Renaissance in Italy Volume III Part 9

[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 fas.h.i.+on 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 seash.o.r.e. 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 scholars.h.i.+p; 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 impa.s.sioned 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 G.o.dless 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.p.a.ce 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 att.i.tudes, the voluminous folds and broad ma.s.ses of powerfully coloured raiment invest his forms with a n.o.bility 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 a.s.sumed the att.i.tude 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 t.i.tles 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing, the student of art must learn to estimate what Piero could do in the way of accurate foreshortening, powerful delineation of solid bodies, and n.o.ble 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 workmans.h.i.+p.

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 ill.u.s.trious 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 ama.s.sing 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 impa.s.sioned 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 t.i.tles 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 sh.o.r.e, in order to visit the heaven-reflecting lakelet, self-encompa.s.sed 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 a.s.similative 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 circ.u.mstance of pageantry, and no Florentine of the fifteenth century was more fond of a.s.sembling 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.ses 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 _ca.s.soni_ 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 mult.i.tudes 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 ill.u.s.trator 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 das. 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 a.s.sumption 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 mult.i.tudes 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sistant, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.sicism 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 pa.s.sion. To this delight in antique details Filippino added violent gestures, strange att.i.tudes, 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 cla.s.sic 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 subst.i.tute 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 ill.u.s.trates. His painting of the "Spring," suggested by a pa.s.sage 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 t.i.tian--but something special to the artist and significant for Medicean scholars.h.i.+p 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 a.s.suming 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 att.i.tude 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 sh.o.r.e by zephyrs. Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the young G.o.ds 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 a.s.signed for this chapter, so many links unite him to the cla.s.s 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 doc.u.ments in ill.u.s.tration of Renaissance pageantry.[190] The point that connects him with Botticelli is the romantic treatment of cla.s.sical 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 s.p.a.ces 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 cla.s.sic subject in a cla.s.sic 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l, 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sion, 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, a.s.signed 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. .h.i.therto 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, pa.s.sion--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 surpa.s.sed 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, n.o.ble. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 repet.i.tion, 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 quant.i.ties; 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 Mich.e.l.lozzo 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 a.s.sai," 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 n.o.bleness 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 cla.s.sical 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

Meanwhile, what was truly great and n.o.ble 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 l.u.s.tre.

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.