treat of art with special reference to the
general culture of the nation.
What, let us ask in the first place, was the task appointed for the fine
arts on the threshold of the modern world? They had, before all things, to
give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and to embody a class of
emotions unknown to the ancients.[2] The inheritance of the Middle Ages
had to be appropriated and expressed. In the course of performing this
work, the painters helped to humanise religion, and revealed the dignity
and beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth century, the riches
of classic culture were discovered, and art was called upon to aid in the
interpretation of the ancient to the modern mind. The problem was no
longer simple. Christian and pagan traditions came into close contact, and
contended for the empire of the newly liberated intellect. During this
struggle the arts, true to their own principles, eliminated from both
traditions the more strictly human elements, and expressed them in
beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The brush of the same
painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of
Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by
the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their
modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic
legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed
the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the
modern mind. Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful
co-agent in the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith
its methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid
upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the
subordination of classical and mediaeval myths to one aesthetic law of
loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences between
paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of that
humanity wherein both find their harmony.
This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may
next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as
distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to
take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that,
while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting
became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of
figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting.
The latter took up the work of investing thought with sensible shape from
the dead hands of the former. Nor had the tradition that connected art
with religion been interrupted, although a new cycle of religious ideas
had been substituted for the old ones. The late Roman and Byzantine
manners, through which the vital energies of the Athenian genius dwindled
into barren formalism, still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to
Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feeling subject, meanwhile,
had undergone a change so all-important that it now imperatively required
fresh channels for its self-expression. It was destined to find these, not
as of old in sculpture, but in painting.
During the interval between the closing of the ancient and the opening of
the modern age, the faith of Christians had attached itself to symbols and
material objects little better than fetishes. The host, the relic, the
wonder-working shrine, things endowed with a mysterious potency, evoked
the yearning and the awe of medieval multitudes. To such concrete
actualities the worshippers referred their sense of the invisible
divinity. The earth of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, the House of Loreto,
the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest sentiments of aweful
adoration. Like Thomas, they could not be contented with believing; they
must also touch and handle. At the same time, in apparent
contradistinction to this demand for things of sense as signs of
super-sensual power, the claims of dogma on the intellect grew more
imperious, and mysticism opened for the dreaming soul a realm of spiritual
rapture. For the figurative arts there was no true place in either of
these regions. Painting and sculpture were alike alien to the grosser
superstitions, the scholastic subtleties, and the ecstatic trances of the
Middle Ages; nor had they anything in common with the logic of theology.
Votaries who kissed a fragment of the cross with passion, could have found
but little to satisfy their ardour in pictures painted by a man of genius.
A formless wooden idol, endowed with the virtue of curing disease, charmed
the pilgrim more than a statue noticeable only for its beauty or its truth
to life. We all know that _wunderthaetige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte
Gemaelde_. In architecture alone, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, their
vague but potent feelings of infinity, their yearning towards a deity
invisible, but localised in holy things and places, found artistic
outlet. Therefore architecture was essentially a medieval art. The rise of
sculpture and painting indicated the quickening to life of new faculties,
fresh intellectual interests, and a novel way of apprehending the old
substance of religious feeling; for comprehension of these arts implies
delight in things of beauty for their own sake, a sympathetic attitude
towards the world of sense, a new freedom of the mind produced by the
regeneration of society through love.
The mediaeval faiths were still vivid when the first Italian painters began
their work, and the sincere endeavour of these men was to set forth in
beautiful and worthy form the truths of Christianity. The eyes of the
worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate: his
imagination should be helped by the dramatic presentation of the scenes of
sacred history, and his devotion be quickened by lively images of the
passion of our Lord. Spirit should converse with spirit, through no veil
of symbol, but through the transparent medium of art, itself instinct with
inbreathed life and radiant with ideal beauty. The body and the soul,
moreover, should be reconciled; and God's likeness should be once more
acknowledged in the features and the limbs of man. Such was the promise of
art; and this promise was in a great measure fulfilled by the painting of
the fourteenth century. Men ceased to worship their God in the holiness of
ugliness; and a great city called its street Glad on the birthday-festival
of the first picture investing religious emotion with aesthetic charm. But
in making good the promise they had given, it was needful for the arts on
the one hand to enter a region not wholly their own--the region of
abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a
world of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was
materialised to the injury of its own essential quality. Spirit, indeed,
spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned; but flesh
spake also to flesh in the aesthetic form. The incarnation promised by the
arts involved a corresponding sensuousness. Heaven was brought down to
earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself was
heavenly.
At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into two main
questions. The first concerns the form of figurative art specially adapted
to the requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth century. The
second treats of the effect resulting both to art and religion from the
expression of mystical and theological conceptions in plastic form.
When we consider the nature of the ideas assimilated in the Middle Ages by
the human mind, it is clear that art, in order to set them forth, demanded
a language the Greeks had never greatly needed, and had therefore never
fully learned. To over-estimate the difference from an aesthetic point of
view between the religious notions of the Greeks and those which
Christianity had made essential, would be difficult. Faith, hope, and
charity; humility, endurance, suffering; the Resurrection and the
Judgment; the Pall and the Redemption; Heaven and Hell; the height and
depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny before the throne
of God: into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid and solemn,
transcending the region of sense and corporeity, carrying the mind away to
an ideal world, where the things of this earth obtained a new reality by
virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite Beyond, the modern
arts in their infancy were thrust. There was nothing finite here or
tangible, no gladness in the beauty of girlish foreheads or the swiftness
of a young man's limbs, no simple idealisation of natural delightfulness.
The human body, which the figurative arts must needs use as the vehicle of
their expression, had ceased to have a value in and for itself, had ceased
to be the true and adequate investiture of thoughts demanded from the
artist. At best it could be taken only as the symbol of some inner
meaning, the shrine of an indwelling spirit nobler than itself; just as a
lamp of alabaster owes its beauty and its worth to the flame it more than
half conceals, the light transmitted through its scarce transparent walls.
In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities which the Greeks
recognised as truly human and therefore divine, allowed themselves to be
incarnated in well-selected types of physical perfection. The deities of
the Greek mythology were limited to the conditions of natural existence:
they were men and women of a larger mould and freer personality; less
complex, inasmuch as each completed some one attribute; less thwarted in
activity, inasmuch as no limit was assigned to exercise of power. The
passions and the faculties of man, analysed by unconscious psychology, and
deified by religious fancy, were invested by sculpture with appropriate
forms, the tact of the artist selecting corporeal qualities fitted to
impersonate the special character of each divinity. Nor was it possible
that, the gods and goddesses being what they were, exact analogues should
not be found for them in idealised humanity. In a Greek statue there was
enough soul to characterise the beauty of the body, to render her due meed
of wisdom to Pallas, to distinguish the swiftness of Hermes from the
strength of Heracles, or to contrast the virginal grace of Artemis with
the abundance of Aphrodite's charms. At the same time the spirituality
that gave its character to each Greek deity, was not such that, even in
thought, it could be dissociated from corporeal form. The Greeks thought
their gods as incarnate persons; and all the artist had to see to, was
that this incarnate personality should be impressive in his marble.
Christianity, on the other hand, made the moral and spiritual nature of
man all-essential. It sprang from an earlier religion, that judged it
impious to give any form to God. The body and its terrestrial activity
occupied but a subordinate position in its system. It was the life of the
soul, separable from this frame of flesh, and destined to endure when
earth and all that it contains had ended--a life that upon this planet was
continued conflict and aspiring struggle--which the arts, insofar as they
became its instrument, were called upon to illustrate. It was the worship
of a Deity, all spirit, to be sought on no one sacred hill, to be adored
in no transcendent shape, that they were bound to heighten. The most
highly prized among the Christian virtues had no necessary connection with
beauty of feature or strength of limb. Such beauty and such strength at
any rate were accidental, not essential. A Greek faun could not but be
graceful; a Greek hero was of necessity vigorous. But S. Stephen might be
steadfast to the death without physical charm; S. Anthony might put to
flight the devils of the flesh without muscular force. It is clear that
the radiant physical perfection proper to the deities of Greek sculpture
was not sufficient in this sphere.
Again, the most stirring episodes of the Christian mythology involved pain
and perturbation of the spirit; the victories of the Christian athletes
were won in conflicts carried on within their hearts and souls--"For we
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and
powers," demoniac leaders of spiritual legions. It is, therefore, no less
clear that the tranquillity and serenity of the Hellenic ideal, so
necessary to consummate sculpture, was here out of place. How could the
Last Judgment, that day of wrath, when every soul, however insignificant
on earth, will play the first part for one moment in an awful tragedy, be
properly expressed in plastic form, harmonious and pleasing? And supposing
that the artist should abandon the attempt to exclude ugliness and
discord, pain and confusion, from his representation of the _Dies Irae_,
how could he succeed in setting forth by the sole medium of the human
body the anxiety and anguish of the soul at such a time? The physical
form, instead of being adequate to the ideas expressed, and therefore
helpful to the artist, is a positive embarrassment, a source of weakness.
The most powerful pictorial or sculpturesque delineation of the Judgment,
when compared with the pangs inflicted on the spirit by a guilty
conscience, pangs whereof words may render some account, but which can
find no analogue in writhings of the limbs or face, must of necessity be
found a failure. Still more impossible, if we pursue this train of thought
into another region, is it for the figurative arts to approach the
Christian conception of God in His omnipotence and unity. Christ Himself,
the central figure of the Christian universe, the desired of all nations,
in whom the Deity assumed a human form and dwelt with men, is no fit
subject for such art at any rate as the Greeks had perfected. The fact of
His incarnation brought Him indeed within the proper sphere of the fine
arts; but the religious idea which He represents removed Him beyond the
reach of sculpture. This is an all-important consideration. It is to this
that our whole argument is tending. Therefore to enlarge upon this point
will not be useless.
Christ is specially adored in His last act of love on Calvary; and how
impossible it is to set that forth consistently with the requirements of
strictly plastic art, may be gathered by comparing the passion of S.
Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross with all that Winckelmann and
Hegel have so truly said about the restrained expression, dignified
generality, and harmonious beauty essential to sculpture. It is the
negation of tranquillity, the excess of feeling, the absence of
comeliness, the contrast between visible weakness and invisible
omnipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suffered by Him that
"ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose
feet were clothed with stars"--it is all this that gives their force and
pathos to these stanzas:
Omnis vigor atque viror
Hinc recessit; non admiror:
Mors apparet in inspectu,
Totus pendens in defectu,
Attritus aegra macie.
Sic affectus, sic despectus,
Propter me sic interfectus,
Peccatori tam indigno
Cum amoris in te signo
Appare clara facie[3].
We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prometheus upon
Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill; and even the
anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly thought to violate
the laws of antique sculpture. Yet here was a greater than Prometheus--one
who had suffered more, and on whose suffering the salvation of the human
race depended, to exclude whom from the sphere of representation in art
was the same as confessing the utter impotence of art to grasp the vital
thought of modern faith. It is clear that the muses of the new age had to
haunt Calvary instead of Helicon, slaking their thirst at no Castalian
spring, but at the fount of tears outpoured by all creation for a stricken
God. What Hellas had achieved supplied no norm or method for the arts in
this new service.
From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with confidence that,
if the arts were to play an important part in Christian culture, an art
was imperatively demanded that should be at home in the sphere of intense
feeling, that should treat the body as the interpreter and symbol of the
soul, and should not shrink from pain and passion. How far the fine arts
were at all qualified to express the essential thoughts of Christianity--a
doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs--and how far, through their
proved inadequacy to perform this task completely, they weakened the hold
of mediaeval faiths upon the modern mind, are questions to be raised
hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm that, least of all the
arts, could sculpture, with its essential repose and its dependence on
corporeal conditions, solve the problem. Sculpture had suited the
requirements of Greek thought. It belonged by right to men who not
unwillingly accepted the life of this world as final, and who worshipped
in their deities the incarnate personality of man made perfect. But it
could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire of a better
world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred to physical
appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the flesh; hope,
ecstasy, and penitence and prayer; all these imply contempt or hatred for
the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be conveyed by the rounded
contours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statuesque
tranquillity. The new element needed a more elastic medium of expression.
Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive
and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had
somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy.
Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on
the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our
sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more
multiform. Colour and shadow, aerial perspective and complicated grouping,
denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their
own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less
potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To
painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal
movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by
sculpture. All that drapery by its partial concealment of the form it
clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with human sentiment, may supply
to enhance the passion of the spectator, pertains to painting. This art,
therefore, owing to the greater variety of means at its disposal, and its
greater adequacy to express emotion, became the paramount Italian art.
To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to create gods
and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and
sepulchral monuments. In the last of these departments it found the
noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to
Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul
is settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spiritual
character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and
its passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither.
The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in
peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around whose
tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was, therefore, the
proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture. Here, if anywhere, the
right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, and the moulded form
be made the symbol of repose, expectant of restored activity. The greatest
sculptor of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.
Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the
art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the stillness
of the Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the art of painting was
not simple. The painters, following the masters of mosaic, began by
setting forth the history, mythology, and legends of the Christian Church
in imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within the scope of treatment
by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their task was comparatively easy;
for the idyllic grace of maternal love in the Madonna, the pathetic
incidents of martyrdom, the courage of confessors, the ecstasies of
celestial joy in redeemed souls, the loveliness of a pure life in modest
virgins, and the dramatic episodes of sacred story, furnish a multitude of
motives admirably pictorial. There was, therefore, no great obstacle upon
the threshold, so long as artists gave their willing service to the
Church. Yet, looking back upon this phase of painting, we are able to
perceive that already the adaptation of art to Christian dogma entailed
concessions on both sides. Much, on the one hand, had to be omitted from
the programme offered to artistic treatment, for the reason that the fine
arts could not deal with it at all. Much, on the other hand, had to be
expressed by means which painting in a state of perfect freedom would
repudiate. Allegorical symbols, like Prudence with two faces, and painful
episodes of agony and anguish, marred her work of beauty. There was
consequently a double compromise, involving a double sacrifice of
something precious. The faith suffered by having its mysteries brought
into the light of day, incarnated in form, and humanised. Art suffered by
being forced to render intellectual abstractions to the eye through
figured symbols.
As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of art, became
more rightly understood, the painters found that their craft was worthy of
being made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life observed
around them had claims upon their genius no less weighty than dogmatic
mysteries. The subjects they had striven at first to realise with all
simplicity now became little better than vehicles for the display of
sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. The human body received
separate and independent study, as a thing in itself incomparably
beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than aught else
that sways the soul. At the same time the external world, with all its
wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the works of human
ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, was seen to be in every
detail worthy of most patient imitation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the
understanding of the artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to
the task of bringing religious ideas within the limits of the
representable. Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts,
in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred subjects,
and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain of myths and Pagan
fancies. In this way painting may truly be said to have opened the new era
of culture, and to have first manifested the freedom of the modern mind.
When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture
of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of
the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole
range of human interests. Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we
feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with
aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power
that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the
earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.
Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of
the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the
most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the
Renaissance. On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my
conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages--the Jews, the
iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors--were
justified in their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and
the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral,
but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations[4]. It is
always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith
would sever us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us
to forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics
have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example,
lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from
worship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming colour,
graceful movement, delicate emotion[5]. Nor is this all: religious motives
may be misused for what is worse than merely sensuous suggestiveness. The
masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they pretend
to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial
blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the soul[6]. Therefore it is
that piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England,
turns from these aesthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself. When
the worshipper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite,
ineffable, unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid
forms, in which the lust of the eye and the pride of life, professing to
subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the goodliness of sensual
existence? Art, by magnifying human beauty, contradicts these Pauline
maxims: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain;" "Set your
affections on things above, not on things on earth;" "Your life is hid
with Christ in God." The sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal
loveliness are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no truce or
compromise of traffic with the flesh. As displayed in its most perfect
phases, in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual
mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety,
means everything most alien to this mundane life--self-denial, abstinence
from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the grave,
seclusion even from social and domestic ties. "He that loveth father and
mother more than me, is not worthy of me," "He that taketh not his cross
and followeth me, is not worthy of me." It is needful to insist upon these
extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them was based the
religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sincere in their determination
to fulfil the letter and embrace the spirit of the Gospel than any
succeeding age has been.[7]
If, then, there really exists this antagonism between fine art glorifying
human life and piety contemning it, how came it, we may ask, that even in
the Middle Ages the Church hailed art as her coadjutor? The answer lies in
this, that the Church has always compromised. The movement of the modern
world, upon the close of the Middle Ages, offered the Church a compromise,
which it would have been difficult to refuse, and in which she perceived
art first no peril to her dogmas. When the conflict of the first few
centuries of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate
between asceticism and the world. Intent on absorbing all existent
elements of life and power, she conformed her system to the Roman type,
established her service in basilicas and Pagan temples, adopted portions
of the antique ritual, and converted local genii into saints. At the same
time she utilised the spiritual forces of monasticism, and turned the
mystic impulse of ecstatics to account. The Orders of the Preachers and
the Begging Friars became her militia and police; the mystery of Christ's
presence in the Eucharist was made an engine of the priesthood; the dreams
of Paradise and Purgatory gave value to her pardons, interdictions,
jubilees, indulgences, and curses. In the Church the spirit of the
cloister and the spirit of the world found neutral ground, and to the
practical accommodation between these hostile elements she owed her wide
supremacy. The Christianity she formed and propagated was different from
that of the New Testament, inasmuch as it had taken up into itself a mass
of mythological anthropomorphic elements. Thus transmuted and
materialised, thus accepted by the vivid faith of an unquestioning
populace, Christianity offered a proper medium for artistic activity. The
whole first period of Italian painting was occupied with the endeavour to
set forth in form and colour the popular conceptions of a faith at once
unphilosophical and unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason of
the human elements it had assumed into its substance. It was natural,
therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent to the arts,
which were effecting in their own sphere what she had previously
accomplished, though purists and ascetics, holding fast by the original
spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcilably antagonistic to their
influence. The Reformation, on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of
compromises sanctioned by the Church, and returning to the elemental
principles of the faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine arts,
which, after giving sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently
attained to liberty and brought again the gods of Greece.
A single illustration might be selected from the annals of Italian
painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded and most earnest
painter found it to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty and
pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of Savonarola, painted a
Sebastian in the cloister of S. Marco, where it remained until the
Dominican confessors became aware, through the avowals of female
penitents, that this picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It
was then removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra
Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be
edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young man,
strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and won the crown of
martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism, constancy, or faith were
meant to be expressed; but the painter's art demanded that their
expression should be eminently beautiful, and the beautiful body of the
young man distracted attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical
perfections. A similar maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the
purposes of religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where the
temples of Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in Christian
Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds of discord in the souls of the
devout[8].
This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between piety and
plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of uniting them in such a way that
the latter shall enforce the former, lies far deeper than its powers of
illustration reach. Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in
conduct. Art aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and
feelings with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are
incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to the
philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological understanding. To
effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the
specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an
impossibility. In like manner there are many feelings which cannot
properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious
feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world
behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.[9] Yet, while we
recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to
maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact,
there is direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of the
two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect
themselves, each after its own fashion. In the large philosophy of human
nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto, there is room for both,
because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the
pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art. They find the
meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive
that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to
its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.
At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to
establish in this chapter. As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance
Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture
of the nation. But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an
aesthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity,
variety, and subtlety than sculpture. Therefore painting was the art of
arts for Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of
its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so
successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism. The religion it
interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is
bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in. The
Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of
subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of
saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving
form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and
pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion,
painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very
pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising
purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of
riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing
mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to humanity the sense of its
own dignity and beauty, and helped to proved the untenability of the
mediaeval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and,
what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness
from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty
of contemplation.
The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was taken thus by
art, proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness
in a world of manifold enjoyment created for their use. Whatever painting
touched, became by that touch human; piety, at the lure of art, folded her
soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This the Church had not
foreseen. Because the freedom of the human spirit expressed itself in
painting only under visible images, and not, like heresy, in abstract
sentences; because this art sufficed for Mariolatry and confirmed the cult
of local saints; because its sensuousness was not at variance with a
creed that had been deeply sensualised--the painters were allowed to run
their course unchecked. Then came a second stage in their development of
art. By placing the end of their endeavour in technical excellence and
anatomical accuracy, they began to make representation an object in
itself, independently of its spiritual significance. Next, under the
influence of the classical revival, they brought home again the old powers
of the earth--Aphrodite and Galatea and the Loves, Adonis and Narcissus
and the Graces, Phoebus and Daphne and Aurora, Pan and the Fauns, and the
Nymphs of the woods and the waves.
When these dead deities rose from their sepulchres to sway the hearts of
men in the new age, it was found that something had been taken from their
ancient bloom of innocence, something had been added of emotional
intensity. Italian art recognised their claim to stand beside Madonna and
the Saints in the Pantheon of humane culture; but the painters re-made
them in accordance with the modern spirit. This slight touch of
transformation proved that, though they were no longer objects of
religious devotion, they still preserved a vital meaning for an altered
age. Having personified for the antique world qualities which, though
suppressed and ignored by militant and mediaeval Christianity, were
strictly human, the Hellenic deities still signified those qualities for
modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by contact with the ancient
mind. For it is needful to remember that in all movements of the
Renaissance we ever find a return in all sincerity and faith to the glory
and gladness of nature, whether in the world without or in the soul of
man. To apprehend that glory and that gladness with the pure and primitive
perceptions of the early mythopoets, was not given to the men of the new
world. Yet they did what in them lay, with senses sophisticated by many
centuries of subtlest warping, to replace the first, free joy of kinship
with primeval things. For the painters, far more than for the poets of
the sixteenth century, it was possible to reproduce a thousand forms of
beauty, each attesting to the delightfulness of physical existence, to the
inalienable rights of natural desire, and to the participation of mankind
in pleasures held in common by us with the powers of earth and sea and
air.
It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder and of younger forces in
this process. The old gods lent a portion of their charm even to Christian
mythology, and showered their beauty-bloom on saints who died renouncing
them. Sodoma's Sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with
arrows, so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of
youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and
laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a gleeful paradox. For
the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian
deities--the heroes of the _Acta Sanctorum_, and the heroes of Greek
romance--were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the
beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed
from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and
fusion--how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to
the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness
of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic
faith--remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to
scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not
a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from
Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art
of the Renaissance.
Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of
beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining
motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking
men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human
culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being as conscious
of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to
the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be
effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for
the modern synthesis. All that aesthetic handling, in this region more
precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do
towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts.
Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than
philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a
cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures.
It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to
extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they
contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose.
Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach
that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the
classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored
to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, perchance, is the
religion, still unborn or undeveloped, whereof Joachim of Flora dimly
prophesied when he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the
kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of the Spirit was to be.
The essence of it is contained in the whole growth to usward of the human
mind; and though a creed so highly intellectualised as that will be, can
never receive adequate expression from the figurative arts, still the
painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it were, a not unworthy
vestibule. It does so, because it first succeeded in humanising the
religion of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique
paganism for the modern mind, and in making both subserve the purposes of
free and unimpeded art.
Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was about to be exhausted, a new
art had arisen, for which it remained, within the aesthetic sphere, to
achieve much that painting could not do. When the cycle of Christian ideas
had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for
antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the
soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In music we
see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian
as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man
alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words,
are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same
combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly
love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure
passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. They
give distinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined; or, as the
Italians put it, _la musica e il lamento dell' amore o la preghiera a gli
dei_. This, combined with its independence of all corporeal conditions,
fenders music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, and
therefore the essentially modern art.
For Painting, after the great work accomplished during the Renaissance,
when the painters ran through the whole domain of thought within the scope
of that age, there only remained portraiture, history, dramatic incident,
landscape, _genre_, still life, and animals. In these spheres the art is
still exercised, and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually produced by
European painters. But painting has lost its hold upon the centre of our
intellectual activity. It can no longer give form to the ideas that at the
present epoch rule the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, too
much a matter of the understanding, to be successfully handled by the
figurative arts; and it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated
that these arts produce nothing really great and universal in relation to
the spirit of their century, except by a process analogous to the
mythopoetic. With conceptions incapable of being sensuously apprehended,
with ideas that lose their value when they are incarnated, they have no
power to deal. As meteors become luminous by traversing the grosser
element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art employs
must needs immerse themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a nature to
gain rather than to suffer by such immersion; and they must make a direct
appeal to minds habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. Of this
sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage of their development, and
this attitude at certain moments of history is adopted by the popular
consciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so completely exchanged
mythology for curiosity, and metaphor for science, that the necessary
conditions for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts about the world
and God are incapable of personification by any aesthetic process; they
never enter that atmosphere wherein alone they could become through fine
art luminous. For the painter, who is the form-giver, they have ceased to
be shining stars, and are seen as opaque stones; and though divinity be in
them, it is a deity that refuses the investiture of form.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] It may fairly be questioned whether that necessary connection between
art and religion, which is commonly taken for granted, does in truth
exist; in other words, whether great art might not flourish without any
religious content. This, however, is a speculative problem, for present
and the future rather than the past. Historically, it has always been
found that the arts in their origin are dependent on religion. Nor is the
reason far to seek. Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is
the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and
apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing
glorification of humanity only exists for simple and unsophisticated
societies in the form of religion. Religion is the universal poetry which
all possess; and the artist, dealing with the mythology of his national
belief, feels himself in vital sympathy with the imagination of the men
for whom he works. More than the painter is required for the creation of
great painting, and more than the poet for the exhibition of immortal
verse. Painters are but the hands, and poets but the voices, whereby
peoples express their accumulated thoughts and permanent emotions. Behind
them crowd the generations of the myth-makers; and around them floats the
vital atmosphere of enthusiasms on which their own souls and the souls of
their brethren have been nourished.
[3]
All Thy strength and bloom are faded:
Who hath thus Thy state degraded?
Death upon Thy form is written;
See the wan worn limbs, the smitten
Breast upon the cruel tree!
Thus despised and desecrated,
Thus in dying desolated,
Slain for me, of sinners vilest,
Loving Lord, on me Thou smilest:
Shine, bright face, and strengthen me!
[4] I am aware that many of my readers will demur that I am confounding
Christianity with ascetic or monastic Christianity; yet I cannot read the
New Testament, the _Imitatio Christi_, the _Confessions_ of S. Augustine,
and the _Pilgrim's Progress_ without feeling that Christianity in its
origin, and as understood by its chief champions, was and is ascetic. Of
this Christianity I therefore speak, not of the philosophised
Christianity, which is reasonably regarded with suspicion by the orthodox
and the uncompromising. It was, moreover, with Christianity of this
primitive type that the arts came first into collision.
[5] Titian's "Assumption of the Virgin" at Venice, Correggio's
"Coronation of the Virgin" at Parma.
[6] Domenichino, Guido, Ribera, Salvator Rosa.
[7] Not to quote again the _Imitatio Christi,_ it is enough to allude to
S. Francis as shown in the _Fioretti_.
[8] The difficulty of combining the true spirit of piety with the ideal
of natural beauty in art was strongly felt by Savonarola. Rio (_L'Art
chretien_, vol. ii. pp. 422-426) has written eloquently on this subject,
but without making it plain how Savonarola's condemnation of life studies
from the nude could possibly have been other than an obstacle to the
liberal and scientific prosecution of the art of painting.
[9] See Rio, _L'Art chretien,_ vol. ii. chap. xi. pp. 319-327, for an
ingenious defence of mystic art. The tales he tells of Bernardino da
Siena and the blessed Umiliana will not win the sympathy of Teutonic
Christians, who must believe that semi-sensuous, semi-pious raptures,
like those described by S. Catherine of Siena and S. Theresa, have
something in them psychologically morbid.
CHAPTER II
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture of Mediaeval Italy--Milan, Genoa, Venice--The Despots as
Builders--Diversity of Styles--Local Influences--Lombard, Tuscan,
Romanesque, Gothic--Italian want of feeling for Gothic--Cathedrals of
Siena and Orvieto--Secular Buildings of the Middle Ages--Florence and
Venice--Private Palaces--Public Halls--Palazzo della Signoria at
Florence--Arnolfo di Cambio--S. Maria del Fiore--Brunelleschi's
Dome--Classical Revival in Architecture--Roman Ruins--Three Periods in
Renaissance Architecture--Their Characteristics--Brunelleschi
--Alberti--Palace-building--Michellozzo--Decorative Work of the
Revival--Bramante--Vitoni's Church of the Umilta at Pistoja--Palazzo del
Te--Villa Farnesina--Sansovino at Venice--Michael Angelo--The Building of
S. Peter's--Palladio--The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--Lombard
Architects--Theorists and Students of Vitruvius--Vignola and
Scamozzi--European Influence of the Palladian Style--Comparison of
Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning.
Architecture is always the first of the fine arts to emerge from barbarism
in the service of religion and of civic life. A house, as Hegel says, must
be built for the god, before the image of the god, carved in stone or
figured in mosaic, can be placed there. Council chambers must be prepared
for the senate of a State before the national achievements can be painted
on the walls. Thus Italy, before the age of the Renaissance proper, found
herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues.
It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, during the long struggle
for independence carried on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany
against the Empire and the nobles, that some of the most durable and
splendid public works were executed. The domes and towers of Florence and
of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the burghers who
subscribed for their erection were staining the waves of Meloria and the
cane-brakes of the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end of her
duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed a vast undertaking, by which the
fields of Milan are still rendered more productive than any other
pastureland in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, bringing the waters of the
Ticino through a plain of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 1179, and
was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard and the Simplon, which,
after filling the Lago Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through a
wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned to account; and to this
great engineering work, as bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth
that placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns of Europe. At the
same period she built her walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen
gates that showed she loved magnificence combined with strength. Genoa,
between 1276 and 1283, protected her harbours by a gigantic mole, and in
1295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into the city by an aqueduct
worthy of old Rome. Venice had to win her very footing from the sea and
sand. So firmly did she drive her piles, so vigilantly watch their
preservation, that palaces and cathedrals of marble might be safely reared
upon the bosom of the deep. Meanwhile, stone bridges began to span the
rivers of Italy; the streets and squares of towns were everywhere paved
with flags. Before the first years of the fourteenth century the Italian
cities presented a spectacle of solid and substantial comfort, very
startling to northerners who travelled from the unpaved lanes of London
and the muddy labyrinths of Paris.
Sismondi remarks with just pride that these great works were Republican.
They were set on foot for the public use, and were constructed at the
expense of the commonwealths. It is, however, right to add that what the
communes had begun the princes continued. To the splendid taste of the
Visconti dynasty, for instance, Milan owed her wonderful Duomo and the
octagon bell-tower of S. Gottardo. The Certosas of Pavia and Chiaravalle,
the palace of Pavia, and a host of minor monuments remain in Milan and its
neighbourhood to prove how much a single family performed for the
adornment of the cities they had subjugated. And what is true of Milan
applies to Italy throughout its length and breadth. The Despots held their
power at the price of magnificence in schemes of public utility. So much
at least of the free spirit of the communes survived in them, that they
were always rivalling each other in great works of architecture. Italian
tyranny implied aesthetic taste and liberality of expenditure.
In no way is the characteristic diversity of the Italian communities so
noticeable as in their buildings. Each district, each town, has a
well-defined peculiarity, reflecting the specific qualities of the
inhabitants and the conditions under which they grew in culture. In some
cases we may refer this local character to nationality and geographical
position. Thus the name of the Lombards has been given to a style of
Romanesque, which prevailed through Northern and Central Italy during the
period of Lombard ascendency.[10] The Tuscans never forgot the domes of
their remote ancestors; the Romans adhered closely to Latin traditions;
the Southerners were affected by Byzantine and Saracenic models. In many
instances the geology of the neighbourhood determined the picturesque
features of its architecture. The clay-fields of the valley of the Po
produced the brickwork of Cremona, Pavia, Crema, Chiaravalle, and
Vercelli. To their quarries of _mandorlato_ the Veronese builders owed the
peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans
with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato
supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the _pietra
serena_ of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine
buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce
or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the
unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and the Normans left
ineffaceable traces of their sojourn on Palermo. Naples and Messina still
bear marks upon their churches of French workmen. All along the coasts we
here and there find evidences of Oriental style imported into mediaeval
Italy, while the impress of the Spaniard is no less manifest in edifices
of a later period.
Existing thus in the midst of many potent influences, and surrounded by
the ruins of past civilisations, the Italians recombined and mingled
styles of marked variety. The Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, Lombard, and
German traditions were blended in their architecture, as the presiding
genius of each place determined. It followed that master-works of rare and
subtle invention were produced, while no one type was fully perfected, nor
can we point to any paramount Italian manner. In Italy what was gained in
richness and individuality was lost in uniformity and might. Yet we may
well wonder at the versatile appreciation of all types of beauty that
these monuments evince. How strange, for example, it is to think of the
Venetians borrowing the form and structure of their temple from the
mosques of Alexandria, decking its facade with the horses of Lysippus, and
panelling the sanctuary with marbles from the harem-floors of Eastern
emperors; while at the other end of Italy, at Palermo, close beside the
ruined colonnades of Greek Segesta, Norman kings were embroidering their
massive churches with Saracenic arabesques and Byzantine mosaics,
interspersing delicate Arabian tracery with rope-patterns and monsters of
the deep, and linking Cuphic sentences with Scandinavian runes. Meanwhile,
at Rome, tombs, baths, and theatres had been turned into fortresses. The
Orsini held the Mole of Hadrian; the Savelli ensconced themselves in the
Theatre of Marcellus, and the Colonnesi in the Mausoleum of Augustus; the
Colosseum and the Arches of Constantine and Titus harboured the
Frangipani; the Baths of Trajan housed the Capocci; while the Gaetani made
a castle of Caecilia Metella's tomb. Under those vast resounding vaults
swarmed a brood of mediaeval _bravi_--like the wasps that hang their
pear-shaped combs along the cloisters of Pavia. There the ghost of the
dead empire still sat throned and sceptred. The rites of Christianity were
carried on beneath Agrippa's dome, in Diocletian's baths, in the
Basilicas. No other style but that of the imperial people struck root near
the Eternal City. Among her three hundred churches, Rome can only show one
Gothic building. Further to the north, where German influences were more
potent, the cathedrals still displayed, each after its own kind, a sunny
southern waywardness. Glowing with marbles and mosaics, glittering with
ornaments, where the foliage of the Corinthian acanthus hides the symbols
of the Passion, and where birds and Cupids peep from tangled fruits
beneath grave brows of saints and martyrs; leaning now to the long low
colonnades of the Basilica, now to the high-built arches of the purely
Pointed style; surmounting the meeting point of nave and transept with
Etruscan domes; covering the facade with bas-reliefs, the roof with
statues; raising the porch-pillars upon lions and winged griffins;
flanking the nave with bell-towers, or planting them apart like flowers in
isolation on the open square--these wonderful buildings, the delight and
joy of all who love to trace variety in beauty, and to note the impress of
a nation's genius upon its art, seem, like Italy herself, to feel all
influences and to assimilate all nationalities.
Amid the many styles of architecture contending for mastery in Italy,
three, before the age of the Revival, bid fair to win the battle. These
were the Lombard, the Tuscan Romanesque, and the Gothic. Chronologically
the two former flourished nearly during the same centuries, while Gothic,
coming from without, suspended their development. But chronology is of
little help in the history of Italian architecture; its main features
being, not uniformity of progression, but synchronous diversity and
salience of local type. What remained fixed through all changes in Italy
was a bias toward the forms of Roman building, which eventually in the
Renaissance, becoming scientifically apprehended, determined the taste of
the whole nation.
It is, perhaps, not wholly fanciful to say that, as the Lombards just
failed to mould the Italians by conquest into an united people, so their
architecture fell short of creating one type for the peninsula.[11] From
some points of view the historian might regret that Italy did not receive
that thorough subjugation in the eighth century, which would have broken
down local distinctions. Such regrets, however, are singularly idle; for
the main currents of the world's history move not by chance; and how,
moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms
of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before
some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps
with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of
architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians
which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and
England?[12] The pyramidal facade common in these buildings, the campanili
that suspend aerial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising
tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in
minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the
open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and
rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and
the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been
carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged
horses, lizards, and knights in armour--all these are elements that might,
we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the
churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their
peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long
reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue
hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm of Lombard landscape.
If Lombard architecture, properly so-called, was partial in its influence
and confined to a comparatively narrow local sphere, the same is true of
the Tuscan Romanesque. The church of Samminiato, near Florence [about
1013], and the cathedral of Pisa [begun 1063], not to mention other less
eminent examples at Lucca and Pistoja, are sufficient evidences that in
the darkest period of the Middle Ages the Italians were aiming at an
architectural Renaissance. The influence of classical models is apparent
both in the construction and the detail of these basilicas; while the
deeply grounded preference of the Italian genius for round arches, for
colonnades of pillars and pilasters, and for large rectangular spaces,
with low roofs and shallow tribunes, finds full satisfaction in these
original and noble buildings. It is impossible to refrain from deploring
that the Romanesque of Tuscany should have been checked in its development
by the intrusion of the German Gothic. Had it run its course unthwarted, a
national style suited to the temperament of the people might have been
formed, and much that was pedantic in the revival of the fifteenth century
have been obviated.
The place of Gothic architecture in Italy demands fuller treatment. It was
due partly to the direct influence of German emperors, partly to the
imperial sympathies of the great nobles, partly to the Franciscan friars,
who aimed at building large churches cheaply, and partly to the admiration
excited by the grandeur of the Pointed style as it prevailed in Northern
Europe, that Gothic--so alien to the Italian genius and climate--took
root, spread widely, and flourished freely for a season. In thus
enumerating the conditions favourable to the spread of Gottico-Tedesco, I
am far from wishing to assert that this style was purely foreign. Italy,
in common with the rest of Europe, passed by a natural process of
evolution from the Romanesque to the Pointed manner, and treated the
latter with an originality that proves a certain natural assimilation. Yet
the first Gothic church, that of S. Francis at Assisi, was designed by a
German; the most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is emphatically
German.[13] During the comparatively brief period of Gothic ascendency the
Italians never forgot their Latin and Lombard sympathies. The mood of mind
in which they Gothicised was partial and transient. The evolution of this
style was, therefore, neither so spontaneous and simple, nor yet so
uninterrupted and complete, in Italy as in the North. While it produced
the church of S. Francesco at Assisi and the cathedrals of Siena, Orvieto,
Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, together with the town-halls of
Perugia, Siena, and Florence, it failed to take firm hold upon the
national taste, and died away before the growing passion for antiquity
that restored the Italians to a sense of their own intellectual greatness.
It is clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their vocation to
revive the culture of the classic age, they at once and for ever abandoned
the style appropriate to northern feudalism. They seem to have adopted it
half-unwillingly and to have understood it only in the imperfect way in
which they comprehended chivalry.
The Italians never rightly apprehended the specific nature of Gothic
architecture. They could not forget the horizontal lines, flat roofs, and
blank walls of the Basilica. Like their Roman ancestors, they aimed at
covering the ground with the smallest possible expenditure of
construction; to enclose large spaces within simple limits was their first
object, and the effect of beauty or sublimity was gained by the
proportions given to the total area. When, therefore, they adopted the
Gothic style, they failed to perceive that its true merit consists in the
negation of nearly all that the Latin style holds precious. Horizontal
lines are as far as possible annihilated; walls are lost in windows;
aisles and columns, apses and chapels, are multiplied with a view to
complexity of architectonic effect; flat roofs become intolerable. The
whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the
spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless
soaring lines--lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent
growth--converge. All this the Italians were slow to comprehend. The
campanile, for example, never became an integral part of their buildings.
It stood alone, and was reserved for its original purpose of keeping the
bells. The windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where there is
rather too much than too little sunlight, were curtailed; and instead of
the multiplied bays and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, the
nave of so vast a church as S. Petronio at Bologna is measured by six
arches raised on simple piers. The facade of an Italian cathedral was
studied as a screen, quite independently of its relation to the interior;
in the beautiful church of Crema, for example, the moon at night looks
through the upper windows of a frontispiece raised far above the low roof
of the nave. For the total effect of the exterior, as will be apparent to
anyone who observes the Duomo of Orvieto from behind, no thought was
taken. In this way the Italians missed the point and failed to perceive
the poetry of Gothic architecture. Its symbolical significance was lost
upon them; perhaps we ought to say that the Italian temperament, in art as
in religion, was incapable of assimilating the vague yet powerful
mysticism of the Teutonic races.
On the other hand, what they sacrificed of genuine Gothic character, was
made good after their own fashion. Surface decoration, whether of fresco
or mosaic, bronze-work or bas-relief, wood-carving or panelling in marble,
baked clay or enamelled earthenware was never carried to such perfection
in Gothic buildings of the purer type; nor had sculpture in the North an
equal chance of detaching itself from the niche and tabernacle, which
forced it to remain the slave of architecture. Thus the comparative
defects of Italian Gothic were directly helpful in promoting those very
arts for which the people had a genius unrivalled among modern nations.
It is only necessary to contrast the two finest cathedrals of this style,
those of Siena and Orvieto, with two such buildings as the cathedrals of
Rheims and Salisbury, in order to perceive the structural inferiority of
the former, as well as their superiority for all subordinate artistic
purposes. Long straight lines, low roofs, narrow windows, a facade of
surprising splendour but without a strict relation to the structure of the
nave and aisles, a cupola surmounting the intersection of nave, choir, and
transepts; simple tribunes at the east end, a detached campanile, round
columns instead of clustered piers, a mixture of semicircular and pointed
arches; these are some of the most salient features of the Sienese Duomo.
But the material is all magnificent; and the hand, obedient to the
dictates of an artist's brain, has made itself felt on every square foot
of the building. Alternate courses of white and black marble, cornices
loaded with grave or animated portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines,
altars, pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, panels of inlaid
wood and pictured pavements, bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens,
gilding and colour and precious work of agate and lapis lazuli--the
masterpieces of men famous each in his own line--delight the eye in all
directions. The whole church is a miracle of richness, a radiant and
glowing triumph of inventive genius, the product of a hundred
master-craftsmen toiling through successive centuries to do their best.
All its countless details are so harmonised by the controlling taste, so
brought together piece by piece in obedience to artistic instinct, that
the total effect is ravishingly beautiful. Yet it is clear that no one
paramount idea, determining and organising all these marvels, existed in
the mind of the first architect. In true Gothic work the details that
make up the charm of this cathedral would have been subordinated to one
architectonic thought; they would not have been suffered to assert their
individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, to the whole effect.
The northern Gothic church is like a body with several members; the
southern Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. The northern
Gothic style corresponds to the national unity of federalised races,
organised by a social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In the
southern Gothic style we find a mirror of political diversity, independent
personality, burgher-like equality, despotic will. Thus the specific
qualities of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages may be traced by
no undue exercise of the fancy in her monuments. They are emphatically the
creation of citizens--of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, distinguished by
alternating obedience and command, not ranked beneath a monarchy, but
capable themselves of sovereign power.[14]
What has been said of Siena is no less true of the Duomo of Orvieto.
Though it seems to aim at a severer Gothic, and though the facade is more
architecturally planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice
shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the
style they used. What can be more melancholy than those blank walls,
broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the
nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few
pinnacles appended at a venture? It is clear that the spirit of the
northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand,
the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect
has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed,
though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive
by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated
details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge,
there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our admiration won.
The frescoes of Signorelli, the bas-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of
Lo Scalza and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alexandrine work
and mosaics of the facade, the bronzes placed upon its brackets, and the
wrought acanthus scrolls of its superb pilasters--these are the objects
for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Orvieto. On approaching a
building of this type, we must abandon our conceptions of organic
architecture: only the Greek and northern Gothic styles deserve that
epithet. We must not seek for severe discipline and architectonic design.
Instead of one presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared to
welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought out by men of independent
genius, whereby each part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse elements
become a whole of picturesque rather than architectural impressiveness.
It would not be difficult to extend this kind of criticism to the Duomo of
Milan. Speaking strictly, a more unlucky combination of different
styles--the pyramidal facade of Lombard architecture and the long thin
lights of German Gothic, for example--a clumsier misuse of
ill-appropriated details in the heavy piers of the nave, or a more
disastrous adjustment of the monster windows to the main lines of the nave
and aisles, could scarcely be imagined. Yet no other church, perhaps, in
Europe leaves the same impression of the marvellous upon the fancy. The
splendour of its pure white marble, blushing with the rose of evening or
of dawn, radiant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like beneath
the moon and stars, the multitudes of statues sharply cut against a clear
blue sky, and gazing at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, the
immense space and light-irradiated gloom of the interior, the deep tone of
the bells above at a vast distance, and the gorgeous colours of the
painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect unparalleled in
Christendom.
The two styles, Lombard and Gothic, of which I have been speaking, were
both in a certain sense exotic. Within the great cities the pith of the
population was Latin; and no style of building that did not continue the
tradition of the Romans, in the spirit of the Roman manner, and with
strict observance of its details, satisfied them. It was a main feature of
the Renaissance that, when the Italians undertook the task of reuniting
themselves by study with the past, they abandoned all other forms of
architecture, and did their best to create one in harmony with the relics
of Latin monuments. To trace the history of this revived classic
architecture will occupy me later in this chapter; but for the moment it
is necessary to turn aside and consider briefly the secular buildings of
Italy before the date of the Renaissance proper.
About the same time that the cathedrals were being built, the nobles
filled the towns with fortresses. These at first were gaunt and unsightly;
how overcrowded with tall bare towers a mediaeval Italian city could be, is
still shown by San Gemignano, the only existing instance where the
_torroni_ have been left untouched.[15] In course of time, when the
aristocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and public order was
maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made way for spacious
palaces. The temper of the citizens in each place and the local character
of artistic taste determined the specific features of domestic as of
ecclesiastical architecture. Though it is hard to define what are the
social differences expressed by the large quadrangles of Francesco
Sforza's hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at
Florence, we feel that the _genius loci_ has in each case controlled the
architect. The sunny spaces of the one building, with its terra-cotta
traceries of birds and grapes and Cupids, contrast with the stern brown
mouldings and impenetrable solidity of the other. That the one was raised
by the munificence of a sovereign in his capital, while the other was the
dwelling of a burgher in a city proud of its antique sobriety, goes some
way to explain the difference. In like manner the court-life of a dynastic
principality produced the castle of Urbino, so diverse in its style and
adaptation from the ostentatious mansions of the Genoese merchants. It is
not fanciful to say that the civic life of a free and factious republic is
represented by the heavy walls and narrow windows of Florentine
dwelling-places. In their rings of iron, welded between rock and rock
about the basement, as though for the beginning of a barricade--in their
torch-rests of wrought metal, gloomy portals and dimly-lighted courts, we
trace the habits of caution and reserve that marked the men who led the
parties of Uberti and Albizzi. The Sienese palaces are lighter and more
elegant in style, as belonging to a people proverbially pleasure-loving;
while a still more sumptuous and secure mode of life finds expression in
the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice. The graceful buildings
which overhang the Grand Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure
of its own authority and loved of the people. Feudal despotism, on the
contrary, reigns in the heart of Ferrara, where the Este's stronghold,
moated, draw-bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over the
water that protects the dungeons, still seems to threaten the public
square and overawe the homes of men.
To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again, we owe the town halls
and public palaces that form so prominent a feature in the city
architecture of Italy. The central vitality of once powerful States is
symbolised in the _broletti_ of the Lombard cities, dusty and abandoned
now in spite of their clear-cut terra-cotta traceries. There is something
strangely melancholy in their desolation. Wandering through the vast hall
of the Ragione at Padua, where the very shadows seem asleep as they glide
over the wide unpeopled floor, it is not easy to remember that this was
once the theatre of eager intrigues, ere the busy stir of the old burgh
was utterly extinguished. Few of these public palaces have the good
fortune to be distinguished, like that of the Doge at Venice, by
world-historical memories and by works of art as yet unrivalled. The
spirit of the Venetian Republic still lives in that unique building.
Architects may tell us that its Gothic arcades are melodramatic; sculptors
may depreciate the decorative work of Sansovino; painters may assert that
the genius of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese shines elsewhere with greater
lustre. Yet the poet clings with ever-deepening admiration to the sea-born
palace of the ancient mistress of the sea, and the historian feels that
here, as at Athens, art has made the past towards which he looks eternal.
Two other great Italian houses of the Commonwealth, rearing their towers
above the town for tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrinsic
beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and the Palazzo Vecchio of
Florence. Few buildings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than
the palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and dale to cloud-capped
Monte Amiata. Yet, in spite of its unparalleled position on the curved and
sloping piazza, where the _contrade_ of Siena have run their _palio_ for
centuries, this palace lacks the vivid interest attaching to the home
Arnolfo raised at Florence for the rulers of his native city. During their
term of office the Priors never quitted the Palace of the Signory. All
deliberations on state affairs took place within its walls, and its bell
was the pulse that told how the heart of Florence throbbed. The architect
of this huge mass of masonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the greatest
builders of the Middle Ages, a man who may be called the Michael Angelo
of the thirteenth century[16]. In 1298 he was ordered to erect a
dwelling-place for the Commonwealth, to the end that the people might be
protected in their fortress from the violence of the nobles. The building
of the palace and the levelling of the square around it were attended with
circumstances that bring forcibly before our minds the stern conditions of
republican life in mediaeval Italy. A block of houses had to be bought from
the family of Foraboschi; and their tower, called Torre della Vacca, was
raised and turned into the belfry of the Priors. There was not room
enough, however, to construct the palace itself with right angles, unless
it were extended into the open space where once had stood the houses of
the Uberti, "traitors to Florence and Ghibellines." In destroying these,
the burghers had decreed that thenceforth for ever the feet of men should
pass where the hearths of the proscribed nobles once had blazed. Arnolfo
begged that he might trespass on this site; but the people refused
permission. Where the traitors' nest had been, there the sacred
foundations of the public house should not be laid. Consequently the
Florentine Palazzo is, was, and will be cramped of its correct
proportions[17].
No Italian architect has enjoyed the proud privilege of stamping his own
individuality more strongly on his native city than Arnolfo; and for this
reason it may be permitted to enlarge upon his labours here. When we take
our stand upon the hill of Samminiato, the Florence at our feet owes her
physiognomy in a great measure to this man. The tall tower of the Palazzo
Vecchio, the bulk of the Duomo, and the long low oblong mass of Santa
Croce are all his. His too are the walls that define the city of flowers
from the gardens round about her.[18] Even the master-works of his
successors subordinate their beauty to his first conception. Giotto's
campanile, Brunelleschi's cupola, and Orcagna's church of Orsammichele, in
spite of their undoubted and authentic originality, are placed where he
had planned.
In 1294 the Florentines determined to rebuild their mother-church upon a
scale of unexampled grandeur. The commission given to their architect
displays so strikingly the lordly spirit in which these burghers set about
the work, that, though it has been often quoted, a portion of the document
shall be recited here. "Since the highest mark of prudence in a people of
noble origin is to proceed in the management of their affairs so that
their magnanimity and wisdom may be evinced in their outward acts, we
order Arnolfo, head-master of our commune, to make a design for the
renovation of Santa Reparata in a style of magnificence which neither the
industry nor the power of man can surpass, that it may harmonise with the
opinion of many wise persons in this city and state, who think that this
commune should not engage in any enterprise unless its intention be to
make the result correspond with that noblest sort of heart which is
composed of the united will of many citizens."[19] From Giovanni Villani
we learn what taxes were levied by the Wool-Guild, and set apart in 1331
for the completion of the building. They were raised upon all goods bought
or sold within the city in two separate rates, the net produce amounting
in the first year to 2,000 lire.[20] The cathedral designed by Arnolfo
was of vast dimensions: it covers 84,802 feet, while that of Cologne
covers 81,461 feet; and, says Fergusson, "as far as mere conception of
plan goes, there can be little doubt but that the Florentine cathedral far
surpasses its German rival."[21] Nothing, indeed, can be imagined more
noble than the scheme of this huge edifice. Studying its ground-plan, and
noting how the nave unfolds into a mighty octagon, which in its turn
displays three well-proportioned apses, we are induced to think that a
sublimer thought has never been expressed in stone. At this point,
however, our admiration receives a check. In the execution of the parts
the builder dwarfed what had been conceived on so magnificent a scale;
aiming at colossal simplicity, he failed to secure the multiplicity of
subordinated members essential to the total effect of size. "Like all
inexperienced architects, he seems to have thought that greatness of parts
would add to the greatness of the whole, and in consequence used only four
great arches in the whole length of his nave, giving the central aisle a
width of fifty-five feet clear. The whole width is within ten feet of that
of Cologne, and the height about the same; and yet, in appearance, the
height is about half, and the breadth less than half, owing to the better
proportion of the parts and to the superior appropriateness in the details
on the part of the German cathedral."[22] The truth of these remarks will
be felt by every one on whom the ponderous vacuity of the interior has
weighed. Other notable defects there are too in this building, proceeding
chiefly from the Italian misconception of Gothic style. The windows are
few and narrow, so that little light even at noonday struggles through
them; and broad barren spaces of grey walls oppress the eye. Externally
the whole church is panelled with parti-coloured marbles, according to
Florentine custom; but this panelling bears no relation to the structure:
it is so much surface decoration possessing value chiefly for the
colourist. Arnolfo died before the dome, as he designed it, could be
placed upon the octagon, and nothing is known for certain about the form
he meant it to assume. It seems, however, probable that he intended to
adopt something similar to the dome of Chiaravalle, which ends, after a
succession of narrowing octagons, in a slender conical pyramid.[23]
Subordinate spires would then have been placed at each of the four angles
where the nave and transepts intersect; and the whole external effect, for
richness and variety, would have outrivalled that of any European
building. It is well known that the erection of the dome was finally
entrusted to Brunelleschi in 1420. Arnolfo's church now sustains in air an
octagonal cupola of the simplest possible design, in height and size
rivalling that of S. Peter's. It was thus that the genius of the
Renaissance completed what the genius of the Middle Ages had begun. But in
Italy there was no real break between the two periods. Though Arnolfo
employed the Pointed style in his design, we find nothing genuinely Gothic
in the church. It has no pinnacles, flying buttresses, side chapels, or
subordinate supports. To use the phrase of Michelet, who has chosen the
dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's intervention in the rearing of the dome
for a parable of the Renaissance, "the colossal church stood up simply,
naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the
need of staff or crutch."[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as
compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of
simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical
ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that
the gain of vast aerial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the
impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very
strongly when we study the model prepared by Bramante's pupil, Cristoforo
Rocchi, for the cathedral of Pavia; yet here we see the neo-Latin genius
of the Italian artist working freely in an element exactly suited to his
powers. When the same order of genius sought to express its conception
through the language of the Gothic style, the result was invariably
defective.[25]
The classical revival of the fifteenth century made itself immediately
felt in architecture; and Brunelleschi's visit to Rome in 1403 may be
fixed as the date of the Renaissance in this art. Gothic, as we have
already seen, was an alien in Italy. Its importation from the North had
checked the free development of national architecture, which in the
eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return to classic details.
But the reign of Gothic was destined to be brief. Petrarch and Boccaccio,
as I showed in my last volume, turned the whole intellectual energy of the
Florentines into the channels of Latin and Greek scholarship.[26] The
ancient world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with one will shook
themselves free of the medieval style they never rightly understood, and
which they henceforth stigmatised as barbarous.[27]
The problem that occupied all the Renaissance architects was how to
restore the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the
modern requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic buildings. Of
Greek art they knew comparatively nothing: nor indeed could Greek
architecture have offered for their purpose the same plastic elements as
Roman--itself a derived style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern
uses than the inflexibly pure art of Greece. At the same time they
possessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work. The ruins of baths,
theatres, tombs, temple-fronts, and triumphal arches, were of little
immediate assistance in the labour of designing churches and palaces. All
that the architects could do, after familiarising themselves with the
remains of ancient Rome, and assimilating the spirit of Roman art, was to
clothe their own inventions with classic details. The form and structure
of their edifices were modern; the parts were copied from antique models.
A want of organic unity and structural sincerity is always the result of
those necessities under which a secondary and adapted style must labour;
and thus the pseudo-Roman buildings even of the best Renaissance period
display faults similar to those of the Italian Gothic. While they are
remarkable for grandeur of effect in all that concerns the distribution of
light and shade, the covering and enclosing of space, and the disposition
of masses, they show at best but a superficial correspondence between the
borrowed forms and the construction these are used to mask.[28] The
edifices of this period abound in more or less successful shams, in
surface decoration more or less pleasing to the eye; their real greatness,
meanwhile, consists in the feeling for spatial proportions and for linear
harmonies possessed by their architects.
Three periods in the development of Renaissance architecture may be
roughly marked.[29] The first, extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of
experiment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second embraces the first
forty years of the sixteenth century. The most perfect buildings of the
Italian Renaissance were produced within this short space of time. The
third, again comprising about forty years, from 1540 to 1580, leads onward
to the reign of mannerism and exaggeration, called by the Italians
_barocco_. In itself the third period is distinguished by a scrupulous
purism bordering upon pedantry, strict adherence to theoretical rules, and
sacrifice of inventive qualities to established canons. To do more than
briefly indicate the masterpieces of these three periods, would be
impossible in a work that does not pretend to treat of architecture
exhaustively: and yet to omit all notice of the builders of this age and
of their styles, would be to neglect the most important art-phase of the
time I have undertaken to illustrate.
In the first period we are bewildered by the luxuriance of creative powers
and by the rioting of the fancy in all forms of beauty indiscriminately
mingled. In general we detect a striving after effects not fully realised,
and a tendency to indulge in superfluous ornament without regard for
strictness of design. The imperfect comprehension of classical models and
the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the fifteenth century account
for the florid work of this time. Something too is left of mediaeval fancy;
the details borrowed from the antique undergo fantastic transmutation at
the hands of men accustomed to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages.
Whatever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was at first unable to
assimilate either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety
of the Romans. Christianity had deepened and intensified the sources of
imaginative life; and just as reminiscences of classic style impaired
Italian Gothic, so now a trace of Gothic is perceptible in the would-be
classic work of the Revival. The result of these combined influences was a
wonderful and many-featured hybrid, best represented in one monument by
the facade of the Certosa at Pavia. While characterising the work of the
earlier Renaissance as fused of divers manners, we must not forget that it
was truly living, full of purpose, and according to its own standard
sincere. It was a new birth; no mere repetition of something dead and
gone, but the product of vivid forces stirred to original creativeness by
admiration for the past. It corresponded, moreover, with exquisite
exactitude to the halting of the conscience between Christianity and
Paganism, and to the blent beauty that the poets loved. On reeds dropped
from the hands of dead Pan the artists of this period, each in his, own
sphere, piped ditties of romance.
To these general remarks upon the style of the first period the Florentine
architects offer an exception; and yet the first marked sign of a new era
in the art of building was given at Florence. Purity of taste and firmness
of judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of
Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their
treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them--and
in my opinion justly--with hardness and frigidity.[30] Brunelleschi in
1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly
classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had
learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own
artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo is a columnar edifice with round arches and
semicircular apses. Not a form or detail in the whole church is strictly
speaking at variance with Roman precedent; and yet the general effect
resembles nothing we possess of antique work. It is a masterpiece of
intelligent Renaissance adaptation. The same is true of S. Spirito, built
in 1470, after Brunelleschi's death, according to his plans. The
extraordinary capacity of this great architect will, however, win more
homage from ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti Palace and
the cupola of the cathedral. Both of these are master-works of personal
originality. What is Roman in the Pitti Palace, is the robust simplicity
of massive strength; but it is certain that no patrician of the republic
or the empire inhabited a house at all resembling this. The domestic
habits of the Middle Ages, armed for self-defence, and on guard against
invasion from without, still find expression in the solid bulk of this
forbidding dwelling-place, although its majesty and largeness show that
the reign of milder and more courtly manners has begun. To speak of the
cupola of the Duomo in connection with a simple revival of Roman taste,
would be equally inappropriate. It remains a tour de force of individual
genius, cultivated by the experience of Gothic vault-building, and
penetrated with the greatness of imperial Rome. Its spirit of dauntless
audacity and severe concentration alone is antique.
Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo Battista Alberti, a
Florentine, who, working upon somewhat different principles, sought more
closely to reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.[31] In
his remodelling of S. Francesco at Rimini the type he followed was that of
the triumphal arch, and what was finished of that wonderful facade,
remains to prove how much might have been made of well-proportioned
pilasters and nobly curved arcades.[32] The same principle is carried out
in S. Andrea at Mantua. The frontispiece of this church is a gigantic arch
of triumph; the interior is noticeable for its simple harmony of parts,
adopted from the vaulted baths of Rome. The combination of these antique
details in an imposing structure implied a high imaginative faculty at a
moment when the rules of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced
to method. Yet the weakness of Alberti's principle is revealed when we
consider that here the lofty central arch of the facade serves only for a
decoration. Too high and spacious even for the chariots of a Roman
triumph, it forms an inappropriate entrance to the modest vestibule of a
Christian church.
Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace
in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo
Rucellai retains many details of the mediaeval Tuscan style, especially in
the windows divided by slender pilasters. But the three orders introduced
by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are
transcripts from Roman ruins. This building, one of the most beautiful in
Italy, was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Fiorentino for the
palaces they constructed at Pienza.
This was the age of sumptuous palace-building; and for no purpose was the
early Renaissance style better adapted than for the erection of
dwelling-houses that should match the free and worldly splendour of those
times. The just medium between mediaeval massiveness and classic simplicity
was attained in countless buildings beautiful and various beyond
description. Bologna is full of them; and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace,
contains one specimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest. Yet
here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence takes the lead. After
Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo, the favourite architect of
Cosimo de' Medici; Benedetto da Majano; Giuliano and Antonio di San Gallo;
and Il Cronaca. Cosimo de' Medici, having said that "envy is a plant no
man should water," denied himself the monumental house designed by
Brunelleschi, and chose instead the modest plan of Michellozzo.
Brunelleschi had meant to build the Casa Medici along one side of the
Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused his project, he broke up the
model he had made, to the great loss of students of this age of
architecture. Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but
comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga,
which continued to be the residence of the Medici through all their
chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo
Pitti.[33] The most beautiful of all Florentine dwelling-houses designed
at this period is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo
Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity of antecedent ages with a
grandeur and a breadth of style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo
Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine domestic
architecture.[34] Other cities were supplied by Florence with builders,
and Milan owed her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to Antonio
Filarete, a Florentine. This great edifice illustrates the emancipation
from fixed rule that distinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier
Renaissance. The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, especially in the
pointed windows; but the feeling of the whole structure, in its airy space
and lightness, delicate terra-cotta mouldings, and open loggie, is truly
Cinque Cento.[35]
In no other style than this of the earlier Renaissance is the builder more
inseparably connected with the decorator. The labours of the stone-carver,
who provided altars chased with Scripture histories in high relief,
pulpits hung against a column of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral
garlands, organ galleries enriched with bas-reliefs of singing boys,
ciboria with kneeling and adoring angels, marble tabernacles for relics,
vases for holy water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable
wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and screens and balustrades
that fence the choir, are added to those of the bronze-founder, with his
mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra sustained by angels,
torch-rests and rings, embossed basements for banners of state, and
portraits of recumbent senators or prelates.[36] The wood carver
contributes _tarsia_ like that of Fra Giovanni da Verona.[37] The worker
in wrought iron welds such screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra
Cintola at Prato. The Robbias prepare their delicately-toned reliefs for
the lunettes above the doorways. Modellers in clay produce the terra-cotta
work of the Certosa, or the carola of angels who surround the little
cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.[38] Meanwhile mosaics
are provided for the dome or let into the floor;[39] agates and marbles
and lapis lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panellings;[40]
stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and heavy roofs are embossed
with figures of the saints and armorial emblems.[41] Tapestry is woven
from the designs of excellent masters;[42] great painters contribute
arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed with gilding, and glass is
coloured from the outlines of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti.
Some of the decorative elements I have hastily enumerated, will be treated
in connection with the respective arts of sculpture and painting. The
fact, meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a new development in
relation to architecture during the first period of the Renaissance, and
that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main aesthetical
purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts,
and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the facades
of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and
inlaid marbles? The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details,
and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a
feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts. As
the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every
detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance
have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest
literary extravagances--the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_, for
instance--have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to
sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.
In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders
were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production
of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless
employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without
the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the
construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct
for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more
true.
To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of
the golden age.[43] Though little of his work survives entire and
unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over
both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the
proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity
and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had
been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister
arts had reached their highest point. His early training in Lombardy
accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single
columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor
cupolas--elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by
Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to
determine the future of architecture for all Italy. Nature had gifted
Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right
limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for
structural symmetry was just. If his manner strikes us as somewhat cold
and abstract when compared with the more genial audacities of the earlier
Renaissance, we must remember how salutary was the example of a rigorous
and modest manner in an age which required above all things to be
preserved from its own luxuriant waywardness of fancy. It is hard to say
how much of the work ascribed to Bramante in Northern Italy is genuine;
most of it, at any rate, belongs to the manner of his youth. The Church of
S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of the Cancelleria at
Rome, and the unfinished cathedral of Pavia, enable us to comprehend the
general character of this great architect's refined and noble manner. S.
Peter's, it may be said in passing, retains, in spite of all subsequent
modifications, many essentially Bramantesque features--especially in the
distribution of the piers and rounded niches.
Bramante formed no school strictly so called, though his pupils,
Cristoforo Rocchi and Ventura Vitoni, carried out his principles of
building at Pavia and Pistoja. Vitoni's church of the Umilta in the latter
city is a pure example of conscientious neo-Roman architecture. It
consists of a large octagon surmounted by a dome and preceded by a lofty
vaulted atrium or vestibule. The single round arch of this vestibule
repeats the _testudo_ of a Roman bath, and the decorative details are
accurately reproduced from similar monuments. Unfortunately, Giorgio
Vasari, who was employed to finish the cupola, spoiled its effect by
raising it upon an ugly attic; it is probable that the church, as designed
by Vitoni, would have presented the appearance of a miniature Pantheon. At
Rome the influence of Bramante was propagated through Raphael, Giulio
Romano, and Baldassare Peruzzi. Raphael's claim to consideration as an
architect rests upon the Palazzi Vidoni and Pandolfini, the Cappella Chigi
in S. Maria del Popolo, and the Villa Madama. The last-named building,
executed by Giulio Romano after Raphael's design, is carried out in a
style so forcible as to make us fancy that the pupil had a larger share in
its creation than his teacher. These works, however, sink into
insignificance before the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, the masterpiece of
Giulio's genius. This most noble of Italian pleasure-houses remains to
show what the imagination of a poet-artist could recover from the
splendour of old Rome and adapt to the use of his own age. The vaults of
the Thermae of Titus, with their cameos of stucco and frescoed arabesques,
are here repeated on a scale and with an exuberance of invention that
surpass the model. Open loggie yield fair prospect over what were once
trim gardens; spacious halls, adorned with frescoes in the vehement and
gorgeous style of the Roman school, form a fit theatre for the grand
parade-life of an Italian prince. The whole is Pagan in its pride and
sensuality, its prodigality of strength and insolence of freedom. Having
seen this palace, we do not wonder that the fame of Giulio flew across the
Alps and lived upon the lips of Shakspere: for in his master-work at
Mantua he collected, as it were, and epitomised in one building all that
enthralled the fancy of the Northern nations when they thought of Italy.
A pendant to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the
banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino
Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and
quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal
spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of
Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this
villa famous in the annals of Italian painting. The memory of the Roman
banker's splendid style of living marks it out as no less noteworthy in
the history of Renaissance manners.[44]
Among the great edifices of this second period we may reckon Jacopo
Sansovino's buildings at Venice, though they approximate rather to the
style of the earlier Renaissance in all that concerns exuberance of
decorative detail. The Venetians, somewhat behind the rest of Italy in the
development of the fine arts, were at the height of prosperity and wealth
during the middle period of the Renaissance; and no city is more rich in
monuments of the florid style. Something of their own delight in sensuous
magnificence they communicated even to the foreigners who dwelt among
them. The court of the Ducal Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, the Palazzo
Corner, and the Palazzo Vendramini-Calergi, illustrate the, strong yet
fanciful _bravura_ style that pleased the aristocracy of Venice. Nowhere
else does the architecture of the Middle Ages melt by more imperceptible
degrees into that of the Revival, retaining through all changes the
impress of a people splendour-loving in the highest sense. The Library of
S. Mark, built by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however, the crowning
triumph of Venetian art. It is impossible to contemplate its noble double
row of open arches without feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilliant,
without echoing the judgment of Palladio, that nothing more sumptuous or
beautiful had been invented since the age of ancient Rome.
Time would fail to tell of all the architects who crowd the first half of
the sixteenth century--of Antonio di San Gallo, famous for fortifications;
of Baccio d'Agnolo, who raised the Campanile of S. Spirito at Florence; of
Giovanni Maria Falconetto, to whose genius Padua owed so many princely
edifices; of Michele Sanmicheli, the military architect of Verona, and the
builder of five mighty palaces for the nobles of his native city. Yet the
greatest name of all this period cannot be omitted: Michael Angelo must be
added to the list of builders in the golden age. In architecture, as in
sculpture, he not only bequeathed to posterity masterpieces of individual
energy and original invention, in their kind unrivalled; but he also
prepared for his successors a false way of working, and justified by his
example the extravagances of the decadence. Without noticing the facade
designed for S. Lorenzo at Florence, the transformation of the Baths of
Diocletian into a church, the remodelling of the Capitoline buildings, and
the continuation of the Palazzo Farnese--works that either exist only in
drawings or have been confused by later alterations--it is enough here to
mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S. Lorenzo and the cupola of S. Peter's.
The sacristy may be looked on either as the masterpiece of a sculptor who
required fit setting for his statues, or of an architect who designed
statues to enhance the structure he had planned. Both arts are used with
equal ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt more masterfully
with the human frame than with the forms of Roman architecture in this
chapel. He seems to have paid no heed to classic precedent, and to have
taken no pains to adapt the parts to the structural purpose of the
building. It was enough for him to create a wholly novel framework for the
modern miracle of sculpture it enshrines, attending to such rules of
composition as determine light and shade, and seeking by the slightness of
mouldings and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive forms that
brood above the Medicean tombs. The result is a product of picturesque and
plastic art, as true to the Michaelangelesque spirit as the Temple of the
Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias. But where Michael Angelo achieved a
triumph of boldness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie; and
this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its grandiose simplicity, proved a
stumbling-block to subsequent architects by encouraging them to despise
propriety and violate the laws of structure. The same may be said with
even greater truth of the Laurentian Library and its staircase. The false
windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming at effect, that mark the
insincerity of the _barocco_ style, are found here almost for the first
time.
What S. Peter's would have been, if Michael Angelo had lived to finish it,
can be imagined from his plans and elevations still preserved. It must
always remain a matter of profound regret that his project was so far
altered as to sacrifice the effect of the dome from the piazza. This dome
is Michael Angelo's supreme achievement as an architect. It not only
preserves all that is majestic in the cupola of Brunelleschi; but it also
avoids the defects of its avowed model, by securing the entrance of
abundant light, and dilating the imagination with the sense of space to
soar and float in. It is the dome that makes S. Peter's what it is--the
adequate symbol of the Church in an age that had abandoned mediaevalism and
produced a new type of civility for the modern nations. On the connection
between the building of S. Peter's and the Reformation I have touched
already.[45] This mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer
cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secularised and limited to
Latin races. At the same time it represents the spirit of a period when
the Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs. As the decree for
its erection was the last act of the Papacy before the schism of the North
had driven it into blind conflict with advancing culture, so S. Peter's
remains the monument to after ages of a moment when the Roman Church,
unterrified as yet by German rebels, dared to share the mundane impulse of
the classical revival. She had forgotten the catacombs and ruthlessly
destroyed the Basilica of Constantine. By rebuilding the mother church of
Western Christianity upon a new plan, she broke with tradition; and if
Rome has not ceased to be the Eternal City, if all ways are still leading
to Rome, we may even hazard a conjecture that in the last days of their
universal monarchy the Popes reared this fane to be the temple of a spirit
alien to their own. It is at any rate certain that S. Peter's produces an
impression less ecclesiastical, and less strictly Christian, than almost
any of the elder and far humbler churches of Europe. Raised by proud and
secular pontiffs in the heyday of renascent humanism, it seems to wait the
time when the high priests of a religion no longer hostile to science or
antagonistic to the inevitable force of progress will chaunt their hymns
beneath its spacious dome.
The building of S. Peter's was so momentous in modern history, and so
decisive for Italian architecture, that it may be permitted me to describe
the vicissitudes through which the structure passed before reaching
completion. Nicholas V., founder of the secular papacy and chief patron of
the humanistic movement in Rome, had approved a scheme for thoroughly
rebuilding and refortifying the pontifical city.[46] Part of this plan
involved the reconstruction of S. Peter's. The old basilica was to be
removed, and on its site was to rise a mighty church, shaped like a Latin
cross, with a central dome and two high towers flanking the vestibule.
Nicholas died before his project could be carried into effect. Beyond
destroying the old temple of Probus and marking out foundations for the
tribune of the new church, nothing had been accomplished;[47] nor did his
successors until the reign of Julius think of continuing what he had
begun. In 1506, on the 18th of April, Julius laid the first stone of S.
Peter's according to the plans provided by Bramante. The basilica was
designed in the shape of a Greek cross, surmounted by a colossal dome, and
approached by a vestibule fronted with six columns. As in all the works of
Bramante, simplicity and dignity distinguished this first scheme.[48] For
eight years, until his death in 1514, Bramante laboured on the building.
Julius, the most impatient of masters, urged him to work rapidly. In
consequence of this haste, the substructures of the new church proved
insecure, and the huge piers raised to support the cupola were imperfect,
while the venerable monuments contained in the old church were ruthlessly
destroyed.[49] After Bramante's death Giuliano di S. Gallo, Fra Giocondo,
and Raphael successively superintended the construction, each for a short
period. Raphael, under Leo X., was appointed sole architect, and went so
far as to alter the design of Bramante by substituting the Latin for the
Greek cross. Upon his death, Baldassare Peruzzi continued the work, and
supplied a series of new designs, restoring the ground-plan of the church
to its original shape. He was succeeded in the reign of Paul III. by
Antonio di S. Gallo, who once more reverted to the Latin cross, and
proposed a novel form of cupola with flanking towers for the facade, of
bizarre rather than beautiful proportions. After a short interregnum,
during which Giulio Romano superintended the building and did nothing
remarkable, Michael Angelo was called in 1535 to undertake the sole charge
of the edifice. He declared that wherever subsequent architects had
departed from Bramante's project, they had erred. "It is impossible to
deny that Bramante was as great in architecture as any man has been since
the days of the ancients. When he first laid the plan of S. Peter's, he
made it not a mass of confusion, but clear and simple, well lighted, and
so thoroughly detached that it in no way interfered with any portion of
the palace."[50] Having thus pronounced himself in general for Bramante's
scheme, Michael Angelo proceeded to develop it in accordance with his own
canons of taste. He retained the Greek cross; but the dome, as he
conceived it, and the details designed for each section of the building,
differed essentially from what the earlier master would have sanctioned.
Not the placid and pure taste of Bramante, but the masterful and fiery
genius of Buonarroti, is responsible for the colossal scale of the
subordinate parts and variously broken lineaments of the existing church.
In spite of all changes of direction, the fabric of S. Peter's had been
steadily advancing. Michael Angelo was, therefore, able to raise the
central structure as far as the drum of the cupola before his death. His
plans and models were carefully preserved, and a special papal ordinance
decreed that henceforth there should be no deviation from the scheme he
had laid down. Unhappily this rule was not observed. Under Pius V.,
Vignola and Piero Ligorio did indeed continue his tradition; under Gregory
XIII., Sixtus V., and Clement VIII., Giacomo della Porta made no
substantial alterations; and in 1590 Domenico Fontana finished the dome.
But during the pontificate of Paul V., Carlo Maderno resumed the form of
the Latin cross, and completed the nave and vestibule, as they now stand,
upon this altered plan (1614). The consequence is what has been already
noted--at a moderate distance from the church the dome is lost to view; it
only takes its true position of predominance when seen from far. In the
year 1626, S. Peter's was consecrated by Urban VIII., and the mighty work
was finished. It remained for Bernini to add the colonnades of the piazza,
no less picturesque in their effect than admirably fitted for the
pageantry of world-important ceremonial. At the end of the eighteenth
century it was reckoned that the church had cost but little less than
fifty million scudi.
Michael Angelo forms the link between the second and third periods of the
Renaissance. Among the architects of the latter age we have to reckon
those who based their practice upon minute study of antique writers, and
who, more than any of their predecessors, realised the long-sought
restitution of the classic style according to precise scholastic
canons.[51] A new age had now begun for Italy. The glory and the grace of
the Renaissance, its blooming time of beauty, and its springtide of young
strength, were over. Strangers held the reins of power, and the
Reformation had begun to make itself felt in the Northern provinces of
Christendom. A colder and more formal spirit everywhere prevailed. The
sources of invention in the art of painting were dried up. Scholarship had
pined away into pedantic purism. Correct taste was coming to be prized
more highly than originality of genius in literature. Nor did architecture
fail to manifest the operation of this change. The greatest builder of the
period was Andrea Palladio of Vicenza, who combined a more complete
analytical knowledge of antiquity with a firmer adherence to rule and
precedent than even the most imitative of his forerunners. It is useless
to seek for decorative fancy, wealth of detail, or sallies of inventive
genius in the Palladian style. All is cold and calculated in the many
palaces and churches of this master which adorn both Venice and Vicenza;
they make us feel that creative inspiration has been superseded by the
labour of the calculating reason. One great public building of Palladio's,
however--the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--may be cited as, perhaps,
the culminating point of pure Renaissance architecture. In its simple and
heroical arcades, its solid columns, and noble open spaces, the strength
of Rome is realised to the eyes of those who do not penetrate too far
inside the building.[52] Here, and here only, the architectural problem of
the epoch--how to bring the art of the ancients back to life and use
again--was solved according to the spirit and the letter of the past.
Palladio never equalled this, the earliest of all his many works.
In the first half of the sixteenth century the dictatorship of art had
been already transferred from Florence and Rome to Lombardy.[53] The
painters who carried on the great traditions were Venetian. Among the
architects, Palladio was a native of Vicenza; Giacomo Barozzi, the author
of the "Treatise on the Orders," took the name by which he is known from
his birthplace, Vignola; Vincenzo Scamozzi was a fellow-townsman of
Palladio; Galeazzo Alessi, though born at Perugia, spent his life and
developed his talents in Genoa; Andrea Formigine, the palace-builder, was
a Bolognese; Bartolommeo Ammanati alone at Florence exercised the arts of
sculpture and architecture in their old conjunction. Vignola, Palladio's
elder by a few years, displays in his work even more of the scholastically
frigid spirit of the late Renaissance, the narrowing of poetic impulse,
and the dwindling of vitality, that sadden the second half of the
sixteenth century in Italy. Scamozzi, labouring at Venice on works that
Sansovino left unfinished, caught the genial spirit of the old Venetian
style. Alessi, in like manner, at Genoa, felt the influences of a rich and
splendour-loving aristocracy. His church of S. Maria di Carignano is one
of the most successful ecclesiastical buildings of the late Renaissance,
combining the principles of Bramante and Michael Angelo in close imitation
of S. Peter's, and adhering in detail to the canons of the new taste.
These canons were based upon a close study of Vitruvius. Palladio,
Vignola, and Scamozzi were no less ambitious as authors than as
architects;[54] their minute analysis of antique treatises on the art of
construction led to the formation of exact rules for the treatment of the
five classic orders, the proportions of the chief parts used in building,
and the correct method of designing theatres and palaces, church-fronts
and cupolas. Thus architecture in its third Renaissance period passed into
scholasticism.
The masters of this age, chiefly through the weight of their authority as
writers, exercised a wider European influence than any of their
predecessors. We English, for example, have given Palladio's name to the
Italian style adopted by us in the seventeenth century. This selection of
one man to represent an epoch was due partly no doubt to the prestige of
Palladio's great buildings in the South, but more, I think, to the
facility with which his principles could be assimilated. Depending but
little for effect upon the arts of decoration, his style was easily
imitated in countries where painting and sculpture were unknown, and where
a genius like Jean Goujon, the Sansovino of the French, has never been
developed. To have rivalled the facade of the Certosa would have been
impossible in London. Yet here Wren produced a cathedral worthy of
comparison with the proudest of the late Italian edifices. Moreover, the
principles of taste that governed Europe in the seventeenth century were
such as found fitter architectural expression in this style than in the
more genial and capricious manner of the earlier periods.
After reviewing the rise and development of Renaissance architecture, it
is almost irresistible to compare the process whereby the builders of this
age learned to use dead forms for the expression of their thoughts, with
the similar process by which the scholars accustomed themselves to Latin
metres and the cadences of Ciceronian periods.[55] The object in each case
was the same--to be as true to the antique as possible, and without
actually sacrificing the independence of the modern mind, to impose upon
it the limitations of a bygone civilisation. At first the enthusiasm for
antiquity inspired architects and scholars alike with a desire to imitate
_per saltum_, and many works of fervid sympathy and pure artistic
intuition were produced. In course of time the laws both of language and
construction were more accurately studied; invention was superseded by
pedantry; after Poliziano and Alberti came Bembo and Palladio. In
proportion as architects learned more about Vitruvius, and scholars
narrowed their taste to Virgil, the style of both became more cramped and
formal. It ceased at last to be possible to express modern ideas freely in
the correct Latinity required by cultivated ears, while no room for
originality, no scope for poetry of invention, remained in the elaborated
method of the architects. Neo-Latin literature dwindled away to nothing,
and Palladio was followed by the violent reactionaries of the _barocco_
mannerism.
In one all-important respect this parallel breaks down. While the labours
of the Latinists subserved the simple process of instruction, by purifying
literary taste and familiarising the modern mind with the masterpieces of
the classic authors, the architects created a new common style for Europe.
With all its defects, it is not likely that the neo-Roman architecture, so
profoundly studied by the Italians, and so anxiously refined by their
chief masters, will ever wholly cease to be employed. In all cases where a
grand and massive edifice, no less suited to purposes of practical
utility than imposing by its splendour, is required, this style of
building will be found the best. Changes of taste and fashion, local
circumstances, and the personal proclivities of modern architects may
determine the choice of one type rather than another among the numerous
examples furnished by Italian masters. But it is not possible that either
Greek or Gothic should permanently take the place assigned to neo-Roman
architecture in the public buildings of European capitals.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The question of the genesis of the Lombard style is one of the most
difficult in Italian art-history. I would not willingly be understood to
speak of Lombard architecture in any sense different from that in which
it is usual to speak of Norman. To suppose that either the Lombards or
the Normans had a style of their own, prior to their occupation of
districts from the monuments of which they learned rudely to use the
decayed Roman manner, would be incorrect. Yet it seems impossible to deny
that both Normans and Lombards in adapting antecedent models added
something of their own, specific to themselves as Northerners. The
Lombard, like the Norman or the Rhenish Romanesque, is the first stage in
the progressive mediaeval architecture of its own district.
[11] I use the term Lombard architecture here, as defined above (p. 31,
note), for the style of building prevalent in Italy during the Lombard
occupation, or just after.
[12] The essential difference between Italy and either Northern France or
England, was that in Italy there existed monuments of Roman greatness,
which could never be forgotten by her architects. They always worked with
at least half of their attention turned to the past: nor had they the
exhilarating sense of free, spontaneous, and progressive invention. This
point has been well worked out by Mr. Street in the last chapter of his
hook on the _Architecture of North Italy_.
[13] Even though it be now proved that not Heinrich von Gmunden, but
Marco Frisone da Campione, not a German, but a Milanese, was the first
architect, this is none the less true about its style.
[14] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 153.
[15] Pavia, it may be mentioned, has still many towers standing, and the
two at Bologna are famous.
[16] Arnolfo was born in 1232 at Colle, in the Val d'Elsa. He was a
sculptor as well as architect, the assistant of Niccola Pisano at Siena,
and the maker of the tomb of Cardinal de Braye at Orvieto. This tomb is
remarkable as the earliest instance of the canopy withdrawn by attendant
angels from the dead man's form, afterwards so frequently adopted by the
Pisan school.
[17] Giov. Villani, viii. 26.
[18] See Milizia, vol. i. p. 135. These walls were not finished till
some, time after Arnolfo's death. They lost their ornament of towers in
the siege of 1529, and they are now being rapidly destroyed.
[19] From Perkins's _Tuscan Sculptors_, vol. i. p. 54. A recent work by
Signor G.J. Cavallucci, entitled _S. Maria del Fiore_, Firenze, 1881, has
created a revolution in our knowledge regarding this church.
[20] Giov. Villani, x. 192.
[21] _Illustrated Handbook of Architecture_, book vi. chap. i.
[22] _Ib._
[23] See Gruener's _Terra Cotta Architecture of North Italy_, plates 3 and
4.
[24] Compare what Alberti says in his preface to the Treatise on
Painting, _Opere_, vol. iv. p. 12. "Chi mai si duro e si invido non
lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo qui struttura si grande, erta sopra i
cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti i popoli toscani, fatta sanza
alcuno aiuto di travamenti o di copia di legname, quale artificio certo,
se io ben giudico, come a questi tempi era incredibile potersi, cosi
forse appresso gli antiqui fu non saputo ne conosciuto?"
[25] What the church of S. Petronio at Bologna would have been, if it had
been completed on the scale contemplated, can hardly be imagined. As it
stands, it is immense, and coldly bare in its immensity. Yet the present
church is but the nave of a temple designed with transepts and choir. The
length was to have been 800 feet, the width of the transepts 625, the
dome 183 feet in diameter. A building so colossal in extent, and so
monotonously meagre in conception, could not but have been a failure.
[26] Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, chap, 1.
[27] The following passage quoted from Milizia, _Memorie degli
Architetti_, Parma, 1781, vol. i. p. 135, illustrates the contemptuous
attitude of Italian critics to Gothic architecture. After describing
Arnolfo's building of the Florentine Duomo, he proceeds: "In questo
Architetto si vide qualche leggiero barlume di buona Architettura, come
di Pittura in Cimabue suo contemporaneo. Ma in tutte le cose e fisiche e
morali i passaggi si fanno per insensibili gradagioni; onde per lungo
tempo ancora si mantenne il corrotto gusto, che si puo chiamare
Arabo-Tedesco."
[28] Observe, for example, the casing of a Gothic church at Rimini by
Alberti with a series of Roman arches; or the facade of S. Andrea at
Mantua, where the vast and lofty central arch leads, not into the nave
itself, but into a shallow vestibule.
[29] See Burckhardt, _Cicerone_, vol. i. p. 167.
[30] See De Stendhal, _Histoire de la Peinture en Italie_, p. 122.
[31] For a notice of his life, see Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p.
247.
[32] The Arch of Augustus at Rimini was the model followed by Alberti in
this facade. He intended to cover the church with a cupola, as may be
seen from the design on a medal of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. See too
the letter written by him to Matteo da Bastia, Alberti, _Opere_, vol. iv.
p. 397.
[33] This ancestral palace of the Medici passed in 1659 to the Marchese
Gabriele Riccardi, from the Duke Francesco II.
[34] Von Reumont, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, vol. ii. pp. 187-191, may be
consulted for an interesting account of the building of this Casa Grande
by Filippo Strozzi. The preparations were made with great caution, lest
it should seem that a work too magnificent for a simple citizen was being
undertaken; in particular, Filippo so contrived that the costly _opus
rusticum_ employed in the construction of the basement should appear to
have been forced upon him. This is characteristic of Florence in the days
of Cosimo. The foundation stone was laid in the morning of August 16,
1489, at the moment when the sun arose above the summits of the
Casentino. The hour, prescribed by astrologers as propitious, had been
settled by the horoscope; masses meanwhile were said in several churches,
and alms distributed.
[35] Antonio Filarete, or Averulino, architect and sculptor, was author
of a treatise on the building of the ideal city, one of the most curious
specimens of Renaissance fancy, to judge from the account rendered of the
manuscript by Rio, vol. iii. pp. 321-328.
[36] Matteo Civitale, Benedetto da Majano, Mino da Fiesole, Luca della
Robbia, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, Lo Scalza, Omodeo, and the
Sansovini, not to mention less illustrious sculptors, filled the churches
of Italy with this elaborate stone-work. Among the bronze-founders it is
enough to name Ghiberti, Antonio Filarete, Antonio Pollajuolo, Donatello
and his pupil Bertoldo, Andrea Riccio, the master of the candelabrum in
S. Antonio at Padua, Jacopo Sansovino, the master of the door of the
sacristy in S. Mark's at Venice, Alessandro Leopardi, the master of the
standard-pedestals of the Piazza of S. Mark's. I do not mean these lists
to be in any sense exhaustive, but simply to remind the reader of the
rare and many-sided men of genius who devoted their abilities to this
kind of work. Some of their masterpieces will be noticed in detail in the
chapter on Sculpture.
[37] Especially his work at Monte Oliveto, near Siena, and in the church
of Monte Oliveto at Naples. The Sala del Cambio at Perugia may also be
cited as rich in tarsia-work designed by Perugino, while the church of S.
Pietro de' Cassinensi outside the city is a museum of masterpieces
executed by Fra Damiano da Bergamo and Stefano da Bergamo from designs of
Raphael. Not less beautiful are the inlaid wood panels in the Palace of
Urbino, by Maestro Giacomo of Florence.
[38] The churches and palaces of Lombardy are peculiarly rich in this
kind of decoration. The facade of the Oratory of S. Bernardino at
Perugia, designed and executed by Agostino di Duccio, is a masterpiece of
rare beauty in this style.
[39] Not to mention the Renaissance mosaics of S. Mark's at Venice, the
cupola of S. Maria del Popolo at Rome, executed in mosaic by Raphael,
deserves special mention. A work illustrative of this cupola is one of
Ludwig Gruener's best publications.
[40] South Italy and Florence are distinguished by two marked styles in
this decoration of inlaid marbles or _opera di commesso_. Compare the
Medicean chapel in S. Lorenzo, for instance, with the high altar of the
cathedral of Messina.
[41] The roof of the Duomo at Volterra is a fine specimen.
[42] It will not be forgotten that Raphael's cartoons were made for
tapestry.
[43] Bramante Lazzari was born at Castel Durante, near Urbino, in 1444.
He spent the early years of his architect's life in Lombardy, in the
service of Lodovico Sforza, and came probably to Rome upon his patron's
downfall in 1499.
[44] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 342.
[45] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 344. See Gregorovius,
_Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. p. 127, and the quotation there
translated from Pallavicini's _History of the Council of Trent_.
[46] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 296-298. Vol. II., _Revival
of Learning_, pp. 161-166. For his architectural designs see his Life, by
Manetti, book ii., in Muratori, vol. iii. part ii.
[47] Gregorovius, vol. vii. p. 638.
[48] Besides the great work of Bonanni, _Templi Vaticani Historia_, I may
refer my readers to the atlas volume of _Illustrations, Architectural and
Pictorial, of the Genius of Michael Angelo Buonarroti_, compiled by Mr.
Harford (Colnaghi, 1857). Plates 1 to 7 of that work are devoted to the
plans of S. Peter's. Plate 4 is specially interesting, since it
represents in one view the old basilica and the design of Bramante,
together with those of Antonio di S. Gallo and Michael Angelo.
[49] The subterranean vaults of S. Peter's contain mere fragments of
tombs, some precious as historical records, some valuable as works of
art, swept together pell-mell from the ruins of the old basilica.
[50] See the original letter to Ammanati, published from the Archivio
Buonarroti, by Signor Milanesi, p. 535.
[51] I am far from meaning that the earlier architects had not been
guided by ancient authors. Alberti's _Treatise on the Art of Building_ is
a sufficient proof of their study of Vitruvius, and we know that Fabio
Calvi translated that writer into Italian for Raphael. In the later
Renaissance this study passed into purism.
[52] It must be confessed that this grandiose and picturesque structure
is but a shell to mask an earlier Gothic edifice.
[53] Compare Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p. 370, for the same
transference of power in literature from Central to Northern Italy at
this time.
[54] Palladio's _Four Books of Architecture_, first published at Venice
in 1570, and Vignola's _Treatise on the Five Orders_, have been
translated into all the modern languages. Scamozzi projected, and partly
finished, a comprehensive work on _Universal Architecture_, which was
printed in 1685 at Venice.
[55] See Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, chap. viii.
CHAPTER III
SCULPTURE
Niccola Pisano--Obscurity of the Sources for a History of Early Italian
Sculpture--Vasari's Legend of Pisano--Deposition from the Cross at
Lucca--Study of Nature and the Antique--Sarcophagus at Pisa--Pisan
Pulpit--Niccola's School--Giovanni Pisano--Pulpit in S. Andrea at
Pistoja--Fragments of his work at Pisa--Tomb of Benedict XI. at
Perugia--Bas-reliefs at Orvieto--Andrea Pisano--Relation of Sculpture to
Painting--Giotto--Subordination of Sculpture to Architecture in
Italy--Pisano's Influence in Venice--Balduccio of Pisa--Orcagna--The
Tabernacle of Orsammichele--The Gates of the Florentine Baptistery
--Competition of Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Della Quercia--Comparison
of Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's Trial-pieces--Comparison of Ghiberti
and Della Quercia--The Bas-reliefs of S. Petronio--Ghiberti's
Education--His Pictorial Style in Bas-relief--His Feeling for the
Antique--Donatello--Early Visit to Rome--Christian Subjects--Realistic
Treatment--S. George and David--Judith--Equestrian Statue of
Gattamelata--Influence of Donatello's Naturalism--Andrea Verocchio--His
David--Statue of Colleoni--Alessandro Leopardi--Lionardo's Statue of
Francesco Sforza--The Pollajuoli--Tombs of Sixtus IV. and Innocent
VIII.--Luca della Robbia--His Treatment of Glazed Earthenware--Agostino
di Duccio--The Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia--Antonio
Rossellino--Matteo Civitali--Mino da Fiesole--Benedetto da
Majano--Characteristics and Masterpieces of this Group--Sepulchral
Monuments--Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. Maria del Popolo--Desiderio da
Settignano--Sculpture in S. Francesco at Rimini--Venetian
Sculpture--Verona--Guido Mazzoni of Modena--Certosa of Pavia--Colleoni
Chapel at Bergamo--Sansovino at Venice--Pagan Sculpture--Michael Angelo's
Scholars--Baccio Bandinelli--Bartolommeo Ammanati--Cellini--Gian
Bologna--Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture.
In the procession of the fine arts, sculpture always follows close upon
the steps of architecture, and at first appears in some sense as her
handmaid. Mediaeval Italy found her Pheidias in a great man of Pisan
origin, born during the first decade of the thirteenth century. It was
Niccola Pisano, architect and sculptor, who first breathed with the breath
of genius life into the dead forms of plastic art. From him we date the
dawn of the aesthetical Renaissance with the same certainty as from
Petrarch that of humanism; for he determined the direction not only of
sculpture but also of painting in Italy. To quote the language of Lord
Lindsay's panegyric: "Neither Dante nor Shakspere can boast such extent
and durability of influence; for whatever of highest excellence has been
achieved in sculpture and painting, not in Italy only but throughout
Europe, has been in obedience to the impulse he primarily gave, and in
following up the principle which he first struck out."[56] In truth,
Niccola Pisano put the artist on the right track of combining the study of
antiquity with the study of nature; and to him belongs the credit not
merely of his own achievement, considerable as that may be, but also of
the work of his immediate scholars and of all who learned from him to
portray life. From Niccola Pisano onward to Michael Angelo and Cellini we
trace one genealogy of sculptors, who, though they carried art beyond the
sphere of his invention, looked back to him as their progenitor. The man
who first emancipated sculpture from servile bondage, and opened a way for
the attainment of true beauty, would by the Greeks have been honoured with
a special cultas as the Hero Eponym of art. It remains for us after our
own fashion to pay some such homage to Pisano.
The chief difficulty with which the student of early art and literature
has to deal, is the insufficiency of positive information. Instead of
accurate dates and well-established facts he finds a legend, rich
apparently in detail, but liable at every point to doubt, and subject to
attack by plausible conjecture. In the absence of contemporary documents
and other trustworthy sources of instruction, he is tempted to substitute
his own hypotheses for tradition and to reconstruct the faulty outlines of
forgotten history according to his own ideas of fitness. The Germans have
been our masters in this species of destructive, dubitative, restorative
criticism; and it is undoubtedly flattering to the historian's vanity to
constitute himself a judge and arbiter in cases where tact and ingenuity
may claim to sift the scattered fragment of confused narration. Yet to
resist this temptation is in many cases a plain and simple duty.
Tradition, when not positively disproved, should be allowed to have its
full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its
testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and
substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders unsubstantial.
Tradition may err about dates, details, and names. It is just here that
antiquarian research can render valuable help. But there are occasions
when the perusal of documents and the exercise of what is called the
higher criticism afford no surer basis for opinion. If in such cases a
legend has been formed and recorded, the student will advance further
toward comprehending the spirit of his subject by patiently considering
what he knows to be in part perhaps a mythus, than by starting with the
foregone conclusion that the legend must of necessity be worthless, and
that his cunning will suffice to supply the missing clue.[57]
Thus much I have said by way of preface to what follows upon Niccola
Pisano. Almost all we know about him is derived from a couple of
inscriptions, a few contracts, and his Life by Giorgio Vasari. It is clear
that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and
taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions. Much of Niccola's
biography reads like a legend in his pages--the popular and oral tradition
of a great man, whose panegyric it was more easy in the sixteenth century
to adorn with rhetoric than to chronicle the details of his life with
scrupulous fidelity. A well-founded conviction of Vasari's frequent
inaccuracy has induced recent critics to call in question many hitherto
accepted points about the nationality and training of Pisano. The
discussion, of their arguments I leave for the appendix, contenting myself
at present with relating so much of Vasari's legend as cannot, I think,
reasonably be rejected.[58]
Before the sculptor appeared in Niccola Pisano, he was already a famous
architect; and it must always be remembered that he and his school
subordinated the plastic to the constructive arts. It was not until the
year 1233, or 1237, according to different modern calculations, that he
executed his first masterpiece in sculpture.[59] This was a "Deposition
from the Cross," in high relief, placed in a lunette over one of the side
doors of S. Martino at Lucca. The noble forms of this group, the largeness
of its style, the breadth of drapery and freedom of action it displays,
but, above all, the unity of its design, proclaimed that a new era had
begun for art. In order to appreciate the importance of this relief, it
is only necessary to compare it with the processional treatment of similar
subjects upon early Christian sarcophagi, where each figure stands up
stiff and separate, nor can the controlling and combining artist's thought
be traced in any effort after composition. Ever since the silver age of
Hadrian, when a Bithynian slave by his beauty gave a final impulse to the
Genius of Greece, sculpture had been gradually declining until nothing was
left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. The so-called
Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood,
fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past. It is
true, indeed, that unknown mediaeval carvers had shown an instinct for the
beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The facades
of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and sometimes forcibly
dramatic groups of animals and men in combat; and contemporaneously with
Niccola Pisano, many Gothic sculptors of the North were adorning the
facades and porches of cathedrals with statuary unrivalled in one style of
loveliness.[60] Yet the founder of a line of progressive artists had not
arisen, and, except in Italy, the conditions were still wanting under
which alone the plastic arts could attain to independence. A fresh start,
at once conscious and scientific, was imperatively demanded. This new
beginning sculpture took in the brain of Niccola Pisano, who returned from
the bye-paths of his predecessors to the free field of nature, and who
learned precious lessons from the fragments of classical sculpture
existing in his native town. As though to prove the essential dependence
of the modern revival upon the recovery of antique culture, we find that
his genius, in spite of its powerful originality and profoundly Christian
bias, required the confirmation which could only be derived from
Graeco-Roman precedent. In the Campo Santo at Pisa may still be seen a
sarcophagus representing the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra, where once
reposed the dust of Beatrice, the mother of the pious Countess Matilda of
Tuscany. Studying the heroic nudities and noble attitudes of this
bas-relief, Niccola rediscovered the right way of art--not by merely
copying his model, but by divining the secret of the grand style. His work
at Pisa contains abundant evidence that, while he could not wholly free
himself from the defects of the later Romanesque manner, betrayed by his
choice of short and square-set types, he nevertheless learned from the
antique how to aim at beauty and freedom in his imitation of the living
human form. A marble vase, sculptured with Indian Bacchus and his train of
Maenads, gave him further help. From these grave or graceful classic forms,
satisfied with their own goodliness, and void of inner symbolism, the
Christian sculptor drank the inspiration of Renaissance art. In the
"Adoration of the Magi," carved upon his Pisan pulpit, Madonna assumes the
haughty pose of Theseus' wife; while the high priest, in the
"Circumcision," displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning on the neck of
Ampelus. Nor again is the naked vigour of Hippolytus without its echo in
the figure of the young man--Hercules or Fortitude--upon a bracket of the
same pulpit. These sculptures of Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what
happened in the age of the Revival. The old world and the new shook hands;
Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other. And yet they still remained
antagonistic--fused externally by art, but severed in the consciousness
that, during those strange years of dubious impulse, felt the might of
both. Monks leaning from Pisano's pulpit preached the sinfulness of
natural pleasure to women whose eyes were fixed on the adolescent beauty
of an athlete. Not far off was the time when Filarete should cast in
bronze the legends of Ganymede and Leda for the portals of S. Peter's,
when Raphael should mingle a carnival of more than pagan sensuality with
Bible subjects in Leo's Loggie, when Guglielmo della Porta should place
the naked portrait of Giulia Bella in marble at the feet of Paul III. upon
his sepulchre.[61]
Niccola, meanwhile, did not follow his Roman models in any slavish spirit.
They were neither numerous nor excellent enough to compel blind imitation
or to paralyse inventive impulse. The thoughts to be expressed in marble
by the first modern artist were not Greek. This in itself saved him from
that tendency to idle reproduction which proved the ruin of the later
neo-pagan sculptors. Yet the fragments of antique work he found within his
reach, helped him to struggle after a higher quality of style, and
established standards of successful treatment. For the rest, his choice of
form and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola resorted to
native Tuscan models. If nothing of his handiwork were left but the
bas-relief of the "Inferno" on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men
struggling with demons in that composition would prove this point. It
remains his crowning merit to have first expressed the mythology of
Christianity and the sentiment of the Middle Ages with the conscious aim
of a real artist. And here it may be noticed that, a true Italian, he
infused but little of intense or mystical emotion into his art. Niccola is
more of a humanist, if this word may be applied to a sculptor, than some
of his immediate successors. The hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery of
Pisa, the octagonal pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, the fountain in the
marketplace of Perugia, and the shrine of S. Dominic at Bologna, all of
them designed and partly finished between 1260 and 1274 by Niccola and his
scholars, display his mastery over the art of sculpture in the maturity of
his genius. So highly did the Pisans prize their fellow-townsman's pulpit
that a law was passed and guardians were appointed for its
preservation--much in the same way as the Zeus of Pheidias was consigned
to the care of the Phaidruntai.
Niccola Pisano founded a school. His son Giovanni, and the numerous pupils
employed upon the monuments just mentioned at Siena, Bologna, and Perugia,
carried on the tradition of their master, and spread his style abroad
through Italy. Giovanni Pisano, to whom we owe the Spina Chapel and the
Campo Santo at Pisa, the facade of the Sienese Duomo, and the altar-shrine
of S. Donato at Arezzo--four of the purest works of Gothic art in
Italy--showed a very decided leaning to the vehement and mystic style of
the Transalpine sculptors. We trace a dramatic intensity in Giovanni's
work, not derived from his father, not caught from study of the antique,
and curiously blended with the general characteristics of the Pisan
school. In spite of the Gothic cusps introduced by Niccola into his
pulpits, the spirit of his work remained classical. The young Hercules
holding the lion's cub in his right hand upon his shoulder, while with his
left he tames the raging lioness, has the true Italian instinct for a
return to Latin style. The same sympathy with the past is observable in
the self-restraint and comparative coldness of the bas-reliefs at Pisa.
The Junonian attitude of Madonna, the senatorial dignity of Simeon, the
ponderous folding of the drapery, and the massive carriage of the neck
throughout, denote an effort to revivify an antique manner. What,
therefore, Niccola effected for sculpture was a classical revival in the
very depth of the Middle Ages. The case is different with his son
Giovanni. Profiting by the labours of his father, and following in his
footsteps, he carried the new art into another region, and brought a
genius of more picturesque and forcible temper into play. The value of
this new direction given to sculpture for the arts of Italy, especially
for painting, cannot be exaggerated. Without Giovanni's intervention, the
achievement of Niccola might possibly have been as unproductive of
immediate results as the Tuscan Romanesque, that mediaeval effort after the
Renaissance, was in architecture.[62]
The Gothic element, so cautiously adopted by Niccola, is used with
sympathy and freedom by his son, whose masterpiece, the pulpit of S.
Andrea at Pistoja, might be selected as the supreme triumph of Italian
Gothic sculpture. The superiority of that complex and consummate work of
plastic art over the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, in all the most
important qualities of style and composition, can scarcely be called in
question. Its only serious fault is an exaggeration of the height of the
pillars in proportion to the size of the hexagon they support. Like the
pulpits of the Baptistery, of the Duomo of Pisa, and of the Duomo of
Siena, it combines bas-reliefs and detached statues, carved capitals, and
sculptured lions, in a maze of marvellous invention; but it has no rival
in the architectonic effect of harmony, and the masterly feeling for
balanced masses it displays. The five subjects chosen by Giovanni for his
bas-reliefs are the "Nativity," the "Adoration of the Magi," the "Massacre
of the Innocents," the "Crucifixion," and the "Last Judgment." In the
"Nativity" our Lady is no longer the Roman matron of Niccola's conception,
but a graceful mother, young in years, and bending with the weakness of
childbirth. Her attitude, exquisite by the suggestion of tenderness and
delicacy, is one that often reappears in the later work of the Pisan
school--for example, in the rough _abozzamento_ in the Campo Santo at
Pisa, above the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Orvieto on the
facade of the cathedral; but it has nowhere else been treated with the
same sense of beauty. The "Massacre of the Innocents," compared with this
relief, is a tragedy beside an idyll. Here the whole force of Giovanni's
eminently dramatic genius comes into full play. Not only has he treated
the usual incidents of mothers struggling with soldiers and bewailing
their dead darlings, but he has also introduced a motive, which might well
have been used by subsequent artists in dealing with the same subjects.
Herod is throned in one corner of the composition; before him stand a
group of men and women, some imploring the tyrant for mercy, some defying
him in impotent despair, and some invoking the curse of God upon his head.
In the "Adoration of the Magi," again, Giovanni shows originality by the
double action he has chosen to develop. On one side the kings are
sleeping, while an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star. On the
other side they fall at the feet of the Madonna. It will be gathered even
from these bare descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life and
movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic intensity, alien to the
ideal of Graeco-Roman sculpture. He effected a fusion between the grand
style revived by Niccola and the romantic fervour of the modern
imagination. It was in this way that the tradition handed down by him
proved inestimably serviceable to the painters.
The bas-reliefs, however, by no means form the chief attraction of this
pulpit. At each of its six angles stand saints, evangelists, and angels,
whose symbolism it is not now so easy to decipher. The most beautiful
groups are a company of angels blowing the judgment trumpets, and a winged
youth standing above a winged lion and bull. These groups separate the
several compartments of the bas-reliefs, and help to form the body of the
pulpit. Beneath, on capital's of the supporting pillars, stand the Sibyls,
each with her attendant genius, while prophets lean or crouch within the
spandrils of the arches. Thus every portion of this master-work is crowded
with figures--some detached, some executed in relief; and yet, amid so
great a multitude, the eye is not confused; the total effect is nowhere
dissipated. The whole seems governed by one constructive thought,
projected as a perfect unity of composition.[63]
A later work of Giovanni Pisano was the pulpit executed for the cathedral
of Pisa, now unfortunately broken up. An interesting fragment, one of the
supporting columns of the octagon which formed the body of this structure,
still exists in the museum of the Campo Santo. It is an allegorical statue
of Pisa. The Ghibelline city is personified as a crowned woman, suckling
children at her breast, and standing on a pedestal supported by the eagle
of the Empire. She wears a girdle of rope seven times knotted, to betoken
the rule of Pisa over seven subject islands. At the four corners of her
throne stand the four human virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and
Fortitude, distinguished less by beauty of shape than by determined energy
of symbolism. Temperance is a naked woman, with hair twisted in the knots
and curls of a Greek Aphrodite. Justice is old and wrinkled, clothed with
massive drapery, and holding in her hand the scales. Throughout this
group there is no attempt to realise forms pleasing to the eye; the
sculptor has aimed at suggesting to the mind as many points of
intellectual significance as possible. In spite of ugliness and hardness,
the "Allegory of Pisa" commands respect by vigour of conception, and
rivets attention by force of execution.
A more popular and pleasing monument by Giovanni Pisano is the tomb of
Benedict XI. in the church of S. Domenico at Perugia. The Pope, whose life
was so obnoxious to the ambition of Philip le Bel that his timely death
aroused suspicion of poison, lies asleep upon his marble bier with hands
crossed in an attitude of peaceful expectation.[64] At his head and feet
stand angels drawing back the curtains that would else have shrouded this
last slumber of a good man from the eyes of the living.[65] A contrast is
thus established between the repose of the dead and the ever-watchful
activity of celestial ministers. Sleep so guarded, the sculptor seeks to
tell us, must have glorious waking; and when those hands unfold upon the
Resurrection morning, the hushed sympathy of the attendant angels will
break into smiles and singing, as they lead the just man to the Lord he
served in life.
Whether Giovanni Pisano had any share in the sculpture on the facade of
the cathedral at Orvieto, is not known for certain. Vasari asserts that
Niccola and his pupils worked upon this series of bas-reliefs, setting
forth the whole Biblical history and the cycle of Christian beliefs from
the creation of the world to the last judgment. Yet we know that Niccola
himself died at least twelve years before the foundation of the church in
1290; nor is there any proof that his immediate scholars were engaged upon
the fabric. The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard to a
monument of so large extent and vast importance, which must have taxed to
the uttermost the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy.[66]
Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of
Niccola Pisano. His manner, as continued and developed by his school, is
unmistakable at Orvieto: but in the absence of direct information, we are
left to conjecture the conditions under which this, the closing if not the
crowning achievement of thirteenth-century sculpture, was produced.
When the great founder of Italian art visited Siena in 1266 for the
completion of his pulpit in the Duomo, he found a guild of sculptors, or
_taglia-pietri_, in that city, numbering some sixty members, and governed
by a rector and three chamberlains. Instead of regarding Niccola with
jealousy, these craftsmen only sought to learn his method. Accordingly it
seems that a new impulse was given to sculpture in Siena; and famous
workmen arose who combined this art with that of building. The chief of
these was Lorenzo Maitani, who died in 1330, having designed and carried
to completion the Duomo of Orvieto during his lifetime.[67] While engaged
in this great undertaking, Maitani directed a body of architects,
stone-carvers, bronze-founders, mosaists, and painters, gathered together
into a guild from the chief cities of Tuscany. It cannot be proved that
any of the Pisani, properly so called, were among their number. Lacking
evidence to the contrary, we must give to Maitani, the master-spirit of
the company, full credit for the sculpture carried out in obedience to his
general plan. As the church of S. Francis at Assisi formed an epoch in the
history of painting, by concentrating the genius of Giotto on a series of
masterpieces, so the Duomo of Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school
of Pisa, marked a point in the history of sculpture. It would be difficult
to find elsewhere even separate works of greater force and beauty
belonging to this, the first or architectural, period of Italian
sculpture; and nowhere has the whole body of Christian belief been set
forth with method more earnest and with vigour more sustained.[68] The
subjects selected by these unknown craftsmen for illustration in marble,
are in many instances the same as those afterwards painted in fresco by
Michael Angelo and Raphael at Borne. Their treatment, for example, of the
creation of Adam and Eve, adopted in all probability from still earlier
and ruder workmen, after being refined by the improvements of successive
generations, may still be observed in the triumphs of the Sistine Chapel
and the Loggie.[69] It was the practice of Italian artists not to seek
originality by diverging from the traditional modes of presentation, but
to prove their mastery by rendering these as perfect and effective as the
maturity of art could make them. For the Italians, as before them for the
Greeks, plagiarism was a word unknown, in all cases where it was possible
to improve upon the invention of less fortunate predecessors. The student
of art may, therefore, now enjoy the pleasure of tracing sculpturesque or
pictorial motives from their genesis in some rude fragment to their final
development in the master-works of a Lionardo or a Raphael, where
scientific grouping of figures, higher idealisation of style, the
suggestion of freer movement, and more varied dramatic expression yield at
last the full flower that the simple germ enfolded.
Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola Pisano's tradition must
now be mentioned Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried
the manner of his master to Florence, and helped to fulfil the destiny of
Italian sculpture by submitting it to the rising art of painting. Under
the direction of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the facade
of S. Maria del Fiore; and in the first gate of the Baptistery, he
bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze, which largely influenced the
style of masters in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity
and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the technical excellence
of Andrea's bronze-work, would be difficult. Many students will always be
found to prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more florid manner
of Ghiberti.[70] What we chiefly observe in this gate is the control
exercised by the sister art of painting over his mode of conception and
treatment. If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic and emphatic
qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea was attracted to its allegories; if
Giovanni infused romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid classicism
of his father, Andrea diverged upon another track of picturesque
delineation. A new sun had now arisen in the heavens of art. This was the
sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, brought the Italians to
a true sense of their aesthetical vocation, illuminating with its
brightness the elder and more technically finished craft of the
stone-carver. Sculpture, which in the school of Niccola Pisano had been
subordinate to architecture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands
of Andrea.
It was thus, as I have elsewhere stated, that the twofold doom of plastic
art in Italy was accomplished. In order to embody the ideas of
Christianity, art had to think more of expression than of pure form.
Expression is the special sphere of painting; and therefore sculpture
followed the lead of the sister art, as soon as painting was strong enough
to give that lead, instead of remaining, as in Greece, the mistress of her
own domain. On the deeper reasons for this subordination of sculpture to
painting I have dwelt already, while showing that a large class of
subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively indifferent and of no
account, were forced upon the artist by Christianity.[71] Humility and
charity may be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age; nor is it
possible to characterize saints and martyrs by those corporeal
characteristics which distinguish a runner from a boxer, or a chaste
huntress from a voluptuous queen of love. Italian sculpture abandoned the
presentation of the naked human body as useless. The emotions written on
the face became of more importance than the modelling of the limbs, and
recourse was had to allegorical symbols or emblematic attitudes for the
interpretation of the artist's thought. Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope,
raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repetition of
the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena
chapel.[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served
to illustrate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was
used by the Italian sculptors to conceal the limbs, and to enhance by
flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf some quality of the
emotions. The result was that sculpture assumed a place subordinate to
painting, and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carvers are
chiefly bas-reliefs--pictures in bronze or marble.[73]
In a like degree, though not for the same reason, sculpture in Italy
remained subordinate to architecture, until such time as the neo-Hellenism
of the full Renaissance produced a crowd of pseudo-classic statues,
destined to take their places--not in churches, but in the courtyards of
palaces and on the open squares of cities. The cause of this fact is not
far to seek. In ancient Greece the temple had been erected for the god,
and the statue dwelt within the cella like a master in his house.
Christianity forbade an image of the living God; consequently the Church
had another object than to roof the statue of a deity. It was the
meeting-place of a congregation bent on worshipping Him who dwells not in
houses made with hands, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. The
vast spaces and aerial arcades of mediaeval architecture had their meaning
in relation to the mystic apprehension of an unseen power. It followed of
necessity that the carved work destined to decorate a Christian temple
could never be the main feature of the building. It existed for the
Church, and not the Church for it.[74]
Through Andrea Pisano the style of Niccola was extended to Venice. There
is reason to believe that he instructed Filippo Calendario, to whom we
should ascribe the sculptured corners of the Ducal Palace. Venice,
however, invariably exercised her own controlling influence over the arts
of aliens; so we find a larger, freer, richer, and more mundane treatment
in these splendid carvings than in aught produced by Pisan workmen for
their native towns of Tuscany.
Nino, the sculptor of the "Madonna della Rosa," the chief ornament of the
Spina chapel, and Tommaso, both sons of Andrea da Pontadera, together with
Giovanni Balduccio of Pisa, continued the traditions of the school founded
by Niccola. Balduccio, invited by Azzo Visconti to Milan, carved the
shrine of S. Peter Martyr in the church of S. Eustorgio, and impressed his
style on Matteo da Campione, the sculptor of the shrine of S. Augustine at
Pavia.[75] These facts, though briefly stated, are not without
significance. Travellers who have visited the churches of Pavia and Milan,
after studying the shrine, or _arca_ as Italians call it, of S. Dominic at
Bologna, must have noticed the ascendency of Pisan style in these three
Lombard towns, and have felt how widely Niccola's creative genius was
exercised. Traces of the same influence may perhaps be observed in the
tombs of the Scaligers at Verona.[76]
The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano, however, was a Florentine--the
great Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, commonly known as Orcagna. This man,
like the more illustrious Giotto, was one among the earliest of those
comprehensive, many-sided natures produced by Florence for her everlasting
glory. He studied the goldsmith's craft under his father, Cione, passing
the years of his apprenticeship, like other Tuscan artists, in the
technical details of an industry that then supplied the strictest method
of design. With his brother, Bernardo, he practised painting. Like Giotto,
he was no mean poet;[77] and like all the higher craftsmen of his age, he
was an architect. Though the church of Orsammichele owes its present form
to Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, as _capo maestro_ after Gaddi's death, completed
the structure; and though the Loggia de' Lanzi, long ascribed to him by
writers upon architecture, is now known to be the work of Benci di Cione,
yet Orcagna's Loggia del Bigallo, more modest but not less beautiful,
prepared the way for its construction. Of his genius as a painter, proved
by the frescoes in the Strozzi chapel, I shall have to speak hereafter. As
a sculptor he is best known through the tabernacle of Orsammichele, built
to enshrine the picture of the Madonna by Ugolino da Siena.[78]
In this monument Orcagna employed carved bas-reliefs and statuettes,
intaglios and mosaics, incrustations of agates, enamels, and gilded glass
patterns, with a sense of harmony so refined, and a mastery over each kind
of workmanship so perfect, that the whole tabernacle is an epitome of the
minor arts of mediaeval Italy. The subordination of sculpture to
architectural effect is noticeable; and the Giottesque influence appears
even more strongly here than in the gate of Andrea Pisano. This influence
Orcagna received indirectly through his master in stone carving; it
formed, indeed, the motive force of figurative art during his lifetime.
The subjects of the "Annunciation," the "Nativity," the "Marriage of the
Virgin," and the "Adoration of the Three Kings," framed in octagonal
mouldings at the base of the tabernacle, illustrate the domination of a
spirit distinct both from the neo-Romanism of Niccola and the Gothicism of
Giovanni Pisano. That spirit is Florentine in a general sense, and
specifically Giottesque. Charity, again, with a flaming heart in her hand,
crowned with a flaming brazier, and suckling a child, is Giottesque not
only in allegorical conception but also in choice of type and treatment of
drapery.
While admiring the tabernacle of Orsammichele, we are reminded that
Orcagna was a goldsmith to begin with, and a painter. Sculpture he
practised as an accessory. What the artists of Florence gained in delicacy
of execution, accuracy of modelling, and precision of design by their
apprenticeship to the goldsmith's trade, was hardly perhaps sufficient to
compensate for loss of training in a larger style. It was difficult, we
fancy, for men so educated to conceive the higher purposes of sculpture.
Contented with elaborate workmanship and beauty of detail, they failed to
attain to such independence of treatment as may be reached by sculptors
who do not carry to their work the preconceptions of a narrower
handicraft. Thus even Orcagna's masterpiece may strike us not as the
plaything of a Pheidian genius condescending for once to "breathe through
silver," but of a consummate goldsmith taxing the resources of his craft
to form a monumental jewel.[79]
The facade of Orvieto was the final achievement of the first or
architectural period of Italian sculpture. Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and
Orcagna, formed the transition to the second period. To find one
characteristic title for the style of the fifteenth century is not easy,
since it was marked by many distinct peculiarities. If, however, we
choose to call it pictorial, we shall sufficiently mark the quality of
some eminent masters, and keep in view the supremacy of painting at this
epoch. A great public enterprise at Florence brings together in honourable
rivalry the chief craftsmen of the new age, and marks the advent of the
Renaissance. When the Signory, in concert with the Arte de' Mercanti,
decided to complete the bronze gates of the Baptistery in the first year
of the fifteenth century, they issued a manifesto inviting the sculptors
of Italy to prepare designs for competition. Their call was answered by
Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di
Cino Ghiberti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists of less note.
The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been consulted as to
the rival merits of the proofs submitted to the judges. Thus the four
great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine
Baptistery.[80] Giacomo della Quercia was excluded from the competition at
an early stage; but the umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and
Brunelleschi, until the latter, with notable generosity, feeling the
superiority of his rival, and conscious perhaps that his own laurels were
to be gathered in the field of architecture, withdrew his claim. In 1403,
Ghiberti received the commission for the first of the two remaining gates.
He afterwards obtained the second; and as they were not finished until
1452, the better part of his lifetime was spent upon them. He received in
all a sum of 30,798 golden florins for his labour and the cost of the
material employed.
The trial-pieces prepared by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti are now preserved
in the Bargello.[81] Their subject is the "Sacrifice of Isaac;" and a
comparison of the two leaves no doubt of Ghiberti's superiority. The
faults of Brunelleschi's model are want of repose and absence of
composition. Abraham rushes in a frenzy of murderous agitation at his son,
who writhes beneath the knife already at his throat. The angel swoops from
heaven with extended arms, reaching forth one hand to show the ram to
Abraham, and clasping the patriarch's wrist with the other. The ram
meanwhile is scratching his nose with his near hind leg; one of the
servants is taking a thorn from his foot, while the other fills a cup from
the stream at which the ass is drinking. Thus each figure has a separate
uneasy action. Those critics who contend that the unrest of
sixteenth-century sculpture was due to changes in artistic and religious
feeling wrought by the Renaissance, would do well to examine this plate,
and see how much account must be taken of the artist's temperament in
forming their opinion. Brunelleschi adhered to the style and taste of the
fifteenth century at its commencement; but the too fervid quality of his
character impaired his work as a sculptor. Ghiberti, on the other hand,
translated the calm of his harmonious nature into his composition. The
angel leans from heaven and points to the ram, which is seated quietly and
out of sight of the main actors. Isaac kneels in the attitude of a
submissive victim, though his head is turned aside, as if attracted by the
rush of pinions through the air; while Abraham has but just lifted his
hand, and the sacrifice is only suggested as a possibility by the naked
knife. The two servants are grouped below in conversation, one on each
side of the browsing ass. This power of telling a story plainly, but
without dramatic vehemence; of eliminating the painful details of the
subject, and combining its chief motives into one agreeable whole, gave
peculiar charm to Ghiberti's manner. It marked him as an artist
distinguished by good taste.
How Delia Quercia treated the "Sacrifice of Isaac" we do not know. His
bas-reliefs upon the facade of S. Petronio at Bologna, and round the font
of S. John's Chapel in the cathedral of Siena, enable us, however, to
compare his style with that of Ghiberti in the handling of a subject
common to both, the "Creation of Eve."[82] There is no doubt but that
Della Quercia was a formidable rival. Had the gates of the Baptistery been
entrusted to his execution, we might have possessed a masterpiece of more
heroic style. While smoothness and an almost voluptuous suavity of outline
distinguish Ghiberti's naked Eve, gliding upheld by angels from the side
of Adam at her Maker's bidding, Della Quercia's group, by the
concentration of robust and rugged power, anticipates the style of Michael
Angelo. Ghiberti treats the subject pictorially, placing his figures in a
landscape, and lavishing attendant angels. Della Quercia, in obedience to
the stricter laws of sculpture, restrains his composition to the three
chief persons, and brings them into close connection. While Adam reclines
asleep in a beautiful and highly studied attitude, Eve has just stepped
forth behind him, and God stands robed in massive drapery, raising His
hand as though to draw her into life. There is, perhaps, an excess of
dramatic action in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of pantomimic
language in the expressive hands of Eve and her Creator. The robe, again,
in its voluminous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of the Deity,
convey an effect of heaviness rather than of majesty. Yet we feel, while
studying this composition, that it is a noble and original attempt,
falling but little short of supreme accomplishment. Without this
antecedent sketch, Michael Angelo might not have matured the most complete
of all his designs in the Sistine Chapel. The similarity between Delia
Quercia's bas-relief and Buonarroti's fresco of Eve is incontestable. The
young Florentine, while an exile in Bologna, and engaged upon the shrine
of S. Dominic, must have spent hours of study before the sculptures of S.
Petronio; so that this seed of Della Quercia's sowing bore after many
years the fruit of world-renowned achievement in Rome.
Two other memorable works of Della Quercia must be parenthetically
mentioned. These are the Fonte Gaja on the public square of Siena, now
unhappily restored, and the portrait of Ilaria del Carretto on her tomb in
the cathedral of Lucca. The latter has long been dear to English students
of Italian art through words inimitable for their strength of sympathetic
criticism.[83]
Ghiberti was brought up as a goldsmith by his stepfather, and it is said
that while a youth he spent much of his leisure in modelling portraits and
casting imitations of antique gems and coins for his friends. At the same
time he practised painting. We find him employed in decorating a palace at
Rimini for Carlo Malatesta, when his stepfather recalled him to Florence,
in order that he might compete for the gate of the Baptistery. It is
probable that from this early training Ghiberti derived the delicacy of
style and smoothness of execution that are reckoned among the chief merits
of his work. He also developed a manner more pictorial than sculpturesque,
which justifies our calling him a painter in bronze. When Sir Joshua
Reynolds remarked, "Ghiberti's landscape and buildings occupied so large a
portion of the compartments, that the figures remained but secondary
objects,"[84] his criticism might fairly have been taxed with some
injustice even to the second of the two gates. Yet, though exaggerated in
severity, his words convey a truth important for the understanding of this
period of Italian art.
The first gate may be cited as the supreme achievement of bronze-casting
in the Tuscan prime. In the second, by the introduction of elaborate
landscapes and the massing together of figures arranged in multitudes at
three and sometimes four distances, Ghiberti overstepped the limits that
separate sculpture from painting. Having learned perspective from
Brunelleschi, he was eager to apply this new science to his own craft, not
discerning that it has no place in noble bas-relief. He therefore
abandoned the classical and the early Tuscan tradition, whereby reliefs,
whether high or low, are strictly restrained to figures arranged in line
or grouped together without accessories. Instead of painting frescoes, he
set himself to model in bronze whole compositions that might have been
expressed with propriety in colour. The point of Sir Joshua's criticism,
therefore, is that Ghiberti's practice of distributing figures on a small
scale in spacious landscape framework was at variance with the severity of
sculptural treatment. The pernicious effect of his example may be traced
in much Florentine work of the mid Renaissance period which passed for
supremely clever when it was produced. What the unique genius of Ghiberti
made not merely pardonable but even admirable, became under other hands no
less repulsive than the transference of pictorial effects to painted
glass.[85]
That Ghiberti was not a great sculptor of statues is proved by his work at
Orsammichele. He was no architect, as we know from his incompetence to do
more than impede Brunelleschi in the building of the dome. He came into
the world to create a new and inimitable style of hybrid beauty in those
gates of Paradise. His susceptibility to the first influences of the
classical revival deserves notice here, since it shows to what an extent a
devotee of Greek art in the fifteenth century could worship the relics of
antiquity without passing over into imitation. When the "Hermaphrodite"
was discovered in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti's admiration found
vent in exclamations like the following: "No tongue could describe the
learning and art displayed in it, or do justice to its masterly style."
Another antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, have been
hidden out of harm's way by "some gentle spirit in the early days of
Christianity." "The touch only," he adds, "can discover its beauties,
which escape the sense of sight in any light."[86] It would be impossible
to express a reverential love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in
these sentences. So intense was Ghiberti's passion for the Greeks, that he
rejected Christian chronology and reckoned by Olympiads--a system that has
thrown obscurity over his otherwise precious notes of Tuscan artists. In
spite of this devotion, he never appears to have set himself consciously
to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to have set forth Hellenic
ideas. He remained unaffectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian.
The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with no more meaning for him
than for that still more delicate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia;
and if his works are classical, they are so only in Goethe's sense, when
he pronounced, "the point is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it
is sure to be classical."
One great advantage of the early days of the Renaissance over the latter
was this, that pseudo-paganism and pedantry had not as yet distorted the
judgment or misdirected the aims of artists. Contact with the antique
world served only to stimulate original endeavour, by leading the student
back to the fountain of all excellence in nature, and by exhibiting types
of perfection in technical processes. To ape the sculptors of Antinous, or
to bring to life again the gods who died with Pan, was not yet longed for.
Of the impunity with which a sculptor in that period could submit his
genius to the service and the study of ancient art without sacrificing
individuality, Donatello furnishes a still more illustrious example than
Ghiberti. Early in his youth Donatello journeyed with Brunelleschi to
Rome, in order to acquaint himself with the monuments then extant. How
thoroughly he comprehended the classic spirit is proved by the bronze
patera wrought for his patron Ruberto Martelli, and by the frieze of the
triumphant Bacchus.[87] Yet the great achievements of his genius were
Christian in their sentiment and realistic in their style. The bronze
"Magdalen" of the Florentine Baptistery and the bronze "Baptist" of the
Duomo at Siena[88] are executed with an unrelenting materialism, not alien
indeed to the sincerity of classic art, but divergent from antique
tradition, inasmuch as the ideas of repentant and prophetic asceticism had
no place in Greek mythology.
Donatello, with the uncompromising candour of an artist bent on marking
character, felt that he was bound to seize the very pith and kernel of his
subject. If a Magdalen were demanded of him, he would not condescend to
model a Venus and then place a book and skull upon a rock beside her; nor
did he imagine that the bloom and beauty of a laughing Faun were fitting
attributes for the preacher of repentance. It remained for later artists,
intoxicated with antique loveliness and corroded with worldly scepticism,
to reproduce the outward semblance of Greek deities under the pretence of
setting forth the myths of Christianity. Such compromise had not occurred
to Donatello. The motive of his art was clearly apprehended, his method
was sincere; certain phases of profound emotion had to be represented with
the physical characteristics proper to them. The result, ugly and painful
as it may sometimes be, was really more concordant with the spirit of
Greek method than Lionardo's "John" or Correggio's "Magdalen." That is to
say, it was straightforward and truthful; whereas the strange caprices of
the later Renaissance too often betrayed a double mind, disloyal alike to
paganism and to Christianity, in their effort to combine divergent forces.
It may still be argued that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and
mortification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by haggard gauntness
in the saints of Donatello, are unfit for sculpturesque expression.
A more felicitous embodiment of modern feeling was achieved by Donatello
in "S. George" and "David." The former is a marble statue placed upon the
north wall of Orsammichele; the latter is a bronze, cast for Cosimo de'
Medici, and now exhibited in the Bargello.[89] Without striving to
idealise his models, the sculptor has expressed in both the Christian
conception of heroism, fearless in the face of danger, and sustained by
faith. The naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed manhood of S.
George are raised to a spiritual region by the type of feature and the
pose of body selected to interpret their animating impulse. These are no
mere portraits of wrestlers, such, as peopled the groves of Altis at
Olympia, no ideals of physical strength translated into brass and marble,
like the "Hercules" of Naples or the Vatican. The one is a Christian
soldier ready to engage Apollyon in battle to the death; the other the
boy-hero of a marvellous romance. The body in both is but the shrine of an
indwelling soul, the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will; and
the crown of their conflict is no wreath of laurel or of parsley. In other
words, the value of S. George and David to the sculptor lay not in their
strength and youthful beauty--though he has endowed them with these
excellent gifts--so much as in their significance for the eternal struggle
of the soul with evil. The same power of expressing Christian sentiment in
a form of perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by profounder
suggestion of feeling, is illustrated in the well-known low-relief of an
angel's head in profile, technically one of Donatello's most masterly
productions.[90]
It is no part of my present purpose to enumerate the many works of
Donatello in marble and bronze; yet some allusion to their number and
variety is necessary in order to show how widely his influence was
diffused through Italy. In the monuments of Pope John XXIII., of Cardinal
Brancacci, and of Bartolommeo Aragazzi, he subordinated his genius to the
treatment of sepulchral and biographical subjects according to
time-honoured Tuscan usage. They were severally placed in Florence,
Naples, and Montepulciano. For the cathedral of Prato he executed
bas-reliefs of dancing boys; a similar series, intended for the
balustrades of the organ in S. Maria del Fiore, is now preserved in the
Bargello museum. The exultation of movement has never been expressed in
stone with more fidelity to the strict rules of plastic art. For his
friend and patron, Cosimo de' Medici, he cast in bronze the group of
"Judith and Holofernes"--a work that illustrates the clumsiness of
realistic treatment, and deserves to be remembered chiefly for its strange
fortunes. When the Medici fled from Florence in 1494, their palace was
sacked; the new republic took possession of Donatello's "Judith," and
placed it on a pedestal before the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio, with this
inscription, ominous to would-be despots: _Exemplum salutis publicae cives
posuere. MCCCCXCV_. It now stands near Cellini's "Perseus" under the
Loggia de' Lanzi. For the pulpits of S. Lorenzo, Donatello made designs of
intricate bronze bas-reliefs, which were afterwards completed by his pupil
Bertoldo. These, though better known to travellers, are less excellent
than the reliefs in bronze wrought by Donatello's own hand for the church
of S. Anthony at Padua.[91] To that city he was called in 1451, in order
that he might model the equestrian statue of Gattamelata. It still stands
on the Piazza, a masterpiece of scientific bronze-founding, the first
great portrait of a general on horseback since the days of Rome.[92] At
Padua, in the hall of the Palazzo della Ragione, is also preserved the
wooden horse, which is said to have been constructed by the sculptor for
the noble house of Capodilista. These two examples of equestrian modelling
marked an epoch in Italian statuary.
When Donato di Nicolo di Betto Bardi, called Donatello because men loved
his sweet and cheerful temper, died in 1466 at the age of eighty, the
brightest light of Italian sculpture in its most promising period was
extinguished. Donatello's influence, felt far and wide through Italy, was
of inestimable value in correcting the false direction toward pictorial
sculpture which Ghiberti, had he flourished alone at Florence, might have
given to the art. His style was always eminently masculine. However tastes
may differ about the positive merits of his several works, there can be no
doubt that the principles of sincerity, truth to nature, and technical
accuracy they illustrate, were all-important in an age that lent itself
too readily to the caprices of the fancy and the puerilities of florid
taste. To regret that Donatello lacked Ghiberti's exquisite sense of
beauty, is tantamount to wishing that two of the greatest artists of the
world had made one man between them.
Donatello did not, in the strict sense of the term, found a school.[93]
Andrea Verocchio, goldsmith, painter, and worker in bronze, was the most
distinguished of his pupils. To all the arts he practised, Verocchio
applied limited powers, a meagre manner, and a prosaic mind. Yet few men
have exercised at a very critical moment a more decided influence. The
mere fact that he numbered Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro
Perugino among his scholars, proves the esteem of his contemporaries; and
when we have observed that the type of face selected by Lionardo and
transmitted to his followers, appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo di
Credi and is first found in the "David" of Verocchio, we have a right to
affirm that the master of these men was an artist of creative genius as
well as a careful workman. Florence still points with pride to the
"Incredulity of Thomas" on the eastern wall of Orsammichele, to the "Boy
and Dolphin" in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, and to the "David" of
this sculptor: but the first is spoiled by heaviness and angularity of
drapery; the second, though fanciful and marked by fluttering movement, is
but a caprice; the third outdoes the hardest work of Donatello by its
realism. Verocchio's "David," a lad of some seventeen years, has the lean,
veined arms of a stone-hewer or gold-beater. As a faithful portrait of the
first Florentine prentice who came to hand, this statue might have merit
but for the awkward cuirass and kilt that partly drape the figure.
The name of Verocchio is best known to the world through the equestrian
statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni. When this great Condottiere, the last
surviving general trained by Braccio da Montone, died in 1475, he
bequeathed a large portion of his wealth to Venice, on condition that his
statue on horseback should be erected in the Piazza di S. Marco. Colleoni,
having long held the baton of the Republic, desired that after death his
portrait, in his habit as he lived, should continue to look down on the
scene of his old splendour. By an ingenious quibble the Senators adhered
to the letter of his will without infringing a law that forbade them to
charge the square of S. Mark with monuments. They ruled that the piazza in
front of the Scuola di S. Marco, better known as the Campo di S. Zanipolo,
might be chosen as the site of Colleoni's statue, and to Andrea Verocchio
was given the commission for its erection.
Andrea died in 1488 before the model for the horse was finished. The work
was completed, and the pedestal was supplied by Alessandro Leopardi. To
Verocchio, profiting by the example of Donatello's "Gattamelata," must be
assigned the general conception of this statue; but the breath of life
that animates both horse and rider, the richness of detail that enhances
the massive grandeur of the group, and the fiery spirit of its style of
execution were due to the Venetian genius of Leopardi. Verocchio alone
produced nothing so truly magnificent. This joint creation of Florentine
science and Venetian fervour is one of the most precious monuments of the
Renaissance. From it we learn what the men who fought the bloodless
battles of the commonwealths, and who aspired to principality, were like.
"He was tall," writes a biographer of Colleoni,[94] "of erect and
well-knit figure, and of well-proportioned limbs. His complexion tended
rather to brown, marked withal by bright and sanguine flesh-tints. He had
black eyes; their brilliancy was vivid, their gaze terrible and
penetrating. In the outline of his nose and in all his features he
displayed a manly nobleness combined with goodness and prudence." Better
phrases cannot be chosen to describe his statue.
While admiring this masterpiece and dwelling on its royal style, we are
led to deplore most bitterly the loss of the third equestrian statue of
the Renaissance. Nothing now remains but a few technical studies made by
Lionardo da Vinci for his portrait of Francesco Sforza. The two elaborate
models he constructed and the majority of his minute designs have been
destroyed. He intended, we are told, to represent the first Duke of the
Sforza dynasty on his charger, trampling the body of a prostrate and just
conquered enemy. Rubens' transcript from the "Battle of the Standard,"
enables us to comprehend to some extent how Lionardo might have treated
this motive. The severe and cautious style of Donatello, after gaining
freedom and fervour from Leopardi, was adapted to the ideal presentation
of dramatic passion by Lionardo. Thus Gattamelata, Colleoni, and Francesco
Sforza would, through their statues, have marked three distinct phases in
the growth of art. The final effort of Italian sculpture to express human
activity in the person of a mounted warrior has perished. In this sphere
we possess nothing which, like the tombs of S. Lorenzo in relation to
sepulchral statuary, completes a series of development.
If Donatello founded no school, this was far more the case with Ghiberti.
His supposed pupil, Antonio del Pollajuolo, showed no sign of Ghiberti's
influence, but struck out for himself a style distinguished by almost
brutal energy and bizarre realism--characteristics the very opposite to
those of his master. If the bronze relief of the "Crucifixion" in the
Bargello be really Pollajuolo's, we may even trace a leaning to Verocchio
in his manner. The emphatic passion of the women recalls the group of
mourners round the death-bed of Selvaggia Tornabuoni in Verocchio's
celebrated bas-relief. Pollajuolo, like so many Florentine artists, was a
goldsmith, a painter, and a worker in niello, before he took to sculpture.
As a goldsmith he is said to have surpassed all his contemporaries, and
his mastery over this art influenced his style in general. What we chiefly
notice, however, in his choice of subjects is a frenzy of murderous
enthusiasm, a grimness of imagination, rare among Italian artists. The
picture in the Uffizzi of "Hercules and Antaeus" and the well-known
engraving of naked men fighting a series of savage duels in a wood, might
be chosen as emphatic illustrations of his favourite motives. The fiercest
emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth,
strained muscles, knotted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo
with eccentric energy. We seem to be assisting at some of those combats _a
steccato chiuso_ wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes
a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in the streets of Rome.[95] The same
remarks apply to the terra-cotta relief by Pollajuolo in the South
Kensington Museum. This piece displays the struggles of twelve naked men,
divided into six pairs of combatants. Two of the couples hold short chains
with the left hand, and seek to stab each other with the right. In the
case of another two couples the fight is over, and the victor is insulting
his fallen foe. In each of the remaining pairs one gladiator is on the
point of yielding to his adversary. There are thus three several moments
of duel to the death, each illustrated by two couples. The mathematical
distribution of these dreadful groups gives an effect of frozen passion;
while the vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthusiasm for
muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy with blood-fury in the artist.
There was, therefore, a certain propriety in the choice of Pollajuolo to
cast the sepulchre of Sixtus IV. in bronze at Rome. The best judges
complain, not without reason, that the allegories surrounding this tomb
are exaggerated and affected in style; yet the dead Pope, stretched in
pomp upon his bier, commands more than merely historical interest; while
the figures, seated as guardians round the old man, terrible in death,
communicate an impression of monumental majesty. Criticised in detail,
each separate figure may be faulty. The composition, as a whole, is
picturesque and grandiose. The same can scarcely be said about the tomb of
Innocent VIII., erected by Antonio and his brother Piero del Pollajuolo.
While it perpetuates the memory of an uninteresting Pontiff, it has but
little, as a work of art, to recommend it. The Pollajuoli were not great
sculptors. In the history of Italian art they deserve a place, because of
the vivid personality impressed upon some portions of their work. Few
draughtsmen carried the study of muscular anatomy so far as Antonio.[96]
Luca della Robbia, whose life embraced the first eighty years of the
fifteenth century, offers in many important respects a contrast to his
contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their immediate
followers. He made his art as true to life as it is possible to be,
without the rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces
of Ghiberti. The charm of his work is never impaired by scientific
mannerism--that stumbling-block to critics like De Stendhal in the art of
Florence; nor does it suffer from the picturesqueness of a sentimental
style. How to render the beauty of nature in her most delightful
moments--taking us with him into the holiest of holies, and handling the
sacred vessels with a child's confiding boldness--was a secret known to
Luca della Robbia alone. We may well find food for meditation in the
innocent and cheerful inspiration of this man, whose lifetime coincided
with a period of sordid passions and debased ambition in the Church and
States of Italy.
Luca was apprenticed in his youth to a goldsmith; but of what he wrought
before the age of forty-five, we know but little.[97] At that time his
faculty had attained full maturity, and he produced the groups of dancing
children and choristers intended for the organ gallery of the Duomo.
Wholly free from affectation, and depending for effect upon no merely
decorative detail, these bas-reliefs deserve the praise bestowed by Dante
on the sculpture seen in Purgatory:[98]--
Dinanzi a noi pareva si verace,
Quivi intagliato in un atto soave,
Che non sembrava immagine che tace.
Movement has never been suggested in stone with less exaggeration, nor
have marble lips been made to utter sweeter and more varied music. Luca's
true perception of the limits to be observed in sculpture, appears most
eminently in the glazed terra-cotta work by which he is best known. An
ordinary artist might have found the temptation to aim at showy and
pictorial effects in this material overwhelming. Luca restrained himself
to pure white on pale blue, and preserved an exquisite simplicity of line
in all his compositions. There is an almost unearthly beauty in the
profiles of his Madonnas, a tempered sweetness in the modulation of their
drapery and attitude, that prove complete mastery in the art of rendering
evanescent moments of expression, the most fragile subtleties of the
emotions that can stir a tranquil spirit. Andrea della Robbia, the nephew
of Luca, with his four sons, Giovanni, Luca, Ambrogio, and Girolamo,
continued to manufacture the glazed earthenware of Luca's invention. These
men, though excellent artificers, lacked the fine taste of their teacher.
Coarser colours were introduced; the eye was dazzled with variety; but the
power of speaking to the soul as Luca spoke was lost.[99]
After the Della Robbias, this is the place to mention Agostino di Gucci or
di Duccio,[100] a sculptor who handled terra-cotta somewhat in the manner
of Donatello's flat-relief, introducing more richness of detail and aiming
at more passion than Luca's taste permitted. For the oratory of S.
Bernardino at Perugia he designed the facade partly in stone and partly in
baked clay--crowded with figures, flying, singing, playing upon
instruments of music, with waving draperies and windy hair and the ecstasy
of movement in their delicately modelled limbs. If nothing else remained
of Agostino's workmanship, this facade alone would place him in the first
rank of contemporary artists. He owed something, perhaps, to his material;
for terra-cotta has the charm of improvisation. The hand, obedient to the
brain, has made it in one moment what it is, and no slow hours of labour
at the stone have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy. Work,
therefore, which, if translated into marble, might have left our sympathy
unstirred, affects us with keen pleasure in the mould of plastic clay.
What prodigality of thought and invention has been lavished on the
terra-cotta models of unknown Italian artists! What forms and faces,
beautiful as shapes of dreams, and, like dreams, so airy that we think
they will take flight and vanish, lean to greet us from cloisters and
palace fronts in Lombardy! To catalogue their multitude would be
impossible. It is enough to select one instance out of many; this shall be
taken from the chapel of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio at Milan. High up
around the cupola runs a frieze of angels, singing together and dancing
with joined hands, while bells composed of fruits and flowers hang down
between them. Each angel is an individual shape of joy; the soul in each
moves to its own deep melody, but the music made of all is one. Their
raiment flutters, the bells chime; the chorus of their gladness falls like
voices through a star-lit heaven, half-heard in dreams and everlastingly
remembered.
Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of Luca della Robbia, and
marked by certain common qualities, demand attention next. All the work of
Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da
Majano, is distinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and
self-restraint--as though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits on
their genius, refusing to trespass beyond a traced circle of religious
subjects, or to aim at effects unrealisable by purity of outline, suavity
of expression, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style. The charm of
manner they possess in common, can scarcely he defined except by similes.
The innocence of childhood, the melody of a lute or song-bird as
distinguished from the music of an orchestra, the rathe tints of early
dawn, cheerful light on shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and
untainted nature that has never known the world--many such images occur
to the mind while thinking of the sculpture of these men. To charge them
with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony, would be to mistake the force
of genius and skill displayed by them. We should rather assume that they
confined themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty, without caring to
realise more obviously striking effects, and that this was their way of
meeting the requirements of sculpture considered as a Christian art. The
melody of their design, meanwhile, is like the purest song-music of
Pergolese or Salvator Rosa, unapproachably perfect in simple outline, and
inexhaustibly refreshing.
Though it is possible to characterise the style of these sculptors by some
common qualities observable in their work, it should rather be the aim of
criticism to point out their differences. Antonio Rossellino, for example,
might be distinguished by his leaning toward the manner of Ghiberti, whose
landscape backgrounds he has adopted in the circular medallions of his
monumental sculpture. A fine perception of the poetic capabilities of
Christian art is displayed in Rossellino's idyllic treatment of the
Nativity--the adoration of the shepherds, the hush of reverential
stillness in the worship Mary pays her infant son.[101] To the qualities
of sweetness and tranquillity rare dignity is added in the monument of the
young Cardinal di Portogallo.[102] The sublimity of the slumber that is
death has never been more nobly and feelingly portrayed than in the supine
figure and sleeping features of this most beautiful young man, who lies
watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of eternal
repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom
perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream. The
turmoil of the world is over for them; they will never wake again; they do
not even dream. Sleep is the only power that still has life in them. But
the Christian cannot thus conceive the mystery of the soul "fallen on
sleep." His art must suggest a time of waiting and a time of waking; and
this it does partly through the ministration of attendant angels, who
would not be standing there on guard if the clay-cold corpse had no
futurity, partly by breathing upon the limbs and visage of the dead a
spirit as of life suspended for a while. Thus the soul herself is imaged
in the marble "most sweetly slumbering in the gates of dreams."
What Vespasiano tells us of this cardinal, born of the royal house of
Portugal, adds the virtue of sincerity to Rossellino's work, proving there
is no flattery of the dead man in his sculpture.[103] "Among his other
admirable virtues," says the biographer, "Messer Jacopo di Portogallo
determined to preserve his virginity, though he was beautiful above all
others of his age. Consequently he avoided all things that might prove
impediments to his vow, such as free discourse, the society of women,
balls, and songs. In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been free
from it--the life, we may say, rather of an angel than a man. And if his
biography were written from his childhood to his death, it would be not
only an ensample, but confusion to the world. Upon his monument the hand
was modelled from his own, and the face is very like him, for he was most
lovely in his person, but still more in his soul."
While contemplating this monument of the young cardinal, we feel that the
Italians of that age understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their
immediate successors. They knew how to carve the very soul, according to
the lines which our Webster, a keen observer of all things relating to
the grave and death, has put into Jolenta's lips:--
But indeed,
If ever I would have mine drawn to the life,
I would have a painter steal it at such time
I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers;
There is then a heavenly beauty in't; _the soul
Moves in the superficies_.
The same Webster condemns that evil custom of aping life and movement on
the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure
repose had been exhausted. "Why," asks the Duchess of Malfi, "do we grow
fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" "Most
ambitiously," answers Bosola; "princes' images on their tombs do not lie
as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands
under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache): they are not carved
with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but, as their minds were wholly bent
upon the world, the self-same way they seem to turn their faces." A more
trenchant criticism than this could hardly have been pronounced upon
Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavino's tombs of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo
della Rovere, if Bosola had been standing before them in the church of S.
Maria del Popolo when he spoke. Were it the function of monumental
sculpture to satirise the dead, or to point out their characteristic
faults for the warning of posterity, then the sepulchres of these worldly
cardinals of Sixtus IV.'s creation would be artistically justified. But
the object of art is not this. The idea of death, as conceived by
Christians, has to be portrayed. The repose of the just, the resurrection
of the body, and the coming judgment, afford sufficient scope for
treatment of good men and bad alike. Or if the sculptor have sublime
imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, suggest the alternations of the
day and night, slumber and waking, whereby "our little life is rounded
with a sleep."
This digression will hardly be thought superfluous when we reflect how
large a part of the sculptor's energy was spent on tombs in Italy. Matteo
Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino's equal in the sculpturesque
delineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose for treatment
were more varied. All his work is penetrated with deep, prayerful, intense
feeling; as though the artist's soul, poured forth in ecstasy and
adoration, had been given to the marble. This is especially true of two
angels kneeling upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in Lucca
Cathedral. Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best
years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is
here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen,
that he deserves to be studied. For the people of Lucca he designed the
Chapel of the Santo Volto--a gem of the purest Renaissance
architecture--and a pulpit in the same style. His most remarkable
sculpture is to be found in three monuments: the tombs of Domenico Bertini
and Pietro da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus. The last might be
chosen as an epitome of all that is most characteristic in Tuscan
sculpture of the earlier Renaissance. It is built against the wall, and
architecturally designed so as to comprehend a full-length figure of the
bishop stretched upon his bier and watched by angels, a group of Madonna
and her child seated above him, a row of standing saints below, and a
predella composed of four delicately finished bas-reliefs. Every part of
this complex work is conceived with spirit and executed with care; and the
various elements are so combined as to make one composition, the body of
the saint on his sarcophagus forming the central object of the whole.
To do more than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be
impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by
grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of
Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be
extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other
works to the verge of mannerism.[104] Their architectural features are the
same as those of similar monuments in Tuscany:--a shallow recess, flanked
by Renaissance pilasters, and roofed with a semicircular arch; within the
recess, the full-length figure of the dead man on a marble coffin of
antique design; in the lunette above, a Madonna carved in low relief.[105]
Mino's bust of Bishop Salutati in the cathedral church of Fiesole is a
powerful portrait, no less distinguished for vigorous individuality than
consummate workmanship. The waxlike finish of the finely chiselled marble
alone betrays that delicacy which with Mino verged on insipidity. The same
faculty of character delineation is seen in three profiles, now in the
Bargello Museum, attributed to Mino. They represent Frederick Duke of
Urbino, Battista Sforza, and Galeazzo Sforza. The relief is very low,
rising at no point more than half an inch above the surface of the ground,
but so carefully modulated as to present a wonderful variety of light and
shade, and to render the facial expression with great vividness.
Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello's few scholars, was endowed with
the same gift of exquisite taste as his friend Mino da Fiesole;[106] but
his inventive faculty was bolder, and his genius more robust, in spite of
the profuse ornamentation and elaborate finish of his masterpiece, the
tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce. The bust he made of Marietta di
Palla degli Strozzi enables us to compare his style in portraiture with
that of Mino.[107] It would be hard to find elsewhere a more captivating
combination of womanly sweetness and dignity. We feel, in looking at these
products of the best age of Italian sculpture, that the artists who
conceived them were, in the truest sense of the word, gentle. None but men
courteous and unaffected could have carved a face like that of Marietta
Strozzi, breathing the very spirit of urbanity. To express the most
amiable qualities of a living person in a work of art that should suggest
emotional tranquillity by harmonious treatment, and indicate the
temperance of a disciplined nature by self-restraint and moderation of
style, and to do this with the highest technical perfection, was the
triumph of fifteenth-century sculpture.
An artist who claims a third place beside Mino and his friend, "il bravo
Desider si dolce e bello,"[108] is Benedetto da Majano. In Benedetto's
bas-reliefs at San Gemignano, carved for the altars of those unlovely
Tuscan worthies, S. Fina and S. Bartolo, we find a pictorial treatment of
legendary subjects, proving that he had studied Ghirlandajo's frescoes.
The same is true about his pulpit in S. Croce at Florence, his treatment
of the story of S. Savino at Faenza, and his "Annunciation" in the church
of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Benedetto, indeed, may be said to illustrate
the working of Ghiberti's influence by his liberal use of landscape and
architectural backgrounds; but the style is rather Ghirlandajo's than
Ghiberti's. If it was a mistake in the sculptors of that period to
subordinate their art to painting, the error, we feel, was aggravated by
the imitation of a manner so prosaic as that of Ghirlandajo. That
Benedetto began life as a _tarsiatore_ may perhaps help to account for his
pictorial style in bas-relief.[109] In estimating his total claim as an
artist, we must not forget that he designed the formidable and splendid
Strozzi Palace.
It will be observed that all the sculptors hitherto mentioned have been
Tuscans; and this is due to no mere accident--nor yet to caprice on the
part of their historian. Though the other districts of Italy produced
admirable workmen, the direction given to this art proceeded from Tuscany.
Florence, the metropolis of modern culture, determined the course of the
aesthetical Renaissance. Even at Rimini we cannot account for the carvings
in low relief, so fanciful, so delicately wrought, and so profusely
scattered over the side chapels of S. Francesco, without the intervention
of two Florentines, Bernardo Ciuffagni and Donatello's pupil Simone; while
in the palace of Urbino we trace some hand not unlike that of Mino da
Fiesole at work upon the mouldings of door and architrave, cornice and
high-built chimney.[110] Not only do we thus find Tuscan craftsmen or
their scholars employed on all the great public buildings throughout
Italy; but it also happens that, except in Tuscany, the decoration of
churches and palaces is not unfrequently anonymous.
This does not, however, interfere with the truth that sculpture, like all
the arts, assumed a somewhat different character in each Italian city. The
Venetian stone-carvers leaned from the first to a richer and more
passionate style than the Florentine, reproducing the types of Cima's and
Bellini's paintings.[111] Whole families, like the Bregni--classes, like
the Lombardi--schools, like that of Alessandro Leopardi, worked together
on the monumental sculpture of S. Zanipolo. In the tombs of the Doges the
old Pisan motive of the curtains (first used by Arnolfo di Cambio at
Orvieto, and afterwards with grand effect by Giovanni Pisano at Perugia)
is expanded into a sumptuous tent-canopy. Pages and genii and mailed
heroes take the place of angels, and the marine details of Roman reliefs
are copied in the subordinate decoration. At Verona the mediaeval tombs of
the Scaligers, with their vast chest-like sarcophagi and mounted warriors,
exhibit features markedly different from the monuments of Tuscany; while
the mixture of fresco with sculpture, in monuments like that of the
Cavalli in S. Anastasia, and in many altar-pieces, is at variance with
Florentine usage. On the terra-cotta mouldings, so frequent in Lombard
cities, I have already had occasion to touch briefly. They almost
invariably display a feeling for beauty more sensuous, with less of
scientific purpose in their naturalism, than is common in the Tuscan
style. Guido Mazzoni of Modena, called Il Modanino, may be mentioned as
the sculptor who freed terra-cotta from its dependence upon architecture,
and who modelled groups of overpowering dramatic realism. His "Pieta," in
the Church of Monte Oliveto at Naples, is valuable, less for its
passionate intensity of expression than for the portraits of Pontano,
Sannazzaro, and Alfonso of Aragon.[112] This sub-species of sculpture was
freely employed in North Italy to stimulate devotion, and to impress the
people with lively pictures of the Passion. The Sacro Monte at Varallo,
for example, is covered with a multitude of chapels, each one of which
presents some chapter of Bible history dramatically rendered by life-size
groups of terra-cotta figures. Some of these were designed by eminent
painters, and executed by clever modellers in clay. Even now they are
scarcely less stirring to the mind of a devout spectator than the scenes
of a mediaeval Mystery may have been.
The Certosa of Pavia, lastly, is the centre of a school of sculpture that
has little in common with the Florentine tradition. Antonio Amadeo[113]
and Andrea Fusina, acting in concert with Ambrogio Borgognone the
painter, gave it in the fifteenth century that character of rich and
complex decorative beauty which many generations of artists were destined
to continue and complete. Among the countless sculptors employed upon its
marvellous facade Amadeo asserts an individuality above the rest, which is
further manifested in his work in the Cappella Colleoni at Bergamo. We
there learn to know him, not only as an enthusiastic cultivator of the
mingled Christian and pagan manner of the _quattrocento_, but as an artist
in the truest sense of the word sympathetic. The sepulchral portrait of
Medea, daughter of the great Condottiere, has a grace almost beyond that
of Della Quercia's "Ilaria."[114] Much, no doubt, is due to the peculiarly
fragile beauty of the girl herself, who lies asleep with little crisp
curls clustering upon her forehead, and with a string of pearls around her
slender throat. But the sensibility to loveliness so delicate, and the
power to render it in marble with so ethereal a touch upon the rigid
stone, belong to the sculptor, and win for him our worship.
The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost ended; and already, on
the threshold of the sixteenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angelo.
Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo Tatti, called also
Sansovino, after his master, must, however, next be mentioned as
continuing the Florentine tradition without subservience to the style of
Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in whom for the first time
the faults of the mid-Renaissance period are glaringly apparent. He
persistently sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative
ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical effect. The truth
of this will be acknowledged by all who have studied the tombs of the
cardinals in S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,[115] and the
bas-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto. In technical workmanship Andrea
proved himself an able craftsman, modelling marble with the plasticity of
wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined invention. Yet the
decorative prodigality of this master corresponded to the frigid and
stylistic graces of the neo-Latin poets. It was so much mannerism--adopted
without real passion from the antique, and applied with a rhetorical
intention. Those acanthus scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of
their consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving the soul as
unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of Bembo.
Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction. Together with San Gallo and
Bramante he studied the science of architecture in Rome, where he also
worked at the restoration of newly discovered antiques, and cast in bronze
a copy of the "Laocoon." Thus equipped with the artistic learning of his
age, he was called in 1523 by the Doge, Andrea Gritti, to Venice. The
material pomp of Venice at this epoch, and the pride of her unrivalled
luxury, affected his imagination so powerfully that his genius, tutored by
Florentine and Umbrian masters among the ruins of old Rome, became at once
Venetian. In the history of the Renaissance the names of Titian and
Aretino, themselves acclimatised aliens, are inseparably connected with
that of their friend Sansovino. At Venice he lived until his death in
1570, building the Zecca, the Library, the Scala d'Oro in the Ducal
Palace, and the Loggietta beneath the bell-tower of S. Mark. In all his
work he subordinated sculpture to architecture, and his statuary is
conceived in the _bravura_, manner of Renaissance paganism. Whatever may
be the faults of Sansovino in both arts, it cannot be denied that he
expressed, in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous external
life of Venice at a moment when this city was the Paris or the Corinth of
Renaissance Europe. At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovino's
inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces of parade--the
"Neptune" and the "Mars," guarding the Scala d'Oro. Separated from the
architecture of the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite
of their colossal scale. In their place they add a haughty grandeur, by
the contrast which their flowing forms and arrogant attitudes present to
the severer lines of the construction. But they are devoid of artistic
sincerity, and occupy the same relation to true sculpture as flourishes of
rhetoric, however brilliant, to poetry embodying deep thought or passion.
At first sight they impose: on further acquaintance we find them chiefly
interesting as illustrations of a potent civic life upon the wane,
gorgeous in its decay.
Sansovino was a first-rate craftsman. The most finished specimen of his
skill is the bronze door of the Sacristy of S. Marco, upon which he is
said to have worked through twenty years. Portraits of the sculptor,
Titian, and Pietro Aretino are introduced into the decorative border.
These heads start from the surface of the gate with astonishing vivacity.
That Aretino should thus daily assist in effigy at the procession of
priests bearing the sacred emblems from the sacristy to the high altar of
S. Mark, is one of the most characteristic proofs of sixteenth-century
indifference to things holy and things profane.
Jacopo Sansovino marks the final intrusion of paganism into modern art.
The classical revival had worked but partially and indirectly upon
Ghiberti and Donatello--not because they did not feel it most intensely,
but because they clung to nature far more closely than to antique
precedent. This enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and strongest
qualities that he can boast; and if his genius had been powerful enough to
resist the fascination of merely rhetorical effects, he might have
produced a perfect restoration of the classic style. His was no lifeless
or pedantic imitation of antique fragments, but a real expression of the
fervour with which the modern world hailed the discoveries revealed to it
by scholarship. This is said advisedly. The most beautiful and spirited
pagan statue of the Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here made
of Sansovino's genius, is the "Bacchus" exhibited in the Bargello Museum.
Both the Bacchus and the Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism,
irradiated and idealised by the sculptor's vivid sense of natural
gladness. Considered as a restitution of the antique manner, this statue
is decidedly superior to the "Bacchus" of Michael Angelo. While the
mundane splendour of Venice gave body and fulness to Sansovino's paganism,
he missed the self-restraint and purity of taste peculiar to the studious
shades of Florence. In his style, both architectural and sculptural, the
neo-pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom.
For the artist at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all
one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent
forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be
subordinated to rich effects of decoration.[116] To this point the
intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts
of Italy, by a process similar to that which ended in the "Partus
Virginis" of Sannazzaro. They were still indisputably vigorous, and
working in accordance with the movement of the modern spirit. Yet the
synthesis they attempted to effect between heathenism and Christianity, by
a sheer effort of style, and by indifferentism, strikes us from the point
of view of art alone, not reckoning religion or morality, as
unsuccessful. Still, if it be childish on the one hand to deplore that the
Christian earnestness of the earlier masters had failed, it would be even
more ridiculous to complain that paganism had not been more entirely
recovered. The double-mind of the Renaissance, the source of its weakness
in art as in thought, could not be avoided, because humanity at this
moment had to lose the mediaeval sincerity of faith, and to assimilate the
spirit of a bygone civilisation. This, for better or for worse, was the
phase through which the intellect of modern Europe was obliged to pass;
and those who have confidence in the destinies of the human race, will not
spend their strength in moaning over such shortcomings as the periods of
transition bring inevitably with them. The student of Italian history may
indeed more reasonably be allowed to question whether the arts, if left to
follow their own development unchecked, might not have recovered from the
confusion of the Renaissance and have entered on a stage of nobler
activity through earnest and unaffected study of nature. But the
enslavement of the country, together with the counter-Reformation,
suspended the Renaissance in mid-career; and what remains of Italian art
is incomplete. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the confusion of
opinions consequent upon the clash of the modern with the ancient world,
left no body of generally accepted beliefs to express; nor has the time
even yet arrived for a settlement and synthesis that shall be favourable
to the activity of the figurative arts.
Sansovino himself was neither original nor powerful enough, to elevate the
mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by any lofty idealisation. To do
that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness of Michael Angelo consists
in this--that while literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies
and the filth of the Bernesque "Capitoli," while the barefaced villanies
of Aretino won him credit, while sensual magnificence formed the ideal of
artists who were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto found no
subject fitter for his genius than a glittering romance, he and he alone
maintained the Dantesque dignity of the Italian intellect in his
sculpture. Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so
gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate
his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject
of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his
immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli,
caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and
agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of
Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and
passionless imagination. By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost
limits, Michael Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble; and the
forced attitudes affected in his work had their value as significant of
spiritual struggle. His imitators showed none of their master's sublime
force, none of that _terribilita_ which made him unapproachable in social
intercourse and inimitable in art. They merely fancied that dignity and
beauty were to be achieved by placing figures in difficult postures,
exaggerated muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs of their models upon
sections of ellipses in uncomfortable attitudes, till the whole of their
work was writhen into uncouth lines. Buonarroti himself was not
responsible for these results. He wrought out his own ideal with the
firmness of a genius that obeys the law of its own nature, doing always
what it must. That the decadence of sculpture into truculent bravado was
independent of his direct influence, is further proved by the inefficiency
of his contemporaries.
Baccio Bandinelli and Bartolommeo Ammanati filled the squares of the
Italian cities with statues of Hercules and Satyrs, Neptune and
River-gods. We know not whether to select the vulgarity, the feebleness,
or the pretentiousness of these pseudo-classical colossi for condemnation.
They have nothing Greek about them but their names, their nakedness, and
their association with myths, the significance whereof was never really
felt by the sculptors. Some of Bandinelli's designs, it is true, are
vigorous; but they are mere drawings from undraped peasants, life studies
depicting the human animal. His "Hercules and Cacus," while it deserves
all the sarcasm hurled at it by Cellini, proves that Bandinelli could not
rise above the wrestling bout of a porter and a coal-heaver. Nor would it
be possible to invent a motive less in accordance with Greek taste than
the conceit of Ammanati's fountain at Castello, where Hercules by
squeezing the body of Antaeus makes the drinking water of a city spout
from a giant's mouth. Such pitiful misapplications of an art which is
designed to elevate the commonplace of human form, and to render permanent
the nobler qualities of physical existence, show how superficially and
wrongly the antique spirit had been apprehended.
Some years before his death Ammanati expressed in public his regret that
he had made so many giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting forms
of lust, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his fellow-countrymen, he
had sinned against the higher law revealed by Christianity. For a Greek
artist to have spoken thus would have been impossible. The Faun, the
Titan, and the Satyr had a meaning for him, which he sought to set forth
in accordance with the semi-religious, semi-poetical traditions of his
race; and when he was at work upon a myth of nature-forces, he well knew
that at the other end of the scale, separated by no spiritual barrier, but
removed to an almost infinite distance of refinement, Zeus, Phoebus, and
Pallas claimed his loftier artistic inspiration. Ammanati's confession, on
the contrary, betrays that schism between the conscience of Christianity
and the lusts let loose by ill-assimilated sympathy with antique
heathenism, which was a marked characteristic of the Renaissance. The
coarser passions, held in check by ecclesiastical discipline, dared to
emerge into the light of day under the supposed sanction of classical
examples. What the Visconti and the Borgias practised in their secret
chambers, the sculptors exposed in marble and the poets in verse. All
alike, however, were mistaken in supposing that antique precedent
sanctioned this efflorescence of immorality. No amount of Greek epigrams
by Strato and Meleager, nor all the Hermaphrodites and Priapi of Rome, had
power to annul the law of conduct established by the founders of
Christianity, and ratified by the higher instincts of the Middle Ages. Nor
again were artists justified before the bar of conscience in selecting the
baser elements of Paganism for imitation, instead of aiming at Greek
self-restraint and Roman strength of character. All this the men of the
Renaissance felt when they listened to the voice within them. Their work,
therefore, in so far as it pretended to be a reconstruction of the antique
was false. The sensuality it shared in common with many Greek and Roman
masterpieces, had ceased to be frank and in the true sense pagan. To shake
off Christianity, and to revert with an untroubled conscience to the
manners of a bygone age, was what they could not do.
The errors I have attempted to characterise did not, however, prevent the
better and more careful works of sculpture, executed in illustration of
classical mythology, from having a true value. The "Perseus" of Cellini
and some of Gian Bologna's statues belong to a class of aesthetic
productions which show how much that is both original and excellent may be
raised in the hotbed of culture.[117] They express a genuine moment of the
Renaissance with vigour, and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry
of Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano. The worst that can be said of them is
that their inspiration was factitious, and that their motives had been
handled better in the age of Greek sincerity.
Gian Bologna, born at Douai, but a Florentine by education, devoted
himself almost exclusively to mythological sculpture. That he was a
greater sculptor than his immediate predecessors will be affirmed by all
who have studied his bronze "Mercury," the "Venus of Petraja," and the
"Neptune" on the fountain of Bologna. Something of the genuine classic
feeling had passed into his nature. The "Mercury" is not a reminiscence of
any antique statue. It gives in bronze a faithful and spirited reading of
Virgil's lines, and is conceived with artistic purity not unworthy of a
good Greek period. The "Neptune" is something more than a muscular old
man; and, in its place, it forms one of the most striking ornaments of
Italy. It is worthy of remark that sculpture, in this stage, continued to
be decorative. Fountains are among the most successful monuments of the
late Renaissance. Even Montorsoli's fountain at Messina is in a high sense
picturesquely beautiful.
Casting a glance backward over the foregoing sketch of Italian sculpture,
it will be seen that three distinct stages were traversed in the evolution
of this art. The first may be called architectural, the second pictorial,
the third neo-pagan. Defined by their artistic purposes, the first
idealises Christian motives; the second is naturalistic; the third
attempts an idealisation inspired by revived paganism. As far as the
Renaissance is concerned, all three are moments in its history; though it
was only during the third that the influences of the classical revival
made themselves overwhelmingly felt. Niccola Pisano in the first stage
marked a fresh point of departure for his art by a return to Graeco-Roman
standards of the purest type then attainable, in combination with the
study of nature. Giovanni Pisano effected a fusion between his father's
manner and the Gothic style. The Pisan sculpture was wholly Christian; nor
did it attempt to free itself from the service of architecture. Giotto
opened the second stage by introducing new motives, employed by him with
paramount mastery in painting. Under his influence the sculptors inclined
to picturesque effects, and the direction thus given to sculpture lasted
through the fifteenth century. For the rest, the style of these masters
was distinguished by a fresh and charming naturalism and by rapid growth
in technical processes. While assimilating much of the classical spirit,
they remained on the whole Christian; and herein they were confirmed by
the subjects they were chiefly called upon to treat, in the decoration of
altars, pulpits, church facades, and tombs. The revived interest in
antique literature widened their sympathies and supplied their fancy with
new material; but there is no imitative formalism in their work. Its
beauty consists in a certain immature blending of motives chosen almost
indiscriminately from Christian and pagan mythology, vitalised by the
imagination of the artist, and presented with the originality of true
creative instinct. During the third stage the results of prolonged and
almost exclusive attention to the classics, on the part of the Italians as
a people, make themselves manifest. Collections of antiquities and
libraries had been formed in the fifteenth century; the literary energies
of the nation were devoted to the interpretation of Greek and Latin texts,
and the manners of society affected paganism. At the same time a worldly
Church and a corrupt hierarchy had done their utmost to enfeeble the
spirit of Christianity. That art should prove itself sensitive to this
phase of intellectual and social life was natural. Religious subjects were
now treated by the sculptors with superficial formalism and cynical
indifference, while all their ingenuity was bestowed upon providing pagan
myths with new forms. How far they succeeded has been already made the
matter of inquiry. The most serious condemnation of art in this third
period is that it halted between two opinions, that it could not be
sincere. But this double-mindedness, as I have tried to show, was
necessary; and therefore to lament over it is weak. What the Renaissance
achieved for the modern world was the liberation of the reason, the power
of starting on a new career of progress. The false direction given to the
art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual revival may be
deplored; and still more deplorable is the corresponding sensual
debasement of the race who won for us the possibility of freedom. But the
life of humanity is long and vigorous, and the philosopher of history
knows well that the sum total of accomplishment at any time must be
diminished by an unavoidable discount. The Renaissance, like a man of
genius, had the defects of its qualities.
FOOTNOTES:
[56] _Sketches of the History of Christian Art_, vol. ii. p. 102.
[57] Since I wrote the paragraph above, I have chanced to read Mr.
Buskin's eloquent tirade against the modern sceptical school of critics
in his "Mornings in Florence," _The Vaulted Book_, pp. 105, 106. With the
spirit of it I thoroughly agree; feeling that, in the absence of solid
evidence to the contrary, I would always rather accept sixteenth-century
Italian tradition with Vasari, than reject it with German or English
speculators of to-day. This does not mean that I wish to swear by Vasari,
when he can be proved to have been wrong, but that I regard the present
tendency to mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the
highest sense uncritical.
[58] See Appendix I., on the Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello.
[59] The data is extremely doubtful. Were we to trust internal
evidence--the evidence of style and handling--we should be inclined to
name this not the earliest but the latest and ripest of Pisano's works.
It may be suggested in passing that the form of the lunette was
favourable to the composition by forcing a gradation in the figures from
the centre to either side. There is an engraving of this bas-relief in
Ottley's _Italian School of Design._
[60] Rheims Cathedral, for example, was begun in 1211. Upon its western
portals is the loveliest of Northern Gothic sculpture.
[61] Antonio Filarete was commissioned, soon after 1431, by Eugenius IV.,
to make the great gates of S. Peter's. The decorative framework
represents a multitude of living creatures--snails, snakes, lizards,
mice, butterflies, and birds--half hidden in foliage, together with the
best known among Greek myths, the Rape of Proserpine, Diana and Actaeon,
Europa and the Bull, the Labours of Hercules, &c. Such fables as the Fox
and the Stork, the Fox and the Crow, and old stories like that of the
death of AEschylus, are included in this medley. The monument of Paul III.
is placed in the choir of S. Peter's. Giulia Bella was the mistress of
Alexander VI., and a sister of the Farnese, who owed his cardinal's hat
to her influence. To represent her as an allegory of Truth upon her
brother's tomb might well pass for a grim satire. The Prudence opposite
is said to be a portrait of the Pope's mother, Giovanna Gaetani. She
resembles nothing more than a duenna of the type of Martha in Goethe's
Faust. Here, again, the allegory would point a scathing sarcasm, if we
did not remember the naivete of the Renaissance.
[62] See above, Chapter II, Italian want of feeling for Gothic.
[63] Having said so much about this pulpit of S. Andrea, I am sorry that
I cannot refer the English reader to any accessible representation of it.
For its sake alone, if for no other purpose, Pistoja is well worth a
visit.
[64] It was long believed that he died of eating poisoned figs.
[65] See above, Footnote 16, for the original conception of this motive
at Orvieto.
[66] See _Il Duomo di Orvieto, descritto ed illustrato per Lodovico
Luzi_, pp. 330-339.
[67] See Luzi, pp. 317-328, and the first extant commission given in 1310
to Maitani, which follows, pp. 328-330.
[68] The whole series has been admirably engraved under the
superintendence of Ludwig Gruener. Special attention may be directed to
the groups of angels attendant on the Creator in His last day's work; to
the "Adoration of the Shepherds," distinguished by tender and idyllic
grace: and to the "Adoration of the Magi," marked no less by majesty. The
dead breaking open the lids of their sarcophagi and rising to judgment
are justly famous for spirited action.
[69] In Gothic sculpture of an early date the Bible narrative is
literally represented. God draws Eve from the open side of sleeping Adam.
On the facade of Orvieto this motive is less altered than refined. The
wound in Adam's side is visible, but Eve is coming from behind his
sleeping body in obedience to the beckoning hand of her Creator. Ghiberti
in the bronze gate of the Florentine Baptistery still further develops
the poetic beauty of the motive. Angels lift Eve in the air above Adam,
in whose side there is now no open wound, and sustain her face to face
with God, who calls her into life. Della Quercia, on the facade of S.
Petronio, confines himself to the creative act, expressed by the raised
hand of the Maker, and the answering attitude of Eve; and this conception
receives final treatment from Michael Angelo in the frescoes of the
Sistine.
[70] _Le Tre Porte del Battistero di San Giovanni di Firenze, incise ed
illustrate_ (Firenze, 1821), contains outlines of all Andrea Pisano's and
Ghiberti's work.
[71] See above, Chapter I, Greek and Christian Ideals.
[72] See above, Chapter I, Greek and Christian Ideals.
[73] What Giotto himself was, as a designer for sculpture, is shown in
the little reliefs upon the basement of his campanile.
[74] What has previously been noted in the chapter upon architecture
deserves repetition here--that the Italian style of building gave more
scope to independent sculpture, owing to its preference for flat walls,
and its rejection of multiplied niches, canopies, and so forth, than the
Northern Gothic. Thus, however subordinated to architecture, sculpture in
Italy still had more scope for self-assertion than in Germany or France.
[75] See Perkins, _Italian Sculptors_, p. 109, for a description of the
Arca di S. Agostino, which he assigns to Matteo and Bonino da Campione.
This shrine, now in the Duomo, was made for the sacristy of S. Pietro in
Cielo d'Oro, where it stood until the year 1832.
[76] Bonino da Campione, the Milanese, who may have had a hand in the
Arca di S. Agostino, carved the tomb of Can Signorio. That of Mastino II.
was executed by another Milanese, Perino.
[77] See Trucchi, _Poesie Italiane inedite_, vol. ii.
[78] See the Illustrated work, _Il Tabernacolo della Madonna d'Or
sammichele_, Firenze, 1851.
[79] The weighty chapter in Alberti's _Treatise on Painting_, lib. iii.
cap. 5, might be used to support this paragraph.
[80] Quercia, born 1374; Ghiberti, 1378; Brunelleschi, 1379; Donatello,
1386.
[81] They are engraved in the work cited above, _Le Tre Porte, seconda
Porta_, Tavole i. ii.
[82] The bas-reliefs of S. Petronio were executed between 1425 and 1435.
Those of the font in the chapel of S. John (not the lower church of S.
John), at Siena, are ascribed to Quercia, and are in his manner; but when
they were finished I do not know. They set forth six subjects from the
story of Adam and Eve, with a compartment devoted to Hercules killing the
Centaur Nessus, and another to Samson or Hercules and the Lion. The
choice of subjects, affording scope for treatment of the nude, is
characteristic; so is the energy of handling, though rude in detail. It
may be worth while to notice here a similar series of reliefs upon the
facade of the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, representing scenes from the
story of Adam in conjunction with the labours of Hercules.
[83] Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, vol. ii. chap, vii., Repose.
[84] See Flaxman's _Lectures on Sculpture_, p. 310.
[85] This criticism of the "Gate of Paradise" sounds even to the writer
of it profane, and demands a palinode. Who, indeed, can affirm that he
would wish the floating figure of Eve, or the three angels at Abraham's
tent-door, other than they are?
[86] See the _Commentaries of Ghiberti_, printed in vol. i. of Vasari
(Lemonnier, 1846).
[87] The patera is at South Kensington, the frieze at Florence.
[88] As also the wooden Baptist in the Frari at Venice.
[89] There is another "David," by Donatello, in marble; also in the
Bargello, scarcely less stiff and ugly than the "Baptist."
[90] The cast was published by the Arundel Society. The original belongs
to Lord Elcho.
[91] It has been suggested, with good show of reason, that Mantegna was
largely indebted to these bas-reliefs for his lofty style.
[92] This omits the statues of the Scaligers: but no mediaeval work aimed
at equal animation. The antique bronze horses at Venice and the statue of
Marcus Aurelius must have been in Donatello's mind.
[93] The sculptor of a beautiful tomb erected for the Countess of
Montorio and her infant daughter in the church of S. Bernardino at Aquila
was probably Andrea dell' Aquila, a pupil of Donatello. See Perkins's
_Italian Sculptors_, pp. 46, 47.
[94] _Istoria della Vita e Fatti dell' eccellentissimo Capitano di guerra
Bartolommeo Colleoni_, scritta per Pietro Spino. Republished, 1859.
[95] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 310, note 2.
[96] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap, xvi., may be consulted as to
the several claims of the two brothers.
[97] His bas-reliefs on Giotto's campanile of Grammar, Astronomy,
Geometry, Plato, Aristotle, &c., are anterior to 1445; and even about
this date there is uncertainty, some authorities fixing it at 1435.
[98] _Purg._ x. 37, and xi. 68.
[99] Among the very best works of the later Robbian school may be cited
the frieze upon the facade of the Ospedale del Ceppo at Pistoja,
representing in varied colour, and with graceful vivacity, the Seven Acts
of Mercy. Date about 1525.
[100] He calls himself Agostinus Florentine Lapicida on his facade of the
Oratory of S. Bernardino.
[101] See especially a roundel in the Bargello, and the altar-piece in
the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Those who wish to understand
Rossellino should study him in the latter place.
[102] In the church of Samminiato, near Florence.
[103] _Vite di Uomini Illustri_, pp. 152-157.
[104] These tombs in the Badia were erected for Count Ugo, Governor of
Tuscany under Otho II., and for Messer Bernardo Giugni. Mino also made
the tomb for Pope Paul II., parts of which are preserved in the Grotte of
S. Peter's. At Rome he carved a tabernacle for S. Maria in Trastevere,
and at Volterra a ciborium for the Baptistery--one of his most
sympathetic productions. The altars in the Baglioni Chapel of S. Pietro
Cassinense at Perugia, in S. Ambrogio at Florence, and in the cathedral
of Fiesole, and the pulpit in the Duomo at Prato, may be mentioned among
his best works.
[105] Besides Civitali's altar of S. Regulus, and the tomb of Pietro da
Noceto already mentioned, Bernardo Rossellino's monument to Lionardo
Bruni, and Desiderio's monument to Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce at
Florence, may be cited as eminent examples of Tuscan sepulchres.
[106] The wooden statue of the Magdalen in Santa Trinita at Florence
shows Desiderio's approximation to the style of his master. She is a
careworn and ascetic saint, with the pathetic traces of great beauty in
her emaciated face.
[107] This bust is in the Palazzo Strozzi at Florence.
[108] So Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, described Desiderio da
Settignano.
[109] The following story is told about Benedetto's youth. He made two
large inlaid chests or _cassoni_, adorned with all the skill of a worker
in tarsia, or wood-mosaic, and carried these with him to King Matthias
Corvinus, of Hungary. Part of his journey was performed by sea. On
arriving and unpacking his chests, he found that the sea-damp had unglued
the fragile wood-mosaic, and all his work was spoiled. This determined
him to practise the more permanent art of sculpture. See Perkins, vol. i.
p. 228.
[110] For further description of the sculpture at Rimini, I may refer to
my _Sketches in Italy and Greece_, pp. 250-252. For the student of
Italian art, who has no opportunity of visiting Rimini, it is greatly to
be regretted that these reliefs have never yet even in photography been
reproduced. The palace of Duke Frederick at Urbino was designed by
Luziano, a Dalmatian architect, and continued by Baccio Pontelli, a
Florentine. The reliefs of dancing Cupids, white on blue ground, with
wings and hair gilt, and the children holding pots of roses and
gilly-flowers, in one of its great rooms, may be selected for special
mention. Ambrogio or Ambrogino da Milano, none of whose handiwork is
found in his native district, and who may therefore be supposed to have
learned and practised his art elsewhere, was the sculptor of these truly
genial reliefs.
[111] See, for example, the remarkable bas-relief of the Doge Lionardo
Loredano engraved by Perkins, _Italian Sculptors_, p. 201.
[112] Another Modenese, Antonio Begarelli, born in 1479, developed this
art of the _plasticatore_, with quite as much pictorial impressiveness,
and in a style of stricter science, than his predecessor Il Modanino. His
masterpieces are the "Deposition from the Cross" in S. Francesco, and the
"Pieta" in S. Pietro, of his native city.
[113] The name of this great master is variously written--Giovanni
Antonio Amadeo, or Omodeo, or degli Amadei, or de' Madeo, or a
Madeo--pointing possibly to the town Madeo as his native place. Through a
long life he worked upon the fabric of the Milanese Duomo, the Certosa of
Pavia, and the Chapel of Colleoni at Bergamo. To him we owe the general
design of the facade of the Certosa and the cupola of the Duomo of Milan.
For the details of his work and an estimate of his capacity, see Perkins,
_Italian Sculptors_, pp. 127-137.
[114] This statue was originally intended for a chapel built and endowed
by Colleoni at Basella, near Bergamo. When he determined to erect his
chapel in S. Maria Maggiore at Bergamo, he entrusted the execution of
this new work to Amadeo, and the monument of Medea was subsequently
placed there.
[115] See above, p. 113. I have spelt the name _Sansovino_, when applied
to Jacopo Tatti, in accordance with time-honoured usage.
[116] To multiply instances is tedious; but notice in this connection the
Hermaphroditic statue of S. Sebastian at Orvieto, near the western door.
It is a fair work of Lo Scalza.
[117] This brief allusion to Cellini must suffice for the moment, as I
intend to treat of him in a separate chapter.
CHAPTER IV
PAINTING
Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy--Florence and Venice
--Classification by Schools--Stages in the Evolution of Painting--Cimabue
--The Rucellai Madonna--Giotto--His widespread Activity--The Scope of his
Art--Vitality--Composition--Colour--Naturalism--Healthiness--Frescoes at
Assisi and Padua--Legend of S. Francis--The Giotteschi--Pictures of the
Last Judgment--Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel--Ambrogio Lorenzetti at
Pisa--Dogmatic Theology--Cappella degli Spagnuoli--Traini's "Triumph,
of S. Thomas Aquinas"--Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco--Sala della
Pace at Siena--Religious Art in Siena and Perugia--The Relation of the
Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.
It is the duty of the historian of painting to trace the beginnings of art
in each of the Italian communities, to differentiate their local styles,
and to explain their mutual connections. For the present generation this
work is being done with all-sufficient thoroughness and accuracy.[118] The
historian of culture, on the other hand, for whom the arts form one
important branch of intellectual activity, may dispense with these
detailed inquiries, and may endeavour to seize the more general outlines
of the subject. He need not weigh in balances the claims of rival cities
to priority, nor hamper his review of national progress by discussing the
special merits of the several schools. Still there are certain broad facts
about the distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is necessary to
bear in mind. However much we may desire to treat of painting as a phase
of national and not of merely local life, the fundamental difficulty of
Italian history, its complexity and variety, owing to the subdivisions of
the nation into divers states, must here as elsewhere be acknowledged. To
deny that each of the Italian centres had its own strong personality in
art--that painting, as practised in Genoa or Naples, differed from the
painting of Ferrara or Urbino--would be to contradict a law that has been
over and over again insisted upon already in these volumes.
The broad outlines of the subject can be briefly stated. Surveying the map
of Italy, we find that we may eliminate from our consideration the
north-western and the southern provinces. Not from Piedmont nor from
Liguria, not from Rome nor from the extensive kingdom of Naples, does
Italian painting take its origin, or at any period derive important
contributions.[119] Lombardy, with the exception of Venice, is
comparatively barren of originative elements.[120] To Tuscany, to Umbria,
and to Venice, roughly speaking, are due the really creative forces of
Italian painting; and these three districts were marked by strong
peculiarities. In art, as in politics, Florence and Venice exhibit
distinct types of character.[121] The Florentines developed fresco, and
devoted their genius to the expression of thought by scientific design.
The Venetians perfected oil-painting, and set forth the glory of the world
as it appeals to the imagination and the senses. The art of Florence may
seem to some judges to savour over-much of intellectual dryness; the art
of Venice, in the apprehension of another class of critics, offers
something over-much of material richness. More allied to the Tuscan than
to the Venetian spirit, the Umbrian masters produced a style of genuine
originality. The cities of the Central Apennines owed their specific
quality of religious fervour to the influences emanating from Assisi, the
head-quarters of the _cultus_ of S. Francis. This pietism, nowhere else so
paramount, except for a short period in Siena, constitutes the
individuality of Umbria.
With regard to the rest of Italy, the old custom of speaking about schools
and places, instead of signalising great masters, has led to
misconception, by making it appear that local circumstances were more
important than the facts justify. We do not find elsewhere what we find in
Tuscany, in Umbria, and in Venice--a definite quality, native to the
district, shared through many generations by all its painters, and
culminating in a few men of commanding genius. When, for instance, we
speak of the School of Milan, what we mean is the continuation through
Lionardo da Vinci and his pupils of the Florentine tradition, as modified
by him and introduced into the Lombard capital. That a special style was
developed by Luini, Ferrari, and other artists of the Milanese duchy, so
that their manner differs essentially from that of Parma and Cremona, does
not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin. The name of
Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together
with their pupils. The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during
the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect.
Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but
scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to
Rome, where they found a nobler sphere for the exercise of their faculties
than elsewhere. But Rome, while she lent her imperial quality of grandeur
to the genius of her aliens, was in no sense originative. Rome produced no
first-rate master from her own children, if we except Giulio Romano. The
title of originality is due rather to Padua, the birthplace of Mantegna,
or to Parma, the city of Correggio, whose works display independence of
either Florentine or Venetian traditions. Yet these great masters were
isolated, neither expressing in any definite form the character of their
districts, nor founding a succession of local artists. Their influence was
incontestably great, but widely diffused. Bologna and Ferrara, Brescia and
Bergamo, Cremona and Verona, have excellent painters; and it is not
difficult to show that in each of these cities art assumed specific
characters. Yet the interest of the schools in these towns is due mainly
to the varied influences brought to bear upon them from Venice, Umbria,
and Milan. In other words they are affiliated, each according to its
geographical position, to the chief originative centres.
What I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs is not meant for a
polemic against the time-honoured division of Italian painters into local
schools, but for a justification of my own proposed method of treatment.
Having undertaken to deal with painting as the paramount art-product of
the Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the leading
characteristics of aesthetic culture in Italy, rather than to dwell upon
its specific differences. The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a
separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to the general history of
the art as developed in Tuscany and propagated by Tuscan influences.[122]
In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages
in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the
history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and
stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders,
painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediaeval
Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study
of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to
realism. It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of
expression. At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of
secularisation was hastened by the influences of the classical revival,
renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for
science. The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation
of actual things: good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture,
occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual
motives. On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments
of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic
legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this
abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a
plain decline from good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual
feeling in a painter's style the test of his degree of excellence; nor
can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the
fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian arts. The
truth is, that in the Church, in politics, and in society, the fifteenth
century witnessed a sensible decrease of religious fervour, and a very
considerable corruption of morality. Painting felt this change; and the
secularisation, which was inevitable, passed onward into paganism. Yet the
art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the
sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has
known--neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full
accomplished art and science, human. After Italy, in the course of that
century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting
suffered from the general depression of the national genius. The great
luminaries were extinguished one by one, till none were left but Michael
Angelo in Rome, and Tintoret in Venice. The subsequent history of Italian
painting is occupied with its revival under the influences of the
counter-Reformation, when a new religious sentiment, emasculated and
ecstatic, was expressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel
sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters.
I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue's picture, visited by Charles
of Anjou, and borne in triumph through the streets with trumpeters,
beneath a shower of garlands, to S. Maria Novella.[123] Yet this was the
birthday festival of nothing less than what the world now values as
Italian painting. In this public act of joy the people of Florence
recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from
the dead. If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful
that a whole community should thus have hailed the presence in their midst
of a new spirit of power and beauty. It proves the widespread sensibility
of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sympathy which,
emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and brace the artist
for his work.[124]
In a dark transept of S. Maria Novella, raised by steps above the level of
the church, still hangs this famous "Madonna" of the Rucellai--not far,
perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and maidens met that
Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, again, from
where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with
Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.[125] We who can
call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon--we who have
studied the rise and decadence of painting throughout Italy from this
beginning even to the last work of the latest Bolognese--may do well to
visit it with reverence, and to ponder on the race of mighty masters whose
lineage here takes its origin.
Cimabue did not free his style from what are called Byzantine or
Romanesque mannerisms. To unpractised eyes his saints and angels, with
their stiff draperies and angular attitudes, though they exhibit
stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as the grim mosaics and
gaunt frescoes of his predecessors. It is only after careful comparison
that we discover, in this picture of the Rucellai for example, a
distinctly fresh endeavour to express emotion and to depict life. The
outstretched arms of the infant Christ have been copied from nature, not
merely borrowed from tradition. The six kneeling angels display variety of
attitude suited to several shades of devout affection and adoring service.
The head of the Madonna, heavy as it is and conventional in type, still
strives to represent maternal affection mingled with an almost melancholy
reverence. Prolonging our study, we are led to ask whether the painter
might not have painted more freely had he chosen--whether, in fact, he was
not bound down to the antique mode of presentation consecrated by devout
tradition. This question occurs with even greater force before the
wall-paintings ascribed to Cimabue in the church of S. Francis at Assisi.
It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano in 1276, just at the
date of Niccola Pisano's death, to carry painting in his lifetime even
further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art. Cimabue, so
runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among
the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art
the outline of a sheep upon a stone.[126] The master recognised his
talent, and took him from his father's cottage to the Florentine
_bottega_, much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. Stephen's at
Vienna. Gifted with a large and comprehensive intellect, capable of
sustained labour, and devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good craftsman
to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work
that taught succeeding centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in
the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the
life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples,
where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost
every city. The "Passion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis"
were painted by him at Assisi. S. Peter's at Borne still shows his mosaic
of the "Ship of the Church." Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower,
that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves two chapels of S.
Croce, illuminated by him with paintings from the stories of S. Francis
and S. John. In the chapel of the Podesta he drew the portraits of Dante,
Brunetto Latini, and Charles of Valois. And these are but a tithe of his
productions. Nothing, indeed, in the history of art is more remarkable
than the fertility of this originative genius, no less industrious in
labour than fruitful of results for men who followed him. The sound common
sense, the genial temper, and the humour of the man, as we learn to know
him in tales made current by Vasari and the novelists, help to explain how
he achieved so much, with energy so untiring and with excellence so even.
It is no exaggeration to say that Giotto and his scholars, within the
space of little more than half a century, painted out upon the walls of
the churches and public palaces of Italy every great conception of the
Middle Ages. And this they achieved without ascetic formalism,
energetically, but always reverently, aiming at expressing life and
dramatising Scripture history. The tale told about Giotto's first essay in
drawing might be chosen as a parable: he was not found beneath a church
roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the
portrait of the living thing committed to his care.
What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before all things else, vitality.
His Madonnas are no longer symbols of a certain phase of pious awe, but
pictures of maternal love. The Bride of God suckles her divine infant with
a smile, watches him playing with a bird, or stretches out her arms to
take him when he turns crying from the hands of the circumcising priest.
By choosing incidents like these from real home-life, Giotto, through his
painting, humanised the mysteries of faith, and brought them close to
common feeling. Nor was the change less in his method than his motives.
Before his day painting had been without composition, without charm of
colour, without suggestion of movement or the play of living energy. He
first knew how to distribute figures in the given space with perfect
balance, and how to mass them together in animated groups agreeable to the
eye. He caught varied and transient shades of emotion, and expressed them
by the posture of the body and the play of feature. The hues of morning
and of evening served him. Of all painters he was most successful in
preserving the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered colours. His
power of telling a story by gesture and action is unique in its peculiar
simplicity. There are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures. The
whole force of the artist has been concentrated on rendering the image of
the life conceived by him. Relying on his knowledge of human nature, and
seeking only to make his subject intelligible, no painter is more
unaffectedly pathetic, more unconsciously majestic. While under the
influence of his genius, we are sincerely glad that the requisite science
for clever imitation of landscape and architectural backgrounds was not
forthcoming in his age. Art had to go through a toilsome period of
geometrical and anatomical pedantry, before it could venture, in the
frescoes of Michael Angelo and Raphael, to return with greater wealth of
knowledge on a higher level to the divine simplicity of its childhood in
Giotto.
In the drawing of the figure Giotto was surpassed by many meaner artists
of the fifteenth century. Nor had he that quality of genius which selects
a high type of beauty, and is scrupulous to shun the commonplace. The
faces of even his most sacred personages are often almost vulgar. In his
choice of models for saints and apostles we already trace the Florentine
instinct for contemporary portraiture. Yet, though his knowledge of
anatomy was defective, and his taste was realistic, Giotto solved the
great problem of figurative art far better than more learned and
fastidious painters. He never failed to make it manifest that what he
meant to represent was living. Even to the non-existent he gave the
semblance of reality. We cannot help believing in his angels leaning
waist-deep from the blue sky, wringing their hands in agony above the
Cross, pacing like deacons behind Christ when He washes the feet of His
disciples, or sitting watchful and serene upon the empty sepulchre. He
was, moreover, essentially a fresco-painter, working with rapid decision
on a large scale, aiming at broad effects, and willing to sacrifice
subtlety to clearness of expression. The health of his whole nature and
his robust good sense are everywhere apparent in his solid, concrete,
human work of art. There is no trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety,
nothing morbid or hysterical, in his imagination. Imbuing whatever he
handled with the force and freshness of actual existence, Giotto
approached the deep things of the Christian faith and the legend of S.
Francis in the spirit of a man bent simply on realising the objects of his
belief as facts. His allegories of "Poverty," "Chastity," and "Obedience,"
at Assisi, are as beautiful and powerfully felt as they are carefully
constructed. Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but are
plainly painted "for the poor laity of love to read." The artist poet who
coloured the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet
and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known
_canzone_ that he was free from monastic Quixotism, and took a practical
view of the value of worldly wealth.[127] His homely humour saved him from
the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the
Franciscan revival. By the same firm grasp upon reality he created more
than mere abstractions in his _chiaroscuro_ figures of the virtues and
vices at Padua. Fortitude and Justice, Faith and Envy, are gifted by him
with a real corporeal existence. They seem fit to play their parts with
other concrete personalities upon the stage of this world's history.
Giotto in truth possessed a share of that power which belonged to the
Greek sculptors. He embodies myths in physical forms, adequate to their
intellectual meaning. This was in part the secret of the influence he
exercised over the sculptors of the second period;[128] and had the
conditions of the age been favourable to such development, some of the
allegorical types created by him might have passed into the Pantheon of
popular worship as deities incarnate.
The birth of Italian painting is closely connected with the religious life
of the Italians. The building of the church of S. Francis at Assisi gave
it the first great impulse; and to the piety aroused by S. Francis
throughout Italy, but mostly in the valleys of the Apennines, it owed its
animating spirit in the fourteenth century. The church of Assisi is
double. One structure of nave, and choir, and transept, is imposed upon
another; and the walls of both, from floor to coping-stone, are covered
with fresco-painted pictures taking here the place occupied by mosaic in
such churches as the cathedral of Monreale, or by coloured glass in the
northern cathedrals of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date from
years before the birth of Giotto. Giunta the Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and
Cimabue, are supposed to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly
struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art. In their
school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new
life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of
Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood on the virtues of S. Francis
and his vow, he learned the secret of giving the semblance of flesh and
blood reality to Christian thought. His achievement was nothing less than
this. The Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, the moral
discipline of man, the Judgment, and the final state of bliss or
misery--all these he quickened into beautiful and breathing forms. Those
were noble days, when the painter had literally acres of walls given him
to cover; when the whole belief of Christendom, grasped by his own faith,
and firmly rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet unimpaired
by alien emanations from the world of classic culture, had to be set forth
for the first time in art. His work was then a Bible, a compendium of
grave divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for
the spiritual and the civil life of man. He spoke to men who could not
read, for whom there were no printed pages, but whose heart received his
teaching through the eye. Thus painting was not then what it is now, a
decoration of existence, but a potent and efficient agent in the education
of the race. Such opportunities do not occur twice in the same age. Once
in Greece for the pagan world; once in Italy for the modern world;--that
must suffice for the education of the human race.
Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only founded a school in his native city,
but spread his manner far and wide over Italy, so that the first period of
the history of painting is the Giottesque. The Gaddi of Florence,
Giottino, Puccio Capanna, the Lorenzetti of Siena, Spinello of Arezzo,
Andrea Orcagna, Domenico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the Pisan
Campo Santo, were either formed or influenced by him. To give an account
of the frescoes of these painters would be to describe how the religious,
social, and philosophical conceptions of the fourteenth century found
complete expression in form and colour. By means of allegory and pictured
scene they drew the portrait of the Middle Age in Italy, performing
jointly and in combination with the followers of Niccola Pisano what
Dante had done singly by his poetry.
It has often been remarked that the drama of the life beyond this
world--its prologue in the courts of death, the tragedy of judgment, and
the final state of bliss or misery prepared for souls--preoccupied the
mind of the Italians at the close of the Middle Ages. Every city had its
pictorial representation of the "Dies Irae;" and within this framework the
artist was free to set forth his philosophy of human nature, adding such
touches of satire or admonition as suited his own temper or the
circumstances of the place for which he worked. Dante's poem has
immortalised this moment of Italian consciousness, when the belief in
another world was used to intensify the emotions of this life--when the
inscrutable darkness toward which men travel became for them a black and
polished mirror reflecting with terrible luminousness the events of the
present and the past. So familiar had the Italians become with the theme
of death artistically treated, that they did not shrink from acted
pageants of the tragedy of Hell. Giovanni Villani tells us that in 1304
the companies and clubs of pleasure, formed for making festival throughout
the town of Florence on the 1st of May, contended with each other for the
prize of novelty and rarity in sports provided for the people. "Among the
rest, the Borgo S. Friano had it cried about the streets, that whoso
wished for news from the other world, should find himself on Mayday on the
bridge Carraja or the neighbouring banks of Arno. And in Arno they
contrived stages upon boats and various small craft, and made the
semblance and figure of Hell there with flames and other pains and
torments, with men dressed as demons horrible to see; and others had the
shape of naked souls; and these they gave unto those divers tortures with
exceeding great crying and groaning and confusion, the which seemed
hateful and appalling unto eyes and ears. The novelty of the sport drew
many citizens, and the bridge Carraja, then of wood, was so crowded that
it brake in several places and fell with the folk upon it, whereby were
many killed and drowned, and many were disabled; and as the crier had
proclaimed, so now in death went much folk to learn news of the other
world."
Such being the temper of the people, we find that some of the greatest
works of art in this age were paintings of Death and Hell, Heaven and
Judgment. Orcagna, in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella, set forth
these scenes with a wonderful blending of beauty and grotesque invention.
In the treatment of the Inferno he strove to delineate the whole geography
of Dante's first _cantica_, tracing the successive circles and introducing
the various episodes commemorated by the poet. Interesting as this work
may be for the illustration of the "Divine Comedy" as understood by
Dante's immediate successors, we turn from it with a sense of relief to
admire the saints and angels ranged in goodly row, "each burning upward to
his point of bliss" whereby the painter has depicted Paradise. Early
Italian art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the white-robed
Madonna kneeling at the judgment seat of Christ.[129]
It will be felt by every genuine student of art that if Orcagna painted
these frescoes in S. Maria Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could
not have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa attributed
to him by Vasari. To what artists or artist we owe those three grave and
awful panels, may still be regarded an open question.[130] At the end of
the southern wall of the cemetery, exposed to a cold and equal north light
from the cloister windows, these great compositions, after the lapse of
five centuries, bring us face to face with the most earnest thoughts of
mediaeval Christianity. Their main purpose seems to be to illustrate the
advantage of the ascetic over the secular mode of life, and to school men
into living with the fear of death before their eyes. The first displays
the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temptations, firm
endurance, and beatific visions of the anchorites in the Thebaid. The
second is devoted to the triumph of Death over the pomp, strength, wealth,
and beauty of the world. The third reveals a grimly realistic and yet
awfully imaginative vision of judgment, such as it has rarely been granted
to a painter to conceive. Thus to the awakening soul of the Italians, on
the threshold of the modern era, with the sonnets of Petrarch and the
stories of Boccaccio sounding in their memories, this terrible master
presented the three saddest phantoms of the Middle Ages--the spectre of
death omnipotent, the solitude of the desert as the only refuge from a
sinful and doomed world, the dread of Divine justice inexorable and
inevitable. In those piles of the promiscuous and abandoned dead, those
fiends and angels poised in mid-air struggling for souls, those blind and
mutilated beggars vainly besieging Death with prayers and imprecations for
deliverance, while she descends in her robe of woven wire to mow down with
her scythe the knights and ladies in their garden of delight; again in
those horses snuffing at the open graves, those countesses and princes
face to face with skeletons, those serpents coiling round the flesh of
what was once fair youth or maid, those multitudes of guilty men and women
trembling beneath the trump of the archangel--tearing their cheeks, their
hair, their breasts in agony, because they see Hell through the
prison-bars, and hear the raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon
their wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands; in all this terrific
amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, vividly presented, full of
coarse dramatic power, and intensified by faith in their material reality,
the Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands that painted here,
summed up the nightmares of the Middle Age and bequeathed an ever
memorable picture of its desolate preoccupations to the rising world. They
have called to their aid poetry, and history, and legend. Boccaccio
supplies them with the garden scene of youths and damsels dancing among
roses, while the plague is at their gates, and death is in the air above.
From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death
herself[131]. Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait of the
Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio
Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age. The
prisons of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast adrift with
maiming that makes life unendurable but does not hasten death.[132] The
lazar houses and the charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly
decay. Thus the whole work is not merely "an hieroglyphical and shadowed
lesson" of ascetic philosophy; it is also a realisation of mediaeval life
in its cruellest intensity and most uncompromising truth. For mere beauty
these painters had but little regard.[133] Their distribution of the
subjects chosen for treatment on each panel shows, indeed, a keen sense
for the value of dramatic contrast and a masterly power of varying while
combining the composition. Their chief aim, however, is to produce the
utmost realism of effect, to translate the poignancy of passion, the dread
certainty of doom, into forms of unmistakable fidelity. Therefore they do
not shrink from prosaic and revolting details. The knight who has to hold
his nose above the open grave, the lady who presses her cheek against her
hand with a spasm of distress, the horse who pricks his ears and snorts
with open nostrils, the grooms who start aside like savage creatures, all
suggest the loathsomeness of death, its physical repulsiveness. In the
"Last Judgment" the same kind of dramatic force is used to heighten a
sublime conception. The crouching attitude and the shrouded face of the
Archangel Raphael, whose eyes alone are visible above the hand that he has
thrust forth from his cloak to hide the grief he feels, prove more
emphatically than any less realistic motive could have done, how
terrible, even for the cherubic beings to whose guardianship the human
race has been assigned, will be the trumpet of the wrath of God.[134]
Studying these frescoes, we cannot but reflect what nerves, what brains,
what hearts encased in triple brass the men who thought and felt thus must
have possessed. They make us comprehend not merely the stern and savage
temper of the Middle Ages, but the intense and fiery ebullition of the
Renaissance, into which, as by a sudden liberation, so much imprisoned
pent-up force was driven.
A different but scarcely less important phase of mediaeval thought is
imaged in the frescoes of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli in S. Maria
Novella.[135] Dogmatic theology is here in the ascendant. While S. Francis
bequeathed a legend of singular suavity and beauty, overflowing with the
milk of charity and mildness, to the Church, S. Dominic assumed the
attitude of the saint militant and orthodox. Dante's words about him--
L'amoroso drudo[136]
Della fede Cristiana, il santo atleta,
Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nemici crudo,
omit nothing that is needed to characterise the impression produced upon
the Christian world by this remorseless foe of heresy, this champion of
the faith who dealt in butcheries and burnings. S. Francis taught love; S.
Dominic taught wrath: and both, perhaps, were needed for the safety of the
mediaeval Church--the one by resuscitating the spirit of the Gospels, the
other by resisting the intrusion of alien ideals ere the time for their
triumph had arrived. What the painters of these frescoes undertook to
delineate for the Dominicans of Florence, was the fabric of society
sustained and held together by the action of inquisitors and doctors
issued from their order. The Pope with his Cardinals, the Emperor with his
Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by
the mediaeval jurists and the school of Dante. Seated on thrones, they are
ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S.
Maria del Fiore. At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican
order--_Domini canes_, according to the monkish pun--are hunting heretical
wolves. Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas.
Beneath the footstool of this "dumb ox of Sicily," as he was called,
grovel the heresiarchs--Arius, Sabellius, Averroes. At again a lower
level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven
sacred and seven profane sciences, each with its chief representative.
Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology
and the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lombard, Geometry and
Euclid, Arithmetic and Abraham, are grouped together. It will be seen
that the whole learning of the Middle Age--its philosophy as well as its
divinity--is here combined as in a figured abstract, for the wise to
comment on and for the simple to peruse. None can avoid drawing the lesson
that knowledge exists for the service of the Church, and that the Church,
while she instructs society, will claim complete obedience to her decrees.
The _ipse dixit_ of the Dominican author of the "Summa" is law.
Such frescoes, by no means uncommon in Dominican cloisters, still retain
great interest for the student of scholastic thought. In the church of S.
Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was afterwards compelled to
sign his famous retractation, Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S.
Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi's, but expressed with the
freedom of the middle Renaissance. Nor should we neglect to notice the
remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa. Here the doctor of
Aquino is represented in an aureole surrounded by a golden sphere or disc,
on the edge of which are placed the four evangelists, together with Moses
and S. Paul.[137] At his side, within the burnished sphere, Plato and
Aristotle stand upright, holding the "Timaeus" and the "Ethics" in their
hands. Christ in glory is above the group, emitting from His mouth three
rays upon the head of S. Thomas. Single rays descend in like manner upon
the evangelists and Moses and S. Paul. They, like Plato and Aristotle,
hold open books; and rays from these eight volumes converge upon the head
of the angelical doctor, who becomes the focus, as it were, of all the
beams sent forth from Christ and from the classic teachers, whether
directly effused or transmitted through the writers of the Bible. S.
Thomas lastly holds a book open in his hand, and carries others on his
lap; while lines of light are shed from these upon two bands of the
faithful, chiefly Dominican monks, arranged on each side of his footstool.
Averroes lies prostrate beneath his feet with his book face downwards,
lightning-smitten by a shaft from the leaves of the volume in the saint's
hand, whereon is written: _veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et labia mea
detestabuntur impium_.[138]
This picture, afterwards repeated by Benozzo Gozzoli with some change in
the persons,[139] has been minutely described, because it is important to
bear in mind the measure of inspiration conceded by the mediaeval Church to
the fathers of Greek philosophy, and her utter detestation of the
peripatetic traditions transmitted through the Arabic by Averroes.
Averroes, though Dante placed him with the great souls of pagan
civilisation in the first circle of Inferno,[140] was regarded as the
protagonist of infidelity. The myth of incredulity that gathered round his
memory and made him hated in the Middle Ages, has been traced with
exquisite delicacy by Renan,[141] who shows that his name became a
rallying point for freethinkers. Scholars like Petrarch were eager to
confute his sect, and artists used him as a symbol of materialistic
disbelief. Thus we meet with Averroes among the lost souls in the Pisan
Campo Santo, distinguished as usual by his turban and long beard. On the
other hand, the frank acceptance of pagan philosophy, insofar as it could
be accommodated to the doctrine of the Church, finds full expression in
the art of this early period. On the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico at
Siena were painted the figures of Curius Dentatus and Cato,[142] while
the pavement of the Duomo showed Hermes Trismegistus instructing both a
pagan and a Christian, and Socrates ascending the steep hill of virtue.
Perugino, some years later, decorated the Sala del Cambio at Perugia with
the heroes, philosophers, and worthies of the ancient world. We are thus
led by a gradual progress up to the final achievement of Raphael in the
Vatican. Separating the antique from the Christian tradition, but placing
them upon an equality in his art, Raphael made the "School of Athens" an
epitome of Greek and Roman wisdom, while in the "Dispute of the Sacrament"
he symbolised the Church in heaven and Church on earth.
Another class of ideas, no less illustrative of mediaevalism, can be
studied in the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena. There, on the walls of the Sala
della Pace or de' Nove, may be seen the frescoes whereby Ambrogio
Lorenzetti expressed theories of society and government peculiar to his
age.[143] The panels are three in number. In the first the painter has
delineated the Commune of Siena by an imperial male figure in the prime of
life, throned on a judgment-seat, holding a sceptre in his right hand and
a medallion of Justice in his left.[144] He wears no coronet, but a
burgher's cap; and beneath his footstool are the Roman twins, suckled by
the she-wolf.[145] Above his head in the air float Faith, Charity, and
Hope--the Christian virtues; while Justice, Temperance, Magnanimity,
Prudence, Fortitude, and Peace, six women, crowned, and with appropriate
emblems, are enthroned beside him. The majestic giant of the Commune
towers above them all in bulk and stature, as though to indicate the
people's sovereignty. The virtues are his assessors and inspirers--he is
King. Beneath the dais occupied by these supreme personages, are ranged on
either hand mailed and visored cavaliers, mounted on chargers, the
guardians of the State. All the citizens in their degrees advance toward
the throne, carrying between them, pair by pair, a rope received from the
hands of Concord; while some who have transgressed her laws, are being
brought with bound hands to the judgment-seat. Concord herself, being less
the virtue of the government than of the governed, is seated on a line
with the burghers in a place apart beneath the throne of Civil Justice,
who is allegorised as the dispenser of rewards and punishments, as well as
controller of the armed force and the purse of the community. The whole of
this elaborate allegory suffers by the language of description. Those who
have seen it, and who are familiar with Sienese chronicles, feel that,
artistically laboured as the painter's work may be, every figure had a
passionate and intense meaning for him[146]. His picture is the epitome of
government conducted by a sovereign people. Nor can we fail to be struck
with the beauty of some details. The pale earnest faces of the horsemen
are eminently chivalrous, with knightly honour written on their calm and
fearless features. Peace, reclining at ease upon her pillow, is a lovely
woman in loose raiment, her hair wreathed with blossoms, in her hand an
olive branch, her feet reposing upon casque and shield. She is like a
painted statue, making us wonder whether the artist had not copied her
from the "Aphrodite" of Lysippus, ere the Sienese destroyed this statue in
their dread of paganism[147].
In the other two panels of this hall Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted the
contrast of good and bad government, harmony and discord. A city full of
brawls and bloodshed is set in opposition to one where the dance and viol
do not cease. Merchants are plundered as they issue from the gates on one
side; on the other, trains of sumpter mules are securely winding along
mountain paths. Tyranny, with all the vices for his council and with
Terror for prime minister, presides over the ill-governed town. The
burghers of the happy commune follow trade or pleasure, as they list; a
beautiful winged genius, inscribed "Securitas," floats above their
citadel. It should be added that in both these pictures the architecture
is the same; for the painter has designed to teach how different may be
the state of one and the same city according to its form of government.
Such then were the vivid images whereby Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed the
mediaeval curse of discord, and the ideal of a righteous rule. It is only
necessary to read the "Diario Sanese" of Allegretto Allegretti in order to
see that he drew no fancy picture. The torchlight procession of burghers
swearing amity by couples in the cathedral there described, receives exact
pictorial illustration in the fresco of the Sala della Pace[148]. Siena,
by her bloody factions and her passionate peacemakings, expressed in
daily action what the painter had depicted on her palace walls.
The method of treatment adopted for these chapters has obliged me to give
priority to Florence, and to speak of the two Lorenzetti, Pietro in the
Pisan Campo Santo and Ambrogio in the Sala della Pace at Siena, as though
they were followers of Giotto; so true is it that the main currents of
Tuscan art were governed by Florentine influences, and that Giotto's
genius made itself felt in all the work of his immediate successors. It
must, however, be observed that painting had an independent origin among
the Sienese, and that Guido da Siena may claim to rank even earlier than
Cimabue.[149] In the year 1260, just before engaging in their duel with
Florence, the Sienese dedicated their city to the Virgin; and the victory
of Montaperti, following immediately upon this vow, gave a marked impulse
to their piety.[150] The early masters of Siena devoted themselves to
religious paintings, especially to pictures of Madonna suited for chapels
and oratories. We find upon these mystic panels an ecstasy of adoration
and a depth of fervour which are alien to the more sober spirit of
Florence, combined with an almost infantine delight in pure bright
colours, and in the decorative details of the miniaturist.
The first great painter among the Sienese was Duccio di Buoninsegna.[151]
The completion of his masterpiece--a picture of the Majesty of the Virgin,
executed for the high altar of the Duomo--marked an epoch in the history
of Siena. Nearly two years had been spent upon it; the painter receiving
sixteen soldi a day from the Commune, together with his materials, in
exchange for his whole time and skill and labour. At last, on June 9,
1310, it was carried from Duccio's workshop to its place in the cathedral.
A procession was formed by the clergy, with the archbishop at their head,
followed by the magistrates of the Commune, and the chief men of the Monte
de' Nove. These great folk crowded round their Lady; after came a
multitude of burghers bearing tapers; while the rear was brought up by
women and children. The bells rang and trumpets blew as this new image of
the Sovereign Mistress of Siena was borne along the summer-smiling streets
of her metropolis to take its throne in her high temple. Duccio's
altar-piece presented on one face to the spectator a Virgin seated with
the infant Christ upon her lap, and receiving the homage of the patron
saints of Siena. On the other, he depicted the principal scenes of the
Gospel story and the Passion of our Lord in twenty-eight compartments.
What gives peculiar value to this elaborate work of Sienese art is, that
in it Duccio managed to combine the tradition of an early hieratic style
of painting with all the charm of brilliant colouring and with dramatic
force of presentation only rivalled at that time by Giotto. Independently
of Giotto, he performed at a stroke what Cimabue and his pupil had
achieved for the Florentines, and bequeathed to the succeeding painters of
Siena a tradition of art beyond which they rarely passed.
Far more than their neighbours at Florence, the Sienese remained fettered
by the technical methods and the pietistic formulae of the earliest
religious painting. To make their conventional representations of
Madonna's love and woe and glory burn with all the passion of a fervent
spirit, and to testify their worship by the oblation of rich gifts in
colouring and gilding massed around her, was their earnest aim. It
followed that, when they attempted subjects on a really large scale, the
faults of the miniaturist clung about them. I need hardly say that
Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti form notable exceptions to this general
statement. It may be applied, however, with some truth to Simone Martini,
the painter, who during his lifetime enjoyed a celebrity only second to
that of Giotto.[152] Like Giotto, Simone exercised his art in many parts
of Italy. Siena, Pisa, Assisi, Orvieto, Naples, and Avignon can still
boast of wall and easel pictures from his hand; and though it has been
suggested that he took no part in the decoration of the Cappella degli
Spagnuoli, the impress of his manner remains at Florence in those noble
frescoes of the "Church Militant" and the "Consecration of S.
Dominic."[153] Simone's first undisputed works are to be seen at Siena and
at Assisi, where we learn what he could do as a _frescante_ in competition
with the ablest Florentines. In the Palazzo Pubblico of his native city he
painted a vast picture of the Virgin enthroned beneath a canopy and
surrounded by saints;[154] while at Assisi he put forth his whole power in
portraying the legend of S. Martin. In all his paintings we trace the
skill of an exquisite and patient craftsman, elaborately careful to finish
his work with the utmost refinement, sensitive to feminine beauty, full of
delicate inventiveness, and gifted with a rare feeling for grace. These
excellent qualities tend, however, towards affectation and over-softness;
nor are they fortified by such vigour of conception or such majesty in
composition as belong to the greatest _trecentisti_. The Lorenzetti alone
soared high above the Sienese mannerism into a region of masculine
imaginative art. We feel Simone's charm mostly in single heads and
detached figures, some of which at Assisi have incomparable sweetness.
"Molles Senae," the delicate and femininely variable, fond of all things
brilliant, and unstable through defect of sternness, was the fit mother of
this ingenious and delightful master.
After the days of Duccio and Simone Martini, of Ambrogio and Pietro
Lorenzetti, were over, there remained but little for the Sienese to do in
painting. Taddeo di Bartolo continued the tradition of Duccio as the later
Giottesques continued that of Giotto. His most remarkable wall-painting is
a fresco of the Apostles visiting the Virgin, the motive of which is
marked by great originality.[155] Our Lady is seated in an open loggia
with a company of holy men and women round her. Descending from the sky
and floating through the arches are three of the Apostles, while one who
has just alighted from his aerial transit kneels and folds his hands in
adoration. Seldom have the longing and the peace of loving worship been
more poetically expressed than here. The seated, kneeling, standing, and
flying figures are admirably grouped together; their draperies are
dignified and massive; and the architectural accessories help the
composition by dividing it into three balanced sections.
Such power of depicting movement was rare in the fourteenth century. To
find its analogue, we must betake ourselves to the frescoes of Spinello
Aretino, a master more decidedly Giottesque than his contemporary Taddeo
di Bartolo.[156] A Gabriel, rushing down from heaven to salute Madonna,
with all the whirr of arch-angelic pinions and the glory of Paradise
around him, is a fine specimen of Spinello's vehemence. The same quality,
more tempered, is noticeable in his frescoes of the legend of S. Ephesus
at Pisa.[157] Few faces in the paintings of any period are more
fascinating than the profiles under steel-blue battle-caps of that godlike
pair--the knightly saint and the Archangel Michael--breaking by the
irresistible force of their onset and their calm youthful beauty through
the mailed ranks of the Sardinian pagans. Spinello was essentially a
warlike painter; among the best of his compositions may be named the
series of pictures from the history of the Venetian campaign against
Frederick Barbarossa.[158] It is a pity that the war of liberation carried
on by the Lombard communes with the Empire should have left but little
trace on Italian art; and therefore these paintings of Spinello, in
addition to their intrinsic merit, have rare historical interest.
Delighting in the gleam of armour and the shock of speared warriors,
Spinello communicated something of this fiery spirit even to his saints.
The monks of Samminiato near Florence employed him in 1388 to paint their
newly-finished sacristy with the legend of S. Benedict. In the execution
of this task Spinello displayed his usual grandeur and vigour, treating
the grey-robed brethren of Monte Cassino like veritable champions of a
militant Church. When he died in 1410, it might have been truly said that
the flame of the torch kindled by Giotto was at last extinguished.
The student of history cannot but notice with surprise that a city famed
like Siena for its vanity, its factious quarrels, and its delicate
living, should have produced an almost passionately ardent art of
piety.[159] The same reflections are suggested at Perugia, torn by the
savage feuds of the Oddi and Baglioni, at warfare with Assisi, reduced to
exhaustion by the discords of jealous parties, yet memorable in the
history of painting as the head-quarters of the pietistic Umbrian school.
The contradiction is, however, in both cases more apparent than real. The
people both of Siena and Perugia were highly impressible and emotional,
quick to obey the promptings of their passion, whether it took the form of
hatred or of love, of spiritual fervour or of carnal violence. Yielding at
one moment to the preachings of S. Bernardino, at another to the
persuasions of Grifonetto degli Baglioni, the Perugians won the character
of being fiends or angels according to the temper of their leaders; while
Siena might boast with equal right of having given birth to S. Catherine
and nurtured Beccadelli. The religious feeling was a passion with them on
a par with all the other movements of their quick and mobile temperament:
it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation. What was cold and sober
would not satisfy the men of these two cities. The Florentines, more
justly balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impassioned impulse,
less capable of feeling the rapt exaltation of the devotee, expressed
themselves in art distinguished for its intellectual power, its sanity,
its scientific industry, its adequacy to average human needs. Therefore,
Florentine influences determined the course of painting in Central Italy.
Therefore Giotto, who represented the Florentine genius in the fourteenth
century, set his stamp upon the Lorenzetti. The mystic painters of Umbria
and Siena have their high and honoured place in the history of Italian
art. They supply an element which, except in the work of Fra Angelico, was
defective at Florence; but to the Florentines was committed the great
charge of interpreting the spirit of Italian civilisation in all its
branches, not for the cloister only, or the oratory, but for humanity at
large, through painting.
Giotto and his followers, then, in the fourteenth century painted, as we
have seen, the religious, philosophical, and social conceptions of their
age. As artists, their great discovery was the secret of depicting life.
The ideas they expressed belonged to the Middle Ages. But by their method
and their spirit they anticipated the Renaissance. In executing their work
upon the walls of palaces and churches, they employed a kind of fresco.
Fresco was essentially the Florentine vehicle of expression. Among the
peoples of Central Italy it took the place of mosaic in Sicily, Ravenna,
and Venice, as the means of communicating ideas by forms to the unlettered
laity, and as affording to the artist the widest and the freest sphere for
the expression of his thoughts.[160]
FOOTNOTES:
[118] In the _History of Painting in Italy_, by Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle.
[119] Nothing is more astonishing than the sterility of Genoa and of
Rome. Neither in sculpture nor in painting did these cities produce
anything memorable, though Genoa was well placed for receiving the
influences of Pisa, and had the command of the marble quarries of
Carrara, while Rome was the resort of all the art-students of Italy. The
very early eminence of Apulia in architecture and the plastic arts led to
no results.
[120] Milan, it is true, produced a brilliant school of sculptors, and
the Certosa of Pavia is a monument of her spontaneous artistic genius.
But in painting, until the date of Lionardo's advent, she achieved
little.
[121] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 182-188, for the
constitutional characteristics of Florence and Venice; and Vol. II.,
_Revival of Learning_, pp. 118-120, for the intellectual supremacy of
Florence.
[122] A glance at the map shows to what a large extent the Italians owed
the progress of their arts to Tuscany. Pisa, as we have already seen,
took the lead in sculpture. Florence, at a somewhat later period, revived
painting, while Siena contemporaneously developed a style peculiar to
herself. This Sienese style--thoroughly Tuscan, though different from
that of Florence--exercised an important influence over the schools of
Umbria, and gave a peculiar quality to Perugian painting. Through Piero
della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, the Florentine tradition
was extended to Umbria and the Roman States. Perugia might be even
geographically claimed for Tuscany, inasmuch as the Tiber divides the old
Etrurian territory from the Umbrians and the duchy of Spoleto. Lionardo
was a Tuscan settled as an alien in Milan. Raphael, though a native of
Urbino, derived his training from Florence, indirectly through his father
and his master Perugino, more immediately from Fra Bartolommeo and
Michael Angelo.
[123] If Vasari is to be trusted, this visit of Charles of Anjou to
Cimabue's studio took place in 1267; but neither the Malespini nor
Villani mention it, and the old belief that the Borgo Allegri owed its
name to the popular rejoicing at that time is now somewhat discredited.
See Vasari, Le Monnier, 1846, vol. i. p. 225, note 4. Gino Capponi, in
his _Storia della Repubblica di Firenze_, vol. i. p. 157, refuses however
to reject the legend.
[124] See Capponi, vol. i. pp. 59, 78, for a description of the gay and
courteous living of the Florentines upon the end of the thirteenth
century.
[125] See the _Descrizione della Peste di Firenze_.
[126] I wish I could here transcribe the most beautiful passage from
Ruskin's _Giotto and his Works in Padua_, pp. 11, 12, describing the
contrast between the landscape of Valdarno and the landscape of the hills
of the Mugello district. I can only refer readers to the book, printed
for the Arundel Society, 1854.
[127] See Trucchi, _Poesie Italiane Inedite_, vol. ii. p. 8.
[128] See above, Chapter III, Relation of Sculpture to Painting.
[129] The wonderful beauty of Orcagna's faces, profile after profile laid
together like lilies in a garden border, can only be discovered after
long study. It has been my good fortune to examine, through the kindness
of Mrs. Higford Burr, of Aldermaston, a large series of tracings, taken
chiefly by the Right Hon. A. H. Layard, from the frescoes of Giottesque
and other early masters, which, by the selection of simple form in
outline, demonstrate not only the grand composition of these religious
paintings, but also the incomparable loveliness of their types. How great
the _Trecentisti_ were as draughtsmen, how imaginative was the beauty of
their conception, can be best appreciated by thus artificially separating
their design from their colouring. The semblance of archaism disappears,
and leaves a vision of pure beauty, delicate and spiritual. The
collection to which I have alluded was made some years ago, when access
to the wall-paintings of Italy for the purpose of tracing was still
possible. It includes nearly the whole of Lorenzetti's work in the Sala
della Pace, much of Giotto, the Gozzoli frescoes at S. Gemignano,
frescoes of the Veronese masters and of the Paduan Baptistery, a great
deal of Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Luini, Gaudenzio Ferrari,
Pinturicchio, Masolino, &c. The earliest masters of Arezzo, Pisa, Siena,
Urbino are copiously illustrated, while few burghs or hamlets of the
Tuscan and Umbrian districts have been left unvisited.
[130] See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. pp. 445-451, for a discussion
of the question. They incline to the authorship of Pietro and Ambrogio
Lorenzetti. But the last Florentine edition of Vasari renders this
opinion doubtful.
[131]
Ed una donna involta in veste negra,
Con un furor qual io non so se mai
Al tempo de' giganti fosse a Flegra.
_Trionfo della Morte_, cap. i. 31.
[132] On a scroll above these wretches is written this legend:--
Dacche prosperitade ci ha lasciati,
O morte, medicina d'ogni pena,
Deh vieni a darne omai l'ultima cena.
[133] This might be used as an argument against the Lorenzetti
hypothesis; for their work at Siena is eminently beautiful.
[134] The attitude and the eyes of this archangel have an imaginative
potency beyond that of any other motive used by any painter to suggest
the terror of the _Dies Irae_. Simplicity and truth of vision in the
artist have here touched the very summit of intense dramatic
presentation.
[135] The "Triumph of S. Thomas Aquinas," in this cloister-chapel, has
long been declared the work of Taddeo Gaddi. "The Triumph of the Church
Militant," and the "Consecration of S. Dominic," used to be ascribed, on
the faith of Vasari, to Simone Martini of Siena. Independently of its
main subject, this vast wall-painting is specially interesting on account
of its portraits. The work has a decidedly Sienese character; but recent
critics are inclined to assign it to a certain Andrea, of Florence. See
Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 89. The same critics doubt the hand
of Taddeo Gaddi in the "Triumph of S. Thomas," vol. i. p. 374, and remark
that "these productions of the art of the fourteenth century are, indeed,
second-class works, executed by pupils of the Sienese and Florentine
school, and unworthy of the high praise which has ever been given to
them." Whatever may be ultimately thought about the question of their
authorship and pictorial merit, their interest to the student of Italian
painting in relation to mediaeval thought will always remain indisputable.
Few buildings in the length and breadth of Italy possess such claims on
our attention as the Cappella degli Spagnuoli.
[136] The amorous fere of the Christian faith, the holy athlete, gentle
to his own, and to his foes cruel.
[137] Everything outside this golden region is studded with stars to
signify an epoyranios topos or heaven of heavens. S. Thomas and
the Greeks are inside the golden sphere of science, and below on earth
are the heresiarchs and faithful. Rosini gives a faithful outline of this
picture in his Atlas of Illustrations.
[138] "For my mouth shall speak truth; and wickedness is an abomination
to my lips."--Prov. viii. 7.
[139] Gozzoli's picture is now in the Louvre. I think Guillaume de Saint
Amour takes the place of Averroes.
[140] _Inf._ iv. 144.
[141] _Averroes et l'Averroisme_, pp. 236-316.
[142] In the chapel. They are the work of Taddeo di Bartolo, and bear
this inscription: "Specchiatevi in costoro, voi che reggete." The
mediaeval painters of Italy learned lessons of civility and government as
willingly from classical tradition, as they deduced the lessons of piety
and godly living from the Bible. Herein they were akin to Dante, who
chose Virgil for the symbol of the human understanding and Beatrice for
the symbol of divine wisdom, revealed to man in Theology.
[143] He began his work in 1337.
[144] A similar mode of symbolising the Commune is chosen in the
bas-reliefs of Archbishop Tarlati's tomb at Arezzo, where the discord of
the city is represented by an old man of gigantic stature, throned and
maltreated by the burghers, who are tearing out his hair by handfuls.
Over this figure is written "Il Comune Pelato."
[145] These were adopted as the ensign of Siena, in the Middle Ages.
[146] In the year 1336, just before Ambrogio began to paint, the Sienese
Republic had concluded a league with Florence for the maintenance of the
Guelf party. The Monte de' Nove still ruled the city with patriotic
spirit and equity, and had not yet become a forceful oligarchy. The power
of the Visconti was still in its cradle; the great plague had not
devastated Tuscany. As early as 1355 the whole of the fair order
represented by Ambrogio was shaken to the foundation, and Siena deserved
the words applied to it by De Commines. See Vol. L, _Age of the Despots_,
p. 162, note 2.
[147] Rio, perversely bent on stigmatising whatever in Italian art
savours of the Renaissance, depreciates this lovely form of Peace. _L'Art
Chretien_, vol. i. p. 57.
[148] See Muratori, vol. xxiii., or the passage translated by me in Vol.
I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 480.
[149] His "Madonna" in S. Domenico is dated 1221. For a full discussion
of Guido da Siena's date, see Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. pp.
180-185.
[150] On their coins the Sienese struck this legend: "Sena vetus Civitas
Virginis." It will be remembered how the Florentines, two centuries and a
half later, dedicated their city to Christ as king.
[151] Date of birth unknown; date of death, about 1320.
[152] He is better known as Simone Memmi, a name given to him by a
mistake of Vasari's. He was born in 1283 at Siena. He died in 1344 at
Avignon. Petrarch mentions his portrait of Madonna Laura, in the 49th and
50th sonnets of the "Rime in Vita di Madonna Laura." In another place he
uses these words about Simone: "Duos ego novi pictores egregios, nec
formosos, Jottum Florentinum civem, cujus inter modernos fama ingens est,
et Simonem Senensem."--_Epist. Fam._ lib. v. 17, p. 653. Petrarch
proceeds to mention that he has also known sculptors, and asserts their
inferiority to painters in modern times.
[153] See above, Chapter IV, Theology and S. Dominic. Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle reject, not without reason, as it seems to me, the tradition
that Simone painted the frescoes of S. Ranieri in the Campo Santo at
Pisa. See vol. ii. p. 83. What remains of his work at Pisa is an
altar-piece in S. Caterina.
[154] To Simone is also attributed the interesting portrait of
Guidoriccio Fogliani de' Ricci, on horseback, in the Sala del Consiglio.
This, however, has been so much repainted as to have lost its character.
[155] In S. Francesco at Pisa.
[156] Spinello degli Spinelli was born of a Ghibelline family, exiled
from Florence, who settled at Arezzo about 1308. He died at Arezzo in
1410, aged 92, according to some computations.
[157] South wall of the Campo Santo, on the left-hand of the entrance.
[158] In the Sala di Balia of the public palace at Siena.
[159] See _Inferno_, xxix. 121; the sonnets on the months by Cene dalla
Chitarra, _Poeti del Primo Secolo,_ vol. ii. pp. 196-207; the epithet
"Molles Senae," given by Beccadelli; and the remarks of De Comines.
[160] I have not thought it necessary to distinguish between tempera and
fresco. In tempera painting the colours were mixed with egg, gum, and
other vehicles dissolved in water, and laid upon a dry ground. In fresco
painting the colours, mixed only with water, were laid upon plaster while
still damp. The latter process replaced the former for wall-paintings in
the fourteenth century.
CHAPTER V
PAINTING
Mediaeval Motives exhausted--New Impulse toward Technical
Perfection--Naturalists in Painting--Intermediate Achievement needed
for the Great Age of Art--Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth
Century--Masaccio--The Modern Manner--Paolo Uccello--Perspective--Realistic
Painters--The Model--Piero della Francesca--His Study of Form--Resurrection
at Borgo San Sepolcro--Melozzo da Forli--Squarcione at Padua--Gentile da
Fabriano--Fra Angelico--Benozzo Gozzoli--His Decorative Style--Lippo
Lippi--Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto--Filippino Lippi--Sandro
Botticelli--His Value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy--His Feeling
for Mythology--Piero di Cosimo--Domenico Ghirlandajo--In what sense he
sums up the Age--Prosaic Spirit--Florence hitherto supreme in
Painting--Extension of Art Activity throughout Italy--Medicean Patronage.
After the splendid outburst of painting in the first half of the
fourteenth century, there came a lull. The thoughts and sentiments of
mediaeval Italy had been now set forth in art. The sincere and simple style
of Giotto was worked out. But the new culture of the Revival had not as
yet sufficiently penetrated the Italians for the painters to express it;
nor had they mastered the technicalities of their craft in such a manner
as to render the delineation of more complex forms of beauty possible. The
years between 1400 and 1470 may be roughly marked out as the second period
of great, activity in painting. At this time sculpture, under the hands of
Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, had reached a higher point
than the sister art. The debt the sculptors owed to Giotto, they now
repaid in full measure to his successors, in obedience to the law whereby
sculpture, though subordinated, as in Italy, to painting, is more
precocious in its evolution. One of the most marked features of this
period was the progress in the art of design, due to bronze modelling and
bas-relief; for the painters, labouring in the workshops of the goldsmiths
and the stone-carvers, learned how to study the articulation of the human
body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of graduated light and dark
at rendering the effect of roundness in their drawing. The laws of
perspective and foreshortening were worked out by Paolo Uccello and
Brunelleschi. New methods of colouring were attempted by the Peselli and
the Pollajuoli. Abandoning the conventional treatment of religious themes,
the artists began to take delight in motives drawn from everyday
experience. It became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes,
striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so that
many pictures of this period, though worthless to the student of religious
art, are interesting for their illustration of Florentine custom and
character. At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape and
architecture, loading the background of their frescoes with pompous vistas
of palaces and city towers, or subordinating their figures to fantastic
scenery of wood and rock and seashore. Many were naturalists, delighting,
like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field flowers and living
creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and
curious. Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects.
Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo
Uccello. Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for
the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the
time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling.
We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters: that stage
of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful,
idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's
vision, opens for the artist. Instead of seeking to set forth vast
subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like the Gaddi, or to invent
architectonic compositions embracing the whole culture of their age, like
the Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising some special
quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic motive, or solving some
technical problem of peculiar difficulty. They had, in fact, outgrown the
childhood of their art; and while they had not yet attained to mastery,
had abandoned the impossible task of making it the medium of universal
expression. In this way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first
half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for the great painters
of the Golden Age. It remained for Raphael and his contemporaries to
achieve the final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate beauty.
But this they could not have done without the aid of those innumerable
intermediate labourers, whose productions occupy in art the place of
Bacon's _media axiomata_ in science. Remembering this, we ought not to
complain that the purpose of painting at this epoch was divided, or that
its achievements were imperfect. The whole intellectual conditions of the
country were those of growth, experiment, preparation, and acquisition,
rather than of full accomplishment. What happened in the field of
painting, was happening also in the field of scholarship; and we have good
reason to be thankful that by the very nature of the arts, these tentative
endeavours have a more enduring charm than the dull tomes of contemporary
students. Nor, again, is it rational to regret that painting, having
started with the sincere desire of expressing the hopes and fears that
agitate the soul of man, and raise him to a spiritual region, should now
be occupied with lessons in perspective and anatomy. In the twofold
process of discovering the world and man, this dry ground had inevitably
to be explored, and its exploration could not fail to cost the sacrifice
of much that was impassioned and imaginative in the earlier and less
scientific age of art.[161] The spirit of Cosimo de' Medici, almost
cynical in its positivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its
egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period;[162] indeed, the fifteenth
century presents at large a spectacle of prosaic worldliness and unideal
aims. Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far
more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of
Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of
Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of
pagan vices. Petrarch in the fourteenth century had preached the evangel
of humanism; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life to painting.
The students of the fifteenth, though their spirit was so much baser and
less large than Petrarch's, were following in the path marked out for them
and leading forward to Erasmus. The painters of the fifteenth, though they
lacked the unity of aim and freshness of their master, were learning what
was needful for the crowning and fulfilment of his labours on a loftier
stage.
Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance-painting, towering above them
all by head and shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands
Masaccio.[163] The Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, painted in
fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where all succeeding
artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned to borrow the composition and
the figures of a portion of his Cartoons. The "Legend of S. Catherine,"
painted by Masaccio in 8. Clemente at Rome, though an earlier work, is
scarcely less remarkable as evidence that a new age had begun for art. In
his frescoes the qualities essential to the style of the Renaissance--what
Vasari calls the modern manner--appear precociously full-formed. Besides
life and nature they have dignity and breadth, the grand and heightened
manner of emancipated art. Masaccio is not inferior to Giotto in his power
of telling a story with simplicity; but he understands the value of
perspective for realising the circumstances of the scene depicted. His
august groups of the Apostles are surrounded by landscape tranquillising
to the sense and pleasant to the eye. Mountain-lines and distant horizons
lend space and largeness to his compositions, and the figures of his men
and women move freely in a world prepared for them. In Masaccio's
management of drapery we discern the influence of plastic art; without
concealing the limbs, which are always modelled with a freedom that
suggests the power of movement even in stationary attitudes, the
voluminous folds and broad masses of powerfully coloured raiment invest
his forms with a nobility unknown before in painting. His power of
representing the nude is not less remarkable. But what above all else
renders his style attractive is the sense of aerial space. For the first
time in art the forms of living persons are shown moving in a transparent
medium of light, graduated according to degrees of distance, and
harmonised by tones that indicate an atmospheric unity. In comparing
Masaccio with Giotto we must admit that, with so much gained, something
has been sacrificed. Giotto succeeded in presenting the idea, the feeling,
the pith of the event, and pierced at once to the very ground-root of
imagination. Masaccio thinks over-much, perhaps, of external form, and is
intent on air-effects and colouring. He realises the phenomenal truth with
a largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself. But we ask whether he was
capable of bringing close to our hearts the secret and the soul of
spiritual things. Has not art beneath his touch become more scenic, losing
thereby somewhat of dramatic poignancy?
Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not heard
of by his family again. Thus perished, at the early age of twenty-seven, a
painter whose work reveals not only the originality of real creative
genius, but a maturity that moves our wonder. What might he not have done
if he had lived? Between his style in the Brancacci chapel and that of
Raphael in the Vatican there seems to be but a narrow gap, which might
perchance have been passed over by this man, if death had spared him.
Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair instance of the painters of
his age. Gifted with exceptional powers, he overleaped the difficulties of
his art, and arrived intuitively at results whereof as yet no scientific
certainty had been secured. His contemporaries applied humbler talents to
severe study, and wrought out by patient industry those principles which
Masaccio had divined. Their work is therefore at the same time more
archaic and more pedantic, judged by modern standards. It is difficult to
imagine a style of painting less attractive than that of Paolo
Uccello.[164] Yet his fresco of the "Deluge" in the cloisters of S. Maria
Novella, and his battlepieces--one of which may be seen in the National
Gallery--taught nearly all that painters needed of perspective. The lesson
was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill-coloured and deficient in
the quality of animation. At this period the painters, like the sculptors,
were trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a craftsman of that guild
before he gave his whole mind to the study of linear perspective and the
drawing of animals. The precision required in this trade forced artists
to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude
naturalism which has been charged against their pictures. Carefully to
observe, minutely to imitate some actual person--the Sandro of your
workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace--became the pride of painters.
No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediaeval mysticism, and unable for
the moment to invest ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile made
the great discovery that the body of a man is a miracle of beauty, each
limb a divine wonder, each muscle a joy as great as sight of stars or
flowers. Much that is repulsive in the pictures of the Pollajuoli and
Andrea del Castagno, the leaders in this branch of realism, is due to
admiration for the newly studied mechanism of the human form. They seem to
have cared but little to select their types or to accentuate expression,
so long as they were able to portray the man before them with
fidelity.[165] The comeliness of average humanity was enough for them; the
difficulties of reproducing what they saw, exhausted their force. Thus the
master-works on which they staked their reputation show them emulous of
fame as craftsmen, while only here and there, in minor paintings for the
most part, the poet that was in them sees the light. Brunelleschi told
Donatello the truth when he said that his Christ was a crucified
_contadino_. Intent on mastering the art of modelling, and determined
above all things to be accurate, the sculptor had forgotten that something
more was wanted in a crucifix than the careful study of a robust
peasant-boy.
A story of a somewhat later date still further illustrates the dependence
of the work of art upon the model in Renaissance Florence. Jacopo
Sansovino made the statue of a youthful "Bacchus" in close imitation of a
lad called Pippo Fabro. Posing for hours together naked in a cold studio,
Pippo fell into ill health, and finally went mad. In his madness he
frequently assumed the attitude of the "Bacchus" to which his life had
been sacrificed, and which is now his portrait. The legend of the painter
who kept his model on a cross in order that he might the more minutely
represent the agonies of death by crucifixion, is but a mythus of the
realistic method carried to its logical extremity.
Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, and a pupil of
Domenico Veneziano, must be placed among the painters of this period who
advanced their art by scientific study. He carried the principles of
correct drawing and solid modelling as far as it is possible for the
genius of man to do, and composed a treatise on perspective in the vulgar
tongue. But these are not his only titles to fame. By dignity of
portraiture, by loftiness of style, and by a certain poetical solemnity of
imagination, he raised himself above the level of the mass of his
contemporaries. Those who have once seen his fresco of the "Resurrection"
in the hall of the Compagnia della Misericordia at Borgo San Sepolcro,
will never forget the deep impression of solitude and aloofness from all
earthly things produced by it. It is not so much the admirable grouping
and masterly drawing of the four sleeping soldiers, or even the majestic
type of the Christ emergent without effort from the grave, as the
communication of a mood felt by the painter and instilled into our souls,
that makes this by far the grandest, most poetic, and most awe-inspiring
picture of the Resurrection. The landscape is simple and severe, with the
cold light upon it of the dawn before the sun is risen. The drapery of the
ascending Christ is tinged with auroral colours like the earliest clouds
of morning; and His level eyes, with the mystery of the slumber of the
grave still upon them, seem gazing, far beyond our scope of vision, into
the region of the eternal and illimitable. Thus, with Piero for
mystagogue, we enter an inner shrine of deep religious revelation. The
same high imaginative faculty marks the fresco of the "Dream of
Constantine" in S. Francesco at Arezzo, where, it may be said in passing,
the student of art must learn to estimate what Piero could do in the way
of accurate foreshortening, powerful delineation of solid bodies, and
noble treatment of drapery.[166] To Piero, again, we owe most precious
portraits of two Italian princes, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and
Federigo of Urbino, masterpieces[167] of fidelity to nature and sound
workmanship.
In addition to the many great paintings that command our admiration, Piero
claims honour as the teacher of Melozzo da Forli and of Luca Signorelli.
Little is left to show the greatness of Melozzo; but the frescoes
preserved in the Quirinal are enough to prove that he continued the grave
and lofty manner of his master.[168] Signorelli bears a name illustrious
in the first rank of Italian painters; and to speak of him will be soon my
duty. It was the special merit of these artists to elevate the ideal of
form and to seek after sublimity, without departing from the path of
conscientious labour, in an age preoccupied on the one hand with
technicality and naturalism, on the other with decorative prettiness and
pietism.
While the Florentine and Umbro-Tuscan masters were perfecting the arts of
accurate design, a similar direction toward scientific studies was given
to the painters of Northern Italy at Padua. Michael Savonarola, writing
his panegyric of Padua about 1440, expressly mentions Perspective as a
branch of philosophy taught in the high school;[169] and the influence of
Francesco Squarcione, though exaggerated by Vasari, was not
inconsiderable. This man, who began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was
early interested in the fine arts. Like Ciriac of Ancona, he had a taste
for travel and collection,[170] visiting the sacred soil of Greece and
sojourning in divers towns of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying
pictures, taking casts from statues, and amassing memoranda on the relics
of antiquity as well as on the methods practised by contemporary painters.
Equipped with these aids to study, Squarcione returned to Padua, his
native place, where he opened a kind of school for painters. It is clear
that he was himself less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a
turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the humanistic instincts
of his age, that the right way of learning was by imitation of the
antique. During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less
than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and
drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective.[171]
From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of
the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at
length in the next chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that
through Squarcione the scientific and humanistic movement of the fifteenth
century was communicated to the art of Northern Italy. There, as at
Florence, painting was separated from ecclesiastical tradition, and a new
starting-point was sought in the study of mathematical principles, and
the striving after form for its own sake.
Without attempting the detailed history of painting in this period of
divided energy and diverse effort, it is needful here to turn aside and
notice those masters of the fifteenth century who remained comparatively
uninfluenced by the scholastic studies of their contemporaries. Of these,
the earliest and most notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last great
painter of the Gubbian school.[172] In the predella of his masterpiece at
Florence there is a little panel, which attracts attention as one of the
earliest attempts to represent a sunrise. The sun has just appeared above
one of those bare sweeping hill-sides so characteristic of Central Italian
landscape. Part of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and grey:
the rest is silvered with the level light, falling sideways on the
burnished leaves and red fruit of the orange trees, and casting shadows
from olive branches on the furrows of a new-ploughed field. Along the road
journey Joseph and Mary and the infant Christ, so that you may call this
little landscape a "Flight into Egypt," if you choose. Gentile, with all
his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for whom the fair sights of the earth
had exquisite value. The rich costumes of the Eastern kings, their train
of servants, their hawks and horses, hounds and monkeys, are painted by
him with scrupulous fidelity; and nothing can be more true to nature than
the wild flowers he has copied in the framework of this picture. Yet we
perceive that, though he felt in his own way the naturalistic impulse of
the age, he had scarcely anything in common with masters like Uccello or
Verocchio.
Still less had Fra Angelico. Of all the painters of this period he most
successfully resisted the persuasions of the Renaissance, and perfected an
art that owed little to sympathy with the external world. He thought it a
sin to study or to imitate the naked form, and his most beautiful faces
seem copied from angels seen in visions, not from any sons of men. While
the artists around him were absorbed in mastering the laws of geometry and
anatomy, Fra Angelico sought to express the inner life of the adoring
soul. Only just so much of realism, whether in the drawing of the body and
its drapery, or in the landscape background, as seemed necessary for
suggesting the emotion or for setting forth the story, found its way into
his pictures. The message they convey might have been told almost as
perfectly upon the lute or viol. His world is a strange one--a world not
of hills and fields and flowers and men of flesh and blood, but one where
the people are embodied ecstasies, the colours tints from evening clouds
or apocalyptic jewels, the scenery a flood of light or a background of
illuminated gold. His mystic gardens, where the ransomed souls embrace,
and dance with angels on the lawns outside the City of the Lamb, are such
as were never trodden by the foot of man in any paradise of earth.
Criticism has a hard task in attempting to discern the merit of the
several painters of this time. It is clear that we must look not to Fra
Angelico but to Masaccio for the progressive forces that were carrying art
forward to complete accomplishment. Yet the charm of Masaccio is as
nothing in comparison with that which holds us spell-bound before the
sacred and impassioned reveries of the Fiesolan monk. Masaccio had
inestimable value for his contemporaries. Fra Angelico, now that we know
all Masaccio can teach, has a quality so unique that we return again and
again to the contemplation of his visions. Thus it often happens that we
are tempted to exaggerate the historical importance of one painter
because he touches us by some peculiar quality, and to over-estimate the
intrinsic value of another because he was a motive power in his own age.
Both these temptations should be resolutely resisted by the student who is
capable of discerning different kinds of excellence and diverse titles to
affectionate remembrance. Tracing the history of Italian painting is like
pursuing a journey down an ever-broadening river, whose affluents are
Giotto and Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, and Mantegna. We have to
turn aside and land upon the shore, in order to visit the
heaven-reflecting lakelet, self-encompassed and secluded, called Angelico.
Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, but in no sense the
continuator of his tradition, exhibits the blending of several styles by a
genius of less creative than assimilative force. That he was keenly
interested in the problems of perspective and foreshortening, and that
none of the knowledge collected by his fellow-workers had escaped him, is
sufficiently proved by his frescoes at Pisa. His compositions are rich in
architectural details, not always chosen with pure taste, but painted with
an almost infantine delight in the magnificence of buildings. Quaint birds
and beasts and reptiles crowd his landscapes; while his imagination runs
riot in rocks and rivers, trees of all variety, and rustic incidents
adopted from real life. At the same time he felt an enjoyment like that of
Gentile da Fabriano in depicting the pomp and circumstance of pageantry,
and no Florentine of the fifteenth century was more fond of assembling the
personages of contemporary history in groups.[173] Thus he showed himself
sensitive to the chief influences of the earlier Renaissance, and combined
the scientific and naturalistic tendencies of his age in a manner not
devoid of native poetry. What he lacked was depth of feeling, the sense
of noble form, the originative force of a great mind. His poetry of
invention, though copious and varied, owed its charm to the unstudied
grace of improvisation, and he often undertook subjects where his idyllic
rather than dramatic genius failed to sustain him. It is difficult, for
instance, to comprehend how M. Rio could devote two pages to Gozzoli's
"Destruction of Sodom," so comparatively unimpressive in spite of its
aggregated incidents, when he passes by the "Fulminati" of Signorelli, so
tragic in its terrible simplicity, with a word.[174]
This painter's marvellous rapidity of execution enabled him to produce an
almost countless series of decorative works. The best of these are the
frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, of the Riccardi Palace of Florence, of
San Gemignano, and of Montefalco. It has been well said of Gozzoli that,
though he attempted grand subjects on a large scale, he could not rise
above the limitations of a style better adapted to the decoration of
_cassoni_ than to fresco.[175] Yet within the range of his own powers
there are few more fascinating painters. His feeling for fresh nature--for
hunters in the woods at night or dawn, for vintage-gatherers among their
grapes, for festival troops of cavaliers and pages, and for the
marriage-dances of young men and maidens--yields a delightful gladness to
compositions lacking the simplicity of Giotto and the dignity of
Masaccio.[176] No one knew better how to sketch the quarrels of little
boys in their nursery, or the laughter of serving-women, or children
carrying their books to school;[177] and when the idyllic genius of the
man was applied to graver themes, his fancy supplied him with multitudes
of angels waving rainbow-coloured wings above fair mortal faces. Bevies of
them nestle like pigeons on the penthouse of the hut of Bethlehem, or
crowd together round the infant Christ.[178]
From these observations on the style of Benozzo Gozzoli it will be seen
that in the evolution of Renaissance culture he may be compared with the
romantic poets for whom the cheerfulness of nature and the joy that comes
to men from living in a many-coloured world of inexhaustible delight were
sufficient sources of inspiration. It should be mentioned lastly that he
enjoyed the patronage and friendship of the Medicean princes.
Another painter favoured by the Medici was Fra Filippo Lippi, whose life
and art-work were alike the deviation of a pleasure-loving temperament
from its natural sphere into the service of the Church. Left an orphan at
the age of two years, he was brought up by an aunt, who placed him, as a
boy of eight, in the convent of the Carmine at Florence. For monastic
duties he had no vocation, and the irregularities of his behaviour caused
scandal even in that age of cynical indulgence. It can scarcely be doubted
that the schism between his practice and profession served to debase and
vulgarise a genius of fine imaginative quality, while the uncongenial work
of decorating choirs and painting altar-pieces limed the wings of his
swift spirit with the dulness of routine that savoured of hypocrisy. Bound
down to sacred subjects, he was too apt to make angels out of
street-urchins, and to paint the portraits of his peasant-loves for
Virgins.[179] His delicate sense of natural beauty gave peculiar charm to
this false treatment of religious themes. Nothing, for example, can be
more attractive than the rows of angels bearing lilies in his "Coronation
of the Virgin;"[180] and yet, when we regard them closely, we find that
they have no celestial quality of form or feature. Their grace is earthly,
and the spirit breathed upon the picture is the loveliness of colour,
quiet and yet glowing--blending delicate blues and greens with whiteness
purged of glare. The beauties as well as the defects of such compositions
make us regret that Fra Filippo never found a more congenial sphere for
his imagination. As a painter of subjects half-humorous and half-pathetic,
or as the illustrator of romantic stories, we fancy that he might have won
fame rivalled only by the greatest colourists. One such picture it was
granted him to paint, and this is his masterpiece. In the prime of life he
was commissioned to decorate the choir of the cathedral at Prato with the
legends of S. John Baptist and S. Stephen. All of these frescoes are
noteworthy for their firm grasp upon reality in the portraits of
Florentine worthies, and for the harmonious disposition of the groups; but
the scene of Salome dancing before Herod is the best for its poetic
feeling. Her movement across the floor before the tyrant and his guests at
table, the quaint fluttering of her drapery, the well-bred admiration of
the spectators, their horror when she brings the Baptist's head to
Herodias, and the weak face of the half-remorseful Herod are expressed
with a dramatic power that shows the genius of a poet painter. And even
more lovely than Salome are a pair of girls locked in each other's arms
close by Herodias on the dais. A natural and spontaneous melody, not only
in the suggested movements of this scene, but also in the colouring,
choice of form, and treatment of drapery, makes it one of the most musical
of pictures ever painted.
Fra Filippo was not so successful in the choir of the cathedral at
Spoleto, where he undertook; to paint scenes from the life of the Virgin.
Yet those who have not examined these frescoes, ruinous in their decay and
spoiled by stupid restoration, can form no just notion of the latent
capacity of this great master. The whole of the half-dome above the
tribune is filled with, a "Coronation of Madonna." A circular rainbow
surrounds both her and Christ. She is kneeling with fiery rays around her,
glorified by her assumption into heaven. Christ is enthroned, and at His
side stands a seat prepared for His mother, as soon as the crown that He
is placing on her head shall have made her Queen. From the outer courts of
heaven, thronged with multitudes of celestial beings, angels are crowding
in, breaking the lines of the prismatic aureole, as though the ardour of
their joy could scarcely be repressed; while the everlasting light of God
sheds radiance from above, and far below, lies earth with diminished sun
and moon. The boldness of conception in this singular fresco reveals a
genius capable of grappling with such problems as Tintoretto solved. Fra
Filippo died at Spoleto, and left his work unfinished, to the care of his
assistant, the Fra Diamante. Over his tomb Lorenzo de' Medici caused a
monument to be erected, and Poliziano wrote Latin couplets to commemorate
the fame of a painter highly prized by his patrons.
The space devoted in these pages to Fra Lippo Lippi is justified not only
by the excellence of his own work, but also by the influence he exercised
over two of the best Florentine painters of the fifteenth century. Whether
Filippino Lippi was in truth his son by Lucrezia Buti, a novice he is said
to have carried from her cloister in Prato, has been called in question
by recent critics; but they adduce no positive arguments for discrediting
the story of Vasari.[181] There can, however, be no doubt that to the
Frate, whether he was his father or only his teacher, Filippino owed his
style. His greatest works were painted in continuation of Masaccio's
frescoes in the Carmine at Florence. It is the best warrant of their
excellence that we feel them worthy to hold the place they do, and that
Raphael transferred one of their motives, the figure of S. Paul addressing
S. Peter in prison, to his cartoon of "Mars' Hill." That he was not so
accomplished as Masaccio in the art of composition, that his scale of
colour is less pleasing, and that his style in general lacks the elevation
of his mighty predecessor, is not sufficient to place him in any position
of humiliating inferiority.[182] What above all things interests the
student of the Renaissance in Filippino's work, is the powerful action of
revived classicism on his manner. This can be traced better in the Caraffa
Chapel of S. Maria sopra Minerva at Rome and in the Strozzi Chapel of S.
Maria Novella at Florence than in the Carmine. The "Triumph of S. Thomas
Aquinas" and the "Miracle of S. John" are remarkable for an almost
insolent display of Roman antiquities--not studied, it need scarcely be
observed, with the scientific accuracy of Alma Tadema--for such science
was non-existent in the fifteenth century--but paraded with a kind of
passion. To this delight in antique details Filippino added violent
gestures, strange attitudes, and affected draperies, producing a general
result impressive through the artist's energy, but quaint and
unattractive.
Sandro Botticelli, the other disciple of Fra Lippo, bears a name of
greater mark. He is one of those artists, much respected in their own
days, who suffered eclipse from the superior splendour of immediate
successors, and to whom, through sympathy stimulated by prolonged study of
the fifteenth century, we have of late paid tardy and perhaps exaggerated
honours.[183] His fellow-workers seem to have admired him as an able
draughtsman gifted with a rare if whimsical imagination; but no one
recognised in him a leader of his age. For us he has an almost unique
value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a
moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the subtlest
thought and feeling of men for whom the classic myths were beginning to
live once more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in the sphere of
orthodoxy.[184] Self-confident sensuality had not as yet encouraged
painters to substitute a florid rhetoric for the travail of their brain;
nor was enough known about antiquity to make the servile imitation of
Greek or Roman fragments possible. Yet scholarship had already introduced
a novel element into the culture of the nation. It was no doubt with a
kind of wonder that the artists heard of Fauns and Sylvans, and the birth
of Aphrodite from the waves. Such fables took deep hold upon their fancy,
stirring them to strange and delicate creations, the offspring of their
own thought, and no mere copies of marbles seen in statue galleries. The
very imperfection of these pictures lends a value to them in the eyes of
the student, by helping him to comprehend exactly how the revelations of
the humanists affected the artistic sense of Italy.
In the mythological work of Botticelli there is always an element of
allegory, recalling the Middle Ages and rendering it far truer to the
feelings of the fifteenth century than to the myths it illustrates. His
painting of the "Spring," suggested by a passage from Lucretius,[185] is
exquisitely poetic; and yet the true spirit of the Latin verse has not
been seized--to have done that would have taxed the energies of
Titian--but something special to the artist and significant for Medicean
scholarship has been added. There is none of the Roman largeness and
freedom in its style; Venus and her Graces are even melancholy, and their
movements savour of affectation. This combination or confusion of artistic
impulses in Botticelli, this treatment of pagan themes in the spirit of
mediaeval mysticism, sometimes ended in grotesqueness. It might suffice to
cite the pregnant "Aphrodite" in the National Gallery, if the "Mars and
Venus" in the same collection were not even a more striking instance. Mars
is a young Florentine, whose throat and chest are beautifully studied from
the life, but whose legs and belly, belonging no doubt to the same model,
fall far short of heroic form. He lies fast asleep with the corners of his
mouth drawn down, as though he were about to snore. Opposite there sits a
woman, weary and wan, draped from neck to foot in the thin raiment
Botticelli loved. Four little goat-footed Cupids playing with the armour
of the sleeping lad complete the composition. These wanton loves are
admirably conceived and exquisitely drawn; nor indeed can any drawing
exceed in beauty the line that leads from the flank along the ribs and arm
of Mars up to his lifted elbow. The whole design, like one of Piero di
Cosimo's pictures in another key, leaves a strong impression on the mind,
due partly to the oddity of treatment, partly to the careful work
displayed, and partly to the individuality of the artist. It gives us keen
pleasure to feel exactly how a painter like Botticelli applied the dry
naturalism of the early Florentine Renaissance, as well as his own
original imagination, to a subject he imperfectly realised. Yet are we
right in assuming that he meant the female figure in this group for
Aphrodite, the sleeping man for Ares? A Greek or a Roman would have
rejected this picture as false to the mythus of Mars and Venus; and
whether Botticelli wished to be less descriptive than emblematic, might be
fairly questioned. The face and attitude of that unseductive Venus, wide
awake and melancholy, opposite her snoring lover, seems to symbolise the
indignities which women may have to endure from insolent and sottish boys
with only youth to recommend them. This interpretation, however, sounds
like satire. We are left to conjecture whether Botticelli designed his
composition for an allegory of intemperance, the so-called Venus typifying
some moral quality.
Botticelli's "Birth of Aphrodite" expresses this transient moment in the
history of the Renaissance with more felicity. It would be impossible for
any painter to design a more exquisitely outlined figure than that of his
Venus, who, with no covering but her golden hair, is wafted to the shore
by zephyrs. Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the young gods of the
air twine hands and feet together as they float. In the picture of
"Spring" there is the same choice of form, the same purity of line, the
same rare interlacement in the limbs. It would seem as though Botticelli
intended every articulation of the body to express some meaning, and this,
though it enhances the value of his work for sympathetic students, often
leads him to the verge of affectation. Nothing but a touch of affectation
in the twined fingers of Raphael and Tobias impairs the beauty of one of
Botticelli's best pictures at Turin. We feel the same discord looking at
them as we do while reading the occasional _concetti_ in Petrarch; and all
the more in each case does the discord pain us because we know that it
results from their specific quality carried to excess.
Botticelli's sensibility to the refinements of drawing gave peculiar
character to all his work. Attention has frequently been called to the
beauty of his roses.[186] Every curl in their frail petals is rendered
with as much care as though they were the hands or feet of Graces. Nor is
it, perhaps, a mere fancy to imagine that the corolla of an open rose
suggested to Botticelli's mind the composition of his best-known picture,
the circular "Coronation of the Virgin" in the Uffizzi. That masterpiece
combines all Botticelli's best qualities. For rare distinction of beauty
in the faces it is unique, while the mystic calm and resignation, so
misplaced in his Aphrodites, find a meaning here[187]. There is only one
other picture in Italy, a "Madonna and Child with S. Catherine" in a
landscape by Boccaccino da Cremona, that in any degree rivals the peculiar
beauty of its types[188].
Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the same sense as Andrea
Mantegna. But he was a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. We
have to seek his parallel among the verse-writers rather than the artists
of his day. Some of the stanzas of Poliziano and Boiardo, in particular,
might have been written to explain his pictures, or his pictures might
have been painted to illustrate their verses[189]. In both Poliziano and
Boiardo we find the same touch upon antique things as in Botticelli; and
this makes him serviceable almost above all painters to the readers of
Renaissance poetry.
The name of Piero di Cosimo has been mentioned incidentally in connection
with that of Botticelli; and though his life exceeds the limits assigned
for this chapter, so many links unite him to the class of painters I have
been discussing, that I can find no better place to speak of him than
this. His biography forms one of the most amusing chapters in Vasari, who
has taken great delight in noting Piero's quaint humours and eccentric
habits, and whose description of a Carnival triumph devised by him is one
of our most precious documents in illustration of Renaissance
pageantry.[190] The point that connects him with Botticelli is the
romantic treatment of classical mythology, best exemplified in his
pictures of the tale of Perseus and Andromeda.[191] Piero was by nature
and employment a decorative painter; the construction of cars for
pageants, and the adornment of dwelling rooms and marriage chests,
affected his whole style, rendering it less independent and more quaint
than that of Botticelli. Landscape occupies the main part of his
compositions, made up by a strange amalgam of the most eccentric
details--rocks toppling over blue bays, sea-caverns, and fantastic
mountain ranges. Groups of little figures disposed upon these spaces tell
the story, and the best invention of the artist is lavished on the form of
monstrous creatures like the dragon slain by Perseus. There is no attempt
to treat the classic subject in a classic spirit: to do that, and to fail
in doing it, remained for Cellini.[192] We have, on the contrary, before
us an image of the orc, as it appeared to Ariosto's fancy--a creature
borrowed from romance and made to play its part in a Greek myth. The same
criticism applies to Piero's picture of the murdered Procris watched by a
Satyr of the woodland.[193] In creating his Satyr the painter has not had
recourse to any antique bas-relief, but has imagined for himself a being
half human, half bestial, and yet wholly real; nor has he portrayed in
Procris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence. The strange animals
and gaudy flowers introduced into the landscape background further remove
the subject from the sphere of classic treatment. Florentine realism and
quaint fancy being thus curiously blended, the artistic result may be
profitably studied for the light it throws upon the so-called Paganism of
the earlier Renaissance. Fancy at that moment was more free than when
superior knowledge of antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art,
and when the painters thought less of the meaning of the fable for
themselves than of its capability of being used as a machine for the
display of erudition.
It remains to speak of the painter who closes and at the same time gathers
up the whole tradition of this period. Domenico Ghirlandajo deserves this
place of honour not because he had the keenest intuitions, the deepest
thought, the strongest passion, the subtlest fancy, the loftiest
imagination--for in all these points he was excelled by some one or other
of his contemporaries or predecessors--but because his intellect was the
most comprehensive and his mastery of art the most complete. His life
lasted from 1449 to 1498, and he did not distinguish himself as a painter
till he was past thirty.[194] Therefore he does not properly fall within
the limit of 1470, assigned roughly to this age of transition in
painting. But in style and spirit he belonged to it, resuming in his own
work the qualities we find scattered through the minor artists of the
fifteenth century, and giving them the unity of fusion in a large and
lucid manner. Like the painters hitherto discussed, he was working toward
the full Renaissance; yet he reached it neither in ideality nor in
freedom. His art is the art of the understanding only; and to this the
masters of the golden age added radiance, sublimity, grace,
passion--qualities of the imagination beyond the scope of men like
Ghirlandajo.
It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged to name this
powerful but prosaic painter as the Giotto of the fifteenth century in
Florence, the tutelary angel of an age inaugurated by Masaccio. He was a
consummate master of the science collected by his predecessors. No one
surpassed him in the use of fresco. His orderly composition, in the
distribution of figures and the use of architectural accessories, is
worthy of all praise; his portraiture is dignified and powerful;[195] his
choice of form and treatment of drapery, noble. Yet we cannot help noting
his deficiency in the finer sense of beauty, the absence of poetic
inspiration or feeling in his work, the commonplaceness of his colour, and
his wearisome reiteration of calculated effects. He never arrests
attention by sallies of originality, or charms us by the delicacies of
suggestive fancy. He is always at the level of his own achievement, so
that in the end we are as tired with able Ghirlandajo as the men of Athens
with just Aristides. Who, however, but Ghirlandajo could have composed the
frescoes of "S. Fina" at S. Gemignano, the fresco of the "Death of S.
Francis" in S. Trinita at Florence, or that again of the "Birth of the
Virgin" in S. Maria Novella? There is something irritating in pure common
sense imported into art, and Ghirlandajo's masterpieces are the apotheosis
of that quality. How correct, how judicious, how sagacious, how
mathematically ordered! we exclaim; but we gaze without emotion, and we
turn away without regret. It does not vex us to read how Ghirlandajo used
to scold his prentices for neglecting trivial orders that would fill his
purse with money. Similar traits of character pain us with a sense of
impropriety in Perugino. They harmonise with all we feel about the work of
Ghirlandajo. It is bitter mortification to know that Michael Angelo never
found space or time sufficient for his vast designs in sculpture. It is a
positive relief to think that Ghirlandajo sighed in vain to have the
circuit of the walls of Florence given him to paint. How he would have
covered them with compositions, stately, flowing, easy, sober, and
incapable of stirring any feeling in the soul!
Though Ghirlandajo lacked almost every true poetic quality, he combined
the art of distributing figures in a given space, with perspective, fair
knowledge of the nude, and truth to nature, in greater perfection than any
other single painter of the age he represents; and since these were
precisely the gifts of that age to the great Renaissance masters, we
accord to him the place of historical honour. It should be added that,
like almost all the artists of this epoch, he handled sacred and profane,
ancient and modern, subjects in the same style, introducing contemporary
customs and costumes. His pictures are therefore valuable for their
portraits and their illustration of Florentine life. Fresco was his
favourite vehicle; and in this preference he showed himself a true master
of the school of Florence: but he is said to have maintained that mosaic,
as more durable, was superior to wall-painting. This saying, if it be
authentic, justifies our criticism of his cold achievement as a painter.
Reviewing the ground traversed in this and the last chapter, we find that
the painting of Tuscany, and in particular the Florentine section of it,
has absorbed attention. It is characteristic of the next age that other
districts of Italy began to contribute their important quota to the
general culture of the nation. The force generated in Tuscany expanded and
dilated till every section of the country took part in the movement which
Florence had been first to propagate. What was happening in scholarship
began to manifest itself in art, for the same law of growth and
distribution affected both alike; and thus the local differences of the
Italians were to some extent abolished. The nation, never destined to
acquire political union in the Renaissance, possessed at last an
intellectual unity in its painters and its students, which justifies our
speaking of the great men of the golden period as Italians and not as
citizens of such or such a burgh. In the Middle Ages United Italy was an
Idea to theorists like Dante, who dreamed for her an actual supremacy
beneath her Emperor's sway in Rome. The reasoning to which they trusted
proved fallacious, and their hopes were quenched. Instead of the political
empire of the "De Monarchia," a spiritual empire had been created, and the
Italians were never more powerful in Europe than when their sacred city
was being plundered by the imperial bandits in 1527. It is necessary, at
the risk of some repetition, to keep this point before the reader, if only
as an apology for the method of treatment to be followed in the next
chapter, where the painters of the mid-Renaissance period will be reviewed
less in relation to their schools and cities than as representatives of
the Italian spirit.
Since the intellectual unity gained by the Italians in the age of the
Renaissance was chiefly due to the Florentines, it is a matter of some
moment to reconsider the direct influences brought to bear upon the arts
in Florence during the fifteenth century. I have chosen Ghirlandajo as the
representative of painting in that period. I have also expressed the
opinion that his style is singularly cold and prosaic, and have hinted
that this prosaic and cold quality was caused by a defect of emotional
enthusiasm, by preoccupation with finite aims. Herein Ghirlandajo did but
reflect the temper of his age--that temper which Cosimo de' Medici, the
greatest patron of both art and scholarship in Florence before 1470,
represented in his life and in his public policy. It concerns us,
therefore, to take into account the nature of the patronage extended by
the Medici to art. Excessive praise and blame have been showered upon
these burgher princes in almost equal quantities; so that, if we were to
place Roscoe and Rio, as the representatives of conflicting views, in the
scales together, they would balance each other, and leave the index
quivering. This bare statement warns the critic to be cautious, and
inclines him to accept the intermediate conclusion that neither the Medici
nor the artists could escape the conditions of their century. It is
specially argued on the one hand against the Medici that they encouraged a
sensual and worldly style of art, employing the painters to decorate their
palaces with nude figures, and luring them away from sacred to profane
subjects. Yet Cosimo gave orders to Donatello for his "David" and his
"Judith," employed Michellozzo and Brunelleschi to build him convents and
churches, and filled the library of S. Marco, where Fra Angelico was
painting, with a priceless collection of MSS. His own private chapel was
decorated by Benozza Gozzoli. Fra Lippo Lippi and Michael Angelo
Buonarroti were the house-friends of Lorenzo de' Medici. Leo Battista
Alberti was a member of his philosophical society. The only great
Florentine artist who did not stand in cordial relations to the Medicean
circle, was Lionardo da Vinci. This sufficiently shows that the Medicean
patronage was commensurate with the best products of Florentine genius;
nor would it be easy to demonstrate that encouragement, so largely
exhibited and so intelligently used, could have been in the main injurious
to the arts.
There is, however, a truth in the old grudge against the Medicean princes.
They enslaved Florence; and even painting was not slow to suffer from the
stifling atmosphere of tyranny. Lorenzo deliberately set himself to
enfeeble the people by luxury, partly because he liked voluptuous living,
partly because he aimed at popularity, and partly because it was his
interest to enervate republican virtues. The arts used for the purposes of
decoration in triumphs and carnival shows became the instruments of
careless pleasure; and there is no doubt that even earnest painters lent
their powers with no ill-will and no bad conscience to the service of
lascivious patrons. "Per la citta, in diverse case, fece tondi di sua mano
e femmine ignude assai," says Vasari about Sandro Botticelli, who
afterwards became a Piagnone and refused to touch a pencil.[196] We may,
therefore, reasonably concede that if the Medici had never taken hold on
Florence, or if the spirit of the times had made them other than they were
in loftiness of aim and nobleness of heart, the arts of Italy in the
Renaissance might have shown less of worldliness and materialism. It was
against the demoralisation of society by paganism, as against the
enslavement of Florence by her tyrants, that Savonarola strove; and since
the Medici were the leaders of the classical revival, as well as the
despots of the dying commonwealth, they justly bear the lion's share of
that blame which fell in general upon the vices of their age denounced by
the prophet of S. Marco. We may regard it either as a singular misfortune
for Italy or as the strongest sign of deep-seated Italian corruption, that
the most brilliant leaders of culture both at Florence and at
Rome--Cosimo, Lorenzo, and Giovanni de' Medici--promoted rather than
checked the debasing influences of the Renaissance, and added the weight
of their authority to the popular craving for sensuous amusement.
Meanwhile, what was truly great and noble in Renaissance Italy, found its
proper home in Florence; where the spirit of freedom, if only as an idea,
still ruled; where the populace was still capable of being stirred to
super-sensual enthusiasm; and where the flame of the modern intellect
burned with its purest, whitest lustre.
FOOTNOTES:
[161] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 12.
[162] See Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, pp. 122-129.
[163] His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, of the family of
Scheggia. Masaccio means in Tuscan, "Great hulking Tom," just as
Masolino, his supposed master and fellow-worker, means "Pretty little
Tom." Masolino was Tommaso di Cristofero Fini, born in 1384 in S. Croce.
It is now thought that we have but little of his authentic work except
the frescoes at Castiglione di Olona, near Milan. Masaccio was born at
San Giovanni, in the upper valley of the Arno, in 1402. He died at Borne
in 1429.
[164] His family name was Doni. He was born about 1396, and died at the
age of about 73. He got his name Uccello from his partiality for painting
birds, it is said.
[165] See above, Chapter III, Andrea Verocchio, for what has been said
about Verocchio's "David."
[166] A drawing made in red chalk for this "Dream of Constantine" has
been published in facsimile by Ottley, in his _Italian School of Design_.
He wrongly attributes it, however, to Giorgione, and calls it a "Subject
Unknown."
[167] The one in S. Francesco at Rimini, the other in the Uffizzi.
[168] Two angels have recently been published by the Arundel Society who
have also copied Melozzo's wall-painting of Sixtus IV. in the Vatican. It
is probable that the picture in the Royal Collection at Windsor, of Duke
Frederick of Urbino listening to the lecture of a Humanist, is also a
work of Melozzo's, much spoiled by re-painting. See Vol. II., _Revival of
Learning_, p. 220.
[169] Muratori, vol. xxiv. 1181.
[170] For Ciriac of Ancona, see Vol. II., _Revival of Learning_, p. 113.
[171] The services rendered by Squarcione to art have been thoroughly
discussed by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Painting in North Italy_,
vol. i. chap. 2. I cannot but think that they underrate the importance of
his school.
[172] He was born between 1360 and 1370, and he settled at Florence about
1422, where he opened a _bottega_ in S. Trinita. In 1423 he painted his
masterpiece, the "Adoration of the Magi," now exhibited in the Florentine
Academy of Arts.
[173] See, for instance, the valuable portraits of the Medicean family
with Picino and Poliziano, in the fresco of the "Tower of Babel" at Pisa.
[174] _L'Art Chretien_, vol. ii. p. 397.
[175] The same remark might be made about the Venetian Bonifazio. It is
remarkable that the "Adoration of the Magi" was always a favourite
subject with painters of this calibre.
[176] I may refer to the picture of the hunters in the Taylor Gallery at
Oxford, the "Vintage of Noah" at Pisa, the attendants of the Magi in the
Riccardi Palace, and the _Carola_ in the "Marriage of Jacob and Rachel"
at Pisa.
[177] "Stories of Isaac and Ishmael and of Jacob and Esau" at Pisa, and
"Story of S. Augustine" at San Gemignano. Nothing can be prettier than
the school children in the latter series. The group of the little boy,
horsed upon a bigger boy's back for a whipping, is one of the most
natural episodes in painting.
[178] Riccardi Chapel.
[179] For an example, the picture of Madonna worshipping the infant
Christ upheld by two little angels in the Uffizzi.
[180] In the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence.
[181] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap. 19. Nothing was more common
in the practice of Italian arts than for pupils to take their names from
their masters, in the same way as they took them from their fathers, by
the prefix _di_ or otherwise.
[182] The most simply beautiful of Filippino's pictures is the
oil-painting in the Badia at Florence, which represents Madonna attended
by angels dictating the story of her life to S. Bernard. In this most
lovely religious picture Filippino comes into direct competition with
Perugino (see the same subject at Munich), without suffering by the
contrast. The type of Our lady, striven after by Botticelli and other
masters of his way of feeling, seems to me more thoroughly attained by
Filippino than by any of his fellow-workers. She is a woman acquainted
with grief and nowise distinguished by the radiance of her beauty among
the daughters of earth. It is measureless love for the mother of his Lord
that makes S. Bernard bow before her with eyes of wistful adoration and
hushed reverence.
[183] The study of the fine arts offers few subjects of more curious
interest than the vicissitudes through which painters of the type of
Botticelli, not absolutely and confessedly in the first rank, but
attractive by reason of their relation to the spirit of their age, and of
the seal of _intimite_ set upon their work have passed. In the last
century and the beginning of this, our present preoccupation with
Botticelli would have passed for a mild lunacy, because he has none of
the qualities then most in vogue and most enthusiastically studied, and
because the moment in the history of culture he so faithfully represents,
was then but little understood. The prophecy of Mr. Ruskin, the
tendencies of our best contemporary art in Mr. Burne Jones's painting,
the specific note of our recent fashionable poetry, and, more than all,
our delight in the delicately poised psychological problems of the middle
Renaissance, have evoked a kind of hero-worship for this excellent artist
and true poet.
[184] A friend, writing to me from Italy, speaks thus of Botticelli, and
of the painters associated with him: "When I ask myself what it is I find
fascinating in him--for instance, which of his pictures, or what element
in them--I am forced to admit that it is the touch of paganism in him,
the fairy-story element, _the echo of a beautiful lapsed mythology which
he has found the means of transmitting._" The words I have printed in
italics seem to me very true. At the same time we must bear in mind that
the scientific investigation of nature had not in the fifteenth century
begun to stand between the sympathetic intellect and the outer world.
There was still the possibility of that "lapsed mythology," the dream of
poets and the delight of artists, seeming positively the best form of
expression for sentiments aroused by nature.
[185] _De Rerum Natura_, lib. v. 737.
[186] The rose-tree background in a Madonna belonging to Lord Elcho is a
charming instance of the value given to flowers by careful treatment.
[187] I cannot bring myself to accept Mr. Pater's reading of the
Madonna's expression. It seems to me that Botticelli meant to portray the
mingled awe and tranquillity of a mortal mother chosen for the Son of
God. He appears to have sometimes aimed at conveying more than painting
can compass; and, since he had not Lionardo's genius, he gives sadness,
mournfulness, or discontent, for some more subtle mood. Next to the
Madonna of the Uffizzi, Botticelli's loveliest religious picture to my
mind is the "Nativity" belonging to Mr. Fuller Maitland. Poetic
imagination in a painter has produced nothing more graceful and more
tender than the dance of angels in the air above, and the embracement of
the angels and the shepherds on the lawns below.
[188] In the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice. I do not mention this
picture as a complete pendant to Botticelli's famous _tondo_. The faces
of S. Catherine and Madonna, however, have something of the rarity that
is so striking in that work.
[189] I might mention stanzas 122-124 of Poliziano's _Giostra_,
describing Venus in the lap of Mars; or stanzas 99-107, describing the
birth of Venus; and from Boiardo's _Orlando Innamorato_, I might quote
the episode of Rinaldo's punishment by Love (lib. ii. canto xv. 43), or
the tale of Silvanella and Narcissus (lib. ii. canto xvii. 49).
[190] I hope to make use of this passage in a future section of my work
on the Italian Poetry of the Renaissance. Therefore I pass by this
portion of Piero's art-work now.
[191] Uffizzi Gallery.
[192] See the bas-relief upon the pedestal of his "Perseus" in the Loggia
de' Lanzi.
[193] In the National Gallery.
[194] His family name was Domenico di Currado di Doffo Bigordi. He
probably worked during his youth and early manhood as a goldsmith and got
his artist's name from the trade of making golden chaplets for the
Florentine women. See Vasari, vol. v. p. 66.
[195] What, after all, remains the grandest quality of Ghirlandajo is his
powerful drawing of characteristic heads. They are as various as they are
vigorous. What a nation of strong men must the Florentines have been, we
feel while gazing at his frescoes.
[196] In many houses he painted roundels with his own hand, and of naked
women plenty.
CHAPTER VI
PAINTING
Two Periods in the True Renaissance--Andrea Mantegna--His Statuesque
Design--His Naturalism--Roman Inspiration--Triumph of Julius
Caesar--Bas-reliefs--Luca Signorelli--The Precursor of Michael
Angelo--Anatomical Studies--Sense of Beauty--The Chapel of S. Brizio at
Orvieto--Its Arabesques and Medallions--Degrees in his Ideal--Enthusiasm
for Organic Life--Mode of treating Classical Subjects--Perugino--His
Pietistic Style--His Formalism--The Psychological Problem of his
Life--Perugino's Pupils--Pinturicchio--At Spello and Siena--Francia--Fra
Bartolommeo--Transition to the Golden Age--Lionardo da Vinci--The Magician
of the Renaissance--Raphael--The Melodist--Correggio--The Faun--Michael
Angelo--The Prophet.
The Renaissance, so far as Painting is concerned, may be said to have
culminated between the years 1470 and 1550. These dates, it must be
frankly admitted, are arbitrary; nor is there anything more unprofitable
than the attempt to define by strict chronology the moments of an
intellectual growth so complex, so unequally progressive, and so varied as
that of Italian art. All that the historian can hope to do, is to strike a
mean between his reckoning of years and his more subtle calculations based
on the emergence of decisive genius in special men. An instance of such
compromise is afforded by Lionardo da Vinci, who belongs, as far as dates
go, to the last half of the fifteenth century, but who must, on any
estimate of his achievement, be classed with Michael Angelo among the
final and supreme masters of the full Renaissance. To violate the order of
time, with a view to what may here be called the morphology of Italian
art, is, in his case, a plain duty.
Bearing this in mind, it is still possible to regard the eighty years
above mentioned as a period no longer of promise and preparation but of
fulfilment and accomplishment. Furthermore, the thirty years at the close
of the fifteenth century may be taken as one epoch in this climax of the
art, while the first half of the sixteenth forms a second. Within the
former falls the best work of Mantegna, Perugino, Francia, the Bellini,
Signorelli, Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter we may reckon Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Giorgione, Correggio, Titian, and Andrea del Sarto. Lionardo da
Vinci, though belonging chronologically to the former epoch, ranks first
among the masters of the latter; and to this also may be given Tintoretto,
though his life extended far beyond it to the last years of the century.
We thus obtain, within the period of eighty years from 1470 to 1550, two
subordinate divisions of time, the one including the last part of the
fifteenth century, the other extending over the best years of the
sixteenth.
The subdivisions I have just suggested correspond to two distinct stages
in the evolution of art. The painters of the earlier group win our
admiration quite as much by their aim as by their achievement. Their
achievement, indeed, is not so perfect but that they still make some
demand upon interpretative sympathy in the student. There is, besides, a
sense of reserved strength in their work. We feel that their motives have
not been developed to the utmost, that their inspiration is not exhausted;
that it will be possible for their successors to advance beyond them on
the same path, not realising more consummate excellence in special points,
but combining divers qualities, and reaching absolute freedom.
The painters of the second group display mastery more perfect, range of
faculty more all-embracing. What they design they do; nature and art obey
them equally; the resources placed at their command are employed with
facile and unfettered exercise of power. The hand obedient to the brain is
now so expert that nothing further is left to be desired in the expression
of the artist's thought.[197] The student can only hope to penetrate the
master's meaning. To imagine a step further in the same direction is
impossible. The full flower of the Italian genius has been unfolded. Its
message to the world in art has been delivered.
Chronology alone would not justify us in drawing these distinctions. What
really separates the two groups is the different degree in which they
severally absorbed the spirit and uttered the message of their age. In the
former the Renaissance was still immature, in the latter it was perfected.
Yet all these painters deserve in a true sense to be called its children.
Their common object is art regarded as an independent function, and
relieved from the bondage of technical impediments. In their work the
liberty of the modern mind finds its first and noblest expression. They
deal with familiar and time-honoured Christian motives reverently; but
they use them at the same time for the exhibition of pure human beauty.
Pagan influences yield them spirit-stirring inspiration; yet the antique
models of style, which proved no less embarrassing to their successors
than Saul's armour was to David, weigh lightly, like a magician's
breast-plate, upon their heroic strength.
Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua in 1431. Vasari says that in his
boyhood he herded cattle, and it is probable that he was the son of a
small Lombard farmer. What led him to the study of the arts we do not
know; but that his talents were precociously developed, is proved by his
registration in 1441 upon the books of the painter's guild at Padua. He is
there described as the adopted son of Squarcione. At the age of seventeen
he signed a picture with his name. Studying the casts and drawings
collected by Squarcione for his Paduan school, the young Mantegna found
congenial exercise for his peculiar gifts.[198] His early frescoes in the
Eremitani at Padua look as though they had been painted from statues or
clay models, carefully selected for the grandeur of their forms, the
nobility of their attitudes, and the complicated beauty of their drapery.
The figures, arranged on different planes, are perfect in their
perspective; the action is indicated by appropriate gestures, and the
colouring, though faint and cold, is scientifically calculated. Yet not a
man or woman in these wondrous compositions seems to live. Well provided
with bone and muscle, they have neither blood nor anything suggestive of
the breath of life within them. It is as though Mantegna had been called
to paint a people turned to stone, arrested suddenly amid their various
occupations, and preserved for centuries from injury in some Egyptian
solitude of dewless sand.
In spite of this unearthly immobility, the Paduan frescoes exercise a
strange and potent spell. We feel ourselves beneath the sway of a gigantic
genius, intent on solving the severest problems of his art in preparation
for the portraiture of some high intellectual abstraction. It should also
be observed that notwithstanding their frigidity and statuesque composure,
the pictures of "S. Andrew" and "S. Christopher" in the chapel of the
Eremitani reveal minute study of real objects. Transitory movements of the
body are noted and transcribed with merciless precision; an Italian
hill-side, with its olive trees and winding ways and crown of turrets,
forms the background of one scene; in another the drama is localised amid
Renaissance architecture of the costliest style. Rustic types have been
selected for the soldiers, and commonplace details, down to a patched
jerkin or a broken shoe, bear witness to the patience and the observation
of the master. But over all these things the glamour of Medusa's head has
fallen, turning them to stone. We are clearly in the presence of a painter
for whom the attractions of nature were subordinated to the fascinations
of science--a man the very opposite, for instance, to Benozzo Gozzoli. If
Mantegna had passed away in early manhood, like Masaccio, his fame would
have been that of a cold and calculating genius labouring after an ideal
unrealised except in its dry formal elements.
The truth is that Mantegna's inspiration was derived from the
antique.[199] The beauty of classical bas-relief entered deep into his
soul and ruled his imagination. In later life he spent his acquired wealth
in forming a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities.[200] He was,
moreover, the friend of students, eagerly absorbing the knowledge brought
to light by Ciriac of Ancona, Flavio Biondo, and other antiquaries; and so
completely did he assimilate the materials of scholarship, that the spirit
of a Roman seemed to be re-incarnated in him. Thus, independently of his
high value as a painter, he embodies for us in art that sincere passion
for the ancient world which was the dominating intellectual impulse of his
age.
The minute learning accumulated in the fifteenth century upon the subject
of Roman military life found noble illustration in his frieze of "Julius
Caesar's Triumph."[201] Nor is this masterpiece a cold display of
pedantry. The life we vainly look for in the frescoes of the Eremitani
chapel may be found here--statuesque, indeed, in style, and stately in
movement, but glowing with the spirit of revived antiquity. The
processional pomp of legionaries bowed beneath their trophied arms, the
monumental majesty of robed citizens, the gravity of stoled and veiled
priests, the beauty of young slaves, and all the paraphernalia of spoils
and wreaths and elephants and ensigns are massed together with the
self-restraint of noble art subordinating pageantry to rules of lofty
composition. What must the genius of the man have been who could move thus
majestically beneath the weight of painfully accumulated erudition,
converting an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line
composed in the grave Dorian mood?
By no process can the classic purity of this bas-relief be better
understood than by comparing the original with a transcript made by Rubens
from a portion of the "Triumph."[202] The Flemish painter strives to add
richness to the scene by Bacchanalian riot and the sensuality of imperial
Rome. His elephants twist their trunks, and trumpet to the din of cymbals;
negroes feed the flaming candelabra with scattered frankincense; the white
oxen of Clitumnus are loaded with gaudy flowers, and the dancing maidens
are dishevelled Maenads. But the rhythmic procession of Mantegna, modulated
to the sound of flutes and soft recorders, carries our imagination back to
the best days and strength of Rome. His priests and generals, captives and
choric women, are as little Greek as they are modern. In them awakes to a
new life the spirit-quelling energy of the republic. The painter's severe
taste keeps out of sight the insolence and orgies of the empire; he
conceives Rome as Shakspeare did in "Coriolanus."[203]
In compositions of this type, studied after bas-reliefs and friezes,
Mantegna displayed a power that was unique. Those who have once seen his
drawings for Judith with the head of Holofernes, and for Solomon judging
between the two mothers, will never forget their sculpture. The lines are
graven on our memory. When this marble master chose to be tragic, his
intensity was terrible. The designs for a dead Christ carried to the tomb
among the weeping Maries, concentrate within the briefest space the utmost
agony; it is as though the very ecstasy of grief had been congealed and
fixed for ever. What, again, he could produce of purely beautiful within
the region of religious art, is shown by his "Madonna of the
Victory."[204] No other painter has given to the soldier saints forms at
once so heroic and so chivalrously tender.
With regard to the circumstances of Mantegna's biography, it may be said
briefly that, though of humble birth, he spent the greater portion of his
life at Court and in the service of princes. It was in 1456, after he had
distinguished himself by the Paduan frescoes, that he first received an
invitation from the Marquis Lodovico Gonzaga. Of this sovereign I have
already had occasion to speak.[205] Reared by Vittorino da Feltre, to whom
his father had committed almost unlimited authority, Lodovico had early
learned to estimate the real advantages of culture. It was now his object
to render his capital no less illustrious by art than by the residence of
learned men. With this view he offered Mantegna a salary of fifteen ducats
a month, together with lodging, corn, and fuel--provided the painter would
place his talents at his service. Mantegna accepted the invitation; but
numerous engagements prevented him from transferring his household from
Padua to Mantua until the year 1460. From that date onwards to 1506, when
he died, Mantegna remained attached to the Gonzaga family serving three
Marquises in succession, and adorning their palaces, chapels, and
country-seats with frescoes now, alas! almost entirely ruined. The grants
of land and presents he received in addition to his salary, enabled him to
build a villa at Buscoldo, where he resided during the summer, as well as
to erect a sumptuous mansion in the capital.
Between Mantua, Goito, and Buscoldo, Mantegna spent the last forty-six
years of his life in continual employment, broken only by a short visit to
Florence in 1466, and another to Bologna in 1472,[206] and by a longer
residence in Rome between the years 1488 and 1490. During the latter
period Innocent VIII. was Pope. He had built a chapel in the Belvedere of
the Vatican, and wished the greatest painter of the day to decorate it.
Therefore he wrote to Francesco, Marquis of Mantua, requesting that he
might avail himself of Mantegna's skill. Francesco, though unwilling to
part with his painter in ordinary, thought it unadvisable to disappoint
the Pope. Accordingly he dubbed Mantegna knight, and sent him to Rome. The
chapel painted in fresco for Innocent was ruthlessly destroyed by Pius
VI.; and thus the world has lost one of Mantegna's masterpieces, executed
while his genius was at its zenith. On his return to Mantua he finished
the decorations of the Castello of the Gonzaghi, and completed his
greatest surviving work, the "Triumph of Julius Caesar."
By his wife, Nicolosia, the sister of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini,
Mantegna had several children, one of whom, Francesco, adopted painting as
a trade. The great artist was by temper arrogant and haughty; nor could he
succeed in living peaceably with any of his neighbours. It appears that he
spent habitually more money than he could well afford, freely indulging
his taste for magnificence, and disbursing large sums in the purchase of
curiosities. Long before his death his estate had been involved in debt;
and after his decease, his sons were forced to sell the pictures in his
studio for the payment of pressing creditors. He was buried in Alberti's
church of S. Andrea at Mantua, in a chapel decorated at his own expense.
Over the grave was placed a bronze bust, most noble in modelling and
perfect in execution. The broad forehead with its deeply cloven furrows,
the stern and piercing eyes, the large lips compressed with nervous
energy, the massive nose, the strength of jaw and chin, and the superb
clusters of the hair escaping from a laurel-wreath upon the royal head,
are such as realise for us our notion of a Roman in the days of the
Republic. Mantegna's own genius has inspired this masterpiece, which
tradition assigns to the medallist Sperando Maglioli. Whoever wrought it,
must have felt the incubation of the mighty painter's spirit, and have
striven to express in bronze the character of his uncompromising art.
Of a different temperament, yet not wholly unlike Mantegna in a certain
iron strength of artistic character, was Luca Signorelli, born about 1441
at Cortona. The supreme quality of Mantegna was studied purity of outline,
severe and heightened style. As Landor is distinguished by concentration
above all the English poets who have made trial of the classic Muse, so
Mantegna holds a place apart among Italian painters because of his stern
Roman self-control. Signorelli, on the contrary, made his mark by
boldness, pushing experiment almost beyond the verge of truth, and
approaching Michael Angelo in the hardihood of his endeavour to outdo
nature. Vasari says of him, that "even Michael Angelo imitated the manner
of Luca, as every one can see;" and indeed Signorelli anticipated the
greatest master of the sixteenth century, not only in his profound study
of human anatomy, but also in his resolution to express high thought and
tragic passion by pure form, discarding all the minor charms of painting.
Trained in the severe school of Piero della Francesca, he early learned to
draw from the nude with boldness and accuracy; and to this point, too much
neglected by his predecessors, he devoted the full powers of his maturity.
Anatomy he practised, according to the custom of those days, in the
graveyard or beneath the gibbet. There is a drawing by him in the Louvre
of a stalwart man carrying upon his back the corpse of a youth. Both are
naked. The motive seems to have been taken from some lazar-house.
Life-long study of perspective in its application to the drawing of the
figure, made the difficulties of foreshortening and the delineation of
brusque attitude mere child's play to this audacious genius. The most
rapid movement, the most perilous contortion of bodies falling through the
air or flying, he depicted with hard, firmly-traced, unerring outline. If
we dare to criticise the productions of a master so original and so
accomplished, all we can say is that Signorelli revelled almost too
wantonly in the display of hazardous posture, and that he sacrificed the
passion of his theme to the display of science.[207] Yet his genius
comprehended great and tragic subjects, and to him belongs the credit in
an age of ornament and pedantry of having made the human body a language
for the utterance of all that is most weighty in the thought of man.
A story is told by Vasari which brings Signorelli very close to our
sympathy, and enables us to understand the fascination of pure form he
felt so deeply. "It is related of Luca that he had a son killed at
Cortona, a youth of singular beauty in face and person, whom he had
tenderly loved. In his grief the father caused the boy to be stripped
naked, and with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering no complaint
and shedding no tear, he painted the portrait of his dead son, to the end
that he might still be able, through the work of his own hand, to
contemplate that which nature had given him, but which an adverse fortune
had taken away." So passionate and ardent, so convinced of the
indissoluble bond between the soul he loved in life and its dead tenement
of clay, and withal so iron-nerved and stout of will, it behoved that man
to be, who undertook in the plenitude of his power, at the age of sixty,
to paint upon the walls of the chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto the images
of Doomsday, Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell.[208]
It is a gloomy chapel in the Gothic cathedral of that forlorn Papal
city--gloomy by reason of bad lighting, but more so because of the
terrible shapes with which Signorelli has filled it[209]. In no other work
of the Italian Renaissance, except in the Sistine Chapel, has so much
thought, engaged upon the most momentous subjects, been expressed with
greater force by means more simple and with effect more overwhelming.
Architecture, landscape, and decorative accessories of every kind, the
usual padding of _quattrocento_ pictures, have been discarded from the
main compositions. The painter has relied solely upon his power of
imagining and delineating the human form in every attitude, and under the
most various conditions. Darting like hawks or swallows through the air,
huddling together to shun the outpoured vials of the wrath of God,
writhing with demons on the floor of Hell, struggling into new life from
the clinging clay, standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating
with lute and viol on the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or
clasping "inseparable hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for
ever"--these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial,
human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the
impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend
the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge,
at whose bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the dead arise, and
weal and woe are portioned to the saved and damned, is Himself
unrepresented.[210] We breathe in the presence of embodied consciences,
submitting, like our own, to an unseen inevitable will.
It would be doing Signorelli injustice at Orvieto to study only these
great panels. The details with which he has filled all the vacant spaces
above the chapel stalls and round the doorway, throw new light upon his
power. The ostensible motive for this elaborate ornamentation is contained
in the portraits of six poets, who are probably Homer, Virgil, Lucan,
Horace, Ovid, and Dante, _il sesto tra cotanto senno_.[211] But the
portraits themselves, though vigorously conceived and remarkable for bold
foreshortening, are the least part of the whole design. Its originality
consists in the arabesques, medallions, and _chiaroscuro_ bas-reliefs,
where the human form, treated as absolutely plastic, supplies the sole
decorative element. The pilasters by the doorway, for example, are
composed, after the usual type of Italian _grotteschi_, in imitation of
antique candelabra, with numerous stages for the exhibition of the
artist's fancies. Unlike the work of Raphael in the Loggie, these
pilasters of Signorelli show no birds or beasts, no flowers or foliage,
fruits or fauns, no masks or sphinxes. They are crowded with naked
men--drinking, dancing, leaning forward, twisting themselves into strange
attitudes, and adapting their bodies to the several degrees of the
framework. The same may be said of the arabesques around the portraits of
the poets, where men, women, and children, some complete, some ending in
foliage or in fish-tails, are lavished with a wild and terrible profusion.
Hippogriffs and centaurs, sirens and dolphins, are here used as adjuncts
to humanity. Amid this fantastic labyrinth of twisted forms we find
medallions painted in _chiaroscuro_ with subjects taken chiefly from
Ovidian and Dantesque mythology. Here every attitude of men in combat and
in motion has been studied from the nude, and multitudes of figures draped
and undraped are compressed into the briefest compass. All but the human
form is sternly eliminated; and the body itself is treated with a mastery
and a boldness that prove Signorelli to have held its varied capabilities
firmly in his brain. He could not have worked out all those postures from
the living model. He played freely with his immense stores of knowledge;
but his play was the pastime of a Prometheus. Each pose, however
hazardous, carries conviction with it of sincerity and truth; the life and
liberty of nature reign throughout. From the whole maze of interlaced and
wrestling figures the terrible nature of the artist's genius shines forth.
They are almost all strong men in the prime or past the prime of life,
chosen for their salient display of vital structure. Signorelli was the
first, and, with the exception of Michael Angelo, the last painter thus to
use the body, without sentiment, without voluptuousness, without any
second intention whatsoever, as the supreme decorative principle. In his
absolute sincerity he made, as it were, a parade of hard and rugged types,
scorning to introduce an element of beauty, whether sensuous or ideal,
that should distract him from the study of the body in and for itself.
This distinguishes him in the arabesques at Orvieto alike from Mantegna
and Michael Angelo, from Correggio and Raphael, from Titian and Paolo
Veronese.
This point is so important for its bearing on Renaissance art that I may
be permitted to dilate at greater length on Signorelli's choice of types
and treatment of form in general. Having a special predilection for the
human body, he by no means confined himself to monotony in its
presentation. On the contrary, we can trace many distinct grades of
corporeal expression. First comes the abstract nude, illustrated by the
"Resurrection" and the arabesques at Orvieto[212]. Contemporary life, with
all its pomp of costume and insolence of ruffling youth, is depicted in
the "Fulminati" at Orvieto and in the "Soldiers of Totila" at Monte
Oliveto[213]. These transcripts from the courts of princes and camps of
condottieri are invaluable as portraits of the lawless young men who
filled Italy with the noise of their feuds and the violence of their
adventures. They illustrate Matarazzo's Perugian chronicle better than any
other Renaissance pictures; for in frescoes like those of Pinturicchio at
Siena the same qualities are softened to suit the painter's predetermined
harmony, whereas Signorelli rejoices in their pure untempered
character[214]. These, then, form a second stage. Third in degree we find
the type of highly idealised adolescence reserved by Signorelli for his
angels. All his science and his sympathy with real life are here
subordinated to poetic feeling. It is a mistake to say that these angels
are the young men of Umbria whom he loved to paint in their striped
jackets, with the addition of wings to their shoulders. The radiant beings
who tune their citherns on the clouds of Paradise, or scatter roses for
elect souls, could not live and breathe in the fiery atmosphere of
sensuous passions to which the Baglioni were habituated. A grave and
solemn sense of beauty animates these fair male beings, clothed in
voluminous drapery, with youthful faces and still earnest eyes. Their
melody, like that of Milton, is severe. Nor are Signorelli's angelic
beings of one uniform type like the angels of Fra Angelico. The athletic
cherubs of the "Resurrection," breathing their whole strength into the
trumpets that awake the dead; the mailed and winged warriors, keeping
guard above the pit of "Hell," that none may break their prison-bars among
the damned; the lute-players of "Paradise," with their almost feminine
sobriety of movement; the flame-breathing seraphs of the day of doom; the
"Gabriel" of Volterra, in whom strength is translated into
swiftness:--these are the heralds, sentinels, musicians, executioners, and
messengers of the celestial court; and each class is distinguished by
appropriate physical characteristics. At the other end of the scale,
forming a fourth grade, we may mention the depraved types of humanity
chosen for his demons--those greenish, reddish, ochreish fiends of the
"Inferno," whom Signorelli created by exaggerating the more grotesque
qualities of the nude developed in his arabesques. We thus obtain four
several degrees of form: the demoniac, the abstract nude, the adolescent
beauty of young men copied from choice models, and the angelic.
Except in his angels, Signorelli was comparatively indifferent to what is
commonly considered beauty. He was not careful to select his models, or to
idealise their type. The naked human body, apart from facial distinction
or refinement of form, contented him. Violent contrasts of light and
shadow, accentuating the anatomical structure with rough and angular
decision, give the effect of illustrative diagrams to his studies. Harmony
of proportion and the magic of expression are sacrificed to energy
emergent in a powerful physique. Redundant life, in sinewy limbs, in the
proud carriage of the head upon the neck, in the sway of the trunk
backward from the reins, the firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the
thick hair, broad shoulders, spare flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of
a man of twenty-two or upwards, whose growth has been confined to the
development of animal force, was what delighted him. Yet there is no
coarseness or animalism properly so called in his style. He was attracted
by the marvellous mechanism of the human frame--its goodliness regarded as
the most highly organised of animate existences.
Owing, perhaps, to this exclusive predilection for organic life,
Signorelli was not great as a colourist. His patches of blues and reds in
the frescoes of Monte Oliveto are oppressively distinct; his use of dull
brown for the shading of flesh imparts a disagreeable heaviness to his
best modelled forms; nor did he often attain in his oil pictures to that
grave harmony we admire in his "Last Supper" at Cortona. The world of
light and colour was to him a comparatively untravelled land. It remained
for other artists to raise these elements of pictorial expression to the
height reached by Signorelli in his treatment of the nude.
Before quitting the frescoes at Orvieto, some attention should be paid to
the medallions spoken of above, in special relation to the classicism of
the earlier Renaissance. Scenes from Dante's "Purgatorio" and subjects
from the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid are treated here in the same key; but the
latter, since they engaged Signorelli's fancy upon Greek mythology, are
the more important for our purpose. Two from the legend of "Orpheus" and
two from that of "Proserpine" might be chosen as typical of the whole
series. Mediaeval intensity, curiously at variance with antique feeling, is
discernible throughout. The satellites of Hades are gaunt and sinewy
devils, eager to do violence to Eurydice. Pluto himself drives his jarring
car-wheels up through the lava-blocks and flames of Etna with a fury and a
vehemence we seek in vain upon antique sarcophagi. Ceres, wandering
through Sicily in search of her lost daughter, is a gaunt witch with
dishevelled hair, raising frantic hands to tear her cheeks; while the
snakes that draw her chariot are no grave symbols of the germinating corn,
but greedy serpents ready to spit fire against the ravishers of
Proserpine. Thus the tranquillity and self-restraint of Greek art yield to
a passionate and trenchant realisation of the actual romance. The most
thrilling moments in the legend are selected for dramatic treatment, grace
and beauty being exchanged for vivid presentation. A whole cycle of human
experience separates these medallions from the antique bas-relief at
Naples, where Hermes hands the veiled Eurydice to Orpheus, and all three
are calm. That Signorelli, if he chose to do so, could represent a classic
myth with more of classic feeling, is shown by his picture of "Pan
Listening to Olympus"[215]. The nymph, the vineleaf-girdled Faun, and the
two shepherds, all undraped and drawn with subtle feeling for the melodies
of line, render this work one of his most successful compositions.
It would be interesting to compare Signorelli's treatment of the antique
with Mantegna's or Botticelli's. The visions of the pagan world, floating
before the mind of all men in the fifteenth century, found very different
interpreters in these three painters--Botticelli adding the quaint alloy
of his own fancy, Signorelli imparting the semi-savagery of a terrible
imagination, Mantegna, with the truest instinct and the firmest touch,
confining himself to the processional pageantry of bas-relief. Yet, were
this comparison to be instituted, we could hardly refrain from carrying it
much further. Each great master of the Renaissance had his own relation to
classical mythology. The mystic sympathies of "Leda and the Swan," as
imaged severally by Lionardo and Michael Angelo; Correggio's romantic
handling of the myths of "Danae" and "Io;" Titian's and Tintoretto's rival
pictures of "Bacchus and Ariadne;" Raphael's "Galatea;" Pollajuolo's
"Hercules;" the "Europa" of Veronese; the "Circe" of Dosso Dossi; Palma's
"Venus;" Sodoma's "Marriage of Alexander"--all these, to mention none but
pictures familiar to every traveller in Italy, raise for the student of
the classical Revival absorbing questions relative to the influences of
pagan myths upon the modern imagination.
Signorelli was chiefly occupied, during the course of his long career,
upon religious pictures; and the high place he occupies in the history of
Renaissance culture is due partly to his free abandonment of conventional
methods in treating sacred subjects. The Uffizzi Gallery contains a
circular "Madonna" by his hand, with a row of naked men for
background--the forerunner of Michael Angelo's famous "Holy Family." So
far had art for art's sake already encroached upon the ecclesiastical
domain. To discuss Signorelli's merits as a painter of altar-pieces would
be to extend the space allotted to him far beyond its proper limits. It is
not as a religious artist that he takes his rank, but as having powerfully
promoted the rehabilitation of the body achieved for art by the
Renaissance.
Unlike Mantegna, Signorelli never entered the service of a prince, though
we have seen that he executed commissions for Lorenzo de' Medici and
Pandolfo Petrucci. He bore a name which, if not noble, had been more than
once distinguished in the annals of Tuscany. Residing at his native place,
Cortona, he there enjoyed the highest reputation, and was frequently
elected to municipal office. Concerning his domestic life very little is
known, but what we do know is derived from an excellent source[216]. His
mother was the sister of Lazzaro, great-grandfather of Giorgio Vasari. In
his biography of Signorelli, Vasari relates how, when he was himself a boy
of eight, his illustrious cousin visited the house of the Vasari family at
Arezzo; and hearing from little Giorgio's grammar-master that he spent his
time in drawing figures, Luca turned to the child's father and said,
"Antonio, since Giorgio takes after his family, you must by all means have
him taught; for even though he should pay attention to literature as well,
drawing cannot fail to be a source of utility, honour, and recreation to
him, as it is to every man of worth." Luca's kindness deeply impressed the
boy, who afterwards wrote the following description of his personal
qualities: "He was a man of the most excellent habits, sincere and
affectionate with his friends, sweet of conversation and amusing in
society, above all things courteous to those who had need of his work, and
easy in giving instruction to his pupils. He lived splendidly, and took
delight in dressing handsomely. This excellent disposition caused him to
be always held in highest veneration both in his own city and abroad."
To turn from Signorelli to Perugino is to plunge at once into a very
different atmosphere[217]. It is like quitting the rugged gorges of high
mountains for a valley of the Southern Alps--still, pensive, beautiful,
and coloured with reflections from an evening sky. Perugino knew exactly
how to represent a certain mood of religious sentiment, blending meek
acquiescence with a prayerful yearning of the impassioned soul. His
Madonnas worshipping the infant Jesus in a tranquil Umbrian landscape, his
angels ministrant, his pathetic martyrs with upturned holy faces, his
sexless S. Sebastians and immaculate S. Michaels, display the perfection
of art able by colour and by form to achieve within a narrow range what it
desires. What this artist seems to have aimed at, was to create for the
soul amid the pomps and passions of this world a resting-place of
contemplation tenanted by saintly and seraphic beings. No pain comes near
the folk of his celestial city; no longing poisons their repose; they are
not weary, and the wicked trouble them no more. Their cheerfulness is no
less perfect than their serenity; like the shades of Hellas, they have
drunk Lethean waters from the river of content, and all remembrance of
things sad or harsh has vanished from their minds. The quietude of
holiness expressed in this ideal region was a legacy to Perugino from
earlier Umbrian masters; but his technical supremacy in fresco-painting
and in oils, his correct drawing within certain limits, and his refined
sense of colour enabled him to realise it more completely than his less
accomplished predecessors. In his best work the Renaissance set the seal
of absolute perfection upon pietistic art.
We English are fortunate in possessing one of Perugino's sincerest
devotional oil pictures[218]. His frescoes of "S. Sebastian" at Panicale,
and of the "Crucifixion" at Florence, are tolerably well known through
reproductions[219]; while the "Vision of S. Bernard" at Munich and the
"Pieta" in the Pitti Gallery are familiar to all travelled students of
Italian painting. These masterpieces belong to Perugino's best period,
when his inspiration was fresh, and his enthusiasm for artistic excellence
was still unimpaired; and when, as M. Rio thinks, the failure of his faith
had not yet happened. It is only at Perugia, however, in the Sala del
Cambio, that we are able to gauge the extent of his power and to estimate
the value of his achievement beyond the pale of strictly religious themes.
Early in the course of his career Perugino seems to have become contented
with a formal repetition of successful motives, and to have checked the
growth of his genius by adhering closely to a prescribed cycle of effects.
The praises of his patrons and the prosperity of his trade proved to his
keen commercial sense that the raised ecstatic eyes, the upturned oval
faces, the pale olive skin, the head inclined upon the shoulder, the thin
fluttering hair, the ribands and the dainty dresses of his holy persons
found great favour in Umbrian palaces and convents. Thenceforward he
painted but little else; and when, in the Sala del Cambio, he was obliged
to treat the representative heroes of Greek and Roman story, he adopted
the same manner[220]. Leonidas, the lionhearted Spartan, and Cato, the
austere Roman, who preferred liberty to life, bend their mild heads like
flowers in Perugino's frescoes, and gather up their drapery in studied
folds with celestial delicacy. Jove is a reproduction of the Eterno Padre,
conceived as a benevolent old man for a conventional painting of the
"Trinity;" and Ganymede is a page-boy with the sweet submissive features
of Tobias. Already Perugino had opened a manufactory of pietistic
pictures, and was employing many pupils on his works. He coined money by
fixing artificially beautiful faces upon artificially elegant figures,
placing a row of these puppets in a landscape with calm sky behind them,
and calling the composition by the name of some familiar scene. His
inspiration was dead, his invention exhausted; his chief object seemed to
be to make his trade thrive.
Perugino will always remain a problem to the psychologist who believes in
physiognomy, as well as to the student of the passionate times in which he
lived. His hard unsympathetic features in the portraits at Perugia and
Florence do not belie, but rather win credence for Vasari's tales about
his sordid soul.[221] Local traditions and contemporary rumours, again,
give colour to what Vasari relates about his infidelity; while the
criminal records of Florence prove that he was not over-scrupulous to keep
his hands from violence.[222] How could such a man, we ask ourselves, have
endured to pass a long life in the _fabrication of devotional pictures?_
Whence did he derive the sentiment of masterpieces, for piety only
equalled by those of Fra Angelico, either in his own nature or in the
society of a city torn to pieces by the factions of the Baglioni? How,
again, was it possible for an artist who at times touched beauty so ideal,
to be contented with the stencilling by his pupils of conventional figures
on canvases to which he gave his name? Taking these questions separately,
we might reply that "there is no art to find the mind's construction in
the face;" that painting in the sixteenth century was a trade regulated by
the demand for particular wares; that men can live among ruffians without
sharing their mood; that the artist and the moral being are separate, and
may not be used to interpret each other. Yet, after giving due weight to
such answers, Perugino, being what he was, living at the time he did, not
as a recluse, but as a prosperous _impresario_ of painting, and
systematically devoting his powers to pietistic art, must be for us a
puzzle. That the quietism of his highly artificial style should have been
fashionable in Perugia, while the Baglioni were tearing each other to
pieces, and the troops of the Vitelli and the Borgia were trampling upon
Umbria, is one of the most striking paradoxes of an age rich in dramatic
contradictions.
It is much to be regretted, with a view to solving the question of
Perugino's personality in relation to his art, that his character does not
emerge with any salience from the meagre notices we have received
concerning him, and that we know but little of his private life. Vasari
tells us that he married a very beautiful girl, and that one of his chief
pleasures was to see this wife handsomely dressed at home and abroad. He
often decked her out in clothes and jewels with his own hand. For the
rest, we find in Perugino, far more than in either Mantegna or Signorelli,
an instance of the simple Italian craftsman, employing numerous
assistants, undertaking contract work on a large scale, and striking keen
bargains with his employers. Both at Florence and at Perugia he opened a
_bottega_; and by the exercise of his trade as a master-painter, he
realised enough money to buy substantial estates in those cities, as well
as in his birthplace.[223] In all the greatest artworks of the age he took
his part. Thus we find him painting in the Sistine Chapel between 1484 and
1486, treating with the commune of Orvieto for the completion of the
chapel of S. Brizio in 1489, joining in the debate upon the facade of S.
Maria del Fiore in 1491, giving his opinion upon the erection of Michael
Angelo's "David" at Florence in 1504, and competing with Signorelli,
Pinturicchio, and Bazzi for the decoration of the Stanze of the Vatican in
1508. The rising of brighter stars above the horizon during his lifetime
somewhat dimmed his fame, and caused him much disquietude; yet neither
Raphael nor Michael Angelo interfered with the demand for his pictures,
which continued to be lively till the very year of his death. That he was
jealous of these younger rivals, appears from the fact that he brought an
action against Michael Angelo for having called his style stupid and
antiquated. In the celebrated phrase cast at him by the blunt and scornful
master of a new art-mystery[224], we discern the abrupt line of division
between time-honoured tradition and the _maniera moderna_ of the full
Renaissance. The old Titans had to yield their place before the new
Olympian deities of Italian painting. There is something pathetic in the
retirement of the grey-haired Perugino from Rome, to make way for the
victorious Phoebean beauty of the boy Raphael.
The influence of Perugino upon Italian art was powerful though transitory.
He formed a band of able pupils, among whom was the great Raphael; and
though Raphael speedily abandoned his master's narrow footpath through the
fields of painting, he owed to Perugino the invaluable benefit of training
in solid technical methods and traditions of pure taste. From none of his
elder contemporaries, with the exception of Fra Bartolommeo, could the
young Raphael have learnt so much that was congenial to his early
instincts. What, for example, might have befallen him if he had worked
with Signorelli, it is difficult to imagine; for while nothing is more
obvious on the one hand than Raphael's originality, his strong
assimilative bias is scarcely less remarkable. The time has not yet come
to speak of Raphael; nor will space suffice for detailed observations on
his fellow-students in the workshop at Perugia. The place occupied by
Perugino in the evolution of Italian painting is peculiar. In the middle
of a positive and worldly age, declining fast to frigid scepticism and
political corruption, he set the final touch of technical art upon the
devotion transmitted from earlier and more enthusiastic centuries. The
flower of Umbrian piety blossomed in the masterpieces of his youth, and
faded into dryness in the affectations of his manhood. Nothing was left on
the same line for his successors.
Among these, Bernardo Pinturicchio can here alone be mentioned. A thorough
naturalist, though saturated with the mannerism of the Umbrian school,
Pinturicchio was not distracted either by scientific or ideal aims from
the clear and fluent presentation of contemporary manners and costumes. He
is a kind of Umbrian Gozzoli, who brings us here and there in close
relation to the men of his own time, and has in consequence a special
value for the student of Renaissance life. His wall-paintings in the
library of the cathedral of Siena are so well preserved that we need not
seek elsewhere for better specimens of the decorative art most highly
prized in the first years of the sixteenth century[225]. These frescoes
have a richness of effect and a vivacity of natural action, which, in
spite of their superficiality, render them highly charming. The life of
AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius II., is here treated like a legend. There
is no attempt at representing the dress of half a century anterior to the
painter's date, or at rendering accurate historic portraiture. Both Pope
and Emperor are romantically conceived, and each portion of the tale is
told as though it were a fit in some popular ballad. So much remains of
Perugian affectation as gives a kind of childlike grace to the studied
attitudes and many-coloured groups of elegant young men.
We must always be careful to distinguish the importance of an artist
considered as the exponent of his age from that which he may claim by
virtue of some special skill or some peculiar quality of feeling. The art
of Perugino, for example, throws but little light upon the Renaissance
taken as a whole. Intrinsically valuable because of its technical
perfection and its purity of sentiment, it was already in the painter's
lifetime superseded by a larger and a grander manner. The progressive
forces of the modern style found their channels outside him. This again is
true of Francesco Raibolini, surnamed Francia from his master in the
goldsmith's craft. Francia is known to Englishmen as one of the most
sincerely pious of Christian painters by his incomparable picture of the
"Dead Christ" in our National Gallery. The spirituality that renders Fra
Angelico unintelligible to minds less ecstatically tempered than his own,
is not found in such excess in Francia, nor does his work suffer from the
insipidity of Perugino's affectation. Deep religious feeling is combined
with physical beauty of the purest type in a masterpiece of tranquil
grace. A greater degree of _naivete_ and naturalness compensates for the
inferiority of Francia's to Perugino's supremely perfect handling. This is
true of Francia's numerous pictures at Bologna; where indeed, in order to
be rightly known, he should be studied by all lovers of the _quattrocento_
style in its most delightful moments[226]. For mastery over oil painting
and for charm of colour Francia challenges comparison with what is best in
Perugino, though he did not quite attain the same technical excellence.
One more painter must delay us yet awhile within the limits of the
fifteenth century. Bartolommeo di Paolo del Fattorino, better known as
Baccio della Porta or Fra Bartolommeo, forms at Florence the connecting
link between the artists of the earlier Renaissance and the golden
age[227]. By chronological reckoning he is nearly a quarter of a century
later than Lionardo da Vinci, and is the exact contemporary of Michael
Angelo. As an artist, he has thoroughly outgrown the _quattrocento_ style,
and falls short only by a little of the greatest. In assigning him a place
among the predecessors and precursors of the full Renaissance, I am
therefore influenced rather by the range of subjects he selected, and by
the character of his genius, than by calculations of time or estimate of
ability.
Fra Bartolommeo was sent, when nine years old, into the workshop of Cosimo
Rosselli, where he began his artist's life by colour-grinding, sweeping
out the shop, and errand-running. It was in Cosimo's _bottega_ that he
made acquaintance with Mariotto Albertinelli, who became his intimate
friend and fellow-worker. In spite of marked differences of character,
disagreements upon the fundamental matters of politics and religion, and
not unfrequent quarrels, these men continued to be comrades through the
better part of their joint lives. Baccio was gentle, timid, yielding, and
industrious. Mariotto was wilful, obstinate, inconsequent, and flighty,
Baccio fell under the influence of Savonarola, professed himself a
_piagnone_, and took the cowl of the Dominicans[228]. Mariotto was a
partisan of the Medici, an uproarious _pallesco_, and a loose liver, who
eventually deserted the art of painting for the calling of an innkeeper.
Yet so sweet was the temper of the Frate, and so firm was the bond of
friendship established in boyhood between this ill-assorted couple, that
they did not part company until 1512, three years before Mariotto's death
and five before that of Bartolommeo. During their long association the
task of designing fell upon the Frate, while Albertinelli took his orders
and helped to work out his conceptions. Both were excellent craftsmen and
consummate colourists, as is proved by the pictures executed by each
unassisted. Albertinelli's "Salutation" in the Uffizzi yields no point of
grace and vigour to any of his more distinguished coadjutor's paintings.
The great contributions made by Fra Bartolommeo to the art of Italy were
in the double region of composition and colouring. In his justly
celebrated fresco of S. Maria Nuova at Florence--a "Last Judgment" with a
Christ enthroned amid a choir of Saints--he exhibited for the first time a
thoroughly scientific scheme of grouping based on geometrical principles.
Each part is perfectly balanced in itself, and yet is necessary to the
structure of the whole. The complex framework may be subdivided into
numerous sections no less harmoniously ordered than is the total scheme to
which they are subordinated. Simple figures--the pyramid and the triangle,
upright, inverted, and interwoven like the rhymes in a sonnet--form the
basis of the composition. This system was adhered to by the Frate in all
his subsequent works. To what extent it influenced the style of Raphael,
will be afterwards discussed. As a colourist, Fra Bartolommeo was equal to
the best of his contemporaries, and superior to any of his rivals in the
school of Florence. Few painters of any age have combined harmony of tone
so perfectly with brilliance and richness. It is a real joy to contemplate
the pure and splendid folds of the white drapery he loved to place in the
foreground of his altar-pieces. Solidity and sincerity distinguish his
work in every detail, while his feeling is remarkable for elevation and
sobriety. All that he lacks, is the boldness of imagination, the depth of
passion, and the power of thought, that are indispensable to genius of the
highest order. Gifted with a sympathetic and a pliant, rather than a
creative and self-sustained nature, he was sensitive to every influence.
Therefore we find him learning much in his youth from Lionardo, deriving a
fresh impulse from Raphael, and endeavouring in his later life, after a
visit to Rome in 1514, to "heighten his style," as the phrase went, by
emulating Michael Angelo. The attempt to tread the path of Buonarroti was
a failure. What Fra Bartolommeo sought to gain in majesty, he lost in
charm. His was essentially a pure and gracious manner, upon which
sublimity could not be grafted. The gentle soul, who dropped his weapon
when the convent of S. Marco was besieged by the Compagnacci[229], and who
vowed, if heaven preserved him in the tumult, to become a monk, had none
of Michael Angelo's _terribilita_. Without possessing some share of that
spirit, it was vain to aggrandise the forms and mass the raiment of his
prophets in imitation of the Sistine.
Nature made Fra Bartolommeo the painter of adoration[230]. His masterpiece
at Lucca--the "Madonna della Misericordia"--is a poem of glad worship, a
hymn of prayerful praise. Our Lady stands elate, between earth and heaven,
appealing to her Son for mercy. At her footstool are her suppliants, the
men and women and little children of the city she has saved. The peril is
past. Salvation has been won; and the song of thanksgiving ascends from
all those massed and mingled forms in unison. Not less truly is the great
unfinished picture of "Madonna surrounded by the Patron Saints of
Florence" a poem of adoration[231]. This painting was ordered by the
Gonfalonier Piero Soderini, the man who dedicated Florence to Christ as
King. He intended it to take its place in the hall of the Consiglio
Grande, where Michael Angelo and Lionardo gained their earliest laurels.
Before it could be finished, the Republic perished.[232] "That," says Rio,
"is the reason why he left but an imperfect work--for those at least who
are only struck by what is wanting in it. Others will at first regard it
with the interest attaching to unfinished poems, interrupted by the
jailer's call or by the stern voice of the executioner. Then they will
study it in all its details, in order to appreciate its beauties; and that
appreciation will be the more perfect in proportion as a man is the more
fully penetrated with its dominant idea, and with the attendant
circumstances that bring this home to him. It is not against an abstract
enemy that the intercession of the celestial powers is here invoked: it is
not by a caprice of the painter or his patron that, in the group of
central figures, S. Anne attracts attention before the Holy Virgin, not
only by reason of her pre-eminence, but also through the intensity of her
heavenward prayer, and again through her beauty, which far surpasses that
of nearly all "Madonnas" painted by Fra Bartolommeo."[233] But artist and
patron had indeed good reason, in this crisis of the Commonwealth, to
select as the most eminent advocate for Florence at the bar of Heaven that
saint, on whose day, July 26, 1343, had been celebrated the emancipation
of the city from its servitude to Walter of Brienne.
The great event of Fra Bartolommeo's life was the impression produced on
him by Savonarola.[234] Having listened to the Dominican's terrific
denunciations of worldliness and immorality, he carried his life studies
to the pyre of vanities, resolved to assume the cowl, and renounced his
art. Between 1499, when he was engaged in painting the "Last Judgment" of
S. Maria Nuova, and 1506, he is supposed never to have touched the pencil.
When he resumed it Savonarola had been burned for heresy, and Fra
Bartolommeo was a brother in his convent of S. Marco. Savonarola has
sometimes been described as an iconoclast, obstinately hostile to the fine
arts. This is by no means a true account of the crusade he carried on
against the pagan sensuality of his contemporaries. He desired that art
should remain the submissive handmaid of the Church and the willing
servant of pure morality. While he denounced the heathenism of the style
in vogue at Florence, and forbade the study of the nude, he strove to
encourage religious painting, and established a school for its exercise in
the cloister of S. Marco. It was in this monastic _bottega_ that Fra
Bartolommeo, in concert with his friend Albertinelli, worked for the
benefit of the convent after the year 1506. The reforms Savonarola
attempted in the fine arts as in manners, by running counter to the
tendencies of the Renaissance at a moment when society was too corrupt to
be regenerated, and the passion for antiquity was too powerful to be
restrained, proved of necessity ineffective. It may further be said that
the limitations he imposed would have been fatal to the free development
of art if they had been observed.
Several painters, besides Fra Baccio, submitted to Savonarola's influence.
Among these the most distinguished were the pure and gentle Lorenzo di
Credi and Sandro Botticelli, who, after the great preacher's death, is
said to have abandoned painting. Neither Lorenzo di Credi nor Fra Baccio
possessed a portion of the prophet's fiery spirit. Had that but found
expression in their cloistral pictures, one of the most peculiar and
characteristic flowers of art the world has ever known, would then have
bloomed in Florence. The mantle of Savonarola, however, if it fell upon
any painter, fell on Michael Angelo, and we must seek an echo of the
friar's thunders in the Sistine Chapel. Fra Bartolommeo was too tender and
too timid. The sublimities of tragic passion lay beyond his scope. Though
I have ventured to call him the painter of adoration, he did not feel even
this movement of the soul with the intensity of Fra Angelico. In the
person of S. Dominic kneeling beneath the cross Fra Angelico painted
worship as an ecstasy, wherein the soul goes forth with love and pain and
yearning beyond any power of words or tears or music to express what it
would utter. To these heights of the ascetic ideal Fra Bartolommeo never
soared. His sobriety bordered upon the prosaic.
We have now reached the great age of the Italian Renaissance, the age in
which, not counting for the moment Venice, four arch-angelic natures
gathered up all that had been hitherto achieved in art since the days of
Pisano and Giotto, adding such celestial illumination from the sunlight of
their inborn genius that in them the world for ever sees what art can do.
Lionardo da Vinci was born in Valdarno in 1452, and died in France in
1519. Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Caprese, in the Casentino, in
1475, and died at Borne in 1564, having outlived the lives of his great
peers by nearly half a century. Raphael Santi was born at Urbino in 1483,
and died in Rome in 1520. Antonio Allegri was born at Correggio in 1494,
and died there in 1534. To these four men, each in his own degree and
according to his own peculiar quality of mind, the fulness of the
Renaissance, in its power and freedom, was revealed. They entered the
inner shrine, where dwelt the spirit of their age, and bore to the world
without the message each of them had heard. In their work posterity still
may read the meaning of that epoch, differently rendered according to the
difference of gifts in each consummate artist, but comprehended in its
unity by study of the four together. Lionardo is the wizard or diviner; to
him the Renaissance offers her mystery and lends her magic. Raphael is the
Phoebean singer; to him the Renaissance reveals her joy and dowers him
with her gift of melody. Correggio is the Ariel or Faun; he has surprised
laughter upon the face of the universe, and he paints this laughter in
ever-varying movement. Michael Angelo is the prophet and Sibylline seer;
to him the Renaissance discloses the travail of her spirit; him she endues
with power; he wrests her secret, voyaging, like an ideal Columbus, the
vast abyss of thought alone. In order that this revelation of the
Renaissance in painting should be complete, it is necessary to add a fifth
power to these four--that of the Venetian masters, who are the poets of
carnal beauty, the rhetoricians of mundane pomp, the impassioned
interpreters of all things great and splendid in the pageant of the outer
world. As Venice herself, by type of constitution and historical
development, remained sequestered from the rest of Italy, so her painters
demand separate treatment.[235] It is enough, therefore, for the present
to remember that without the note they utter the chord of the Renaissance
lacks its harmony.
Lionardo, the natural son of Messer Pietro, notary of Florence and landed
proprietor at Vinci, was so beautiful of person that no one, says Vasari,
has sufficiently extolled his charm; so strong of limb that he could bend
an iron ring or horse-shoe between his fingers; so eloquent of speech that
those who listened to his words were fain to answer "Yes" or "No" as he
thought fit. This child of grace and persuasion was a wonderful musician.
The Duke of Milan sent for him to play upon his lute and improvise Italian
canzoni. The lute he carried was of silver, fashioned like a horse's
head, and tuned according to acoustic laws discovered by himself. Of the
songs he sang to its accompaniment none have been preserved. Only one
sonnet remains to show of what sort was the poetry of Lionardo, prized so
highly by the men of his own generation. This, too, is less remarkable for
poetic beauty than for sober philosophy expressed with singular brevity of
phrase.[236]
This story of Da Vinci's lute might be chosen as a parable of his
achievement. Art and science were never separated in his work; and both
were not unfrequently subservient to some fanciful caprice, some bizarre
freak of originality. Curiosity and love of the uncommon ruled his nature.
By intuition and by persistent interrogation of nature he penetrated many
secrets of science; but he was contented with the acquisition of
knowledge. Once found, he had but little care to distribute the results of
his investigations; at most he sought to use them for purposes of
practical utility.[237] Even in childhood he is said to have perplexed
his teachers by propounding arithmetical problems. In his maturity he
carried anatomy further than Delia Torre; he invented machinery for
water-mills and aqueducts; he devised engines of war, discovered the
secret of conical rifle-bullets, adapted paddle-wheels to boats, projected
new systems of siege artillery, investigated the principles of optics,
designed buildings, made plans for piercing mountains, raising churches,
connecting rivers, draining marshes, clearing harbours.[238] There was no
branch of study whereby nature through the effort of the inquisitive
intellect might be subordinated to the use of man, of which he was not
master. Nor, richly gifted as was Lionardo, did he trust his natural
facility. His patience was no less marvellous than the quickness of his
insight. He lived to illustrate the definition of genius as the capacity
for taking infinite pains.
While he was a boy, says Vasari, Lionardo modelled in terra-cotta certain
heads of women smiling. This was in the workshop of Verocchio, who had
already fixed a smile on David's face in bronze. When an old man, he left
"Mona Lisa" on the easel not quite finished, the portrait of a subtle,
shadowy, uncertain smile. This smile, this enigmatic revelation of a
movement in the soul, this seductive ripple on the surface of the human
personality, was to Lionardo a symbol of the secret of the world, an image
of the universal mystery. It haunted him all through his life, and
innumerable were the attempts he made to render by external form the magic
of this fugitive and evanescent charm.
Through long days he would follow up and down the streets of Florence or
of Milan beautiful unknown faces, learning them by heart, interpreting
their changes of expression, reading the thoughts through the features.
These he afterwards committed to paper. We possess many such sketches--a
series of ideal portraits, containing each an unsolved riddle that the
master read; a procession of shadows, cast by reality, that, entering the
camera lucida of the artist's brain, gained new and spiritual
quality.[239] In some of them his fancy seems to be imprisoned in the
labyrinths of hair; in others the eyes deep with feeling or hard with
gemlike brilliancy have caught it, or the lips that tell and hide so much,
or the nostrils quivering with momentary emotion. Beauty, inexpressive of
inner meaning, must, we conceive, have had but slight attraction for him.
We do not find that he drew "a fair naked body" for the sake of its carnal
charm; his hasty studies of the nude are often faulty, mere memoranda of
attitude and gesture. The human form was interesting to him either
scientifically or else as an index to the soul. Yet he felt the influence
of personal loveliness His favourite pupil Salaino was a youth "of
singular grace, with curled and waving hair, a feature of personal beauty
by which Lionardo was always greatly pleased." Hair, the most mysterious
of human things, the most manifold in form and hue, snakelike in its
subtlety for the entanglement of souls, had naturally supreme
attractiveness for the magician of the arts.
With like energy Lionardo bent himself to divine the import of ugliness.
Whole pages of his sketch-book are filled with squalid heads of shrivelled
crones and ghastly old men--with idiots, goitred cretins, criminals, and
clowns. It was not that he loved the horrible for its own sake; but he was
determined to seize chara |
