Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa Part 17

The great masters of the Middle Age had set themselves to express in stone or colour the delicate beauty of the soul, its terror, too, in the loneliness of the world, where only as it were by chance it might escape everlasting death. The subtle beauty and pathos of their art has escaped our eyes filled as they are with the marvellous work of Greece, unknown till our own time, the splendid and joyful work of the Renaissance, the mysterious and lovely work of our own day: it remains, nevertheless, a consummate and exquisite art in its dawn, in its noon, in its decadence, but it seeks to express something we have forgotten, and its secret is for the most part altogether hidden from us. It is from this art, as beautiful in its expression of itself as that of Greece, that Niccol Pisano turns away, not to Nature, but to Antiquity.

The movement which followed, producing while it continued almost all that is to-day gathered in the Bargello, together with much else that is still happily where it was born, is as it were an appeal from Antiquity to Life, to Nature. In the simplicity and impulse of this movement, so spontaneous, so touching, so full of a sense of beauty, which sometimes, though not often, becomes prettiness, the art of sculpture, awakened at last from the mysticism of the Middle Age, seems to look back with longing to the antique world, which it would fain claim as its brother, and after a little moment in the sun falls again into a sort of mysticism, a new kingdom of the spirit with Michelangelo, and of the senses merely with Sansovino and Giovanni da Bologna.

Really Tuscan in its birth, the art of the Quattrocento became at last almost wholly Florentine, a flower of the Val d'Arno or of the hills about it, where even to-day at Settignano, at Fiesole, at Majano, at Rovezzano, you may see the sculptors at work in an open bottega by the roadside, the rough-hewn marble standing here and there in many sizes and shapes, the chips and fragments strewing the highway.

In the twilight of this new dawn of the love of nature, perhaps the first figure we may descry is Piero di Giovanni Tedesco (1386-1402), who carved the second south door of the Duomo about 1398, where amid so many lovely natural things, the fig leaf and the oak leaf and the vine, you may see the lion and the ox, the dog and the snail, and man too; little fantastic children peeping out from the foliage, or blowing through musical reeds, or playing with a kitten, tiny naked creatures full of life and gladness.

The second door north of the Duomo was carved by Niccol di Piero d'Arezzo, who was still working more than forty years after Tedesco's death; but his best work, for we pa.s.s by his Statue of St. Mark in the chapel of the apex of the Duomo, is the little Annunciation over the niche of the St. Matthew of Or San Michele. In his work on the gate of the Duomo, however, he was a.s.sisted by his pupil Nanni di Banco, who, born in the fourteenth century, died in 1420; and in his work, and in that of Jacopo della Quercia, a Sienese, and a much greater man, we see the very dawn itself.

Nanni di Banco, Vasari tells us, was a man who "inherited a competent patrimony, and one by no means of inferior condition." He goes on to say that Nanni was the pupil of Donatello, and though in any technical sense that seems to be untrue, it may well be that he sought Donato's advice whenever he could, for he seems to have practised his art for love of it, and may well have recognised the genius of Donatello, who probably worked beside him. He too worked at Or San Michele, where he carved the St. Philip, the delightful relief under the St. George of Donatello, the Four Saints, which seem to us so full of the remembrance of antiquity, and the S. Eligius with its beautiful drapery, a little stupid still, or sleepy is it, with the mystery of the Middle Age that after all was but just pa.s.sing away. Something of this sleepiness seems also to have overtaken the St. Luke, that tired figure in the Duomo; and so it is with a real surprise that we come at last upon the best work of Nanni's life, "the first great living composition of the Renaissances," as Burckhardt says, the Madonna della Cintola over Niccol d'Arezzo's door of the Duomo. Even with all the work of Ghiberti, of Donatello even, to choose from, that relief of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory, stretching out her hands among the cherubim, with a gesture so eager and so moving to St. Thomas, who kneels before her, remains one of the most beautiful works of that age, and one of the loveliest in all Tuscany.

There follows Ciuff.a.gni (1381-1457), that poor sculptor working in his old age amid much that was splendid and strange at Rimini, where Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) had painted in his youth. For all his genius, Ghiberti, that euphuist, did not influence those who came after him as Donatello did. His work, inspired by the past, by Andrea Pisano, for instance, is full of the lost beauty of the Middle Age, the old secrets of the Gothic manner. His solution of the problem before him, a problem of movement, of character, of life, is to make the relief as purely picturesque as possible; with him sculpture almost pa.s.ses into painting, using not without charm the perspective of a picture the mere seeming of just that, but losing how profoundly, much of the n.o.bility, the delight of pure form, the genius peculiar to sculpture. As an artist pure and simple, as a master of composition, he may well have no superior, for the fantasy and beauty of his work, its complexity, too, are almost unique, and entirely his own; but in simplicity, and in a certain sense of reality, he is wanting, so that however delightful his work may be, those "gates of Paradise," for instance, that Michelangelo praised, it seems to be complete in itself, to suggest nothing but the wonderful effect one may get by using the means proper to one art for expression in another, as though one were to write a book that should have the effect upon one of an opera, to allow the strange rhythm and sensuous beauty of Tristan and Isolde, for instance, to disengage itself from pages which were full of just musical words.

Ghiberti's gift for composition, as well as his failure to understand, or at least to satisfy the more fundamental needs of his art, may be seen very happily in those two panels now in the Bargello, which he and Brunellesco made in the compet.i.tion for the gates of the Baptistery.

Looking on those two panels, where both artists have carved the Sacrifice of Isaac, you see Ghiberti at his best, the whole interest not divided, as it is in Brunellesco's panel, between the servants and the sacrifice, but concentrated altogether upon that scene which is about to become so tragical. Yet with what energy Brunellesco has conceived an act that in his hands seems really to have happened. How swiftly the angel has seized the hand of Abraham; how splendidly he stands, the old man who is about to kill his only son for the love of G.o.d. And then consider the beauty of Isaac, that naked body which in Brunellesco's hands is splendid with life, really living and n.o.ble, with a truth and loveliness far in advance of the art of his time. Ghiberti has felt none of the joy of a creation such as this; his Isaac is sleepy, a little surprised and altogether docile; he has not sprung up from his knees as in Brunellesco's panel, but looks up at the angel as though he had never understood that his very life was at stake. Yet it was in those gates which, Brunellesco, as it is said, retiring from the contest, the Opera then gave into his hands, that we shall find the best work of Ghiberti.

There it is really the art of Andrea Pisano that he takes as a master, and with so fair an example before him produces as splendid a thing as he ever accomplished, simpler too, and it may be more sincere, though a little lacking in expressiveness and life. All the rest of his work seems to me to be lacking in conviction, to be frankly almost an experiment. His Statue of St. John Baptist, his St. Matthew and St.

Stephen, too, at Or San Michele, different though they are, and with six years between each of them, seem alike in this, that they are, while splendid in energy, wanting in purpose, in intention: he never seems sufficiently sure of himself to convince us. His reliquary in bronze containing the ashes of S. Zen.o.bius in the apse of the Duomo, is difficult to see, but it is in the manner of the gates of Paradise. It was not to the disciples of Ghiberti that the future belonged, but to those who have studied with Brunellesco. His crucifix in S. Maria Novella, his Evangelists in the Pazzi Chapel, are among the finest work of that age, full of life and the remembrance of it in their strength and beauty.

It is, however, in the art of a contemporary that the new age came at last to its own--in the work of Donatello. In his youth he had worked for the Duomo and for Or San Michele side by side with Nanni di Banco, who may perhaps pa.s.s as his master. Of Donatello's life we know almost nothing If we seek to learn something of him, it must be in his works of which so many remain to us. We know, however, that he was the intimate friend of Brunellesco, and that it was with him he set out for Rome soon after this great and proud man had withdrawn from the contest with Ghiberti for the Baptistery gates. Donatello was to visit Rome again in later life, but on this first journey that he made with Brunellesco for the purposes of study, he must have become acquainted with what was left of antiquity in the Eternal City. It was too soon for that enthusiasm for antiquity, which later overwhelmed Italian art so disastrously, to have arisen. When Donatello returned about a year later to Florence to work for the Opera del Duomo, it is not any cla.s.sic influence we find in his statues, but rather the study of nature, an extraordinary desire to express not beauty, scarcely ever that, but character. His work is strong, and often splendid, full of energy, movement, and conviction, but save now and then, as in the S. Croce Annunciation, for instance, it is not content with just beauty.

Of his work for the Duomo and the Campanile, I speak elsewhere; it will be sufficient here to note the splendour of the St. John the Divine in the apse of the Duomo, which, as Burckhardt has divined, already suggests the Moses of Michelangelo. The destruction of the unfinished facade has perhaps made it more difficult to identify the figures he carved there, but whether the Poggio of the Duomo, for instance, be Job or no, seems after all to matter very little, since that statue itself, be its subject what it may, remains to us.

In his work at Or San Michele, in the St. Peter, in the St. Mark, so like the St. John the Divine and in the St. George, here in the Bargello, we see his progress, and there in that last figure we find just that decision and simplicity which seem to have been his own, with a certain frankness and beauty of youth which are new in his work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. JOHN THE DIVINE

_By Donatello. Duomo, Florence_

_Alinari_]

There are some ten works by the master in the Bargello, together with numerous casts of his statues and reliefs in other parts of Italy, so that he may be studied here better than anywhere else. Looking thus on his work more or less as a whole, it is a new influence we seem to divine for the first time in the marble David, a little faintly, perhaps, but obvious enough in the St. George, a Gothic influence that appears very happily for once, in work that almost alone in Italy seems to need just that, well, as an excuse for beauty. That marble statue of David was made at about the same time as the St. John the Divine, for the Duomo too, where it was to stand within the church in a chapel there in the apse. A little awkward in his half-shy pose, the young David stands over the head of Goliath, uncertain whether to go or stay. It is a failure which pa.s.ses into the success, the more than success of the St. George, which is perhaps his masterpiece. Made for the Guild of Armourers, from the first day on which it was set up it has been beloved. Michelangelo loved it well, and Vasari is enthusiastic about it, while Bocchi, writing in 1571,[116] devotes a whole book to it. In its present bad light--for the light should fall not across, but from in front and from above, as it did once when it stood in its niche at Or San Michele--it is not seen to advantage, but even so, the life that seems to move in the cold stone may be discerned. With a proud and terrible impetuosity St. George seems about to confront some renowned and famous enemy, that old dragon whom once he slew. Full of confidence and beauty he gazes unafraid, as though on that which he is about to encounter before he moves forward to meet it. Well may Michelangelo have whispered "March!" as he pa.s.sed by, it is the very order he awaits, the whisper of his own heart. It is in this romantic and beautiful figure that, as it seems to me, that new Gothic influence may be most clearly discerned. M. Reymond, in his learned and pleasant book on Florentine sculpture, has pointed out the likeness which this St. George of Donatello bears to the St. Theodore of Chartres Cathedral, and though it is impossible to deny that likeness, it seems at first almost as impossible to explain it. It is true that many Italians were employed in France in the building of the churches; it is equally true that Michelozzo, the friend and a.s.sistant of Donato, was the son of a Burgundian; but it seems as unlikely that an Italian artist, inspired by the French style, returned from France to work in Florence, as that Michelozzo was born with a knowledge of the northern manner which he never practised. An explanation, however, offers itself in the fact that the Religious Orders, those internationalists, continually pa.s.sed from North to South, from East to West, from monastery to monastery, and that they may well have brought with them certain statues in ivory of Madonna or the Saints, in which such an one as Donatello could have found the hint he needed. That such statues were known in Italy is proved not only by their presence in this museum, but by the ivory Madonna of Giovanni Pisano in the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa.

The Marzocco which stood of old on the Ringhiera before the Palazzo Vecchio might seem to be a work of this period, for it is only saved by a kind of good fortune from failure. It is without energy and without life, but in its monumental weight and a certain splendour of design it impresses us with a sort of majesty as no merely naturalistic study of a lion could do. If we compare it for a moment with the heraldic s.h.i.+eld in Casa Martelli, where Donato has carved in relief a winged griffin rampant, cruel and savage, with all the beauty and vigour of Verrocchio, we shall understand something of his failure in the Marzocco, and something, too, of his success. In that heavy grotesque and fantastic Lion of the Bargello some suggestion of the monumental art of Egypt seems to have been divined for a moment, but without understanding.

In the Casa Martelli, too, you may find a statue of St. John Baptist, a figure fine and youthful and melancholy, with the vague thoughts of youth, really the elder brother as it were of the child of the Bargello, who bears his cross like a delicate plaything, unaware of his destiny.

That figure, so full of mystery, seems to have haunted Donatello all his life, and then St. John Baptist was the patron of Florence and presided over every Baptistery in Italy; yet it is always with a particular melancholy that Donatello deals with him, as though in his vague destiny he had found as it were a vision. The child of the Bargello pa.s.ses into the boy of the Casa Martelli, that lad who maybe has heard a voice sweet enough as yet while wandering by chance on the mountains, sandalled and clad in camel's hair. We see him again as the chivalrous youth of the Campanile, the dedicated, absorbed wanderer of the Bargello, the haggard, emaciated prophet of the Friars' Church at Venice, and at last as the despairing and ancient seer of Siena, a voice that is only a voice weary of itself, crying unheeded in the wilderness. And, as it seems to me in all these figures, which in themselves have so little beauty, it is rather a mood of the soul that Donatello has set himself to express than any delight. He has turned away from physical beauty, in which man can no longer believe, using the body refined almost to the delicacy and transparency of a sh.e.l.l, in which the soul may s.h.i.+ne, or at least be seen, in all its moods of happiness or terror. That weary figure who, unconscious of his cross, unconscious of the world, absorbed in his own destiny, in the scroll of his fate, trudges through the wilderness without a thought of the way, is as far from the ideal abstract beauty of the Greeks as from the romantic splendour of Gothic art. Only with him the soul has lost touch with particular things, even as the beauty of the Greeks was purged of all the accidents and feeling that belonged alone to the individual. Like a ghost he pa.s.ses by, intent on some immortal sorrow; he is like a shadow on a day of sun, a dark cloud over the moon, the wind in the desert. And in a moment, we knew not why, our hearts are restless suddenly, we know not why, we are unhappy, we know not why, we desire to be where we are not, or only to forget.

So in the bronze David now in the Bargello we seem to see youth itself dreaming after the first victory of all the conquests to come, while a smile of half-conscious delight, is pa.s.sing from the lips; tyranny is dead. It is the first nude statue of the Renaissance made for Cosimo de'

Medici before his exile. For Cosimo, too, the Amorino was made that study of pure delight, where we find all the joy of the children of the Cantoria, but without their unction and seriousness. And then in the portrait busts the young Gattemalata, and the terra-cotta of Niccol da Uzzano, we may see Donatello's devotion to mere truthfulness without an afterthought, as though for him Truth were beauty in its loyalty, at any rate, to the impression of a moment that for the artist is eternity.

His marvellous equestrian statue of Gattemalata is in Padua, his tomb and reliefs and statues lie in many an Italian city, but here in the Bargello we have enough of his work to enable us to divine something at least of his secret. And this seems to me to have been Donatello's intention in the art of sculpture: his figures are like gestures of life, of the soul, sometimes involuntary and full of weariness, sometimes altogether joyful, but always the expression of a mood of the soul which is dumb, that in its agony or delight has in his work expressed itself by means of the body, so that, though he never carves the body for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty, he is as faithful in his study of it for the sake of the truth, as he is in his study of those moods of the soul which through him seem for the first time to have found an utterance. His life was full of wanderings; beside the journey to Rome with Brunellesco he went to Siena to make the tomb in the Duomo there of Bishop Pecci of Grosseto, and in 1433, when Cosimo de' Medici went into exile, he was again in Rome, and even in Naples.

Returning to Florence after no long time, in 1444, he went to Padua, where he worked in S. Antonio and made the equestrian statue that was the wonder of the world. On his return to Florence, an old man, a certain decadence may be found in his work, so that his reliefs in S.

Lorenzo are not altogether worthy of him, are perhaps the work of a man who is losing his sight and is already a little dependent on his pupils. One of these, Bertoldo di Giovanni, who died in 1491, has left us a beautiful relief of a battle, now in the Bargello, and later we catch a glimpse of him in the garden of Lorenzo's villa directing the studies in art of a number of young people, among whom was the youthful Michelangelo. But of the real disciples of Donatello, those who, without necessarily being his pupils, carried his art a step farther, we know nothing. His influence seems to have died with him. Tuscan art after his death, and even before that, had already set out on another road than his.

Something of that expressiveness, that _intimite_, which Pater found so characteristic of Luca della Robbia, seems to have inspired all the sculptors of the fifteenth century save Donatello himself. Not vitality merely, but a wonderful sort of expressiveness--it is the mood of all their work. It is perhaps in Luca della Robbia and his school that we first come upon this strange sweetness, which is really a sort of clairvoyance, as it were, to the pa.s.sing aspect of the world, of men, of the summer days that go by so fast, bringing winter behind them. What the Greeks had striven to attain, that naturalness in sculpture, as though the G.o.d were really about to breathe and put out its hand, that wonderful vagueness of Michelangelo akin to nature, by which he attained the same life giving effect, a something more than mere form, bloomed in Luca's work like a new wild flower. Expression, life, the power to express the spirit in marble and terra-cotta, these are what he really discovered, and not the mere material of his art, that painted earthenware, as Vasari supposes.

Of his two great works in marble, the tomb of Benozzo Federighi, Bishop of Fiesole, at San Miniato, and the Cantoria for the Duomo, of his bronze doors for the sacristy there, and his work on the Campanile, I speak elsewhere; but here in the Bargello, and all over Tuscany too, you may see those terra-cotta reliefs of Madonna, of the Annunciation, of the Birth of our Lord, painted first just white, and then blue and white, and later with many colours which are peculiar to him and his school--could such flower-like things have been born anywhere but in Italy?--and then, if you take them away they fade in the shadows of the North.

Among the first to give Luca commissions for this exquisite work in clay was Piero de' Medici. For him Luca decorated a small book-lined chamber in the great Medici palace that Cosimo had built. His work was for the ceiling and the pavement, the ceiling being a half sphere. For the hot summer days of Italy, when the streets are a blaze of light and the sun seems to embrace the city, this terra-cotta work with its cool whites and blues, was particularly delightful bringing really, as it were, something of the cool morning sea, the soft sky, into a place confined and shut in, so that where they were, coolness and temperance might find a safe retreat. And it was in such work as this that he found his fame.

Andrea della Robbia, his nephew, the best artist of his school, follows him, and after come a host of artists, some little better than craftsmen, who add colour to colour, till Luca's blue and white has been almost lost amid the greens and yellows and reds which at last altogether spoil the simplicity and beauty of what was really as delicate as a flower peeping out from the shadow into the sun and the rain.

But of one of the pupils of Luca, Agostino di Duccio, 1418-81(?), something more remains than these fragile and yet hardy works in terra-cotta. He has carved in marble with something of Luca's gentleness at Perugia and Rimini. He left Florence, it is said, in 1446, after an accusation of theft, returning there to carve the lovely tabernacle of the Ognissanti. It is said that he had tried unsuccessfully to deal with that block of marble which stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and from which Michelangelo unfolded the David. Two panels attributed to him remain in the Bargello, a Crucifixion and a Pieta, which scarcely do him justice.

The last sculptor of the first half of the fifteenth century, his best work seems to me to be at Rimini, where he worked for Sigismondo Malatesta in the temple Alberti had built in that fierce old city by the sea.

It is with the second half of the fifteenth century that the art contrived for the delight of private persons, for the decoration of palaces, of chapels, and of tombs, begins. Already Donatello had worked for Cosimo de' Medici, and had made portrait busts, and, as it might seem, the work of Luca della Robbia was especially suited for private altars or oratories, or the cool rooms of a people which had not yet divided its religion from its life. And then, in Florence at any rate, all the great churches were finished, or almost finished; it was necessary for the artist to find other patrons. Among those workers in metal who had a.s.sisted Ghiberti when he cast the reliefs of his first baptistery gate was the father of a man who had with his brother learned the craft of the goldsmiths. His name was Antonio Pollajuolo. Born in 1429, he was the pupil of his father and of Paolo Uccello, learning from the latter the art of painting, which he practised, however, like a sculptor, his real triumph being, in that art at any rate, one of movement and force. His best works in sculpture seem to me to be his tombs of Sixtus IV and Innocent VII in S. Pietro in Rome; but here in the Bargello you may see the beautiful bust in terra-cotta of a young condottiere in a rich and splendid armour, and a little bronze group of Hercules and Antaeus. In the Opera del Duomo his silver relief of the Birth of St. John Baptist is one of the finest works of that age; but his art is seen at its highest in that terra-cotta bust here in the Bargello, perhaps a sketch for a bronze, where he has expressed the infinite confidence and courage of one of those captains of adventure, who, with war for their trade, carried havoc up and down Italy.

It is, however, in the work of another goldsmith--or at least the pupil of one, whose name he took--that we find the greatest master of the new age, Andrea Verrocchio. Born in 1435, and dead in 1488, he was preoccupied all his life with the fierce splendour of his art, the subtle sweetness that he drew from the strength of his work. The master, certainly, of Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo, and finally of Perugino also, he was a painter as well as a sculptor; and though his greatest work was achieved in marble and bronze, one cannot lightly pa.s.s by the Annunciation of the Uffizi, or the Baptism of the Accademia. Neglected for so long, he is at last recognised as one of the greatest of all Italian masters of the Renaissance.

The pupil of a goldsmith practising the craft of a founder, he cast the sacristy gates of the Duomo for Luca della Robbia. In sculpture he appears to have studied under Donatello, though his work shows little of his influence; and working, as we may suppose, with his master in S.

Lorenzo, he made the bronze plaque for the tomb of Cosimo there before the choir, and the monument of Piero and Giovanni de' Medici beside the door of the sacristy. It was again for Lorenzo de' Medici that he made the exquisite Child and Dolphin now in the court of Palazzo Vecchio, and the statue of the young David now in Bargello. The subtle grace and delight of this last seem not uncertainly to suggest the strange and lovely work of Leonardo da Vinci. There for the first time you may discern the smile that is like a ray of suns.h.i.+ne in Leonardo's shadowy pictures. More perfect in craftsmans.h.i.+p and in the knowledge of anatomy than Donatello, Verrocchio here, where he seems almost to have been inspired by the David of his master, surpa.s.ses him in energy and beauty, and while Donatello's figure is involved with the head of Goliath, so that the feet are lost in the ma.s.sive and almost shapeless bronze, Verrocchio's David stands clear of the grim and monstrous thing at his feet. Simpler, too, and less uncertain is the whole pose of the figure, who is in no doubt of himself, and in his heart he has already "slain his thousands."

In the portrait of Monna Vanna degli Albizi, the Lady with the Nosegay, Verrocchio is the author of the most beautiful bust of the Renaissance.

She fills the room with suns.h.i.+ne, and all day long she seems to whisper some beloved name. A smile seems ever about to pa.s.s over her face under her cl.u.s.tering hair, and she has folded her beautiful hands on her bosom, as though she were afraid of their beauty and would live ever in their shadow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LADY WITH THE NOSEGAY (VANNA TORNABUONI?)

_In the Bargello. Andrea Verrocchio_

_Alinari_]

In two reliefs of Madonna and Child, one in marble and one in terra-cotta, you find that strange smile again, not, as with Leonardo, some radiance of the soul visible for a moment on the lips, but the smile of a mother happy with her little son. In the two Tornabuoni reliefs that we find here too in the Bargello, it is not Verrocchio's hand we see; but in the group of Christ and St. Thomas at Or San Michele, and in the fierce and splendid equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni at Venice, you see him at his best, occupied with a subtle beauty long sought out, and with an expression of the fierce ardour and pa.s.sion that consumed him all his life. He touches nothing that does not live with an ardent splendour and energy of spirit because of him. If he makes only a leaf of bronze for a tomb, it seems to quiver under his hands with an inextinguishable vitality.

Softly beside him, untouched by the pa.s.sion of his style, grew all the lovely but less pa.s.sionate works of the sculptors in marble, the sweet and almost winsome monuments of the dead. Bernardo Rossellino, born in 1409, his elder by more than twenty years, died more than twenty years before him, in 1464, carving, among other delightful things, the lovely Annunciation at Empoli, the delicate monument of Beata Villana in S.

Maria Novella, and creating once for all, in the tomb of Leonardo Bruni in S. Croce, the perfect pattern of such things, which served as an example to all the Tuscan sculptors who followed, till Michelangelo hewed the great monuments in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. His brother Antonio, born in 1427, worked with him at Pistoja certainly in the tomb of Filippo Lazzari in S. Domenico, surpa.s.sing him as a sculptor, under the influence of Desiderio da Settignano. His finest work is the beautiful tomb in S. Miniato of the young Cardinal of Portugal, who died on a journey to Florence. In that strange and lovely place there is nothing more beautiful than that monument under the skyey work of Luca della Robbia, before the faintly coloured frescoes of Aless...o...b..ldovinetti. Under a vision of Madonna borne by angels from heaven, where two angels stoop, half kneeling, on guard, the young Cardinal sleeps, supported by two heavenly children, his hands--those delicate hands--folded in death. Below, on a frieze at the base of the tomb, Antonio has carved all sorts of strange and beautiful things--a skull among the flowers over a garland harnessed to two unicorns; angels too, youthful and strong, lifting the funeral vases. At Naples, again, he carved the altar of the Cappella Piccolomini in S. Maria at Montoliveto.

Here in the Bargello some fragments of beautiful things have been gathered--a tabernacle with two adoring angels, a little St. John made in 1477 for the Opera, a relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds, another of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory of cherubim, and, last of all, the splendid busts of Matteo Palmieri and Francesco Sa.s.setti; but his masterpiece in pure sculpture is the S. Sebastian in the Collegiata at Empoli, a fair and youthful figure without the affectation and languor that were so soon to fall upon him.

Perhaps the greatest of these sculptors in marble, whose works, as winsome as wild flowers, are scattered over the Tuscan hills, was Desiderio da Settignano, born in 1428. He had worked with Donatello in the Pazzi Chapel, and his tabernacle in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in S. Lorenzo is one of the most charming things left in that museum of Tuscan work. Of his beautiful tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S.

Croce I speak elsewhere: it is worthy of its fellows--Bernardo Rosellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni in the same church, and the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rossellino at S. Miniato. Desiderio has not the energy of Rossellino or the pa.s.sionate ardour of Verrocchio.

He searches for a quiet beauty full of serenity and delight. His work in the Bargello is of little account. The bust of a girl (No. 198 in the fifth room on the top floor) is but doubtfully his: Vasari speaks only of the bust of Marietta Strozzi, now in Berlin. He died in 1464, and his work, so rare, so refined and delicate in its beauty, comes to its own in the perfect achievement of Benedetto da Maiano, born in 1442, who made the pulpit of S. Croce, the ciborium of S. Domenico in Siena. It was for Pietro Mellini that he carved the pulpit of S. Croce, and here in the Bargello we may see the bust he made of his patron. In his youth he had carved in wood and worked at the intarsia work so characteristic a craft of the fifteenth century; but on bringing some coffers of this work to the King of Hungary, Vasari relates that he found they had fallen to pieces on the voyage, and ever after he preferred to work in marble. Having acquired a competence, of this work too he seems to have tired, devoting himself to architectural work--porticos, altars, and such--buying an estate at last outside the gate of Prato that is towards Florence; dying in 1497.

It is with a prolific master, Mino da Fiesole, the last pupil, according to Vasari, of Desiderio da Settignano, that the delicate and flower-like work of the Tuscan sculptors may be said to pa.s.s into a still lovely decadence. His facile work is found all over Italy. The three busts of the Bargello are among his earliest and best works--the Piero de'

Medici, the Giuliano de' Medici, and the small bust of Rinaldo della Luna. There, too, are two reliefs from his hand, and some tabernacles which have no great merit. A relief of the Madonna and Child is a finer achievement in his earlier manner, and in the Duomo of Fiesole there remains a bust of the Bishop, Leonardo Salutati, while in the same chapel, an altar and relief, from his hand, seem to prove that it was only a fatal facility that prevented him from becoming as fine an artist as Benedetto da Maiano.

With Andrea Sansovino, born in 1460, we come to the art of the sixteenth century, very n.o.ble and beautiful, at any rate in its beginning, but so soon to pa.s.s into a mere affectation. The pupil, according to Vasari, of Antonio Pollaiuolo, Sansovino's work is best seen in Rome. Here in Florence he made in his youth the altar of the Blessed Sacrament in the left transept of S. Spirito, and in 1502 the Baptism of Christ, over the eastern gates of the Baptistery, but this was finished by another hand.

And there followed him Benedetto da Rovezzano, whose style has become cla.s.sical, the sculptor of every sort of lovely furniture,--mantelpieces, tabernacles, and such,--yet in his beautiful reliefs of the life of S. Giovanni Gualberto you see the work of the sixteenth century at its best, without the freshness and delicate charm of fifteenth-century sculpture, but exquisite enough in its perfect skill, its real achievement.

There follows Michelangelo (1475-1564). It is with a sort of surprise one comes face to face with that sorrowful, heroic figure, as though, following among the flowers, we had come upon some tragic precipice, some immense cavern too deep for sight. How, after the delight, the delicate charm of the fifteenth century, can I speak of this beautiful, strong, and tragic soul? It might almost seem that the greatest Italian of the sixteenth century has left us in sculpture little more than an immortal gesture of despair, of despair of a world which he has not been content to love. His work is beautiful with the beauty of the mountains, of the mountains in which he alone has found the spirit of man. His figures, half unveiled from the living rock, are like some terrible indictment of the world he lived in, and in a sort of rage at its uselessness he leaves them unfinished, and it but half expressed;--an indictment of himself too, of his own heart, of his contempt for things as they are. Yet in his youth he had been content with beauty--in the lovely Pieta of S. Pietro, for instance, where, on the robe of Mary, alone in all his work he has placed his name; or in the statue of Bacchus, now here in the Bargello, sleepy, half drunken with wine or with visions, the eyelids heavy with dreams, the cup still in his hand.

But already in the David his trouble is come upon him; the sorrow that embittered his life has been foreseen, and in a sort of protest against the enslavement of Florence, that nest where he was born, he creates this hero, who seems to be waiting for some tyranny to declare itself.

The Brutus, unfinished as we say, to-day in the Bargello, he refused to touch again, since that city which was made for a thousand lovers, as he said, had been enjoyed by one only, some Medici against whom, as we know, he was ready to fight. If in the beautiful relief of Madonna we find a sweetness and strength that is altogether without bitterness or indignation, it is not any religious consolation we find there, but such comfort rather as life may give when in a moment of inward tragedy we look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son. What secret and immortal sorrow and resentment are expressed in those strange and beautiful figures of the tombs in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo! The names we have, given them are, as Pater has said, too definite for them; they suggest more than we know how to express of our thoughts concerning life, so that for once the soul of man seems there to have taken form and turned to stone. The unfinished Pieta in the Duomo, it is said, he carved for his own grave: like so much of his great, tragical work, it is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the beginning. For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening, he is like the day which will pa.s.s into the night. In him the spirit of man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love. All things particular to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make, as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its pa.s.sionate intensity--a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the snow. And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day. With him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures of fallen G.o.ds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "LA NOTTE"

_From Tomb of Giulinto de' Medici. Michelangelo_

_Anderson_]

FOOTNOTES:

[115] It seems necessary to note that probably Arnolfo Fiorentino and Arnolfo di Cambio are not the same person. Cf. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 127, note 4.